The Juilliard Blues

Inside the tight limits of musical formality, fresh ideas seem to die like birds blundering against a window. Pleasant enough music can still be written within the old boundaries, but its most pleasing aspect is likely to be its very familiarity. In their continuing search for an escape into originality, classical composers sometimes reach toward jazz, and lately they have begun to meet jazzmen coming the other way--in search of respectability. Though both schools share an adventurous spirit and an unsmiling sense of high purpose, the temptation that rules their encounters with one another is an unhappy one: the urge to make a lady out of jazz.

No Freedom. However much the classicists have tried, the collision of jazz idiom and classical technique has been mainly the work of jazzmen. Dave Brubeck has been an ardent explorer of quiet waters, but the classic case of the Juilliard blues afflicts John Lewis, whose fascination with the baroque and the commedia dell' arte has led his Modern Jazz Quartet into music of great cerebration and even greater anemia. Lewis' music often seems too fragile even to be called jazz; but now a new group of jazz composers has arrived with the claim that they are uniquely "serious"--a priggish way of saying that they've been to school.

The "serious" composers write what they call "classical jazz." Their music is based on jazz materials, but it is embroidered with twelve-tone technique and polyrhythms. Musing last week on the premiere of his Forms 1963 at a classical jazz concert in New York, Composer David Epstein pointed out that his music left no room at all for improvisation, the enriching, defining ingredient of nonclassical jazz. "The freedom of an older jazz style," Epstein wrote, "has given way to strict and careful musical planning."

This is like bragging that plucking a rooster makes him crow better. Though jazz composers and arrangers have shown that improvisation is not always essential to good jazz, the scores they write are tailored to fit the styles and sounds of individual musicians. There are no standard jazz compositions that every musician is expected to play in the same way; the rhythmic subtleties that jazz requires defy notation by the composer.

No Swing. Jazz simply does not work unless it swings; and to swing, the beat must be constantly tugged and pushed across the familiar line of four-four balance until the real rhythmic message is felt more than heard. The time values involved are microscopic: big bands rarely manage to swing because the inner rhythms are blurred by imprecise ensemble playing; classical jazz cannot swing because the composer's notation is too rigid.

Beyond such problems, the jazz form is beguilingly simple. Its tunes are mostly based on four eight-bar phrases, the first two and the last identical, the third a "bridge" that resolves them all with a different, modulating melody. In small combo jazz, the first 32 bars are generally played in ensemble "head arrangements" the players have agreed upon; then comes an exchange of "blowing choruses" in which each player takes his turn "cooking" the melody, guided only by its harmonic outline. The song is resolved with a final 32 bars, the same as the first.

The form is so tight and so simple that players led by Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Jimmy Guiffre and others have abandoned it to hunt down a more satisfying freedom. Coleman and Guiffre both now play atonal jazz, and Miles Davis defected with his discovery of the "interlude," a four-or eight-bar figure laced into a song between phrases. Davis sometimes plays one dominant chord throughout a 16-bar interlude, making only rhythmic variations. Elvin Jones, the most richly inventive of the modern drummers, plays highly abstract polyrhythms that leave the old eight-to-the-bar style of jazz drumming far behind.

Enriched by such experimentation, the true spirit of jazz still belongs to its players, not to composers who study the form at the distance of a good conservatory. Leonard Bernstein has captured the sound of its blue notes--the appoggiatura tones that mimic the human voice in lament--and others have used its reiterated play-song melodies. But even among jazzmen, the only composer who has consistently written good jazz for orchestral players without merely repeating George Gershwin is Duke Ellington, and Ellington's "classical jazz" swings only because it is safe, sensual music. "We're going to do this thing," he has said in a little lecture on swinging, "until your pulse and my pulse are the same." His genius is mainly in his knowledge of the dynamic range of orchestral instruments.

Ellington's compositions for jazz band and orchestra usually stay within a concerto grosso form that lets the band handle the jazz, while the orchestra plays its own fiddle. After a recent Ellington concert with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Jazz Critic Leonard Feather coolly dissected the Duke's Night Creatures concerto: "Ellington played jazz, and the orchestra played classical music. If you put rubies and diamonds on the same string, you don't have a necklace of novel stones--just diamonds and rubies."

Some day someone may actually teach symphony orchestras how to swing; but short of that improbable achievement, the highest moments in jazz will still belong to working jazzmen whose own free sound is their best and clearest standard.

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