| Share page | Visit Us On FB |
|
48 JAZZ
limitations. If we confine it to a simple pattern like, say, a pack of cards, a sensitive subject is sometimes able to predict whether spades or diamonds are going to turn up next. The more we fan out from these narrow confines, the less exactitude we may expect from our science. Telepathy may inform you that something dreadful is, at the moment, happening to your mother-in-law; it will hardly be exact enough to add the information that she is being run over by a number 623 trolley-bus.
Clearly, you can't improvise jazz successfully with more than about half a dozen musicians. How far can you go in jazz composition without a printed score—without your 'dots' ?
Our greatest living jazz musician has gone on record as agreeing that you get a limited range of effects from purely improvised jazz; Louis Armstrong did not want to go on 'faking' for ever, because "there is more to music than just playing one style."
The High Priests of the 'dots', the 'straight' musicians, naturally take a far more severe view of the limitations of jazz. Ernest Newman, for instance, writes: "Jazz being (in the compositional sense, apart from orchestration) merely a bundle of tricks, the composer who tries to develop jazz is on the horns of a dilemma: if he makes use of the tricks, he fetters his individuality, and if he does not, he ceases to write jazz."
Some hold that these very limitations of jazz are the essence of its fascination. The rhythmic beat gives a |
||