On Fri, 30 Jan 1998, robert sadowski wrote: > Les, > Just a thought - I've always felt that Debussy was the first "jazz > cat". I guess I'll have to listen to more Chopin. > Hi, Bob. No 'bout a doubt it (!), Claude was an "original". It's just that he wasn't the original original. Chopin was. An important distinction to be made between Chopin and jazz however is this. The piano technique and harmonic innovations Chopin introduced never intruded on the important thing--the music itself and what it was saying. Or, to put it another way, the technique and the harmonic devices Chopin used were the servants of the music he wrote, they were never the music itself. In much of the pro- gressive jazz I hear today, I often get the feeling that the harmonic devices and the technique have become the music. Much of what I hear re- minds me of elaborate variations on the same up-tempo Czery etude. I never got that feeling when listening to the music of Brubeck, or Des- mond, or their likes, but of course, they went "mainstream" long ago. Further, as someone once pointed out, "Once you write down the notes, it's no longer jazz". (Of course Erroll Garner might have said that because he COULDN'T write down the notes!). :) Just how progressive was Chopin? Consider the following sketch. ============================================================================ Chopin's back in the same smoke-filled club I mentioned in an earlier post. He's dressed in all black, including a beret pulled down low over his brow and he's smoking a hand-rolled cigarette of indeterminate origin. Once again he's seated at his high-end, state-of-the-art, Steinway D-sampled, digital piano and basking on the glow of a 15-watt, orange spotlight. Suddenly, you hear the drums and a soft high-hat lay down an insane beat and Chopin begins to play. It's the last move- ment from his sonata in Bb minor--except for Liszt, a piece his contemporaries just couldn't understand. And no small wonder, because in it Chopin was anticipating what "progressive" jazz would be doing more that a century and a half later! Chopin once described the piece as "Night winds whispering over a graveyard". Today, a fan in the audi- ence would describe it as "totally radical" and "outta sight"! Listen. See for yourself. Les Smith PS For those of you out there wondering: yes, Chopin still has an acoustic piano, too. It's a concert grand and he keeps it at his condo on the beach.
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