ESSAYS
This section includes essays on various jazz subjects, written by a number of writers. Contributions are welcome. Writers interested in contributing are welcome to contact the editor by filling out the form in the CONTACT tab. Photographs to illustrate those essays are welcome. Readers can click on the INDEX button for a list of articles in this folder.
Paul Furniss
MINIMALISM AND JAZZ
by Ian Muldoon
January 27, 2026
What got me going on an internal mental rant yesterday was a comment about Andrea Keller’s pianism: “it’s just minimalism”. “Just” is what got my hackles hackling. Minimalism is a feature of Dr Keller, and The Necks, and Phil Slater and his works Immersion Lure and The Dark Pattern, and Miles Davis’s iconic Kind Of Blue. Mingus said complicated is easy, simple is really really hard. A piano string plucked by Keller in a particular moment, or a cymbal splash by Jimmy Cobb on So What (Davis) from Kind Of Blue (1959) or a brief clarinet solo by the late John McCarthy (1930-2011) are instances of musical minimalist magic. Of course there are multitudinous point picking possibilities with meaning and definition around the terms “jazz” and “minimalism”…