Flirting with Coherence

Jazz musicians love puns. Here’s an example: “Just You, Just Me” was a song from a 1929 film called “Marianne,” which was adopted by musicians as a jazz standard and reinterpreted over the years. In the 1940s, pianist Thelonious Monk composed a song with harmonies adapted directly from “Just You, Just Me” but with a new melody, which he titled “Justice.” This kind of oblique reference between “Just Me” and “Just Us” and “Justice” is commonplace, but Monk went a step further when he later renamed his composition “Evidence.” Of course, if you knew the tune had been called “Justice” before, the punning logic would need no explanation. These sorts of stacked associations, though, lead to some of the most interesting puns.

There are different flavors of puns, but one of the most common in jazz is what might be called a “recursive pun,” which Wikipedia defines as “one in which the second aspect of a pun relies on the understanding of an element in the first.” This describes not only the multistep logic behind “Evidence,” but also the rationale for a host of other classic compositions titles: Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation” was followed by Sonny Rollins’s “I Know,” Miles Davis’s “Tune Up” preceded John Coltrane’s “Countdown,” “How High the Moon” was reimagined as Coltrane’s “Satellite,” and so forth.

The practice of writing a new melody over existing harmonies, as Monk did with “Evidence,” is generally acknowledged as a major innovation of the bebop era, which encompasses the music of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and others in the decade after WWII. In academic parlance, these compositions are known as “contrafacts.” The story goes that jazz musicians enjoyed using American pop songs of the time as improvisational vehicles—primarily for their harmonic frameworks—but sought to avoid raising performing and recording expenses with royalty payments. Instead, they managed to play these same songs by writing contrafacts. Punning titles weren’t just inside jokes for musicians, though; sometimes, as in “Evidence,” they referenced their antecedents to create a point of tangency between the older music and the newer.

On a hazy afternoon last summer, I sat listening to John Coltrane with a friend in Brooklyn. This friend, who is a drummer, and I had gotten together to play some duets and before we played he put on a 1958 Coltrane record called “Soultrane.” Aside from being a very swinging record, the album is significant because in its liner notes, the critic Ira Gitler coined the term “sheets of sound.” The phrase is tossed around here and there in jazz history classes, but in practical terms it refers to Coltrane’s rapid-fire sequences of notes, which cascaded in groups of regularly ascending or descending tones.

You can hear this approach on any number of late ‘50s and early ‘60s Coltrane (e.g.,“Blue Train,” “Stardust,” “Giant Steps”), but my friend wasn’t as interested in the “sheets of sound” as he was in Trane’s rhythmic precision. As Coltrane played run after run on the loping medium-tempo track “Good Bait,” my friend mantrically repeated, “He’s playing what he means. He’s playing what he means!”

I was a junior in high school when it started.

Every Saturday morning, I would leave my house in suburban New Jersey and take a train into Manhattan, transfer to the subway, and make my way over to the Manhattan School of Music on the Upper West Side. It was there that I became a musical glutton.

One of the privileges of attending the music school’s pre-college program for high school students is complete access to the music school’s library. For two years, my weekly ritual was a walk down along the long series of stacks to the CD retrieval area, a small room separated by a waist-level divider (not unlike a drive-through without the car). I would hand the library worker—usually a somewhat homely female conservatory student, cruelly nicknamed “The Chub” by my peers—an index card with call numbers for the five CDs I’d be taking home.

Can you remember the last time somebody trolled you?

If not, perhaps you’re not familiar with the word “troll,” as in the slang verb form “to troll.” This usage derives from another, narrower meaning of “troll” that emerged out of the proliferation of online chat rooms and web forums circa the ’90s, which Wikipedia defines as “Someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as a forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.”

As with other popular internet slang, trolls and trolling have migrated from the virtual into the real. It’s relatively common to hear of people “getting trolled” in everyday life, which I would define as being deliberately misled and thereby humiliated or made upset. Not all trolling is created equal: most trolling, like slipping a fake anonymous love letter under your roommate’s door on Valentine’s Day, is generally harmless. Other forms of trolling, however, can border on harassment and possibly be subject to legal action.