Friday jazz spotlight (and format change): Tigran Hamasyan

 I think I'm going to handle this a little differently.  Time for some changes.  'Cuz.  I have been throwing up music clips with nothing more than some fun with titles and subtle or not-so-subtle references to politics, or my own posts.  Jazz in particular, though, is a weird genre.  There is a high barrier to entry, in econo-jargon, and much of what I post is either obscure or challenging, even by the standards of a strange genre like jazz.  I think what I want to do for a while is something that I have occasionally done, which is provide some guidance.  What I plan to do is spotlight someone interesting, and give some advice on how to listen.  Pop music is lowest-common-denominator dance music, background music, and other such meaninglessness, and one needs no explanation because there is little if anything to explain.  Jazz is different.  So, I'll post some piece by an artist and some commentary about what is happening, why it is interesting, and how to listen to the unique and perhaps challenging things the artist is doing.  Maybe this will work.  I dunno.  Maybe it will just suck up more of my time and be un-fun, but for a while, I'll ramble about the artists grabbing my attention.

For today, let's start with Tigran Hamasyan.  Tigran Hamasyan will challenge your understanding of time in music.  If you are not familiar with time signatures, they refer to beats and measures.  You almost certainly know what a waltz is.  Three beats, emphasis on the first beat.  ONE two three, ONE two three.  That's a waltz time.  Simple, and "unsyncopated," meaning that the emphasis comes on the first beat rather than on any unexpected location within the measure.  A lot of classical, and Western music more generally is in 4/4 time.  Bor-ring.  The first jazz musician to play around significantly with different time signatures was Dave Brubeck.  "Take Five."  That one was 5/4.  That weird rhythm was because there were five beats rather than four.  Brubeck recorded his classic album, Time Out, including that track, in 1959, and jazz took off from there with different time signatures.

And now we have Tigran Hamasyan.  The first vital element to understand what he's going to do here is that he's going to give you crazy changes in time.  I love math rock, but he's going to make the craziest math rock musicians look like they're stuck in pre-algebra, and I'm not even going to play the craziest of his pieces.  Listen to the shifting rhythms.  You'll note this from where the emphasis comes.  You are kept off balance by the fact that the emphasis keeps coming in unexpected places, and he keeps changing where the emphasis comes.

The next thing to note is that while Hamasyan is nominally playing jazz piano, the piece could almost pass, compositionally as... metal.  (Checks notes... Um... Yeah.)  I am not a metal head, but Hamasyan is drawing on a style of metal called "djent."  I can't really listen to most of the stuff, which tends to have these wretched, guttural screams instead of this thing called "singing," but the guitarists play interesting things on the low end.  Listen to the chords.  Those are metal chords.  He's playing heavy metal, and then improvising in weird, changing time signatures on top of that.

Hamasyan does more than that.  The melodies themselves draw on Armenian folk music (he's Armenian), and basically, he's doing more than I can explain in a blog post.  Maybe, though, some explanation can make it at least somewhat comprehensible.

I dunno.  Maybe I'll keep doing this.  For now, here's Tigran Hamasyan, "Levitation 21," from The Call Within.