There's that old saw about architecture being "frozen" music. First of all, architecture is experienced in time, just like music, so there's no need to "freeze" music in order for the metaphor to work. Ok, so architecture is sort of like music. It's so easy to make facile connections using this linkage between the two, however, that serious architectural thinkers don't go near the concept. We know they are both artforms experienced through time that are not so much mimetic representations of something else but their own self-referential world of motifs, texture, scale, and mass. Recently my wife and I took in the venerable, rail-thin 71-year old pianist McCoy Tyner at a concert at 'The Schnitz' Schnitzer Hall in downtown Portland. Tyner has what could be described as an 'architectonic' or perhaps 'monumental' way of playing, utilizing a sustained, blocky, chordal (as opposed to linear) approach, chords piled on top of each other in a complex manner. The constructions he was making have always seemed somewhat spatial to me, although it was hard to determine why - perhaps it had something to do with solidity, mass, and a perceived space within the chords. This abstract, probably too simplistic description doesn't do justice to the humanity that comes across in his playing, the effortless ability to make complex statements and evoke different feelings and colors, telling a story. I was so impressed with the places an artist can go when they've been able to work on their art without interruption for 60 years. As any good concert can do it allowed me to sit and speculate on architecture and music, two things I love very much. I came to be thinking about the mechanics of how music comes to be associated with space/place.
So a thesis for this article would be that music provokes recollections in the mind of architecture and more broadly, urban space. Undoubtedly, urban space must provoke musicians in their work of musical creation. Architects can also be provoked by music in their work, but as an architect, this is actually less interesting to me than the actual mental images that occur as I listen to or play music, invariably of cities. There's the guy (Michal Levy) who makes computer animations based on John Coltrane recordings, which I admire, but don't feel any deep association between the music and the "depiction," skillful though they may be. Perhaps this essay is doomed to the same kind of problem - everybody has such personal connections to music that any sort of seeking out of commonality in experience is a quixotic quest.
This essay only can incorporate jazz music into the discussion. As an artform developed almost exclusively in cities, as a cultural production is inextricably linked to cities and their multiple societies and social strata, jazz is well-placed for such a discourse. Architecture, it isn't required to be said, is deeply, intrinsically linked to urbanism/urbanity. Jazz also happens to be virtually the only music I've ever been able to listen to at any length, since I was a child. It probably is based on being exposed to and affected by the blues and ragtime in kindergarten at Lakeville Elementary (thanks to an amazing music teacher named Dr. Sheppard). Early imprinting got me, I think, and my jazz listening repertoire has expanded as I've matured but has not broadened to virtually anything in rock, folk, pop. Not intentionally a snooty bastard, but ended up there.
So what are some ways that the city (and by extension architecture) and jazz (and by extension music) intersect? Let me count the ways.
1. It's true that you can often tell what kind of a space music is being performed in by the sound of the recording. I once imagined that there could be a machine that could map the space (ie. the studio, room or hall) and musicians within in based on processing the sound they're making as it reflects off adjacent walls and the musicians' bodies. You could thus play a historic recording and see on a video screen along with the playback ghostly images (fascinating to imagine the geometry of images based on sound reflection) of the performers making the recording, a kind of indexical stamp based on hidden data in the music (this I believe is there, even in monaural recordings). It was probably based on a desire to see Lester Young holding his saxophone in that funny way he did; to see the performers as they actually looked on a normal day in the studio. Somebody needs to invent this device!! Music could literally reflect architecture and its inhabitants.
2. Number 2 is my main focus here - certain music often offers an association to me of urban places. Meaning, as I listen to a piece of music, a mental image comes into focus of a place I've been (more rarely a place I've imagined but never been). This is often based on what I know about the musicians, my imagination about how they lived their lives, and my imagination about a place I know in a former time when the music was made. As such it's highly personal and inflected (or shall we say "infected") by experience. For me it's also much easier to get a picture of a place if there's no vocal component (although if it's subdued enough or choral in nature a picture can erupt).
For example, submitted for your review-
Example A. Miles Davis' classic recordings just absolutely reek of New York City (in the best sense) to me. Biographically, Davis of course spent a good deal of time in New York City. One can make the simplistic statement that Davis' recordings are full of space. They are spare and open and dynamic. From albums such as Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants (Prestige) I am given to images of the small blocks of Greenwich Village, with their small stores, coffee shops, Armenian restaurants, Washington Square Park, New York University. I associate Davis with the Village Gate on Bleecker Street, where I was able to visit once during college in the early '90s before it closed (whether or not he played there much I don't know). I think of an edgier neighborhood (that it never was in my lifetime) full of horn-rimmed hipsters, the flourishing visual arts scene dominated by Abstract Expressionism. There's a new freeness in the air, but still restricted by a need to achieve technical skill/systematic concepts. Based on my knowledge of Davis' life and Julliard education, his starker recordings, with lots of space in them (Columbia albums like Kind of Blue and his other recordings with Gil Evans' arrangements for big band from the late 50's such as Miles Ahead) strongly evoke panoramas uptown along Riverside Park, near Grant's tomb, and various street locations on the Upper West Side around Columbia University (full disclosure - I spent plenty of time as a flaneur prowling these streets during college whilst taking study breaks). Of course, Davis is on continuous rotation in our bars and restaurants these days, from last week at Carlyle here in Portland to a bar I used to frequent in New York called Sweet and Vicious (on slow weekends), so hearing him in an urban context is a given, and most certainly has "infected" my subconscious.
Example B. Modernist alto legend Jackie McLean's recordings from the 1980's and '90's bring to mind a strong association with east coast 'rust belt' cities that declined precipitously in the post-industrial 70's onward. Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford all seem to be evoked in these recordings - the slightly acrid, hi-pitched ensemble-oriented albums such as Dynasty (Triloka), Rites of Passage (Triloka), Rhythm of the Earth (PolyGram), Fire and Love (Blue Note) etc. These are ensemble recordings of great energy, nuance, and craft, with African and Latin influences. In those cities, if you've never been, you get a sense of space, blue sky. Empty lots. Empty brick warehouses with glass paned windows slowly losing individual panes. Elevated concrete highways snaking through a gridded streetscape. You often see brutal modernist overlays on older city fabric in these cities - a blend of utopian housing blocks, monumental public works (such as the New Haven Coliseum, recently demised), mixed with earlier layers of wood framed or brick faced worker housing from times before. You get a feeling of hard times, street conversations. These cities are especially bleak in summer, surprisingly. These cities are also very racially divided, with two entirely distinct cultures, black and white coexisting in virtually the same location. Of course, this is inf[l]ected by what I know of McLean - that he spent this period composing and teaching at The Hartt School of the University of Hartford. And again, full disclosure, I spent the late '90's in New Haven attending Yale University, listening to a bunch of McLean's recordings I had taped from the library at WKCR (Columbia University's radio station) where I had dj'ed before as an undergrad. I love this music, even though it's not considered his "classic period."
Example C. Certain contemporary jazz musicians of quality such as Kenny Garrett ("Songbook" [1997, Warner Bros.]) Marc Cary ("The Antidote" [1998, Arabesque] along with "Rhodes Ahead" [1999, Jazzateria]), Nicholas Payton ("Nick at Night" [2000, Verve]) and Don Byron (pick an album) send me straight to Brooklyn, and in particular Fort Greene, that unbelievably lovely neighborhood of dense, architecturally distinctive (and diverse-period) row housing, acute and obtuse street angles, treed blocks alternating with broad avenues, small changes in elevation, cars parked tightly, busy and not-so busy people out walking and driving. It's a slightly isolated neighborhood, with all the subways skirting the outlines. The direct grooviness of these albums evoke local flows, surprise moves, walking down the street. An intimate, non-monumental optimism pervades these musics, although there is moodiness and much mystery in them - an outright shamanistic beauty in the work of Marc Cary, not nearly recognized enough for his giant talents (Full disclosure again: I lived in Park Slope not to far from Fort Greene from 1999-2003 and spent lots of time padding around Brooklyn on foot, bike and subway. I also taught at Pratt Institute's School of Architecture and was in and out of the neighborhood quite a bit.) Somehow I imagined these musicians in this neighborhood, whether or not they actually live there (although I know for a fact Kenny Washington lives there), in old high-ceilinged apartments with large windows with elegant white painted wood trim and mouldings, full of light and views of airshafts or leafy streetscapes, working through compositions, racing off to Manhattan to gig. In Wikipedia's entry on Fort Greene one can see that Betty Carter, Cecil Taylor, Branford Marsalis, Gary Bartz, Slide Hampton all live/lived in this neighborhood. So I'm not too far off (?).
Examples D, E, etc. Coltrane for me is the Bronx, and Harlem (not sure if his bio backs me up). Sarah Vaughan and Long Island City have a connection for me. What's also interesting is the sheer volume of music in my collection that doesn't evoke urban space. Most don't evoke any kind of space, and a minority evoke rural space. A recording such as Buddy DeFranco and Art Tatum's group session album (1955, Pablo) brings me oddly enough to rural northern New Jersey, particularly the area around Denville and its lakes where we used to visit our cousin Frank. Rolling verdant treed hills, undergrowth, are similar to the profusion in Tatum's inventive playing (especially a A Foggy Day). The opulence and smoothness of the recording is undeniably bourgeois to me, evoking country estates and treed properties. Also, Duke Ellington's soundtrack to the Otto Preminger movie Anatomy of a Murder with its foreboding yet brassy, broad ostinatos (with "echoiness" possibly added in the mix as producers were wont to do back then - kind of what they like to do to radio dj's today) brings out strongly the stark windswept hilly vistas of upstate New York, the area of Pompey Hill near Syracuse in particular. If you've seen the movie it takes place in rural (U.P.) Michigan, so no big stretch there. Ellington's brilliant, if you didn't already know (and lot's of people don't sadly).
Having moved to Portland last year I have to admit, I haven't heard Portland in music yet. It's almost too immediate in my experience for music to have been applied to it mentally yet. I haven't actually been listening to a lot of music since we moved here. I think once I have digested the city further - and I start listening in earnest again - places will occur to me. There are definitely several places I've encountered with a bona fide genius loci (too much Latin?). Portland like any good city has many micro-communities, formed around street intersections, and is not just about place and space but about the type of people that inhabit them and give them character. Somehow, the folk-rock that is so prevalent around here is to me a denial (or a cop-out) of the low-scale urbanity that is vital here. Eastcoasters when they visit us here ask where "the city" is. And of course there is downtown Portland. But the city itself is all around them, in a level of density they are not used to in a city. North, Northeast, and Southeast Portland to me suggests the boroughs of Queens and the Bronx in New York most strongly in its apparent density, although the New York boroughs are obviously more developed and denser. Which is probably why I'm here (full disclosure, again: both of my parents are from Flushing, Queens).
3. Parenthetically, another way is to literally hear the city in music. In a recording led by pianist Teddy Wilson made in July of 1935 in New York City that included Billie Holiday called "Miss Brown to You," 32 seconds into the recording during Benny Goodman's clarinet solo, a car or train horn can be distinctly heard during a pause in his playing (on the bridge of the tune). Which is kind of cool. I'm guessing it was really hot that day and a window was open. Can't get much more urban than that. Better than a sampled cop siren!
4. The last association I have between music and place is when I play music (I'm an amateur player) - I also get flashes of places - usually places in the town I grew up in, along roads in rural/most ritzy parts (yes, on the north shore of Long Island, the more rural, the more expensive). I'm not sure why I get these pictures. I spent time driving up there in high school being bored, checking out the latest architectural McMansion monstrosities going up, chatting philosophy, eating bagels, smoking (bad kid), with friends or alone. Perhaps it was the relaxation and detachment that I felt that's the same I feel when I play music. Music is definitely therapeutic; perhaps it creates a line back to more relaxed times, simpler times of introspection and reflection.
Another parenthesis. Food and place have also been linked mentally on certain occasions. It's a reason why I like bold flavors and Indian cooking in particular - they tend to transport me. I have several strong memories of getting mental images of eastern architecture/places I've never been while eating Indian food in New York restaurants, how flavors can form spaces or at least create a memory of a place one's never been. Whether it's synesthesia or just an overactive imagination, I couldn't speculate.
Now honestly, wouldn't it be cool if I or you heard music when we looked at architecture? C'mon architects!
