Dilemmas in jazz composition and impacts on the improvisor: (Part 2: Notation)

Notation, the working out of compositions, is primarily an ingenious expedient for catching an inspiration, with the purpose of exploiting it later. But notation is to improvisation as the portrait to the living model. It is for the interpreter to resolve the rigidity of the signs into the primitive emotion.

Ferruccio Busoni [1]

It is a great trap for the jazz composer to write something simple and then try to make it into something that it is not. Slightly ashamed of our seemingly insignificant melodic idea, we may try to make it appear more complicated than it actually is by adding a few bars to create an irregular form [2] or an unsymmetrical form, [3] or over complicating the rhythm of melody. This is often a real trap for the novice jazz composer who may do everything possible to make a little sixteen bar tune seem more important than it actually is. I know this, because I have done it. 

Though it seems somewhat counter-intuitive, we should actually be striving to make our compositions appear as simple as possible.[4]

This statement would not sit well with modern classical composers such as Brian Ferneyhough, whose stated aim is to terrorise a musicians into a stressed psychological state with incredibly complex manuscripts. Curiously, Ferneyhough feels that this state actually serves his music. Maybe this is possible in contemporary classical music, though I am skeptical. However, I am certain that jazz improvisation is better served by a relaxed mind.

A melody with just few chords on a lead sheet which produces a fantastic improvisation is a completely successful jazz composition. The Miles Davis composition, Solar, a twelve bar non-blues form, is one of the great examples of such genius. This seemingly simple composition has likely yielded more bright improvisational moments on stages around the world in the last thirty years than almost any other. If we were to musically analyse the best of those Solar “improvised compositions”  we would likely discover all the complexity contained within a twenty-minute string quartet of Beethoven or Bartok. Solar is like the greatest of pop songs. It is perfect. The genius is in this deceptive simplicity.

In the same vein I have often had musicians tell me that that they would love to sit down and write a hit pop song, but they do not have the time to do so. They often say it would be easy. I always know when someone tells me this that that they have never even tried. Writing a simple pop song is as difficult as writing a good improvisational vehicle, perhaps even more so.

 
[1] Ferruccio Busoni quoted in Introducing Modern Music written by Otto Karolyi, 1995 Penguin Books 329p

[2] Irregular form: My personal definition: I have defined this is as any composition that does not remain static on fours trades. For example forms with a total of 10, 12, 14, 18, 20, 22, 26, 28, 30, 34, 36, 38, 42, 44, 46, 50 and 52, Any such composition is automatically non-static on eights trades also.

[3] Un-symmetrical form: My personal definition: the un-symmetrical form is a more advanced irregular form that has a harmonic section with an odd number of bars and is unfortunately not very common in the jazz repertoire. I love to play this type of composition because one has to concentrate totally to maintain the form. Thelonious Monk has mainly written regular tunes but in his remarkable legacy of more than eighty compositions there are also a number of unsymmetrical forms. Wayne Shorter and Charles Mingus are also important composers of the un-symmetrical form.

[4] I deeply thank New Zealand bass player Dan Fulton for the seeds of this  illumination.