AI Blues

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While composers and performers are two separate breeds in classical music, jazz musicians are often one and the same. All it takes for them to earn a composer credit is to write out an original on a lead sheet. So, too, are they composers when they make up their own music on the spot by improvising.

Yet jazz has had its share of full-time composers, of which Maria Schneider and Matthias Rüegg are prime examples in our time. Add to that list Darcy James Argue, a pianist by trade who lets his music speak from the page rather than from the keyboard.

At 49, the native Vancouverite has made a name for himself in the Big Apple and beyond over the last two decades. Back home in Canada, he started on trumpet, but switched to piano for lack of ability as a brass player. Fast-forward to the early 1990s when he arrived in Montreal as a music major at McGill University, a steppingstone to his stateside move to pursue his master’s at the Manhattan School of Music.

To be noticed in the jazz mecca, aspiring jazzers have to earn their stripes by doing plenty of sessions; full-time composers, in contrast, must find another way to gain acceptance. As important as jamming is, that is only half of the story; the other half involves the social skills needed to build networks and recruit interpreters committed to another person’s vision.

On that count, Argue has been very successful. His band, Secret Society, a 16-to-18-strong outfit first put together almost 20 years ago, is a testament to this. Bolstered by its debut album of 2006, Infernal Machines, the band got its first big break four years later by appearing at the Newport Jazz Festival.

To date, Argue and his “co-conspirators” (as he likes to call them) have released four albums, last year’s Dynamic Maximum Tension (Nonesuch Records) receiving considerable media coverage—so much so that it was shortlisted for this year’s Grammy Awards in the Best Large Jazz Ensemble category, albeit excluded from the winner’s circle. In the week after attending the gala, Argue took time in his busy schedule to share a wide range of insights during a video conference, speaking not only of his music but issues of concern to him as a global citizen.

Hope in Dire Times

Much of his music, it must be noted, is informed by current events and trends. Yet his purpose is not to advance any political or personal agendas. He leaves that up to listeners to entertain whatever connections they may draw between his art and the topics striking his fancy.

“We live in pessimistic times,” says the composer, “and the past few years have been very unsettling for the world, music included. Just look at how big tech is pushing AI on us as a substitute for human creativity. So many people are climbing on that bandwagon now, some to the point of embracing it wholeheartedly—a disheartening prospect, to say the least. We, as artists, have to push back on that.”

Regarding his own take on the album, Argue says: “Before even writing, I started to search out things that would instill optimism in me, where one feels a sense of agency to take independent action rather than going along with big tech’s narrative. Nothing is more aberrant to me than the notion of machines being able to replicate human creativity.”

As diverse as the 11 pieces on this twin-CD set are, each one is dedicated to a person whose life has impressed the composer in some way, visionaries like Buckminster Fuller and Alan Turing, jazz geniuses Duke Ellington and Bob Brookmeyer (a mentor of Argue), Cab Calloway and Levon Helm, even the flamboyant actress Mae West, all individualists in his view. It is their single-mindedness that touches him, something to inspire us all to stick to our guns rather than being told what to do.

A Blue Masterpiece

Of the works, the next-to-last track Tensile Curves is the pièce de résistance. Clocking in at over 34 minutes, it is Argue’s most ambitious composition to date. While its dedicatee, the Duke himself, may seem almost too pedestrian, Argue has taken on this towering icon of jazz history in a singular way.

Paul Gonsalves, Duke Ellington

It all started with a commission from Vancouver’s Hard Rubber Orchestra to write a half-hour piece. He chose Ellington because of his significant body of long-form pieces. Of them, Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue stands out, its notoriety forever enshrined when tenorman Paul Gonsalves blew 27 choruses before an ecstatic crowd at the Newport Jazz Festival. As famous as that 1956 rendition is, the original version from 1937 was what Argue zeroed in on, that one more tightly focused on the composition itself, the Diminuendo part. As to how the piece turned out, Argue claims to be very proud of it. As time-consuming as it was, he was helped in his chore by proceeding to what he calls pre-composition, a tactic he learned from Brookmeyer.

“It’s important to explore first,” Argue explains, “which is what pre-composition is about. You just write things down for their own sake—a set of pitches, chords, intervals, a bass line—and submit them to various compositional devices to generate your material. Not only does this help me overcome that fear of the blank page, but I am more productive that way, which is required given my hectic schedule.”

And a busy man he is. Notwithstanding the logistics involved in organizing rehearsals for his crew, Argue must contend with three teaching assignments—two in New York (Manhattan School of Music and the New School), the other at Princeton in neighbouring New Jersey. On the composition front, Argue was hard at work in the spring preparing for a joint project between l’Orchestre national d’Île-de-France and guest vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, an opportunity that will reunite composer and singer, heard on the album’s closer, Mae-West: Advice.

This summer, Argue and his cohort hit the road, first at the Ottawa Jazz Fest on opening night, June 21, for an exclusive Canadian engagement, then to Europe for appearances at the North Sea Jazz Festival in Holland and another in Rome. Further afield, the composer was awarded a commission by NDR Bigband in Hamburg, its première set for March 2025. While not on his front burner at this time, there’s no shortage of current-day topics to choose from, and he’ll probably get his juices flowing with some pre-compositional work.