
Once back when I was a classical music snob I was very into string quartets and Charles Ives. I though string quartets seemed to contain a composer's real thoughts. One could still get pretty flowery in that setting, but there is little place to hide in such a small ensemble. one of the most transformative musical experiences I've ever had was listening to the Guarneri String Quartet play Janacek's second quartet (like Ives, Janacek only produced two quartets, and also like Ives, they are both exquisite) - I remember saying something like "it's like doing algebra while the plane is going down" in slackjawed afterglow.
Charles Ives is the most American of composers, and that meant something to me back in my snob days. Aaron Copland gets the limelight for ripping off Dvorack and Stravinsky and filtering it through the dirty rag of Tin Pan alley (ok, not really. Aaron Copland is a motherfucker of a composer when you start digging into his catalog, and a double motherfucker of a catalyst for music. One minor contribution of his was bringing a promising young Welsh violist by the name of John Cale over to study under him, but Cale soon fell in with a bad crowd and his musical career took a different turn) but Ives is the bomb.
Ives was like Walt Whitman, in that he was engrossed in the cosmic American experience, pulling in folk songs, leaving parts of them intact as to not betray his sources, while submerging the melodies in his own processes: a hodgepodge of Romantic technique and experimental ideas. He took an entrepreneurial stance toward the music of The people and that of The Spheres - gathering it all into a pile and saying now, what can I do with all this? In Ives, just like in Whitman, John Fahey, Bruce Springsteen, we can find an abstracted variant of who we are as a people.

The thing that is interesting about the progression is that the earlier, simple pieces have a tranquil air about them, a dreamlike lollygagging around the scales, where as they get more complicated, the melodies get confused, the mood is tainted with anxiety and occasional panic. The steps herein the expert end seem to be taken lightly, as if experience has shown that the ground might just give way if one stomps around as one did in their youth.

Take Oliver Nelson's brilliantly titled The Blues and The Abstract Truth. With a thesis statement like that, all emblazoned in Impulse! black, white and orange, this record should contain all the answers, and of course it doesn't even come close. Nelson delivers piece after piece of perfectly wrought jazz pleasentry in a variety of styles: "Stolen Moments" is penthouse cool and groovy, "Hoe-Down" is an awkward repositioning of the kind of cornball Appalacian themes Aaron Copland was much better at assimilating into his art, "Cascades" is an impressive bop workout. It's not until we get to "Yearnin'" where we get close to the blues and the abstract truth. The truth is there is no viable abstraction of the truth. We can talk around it, rub up next to it, but The Truth is an egg that proves to be hollow when we crack it.

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