The InterludePosters
Concert bills for the recordings that carry the thinking of Strategy Is the Making, each drawn from the recording itself.
- A companion to Strategy Is the Making
- 18 × 24 in
- Print-ready PDFs, sent by email
Each chapter of the book moves through seven recordings.
Each recording in Strategy Is the Making is a way of organizing time and attention under pressure, and each one is the thing the chapter around it asks an organization to learn to do. A quartet runs three tempos at once and stays one piece of music. A band regroups the same nine beats and turns a limp into a walk. A radio edit decides what survives of a song on its way to a mass audience.
In The Interludes, every record is drawn as a mark set at the size of a word, where position along the line is time and height is stress. These posters give those marks the scale of a concert bill, in the Swiss modernist manner of the 1950s and 1960s. The rhythm in each image is the record's own. The composition and the color belong to the poster.
01
Poinciana
Ahmad Jamal Trio
Argo · At the Pershing: But Not for Me · Chicago, 16 January 1958
An interior can be fully ordered and tell you nothing about the street.
Recorded live at the Pershing Lounge in Chicago, the trio plays quietly because all three parts are exact. Vernel Fournier keeps the rhythm recognizable while changing its sound, Ahmad Jamal leaves most of the room empty, and Israel Crosby does the work that makes the silences safe. The order in the performance is total, and nothing audible in the room announced that the trio was three years from a music that would abandon most of what it depended on. The poster raises the ordered ground as dark bars and lets the sparse events above it swell into discs that print through the bars and through each other.
02
Autumn Leaves
Bill Evans Trio
Riverside · Portrait in Jazz · New York, 28 December 1959
The lead belongs to whoever has something to say, and it can change hands inside a bar.
Everyone on the stand knows the melody and the harmonic framework, and within it the roles keep shifting. The bass sometimes leads, the drums sometimes make melodic statements, and the piano sometimes drops into pure accompaniment. The mono and stereo pressings of Portrait in Jazz carry different takes from the same afternoon, and neither one is the definitive take. The poster gives each register its own band of translucent ink and lets the bands cross, so the lead can be seen passing among them wherever the colors deepen.
03
Blue 7
Sonny Rollins
Prestige · Saxophone Colossus · Hackensack, 22 June 1956
Judge a probe by what comes back, because the intention read into a result is a guess.
On his first solo, Sonny Rollins works a compact figure, turns it, displaces it, and lets each variation propose the next. Gunther Schuller heard thematic development in it, and Benjamin Givan later showed that the figure was one of Rollins’s habitual formulas, audible on many of his other records from the 1950s. What a listener can hear survives the correction intact, and a probe is judged on the same ground, by what comes back. The poster keeps the figure on a blue field and moves its accent with each return.
04
The Drum Also Waltzes
Max Roach
Atlantic · Drums Unlimited · New York, 14 October 1965
Rhythm can be the content of a piece as well as its frame, and a drummer alone at the kit can supply the melody.
Alone at the kit, Max Roach plays a waltz whose placement of beats carries the melody. Asked about his solos, he spoke of design, of periods and question marks, and said each limb gave him a distinct voice. The piece became a standard that other drummers learned, because Roach composed it as a fixed piece. The poster draws each bar of the waltz as a struck drumhead, with the stress on its first beat.
05
Blue Rondo à la Turk
Dave Brubeck Quartet
Columbia · Time Out · New York, 18 August 1959
A rhythm people stop counting stops being seen as a choice, so decide which tempos to absorb and which to keep visible.
The meter limps for three bars and walks in the fourth: nine pulses grouped two, two, two and three, then regrouped as three, three and three. The record then sets that meter beside a straight four-four blues, and neither meter defeats the other. “Take Five,” from the same sessions, lets the listener stop counting, and “Blue Rondo” keeps the count audible to the end. The poster turns each bar into a row of blocks on a diagonal grid, with the long group in red, so the limp and the walk read before the count does.
06
Pillars
Tyshawn Sorey
Firehouse 12 · Pillars · recorded 30 and 31 July 2017
Deliberate slowness is a designed tempo, and some things are perceptible only at that rate.
Tyshawn Sorey’s octet work runs nearly four hours, and its sounds arrive slowly enough for their arrival to become audible. Silences extend beyond comfort and continue, and accelerated listening produces almost nothing. Pillars is not on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube. Firehouse 12 Records sells it on CD and as a download. The poster gives one event a field with room for many more, so the slowness becomes the image.
07
Lonely Woman
Ornette Coleman Quartet
Atlantic · The Shape of Jazz to Come · Los Angeles, 22 May 1959
Parts of one system can run at different rates when they meet at a few fixed points and listen in between.
Billy Higgins opens alone at a fast bebop clip, Charlie Haden comes in underneath him at a different rate, and Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry state the melody on top, slow and unhurried. No piano or guitar states the harmony or marks the beat on anyone else’s behalf. The players arrive together at the points that matter and are apart everywhere else. The poster gives each layer its own bar and its own rate, running downhill together.
08
The Girl from Ipanema
Stan Getz and João Gilberto with Astrud Gilberto
Verve · Getz/Gilberto · New York, March 1963
The channels that carry an innovation to scale select what survives the trip, and they alter its duration, language, credit, and meaning.
The album version opens with João Gilberto singing the Portuguese lyric, and Astrud Gilberto follows in English, at a session where she had not been booked to sing. The single edit removed the Portuguese verse, reduced the record to under three minutes, and reached number five on the Billboard Hot 100. Each channel that carries an innovation outward is a filter with criteria of its own. The poster draws the album as the outer ring and the single as the inner one, with the cuts left in view.
09
Peace Piece
Bill Evans
Riverside · Everybody Digs Bill Evans · New York, 15 December 1958
A ground that stays fixed lets the whole band tell a signal from a drift.
Bill Evans recorded “Peace Piece” alone at the piano, after the other musicians had gone. The left hand repeats one two-chord pattern throughout, and the right hand grows more restless above it, building denser phrases and venturing beyond the home key near the end. Small changes register as events because the listener has an unmoving reference to hear them against. The poster interleaves two sets of bars that keep the same length from top to bottom, and lets one blue bar run past the rest.
10
The Köln Concert, Part I
Keith Jarrett
ECM · The Köln Concert · Opernhaus Köln, 24 January 1975
Uncertainty becomes manageable when attention turns from the missing instrument to the instrument present.
Keith Jarrett, alone at the piano, played the Cologne Opera House on a smaller rehearsal instrument he had not asked for: out of tune, thin in the upper register and weak in the bass. Long stretches of Part I sit on rolling left-hand ostinato figures and two-chord vamps, which put weight into a bass register that could not produce weight on its own. A different piano would have produced a different hour of music. The poster stands sixty-six bars in a column, one for each minute of the concert, widest through the middle and narrow at the top and the bottom.
Each poster is designed to be printed at 18 × 24 inches.
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