In fact, the poetry comes precisely from its focus on the stuff of music, what for McCabe were the eternal verities of harmony, structure, momentum, and cohesion.
But as he moved from his relatively reserved early work with Miles Davis to the much wilder My Favorite Things and, shortly before his death, to the challenging free jazz of Interstellar Space, his music shed traditional Western harmony, structure and rhythm.
It built on some of the best lessons of Charles Mingus and Bob Brookmeyer, not only in harmony and structure but also in momentum, in moving a piece forward.
Whatever others thought of Wagner's vocal writing and ponderousness, none could deny his control of harmony, dramatic structure, and orchestration.
There are tons of young jazz saxophonists out there pursuing current ideas of harmony and structure and rhythm, but he has something rare going for him: he has a sound.
He's clearly spent some of the interim thinking more about harmony and structure than hooks: these songs, passive-aggressive as they may be, contain strong major-to-minor movements, irregular shapes, contrary motion between voice and guitars.
Kalifactors, led by the pianist Albert Sanz and the saxophonist Robert Stillman, moves warily and wittily, more or less doing away with the mainstream jazz harmony and structure of the 1960's; Mr. Opsvik, a bassist, writes tunes full of incredibly catchy little ideas.
Mr. Fuller, once a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, was part of both the post-bop mainstream and its passage (in the 1960's) into expanded harmony and structure; Mr. LeDonne is a high-demand pianist in the New York straight-ahead jazz scene.
For 2009 he is finishing a second violin concerto for the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra; working on "Kommilitonen!," a politically engaged opera for students at the Juilliard School; and "thinking hard," he said, about two separate orchestral scores that he knows will both be symphonies — Nos. 9 and 10 — because "I can hear the harmony and structure even at a distance".
There are no final cut rules about aesthetic in harmony of structures with their environments, the preferences of people are statistically unified through certain principles.
He could hear the harmonies, the structures, the mood changes.
