[TPIN] Re: Chet, Miles, closing eyes, John Garvey on reading music

[Jeff Helgesen]

(a) Chet could read music and did so in concert at least once.  I have
a DVD to prove it.  :-)

(b) Miles was a fine reader -- check out his work with Gil Evans, the
Birth of the Cool material, etc. etc.  He was known to study
orchestral scores.

(c) When I'm improvising, I close my eyes.  Except when they're open.

(d) Some notes about reading from the written page from an article by
jazz bassist Chuck Israels about discussions with John Garvey, who was
a conductor and mentor of mine in the jazz program at the University
of Illinois in the 1980s (and who recently passed away):

"The fact that most music making in the western world is learned by
notation obscures the whole thing enormously. Music students have a
minimal amount of aural experience from their own family or cultural
background. Instead they learn the rules of grammar, of intonation, to
start and stop at the right times and together and to play or sing
with the conventional idea of what a beautiful tone is. With only
these elements you cannot make music.

All notation, useful as it may be, is a falsification in some way or
another from the actual style of performing that particular music. The
job of the performer is to turn it back into music, a living thing.
Most performers need to be deprogrammed. The program they need to be
deprogrammed of is the learning of the grammatical rules of notation.
One of the jobs of the conductor is to shake off this program. It is
necessary for each conductor according to his nature and according to
the kind of people with whom he is dealing, to do something to shake
people up so that they can pierce through to the stylistic, emotional,
corporal, corporeal reality."

For more...:

http://www.chuckisraels.com/articlenotes.htm

--
Jeff Helgesen
Buy our CD at http://cdbaby.com/cd/jazzmayhem