Tell me about Jazz (and let’s try to play it!)

A while back FunBun posted in the forum something about listening to all different kinds of music, "High art" music and everything.  it took me a while to realize that i have been locking my self into a rather narrow spectrum of music for a long time. So i decided to try to listen to someting way out of my comfor zone every day (well almost every day). I have now been around medieval folk music, Wagner, blue grass, and jazz to mention a few styles.


And Coltrane is just amazing.



I grew up (in the 60' s 70's) with parents who had different musical taste. Both were somewhat into classical music, but my father was into 40ties 50ties jazz and my mother more into Beatles, Stones, Janis Joplin and all that stuff.
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Somehow i wrote off jazz, as unlistenable. Don't know why. just happened. 

Seems i have some catching up to do.


Mikael

Now on to the next big question:
How do we play “Jazz” (or something close to it) on our AE Modular synthesizers? 

- Playing simple walking Bass lines with the SEQ16 and SEQ8 should be easy.


- Modulating speed and rhythm shouldn’t be hard either, for example with the MM-DIV.

- How can we create those swinging percussion patterns though? Mixing both on-beat triggers with off-beat triggers, delayed by the 2ENV, maybe?


- We should be able to play some Jazz 7th chords and chord progressions with the SOLINA module, I suppose.


- Using the QUANTIZER could possibly make it easy to generate improvisational lead sequences using a mix of regular sequencers and random generators, like the RBSS.

I'm a pretty 'basic bitch' when it comes to jazz (Miles Davis - Kind of Blue is a fav like almost everyone starting out i guess haha), and also Coltrane, Herbie Hancock,..

If you are looking into modern stuff which mixes in synths, samples, soundscapes, I would however also recommend some great more recent stuff:

The absolutely phenomenal Flying Lotus album 'You're Dead' which also features a lot of Herbie Hancock going ham on it. But also features tons of synths, Thundercat, and even Kendrick Lamar!



Thundercats solo stuff is also a great blend of wild jazz, pop and anime-geekstuff.



And there is the more classic, but also fantastic Kamasi Washington (his 'The Epic' album is great) who manages to blend mind-bending jazz with a Street Fighter showdown in this clip:




And concerning swing: the Topograph drum sequencer can have swing!

After all, programming giant steps in a sequencer does not have any musical accomplishment, after all every one can look up the score in a real book. You being able to play the chord changes and improvising over them, now that's a complete different thing.

I was actually going to try to come up with a means to collaborate on jazz tunes with AE modular...so this is very timely. I was going to have a clever name like Remote Electronic Jazz: Exploring Collaboration Through Stems (REJ:ECTS!)

Firstly I think "jazz" by itself is kind of meaningless. There is so much jazz that its like saying rock or electronic music. The depth and disparity between different styles and artists is huge. The only thing that sets it apart from other musical styles is that it has intentional periods of improvisation. Some jazz is very structured (see big band) and some very loose (see free jazz). One could argue that improvised modular jams are a form of jazz.

I'll try to give a brief historical overview since it is how my mind works.

Firstly jazz grew out of the blues tradition and ragtime in the late 1800's/early 1900's. The first music identified as jazz is Dixieland jazz that started in the Mississippi delta in the American south - mostly out of New Orleans. I would describe this style as having a lot of polyphony as there are often several monophonic instruments (clarinet, trumpet, trombone) playing lines simultaneously. Drum kits were very rudimentary (it was in development) and harmonic support (if even present) was often only a tenor banjo. This might be a style that can translate well to modular.

From there the musicians moved up the Mississippi river to Chicago and this is often associated with the big band and swing era. This is where you get jazz orchestras and more structure. Duke Ellington is probably the most associated artist to this style, but there were many including Count Basie, Cab Calloway, and Buddy Rich. The stereotypic style is a composed piece that has solo sections for improvisation. This style peaked in the 1940's and if you watch Ken Burns: Jazz, they take a rather bleak view that this was the epitome of jazz style. I guess it is correct in that the style as a whole never had the same mainstream impact as it did at that point in time.

As big band fell out of favor, musicians/venues realized that paying 30 people a night is expensive. So the groups became smaller and "combos" took over, which is a term for jazz groups that are sized more like a pop or rock band. The scene moved to New York and you start getting virtuosic playing and more complicated improvisation. This lead to bebop where players like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis play amazingly fast tunes (like Donna Lee). Bebop is known for the rapid harmonic changes, which require the dexterity and musical know-how to improvise within the harmony.

From there jazz spreads out in many directions. Miles Davis, almost in a punk rock contrarianism of the frantic pace of bebop, gets cool jazz going and explores modal harmony. Jazz goes electric with fusion (see Return to Forever, Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters, and Weather Report). People abandon form and go for free jazz.

Notable parallel developments is in expressing jazz influences through other cultural lenses. Latin jazz (such as Bossa Nova) is a classic example and Antonio Carlos Jobim is one of my favorite composers. In France in the 1940's Romani people had their hands at swing music and created Manouche jazz by guitarist Django Reinhardt. As a bit of trivia, Jamaican musicians in the 1950's tried to imitate the swing music they heard on the radio and invented Ska.

Now that the history is out of the way, I'm going to get lunch and come back and post about structure.

Alright, so here’s a first attempt to add some “jazzy” elements to an AE Modular jam:



The hi-hat/cymbal thing is triggered by mixing a regular MM-DIV clock division with a BEAT DIVIDER clock division. The BEAT DIVIDER is normally for MIDI clock and divides the clock rate by three. When not feeding it a MIDI clock, but a fast LFO, this gives us some swing-like off-beat hits. Still feels a bit static, but that’s also part of the sub-par sound design. I’m using the old ENV modules which have two gate inputs, but which don’t have the snappiest slope.

I also threw the old DIVIDER module into the clock division mix, receiving an inverted BEAT DIVIDER clock (inverted by the LOGIC module). This also gives us slightly shifted beats, to mix with regular ones. I did that for the Bass voice, to add some additional in-between notes.

By shifting the MM-DIV manually and via CV (switched on/off by the 3VSWITCH) I can change the overall rhythms.

The SOLINA is set to 7th chords, but I have a feeling that I’m not hitting Jazz-typical chords and a typical progression. The rhythm is also not very jazzy, but I was running out of clock division signals.

Then of course there is the improv bit. A mix of triggers going into a new 2ENV module, with RBSS-modulated decay time and melody. Scaled and offset by a 2CVTOOL. The voice receives CV quantized to a pentatonic scale (same as the Bass sequence) with added slew.

Hm. Okay. I think my next try will be less dense and more focussed. For example just on percussion or a note/chord progression. This jam went a bit out of hand

Particularly with playing jazz on modular. The #1 most important thing is improvisation. Next to that complex chord changes. Improvisation modular synths can do easily. That's why I've been so adamant about random sources. We finally have the rbss, but we need more random to truly get a deeper level of improvisation.

Jaco Pastorius is my favorite bass player. Here's Jaco on Birdland, probably the most popular tune Weather Report ever did:


I did a tribute to Jaco on my last album: A Tune For Jaco a.k.a. Bot Trot:
blackwarriorlures.bandcamp.com/track/bot-trot-a-tune-for-jaco

I'm not trying to play jazz on modular, but I'm trying to fuse Steve Reich, Terry Riley-like minimalism with much of what Miles did on the Sketches of Spain album. Playing modal is easy on modular synths. Improvisation is easy with generative patching.

Look at the mini-Moogs that Zawinul was playing in the video above. Those are modular synth because all synths were modular when jazz fusion was developed. But, you gotta hook up a keyboard to it if you wanna do proper chord changes.

Sarah Belle Reid is doing some very cool things with her trumpet and a Buchla Easel.

pt3r What do you do when your body is not capable of playing the horn anymore?