All Ages

Another point brought home by regular attendance at The Blue Whale: young people are capable of making great music, prodigies can sometimes live up to their hype, but it takes some old motherfuckers to make really timeless shit.

I myself was always an outlier without ever threatening to rise quite to the level of prodigy. I was also, if I don't say so myself, unusually level-headed about those kinds of things, and I generally got good advice and generally took it appropriately to heart. Where I and those I was immediately surrounded by failed, however, was in neglecting to accept college as a mere drop in the proverbial bucket of lifelong learning and evolution. Perhaps part of that was not knowing enough to see that four years was an inconceivably small amount of time in which to implement my conceptions, to say nothing of those I might have later. Being unusually facile at jumping through all the right hoops certainly hurt my chances of realizing this sooner. And yet the world, both within and without academia, seemed to no less than expect this from me and everyone else in the pipeline.

It took a healthy distance in both time and space from my college years for me to fully appreciate what a knot I had tied myself into during that time. It was a difficult, sometimes painful process to untie that knot. Once I decided that I could not possibly practice four hours a day without making unacceptable compromises in all the other musical areas that interested me, the physical dimension of brass playing became a major concern for me in a way it had never been previously, a double-whammy since I therefore had no experience dealing with it as such. Everything I knew about the tuba, myself, and the space where the two meet was based on a limber 20 year-old body and an even more voracious and self-motivated spirit. This has been its own adventure from which I am only now showing the smallest signs of emerging; even so, if it's possible to have been even slower to anticipate such changes in other areas, the conceptual area is just that place. It's hard to understand why I didn't stumble on certain ideas sooner...except that it's really not that hard at all. I didn't know enough, for one, but it's not just about knowing: doing matters too, and while it's possible to outpractice and outstudy your peers at an early age, I think it's much harder to accelerate the process of conceiving, realizing, curating, and reflecting, the process that drives artistic maturation not just internally but also in developing and understanding one's relationship to the world into which the work is to be released. And as any good constructivist would hasten to point out, even as I claim irreverence for such relationships to external forces, that in itself is a relationship I had better understand thoroughly before anything meaningful can come of it.

I have heard a number of young geniuses recently, players to whom I would be hanging on by a thread were I in their bands, and who are clearly much more than mere soulless technicians or stylists; and yet the old masters clearly have something more. They still have all the technique and vitality, but conceptually they are miles beyond musicians their children's age. And when you put it that way, who could really be surprised?

whaling oops

So...perhaps there's something about October, much as I claim it as Blog Month's rightful calendrical home, that makes it difficult for me to make good on the project's greatest challenge. Perhaps being cloistered in a big kid art school dorm, confined to the same 2 minute walks between front door, practice room, and library, actually presented a more manageable scenario for daily blogging than the life of a freelance musician or transitioning recent graduate. Whatev. This year in particular, if it's not already obvious, has seen the conceit of daily blogging more or less dispensed with anyway in favor of the mere illusion of it. In other words, I work on these things in large chunks and well ahead of time, then clean them up in a flash of light on days when I have nothing better to say and before dumping them on you'all. Today, though, in place of yesterday, I will write off the cuff.

Last night I went to the Blue Whale to hear the Mark Dresser Quintet. The leader likely needs no introduction, but the band might, and you'll be pleased to make their acquaintance.

Saxophonist Ben Schachter emailed me a few years ago after finding his way to my website while searching for jazz tuba players. This was my first chance to hear him play live. He is a burning player with a striking tone, bright but warm and filling the room at every dynamic.

I first made the acquaintance of trombonist Michael Dessen at the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute last year. I've since heard him at the Whale a couple of times. Crazy chops; a rare ability and willingness, for someone with such a strong, bright sound (he and Ben make for quite a tonally unified front line) to alter his tone with varying degrees of airiness; and he plays with an F attachment, which I wish more trombonists would consider in this kind of setting (truthfully we all know why they don't; Michael has the chops, though).

I have heard pianist Joshua White many times at the Whale. Do not miss the chance to hear him if he ever comes to your area. Trust me. Until now, I'd heard him only on standard material and in the company of peers, but he didn't miss a beat here either. It's kind of scary.

Drummer Kjell Nordeson, native of Sweden and current student in the Integrative Studies program at UCSD, tied the whole thing together beautifully. Dresser's music has more than its fair share of twists and turns, including metric modulations, and in these hands they were always musically effective. There was swinging, there was burning, there was math, and there was freedom.

To summarize, can't really overstate how nice it is to have music of this quality happening locally, affordably, and most of all, frequently. I'm more excited about live music than I've been in a long time. So I'm going back tonight. Catch you'all on the other side of that.

Living Beyond Style (for realz)

If there's one thing regular attendance at The Blue Whale has brought home to me, it's that the notion of being beyond style is deeper than the lip service nearly all of us living and working today tend to pay to it. That is to say that I have been hearing a lot of music there that very much reflects the image the rest of the country has of L.A. (slick, polished, resolved, catchy, technical), some of which I wouldn't otherwise be going out of my way to experience, but which has, generally, been so well conceived and executed as to transcend the limitations (as people like me tend to see them) of the styles in question.

The saying about "good music and the other kind" comes to mind here, though to get on a razor's edge about it (and really, Modernists, where else would we want to be?), it is a saying that, much as we love its utterer, skirts more issues than it addresses. Even from the unfiltered vantage point of an individual audient, such all-or-nothing evaluations paper over the nearly intractable complexity of the listening experience, comprised as it most always is of numerous "good" and "bad" aspects all at once. Such it is that a group like the Billy Childs Electric Band, which I caught recently, constantly threatens a listener like me with all the rhetoric of showbiz and a notable banality of pre-composed material, all while melting my face right off as a total musical package that ranks in the top 10 live music experiences I've ever had.

Indeed, Childs' compositions and keyboard chops alike are almost impossibly polished. In Minneapolis, we run people like that right out of town with behind-the-back shit-talking. They don't fit the narrative we've constructed for ourselves to inhabit, the one where we repackage all of our shortcomings as conscious musical decisions and deride anyone whose faults are less obvious, whose technical polish is laid on thicker than ours, and, most of all, who are more obviously stylists than innovators. I must confess to having fallen victim to the Minneapolitan mindset myself on more than one occasion, and that is to say that Minneapolis, though it is an admirably pluralistic and original place in many ways, is not quite as far beyond style as we'd all like to think. Style, as any professional musician learns quickly, is only slightly less political than sex; to be beyond it, then, is not so simple as merely refusing to talk about it.

To wit, it's easy to highlight the superficial commonalities between the Childs group and the best of my hometown in spite of the stylistic grand canyon that separates them: high-level listening and interplay among the players, an incredible dynamic range (I doubt many Minneapolitans have ever heard a group this slick play so incredibly soft), and an unmistakable jazz aesthetic. The differences are just as stark: Childs' music is more through-composed, more harmonically "inside," and far more refined in overall tone color than most anything you can hear in Minneapolis without venturing to the Dakota.

Even after a relatively short time out here, I can already see the warnings of so many Minneapolitan rogues in evidence: clearly there is a more dominant mainstream at play in L.A. than in Minneapolis, and clearly I will find my way into friction with it at some point along the way. To be 100 percent beyond style is to be ambivalent about one's own stylistic direction, and to hew to whatever this mainstream dictates for you. Clearly I have no intentions of going quite that far as a performer or composer. I must say, though, that as a listener, given the quality of work out here, I certainly can imagine worse fates: I am learning a ton from what I'm hearing, and concurrently having a swell time doing so.