Thanks for sharing your work. In the examples you so generously linked here, I unfortunately find very little evidence of any engagement with the formal or structural conventions of jazz, beyond the level of kitsch. Or, rather, “jazz” is, at the present historical juncture, perhaps kitschy anyway (formal stagnation, cultural obsolescence, etc), so perhaps to invoke it as a compositional identifier is indeed appropriately conventional. If your work is indeed engaging with kitsch forms in earnest, then that’s okay. However, this is not necessarily clear, given that you appear to believe your work as demonstrating literacy of and fluency with e.g. chord-scale relationships indicative of ‘jazz’ theory. Though I would disagree, given that its harmonic content—at least present in the works you’ve shared here—is quite low-level in complexity: i.e. I-V, I-♭v, I-♭iii, etc. Its texture and harmonic rhythm is often homophonic or isorhythmic (due to use of ostinati that solely comprise the aforementioned intervals, or a simple i-iii-V arpeggiation ostinato, etc)—whereas nearly 100% of so-called jazz from James P. Johnson to Warne Marsh to Cecil Taylor to Weather Report (the genre accommodates a very wide swath!) is polyphonic and contrapuntal. As you know, the fundamental principle of so-called jazz improvisation is emergent harmonic tension-and-release, achieved through voice-leading, chromaticism, intra-tonic modulation (e.g. chromatic mediant movement). (This is even present in relatively “static” harmonic environments found in the work of Coltrane post-'59, Davis post-'69, et al.) Quantizing scale and chord structure to be grounded as symmetrical strongly delimits the maintenance—or, better, adaptive extrapolation and mutation—of this principle. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, the rhythmic content of your work is devoid of syncopation, hemiola, clave, microrhythmic and pulse-stream modulation, complex hypermeter, etc.—in other words non-grid-based rhythmic morphologies. (cf. Benadon (2009) for a formal description of some of these morphological characteristics).
I’m not trying to appear like the Jazz Police or something. I realize that to invoke words like “convention” and “tradition” is potentially tiresome and stodgy. fwiw, I find the neo-con strain of Jazz to be abhorrent, which only serves to hamstring and suppress potential innovation (not to mention erase a lot of important past innovations in the music beyond The Golden Era). And your work appears to me to exactly the sort of formal innovation that folkloric musics like jazz need, through its novel use of contemporary and sophisticated instrumentation (modular synthesizers, which have a similarly folkloric tradition). But my intention is merely to clarify (for myself and others, hopefully) the function of ‘jazz’ in relation to your work. I apologize if I appear hectoring or pedantic, because this is not my intention—I hope my comments are received in the spirit of mutual respect and seriousness with which we approach music.
