When Jazz And Not-Jazz Converge

For the second time, I saw Dirty Projectors in concert last night. And I couldn't help thinking about how much the show reminded me of the music of Guillermo Klein.

Hear me out. I know I've been harping on about this Klein fellow a lot lately, and I also know I'm not the first to have had this thought. I also don't know if Klein has ever seen Dirty Projectors perform, or if lead singer/composer Dave Longstreth has ever heard of Los Guachos. But after last night, it's clear to me that on musical terms, they would sit quite well on a bill together.

Dirty Projectors, for those unfamiliar, is a rock band, and an idiosyncratic one at that, bristling with herky-jerky passages, R&B or reggae borrowings and three cascading female voices. (It's also won a fair amount of beyond-"indie" acclaim for this weird stuff, which is both notable and incidental.) Guillermo Klein's music is chock full of remarkably similar individual signatures, though it clearly could be assigned to the category of Latin jazz.

I contend the two bodies of work converge at more than a superficial level. (I'm using the word "converge" as Lawrence Weschler might, he of the book and contest of uncanny, perhaps-more-than-coincidental similarities at McSweeney's.) I'm wondering if you jazz fans ever listen to pop, rock, classical, "world" music, rap, etc. and think: "I know something in jazz, an entirely different genre (and/or social world) of music, which reminds me of exactly that!" Where are your convergences between not-jazz bands or performers and jazz ensembles or musicians — and what do you make of them?

 

Perhaps the most salient of the connections between Klein and Longstreth is their penchant for hockets, the old device where two or more voices alternate to form a single melody line. You see it especially in Dirty Projectors songs like "Gimme Gimme Gimme" (deep within the song), or as an important part of Guillermo Klein charts like "La Última" or "Miula" (the end section).

But there's also the fact that both composers like to experiment with time signatures, and don't shy away from 3/4 or 6/8 patterns. Longstreth likes to disguise his three-beat meters with lots of syncopation, like in "Temecula Sunrise," which also has a 4/4 chorus; Klein likes superimposing four on three, or two against three, or even 7-7-7-3 across six (don't ask). The end results usually feel natural, at least when you see it executed live; it's abundant on Klein's new album Domador De Huellas, especially on songs like "De Solo Estar."

Klein's new album also re-interprets, sometimes radically, the music and poetry of Cuchi Leguizamón. Longstreth made a full-length record scoring his misremembered recollections of the hardcore band Black Flag's Damaged. There's something in how both composers demanded some sort of rebirth out of their source material, how both "make it new."

And there's the issue of singing. Klein loves human voices both as instrumental textures and prominent centerpieces, especially those of females who are much better at singing than he is: Luciana Souza, Claudia Acuña, Carme Canela, Liliana Herrero. At the same time, he takes to the microphone himself, finding a way to be affecting in spite of his deficiencies. Longstreth is no vocal powerhouse either, but has developed a highly individual technique, incredibly melismatic and piercing, which gets his vision across. And currently, Dirty Projectors features a trio of great female singers who both solo and provide ethereal textures: Amber Coffman, Angel Deradoorian and Haley Dekle.

There are several other similarities: their penchants for damaged, overlapping minimalism; the roles piano (Klein) or guitar (Longstreth) play in their compositions; the way they write for groups of specific people in mind; the fact that all those groups have great, anchoring bassists and drummers. But I'll stop with the emphasis on the fact that they both like to tinker with conventions a lot — with all the stop-starts, metric play, meaty beats, offset melodies and forced dissonances — with the goal of making it seem natural. Often, in both cases, it actually works.

And again, I invite y'all to contribute your own sonic connections. Does the tight songcraft of Deerhoof remind you of Booker Little's well-structured writing at all? If you could distill the weird folk of Holy Modal Rounders or Joanna Newsom into piano miniatures, would you get something like Ran Blake? Doesn't the huge toomp of vintage Kanye West beats, combined with his ability to actually structure songs, remind anyone else of the impeccable swing plus organized riffs of old Basie? (Sacrilege, I know, but I can't think of many Kanye productions from, say, 1999-2007 that aren't musical.) Beirut vs. Tiny Bell Trio? Big Daddy Kane's spillover virtuosity vs. Johnny Griffin's? Tortoise vs. Claudia Quintet?

Where do you see convergences, intentional or not, between jazz and not-jazz? Do elaborate.