The “Music” of Public Health

Never Stop II By The Bad Plus (Artist)

Audio CD (January 19, 2018) Number of Discs: 1 Legbreaker Records Run Time: 52 minutes $12.00 ASIN: B07991ZZVM

Kind of Blue By Miles Davis (Artist)

Audio CD (March 25, 1997) Number of Discs: 1 New York, NY: Columbia/Legacy Run Time: 55 minutes Price: $6.99 ASIN: B000002ADT

The Final Tour: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6 By Miles Davis and John Coltrane (Artists)

Audio CD (March 23, 2018) Number of Discs: 4 New York, NY: Sony Legacy Run Time: 221 minutes Price: $35.29 ASIN: B077ZCTV18 ADDIN EN.REFLIST

The Bad Plus has long been a favorite piano trio, performing since 2000 with pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson, and drummer Dave King. Their music is uniquely identifiable with sustained polyrhythms, memorably haunting themes, and allusions to rock and classical music. The Bad Plus now has a new pianist, Orrin Evans, and I was fortunate to hear the trio perform recently. Yes, the pianist is often the dominant driver of the sound of a trio, but the music was still unmistakably that of the Bad Plus, even though the music played was newly composed for the group’s most recent recording (Never Stop II).

STILL THE BAD PLUS

Why was the sound still that of The Bad Plus? What persisted across the old and new trios? The answer lies in what patterns we find as we listen to music. For me, the driving and persistent rhythms remained, the quirky themes were still there, and the visual spectacle was unchanged. Trained by a half-century of listening to jazz, I recognized these semblances subconsciously as I processed aural and visual data to find the critical elements of the music. Rhythm is central to jazz, and the rhythms of The Bad Plus are easily recognizable and at times forcibly generated by the piano. But the spare phrasing of melodies, sometimes a delicate relief from the driving rhythms, is also characteristic of their music. Jazz, even if fully improvisational, is performed by a team, drawing cues to play synergistically. The interactive dynamics of the rhythm section of The Bad Plus, King and Anderson, are remarkably coordinated after two decades of playing together. The notes fit together: quoting Miles Davis—“It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note—it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.”^1(p90)

THEMES AND RHYTHMS OF DATA

From jazz to public health: where is the analogy? For me, the analogy, and not so artificially posed, lies in finding the patterns in data generated by only partially understood processes: an ensemble of jazz musicians interactively improvising around a theme or the multiplicity of factors driving the health of a population made up of quite different individual members. In public health, we might start by looking at visual data displays and then move on to data analytics or perhaps to the tools of “big data.” The data of music can also be analyzed to find patterns. For example, Rafa Irizarry is a well-known Harvard bioinformatician. One paper from his dissertation, entitled Statistics and Music: Fitting a Local Harmonic Model to Musical Sound Signals, describes a statistical approach to analysis of musical sounds.² But, neither listening to music nor assessment of public health data can be reduced to analytical algorithms. We learn how to listen to jazz and bring experience and a tailored approach to appreciating a performance. Similarly, we approach data with expectations, a practiced eye, and a set of tools for finding patterns. We are looking for the themes and the rhythms of the data—the “music” of public health.

MILES DAVIS—KIND OF BLUE

If not already a jazz listener and thinking about becoming one, how do you start? By listening, of course, and The Bad Plus would be a good starting point. When pushed for one essential recording, my answer, which would likely be echoed by many, is the Miles Davis Sextet album Kind of Blue, recorded in 1959. The recording is considered a paradigm changer in its shift to modal jazz, with repeated chords rather than chord progression, and ensemble playing.³ Listen to the first track, “So What,” and appreciate the sustained repetition of the thematic chords. I discovered the album in 1966 and have listened to it countless times since. There is an underlying mystery and mood in its themes that never wane and, knowing the pieces, I have an expectation of what is to come. Kind of Blue is the perfect title for the music.

There are many recordings of the songs on Kind of Blue made by Davis with differing groups of musicians. The original sextet was spectacular: Davis on trumpet, John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley on saxophone, Bill Evans or Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Jimmy Cobb on drums. Only Cobb survives, and I recently heard him, at age 89, playing still-driving drums. Listening to the differing recordings gives insight into the inherent variation of jazz performances. There is a fascinating compilation of the outtakes of Kind of Blue; as the group records, Davis stops the performance after seconds or minutes. What was wanting from his point of view? In 1960, Davis toured Europe with Coltrane, replaced during the tour by Sonny Stitt on saxophone, and played many pieces from Kind of Blue. Previously hard to find and available on European labels, the concerts are now compiled in a CD box set: Miles Davis & John Coltrane, The Final Tour: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6. Juxtaposed with the 1959 recording of Kind of Blue, evolution is evident—an added edge to the playing of Coltrane and a more improvisational feel.

JAZZ AND FICTION

I offer other recommendations for getting started: Coltrane’s Giant Steps, Bill Evans’s Live at the Village Vanguard, Charles Lloyd’s Forest Flower: Charles Lloyd at Monterey, and any compilation of Duke Ellington’s orchestra (try Ellington at Newport 1956). There are books to guide new listeners; How to Listen to Jazz, by Ted Gioia,⁴ is among the best and has a reasonable discography covering the eras of jazz. Echoing Gioia, the author Haruki Murakami, who once ran a jazz club in Tokyo, Japan, provides a synopsis of what to listen for as he analogizes jazz and fiction and captures their common elements:

Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm [emphasis added]. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music—and mainly from jazz. Next comes melody—which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm. If the way the words fit the rhythm is smooth and beautiful, you can’t ask for anything more. Next is harmony—the internal mental sounds that support the words. Then comes the part I like best: free improvisation.⁵

Start listening, while reading AJPH!