Charles Ives and Jazz — Notes from the Ives Society
- Eric Hofbauer
- Jun 1
- 5 min read
In 2024 I was invited by the Charles Ives Society to participate in two events: a solo lecture filmed at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, where Charles Ives’s studio has been painstakingly reconstructed, and a panel discussion titled ‘Improvisation and Ives’ alongside Bill Frisell, Phil Lesh, Ethan Iverson, Jack Cooper, and David Sanford, moderated by musicologist Judith Tick. It was one of the most stimulating musical conversations I have had in years, and I have been thinking about it ever since.
These are some of the ideas I brought to those conversations, expanded and written down.
Why Ives?
I came to Charles Ives through my mentor at Oberlin, Wendell Logan. One of his famous sayings when the big band was going off the rails in rehearsal was "sounds like some Charles Ives in here". He said that enough to inspire me to check out the Unanswered Question in the library so I could get the reference. I got it quickly. Turns out Wendell was a big fan of Ives too and helped cultivate my relationship with the Ives repertoire. The most overt Ives expression in my work was the Prehistoric Jazz project — my series of jazz quintet arrangements of landmark 20th century works. Volumes one and two covered Stravinsky and Messiaen. For volume three I chose Ives’s Three Places in New England, and in doing so, elevated my relationship with Ives' language both from an improvisers conception as well as from a composer/arranger perspective.
The obvious connection between Ives language and jazz improvisation is melodic fragmentation (in jazz parlance, quoting or riffing): Ives used vernacular American music — hymns, marching band tunes, folk songs, parlor music — as raw material for large scale composition. Jazz does the same thing from a different direction, that of spontaneous improvisation. Both traditions take the music of everyday American life and find in it the seeds of something profound through various forms of transformation and re-imaging. Kevin Whitehead, writing about the Prehistoric Jazz series for NPR’s Fresh Air, described it as situating ‘the last century’s classical music and classic jazz in the same modernist continuum.’ That is exactly right, and Ives is the figure who makes that continuum most visible.
 | “Ives’s appropriation of plantation songs, military marches and other vernacular sources is itself jazz-like. And Three Places, inspired as it is by Revolutionary and Civil War monuments as well as natural scenes in and around Ives’ native Connecticut, amounts to a meditation on America’s past and future — something about which jazz has quite a lot to say.” — DownBeat review of Prehistoric Jazz Vol. 3 |
Polytonality and Simultaneous Realities
Ives’s most distinctive technique is the simultaneous presentation of multiple musical realities — two bands playing in different keys marching toward each other, a hymn tune emerging from inside a dissonant cluster, fragments of memory colliding in real time. This is not so different from what happens in a jazz ensemble when the rhythm section implies one harmonic center while a soloist pushes against it, or when a collective improvisation produces moments of unplanned convergence that feel more organized than any written score.
Jazz musicians have always operated in multiple harmonic and temporal realities at once. We just usually call it tension and release rather than polytonality. The insight I kept coming back to in my work on Three Places in New England is that Ives understood music as the documentation of experience — not the idealization of it. Experience is not monophonic. It is full of competing signals, overlapping memories, the past intruding on the present. Jazz improvisation at its best captures exactly that quality.
The Panel: Improvisation and Ives
Sitting in conversation with Bill Frisell, Phil Lesh, and Ethan Iverson about Ives’s relationship to improvisation was a remarkable experience. What struck me most was how each of us had arrived at Ives from a completely different direction — rock, jazz, contemporary classical — and yet found in his music the same things: the embrace of contradiction, the insistence on the vernacular as a legitimate artistic language, the willingness to be weird in the service of being true.
Frisell talked about Ives’s use of familiar tunes as a kind of democratic gesture — the idea that music everyone knows belongs to everyone, can be transformed by anyone. Lesh brought the Grateful Dead’s perspective on extended improvisation and the communal experience of music-making. Iverson approached it from the theoretical side, examining how Ives’s harmonic language anticipates post-bop developments that wouldn’t arrive in jazz for decades.
My contribution was the specific argument that three-part counterpoint — the relationship between melody, harmony, and bass in Ives — maps directly onto the jazz ensemble, for example, the rhythmic displacement techniques Ives used in his piano music are essentially what bebop drummers developed independently fifteen to twenty years later. There is a deep structural kinship here that has nothing to do with influence and everything to do with two traditions working on the same American narrative of contradiction, of freedom, of individuality through their own music cultures, timelines and experiences.
What It Means for My Playing
Working on Three Places in New England changed how I hear American music. Ives was born in 1874 in Danbury, Connecticut — and comes of age in a world that produced ragtime, blues, and the earliest jazz. He was not influenced by those traditions in any documented way, but he was shaped by the same cultural environment, the same collision of European classical training with the messy, plural reality of American vernacular music.
When I play Jimi Hendrix or Abbey Lincoln or Joni Mitchell through a jazz ensemble lens — which is exactly what EHX does on Tongues / Hope Language — I am doing something recognizably Ivesian. Taking music that means something personally and culturally, subjecting it to serious musical transformation through a personal artistic language/vocabulary, and trusting that the transformation reveals rather than obscures what the music is really about.
Ives did not compromise between the vernacular and the serious. He insisted they were the same thing. That is the most important lesson I have taken from him, and it is the one that most directly shapes how I approach my work as a composer and arranger.
The Lecture and Panel
Both the solo lecture filmed at the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the panel discussion ‘Improvisation and Ives’ with Bill Frisell, Phil Lesh, Ethan Iverson, Jack Cooper, and David Sanford are available on the Charles Ives Society YouTube channel. If you are interested in any of these questions I strongly recommend watching the panel — it is one of the most genuinely fun musical conversations I have been part of.
The Prehistoric Jazz series — volumes one through four covering Stravinsky, Messiaen, Ives, and Ellington — is available on Bandcamp and all streaming platforms such as Spotify and YouTube.
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