Voice from the Past: Escape from Yugoslavia & My Grandfather’s Ominous Warning

I. Prologue My family on both sides were Germans from Hessen who migrated to Hungary in the 1720s, likely for economic reasons. Over a century later, Emperor Franz Josef I announced that he would allow Protestants to settle in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the region now known as Croatia. They moved there in 1865, but […]

Continue reading →

Strange Bedfellows: Jazz and Pop and Heinrich Schenker?

I. A Brief Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935) was an Austrian musician, composer, and most notably, music theorist whose ideas about analyzing and explaining music were groundbreaking and successful. Along with other theories, like Allen Forte’s “Set Theory” and Arnold Schoenberg’s “Serialism” (two mathematically oriented theories of analysis (Set Theory) and music composition […]

Continue reading →

Music and Evolution: Hearing Math, Seeing Sound, and Other Unanswered Questions

Music and Evolution:  A Brief Overview The evidence presented in the research on music and evolution, beginning with Darwin himself,[1] focusses largely on music’s purported ability to support “mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion,”[2] language development,[3] and other things. The prevailing evolutionary theories about music follow Darwin’s lead—they are predominately sociological, cultural, […]

Continue reading →

A Tale of Two Genres: The Surprising Similarities in the Development of Jazz and Classical Music

Jazz and classical music are two of the most monumental achievements in human history. Together, they encompass a range of expressive capability that is simply astounding, giving voice to the human experience from centuries past to the present and in doing so, enriching our lives immeasurably. This is more remarkable when one considers that they […]

Continue reading →

Jack Hues and the Muse: The First Thing You Need is Music

In the world of rock and pop music, the most successful musicians and groups tend to emerge in their early 20s with a burst of creativity that few can sustain past a handful of recordings. Unlike in classical music and jazz, where musicians and composers continually develop and evolve well into old age, rock musicians generally […]

Continue reading →

The Touch of Your Lips, Part III: The Essential Touch in Jazz Piano

It would be nice and tidy if the development of tone color as a primary in jazz piano matched its development in the other instruments, but that is not the case. From early on in jazz’s history, composers and bandleaders like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, and others were focused on the different tone […]

Continue reading →

The Touch of Your Lips, Part II: Touch and Tone Color in Jazz Piano

  As mentioned in Part I, tone color took on a prominent role in classical music in the 19C. The Romantic composers like Wagner, Strauss, Berlioz, Chopin and many others were, I think it is fair to say, somewhat obsessed with it. The composers before them were certainly aware of tone color, but it was […]

Continue reading →

The Touch of Your Lips: The Colors of Jazz Piano

The idea that pianists are able to create different tone colors and different timbres on the instrument has been passionately discussed for well over a century. For some performers, the sound can be a musical identifier on par with a fingerprint, which is a strong argument for their ability to coax a wide array of […]

Continue reading →

New Rock Vistas: The Gaze of Future’s Past

Rock is Dead? Long live the Hip-Hop King? Not so fast—while it is true that Hip-Hop/R&B have surpassed Rock in sales in the US, sales are probably not the best measure for the health of an art form. Sales figures measure popularity and revenue, which occasionally, but not often, coincide with innovative artistry. Perhaps it […]

Continue reading →

FraK on “All About Jazz”

Happy to announce that some of my articles are now being published at “All About Jazz,” which is one of the finest jazz resources on the web. It’s been a “go to” for me for many years, so really an honor for me to be a contributor there. Here are the first articles: Cold Fusion […]

Continue reading →

Hot Fusion II: U.K.’s First Album “U.K.”

Prologue: In the second part of this series, I laid out my criteria for what would constitute a fusion of jazz and rock that remained true to both styles, which, in my definition, means that the resultant music would have to appeal to both rock and jazz fans, which is not an easy task. Steely […]

Continue reading →

We’re All Minimalists Now: The Ghost of the Monastery that Haunts the Modern World

A Brief History of the Minimalist Aesthetic Minimalism is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a style or technique (as in music, literature, or design) that is characterized by extreme spareness and simplicity.”  Musically speaking, this translates to a few characteristics common to most pieces: Slow-moving or static harmony, Small number of repetitive and simple rhythmic figures, […]

Continue reading →

Hot Fusion I: Steely Dan’s Aja

Hot Fusion I: Steely Dan’s Aja I ended the first part of this series with the question that prompted these articles: “Why is there so little music that genuinely fuses two styles together and does so in a way that maintains the integrity of the stylistic contributors?” I could have phrased in differently by asking […]

Continue reading →

Cold Fusion: The Search for the Jazz/Rock Unicorn

Part I: A Brief Stylistic History The fusion of different styles of music has been an explicit goal of many musicians in the 20C. In the early part of the 20C, many classical composers like Bela Bartok, Aaron Copland, Maurice Ravel, and Claude Debussy were interested in incorporating early jazz and ethnic folk music into […]

Continue reading →

New Rock Vistas: MCC, Part II, Interview with Martin Persner

Martin Persner kindly agreed to an interview for this article, which follows as Part II of a two part series on MCC. ASF: What is the musical background and training of the members? MP: Most of us are self-taught but we were brought up in more or less musical homes. Me and Arvid (my kid brother) […]

Continue reading →