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Jean Genet’s The Maids |
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Improvising on The Maids & Giant Steps - A director’s note by Konarak Reddy Giant Steps, the jazz standard by Coltrane. This amazing and complex progression sets up functioning dominants (The dominant chord is the V chord. And functioning means that it resolves to the I chord) much like the Christian Amen in church. The V chord creates tension and then resolves to the I chord, which emotes rest and peace and completion.
Improvisations on the V chord can carry notes outside of diatonic harmony or the parent scale, which creates tension. Eg b5, #5, b9, #9, +11, b13, #13 etc. Curiously, in Bar 3 of Giant Steps the Eb is the I chord, the home ground for the previous Bb7 dominant V chord. But as the progression continues, it functions as the bV substitute and can be treated as the dominant V of the following bar. D7, which can be treated as the I chord, in turn becomes the next V going to the fifth bar with G as the I. This same progression is repeated in bars 7-9, but transposed to the scale of Eb. B, the bV sub for the V chord F7, resolves to Bb, the I chord, which in turn becomes the V chord for the next bar where Eb is the I chord.
Thus there is a constant shifting of the home ground…Suddenly this peace created, this security shakes beneath you and becomes illusory and unreal. This is interesting to play on, especially when the point of rest suddenly becomes the place of tension and explosion. It feels as if the ground you are standing on, suddenly appears shaky and crumbles to the next point, which similarly falls. It is a constant change of scales, emotions and game playing as the I chord, or the home, is never really there and falls away under you. Improvising on this has to done with the fun and irony the piece entails; yet occasionally one has to take the progression seriously to create in the listener a feeling of a roller-coaster effect.
Genet’s The Maids is similar. In the 1930s, two maids - Christine and Lea Papin - murdered their employers by tearing out their eyes and then mutilating the corpses and bathing one another in the blood. This horrific scene and the images involved must have intrigued Jean Genet because, in the 1940s, he wrote The Maids .
Genet colored the bizarre psychology of women who may be capable of murder, with the improvisational quality of a child's game of dress-up and make-believe, and further shrouded it all in the veil of ritual and ceremony. What we are left with is not only a chilling tale, but also a compelling journey through the moments that precede destruction.
It is serious theatre for serious theatre lovers. It is exploration and game playing at its subtle best and you never reach home till the end! It is a challenge improvising on a piece like this. It is not simple to hold artistic integrity, emotions and mental logic in tight rein. These pieces are not for the weak and easy. Attempting Giant Steps or The Maids, attempting to improvise on them lays bare the artist, his/her emotions, his/her thinking processes…Check the integrity of the subtle way the ground slips away just as you reach home! Funnily, it is just this quality that makes Giant Steps so similar to The Maids. For in this progression of thought, the home does not feel safe, thereby creating a feeling of falseness, thus leading to game playing and the juggling of emotions and then the juggling of the intensity of emotions.
Art is mellifluous and sometimes can be brilliant and also tremendously hard, just like life. There are no short cuts.
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