Crossing Over:
   Jazz and Pop

* McCartney: Standing Stone

London Symphony Orchestra & Chorus/Lawrence Foster
EMI 56484 Total time: 76:45

* Marsalis: Blood on the Fields

Marsalis (trumpet), Wilson, Hendricks, Griffith (vocals),
Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra/Wynton Marsalis
Columbia CXK 57694 Total time: 58:41 + 52:50 + 50:49

Summary for the Busy Executive: The siren song.

George Gershwin may not have been the first or even the best composer to
attempt a synthesis of pop and classical, but he certainly had the most
impact.  He became an iconic figure to certain composers who either tried
to follow him or to show him where he had gone hopelessly wrong.  A very
well-respected jazzman once remarked to me of such syntheses, "If I can't
imagine Louis Armstrong playing it, it's not jazz." In the same vein and
with the same sense of restriction, I would say, "If I don't feel in the
presence of an extended argument from a small set of basic materials, it's
probably not classical."

However, I don't really see why such a synthesis should strike anyone
as the squaring of a circle.  After all, the history of music is full of
crossovers.  Classical composers have taken from popular sources, and one
can point to several examples of popular musicians fruitfully influenced
by classical music.  Composers can use jazz and pop in several ways:

1.  As a kind of exotic color laid over essentially a classical foundation.
Gershwin is the most conspicuously successful of these composers, although
others would include Ravel, Devreese, Debussy, Stravinsky, Milhaud,
Martinu, Antheil, and the explicit "jazz" pieces of Copland.

2.  Without significantly thinking about it.  After all, composers are
people too.  American composers in particular have heard as much junk as
American non-composers.  The "hard" music of Aaron Copland uses rhythms
that probably wouldn't have occurred to someone who hadn't heard jazz.
In short, one finishes a phrase in a certain way or dances a certain way
because the "inner music" has been shaped by a certain experience.

3.  By thinking about it.  Here, we have the "third stream" of Jimmy
Giuffre, Gerry Mulligan, Mingus, Russell, Roach, Taylor, and Schuller.

Wynton Marsalis has crossed over throughout his career.  Thoroughly
trained in both classical and jazz, he has performed successfully in both.
His classical trumpet career has waned of late, but (as his father, Ellis,
remarked) there really are only so many pieces in the classical trumpeter's
repertory.  Wynton has always interested himself in arranging, coming up
with incisive charts that also make the players sound good.  However, more
and more he has come up with longer pieces - putting jazz musicians in
classical-concert situations.  I remember in particular a ballet, Citi
Movement.  Certainly, Blood on the Fields, a jazz oratorio on the subject
of slavery, counts as his most ambitious project to date.

The work has enjoyed spectacular worldly success: a Lincoln Center
premiere, an album release, and the Pulitzer Prize.  For me, it's a piece
so awful, only a genius could have written it.  It suffers most from what
seems the brain-deadest libretto ever written by anybody.  For example:

   Look and see
   To learn and be
   One part of we
   And not just ye
   If you'd be free

That's by no means the worst one meets in this misery of a text.  To
call the characters - a wise, magical "fool," a female doormat, and an
Angry Young Man - "cardboard," gives the author way too much credit.  They
mouth slogans, purple patches, and psychobabble.  It angers me, because I
consider the theme of American slavery and its consequences one of the most
important an American artist can take on, but it imposes a responsibility
for maturity and enlightenment.  Suffice to say, on these two scores, the
libretto operates at a far lower level than, say, Robert Hayden's
"Frederick Douglass." Marsalis didn't write this mess, but he chose it.
Still, composers have occasionally triumphed over bad libretti, just not
here.  Musically, the work rambles and natters.  The text provides little
obvious opportunity to soar.  The musical dithering contradicts Marsalis's
normal profile as a player and composer, marked by an almost ruthless
economy of notes and drive of idea.  I can surmise only that the text
flummoxed him, as it would have almost anybody.

Of the performers, Jon Hendricks, as the trickster-shaman, comes over best,
with a great show-biz bounce.  He also has the best music.  I've never been
a fan of Cassandra Wilson, and I don't know Miles Griffith's other work.
However, judging them by this performance would be unfair.  The Lincoln
Center Jazz Orchestra, led by Marsalis, consists of wonderful musicians,
but the playing is unfocussed.  They fail to catch the impulse of the
music, which at slightly under three hours seriously handicaps them.
The recording seems taken from the live performances.  I doubt a studio
recording would have improved the result, however.

In short, the piece disappointed me, but I look to Marsalis to find
his feet again.  His Citi Movement I believe one of the most successful
extended jazz works of recent years, and if anyone has the composing chops
and interests to add to the classic-jazz repertory, it's Wynton Marsalis.

McCartney long ago passed into the category of classic with his
songwriting for the Beatles.  However, he has for a long time itched
to compose extended classical works.  He has never formally studied,
and he has problems reading music.  He can't even write it down through
conventional notation.  Because of all this, even the announcement of these
works has elicited a sort of "how dare he" response from some music lovers.
When the notice came out about Standing Stone, I hadn't seen eyebrows
arched so far back since Margaret Dumont in Night at the Opera, even though
clearly most of the criticism came from people who hadn't heard the work
(always a dubious proposition).

One might ask the question whether, given today's MIDI technology, one
needs to read music in order to compose long works.  McCartney certainly
has access to the best hardware and software and to the people who can
teach him how to use it.  His distinction as a melodist and harmonist I
don't doubt.

McCartney's obvious musical talent and his equally-obvious means to
realize a project (money, connections, time) allied to the desire to
stretch himself have always struck me as admirable, whatever I thought of
the results.  After all, he could have spent the bucks on a fleet of solid
gold dune buggies.  Furthermore, he seems to learn something essential with
each project of this sort.  For example, from Liverpool Oratorio (the only
section I thought successful was the Jamaican song) he became aware of some
of the considerations of structuring a long piece, that pure inspiration -
which carried him through writing a pop song - probably wouldn't get him
through an extended piece.  He needed architecture.  Where, for instance,
would he place a climax?

McCartney still hasn't worked with the usual forms of classical music,
but that's not as important, it seems to me, as knowing that the piece
needs some sort of structure and building it.  The structure of Standing
Stone comes from a poem written by McCartney.  A throwback to Sixties
flower power, as literature, it won't win the Bollingen Prize.  As a
"libretto for the mind," it serves the composer well enough.  As with
Richard Strauss, much of the structure comes from the poem's narrative as
well as its images.  Fortunately, listeners don't need the poem to enjoy
the work, and, unfortunately, the poem doesn't really clarify the music to
the listener, however it may have helped the composer.

Some listeners find the idiom derivative, and you definitely hear bits
of Ravel, Delius, Holst, and lush Hollywood movie scores.  But I believe
in giving the composers their language.  The better question seems to me
whether composers say something interesting in the idiom they choose.
The work, which clocks in at more than an hour and a quarter, doesn't
move altogether convincingly.  There are long stretches of aimlessness -
textures that go on too long, short ideas repeated rather than developed.
The narrative structure isn't enough.  McCartney needs to learn the little
tricks of unity employed by composers since at least the Renaissance.
However, to do so probably requires him to learn to read music - to
manipulate music as pattern, not just as sound or melody.  Episodic as it
is, my favorite movement remains the second, due to the quality of the
basic musical ideas and to its relative coherence as a movement.  Some of
the ideas throughout Standing Stone are first-rate, in fact, but because
McCartney's repertoire of manipulation is so small, he has to use far too
many of them to fill out the time.  There's more than enough material for
six large works.  I may adore the love theme that ends Standing Stone (the
choral lyrics are another matter), but it has little to do with the rest of
the finale.

A problem of attribution continually vexes me.  McCartney's contribution
consisted of playing the work into a computer, which came up with a rough
score.  As anyone who has used MIDI software knows, the computer tends to
take a human at his word, especially regarding rhythm, and few humans play
in tempo strict enough for a computer.  As a result, notated bar lines
may not match up to the bar lines one hears.  There will usually be
fine adjustments of things like triplets and other rhythms.  McCartney's
computer "score" was passed off to a musician who cleaned it up and handed
it off to composer Richard Rodney Bennett and a team of orchestrators who
produced the final version.  Much of what I like about Standing Stone is
its orchestration and counterpoint.  Richard Rodney Bennett and John Harle,
among others, orchestrated it.  Bennett and Harle have always been
marvelous orchestrators - no news there.  The counterpoint is tremendously
clear and independent, but I have no idea whether that's due to McCartney
or to his refiners.  Some of the textures I have no trouble attributing to
McCartney - basic tune with accompaniment and, in one passage, an "Ivesian"
soup, which I nevertheless admire as a sign of McCartney trying to break
free of the contrapuntal restraints imposed by his keyboard technique.  On
the other hand, especially in passages of folk-like dances during the last
movement, the counterpoint becomes downright sophisticated.  Is this
McCartney or his elves? A combination? I have no idea.

The sound is gorgeous and the playing better than it had to be.  If you're
looking for another Sibelius symphony or Rachmaninoff concerto, this might
disappoint you.  It fascinates me mainly as a document in McCartney's
progress as a composer of large works.  I think it an advance over the
Liverpool Oratorio, and it kept my interest enough to want to hear what
McCartney will do next.

Steve Schwartz