Gil Evans - Into the Hot

Gil Evans
Into the Hot

I don't think that I will bother spending much time writing about this album. It is not even a Gil Evans album - as even the most cursory of listens will reveal; Evans was fulfilling a contractual obligation to impulse! with it, and while he apparently was in the same building during its recording, the extent of his contributions was the occasional adjustment to the studio thermostat. This album is mostly interesting as an early example of Cecil Taylor on the piano - and to be quite frank, you need to be a pretty serious Taylor fan to find it interesting.

That this is not a Gil Evans album is moderately frustrating, even if you chose to be incredibly generous and incredibly kind and give him credit as a "producer", this isn't Evans' music. Compared to Out of the Blue, as was clearly intended by its title, Into the Hot has none of the characteristics that define Evans' music of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Enough has already been written about this, what I have to say about this album is in an attempt to judge it based on its merits without getting wrapped up in its rather complex and disappointing history

The point I would make about this album is that it is largely, "Angkor Wat" being the exception, a very early free jazz recording (if you consider Coleman's Something Else the beginning of the movement). Sadly, it does not contribute much to free jazz.

The problem is that the tunes are largely indistinguishable. I still, after listening to this album for the last week, can not tell you with any more confidence than that of a slightly experienced guess, tell you which song is playing. This is largely because of the lack of clear guidance and ownership of the album's putative leader. But the larger issue that is exposed is free jazz musicians' tendency to dismiss the importance of a guiding structure in their compositions and improvisations ad being too constricting to their musical freedom.

(It is a separate post that this idea is crap. The very brilliance of great music of any genre is the ability of the musician/composer to express ideas using the rules of the genre/form being employed. It is easy to be creative while disregarding the rules and then claim that what you have achieved is serious music. Since you have no objective standard of comparison, how can anyone disagree? It is much more impressive to create something new and vibrant within an existing framework. Think of Shakespeare's sonnets. They are some of the world's most impressive poetry, composed in a well-defined form. Now think of the poetry written by every goth teenager who has no idea of the rules of poetry and you will get a sense of what I am talking about. Working within the restrictions of the genre/form is where true brilliance can be demonstrated. Please note that I am not opposed to breaking rules and innovation. I am simply against artistic laziness wherein musicians and artists can claim that rules are holding them back.)

Free jazz is nothing more than taking improvisation to its ultimate extreme where the ideas of the performing musician become dominant and relegate the composer to a minor background role. (Compare this to classical, at the other extreme, where the composer is the ultimate. Consider how the two musics are marketed, jazz is marketed based on who is doing the playing, classical is marketed on the piece being performed. There are exceptions, Itzhak Perlman in classical or a recent recreation of the Kind of Blue album at a jazz club in my hometown.)

My issue is, just as you can not just throw any bum up on the stage with a violin and the sheet music for a Mozart violin concerto and expect an inspired performance, you can't give well-trained musicians the key to the studio and let them randomly fill up tape and expect anything brilliant - you might get it in either of the two scenarios, but you can not expect it. You need a central, guiding force.You need a trained musician. You need a preset piece of music. If you didn't, you could walk into any junior high band hall in the country, record the warm-ups before rehearsal and sell it as free jazz. And that, at its worst, is what free jazz sounds like, random tootings and bangings of prepubescent geeks.

But given a sophisticated leader who understands that music needs structure, even if it is the most minimal structure possible, the result can be sophisticated and sublime. It takes talent to find that little piece of structure, and most musicians lack that talent. Which is why so much free jazz sounds like the aforementioned junior high concert band warming up - there is too much concern with the "free" and not enough of the "jazz", the part that is supposed to provide the structure.

This album's major problem is a lack of that structure, both within the tunes themselves and between the tunes. Like I mentioned above, it all sounds the same, which is the ultimate sign that a free jazz album is a failure. If you can't tell if that is the band warming up or if it is the band performing, there is something wrong. It does not mean you are an unsophisticated listener, it means it is bad music.This album has no intellectually rigorous leader who imposes a central, guiding principle. It fails in providing a basic framework from which the listener can experience the ideas put forth by the musicians. At its most basic then, this album is nothing more than random rehearsals that someone was silly enough to put down on tape.

This sort of stuff reminds of Jackson Pollock, who I do not like. I hate looking at a Pollock:

I get that lots of people see great art in that kind of stuff. I do not. I do not see any structure their, either philosophical, or artistic, or technical. It is paint splatters. I finally realized that I can't consider this to be art because I can not find any guiding central principle to its creation. This does not mean I dislike all abstract art. Far from it. I just demand that it have structure, even if that structure is so minimal as to be transparent, if it is there it will exert its influence.