False Dichotomy is a work that presents an evolution of jazz in a way that absolutely did not happen.

It started as an attempt to portray the evolution of jazz through a series of hallmark jazz musicians/composers, each having a movement dedicated to them. Ideally, it would’ve started with early blues and progressed through the big band heyday to the modern complexity of Joshua Redman and beyond. But this plan soon proved to be inaccurate for the resulting work.

Things started to go awry in the planning stages, as jazz (like any music) isn’t a really linear progression after a certain point, making it impossible to have a meaningful comprehensive history in only three short movements. The next roadblock came in picking the composers. I knew I wanted a simple 12 bar blues, a ballad, and a fast, complex finisher, but without specific composers to tie each movement to, picking the exact styles became progressively more fleeting. Nevertheless, I pressed on and drafted the piece, from whence I realized how far off base this music was from its intentions, and False Dichotomy was born.

The work is in three movements, with each one presenting a caricaturized style of jazz. “Hokey” emulates a 12-bar blues big band chart with an early blues intuition. With a simple head, solo section, and a soli, the movement embodies a lot of jazz stereotypes and clichés. The second movement, “Lyrical”, is a ballad utilizing chromatic harmony and expands the tonal language of the piece. Using more nonfunctional harmony, it presents a contrapuntal theme led by the alto with dialogue between the other voices. Then “Unrealistic” revisits a complicated blues form with a chain of dominants and hemiola to start things off in a very disorienting fashion before settling into a groove. The movement is structured in a rondo form that presents various keys and styles, with each variation progressively blurring the lines between the different themes and sections. In short, this movement presents a collective improvisation on the blues form itself.