I took a music composition class and my teacher proposed that jazz musicians were influenced by impressionist painters, but she did not go into any detail. I latched on to this idea and found it fascinating. Was it the fact that they blurred the lines and did not conform to the rigid standards of the day? Was Miles Davis even aware of Claude Monet? My teacher mentioned this concept several times. The last time she mentioned it, I challenged her by asking “How do you know this?” I might have caught her off guard, or she wanted to move on to other topics, because she did not give me an answer. Don’t get me wrong, she was a fabulous teacher and crammed everything from Gregorian chants to Sting into a one quarter course. We composed our own music and sounds for songs and movie soundtracks. I felt great respect for my teacher because she backed it up with some of the most incredible piano playing that I had ever heard. And maybe I shouldn’t wonder why she never answered the question. She planted the seed and now it was up to me to do the research. What do jazz musicians do that is different? Add extra notes to chords? Play odd scales and time signatures? There must be something to this.

I began my homework by visiting the De Young Museum in San Francisco for the Impressionist exhibits on loan from the Musee De’Orsay in Paris. This was the fun part. The first exhibit featured Impressionist painters Monet, Renior and others. The Post Impressionist exhibit featured Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec and others. Sure enough, there were some of those paintings that sometimes look better from far away than close up. There was a broad range of paintings even within the Impressionist style. Contrasting colors, evident brush strokes and dark next to light tended to elicit new, unknown emotional responses in the viewer’s mind and heart. We have seen many of these paintings over time, but one can imagine how unexpected these paintings were for people of that era. I came away still curious, entertained and inspired. Exactly what you hope for from a museum exhibit.

And now I needed some facts. These days, it’s pretty easy. Just google and voila! Below is what I found and my instincts were pretty accurate. I realize now that this relation between impressionism and jazz is probably common knowledge among scholars and maybe even among contemporary jazz players, but not so well known by the rest of us. If any of you scholarly types out there can add some more connections, I’m all ears. And I won’t cut mine off, like my favorite Impressionist painter.

impressionism
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music | 1996 | MICHAEL KENNEDY and JOYCE BOURNE | Copyright impressionism. Term used in graphic art from 1874 to describe the work of Monet, Degas, Whistler, Renoir, etc., whose paintings avoid sharp contours but convey an ‘impression’ of the scene painted by means of blurred outlines and minute small detail. It was applied by musicians to the mus. of Debussy and his imitators because they interpret their subjects (e.g. La Mer) in a similar impressionistic manner, conveying the moods and emotions aroused by the subject rather than a detailed tone-picture. To describe Debussy’s harmony and orchestration as impressionist in the sense of vague or ill-defined is to do them a severe injustice. Some of the technical features of musical impressionism included new chord combinations, often ambiguous as to tonality, chords of the 9th, 11th, and 13th being used instead of triads and chords of the 7th; appoggiaturas used as part of the chord, with full chord included; parallel movement in a group of chords of triads, 7ths, and 9ths, etc.; whole-tone chords; exotic scales; use of the modes; and extreme chromaticism.