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!
