I don't believe in twelve-tone swing
Dear Sam, when you asked whether there might be a mixture of jazz and "serious" music (hereinafter referred to as E-music, as in the case of GEMA) in the future, I involuntarily had to think of a colleague of mine who deals with electronics and other very advanced things in E-music. He exclaimed after listening to the Modern Jazz Quartet (at the Donaueschingen Music Festival 1957): Today I have learned a lot!
I wonder what he might have learned, because what the Modern Jazz Quartet is doing seems to me only an approximation of certain classical material, harmonic, thematic; and what it expresses is floating between swing and the 18th century, is colder than other jazz, "cultivated" and pointing towards literary Parisian salons (Mallarmé, Baudelaire). The instruments are worn out to the point of uselessness by E-music. For example, the vibraphone is simply no longer possible for us E-musicians, while it still makes a sensation with fans, especially under the hands of Milton Jackson. So what could my electronic colleague have learned on that October morning in Donaueschingen? Perhaps he noticed the cerebral celebrating element (an element usually alien to jazz)? Or the certainly ample similarity of the Modern Jazz Quartet's swanky, dotty style with some expressions of the 'pointy' style of certain serious musicians - and he might have thought of the echo of such music and of the Modern Jazz Quartet coming from steel-tube salons, an echo based on misunderstanding or on too simplistic considerations. Perhaps a relationship could be found there, but it is uninteresting because it has little to do with the life of either jazz or new music and would only point to a marginal phenomenon.
Let's think historically, let's think of the last fifty years of music: the glorious emergence of jazz, a conquest of the world, against the difficult path of a new music, on the shoulders of a centuries-old tradition fighting against ignorance, reaction, bourgeoisie, in the hot endeavour for a youth - while jazz effortlessly conquered the hearts.
Without tradition, however, E-music is unthinkable; every new manifestation, no matter how daring, is proof of this (the truly new even has to use very familiar terms to express the unknown).
In clear contrast to this there is jazz, - a barbaric idea free of tradition, in a position diametrically opposed to the new music (supported by the past, but at the same time burdened with it).
Both musics exist independently of each other. Occasionally, an E-musician has taken something from jazz: Stravinsky in the "Story of the Soldier" and in the "Ragtime", Milhaud in the "Création du monde", the early Hindemith in the "Chamber Music" and in the "Suite 22" - several more examples could be cited, but such occasional adoptions do not change the nature of the new E-music and, moreover, have little to do with jazz. They are quotations of jazz, occasionally possible intermediate positions, such as Liebermann's "Concerto for Jazz Band and Orchestra" or my "disgusting, decadent" (according to the East "Berliner Zeitung") ballet "Maratona di Danza". But all that is not jazz! The use of jazz elements does not make jazz.
On the other hand: jazz musicians sometimes use terms from E-music (often for similar parodic purposes as E-music quotes jazz).
But - and this is what I mainly wanted to tell you - it is never to the advantage of one element or the other. In combination, jazz weakens the spirituality of E-music, and vice versa, the latter weakens the spontaneity of jazz.
E-music is intimate, it is soliloquy, address (it can be abstract), it is refined sound art imagining an ideal (prepared) audience, or none at all. Jazz, however, is dance music ( indeed it is! indeed it is!), utility music, even if it is the best, more physically effective than E-music wants to be, it cannot and does not want to evoke anything other than excitement, movement, while E-music evokes a thousand different emotions and is full of secrets often impeding access to it. Improvisation, the emotion-generating element in jazz, is one hundred percent dependent on the performer, on the player, while E-music can evoke the emotions intended by the composer even when his music is performed by less bravura soloists or orchestras, even when you only read it in the score.
Dear Sam, it is precisely because I love jazz, and most of all the spontaneous, unintellectual kind, that I can neither imagine nor wish that there would ever be a union between the two worlds. Something new will always grow out of both types of music, independently of each other, in the wildest quarrels about styles and schools, somewhere in the world the necessarily new will emerge quite inconspicuously, while others break out, drop off.
Jazz is a new art that does not need the old art. The fascination is in the juxtaposition, not in the confusion.
Ciao!
Yours H W. H.
