All That Jazz

[Grant White]

I see TRP's musical style embedded more widely in a variety of styles and 
schools of expression. Bebop at times, lyrically classical at others, 
abrasively contemporary when it helps and just plain pop for effect. The 
interesting thing about jazz, is that it and later extensions of the 
style reworked the grand traditions; faster, higher, syncopated whatever 
in a virtuoso display that embraced styles from a variety of cultures, 
eastern modality and perhaps most importantly imported rhythmic 
variations. The ending of COL49 is just like a little tune by Bartok - 
dance #5 in Bulgarian Rhythm, all crashing keyboard dissonance in minor 
seconds and fifths, compelling you to a frenetic conclusion but then, 
when you most need it to continue, stopping.

Grant
--                                                                       -
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On Wed, 17 Jan 1996, Gillies, Lindsay wrote:

> 
> Lindsay Gillies responds to Chris Stolz:
> "chris stolz writes:
> If there is a writer who has captured the structural intricacies and
> freeforms of jazz (truly schizophrenic music) it would be Pynchon.
>  ------------------------------------------
> agreed 110%.  there is a deep relationship between Pynchon's prose style and
> bebop and its children,  . . . "
> 
> Don Larrson responds:
> Well, yes, but . . .
> Pynchon admits admiring Kerouac, the master of "sweet spontaneous bop
> prosody" (if I remember Ginsberg's words correctly), but he doesn't stick
> a roll of teletype paper in and go at it either.
> ...
> On the other hand, his writing has a high degree of structure to it that has
> affinities with Baroque and or Classicism.   [...] Like the bopsters,
> though, he often employs structure only to undercut it at the same time.
>  ------------------------------
> to which Lindsay sez:
> as Will also points out, there is nothing "spontaneous" about bebop.  Alan 
> G.'s zen-flavor compositional approach is very, very different, even if it 
> ends up sounding similar.  Coltrane, we know, practiced endlessly and 
> obsessively, and as opposed to classical composers needed to deploy many 
> modalities beyond the major and minor.  Even the folk-inspired model 
> experimentation of a Bartok doesn't come close.  Its the very densness and 
> prefiguration of bebop and its offspring (particularly Coltrane) that I 
> think compare to TRP's prose methods.  Both are fundamentally different as 
> approachs from Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, and the beats, zen, buddhist, 
> or otherwise.
>