Day 16: French Fries, Boogies, and a Dissertation

Today, I read the first chapter in P.G. Smith’s dissertation about Julius Watkins. This was the biographical bit, and while it did not lead to any meaty or contentious insights (naturally), it did give a decent background to Julius’s life.

Which leads me to wonder whether composing a general timeline for the whole instrument might be of order.

In any case, here is the brief timeline of Julius Watkins’ life, as taken from Smith’s dissertation.

Phase 1

1921 – Julius Burton Watkins born in Detroit
1937 – Drops out of high school to devote more time to being a soloist
1939-1942 – Tours with Ernie Fields’s orchestra, but forced to play trumpet or trombone only. Unhappy.
1942 – Moves to Denver, forms an unrecorded sextet. Plays for a year.
1943 – Moves to Detroit, steady work, unfulfilled as a soloist
1946-1949 – Tours with Milt Buckner’s “Beale Street Gang” as a hornist, trumpetist, and trombonist.
1950 – Enters Manhattan School of Music, thrives for one year
1953 – Due to unknown circumstances, drops out of school. Also divorces first wife

Phase 2

1954 – Appears with Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins, marking the beginning of a 5 year run as a combo soloist with many groups. Also records with Pete Rugolo this year.
1954 – Forms Julius Watkins Sextet, which records two 10″ blue note LP’s.
1955 – While on a date with the Oscar Pettiford Sextet, meets Charlie Rouse, who will become musical partner for next 4 years
1955 – Closing months: Les Modes (alternatively: Les Jazz Modes, The Jazz Modes) forms.
1955-1956 – Still unrecorded, Les Modes tours consistently, most notably and importantly in Birdland for one week, starting Jan. 3, 1957
1957 – After success at Birdland, Les Modes record 4 albums: Mood in Scarlet, The Jazz Modes, Smart Jazz for the Smart Set, and The Most Happy Fella
1959 – After slowing record sales, The Jazz Modes end after a disastrously reviewed avant-garde performance with a ballet company on Jan. 23, 1959

Phase 3

1959 – Meets Quincy Jones, who he will perform with for the next year or so
1959 – During a tour in France with Q. Jones, the band becomes stranded in Europe for 10 months. During these 10 months, Watkins develops into a consistent alcoholic, also given nickname “Phantom”
1960-1968 – Performs consistently, yet almost exclusively as a sideman
1968 – Health failing, drops off the recording scene, becomes homeless.
1969 – Moves into Warren Smith’s studio for 18 mos., meets and records with Pharoah Sanders, Mary Lou Williams (with David Amram), and others
1970 – Meets 2nd wife, married and moves to New Jersey
1972 – Records last known original piece and takes last known improvised jazz solo with the Jazz Contemporaries
1972-1977 – Begins teaching, but plagues with diabetes, playing suffers, only really appears in large orchestras
1977 – April 4, dies of a massive heart attack

That’s a lot of Julius’s life (but not all!)

As well, today I transcribed two solos: Oscar Pettiford’s Two French Fries and Mitch Miller’s Horn Belt Boogie

On Two French Fries, we hear solos from both David Amram and Julius Watkins (get the title?). I transcribed Amram’s, since I will be exploring him a bit next. While on the surface, the soloists are nearly indistinguishable, the division becomes readily apparent when analyzed structurally. First of all, the form is a 32 bar AABA. After bar 32 of the first soloist, we hear a sharp stylistic distinction, with more bends, more lip glissandos, fewer chromatic leading tones, more blue notes, more missed notes, and a smaller range. This is David Amram. It is a really cool solo, way more bluesy and “swaggerissimo” (as my band instructor likes to say) than Watkins.

On Horn Belt Boogie we hear what may possibly be the first recorded improvised french horn solo in a jazz setting (I have to do some more digging on this one, though). The soloist is probably Gunther Schuller, but I need to do a lot more digging around to find out more about this piece. While short, the solo is very nice, conforming to the bebop licks that were dying out (well, still are) very slowly. Lots of flat sevens and sixes. Yeah.

In Love and Horn-
Mamet

Day 12: It’s Hannukah in Jazzland, and Everybody’s Blue – a Retrospective

Hannukah in Jazzland

At around 10:30 this morning, I got the email I’ve been waiting for:

Hold Notice
The following item has arrived and will be held for you at the
Circulation Desk for 10 days. If you no longer want the item or need
it to be held longer, reply to this message or contact the appropriate
library:

Schaughency, Steven Michael, 1961-
The original jazz compositions of Julius Watkins
CALL NO: LB1840.G744 1994 .S36
BARCODE: U1850058864019uncp
BELONGS TO: University of Northern
PICKUP AT: BY: 06-19-15

I was (well, still am) ecstatic. This is what I have been waiting for. This is one of the most heavily cited works regarding Julius’s compositional talent, and is absolutely brilliant in analyzing the man as a composer, aside from just being a horn player. Which is what all of us want to be known for, right? Escaping the obscurity, gaining recognition as a musician first and a horn player, well, second.

While I haven’t read the dissertation fully (that’s for tomorrow), suffice it to say, it’s Hannukah in Jazzland, and little Abey got the present he always wanted.

Aside from the wonderful shiny new toy I got today, most of it was spent doing a “retrospective” summary of my readings and work so far. So here it is:

What I know (a bulleted list)

• Before Joseph Kerman, musicology was an antique study bogged down by its imperfections: modernity was still a foreign word to it and its students
• Kerman advocates for many things: a mixture of broad and the narrow analysis, critical analysis, a mixture of structural and tonal analysis without falling too heavily on one
• Kerman leaves the musicological world with one resounding call: keep motion. Not moving; motion.
• (all this, for me, gives great meaning and theory to my research project; take a critical look at the horn players I study, use a mixed lense when looking at the notes, and remember, music is music first and everything else imposed)
• Deveaux then takes this Kermanistic lense and applies it to jazz studies
• There is a three way struggle for control of what jazz is between the preservationists (W. Marsalis), the avant-gard-ians (O. Coleman, A. Braxton), and the commercialists (K. G.)
• This three way struggle, though, forces a concept to occupy one and only one space, leaving no room for a biassociated or triassociated music.
• Jazz is nearly impossible to define positivistically, its general aesthetic keeps theorists on their (our) toes
• No matter, though, for Deveaux: no matter what these musicians make, whether jazz or not, it will be great music
• Bergeron takes a Foucauldian view of western musicological structuring and analysis: the canon is constructed by varied power structures, written on and played by the musicians
• With this in mind, Morgan argues for a multicanon constructed by the people who live with it every day
• As a historian artist (me), work always to erase and reconstruct new boundaries
  • (A brief note here: it is impossible to work (exist) without defined boundaries, yet often, boundaries become tiresome and oppressive rather quickly)(that’s why Morgan says this)
• Randel discusses the musicological toolbox (the boundaries), and essentially says that we have twelve tones, strong beats, and a popular mindset to find out how music works. We can use this to make sense of many things, but often these “round” tools leave out “square” pegs.
• Finally, Gary Tomlinson stresses the importance of not seeking exclusively musical characteristics in jazz, and for not building walls around yourself as listener in an attempt to make sense of the music. Because that leaves you walled in
  • (This is because of his love of Bitches Brew and the general negative reaction towards the masterful album by institutionalized jazz critics)(He defends Bitches Brew)(I do too)

As far as the horn in jazz goes:

• Leonard Feather (and the rest of the jazz world) view the horn in jazz as an “oddity”
• The horn is nearly always used in large ensemble settings, but starting in the fifties with J. Watkins and J. Graas, gained modest solo recognition
• There are many awesome horn players, among them: J. Graas, J. Watkins, W. Ruff, D. Amram, T. Varner, J. Clark, A. Shilkloper (and maybe G. Schuller)

That’s it. That’s what I know.

So knowing, this I ask:
What is Jazz theory/What makes Jazz work?     What makes a jazz musician significant?

So asking, I will answer:
Who are the significant horn players?     What (musically) do these artists do?

Finally: Everybody’s Blue(s). That’s what I have been transcribing. Julius played it with the Quincy Jones orchestra in 1960. It’s a simple blues progression (hence the title), and might just be the longest solo Julius ever recorded. But here’s what’s truly special about it: it’s on videotape.

That’s right folks: we have the footage, it really happened. Jokes aside, it’s really important that we have this, because now, I can look at his fingerings. Julius’s mind does not disappoint. More on that when the transcription and analysis of it are done. A bit on the solo right now though: it is really, really cool. From a theoretical standpoint, that is. It is not the flashiest, or the most “ear catching”, but the real killer moment comes to me at 5:33, when, after spinning out some of his hot lick madness, he very easily and nonchalantly hits a high f. Which, for those of you not associated with the instrument, is not recommended to even attempt, let alone hold during a jazz solo. While the note would be a feat in itself, Julius is not content with that, and descends the ladder into the horn’s depths, cleanly cutting straight through five octaves, finally resting on a pedal f.
As I mentioned, the solo is really long, and I will go into some more detail tomorrow when I am done with the full transcription and have made my way through the whole solo. And with that…

In Love and Horn-

Mamet

Day 8: Autumn Leaves – A Monotonous Fall

I wouldn’t be dishonest in saying no grand intellectual leaps were conquered today, as most of my morning was spent researching what to read next. (read, monotony).

Though, a few things of note (please, hold the applause) did happen.

First: essentially washed my hands of non-jazz musicology. Although I will continue to reference it and its glorious petty arguments with itself, and occasional brilliant insight, I will mostly focus on writings specific to jazz, creative American music, and the French Horn. This decision, of course, was not made without some weight, and it came while in the midst of reading Nettl & Bohlman’s anthology: Comparative Musicology & Anthropology of Music. While its collection of essays are insightful (and, as I gather, a staple of the modern musicologists bookshelf), they are not wholly applicable to my study at this time. Which made me wonder (while reading a riveting account of Western imposition on African music): If this doesn’t “push my buttons”, then what will? In a later essay (a summary of Charles Seeger by Nettl himself), I answered: nothing. Well, nothing that’s not jazz studies, that is.

So I trekked down to the basement, the lovely music library, to consult two of my favorite Packard staples: Darryl and Dave. After some brief searching and consultation, I spent most of my time scanning Leonard Feather’s essay What Is Jazz?, to be read tomorrow, and looking for other good jazz things to read.

Needless to say, possibilities abound, yet time does not. Decisions, as they say, loom dark on the horizon, waiting to strike my intellect forward. Or whatever.

But that’s not why the day was “hard”. Oh no.

As I mentioned briefly yesterday, I wanted to do a ballad of Julius’s. Fair enough. Yet, he seems to shy away from ballads, rarely taking an improvised solo over the ones he records on (although, his ensemble playing on When Sunny Gets Blue and more noticeable Goodbye is particularly touching).

Anyways, he does take one solo of note over a ballad. It just so happens to be one of my favorites: Joseph Kosma and Jacques Prévert’s Autumn Leaves (made most famous, of course, by Cannonball Adderley).

Although at first glance the solo seems easy to tackle (as it did to me yesterday), once pen hits paper, oh, say, around 3:21, I nearly cried. Looking down now at my rough transcription notes, my staff lines are filled with incomprehensible rhythmes, notes and phrases surrounded by parentheses (to mark “ghosted”) and just general markings to remind myself: this part is free. Hence the trouble of solo transcription: it is a Western structural imposition on a non-western tradition.

More on that, I think, for later. But a thought to let marinate in the “Brain Stew“, for now, I believe.

So I got through about 3/4s of Julius’s Autumn Leaves solo, to be finished tomorrow. Less free, thank god.

In Love and Horn-

Mamet

Day 7: The Oblongated Histories of Jazz

What Kerman does to mainstream musicology (shakes things up, modernizes, reviews), essayist, textbook writer, professor, and jazz historian Scott Deveaux does in his 1991 essay “Constructing the Jazz Tradition“. In an opening scene that evokes images of the Scooby Doo gang unmasking a ghost, Deveaux yanks off the hood of the jazz community’s intuitive history as constructed and taught. “After an obligatory nod to African origins and ragtime antecedents, the music is shown to move through a succession of styles or periods, each with a conveniently distinctive label and time period: New Orleans jazz up through the 1920s, swing in the 1930s, bebop in the 1940s, cool jazz and hard bop in the 1950s, free jazz and fusion in the 1960s” (and then, as I added in my notes, funk in the 1980’s, preservatism in the 1990’s). He argues that this history is a deterministic and self-imposed one, and that it serves the political purpose of providing a non-European art form to the popular listener. Yet by using the term “jazz”, its own community molds and reshapes wildly different musical forms (think, say, The Red Onion Jazz Babies mixed with The Dead Kenny G’s). Both are jazz, but besides a mild instrumental resemblance, Deveaux (and I) ask: what really ties totally different traditions under the same genre? And he, as any good scholar is apt to do, doesn’t answer the question but justifies it. He illuminates the tri-fingered rift dividing the jazz community at that time (and now). On one side, under the burnished trumpet-sword of Wynton Marsalis, slumber the neoclassicists, the community of Preservation Hall t-shirt sporting, public radio subscribing, institutionalized camp. On the other end of the battlefield, using as their battle standard tattered banners of Ornette Coleman and Anthony Braxton (who I will be reading tomorrow), toil the avant-garde, trapped in a vortex of endless revolution, never satisfied, throwing away rules and piecing together unrelated ones to create fantastical, sometimes beautiful, sometimes acoustically offensive fabrics of sonority. And far away from these two embittered enemies sit the commercialized cats of Kenny G.’s tradition, surrounded by wealth, success, and popularity, not caring one bit whether they are being creative or preservative, just so long as the label is buying. Deveaux tries to illuminate these three groups in as equal a light as possible (and does a pretty decent job at it).

But I will be honest right now: I fall under, and am a savage, zealous defender of, the avant-garde creativists. But that’s just for honesty’s sake; I will try to keep my opinions out of the debate until I am ready to write my last work, at which point I will write one sentence, which will be my most famous, outlining my position. I will then promptly die.

Anyways, all of these camps believe it is their job to win to keep jazz alive. For the neoclassicists, jazz is something that existed once and died along with its other heroin-abused bodies, and if we want jazz music, we have to reconstruct a world of pure 50’s & 60’s hard hitting bop. For the creativists, a “retrospective aesthetic” is a death in itself: the only way to keep the music alive is to always create new kinds. And (most humorously), for the consumerists, they argue that you can’t really work if you’re dead from hunger, so give in to the market and make some dough.

To all this dissonant confusion, Deveaux brilliantly retorts: “They will continue to make music, and whether or not that music is called jazz is a matter of relative inconsequence.” Harkening back to his intellectual predecessor Kerman, Deveaux wants us to be critical and care whether the music is good or bad, not whether it is historo-structurally consonant with the whims of its academy (read: Berkeley, NYU, Manhattan School of Music, U of O, etc.)

Making such a good point begs for a closing of the work, and Deveaux acquiesces.

As will I. No new transcription work today, I just managed to finish “The Oblong“, which I will post once scanned. As well, looking forward, I decided I wanted to do a ballad of Julius’s, so I picked “Autumn Leaves“, a great standard, from one of his Jazz Modes sessions.

Here are two transcriptions: a revised “Jack the Fieldstalker” and a completed “Baubles Bangles and Beads“.

Julius Watkins: Jack the Fieldstalker

Julius Watkins: Baubles Bangles and Beads

In Love and Horn-

Mamet

Day 6: Historical Performance of Oblong Music

These titles are fun!

I finished Joseph Kerman’s Contemplating Music, Challenges to Musicology Today. It was an ironic doozy of a text. Essentially, Kerman finishes his scathing review by further implicated musicology as a stagnant study. He argues for applicability, accountability, and reality be applied to a field that he (and a few lucky others) at the time viewed as wholly and resoundingly conservative. In his time, musicology was good (publicly) pretty much only for accurate historical performance and reproduction. Kerman’s colleagues would obsess over minute details in instrument building, note choice, dress, technique, everything that would make a performance more authentic. As Kerman recounts late in his final chapter (p. 192), “‘authentic’ has now acquired the same cult value when applied to music as ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ when applied to food…. Yet authenticity is no guarantee of a good performance.” Certainly, this applies to the horn: anyone with at least one working ear will tell you that using valves on a modern horn, even a single, provides more accuracy and purity than a natural horn, with its hand-stopping technique, ever could.

In other words: if the thing wasn’t good, then why didn’t the throes of history do away with it?

Enough of that, though. “All things are good, some just are wearing bad clothes.” So now I’m done with Kerman, the great modernizing agent of a previously immobile machine, and I’m ready to start focusing on research that will apply specifically to the horn in jazz.
While I will get to the writings on and of Willie Ruff, on Julius Watkins, on and of David Amram, and of Gunther Schuller, I will first begin with what many often go to for a brief yet clear definition of what jazz is: Scott Deveux’s “Constructing the Jazz Tradition.” Apparently, Deveux uses a Kermanistic mix between a positivist basis and a critical interpretation to show historically how jazz culture has been shaped. In clearer words: Deveux uses the notes and also his feelings to tell us how jazz works, a method towards which good old Joe K. would applaud.

Only time will tell, though, if this prediction is true, and that time will come tomorrow.

Today, I transcribed a solo which I have already tried to tackle three times and never got past. In my opinion, this is the greatest solo Julius Watkins ever took: off of the self-titled “Jazz Modes” album, Julius’s own tune: The Oblong.

It’s an awesome, and by that I mean awe inspiring some, solo. Julius gets so high, and is so clean, I was in a state of shock as I discovered the note patterns he employs during this masterful cut. Hey, thank god they remembered to press “record”. What makes this solo so special, however, is how few notes Julius misses. At times, even the best horn players flub notes, and I don’t think Julius flubs a single note in this solo. He also shoves his lip trills in your ear, forcing you to forget about all the other petty instruments and remember, oh yeah, the horn is ruler of the universe.

But without getting too dramatic.

So I love that solo, and the tune. Enough said. (As a sidenote, it was also the very first tune I ever heard Julius on. Lucky little Abey was I!)

As well, I scanned another transcription! This one is Jack the Fieldstalker, an Oscar Pettiford tune from his “The New Oscar Pettiford Sextet.”

Julius Watkins: Jack the Fieldstalker

Again, a flashy solo from Julius, really really good.

And that’s all for today!

In Love and Horn-

Mamet

Day 3: Baubles, Bangles, Beads, and the Death of Antiquity

Today I read one of the most vibrant, exciting, incendiary musicologists I have ever encountered. To be fair, it’s not like I’ve read much musicology, but Joseph Kerman is really, really good. No kidding. I made it through chapter 2 (so up to chapter 3, isn’t that something) this morning, and it was a whirlwind. Basically, he rises from the ashes of antiquity (there goes the title!) to condemn his colleagues as being stuck on old forms of music. He wants, craves, the modern, and notices it lacking in his field. It’s a really good platform for my studies to leap off from, and is giving me great ideas about how to analyze music.

For instance (I promise, briefly), the intuitive response for studying music is “Get the facts! Write down the notes! Ignore your ears and look at the physics, the culture, the… real things!” Well, as my 8th block professor said on the first day of class, “kiddos, thank god you don’t go to one of those state schools where there are 400 people to a class and everything is quantifiable.” Kerman argues hand in hand with dear Professor Olive, and he makes a point of saying that as a musicologist, theorist, and analyst, he inserts his emotions into the music he is studying. Why study it if it doesn’t sound good? While there is merit to the quantified, the qualified is what we understand, what we fall in love with, why we listen.

With that, the song of the day: Baubles, Bangles, and Beads. You seem surprised. Is it because you are only familiar with the droopy orchestral Percy Faith version? No? What about the savage Peggy Lee music video? Better yet: “Francis Albert” Sinatra & “Antonio Carlos” Jobim?

Sorry to offend with my sarcasm. I just really don’t like this music.

And I guess Julius (Watkins) didn’t either, because he turns these slow gallops into a breakneck sprint. His playing is the head is sloppy at moments, but what can you say for triplets at >250 BPM on a horn? And so with the solo, he gives us 40 or so seconds of glory.  He rips his scales so fast, and so clean, I am still inspired when I listen to it for the tenth time in a row.

So I transcribed that today, it was the hardest transcription I’ve tried yet. His rhythm is all over the place. Which is cool. He also develops a very clean, nice, upper range, and double tongues quite a bit, which is an interesting thing to hear. I will post that tomorrow, when I have put it into finale.

Speaking of: as promised, the transcription of “Jack the Fieldstalker.” Again, this is off of J. Heath’s “Triple Threat,” an album which I urge you all strongly to purchase post haste. (For the street cred).

http://imgur.com/rxFC6MU

The scan didn’t come out too perfectly, so I think I will switch to using Finale, however unwieldy it is. For questions about the transcription, or if you want to reprint it or use it for something, please feel free to email me (as always) at abram.mamet@coloradocollege.edu. I’ll be here all summer, folks.

In Love and Horn,

Mamet