Sunday, February 28, 2010

The Philosophy of Jazz - Part One

Was around 30 years that Europe surrendered to the improvisation of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Writers coming to Virginia Woolf assumed this intimate style of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. Except for one or the other, there were many intellectuals, especially the poets of the Beat Generation, who fell in love with the syncopated music of Charles Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

In one of his most important novels (Nausea), Sartre wove a torn compliment to jazz and its variables. There was much in common between this music and african-American philosophy. I dare say that since the old and some jazz elements were already part of the inquiry. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, the first of humble origin and other middle-class, one from Chicago the other Washington, transformed the art of jazz style and improvisation. These two suggest more and more styles in a multitude of trials. First came the Hot, Sweet and then Bebop, Cool, the Progressive, Hard-bop and never stopped. Were combined: the jazz should be traditional and innovative music in a transformation. But as you learn to play jazz ?????.

Only one definition - meaning one has to feel. This was never a problem for african Americans, a people committed to the emotion. For they say, means that suddenly appears from nowhere and it comes ready, and the photographic experience of a week. It was that way, living intensely their songs that Billie Holiday sang: "If you learn a song and it has something to do with you, there is nothing to develop. You just feel something too. For me it has nothing to do with work, arrangement or test. Give me a song that I can feel and it will not give me any work. There are some songs that I'm so sorry, I can not even sing them, but that is another thing. Singing songs like "The Man I Love" or "Porgy" does not give me more work than sit and eat a dish to Chinese duck and I love the Chinese. I've lived songs like that. When the corner, as I live and love again. "

What more can one do in your life not to be: test, try, make mistakes, correct, interpret, birth and death?. What does not think of jazz as a music without refinements. Far from it. His constant renovation was made possible thanks to a sophisticated interpretation of the musical tradition african American. How to live intensely the present, would have to be quite the past. In this way one can interpret the testimony of Charles Parker: "I felt that there must be something else. Sometimes I could hear it, but was unable to touch her. Well, that night improvising on "Cherokee," I found that using the higher intervals of a chord with the melody line and anchoring them with the appropriate sequences, I could play what they had heard long ago. It was as if born again. "

In a classic text on the tradition and individual talent, the poet and literary critic TS Eliot (1888-1965), jazz musician first time, brought new colors to the same idea: "It is likely that the artist will know what will be designed, unless you live in what is not only the present but the present moment of month, unless you are aware, not of what is dead now but what continues to live." - Namastê.
http://borboletasdejade.blogspot.com/2010/02/filosofia-do-jazz-primeira-parte.html

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