Page 8 - Priorities #20 2002-October

Student View
Jazz Music Blends History, Improvisation and Teamwork
For most listeners, "new" music (i.e. whatever we don’t usuallylistento)cangrateontheear. Priorygradand professional jazz musician Taylor Eigsti would like nothing better than to make the music he loves more approachable. In an interview last spring, he talked about ways for non- jazz listeners to understand the genre.
Taylor’s fourth CD, Resonance, was released at the prestigious jazz club, Yoshi’s, this month. You can read about it and hear sound clips online at Tayjazz.com. It will be available at record stores starting mid-October.
Taylor has signed a recording contract with the Bop City label, whose owners either produced or engineered recordings for artists such as Diana Krall, Frank Sinatra, Earth Wind and Fire, Nat King Kole and David Benoit. They plan to record a new CD with Taylor in early 2003.
How could people who don’t generally listen to jazz begin to
enjoy it?
It helps to know a little about it beforehand. In jazz music, you take a melody, you play (an improvised) solo, then you play the melody. It’s basic music, basic chords, then the soloist doing what he wants on top of that to make it sound cool. Playing off other people (in the group), reading their minds. More than just that—it’s a story being created on the spot. Which is why a song played by a live group is different every time.
That’s pretty much the way it is, whether it’s abstract jazz or bebop or something really funky. There are a lot of great, hip, modern things that people can listen to.
Is there a way to know it’s jazz you’re hearing?
You won’t find jazz in an elevator. Frank Sinatra and Kenny G aren’t what I would call jazz, although a lot of people lump them in with jazz. Sinatra was a pop singer of his time and Kenny G is a soft rock instrumentalist—he just happens to play the sax.
If you’re listening to a real jazz song, you’ll hear the melody first, then a bunch of notes that aren’t the melody but are being made up on the spot.
So improvisation is a key. Wasn’t that the case in early classical music? Bach actually has some places in his music where he says "improvise over that." There are interesting connections between baroque music, for example, and jazz, involving improvisation.
There are many ways to get into jazz. For my generation, at least, you could start with modern music. Everything in pop music has branched out of jazz...You can listen to the basic rhythms and get the traces between the music (styles). You can start with slave songs, putting them to instrumental music, then Dixieland, then older jazz, then swing era, which progressed into the more linear style of chords that musicians now improvise over to get all these other modern genres. Like, rap came out of that jazz genre andR&B.
Do you think there’s an affinity between rap and jazz?
Well, yes—and improv comedy. It’s that you are being spontaneous. You don’t know what’s going to happen ahead of time. You know the basic rules, the basic palette, and whatever you do with that is up to you. And it’s so great because it’s everyone in the groupplayingoffofeachother. Iloveplayingina trio so much more than working alone.
So musicians build on the work of other musicians and on the work of earlier musicians
Yes, exactly. And it kind of sucks to see that a lot of contemporary musicians are just ignoring these earlier genres. You can tell it in their music, too. It’s just a copy of music they are hearing now, but it’s not going anywhere. You’ve gotta know the history of what you are doing. If you’re not rooted down on the ground, then you can’t grow into something else. But if you have all that music under you, then you can use it to push up.
—C.Dobervich
Taylor Eigsti, Class of 2002,is a freshman at USC this fall.
“You’ve gotta know the history of what you are doing. If you’re not rooted down on the ground, then you can’t grow into something else.”
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