Friday, March 13, 2026

Notes on "Jazzdeath"

The Notes

In summary, herein one finds notes on a solo trombone piece of mine, “Jazzdeath,” which may be heard via Next Year’s Snow, best in the full context of my 2026 self-titled record, Janis, as its second track. I encourage the reader to indulge there before here, but I fear I cannot intervene beyond myself, so I begin.

To dispel first the notion that “Jazzdeath” is a death of jazz qua a jazz fading or a Dixieland transformation radicalized beyond historic precepts as sometimes suggested in varying degrees of intensity across the jazz world’s vivid, potent, and most crucially ongoing history, I etymologize the idiosyncratic compound as, initially, a nonce word not insofar as one could reckon it a placeholder — for it was never quite such a thing, and I had decided to stick with it early on — but rather in that “Jazzdeath” was a provocateur’s placeholder in the original Bandcamp draft, for which I had no plans even having written out it and most of the other titles that came to comprise Janis in advance of the recordings themselves. From its onset, of course, I knew the tenor trombone would be at its heart, for it has long remained near the center of mine, though only briefly did I bother participating in a “jazz band” in my middle and high school years and only in tangents did I seek to understand jazz intrinsically until it flowed through me on terms I could dictate through my own work (vain as I am and was), but I do not want to instill such a deleterious assumption as the audacious, lurid claim that “Jazzdeath” is in any way autobiographical, for doing so would mean discounting the exteriorities breaching others’ unspoken, improvised interiorities, those which informed my efforts. Though in some ways it does pain me to write such things down for they do not lend the same Proustian semblance as writing while running through the changes and blaring, proud, and sharp trombone bends of Louis Armstrong’s (wonderful, timeless) rendition of “Long Gone (from Bowling Green)” in mind’s ear, I must, as a linguist, believe in the primacy of the word, so making this document correspond with its heard counterpart will reduce the variables in reading and represent what I hope will be a paradigmatic shift in the field of “Jazzdeath” studies (should one ever exist), for can the the islanderly demeanor I assume out of habit not still maraud sea by sea until it finds what it seeks in plunder? Sanctifying nothing, my wish is conceptual conveyance, a “great vehicle” as much as mundane public transit, so let us let live live jazz and take a gander at the meanings of the tense muscles at play.

Despite the outside quality of “Jazzdeath,” I recorded it in a predominantly off-white apartment bedroom, ostensibly in homage to the surreal, impersonal guitar recordings of Kieran Daly et al. on his Madacy Jazz, which would contribute to an inhuman quality if not for my crude, unclassical arrangement of conduits of digital recording and my tendency away from the tape-music analog post-editing one would expect of a serious classical piece of total rigor and responsibility to an audience seeking to detect the macrostructures and microstructures in anything from the machined playback of an orchestra to the graced gestures of a virtuoso soloist, but Babbitt notes in an essay I so often cite to friends, “The Composer as Specialist,” that much academic music has become popularly invisible and thus, despite these notes’ overall necessity, my plan did not change such that some parts would fly over hither and thither while others would be obvious. My original intention, to play trombone essentially consecutively for multiple sound sources across my room for thirty minutes and leave the result in one take, had an overambitious component I later realized as I began, and the piece was truncated to its nineteen-minute final length in the very process which engendered and then cemented it, but I could not help but see my gasps for air as intimately connected to the masochistic work of the late Kaoru Abe, translated to the trombone in the thick of a rather ordinary Wednesday afternoon, and classical frameworks both did and do not account for what I arranged leading up to “Jazzdeath”’s eventual realization, for my composition amounted to the placement of several microphone arrays across the room I had already necessarily specified as the place wherein I would perform for no audience — indeed, lacking an audience was itself a crucial component to the Abe-esque suffering I sought to evoke, yet I simulated or dissimulated the records of the many by interspersing, inside, a rigorous array of unsynchronized destinations, soon to themselves become sources in the reconstruction to stereo.

I interspersed a Shure SM-58 (into the audio interface, but facing my initial position head-on), a Zoom H4n Pro, a Dell Axim X3 PDA running Windows Mobile 2003 or something contemporaneous (its recording set to 11kHz), my iPhone 14 (in the storage area), and my ThinkPad T480 (in stereo) evenly across my domain and individually armed them as the sun pervaded in part such a space without any immediate effect on any part of the work; it is not heard, nor will it be apparent to the listener except, perhaps, in any subtle leakage which entered from outside, and drew my slide in what would become the cue for resync as the process carried on and Ableton became the venue. To dramatize my means less, I had already thought of Abe during fleeting warmups, but his wrenching performances for winds wound me up not because they were unconventional (though it is true that they are), but because the degree of tonality and drifting melody took up a prominence I thought had not often been observed in his work, leading me, along with some semblances of Braxton — who is and was far harder to translate into the perplexing language of my attachment-bereft tenor trombone — to the tropes of swing, where I had heard the trombone most often in the world of jazz, and the vast microphone array thus mirrors multiple interpretations of the space at once in all their intrinsic flaws, a Daly-esque setup if I could idealize one despite the unflattened demeanor with which I performed until I gasped for air (whereafter I would continue and did on multiple occasions), rotating the horn and myself in tandem such that each source would receive a different reflection at different times, an idea which even led me to walk around at times. The recording evoked a wide variety of keys and motifs which would recur in flashes as I recalled them, a quasi-mnemonic motion, but an overall diatonic sense smashed into me as I ran against the bounds of my gamut of possibility, but purposefully inserting dissonant nonsense on occasion rebalanced the picture beyond normalcy.

In terms of the musical group and its forms, the chamber ensemble captivates me most iron-fistedly for its intimate nature as a group of simultaneous monophonies or just as often few-voiced polyphonies (eg. on the string instruments), whereby individuals’ interactions composite into posited dynamics by means of interpretive efforts, be they of a score or a thought inexplicably shared, so I theorize that, while no astral linkage ties the chamber together, it is the most synchronous and internetworked of the construable forms I can imagine, for the symphony, while noble and vast beyond a single-listen comprehension, is not so microscopic, so readily divisible into its pieces, but as a lonely soloist so caught up in the solitude of my work that I must play at chance and solve my own games for lack of others to work with in the indie-captive college town in which I reside for some share of rent or another, I am not beholden to genuine polyphonies, so I imagined a shifting tempo, swung and elusive, and that sufficed for me. Surrounding the illusory ensemble was a veil of audience across eras of fidelity, concretized but in the now totally dominant digital domain I cannot qualify with any semblance of a tape, wire, or lathe, for it holds the totality of my work and cannot be separated in its mechanics from the entire body of my practice as an artist and critic. After plentiful gasps for air, punctuated by “Oh my God!” or something else of the sort exhorting a higher power to grant me more breath, Giles Corey’s cry for more weight, more burden on me to represent the physicalities of my conceptual exertions even as haphazardly translated into this integral abstraction, the complete conceit seemed to be on the cusp before I completed the fabled resync I so longed for, but although nothing stopped recording during my noble fool’s errand or errored out otherwise, I discovered that the Dell Axim, quite a venerable device without much prevision in its controls, had clipped heavily even at the ostensibly safe volume I had set for it, but even so, I felt inclined to use it as a source of vicious distortion and uncleanliness akin to the earliest mechanical recordings, repeated over and over into the diaphragm for lack of reliable duplication, running up to my already-discontinued field recorder I will use until it is incapable of turning on or (after that) being used as a percussion instrument or bent circuit (though my hope is that it never comes to that or won’t for some time), and the mixing stage proceeded seamlessly after I realized the noise of my barely-oiled slide drawing inward (or outward — I cannot recall) to the first position (or something like that), and, seeing that all of my other recordings had their own attributes ranging from a stately muffling to shocking clarity, I automated between them using only well-tuned and highly occasional delays for special effects, peak-limiting the master, and using as much as abusing equalization, volume curves, both singleband and multiband compression, and stereo-field imaging — above all else panning for the monophonic recordings, but also the stereo material — to create a reduction which constantly shifted such that no one listening would be stuck with a single angle of the informal realization of a concept so spontaneous it could not contain itself. I thus rendered the work and allowed it to define Janis as a wall past which most would not, I imagined, persevere to see the more immediate, less covert beauty I sought in the remainder of the work, but “Jazzdeath” has never struck me as anything but a gorgeousness engorged in something greater than itself, an aesthetic stride into something that lies beyond martyrdom and self-situates in the real as much as the illusory that pervades us all, which, for all I can see, must bear some reality to itself likewise. I sat first chair throughout my time in high school concert band and led the marching band section in my senior year likewise, but those days are not actively present, for this was wrought with my own hands, my own breath, and thus my own insufficiences, my gasps for a superior predicament to the life I from day to day live, gasps which shall proceed even lacking an attainable target.

The most overt glean from “Jazzdeath” is, as much as it is a simple, sentimental, and ultimately longing requiem for jazz trombone and an optimistic dirge to eulogize it in the wake of its long-misremembered fading away from the repertoire in the obsolescence of the swing era even continued by a select few bop and even free performers, a real sense of exertion and perhaps even suffering while this body expends on its strained work, a phenomenon all professional musicians, as I was told after releasing the piece, experience in ways we may or may not comprehend anon or ever should we properly restrain ourselves from the artistic impulse and the spontaneity I have sought to capture in both “Jazzdeath” and, more importantly, the industriousness of exercising that discipline day to day, for I am informed that playing jazz at a more professional level carries the risk of a body’s seams loosening to the point of breakage, lip, lung, and tongue strained over and over along with carpal-tunneled fingers themselves gasping in arthritic tremors. Thus, there must be a very real bodily horror in the strenuous life of the performer I do not often see discussed, the means whereby music violates us, the shapers of sound and otherwise of pleasing or displeasing qualities into the arts and their works, but the constant of labor will never vanish so long as the body is the form, and even in the absence of the body, there would be cognition, the work of the mind, even the same involuntary recall that led me into Satchmo gestures when falling back on what I knew as a child, the ways I, as a child, spake and worked with a tabula-rasa mind when I did not know ostentation from ensemble rhythm (for one needs a structural basis and a fundament of strong silken rope, as my late grandfather, a righeous man of blues whose days in Vietnam, even, whatever the war was to him, never passed without strums of a guitar, taught me in the distant days when I longed to play the drums, albeit in many less words and with far wiser a disposition — certainly sans my poetic embellishment of a strong silken rope, certainly my own), but even as a mind-body dualist of sorts, I must admit that the mind, too, demands the burning of calories to do its work and will not, unless nourished with food as much as the idea, think. It belabors me to consider what my work has already done to me knowing how rapidly my once-stable myopia has progressed, how my glasses thickened in tandem with my refocusing into computer-borne light emanating from backlit screens displaying almost every musical, visual, and literary endeavor I both produce and experience, to further weigh down my face and require more frequent up-nose pushing than I already did thitherto as a matter of habit, it logically ensuing that I cannot imagine the indistiction of all the forthcoming blurs I will see when without glasses when I must already go about my day near-perpetually with since I spend my days reading, writing, listening, composing, producing, and so on, a menagerie of dirty deeds with toxins in their spurs, but I cannot help but strain myself, for conniving forces beyond me wanting me to go without until time’s end, refusing to let these artistic strains have sway, must be safely ignored lest they scheme behind me, Roman eunuchs, and recommend my ruin right before my eyes myopic. In fact, this morning, the 13th of March, 2026, a Friday, I mistakenly sat on my glasses and am only just now realizing the potential implications of the case wherein I might have found myself unable to bend them back into shape as I did in reality, but “Jazzdeath” is less a plea to stop and more a means to implore the world to begrudgingly continue even if it runs up against its limit, itself, and everything else, a call for clever exteriorities put to use as tools, and with it I hope to inspire greater agencies than we know among the performers who, like neophyte underclassmen, will, or so I hope, find the world in themselves and themselves in the world, but if I am to speak more pragmatically, I am to say that “Jazzdeath” renders the inapplicable a source of fun and enrichment once more if it does anything at all — whether anything is done I leave as an exercise for the reader, a soloist in their own way.

The References

posted by Janis Lago @ March 13, 2026   0 Comments