Le 29 juin 2017
de 11h00 à 11h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3208
Séance - Stylistic Features of Jazz
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Barbara Bleij
Many of Wayne Shorter’s mid-60s compositions have become part of the core jazz repertoire. Commonly, these compositions are seen as a blend of traditional hard bop elements and highly personal and original, if not idiosyncratic, innovations. This ties in with persistent jazz narratives of the Promethean ‘genius’, who shapes and transforms jazz from within. For one thing, such a view prohibits looking at jazz in the broader cultural-historical context in which it is created. In the case of Shorter, this is all the more problematic since his technical procedures do get viewed as essential in the development of jazz.
Analyses of three iconic pieces, ’E.S.P.’, ’Virgo’, and ’Infant Eyes’, will shed light on Shorter’s compositional techniques, and demonstrate that they are in fact quite lucid and straightforward. Although each constructed differently, the compositions share a type of design: a ‘basic idea’ shapes their configuration, from the background organization to the foreground details. Harmonic phenomena that deviate from tonal conventions in jazz are tied to the ‘basic idea’, while tonality still works as a unifying factor. It will be argued that Shorter not only drew on the jazz tradition but also on other contemporary threads, something he has consistently alluded to in his many public – yet woefully cryptic – utterances. In this way, the paper offers a more balanced view on the cultural heritage that Shorter saw as his own, and, by extension, on sources that fed jazz as a whole in a period that shaped so much of jazz to come.
