steelstringcheese

For whatever reasons, Dave Brubeck is often overlooked by purists when recounting the greatest artists of jazz. But his legacy is nearly as impactful as any artist of the last century, and his music easily as inspiring.

Brubeck, always smiling.

I first encountered him when I was 18 years old. He was a featured artist on VH1′s “New Visions Jazz,” hosted by Ben Sidran. Mr. Brubeck was performing a couple of standards (“I Hear a Rhapsody” and “These Foolish Things”) at a jazz festival in Florida; and even I, with my then limited capacity to understand the subtleties of jazz, was dazzled by they way he could evoke orchestral textures from a piano. In a subsequent interview, he was asked how he felt about playing the old fan favorites dozens of times per year, for years on end. Hardly a month goes by that I don’t recall his answer as one of the first lessons I learned about being a performer. He said that he was fortunate to be playing music for so many people, and for so long, and that if people wanted to hear “Take Five” for the 200th time, it remained his job to play it for them, and to do so with as much intent and fervor as he ever did.

Another of the several lessons I learned by listening to his music was that a style is represented by its distilled essence, not by its most frequently used techniques. To illustrate: “Blue Rondo a la Turk” is one of the greatest blues pieces ever written and performed, and without adhering strictly to the incessantly repeating twelve-bar form. Today, remember Dave Brubeck in hindsight the way countless students and fans enjoyed him in person — by taking delight in the impeccable structure, exhibited both on the page and in improvisation, in the music of Brubeck’s classic quartet, who were matchless both in their knack for craftsmanship and in their appeal to humanity’s basest feelings.

Over at Noise Made Me Do It,we are treated to an excerpt from a 1964 Down Beat magazine interview with Miles Davis, in which he is given a blind listening test. In typical Miles fashion, he spares no energy in tearing down his peers. For example, in response to Eric Dolphy:

The next time I see him, I’m going to step on his foot…I think he’s ridiculous. He’s a sad motherfucker…The composition is sad.

And upon hearing Cecil Taylor:

Take it off! That’s some sad shit, man…Is this what the critics are digging?

We all know that Miles launched the careers of several of Jazz’s greatest performers. He was, along with Art Blakey and Duke Ellington, one of the great bandleaders. But we also know that it might be a stretch to declare him a trumpet virtuoso; it just happened to be his instrument of choice. So are his scathing remarks about others’ performances unqualified?

Of course Miles was not anywhere near Clifford Brown or Wynton Marsalis in his command of the trumpet. I consider his strength as a soloist to be his ability to contribute to the overall mood and texture of a piece — to create a mystique which frames the performances of his sidemen. Perhaps it was his sensitivity to the dynamics of group interaction that makes him an astute critic.

Personally, I’m somewhere between rejecting his opinions for being contrarian — devised largely to arouse attention and assert his dominance in the arena of musical discourse, and respecting his insights as products of a prolific career that relied heavily on cohesive, smartly directed ensembles. Perhaps the criticisms he offered in this interview might be more easily taken to heart if his demeanor was not so cocksure. Then again, have you or I ever learned anything that was delivered with a “pretty please?”

May I present this video of a performance of Erik Satie’s Vexations:

And here is the related Wikipedia article, a rather interesting read: Vexations (Wikipedia)

In The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies, Jonathan Kramer writes the following reaction:

But then I found myself moving into a different listening mode. I was entering the vertical time of the piece. My present expanded, as I forgot about the music’s past and future. I was no longer bored. And I was no longer frustrated because I had given up expecting. I had left behind my habits of teleological listening. I found myself fascinated with what I was hearing…True, my attention did wander and return, but during the periods of attending I found the composition to hold great interest. I became incredibly sensitive to even the smallest performance nuance, to an extent impossible when confronting the high information content of traditional music. When pianists traded off at the end of their twenty-minute stints, the result was an enormous contrast that opened a whole new world, despite their attempt to play as much like each other as possible. What little information I found in the music was in the slight performance variability, not in the notes or rhythms.

It seems Kramer has echoed a more succinct statement by John Cage:

In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all, but very interesting.

When I first got into Meshuggah, I couldn’t figure out how to tag them. Progressive? Experimental? Their lead guitarist, Fredrik Thordendal, has given us a word for it: “Djent” is an onomatopoeia, referring to the crunchy, stabbing guitar sound that pervades Messhugah’s music. Since the introduction of the term, other bands have been described as djent.

The most impressive feature of Meshuggah’s music is its dizzying syncopation. Often, you hear a cymbal grinding out quarter notes while the rest of the rhythm section chugs through labyrinthine polymetric riffs:

Maryland band Periphery expand on Meshuggah’s formula with increased melodicism and flashier guitar work:

Hailing from the Netherlands, Textures offers a take on djent that is more atmospheric. I especially enjoy “Sanguine Draws the Oath,” partly because of the undeniably Mike Patton-esque vocals in the chorus (first heard at 1:29).

Several have criticized the use of “djent” as a genre label, arguing that it is merely a term meant to describe a guitar tone. However, once any nomenclature has been established within a certain context, it becomes a cultural habit that is nigh impossible to break.

Apart from “Nü-Metal,” which is universally abhored, Metalcore is likely the most reviled metal subgenre among traditionalists. It is so-named because it borrows elements of hardcore punk, and is therefore a natural extension of grindcore and crossover. For that reason, I regard it as no less genuine than any other metal style. Browse the forums, however, and you quickly get a different impression. I once asked the metal-archives.com staff why several prominent metalcore bands were not included in their Encyclopaedia Metallum, and the terse answer was, “Because we only include real metal bands.”

I find it difficult to understand how these artists can be considered so distant in style as to be discounted from the repertoire. They utilize many of the same musical techniques, especially in the guitars. What’s different about metalcore is mostly in the vocals and drums. Vocals are screamed, not in a menacing manner befitting black metal, but in a fit of youthful rage. This, and a tendency to promote “straightedge” lifestyles, are the punk elements that put the “-core” in metalcore. Drum patterns are more complex than ever — even approaching a post-bop jazz sound at times.Tempo and meter changes are frequent and sudden enough to humble the most accomplished prog rockers.

The guitar solo is no longer  the centerpiece of most arrangements, but soloistic guitar riffs in a higher register provide backing for verses. Guitarists flail away at dissonant intervals as though they only just discovered half-steps.

The Dillinger Escape Plan are arguably the most relevant metalcore band. Their music, and that of others like Into the Moat, Ion Dissonance, From a Second Story Window, The Number Twelve Looks Like You, and PsyOpus, is commonly labeled “mathcore” because of its extreme complexity.

Another subcategory of metalcore is “melodic metalcore,” here represented by All That Remains:

As you might imagine, All That Remains’s melodicism has helped them establish more credibility with purists than other metalcore artists.

Finally we come to deathcore — a currently popular subgenre that fuses the growls and guitar riffs of death metal with the breakdowns of metalcore. Despised Icon is one such group:

Mr. Bungle is a group that has has a significant impact on musicians while remaining largely unknown among the general public. Fronted by Michael Patton, himself better recognized as the vocalist for Faith No More, they began as a sort of novelty group. In their first, self-titled album, their music is an amalgam of ska, jazz and thrash; and their lyrics deal with subjects far removed from the usual, such as the properties of an egg, having to put down a family dog, myriad porn fetishes, and surreal portraits, like that of a quadriplegic mute at a discotheque.

Their sophomore release, Disco Volante, is in my opinion a masterwork to be ranked with the likes of The White Album. It opened my eyes to how the studio can be used as an instrument. It seems that Disco Volante marks a point at which Patton’s musical maturity is fully realized. He utilizes his voice not merely as a means for delivering lyrics, but as a means of contributing to the arrangement, using whatever sounds necessary. In “Carry Stress in the Jaw,” Mr. Bungle delivers a brilliant collage of hardcore, metal, free jazz, and art song, followed by the album’s hidden track (hidden in plain sight after track three, not at the end of the album as per convention).

At this point, the Downtown New York scene was thriving; and John Zorn himself had produced Mr. Bungle’s first album. From the mid-90′s on, Patton and Zorn would be regular collaborators.

Mr. Bungle released only three studio albums, each bringing something different to the table. Their third, California, explored more conventional song styles (e.g. surf-rock, doo-wop, pop ballad); but a couple of stand-out tracks, including “Ars Moriendi,” represent their experimental side under moderation:

Mr. Bungle’s first album was released in 1989, long before the “rap-metal” of late 90′s artists Limp Bizkit, Korn, and other so-called “Nü Metal” artists, but Bungle’s spirit and sound echo through every decidedly non-traditionalist metal act to the present.

Although no other group totally captures the essence of Mr. Bungle, some come close. Idiot Flesh is one. Their third album, Fancy, while inconsistent, has some clever moments. Songwriting credits for “Chicken Little” include vocalist Nils Frykdahl, along with composers Béla Bartók, Pierre Boulez, and Iannis Xenakis.

We’re getting to a point where several major subgenres are being re-split into sub-subgenres. Some, like “blackened thrash” and “death ‘n’ roll,” are not prolific enough to be featured in a history. But Melodic Death certainly is. It was big in the 90′s, and continues to be one of the most listened-to metal styles today.

Melodic death bears some traits of Florida-type death metal, but its point of divergence is an increased melodicism in the guitars. Vocals are still growled, but guitar riffs are often based on the same phrygian, diminished, and harmonic minor sounds as earlier forms of metal. Tempos are often slower, with fewer blast beats and more classic rock grooves. The net result is a style that satisfies those who crave the brutal sounds of extreme metal without alienating the casual listener.

Some of the pioneers of the melodic death style include At the Gates, Dark Tranquility, and In Flames, all of whom were from Sweden. Because this movement was highly localized, it is sometimes referred to as “Gothenburg metal.” One group from Gothenburg, Arch Enemy, was founded by ex-Carcass guitarist Michael Amott (Carcass themselves, a British band, also being integral to 90′s melodic death). After two albums, they found a replacement singer in Angela Gossow; and this lineup has been very successful.

Metal is usually a marriage of musicianship and spectacle — powerful music, often masterfully performed, coupled with theatrical presentation. But the Norwegians have a tradition of blurring theatrics with reality. Black metal represents the darkest possible contingent within metal.

The black metal image is engineered to shock and provoke. Whereas death metal musicians wrote songs about corpses, black metal musicians strive to look like corpses. Some black groups routinely decorate their stages with pig and goat heads. In black metal, metal’s detached fascination with gore and tragedy crosses the fourth wall.

Musically, black metal is close to death metal in its use of blast beats and tremolo-picked riffs, but the singers screech rather than growl, and there is less variation in song forms. Black metal can easily sound like a wall of noise from start to finish; but some black groups temper their hyper-noisy arrangements with keyboards, and a sub-class of black metal called Viking metal hearkens to ancient Norse folk music.

Norway is a nation in religious turmoil. Although it is home to a higher percentage of atheists and agnostics than most other countries, it retains vestiges of a theocracy founded after the Reformation. The royal family is required to be Lutheran, and at least one half of the state government must belong to the state church. Some idealistic youth are offended by Christianity’s encroachment on indigenous pagan traditions. Many of these youth are integral to the black metal scene. Some have become notorious for engaging in a church-burning campaign. For them, black metal is protest music. To the rest of us, this is a bit too intense — a situation best left to run its course. Classic shock-rocker Alice Cooper, on the other hand, claims to see through the menacing exterior:

The closest thing to black metal in my collection is the album Demigod, by Behemoth. These are not strictly a black band, but cross the line between death and black, inspiring the highly specific tag “blackened death.” This sort of hair-splitting is quite common in modern parlance.

During the 1990′s, grunge replaced pop metal as the predominant hard rock style on the radio; but metal’s fan base remained as strong as ever, albeit back in the underground. Still, some groups popped into the collective conscious, as token ambassadors of metal. Among them were a small but significant contingent of post-thrash artists whose music bounced more than it thrashed, and encouraged head-bobbing over head-banging.

This was a decade of eclecticism. Hip-hop artists De La Soul and Arrested Development adopted elements of alternative pop. Beck infused folk with rap. Ex-Sugarcubes singer Björk migrated from avant-garde indie rock to an exotic blend of electronica and world music. Likewise, some of the most visible metal acts were incorporating rhythms drawn from non-metal sources. The Brazilian group Sepultura, for instance, expressed national pride by incorporating ideas from local indigenous music on their now-classic album, Roots. And one can often sense the influence of funk and hip-hop in the rhythms of a Texan band called Pantera, who would single-handedly define a genre:

The members of Pantera called their music “power groove,” which today is referred to simply as “groove.” Earlier, I compared thrash to hard bop, explaining that just as hard bop defines the modern jazz sound, thrash is the basis for most modern metal. We can carry the metaphor further: As the “funky jazz” of hard bop artists Kenny Dorham and Horace Silver is to jazz, groove is to metal. Groove expands on the classic thrash sound by making it more — dare I say “danceable?”

This is a small sub-genre; it’s difficult to find a lot of artists who fit the description. But it is as important to the metal timeline as any. Its influence can be heard in Slayer’s God Hates Us All, a groovy departure from an otherwise dyed-in-the-wool thrash band.

Pantera were a welcome counterbalance to their grungy contemporaries. Alice in Chains found their strength in songcraft; but with Pantera, the riff was still king. And this is some surprisingly aggressive stuff for having enjoyed airplay. Singer Phil Anselmo claimed that their intent in recording Far Beyond Driven was to produce the heaviest sounding album ever. With near-amelodic vocals and Dimebag Darrell’s ultra-crunchy guitar, Pantera delivered satisfaction to those listeners whose preferences lay on the heavier side, while paving the way for the next decade’s metalcore explosion.

If any group exists today whose music might be considered groove metal, it’s Lamb of God. Their vocal style is completely void of melody, and therefore akin to the death growl, but their riffs and rhythms do not resemble death in the slightest. This is the new face of groove:

“Alternative” was a buzzword during the 90′s, signifying pretty much anything that didn’t sound like dance-pop. But it was during the 80′s that so-called alternative music took root, in groups like the B-52′s and R.E.M. The eclectic sounds of rock’s fringe would inevitably contain traces of metal.

During the late 80′s and early 90′s, artists like Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fishbone, and Primus, who you might not consider metal, borrowed enough ideas from metal to generate significant crossover appeal.

Primus had especially close ties with metal. They originated in California, where bassist and founder Les Claypool and eventual Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett were schoolmates. When Metallica’s bassist Cliff Burton died, Claypool was briefly considered as a replacement, but, as James Hetfield put it, was rejected for being “too good.” Primus’s classic lineup would also include guitarist Larry LaLonde, who previously appeared on Possessed’s Seven Churches. In spite of their metal connections, Primus crafted a sound that remains entirely their own.

The opening bars of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” have been treated by entertainment journalists as the critical strike that felled Metal. Throughout the early 90′s, a new style of hard rock, dubbed “Grunge,” dominated the airwaves. Songsmanship took priority over virtuosity, explorations in texture over sheer heaviness. The trend was so hot that labels scrambled to sign any act that came out of Seattle, good or bad. Pop metal’s superficiality had grown tiresome, and more genuine forms of metal were once again pushed into the underground, with rare exceptions — Metallica, Ozzy, and Pantera, among others — maintaining a high degree of visibility.

In hindsight, I realize that grunge was not the “anti-metal” we once perceived it to be, but rather a more subtle expression of metal. Some groups began their careers in metal, but were only rebranded as grunge. Soundgarden unashamedly carried Black Sabbath’s torch. Alice in Chains, in singer Layne Staley’s words, “dressed in drag and played speed metal,” before growing into an immensely successful crossover act. And as far as I am concerned, Stone Temple Pilots’s Core is a straight-up metal album.

Here are Alice in Chains at their finest:

Punk and alternative weren’t the only styles into which metal artists crossed over. Throughout the 80′s and 90′s, there was also an ongoing flirtation with funk and soul. Extreme, Living Colour, King’s X, and Faith No More are often designated as “funk metal.” Living Colour were particularly convincing as both an R&B group and a metal group.

At times, Faith No More’s early material sounds like a thrash band pretending to know how to play other styles. But their sound matured with each release, until — a rarity in the music world — they peaked with their final album. The appropriately titled Album of the Year is a sure masterwork, thanks in part to tracks like this: