The Jazz Exchange

My good friend Paul Brady wrote a really nice article about his experience one night on the Detroit music scene. Paul is the rhythm guitar player with Hot Club of Detroit pictured above (Paul is on the left):

Jazz and Emotions

by Paul Brady

A few weeks ago I attended a Detroit Symphony Orchestra concert, as I do almost every week during their regular season. However, I had been looking forward to this particular program since its announcement, and I was not the only one. Why the anticipation? The DSO is arguably a top ten orchestra in the U.S., but they don’t quite have the drawing power to bring in the top tier maestros every weekend, like their neighbor in Chicago. Actually, it’s a bit refreshing to see the lesser known and up and coming conductors coming through town. However, the weekend in discussion brought to Detroit one of the worlds most celebrated conductors, Charles Dutoit.

The French-speaking Swiss conductor was employed to perform an all French program, which included Ravel’s piano concerto for left hand only, featuring the French pianist Jean-Phillipe Collard, Berlioz’s Overture to “Beatrice et Benedict,” and the Symphony Fantastique. The response from the audience could only have been overshadowed by the response from the orchestra. In the last three years I have attended nearly every major program the DSO has performed, not to mention being dragged there week after week by my father who had a subscription from the time I was about 10 years old until I turned sixteen. This time, I witnessed something new. While Maestro Dutoit was taking his final curtain call for the performance of the Symphony Fantastique , the orchestra members all put down their instruments and applauded him.

Orchestral musicians do not impress easily. Even after the most powerful ending of a Shostakovitch symphony, that would have NFL football players in tears, I have seen poker faces. Not this time. The performance was that good. At that moment, I truly felt that for me, this was the center of the musical universe. It wasn’t.

Usually after DSO concerts I hurry to one of a fewwatering holes for a drink and to reflect on what I have just heard and seen. That night, I chose Dylan’s Raw Bar and Grill, an east side seafood restaurant and piano bar. The piano bench that night, and every Wednesday through Saturday night, was occupied by Marty Ballog. Marty is a great performer and very good at his job, which usually consists of playing piano and singing over a noisy smoke-filled bar, often with patrons sharing the piano bench and singing (out of tune) along side him. He is a capable jazz improviser, with a vast repertoire of standards from the American songbook. He is not the best pianist in Detroit by any means, but his abilities far exceed those of the basic saloon player. He has a reliable technique and a more than adequate harmonic vocabulary.

This Saturday happened to be less busy than usual for Marty, as it was blisteringly cold with several inches of snow on the ground. These are the nights where you want to catch him. If he knows you, he’ll likely play one of your favorite songs minutes after you’ve entered the bar. I was sitting close to the piano, and received pretty much a private concert. I sipped my drink while Marty played and sang many of my favorites: My Romance, I Should Care, My Heart Stood Still (we share a common interest in Bill Evans), Call Me Irresponsible, Poinciana, Gone with the Wind. He capped it off with Chicago, my former city of residence. At some point during that set, I forgot completely where I had just come from. I was totally absorbed in the moment. How did the sounds from a closed baby grand piano and the voice of an under-the-weather pianist completely knock out of my head thoughts of a classical masterpiece performed by a top level orchestra, one with a history of performing French music, with none other than the leading French music maestro at the helm?

I’m obsessed with classical music (and long sentences; hey, it worked for James Joyce). I’ll outlast anyone in marathon discussions about the minutest of details having to do with the genre and then I’ll insist that we keep talking about it when someone has tried to change the subject three times. I drive my friends and family crazy. And yet, jazz, in its most basic form, stirs up my emotions even more, with all due respect to Maestro Dutoit and the DSO. How is it that a cocktail pianist with a few jazz chops is able to stir more of me than classical music performed at the highest level?

For almost everything that I find unique about jazz, I can find a counterpart in classical music, so it’s not just that jazz “grooves” harder. It goes deeper than that. I’ll listen to any number of pieces by the great ballet composers and find myself “grooving” in my seat just the same way I groove to a Wes Montgomery side, but I find a romanticism in jazz that I can not find anywhere else, even in the most romantic of the Romantic era symphonies, with all due respect to Maestro Berlioz. What is it that gives jazz this seductiveness?

I don’t know for sure, and maybe that in itself is the answer. Historically, there has always been an exotic, rebellious, risque tinge surrounding jazz, giving it some uncertainness. There are still ongoing debates as to whether jazz should be taught in conservatories. Maybe the concept of improvisation, which is to create something out of nothing, frightens music administrators. Maybe it is the setting that we so often associate with jazz, the bar and the night club, that contributes to its forbidden fruit-like lure.

What do you think?