Nefertiti
Nefertiti is one of the seminal tunes in the jazz lexicon – for me. It puts forth an abstract vision of line and harmonic color and relationship, which at the same time is coherent, and shifts with every hearing. This is possibly why Miles chose to just play the thing over and over again as the title track on “Nefertiti”, rather than solo on it – the tune has its own internal energy and impetus.
Wayne Shorter, the composer, accomplishes this through a combination of overlapping repeating melodic figures, which at the same time are rendered against different combinations of background harmonizations. The harmonizations themselves are quite abstract, linked more by common chord colors and subtle implied harmonic relationships. It’s a bit like a classical piece by Anton Webern – short, complex, yet coherent and complete.
Perhaps no surprise I feel this piece represents the potential for a Kandinsky, which came from the same era as Schoenberg and Webern. Nefertiti is a jazz tune which embodies some of the aesthetic principles the Blaue Reiter artists were aspiring to at the time – an art that was freely expressive, relied on its own internal structure to compose a style, yet which still organized itself to some degree based on classical principles of line and color, placed in entirely new contexts. It is impossible for me to improvise otherwise to Nefertiti as well – it DEMANDS that the player put him/herself in a state of harmonic and melodic freedom, with only the chord color and melody fragments to guide them. If one can enter that space, and FEEL ones’ way through the fragments (very similar to how Kandinsky talked about painting), something quite extraordinary emerges: a FREE, yet STRUCTURED style! Nefertiti and Kandinsky both unlock this world for me. They force the issue, as it were – you MUST put on a different set of eyes and ears to go to them, one which is free of expectation other than to enjoy whatever associations present themselves, and to travel on their journey WITH them.
It is also true that Nefertiti, like Kandinsky’s geometrical paintings, invites you to free associate objects in ever shifting, kaleidoscopic combinations. It is the figures that unify, that generate form, through the mind’s “spiritual” (sic Kandinsky) sense of association and reflection. Ultimately we are cast upon our own aesthetic resources to make sense of it, and as in a mirror, that process is exposed to us – we are shown our own thinking. Thus the reward for jumping into a world devoid of form is a gift back to ourselves of self-perception, self-awareness, and ultimately of self-created experience. These works encourage us to create WITH them, to define meaning moment to moment. In this way “abstract” art may well be considered among the most honest and inclusive art forms. The medium IS indeed the message!!
The objective in improvisation is to imagine the painting, musically in ways that Kandinsky possibly did visually. Kandinsky was synaesthetic. He heard colors and saw music. Here the tune is broken up into fragments to correspond with the wealth of shapes, colors and directions in this complex work. At this phase of Kandinsky’s career (1912 to 1916 or so) he was delighting in the new discoveries of pure color, shape and structural abstraction – of the new vocabulary he was developing to free the “sounds” of visual images from previously limited use and context. I’m seeking to push a degree of musical abstraction alongside the visual elements. The actual melody – the ‘head’ – of the song does not appear until 2/3 of the way in, and ends the piece. If I’ve done my job right you should hear the composition as just an extension of all the energies that came before. I’m sure one could represent the ‘deluge’ in a more intense and ‘stormy’ way, but trying to compete with everything going on in this work seemed a bit too unbalanced to me. Let the artwork dance in our minds, and give it a relatively friendly musical background. Yet if one focuses on the music being improvised, even though it has gentle parts, it’s fairly jagged and free-form style are truly modern in and of themselves.
