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Music Dorkery

METAL IS THE NEW JAZZ

 Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at 10:44am by

tomas haakeI’ve spent plenty of time in this space discussing the myriad connections between classical music and heavy metal, a topic I always love falling back on when skeptics peg metal as a low-class art form (i.e. my relatives: “You do what for a living??”). Now the New York Times has given me some more cannon fodder by arguing that jazz and metal are artistic cousins, and since my family takes the New York Times as the bible and listens to NPR jazz broadcasts like they were State of the Union addresses I’ll be well-armed next time Aunt Sadie scoffs at why I’m not a lawyer or banker like all the other nice Jewish boys.

Jazz stages and metal stages are places where a certain kind of experimentation happens: brainy and cabalistic, with a hint of a smile. Both increasingly depend on educated virtuosos. In both genres you can develop curious harmonic worlds, warp the tempos, brush against folkloric or conservatory music, play many notes very speedily and engage sturdy American grooves or a more studied system of fitting odd-number beats into even-number meters. Pat Metheny, jazz guitarist, meet Paul Masvidal of Cynic; Jeff (Tain) Watts, jazz drummer, meet Tomas Haake of Meshuggah. Both forms seem to have a neatly divided audience: maybe two-thirds respectfully fixated on the music’s past, one-third concerned about building paradigms for the future.

And so on and so forth. Read the article at the fit-to-print website of the New York Times, and thank Suckalo Mark Moritz-Rabson for sending this one in.

-VN

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  • Mario

    Boner @ Paul Masvidal being mentioned in the NYT

    • iolanach

      came here just to say that. holy shit.

    • Dementer

      They should’ve just put ALL of Cynic up there! That’s the perfect example of jazz and metal.

      But yes, Paul Masvidal is shred god!

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Sean-Wright/1365416981 Sean Wright

    If Metal is the new Jazz……we need more heroin, people taking caps of demerol, and writing books like “Naked Lunch” and “Exterminator. Teach the younger generation a thing or two of “rebelling” and ‘sticking it to the man’.

    In case if you didn’t get that, those were all William S. Burrough references.

    • timmah

      There’s plenty of messed up jazz musicians out there bud. Just go looking. Start with Lenny Breau.

    • Rachel

      Charlie Parker wasn’t much better than any metal star. He sold his saxophone about every week to a pawn shop just so he could afford more drugs. A few days later, he would get paid from doing an earlier gig, the he would go back and buy his sax again. He did that until he died of a drug overdose.

  • SolaceInNothing

    Two semesters ago I got an A on a speech I did for my American Music class in which I discussed the simularities of modern metal and jazz. I then played for the class apart of The Facelss’s “The Ancient Covenant” off of their Planetary Duality album and everyone looked at me with a gasp. Obviously it was the gutteral vocals that people were most surprised at, but I merely explained that not understanding the lyrics was no different then listening to Opera, it doesn’t matter if you dont understand them because it is about the emotion being put forth.

    It is a bit of a catch 22 being a metalhead, because one is drawn to the obscurity of listening to such music or In other words, it is cool to listen to music that alienates most mainstream tastes. Yet as one matures it becomes a bit disconcerning that such amazing musicians do not get more praise precisely because of the music that they create.

    This is why I am thrilled at this article. Its refreshing to see a little mainstream praise for such great artists.

  • Ron

    If you like reading about fucked up, drug fueled shenanigans, you need to go read the biographies of the old school jazz guys. Art Pepper’s “Straight Life” is the best. That guy was a fucking nutter, puts the metal crowd to shame. Miles Davis’ autobio “Miles” is pretty sick too. And the Coltrane book “Ascension” gives some great insight into the original shredder.

  • timmah

    Been saying Jazz and Metal are related for years. Does nobody pay any attention to the guitar solos on basically the entire “Nothing” album by Meshuggah? Straight up jazz.

  • http://music.msn.com/superfans/heavy-metal/blog pdf

    There’s also acts like Yakuza that explicitly mix the two; their vocalist doubles on saxophone. (Lots of crazy sax solos on the forthcoming Ihsahn album “After,” too.)

  • Pat

    If by similar you mean both genres are chock full of pointless masturbatory noodle-charts masquerading as melody, yeah that’s about right.

  • http://verbeatblogs.org/impop tiagón

    truth it is. great article, thanks for the link.

  • Glenn

    Hmm. I don’t agree. Aside from an occasional superficial similarity in a particular song, the two styles are essentially antithetical.

    The central aesthetic tenet of jazz is improvisation by all parts across a loosely defined song structure. How that has actually sounded has changed over the decades, but the core idea is true: you’re supposed to perform “spontaneity” when you play jazz.

    Metal, on the other hand, is not fundamentally interested in improvisation, either in terms of composition or performance, though improvisation might be used at times to spur a fixed composition. Indeed, in terms of composition, metal is far more interested in rigid and predictable (from one hearing to the next) structures of riffs, melodies, and rhythms, where each instrument is carefully assigned a specific role and specific musical “parts”. Also, for all of the appeal of the musicians’ virtuosic skill, metal bands are generally expected to perform note-perfect versions of their studio recordings when they play live.

    • Pat

      Correct sir. I can’t understand why metal fans think they deserve to be loved by legit pop culture so much – when did metal become populated with such wusses? Punk, HC, “heavy metal’” – these styles were reactions to enetertainment voids left by popular culture, and the recognition of its utter irrelevance to the average person. When “the shit” goes mainstream, it usualloy ceases to be anything particularly interesting.

    • Rachel

      Yes, metal has some rigid structure to it, but I think we are generally looking at the chords and ideas. Metal has melodies rooted in a similar idea to a Lead Sheet. Lead Sheet melodies and main riffs from metal songs share the most similarities. I think a metal band “comping” underneath an instrumental solo could be distasterous because comping is a sort of improv, so drummers and guitarists could not possibly “stumble upon” making a logical sound. As a generalization, metal is built upon rigid structure. It would be nice to see Nile “trade fours” or “take a chorus” every now and then, but would be pretty difficult to make work. As far as sponaneity goes, take a listen to the guitar solo in Meshuggah’s song Bleed (from Catch 33). It is a solo that sounds improvisational, but the drums never actually stray off from that consistent beat.

  • Me

    I’m sure many/most of you have heard of the Alex Skolnick Trio (guitarist of Testament’s jazz project after leaving the metal scene to pursue a career in jazz). Seen them live a few times, and they are the shit. Not to mention it’s pretty sweet when he breaks out the metal covers that often starts out as jazz and ends up in an almost rock-like and effects jam.

    • Discipleofthewatch

      Well, I believe I’ve heard of him/ them a few times before, indeed.

  • http://www.hibernum.net hibernum

    Replace the drums with someone who can do fills, and add a shoo bee doo bee singer:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOb6JSQd-Qw

    And it sounds rather jazzy. Though I think that Glenn has a valid point about improvisation being central to jazz and largely, though not totally, absent in metal. Just check out Slayer’s live solos. Often Kerry improvises.

    • fester

      If by “improvises” you mean “wildly flails his fingers while picking at top speed”, then sure. I love slayer, don’t get me wrong, but there’s not a damn thing highbrow about kerry king’s playing.

  • http://www.bayareametalscene.com DS

    LOL, just came across this on CL:

    http://sfbay.craigslist.org/eby/muc/1540061095.html

    Yes, it’s related.

  • Coby

    A huge example of the similarities is the band Lye by Mistake. Fea Jur is like a jazz album with distortion, and sometimes it just sounds like jazz period.

  • Vince

    Exactly! I wrote a paper at my university in jazz history comparing death metal to jazz and i called it the death of jazz. I thought maybe the professor (being an old jazz hippie musician himself) would not like the paper but i aced the class and the paper was worth a lot. but it is true, metal and death metal are more relatable to classical and jazz music than actual rock music. most dont see it but the fundamentals are there.