Look, I don’t think I’m all that excited about dancing to careful 3 minute transcriptions of recorded big bands. I like a little more chaos with my historical recreation. I’ve been listening to some live and radio recordings from the 30s and 40s, and some modern stuff like this video from the Kansas City soundtrack, and I like it when they go off-script. There’s a really great sax battle in one of the Kansas City songs, and it’s entirely not-historically-accurate, but it is entirely awesome.
What exactly are my issues?
I think it’s a bad idea to train dancers to dance to 3 minute songs.
Recordings of bands are amazing and important. But if we just reproduce those recordings exactly, we’re missing the point of jazz: improvisation, innovation, and taking risks within a shared structure.
We need to encourage song writers and arrangers to develop new music, to keep those skills alive and to foster the recording of modern jazz bands.
I LOVE seeing a good band leader managing a band, getting a musician to solo at just the right time, because that musician is on fire, responding to the crowd, working the vibe in the room up and down. Listening to the audience, bantering with them.
As I write this, I’m thinking about Adrian Cunningham, who’s currently one of my favourite band leaders. He gets fantastic performances out of musicians I might see every week at home. But the show is fresh and exciting because he’s innovating and improvising with the whole band and whole song, even while the soloists or individual musicians are improvising within that bigger shape. I know that these guys need decent transcripts to work with old songs. And I know a big band needs a big stack of charts, and that they rely lesson improvisation and more on the careful choreography of musicians and parts. But, to be honest, big bands aren’t the bands I book or see as often as small bands. Simply because lots of musicians = lots of individual pay packets = a big hire fee for the band.
I danced to a very nice and very faithful version of Lavender Coffin by Gordon Webster’s band at Snowball, and while I had a bunch of fun, I was actually left thinking, ‘Gee, I hear this song all the time. I’d like to hear something new.’ It’s a decent song, but it’s not amazing. And it gets DJed all the time. It’s very safe. What makes the recording good is the band’s performance on the recording.
I understand what Webster’s doing with his band: this is pop music, and playing favourites to make a party. His songs are quite formulaic, and have a very clear, almost identical structure. They’re great. They’re exciting. But they’re entirely predictable. This is great if you’re dancing a set sequence of steps, or want everything in your dance to be safe and predictable.
But I dance to live music because I like to be surprised. I want something new and interesting. Sometimes that new stuff is going to suck balls. But sometimes it’s going to be wonderful.