Emil Richards / Don Ellis

Re: the above subject -

Since I have seen a few questions revolving around this, I am always more
than happy to supply essentially useless information .

>Re: Microtonal Jazz. I have seen - but not heard - an LP by Emil Richards
>with a title akin to _Emil Richards and his Microtonal Blues Band_. It was
>in Erv Wilson*s record collection and he pointedly stopped me from further
>inquiry.

There were two LP's, both still sitting in my closet:

- "Journey To Bliss - Emil Richards and the Microtonal Blues Band"
(Impulse Stereo A-9166)

- "Spirit of 1976 - Emil Richards and the Microtonal Blues Band / Live at
Donte's"
(Impulse Stereo A-9182)

To be upfront about it, these are not excursions into microtonal composition
per se; Emil and company just used microtonal instruments, virtually all of
these percussion (and mostly made by Emil, I think) to add colors to the
music. They had been influenced by Hari Har Rao, who had recently begun
teaching Indian music in the LA area at the time. Most of the expansion of
the jazz idiom came in the form of odd meters. They were also being
influenced by the Maharishi himself (with LP #1 having a particularly
striking oil painting of him on the back), and more than a certainty being
influenced by burning vegetation of an illegal nature (except for medicinal
purposes, of course).

You probably don't need to check them out as microtonal resources, but if
you want a retro insight into the late 60's (when I believe these were
recorded) they are just the ticket. Side Two of LP #1 is "Journey To Bliss:
A Meditation Suite in Six Movements". Priceless stuff, I assure you.

Emil was turned on (hmmm...) to the Indian thing by Don Ellis, and for a
while they had a group called the Hindustani Jazz Sextet. About that group,
I know nothing. Maybe Daniel Wolf knows - seems like he was a California
boy back then...

Peace and love, flower-people!
Cheers,
Jon
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Jonathan M. Szanto | If spirits can live online . . . . . . . . .
Backbeats & Interrupts | . . . then Harry lives in Corporeal Meadows
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Lorenzo
Check Bill Sethares' paper, "Local consonance and the
relationship between timbre and scale" J.A.S.A.
94(3):1218-1228. It deals precisely with your question of a
consonance measure. BTW, consonance is frequency dependent, so
an inversion of a chord will not normally have the same
consonance as the root position. We've applied the technique
to historical harpsichord tunings and our paper should be
accepted for publication in JASA any day now.
John

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Lorenzo,

I don't think your method will lead you into any serious errors, although it
seems like the various inversions of a given chord will often differ a lot
less in consonance than fundamentally different chords. Also, I often prefer
more dissonant chord voicings on guitar over more consonant ones, if the
musical context befits them. Of course, for a six-string chord, you have 15
individual values for dissonance to add up.

Since you are comparing intervals to their inversions and not to
fundamentally different intervals, the results I posted for you were
perfectly useless to you. Fortunately, my theory tells you that the
certainty with which a tempered interval will be perceived as its most
likely just interpretation is proportional to the denominator of that just
interval (in lowest terms), and a factor, related to the degree of
mistuning, which will be the same for all inversions of an interval, and
thus ignorable for your purposes. So, interpreting this certainty as
consonance, we can say that the perfect twelfth is twice as consonant as the
perfect fifth and three times as consonant as the perfect fourth. The major
tenth is twice as consonant as the major third and 2.5 times as consonant as
the minor sixth. The major sixth is 1.666666667 times as consonant as the
minor third or minor tenth. However, the increased consonance of wider
intervals comes at the price of a thinner harmonic texture, which is not
always desireable.

For other intervals, the ratio-interpretation will vary according to
inversion; contact me privately for more details. Also, if I'm treating the
intervals as non-interacting and simply adding values for each interval in a
chord, I'd feel better about adding dissonance levels than adding consonance
levels. To be continued . . .

-Paul


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