The current fetish for originality in music is partially an outgrowth of copyright law. If you write your own songs, you can make more money from the publishing rights in addition to your album sales. The influence of Bob Dylan and the Beatles further created the expectation that popular musicians would mostly be writing their own material. Before the mid-sixties, it was a different story. Pop and jazz artists were mostly interpreting existing, familiar material, and only rarely writing new stuff. Even the most prolific and brilliant jazz composers like Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk devoted album after album to arrangements of standards. Nobody arranged standards more radically and personally than John Coltrane.
Coltrane’s arrangement of this tune bears the same relationship to the one in The Sound Of Music as “Hard Knock Life” by Jay-Z bears to Annie. Jazz arranging uses different technology than sampling and remixing, but it makes the same musical statement. It’s a stamp of personal ownership on a familiar piece of public musical property.
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For a long time, “Human Nature” was not my favorite song on Thriller. It took me many years to wise up to how awesome it is. Maybe it’s a gender thing. I played it for Anna last night and she swooned instantly over the delivery, arrangement, melody, the whole thing worked for her. I’m slowly opening up to it too. I was amused to learn that it was written by Steve Porcaro and John Bettis of Toto. I don’t know if they or Quincy Jones thought up the synth intro and outtro, but both are gorgeous.
Before digital recording media, recording artists faced a tradeoff between spontaneity and perfection. Recording take after take until the performances are spotless can quickly suck the joy and energy out of the music. But the kind of sloppiness that goes unnoticed in a live performance can get on your nerves after many repeated listens. It’s possible to splice different performances together with tape to make a seamlessly perfect one, but it’s a labor-intensive process. One way around the tradeoff is to have the best musicians in the world. The Beatles knocked out their early albums in a matter of hours. Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue took only two days of live recording. These kinds of heroic feats of musicianship are only possible if you’ve spent years playing together professionally, like the Beatles, or if you put in many hours of a day of disciplined practice, like the guys in Miles Davis’ band, or ideally, both.
Another method to get lively yet polished recordings is to use ferocious discipline to create the illusion of spontaneity. Michael Jackson was able to give his performances on Thriller so much polish by recording take after take after take, all at the same level of manic intensity, with his grunts and screams arrayed precisely and intentionally. I can admire the focus he was able to bring to bear over long hours of tedious studio labor, but the psyche that produced his work ethic isn’t something I’d wish on myself or anyone else.
It’s no accident that music and games share the verb “to play.” Both music and games are semi-structured forms of social learning. As far as I’m concerned, the most exciting thing happening in the video game world is the explosion of music-based games like Dance Dance Revolution.
My friend Leo told me that he always faces a conflict when shopping for jazz records. He wants to show love for working musicians by buying their newer recordings, but then, he could always just pick up another Miles Davis album and know it’s going to be ridiculously good.
Probably my favorite Miles album out of many close contenders is In a Silent Way. It’s one of his first jazz-funk records, and there are no traditional songs on it. Each side is a single long track, pieced together by Miles and producer Teo Macero from excerpts of long improvisations. Earlier Miles albums had used tape editing to create seamless suites and to composite different takes of the same tune together. In A Silent Way was the first Miles album to use the mixing desk as a fundamental compositional tool. Miles and his producer remixed the improvs into something unambiguously new.
