Wednesday, March 9, 2016
"... you don't learn jazz in school. You don't learn it; you have to do it. You have to go out and learn jazz by playing. Jazz is a way of life, and you have to learn about it on the street, so to speak. But the training comes in by giving you the tools to work with." - Paul Horn, alto sax, flute and clarinet
“The Paul Horn album, entitled Something Blue, was obviously influenced by the Miles Davis album, and indeed the Paul Horn group was one of the first fully to explore the new territory opened by Miles.
Paul Horn's 'Dun-Dunnee', for instance, is a forty-bar AABA tune with but one chord or scale for the eight-bar A sections. (It can be thought of as either one long G7 chord or a mixolydian scale; that is, a scale starting on G using the white keys of the piano.)” - Bob Gordon, Jazz West Coast: The Los Angeles Jazz Scene of the 1950’s
“Though the Paul Horn Quintet has a readily identifiable sound through the blending of the leader's alto saxophone or flute with Richards' vibraphone, it is the writing rather than the instrumentation that lends these performances their most personal quality. Paul and his sidemen alike, instead of relying on horizontal melodic values alone, tend to create compositional structures in which the harmonic setting, and often the metric variations, are striking characteristics that give these works much of their originality of color and mood.” - Leonard Feather, The Sound of Paul Horn
“One final word: if you are not a musician and can't tell a bar from a saloon, don't let this deter you. As Paul cogently observed: ‘Any layman could listen to this music and tap his foot to it without knowing there is anything so different about our approach to time or meter.’ Then he thought a moment, smiled, and added a postscript: ‘Except, of course, the layman might wonder once in a while why his foot was out of step.’" - Leonard Feather, Profile of a Jazz Musician
Paul Horn [1930-2014] achieved international stardom as a musician who was recorded playing his flute in exotic and romantic settings such as the Great Pyramid of Egypt or the Taj Mahal in India.
His early years as a musician were spent in southern California where he also appeared in exotic and romantic Jazz settings as a member of the original Chico Hamilton Quintet which featured a cello and a guitar as the other lead instruments, playing flute behind poets and wordsmiths reading verse and lyrics to Jazz and on LP’s with the ethereal title of “Zen.”
He even formed his own quintet which played original music that combined both modes and unusual time signatures as the basis for improvisation [think Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue Meets Dave Brubeck’s Time Out].
One of the most detailed interviews about the Paul Horn Quintet and it inclusive approach to Jazz was written in 1961 by John Tynan who was an Associate Editor for Down Beat magazine at the time.
“In earlier days of jazz it was fashionabe in some allegedly responsible critical circles to over-venerate the hardy worthies who created tradition in their own time and owed little or nothing to formal musical schooling.
At the same time, the musically sophisticated jazz musician was regarded with squint-down-the-nose suspicion. It was an early manifestation of the lamentable tendency to place "sincerity" and "roots" above musicality and technical proficiency, thereby distorting aesthetic values.
read more: http://jazzprofiles.blogspot.com.br/2016/03/paul-horn-1961-interview-with-john-tynan.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+JazzProfiles+(Jazz+Profiles)
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