I recently had the privilege of attending the International Jazz Composers’ Symposium, in my own backyard in Tampa. The Symposium consisted of various lectures, research presentations, guest artist encounters, new music reading sessions, and each evening was capped off by a concert featuring the music of guests artists Bill Hollman, Stefon Harris Ft. The Turtle Island String Quartet, and Jim McNeely performed by the composers conducting Chuck Owen’s Jazz Surge. It was the perfect chance to hang and meet other composers while experiencing and discussing each other’s musical tendencies, perceptions and struggles. The word camaraderie kept floating around amongst the various sessions and hangs in between and I think this best illustrates the overall success of event. The symposium was an opportunity for a bunch of composers to all turn on the hose and get theirs hands in the dirt and mud to assist each other in shaping our understanding of music and composition.

I would have to say that the new music reading sessions were definitely the crack of the symposium, with the notable highlights of Caitlin Smith and Lars Mollar. Each composition took you to a new place and opened new insights into things like the creative process, harmonic concepts, and most notably, or at least to me, melodic construction. Strong haunting melodies, you know the kind that you walk away singing for the next week, were not as prominent as I would have expected them to be at a jazz composers symposium. Immediately I started asking myself, is it me or what? In fact, bulls eye, it is me! When I write, and I assume it is the same with so many others, I tend to get so caught up in chasing after cool, hip harmony, and trying to shock listeners’ ears that I forget to write a good melody. A melody that at least ten people in the room will sing at some point in the next week. We write “songs,” not an epic adventures into the depths and bowels of human understanding of ordered sound. Fifty percent of the charts that I heard, I couldn’t have sang back to you after the reading was over. This is by no means a dig on the composers or the music but merely an observation of our (myself included) explorations of the music. Where is the melody in the grand scheme of things?

In the end, I left the symposium with more questions than answers or conclusions. But that is the beauty of what we do. To continue to ask questions keeps us reaching higher and higher for God knows what. I think group addiction, if there is such a term, (and if there isn’t…dibs) is the best kind!

What am I reading?

Modern Art and the Death of a Culture

By Hendrik Roelof Rookmaaker