Sonny Rollins hilariously clenches his fist as he arrives to receive the 2007 Polar Music Prize. Photograph: Pontus Lundahl/AP
When I first heard Sonny Rollins, he made me laugh. Same thing had happened the first time I heard Thelonious Monk, and the two of them remain among my favourite musicians close on four decades later.
It wasn't that they played musical gags, paraded the superiority of their methods over ludicrously outdated predecessors, or made nudging ironic references to sources only an in-crowd would know. It was something about their casual determination to glorify the warped chord, hit the bone-shaking low note where the soft resolution was expected, to improvise on the cheesy song most hip jazzbos wouldn't touch. Their indifference to the usual regulations seemed irresistably and infectiously disobedient. It produces a laugh that's maybe more relieved and maybe more grateful than rib-tickled, but a laugh all the same - and a laugh about something that matters.
At the Bath International Music Festival's Jazz Weekend, running over the past weekend of May 25-28, the Italian pianist Stefano Bollani and the Norwegian accordionist Stian Carstensen demonstrated enough technique and musical sophistication to indicate they could have easily played a sublimely straight set of interpretations of much-loved works (from jazz, classical music, and much else) and had a misty-eyed audience swooning into their laps. Instead, they turned a lot of what they played into a slapstick routine. In the manner of those delightedly disrespectful music-lovers Harpo and Chico Marx, the technically awesome Bollani would accompany jaunty polkas with stagily genteel, shoulder-shaking fake laughter, or add a percussion of ferocious foot-stamping or slamming of the piano-lid. He would elaborately mimic classical-piano wrist flourishes or expressions of orgasmic rapture. Yet everything this pair played was exquisitely musical, to the last evaporating vibration. Far from undermining the beauties of the traditions they casually cruised through, they celebrated the love of music-making - of "playing" it in the broadest, oldest, and yet most childlike sense of the word "play" - that has made musicians pursue the art since the local venue was a cave.
This doesn't work for everyone. Getting back to Sonny Rollins, I've had plenty of discussions about him with devoted and knowledgeable jazz lovers irritated by what they hear as Rollins's detached, sardonic, "ironic" aspect, somehow an inferior quality to the explicit profundity of his devotional, spiritually-focused follower, John Coltrane. On the Bath weekend, some listeners might well have felt more emotional about the monastic and prayer-like ambient music of Norwegian pianist Christian Wallumrod's delicate quartet, for instance, than Bollani's and Carstensen's virtuosic horseplay.
But "comedy" had a lot of other meanings before it came to be defined as the art of raising a laugh - like testing the endurance of stereotypes, challenging authorities and received wisdoms, or simply resolving chaotic beginnings as happy endings. The balletic flourish, the haunted gaze into the distance, doesn't necessarily point to a more fundamental truth being in the air than the gale of laughter does.
But in a world of disorder, misunderstanding, and premature, bad ends, is that just a cop-out for the musical artist seeking to vibrate to the sounds of life as it's really lived?
