Jazz for aficionados

Listening to Sharel Cassidy, Gratitude. (2025)

I noticed it had Christian McBride on bass, so I thought I’d check it out.

Good album.

Here’s a taste.

https://youtu.be/Dc90pyyqK-Y?si=EPwV9_JagIv2RgqY

I really enjoyed listening to Herbie Hancock "Man Child."  Lots of top players

frogman, thank you for the long post responding to my various posts. You have more of an understanding of the structure of music and a vocabulary to discuss it than I ever will. I think that also helps with an appreciation of music, but I’ve loved music from an ignorant standpoint for as long as I can remember. I’m not saying that as a dig. I’m just saying that most people who love music do not have your knowledge about how it works.

I’d like to respond to the points you bring up about my posts, but first I’d like to tell you how I view music’s value to humanity. I think the arts, including music, defined Homos sapiens. The previous species of Homos (erectus, etc.) did not seem to make art. (I’ll leave Neanderthals out of the discussion.) I imagine early humans used music as a way to express their awe at belonging to the universe. And this I call spirituality. And this spirituality I hear in Coltrane’s music in spades.

Now why do I get into this whole subject of women? It is my belief that up until about seven or eight thousand years ago women had an equal (or greater place) in terms of creating art. About the time the Greeks began philosophizing and the Hebrews began writing the Torah, women were cut out of philosophizing and art making. And it’s not until my generation that they have begun to claw back an equal place.

Do women have a different sense of artistic expression? As a trained poet who has watched women change poetry in my lifetime, and change visual arts, I believe I have also watched them change music. And this is too long a discussion for here, because I’d have to go through numerous examples of where I’ve witnessed this. Like everything else, I think music has been a boys’ club. What has been lost in music? Hopefully we’ll find out. I think of it as the Feminine Creative Spirit. And that’s too huge a topic to get into here, but I think it goes beyond the arts.

On the question of feminine versus masculine swagger, please listen to this cut from Melissa Aldana and tell me whether or not you hear a feminine approach. To my ear it is very clear, but perhaps I’m just hearing what I want to:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqVOMc3_eDE

On the question of "chamber" music, I think I haven’t been able to express myself because of my poor vocabulary about music. I am talking about music written for the chambers of lords and ladies of the court. Music written to please the court and to be pleasant to the ear. Although the lower classes and uneducated people did go to Shakespeare plays (which speaks highly of the poet), I don’t think they listened to what is referred to as "classical" music. I put that in quotes because classical is also a period of music following baroque. The composers of the classical period had long bored me especially in comparison to the Romantics and beyond. Now that I have become an old man, I appreciate Papa Haydn and Mozart more. I have always loved Bach.

In a sense, I can compare the Romantics with jazz. Here’s where I’m talking about in my poem to John Coltrane 

"music wasn’t doled
 out over cloistered walls
 it comes from the streets
 where women’s bodies
 turn  rags to style"

The cloistered walls I refer to are the walls of nobility’s castles and the church. Although, I must admit that I love the masses of Bach, Mozart, and many others. I think these composers are able to go beyond the liturgical to a deep spiritual well from which music comes. And from which jazz comes thanks to mostly musically uneducated folks who were touched as I say in my Coltrane poem:

"& think that grace lands anyplace  
 like snowflakes
 promiscuously kissing faces"

In other words, a snowflake promiscuously kissedd Louis Armstrong’s face. Since music comes from the human soul, he didn’t need a formal education. And I'm sure you know I can't leave out Mozart when I talk about the snowflake's blessing. He was writing symphonies in his early teens. 

I appreciate your elaboration of the meaning of "gesture" in music. I understand it far better now. I had to smile because Simon Rattle was conducting your example of Mozart’s 4oth. I got to go backstage and meet him once and he had a big thick notebook with jokes about violists. Of all the things I didn’t think I’d see when I went to meet Sir Simon Rattle.

I hope I was a bit more clear in this overly long post. I don’t think you and I would disagree about much in regards to what is good music. I think our disagreement is more in terms of talking about music, and I think this is mostly my fault. I have written about many things before, but not music. 
 

frogman, BTW, I have a number of Beethoven's string quartets on vinyl. His last ones sound as though they were written in the 20th century. I have no idea how he was able to make those musical leaps. I heard one of his early piano sonatas played live (first, second, or third?). You would understand how to describe the leaps he took from one musical gesture to the other, but I turned to the guy sitting next to me and said, "That sounded like jazz." 

curiousjim, I like Sharel Cassidy. I'll stream one of her albums.