RIP James Brown
James Brown was one of the three or four most important popular musicians in my life. Most of the popular music to which I listened—and more importantly to which I danced—was either by James Brown or influenced by him. And Brown’s reach went far beyond popular music.
I wrote this essay, It’s Best Done With Scissors: Miles, Groucho, and the Art of Composition with Tape, for a group of on-line friends a few years ago. I’ve never published or posted it before. But it occurred to me that today might be a good day to do so, in honor of the life of James Brown. Most of it is not about James Brown at all, but about the most important musician in my life, Miles Davis. But in the middle of this essay, I detail a number of ways in which Miles’ electronic music of the 1960s and 70s was influenced by Brown.
It’s Best Done With Scissors: Miles, Groucho, and the Art of Composition with Tape
What problem were Miles trying to solve by their methods of constructing music in the studio in the late 60s and 70s? What was the point of Teo Marceor turning the tape machines on while Miles and his colleagues played in the studio and then constructing long pieces of music from different parts of these tapes?
One answer, I think, is this: Miles was trying to develop a new solution to the problem of combining three elements in jazz: collective improvisation, the density of a large band, and what I will call long-form music.
Long Forms In Jazz
Long forms are relatively uncommon in jazz. The reason, I think, is that long pieces of music are conventionally thought to need what we might call common structural elements in order to be something more than a haphazard collection of short pieces of music. To be successful, a long piece must be composed of a number of different, shorter pieces of music that are connected somehow, either in terms of relationships between the melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre or some combination of all of them. The nature of the connection, obviously, can vary a great deal from one piece of music to another. Indeed a connection can be created by opposition. One section of a piece might share a melody with a second section, although they rhythms and form of development are very different.
One solution to the problem of long forms in jazz is that devised by Duke Ellington. (The other great figure in this tradition is, of course, Gil Evans.) Duke’s solution was based upon a longer tradition of big band jazz which was, it is commonly said, was created by Fletcher Henderson and brought to a high point by Duke himself. In order to coordinate the members of a big band, much of the music must be written, not improvised. Thus big band jazz combines both fully written passages of music with other passages that leave space for solo improvisation. Duke’s long pieces were constructed out of a number of different sections, which, like his shorter works, combined written passages with improvised solos. In his best works, these sections hang together through one or another structural connection.
The limitation of Duke’s solution to the problem of long-form is that it, like big band jazz as a whole, makes the kind of collective improvisation typically found in small group jazz difficult if not impossible, for the soloist’s improvisations take place against a background that remains mostly the same from one performance to another.
Collective Improvisation
Duke (and Gil) made great jazz, even without collective improvisation. (It is no criticism of their work to point out a limitation of it. All musicians must make choices about which limits to accept and which to try to transcend.) Collective improvisation has almost always been important in small-group jazz from Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five until today. In the best of pre-60s small group jazz everything from top to bottom could be improvised. The great quintets of the 50s—Miles’s first quintet and the Brown-Roach group—were made up of musicians who bounced ideas back and forth from one to another and continually evolved new ways to perform each piece. What was not improvised was the basic form of the piece, which guided the improvisation. Until the 60s, most jazz improvisation took place against the background of a relatively short form—a 32 bar popular song or 12 bar blues being the most common. Later, a variety of modal forms were added to the mix. In relatively small groups–say no larger than six or seven pieces–these short forms, together with a fairly standard head and, in some cases, arranged transitions from one solo to another (e.g. the transition from Miles to Trane in ‘Round Midnight) provided the unchanging framework within which everything else could change. Everything did not change in every performance, of course. But the potential for such change was part of what makes a jazz performance of this type so exciting. And, in the hands of the perhaps greatest masters of this kind of jazz—for example, Miles’s second quintet—the performance of the same tunes could change dramatically from one night to another (see, for example, the performances on the Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel.)
Collective improvisation is a wonderful element of jazz. But it does tend to make long forms difficult if not impossible to create. Until the sixties, what I have called an unchanging framework seemed to be central to the collective improvisation of small0group jazz. But such an unchanging framework—the repetitions of the 32 or 12 bars of the tune—makes it difficult to create the larger structural patterns of long-form music. And, even when first Ornette Coleman and then John Coltrane challenged the conventional framework for small-group jazz, they did so in a way that makes long forms of the more traditional sort difficult to sustain. For, whatever its merits—and, to my mind, there are many—free jazz does not lend itself to the creation of long pieces that cohere in customary way. (I would suggest that they cohere in a very new way but that is another story. All I will insist on here is that they don’t cohere in a way that Miles and many others could appreciate.)
Miles and Large Bands
So, the problem I think Miles was, at least implicitly, thinking about in the late 60s was how to keep the collective improvisation that characterized the second quintet while adding to the mix, first, the density of a large group and, second, long forms. Obviously, he was also interested in borrowing certain elements from rock and funk music. My suggestion here is that whatever his other reasons for looking to these kinds of music for inspiration, these borrowings were also meant to serve other purposes, purposes that are rooted in Miles own musical trajectory.
From the Birth of the Cool to his work with Gil Evans, Miles had always been interested in the density that can be created with large ensembles. The density in his late 60s and 70s music was created in part by traditional means—enlarging the band—and in part by using electronic instruments that create a dense sound. Miles could create a dense music while sustaining the collective improvisation of his mid-sixties work by employing two methods. First, his band of the late 60s and 70s were not as large as a traditional big band. They were small enough for the musicians to be able to make music together without elaborate written charts. Instead, they built up a dense sound by adding layers of improvised music, one over another.
Jamming in E-flat for Four Hours
Second, Miles simplified the framework for collective improvisation, as compared to the frameworks used in the second quintet or in the work of Ellington and Evans. (This, we might say, was the limit Miles accepted in order to attain other ends.) Harmonic change was minimized as the music revolved around modes and was grounded by an ostinato that was often doubled by the bass and another instrument. (Jamming for 4 hours in E-flat, as his tenor saxophonist Dave Liebman once put it.) This simplified framework made it easier for a larger band to improvise together.
The Influence of James Brown
Accepting these limits also enabled Miles to attain another aim, to connect his work with the Black popular music that meant a great deal to him and to an audience he was trying to reach. Here the influence of James Brown on Mile’s music comes to the fore. (Some of these influences can be seen, of course, in earlier music as well such as some of the material on Miles in the Sky and In A Silent Way.) Miles was influenced by Brown in four ways.
First, he utterly jettisoned song and blues forms.
Second, he based his music on extended ostinatos or vamps, eliminating any traditional harmonic movement in his music. Miles had already moved some way in this direction earlier in his career. The music of A Kind of Blue replaces functional harmony and song forms with a series of modes. Note, however, that these modes are often arranged to suggest song or blues forms, as in So What. Like the live music of James Brown, Miles electric work goes further in jettisoning functional harmony and song forms by basing extended periods of music on an ostinato that implies a single mode. (Of course, in his improvisations, Miles and the other soloists do not restrict themselves to that mode. Some of Mile’s most exciting solos on, for example, Jack Johnson, make extensive use of bi-tonality.) Thematic material, in Miles’s electric music, as in the live music of James Brown, appears from time to time and gives some structure to these pieces. They also serve as a way to signal a change from one tune to another. (Enrico Merlin has presented a fascinating paper on these techniques in Mile’s live music.) These swatches of theme sometimes are structured as a call and response between Miles and another instrument or groups of (e.g. in Bitches Brew.)
This, of course, can be found in James Brown’s music as well and is the third way in which Brown influenced Miles.
Finally, fourth, Miles music borrows to some degree from the funk0oriented rhythms of Brown as well as those of Sly Stone. This becomes most evident in the great works Agharta and Pangea.
Scissors and Tape
The remaining problem was that of creating long forms. My guess was that this was not, at first, an explicit aim of Miles and Teo. According to Bob Belden’s notes to the second quintet box, Mile’s had been used to going into the studio and letting the tapes run while the band rehearsed the head of a piece and then launched into a performance. In the earlier years of the second quintet, most of the released music was the first complete take of any tune. The complete take always followed some rehearsals and, in many cases, one or more aborted takes. Later, however, additional complete takes were made. And, then, with Circle in the Round, someone had the inspired idea of joining together a number of—probably incomplete—takes to make a larger piece. It had, of course, been common for producers to create a master take from a number of incomplete fragments. This was very much the way in which Miles Ahead was made. But the aim in creating Miles Ahead was to create the best realization of a largely composed work. The master take was meant to combine the best of the orchestra’s reading of Gil’s charts with Miles’s best solos. What was new with Circle in the Round was that the composition itself was created by cutting and pasting fragments of improvised music.
Once the possibility of creating a larger piece from incomplete fragments was recognized, it made a great deal of sense for Miles to take his new, larger groups into the studio and improvise while the tape ran. Collective improvisation is always a chancy matter. There are bound to be patches of uninspired or confused music, along with moments when everything hangs together. This is especially true for Miles’s work in the late 60s and 70s since he was heavily experimenting in these years with new musicians in new combinations as well as with new forms. Thus the possibility of creating music by cutting and pasting fragments meant that Miles did not have to be confident, as he probably was in the early years of the second quintet, that a first take would be an acceptable work. He knew that whatever problems the group ran into in the studio, he and Teo could take the good parts and make something of them.
Finally, the stage was set for the creation of collectively improvised, large group, long0form music, as found, for example, in the suites that make up In A Silent Way and Jack Johnson, in the long pieces on Bitches Brew and in many of Miles’s other studio works of this period. In A Silent Way is a splendid example of what I am talking about. Miles and Teo Macero created two wonderful pieces that are much more than the sum of their parts by skillful editing of a number of fragments of music.
That is my current thought on the rationale for Miles’s and Teo’s compositional practices in the late 60s and 70s. I have more to say about how Miles tried to accomplish similar aims in live performance in the 70s (and how this whole development was influenced by the performance practices of the later years of the second quintet.) I will leave this to another time. I want to end, however, with two analogies to Miles’s and Teo’s compositional practices.
You Bet Your Life
We come, finally, to Groucho and Hitchcock. (Some of you may have recognized that the title of this piece is a paraphrase of something Hitchcock once said about the best way to commit murder or film.) In the fifties Groucho had a quiz show that was first broadcast on radio and later on TV. It was called You Bet Your Life. I recently bought a DVD set of many of the shows and watched a few of them. They are always enjoyable and sometimes absolutely inspired.
You Bet Your Life was a fairly ordinary quiz show that had something to do with guessing a secret word. The real attraction of this show was Groucho’s banter with the, often unusual, contestants on the show and with his sidekick. I recently recalled something striking I once read about the making of this show. (I am looking for the reference!) Aside from the basic elements of the game, the show was almost wholly improvised. And this was especially true of Groucho’s often hilarious questions, remarks, and ripostes to what his guests and sidekick said. Moreover—and this is the kicker—while the show was about 22 minutes long (the thirty minutes of its radio or television slot minus time for commercials), the producers often filmed up to 45 minutes for each show and then cut it back to 22 minutes. And, while cutting, they sometimes rearranged the pieces to create the final sequence of each show.
My point is that the cutting and pasting compositional technique Miles and Teo devised is a compelling way of creating a longer, structured work by improvisational means, one that other artists in other media had already developed. For that was exactly what Groucho and company were doing in creating You Bet Your Life. The quiz show was only the, more or less insipid, framework for collective comedic improvisation in which not only Groucho his funny contestants took part. (Compare jamming for four hours in E-flat.) The producers were content to let this improvisation take its own uneven course while waiting for inspiration to strike Groucho and his colleagues. And they sometimes did this at the expense of the game show format. But they knew that, in the end, they could cut and paste to create a narrative structure for the show that not only kept to the framework of the quiz show, but was of interest to the audience.
A last brief analogy: At some level, it seems to me that the whole notion of creation by cutting and pasting was brought to the arts by film. (This is perhaps prefigured, to some extent by developments in the novel. That we call some novels “cinematic,” however, suggests that the great influence of film on the techniques of novelists.) The great masters of film montage—and Hitchcock is certainly among them—developed new forms of artistic expression that rested on assembling a variety of materials to make a whole work. And some of them—the Marx Brothers (certainly not Hitchcock) were among them—created these materials by a process of improvisation. So what we might call the scissors aesthetic was certainly long underway when Miles and Teo first brought it to jazz composition.