Sphinx

I am feeling tired and useless and miserable, and my nose hurts. The latter is due to being swiped by Olga, who took exception to being removed from the study windowsill where she was happily watching birds; the rest is seriously over-determined, but at least one contributing factor is the effort of trying to take on board the feedback on my latest bit of jazz composition. All this term we’ve been working on a piece based, however loosely, on rhythm changes [note for non-jazz people: the basic structure of George Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm, which formed the basis for numerous other compositions, especially in the bebop era, and interminable jam sessions]. I’ve been struggling to develop something that doesn’t just sound like a pastiche of Charlie Parker or Duke Ellington – there simply don’t seem to be many models for more contemporary rhythm changes, apart from Thelonius Monk, and if you follow that you just sound like second-rate Monk – but had written something that I thought was actually interesting and with a strong melody line. So it was a little disheartening – getting close attention from the tutor is always a double-edged sword – to be told that, while the rhythm is interesting and the bass line is good, and the melody has a good rhythm, my note choices are much too nice and safe, and by implication boring.

This is not an entirely unfamiliar comment; I got something very similar last year, when I first started these courses. I did actually think I’d got a bit better – and I’d followed all the advice about trying to sing the melody line, testing every note to see if it really is the right one rather than just falling into conventional patterns, not feeling restricted by conventional tonality etc. And what sounds right to me after all this is something that my admittedly very Monkish tutor thinks is much too conventional.

It’s not that I am a sworn devotee of diatonic harmony; on the contrary, the Peter Brötzmann Octet’s Machine Gun is one of my Desert Island Discs, I worship at the shrine of Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock and Miles’ classic 1960s quintet and Ornette Coleman, and my wife refuses to listen to a good 85% of my record collection. But Charles Mingus is another of my gods, with his powerful rhythms and blues-influenced riffs – maybe it’s something about being a bass player, always grounded in the harmonic structure even as the saxophone players squawk and grunt in random keys – and actually Shorter was all about the melody as well as the harmony. And frankly who chooses rhythm changes as the basis for something avant-garde?

Anyway, I diligently noted down all the suggestions for changing notes to make them sound more interesting, and tried them out this morning – and they all sound rubbish as far as I’m concerned; I genuinely cannot see how my original note choices are not clearly better. Possibility A: I’m just too attached to the first version of the tune to be properly objective. Possibility B: I am simply irredeemably square.

Possibility C: I’m in a big black hole this morning anyway, so am simply craving the warm duvet and chocolate brownie of nice, mostly diatonic melody rather than the bracing cold shower of experimental dissonance, and will see this all differently at some point in the future.

I could, as usual, try to relate this to teaching more generally, but it’s not terribly heartening; I am currently the student who just doesn’t get what’s wrong with his work, in however many different ways this is explained, and was clearly secretly expecting a much better mark. I’m always reminded in such situations of the late lamented Radio Active repertory company, and their rehearsal for an adaptation of, I think it was, Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit. “The thing is, Peter, you are acting badly. What you need to do is act better. Remember when we went to see Gielgud? Gielgud is what we in the profession call a good actor. He acted well. You, Peter, are a bad actor.”

Or maybe I’m the student who just wants to write conventional narrative military history, despite all my attempts at persuading him that it’s boring and pointless however well it’s done. In which case this may be some sort of karmic judgement, and the tutor is playing my usual role of saying, well, if you insist on being so conservative could you at least try to be interesting about it, and my response is that I find Alexander the Great’s battles interesting. What if I just like pretty melodies?