My Music

Zachary Lipton - Tenor Saxophone
Tobin Chodos - Piano
Phil Rowan - Bass
Craig Weinrib - Drums

Many things inspire uneasiness, hesitation. Often these are things no one ought to do. My fear of crossing the street in Boston is a well-founded pillar of self-preservation. My reluctance to show up late to a gig is well placed. But there is another category of thoughts that provoke a similar but distinct emotion. In these cases, the aversion occurs despite a deeper gut feeling compelling the action in question. Kissing a girl for the first time. Auditioning for a competitive ensemble or conservatory. Here it is a fear of failure or rejection, not self-preservation, that inspires the hesitance. Generally, in these cases, the greater the aversion, the more there is to be gained by the act.

As a jazz musician, I've encountered many such moments of queasiness. Dealing with the language of Charlie Parker has always been tortuous in this sense. His music offers so much invention, melody and harmony, but also an insurmountable feeling of inadequacy. Similarly, there have been many times when I felt an initial disinclination to sit in at a jam session solely on account of how talented and accomplished the other members of the band were. Clearly, in these cases, the fear serves as an indicator of value to be gained by opposing it.

My grandfather, Issachar Miron, a composer of klezmer and Jewish liturgical music, has continually insisted that I compose music to lyrics. Every time I visit him, he demands that I write lyrics. The thought is terrifying. Presenting myself naked, without the cover of intellectualism or virtuosity, subject to embarrassment. He is clearly right. This is not the same survival instinct that keeps me from eating sushi at the supermarket. My visceral reaction to his proposition is the surest evidence its rightness.

My first record contained competent compositions. I tried to get at something structurally beyond the repetition of one section of music (whether it be 32 bars of 4/4 or 43 bars of complex meter). I employed a few two-decade-old techniques. Cue-based forms, deriving coherence from melodic cues which signal new sections. Songs featuring sections for improvisation that are related to but distinct from those over which the melodies are played. Both techniques were used frequently, and more effectively, by Wynton Marsalis on records like Think of One and Black Codes from the Underground. While these remain ideas that I am open to, my new material breaks in concept.

I cannot as easily identify or describe the specific methods by which I currently seek reprieve from the monotony of the standard jazz paradigm. The approach is more nuanced than last time. One idea that preoccupies me is the use of fragments. Both in writing and composing I have become fixated on the possibility of ripping an idea from its functional surroundings, putting it on display with no syntax or grammar to dress it. Treating it as an object situated like an item of furniture. The songs I write now employ many such fragments, forming contrasting sections, connected in concept but not necessarily in time.

On another front, the motivic development of music through the recycling of melodic material is an idea I find underemployed in jazz. In the improvisations of Sonny Rollins, such motivic development is abundant. But in composition it is rare. Partly this is due to the shortness in scope of most jazz compositions. When constructing a melody and harmonic rhythm to fill a 32 bar form, there is only so much one can explore the development of a motif. The compositions for the next record are longer in scope, more through-composed and make use of recurring, evolving motifs.

Another idea that I am exploring is the juxtaposition of fast-moving functional harmony with warmer, fuller chords, all within the same section. The presence of this functional harmony has presented a challenge in adapting the music from the piano, where it is composed, to a band. First of all, the dense contrapuntal passages involving fast-moving chords do not lend themselves to a typical “tune plays itself” arrangement. A piano interpreting chord symbols at the clip of one chord per beat is unacceptable. This has led me to explore ways to compose a third voice for the piano, allowing for a greater degree of contrast when the “self-playing” sections are introduced. Also, the presence of these dense, rigidly functional passages requires a pureness of sound in the horn, in this case the soprano saxophone. My technique, half-formed as it stands today, is insufficient to capture the sonority and cleanness demanded by the music I am writing. I will work to increase my technique, further classical study is necessary.