Word: jazz
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It’s the reason Jackson Pollock gained an audience, the reason John Coltrane’s free jazz leanings became high art, the reason anyone listens to The Beatles’ “Revolution 9.” As Emerson put it, “art is a nature passed through the alembic of man”; it can translate the havoc of the world into a form that’s easier to understand...
...Jazz clarinetist Don Byron’s latest album, “A Ballad for Many,” certainly deals in disorder. The first half hour of his collaboration with the Bang on a Can All-Stars—an instrumental group whose core of material comes from avant-garde composers like Brian Eno and Steve Reich—is dissonant enough to make acid jazz sound like Muzak...
...Byron—who played with the Harvard Jazz Band in concert earlier this year—waits too long to resolve this atonal mayhem into something more accessible. Tension isn’t a counterpoint to his music; it’s the grammar he uses to compose...
That grammar is at its most flowery in “Eugene,” a six-part suite Byron composed to accompany a 1961 TV show from comedian Ernie Kovacs. The music’s as esoteric as its muse, working mostly with the diminished scales that jazz players often use to add color to their solos...
However, a language is only useful around those who speak it, and it’s hard to find an audience that’s fluent in the diminished scale. Even fairly serious jazz musicians will find these pieces exhausting; untrained listeners will find them completely impenetrable...