Andre 3000’s Piano Sketches Album— If You Can’t Say Something Nice, Don’t Say Anything At All

LEARNING HOW TO THINK ABOUT MUSIC

You may have heard about the controversy surrounding hiphop veteran Andre 3000’s album of piano sketches. If you’re online a lot, you may have seen pianist Matthew Shipp’s rant about the album. If you haven’t seen it already, I’m including it below. (Matthew Shipp has some music on bandcamp, and I cropped the photo below to include a reminder about that.)

Here’s the rant. I’m putting all of it here, but as with Andre’s piano sketches, you can get the idea from just a little bit of it. I’ve read the whole thing a few times, and it’s not exactly packed with surprises once you get past the beginning.

so a friend called me up and mentioned that Andre 3000 has a piano album out--i was like what . I checked it out on youtube -- my impression of it. I think it is complete and utter crap -horrific-god awful insipidly wretched nothing . oh my fucking god this is some atrocious shite --- is he some type of fucking asshole ? is he a complete and utter dilletante ? I could go into detail about why each cut is stillborn --but why bother --it does not even deserve the attention of a critique it is so dreadful . the guy is not a pianist -that is the beginning and the end of it --- what an ugly piano sound -- lets not even talk about telling a story with harmony ---sounds like he listens to a bunch of music gets a couple of gestures in his head --sits down in a stream of consciousness and gets at some gesture for a few bars of something that he has not internalized -and barely knows on the most superficial level and then he loses the thread--of course there is zero composition going on in the improvisations --no language to speak of just a few cliches in his head that he can't actually play the cliche but he hits and tries at it until he peters out quickly --- wow -- he is so horrible at playing harmony --so many horn players that piano is not their instrument play so much better --- this sounds to me like pure fraud ---- what a lack of respect for the discipline by someone who in my opinion is a complete asshole for doing this -- it is depressing that this garbage will get any attention because he has a name and fame --- there is nothing refreshing about the naivety of it --it is just downright dreadful and awful--true fucking crap --insipidly wretched nothing.

I’m not going to do a hit piece on Matthew Shipp’s hit piece. Aside from the harsh words, I think Shipp is making a crucial point about the music industry, and it’s a point that really ought to be up on billboards.

I’ll make the point in my own words, not his— we have acres of brilliant music improvisors today, doing things that both connect with and subvert the largely unloved jazz genre. And Shipp, one of the absolute best, a master who’s represented in my collection by a dozen records, jolly well ought to be miffed that mainstream coverage of music treats him as if he doesn’t even exist. And the attention Andre 3000’s album is getting, in the light of Shipp’s neglect, is nauseating.

Here’s a little bit of Shipp, his piece “The Multiplication Table.”

The first two minutes are all piano, and that’s the part that’s most germane to my essay. But please feel free to listen to more, as there’s much to savor in the rest of the track; when the bass and drums come in, they’re not just any bass and any drums. It’s William Parker on bass, and Susie Ibarra on drums and percussion, and both of these people are enormously creative. If you’re a fan of older jazz, you may hear these artists and be surprised at how much you NOTICE what William and Susie are playing. It doesn’t feel like a pianist “backed up” by a “rhythm section.” It’s a very interactive trio performance. (Listening note: try to find a situation where you can really hear William Parker’s bass. I’m listening to it now on junky earphones that don’t have much bass, and when you miss William Parker, you’re missing a lot.)

If you focus mainly on the early solo piano part, the contrast between this performance and what you get on Andre’s album will be quite dramatic.

Here are some things to listen for in Shipp’s playing:

🧜‍♀️He’ll play a chord, and then he’ll switch to another chord. If he returns to the original chord, he’ll voice it a little differently this time. This means he’ll play a variation on which notes he’s using, leaving one or more out, adding one or more.

🧜‍♀️He’ll play a chord, and repeat it, but with some other variation. Maybe it’s louder, or softer this time. Or he’ll hold it longer, letting it trail off. But then he might surprise us and bring it back.

🧜‍♀️He’ll play a chord, and then break it into pieces, and add some internal motion. Things will move within the chord.

🧜‍♀️He’ll play a chord, or a few chords, and then play a thinner and faster-moving line that sounds like a response to the chords. He creates, at times, the feeling of a conversation, even before the other two musicians come in.

🧜‍♀️He’ll play an idea, and repeat it a few times, but then a repetition will be slightly different in some way. Or an idea that stays in its lane for a while will suddenly hop a divider and plow into oncoming traffic.

🧜‍♀️In general, he gives us rhythmic variety, and rhythmic surprises. This gives a repeated chord the impression of physical motion, and it feels very organic. Chords move around, and a collection of notes appears to travel from one place to another.

Here’s the way I tell students to think about chords: chords are a vertical entity, meaning their personality appears to mostly be about simultaneous color. And they can be very beautiful and evocative, outside of a horizontal context. But I recommend thinking of them in terms of their horizontal character: this means how they relate to time (rhythm) and how they are part of a story that continues before and after them (melody).

Now, here’s Andre’s piece, “and then one day you’ll…”

Andre will play a chord, often in eighth notes. You’ll get that same chord, played exactly the same way, eight times in a row. Then he’ll play a second chord, the same way, eight times in a row. Then a third chord, the same way, more or less. Maybe some subtle adjustments, but mostly it’s the same thing over and over.

Then, maybe a new group of chords. But they’ll be played with a similarly repetitive approach.

Then he might play a short line, a little different from the chord textures he’s been playing for 30 seconds.

Now, it’s back to some stuff we’ve already heard, played pretty much the same way as before. Then a chord surprise; we haven’t heard this one before. Then it’s back to some familiar material.

A new set of chords comes in, eventually, and that set is played repetitively too. Then he holds the last chord for a while, until it dies off.

Then we get some more familiar stuff again. Maybe not for quite as many times as before.

Eventually, he ends the piece by playing a really low note and a really high note at the same time. Then you get that unpleasant staticky sound you hear on an iPhone recording when someone has picked up the iPhone and hit “stop.”

Now, Matthew Shipp refers to this music as “horrific.” That’s pitching it a little strong, for me, but I know what’s bugging him. Aside from the lack of invention with harmony— the chords don’t tell a story, as Shipp points out— they’re also played with no rhythmic spark. Amateur piano players tend to find a chord and just play it over and over, with no feeling and with rudimentary plodding rhythm, and that’s what you get here.

But I don’t think Andre’s ideas are bad, and if you read between the lines of Shipp’s screed, he seems to base his dismissive position on the sloppy execution, lack of chord knowledge, and inability to develop the material. Fair enough, but nowhere in Shipp’s comments is a serious claim that the basic ideas are inherently awful in some absolute sense. He does say that Andre is trafficking in cliches, but the bulk of his criticism isn’t about that. In fact, I suspect that Shipp, a musician for whom improvisation is paramount, understands that music is largely found in the artist’s ability to build outwards from small ideas.

I’m a music teacher, which means I teach people to make music. And my teaching philosophy is based on my belief that people can learn about all those ways to build outwards from whatever you have at the beginning.

That doesn’t mean they will. I find that many people resist my efforts to teach them basic music fundamentals. You might be surprised to see how many music students don’t want to learn how melody works, or how you can learn to build a melody from a small set of materials. You might be appalled, as I am, to see how many aspiring songwriters don’t want to learn about chords.

But I maintain that Andre’s basic material is fine, and could have yielded a more interesting and better executed result, if he’d put more work in.

If you listen to Shipp’s introduction, and then listen to Andre again, it’s possible to imagine Andre spiffing up his handful of modest ideas with internal motion, and returning to a chord and changing it a little, making it bigger or smaller, or louder or softer.

You can also imagine him playing the short melodic line that he returns to a few times, and varying it a lot more, making a little story of it. He varies it slightly, and I like that. But it’s one of the most interesting ideas in the piece; I’d like to hear him develop it. That he didn’t do.

Developing a musical idea— making it grow and change and move— isn’t an intuitive thing to do, for most people. Amateur improvisers mostly play something a few times, and then move on to something else. Serious improvisers can play something and then approach it from a different angle, or take it apart and put it back together a new way. It took me a long time to learn how to do this, and I had the advantage of teachers explaining various methods to me. And they pointed me to recordings where composers could be heard using various devices to develop musical ideas into a richer landscape. Over time, it sunk in, and now I can’t get rid of it even if I wanted to.

If Andre had taken some lessons, from Shipp, or from Cooper-Moore, or Myra Melford, or Vijay Iyer, or Jamie Saft, or Marilyn Crispell, or Craig Taborn, they could have showed him a hundred ways to take his own ideas and develop them. Even a few lessons from me (I’m not anywhere near their level) would have helped him learn some useful tricks and devices. And even though I don’t have the rhythmic vocabulary of those luminaries, I could have given him enough rhythmic thinking in an hour to keep him busy for months, if not years.

And he could have learned some good stuff even without taking a in-person lesson, but instead just watching a YouTube video like this one. There’s a lot of dubious advice for musicians online, but this particular lesson is really brilliant; it gives you a highly accessible method for finding interesting new chords. You could learn this method in about ten minutes.

If Andre had taken any of the chords from his piece and applied the method from Jeff’s video, he could have really gone places. He would have been telling a story with harmony, doing what Shipp mentioned in his tirade.

And I would not have written this essay.

FURTHER RESEARCH:

Good interview on substack where Shipp gets a chance to discuss the album and his feelings about it in a calmer context.

The Good and Evil Session: An Interview With Matthew Shipp on André 3000

ADMIN: attn,

Harvey Gold

. Please consider this essay to be, at least in part, a development of one of my own small ideas: my ambivalence about Chopin. I’ve thought about it, and while I think there was a grain of value in my original view— the idea that I prefer composers who aren’t so much about the piano— I’m not sure that this position ultimately has much nutritional content, and I’m increasingly skeptical about whether I even continue to feel that way. So, I’m recanting.

Okay, now I need to take a nap. Recanting really takes it out of me.