English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Jazz, the only true classical music of the twentieth century? 0:00 I find it almost superfluous to speak of a bridge between jazz and classical music, as if there were already two well-separated entities and we were trying to throw a few flimsy little bridges between these two mountains, flying over a disturbing void. In fact, it happens that the two fuse, and dare I go to the end of my thought, and I take responsibility for this, but it seems to me that jazz is perhaps the only true classical music of the 20th century.
0:30 "Classical" doesn't mean much. Generally, I'm not talking about music alone. When we speak of the classics of literature or cinema, for me the best definition of classical, the simplest one, which we never think of, is what we learn in school as something already acquired, as a heritage. In the logical sense, that's what classical is. In the historical sense, there's something else. So officially contemporary classical music, everything after the Vienna School, after Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, engaged in avant-gardes that moved away from the general public.
1:03 I wouldn't say that jazz comes to occupy the place left by that void, but we must be fair. There is a void — you might say, well, the general public can be wrong, it's not because the general public doesn't appreciate this music that it isn't good. I'm not saying that, that would be a value judgment, that it's not good. Because one could rightly say that in every era, new music has always seemed unlistenable to contemporaries set in their habits. In a letter to Malesherbes, Rousseau invites him to come join him in Switzerland and says "we would make a little music together, without so many musicians, which would be a nice change from the modern din."
1:36 The modern din, at the time, was Rameau. The great Monteverdi himself — his early works, people complained there were dissonances. And now look, he's one of the great classics of early music.
Learned music and popular structures 2:06 We shouldn't be too relativistic. Something new happened starting with the avant-gardes of the 20th century. If I take a learned music, as opposed to popular music — Bach's, for example, in his most learned and difficult works, the Art of Fugue, the Goldberg Variations, the Musical Offering, which are of extraordinary compositional complexity. If I use a metaphor, I'd say it's the higher mathematics of musical writing.
3:05 Still, those works, and the whole of Bach's output, remain in touch with popular structures. So jazz came to occupy that void. In fact people say it's the most learned of popular musics, the most popular of learned musics. I'll take responsibility for saying this, but I think that in fifty years, when people teach what the classics of the 20th century, of modernity, were, it will be more a solo by Monk.
3:40 A flight by Clifford Brown with his solos so airy. Or a devastating ballad by Billie Holiday. Than the classical musicians that I listen to — I'm an amateur, I like it, but really, I mean, there aren't as many elements brought together that allow you to hold both the popular bass and the most sophisticated avant-garde at once, as is done in jazz.
John Lewis, the Modern Jazz Quartet and the Third Stream 4:22 At the time the album was called Third Stream, literally third current. Third stream, implying there's classical and jazz, well this thing is as if the two flowed together into a third stream. You can no longer distinguish classical from jazz. It's an album released by a 100% jazz group, the famous Modern Jazz Quartet. So, so far, we're still in jazz. Founded by a pianist who comes from what is most fundamental in jazz and blues, John Lewis, who never had a very great technique, but who reaches the summits of jazz piano literature. John Lewis knows exactly which notes to play for what he has to say, so he doesn't need to play clusters of notes, run scales and arpeggios up and down, and do pyrotechnics.
5:09 His notes are sparse but have a density that no one mistakes when listening to him. So, somewhat like Duke Ellington, he has a double glory: as a pianist, as a soloist, and above all as the catalyst of a group he founded, as the arranging, composing brain, which was called, and this is significant, the Modern Jazz Quartet. You'd think you were starting from a classical string quartet. Because John Lewis, coming from the depths of Harlem, was an arranger in Dizzy Gillespie's Big Band, which is undoubtedly the most thunderous, most atomic, most wild big band that ever existed in the history of jazz.
6:01 He was an arranger there, John Lewis. And yet he would veer toward something hyper-classical. Because John Lewis is an African American who, somehow — this is part of his biography, who knows by what mystery — dreamed of living at Versailles, at the Trianon in the 18th century, of knowing Rameau, Couperin and Bach, even Mozart. He wrote quite a few pieces that go in that direction, he even wrote fugues, real Bach-style fugues, with vibraphone, piano, double bass and drums. He already had this somewhat separate, extremely codified place in the Modern Jazz Quartet — you know those Modern Jazz Quartet concerts, you could hear a pin drop.
6:53 But now, in this album, in addition to his admirably balanced quartet, since there's himself on piano playing just a few notes but of incomparable density, doing all the arrangements, the conception, the introductions — there's someone who, on the contrary, develops enormously: the greatest vibraphonist in the history of jazz. A vibraphone is basically an amplified xylophone. It's Milt Jackson, nicknamed Bags, who is a bit like the Parker or the Gillespie of the vibraphone.
7:29 Milt Jackson's baroque, expansive side and John Lewis's hyper-classical side create a complementarity that gives all its interest to this Modern Jazz Quartet. And now, on this album, he decides to have an encounter — it was John Lewis's policy to seek out encounters, to rub shoulders with other musical genres with his quartet. He meets the Beaux Arts String Quartet of New York, one of the great string quartets of the time, whose repertoire is the quartets of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms.
Listening to "Sketch": classical or jazz? 8:02 On a composition by John Lewis — but I won't say more — called Sketch, you have a jazz quartet and a string quartet at the same time, third stream.
10:49 [unintelligible transcription noise]
12:50 The project of John Lewis's music — was it classical or jazz? There's only one answer: it's undecidable. Either answer is equally true. And at the same time it's neither one nor the other. That's where it gets interesting. And now I'm going to narrow the material down further. There we had a double quartet, so to speak, a jazz quartet and a classical quartet fusing together.
Lennie Tristano, the cool and the Requiem for Parker 13:24 And now we're going to hear a single instrumentalist, a soloist at the piano. I'm thinking especially of the beginning of a rather long piece he's going to play called simply Requiem. Already the title brings to mind all sorts of classical references — there are many Requiems in classical history. It goes back to the Middle Ages, it's the mass for the dead. "Grant them eternal rest, dona eis Domine requiem" — "grant them rest," that's where it comes from. So the Requiem is an established and well-frequented classical form. And here suddenly it's a pianist well known in the jazz world, a blind man, another white man this time, unlike Tatum — Lennie Tristano, of Italian origin, who greatly influenced the movement that came right after bebop.
14:10 Which we call cool — these are somewhat arbitrary labels, I'll say. Bebop had developed enormously in terms of instrumental technique, the phrases were of unheard-of complexity. And poor Miles Davis — I don't mean that pejoratively, he's one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century. But we know well that it wasn't as a trumpet technician that Miles distinguished himself in the history of jazz, even though he played admirably. He had the intelligence to quickly understand, facing trumpeters who already existed before him and were being talked about, I'm thinking of Dizzy Gillespie.
14:51 He very quickly understood that he couldn't go further in pyrotechnics and phrasing, and so he had the intelligence to realize he could get by through feeling, sound, and unexpected phrasing. He was the only one, and the first, to do this, and he created a new musical world called cool because it's more relaxed, more inward, than bebop.
15:29 I'll allow myself to say also that cool, coming after bebop, coincides with a rise in standard of living. An African American middle class that was beginning to appear. And cool music is what you hear in the lobbies of the grand hotels in Las Vegas, etc. It's not in the little dives of Kansas City or Harlem. And so this somewhat smooth side of Miles, this cool side, this inward quality, these inimitable sounds made with the muted trumpet, came at just the right time to satisfy these new middle strata of the African American world.
16:00 So, Lennie Tristano is a pianist to whom it's mainly musicians who pay tribute. He never had great fame with the general public, because his music is very particular. He plays endless solos on a very restricted part of the piano, deliberately — it's an asceticism. He avoids the easy effects of contrasting extreme low and extreme high registers. He plays within the three middle octaves. And yet he differentiates with an absolutely staggering science of rhythm and harmony.
16:53 But here, it's not the jazz-inflected Tristano we're going to hear, even if it would be unthinkable without jazz. It's called Requiem, on the occasion of Charlie Parker's death. It's a tribute to Bird. And it begins as if it were a Schumann prelude, from the great German Romantic piano repertoire. And it continues in the most archaic essence of the blues. That's why I wanted to have you hear this piece, Requiem by Lennie Tristano.
