What I meant, George, is that Bach's mind was so fluid and spontaneous that, writing or playing, (for small, intimate settings) nis creative process was the same. Just that one was immediately produced with a musical instrument and the other, paper then instrument. Same process.
@administrator said in Is It Jazz or Is It Classical?:
Now, I would pay good money to hear J.S. Bach improvise!
You do often when you listen to his small group or solo works. So much of that is just him improvising as he catches it on paper.
Something very interesting in that film, and think it's lost on a lot of viewers, is that the director used a very subtle device. Some of the film is B&W and some in colour. It represents two different time frames, the B&W is the past, the colour is the present.
Like practically all biopics, that film takes poetic license. Yet, I believe, it's true in substance.
curlydoc, I'm a little late to the game but I'm so sorry for your falls and broken ribs. Must've been very painful and restricted.
I've just got two comments:
Continue to better health.
Long Tones.
Barliman - the pole dancer they were going to use got waylaid at the last minute. Otherwise, there would have been no complaints.
Well. somebody went to a lot of trouble putting that together, but I wonder - what criteria? No:
Carol King
James Taylor:
BS&T and Chicago
Barry Manilow (sorry)
Ray Charles
Aretha Franklin?
The list could go on.
Man, a little help up front would be nice.
Who'a the soprano?
Thank you, Shifty.
It would be nice if you gave credit to the composer and performers.
Look at a Monet and simultaneously listen to Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and you can intuit it.
Lester Young
Colman Hawkins
Charlie Parker
Dizzy Gillespie
Cecil Taylor
Ornette Coleman
Do we really need to go on?
Riffing off of George's comments about watercolors and pastels, this anecdote might interest the musician/painter at heart.
I was doing a watercolor abstract at the Honolulu Academy of Art and felt this presence over my shoulder. I finally looked up and it was my instructor, who asked, "Are you a musician?" I said yes and asked how he knew. "From the way you handled colors" he said.
I thought that was an interesting parallel. I was a budding composer of what you might call "abstract music".
This only applies to American pistoned valves. I played trumpet professionally in military concert and big bands and in pop/soul bands and never was anal about different sounds per valve combination. The body follows the mind.
That's not to say that, occasionally. on certain sustained tones blending in a section, I might not have used an "alternate" fingering, but usually you just have a clear mental picture of the sound you want to produce and get out of the way of your physiology. Your body's smarter than you think.
I think I'm missing your point. That Bix was an innovator? The world is and has been, full of innovators.
"I explained that pitch and tempo in the real world are locked together I know you know this . . "
Well, I don't know this. I've heard people play with exact rhythm bur faulty intonation. And people with exact intonation who swing like the anchor on the Queen Mary. Am I misunderstanding your sentence?
I was referring to an era of finite time requirements and how the aesthetics impact on that. Only.
Regarding the aesthetics of whether or not a composer of the past would compromise his tempos in order to fit the technology, I don't think that has a universal answer.
In the case of that composer who would not compromise, his option is to forgo getting his music recorded. His choice.
OTOH, some composers would be willing to compromise adjustments to tempo in order for a recording to take place.
I remember doing some research for an upcoming tour containing "An American in Paris" and noticing the difference in tempos between the original Whiteman recording and recordings by, say, Bernstein, Fiedler etc. I would suggest what's a bigger question: what's authentic and does it matter musically?
In this case, I opted for as historical as I could get. But I'm not going to go eye-to-eye with Uncle Lenny over the musicality of the respective choices.
Let's keep in mind that old records had time parameters that modern recordings do not. In many cases, music was played quicker to fit in the finite requirements of the recording parameters of the time.