Rock & Bach

Modern Jazz Quartet pianist John Lewis once said that the composer Charlie Parker most resembled was Mozart, citing the effortless elegance of both musicians: “not a note out of place, everthing crystal clear.”

My music teacher at Berkeley told us that there’s no such thing as a passing tone in Parker’s melodies: everything is essential. It’s true that some of his solos seem so pristine that it’s hard to imagine a person actually making them, to say nothing of improvising them under the strain of lightning-fast tempos and complex harmonies. Einstein’s observation about Mozart applies just as well to Charlie Parker: “music so pure that it seems to have been ever present in the universe, waiting to be discovered by the master.”

If Charlie Parker is like Mozart, John Coltrane is like Beethoven. Neither Coltrane nor Beethoven had the preternatural grace of their respective predecessors; there’s much in their music that’s ungainly or brusque. Both have a tendency to get hold of a single idea and refuse to let go (Miles to Trane: “take the horn out ‘cha mouth!”), probing it obssessively until it yields something of what they’re looking for. The entire third movement of the Tempest Sonata is built on the introductory four-note theme: the development section consists of nothing but this rhythmic figure repeated over and over in different keys with different dynamics, sort of like the Acknowledgement section of A Love Supreme where Coltrane plays the theme something like forty times, in every register of his instrument.

Brian Wilson is one of my favorite musicians, but I’m a mere tourist in terra Wilsonis compared to my friend Tommy. Without Tommy I’d have never known about the episode of The New Leave It to Beaver where Brian Wilson plays a substitute teacher, or the Good Morning America appearance where a drunk Dennis Wilson falls asleep and a clearly unwell Brian responds to Joan Lunden’s question “What kind of music do you like to listen to?” by nearly shouting, “I LISTEN TO A RECORD CALLED ‘BE MY BABY’ BY THE RONETTES.”

Tommy is also my first ever regular music student. This past semester we’d meet every week after his Evidence class, head over to the music building and work our way through the Beach Boys catalog. We managed to get through most of SMiLE, about half of Wild Honey, and a few miscellaneous things like Do You Really Have A Heart by Dobie Gray. As a singer Tommy is largely indifferent to pitch but intrepid and totally un-self-conscious; I always got a kick out of the looks we’d get from the practice room regulars (generally a staid bunch) as they’d pass by us playing four-hand piano and belting out Beach Boys songs at the top of our lungs. I have to say it really made me feel good to see how much he enjoyed his lessons.

“I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to finally be able to play these songs! I feel like I’m learning the secrets of the universe!”

Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli was a bit of a storyteller and liked to claim among other things that he was a descendent of St. Francis of Assisi. He was the most subtle and refined of pianists, with incredible timbral control; as a Debussy player he was peerless. Miles Davis was a big fan of his - in his book he talks about how he was listening to a lot of Michelangeli’s recordings around the time he made Kind of Blue.

Piotr Anderszewski has this to say about Michelangeli:

“He didn’t like performing. But he didn’t like recordings either. He didn’t give interviews, he didn’t write books. He’s a ghost, actually.”

Debussy was one of the first European composers to make extensive use of whole-tone and pentatonic scales. Apparently he heard a Javanese Gamelan outfit at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition and flipped out. Can you blame him?

Yesterday I went to see Radu Lupu play the Mozart D minor concerto with the SF symphony. It was a bit of an adventure getting there – the train was delayed because of a suicide and a half dozen cabs passed me by before I managed to flag one down. The Russian cabbie told me a funny story about going to Radiohead’s website for an mp3 and thinking that the RIAA had nabbed him for piracy when the splash page flashed ‘HAIL TO THE THIEF.’ I got to the hall just as the orchestra tutti was starting and had to be snuck in the back by one of the ushers.

It was well worth it. Lupu was great as always and of course Mozart is far and away my favorite composer. The D minor in particular is unusual in so many respects – the orchestra part really has no melody in the beginning; it’s all pulsating rhythm and atmosphere, and the piano introduces a completely different theme when it enters. To me it’s among the most exciting soloist entrances in any concerto. The ensuing dialogue between orchestra and soloist is witty and moving and perfectly made, typical of Mozart.

Lupu is an interesting physical presence on stage.

My friend Kirsten remarked that it was strange to watch someone so scruffy play Mozart. “I feel like he should be playing Brahms or something, you know, something bearded!”

During orchestra tuttis he’s utterly catatonic, leaning back in a straight back chair with arms folded across his big belly. Then he puts his hands on the keyboard and produces the most uncannily gorgeous sonorities. The piano really sounds like another instrument when he plays. New Yorker critic Alex Ross says that Lupu’s Brahms op.117 is one of the most beautiful piano recordings ever made; I agree.

Lupu plays Mozart:

Friedrich Gulda was one of the few established European classical musicians to try his hand at jazz. He often performed mixed programs of classical and jazz compositions and recorded with Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea. Here we see a clip of him playing and conducting the rondo of the famous ‘Emperor’ concerto. I really like this piece because it highlights Beethoven’s playfulness, which often gets lost in the general emphasis on the Sturm und Drang aspect of his music.