Led Zeppelin and Nu-Jazz
Sunday, November 27th, 2005What is the connection between Led Zeppelin and Nu Jazz?
Seems bizarre when one in first glimpse tries to answer such questions. One in overly considered toward hard, heavy metal rock, stadium size one. The other one revolves often with the image of black people playing cool moderately groovy heavily improvisationalized music in a gent black suit and a tie.
But both are actually two of my most beloved styles of music. Why would i considered Led Zeppelin a style of music? well because no other bands approached the Led Zeppelin style of playing music, it was so unique that i had to establish it as a single style of music. Beside of course because my great and enduring respect for them, that i would put them in the style of their own. So two styles of music, lives in differing venues and conform the differing spirits. But why beloved?
Aside from all subjective reason that may prevail (which i know would take a big portion in the explanation if its allowed), i can invite you to look in an objective perspective why i would cherish Led Zeppelin and Nu Jazz and at the same time provide them the credit to greatness they had deserved.
A simple hint: i like to listen to something that musically grants me something new. (i have to admit im not so much as a lyrical person, although i like some lyrics very much but im not the one accustomed to automatically hears lyrics when i hear music, but on the contrary, im an avid listener of melody and sounds of various instruments welding together in a song). In other ways of saying it, i am a notes observer, a caring and loyal on-looker of how the notes progresses, transcends, and moves in pitch or rhythm within a song.
As if the notes were syllables or letter of words, it tries to speak something to the listener. The listeners listens, and in between listening, he is truly active, because he is using his senses and soul to construct an imaginary landscape of abstractness in his brain of what the music is "saying". It happens, perhaps not oftenly in popular music seen by videoclip (since the videoclip provide a clear and real replacement of the imagination one would have), but more in music that grew in yester-year where video broadcasting was not an option, and pure listening through stereo or radio was the norm. The meta-verbal form (the "words") being transfered through music is a strange creature, i must say, it conforms a limitless stature of posibilities, an apt of transcending boundaries, therefore conveying the meaning of the Absolute free, and therefore mystery. That is why we often hear the sayings that people uses music as their escape-pad from reality, or people get high through music, or people behave in a strange and different ways when exposed to music, they wander, they take drugs (to even increase the "escaping" efficiency), basicly pursuing any acts of metaphorically "escaping". Shortly said, it is possible for people to do it because the mystery capacitate it.
Strange word perhaps, mystery, when some of you read it, but its true. In the case where the uncertainty is an ubiquity, one can’t help but making various assumptions and theories to create logical explanation, and therefore the questions which assumptions and theory is the right one will always floats about, creating mystery. Well, musical notes and its limitless possibilities will always be a mystery.
Like a book, every song or "piece" contains a story, being told by both the lyrics and the music. The lyrics as well as the music has verses of "words" to say. It is apparent to say, in the great vast spectrum of music, there is also vast differences in the term of the volumes of these "words". Some styles such as folks consists almost entirely out of lyrics, with usually only an accompaniment of an acoustic folk guitar and a harmonica, leaving the "words" of music in the shelf. Other totally different styles, such as new age with the names of Vangelis, Enya, or greatly mistreated when not said, classical music, totally un-addressed the importance of lyrics and pursued with a total exploitation of musical "literature", conveying great volumes of "words" of music.
Along with varying volumes and compositions between lyric and music, vary also the stories conveyed in songs. Some are straightforward-ly told (like folk music), some are totally vague and imagination-spurring (like new age), while some deviate to just a unified and harmonically combined mixture of straightforward and imagination-spurring. Specifically, in the case of Led Zeppelin, a brilliantly composed straightforward but mysterious lyrics, with an army of straightforward but mysterious music to back it up.
Robert Plant always has the signaturial heavy blues character borrowed from its role models of blues, such Willie Dixon or Muddy Waters, but Plant revamped it up, cranked it, intensified it most appropriately, those blues formulas into their own unparalleled Robert Plant’s signature of hard heavy blues. The newly born baby of Plant’s blues delivered so much intensity to the blues, that often people forget that those intensities embedded the lyrics even greater power of mysterious quality.
The results are an unparalleled atmosphere of spine-tingling vocal property infusing a great sense of arcane, mystifying depth.
Jimmy Page, as simply said, the band’s music conceptor, is no different in approaching his version of combining blues and rock. As an orchestral piece that consists of so many sections, so too are Plant’s piece. One cannot approach Plant’s concepted Zeppelin songs as a usual pop song, especially in the nowadays, would be approached. It is different and lies on different concept of authenticity, and if i may say geniosity. As Chris Welch, author of Led Zeppelin: Dazed and Confused said it, the amount of brilliant ideas packed-in in just the first half of Led Zeppelin I (first album) are more than would be evident in many other band’s entire recording lifetime.
Jimmy created a wall of harmonic layers of sounds boundless in exploration. When one listens to Page’s melody, one wonders how one could have so many compositional ability. It escalates the songs structures being previously formed by their comrades and compatriots. Its exploration achieves magnificent level of variety. It took influences from as far as Eastern music to blues, funk, jazz, reggae. The length of songs can range from relatively short 4 minutes to a grand epic like 8 minute, multi-sections, Stairway to Heaven. Its choice of notes, sounds, and timing are curiously inciting the overwhelmed question of how can one have senses like that, especially if you recall this is a band that uses hundreds of notes and more than teens of chords - recall Stairway to Heaven or Since I’ve Been Loving You (if i even may say to myself "how can he pick that note! it’s just feels RIGHT and LOGICAL one!"). In the process, Jimmy had consciously created an immense sense that something is possible to be done in music that had never been done before, the sense, when you’re being the listener, of being at the edge and anchorless, the sense of not knowing where the boundaries are, sense of being overwhelmed, almost frightened, and unpredictable at the same time, a sense of being in the face of uncertainties that lie ominously ahead, a sense of curiosity, a sense of mysteriousness.
This form of mysterious and unresting explorative character enforced by Zep, implies that the stories in their songs transcends beyond those of others. There is always an indefinite story told by them beside the already the intense and curiosity-inciting vocal and lyrics, a story that lurks between the progression of notes in their music, and the attacks of their unmatched rhythming. Gracefully explaining, that the music indeed lives there not merely as accompaniment to the expression of vocals but also as something else, that adds depth and story to the already mystifying Plant’s lyrics and vocal playing. And so far as a song is like a book, it has become a common thing that every time i read Led Zeppelin’s book i always find another detail, another story, another something to think about that is to be excavated from the book.
These are, actually, the elements that exactly defines my eternal attraction to Led Zeppelin.
Song’s Study Case : Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You, The Songs Remained The Same, Rain Song.
Now, whatabout Nu Jazz. Why the same attraction?
Jazz incorporates in itself as an indipensable element, improvisation. Improvisation pursued through instruments and sometimes also vocal. The greatest of jazz musicians creates improvisation on the spot, real time, emphasizing the nature of surprise and unpredictability in music more than the less great musician. They understood that these elements of surprises itself that makes jazz interesting. Till the present day, the connosieurs of jazz maintain these understandings in order to preserve jazz.
What comes in effect of improvisation turns out to be as important as the improvisation itself. Improvisation means exploration, the ever-going pursue to cross boundaries and transcend limits. Sounds familiar? of course because Led Zeppelin did the same thing. Led Zeppelin as a band hungry of exploration and tiredless expansion of musical structures, emulates in the perfect way any great jazz musician. They are hand in hand in their concept of breaking boundaries. And they open up a chance for people to feel the unthinkable for any other music, the unpredictability, the mystery. To so doing and equal as Zeppelin, they created pieces of work that genuinely contain so many verses and stories told just through the soundings and compositions of their instruments. A vague stories that is, even more vague than Zeppelin, since some jazz and its derivates (which we will discuss later) consists of no lyrics to support meaning, perhaps only titles of the track.
Their ways to create story through musical melody and harmony however are different. If Zeppelin created a maze of intense blues and multiple sections rock ‘n’ roll structure, the jazz musicians created compositions founded on great knowledge of instruments-arrangement-feeling relationship. To do cool jazz for instance, certain instruments are included and certain arrangement style is adopt, beside of course the composition of notes itself. But the effect are the same, a dazzling well of successions of notes and sounds and timing that’s pregnant of its own capacity of telling its own stories apart from lyrical stories.
Nu jazz borns as forms of original jazz mutates and synthesizes with other forms of music especially funk, electronica, hip hop, latin and indie, and other forms to date. The forms of music that is specifically considered previously very different to jazz in terms of structures and improvational capacity. The change of times and technological development arrests this difference and barriers to combine together jazz and other styles, creating another maze of let me say "nourishing" and interesting jazz styles. "Nourishing" because their jazz characteristics involves more musical stories to explore than other types of music. And interesting because the evolution made possible something that had never happened before and provide the chance for my favorite styles of music to work together and extend their story-telling capability through the grand styles of music of all, jazz.
In the end, the fact that Led Zeppelin and nu-jazz musicians are brilliant in compositing and pushing the boundaries of ordinary musical commonalities is what makes their compositions becomes such a favorite pieces for me. Because in that search for their own uniqueness, they have set mysteries in the stories of their songs which eventually kept me coming back to them to discover and re-discover them again.
Song Case Study: Fedime’s Flight - Jazzanova, Indra - Thievery Corporation, Rhodes Royce - Plastyc Buddha, Symptoms of Disease - Erlend Oye.
Cheers, and all hail Zeppelin!
