OFF: We be jammin'

[Carl Edlund Anderson]

On tor 4 mar 1999 11.59 +0000 "<Nick English>" <nick at THECAMPUS.COM> wrote:
> BTW, It's time to chime in with my opinion on this whole jam/improv
> thing:
> I much prefer what BOC does. I saw the Allman Brothers way back in 92
> or so...In something like two hours, I recognized about five
> different songs. It was mostly just an endless jam...and it was THE
> most boring concert I've ever been to (And that includes The
> Busboys!).

     Dude, that's 24 minutes a song!  Early 90s Allmans seldom
took a piece to that length.  I'd say most of their pieces were
about 8 minutes or so, with a few heading out towards 15 and some
shorter ones around 5.

     :)

     I recognize differences of approach and musical tradition.
Essentially, BOC--like a classical orchestra--reproduces
pre-existing compositions in concert.  The chief differences
between a BOC gig one night and the next will depend primarily
on how "charged up" the performers are.
     I wouldn't expect a symphony orchestra to start jamming in the
middle of a performance--I'd judge their performance and that of
a band like BOC in a similar way: matters of timing and emphasis,
essentially.  A given piece can be performed "well" or "badly"
within subjective criteria, notwithstanding slight differences
in arrangement; Buck might turn in a "better" or "worse" solo
on some nights, where judgement devolves on the choice of sounds
rather than the quality with which they are produced.

     I would have to judge a band which comes from an improv-
based tradition rather differently.  I've seen the Allmans sit
there and widdle uninspiredly, and I've seen them turn in jaw
dropping jams.  Here I would also distinguish between their
soloing over a pattern (which the Allmans certainly do a lot
of) and something more like a _jam_, where everyone is largely
making it up as they go and the performers must rely on their
intuition and mutual familiarity to keep it from all falling
apart.  Anything might happen.
     Personally, I find such performances *potentially* the
most rewarding--they can certainly be dismal failures :) But
a successful act of cooperative creation will always leave
the strongest impressions on me.  Finding that point of
unexpected musical transcendance.  This is not at all to
denigrate what BOC (or the London Philharmonic) do, since
I don't really view them as attempting to do the same thing.
It's apples and oranges.  BOC are, after all, one of my
favorite bands--and I wouldn't expect them to suddenly transform
into The Spacious Mind on-stage!

     On this theme ...
     I was listening to some early Led Zep recordings the other
day, and thinking they presented a marvelous combination of
structure and improv.  They had a wide familiarity with
basic patterns and song structures from blues and pop pieces,
and give the impression, at least, of having been able to
careen precariously from one riff/pattern/song to another
and more or less be able to follow one another.  They could
zip from an interpretation of one of their compositions (and
these certainly could evolve over time), through references
to and snippets of other songs, into pretty much free-form
jamming (isn't said that all the riffs on their second album
came out of live jamming on "Dazed and Confused"?), and then
back out to the song again.
     Not bad.  They were helped in having a vocalist with,
apparently, no fear--willing to sing the words of one song
to the tune of a completely different one, and apparently
just belt out whatever came to mind when necessary.  And
do it convincingly.  Rare things in a vocalist!

     Enough rambling for the moment! :)

Cheers,
Carl

--
Carl Edlund Anderson
Dept. of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, & Celtic
St. John's College, University of Cambridge
mailto:cea20 at cus.cam.ac.uk
http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~carl/