Next time on New Dimensions, I'll be talking about eco-villages and intentional communities. Sunday morning at 7 o'clock here on WUGA.
And now, Shickley Mix. The question is, Mr. Shickley, are you ready? Yes. The answer is yes. Here's the theme.
Hello there, I'm Peter Shickley, and this is Shickley Mix, a program dedicated to the proposition that all musics are created equal. Or as Duke Ellington put it, if it sounds good, it is good.
And here's a good deal. Our bills are paid by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the National Endowment for the Arts, and by this influential radio station, located right here on your radio dial.
And from within whose two-two solid walls, this pulse-quickening program seeps into the general consciousness, reaching opinion makers throughout the entire county, thanks to the distribution.
The distributional prowess of PRI, Public Radio International. I could, without a doubt, be justifiably charged with exaggeration
if I said that Fargo, North Dakota, in the late 1940s, was one of the jazz capitals of the country. But radio station WDAY, which is where Peggy Lee got her start,
still had live musicians on staff. They might have all sorts of different names during the day, but basically it was the same guys. For the morning show, teletest time, they were a big band.
And at noon, they were playing polkas as the best little band in the land, or backing up the station's country and western singers, Hank and Thelma. But the leader and chief arranger, Frank Scott, was, and still is,
a swing and jazz band man at heart. He later moved to L.A., where he arranged for some of the best-known singers in jazz, but stayed true to his roots by working for Lawrence Welk as well.
As a high school kid, I used to hang around the studio. I remember once they had a contest for musicians, and the winner got to play with the band. So here's this farm kid with his electric guitar,
and Scott had done a real up-tempo arrangement of Love or Come Back.
And at the rehearsal, this kid was really burning rubber. He was tearing up the road. And after they ran the chart down, Scott came out of the control room, and he was playing a little bit of rock. Okay, let's do it up to tempo.
And they cranked it up, and the kid was right with him. I wonder what happened to that guy. Anyway, most of what jazz I did here in Fargo was pretty mainstream. When it comes to the farther-out stuff,
well, I remember there was a novelty tune called Bebop Spoken Here on the radio, but I didn't hear much of what true boppers would have called really gone sounds, like Charlie Parker.
Charlie Parker.
Charlie Parker and co-hosts. Charlie Parker and co-hosts playing his tune Au Prival. I don't know what Au Prival means unless it's at the privy.
Speaking of gone sounds, I do remember a couple of bebop jokes. Cat goes into a diner and says to the waitress, You got any pie? Waitress says, The pie is gone.
The hipster says, I'll have some of that crazy pie.
Charlie Parker was born in Kansas City, but you know what, Toto? I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.
Some classical composers had gotten rid of tonality, the sense of a key or home base, as well as a discernible beat or pulse by the beginning of the First World War.
After the Second World War, the beboppers pushed jazz out to the very edge. Bop was still based on traditional harmonic structures in 4-4 time,
but those guys altered the chords so extensively and used so many inks, that it was almost impossible to find the right key. The technical term for those added notes is added notes.
That you have to be pretty sophisticated to follow some of the harmonies. In fact, they went out of their way to make it difficult. They wanted to weed out the amateurs. And they often played at such breakneck tempos
that your average Charleston dancer would have had trouble figuring out where the downbeat was. Like I said, we're not in Kansas anymore.
Dizzy Gillespie and his band playing Things to Come back in 1946. It reminds me of a friend of mine at Juilliard, a bass player. He used to go up to Harlem and play in jam sessions.
And he says he gave it up finally because he said the trouble is there'd be 10 or 15 horn players there. And they'd set up a tempo like that. So he'd have to be going...
And of course, all these horn players, they play a few choruses. They play a few solos, you know. And then they lay out for 10 minutes and everything. Where he and the drummer... For the whole time. Couldn't take it anymore.
So anyway, these two hipsters are walking along, feeling no pain. And they come to a railroad crossing. One of the cats turns and looks down the tracks and he says, Hey man, dig that crazy ladder.
You did have to be there. You really did.
So anyway... Sigh.
Hold on, just a second. Hello? Yeah. Yeah, it is a great tune. Great tune. Yeah, it's one of... I think it's one of Charlie Parker's best. Yeah. Well, no. Thanks a lot.
No, we do recordings on this show. This isn't really a live music show. I appreciate it, but I'm afraid not. Okay, right. Bye. Today's show is called Things Fall Apart.
It's one of several programs exploring the cross-pollinization between jazz and classical music. And this time, we're looking at... What happened when the centuries-old systems of harmony and timekeeping broke down?
As I mentioned before, in classical music, the key and the beat started to disappear early in the 20th century. But nevertheless, the most often played symphonic composers of the first half of the century,
Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Strauss, Bartok, Hindemith, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Vaughan Williams, Copland, they all worked mostly within a tonal framework and with a feeling of a pulse.
But after the middle of the century, that changed. The so-called post-Webern sensibility gained sway.
And by the 1960s, many composers of both classical and jazz persuasions had forgotten what Kansas even looked like. Here's a bit of chamber music.
Both of these pieces show a strong jazz influence, but also reflect what was going down in the 50s and 60s classical scene. The first one not only has a strong beat, but a real walking bass.
The tonality, however, is tenuous. The second one, which was actually written first, still has a beat, albeit less obvious, but tonality has been completely 86ed.
I call this pair, Who's Got the Key? And I'll see you in about 11 and a half minutes.
Who's Got the Key? Not those two pieces. The first of which was the second movement.
Called Lines and Choruses of the Summer Trio for Flute, Cello, and Piano by Peter Schickely, alias Yours Truly. It was performed by the Walden Trio.
And the second work was Milton Babbitt's All Set, played by the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, under the direction of Arthur Weisberg. Played terrifically. I know some of those players.
I know that some of them play jazz, too, and you can really tell. The terms lines and choruses, in my title, are used in the jazz sense. Line for melodic line, and chorus, meaning a solo based on once through the tune.
Babbitt's title, All Set, is a pun, because set is a math term, meaning a particular bunch of numbers, therefore, by extension, a particular bunch of pitches. In other words, a 12-tone row is a 12-tone set.
And the row that Babbitt uses here is all combinatorial, which means... Well, you know what? We're running a little short on time here. I think I'll have to... We'll have to explain that on another program.
But I would like to read Babbitt's wry comment on his piece here. He says,
Whether All Set is really jazz, I leave to the judgment of those who are concerned to determine what things really are,
and if such probably superficial aspects of the work as its very instrumentation, its use of the rhythm section, the instrumentally delineated sections,
which may appear analogous to successive instrumental choruses, and even specific thematic or motivic material may justify that aspect of the title, which suggests the spirit of a jazz instrumental,
then the surface and the deeper structure of the pitch, temporal, and other dimensions of the work surely reflect those senses of the title,
the letter of which brings the work closer to other of my compositions, which really are not jazz. And that's Milton Babbitt, and you're you, and I'm Peter.
Peter Schickely, and the show is Schickely Mix, from PRI, Public Radio International. We're talking about jazz and classical music in the third quarter of the 20th century, approximately.
Actually, the span of today's pieces is about 20 years, from 1946 to 1966, during which time the walls came tumbling down.
The show is called Things Fall Apart, but of course that's a loaded title. One composer might talk about the breakdown, one of tonality and beat, while another talks of being liberated from tonality and beat.
The 60s were a time of polarization, and what happens in times like that is that some of the extremes turn out to be more similar than one had thought.
In one area, jazz and classical probably came closer together in the 60s than in any other time. Free jazz, free-form jazz, performance art, free improvisation.
It has been noticed that the most highly-matched, mathematically-organized pieces can often sound quite similar to the most freely-improvised music.
Here's a pair of piano solos. The first one is just piano. The second one features the piano as part of a larger ensemble.
We'll hear some of them, too. In the first piece, the notes are rigorously organized. In the second, they're completely improvised.
Now, organized and improvised are not necessarily mutually exclusive terms, but as used here, they are.
No one could possibly improvise following the procedures used by the composer of the first piece, and no one could possibly construct a set of rules that would result note for note in the second piece.
Yet the similarities are sometimes as striking as the differences. I call this pair, You Say Yin and I Say Yang. I'll be back in less than five minutes.
Cecil Taylor and ensemble in part of Enter Evening. Before that, we heard Maurizio Pollini playing the third movement of Pierre Boulez's second piano sonata.
You know, Cecil Taylor studied at a conservatory. Is that excerpt jazz? Who cares? Or rather, yes. Because it's a piece of jazz.
it's intended to be played by jazz musicians, and that has a lot to do with what it is.
In terms of popularity, jazz reached a nadir in the late 60s. A lot of jazz musicians didn't even want to be associated with the name. It was like the kiss of death, like opera on Broadway.
You know, if a simple definition of opera is a music theater piece in which the words are all or almost all sung, then several of the long-running shows on Broadway have been operas,
but no publicity agent in her right mind would call them that. Interestingly enough, the popularity of contemporary classical music reached a nadir
at about the same time. Now, I have the greatest sympathy for jazz musicians playing smoky clubs in which people talk and clink their glasses instead of listening, or playing dances at which
the audience is more interested in squeezing flesh than extending their ears, but I gotta say, when jazz finally achieved...
the cultural respect that it deserved, when it finally divorced itself completely from entertainment, it ended up having the same ingrown, alienated, head-up-its-lower-alimentary-canal
problems that classical music has had. I hope I don't lose any friends when I say that I'm glad that jazz is being taught at universities now, but it wouldn't exist, it wouldn't be what it is,
if it had grown up in universities, if it hadn't grown up in a community in which jazz is taught. In which its duties had to do with religion and entertainment, as well as art, with a capital R.
Now, I don't want to get too pontificational here, and you can't legislate these things, but I can't help thinking that jazz is now going through what classical music has been
going through for half a century, trying to figure out how to keep the respect of the establishment without becoming irrelevant to the community. How to pursue art for art's
sake without waking up on a desert island with your soul starving to death. How to reconcile the fact that a lot of great artists have been loners, with the fact that music is a performance art,
and performance arts get all sickly and start talking to themselves if they don't get regular blood transfusions from audiences. Furthermore, it seems to me that the basic thing that's...
Sorry about this, folks. Hello?
No, look, I told you, it's not a live music show, okay? We only do recordings. We don't have... No. Sorry. No, look, I told you, it's not a live music show, okay? We only do recordings. We don't have... No. Sorry.
place else to play it. Okay, right, bye. Man, persistent. Well, it's probably just as well
that the phone rang. I was really getting a little going there, and let's face it, what do I know?
Well, I know that I'm sometimes right, and I'm often wrong, but I'm always Peter Shickley,
and the evergreen program is Shickley Mix from PRI, Public Radio International. Things fall apart,
whether they're jazz or classical. It's natural, like the cycle of seasons. The thing is that artists do get tired of certain traditions and feel that something new has to be done to avoid
artistic cookie-cutterism, and just as nobody can sit down and decide to write a masterpiece, so nobody can legislate a golden age into being or keep a golden age from fading.
For centuries, Western music has been organized on the principle of harmonic motion, that is, a piece can be readily analyzed as a progression of chords that limit or define what the individual
melodic parts can do. You can hear it when the chords change. Here's a chord. Change. Change.
Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change.
Now, in fact, in jazz the progression of chords in a particular piece is referred to as its changes. Here's a chord.
Change. Change. Change. Change.
Even if you're not a trained musician and don't know what the chords are, you can tell when the chords change.
So at various times in the 20th century, a whole lot of different composers got tired of thinking that way, felt constricted by it. But they didn't all take the same door when they decided to leave home.
One door that leads to a place that's very different from Boulezbourg or Taylor Town is called the reptile door because it's covered with scales. Little joke there.
Very little joke. Here are two pieces in which the coordinating principle, instead of a set of chords, is a scale.
In the first piece, you won't be aware of chord changes because the composer wasn't thinking in terms of chords. He just sets up some beautiful melodies on a common scale.
In the second piece, which is a jazz number, after an intro and the statement of the tune, the players improvise not on a set of chord changes, but simply on scales. You use one scale for 16 bars.
Then it bumps up a half step for 8 bars. And then it drops back down to the original scale for 8 bars. So even if the pianist is playing chords in the background, they don't limit what you play.
You are limited only by the scale. Which doesn't mean, by the way, that non-scale notes can't be used in passing, just as in harmonically organized music.
Also, by the way, when I talk about using a scale, I don't mean playing scales like da-da-da-da-da-da-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee.
I mean that in constructing your melodies, you use notes from that scale, but without worrying about whether they belong to a C chord or a Bb minor chord or an F sharp 13 chord.
We'll call this pair of pieces, running the gamut. See you in about 12 minutes.
Thank you for watching.
Running the gamut. Two pieces based on scales rather than chord changes. First was the Suite for Violin, Piano, and Small Orchestra by Lou Harrison.
This was the fourth movement, aria, and that was Lucy Stoltzman and Keith Jarrett on violin and piano. Robert Hughes was the conductor and a small group there backing them up.
And the few times that Harrison does introduce a tone that's not in the regular scale, it's sort of analogous in another piece to going to a different chord.
Then we heard So What from the classic Miles Davis album Kind of Blue, with Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers, James Cobb, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans.
Now, with what time we have left, I thought I should give an example of what all these composers were reacting against.
So, I'd like to play as much as possible of Johann Sebastian Bach's well-tempered clavier, or Book Two. Book Two, not the first one. Everybody knows the first one. Because I think that the...
Excuse me. Hello? Hi, reader. Well, don't let them come up. They're on their way... Why didn't you stop them? Okay, okay, okay. I know.
And they're probably all big guys too, right? Okay, I'll take care of it. Never mind. Bye. Man, well, looks like we're going to have some visitors here, folks.
And I guess the easiest way to do that is... The easiest way to handle them is just to let them play and get rid of them. They want to do that bird tune, au prévave, that we started the show with.
Man, we've got to get better security in this place. I mean, anybody could... Okay, guys. No, come on in. Come on. Now, look. Just come in and play. You've got this memorized, right?
Because there aren't any music stands here. So, just play and vamoose, okay? Here we go. Charlie Parker's immortal au prévave. Performed by... Oh, brother.
Go ahead.
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