Cubism
16 songs, 1h51m. Featuring Wayne Shorter, Dave Brubeck, Chick Corea, Shai Maestro, and more.
I was recently challenged to compile a playlist that is the closest audio approximation of cubism. This theme took more time than usual. If you’re ever at a cubist exhibition and happen to have your headphones with you, take this playlist for a spin. I’ll be especially curious to hear from you, listeners!
As a starting point I remembered a conversation I had with Shai Maestro a few years ago about Picasso: he said he was listening to Wayne Shorter albums while strolling around a Picasso exhibition, and he felt the two were a good aesthetic match. So I first went down on the Wayne Shorter path, and then it hit me: cubist paintings are compartmentalised, tend to have bold colour palettes and brush strokes, and most importantly, have something about them that may make the viewer slightly uncomfortable. (I barely scratched the surface with this analysis—happy to get art enthusiasts’ take.)
I feel I get the same combination—bold colour palettes and brush strokes, a bit of discomfort—when I listen to many classic jazz saxophonists. This playlist is centred around some of them (Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane, Tyrone Washington; and two contemporary ones, Oded Tzur and Nubya Garcia). But it’s not just the sound of an energetic saxophone solo that accompanies cubist paintings well. The long solos often venture outside our ears’ comfort zones, push the scales beyond the aesthetically pleasing to the dissonant, and return masterfully. All of the songs have a few minutes of dissonance which makes it a slightly less easy listening experience. Myself, I really enjoy indulging in the contrast between the theme and the dissonance, especially at live gigs (my absolute favourite concert experience so far has been the Shai Maestro Quartet such as this show, with Philip Dizack on the trumpet).
Cover photo credit: Juan Gris: Still Life with Fruit Dish and Mandolin (1919).
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Great! :-D Loved the analogy, and the selection...