Featured artist:
JOHN RONEY
What
generally distinguishes the jazz musician from the rocker is that
he is a musician, that is fluent in the language of music. This
fluency allows him to express himself easily and spontaneously
on virtually everything, and if need be, with musicians with whom
he has never played – such is his mastery of the language
and his instrument. However, this great skill, this fluency does
not always serve him well if it leads him down the musical path
of least resistance. There is a case to be made that, especially
during the past 25 years, jazz has suffered as a result of a surfeit
of marvellous musicians who have defaulted to soloing over the
long and hard work required of composition.
Since
rockers are rarely musicians, their single access to the privileged
world of music is usually via original material that requires
no more musicianship than what is necessary to perform it. If
it’s an unspoken conceit that most jazz musicians look down
upon rockers, the latter can rightfully claim that since the late
1960s they have produced more enduring and memorable music. Mention
the names of real songwriters and the first thing that comes to
mind are their best known songs: Duke Ellington, Carlos Jobim,
George Gershwin, Hoagy Carmichael, Cole Porter, and from rock/pop,
Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Sting. But how many
songs can you name from Herbie Hancock, Larry Coryell, Michael
Brecker, John Scofield, Joe Zawinal, the later Miles Davis?
Far too
often in jazz, a musician, posing as a songwriter, decides to
immortalize a catchy sequence of notes or simple chord progression
by inverting, converting, colouring, varying, flipping and reformulating
it. But however dazzling is the musicianship, the acrobatics are
not to be confused with composition. Branford Marsalis states
unequivocally, “One of the problems I have with a lot of
today’s jazz is the lack of melody and overemphasis on harmonic
associations.” To put it unkindly, too much jazz writing
has degenerated into the technique of looping where a sequence
of notes is introduced and repeated ad nauseam; chord
and key modulations strictly verboten. And no matter
how inventive and even deeply felt is the improvisation, all the
harmonics in the world will not relieve a monophonic Drone &
Variations of its monotony.
This
trick-writing trend reached its apogee when fusion cowboys Coryell,
Clarke, the Breckers and gang, with their vastly superior musicianship,
decided they would move into and co-opt rock, but the power play
stalled in its single track because for all the marvellous playing
they couldn’t write worth a damn. Beating back a quick retreat,
they instead brought their own genre to its nadir to the effect
that for the past 25 years fusion and the like have served as
mostly filler or ballast for CD quotas. Make no mistake about
it, for those for whom fusion quickly tires, it’s because
its architecture is as flat as the minds that went into its creation.
Which is why we’re never surprised to learn that jazz musicians
-- for whom the quick write has become a rite of mediocrity --
at some point in their careers usually return to the standards
or classical music in order to reacquaint themselves with the
art of composition which they themselves have not been able to
supply.
It’s
difficult to say when monophonic composition (pardon the oxymoron)
gained currency, but like with abstract art that requires no drawing
skills, it opened up the category of songwriter to include almost
everybody. After Miles Davis embraced it, the easy write became
the founding principle of fusion and then new age music. One can’t
help but notice that as jazz flounders compositionally, all other
genres are now able to easily mix with it (hip hop, groove, rap),
a development that threatens to peripheralize the serious jazz
that is being written and performed to shrinking audiences.
Fighting
upstream against this tidal wave of mono-tonality is the music
of pianist John Roney, who, for the most part, in Rate of
Change (Effendi, 2006), avoids the easy write and pitfalls
of being fluent in the language of music. Despite his young years
(he just turned 30), Roney is able to make his sensitivity and
world view the substance of his playing and especially unassuming
song writing that from one track to the next reveals his natural
reticence and vulnerability. He instinctively stays away from
the flourishes and arpeggios associated with the lush sound that
is often soulless and depersonalized, because keeping it straight
and simple best guarantees the transparency that is the affecting
issue of his music. And while his improvisation rarely astonishes,
throughout Rate of Change there is an abundance of fecund
moments when partially disclosed meanings or moods suddenly congeal
into the articulations we associate with style: those DNA-like
intervals the musician forges as he transforms his experience
into art. No surprise that he has been quarterbacking the Montreal
Jazz Festival’s late night jam sessions for the past few
years, and has recorded on Montreal’s distinguished Effendi
label -- that for the most part will have no truck with lightweight
fusion’s heavyweights.
One of
the first things that strikes a note with Roney’s music
is that it is informed by his background in bebop and classical.
The track “Piano Segue” not only pays tribute to Romanticism
(Beethoven, Chopin), but what the era stood for: composition whose
cathedrals continue to tower over everything else. Like the classicists,
Roney aspires to make his inner voice and vision reflect life’s
largest categories, which oblige him to create structures that
can support and cohere a complex range of feelings and impulses.
He achieves this by discovering in the infinite permutations of
music a particular cadence and scale that defines him in his encounters
with the world. What emerges is the voice we recognize as John
Roney’s.
Listeners
who have long felt cheated by jazz’s dereliction of compositional
duty will be rewarded by Roney’s dedication to the blood,
sweat and ears required of song writing. In Rate of Change,
we have a pianist whose personal vibration and expressive operations
combine to create music that does honour to the life that that
has been lived and contemplated, for audiences for whom his music
articulates what would otherwise remain unexpressed. Such is the
power of creation, and if a few of the tracks on Roney’s
highly recommended CD fall short, it is because he has aimed high.
In
the probing, introspective, sometimes wistful journey that characterizes
Rate of Change, Roney is greatly abetted by his exceptional
drummer, Jim Doxas, who, through the power of his startling invention,
makes the case that percussion can be every bit as performative
as a lyrical instrument. He achieves this result on a minimalist
drum set because he possesses a maximalist imagination.
What
distinguishes Doxas’s approach to improvisation is that
he refuses to play it safe, allowing the moment -- and not received
wisdom -- to dictate the kind of framework that will contain,
shape and guide the piece under consideration. He is astutely
committed to the belief that significant music is always distinguished
by what it leaves unsaid, the gaps of which inspire him to produce
a highly original vocabulary of accents, sound swells and silences
that speak to his keen ear and very special touch; unlike most
drummers, he’s able to personally engage an audience while
leaving the group dynamic intact. And if he has caught the full-time
attention of piano great
Oliver Jones, it’s because
he is able to flawlessly negotiate the demands of tempo and concept
by supplying a structure of sound that may completely recast or
resize a song or section of it, which he then colours and fills
in: the effect is nothing less than edifying. Even when producing
a whisper on the cymbals, the perfectly weighted sequence of taps
attains the breadth of the human voice. 
Doxas
persuades us that percussion can flow like water, sometimes like
water over sharp rock, like ice fog over freezing water or a gentle
breeze cooled off by water. He epitomizes the bold and inventive
drummer who isn’t afraid to go out on a limb where he risks
losing it on occasion. What more can you ask of a percussionist
than to reveal the potential of his instrument so the listener
leaves wiser and with whetted appetite.
Doxas
has recently recorded with both the
Effendi and
Justin Time labels. The former gravitates to
an immaculate, studio-shaped sound, the latter toward the acoustics
we associate with analog. Either way, neither can rival Jim Doxas
live, already one of Canada’s very best.
From
Rate of Change, listen to John Roney and Jim Doxas perform
the very beautiful and deeply felt "Older
Now."
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