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!
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