Review of Keith Waters,Postbop Jazz in the 1960s: The Compositions of Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and Chick Corea(Oxford University Press, 2019)

Abstract

Theory[1] Keith Waters's Postbop Jazz in the 1960s (2019) brings together more than two decades of work by one of the most prolific jazz scholars in music theory. Over the course of his academic career, Waters has focused consistently on the practices of a particular set of jazz musicians in the 1960s. During this period, the output of musicians like Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and Chick Corea often blended elements of tonal jazz from earlier decades-including bebop, hard bop, and soul jazz-with features of emergent modal and free (or avant-garde) jazz practices. Waters and others use the term postbop to refer to the compositional and improvisational tendencies that emerged from this confluence, which are exemplified by a small but influential repertoire of jazz compositions and associated recordings. (1) His enduring engagement with this music has yielded a series of widely cited publications. While a few of these studies broadly address improvisational (2013) or harmonic (Waters and Williams 2010) strategies, most confront analytical or methodological issues through the lens of a specific musician's output. These include examinations of form and metric displacement in improvisations by Hancock and Keith Jarre (1996, 2001), nonfunctional harmony in compositions by Hancock (2005) and Corea (2016), the influence of the ic 4 cycles in John Coltrane's "Giant Steps" on postbop composers (2010), and improvisatory practices in Miles Davis's celebrated second quintet (2003, 2011). (2) [2] In contrast to the focus on postbop improvisation in Waters's first monograph (2011), the primary aim of his second book is to characterize the compositional tendencies of postbop musicians.(3) Some of these tendencies overlap with tonal and modal jazz practices, while others evolve or problematize them. For example, both postbop and modal jazz tunes often weaken or 20. This connection testifies to Waters's engagement with this repertoire as both an analyst and accomplished pianist. Waters's approach to functional substitution could also suggest an embodied approach-one can imagine dominant function stubbornly sticking to chord shapes that feel almost the same as conventional dominant voicings, for example. See Sudnow and Dreyfus 2001 for discussion of embodied keyboard pathways as a key component of improvisational fluency for jazz pianists.Return to text 21. In forthcoming work on harmony in the music of jazz pianist Robert Glasper, I advance such a framework using commutative, m3/M3 cycle-based CURSOR and SLIDE transformations. Callender (2007) offers a similar approach in his analysis of Ligeti's Arc-en-ciel, which applies commutative, invertible transformations that he calls Rotation (Rt) and Slide (Sl) to tall-tertian major-and minor-seventh chords. Return to text 22. Waters's labeling method for these progressions mirrors the sequence labeling technique used in Lai 2015 (see especially Chapter 17). Return to text 23. Waters's bibliography includes both Biamonte 2010 and Harrison 1994. Return to text 24. For exam...