Jazz guitarist, arranger and bandleader Tony Corman is from the Boston area, and has lived in Berkeley, CA since 1986. He’s also an author of excellent titles like this one. Corman has found a gap in the market – the recorded intros and endings found on famous recordings of well-known tunes. His book collects over a hundred transcriptions of famous intros and endings, including Clifford Brown’s Joy Spring, Miles Davis’s Bye Bye Blackbird and Cannonball Adderley’s Autumn Leaves.
Corman focuses on artists like Davis, Adderley, Coltrane, Bud Powell, Wes Montgomery, Dexter Gordon, Mike Stern and Alan Holdsworth. Most transcriptions are of the rhythm section on the recording, but some include horn parts as well. There’s a section devoted to Charlie Parker.
His book – like The Real Book and subsequent developments – is part of the evolution of jazz into an art music. My suggestion is that jazz shares some of the features of Western art music – that apparently unique, autonomous art music which contrasts with traditional art musics such as gagaku, courtly gamelan and Indian classical music. Here I’ve been influenced by James Parakilas’s insightful article Classical Music As Popular Music from 1984, which argues that classical music can be described as a popular music.
The claim that jazz is an art music – a classical music – commonly means (1) jazz is a serious art form in its own right, despite long association with the entertainment industry – in Adorno’s language, it’s an autonomous art; (2) it has arrived at an era of common practice, codified and taught in the academy; (3) it’s a universal, international language transcending national and ethnic boundaries.
To describe jazz in this way is not elitist, nor does it have “connotations of respectability”, and nor does it involve a static common practice. Does calling Turner’s Rain Steam And Speed – or Shakespeare’s King Lear – classic art make them respectable or static?
Corman doesn’t address such philosophical issues. He’s produced something much more aesthetic: a delightful spring-bound volume, beautifully designed, that helps jazz musicians to craft wonderful sounds. Highly recommended.
The Real Intros And Endings Book, by Tony Corman. Sher Music Co., 109 pp, $29/$18 (pbk, e-book). ISBN 979-8992226324
