The Dueling Philosophies of Two New Guitar Albums
By Jon Hersey
Two widely celebrated guitarists recently released new records: Uncle John’s Band by jazz guitarist and composer John Scofield, and Baroque by Miloš Karadaglić, the “guitar hero of classical music.” They represent not merely different musical approaches appropriate to their different genres but two divergent worldviews.
Uncle John’s Band by John Scofield
The philosopher David Stove called the era beginning after World War I—when “the world turned upside down”—the Jazz Age. Much chagrined, he contended that the period, as indicated by its characteristic music, was one not of mere “random change” but “of reversal”—the inversion of the values and ideas that came before. In music, staid and operatic Victorian vocal melodies gave way, in America at least, to loose, swung, sexy rhythms and relaxed instrumental leads.
In the century since, jazz has become only more unbuttoned. The locked-in grooves of Bix Beiderbecke and Sidney Bechet, and the written arrangements of Duke Ellington and Count Basie, were replaced with flabbier rhythms, freeform improvisation, and the questioning even of such musical conventions as playing in key. John Scofield, whose career kicked off in the 1970s, has never been the most avant-garde (thank goodness), but his unique blend of jazz, blues, rock, and soul has aptly been described as “boozy.” (See if you can pick out which solos are his and which are Pat Metheny’s in their collaborations: for instance, “The Red One.”)
What might strike some as carelessness is, in fact, decades of studied effort at conjuring pleasing, relaxing vibes. “The Girlfriend Chord” on Scofield’s latest release, for example, suggests a snowy, slippery but happy day, and it wouldn’t be terribly out of place on something like Vince Guaraldi’s Charlie Brown Christmas. Nor for that matter would the track that follows it, “Stairway to the Stars,” which sounds like a couple slow dancing in the dark around a glittering tree.
But the results of such a lax approach, as one might expect, are mixed. Whereas “TV Band” and “Mo Green” are upbeat, bluesy, and even somewhat refreshing, “Mask”—with its off-key falling tones and stuttering guitar lines toward the song’s end—calls to mind a drunk hobo stumbling through a dank gray alley. And “Budo” sounds like what one might imagine would be the mental life of a computer circuit, ceaselessly passing disconnected bits of data every which way. These make the album’s beautifully lyrical passages, such as on “Somewhere,” seem to come from somewhere out of left field. It’s one thing to throw out the “rule book” in service of a musical theme with life-serving value; it’s another to do so with no apparent reason whatsoever.
As with much of Scofield’s catalog, this mixture gives Uncle John’s Band the feel of a watercolor with too much water, the colors bleeding. That, it seems, is a clue to his basic approach: to suggest a theme but not declare it, to hint at a purpose but not pursue it—to leave listeners with the vague and approximate. And in that sense, Scofield’s jazz really is the inversion of Victorian and earlier music, particularly Baroque music, which provided the soundtrack to the Enlightenment, a time of supreme confidence in the power of reason and a corresponding certainty in man’s ability to clearly convey definite ideas.
Baroque by Miloš Karadaglić
There is nothing indefinite about Miloš Karadaglić’s latest effort, Baroque, a collection of music from that era (1600–1750), with some pieces arranged for solo guitar and others for guitar and orchestra. Its opener, Sonata in D Minor by Domenico Scarlatti, conveys vivid and beautiful yearning—like a long, slow, patient romantic evening. Similarly, Karadaglić’s rendition of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s “The Arts and the Hours” provides a perfect accompaniment to a glass of wine and a candlelit dinner, perhaps one with a view to a mountain landscape. The word that best describes these and the album’s other solo guitar pieces is “intimate.”
Plopped between these are concerti for guitar and orchestra, which strike a strange contrast. Masterful as they are, they show why the more traditional string instruments—violin, viola, cello, and so on—have so long dominated the genre. They evoke a beautiful, voice-like quality, whereas the guitar (and I say this as a guitar player) is so much mellower as to fade into the background whenever the two compete, making for a musical peek-a-boo that isn’t particularly flattering to the six-string. Nonetheless, the album is the musical equivalent of a well-ordered mind: precise, detailed, purposeful.
“Precision and structural perfection are not the objectives” of Baroque music, wrote Arianna Warsaw-Fan Rauch in her great guide to classical music, Declassified. Rather, they are “by-products of a higher aim: to create something magnificent and grand—like a cathedral built of notes instead of stone.”1 Jazz can reach such heights, too: for instance, Metheny’s The Way Up. Such achievements are rare in the genre, not because it lacks the musical tools to erect them but because of the unfortunate vogue of eschewing them. The result is that while one insanely talented musician gives us a soundtrack for a relaxing if somewhat aimless walk, the other stops us in our tracks, giving us something to aim at, savor, and admire.
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Don’t take my word for it. Have a listen to these two albums and let me know what you think. I’d also love to know what you’ve been listening to lately, so drop me a line.