Jazz & Live Electronic Music

Live ElectronicsSjangerkunnskap og historie

hakon.kvidal@nmh.no

Jazz with pre-recorded tape music

• Jazz musicians began to experiment with the use of electronic music around 1960.

• Initial experiments combined the playing of jazz musicians with tapes made in the fashion of musique concrete.

• By the mid- to late 1960s, jazz musicians began to include the use of electronic instruments and sound modifying devices in live performances.

Bernard Parmegiani: JazzEx (1966)• Parmegiani, an early innovator from the French school of

musique concrete in Paris

• Electronic Instrumentation: Tape composition with jazz quartet.

• Parmegiani composed the tape music with a jazz quartet in mind, assembling an arrhythmic sequence of colorful tones and noises to which he felt jazz musicians could freely improvise.

• This early experiment in combining jazz and electronic music was accomplished before the commercial availability of music synthesizers.

Listen for: the contrasting sounds of electronic music and jazz musicians and the interaction between the two. Note the way in which the jazz players complement the electronic sounds with their own unconventional techniques.

0:00 – 1:00 The piece begins with the frantic sounds of the sax and trumpet, accompanied by a quietly scraping drone. This is followed by a passage of trumpet and electronic tones that blend so well that they are almost indistinguishable. The drummer and bass player join the fray.

1:01 - 2:00 There is a bass solo accompanied by a 2.5-second tape loop comprised of a wavering drone. The loop creates a slow rhythm to which the bass player responds.

2:01 - 3:00 At 2:04, the bass solo and electronic drone are interrupted by an eruption of the sax and a short, rapid sequence of cascading electronic tones that blend with the percussion. A sustained tone on the saxophone anticipates the entrance of a low-pitched electronic tone at about 2:11 . The drone continues, unwavering, over which the sax player solos. At about 2:50, the electronic tone increases in volume and begins to waver with vibrato. At the same time, a thread of filtered white noise begins to increase in vo lume. This excerpt ends with a flourish by the quartet playing all at once, during which a sympathetic burst of white noise accompanies the drummer's cymbals, and a touch of echo is added as the white noise diminishes

Jazz Using Electronic Instruments in Performance

• Herbie Hancock (1940-)• Miles Davis Group late 60’s• Exploration of synthesizers

Herbie Hancock and a bevy of electronic keyboards (1978), including (clockwise from left) :

Oberheim PolyphonicYamaha PolyphonicARP 2600Sequential Circuits ProphetARP String EnsembleHohner D6 ClavinetMicromoog MinimoogARP Odyssey (no. 2) Polymoog.

(Kaz Tsuruta from Columbia 34907)

Sextant (1973)• Hancock's lineup for these

records introduced the idea of a synthesizer player as a sideman, whose role was not only that of soloist, but creator of sonic backdrops and effects to accompany instrumental solos and rhythm parts.

• Ex: Rain Dance

Live Electronic Music

• Precursor: Loudspeaker music, acousmatic music

• Ex: M.E.V. (Musica Elettronica Viva, Rome Italy)Spacecraft (1967) Recorded in Cologne in 1967 by Bryant, Curran, Rzewski, Teitelbaum and Vandor.

Resources

• Thom Holmes: Electronic and Experimantal Music, Chapter 13.

• Playlist on YouTube: www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=PLQTbzmQRH0BwFhnVk-gAPvmqZ8Vceiz55