Mark Turner on "Hesitation Blues"
“For the last five years or so, I’ve just been trying to figure out: what is the blues and what does that mean to me? You know, you’re in school, you’re a jazz musician, you should deal with the blues and swing, but I think it needs to be personal and meaningful and have some kind of reference that you can touch and hold and do something about – because otherwise I think the blues can be banal. And I’ve heard it, I hate to say, done in that way all too often. And I actually believe the blues to be sacred, like a spiritual discipline, and it needs to be taken seriously.”
-Mark Turner
In describing the possibility of the blues being banal, I think Turner touches on a more systemic issue in jazz and jazz education: how we approach teaching and learning the music has shifted away from a personal approach with the ultimate goal of self-expression, to using “accepted” approaches and vocabulary that conform to a preconceived notion of what jazz – and especially the blues – should sound like. And arguably, this has fostered the banality that Turner alludes to.
Though this view can be perceived as inflammatory, it’s not meant to be. Given the shifts in what it means to be a music professional and the opportunities available to musicians today, and the shifting demands and expectations this places on young students and professionals, I believe it’s important to reassess the accepted model(s) of how jazz is taught in order to foster a shift back to personal creativity…which will be a topic for another post - this is about celebrating the brilliance of Mark Turner!
Turner has been one of the most studied tenorists of the past twenty years, so there is little that I can offer that hasn’t already been said. One of the foremost experts of Turner’s music is Kevin Sun, who in addition to contributing a foreword to Jeff McGregor’s collection of Turner’s transcriptions and essays, has written extensively about him on his blog, A Horizontal Search. Here is an entry where Sun offers an astute analysis of Turner’s playing over the blues (and playing in general), in which he references the cut presented here as a developmental milestone in Turner’s approach.
This recording of “Hesitation Blues,” off of the 1997 album Warner Jams vol. 2: The Two Tenors, featuring James Moody, though not as mature in conception as Turner’s recent output, still illustrates how he avoids banality to elevate his voice to be one of the most unique in modern jazz. Of note in this solo is Turner’s extensive use of the blues scale, though never sounding contrived doing it; as well as his creative lines that, though being rooted in bebop aesthetics and sounding familiar, are brilliantly conceived.
Please enjoy and feel free to leave comments. -BR
Solo starts at 2:05.
