Cool at heart
U-M Jazz Festival honors legendary Miles Davis
February, 2012
By Marilou Carlin
The life and music of Miles Davis was at the heart of this year’s University of Michigan Jazz Festival, held Saturday, Feb.11. The festival featured a day of clinics, lectures, masterclasses and performances at the School of Music, Theatre & Dance.
The festival featured the U-M Jazz Ensemble, the U-M Jazz Trombone Ensemble and performances by trumpeter Sean Young (photo below) with Geri Allen on piano, Robert Hurst on bass and Sean Dobbins on drums. Also appearing will be legendary trombonist Curtis Fuller (photo left), who received a Lifetime Achievement Award.
The Jazz Festival is organized and run annually by SMTD through the Department of Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation, with support from numerous academic units within U-M. It is a noncompetitive event providing collegiate and high school students with an opportunity for increased experience and understanding of American jazz. All participating students enjoy interaction with the festival guest artists, the music faculty of SMTD, and other professional jazz musicians and distinguished music educators. The festival is open to students, educators and music lovers of all ages.
The 2012 festival is named “Miles Davis Day” in celebration of the late great trumpeter, and will include a historical lecture about Davis with Young and Fuller. Jones is one of jazz’s top young trumpeters, known for both his lyrical fluidity and high-tier technical facility. Fuller, a Detroit native celebrated for his unique style and sound, has enjoyed half a century of performing with a who’s who of jazz giants, including Davis.
Other highlights of the day included a music career seminar (“Getting a Gig”), a Sean Jones masterclass, and a Festival Awards Concert featuring the UM Jazz Lab Ensemble with guest soloist Bill Sears.
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1 Comment to Cool at heart
by Nakul
On March 12, 2012 at 3:42 pm
Being a musician, I am, of urocse, biased but the good news is that I do believe jazz can be saved. The bad news is, I doubt that it will. The art of melodic improvisation flourished when it was part of the popular music of the ’20 s through the big band era. Kids who were buying records could relate to it physically through dancing. In order to awaken the public’s atrophied ears to our beloved art form, that connection would have to be reestablished. A golden opportunity was missed during the GAP commercial inspired mini swing craze of the mid to late ’90 s. It got young people swing dancing. The craze ended because, not suprisingly, people became bored with the music even though the players wore funny hats and twirled their instruments and made every effort to be visually entertaining. Why? Maybe we should be a little scientific about this. Not rocket science, mind you, because we are talking about entertainment here. Back in the ’70 s, when dance clubs still hired bands (before DJs took over completely) I had an epiphany of sorts while taking a guitar solo with my funk band. The dance floor was full but I realized that my solo could be good, bad, or mediocre and it really would not make much of a difference to the dancers. That was because they were dancing to the symmetrical back beats on 2 and 4 of the measure. As Dick Clark’s studio audiences on American Band Stand repeatedly informed us it is a good beat and it is easy to dance to (sic). I once saw a film of the Benny Goodman band where the camera was looking down on a crowded dance floor from a balcony. As Goodman built his clarinet solo to a climax, you could see the dancers jumping higher into the air. They were driven by Gene Krupa’s quarter notes on the bass drum and loud, propulsive, asymmetrical hits on the snare, but people were essentially dancing to the improvised melody. The drumming of Joe Jones with the Basie band is another example of asymmetrical back beats. Unfortunately, none of the swing acts that achieved notoriety during the ’90 s (Big, Bad Voodoo Daddy, Brian Setzer et al ) picked up on this. The shuffle got old real fast. Strong back beats propel the dancers but a steady 2 and 4 disengages them from the melody. Forget jazz and history and zoot suits for a minute and break it down to the sonic essentials of what makes people dance and there may be a glimmer of hope for a fusion with melodic improvisation. Whether people are dancing to Rihanna or Basie, we know that they like it around 120 beats per minute. What they are dancing to is the quarter note pulse. You can easily take any contemporary dance track, strip away everything but the bass drum, and superimpose Satin Doll. The only difference is that the rhythm of the modern (unimprovised) melodic content is usually defined with straight eighths and sixteenth notes instead of swing eighths. At this point, you may ask who cares? Well, we do, obviously and the marketing and promotional geniuses have not been able to prevent America’s only original art form from going down the tubes. Could it be that the music itself needs to be dealt with? It didn’t mean a thing without that swing because that was the feeling that connected the dancer and the melodic improvisor. New music can be created with that feeling that connects with today’s dancers but it won’t swing for long unless the crutch of the symmetrical back beat is avoided.