© -Steven
Cerra , copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“Beginning in the mid-1940’s,
Kenton found an enthusiastic, ever-growing, devoted audience. His music
seemingly spoke to the postwar young and veterans of World War II. The
enveloping, orgasmic sound of the orchestra had a hypnotic quality. The general
feeling was that Kenton was hip. And though many critics disagreed vehemently,
supporters of the orchestra would have none of that. They loved with a passion
this vivid, often stirring, immoderately loud music that made them feel good
and seemed to promise something for the future.”
- Burt Korall, Jazz author and critic
There’s a
tremendous bond between Jazz musicians.
They know how hard
it is to play this music; harder still to create it.
As a result, Jazz
musicians have a ready respect for others who demonstrate a facility in
navigating the music’s many challenges.
The knowing look;
the smile of appreciation; the nodding of the head in approval are all subtle
signs accorded to a musician who can make it happen in Jazz.
Jazz doesn’t
exist; it has to be brought into existence by the improvising skills of the
musician, individually and in combination.
Of course, the
melodies, chord structures and blues frameworks that these improvisations are
based on are, for the most part, written compositions.
But this notated
music only serves as a point of departure.
Jazz is almost
impossible to teach, but it can be learned.
In Jazz, one of
the sincerest forms of flattery is indeed imitation; copying the work of others
in order to get the “feel” of how Jazz is done and to develop one’s own
sensibilities for making it.
It’s like trying
on our elders’ clothes until one is able to “dress” oneself with originality, assurance
and style.
When it all comes
together and one finds one’s own voice in Jazz, there’s a tremendous sense of
satisfaction and power in what the author Arthur Koestler once described as
“The Act of Creation.”
Although I am not
at all practiced in other, creative arts, I am told by many who are that artists
share a similar affinity with the work of each other be they painters or poets
or photographers; essayists or writers or biographers; playwrights or actors or
movie directors.
Sometimes these
artistic accords cross lines and combine well with one another.
Imagine viewing
motion pictures with film scores by Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith or Ennio
Morricone, or listening to Leonard Bernstein or Sting read the narrative to
Tchaikovsky’s Peter and The Wolf while
the symphony orchestra plays out the sounds of each of the characters or any of
the multitude of multi-media experiences that we create for ourselves like
viewing photographs or reading a novel while listening to music.
The arts blend and
form a concurrence with one another because each in their own way takes us
through perception into the world of imagination, emotion and atmospheric mood.
Artistic
expression also satisfies our need to shape our own world; our individualism,
as it were.
Part of growing up
is rejecting the world of our parents [without, of course, rejecting them] and
seeking out our own interests and world view. Artists help us to do this by
replacing the powerful ambiguity of imitation with the thrilling assurance of
finding our own preferences.
Artists often pave
the way for the new. In Jazz, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, King Oliver’s
Creole Jazz Band, and Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives were followed by the big
bands of The Swing Era and they, in turn, were followed by Bebop and various
forms of progressive or modern Jazz.
In painting, Greek
and Roman art was followed by that of Medieval Times, and then the Renaissance,
Mannerism, The Baroque and the various schools of Modern Art including,
Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impression and the
many schools of Twentieth Century painting and sculpture.
Two examples of
artists that strike me as constantly searching and probing for new directions
while having an artistic unity based in iconoclasm are the painter Wassily
Kandinsky [1866-1944] and the composer-arranger-bandleader Stan Kenton
[1911-1979].
Put into a simpler
form: I like listening to Kenton’s music while viewing Kandinsky’s art. Both
are known for their daring.
Kandinsky died in
1944, a few years after Kenton formed his first big band in 1941. As a Russian
living in Germany
A leading member
of a group of Munich
Using a rainbow of
colors and a free, dynamic brushwork, Kandinsky created a completely
non-objective style.
Whatever traces of
representation his work contains are quite unintentional – his aim was to
charge form and color with a purely spiritual meaning [as he put it] by
eliminating all resemblance to the physical world.
Not to push the
analogy between art and music too closely, but Stan Kenton in his music, as did
Kandinsky in his painting, eventually eschewed representational forms of the
Jazz while pursuing more abstract forms of the music.
He didn’t want his
band to swing or his music to be danced to, he wanted it to be modern, contemporary,
and progressive.
But most of all he
wanted his music to be listened to, to have an impact, to be felt!
Big, brassy and
bombastic, Kenton’s musical conception was orchestral bordering on the
grandiose. His music wasn’t mainstream, if anything, it was characterized by a
concerted effort to attack established Jazz “traditions.”
Can you imagine
standing in front of the Kenton band when it unleashed the power and majesty of
its music?
Trumpets
screaming, French Horns heralding, trombones blatting, and tuba’s bellowing
bass notes – what a rush!
I feel the same
flash of excitement when I view Kandinsky’s paintings with their bold, bright
colors, non-objective configurations and juxtaposition of shapes and patterns.
Both Kandinsky and
Kenton were spurred on by the artistic urge to find their own style; to do it
their way.
“Kandinsky's—or
any artist's [Kenton?]—ideas are not important to us unless we are convinced of
the importance of his pictures. Did he create a viable style? Admittedly, his
work demands an intuitive response that may be hard for some of us, yet the
painting here reproduced has density and vitality, and a radiant freshness of
feeling that impresses us even though we are uncertain what exactly the artist
has expressed.” [H.W. Janson, History of Art].
