In my biweekly “Sightings” column, which appeared in the “Pursuits” section of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I played Bill Safire avant la lettre–sort of:
Not long ago I was chatting with three gifted musicians who were looking for a new way to describe what they do. All are widely thought of as “jazz musicians,” even though that venerable phrase is no longer a good fit for the increasingly uncategorizable music they make. Luciana Souza, who came to this country from Brazil, sings everything from bossa nova to American pop standards to her own settings of the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Pablo Neruda. Maria Schneider leads a big band for which she writes large-scale compositions structured along classical lines into which she weaves flamenco, Latin American music and jazz improvisation. Theo Bleckmann is an uncompromisingly avant-garde vocalist whose latest album, “Las Vegas Rhapsody: The Night They Invented Champagne,” is a collection of show tunes accompanied by the Basel Chamber Orchestra.
How do you sum up such artists in a well-chosen word or two? You don’t–and that’s one of the problems with which they grapple as they try to find an audience for their music. This is why I was so struck when one of the three musicians (I can’t remember who) casually used the phrase “shuffle play” in an attempt to describe the stylistic multiplicity of their work. The others agreed at once: That’s what they do.
I wouldn’t have been nearly as impressed by their on-the-spot consensus were it not for the fact that I’d already heard the same phrase used in the same way by other artists of like inclination. Suddenly it hit me: I’d been watching a new cultural metaphor take shape….
The new music I have in mind isn’t random, but it definitely goes out of its way to take the listener in surprising directions. The Bad Plus, for instance, specializes in bracingly quirky jazz versions of such decidedly unjazzy tunes as Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” and the theme from “Chariots of Fire.” Nickel Creek plays bluegrass-flavored music that owes as much to the synthesized technopop of Radiohead as it does to the high, lonesome sound of Bill Monroe. “Observatory,” Julia Dollison‘s debut CD, contains songs by Jerome Kern, Duke Ellington and Rufus Wainwright, sung in a richly imaginative, pigeonhole-eluding style that lies somewhere in the no-man’s-land separating jazz from pop.
Michael John LaChiusa’s See What I Wanna See and Adam Guettel’s The Light in the Piazza are operalike “musicals” whose kaleidoscopic scores reflect their composers’ passions for an extraordinarily wide variety of music. Osvaldo Golijov writes “classical” music into which he stirs Afro-Cuban percussion, gospel-style choral writing, even the keening wail of a klezmer clarinet.
What to call this new kind of music-making? At first glance it resembles postmodernism, but the self-consciously wide-ranging eclecticism of postmodern artists is always tinged with irony, whereas the musicians of whom I’m thinking embrace many different styles in a wholehearted way that has nothing in common with the cool detachment of the postmodernist. Their new approach thus requires a new label, and “shuffle-play music” might be in the early stages of catching on….
No link, so if you want to read the whole thing–of which there’s a good deal more–I suggest you avail yourself of one of these alternatives:
(1) Head for the nearest library, where you’ll find a copy of the Saturday Journal and (presumably) a comfy chair.
(2) Subscribe to the Online Journal by going here. Doing so will give you immediate access to the full text of this week’s “Sightings” column, plus a plethora of other good stuff.