Pollack argues that the main reason that Giant Steps is such a high mountain is because it is traditionally played at such a ferocious tempo. Slow it down, and the Coltrane Changes become fairly ordinary ii-V-I substitution progressions.
I’m persuaded. I love Coltrane, and I’ve listened to the Giant Steps album countless times. The Coltrane Changes are very nice, but in the line of other jazz theory such as tritone substitution, the deceptive cadence, and so on.
The main thing with Giant Steps is that to play it like Coltrane does you have to practice it to death, accumulate a vocabulary of riffs, and gain facility at improvising over sophisticated changes moving at a speed that other tunes won’t have prepared you for.
EDIT: I originally posted the wrong link, to Giant Steps slowed down 30%. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilbrDJy9-98
I haven’t heard that one. I think I prefer this one, attributed to Leibniz:
“Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.”
On top of that there is definitely some feel and intuition going on. But for a band to play non-trivial music, everyone is counting unless they know the material cold, and even then they are probably counting at times.
But I think the quote is also referring to casual enjoyment of music where the counting might not be deliberate.
-- some movie I don't recall
There is a premise hidden in those speculations that there is some strong connection between the structure of the universe itself and the structures humans find pleasing when listening to music. And I detect a suggestion that studying the output of our most genius musicians might reveal some kind of hidden information about the universe, specifically related to some kind of "spirituality".
This was a sentiment shared, in some sense, by the deists of the enlightenment. They rejected the scriptures and instead believed that studying the physical universe might reveal the "mind of God".
If we are looking for correspondences between these things - why limit ourselves to Euclidean geometry? Modern physics leans on Riemannian geometry, symmetry, and topology. It appears the topology of the universe, under a wide array of experiments, is way more complicated than the old geometric ideas. Most physicists talk about Lie Groups, fiber bundles, etc.
If you take "as above, so below" seriously and you want to find connections between cosmology and music, I believe you have to use modern mathematical tools. I think we need to expand beyond geometry and embrace topology. Can we think of the chromatic scale tones as a Group? What operators would we need? etc.
It's interesting to try to get into the head of a guy like Coltrane and his mathematical approach, but perhaps we could be pushing new boundaries based on new understanding.
1: https://strongsongspodcast.com/blogs/episodes/s05e05-john-wi...
Else: Deringers at noon. Bring your second.
Of which you're undoubtedly aware; I'm just explaining the inside joke in your second line to others.
P.S. Kind of Blue is also my favorite.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/...
In my opinion the underrated "Get Your Greasy Head Off The Sham" by Breastfed Yak is jazz at it's finest.
towards my craving for instant gratification with sound and lights I found a well produced video by Vox on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62tIvfP9A2w
One day, every black American will be gone, and all that will be left of them are statues that everybody holds in very high regard.
I agree that we have some distance to go in ensuring that wealth moves to the communities that created the art and the value, but absent evidence that this author has been "treating their descendants like dangerous parasites", I think they're catching strays from you.
So I know what they're saying. Do you not?
Coltrane is so respected because he use to fall asleep with his saxophone in his mouth because that is the level he would practice.
He represents the ultimate dedication to mastering an instrument.
You should really try making some friends with black people that like jazz so you can understand what a clueless thought this is.
I know, right? It's those Dutch folks living in Bulgaria hating black American descendants again, eh? /s
So, to be serious, do you have evidence that Roelant Hollanderr is treating black American descendants as "dangerous parasites"? Those are pretty hefty accusations. I haven't found anything on their website, but I am sure you have some solid evidence somewhere.
He is using the right "words" or "concepts" (tetrachord, hexachord) but these words have been mutilated by "musicology" and "music theory" to the point that they don't have any "useful" meaning at all anymore. The tetrachords and hexachords he mentions just are no tetra-/hexachords. If this fundamental building block is wrong, everything else down the line has to be, too.
How do I know?
Well, a colleague of mine (fellow professor) has found the Bach manuscript and I have found the Coltrane manuscript where BOTH of them lay out the whole of "music theory" in half a page.
If the two greatest masters of music used the SAME system, it should be ok for you and me. Just stay away from all the crap coming out of "music theory" or "musicology" or YouTube videos or websites made by "experts" or "non-experts". They just don't know.
Instead take any piece of classical music (e.g. WTK 1) or any Coltrane improvisation (from 1960 on) and look for the smallest "building block" - WITHOUT any priors!
That's difficult, I know, but that separates the men from the boys. These priors are "scales" (there is no C-C seven-note scale), or "harmonies" (there is no "dominant", Bach wouldn't know what you were talking about, and Coltrane just used it to be able to communicate with the rest of the world), or wrong tetra- and hexachords.
So just LOOK at the page or transcription! No priors! Then it will become obvious to you, too, especially in Coltrane's later improvisations, e.g. Live at the Half Note, and Bach made it abundantly clear in the first two fugues of the WTK 1.
That's why he wrote it in the first place (read the title page).
It's there for all of us to see and understand and - much more importantly - to use!
Also what are the manuscripts that lay out their approach to music theory in half a page?
Genuinely curious. I personally think I probably agree and music theory is often misunderstood as prescriptive rather than descriptive.
https://archive.org/details/zorn-john-ed.-arcana-v.-musician...
Chapter 25 - Music and Mysticism, Rhythm and Form: A Blues Romance in 12 Parts - Adam Rudolph
This is a better scanned copy: https://archive.org/download/zorn-john-ed.-arcana-v.-musicia... (PDF)
