Too. Many. Notes! All that noodling. Honking and screeching. Borrrrrrring.
Recording his music in the EP format, then, was simply a way of following the lead created by a new audience. "On an artistic level, making an EP is more like writing a short story. I think of it as a story rather than a bunch of tunes with solos. Form became the thing for me: how does the form of one tune tell the story? I want there to be closure at the end of the track.
You hear this in Greenstein's music. On Vol2, the second of his two EPs, with Michal King and Takeshi Ohbayashi on keys, bassist Joshua Crumbly, and drummer Jonathan Pinson. Consisting of five tunes over 20 minutes, Greenstein creates music that is approachable and tonal (that is, not edgy or avant-garde) and that makes a statement through atmosphere and groove. There-s improvising and interesting form—this is not some poppy, smooth jazz—but the tunes aren't structured as bebop melodies, strings of solos from all the players, then the melody again. The opener, "Once You're There" sets out a tenor saxophone melody in ballad form and then sets up a hip-hop-type groove ... but one with alternating bars of four beats and six beats. The original melody doesn't return as a ballad. "Retrograde" features a haunting minor melody that transitions into an unusual, somewhat military sounding drum groove just as a ghostlike electronic keyboard begins playing figures and washes behind Greenstein's improvisation. The melody does return this time, with just the tenor and Wurlitzer piano remaining.
"The idea," Greenstein said of this recent recording, "is this: if you have one subway ride, can you go through this transformative experience in that time. It's connected to this idea that you are holding someone's hand and saying, this music is okay, it won't bite. It's not a complex, through-composed thing that will exhaust you. Hopefully, you hear it, you might think you didn't need it, then you realize how much you needed it.
"I think that's what Bird with Strings did for me. I thought he's talking to me. He's bringing me into the song. I'm trying to do the same thing. So you as a listener can enter this story, a whole world of sound and texture. Hopefully, this music stays with you, and you can grow with it, through the closure, through it being a full statement. Too much jazz lacks that full statement."
As a jazz critic and fanatic, I frequently hear what people do not like about the music. Chief among their complaints is this: jazz is indulgent—music for other musicians that just goes on and on with all that playing, all that complicated music. I might deride folks for lack of patience or appreciation, but what's wrong with jazz being more accessible, more digestible, shorter? After all, what we admire about The Beatles or Stevie Wonder might be an ability to compress so much great music into a classic pop song length with the impact that comes with brevity.
In the early decades of jazz, of course, the music as recorded came in short form. Until the LP became common in the '50s, almost every recorded performance was less than four minutes. Duke Ellington, to use just one example, could fill three minutes with a universe of creativity. In the most recent past, jazz musicians have tried to make their art more accessible by writing tighter tunes and recording shorter, "poppier" material, and there are examples of some success. But dumbing the music down to compete with real pop—hooks and choruses and all that—meant erasing the beauty that made jazz special.
In the last few years, however, we are seeing a new brevity arrive from jazz musicians who are thinking differently about getting their art into people's ears. Specifically, we are seeing the release of EPs—"extended play" recordings that contain fewer tracks then a traditional full-length "album", which usually means about 20 minutes of music.
Most notably, in 2017 saxophonist Kamasi Washington released Harmony of Difference, an EP containing music written for an installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Washington's previous recording was his three-CD debut, The Epic, a recording that utterly defied the notion that the hipper jazz audience requires something brief. It was released on Brainfeeder, an imprint associated with Flying Lotus rather than mainstream jazz. Yes, Washington's latest work was inherently shorter, but the move remains intriguing and savvy. And he's not alone.
More and more, jazz artists across the spectrum find that releasing EPs makes sense. Often, these shorter collections of tunes are being released digitally rather than in a physical format, quite often through Bandcamp. How and why this makes sense in the 2018 commercial climate for jazz is an intriguing question that I explored with saxophonist and composer Jonathan Greenstein and the president of Mack Avenue Records, Denny Stilwell.
Up-and-Coming Artists and EPs: Saxophonist Jonathan Greenstein
How does a 14-year-old who's been studying classical music in Israel have his head turned in the direction of jazz? Jonathan Greenstein had his 8th-grade after-school music teacher give him a cassette of Charlie Parker's classic Bird with Strings album. "This will really convince you," he told the young saxophone student. "It was the opening phrase of 'Just Friends'—it was so different from anything I'd heard before, anything I'd heard on the radio," Greenstein says, with wonder still in his voice. "I was listing to a lot of Pink Floyd at the time, a lot of Metallica."
Today, Greenstein is in his early 30s and living in New York, and the lessons of Bird with Strings are still paramount. What Greenstein heard in Parker's art in 8th grade was simple: he heard a story-teller at work.
Greenstein studied music in Israel out of high school and played in the IDF military band as part of his mandatory service. But the lure of coming to the birthplace of jazz was strong. "I wanted to give it a try. I figured I'd regret not trying, even if I tried and failed. I visited The New School in New York then headed up to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. There, someone told us to go a free concert with alumni, and there was a student who was a songwriting major, and she sang a country song."
Greenstein aspired to play jazz, but at some level, the real lure was storytelling. "I thought, if there is someone who can sing something like that, a pop hit, that's the place for me."
After music school, says Greenstein, "I thought, I am ready. I moved to New York and nobody cared." He and a few friends went out every night "trying to cut each other" but "New York is very expensive, and I ran through my money quickly." He moved back to Israel for a time but didn't feel at home, at least not musically. And so in 2011 he returned to New York and developed a new way of thinking about his music. "I'm thinking, I don't like the supper club experience. I didn't want to play at Dizzys [expensive jazz club that is part of Jazz at Lincoln Center] and have people pay a $30 cover, $50 for a meal, more for wine. That was not the experience I wanted for my music. You play differently for those audiences."
Crafting a New Way of Telling a Jazz Story
Greenstein wanted out of jazz clubs and thought about a place where the audience would be standing up. "So, I thought, what if we play at a rock club—at Rockwood Music Hall? I convinced them to let me play even though they don't usually have instrumental music. We played on a Wednesday at 1.00 AM. On our first gig there was one guy, drunk, who yelled, 'Jazz at Rockwood, I can't believe it!' We played there every week for a year and a half. It completely changed what I was trying to do. Because the audience is standing up, a certain groove has to be there. Everything has to have closure, a concise story. It has to be short or otherwise people will pull out their phones. If we started with something that sounded too 'jazzy', we would lose the audience right away."
In the early decades of jazz, of course, the music as recorded came in short form. Until the LP became common in the '50s, almost every recorded performance was less than four minutes. Duke Ellington, to use just one example, could fill three minutes with a universe of creativity. In the most recent past, jazz musicians have tried to make their art more accessible by writing tighter tunes and recording shorter, "poppier" material, and there are examples of some success. But dumbing the music down to compete with real pop—hooks and choruses and all that—meant erasing the beauty that made jazz special.
In the last few years, however, we are seeing a new brevity arrive from jazz musicians who are thinking differently about getting their art into people's ears. Specifically, we are seeing the release of EPs—"extended play" recordings that contain fewer tracks then a traditional full-length "album", which usually means about 20 minutes of music.
Most notably, in 2017 saxophonist Kamasi Washington released Harmony of Difference, an EP containing music written for an installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Washington's previous recording was his three-CD debut, The Epic, a recording that utterly defied the notion that the hipper jazz audience requires something brief. It was released on Brainfeeder, an imprint associated with Flying Lotus rather than mainstream jazz. Yes, Washington's latest work was inherently shorter, but the move remains intriguing and savvy. And he's not alone.
More and more, jazz artists across the spectrum find that releasing EPs makes sense. Often, these shorter collections of tunes are being released digitally rather than in a physical format, quite often through Bandcamp. How and why this makes sense in the 2018 commercial climate for jazz is an intriguing question that I explored with saxophonist and composer Jonathan Greenstein and the president of Mack Avenue Records, Denny Stilwell.
Up-and-Coming Artists and EPs: Saxophonist Jonathan Greenstein
How does a 14-year-old who's been studying classical music in Israel have his head turned in the direction of jazz? Jonathan Greenstein had his 8th-grade after-school music teacher give him a cassette of Charlie Parker's classic Bird with Strings album. "This will really convince you," he told the young saxophone student. "It was the opening phrase of 'Just Friends'—it was so different from anything I'd heard before, anything I'd heard on the radio," Greenstein says, with wonder still in his voice. "I was listing to a lot of Pink Floyd at the time, a lot of Metallica."
Today, Greenstein is in his early 30s and living in New York, and the lessons of Bird with Strings are still paramount. What Greenstein heard in Parker's art in 8th grade was simple: he heard a story-teller at work.
Greenstein studied music in Israel out of high school and played in the IDF military band as part of his mandatory service. But the lure of coming to the birthplace of jazz was strong. "I wanted to give it a try. I figured I'd regret not trying, even if I tried and failed. I visited The New School in New York then headed up to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. There, someone told us to go a free concert with alumni, and there was a student who was a songwriting major, and she sang a country song."
Greenstein aspired to play jazz, but at some level, the real lure was storytelling. "I thought, if there is someone who can sing something like that, a pop hit, that's the place for me."
After music school, says Greenstein, "I thought, I am ready. I moved to New York and nobody cared." He and a few friends went out every night "trying to cut each other" but "New York is very expensive, and I ran through my money quickly." He moved back to Israel for a time but didn't feel at home, at least not musically. And so in 2011 he returned to New York and developed a new way of thinking about his music. "I'm thinking, I don't like the supper club experience. I didn't want to play at Dizzys [expensive jazz club that is part of Jazz at Lincoln Center] and have people pay a $30 cover, $50 for a meal, more for wine. That was not the experience I wanted for my music. You play differently for those audiences."
Crafting a New Way of Telling a Jazz Story
Greenstein wanted out of jazz clubs and thought about a place where the audience would be standing up. "So, I thought, what if we play at a rock club—at Rockwood Music Hall? I convinced them to let me play even though they don't usually have instrumental music. We played on a Wednesday at 1.00 AM. On our first gig there was one guy, drunk, who yelled, 'Jazz at Rockwood, I can't believe it!' We played there every week for a year and a half. It completely changed what I was trying to do. Because the audience is standing up, a certain groove has to be there. Everything has to have closure, a concise story. It has to be short or otherwise people will pull out their phones. If we started with something that sounded too 'jazzy', we would lose the audience right away."
Recording his music in the EP format, then, was simply a way of following the lead created by a new audience. "On an artistic level, making an EP is more like writing a short story. I think of it as a story rather than a bunch of tunes with solos. Form became the thing for me: how does the form of one tune tell the story? I want there to be closure at the end of the track.
You hear this in Greenstein's music. On Vol2, the second of his two EPs, with Michal King and Takeshi Ohbayashi on keys, bassist Joshua Crumbly, and drummer Jonathan Pinson. Consisting of five tunes over 20 minutes, Greenstein creates music that is approachable and tonal (that is, not edgy or avant-garde) and that makes a statement through atmosphere and groove. There-s improvising and interesting form—this is not some poppy, smooth jazz—but the tunes aren't structured as bebop melodies, strings of solos from all the players, then the melody again. The opener, "Once You're There" sets out a tenor saxophone melody in ballad form and then sets up a hip-hop-type groove ... but one with alternating bars of four beats and six beats. The original melody doesn't return as a ballad. "Retrograde" features a haunting minor melody that transitions into an unusual, somewhat military sounding drum groove just as a ghostlike electronic keyboard begins playing figures and washes behind Greenstein's improvisation. The melody does return this time, with just the tenor and Wurlitzer piano remaining.
"The idea," Greenstein said of this recent recording, "is this: if you have one subway ride, can you go through this transformative experience in that time. It's connected to this idea that you are holding someone's hand and saying, this music is okay, it won't bite. It's not a complex, through-composed thing that will exhaust you. Hopefully, you hear it, you might think you didn't need it, then you realize how much you needed it.
"I think that's what Bird with Strings did for me. I thought he's talking to me. He's bringing me into the song. I'm trying to do the same thing. So you as a listener can enter this story, a whole world of sound and texture. Hopefully, this music stays with you, and you can grow with it, through the closure, through it being a full statement. Too much jazz lacks that full statement."
by Will Layman, Pop Matters | Read more:
Image: YouTube
