Dan Weiss is a drummer and composer from New York. He plays in many different band- settings, but what caught my eye was his instrumentation of his large ensemble, with whom he released his album “fourteen” (released in 2014 and with fourteen band members).
Next to some standard jazz instruments like drums, piano, guitar and double bass and different horns, he also added a second pianist, a percussionist, as well as a harp and three vocalists.
I didn’t know Dan Weiss’ music before starting my research, he was brought to my attention by a former teacher of mine, David Grottschreiber. I was excited to find another contemporary jazz composer using multiple voices in his music.
Weiss treats the voices as an equal member of the large ensemble (maybe also because this band isn’t a traditional big band instrumentation, where it gives more freedom to the composer to work the instruments into the music in a more open way).
Auditory summary of the album
I would like to summarize this piece of music in a few words before going deeper into the analysis of specific moments, because the whole album is basically one long piece, with no apparent endings or beggining, yet it is split up into seven "tracks" (the pieces themselves are called Part 1 to 7). But often, the parts drag into each other, for example the melodies heavily resemble an old part in the beginning of a new part. When looking at the scores I bought off Dan Weiss' website, I also noticed that either not everything is notated out exactly as it is played on the album, or the seven parts of the album are split up differently in the scores that I got.
This made me want to write a very short summary of what one can hear when listening to the album and paying close attention to the voices. After this, I will also go into the scores and look at some specific examples there as well.
Part 1: There is only one voice being used, first one vocalist alone with the band, then the other vocalists join the unison melody throughout the piece. The voices are definitely the main melody, while the saxophones play kind of a counter-melody to the voices. The voices sing everything on "ah" without a lot of attack and very fluid. Towards the end of the piece, the voices are also added as a doubling of the trombone voices (overdubbed) so it sounds like there are a lot of voices stacked onto each other.
Part 2: It takes a long time until the voices come in, first they are just one piece in a bigger, freer part, then they start working as a section, singing bells, choirs and unison melodies. The piece ends with a clapped background of the voices in shifted rhythms (resembling "Clapping Music" by Steve Reich) and a perpetuum of a vocal cyclic rhythmic outro. This piece is seamlessly followed by Part 3.
Part 3: Part 3 starts off with the voices still in the shifted rhythm pattern, while the acoustic guitar is playing a solo-melody. After, the voices are used as a unison and a three part section again, inbetween, Weiss himself recites nonsense rhythmical lyrics over a drum rhythm. On the three part backing voicings, the band enfolds in other backings. Then a free collective horn solo ends the piece, without the vocals involved. This is one of the more clear "endings of a piece". The improv ends aprubtly, and the new piece is rung in with a soft piano intro.
Part 4: After the short intro, there is an instrumental part with an odd groove in the background and the horns and the guitars building up a dissonant soundscape with rhythmic eight note patterns in the background overlaying the drum beat. The voices are not featured in this piece.
Part 5: We hear a very long trombone duo intro, then some freely played melodies woven together, where always two to three instruments double each other. The voices are used very sparsely, and in unison together. They then split up and double different instruments.
For this piece, the score is only the trombone intro, so it is impossible to show in the score of how the voices were used in this part. But it is clear that every instrument's melodic information stems from the melodies on that one page of the two-part trombone intro from the beginning of the piece.
Part 6: The beginning is still the voices in the old melodies of Part 5. A kind of „rock“ inspired piece, the voices are sometimes singing two voices, sometimes unison, giving rhythmical kicks as the only section backing the intro.The kicks are timed together with the drums, which is sadly not visible in the score, as the drum-part is never notated throughout all the scores. After a solo, the voices come back in the same kind of backing, but this time with horns added to their section. In this end part, where the tempo picks up a little and the drums are playing a heavy groove underneath a quite chaotic line from the harp, the voices are playing more steady backing kicks, again heavily reliant on the drum beat, where before they were scattered out in the also more random groove, this time, they are clearly singing the backings with the kicks of the drum. The ending is again quite clear here, the voices end in an extremely unnaturally high register, almost screaming.
Part 7: This part is a very slow, dark piece, with slow melodies, that weave into each other. There seems to be only two notes sung by the voices and played by other instruments. It is unclear how many vocalists are actually singing at the beginning as the blend is done very smoothly. Towards the end of the piece, one can make out two distinctive voices, also in register.
In the following pictures, I will showcase some of the more interesting moments in the album "Fourteen", where I like the use of the voices, and found them to be used creatively and in a new, fresh way.
Example 3 - this slideshow shows the cyclic rhythmical movement of the voices with the clapping in the background in Part 2/3. The voices come in one at a time, not with a fixed bar number but with approximate time indications for when who comes in.
On the recording, this excerpt is still in Part 2, but looking at the scores, they seem to be written on Part 3.
