EVERY GENRE PROJECT - October 6 - Chamber Jazz

Genre of the Day - Chamber Jazz

Album of the Day - The Colours of Chloë by Eberhard Weber (1974)

Far fewer genres are the triumph of individual labor than there are genres powered by a collective of musical minds working in harmony and synergy. Sure, I’ve covered the work of singer-songwriters and wandering bards like in Vietnam’s xẩm and Ethiopia’s azmari, but the bulk of genres are the synthesis of communal effort, like yesterday’s gondang or the Cayman Islands’ kitchen dance or simply rock. Even when an individual produces their own music, music is one of the most fluid forms of artistic transmission; all musical creation is indebted relatively directly to an artist’s influences and the pre-existing melodic and harmonic possibilities in their mind, which I’m not sure is an argument in support of or against copyright lawsuits as in the recent case that might shift the course of Latin music history. I’m leaning against them: who’s to say the claimants possess proprietary ownership over a rhythm that can be traced through centuries?

That’s all to say that chamber jazz deals with the question of the optimal nature of group musical expression, as jazz has always been a collective form made possible by the summative inventiveness of a few instrumentalists, though it’s been equally defined in terms of individual visionaries—as all genres are, really. Chamber jazz developed in the ‘70s, a decade that was as much of a wild west in jazz as the global economic system’s constant financial crises. Those phenomena have little correlation other than my mind mostly being geared towards midterms at present, but just as countries and their economic bureaucracies, jazz was shifting to new ideological modes in the aim of maintaining a creativity surplus. 

Chamber jazz developed in parallel to Third Stream, which began flowing in the late ‘50s as a synthesis of the greatest musical innovation classical music and jazz music could contribute. Though the two are often diametrically portrayed, scouring musical history reveals they had long been in kahoots. Chamber jazz, like classical chamber music that’d been developing since the 19th century, posited that a small, insular group of masterful musicians in a small space could play off each others’ genius and allow room for unrestrained improvisation. Chamber jazz leans towards the cooler end of the spectrum compared to modern creative’s freewheeling fervor, though it presaged the peak of interest in so-called ‘global’ music by a decade or so in engaging with classical and folk music across the globe and utilizing atypical instrumentation in the jazz setting like the tabla or cimbalom.

A Brazilian iteration of chamber jazz.

Between the fashion house and Chloë Sevigny, it makes sense that the iconically chic name would lend itself to such a musically jetsetting genre’s most renowned exploration of tonal color in bassist Eberhard Weber’s 1976 The Colours of Chloë. “More Colours” sets out to extend the listener’s auditory color spectrum in flush yet looming strings that surrender to Weber’s bass that moves with its own sitar-esque whimsy, flashing closer and floating away, previewing vignettes of new textures with juxtaposed piano pirouettes. “The Colours of Chloë” makes a nest for the bird-like whistling ocarina flute with exuberant drums and increasing synchronization within free expression. “No Motion Picture” does play out a bit like a feature film, oscillating through emotional tones as each instrumental character takes center stage. After a chilling stillness ushered by ethereal choirs and downcast strings, a musical motif that is recurring throughout the album weaves its way back in, speaking to the cyclical nature of musical expression that still manages to expand by virtue of time and the limitless tonal abilities of human instruments and their manipulation.