some belated thoughts on Ethan Iverson on Nikolai Kapustin, fleshing out some potential ideas that were implicit in Iverson's brief remarks

 

https://iverson.substack.com/p/clarinet-sonata

I’m gonna dive into the weeds:

 

One name people have mentioned to me in connection with Playfair Sonatas is Claude Bolling, who had the big crossover hit Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano. While Bolling was obviously a talent, he is also the quintessential “classical composer trying too hard to be jazzy.” There is not much of an organizing voice there other than pastiche.

 

I’m not really a huge fan of Nicolai Kapustin, either, which is sort of like written-out Oscar Peterson for virtuoso pianists. God bless everyone who does that stuff, for it is certainly hard to do, but it is decidedly conservative.

…

Bolling, Kapustin, and Batiste go straight in with no hesitation. But hesitation is warranted. There’s more to aesthetics than just getting over with the audience. There should be a deeper, more internal reality to the notes and rhythms.

 

In Playfair Sonatas, the dedicatees of the slow movements are Carla Bley, Roswell Rudd, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Joe Wilder, and Paul Desmond. They all thought about combining European and African idioms on a deep level. For those six, varied forms of sophistication such as irony, nonchalance, theatre, and stubbornness meet in the subconscious on the way to a finished personal aesthetic.

…

 

What that deeper, more internal reality to the notes and rhythms might be could be the subject of any number of books, couldn’t it?

 

But what does Iverson mean by writing that Claude Bolling or Nikolai Kapustin “go straight in with no hesitation”.  Hesitation regarding what?  What hesitation about “what” is warranted?  Now that Bley, Rudd, Coleman, Dolphy, Wilder and Desmond all thought about combining European and African idioms on a deep level is probably true but isn’t there a conundrum in that framing?  Why are Americans stuck with combining European and African idioms, or are they stuck with just these two options?  Lou Harrison wasn’t stuck with just those two options! 

 

Saying that Bolling and Kapustin didn’t quite pull off the elusive jazz/classical synthesis might be Captain Obvious but I have not seen anyone attempt to make a full or clear argument as to why they haven’t pulled that off.  This is really a case where you have to prove the negative, you have to explain what they did wrong.   The trouble is that in the history of jazz and classical fusion attempts it would seem as though mostly what we have our failures in a realm where many a partisan of jazz and classical would rhetorically ask what anyone would even guess “success” could even mean. 

 

I don’t think the problem with written-out Oscar Peterson is that it is “decidedly conservative”.  Was Oscar Peterson decidedly conservative? What does it mean to even say “conservative” about Peterson’s style if Kapustin overtly emulates it? Is it actually bad to do so? 

 

I think there is an intuition that something is off in Kapustin’s nods to Peterson but I would suggest, guitarist though I be and guitarist more steeped in classical guitar literature that I am, that the problem with Kapustin’s emulation of Oscar Peterson’s style is in the nature of Peterson’s style; Peterson’s style is anywhere between two, three or even four removes from the American songbook.  Think of the songs in the songbook as the bones in the skeleton and Peterson’s interpretations as sinew, gut, muscle, and skin.  Peterson’s work is the finished house and Kapustin copies the finished house without appraising the foundation. 

 

This is a problem with and within jazz itself.  Peterson’s embellishment and ornamentation of songbook standards is already multiple levels of remove from the bare-bones songs.  When Oscar Peterson played “Summertime” we know that he played Gershwin. We’ve heard the Gershwin hundreds or thousands of times in our lives, maybe, if we live in the United States and have heard the standards.  Someone like Peterson could take all the liberties he took because of the shared songbook.

 

The problem with Kapustin’s piano sonatas, which I don’t mind hearing whenever I’m hearing them but can hardly ever remember two or three days afterward, is that what Kapustin did is as if he transcribed Peterson’s vocabulary toward the end of writing piano sonatas but … how clearly can you sing the foundational tunes of any of the themes in Kapustin’s nineteen piano sonatas?  Another matter could be that if Kapustin has a sonata exposition that blazes away in a single key then how would you even recognize when one theme ends and another beings within all those fiery running scales?

 

Haydn used to complain of his contemporaries, as Richard Taruskin occasionally noted, that there were too many folks jamming too many ideas into their pieces.  Haydn didn’t say the ideas were bad ideas, just that there were too many of them.  Too many ideas and the audience won’t remember the piece long enough or well enough for it to touch their hearts.  The observation that music and memory are intertwined is an ancient one and it’s one of the first and most obvious points broached in Augustine’s De Musica. For music to touch your heart you have to be able to hear it and remember it.  At the risk of attempting to intuit what Iverson’s apparent unhappiness with Nikolai Kapustin’s post-Petersonian bravura is really pointing toward is this, Kapustin picked up the vocabulary as a finished idiom better than he went back behind that idiom to firmly grasp what Peterson was several layers of remove from; Kapustin faltered at the point of thematic presentation and thematic differentiation across his large-scale forms.

 

I’ve already implied the nature of thematic presentation. You need to be able to recognize when you’re hearing a theme.  Kapustin’s piano sonatas can be full of dramatic flourishes that can promise that “something is coming! A theme is on its way!”  Well, when does it show up?  Iverson has written that many classical musicians can’t sing Armstrong solos but that is itself too many removes from the real issue, which is that people should know the songs Armstrong performed and if they get around to those solos that’s for a later stage in development.  Thematic presentation is the start of “Jumpin’ Pumpkins” or the head tune of “`Round Midnight” and not all those legendary solos.  Kapustin was scrupulous about replicating the effect of all the spur-of-the-moment improvisational embellishments but the price was creating a cycle of piano sonatas where each sonata could occasionally feel like it’s part of a big mega-sonata in an installment plan, which is roughly how Kyle Gann described the piano sonatas of Medtner.  Ironically, and it’s a good thing Kapustin isn’t with us to see me write this, Kapustin’s piano sonatas can resemble those of Medtner’s by dint of having a vibe so pervasive it blurs the identity of each of his piano sonatas. Kapustin really didn’t like Medtner’s piano music as I recall. 

 

As for thematic differentiation, this would be where Kapustin blasting through an exposition without any clear key changes can present a problem but the more basic concern I have had is he seemed reluctant to slow down enough to let his themes be themes.  Kapustin didn’t study composition at a formal level. It comes across. In the way his piano sonatas are full of flourish but can be muddled on structural clarity.  Scott Joplin mastered thematic presentation and differentiation even if he ran with AABBACCDD so much it became a cliché to talk about the structure of a Joplin rag as distinct from any and every other kind of rag.  His contemporaries James Scott and Joseph Lamb were able and willing to end rags with their A and B strains, which I think was a brilliant move on their part that I sometimes wish Joplin did more in his work. 

 

Don’t go back to Peterson without going back to ragtime and blues.  The problem isn’t with emulating Peterson but with not picking up blues and ragtime.  The hesitation that Iverson wrote about is, if I may suggest this, an intuition that nobody can just go and adapt a Petersonian idiom to sonatas and fugues without getting a firm grasp of what foundation Peterson was building on.

 

Paradoxically, I find I mainly like Kapustin’s 24 Preludes and Fugues.  The sheer demands of writing a fugue and the centuries of thematic/linear concentration the tradition demands forced Kapustin to be clearer.  Whether or not his cycle of preludes and fugues “makes it” into the repertoire canon or the academic canon remains to be seen but it’s the more effective work in Kapustin’s body of work for me than his piano sonatas because there’s no getting around Bach, for instance.  There’s no getting around Shostakovich, either. 

 

But jazz and classical composers who want to experiment with a jazz/classical synthesis need to trust in the possibilities latent within the simplicity of the materials.  You should be able to write a big sonata form using just themes from a Scott Joplin, James Scott or Joseph Lamb rag.  You could probably do it with something by May Aufderheide, for that matter.  You should be able to take a blues by Charley Patton or John Lee Hooker or Fred McDowell and have that be enough to make yourself a sonata form.  The same goes for Blind Willie Johnson, Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red, I think the idea is clear enough at this point. 

 

Bach began the Goldberg Variations with a theme in which you never have more than two notes being actively played at any point in the initial presentation of the theme.  Jazz/classical fusion experiments should be able to start that bare-bones.  You don’t need jazz chords. You probably don’t even need jazz rhythm initially, because how many of the jazz standards from the great American songbook actually started off as jazz standards? You could go with a ragtime/Mississippi John Hurt take on “Just as I Am” and not even attempt to create some new theme whole-cloth.  In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this “sampling” was part of the art of inventio in rhetoric.

There's also no long-term path to that capacity for choosing that doesn't go through a long circuitous journey into the mountain range of theory. If we want to chart a path forward in which jazz and classical synthesis has some chance to "work" we don't go back to Peterson, we don't even go back to Armstrong, we go back further to Scott Joplin and James Scott and to shape-note hymns and ragging the classics.  There's a lifetime's worth of possibilities just exploring how to take themes from Joplin's rags (or Lamb's or Scott's) and making those themes the building blocks of piano sonatas.  Somebody could take themes from Heliotrope Bouquet and make them the basis for a piano sonata, especially now that all of Joplin's work has passed pretty firmly into the public domain.  Take themes from Treemonisha and make a piano sonata out of that.  Play with strains of The Entertainer in parallel minor or flip the passages upside down to see how they sound.

Armstrong, even, is too far out into the history of jazz.  The most promising point at which a potential jazz/classical synthesis could start to be explored seems like ragtime because it's the style that existed before there even was jazz.

Anyone who can make a piano sonata or even a fugue in the style of Scott Joplin could probably move on to exemplars farther along into the history of jazz.  And if we go by Joplin's School of Ragtime nothing that jazz performers, fans or historians call "swing" is even necessary. No amount of swing in the world is going to salvage a tune that doesn't stick in your memory sung or played without it. 

Some thoughts for a fairly typical rainy Seattle evening. 

POSTSCRIPT 2-26-2025

I've seen Iverson write in a few places that he thinks most theory is bunk but how is he ever going to explain what's wrong with the actual works of Bolling or Kapustin if he doesn't, at some point, resort to music theory?  Absent a set of theories and aesthetic paradigms that actually get explained we're stuck with a situation like the one in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic season one, with Rarity asking Rainbow Dash what she meant by saying "It needs to be about 20% cooler".  Particularly in light of ultimately negative appraisals of jazz/classical fusions the Rainbow Dash useless axiom couldn't possibly be more apt!