Hasn’t jazz always used pop music as its source material? From the Gershwin, Berlin, Porter-composed jazz standards to Sonny Rollins doing “I’m an Old Cowhand” and later Dolly Parton and “Sweet Leilani” to Coltrane doing “My Favorite Things” to the Bad Plus doing “Film.” Iverson may not be Monk, and Richard James may not be Porter,, but what’s the difference?
Oh yes, I'm definitely thinking of something else. I saw Woody Allen live in 2010-11 or so and I was blown away. The thing is, Allen practiced for hours daily for years on end. He took jazz VERY seriously. He wasn't just dabbling. I mean, I should say that I can't read music and have no formal training and once started a band with an extremely fluid, well-versed, conservatory-trained alto sax player. But even then I was conscious that I was wandering into a place where I needed to be respectful -- and I'm talking strictly on a musical level.
You make some good points. I enjoyed the Bad Plus when Iverson was in it but I think I mainly preferred their original music instead of say, the “Iron Man”,“Tom Sawyer” and other played to death classic rock covers. Yes, they and others like it were cool on first listen but didn’t really stand up to repeated listening for me. I’ve not listened to any of the old TBP recordings in some time now and have only heard a bit of the new band’s material with Ben Monder, whom I love.
I’ve not yet heard the Andre 3000 piano record and ditto for his flute record. In fact, if it wasn’t for following Ethan Iverson’s “Transitional Technology” newsletter, I probably would never have heard about either of these records. I will say now that my interest is piqued.
Didn’t some comedian or something or other try to do the same thing with jazz?? This would have been a few years ago. I can’t remember his name but I’m pretty sure that the premise was he can’t play piano at all but yet he hired a jazz rhythm section (bass and drums) and then made a record of him “trying” to play jazz piano. I know I’m not making this up.
I’m sure there is/was some outrage about that incident somewhere but maybe because this guy isn’t as much of a public figure as Andre 3000, it was forgotten about?
I found it. His name is H. Jon Benjamin (from Wikipedia)
In 2015, despite not knowing how to play any instrument, Benjamin released his first jazz album, Well, I Should Have....[16] Benjamin "played" piano and was joined by Scott Kreitzer on sax, David Finck on bass, and Jonathan Preitz on drums.[17]
Thanks for your response. My personal preference is for more “genre” mixing. I try think our culture is at its best when we embrace our creole cultural heritage.
Agreed. With music it's tricky because there's a sense of freedom to draw from all sounds -- I think all musicians absorb influences from literally everything -- but there's also a vague overhanging sense of doing so with some measure of credibility (for lack of a better word).
Bob -- Thanks for pointing this out. I was going to mention how there are many jazz covers of popular tunes that (in my opinion) don't suffer from what I'd call a language barrier. I would argue that the difference between Coltrane and Armstrong doing popular tunes of the day in >their< day is that jazz was still in the popular music vernacular back then. And pop music often contained elements of orchestration, so there wasn't this traffic median separating the music into highbrow/lowbrow lanes.
As jazz faded from pop-culture prominence, that separation became more pronounced. I often get the sense that jazz musicians think they're "slumming" it to relate to the masses, and it comes off as stilted. There's a whiff of condescension -- not to mention a misunderstanding of the music -- that I can't ignore.
I'm all for musicians being able to draw from everything -- it's all sound, after all. But, by the same token, I think there's absolutely something awkward or... >off< when musicians reach into areas where they're not fluent, especially since they're likely not aware of their lack of fluency.
I suspect there's a sense among formally trained jazz musicians that, because they can play very complicated music, that "simpler"/more direct forms like rock, funk, and blues are just going to fall under their fingertips. And that's just not the case. I feel like jazz musicians on the whole are tempted to look at rock and hip hop on a chart and go "I can do that." But I find that, unless musicians are truly "bilingual" -- unless they >grew up< ingesting popular forms alongside their jazz training -- there's a fundamental aspect to those more "gut-level" genres that they just don't get.
This also cuts both ways: There was an early-2000s solo album by Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest (who, of course, were one of the rap groups responsible for re-introducing jazz to youth culture) and it just felt to me like someone raiding the cupboard and making wax replicas of older styles.
This stuff gets complicated when we factor-in the obvious racial element BUT i think that >musical< language barriers are rooted just as much in aesthetic divisions as they are in "cultural" (i.e: "ethnic") barriers. I can't tell you how many rock bands started wearing cowboy hats when they discovered Hank Williams. Jeff Tweedy's first band Uncle Tupelo, for example, to me sounded like they were wearing hillbilly stereotypes almost like a form of whiteface. To me, it wasn't "theirs." And most kids raised on hip hop during the late '80s onwards were not innately well-versed on funk or R&B -- and certainly not jazz.
Each idiom has its own snobbish codes and dogma, and when they collide it can make for great music, but also a comedy of errors, especially when musicians aren't mindful of the fact that they're tourists visiting someone else's "native" realm when they delve into styles they themselves aren't "native" to. Like real-life tourists, I prefer when musicians have a sense of respect enough to be aware of their unfamiliarity.
Also, I think OutKast is great, and I thought both Ethan Iverson and Matthew Shipp were respectful of Andre 3000’s talent and accomplishment if not his years-old and apparently dashed off piano recording.
Thanks for listening. FWIW, then and now, my approach to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was: What if Mal Waldron played a Kurt Cobain song? Specifically, I was imitating Waldron playing "Beat It" on BREAKING NEW GROUND. I don't deny TBP had hype, and perhaps even too much hype.
Oh, we talked about it during our interview, and I found your explanations quite convincing about what the band's intentions were. (I dug around for the piece and it's no longer online, and the audio is in a box somewhere on an old format.) It should also be noted that the band has almost always had a majority of original compositions on its albums. But as a quote-unquote "native" rock listener, I often find jazz musicians' handling of popular music to reek of unfamiliarity -- if not outright condescension. There's a lack of fluency there that hits me in a similar place as Andre's piano noodling does. I think both you and the band have settled into a space where there isn't even a hint of a gimmick now. That's ultimately more compelling to me. Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
personally i wish we lived in a world where the canon of standards hadn't been finalized in 1977. i'm excited to hear reinterpretations of songs written in my lifetime and don't care that it's done so rarely by the jazz establishment that it comes off as a gimmick
I also think it's a fun exercise to imagine hearing one's own music without knowing that it was actually you. I think most of us would sit there with our arms folded tut-tutting and rolling our eyes. It would be fascinating to be able to know what Ethan Iverson circa 2003 would have said about The Bad Plus.
I've actually bought records and books on the basis of a bad review they received because the criticism was intelligible enough to see that the critic's tastes and preferences did not match my own but the art under discussion would appeal to me. The "bad" review in other words was an honest one and so wasn't gatekeeping at all.
In that case, you and I might be way more in-alignment than I thought: I distinctly remember being at my local bank once and the teller said "I went out and bought that album after reading your review." It turns out I didn't like the record, but I was neutral/descriptive in my tone. I thought "I did my job today." When I review something, my hope is for the audience to go around my opinions and get to what >they< would think about the music. It's my hope that my descriptions, not my criticisms based on personal taste, reach the reader.
OK, sorry to question your intelligence or engagement. But there are _no_ covers on the three albums after For All I Care (Never Stop, Made Possible, Inevitable Western), and while Rite of Spring is a "cover," it's in a different category than rock/pop song covers. To me those are the albums when the Iverson-King-Anderson lineup was really cooking, so it's a shame not to address them. Did they use covers to generate hype? I'm sure their record company did, but slagging a jazz group for trying to achieve some minor measure of popularity by covering pop tunes (they aren't all rock, btw) is a tired trope. Now, if we're talking about their final album together, It's Hard, I would agree that those covers did wear thin -- they just didn't have the spark present in earlier ones -- in part, I would guess, because the band was already in the throes of a sour breakup, and Iverson, in particular, was moving in a very different direction.
Agree with your penultimate paragraph, except that, if you're going to write as a critic, you need to evaluate the covers based on something other than personal preference. Compared to similar efforts, I would argue that covers like Iron Man, Karma Police, and Barracuda (just to pick a few) transform those tunes harmonically, rhythmically, and formally in ways that are rarely heard in the jazz or rock world. That's in line with what the best jazz versions of pop songs have always done.
Oh, no sweat at all, really. I mean, none of us really has any idea who we're responding to (and I include myself as much as anyone else). Such discussions could potentially be so much more pleasant over a dinner table -- at least at first. I mean, then again, it's kind of a wondrous miracle that we get to talk to complete strangers at such great distances, so I say we make the best of it while we can.
I agree with you that The Bad Plus did do some interesting arrangements of the songs they chose. My issue was more with some of the songs they chose -- this idea that they could just raid the cupboard of popular tunes.
As a lifelong Black Sabbath and Rush fan, for example, it rubbed me that someone could just walk up to that entire body of work and, essentially, go straight for the karoake-night song selections. That, to me, is a fundamental misunderstanding of what those bands were about -- or at least, just a skin-deep understanding. I have a very personal stake in the catalogs of those bands. To have someone just kind of give them a cursory glance is almost offensive to me.
I find it odd that jazz musicians -- who play in a medium where variation and constant evolution is practically encoded into the DNA of the music, wouldn't go further than that. (And yes, I know The Bad Plus also did an Aphex Twin tune as well. And I'm aware that there's a longstanding jazz tradition of re-interpreting popular tunes, both from the "songbook" of jazz and from "pop" music... Coltrane, Armstrong, etc)
My issue isn't so much with jazz groups doing covers, but with this sense that it's just easy to cross this sub-cultural divide between musical camps. Again, this goes both ways. I feel like different styles of music are like cultures/languages unto themselves, almost like different countries or even interplanetary worlds. The beauty in those worlds mixing often does come from messy misunderstandings -- in that wonderful space where the language barrier >becomes< the beauty -- but I would also prefer that musicians going in either direction be mindful when they're engaging in musical tourism.
Then again, I have the >same< issue when rock bands do the same thing with their >own< material and kind of trot out this big-tent populist schtick. Rock radio stations do the same thing. For The Bad Plus to follow their lead is to pick the low-hanging fruit -- like going to a tourist-trap shop in a new city and getting postcards and t-shirts with the most obvious slogans on them.
I appreciate this tremendously. "Thoughtful" is about the highest compliment I think we can ever receive. Thank you for reading it, and for sharing your thoughts as well. 🫡
If you’ve actually listened to the Bad Plus in the Iverson era, you would have a smarter take than this. TBP always had a high originals-to-covers ratio, but their covers are consistently inventive and delightful.
I listened carefully to that block of records from Vistas to the album with Wendy Lewis (For All I Care), an all-covers offering that left a final impression on me. Throughout that stretch, I was also assigned to write about the band at multiple points, saw them live twice, interviewed two bandmembers on seperate occasions, and had a front-row seat to all the media noise around the band in ‘03. (Which is to say that I was getting those presskits like every other music journalist was, but that was during the last-gasp phase of music writers and bloggers being able to shape culture.)
I initially enjoyed the band but felt that the covers angle wore thin to say the least, and I’m thrilled that they’ve abandoned it entirely. Again, I saw them last year and loved it. As someone who grew up listening to the rock music the band was mining for its covers >and< who was taking a deeper plunge into jazz right around the same time as Vistas (going to my local library and returning with stacks of jazz CDs, and then attending Rochester’s jazz festival, which The Bad Plus played), I was quite conscious of the divide between those two realms.
I actually feel glad for people when they enjoy something that I don't. If people enjoy those covers, then I’m not going to try and argue them out of it. That's like walking up to somebody and insisting that they're wrong for liking pistachio ice cream. It's idiotic, blind, and religiosic to expect that everyone needs to hear things the same way we do. I do maintain, however, that for ME the band’s attempts to cross the jazz-popular barrier were stilted. I'm thrilled to see that they're lately putting their focus elsewhere, and I’m pleasantly surprised to see them rise above a gimmick they were always better than to begin with.
I think if you had thought your answer through a little more, it would occur to you that “smart” has nothing to do with this.
Hasn’t jazz always used pop music as its source material? From the Gershwin, Berlin, Porter-composed jazz standards to Sonny Rollins doing “I’m an Old Cowhand” and later Dolly Parton and “Sweet Leilani” to Coltrane doing “My Favorite Things” to the Bad Plus doing “Film.” Iverson may not be Monk, and Richard James may not be Porter,, but what’s the difference?
Woody Allen plays jazz clarinet, but it sounds like you are thinking of something else?
Oh yes, I'm definitely thinking of something else. I saw Woody Allen live in 2010-11 or so and I was blown away. The thing is, Allen practiced for hours daily for years on end. He took jazz VERY seriously. He wasn't just dabbling. I mean, I should say that I can't read music and have no formal training and once started a band with an extremely fluid, well-versed, conservatory-trained alto sax player. But even then I was conscious that I was wandering into a place where I needed to be respectful -- and I'm talking strictly on a musical level.
You make some good points. I enjoyed the Bad Plus when Iverson was in it but I think I mainly preferred their original music instead of say, the “Iron Man”,“Tom Sawyer” and other played to death classic rock covers. Yes, they and others like it were cool on first listen but didn’t really stand up to repeated listening for me. I’ve not listened to any of the old TBP recordings in some time now and have only heard a bit of the new band’s material with Ben Monder, whom I love.
I’ve not yet heard the Andre 3000 piano record and ditto for his flute record. In fact, if it wasn’t for following Ethan Iverson’s “Transitional Technology” newsletter, I probably would never have heard about either of these records. I will say now that my interest is piqued.
Didn’t some comedian or something or other try to do the same thing with jazz?? This would have been a few years ago. I can’t remember his name but I’m pretty sure that the premise was he can’t play piano at all but yet he hired a jazz rhythm section (bass and drums) and then made a record of him “trying” to play jazz piano. I know I’m not making this up.
I’m sure there is/was some outrage about that incident somewhere but maybe because this guy isn’t as much of a public figure as Andre 3000, it was forgotten about?
I appreciate the thoughtful reply. I hadn't heard about a comedian doing that, but now >my< interest is piqued!
I found it. His name is H. Jon Benjamin (from Wikipedia)
In 2015, despite not knowing how to play any instrument, Benjamin released his first jazz album, Well, I Should Have....[16] Benjamin "played" piano and was joined by Scott Kreitzer on sax, David Finck on bass, and Jonathan Preitz on drums.[17]
Ha! I have to hear it (though I wish I could un-learn the fact that Benjamin can't play before listening). Thanks for the tip!
Thanks for your response. My personal preference is for more “genre” mixing. I try think our culture is at its best when we embrace our creole cultural heritage.
Agreed. With music it's tricky because there's a sense of freedom to draw from all sounds -- I think all musicians absorb influences from literally everything -- but there's also a vague overhanging sense of doing so with some measure of credibility (for lack of a better word).
Bob -- Thanks for pointing this out. I was going to mention how there are many jazz covers of popular tunes that (in my opinion) don't suffer from what I'd call a language barrier. I would argue that the difference between Coltrane and Armstrong doing popular tunes of the day in >their< day is that jazz was still in the popular music vernacular back then. And pop music often contained elements of orchestration, so there wasn't this traffic median separating the music into highbrow/lowbrow lanes.
As jazz faded from pop-culture prominence, that separation became more pronounced. I often get the sense that jazz musicians think they're "slumming" it to relate to the masses, and it comes off as stilted. There's a whiff of condescension -- not to mention a misunderstanding of the music -- that I can't ignore.
I'm all for musicians being able to draw from everything -- it's all sound, after all. But, by the same token, I think there's absolutely something awkward or... >off< when musicians reach into areas where they're not fluent, especially since they're likely not aware of their lack of fluency.
I suspect there's a sense among formally trained jazz musicians that, because they can play very complicated music, that "simpler"/more direct forms like rock, funk, and blues are just going to fall under their fingertips. And that's just not the case. I feel like jazz musicians on the whole are tempted to look at rock and hip hop on a chart and go "I can do that." But I find that, unless musicians are truly "bilingual" -- unless they >grew up< ingesting popular forms alongside their jazz training -- there's a fundamental aspect to those more "gut-level" genres that they just don't get.
This also cuts both ways: There was an early-2000s solo album by Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest (who, of course, were one of the rap groups responsible for re-introducing jazz to youth culture) and it just felt to me like someone raiding the cupboard and making wax replicas of older styles.
This stuff gets complicated when we factor-in the obvious racial element BUT i think that >musical< language barriers are rooted just as much in aesthetic divisions as they are in "cultural" (i.e: "ethnic") barriers. I can't tell you how many rock bands started wearing cowboy hats when they discovered Hank Williams. Jeff Tweedy's first band Uncle Tupelo, for example, to me sounded like they were wearing hillbilly stereotypes almost like a form of whiteface. To me, it wasn't "theirs." And most kids raised on hip hop during the late '80s onwards were not innately well-versed on funk or R&B -- and certainly not jazz.
Each idiom has its own snobbish codes and dogma, and when they collide it can make for great music, but also a comedy of errors, especially when musicians aren't mindful of the fact that they're tourists visiting someone else's "native" realm when they delve into styles they themselves aren't "native" to. Like real-life tourists, I prefer when musicians have a sense of respect enough to be aware of their unfamiliarity.
Also, I think OutKast is great, and I thought both Ethan Iverson and Matthew Shipp were respectful of Andre 3000’s talent and accomplishment if not his years-old and apparently dashed off piano recording.
Thanks for listening. FWIW, then and now, my approach to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was: What if Mal Waldron played a Kurt Cobain song? Specifically, I was imitating Waldron playing "Beat It" on BREAKING NEW GROUND. I don't deny TBP had hype, and perhaps even too much hype.
Oh, we talked about it during our interview, and I found your explanations quite convincing about what the band's intentions were. (I dug around for the piece and it's no longer online, and the audio is in a box somewhere on an old format.) It should also be noted that the band has almost always had a majority of original compositions on its albums. But as a quote-unquote "native" rock listener, I often find jazz musicians' handling of popular music to reek of unfamiliarity -- if not outright condescension. There's a lack of fluency there that hits me in a similar place as Andre's piano noodling does. I think both you and the band have settled into a space where there isn't even a hint of a gimmick now. That's ultimately more compelling to me. Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
personally i wish we lived in a world where the canon of standards hadn't been finalized in 1977. i'm excited to hear reinterpretations of songs written in my lifetime and don't care that it's done so rarely by the jazz establishment that it comes off as a gimmick
I'd never even heard of that Waldron cover. I love Waldron, but after listening to it, I feel like either he or I had never heard Beat It before.
I also think it's a fun exercise to imagine hearing one's own music without knowing that it was actually you. I think most of us would sit there with our arms folded tut-tutting and rolling our eyes. It would be fascinating to be able to know what Ethan Iverson circa 2003 would have said about The Bad Plus.
Society suffers when music critics aren't there to serve as guides to artists and art that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Thanks for the reply. I completely agree - but I'd call that curation, not criticism.
I've actually bought records and books on the basis of a bad review they received because the criticism was intelligible enough to see that the critic's tastes and preferences did not match my own but the art under discussion would appeal to me. The "bad" review in other words was an honest one and so wasn't gatekeeping at all.
In that case, you and I might be way more in-alignment than I thought: I distinctly remember being at my local bank once and the teller said "I went out and bought that album after reading your review." It turns out I didn't like the record, but I was neutral/descriptive in my tone. I thought "I did my job today." When I review something, my hope is for the audience to go around my opinions and get to what >they< would think about the music. It's my hope that my descriptions, not my criticisms based on personal taste, reach the reader.
OK, sorry to question your intelligence or engagement. But there are _no_ covers on the three albums after For All I Care (Never Stop, Made Possible, Inevitable Western), and while Rite of Spring is a "cover," it's in a different category than rock/pop song covers. To me those are the albums when the Iverson-King-Anderson lineup was really cooking, so it's a shame not to address them. Did they use covers to generate hype? I'm sure their record company did, but slagging a jazz group for trying to achieve some minor measure of popularity by covering pop tunes (they aren't all rock, btw) is a tired trope. Now, if we're talking about their final album together, It's Hard, I would agree that those covers did wear thin -- they just didn't have the spark present in earlier ones -- in part, I would guess, because the band was already in the throes of a sour breakup, and Iverson, in particular, was moving in a very different direction.
Agree with your penultimate paragraph, except that, if you're going to write as a critic, you need to evaluate the covers based on something other than personal preference. Compared to similar efforts, I would argue that covers like Iron Man, Karma Police, and Barracuda (just to pick a few) transform those tunes harmonically, rhythmically, and formally in ways that are rarely heard in the jazz or rock world. That's in line with what the best jazz versions of pop songs have always done.
Oh, no sweat at all, really. I mean, none of us really has any idea who we're responding to (and I include myself as much as anyone else). Such discussions could potentially be so much more pleasant over a dinner table -- at least at first. I mean, then again, it's kind of a wondrous miracle that we get to talk to complete strangers at such great distances, so I say we make the best of it while we can.
I agree with you that The Bad Plus did do some interesting arrangements of the songs they chose. My issue was more with some of the songs they chose -- this idea that they could just raid the cupboard of popular tunes.
As a lifelong Black Sabbath and Rush fan, for example, it rubbed me that someone could just walk up to that entire body of work and, essentially, go straight for the karoake-night song selections. That, to me, is a fundamental misunderstanding of what those bands were about -- or at least, just a skin-deep understanding. I have a very personal stake in the catalogs of those bands. To have someone just kind of give them a cursory glance is almost offensive to me.
I find it odd that jazz musicians -- who play in a medium where variation and constant evolution is practically encoded into the DNA of the music, wouldn't go further than that. (And yes, I know The Bad Plus also did an Aphex Twin tune as well. And I'm aware that there's a longstanding jazz tradition of re-interpreting popular tunes, both from the "songbook" of jazz and from "pop" music... Coltrane, Armstrong, etc)
My issue isn't so much with jazz groups doing covers, but with this sense that it's just easy to cross this sub-cultural divide between musical camps. Again, this goes both ways. I feel like different styles of music are like cultures/languages unto themselves, almost like different countries or even interplanetary worlds. The beauty in those worlds mixing often does come from messy misunderstandings -- in that wonderful space where the language barrier >becomes< the beauty -- but I would also prefer that musicians going in either direction be mindful when they're engaging in musical tourism.
Then again, I have the >same< issue when rock bands do the same thing with their >own< material and kind of trot out this big-tent populist schtick. Rock radio stations do the same thing. For The Bad Plus to follow their lead is to pick the low-hanging fruit -- like going to a tourist-trap shop in a new city and getting postcards and t-shirts with the most obvious slogans on them.
This is such a thoughtful piece. (And I say that as a fan of both the OG TBP & pre-midlife crisis André 3000…)
I appreciate this tremendously. "Thoughtful" is about the highest compliment I think we can ever receive. Thank you for reading it, and for sharing your thoughts as well. 🫡
If you’ve actually listened to the Bad Plus in the Iverson era, you would have a smarter take than this. TBP always had a high originals-to-covers ratio, but their covers are consistently inventive and delightful.
I listened carefully to that block of records from Vistas to the album with Wendy Lewis (For All I Care), an all-covers offering that left a final impression on me. Throughout that stretch, I was also assigned to write about the band at multiple points, saw them live twice, interviewed two bandmembers on seperate occasions, and had a front-row seat to all the media noise around the band in ‘03. (Which is to say that I was getting those presskits like every other music journalist was, but that was during the last-gasp phase of music writers and bloggers being able to shape culture.)
I initially enjoyed the band but felt that the covers angle wore thin to say the least, and I’m thrilled that they’ve abandoned it entirely. Again, I saw them last year and loved it. As someone who grew up listening to the rock music the band was mining for its covers >and< who was taking a deeper plunge into jazz right around the same time as Vistas (going to my local library and returning with stacks of jazz CDs, and then attending Rochester’s jazz festival, which The Bad Plus played), I was quite conscious of the divide between those two realms.
I actually feel glad for people when they enjoy something that I don't. If people enjoy those covers, then I’m not going to try and argue them out of it. That's like walking up to somebody and insisting that they're wrong for liking pistachio ice cream. It's idiotic, blind, and religiosic to expect that everyone needs to hear things the same way we do. I do maintain, however, that for ME the band’s attempts to cross the jazz-popular barrier were stilted. I'm thrilled to see that they're lately putting their focus elsewhere, and I’m pleasantly surprised to see them rise above a gimmick they were always better than to begin with.
I think if you had thought your answer through a little more, it would occur to you that “smart” has nothing to do with this.
Well, Ethan is right. Andree 3000 piano music is “JUST BORING”.