La Monte Young and Jazz

Transcription

1 Aaron Oppenheim Seminar in Music Literature & Criticism, Mus-237: David Bernstein December 12, 2011 La Monte Young and Jazz La Monte Young is widely credited as being the father of minimalist music, probably the most important musical movement of the second half of the 20th century. Minimalism has influenced, in one way or another, a wide variety of music which followed. Though tendrils of early minimalism extend into experimental rock music such as the Velvet Underground, the influence of jazz music on the early work of La Monte Young is often downplayed. Often seen as something of a reaction to the increasing complexity of europeanderived serialist composition, as practiced by composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Milton Babbitt, in fact many of Young's most important innovations seem to have come from the influence of the avant-garde American jazz music of roughly the same period. As Henry Flynt put it, [T]here tended to be no social contact between new music and those who defined jazz[ ] The fact that Young and some of his friends were proficient, and assertive, as jazz musicians was a turning point in new music, (Flynt, 50). La Monte Young's continuing history in jazz Young's own background as a jazz musician is well documented. Few biographies of Young fail to mention that he beat Eric Dolphy for second chair saxophone in the LA City College jazz band in the mid 1950s. Young now says that he broke off from jazz around the time of his focus on western compositional styles, in the late 1950s, as he was composing

2 pieces like his famous Trio for Strings (1957). In a 2000 interview, he says, "I continued to improvise, and to utilize improvisation in my work, but I lost interest in the limitations of jazz. Jazz really imposed so many limitations that I became extremely disinterested in it, (qtd. by Zuckerman). It seems, even in the early 1960s, Young was attempting to downplay the significance of the influence of jazz on his work. According to Tony Conrad, who was a performer in The Theatre of Eternal Music, Young's group in the early to mid 1960s, "For the first month I played one note, then adding an open fifth for the next month or so. This made Young ecstatic, as he had already composed a piece, Composition 1960#7, which was nothing more than a perfect fifth, marked 'to be held for a long time;' and the onus that the ensemble's work might appear to resemble 'jazz improvisation' was lifted from him by the device of this nominal contiguity with his neo-dada composition period, (Conrad, 15). Henry Flynt's account of the period of Young's early time in New York City differs somewhat from Young's account of his abandonment of jazz styles. Flynt was able to recognize Young's use of jazz methods, though Young claims that he lost interest in that style. As Flynt writes, "Something was happening which the reviewers consistently did not see. Young had a jazz direction running in parallel to his neo-dada gestures. The critics saw only the death of thematically modulated music and the advent of sterility: because art music was their beat. It was the threat they expected," (Flynt, 61). That Young was continuing to perform his own take on jazz music into the 1960s is not well documented. Young credits Indian raga as the primary influence on many of his innovations in art music at the time, but jazz would also have been a significant source of inspiration for his music. The lack of archival recordings available (to anyone but Young himself) makes any discussion about the nature of this early music problematic. As far as first hand sources, we

3 have only a few fellow composers, such as Flynt, who have written about the period to rely on. Young claims that he "lost interest in the limitations of jazz," though Flynt's account seems to run counter to this claim. Many critics who write about the early influences on minimalist music tend to gloss over the influence of jazz music, and focus instead on the influence of world musics. This may in part be due to Young's insistence that he abandoned jazz in the late 1950s because he found it too limiting. While Terry Riley continued to play jazz piano for pay throughout the early 1960s, he has always made it clear that he considered this work to be simply for the money, not related significantly to his compositional work of the same time. According to Wim Mertens, Another possible line of investigation [into the origins of Minimalist music] would have been to draw attention to the open influence of non-european, so-called primitive music. La Monte Young has been influenced by Japanese Gagaku-theatre and Indian raga music and he and Terry Riley are both disciples of the Indian raga master Pandit Pran Nath, (Mertens, 88). This is typical of the focus of later writers to look only at the influence of eastern traditional musics, not paying much attention to the more clear influence of jazz music on the work of Young and Riley. Improvisation Young's most important innovation in art music may have been his creation of structures for improvisation, relayed to performers through verbal instruction rather than written scores. This is something which was the norm in jazz composition. Young's practice of this method is exemplified in the work of The Theatre of Eternal Music. As Tony Conrad, who played violin with The Theatre of Eternal Music for several years, puts it, "[The Theatre of Eternal Music] dispensed with the musical score, offering a way for classical music to ditch compositional authoritarianism in favour of the improvisational collaboration already mapped

4 out by jazz musicians, (qtd. by Duguid). Improvisation has always had something of an uneasy place in European derived art music. While improvised cadenzas were an important element of classical music from the renaissance until the 19 th century, by the 20 th century the practice of improvising in classical music had become almost completely eliminated. Composers of the mid 20 th century strove increasingly for accuracy in performance, minimizing expressive playing, and requiring extremely strict adherence to the written score. Even John Cage, for all his work expanding the vocabulary of art music and changing the role of the composer by writing chance-determined compositions, was vehemently against improvisation in his own work. Compositions such as 0'00 (1962), which called only for the performer to perform a disciplined action, still seem to rule out improvisation with Cage's use of the word discipline. As Henry Flynt puts it, "Cage was against improvisation on the grounds that it was beyond the human mind to organize music in a new way in real time, (Flynt, 46). Cage's interest in creating sound as it is in nature, rather than music with a human, authorial voice, didn't allow for improvisation by human performers. He didn't believe that improvisers could come up with anything truly new, and would likely just fall back on familiar, practiced riffs and such if left to improvise. Young borrowed from the contemporary jazz of the late 1950s and early 1960s, in particular the work of John Coltrane, the method of modal improvisation over a fixed, static harmonic base. Coltrane himself adapted his understanding of Indian raga to jazz as of the late 1950s, through a friendship with Ravi Shankar. In the documentary, The World According to John Coltrane (1990), Young says, "John Coltrane was using what were like elements of minimalism in his playing. when he would take a fixed constellation of tones and do these very interesting mathematical permutations on them. it's not unlike what you would hear Lester Young doing in blues, but he had refined the process because of his exposure to indian

5 classical music and other eastern traditions of modalism, and you can hear it tied in with his blues legacy and brought into a new level of refinement and understanding, (Palmer). While Coltrane's modal music still bore some similarity to the bebop which was common in the late 1950s, La Monte Young and The Theatre of Eternal Music's work abandoned the chord changes and rhythmic structures still present in Coltrane's work. Young and others describe the performers in The Theatre of Eternal Music as being inside the sound, that they were not creating music but simply shaping it. Similarly critics described Coltrane's improvisational style of the late 1950s, which greatly influenced Young, as sheets of sound, implying a physical, tangible quality. Coltrane didn't improvise melody or notes, but rather sheets. Performance before composition Young also brought the idea of dispensing with the score in western art music, using verbal instructions to performers to relay what he wanted them to perform. In his compositions of 1961, numbered 1-29, Young wrote and performed the scores before the dates he assigned the act of their composition. This was something of a neo-dadaist extension of the implications of jazz composition, in which works are often composed and performed without being written down, a written score, or a set of changes, only made as necessary for copyrighting or if absolutely needed. According to Flynt, "As Young told me decades later, the idea that a piece could exist in performance before it was regularized as a composition came from jazz, (Flynt, 61). Similarly, Young's composition The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys (1965) was being performed by the Theatre of Eternal Music well before any score was written. As Young states, A written score exists for at least one section of The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys. This score contains a great deal of information about the frequencies actually

6 played on the tape. It should be noted, however, that the score was written out after the tape was recorded and does not include instructions for performing the work. The score was probably written out by sometime in November 1965, as I submitted it as part of the supporting materials for my Guggenheim application, (Young). Authorship in the Theatre of Eternal Music The well-documented disagreement on the authorship of the early Theatre of Eternal Music group's music may also stem somewhat from Young's background in playing in jazz groups. Tony Conrad and John Cale, who were both members of the group from about 1963 to 1966, claim that the performances of The Theatre of Eternal Music were group improvisations, and should be credited as having been written collectively by all the performers. Young claims that the improvisations were part of his composition, The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys. While Conrad and Cale had a european classical music background, with all of that education's subsequent dismissal and avoidance of improvisation, Young's jazz background could easily lead him to the belief that he, as the leader of the group and perhaps primary director, retained authorship over the material no matter how much other musicians would improvise with his material, and how far they would deviate from it. In jazz there is a clear tradition of assigning authorship to one composer, no matter how freely improvised the material is. The late group of John Coltrane would often play extremely extended, free improvisations on themes, while still crediting the original composer of the theme with authorship of the piece. On the 1966 live recording of Coltrane's late group, Live in Japan, an hour long, wildly free improvisation is titled My Favorite Things and credited to Rodgers & Hammerstein, despite the fact that out of the hour duration, clear elements of the original theme are apparent only twice, comprising no more than a couple of minutes of music, a tiny fraction of the whole improvisation. With Young's jazz background, this sort of

7 authorial assignment would have been the norm, while the fact that The Theater of Eternal Music's work was so different from the european classical establishment may have led Cale and Conrad to feel that their music was collectively rather than individually composed. As Conrad states his point-of-view, "By improvising, we eliminated the role of composer. But more, this was the turning point from a regime of writing music to a regime of listening, (qtd. by Duguid). Young, on the other hand, states his position that he is the sole author of the Theatre of Eternal Music's work by pointing to jazz explicitly. Performers were often given virtually free rein to interpret the composer's instructions as they wished. Yet, a 'composer' was clearly identified for each piece, no matter how creatively or individually a particular performer's role was played out. This freedom to the performer had roots [..] in jazz improvisations such as those created by Lennie Tristano, where performers improvised contrapuntally. [ ] When a jazz musician improvises on the chord changes of a standard tune, the composer of the tune is usually, if not always, considered to be the composer of the entire work, (Young). Saxophones Another important shift brought about by minimalism from the norms of art music, which came from jazz, was Young and Riley's use of the saxophone as a major instrument. The saxophone is an instrument that never had much of a significant place in European classical music. It is also a rather recent instrument, having been developed only in the mid 19 th century. Young and Riley's use of saxophone as a central instrument in their early music obviously comes from their jazz background. Though Young had by the early 1960s supposedly abandoned jazz playing, he decided to pick up a sopranino saxophone to experiment with, after John Coltrane's use of the soprano sax on My Favorite Things (1960),

8 and ended up using that instrument in his group improvisational pieces for some time. The continuing evolution of avant-garde jazz As minimalism and the jazz avant-garde continued to evolve, they both seemed to have similar interests and developmental areas. The jazz avant-garde became more interested in long durations, with LPs like Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz (1960) and John Coltrane's Ascension (1965) and Om (1965) containing only a single, 40 or so minute extended group improvisation. Many of the late Coltrane group's pieces would take up an entire side of an LP, and in live performances single pieces could stretch out to an hour or more. Additionally, the jazz avant-garde, in particular John Coltrane and his followers, including Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler and Alice Coltrane, had an increasing interest in connecting music with spirituality, similar to Young's own interest in creating mythological backgrounds for his music. Young insist ed that The Theatre of Eternal Music was just tapping in to music that was already in the world, already occurring as a supernatural element which musicians could access. As Young states, in reference to the work of John Coltrane, If you believe that the universe is composed of vibrations, then you can understand how a study of sound, which is the most concrete form of vibrations that the human mechanism can immediately assimilate, can be an introduction to an understanding of universal structure," (Palmer). The spiritual intent of Coltrane's music is clear from the titles he gave his works from the mid-1960s onward, such as Ascension, A Love Supreme, Meditations, Om, and others. The long-duration avant-garde jazz pieces of the 1950s and 1960s did away with traditional notions of form, in a similar way that The Theatre of Eternal Music's work did. Coltrane's late improvisational pieces had static textures, with relatively little in terms of

9 variation of tempo or intensity. These pieces might start somewhat slowly, but would soon turn into a continuous high-intensity group improvisation, with all performers playing at the limits of their abilities in terms of volume, speed, and stamina. Critic Frank Kofsky's description of the music of Coltrane's classic quartet could nearly as well have been a description of The Theatre of Eternal Music's work: "With the introduction of electronic instruments into popular music, the sensation of being surrounded and sometime even overpowered by exploding waves of sound became a familiar one. In point of fact, however, well before heavily amplified rock music burst onto the scene, Coltrane and his associates [...] had demonstrated their ability to whip audiences to peak after peak of emotional fervor, until a final crescendo left listeners drained and gasping for breath: an hour-long performance, often of only one or two pieces, that seemed to have lasted days, (Kofsky, 425). It is difficult to say whether the currents of influence between minimalism and jazz flowed much in the other direction. At the time, jazz wasn't taken as seriously by the critical establishment as art music, even art music as far out and unprecedented as the work of The Theatre of Eternal Music. Many jazz critics were extremely turned off by the innovations of Coltrane and Coleman, calling this music anti-jazz and the like, implying that it wasn't a continuation of the tradition of jazz but rather a reaction, a break from tradition, an oppositional stance, ignoring the background both Coltrane and Coleman had in more straightforward jazz music, as well as the evolutionary steps which were taken to get to the freedom their music had in the 1960s. As such, there is relatively little period writing about avant-garde jazz in the early 1960s. Nevertheless, there were some direct interactions between figures on both sides, most notably with trumpeter Don Cherry, who had spent long periods in Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler's groups, as well as recording with John Coltrane, who recorded some radio sessions with Terry Riley in the 1970s. While the answer to the question of minimalism's influence on avant-garde jazz is

10 unclear, the influence of jazz on minimalism is not. La Monte Young, as well as Terry Riley's backgrounds as jazz performers had a significant impact on their playing styles and choice of instrumentation. Additionally, many of La Monte Young's musical innovations in art music were derived from jazz, and his early work was heavily influenced by John Coltrane. Many more linkages between the two musical scenes occur if one were to expand one's purview, with performers such as Steve Lacy and Garret List frequently occupying and collaborating in both worlds, as well as a continuing interest in improvisation from minimalist composers such as Charlemagne Palestine, Tony Conrad, Henry Flynt, Terry Riley, Meredith Monk, and many others.

11 Works cited Conrad, Tony. Early Minimalism, Volume One (liner notes). 82 pp. Table of the Elements Records, CD boxset. Duguid, Brian. "Interview with Tony Conrad." EST Magazine. June Web. 9 Dec < Flynt, Henry. "La Monte Young in New York, " Ed. William Duckworth and Richard Fleming. Bucknell Review: Sound and Light: La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela XL.I (1996): Kofsky, Frank. John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s. New York: Pathfinder, Print. Mertens, Wim. American Minimal Music: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass. London: Kahn & Averill, Print. Palmer, Robert dir. The World According to John Coltrane. BMG, DVD. Young, La Monte. Notes on The Theatre of Eternal Music and The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys Web. 9 Dec < Zuckerman, Gabrielle. "American Mavericks: An Interview with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela." American Mavericks from American Public Media. July-Aug Web. 9 Dec <