Paul Motian and abstraction

It has been over two years since I last published a post on my blog, which is a shame because I really enjoy this type of writing.

The inspiration to get back to writing comes from an experience I had playing with the great saxophonist Billy Drewes at Bar Bayeux a few months ago.

I got the gig totally by chance. I had just finished playing the early set with Yvonne Rogers and Walter Stinson, and we were hanging and chatting afterwards. The next band was set to start at 8:00, but 8:10 rolled around and the drummer for the other group hadn’t showed up yet. Turns out he totally forgot about the gig and wasn’t going to make it - so they asked me to do it. The band was Adam Kolker, Billy Drewes, Jeremy Stratton, and now me. It helped that I had played with Adam a few months earlier on a project run by David Berkman.

The experience was made both cooler and stranger by the fact that I had worked as a server on Monday nights at the Village Vanguard for the past two years. Billy plays saxophone in the big band at the Vanguard, so I had been listening to him play for a couple hours every week (both in the section and as a soloist). Getting to play with him ended up being a pretty cool full circle moment.

We mostly played Billy’s compositions. I’ve since learned (from my friend Noah Rott, who studied with Billy) that he’s an incredibly prolific composer, and has hundreds of pieces in a huge variety of musical styles. The pieces Billy brought to this gig were mostly rubato melodies (sometimes with chord changes, sometimes without) which vaguely fit into the style of music pioneered by Paul Motian in the later part of his career. Billy played a lot with Paul, who is one of my favorite drummers of all time and one of my biggest influences, and it was special for me to get to channel some of that energy on this gig.

At first, I didn’t know what the vibe of the music would be. A stack of mostly handwritten charts was put on my music stand, and I only had about a minute to ask questions about “what is the tempo of this piece, what’s the solo form, etc.” Mostly, the music consisted of fast rubato melodies played twice by the two saxophonists in approximate unison, followed by freely improvised solo sections.

As we were playing, Billy would occasionally give me directions before or during the pieces. At one point we started a new tune where I received no direction as to how to play beforehand, and I decided to try some kind of swelling textural thing with a bunch of rolls around the drums and cymbals. It was apparently not the texture he had in mind for the tune, he yelled out to me “Up-tempo free!”

Immediately I knew what he meant, but as I reflected on it further it occurred to me that “uptempo free” is kind of an oxymoron. People associate the word “free” in jazz with “play something that’s totally improvised from scratch, perhaps relatively dissonant, but ultimately is whatever you want.” In fact, I was already playing “free,” and had decided on some kind of roll-y swell-y thing. So to include a stipulation (up-tempo) with the “free” directive to some degree runs contrary to the spirit of free jazz, doesn’t it? Is it freely improvised, or are you telling me what to do?

The experience got me thinking about the approach of Paul Motian, the whole concept of semi-rubato jazz, about what it means to improvise freely, and about the many different ways to do it. Eventually, I arrived at a metaphor about painting to tackle this question.

In the metaphor, traditional jazz playing is traditional figurative painting. It’s very concrete. “This is a song about love.” “This is a painting of a man.” The meaning and subject are clear. There is incredible technique involved in achieving this at the highest level, and this type of approach is the bedrock of the artistic medium.

But, throughout western art history traditional figuration began to expand and break down. The impressionist movement began, and artists began to place mood and expression on a higher level of importance than precision and accuracy. In fact, they found that by breaking down the emphasis on precision, they were able to find new moods they hadn’t previously discovered. They were able to work in a more abstract and emotional realm.

To me, this is what Paul Motian did for jazz. He took musical approaches from the straight ahead drumming world and blurred them, broke them down, and abstracted them. In fact, if you analyze the content of what he’s playing usually you can understand it through the lens of “this is an abstraction of an already established jazz style.” Listen to the following recordings from Paul’s album Time and Time Again. On Wednesday, Paul essentially plays all the material you would play on drums in a straight-ahead jazz ballad, but jumbles it all up and blurs it and finds an incredible, different, wistful mood through it. On Whirlpool, Paul is basically playing the content you’d find in a medium swing jazz tune with brushes, but he breaks it down, abstracts it, in the same way.

To extend the metaphor, truly, completely freely improvised music would be more like a Jackson Pollock painting. It’s the logical conclusion of total abstraction - blurring and breaking down meaning as far as you can possibly take it. Sometimes Paul is wrongly lumped in with musicians like this. He’s seen as a Pollock rather than a Monet, and I think this is a mistake. When you listen closely to the content of what Paul plays during his rubato period at the end of his career, you can hear the lineage of jazz drumming (of which he was already an important part), but it’s like putting that lineage in a blender. It’s still made of the same components, but it’s liquified, more fluid, pliable. What results is the same thing that comes from a Monet painting: beautiful, expressive, loose, hyper-legato, feelings-forward work.

When I reflect on playing with Billy Drewes, I realize that when he yelled out “Uptempo free!” that this is what he meant. In just two words, he was able to direct me to “take the content you’d hear in a traditional uptempo jazz song, like something you’d hear on a Clifford Brown and Max Roach album, and then break that material down, blur it and abstract it until you can’t hear the pulse anymore and you’re just working with the general density, energy, and sound palette that you’d get in one of those fast traditional jazz songs.” This was how I interpreted his comment in the moment, and after the gig he told me that I had played what he was looking for.

I think part of what made Paul Motian so amazing was that he pioneered this in-the-cracks style - previously uncharted ground. Not really traditional, not really free, his music is something that blurs these two things together, slipping in and out of each one moment by moment. When I think about what I hope to achieve in my creative life, this is definitely part of it.

When I think about how to teach young straight-ahead jazz musicians how to play free, I also think that Paul’s approach can be a great thing to include in the conversation. If students are struggling to come up with ideas in a free improvised setting, or are resistant to the concept of playing free because “free jazz is weird and bad,” then it could be a good exercise to say “play a ballad totally traditionally. Now play it a little looser. Now play it a little looser. Now blur it some more. Now abstract what you’re doing even more.” and see if you can get them to arrive at similar textures to what Paul used in his music later in his life.