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,

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.

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”.

Plus, just because the OST doesn’t contain alternate takes doesn’t mean they’re all written. Do you know for sure?

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.

Plus, just because the OST doesn’t contain alternate takes doesn’t mean they’re all written. Do you know for sure?

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?

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.

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?

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.

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 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

“I think before the stimulus gets to us, the question isn’t as important?”

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.