The Classical Tinge Part 3: Basso continuo, rhythm sections and Real Books DAVE JONES continues his series on the relationship between classical

music and jazz

Figured bass, realised by the basso con­tinuo, was in a number of ways a baroque notational equivalent of cur­

rent day Real Book charts for jazz musi ­cians, providing melody and bass lines, and f1gured indications of what chords should be used, with the vo ic ing of the chords being entirely up to the performer. The late jazz pianist, composer, teacher and criti c John Mehegan was the author of The Jazz Improvisation Series, one of the earliest published series of detail ed jazz tutor books, where he offered the flfst serious attempt at applyin g f1gured bass to jazz.

Mehegan saw the use amongst j azz musicians of chord letters to indi cate which chords to play in a particular key (as per the Real Books) as strange, when an organised generic method of indicati ng chords had existed for several hundred years, namely f1gured bass. There was a strong argument for this being a better method, as it encouraged higher level skills in transposition, which was likely to lead to a quicker recognition of the similari­ties between the chord progressions for vari­ous standards, and therefore a larger and more quickly memorised repertoire.

His method was adopted successfully by some musicians, but in co ntrast, many j azz musicians, if usi ng a form of notation at all, have tended towards nam ing chords via let­ter names, speci f1c to the key they are play­ing in. However, it's co mmon for jazz musicians to vcrbalise generic chord num er­als amongst themselves, e.g. iii-Vl-ii-V-1.

In the sa me way that jazz musi cians have a stock mental library of phrases that they may draw upon as part of their improv isa­tions, J. S. Bach and his co ntemp oraries had "a vo cabulary of flourish es and other orna­mem al gestures" that could be utilised in the improvisation of entire pieces. We unfortunately don't have the benefit of sound recordin gs from anything furth er back than the late romantic and early 20th century eras of classical music, but recent research indicates that the notated music we have today from the baroque period may represent only a part of the keyboard reper­toire performed in this era. Much of it may have been improvised in performance rather than written down, with performers rely ing on musical phrases and patterns passed down from teacher to student.

The baroque "prelude", originally intended as a "warm-up" piece before the more seri­ous musi ca l business of, e.g., a fugue (some of which J. S. Bach was known to impro­vise). gradually became almost extinct in terms of being an improvised piece, when idea l examples of preludes were notated a nd so effectively became handed down as a fixed form of compositio n. This pa rtly explains the quite common, but incorrecl assumption since then that all classical music was fully notated and should be played as written, with the score being a defmitive account of th e work.

However, even in a supposedly fully notated classical sco re, there is always a signifiCant amount of musi ca l information absent, with instmctions for performance being quite vague in so me respects. For example, tempo markings, typically in Italian, German or French, did not a lways state precise values for metronome markings in beats per minute. Dynamics markings to indicate loud, soft etc. are again in words represent­ing relative loudness and softness and not actual measurable values, and gradual changes in tempo or loudness (ra llentando, crescendo etc.) are similarly vague because they are set between limits which arc already vague in themselves. Consequently, perfor­mances of works in the classical repertoire by different performers and conductors ha ve always sounded different, to varying degrees, with or without improvisation.

Looking back to those exampl es of the baroque improvisational influence on j azz that I mentioned in part two of the seri es, there's another Bud Powell exa mpl e, namely Bud On Bach, which has similariti es to Enrico Pieranunzi's approach on his 2011 solo piano release entitled Enri co Pi era­nunzi Pl ays J. S. Bach, G. F. Handel, D.

Mehegan saw the use amongst jazz musicians of chord letters (as per the Real Books) as strange, when an organised generic method of indicating chords had existed for several hundred years, namely f1gured bass

., G J A zz J 0 u R N A L T H E c L A s s I c A L T I N G E

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m Jacques Loussier in London. 1973

Scarlatti, in that Bud interprets C. P. E. Bac h's Solfegietto In C 1\.Jinor (although unlike Pi era nunzi , in this case Bud is occa­sionally messy in his execution). follow ed by his improvised version.

The other exa mpl es I'd like to menti on seem to fall into two fairly di stinu categories -those whi ch represe nt to varying degrees the novelty "j azzin g up" of the baroque, and others which o ffer a more serious attempt at integrating the two genres. In the case of the latter, there's John Lewis of course, in hi s work with the Modern Jazz Quartet, where he utilises aspects of baroque counterpoint in the man ner of J. S. Bach.

In relatively recent years, Uri Caine has offered something more radical in his record­ing of the Goldberg Va ria tions (2000) for large ensemble including voices and electron­ics, where he essen tially does someth ing sim­ilar to the aforememioncd Pieranunzi in connecting jazz and the baroque via what happened musically in the centuries between.

Trombonist Samuel Blaser's Consort in Motion (20 I 1) consists of his quartet's unique in terp retations of early baroque and late rena issance compositions by the Italian composers Monteverdi, Frescobaldi and Marini. Severa l of the tracks are inspired melodically or rhythmically by the original compositions, but with th e remain­der paying closer attention to the originals.

In terms of novelty "jazzing up" of the baroque, the most obvious example is per­haps Jacques Loussier's Play Bach series, which although co mmercially successful, didn't receive a great deal of critical acclaim - understandable, given the fairly superficial nature of the interpretations. Claude Bolling's Suite For Jazz Flu te A11d Jazz Piano Trio and Suite For Cello And Jazz Piano Trio offer something arguably less superficial , although the improvised content always tends to be swung, even if it seems out of context with the initial statement of the theme. Pianist David Rees-Williams is significantly less superfiCial in this respect than Loussier or Bolling in his interpretation of John Alcock's Almand. However, on other material he somet imes borders on easy listening.

Dave Jon es is a critically acclaimed jazz pianist and composer, an author of modules for BA (Hans.) Music courses, and a it'cturer in music