The Dixieland Nightmare

"Keep it simple."

But there isn't a simple solution to the VI^{7(♭13 )} chord, i.e. in Bourbon Street Parade, Sheik of Araby, Whispering, Rock-a-Bye Your Baby, Wait 'Till the Sun Shines Nellie, and who knows how many other tradjazz warhorses.

This chord has been the bane of my existence for as long as my ears have been awake to it. In my nightmares and often in real life too, it goes down something like this:

If the melody player knows one note of the actual melody, it's probably the ♭13, because that's the highest, tensest note in the chart. So the cherry is always on top, no matter what kind of sundae is on the menu that day.

The bass player has been scolded to "keep it simple," and so given any G chord, the options are G and D. That's it. The language used to describe bass players who play notes other than G and D is even less flattering than the old joke about players who can do only this. So, "simply" put, this is a dominant chord, shit runs downhill, and payday is on Friday.

The chord player, meanwhile, has been playing these songs for decades and hasn't looked at a chart in years, but they know that G-B-Eb forms an augmented triad, hence that we are dealing here with a Black Sheep offshoot of the Augmented family, and that the remaining members of this clan are A-C#-F. And although the chord player is too tasteful to overdo it, planing is definitely a thing, and so planing there will be.

In other words, if everyone narrowly assimilates to their role, eventually there will be at least one C#-D-Eb pile-up, and probably more than one. This is especially likely in Sheik where the chord just sits there for two whole bars at medium tempo. If there are more than a couple of solos then there almost certainly will be a D-Eb-E pile-up too. This is the tradjazz version of thematic development.

I'm being extremely pedantic and a bit viscious here, but I promise there is a point to it.

The point is: the bass and chord players can't treat this chord as either a straight dominant OR augmented chord, because IT IS NEITHER of those things. By the most obvious analysis it is only one note away, but that analysis is so misleading as to deserve to be labeled actually "wrong." The functional diatonic weighting and countour of this chord are unique in tonal music. Hence there also is no point in everyone simply agreeing to treat it as straight dominant or augmented. That doesn't fit any of these melodies anyway, as parties to any such agreement will be quickly and viscerally reminded; but even if it did there would be much lost and nothing gained this way.

Technically, in the case of the above-named tunes, I believe this chordscale is best analyzed as "fifth mode of harmonic (or melodic) minor";

i.e. G^{7(♭13 )} = C harmonic (or melodic) minor starting on G;

but that is far too verbose to be useful, especially for tradjazzers who would rather live with the clams than bring this kind of talk into the band. So, I propose we label it the "Dixieland Nightmare" chord, in honor of an offhand remark that was once made to me by a bandleader.

In high school and college this chord used to drive me nuts as a listener, but now it drives me nuts as a bass (function) player. 

Staying with G7 as the working example:

If the melody shuttles between E-flat and D, then both of those notes are out; C is outest-of-out, as always; and there is an unresolved ambiguity even in what I consider to be the "correct" reference analysis of the chord, namely: are we using harmonic or melodic minor? i.e. Is it A or A-flat? So even there, one of the most obvious "simple"-but-hip solutions, the G-A-B walkup, comes with the same risk of a pile-up.

And so . . . buckle up, hornheads! The F is a really attractive option. The F is both minimally consonant AND minimally risky. So, we can walk DOWN, G to F; we can even do one full bar of each if we must; and this is a very elegant solution! Most days it seems to me like the ONLY elegant solution. The problem (for others, not for me) is that this lands us on the third of the impending C7 chord. Unless you're dealing with exceptionally hardheaded necrophile purists, this is also quite elegant against the resolution to D in the melody. There are two problems, though. (1) Those necrophiles ARE out there; and (2) generally putting the third on the bottom in this style IS actually pretty destabilizing, and people get annoyed with it when it happens all the time; that is why bass players are so often admonished to "keep it simple" even where doing so creates clams rather than preventing them.

So, as nice as this line is, you can't play it every time. Probably you can only play it once per song, and there are likely to be more choruses than there are unique workable solutions. You can probably get away with the G-A-B walkup, one way or another. I often find myself ghosting the dangerous note in those once-bitten-twice-shy moments. And again, "keeping it moving" IS a viable alternative to "keeping it simple": you can fill-ghost with G-A-B♭-B such that the NCTs really are placed and articulated like NCTs and the anchors like anchors; and this (I really REALLY mean this) usually leads to better results and happier sidespersons as compared with letting some necrophile talk you into "keeping it simple."

"You played a Bb under a G7 chord!" Sure did. If you want to fight about it, fight with Messrs. J.S. Bach and P. Chambers, for starters. Just realize that you're fighting the music that came BEFORE tradjazz at least as much as the music that came after it; you're not just damming the backwash, you're damming the headwaters too. That is really Somethin' Else!

Lasch—Nationalism, Survivals, Advancement

Christopher Lasch
The Agony of the American Left
(1969)

[119] the civil rights movement, in its Southern phase, rested on the indigenous Negro subculture which has grown up since the Civil War under the peculiar conditions of Southern segregation—a culture separate and unequal
[120]
but semiautonomous and therefore capable of giving its own distinctive character to the movement for legal and political equality.

...

[121] The one thing that emerges clearly from Herskovits's work is that whether one is talking about Latin America or about the United States, African survivals are easier to trace in areas like music and religion than in language, politics, social organization, and family life, where they seem almost nonexistent.

Unfortunately the whole question of African survivals
[122]
has now become involved in the politics of cultural nationalism, and it is hard to argue against Herskovits without being accused of wishing to subvert the cultural identity of black people. Herskovits himself explicitly acknowledged a desire "to give the Negro an appreciation of his past" and "to endow him with the confidence in his own position in this country and in the world which he must have." The same purpose animates many of his present admirers. It is no service to black nationalism, however, to pretend that it grows out of an African heritage; nor is it even necessary to the argument that Negro culture in America ought to be preserved. If the defense of that culture rested only on appeals to the African past, it would not be worth defending.

...

[124] Some of [Oscar] Lewis's critics...argue that the concept of the culture of poverty implies a "value judgment" and a "cultural smugness" resting on ignorance of the accomplishments of this type of culture, especially of black culture. Thus Todd Gitlin, a spokesman of the New Left, advises those who write about the ghetto to "listen to Otis Redding, B.B. King, the Impressions, etc. etc." and to
[125]
read Charles Keil's Urban Blues, which he says shows "the richness of ghetto culture."

These remarks betray a very common misunderstanding of the culture of poverty and of the concept of culture itself. Oscar Lewis is not making a "value judgment" when he says that the culture of poverty is a "thin culture." This statement has nothing in common with the cliché that Negroes are "culturally deprived"—the standard view to which Gitlin rightly objects, but which he confuses with Lewis's view. When teachers in ghetto schools say that black children are "deprived," "disadvantaged," and "unteachable," they do show a "cultural smugness" which makes them unable to talk to the children or to listen to what the children are saying. The schoolmarm's view of "culture" assumes that poems, for instance, should conform to certain rigid standards of grammar, meter, and sentiment. Thus a poem about "The Junkies," as Herbert Kohl notes, is dismissed as "the ramblings of a disturbed girl," whereas the same teacher praises "Shop with Mom" for its "pleasant and healthy thought." Similarly with music: some people can't hear jazz, blues, gospel, or "soul" because it doesn't live up to their arbitrary expectations of what "good music" should sound like.

These are "value judgments" with a vengeance. But Lewis is trying to understand the culutre of poverty, not in the narrow sense of the term culture but as a design for living. (Gitlin confuses the two meanings of "culture." And what Lewis discovered in the Puerto Rican ghetto applies—urban blues notwithstanding—to the black ghetto as well: "The low aspiration level helps to reduce frustration,
[126]
[and] the legitamization of short-range hedonism makes possible spontaneity of enjoyment," but "there is a great deal of pathos, suffering and emptiness among those who live in the culture of poverty." To cite a book on the urban blues in refutation of these conclusions misses the point. The question is not whether Negro music provides a "rich" record of suffering, the question is whether the ghetto subculture gives much support to its members. It is precisely because the chief characteristics of the ghetto culture are despair and self-hatred that black nationalism has arisen as a radical cultural therapy for the ghetto.

The contrast between the comparative vitality of Negro culture in the South and the poverty of the culture of poverty explains why nationalist sects like the Nation of Islam, which have never made much headway in the South, find the Northern ghetto a fertile soil; while the civil rights movement, on the other hand, has become progressively weaker as the focus of the Negros' struggle shifts from the South to the North. The civil rights movement does not address itself to the question of how Negroes are to acquire a culture, or to the consequences of their failure to do so. It addresses itself to legal inequalities. Insofar as it implies a cultural program of any kind, the civil rights strategy proposes to integrate Negroes into the culture that already surrounds them.

Now the real objection to this is not the one so often
[127]
given by the advocates of black power—that black people have nothing to gain from integrating into a culture dominated by materialistic values. Since most black people have already absorbed those values, this is a frivolous argument—especially so since it seems to imply that there is something virtuous and ennobling about poverty. What the assimilationist argument does overlook is that the civil rights movement owes its existence, in part, to the rise of a Negro subculture in the South, and that the absence of a comparable culture in the ghetto changes the whole character of the race problem in the North. American history seems to show that a group cannot achieve "integration"—that is, equality—without first developing institutions which express and create a sense of its own distinctiveness. That is why black nationalism, which attempts to fill the cultural vacuum of the ghetto, has had a continuing attraction for Negroes, and why, even during the period of its eclipse in the thirties, forties, and fifties, nationalism won converts among the most despised and degraded elements of the Negro community in spite of the low repute in which it was held by Negro leaders.

...

[134] Black power proposes, or seems to propose, that Negroes do for themselves what other ethnic groups, faced with somewhat similar conditions, have done—advance themselves not as individuals but as groups conscious of their own special interests and identity. A comparison with other ethnic minorities in American history—the Irish, for example—is instructive. When the Irish first came to Boston, they were "the lowest of the low, lower than the Germans or Scandinavians or Jews, or even the Negroes, who had come earlier and edged a bit up the economic ladder. Irishmen were lucky if they could find part-time work on the dock or in the ditch; Irish girls hoped at best to get work as maids in hotels or in big houses on Beacon Hill. . . . The people from Ireland were a proletariat without machine
[135]
skills or capital. Their sections of Boston were the land of the shanty Irish." [Burns, John Kennedy: A Political Profile] ...the Irish were also the target of vicious ethnic stereotypes. ... Moreover, the Irish were papists and hence presumably loyal to a foreign power. Nor did they speak good English.

In the face of these disadvantages, how did the Irish escape from their shanty-town ghettos? The myth is: by individual initiative, which demonstrated ability, they overcame barriers to advancement through the usual avenues of social mobility, which eventually led to their assimilation. These commonly held assumptions about the nature of American mobility can easily be tested against a familiar case, that of the Kennedy family, which of all examples ought most nearly fit the myth of America as a society open to individual initiative.

As cogent and suggestive as the ensuing passage is, this basis for elevating a single high-profile example to the status of representativeness is quite flimsy! No particular event ought to most nearly fit any given thesis!

The career of Joseph Kennedy, founder of the present dynasty, does conform in many ways to the class entrepreneurial pattern. What is instructive about Kennedy, however, is that even by the 1920s entrepreneurial opportunities existed only on the fringes of American capitalism. By that time the normal avenue of business advancement lay in the corporate bureaucracies—and these, it is important to realize, had become increasingly the last refuge of the old American elite. As one historian has noted: "Once it became clear that political control of the
[136]
big cities would inevitably pass into the hands of the immigrant groups, Big Business came to be regarded as a new preserve of the older Americans, where their status and influence could continue to flourish." The result was that "the social patterns established within Big Business bureaucracies at the turn of the century helped to close off key areas of the economy and to keep them virtually impenetrable to even the most gifted outsiders. For one without the background, etiquette, and personal appearance to 'fit in,' and without sponsors to smooth his way, a career in one of the major corporations would be more like scaling a high wall than climbing a ladder." [Rischin, The American Gospel of Success (1965)] The corporate bureaucracies readily adapted themselves to the purposes of ethnic exclusiveness because success in the bureaucratic career, by its very nature, depends on the accumulation of educational advantages, on family connections, and on other signs of social status. A study of 185 business leaders between 1901 and 1910 shows that while fourteen per cent had either founded or bought the business in which they now occupied the top positions, twenty-seven percent inherited their positions, while all the rest "climbed the bureaucratic ladder, not infrequently, of course, after their family status, education, and other social endowments helped them get the proper start." [Miller, Men in Business (1952)]

Endowed with several advantages at the start of his career, notably a Harvard degree and marriage into the powerful Fitzgerald family, Joseph Kennedy was president of a
[137]
small bank in Boston by the time he was twenty-five. "But many a Yankee banker still could not wholly accept Joe Kennedy. It was alright for Irishmen to run little East Boston banks and handle immigrants' remittances, they felt, but not to crash the central citadels of finance. So Kennedy, disgusted, began to operate more and more in New York and Hollywood." [Burns] His successful speculations on the West Coast, followed by even more spectacular operations on Wall Street in the early twenties, testified to Kennedy's financial genius but also to the degree to which the normal bureaucratic career was closed off to ethnic minorities. It is highly misleading to think that in American history those minorities have escaped poverty through the dominant institutions of the surrounding culture. On the contrary, they have succeeded in marginal institutions, a fact that incidentally reveals one dimension of the present race problem—the decline of entrepreneurial capitalism in a mature industrial economy.

Entrepreneurial opportunities, however, are only part of the story, even in the case of earlier minorities. Those opportunities could not have been exploited if groups like the Irish had not already achieved a strong sense of ethnic solidarity. In the case of the Kennedy family, it is important to note that Joseph Kennedy's career rested solidly on the achievement of the previous generation. Both his own fa-
[138]
ther, Patick J. Kennedy, and his father-in-law, John F. Fitzgerald, had already "advanced far up into the ranks of middle-class respectability" by selling things to other Irishmen (liquor, for instance) and by capturing their votes, "thus stor[ing] up influence to trade in the political arena." Both saloon-keeping and machine politics represented a form of collective self-help in the Irish ghetto; they depended on a sense of Irish solidarity. In effect, the Irish created their own institutions parallel to the official institutions of American society: the saloon, the Irish-American church, above all the political machine. "Unable to participate in the normal associational affairs of the community," Oscar Handlin writes, "the Irish felt obligated to erect a society within a society, to act together in their own way. In every contact therefore the group . . . became intensely aware of its peculiar and exclusive identity." The Irish did not advance as individuals, they advanced as a group, drastically altering the structure of urban politics in the process. Nor did they lose their ethnic character through assimilation into American life; politicians recognize this when they cater to the "Irish vote." As Harold Cruse observes, "Every four years the great fiction of the assimilated American (white and/or Protestant) ideal is put aside to deal with the pluralistic reality of the hyphenated-American vote." The rest of the time this reality is swallowed up in the rhetoric of opportunity and individualism.

The assertion that "the individual in America has few
[139]
rights that are not backed up by the political, economic and social power of one group or another" is borne out not only in the case of the Irish but even more clearly in the case of the Jews. Like the Irish, the Jews escaped extreme poverty through the labor movement or through marginal businesses or professions serving a largely Jewish clientele. To a degree that is seldom recognized, Jewish life in America is self-contained. According to a recent study of Jews in a midwestern city, the Jews after three generations still live in "separate but equal" communities "that endure in spite of all sociological predictions to the contrary." [Kramer and Levantman, Children of the Gilded Ghetto (1961)] Even Jews who have achieved wealth and status...are "understandably reluctant to sever their remaining ties... The community, and their special relation to it, is, after all, the precondition of their status."

In spite of the decline of overt anti-Semitism, the Jews in this city (Minneapolis?) and elsewhere—except for those in the intellectual community, which is exempt from these generalizations—still live in their own separate and self-sufficient community. They derive important advantages from separation of which Jewish businessmen, for example, are well aware.

"In a period of growing oligopoly, Jewish businesses have survived in the shelter of ethnic segregation. Because Jews are excluded from the dominant business community,
[140]
they are beyond the reach of its informal sanctions. They are 'outsiders,' marginal retail traders, who have no reason to be susceptible to the opinion of gentile colleagues who do not accept them in any case."

Thus Jewish businessmen continue to prefer a flexible price system to fixed prices, thereby performing "considerable economic service as middlemen for inflation-conscious consumers and overstocked manufacturers, at the cost, however, of their social honor in the larger business community." Similarly Jewish doctors serve Jewish patients, Jewish lawyers predominantly Jewish clients. "Exploiting their marginality for their own advantage has been the one means of economic survival consistently available to Jews." One of the marginal opportunities open to Jewish entrepreneurs, it should be added, is the black ghetto. Thus in spite of their services to the civil rights movement, Jews now find themselves singled out as special objects of the wrath of black militants. "It is now widely accepted as an incontrovertible fact that . . . there exists a pronounced anti-Jewish sentiment among the Negro masses in this country."

The history of American ethnic-group pluralism does not support the integrationist assumption that individual initiative has been the traditional mechanism of social mobility. Those who urge Negroes to advance themselves through the "regular" channels of personal mobility ignore the experience of earlier minorities, the relevance of which is obscured both by the tendency to view the history of immigration as a triumph of assimilation and by the individualist
[141]
premises which persistently blind Americans to the importance of collective phenomena and therefore to most of history.

...

[141, footnote] Recent studies do not seem to bear out [the] assertion that "immigrants made sacrifices of present consumption to capitalize their children." One of the interesting conclusions to emerge from Stefan Thernstrom's study of Irish Workers...is that the Irish often achieved "property mobility" at the expense of their children, or at least the expense of "the forms of mobility which required education."

A Blasphemous Thought on Cage

Ever since my first encounters with his writings (shallow readings to be sure, but having a lasting impact nonetheless), I just can't shake the feeling that Cage has even more to offer to traditionalists than to experimentalists. What I mean by this is that his trademark philosophies may have opened up a whole new world, but this doesn't mean they cannot or should not be applied to the old one. Perhaps this requires a certain amount of willful misreading, not only of Cage but also of what I am calling traditional music, yet I see few drawbacks and many rewards to this scenario. What a pleasure (not to mention a relief) it is to hear the sounds of the Eroica Symphony just being themselves; Beethoven's intent need not always be ours.

The New Traditionalist Critique?

The following recent comments from two respected older jazz musicians both level an accusation towards jazz academia that I find somewhat surprising.

First, here's drummer Ralph Peterson interviewed by pianist George Colligan:

GC: How important is it to have musical heroes?

RP: I think if you don’t know how to play like somebody else first, you can never arrive at what somebody can identify as your own style. That’s another problem with what’s going on right now. All these institutions are pushing kids to have their own style.

GC: Before they are ready.

RP: I’m telling you…. they ain’t got no fucking style. I don’t have no fucking style. My style is copying the style of the people I love and the way I combine it and that’s nothing more.

GC: But it has come out as your own identifiable style?

RP: Yeah, the way I combine these musical things is not going to be the way you combine them, even if we study the same guy’s playing.

Next, here's a passage from an article by bassist Chuck Israels:

Excessive reverence for the romantic illusion of "original thought" is the most fraudulent and destructive element in the institutionalized process of jazz education. Students are encouraged, sometimes even forced to engage in a frenzied "real time" search for "what to play", resulting in frustration for the student and the audience. The usual result is awful gibberish which ought to be embarrassing to all parties but which seems to be not only condoned but encouraged by those jazz educators who misunderstand the process of improvisation.

What we're accustomed to hearing, of course (or at least I am), is not that universities fail to impart style to their jazz students, but that this is, to a fault, all that they do, churning out soulless virtuosic clones in the process. A certain conformity among academically trained jazz players is indeed observable (and in many ways unfortunate), but I'm less convinced than I once was that this is particularly avoidable, or that it is in any way unique to the academic environment. As Peterson says, players with similar influences can (and should, and often do) arrive at distinctive personal styles nonetheless; I do think, though, that this presupposes a certain breadth of influences, as well as a generally staunch work ethic, and I'd say that these two characteristics are typically in short supply, not just among college music majors, but among most communities of musicians I've interacted with across many styles and career paths. Hence, in my mind, putting it all on the academics isn't entirely fair. These considerations, along with its malleability to so many different agendas, make the "clone" critique too easy to level, glossing over more substantive issues. To that end, the present accusations would seem to raise the possibility that this old trope, whether it's legitimate or not, has finally gotten under the academics' skin, and that they've (over)reacted accordingly. Are schools really feeling increased pressure to deliver more individualists and fewer stylists? Is this creating a scorched-earth mentality in jazz academia? Or are these two musicians just blowing smoke? I'm intrigued without being encouraged.

Both statements are rather severely worded, appealing to the notion of pressure or coercion. (Peterson: "All these institutions are pushing kids to have their own style." Israels: "Students are encouraged, sometimes even forced to engage in a frenzied 'real time' search for 'what to play'"). Without specific examples, I'm left to guess who might be doing the pushing and where they teach, but I will say that this strikes me as a very unlikely critique of jazz education, not only in my direct experience, but also in what I've been able to glean second hand from peers who attended different schools than I did. When we vent about our schooling, it's not about having been forbidden to have models, but rather about having had them prescribed for us. Israels argues against this, saying that, "A poor model is better than none...Get a grip, any grip; then move on to a firmer one." This is a refreshingly pluralistic statement, and on those grounds alone, I'm on board. However, the bigger topic under discussion here isn't stylistic pluralism, but rather the merits of establishing a single, pervasive model at an early stage of musical development. I'm less comfortable with this idea for a variety of reasons, some philosophical, and others personal.

My own number one critique of jazz education has always been its poverty of style-neutral pedagogical discourse; put another way, that the study of improvisation is only ever approached through the lens of particular styles (usually bebop) and never the other way around. Though I respect and agree with allowing students to choose which players or styles they might organize their study of jazz around, I disagree that improvisation cannot also be profitably studied abstractly or autonomously, and I don't think it's far-fetched to suggest that jazz students might benefit immensely from at some point being made to confront the practice of improvisation unburdened by their study of particular jazz styles or players. I consider improvisation to be roughly, if not perfectly, analogous to technique, and just as one's breathing or lip flexibility won't develop beyond an elementary stage without occasionally being isolated from the myriad other things one has to think about when performing, so too one's general improvisational technique can and should be isolated if it is to be developed to its fullest potential.

My purpose here is not necessarily to insist that the "frenzied real time search for what to play" is a viable performance strategy, nor even that it is, strictly speaking, a logical possibility, and I'll leave more specific hashing out of the nature of thought and the inescapability of influence to the neuroscientists and philosophers. My point is simply that attempting such a thing can be usefully informative about the state of one's own playing, thought and identity, and when done in the practice room rather than on stage, it can't possibly hurt anything. An art which stubbornly refuses to so much as entertain the occasional "romantic illusion" is one which I want no part of. One certainly could argue that style is inescapable, yet I'd say that I've learned the most about myself as an improvisor by finding out what happens when I try to escape it anyway. Don't just tell me that I'm bound to fail; I want to know how and why. This is invaluable information for a musician to have about themselves, and students shouldn't be discouraged from attempting to ascertain it.

I spout a fair quantity of abstract philosophical speculation in this space, but on this issue, my opinion is overwhelmingly informed by my own experiences. Having now been out of college longer than I was in, it's more apparent to me than ever that I've gained the most from intense study of a small amount of material over longer periods of time, and little-to-nothing from the opposite; but I also feel that my earliest such efforts created too many blind habits and not enough flexibility (again, the consequences of approaching improvisation solely through the lens of style; if only I'd understood it better). I'm particularly troubled by Israels' "favorite musician" standard, as this represents an even narrower band of influence than that which I engaged with at this stage. This was a time when, like many teen musicians, I'd only recently had my musical awakening, and the impact of having located "the real shit" meant that I fawned over virtually anything I heard. Once I'd heard a lot more music, though, this fawning subsided and I had a real problem, namely that my playing had grown up around models which were no longer as important to me as they had once been.

I've truly disavowed very little over the years, but even so, the impact of one's first influences can be all-encompassing, and even slight changes of taste later on can create crises of identity. This is more or less my story. All of this was magnified considerably when I became interested in non-jazz improvisational musics, but by that time, I was already fighting, if not yet winning, the battle. An overbearing teacher pushing me to sound more original would have been superfluous because I was, rightly or wrongly, strongly predisposed to play that role for myself. I was fortunate not to have too many run-ins with overbearing traditionalists either, and where they did occur, they were less run-ins that directly affected my academic standing than they were of the off-handed-codgerly-remark-in-a-masterclass variety.

There are many facets of my musical education which experience has since suggested might have been more productively undertaken working backwards from what conventional wisdom dictates. The stylization question is at the top of this list. To return for a moment to the technique analogy, one would never tell a student that "a poor model is better than none" with regard to general instrumental technique because poor habits must ultimately be unlearned, and they are harder to break than they are to develop. Perhaps the analogy to stylization is not a perfect one, but my own ongoing process of unlearning much of my earliest stylistic conditioning has made me wish a thousand times over that I had focused on more broadly applicable improvisational skills as a teen and saved deeper study of players and styles for later, when I really knew what I wanted, and when my ability to develop stylistic fluency without relying on blind physical habits was more fully developed. (Whereas Israels twice uses the word "habits" favorably, it has always been a jazz ed bugaboo in my book.) It is, of course, completely subjective what constitutes a "poor" model stylistically, and less so (though, I hasten to add, not entirely) what constitutes a poor model technically, and that's where the analogy breaks down; all I'm saying is that when I was 17, I had no idea that my own stylistic orientation might change, and under those circumstances, it has proven imprudent to grasp at the lowest hanging stylistic fruit. This is why I like to say that stylization is an advanced topic, not a beginning or intermediate one.

I've written recently about the mass disavowals of jazz among twenty-something peers, which I'm not convinced should be taken as an indictment of either jazz generally or its academic manifestations specifically, but which I am convinced is an observable trend which demonstrates the unlikeliness that your favorite musician when you're 18 will still be your favorite musician when you're 22. Settling on a stylistic orientation (or a constellation of them) is an unpredictable long-term process, and one which it could be argued that the attentive and driven musician never truly completes. In any case, to venture far enough down this path to attain even a transient stability requires a breadth of listening and study that most undergraduates won't manage to acquire before graduating. (In my case, having this forced on me by musicology professors rather than being left to my own devices sapped my very will to undertake it, and I've only recently recovered). If there's a good chance you haven't yet heard or even heard of your "favorite musician," then it's too early to invest disproportionately in imitation of a convenient model that you might not hold in such high regard shortly thereafter. Many students will suffer through this process, as I did, and survive more or less in one piece; I'm not convinced, though, that it is either ideal or unavoidable.

What else to say, then, about Israels' dissatisfaction with young players not being able or willing to name a favorite musician than that the very idea becomes increasingly untenable as one's breadth of listening experience accumulates, the best work of great artists therein coming to stand in equally high relief not only from the work of less accomplished contemporaries, but also from the bulk of their own output. Shostakovich is one such gloriously uneven composer: he wrote one of my five favorite pieces of music, but only two of my fifty favorite and probably not three of my hundred favorite. Were I to bump into Professor Israels in the hallway, Wayne Shorter would be my gun-to-the-head answer (probably after some throat clearing), both in terms of my overall attraction to his music and also time spent studying his style; yet his work is also uneven, perhaps moreso than some of the other candidates, and it doesn't really serve anyone's purposes to deny that. I think that the scale on which purposeful musical assimilation operates is much smaller than that of the Favorite Musician: rather, particular records or tunes, even particular moments in particular performances of particular tunes, are what we're really after. If "romantic illusions" about jazz are indeed to be avoided, then academia certainly should cultivate a willingness to judge case-by-case rather than constructing shrines. (Shit, even traditionalists have dirty words for people who indiscriminately worship a brand name.)

I'll close with a more personal reason I'm not comfortable naming a favorite, which is that the particular strain of wild-eyed idolatry that prevailed for many years among followers of Parker, Coltrane and others makes me very uneasy. From Phil Woods' forgery to Jon Faddis' soul patch to whoever started this nonsense about bebop being "the music of the future," no one has made it more difficult for my generation of jazz students to have "musical heroes" than those members of the older generations who have taken their own hero worship to such irrational, destructive, narcissistic heights. Seriously, guys, if this is a problem at all, it's on you and not on us. You showed us all the wrong ways to have heroes; forgive us, then, for being nonplussed when you ask us to name ours.