Bad jazz and good music

A friend of mine was talking about doing function gigs, playing in a multi-purpose band doing anything from pop covers to jazz standards. They said that they prefer doing pop with this band because “bad jazz just breaks your heart”. This isn’t someone I think of as terribly precious about music either. They’re a superb musician, but also a very practical person, adaptable and aware of the demands of the business, with the dry sense of humour that’s essential for survival. The comment was a moment of candour, a reveal of how important music is to them.

And I don’t think they were saying that playing pop music is easier, or that the music is less important. This wasn’t musical snobbery. I think this was about their experiences of particular musicians making a better job of pop covers, and being less at home playing jazz, and that this feels bad if you’re a jazz musician. Why might this be? For my friend I think that playing a well known cover in a function band might be a clear task. It’s about matching the original, doing a good pastiche, so that the punters at the wedding (or whatever) recognise it and respond. It’s like telling a joke. If it lands it lands. You need to be a skilled musician to make it work, but the task is clear. I heard a fantastic covers band at a wedding just a few weeks ago, who were able to do all of the above and then take it to another level, brilliant musicians bringing the songs to life. I loved it. I think it would have mostly sounded the same on the next gig. Improvisation is part of the issue. And playing jazz for a function gig involves improvising in a style and is not usually rehearsed in advance. It’s a sort of pastiche, but you might not be thinking of one particular source performance when you're playing, say, ‘Night and Day’. It can be done really well, if you put the right band together, but if you’re playing with people who aren’t playing the music with love, it can be a turgid affair, with people ploughing through a tune they don’t really know well enough, eyes glued to the chord chart, not much groove happening, no one listening. Jazz depends on musical connection and subtle communication between the players. Even if you’re playing very ‘inside’, say emulating a mainstream 50s sound, Getz or early Coltrane, all of the players are improvising all of the time, keeping the groove, making the phrasing, balancing the dynamics. There’s a lot to take care of. With the right players, I love doing a jazz function gig, but with the wrong ones it can ‘break your heart’.

There is plenty of scope for playing jazz badly, but for it still to sound sort of like jazz, perhaps to the punter who isn’t all that well versed. The drums go ting-ta-ting, the bass plays four crotchets in a bar, the piano comps a bit randomly and the horn player widdles around over the top. “I like some jazz, but I don’t like the widdling”, another friend once said to me, right before my gig. “It sounds like ‘widdling’ because you’re not listening properly”, I could have objected. But sometimes it IS widdling, by which I guess they meant aimless playing with no clear shape to the phrasing or melodic direction. There’s good music and bad music, as Duke said, and that includes jazz. In fact, maybe there’s more bad jazz, partly because playing it well is difficult, but also because playing it badly is easy. I tried not to ‘widdle’.

In music therapy improvisation (MTI) it would be unusual to play bad jazz. My experience of MTI is that the music is usually much more interesting than this. There’s no formula. As a therapist you wait to hear what comes out and then respond to it. There’s no requirement for a client in a session to be musically proficient. But as it happens, the music is often very engaging. Here’s a theory: it’s always engaging, as long as the intention is playful. A client can have zero experience playing instruments, but if they’re in a creative mood, and the therapist is hooked into this, it will sound good. Freedom is infectious. I would MUCH rather listen to the music in a music therapy session than to, say, jazz played formulaically, where playfulness is absent.

Priestley talked about the phenomenon of ‘anti-music’. Perhaps we need to think about this more than we do in music therapy. Musicians can inspire one another, but they can also break hearts, sap the life out of it. When someone is in their own world, imagining the music but not hearing it in the room, not paying attention to the other sounds around them, this can be a depressing, energy sapping experience. Bad music is a thing. As music therapists we can accept painful and challenging sounds into the room, but bad music is something else . It breaks your heart. Bad jazz has some special shortcuts to this, which might be about overcomplicating, not listening properly, having no love of the important details of a style, but really it all comes down to intention. Are the musicians caring about each other? This can be done with no technique at all. One person bashes a cluster of notes on a piano. There’s a pause. The next person hits a drum, matching the intensity and intention of the first - hey presto, good music!

Just in time

Now you're here and now I know just where I'm going

No more doubt or fear, I found my way

(Styne/Comden/Green)

In her Netflix special Joke Show, the comedian Michelle Wolf describes a blog as ‘a conversation no one wanted to have with you’. This sounds about right. So, liberated by this awareness, I’m pressing on, along with all the other bloggers…

A nagging question for me, in the field of music therapy, is one of musicianship. Actually it’s not only in music therapy, it’s music making more generally (btw I’m not a fan of the word ‘musicking’ despite attempts to get used to it - I prefer music as a mysterious noun). When making music with another person, and especially since becoming a music therapist, I am so often struck by how much the experience affects how I feel about them. If the music clicks, I usually click with the person too. Why is this? Perhaps what I need is to feel reciprocal listening, to feel that what I’m doing is being heard and responded to, and that my responses to them are important to them and have meaning for them.

But I’m more picky than that as well. I did a duo gig once with someone who (my experience) didn’t have a good time feel. Every time we began a tune at a medium or fastish tempo, I could feel it beginning to slow down to their comfort zone. I tried pushing, but this had limited effect. I felt frustrated, blocked, even offended. It was our first meeting, and so our first time playing together, so was I being impatient, not allowing the relationship to emerge? Maybe, but I had another experience recently with a new musician to me, where everything instantly clicked. We also got on. Generally I feel I’ve been lucky, experiencing the latter more frequently, and often surprised by musical frustrations when they come up.

A very experienced jazz musician once said to me that playing with good time is about memory. If you can remember the tempo then there’s no need to slow down. Losing time is about losing memory, or perhaps not bothering to remember, or not listening and paying attention properly. One of the benefits of being a music therapist might be that when this happens in a session, with a client, it could be understood as communication. As the therapist, I might notice the time dragging (assuming we’re playing in a recognisable pulse in the first place) and I could reflect on it. What does it tell me about the client? Are they dragging because they are feeling slow, depressed, heavy? Is there a physiological reason - slow processing time, motor difficulties, some other physical impairment or illness? Is there an unconscious meaning behind the slowness - are they holding me back so that I can feel what it’s like to be held back, for example?

All of this assumes that my time is ‘right’ and theirs is ‘wrong’, that I’m ‘in time’ and they’re falling behind, perhaps. This might be rather subjective, but it might also be empirically correct - one of us might be a better metronome (which one?). This would suggest that having good time awareness is a very important prerequisite for becoming a music therapist. It might even be extended to the idea that having a good ‘feel’ is important too, since feeling a groove and playing in time are so closely related. Is this the case? If so, what else might be important? Intonation? Sound quality? Control of dynamics? My intuitive response would be, yes, all of those. In other words, to be a good music therapist, you need to be a good musician. What a surprise! You get all the big insights here - stick with me.

There’s another nagging problem, voice in my head, whatever. How do I know the difference? How do I avoid projecting my own musical inadequacies onto another musician, who might be a music therapy client? The subtleties of groove, for example, can be experienced as ambiguous - who is dragging and who is rushing? Herbie Hancock’s Chameleon, from the classic Headhunters album, speeds up substantially throughout the track. It’s not about playing with strictly metronomic time, because we know who does this best of all, and it’s definitely not humans. Groove is mutually felt, negotiated, settled into. Sound quality is subjective. Musical personality is a matter of taste. Musicality is culturally determined as well, so a musical difference might be a cultural difference, rather than a difference in competence or sensitivity.

Where does this leave me? With a feeling that I have to trust my own musical judgement, while understanding that it’s fallible. But also with an awareness that musical differences can be felt as personal differences, that how someone is with me as a musician can have a profound effect on how I feel about them as a person. I also notice that the musicians with whom I have developed the best musical relationships are those with whom I feel a shared understanding and have developed trust. I feel intuitively that a person can tell me a lot about themselves through their music, which can include whether they trust me, and whether they want me to trust them. Another friendship with a musician comes to mind, one in which trust has eroded a little over the years, and where this loss is also (by me at least) felt musically whenever we find ourselves playing together. Interestingly, although this isn’t ideal, it is survivable, and maybe even transformable, who knows…

So musicians are people, and people are musicians. I think this idea is a big part of what brought me to music therapy in the first place, and what keeps me fascinated with this peculiar discipline. Why does this musician make me feel good, while this other one can make me feel bad? And why is music such an effective medium for transmitting these feelings? I will continue to try to understand this, which must include a developing awareness of whatever my part is in the shared process, just like, you know, in life.