Jazzketblog
Friday, May 25, 2007
Shorted cords, flubbed notes, only in jazz
The other day at work I finally got around to giving a real listen to Al Cohn's Overtones CD, one of a bunch of disks I picked up cheap at B&N when they had a display rack of Concord Jazz cutouts. For the most part it's a pretty good CD, with good tunes and session players and the typical Concord production values - listenable but not particularly present. One song stood out though, and not for the musicianship or arrangement, but for the fact that the guitar player Joe Cohn (Al's son) kept dropping out when you'd think he would be comping away. So I skipped back a bit, turned up the volume, put on my headphones so as not to disturb my fellow feds, and replayed the last minute or so. Sure enough the dude had a bad guitar cord making his contributions to the mix a rather random affair.
Now in jazz a flubbed note created when a player is "going for it" is an oft-hallowed thing, a vibration signifying effort and emotion, unless of course the player is one you don't like. And the great Miles, who probably became intimately versed in the flub while trying to keep pace with speedsters like Dizzy or Clifford Brown, discovered that an intentional flub while playing a slow n' easy passage could help set a mood. But a bad guitar cord? You'd think they would have cut another take. There just *might* be crying in baseball, but there is no deep meaning to a cold solder joint or frayed conductor or bad input jack. Of course some deconstructionist music critic could say something about the meaning of the shorted cord in relation to some aspect of the session, or the year it was recorded etc. More than likely it had something to do with tired or bored players, a sleeping engineer, or whiskey.
Now in jazz a flubbed note created when a player is "going for it" is an oft-hallowed thing, a vibration signifying effort and emotion, unless of course the player is one you don't like. And the great Miles, who probably became intimately versed in the flub while trying to keep pace with speedsters like Dizzy or Clifford Brown, discovered that an intentional flub while playing a slow n' easy passage could help set a mood. But a bad guitar cord? You'd think they would have cut another take. There just *might* be crying in baseball, but there is no deep meaning to a cold solder joint or frayed conductor or bad input jack. Of course some deconstructionist music critic could say something about the meaning of the shorted cord in relation to some aspect of the session, or the year it was recorded etc. More than likely it had something to do with tired or bored players, a sleeping engineer, or whiskey.
Labels: bad equipment, concord, guitar, jazz
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