Influences, Veiled and Declared
I'd say that I find the members of The Bad Plus more interesting than I do The Bad Plus itself. Well, I don't really have any opinion about the bassist, but their gorgeous cover of Aphex Twin's "Flim" aside (and, really, as long as Dave King can cop the drum 'n' bass thing on his kit, it'd be hard to fuck it up) I don't really care for what I've heard of their originals or their infamous covers. Yet Dave King is a really cool drummer and I think Ethan Iverson is a very interesting pianist as well as being a very interesting and thoughtful writer, as a perusal of his/their blog would indicate.
Recently he had a post about his upcoming gig with the Charlie Haden/Paul Motian rhythm section which he uses as a springboard to briefly wax enthusiastic (not for the first time) about Geri Allen, who everyone seems to agree was a Bright Young Thing on the jazz scene in the 80s and considered by many greats to be the Next Generation, but she kind of retreated as she got older; she still records, but neither in profile nor in her music is she quite as out there as she was back when. Iverson talks about how he would normally be more tempted than usual to get all Keith Jarrett with the Haden/Motian rhythm section, pointing out the influence Jarrett's recordings with those two had on him (and unsaid but perhaps more to the point is that Jarrett's major influence, Paul Bley, was once referred to by Iverson as "my true forebear"), but then says that Allen's recordings with that pair remind him of how flexible they are and how he needn't be tied to a particular conception when playing with them.
In the course of this Iverson draws what he admits is a simplistic evolutionary tree which shows Jarrett coming from Bill Evans and Paul Bley while Allen comes out of Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols. Which is, yes, relatively true, and I think he's right to say that Monk and Nichols (as pianists, at least) have pretty much no purchase in the musical world of Keith Jarrett. It's not necessarily true of the other direction, though, which is what set me thinking; I'm not nearly as familiar with Geri Allen's output as I should be, but while her older playing was definitely rocking some percussive angular vibrations, her more recent playing at least has also displayed an affinity for a kind of Herbie Hancock approach. Actually, several locations online cite (without direct attribution) her primary influences as Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, and Keith Jarrett! Iverson himself, in an interview with Jason Moran, notes that these days she's playing a lot of Herbie Hancock. And one of the several places Herbie comes from is definitely Bill Evans, who was after all one of the probably two most directly influential jazz pianists of all time (along with Bud Powell). For the record, I'd say that after them in the modern era it's McCoy Tyner much more so than Herbie for a direct influence; more cats sound like they're copping McCoy, but on an inspirational and conceptual level Herbie's influence has been at least just as broad. (This is sort of like how I feel Clapton's more directly influential than Hendrix because there were more people running around playing Clapton licks, but Hendrix's more abstract essence was equally if not more inspirational to people who applied his lessons to many different contexts and vocabularies.)
The aforementioned Jason Moran frequently cites the late great Andrew Hill as one of his primary influences, perhaps the influence, while also pimping for Monk, Nichols, his teacher (the late great) Jaki Byard, and others from off the beaten path of jazz piano influence, but at least one person out there on the internet (my memory fails me and I don't feel like trawling through Google search results) thinks that Moran sounds more like - wait for it - Herbie Hancock than Andrew Hill, and I don't think I've ever seen Moran speak one way or another about Hancock's influence.
What gives?
First of all, I think the Hancock vs. Hill comparison was probably in reference to Moran's debut album, Soundtrack to Human Motion, where I hear it as well, although at the time I heard that album I was sadly ignorant of Andrew Hill. I think it has to do with Hancock's touch; both Moran and Hancock are of course great pianists (one is, laying out my cards, my favorite current player and the other is my favorite player in the history of jazz piano) and capable of varying the colors they get out of the piano, but Moran's debut is more consistently soft-focus than the bulk of his later material, and it's that kind of abstract haze which calls Herbie to mind.
According to Hancock, by the way, one of his primary pianistic influences is Oscar Peterson! Who sounds nothing like him!
What gives?
The most cogent explanation I've ever seen Hancock give in the first person about his musical influences is this: "by the time I actually heard The Hi-Lo's, I started picking that stuff out; my ear was happening. I could hear stuff and that's when I really learned some much farther-out voicings -like the harmonies I used on 'Speak Like A Child' -just being able to do that. I really got that from Clare Fischer's arrangements for the Hi-Lo's. Clare Fischer was a major influence on my harmonic concept... He and Bill Evans, and Ravel and Gil Evans, finally. You know, that's where it really came from. Almost all of the harmony that I play can be traced to one of those four people and whoever their influences were." He's talking here specifically about his harmonic language, which is the most unique and evolutionary aspect of Hancock's playing, and it absolutely owes a lot to both Bill and Gil Evans, as well as Ravel (I think I've also seen reference to him name-checking Messiaen and jazz theorist George Russell). The Hi-Los I've never personally heard, but this video of Clare Fischer certainly points at what Hancock could have learned from the man - also check out the shorts + Uggs combination!
McCoy Tyner is another likely influence, though I've never seen Hancock mention him (doesn't mean it hasn't happened), and in Hancock's bluesier moments, particularly on standards, there's something I associate with Wynton Kelly: maybe this is what he learned from Oscar Peterson?
Well: the other main figure in Hancock's pianistic evolution - at least out of the ones I can recall reading him talk about - is the obscure (and again late, and from what I'm hearing I'm going to say great) Chris Anderson, with whom Hancock apparently studied, or maybe just wanted to study with, but at any rate who knocked Herbie's socks off after he was already pretty far along in his apprenticeship. I never heard any Chris Anderson before tonight (thanks, eMusic!) but again I can hear that this is a man from whom Hancock would've drawn both inspiration and influence. Anderson's approach to the piano, physically, is maybe a little more muscular than I would associate with Herbie, but in his harmonies and his way around the keyboard I can hear the connection. His way around the keyboard. Wait!
Critics often speak of certain pianists who play with an "orchestral" approach to the piano. Sometimes this is meant (I have in mind Dick Hyman speaking of Jelly Roll Morton) to indicate that the pianist is imitating other instruments or (like Morton) the totality of jazz band. More generically the "orchestral" approach is indicated as an alternative to the "right hand plays single-note solos while the left hand plays block chords" paradigm of post-swing pianists. Hancock, like Jarrett and Bley, is unusual among "modern" (by which we mean born between 1930 and 1950) jazz pianists in having something of this "orchestral" approach. I don't recall what the commonly understood meaning of a "pianistic" approach to the piano would mean, but I associate it with the "orchestral" - essentially for me the conceptual faultline is between adapting the piano to the physical and mental reality of having two hands that function semi-independently and giving each hand a particular task (not-orchestral, what most have done from bebop on forward), or approaching the piano at face value, forgetting as much as possible the prejudices necessarily imposed by the design of the human system, and just viewing it as 88 keys meant to be played by whatever fingers we choose to bring to bear. Bud Powell, and most jazz piano, and lots of classical music, and most folk-based piano, is strongly in the "two hands, separate tasks" camp, while lots of classical music, and Art Tatum, and a few others, are more in the "orchestral" camp. By ignoring the traditional division of labor the hands become, paradoxically, more independent and range over the keyboard orchestrating (if you will) the music. All this stuff is on a sliding scale; neither Hancock nor I think Bley are nearly as "orchestral" as Tatum or Jarrett in his more ecstatic moments, but they're also further out in that realm than Bud Powell or Thelonious Monk.
Art Tatum? A primary influence (along with Nat Cole) on...Oscar Peterson! Well, actually, Peterson himself tended to deflect the Tatum influence in the direct sense; Peterson really does sound like a swing pianist - Cole, or Teddy Wilson - who learned some bop concepts and took some speed. Tatum was a powerful force in the young Peterson's life - he nearly gave up the piano after hearing the man's records - but he was a more inspirational (Hendrixian) influence than a direct "I learned his licks" (Claptonian) one. With Tatum it was the overpowering virtuosity and a lesser manifestation of that seem ambidextrous freedom, either hand capable of skittering across the keys without being tied to predefined roles.
This doesn't need to be detective work: that Hancock found Oscar Peterson very inspiring and influential at one point in time doesn't mean that Peterson's DNA needs to be clearly written in Hancock's playing, but that in itself is interesting. What we pick up when we need it and throw away when it's time to move on, it leaves a mark on us even if the mark isn't apparent to even moderately focused scrutiny. I imagine that a great part of Hancock's attraction to Peterson as well as Chris Anderson is the freedom with which they navigated the keyboard as compared to a Bud Powell, who was perfectly capable of playing all over the piano with both hands but generally chose not to, and this inspiration stayed with him long after other traces of Peterson's playing would have left the building and been replaced by the aforementioned harmonic pioneers. Herbie is, after all, a pretty out-there pianist in his note choice, more than he often gets credit for. Sure, people pick up on the abstraction, but there are some spiky voicings thrown in there with the Bill Evans-derived chords. The spikiness is deflated, though, by his touch, that light, feathery, I-performed-a-Mozart-concerto-as-an-11-year-old touch. Not that Hancock can't be percussive when he wants, but he doesn't seem interested in making the piano roar like a McCoy Tyner. If he laid into the keys harder much of his playing would probably sound a little more like Bartok than Ravel. I don't know where Herbie got his touch (intuition? Nat Cole? Maybe Peterson again - for all his hardswinging bluesiness I don't think of Oscar as a pounder so much as a tickler) but it's one of the most powerfully identifiable aspects of his playing and yet a much more difficult thing to quantify and analyze than, say, tracing the roots of his harmonic language.
Hancock, as I said above, is my favorite pianist, but I don't know how much I would really want to sound like him. (I've always remembered a quote from Billy Corgan, where he effectively said that he doesn't always like all the music Smashing Pumpkins made, but it was always an honest representation of who they are. I took and take this to mean that he sometimes wished he didn't write very gushy pop ditties or very derivative Sabbath riff-rockers, but he wasn't going to pretend that those impulses weren't a part of who he was.) Actually, I'd kind of want to sound, if I were grafting personalities together, like Herbie's note choices as filtered through Monk's hands. Hancock's chords with Monk's touch? As I imagine it in my brain, that actually sounds a little like...
Andrew Hill. (?!?)
Recently he had a post about his upcoming gig with the Charlie Haden/Paul Motian rhythm section which he uses as a springboard to briefly wax enthusiastic (not for the first time) about Geri Allen, who everyone seems to agree was a Bright Young Thing on the jazz scene in the 80s and considered by many greats to be the Next Generation, but she kind of retreated as she got older; she still records, but neither in profile nor in her music is she quite as out there as she was back when. Iverson talks about how he would normally be more tempted than usual to get all Keith Jarrett with the Haden/Motian rhythm section, pointing out the influence Jarrett's recordings with those two had on him (and unsaid but perhaps more to the point is that Jarrett's major influence, Paul Bley, was once referred to by Iverson as "my true forebear"), but then says that Allen's recordings with that pair remind him of how flexible they are and how he needn't be tied to a particular conception when playing with them.
In the course of this Iverson draws what he admits is a simplistic evolutionary tree which shows Jarrett coming from Bill Evans and Paul Bley while Allen comes out of Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols. Which is, yes, relatively true, and I think he's right to say that Monk and Nichols (as pianists, at least) have pretty much no purchase in the musical world of Keith Jarrett. It's not necessarily true of the other direction, though, which is what set me thinking; I'm not nearly as familiar with Geri Allen's output as I should be, but while her older playing was definitely rocking some percussive angular vibrations, her more recent playing at least has also displayed an affinity for a kind of Herbie Hancock approach. Actually, several locations online cite (without direct attribution) her primary influences as Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, and Keith Jarrett! Iverson himself, in an interview with Jason Moran, notes that these days she's playing a lot of Herbie Hancock. And one of the several places Herbie comes from is definitely Bill Evans, who was after all one of the probably two most directly influential jazz pianists of all time (along with Bud Powell). For the record, I'd say that after them in the modern era it's McCoy Tyner much more so than Herbie for a direct influence; more cats sound like they're copping McCoy, but on an inspirational and conceptual level Herbie's influence has been at least just as broad. (This is sort of like how I feel Clapton's more directly influential than Hendrix because there were more people running around playing Clapton licks, but Hendrix's more abstract essence was equally if not more inspirational to people who applied his lessons to many different contexts and vocabularies.)
The aforementioned Jason Moran frequently cites the late great Andrew Hill as one of his primary influences, perhaps the influence, while also pimping for Monk, Nichols, his teacher (the late great) Jaki Byard, and others from off the beaten path of jazz piano influence, but at least one person out there on the internet (my memory fails me and I don't feel like trawling through Google search results) thinks that Moran sounds more like - wait for it - Herbie Hancock than Andrew Hill, and I don't think I've ever seen Moran speak one way or another about Hancock's influence.
What gives?
First of all, I think the Hancock vs. Hill comparison was probably in reference to Moran's debut album, Soundtrack to Human Motion, where I hear it as well, although at the time I heard that album I was sadly ignorant of Andrew Hill. I think it has to do with Hancock's touch; both Moran and Hancock are of course great pianists (one is, laying out my cards, my favorite current player and the other is my favorite player in the history of jazz piano) and capable of varying the colors they get out of the piano, but Moran's debut is more consistently soft-focus than the bulk of his later material, and it's that kind of abstract haze which calls Herbie to mind.
According to Hancock, by the way, one of his primary pianistic influences is Oscar Peterson! Who sounds nothing like him!
What gives?
The most cogent explanation I've ever seen Hancock give in the first person about his musical influences is this: "by the time I actually heard The Hi-Lo's, I started picking that stuff out; my ear was happening. I could hear stuff and that's when I really learned some much farther-out voicings -like the harmonies I used on 'Speak Like A Child' -just being able to do that. I really got that from Clare Fischer's arrangements for the Hi-Lo's. Clare Fischer was a major influence on my harmonic concept... He and Bill Evans, and Ravel and Gil Evans, finally. You know, that's where it really came from. Almost all of the harmony that I play can be traced to one of those four people and whoever their influences were." He's talking here specifically about his harmonic language, which is the most unique and evolutionary aspect of Hancock's playing, and it absolutely owes a lot to both Bill and Gil Evans, as well as Ravel (I think I've also seen reference to him name-checking Messiaen and jazz theorist George Russell). The Hi-Los I've never personally heard, but this video of Clare Fischer certainly points at what Hancock could have learned from the man - also check out the shorts + Uggs combination!
McCoy Tyner is another likely influence, though I've never seen Hancock mention him (doesn't mean it hasn't happened), and in Hancock's bluesier moments, particularly on standards, there's something I associate with Wynton Kelly: maybe this is what he learned from Oscar Peterson?
Well: the other main figure in Hancock's pianistic evolution - at least out of the ones I can recall reading him talk about - is the obscure (and again late, and from what I'm hearing I'm going to say great) Chris Anderson, with whom Hancock apparently studied, or maybe just wanted to study with, but at any rate who knocked Herbie's socks off after he was already pretty far along in his apprenticeship. I never heard any Chris Anderson before tonight (thanks, eMusic!) but again I can hear that this is a man from whom Hancock would've drawn both inspiration and influence. Anderson's approach to the piano, physically, is maybe a little more muscular than I would associate with Herbie, but in his harmonies and his way around the keyboard I can hear the connection. His way around the keyboard. Wait!
Critics often speak of certain pianists who play with an "orchestral" approach to the piano. Sometimes this is meant (I have in mind Dick Hyman speaking of Jelly Roll Morton) to indicate that the pianist is imitating other instruments or (like Morton) the totality of jazz band. More generically the "orchestral" approach is indicated as an alternative to the "right hand plays single-note solos while the left hand plays block chords" paradigm of post-swing pianists. Hancock, like Jarrett and Bley, is unusual among "modern" (by which we mean born between 1930 and 1950) jazz pianists in having something of this "orchestral" approach. I don't recall what the commonly understood meaning of a "pianistic" approach to the piano would mean, but I associate it with the "orchestral" - essentially for me the conceptual faultline is between adapting the piano to the physical and mental reality of having two hands that function semi-independently and giving each hand a particular task (not-orchestral, what most have done from bebop on forward), or approaching the piano at face value, forgetting as much as possible the prejudices necessarily imposed by the design of the human system, and just viewing it as 88 keys meant to be played by whatever fingers we choose to bring to bear. Bud Powell, and most jazz piano, and lots of classical music, and most folk-based piano, is strongly in the "two hands, separate tasks" camp, while lots of classical music, and Art Tatum, and a few others, are more in the "orchestral" camp. By ignoring the traditional division of labor the hands become, paradoxically, more independent and range over the keyboard orchestrating (if you will) the music. All this stuff is on a sliding scale; neither Hancock nor I think Bley are nearly as "orchestral" as Tatum or Jarrett in his more ecstatic moments, but they're also further out in that realm than Bud Powell or Thelonious Monk.
Art Tatum? A primary influence (along with Nat Cole) on...Oscar Peterson! Well, actually, Peterson himself tended to deflect the Tatum influence in the direct sense; Peterson really does sound like a swing pianist - Cole, or Teddy Wilson - who learned some bop concepts and took some speed. Tatum was a powerful force in the young Peterson's life - he nearly gave up the piano after hearing the man's records - but he was a more inspirational (Hendrixian) influence than a direct "I learned his licks" (Claptonian) one. With Tatum it was the overpowering virtuosity and a lesser manifestation of that seem ambidextrous freedom, either hand capable of skittering across the keys without being tied to predefined roles.
This doesn't need to be detective work: that Hancock found Oscar Peterson very inspiring and influential at one point in time doesn't mean that Peterson's DNA needs to be clearly written in Hancock's playing, but that in itself is interesting. What we pick up when we need it and throw away when it's time to move on, it leaves a mark on us even if the mark isn't apparent to even moderately focused scrutiny. I imagine that a great part of Hancock's attraction to Peterson as well as Chris Anderson is the freedom with which they navigated the keyboard as compared to a Bud Powell, who was perfectly capable of playing all over the piano with both hands but generally chose not to, and this inspiration stayed with him long after other traces of Peterson's playing would have left the building and been replaced by the aforementioned harmonic pioneers. Herbie is, after all, a pretty out-there pianist in his note choice, more than he often gets credit for. Sure, people pick up on the abstraction, but there are some spiky voicings thrown in there with the Bill Evans-derived chords. The spikiness is deflated, though, by his touch, that light, feathery, I-performed-a-Mozart-concerto-as-an-11-year-old touch. Not that Hancock can't be percussive when he wants, but he doesn't seem interested in making the piano roar like a McCoy Tyner. If he laid into the keys harder much of his playing would probably sound a little more like Bartok than Ravel. I don't know where Herbie got his touch (intuition? Nat Cole? Maybe Peterson again - for all his hardswinging bluesiness I don't think of Oscar as a pounder so much as a tickler) but it's one of the most powerfully identifiable aspects of his playing and yet a much more difficult thing to quantify and analyze than, say, tracing the roots of his harmonic language.
Hancock, as I said above, is my favorite pianist, but I don't know how much I would really want to sound like him. (I've always remembered a quote from Billy Corgan, where he effectively said that he doesn't always like all the music Smashing Pumpkins made, but it was always an honest representation of who they are. I took and take this to mean that he sometimes wished he didn't write very gushy pop ditties or very derivative Sabbath riff-rockers, but he wasn't going to pretend that those impulses weren't a part of who he was.) Actually, I'd kind of want to sound, if I were grafting personalities together, like Herbie's note choices as filtered through Monk's hands. Hancock's chords with Monk's touch? As I imagine it in my brain, that actually sounds a little like...
Andrew Hill. (?!?)
Labels: Music
posted by medrawt at
23:44
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