Secret Society
Last night Matt and I went out the Flux Factory in Queens to check out Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society. The flux factory is apparently in the middle of nowhere in Queens, but luckily it wasn’t too long a ride on the 7 from Matt’s place in Long Island City. The concert itself was well worth the ride. The setup was your typical 20 piece big band, but playing some really awesome, dark music. Recordings of past shows are available on Darcy’s website and do a pretty good job of capturing them.
They reminded both Matt and me of Justin Mullens’ Delphian Jazz Orchestra, a show that we saw at the Bowery Poetry Club a few months ago. The Secret Society also happens to play at the BPC, so maybe I should look into other big bands playing there as well. The thing that I really like about this kind of music is the way that it just keeps building in intensity. Even when they were playing a ballad, the trumpets would sneak in at some point and all of the sudden they’d be screaming, but in a way that compeletely fit the mood of the piece and just built the intensity even further.
This show and the Newport Jazz Fest got me thinking about the arc of a performance’s energy and structure. Bear with me here, I’m imagining arcs within arcs. At the smallest scale, an improviser needs to build this sort of arc into his/her solo. As Arni Cheatham from the Aardvark Jazz Ensemble said once at a rehearsal, building a solo is like making love, you have to build up to things.
The next level of structure would be the song level. This is where I find that the typical head-solos-head jazz combo form falls flat. With each soloist building his own solo’s energy, there isn’t much continuity from one to the next or to or from the head. When you take the head out, it doesn’t really feel like you’ve arrived anywhere aside from where you started. Big band music like the Secret Society or the Delphia Orchestra, being through-composed, can go somewhere. The extra structure around the solos, and perhaps instead of some of the improvising, allows the energy to build and unifies the whole piece. It’s not a new idea, incorporating improvisation into a large-scale structure, Mingus did it with his through-composed pieces, but I feel like these new bands really take the idea and run with it.
I guess you can see where this is going. The next levels would be the set / album level, then maybe the career level. I suppose this is all stuff that they teach you in composition 101, but I feel like it’s been neglected in jazz’s emphasis on the individual improviser.