Keith Waters
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780195393835
- eISBN:
- 9780190268046
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780195393835.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Popular
The influence of Miles Davis's “second great quintet, ” consisting of Davis, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams continues to resonate. Jazz musicians, historians, and ...
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The influence of Miles Davis's “second great quintet, ” consisting of Davis, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams continues to resonate. Jazz musicians, historians, and critics have celebrated the group for its improvisational communication, openness, and its transitional status between hard bop and the emerging free jazz of the 1960s, creating a synthesis described by one quintet member as “controlled freedom.” The book provides a critical analytical study of the Davis quintet studio recordings released between 1965 and 1968, including E.S.P., Miles Smiles, Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky, and Filles de Kilimanjaro. In contrast to the quintet's live recordings, which included performances of older jazz standards, the studio recordings offered an astonishing breadth of original compositions. Many of these compositions have since become jazz standards, and all of them played a central role in the development of contemporary jazz composition. Using transcription and analysis, the author illuminates the compositional, improvisational, and collective achievements of the group. With additional sourcesthe book shows how the group in the studio shaped and altered features of the compositions. Despite the earlier hard bop orientation of the players, the Davis quintet compositions offered different responses to questions of form, melody, and harmonic structure, and they often invited other improvisational paths, ones that relied on an uncanny degree of collective rapport. And given the spontaneity of the recorded performances—often undertaken with a minimum of rehearsal—the players responded with any number of techniques to address formal, harmonic, or metrical discrepancies that arose while the tape was rolling.Less
The influence of Miles Davis's “second great quintet, ” consisting of Davis, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams continues to resonate. Jazz musicians, historians, and critics have celebrated the group for its improvisational communication, openness, and its transitional status between hard bop and the emerging free jazz of the 1960s, creating a synthesis described by one quintet member as “controlled freedom.” The book provides a critical analytical study of the Davis quintet studio recordings released between 1965 and 1968, including E.S.P., Miles Smiles, Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky, and Filles de Kilimanjaro. In contrast to the quintet's live recordings, which included performances of older jazz standards, the studio recordings offered an astonishing breadth of original compositions. Many of these compositions have since become jazz standards, and all of them played a central role in the development of contemporary jazz composition. Using transcription and analysis, the author illuminates the compositional, improvisational, and collective achievements of the group. With additional sourcesthe book shows how the group in the studio shaped and altered features of the compositions. Despite the earlier hard bop orientation of the players, the Davis quintet compositions offered different responses to questions of form, melody, and harmonic structure, and they often invited other improvisational paths, ones that relied on an uncanny degree of collective rapport. And given the spontaneity of the recorded performances—often undertaken with a minimum of rehearsal—the players responded with any number of techniques to address formal, harmonic, or metrical discrepancies that arose while the tape was rolling.
Sonia Tamar Seeman
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- February 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780199949243
- eISBN:
- 9780190908294
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199949243.003.0008
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
This chapter traces a poetics of emergent meaning in sözlü Roman oyun havası from static iconicity drawn from çingene references in kanto songs through musicians’ creative incorporation of improvised ...
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This chapter traces a poetics of emergent meaning in sözlü Roman oyun havası from static iconicity drawn from çingene references in kanto songs through musicians’ creative incorporation of improvised poetic mani and shouted hocali forms. While expressing communal reactions to specifically Roman experiences, the inclusion of patricularistic references from mani and hocali inscribed revised social distinctions along gendered, generational, class, and status lines. Through musical analysis and observations of musicians creating new songs, I demonstrate how musicians drew on keriz-style improvisations to expand melodic repertoires for song settings in response to the increased demand for new and relevant dance tunes. Commercial circulation and copyrighting of these songs also increased tensions between artists themselves and studio heads, thus reshaped community-based practices of borrowing and performing. The chapter ends with narrations of three performance events to illustrate the dynamic relationship between an ongoing metaphoricity of sound to a mimesis of enlarged presence and pluralized identities.Less
This chapter traces a poetics of emergent meaning in sözlü Roman oyun havası from static iconicity drawn from çingene references in kanto songs through musicians’ creative incorporation of improvised poetic mani and shouted hocali forms. While expressing communal reactions to specifically Roman experiences, the inclusion of patricularistic references from mani and hocali inscribed revised social distinctions along gendered, generational, class, and status lines. Through musical analysis and observations of musicians creating new songs, I demonstrate how musicians drew on keriz-style improvisations to expand melodic repertoires for song settings in response to the increased demand for new and relevant dance tunes. Commercial circulation and copyrighting of these songs also increased tensions between artists themselves and studio heads, thus reshaped community-based practices of borrowing and performing. The chapter ends with narrations of three performance events to illustrate the dynamic relationship between an ongoing metaphoricity of sound to a mimesis of enlarged presence and pluralized identities.
