By John Chmaj
Stuart Davis once remarked that he liked to paint to jazz, and Earl Hines was among his favorites. Once when he was painting to Hines, he realized he had been painting to the jazz improvisation! Here is an opportunity to reverse and repeat that exercise: to ‘paint music’ to Davis’
To do so requires that we enter into the energies, patterns, flows and correspondences in the work. The title, “Hot Stillscape for Six Colors”, gives us guidance here. Davis has created form through the focus on a relatively discrete set of colors and shapes, which he combines in his unique style of hinting obliquely at real-world objects while managing to use them to generate their own independent focus and energy (“Cubism on acid”). The work is actually quite musical – there are obvious melodic ‘themes’ or fragments:
- Dots of various staccato shapes and rhythms
- Wandering lines
- Planes that intersect, broken up and integrated by their own lines and color schemes
- The six colors themselves, pulled together into an ingenious set of non-repeated uses within and across all forms
Using the tune, “All of Me” is more than a musical pun – given it comes from Hines’ era. It’s a great vehicle to encapsulate improvisation on Hot Stillscape:
- There are six primary chord colors
- Cmaj, E7, A7, D7, G7, F/Fmin
- Each color cycles through relatively equally in the form – it’s not just about sitting on one key then moving to another
- The form is in motion all the time
- The form is short, and simple, so the background framework can operate clearly, much like a good ground for theme and variations
- The tune can easily impart a playful, expansive approach, even though it’s also clearly of the Swing era
The trick is to compose an experience that holds together as a whole, both as a coherent, flowing improvisation (a la Hines) and as a representation of ones’ experience of the painting. My approach is to work with the patterns or correspondences one at a time – as if one was enjoying playing with the dots, planes and shapes. At the same time there’s a challenge not to make the improvisation too symmetrical – Davis’ work is full of quirky jumps, surprises, discontinuities. Everything operates on everything in Hot Stillscape – there’s no rest, no center, it’s just what it says it is, a “hot stillscape.” So, it should be performed that way, and swing in its own crazy way.