Editor’s introduction
Neil Croally
All art aspires to the form of music, because music is pure form . Someone misquoting Walter Pater 1
Music has been on my mind lately, because I have been marvelling again at the intricacies of jazz harmony, an interest aided and sustained by reading James Kaplan’s 3 Shades of Blue. Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lost Empire of Cool . 2 Apart from detailing the variously painful and difficult lives of his three subjects, Kaplan is good at showing the intellectual and aesthetic effort that went into creating the extraordinarily inventive harmonic worlds of be-bop and modal jazz, even as the latter reacted strongly to the chordal complexity of the former. 1959, the central focus of Kaplan’s book, being the year of Kind of Blue , was also the year in which the jazz world confronted the shock and awe of Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz . This record – still provocative – was subtitled A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet . For some listeners, there was nothing collective about the players of two separate quartets playing anything they liked. But was this free jazz – or freedom music, as some practitioners preferred to label it – simply the aural equivalent of rampant libertarianism? Not really. For all its apparent chaos and disconnectedness, Free Jazz displays individual players responding to what a collective is creating: better to describe this music as anarcho-syndicalist rather than libertarian. (This is not to say that the record is actually listenable.) I mean that Ornette Coleman’s revolution ary offering is still grounded in the jazz (and human) realities of collaboration, exchange, call and response and that, in this sense, jazz conforms to the idea that the nature of humanity as produced by evolution is essentially co-operative. 3 In traditional jazz, relatively 1 That someone is, of course, me. Pater actually wrote (‘The School of Giorgione’ from The Renaissance 1888 ): ‘ All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.’ He repeats the point later in the same text: ‘It is the art of music which most completely realises this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of matter and form. In its consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other .’ I think that Pater’s view that the best art marries or obliterates the distinction between form and content (as I always knew the terms of the debate in my A-level years) misses the point: it is not clear that music has content at all in the same way as the written and plastic arts. I suspect that is why I remembered (that is, preferred) ‘music is pure form’. 2 Kaplan 2025. For jazz aficionados at least, this is a book to be devoured. It details the careers of the three great jazz musicians leading up to, in the making of, and after Kind of Blue , one of the most celebrated of jazz LPs, recorded in either jazz’s annus mirabilis or the year of its death, depending on one’s critical allegiances. The book also recounts the tragedy of how too many musicians of the 40s and 50s took Charlie Parker’s self-destructive genius as exemplary, seeing the heroin addiction that would kill him at the age of 35 as the necessary condition of his harmonic hyper-innovation: the substance was the style. 3 On humans as evolving as social animals, see Dunbar 2014. For more particular discussions or how our ethical systems evolved from our social nature, see Singer 1981; De Waal 2006. For further discussion of the relationship between our social nature, joint intentionality and the evolution of our ability to think in distinctively abstract ways, see especially Tomasello 2014. On the important and currently much debated topic of the evolution of the
i
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker