Musically that means choosing sophisticated pop-jazz narratives that adhere to a rigid structure and bowing down to the masters: Gershwin, Ellington, Berlin et al. Lyrically it involves committing to songs that profess a bedrock belief that things last, including passionate love.
I have nothing against songs without conventional buttons that emerge from the action and are then folded back into it, but this Jazz Age narrative deserves better than portentous solos called "You Cannot Live Forever," the lyrics of which consist largely of the title repeated ad infinitum, or instrumentals with monikers like — I kid you not — "The Gatsby".
Some of the choreography, performed by dancers who may also be seen on Broadway and with the Ailey troupe, drew on every jazz-dance cliché and familiar jazz-dance narrative in the book.
But applying the junkie-jazz-musician narrative to Kalaparusha's story is too easy, and ultimately rings false.
Another powerful early narrative – jazz as the sound of modern life: futurist-primitive noise-music that conquered the world – has proved difficult to sustain as jazz styles have rewound towards the past.
CONTRADICTIONS By Alfred Corn Copper Canyon Press ($20, hardcover) From "New York Three Decades On" Jazz cuts through narrative nostalgia -- Louis Armstrong reinventing Storyville on someone's chrome transistor up the platform that late August I stepped off the train.
Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra The bassist Marcus Shelby, who was once a member of the Los Angeles band Blacknote and now leads the Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra in San Francisco, has taken the idea of the narrative jazz suite from Duke Ellington (via Wynton Marsalis, whose work his strongly resembles) and built his own large-canvas works, rich in American history and jazz history.
Director Spike Jonze jazzed up the narrative in 2002 with Adaptation, a story about the perils of adapting such a story into a film.
This is narrative as jazz improv, each refrain exploring a new melody or theme.
The scores, one by Bjork, one by Craig Armstrong, did not move or interestingly handicap Ms. Kelly-Fiero's stretching movement style, and she did not seem to have decided whether to come down on the side of abstract jazz dance or moody narrative.
