Re: (FS) Blue in Green jazz by Miles Davis Posted by Richard on July 24, 1997 at 19:38:21:
In Reply to: (FS) Blue in Green jazz by Miles Davis posted by Molly E. Holzschlag on January 23, 1997 11:00:00:
Quote from Frank Zappa: "Jazz isn't dead. It just smells funny."
When is music inside and when is it outside? In the lexicon
of music, the inside player is the one who sticks with a melody
that follows a traditional scale. The outside player is the
one whose dissonance outside of the scale creates its own
melody. Zappa was particularly effective in many of his compositions
when playing outside of the scale. Miles Davis did much of the
same, especially with Bitches Brew when rhtymic variations also set
the tonal quality of being "outside" the center of the piece.
Yet why is it that many of these pieces and artists remain
"inaccessable" to many listeners? To appreciate the condition
of being outside, does one need to have a dissociative experience
in their life? Or is it that as we grew we developed diminished egos
and thereby we lost the great mediator between the id and super ego?
For didn't Hess express these great variations in which he and his
characters vacillated between the inside, as in self absorbtion and
preoccupation, and the outside, or hedonistic pleasure seeking in which
our inhibitions were lost and we cared not for moral strictures?
Steppenwolf jumping through the door that led him to homoerotic pleasure
despite his firm belief he couldn't possibly engage in such activity?
How did he step outside himself, Steppenwolf that is? Was he
prompted by the effects of others around him and the music and jazz he
heard? Or was it ultimately the narcotic cocktail that provided
the requisite destruction of his self-imposed boundaries between
that which he thought was inside and what he knew was outside?