Jazz, Genes, and Jizz
TLS September 11, 2009 from Stephen Brown's review of Richard Williams' "The Blue Moment: Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue" and the remaking of modern music": Try this experiment, sing the first seven notes of the major scale, doh, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti . . . and stop on that seventh tone, the "ti." You'll feel the aching incompleteness that so wants the satisfaction of a final "doh." This is the quality that makes "doh" the central tone of the scale, and makes us feel the other tones in relationship to it. A whole system of harmonies grew to support this centredness, granting the listener a reference place in musical space skin to the position in visual space that perspective grants the viewer of a picture. And like perspective, the tonal system was rejected by Modernists. In effect, there had been, by the 1930s, two "modern" revolutions in music: a violent one under Schoenberg and his twelve-tone system; and ...