The one reason why I haven’t bothered to sit through Cowboy Bebop yet is because of my disorientation towards the OP song by yours truly, Yoko Kanno.
Gershwin was known for pushing the form of jazz to “accepted” levels. He was too a classical player, and we’ve all heard Rhapsody in Blue et. al, since jazz was termed not as a written art form on par with classical but as, well, “jazz”, hence the derogatory originations of the term. While jazz was being written, archived, taught, proliferated, propagated, I think this has been for the better, since anyone with a certain amount of socio-economic privilege has the access to this world of music.
However, I just don’t like written jazz. Case in point, Yoko Kanno, specifically The Seatbelts, more specifically, the music in Cowboy Bebop. But in saying this we’re running into our Scene & The Sound paradox. I was checking out the OST on youtube and I noticed all the songs sounded the same. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, per se, since I had to take into consideration the fact that all these songs were probably composed for the anime, thus the similarities, or I would hope that this was originality within a prescribed perimeter of what’s allowed in a certain soundtrack. This goes without saying that in order to appreciate these songs you have to also watch their semiotic counterpart, the visual to the music, the scene to the sound.
Back to notation: so music has two forms, basically, it’s written form, and the aural component, the end result that is the purpose of the notation. Perhaps this is the same with plain old literature, yet, what with our linguistic determinism and whatnot, if not for the mentally ingrained sounds of words we wouldn’t have the concept at all. Does this make me an advocate of musical illiteracy? Only half-so: I’m perhaps supportive of big band music, but I just can’t dig the limitations of written jazz, as that consists of an oxymoron in itself. I think, first and foremost, improvisatory jazz in all its capriciousness is not something that can or should be written down. The cold shoulder one may easily hand to this opinion since I cannot so easily homogenize “jazz” as something that’s completely improvisatory, since we do have big band music that’s written – big bands do include solos, too.
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Nice argument, and I will agree. I suppose I never looked at the OST as true jazz anyway, because it has a great deal of form (confinement), similar to typical radio music. It did yield that jazzesque, vibe, and did not detract from the series imo; nor try to steal focus. I believe it was just about small emphasis in atmosphere, as well as moods emitted from various instruments (ie saxophone).
Will we see the 4 movements of A Love Supreme for an AMV? Not likely, as it would be a rather shallow mix, and the music has more to say than a random clump of Bebop scenes. If the soundtrack was that involved, it would surely take away from any visual series. At most, I would say any OST should never take more than 50% of the focus in an anime series, but that’s just me.
Cheers :)
There are soundtracks that are able to stand on their own and work perfectly well even without knowing the shows they were written for. In case of Bebop, I’ve listened to the soundtrack and enjoyed it before I’ve even seen the show, and when I listen to it now the only “plus” the knowledge of the anime gives me is a little “aha!” moment when I sometimes remember a particular scene. I used to listen to compilations of Bebop and Gungrave music at work, and people would often come to me asking about the performers, never noticing that they were listening to a soundtrack (to be fair, though, I removed the few obviously soundtrack-y numbers). (Imahori Tsuneo composed some really good music for Gungrave, and it’s yet another soundtrack I’ve been listening to long before getting around to watch the show itself.)
As for writing down jazz, well, that’s an opinion I disagree with. While I think it’s important to leave room for interpretation and improvization in jazz, not writing it down at all would severely limit where and how could it be performed and used, which I think should not happen.
Btw, as far as the music of Bebop goes, I agree with RyanA that it’s hard to call it “true” jazz, all the more so as it includes so many different elements. I’ve always regarded it as a sort of jazzy lounge music.
RyanA: It would probably be too elitist of me to scoff at the music entirely and disregard it as “low-jazz” – it’s jazz in its own right, although this particular kind isn’t my cup of tea. Perhaps you’d even call it “commercial” insofar as it was composed for the anime – a commission.
I would surely shit myself if I heard A Love Supreme blatantly inserted into an anime [although it would be clever if someone wrote a soundtrack-esque variation off its a-love-supreme motif]. This topic dives deeper into insertion of meaning, which probably warrants another entry. But anyway, this also touches upon how jazz just can’t really be used as and for soundtracks because if it is improvised for itself, trying to reallocate its meaning into something different can’t work, you can’t “partition” meaning. This would be different if the solos were based off of the visual component of the anime, but I’m assuming that the music was composed in tandem to the animation or after the finalized product. Despite this, it doesn’t matter unless the visual was based off of the music, because the animation would be wholly influenced by the stand-alone meaning of the musician’s improvisation, not the other way around.
kuromitsu: Perhaps you haven’t seen the show (like myself), but you did know that it was a soundtrack, right? There’s a significant amount of bias in that fact alone, as I was saying how I had to take into consideration the lone fact that it was a soundtrack. This goes back into TheBigN’s comment on how it doesn’t really matter, as he said
The archiving of music can be a tricky subject, like how sheet music affects us as tools and such. You’re right, I am very, very grateful for the fake book that I carry around to gigs (I’d be screwed otherwise!) and making standards accessible via books has probably expanded the form of jazz to new heights, although jazz is probably dying. On that note, I never did get to go to an IAJE conference…:(
I think writing down jazz has pushed the standards higher, and thus if you can’t sightread you’re not labeled as a “true musician”, only one of those “suzuki method bastards”. Yeah, I can reference Wes as a trump card or something and say “you don’t need to be able to read to be godlike” but, overall, notation has more benefits and pros than not notating, in the long run, probably.
It’s interesting, however, to view unnotated jazz (or any music) as more of a form as oral storytelling, a cultural tradition. Archiving is a societal trait, and when we dig up these archives – a ritual in itself – we are performing that cultural archaeology. However, I can’t quite spit out at first thought what archiving actually entails about society.
Unwritten jazz. Where to start?
And on that note, how improvisatory is jazz improvisation? Licks, hooks, rhythms, standards, chord structures. You can drop notes along 12-bar blues all day, but that just means you’re playing within the confines of a slightly larger sandbox.
What it boils down to is a manual on how to play versus a manual on how to improvise.
I reckon, from an uninformed position re. musical history, that our understanding of the role of written archives can be improved by a comparison with the impact of archives of sound recording.
Maybe that gap between the form of musical record and the music (as encountered by the listener) means that notation archiving is a more convenient way to balance improvisation with the (sophisticated) advantages coming from an archive? I guess there’s a parallel between the role of soundtrack jazz and jazzish pop, in that they offer a stylised finished article which thinks of a jazz performance as definitive (if that follows). So, with a slightly dodgy dichotomy, Yoko Kanno is (necessarily) operating with album-minded rather than notation-minded jazz?
Anyhow, much as I adore Cowboy Bebop, I’ve never felt the need to listen to the OST.
intro: I think each successive jazz “era” was a revolt against the previous one (don’t quote me on that) since the latter thought the former was too standardized, too square, too status-quo. I guess “free jazz” (I hate the stuff) would be the only kind of jazz that doesn’t limit itself to the perimeter of our slightly larger sandbox, but even with the confines of a given time and key signature (the latter means relatively less and less the “further” you dive into the music) I’d still say there’s an infinite amount of creativity to be exploited. That’s my inherent jazz side talking, although if I were a true classical buff (not one in the slightest) I’d just say, “yeah, you are limited.” And you are, but that’s not really the point (not that I’m trying to shirk that haunting refrain, though). I think that’s one of the best characteristics of jazz – an attempt to be really, really crazy within a series of rules, although those rules are sort of ambiguous to begin with. While we have a sandbox, we can’t think of it as nearly two-dimensional as plowing into the sand or rising above it opens our third dimension and thus our realization and “alteration” of those boundaries.
coburn: Notation archiving is a more convenient way to balance improvisation with the (sophisticated) advantages coming from an archive? Hmmm, I think that, unlike literature, reading a piece of music is entirely different than playing or hearing it. That only holds true since I don’t have perfect pitch nor can I hear a piece of music just by looking at it. I mean I wish I could but that’s in a completely different level of skill etc (the main reason why I’m no composer).
Notation archiving, I think, can never, ever record the aesthetic sonority of textures. I should learn to write/read percussion music to write arrangements, but if we were looking at a transcribed score of a 5 piece combo, could even a genius experience the music in its entirety just by reading it? That’s hard to imagine (probably not impossible, though).
It’s also hard to annotate certain styles, as when you get into “complex rock,” where lots of bends and note duration/rhythmic alterations (within a static tempo) take place, standard notation fails greatly. I think searching Wiki would produce an article on the type of notation used for it. Essentially, I’m just saying that there are times when the concrete cannot “substitute” nor “substantiate” the aural.
A jazz performance as definitive…of itself? That the sub-genre of jazz takes no heed to the final, overall, “jazz” product (if that’s what you mean)? Album-minded vs. notation-minded…hmm. I can’t conceive of what “notation-minded” means, unless you were speaking of that in those paragraphs. Can you re-explain that?
I’m not well-versed in the technicalities of music, but when I love hearing something, I really don’t give much of a damn. For example, I really like Cherry Girl by Sana (one of the Mirumo de Pon OPs). It’s just fun to listen to (don’t ask me how I got to watch Mirumo).
Among all the media, I think music is the most aural because it solely relies on the sound and the fury. The visual imagery that is elicited is secondary to the sound where everything comes from.
–> re. my first comment: I managed to make that one pretty obscure, and still can’t think of quite the right words to use.
I was getting at the idea of the origins of jazz as oral history, and the move towards it becoming an archived music. By notation minded archiving I meant a tradition of music as passed down on paper, which as you say offers considerable scope for interpretation by the performer. In fact, such a tradition doesn’t (to my knowledge) really exist in a pure form in jazz. It was a hypothetical idea – what if there were no aural recordings, just notes?
That process of creating (and referring back to) an archive on paper is different from handing down a recording of a performance. It’s a distinction that’s much easier to make in classical music – where you can see an arrival of recording in an environment which previously contained only written archives. I think that the album, as a way to archive music, has radically different affects from notation on the evolution of a tradition.
While slightly unsure how far this distinction is useful, I was thinking that soundtrack jazz fits better with the reality of jazz as a music handed down in part via albums, which offer fixed sounds to the listener. So recording technology is perhaps as important to defining that “written jazz” as notation is.
Or did that back up ramble just make things worse?
Wow, lelangiric being elitist? Tell me it isn’t so! All this crap about written jazz vs improvised jazz, which is supposed to be the ‘real’ jazz doesn’t jive because music is written down and improvised at the same time anyway, regardless of its genre. Writing the music down has long become part of music. Scribes would copy a performance as they heard it in the 19th century, whether Liszt was actually improvising his cadenza or not.And if you really want music to last, write the damn thing down. How else do you think I know Autumn Leaves 60 years after the fact?
Plus, just because the OST doesn’t contain alternate takes doesn’t mean they’re all written. Do you know for sure?
Michael: It’s most likely different for me: if I enjoy something I hear I try and listen deeper, to try and understand – the same is true for you concerning literature, right?
I’m sure music is aural, more so than any other medium. If “the visual imagery that is elicited is secondary to the sound where everything comes from,” doesn’t that imply that there is a state of origin which needs to be addressed? Are we saying that there is a solution to the chicken or the egg? – the scene or the sound?
coburn: I understand better now (I hope). This can be tricky because the history of jazz is so relatively short in comparison to the relatively ancient corpus of classical music going back to Gregorian Chant and other stuff I’ve never heard of. Likewise, technological developments (Edison invented the phonograph in 1877) started taking place at a faster rate (is that Moore’s law?) and so the development of jazz as an art form evolved in tandem with sound recording technologies. This brings up a lot of history that I don’t know, particularly the Harlem Renaissance (again, I don’t know anything about it) and how socio-economic access was a big part in determining who could afford instruments, who could find the time to practice, etc. etc.
Contrary to ritchan’s argument that there is no “real” jazz (which in itself is amusing considering the popularity of the “fake book” or, as you will, the “real book”). However, on second thought, I think that “real” jazz exists but can never exist – it’s the temporal elusiveness of the pinnacle of improvisation that can never, ever be recreated; and it’s more than the notes, the mood, the feeling, the atmosphere, the audience, “the swing”. I can’t speak on those terms, although, since it’s not like I can elevate myself to such a pinnacle, wherever that is.
The “reality” of jazz I can only speculate upon…I think that the reality is that jazz is both an archived music and a completely-aurally traditionalistic music, although all music forms are, probably. Notation-archiving, for jazz, works in that it assists the production and evolution of the player – these tools take the shape in for-sale-transcriptions (The Omni Book is the best example of this), play-along CD’s, compilation/anthology books (fake/real books), magazines (instructional or otherwise), and so forth and so on. Thus the encapsulating essence of jazz lies both in its archivable materials and temporal performances and improvisations. This is the same for classical music, and I suspect that the similarities derive from the onset of capitalism (jazz, historically, can’t be anything but capitalism-alistic) and commodification rather than an influenced, evolutionary “ cladogenesis” of sorts
“Soundtrack jazz” seems to contradict the notion of the album, although there are probably exceptions. At first thought, it seems as though the album presumes music composed for itself, for no ulterior motives, for no scenes, for no semiotic counterpart: the album is a story, a history unto itself. The soundtrack, however, implies and refers back to the scene vs. sound argument wherein music is composed to accompany something other than itself.
This notion of “real” as improvisatory, however, does conflict with the notation/written aspect of things. Thus the problem of homogenizing any art form to a monolithic word or definition.
Perhaps the main thing I was trying to get at, with the archiving argument, was how digitizing (not in the strictly electronic sense) shapes, structures, transforms, constructs and influences society, its traditions, and its machinations. What does writing down, notating, transcribing, say about society? About people? About humanity? Archives are the source of our archaeology, about this study is two-fold in that it can directly produce knowledge about the source of the archive and it can also indirectly produce knowledge about the archaeologist, the way the archive is used
ritchan: [I guess all opinions, “humble” or otherwise, or inherently elitist, although I’m not too sure about the distinctions between “elitist”, “opinionated” and “polemic”]
I didn’t say that improvised jazz is the “real” jazz, although if you’re referring to coburn’s comment, he, too, was not saying that there is a pure form of jazz to be found. Hence,
I don’t really think there is any kind of “authenticity” to be found in any genre of music, they’re all “authentic” in and of themselves in relation to mediums and art forms as autonomous, parallel, co-existing “things”.
Given that the only tracks I listened to were ones performed by The Seatbelts. So, if an entire big band could synchronically improvise without having Kanno compose on paper beforehand for them, I would give them my hat and commit suicide, or something. Neither do I know the naunces of studio recording, or if it’s mostly improvised or if it’s written out first. I’m just saying that while it’s highly, highly unlikely that big bands can improvise together, the fact that music was composed by Kanno beforehand leaves out any possibility of the music being not written because it was exactly that – composed for the performers.
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[...] There is a scene in The Sound and the Fury where (was it Luster?) an African-American who takes care of Benjy howls, and Faulkner emphasizes on it by using capital and small letter O’s to emulate the sound, like whoOooOooOey. I don’t need to say much on how Cowboy Bebop relies on sound, do I? Daniel (another one) writes well about it here. [...]