Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica by Courrier Kevin

Author:Courrier, Kevin [Courrier, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Continuum US
Published: 2007-03-23T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Music from the Other Side

of the Fence

You can physically drown in paint, you can mentally drown in music.

—Don Van Vliet

The quest for pure freedom that Trout Mask Replica sought came out of nowhere in the world of rock and roll. The ground it travelled, however, had already been tilled in the other arts. For example, its roots lay in abstract expressionism, where painters applied their paint gesturally and nongeometrically to the canvas with speed and force, to convey depth of emotion through sensation. The pure spontaneity in the work of Franz Kline, Hans Hoffman, Jean Dubuffet, Willem de Kooning, and especially Jackson Pollock, cut through the limits of realism by suggesting that the expressive method of painting was just as valuable as the painting itself. As a movement, originating in the 40s, it would soon become fiercely popular in the visual arts world of the 50s.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a number of classical composers were growing weary of tonality and wishing to dispense with the adherence to a single key as the one accepted foundation for musical composition. In response, Arnold Schoenberg developed a twelve-tone system in which all twelve notes in the chromatic scale were performed before the initial note was played again. Anton Webern offered his own interpretation of twelve-tone serialism by using it to create an abstract sparseness in his pieces. Igor Stravinsky became inspired to take music back to a pre-romantic era. From there, he could explore form rather than content, ultimately leading him into neoclassicism and interpreting the music of the past. Composer Edgard Varèse wished to clear the decks altogether by reinventing western music at its core. He explored it as a scientific construct of sounds, creating a whole new world of music yet unheard.

As for American jazz music, many of its practitioners already considered it free, built on improvisation, soloing, and liberated voices calling out to one another. But by the 50s, there were some who claimed it wasn’t free enough. “Free jazz” became a radical deviation from the form that challenged the conventional chord progressions and time signatures at its foundation. It erupted out of the untimely death of Charlie Parker, who opened the door for innovators to rethink the legacy they inherited. Pianist Cecil Taylor, for instance, decided to bring the ideas of Schoenberg and Webern into the land of Bud Powell and Horace Silver. In 1957, he appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival with an abstract atonal sound that, as he put it, “imitate[s] on the piano the leaps in space a dancer makes.” Those leaps began in a lonely loft where by night, after returning from his dull day job delivering sandwiches, he would hold “imaginary concerts” of his music, envisioning an audience that could one day hear and appreciate it.

Ornette Coleman, a Texas-born saxophone player who eventually sojourned to LA, took his own leaps into space with his quartet by playing jazz music that abandoned form altogether. When he appeared at the Five Spot

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