The Case Against Audience Tampering

I rarely engage in the typical inter-blog linking and back-patting behaviors, but I'll make an exception here. I've been a major detractor of pre-concert lectures and other such activities since I was a teenager (i.e. since people started trying to use it on me), and now Matthew Guerreri has a postup that supposedly explains why I enjoyed myself more without Joe Musiciologist helping me "understand" the music. Daniel Wolf also has a typically-eloquent take on the matter here.

Matthew, who I respect greatly as a writer, says that these findings contradict his personal experience. Conversely, they reflect mine very accurately. That two people would feel so differently on this ought to be proof in and of itself that listeners must be drawn in on their own terms, and that contrary to what pre-concert talks often assume, different listeners will be engaged by different landmarks in the same piece.

The Tasteless Display of Non-Virtuosity

It is high time we stopped hating virtuosity. I am a firm believer that the thinking musician cannot possibly have too much technique, for if he/she is truly a "thinking musician", then he/she will have plenty of constructive uses for those abilities. The tasteless display of virtuosity is not the inevitable consequence of developing virtuosic technique; those who put on such displays have something else wrong with them that is pretty much unrelated to their technique, even if their technique becomes a vehicle for expressing this pathology.

If you ask me, tasteless displays of non-virtuosity are equally disconcerting. There's a classical-era string quartet piece in the Muzak rotation where I work that is rottenly out of tune. Someone (several someones, actually) got paid to play, record, mix, produce, distribute, and license that music, while there are inevitably several quartets worth of string players the world over with impeccable intonation who are eating ramen and peanut butter for dinner tonight. Do you feel better now?

Of course, I'm going to get myself labeled an elitist, a snob, or a typical young whipper-snapper, whereas the anti-virtuoso people are being inclusive, open-minded, mature, perhaps even multi-cultural. And of course, I'm a tuba player engaged in the Sisyphian struggle against the valve system and all of it's inherent flaws of intonation, so who's to say I could do any better? The point is that some people are not satisfied with merely attaining the level of technique needed to land a Muzak session gig. Vanity, self-aggrandizement, and exhibitionism are not good reasons for feeling this way, but artistic vision and personal pride are. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. The circus acts give virtuosity a bad name; nonetheless, it is vital to music, and a dearth of it is harder to endure than the most shameless displays of excess.

Prepare >>> Produce

As a college music student, it always seemed that everything I was doing was preparatory. Every act of performance or composition was in some sense undertaken less for its own sake than as an exercise aimed at sharpening my abilities, or perhaps as a barometer of where those abilities stood at the time. Just over two years removed from my last school-related activities, I find myself suddenly overtaken by frustration at how little of value (even to me) I have produced up to this point, as well as the realization that this has occurred largely because the focus has always been disproportionately on preparation rather than actual production.

There are a handful of recordings and scores that I'm very proud of, but in large part, all of those great things that my early accomplishments supposedly foreshadowed have yet to materialize. All of this has allowed me to confirm that the greatest challenge in making the transition to the "real world" is not economic, but artistic and philosophical: how does one go from constant preparation to consummating that preparation in the form of tangible musical products (i.e. performances, recordings, and scores)?

Preparation is hard work physically, but mentally and emotionally, it's comparatively easy as long as it is always directed at something abstract and years in the future. In an academic setting, there is also lots of direction, coaxing, and pressure coming from without as well as within. Now, however, I am feeling pressure (from myself rather than from others) to deliver the goods in a timely fashion.

I was, of course, always frustrated with the fact that school involved so much preparation and so little resolution of that preparation. I was scared off (perhaps, it now seems, for good) from taking composition lessons when a professor I approached told me that he had stopped composing altogether as an undergraduate while studying theory. Privately, I reacted very strongly against this: "To stop composing now," I though to myself, "would merely diminish my total output." Big-headed and naive? Absolutely...but I was right. I wrote several worthy pieces during this time, and they're almost everything I have to hang my hat on at this point.

Since there are only so many hours in the day, more producing equates directly to less preparing, and hence, it's too easy to feel that there's another big-headed, naive assumption behind this decision also (i.e. as if I was done learning for good). I've made up my mind, though, for better or worse, that it's time to throw down. I'm not getting any younger, and it would be a shame to waste all of that hard work.

Making E-Time

Let's call this the second in a two-part series on music and the internet, the first of which would be located here

While writing that entry, I was reminded of the time I volunteered to work the phones for a local radio station's pledge drive. They had a sheet sitting on the table listing the number of people who had listened to the station online the previous day, which country they were from, and the total amount of time by country. The good news was that 6 people from China tuned in; the bad news was that the total amount of time the 6 of them listened to the station was less than 5 minutes. As I recall, The Netherlands topped the list with 2 people and a total of 3+ minutes; this was the only country (including the U.S.) where listeners averaged a minute or more each.

So, is there something inherently casual, or even inane, about the internet? Not for me. I block out time every so often to listen (REALLY listen, that is) to music on other musicians' websites and read articles and blogs that are relevant to my musical endeavors. Of course I enjoy it, but I am very careful to make it constructive. When my attention span lapses, I go do something else. If I stumble on something I'm not interested in, I move on quickly.

The best thing about the internet is also the worst thing about it: everything is just a click away. This has yielded great advances in communications, but it also presents an unparalleled opportunity for fickleness to get the better of the user. The internet isn't doing anyone any good if no one takes advantage of it, but it's also not much good when used for trivial reasons either.

Finally, here's an excerpt from a recent Electronic Frontier Foundation newsletter that dovetails nicely with what I wrote previously about physical storage devices:

The NPD Group's latest music stats provide yet another reason that the RIAA's war on college students is misguided:

"The 'social' ripping and burning of CDs among friends -- which takes place offline and almost entirely out of reach of industry policing efforts -- accounted for 37 percent of all music consumption, more than file-sharing, NPD said."

This data suggests offline sharing is growing, and that's to be expected. Along with burning CDs and DVDs for each other, fans can swap hard drives, share USB drives, and use many other technologies to share music without hopping online or installing P2P software. It's only going to get easier to share mass volumes of music in this way -- these tools are increasingly ubiquitous, with ever-growing capacity and ever-diminishing price.

My Philosophy In a Nutshell

Much ink has been spilled and time wasted trying to define "music" from a technical or structural point of view, but what about defining it in terms of perception/reception? I'm willing to accept any sound as musical. However, if I wish to find the music in any old sound, I am the one who must decide that this is what I want to do, how I should do it, and why it is important to me. The sound as a physical phenomenon remains unchanged whether I ignore it or contemplate it. A Mozart piano sonata could be a mere distraction if it threatens to drown out an important conversation, while a construction crew could unwittingly create a musical experience for someone who chooses to receive it as such.

In my relatively brief time as a musician, my music has been both a distraction and an attraction to many people. I, of course, intend only the latter, but I only control the sound; the audience controls the music. That there is, in fact, a whole sovereign genre called "ambient music" is very disappointing to me. Besides the fact that I despise this phrase, I would also argue that it is a contradiction in terms. Making music has as much to do with receiving as it does with sending. For this reason, it may be possible to create music unintentionally or accidentally, but it is not possible to perceive it that way. There is a difference between "hearing" and "listening" just as there is between "seeing" and "looking".

Some call this an intellectual distinction; I disagree. That position presupposes that there is only one way to hear a piece of music; that there are certain things that everyone needs to be on the look out for, lest they fail to "understand" the piece. As Debussy said, listeners need only to listen. Let them notice and miss what they may. It is not a question of intellectuals and non-intellectuals, but of those who decide to pay attention and those who either can't or won't for whatever reason.

Among those who pay attention, no two will have the same experience, nor should they. The aims and implications of much of the audience outreach that has been done in the last several decades are profoundly flawed because they assume that the goal is to teach large numbers of people to experience the same music the same way. It's no wonder little progress has been made, for this is simply impossible. The current paradigm is one that aims to educate diverse perspectives into conformity rather than simply allowing them to take their place and exist as they may, but that approach is no better suited to music than it is to government.

Sweating The Details

If you read The Nation, you may have noticed that the May 14 issue featured a sizable piece on Ornette Coleman and the long-overdue awards he has received recently¹. It's always nice when a worthy music-related story gets covered by a non-musical publication with wide distribution. What was not so thrilling this time around, however, was the terminological malfeasance committed along the way.

In attempting to put Coleman's musical innovations into historical context, author David Yaffe wrote the following:

Miles Davis's Kind of Blue had come out a couple of months earlier, just a few months after John Coltrane's Giant Steps, each disdaining chord changes in favor of solemn inquiries into chords and modes. Davis's So What coolly navigated between a couple of minor Mixolydian modes; Coltrane's Giant Steps circled the circle of fifths.

For all the presumed good intentions here, this passage is nothing short of an embarrassment. It is possible (remotely) that the term "minor Mixolydian" is a provincialism of which I was not previously aware, but I cannot confirm this. In any case, it is quite obviously a poorly chosen one given that the mode in question already has a Greek name of its own².

There is perhaps less reason to get worked up over the circle of fifths reference. Though what Yaffe wrote is technically incorrect, we have all seen the term used in this colloquial manner before. Giant Steps is based on a circle of sorts, but it is actually a circle of major thirds, an interval which symmetrically divides the octave and hence lands on only three of the twelve key centers contained in the circle of fifths. Sure, I'm speaking musician-speak because I am one, but how many "average listeners" could phenomenologically confuse one circle for the other at the time Giant Steps was released, when it sounded to most such people like it came from outer space? It's not just that the term "cirlce of fifths" literally refers to something else, it's that this something else was, even in 1959, totally mundane, whereas Giant Steps was simultaneously earth-shattering and profoundly alienating, depending on one's sensibilities.

The misuse of terminology certainly risks detracting from the authority of the article in the eyes of navel-gazers like me, but is there anything more to this? I think that there very clearly is, and that it most likely betrays pretensions to hipness above all else. That is to say that the fatal error in Yaffe's process was not his particular choice of words but rather his choice to invoke technical jargon at all. Considering that he has a PhD in English, I suspect that if clarity were his motive he probably has the writing chops to make good on it. Then again, considering that he is a music critic with a PhD in English, the hipness/clarity (im)balance is totally predictable.

If it had been up to me, I would have eschewed the jargon altogether and instead written something like this:

Both Miles and Coltrane were moving away from the dominant jazz style of the late 1950's, but in quite different directions. In So What, Miles implemented more static harmonies and a relaxed tempo; Coltrane did the opposite in Giant Steps, saturating musical time with novel chord changes and blowing through them at a blistering pace. Later exponents of both tendencies eventually went to such extremes that traditionalists questioned whether this was jazz at all. Some musicians would eventually ask themselves this question too and realize that the short, rigid, repetitive nature of songform-based jazz no longer permitted them to play what they felt. This was the winding path many later took to "free jazz" which relaxed or abandoned such constraints. Coleman's brand of it was, in hindsight, not among the more radical departures, especially vis-a-vis the role of the drummer, but he had helicoptered in so far ahead of everyone else that visionary status was inevitable. At a certain point, all that remained was for those pesky traditionalists to catch up with everyone else.

It is notoriously difficult to explain obscure technical topics in plain English, regardless of the subject, and editors are justifiably weary of articles that are too technical. One way to ease that fear is to hire people who simply don't have the technical background at all, but in Yaffe's case as in so many others, the results of that strategy speak for themselves. My explanation is less technical than his, but no one without a strong technical background could have produced it.

I don't think this is by any means too much to expect out of the critical establishment. Musicians as a group may not be a model of intellectual potency, but I would venture that there are more than enough who deal equally well with music and the English language to make a more attractive solution possible. I hesitate to invite readers to peruse the blogosphere in search of support for this claim, but given that it is no easier to make a living as a jazz musician than it ever has been as a writer, you can bet your life that there are more than a few qualified people who would accept most any offer to function in both capacities. What's more, the well-known conflict-of-interest that arises when musicians are charged with publicly chronicling and/or evaluating the work of their peers isn't such a big problem in the case of a figure like Ornette, who doesn't have many peers and won't be working with most of them anyway. I have to think that there are plenty of musician-scholars who could have produced a piece on Ornette that was every bit as well-written and well-informed, yet also technically correct and entirely comprehensible to non-musicians.

Whatever the real reason for Yaffe's slip-up, the larger point is that the jargon was simply uncalled for here: musicians don't need to be told the harmony of So What and non-musicians won't understand if you try to tell them. The only people who actually seem to inhabit a grey area between these two levels of understanding are the critics themselves.

Lest I be seen as taking personally-directed cheap shots purely for sport, I trust that most anyone taking the time to read this knows that "terminological malfeasance" happens all the time. I wish to level these criticisms at the entire world of music journalism, not just one author or one publication. This case merely pushed me over the edge (although I have to admit, I'm almost starting to like it over here). Of the top of my head, the following anecdotes from my college years come most immediately to mind:

•I recall spending most of a class session in Jazz Combo with Phil Hey at the U of MN unpacking the assertion made during the Ken Burns Jazz documentary that Charlie Parker was the first jazz musician to improvise solely on the structure (chord changes) of a tune rather than the melody. You can see the selfsame reductive process at work here that resulted in Giant Steps becoming a Circle of Fifths composition...but seriously, did anyone on the editorial level over at PBS actually listen to Louis Armstrong?

•there is, according to one source of mine, a prominent local writer who frequently confuses rhythm and meter.

•one music-major cohort of mine who took a jazz history class taught through non-music academic department and taken by students from a variety of majors emerged with a laundry list of faux-technical missteps committed by the professor and clear evidence of the students' lack of a musico-technical background that would have made a technical approach valid in any case.

Now it's time to anticipate the inevitable cynical rejoinder to my complaints here: "Who the hell cares, and why?" I would hope that it might be self-evident to a good number of readers that intellectual integrity is crucially dependent on the accuracy of the article from top to bottom. Certainly a large quantity of the correspondence I receive here is aimed at correcting small factual errors, and a hell of a lot more people read The Nation than read my blog. Many have remarked on the "gotcha" mentality that modern social media platforms encourage, but as the errors add up, it's not unreasonable to question the overall accuracy of the work, or even the publication as a whole. Yaffe says that Ornette once asked a doctor to castrate him; that certainly makes for great cocktail party banter, but how do I know this is accurate coming from someone who describes Giant Steps as disdaining chord changes?

Even if you think lapses in usage are truly harmless (I would disagree), it's still not right, or at least not as right as it could be, and the fact that self-interest is not sufficient even for commercial publications and professional writers to clean up their collective act is telling. I think that we owe it to them to make them owe it to us. How's that for clarity?

Somehow, I'll condense all of this into a paragraph and send it to The Nation. I'd be the first to agree that they have more important things to worry about, so I doubt they will print it. The outside chance that someone might read it and really think about it, however, is enough for me³.

notes
4/8/16
1. The article is now online, which it was not at the time this post was written.

2. At the risk of being over-thorough in my revision here, I can report that today Google returned only thirteen results for "minor Mixolydian mode" and one fewer than that for "minor Mixolydian modes," the latter including a reference to this post on another blog and the original article itself (and NOT my blog; that hurts, Google). Of the remaining pages, only this one uses the term as Yaffe does; the rest are merely lists of terms and topics where the words occur in this order by virtue of having been alphabetized. This lone corroboration was posted on a message board in 2001, so technically I could/should have been able to find it in 2007. Perhaps it is a parochialism issuing forth from the Balkan clarinet community? Frankly I don't think it really matters: if it was not truly an authorial boo-boo, it was still an editorial one, and this is the larger point.

3. The final insult: The Nation did amazingly enough publish two letters regarding Yaffe's piece. One offers some minor factual (not terminological) corrections; the other, longer screed by one John Provost is a meandering, faux-poetic, personal reflection on a 2004 Ornette concert. I'm willing to accept whatever abuse the more sanguine among us might have for the sentiments I expressed in this post, but if we're going to absolve authors and editors for their less-than-ideal terminological compromises based on space constraints, then it becomes ever more perplexing why a letter like this was printed. It certainly is more perplexing even to me than Yaffe's appeal to jargon, for which the explanations actually are too-obvious.

Here, according to the sent folder of my email account, is what I sent to The Nation that May 29:

Thank you so very much for your recent piece on Ornette Coleman (David Yaffe, Art of the Improviser, May 14). Yaffe should, however, be embarrassed at having used a made up term ("minor Mixolydian") in the course of referencing one of the most famous, most simple, and most famously simple jazz standards in history, Miles Davis's So What. A more musically competent writer would not only have known that So What uses the Dorian mode, but could have managed a perfectly decent explanation of Coleman's early 1960's innovations without resorting to jargon at all, hence making to article more comprehensible to non-musicians.

Into Thin Air?

Pronouncements of the imminent death of CD's are increasing in frequency. Digital downloads, so say those in the know, are poised to take over completely. Unlike many, I am not so attached to CD's that I would oppose this simply out of conservative desperation. I do, however, want to point out a few things that I have yet to hear anyone mention.

First, even if recorded music becomes sold exclusively through online downloads, it still must be stored on some kind of media, both before and after the transaction. Whether that is a hard drive, a jump drive, an iPod, or god forbid a compact disc, the data is not simply going to disappear into thin air. The method of delivery may change drastically, but in the end, the music must still be delivered to someone somewhere and on to something. Barring the development of technology for downloading material objects, such devices will continue to be part of the picture. This fact ought to be embraced rather than lamented, for internet communications are too prone to eavesdropping and censorship to be allowed to become the sole method of transporting data from one computer to another.

Next, let's make a list of what one must presently be able to afford/possess in order to purchase and download music and why:

(1) A Credit Card
These days, most bank accounts come with check cards that work just the same, but they do not have the fraud protection that comes with a "real" credit card. They are a direct line to your bank account, and when that money is gone, it's gone for good. This means that it is exceedingly risky to use them for online shopping. A "real" credit card, on the other hand, is something that many poor people don't have, and also something that many others of all income levels do not otherwise want or need. To require a credit card in order to purchase recorded music would be to effectively shut out a large number of people from the process, or force them into a lifestyle decision they don't want to make.

(2) A Sufficiently Capable Computer
Every time I see one of those Dell commercials where the CEO says he is all about improving people's quality of life, I throw something at the television. Computer manufacturers mastered planned obsolescence long ago, and they continue to use it to this day in order to line their pockets. There are 20 year old CD players that still work fine, but how many 20 year old computers are there that can download a 3 minute song from iTunes? In any case, even "cheap" computers of any kind are still major investments for most people in the world today. I know plenty of people (musicians and music lovers all of them) whose computers couldn't download a piece of text, let alone an MP3 of virtually any length. Make this the only way to get recorded music and you have ensured that only the middle and upper classes have access.

(3) Sufficiently Capable Wired Internet Access
Of those who can afford a computer at all, how many can also afford an extra monthly bill for fast internet access? In most areas of the U.S., wireless can be had for free one way or another, but it is inherently insecure, making it risky to make purchases this way.

Of course, I could have it backwards: perhaps the demand for downloads among the working classes will lead to the spread of low-end MP3 players and automated downloading stations in malls where one can pay cash. The music and technology industries speak the language of money, and in the end, one would expect them to leave no market untapped. So, perhaps what we are facing here is only a temporary problem, not to mention one that has been faced a few times before. Nonetheless, I think that it is part of a larger problem anyway. From New York City jazz club cover charges to the price of commercially produced CD's, listening to music has already become somewhat forbidding to those without a lot of disposable income. It has been pointed out that, compared to CD's, downloads cost less for consumers and earn more for record labels. That is only true, however, if one assumes that the consumers all possess the three things listed above, and I still know enough people for whom this is not the case to make this cause for concern. I have enough money in the bank to afford several dozen gallons of jet fuel, but I do not own my own private jet. Such is the situation with downloads: what good is being able to buy a track for a dollar if one must invest hundreds or thousands of dollars accessorizing just to gain access to that track?

The industry has already shown us that changes in format don't just happen on their own for no reason. Perhaps it was inevitable that technology evolves faster now than it ever has before. However, this also means that it becomes more and more expensive for the masses to keep up, and easier for the industry to profiteer through planned obsolescence and other tactics. Coincidence? Consider current events: the RIAA continues it's misguided crusade against piracy, the Copyright Royalty Board is trying to kill internet radio as we know it, computer companies continue to implement planned obsolescence, and internet service providers are busy opposing the construction of municipal wireless internet utilities. Let's face it: to a great extent, the corporations have us by the balls, and where they don't, they sure would like to. If I thought that they had our best interests in mind, I would not be so hesitant to celebrate the inevitability of an all-download music business. As it is, however, I haven't really stopped to think about how I feel about downloading as a consumer; instead, I'm preoccupied with anticipating the consequences of allowing large media corporations to control all access to recorded music. Call me paranoid, but you never know. The affordability of home recording equipment coupled with, yes, the internet, has hastened the demise of the so-called "music industry." I, for one, would like to make sure the damn thing is completely dead (in addition to seeing the "digital divide" thoroughly bridged) before I'll be okay with the thought of obtaining recorded music exclusively through downloads.

Name The Band After Yourself

If your band is truly a joint venture among the members, if it is going to be heavily promoted through all of the usual outlets, and if you have a really good idea for a name, you have all the reason you need to apply that ingenious name to your group and continue going about your business. However, I have a problem with the idea that every group that has a gig must also have a name, particularly when the group in question does not demonstrate the characteristics of a "regular" band (i.e. being a priority for everyone involved and playing out consistently).

I say this because I occasionally find out that I missed a show I would have really like to have heard simply because I did not know who was in the group, let alone what they actually do when they get together. Knowing the venue is helpful but is usually not enough by itself; if you also know who the performers are (all of them), that completes the circle. How ridiculous it is that this information is seldom available because everyone feels obligated to use their latest play on words in lieu of the name(s) by which they are known to the rest of the world.

If you go to shows based entirely on the name of the band, you have probably been to a lot of shows you hated. If you play with a rotating cast of characters and you rename each subsequent group, you are hurting attendance at your gigs. Your name, your instrument or voice, and the venue are both more pertinent and more helpful pieces of information. People who can't read minds (like me) will thank you.

Returning With a "Pop" Instead of a "Bang"

Per normal blog etiquette, this is where I'm supposed to apologize for my protracted absence from cyberspace the last couple of weeks. In reality, the person I owe the apology to is myself, for the tenuous readership this blog enjoys is proof that I need you more than you need me. In any case, here's your damn article, saps.

In an attempt to return with a bang/stir up controversy/see if anyone is actually reading, here's an idea I had recently that is sure to get some undies in a bundle. Like many of my ilk, I don't see most pop music as being worthy of academic attention. Unlike many of my ilk, however, I say this not because it is too easy to listen to*, but because it is too easy to play.

It is not uncommon to hear complaints about academia's seemingly exclusive focus on the classical and jazz traditions. The word "elitist" is thrown around with some frequency when this topic comes up. I have three questions for people who level these complaints:

•"What specifically, then, ought to be covered in such a curriculum?"

•"Are these college level academic topics?"

•"Be careful what you wish for. Don't you see what they've done to classical and jazz music?"

If you've spent any appreciable portion of your teenage years playing music, yet upon arrival to college you need someone to hold your hand while you explore the mystical worlds of power chords, backbeats, and modulations of an ascending minor third, you are not functioning on a post-secondary level in this particular subject area (music) in the first place and should not be admitted to college as a music major anyway. There are plenty of fine musicians who play by ear and may struggle with the "theory" behind these concepts in written form, but if these devices are beyond one's technical capacity as an instrumentalist or vocalist, college is not the place to address this deficiency. At most schools, the admissions bar is already much higher than that, and in reality probably ought to be higher yet anyway.

Please don't jump to conclusions about what I'm saying. I wish that colleges would involve many more students in their music programs than they currently do by expanding their offerings to non-majors. (Have I plugged this lately? Please feel free to read it if you haven't already) These offerings, however, need to be consistent with the level of coursework done in every other department at the school.

It's no surprise that pop music has made the most inroads in the musicology area of the curriculum, and that many schools offer classes like "History of Rock and Roll" as token gestures of goodwill towards the other liberal arts departments. As long as they jump at every opportunity to make connections to sociology, cultural studies, or whatever, there's plenty of fodder there for a college level class. Musicology and pop is a match made in heaven as long as both groups are so perversely content to wallow in concerns that have absolutely NOTHING to do with the actual creation of music. Conversely, colleges are understandably unwilling to approach pop music in the applied, ensemble, and theory areas because the curriculum would then fall well short of what could reasonably be deemed "college level" coursework.

There is no college arithmetic, nor do English literature students read Dr. Seuss, and to teach the performance of pop music as a specialization in post-secondary education would come close to crossing this line. You could say I'm biased, but this is something of a style-neutral issue anyway: a 4-year degree is a 4-year degree, and it had better signify a certain level of accomplishment at something. Like it or not, in a field where almost everything else is entirely subjective, raw technique is one of the few legitimate objective standards one can apply. In trying to precisely locate the cause of the problems so many people have with academia, the general emphasis on technique should not be confused with how it is approached. I would argue that the former is correct while the latter, in my limited experience, leaves quite a bit to be desired.

In any case, schools should not be granting music degrees of any kind to people who can't play their instruments (actually, they already do, which means that adding a pop music specialization would be compounding rather than solving the problem). That the techniques required by pop music would be inappropriate for college level coursework should also betray the fact that one does not need a degree to play pop (actually, any) music in the first place. Of course, all of us look forward to those precious few opportunities to get credit for something we would be doing anyway. That, however, is not what post-secondary education is about. Post-secondary education is about being dragged kicking and screaming out of our comfort zones and experiencing unforeseen and unprecedented personal growth as a result. You could call me, as a degree holder myself, a hypocrite, but in truth, "what I did during college" was nothing like "what I would have been doing anyway", and as ungrateful and irreverent as I get about much of my experience as a lowly undergrad, the truth is that it undoubtedly had a sizable impact on my musicianship. Just because someone is earlier in the process and/or interested in different music doesn't mean they don't deserve instruction and encouragement. I don't believe, however, that post-secondary educational institutions are obligated to provide it when the subject matter falls outside their scope.

So far as "nurture" (as opposed to "nature") is concerned, it's not too difficult to objectively evaluate different kinds of music for suitability for academic study (which is not to say I endorse their thought process on this 100% of the time, but academics are the way they are for a reason, and there's an upside to this as well as a downside). As for nature, academic musicians are reluctant to acknowledge it at all, content instead on pretending that they can work miracles with any student. This is a prudent business decision, but it doesn't always yield the greatest pedagogy. Anti-elitists beware: you ought to be careful what you wish for. Two ways academics ruin music are when they, (1) have delusions of controlling "nature", and (2) institutionalize certain biases as objective standards for lack of any other beyond the technique example given earlier.

It's not my place to say whether pop music is worthwhile on its own merit; that's up to individual preference. The requisite abilities (that is, those that can be taught at all) are so basic that they are not worthy of being taught at the post-secondary level. I say this, of course, taking for granted that there would be highly functional music programs in our K-12 schools, which is largely not true at this point. However, in a perfect world, these skills would be part of middle and high school curricula, and those who did not possess them as prospective college freshmen would be appropriately nudged towards remedial instruction, just as in every other academic discipline. I have been known to insist that, "Anything is difficult to do well." I still believe that. The path to doing something well, however, may or may not be worthy of college credit depending on the destination.


*It goes without saying, of course, that I find pop music incredibly difficult to listen to, and therein lies the problem with the all-too-handy convention of using "easy" and "difficult" as euphemisms for other things. I would argue that such labels always tell us much more about the person who made the statement in the first place than they do about the actual music that person is referring to. I promise to produce a treatise on this sometime in the next 40 years. For now, the readership can surely forgive me on the grounds that the cleverness of this particular turn of phrase outweighs the hackneyed semantic transgression I was forced to employ in its service.

Article for TCJS

Note: The following is an article of mine that recently appeared in the Twin Cities Jazz Society newsletter.

________

TCJS education chair Vicci Johnson recently invited members to share their views on jazz pedagogy. Having been preoccupied with this question for some time, I have plenty (perhaps too much) to say. The following is my best attempt at fitting it all into a relatively concise article-length piece.

First, let’s start with a pop quiz for all of you musicians and educators out there:
(1) What does it mean to imitate Louis Armstrong?
(a) To swing convincingly
(b) To invent swing altogether
(2) Who is the better Charlie Parker imitator?
(a) The player who sounds just like him
(b) The player who sounds like no one else
(3) What should a piano student attempt to glean from Cecil Taylor?
(a) Some hip "outside" licks
(b) An uncompromising attitude towards realizing his/her artistic vision

Did you answer (a) every time? Did you do so on the grounds that (b) was simply impossible? And did you also just mutter to yourself that these three jazz greats have absolutely nothing in common with each other? Congratulations! You passed the quiz with flying colors because the mainstream of jazz education agrees with you. I, however, do not.

The musician Anthony Braxton has coined two terms that would be of great use here. He refers to musicians who consciously imitate the personal style of an earlier musician as stylists and those who create a new style altogether as restructuralists. Each of the three musicians featured in the pop quiz is an archetypal example of the latter, and each has ultimately inspired countless subsequent stylists over the years. By no means do I intend to argue that jazz musicians need abandon conscious and overt imitation of other players, or that jazz education need concern itself entirely with seeking out the next big thing. Nonetheless, as both a student and (more recently) a teacher, I have always been deeply upset about the dominant paradigm in jazz education because it embraces stylization as an oppressive force. Restructuralists by definition come along only so often, but even so, it seems to me that today’s most widely accepted and utilized methodologies fall well short of fulfilling their obligation to encourage and nurture the development of traditional and innovative players alike. The following specific objections to the current paradigm are made in support of this claim and, I hope, point towards some more desirable and comprehensive alternatives.

First of all, the jazz educator must be able to distinguish between the concepts of intent, technique and habit. Intent is the preconceived notion of what the musician wishes to play or sing while improvising. Technique is the means by which this notion is realized on the instrument or voice. Habits and reflexes, meanwhile, are executed by the subconscious; it goes without saying that they can easily become barriers to realization of a intent, if not to the creation of one in the first place. It is paramount, then, that jazz pedagogy strive to (a) inform and nurture the cognitive faculty that creates preconceived musical intent, and (b) develop the instrumental or vocal technique(s) required for accurate and consistent realization of such intents in real time. Even Jamey Aebersold says, "If you don’t think before you play a phrase, it is not improvisation - just an exercise.” Whatever one thinks about his other views, he most certainly has this much correct.

Traditionally, objective (a) has been achieved through listening, transcription, and analysis of recorded music, and no issue need be taken with this approach in my opinion. To attain objective (b) without instilling blind habits is a more complicated proposition, for to some extent, the very idea of technique presupposes the creation of habits or reflexes through directed repetitive practice. Basic tone production on a wind instrument, for example, quickly becomes habit for accomplished players, as does good hand position, breathing, posture, etc. This is on purpose, for the player intends to use each of these skills every single time he or she plays a note. When a skill is of such primary importance, it is indeed advantageous to make it as close to subconscious as possible. Conversely, the following "lick" is not nearly so universally applicable:



Blind habits or reflexes are disabling! When "good" tone production becomes subconscious, the player has succeeded in disabling him/herself from producing a "bad" tone. (Don't believe me? Try teaching jazz to a professional classical musician!) Similarly, licks such as Figure 1 (as well as the various scales and patterns used to teach music theory) can easily come to unduly dominate the player's intent if practiced and studied in a way that encourages their ossification as blind habits. To be sure, such licks will always have a place in jazz improvisation as stylistic or allusive devices. Nevertheless, they must be used intentionally rather than habitually in order to be effective.

Given these observations, it follows that one of the absolute pillars of contemporary (with a lower-case "c"!) jazz pedagogy is also the most substantial undue burden on it. I am speaking of "vocabulary." That this word has or has ever had any currency at all as a pedagogical term in jazz is galling. It embraces a false analogy between language and music which equates words not with single notes or sounds but with entire phrases or "licks" such as Figure 1. Certainly there is great value to be placed in the ability to teach stylization, and vocabulary as a concept is indeed appropriate (perhaps essential) to this task. However, is this all that jazz education is charged with accomplishing today? To create revivalists, legacy bands and sound-alikes? Jazz education has bigger fish to fry, or at least it should. We cannot expect our students to innovate like Charlie Parker did simply by teaching them to sound just like him.

When pressed on this matter, educators will typically respond one of two ways. First, the staunchest traditionalists will retort that what I am advocating is fine and dandy, but that it is not "jazz" education. To be worthy of the most coveted four-letter word in the English language, the music must be a stylization, an overt imitation of a previous restructuralist (of which there have been no new ones, by the way, since 1967) in a clearly identifiable, linear fashion. In response to this, I can only say that I am more than willing to forfeit the "jazz" label in exchange for escaping such traditionalist dogma. Stylization and literal imitation will always be part of jazz, but the view that this is the only pathway to success is relatively new. The most qualified educators are the ones who are equally comfortable working at various points along this continuum.

On the other hand, slightly more enlightened or eclectically-minded individuals may indeed believe in fostering more individual approaches, but will argue that the creation of a vocabulary is only an intermediate step in the process, one of those rules that must be learned before the player can be permitted to break it. To evaluate this claim, simply listen to recent and new generations of players who have come up through this system and ask yourself how many of them, even among the most celebrated, have truly moved beyond this intermediate level of regurgitating phrases drawn from a closed inventory of possibilities. I suspect that you will then agree with me that vocabulary is an oppressive pedagogical force, both in theory and in practice. It always closes more doors than it opens, and the results are now on display for all to hear as never before.

The elephant in the room here is the fact that if we are talking specifically about junior high and high school bands, then we are talking about classroom (as opposed to "studio") teaching, and about large "big bands" rather than small "combos." Quite frankly, this can be crippling: varying ability levels, surpluses or deficits in instrumentation, and the sheer size of the groups can lead to a necessary shifting of priorities that is not always favorable to the ideal curriculum. Indeed, we could hash out the musico-philosophical rigamarole ad nauseum and not be left with anything whatsoever that could be applied effectively to this particular educational context.

There is, however, one important observation that can be made: the two styles of jazz that allow for the most collective improvisation among large groups of horn players are (a) traditional, and (b) free. Unfortunately, these two styles are all but absent from the mainstream of jazz education. Why? Because mainstream jazz educators are by and large not personally interested in or engaged with this music. For all the talk of linear tradition, that these styles would be so conspicuously absent from the picture speaks to the possibility that there is indeed something at work here that is both more powerful and less directly mediated by logical thought: in a word, taste. Nonetheless, traditional and free jazz are vital to any comprehensive understanding of the jazz tradition if for no other reason than that they represent the earliest and the most recent innovations respectively. That they would also offer potentially valuable solutions to a major conundrum of classroom teaching is a happy coincidence, yet one which mainstream jazz education has seemed slow to avail itself of. As the saying goes, the silence is deafening.

We do not need to install musical relativists in every school band directorship in the country in order to remedy this situation, but we do need individual educators to step up to the plate by putting their own likes and dislikes on the back burner when necessary. It also would not hurt for influential mainstream organizations like Jamey Aebersold Jazz Inc. and the International Association of Jazz Educators to contribute whatever tangible support they can in the form of materials and guidance. If stylization and tradition are indeed so inescapable, then why emphasize them so dogmatically from day one? Instead, teachers of beginning and intermediate students should feel confident in emphasizing broadly applicable skills rather than stylization, and exposure to rather than advocacy for various jazz styles. You will not know immediately when the next restructuralist is sitting in your classroom. The least you can do is allow yourself to find out.

After reading what I have to say on these issues, you may think you have me pegged as nothing more than a jazz dilettante, as someone whose CD rack contains a calculated assortment of music aimed more at attracting women than at providing listening pleasure, and as one of those people who espouses an all-encompassing musical relativism that is in reality no more rational than it is honest. Hopefully, you haven't jumped to those conclusions, but if you have, I must apologize for (somewhat deliberately) misleading you; there are plenty of people like that out there, but I am not one of them. I am a veritable jazz-head, but I know better than to rail against anything that deviates from what has been done so far simply because so much of that music came out of left field when it was made. It is just that simple. Furthermore, those musicians had nothing like the resources that modern communications technology has made available; that fact alone ought to have subsequent generations of musicians and educators aiming higher than ever. First, however, we need to revisit that quiz you took at the beginning of the article. If you answered (a) to any of those questions, I would politely ask you to reconsider your answer(s) in light of what I have said here. I feel strongly that the essence of jazz lies in being willing to part ways with what was done in favor of what might be. That is what guides me as both a teacher and a player.

My Composition Lessons with Bartòk (Part 2)

Without going back on what I wrote in Part 1, I also must say that I've discovered some pitfalls of getting to know a piece primarily or only by playing it yourself, although these mainly relate to being a listener/audience member rather than a composer. To state the obvious, playing a piece is typically more fun than listening to it. (the obvious exception, I think, is when the piece is of mediocre quality and exceptional difficulty) Otherwise, it's fair to say that being in the band sometimes allows for the development not only of a false impression of a piece, but also a false affinity based on this impression. I occasionally listen back to Bartòk's Concerto for Orchestra and am not nearly as taken with it as when I was a member of the orchestra. This then begs the question: what exactly did I learn from it anyway? The pitfall here would seem to the same as taking the piece in from too great a distance, namely a false impression or otherwise skewed or incomplete understanding leading to some analgous outcome in one's own work.

Upon listening to the piece recently, I was struck by a phenomenon which I have to myself always called "obviousness" for lack of a better term. "Obviousness" could be defined as "the gratuitous restatement of primary thematic material seemingly without sufficient variation or elapsed time since the last statement, or in unsuccessful 'forced' stretto with other material." I suffer from it myself on occasion, as do countless other "young" composers and quite a few overrated media darlings. The third movement of Hindemith's Symphony in B-flat has one of these moments towards the end, slightly tainting for me what I otherwise find to be a brilliant and underrated symphonic work (likely unknown to much of the "establishment" because it was written for band). Being another piece that I first got to know only by playing it, it is significant that in neither case did the "obviousness" bother me until I undertook repeated listenings from the peanut gallery rather than the stage. I still think that the advantages for a composer in playing rather than listening or score reading far outweigh this potential booby trap as long as one is acutely aware of it. I'd like to think that rather than leaving the experience holding a false affinity for certain compositional tricks, one simply gains a unique and valuable perspective on the piece whereby the advice is positive ("do this") rather than negative ("don't do this"). One would be poorly advised not to fill in the blanks by listening to a recording later.

Conventional wisdom seems to be that teaching by way of negative advice is a bad idea. Nonetheless, I have found it crucial to have "negative influences" (i.e. experiences that turn you against something rather than in favor of something). There was another piece I once played in wind ensemble that I formed an inaccurate judgement of as a player; it was incredibly densely orchestrated and technically challenging, and hearing it from the inside, I was enthralled with it. Upon hearing our recording, however, I literally did not recognize it. There was so much going on that one simply could not hear it all from any one location (what I heard from my chair was about 50% of the piece, and what I heard as an audience member was the other 50%). I still couldn't tell you how I really feel about that music because the shock was great enough to preclude accurate judgement for the time being. Obviously, there's quite a composition lesson to be learned here as well, even though the mechanism is aversion rather than assimilation.

It's merely a symptom of my personality that many of my most important influences are indeed negative ones rather than positive ones; such was the case for me with this piece. Thinking "I want to be like that" is often less powerful than those moments where you think "I never want to be like that!" Maybe it's not a good way to teach, but it's still a good way to learn. Having completed the circle by experiencing the music from the inside, I have a better understanding of what I think went wrong than I would coming at it from most any other perspective, where the density would simply have been blinding.

Towards "A Full Understanding"

Jazz and race. It's a topic that's been making it's way around the blogosphere lately. By the time I get this post up, the whole thing probably will have passed over. Fine. This isn't something that one just rattles off a casual sketch about. It deserves a well thought-out, carefully worded, conscientious effort even from a blog, the most notoriously casual and unregulated of all media outlets. I'd undoubtedly have less to talk about here (which would be a good thing) if more people had put more thought and more effort into what they've written. Here, then, are my responses to the good, the bad and the ugly of what has been said recently. My sincere thanks and congratulations to anyone who actually reads the whole thing.

This is undoubtedly the touchiest subject to fall within the purview of this blog (sorry guys, B-flat versus C tubas doesn't even register on the scale). With that in mind, let me establish a few things from the outset that the reader may want to keep in mind while evaluating my comments. This is a classic example of a situation where everyone wants to be the victim. Needless to say, African Americans as a group have endured victimization the likes of which few other Americans can relate to directly, both in general, and specifically with regard to the exploitation of certain largely African American musical contributions and innovations. I get that. This particular situation proves that we are all victims of what has been perpetrated, albeit to varying degrees. It is understandable that some amount of the animosity and distrust created by these injustices endures in succeeding generations of musicians who, individually, have not really done anything to each other.

I am white: to say that I too feel victimized is simply for me to be honest, but could also be interpreted as ignorant. Hence, I need the reader to realize that I by no means consider my own victimization to be on par with the ongoing oppression and exploitation of blacks. It is too easy for whites to come across as insensitive on this matter, and also too easy for blacks to take it this way when it may not have been meant as such. Please do not take anything I say here as an indication of a lack of empathy or historical knowledge (there will be more on my background later). I am acutely aware of the existence and the fallacies of the "cult of white victimhood" (Twin Citeans may recognize that phrase; I'm stealing it from this disturbing City Pages article of last year, which has nothing to do with music, but which many readers will find interesting nonetheless). I do not subscribe to this school of thought; it is a propaganda victory of the right wing designed to whip up racial tensions ("divide and conquer"). My victimization pales in comparison to the real issues here, but I am a victim nonetheless and I insist on the right to voice my concerns. I will do so by taking various recent online statements as starting points and working out from there. At the conclusion of each discussion, I will afford each of these people the opportunity to cover their asses by giving an assignment to each of them based on the claims made in their statements. These people (and anyone else) are thusly invited to post their completed assignments as comments to this entry. Without further ado:

EXHIBIT A
excerpt:
White folks know the historical value of jazz as an art form. They will stop at nothing to write themselves a part of it. But their presence means the scarce resources are taken from the black artists who are the true keepers of the legacy. White males will recognize the dead and dying ones, but never anoint the younger turks like James Carter and Christian McBride. Of course , we shouldn't expect them to. They had always looked out first for their own.

--

The best thing white musicians can do is get out of the way and let them play. Let them be heard, let them be able to sustain a living and leave a legacy. I am still searching for a true white jazz musician. And I have heard many. I hear intellect, but not "soul" and energy. Maybe one day , I will hear one. In the meantime, I refuse to lower the standards I was taught so that they can pretend they have a right to our legacy. Do you think they would accept a black man playing Irish or Yiddish music?

A gem of ethnomusicological scholarship, if I don't say so myself. I have faith that the black supremacist account of jazz history is espoused by a relatively small number of individuals, so small in fact that I'm not sure I've ever met one of these people in person. If I have, they have all been unusually kind to me. Nonetheless, as this document proves, they are out there somewhere, and even if they only express their "real" views in private, anonymously or through one-way online conduits, those views are communicated often enough that this is by no means a dead issue. As the bumper sticker says, if what I'm about to say makes you feel attacked, it is probably a counter-attack.

Dropping McBride's name the way he does is ridiculous. I don't know anyone I've ever worked with, black or white, who wouldn't give up their first born child for McBride's ability. Carter I'm not so sure about, but I hardly find him to be a good example of a musician who has been systematically denied media attention. More like the other way around.

The intellect/soul dichotomy and its many variants should be familiar to anyone who reads about music regularly. It's a bad enough to dismiss a whole slew of musicians (including at least a few widely acknowledged masters) as worthless based entirely on the color of their skin, but to do so on this hopelessly subjective and cliched basis is laughable. Would I accept a black man playing Irish music? Of course. No less than I would accept a black man playing classical music, which many do quite well. How do you explain that?

Assignment for Greg: write a five paragraph essay on the music of one or more of the following white musicians, explaining in specific and widely accepted/understood musical and sociological terms why those in question are not worthy of being called jazz musicians.
(1) Bill Evans
(2) Dave Holland
(3) Pat Martino

EXHIBIT B
excerpt:
Whether or not there are authentic systems in [Dave] Douglas’s music is not even close to the point. To me, the question is: What is jazz music? What I really don't like is how the avant-garde, which is more like contemporary European music, is treated as the solution to jazz to the exclusion of real jazz. I realized the problem years ago when Roland Kirk complained to Cecil Taylor in Downbeat that Cecil wouldn't let him sit in with his band. Cecil said they had arrangements, and that's why he didn't let Kirk sit it, but that's not a good reason. That's what holds the music back. It is a real problem that there is no agreed-upon place for avant-garde musicians and the musicians who play real jazz to play together. Because if the avant-garde musicians stay away from the jazz musicians, their music gets to the point where it has less and less to do with jazz. I don't like that.
-Stanley Crouch

The first thing jump out at me about Crouch's statement is a perverse concern with defining jazz, a position which the reader must acknowledge in order to evaluate everything he says during the interview. His approach is notable (but not unique) in the way it aspires to neutrality in order to conceal a value judgement (which, make no bones about it, he wants you to share). Douglas is not a bad musician, he's just not playing jazz, or at least not "real jazz." Sounds objective enough, but let's consider the source: coming from someone who takes stylistic labels for granted, perhaps it could be taken as a neutral statement; coming from Stanley Crouch, it is a veiled condemnation. His statement quoted earlier in the article that "Douglas is not a bad musician" now seems suspiciously candy-coated. Of course, he's entitled to his opinion; from reading the whole interview, I would expect that the two of us most likely share many tastes in music. I simply find the elevation of the "what is jazz?" question to be a bit misguided in general, and given what we know about him, I don't think it is one bit unreasonable to wonder if this is really just about music.

Of course, at this point in the interview, he makes it clear enough that he is expressing opinions rather than facts, but these are opinions about sociology, not music. He doesn't like the avant-garde because arrangements make participation in music-making more exclusive? What about the musical results? I don't think it's too extreme to insist that the musical outcome of any given event is far more significant in any evaluation of it's overall success than the logistics of how inclusive the event is, yet Crouch attempts no such evaluation here, not even on a subjective basis. Hence, not only has he elevated the all-trivial question of stylistic definition to the height of concern, but he answers the question not by evaluating musical properties but by wallowing in social concerns.

On top of all of this, it's ludicrous that he assails the avant-garde for being exclusive. As if any old dope could have simply sat in with Charlie Parker! The stories I've heard about people trying didn't have particularly happy endings. A rift between the mainstream and the avant-garde is an inevitable consequence of a virile art form, and in most cases, I'm not sure members of the two groups are terribly disappointed that they cannot play together. Kirk was not exactly a mainstream guy himself after all, and as petty a thing as it is to say, I feel obligated to point out the obvious fact that he was also blind. Could that have had something to do with it? I've sat in with groups playing original material even though that meant I had to read. I'm having someone do the same with one of my groups tonight. The solution is not to do away with arrangements, but to be a competent sight-reader, which most jazz musicians are anyway these days. Of course, the dixieland guys also think that arrangements are wrong-headed, but Crouch's own stated interests would seem to reach far beyond that. Last I checked, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra plays "arrangements." Does that fact by itself "hold the music back?" Wait...don't answer that.

Another grave mistake is to lump the entire avant-garde together. "Free" music most certainly does not use arrangements. It is nothing less than the single most inclusive Western musical form yet devised. Yes, it tolerates charlatans to a greater extent than most musical traditions as a consequence of this openness, but it also enables what are to me some of the most compelling possibilities anywhere in all of art. Any idiot can see that Crouch's ideal of "real jazz" is far more exclusive than this.

Assignment for Stanley:Write a five paragraph essay defining jazz. Use specific and widely accepted/understood musical and sociological terms.

"EXHIBIT C
excerpt:
"Defining 'who can play' is subject to a great deal of cultural bias that breaks down largely along racial lines. Of course, to suggest that the criteria for evaluating the music should emanate from the culture that spawned the music would be interpreted as 'reverse racism."
-Eric Gould

Which culture would that be? Perhaps the culture of New Orleans, which was more thoroughly integrated in the late 1800's than some American cities are today? I think you could argue that race became a larger factor in jazz only after it moved on to places where race was a larger factor in general, but that is a superfluous observation to make here. What Gould is saying implies ownership, and that is more worth examining in depth. Outsiders are being asked to take on a false consciousness and assimilate the value judgments of what is assumed to be a largely foreign culture in exchange for membership in the "jazz" club. Even if you find this reasonable, it certainly isn't very nice. Perhaps the reason you seldom hear such things these days from Europeans talking about their classical tradition is because they have not suffered exploitation like American blacks have. At some point, you'll just have to take my word that I aim to be as sensitive to these issues as any outsider can be without actually having been in the victim's shoes. I still do not think that it helps matters to militantly guard a culture's artistic contributions from all outsiders as if it were a trade secret. It would, in fact, be a tremendous gesture of goodwill and reconciliation to be open to many interpretations of what jazz might mean to people of diverse backgrounds, and in fact, that view is not altogether unusual these days. Some will inevitably reply that the ongoing possibility of exploitation precludes this, a view which I find unduly conservative, but which I suppose I can't disagree with entirely. But just to be clear, if this is indeed the way we're operating these days, I hereby grant permission to all non-whites to play classical music, and to synthesize new musical works from this and other streams of tradition. You can bet your life that I would be labeled a racist if I opined to the contrary.

In any case, here's your assignment, Eric:
Write a five paragraph essay detailing the criteria for evaluation that you think should be used to decide who can play. Use specific and widely accepted/understood musical and sociological terms.

EXHIBIT D
excerpt:
The reason most of the whites & asians come out and support is because they're still trying to cop what we're doin'...especially the creative music, because they don't have a full understanding which propels them. Blacks in some since have moved on like Miles and on to tha next.
-http://www.myspace.com/coreywilkes

Aargh. This takes the cake. Let's again reason by analogy to European classical music: when was the last time a white classical pianist gave a recital for a predominantly Korean audience and subsequently complained that there were too few white men in the audience and that the only reason it was packed with young Korean women is that they were there to cop his phrasing? I would hope that this a strictly hypothetical situation, and that if it's not, plenty of people would be lining up to speak out against such an attitude. I can only speak for one white person (myself), but that's not why I go the hear live music. I mean, it's just so much easier to cop that shit from records because that way you can hear it more than once (and of course, most of us are pretty slow, so we need to hear things many times before we can remember them).

In all seriousness now, the "full understanding" line is the single most offensive thing I've read in music-related discourse in quite a while. I most certainly do not understand fully why music has such a profound effect on me. I think that if I did, it would lose some of it's attraction. That's not a white or a black sentiment, that's the sentiment of all people who play music for it's own sake rather than to have their ego stroked. If you aren't in it for the music; if you're a Stanley Crouch type who's more concerned with who and how than what; if you believe that people of different races are genetically predisposed to sound a certain way; then you are the one who lacks a "full understanding" and you really need to go hang out at Berkleeuntil you inevitably run into some kid from Uzbekistan who sounds like he grew up in Chicago. How's that for "cultural context"?

Assignment for Corey:at the first set break of your next gig, go up to five unknown white people in the audience and ask them why they came. Report back. (Extra credit: go up to five men and five women and ask them why they came. That question is on a lot of people's minds also, and is no less controversial.)

EXHIBIT E:

Wynton Marsalis recently appeared on The Daily Show, where he described the music of Armstrong, Ellington and Parker as "subversive." His latest release is supposed to carry on that tradition. I don't need to see a genuine copy of Wynton's tax return to get a decent idea of what he makes and how he lives, and I don't find that to be the least bit subversive, the provocative subject matter of his music notwithstanding. Let me tell you why. (note: I am not a blanket Wynton hater. J Mood is one of my favorites of all time; why the hell won't he do that anymore?)

To be an art musician of any kind is still subversive, but not in the way jazz used to be. Jazz musicians of all races live in less-than-affluent circumstances, eschewing "American Dream" bullshit in favor of a hard scrabble life with few lights at the end of the tunnel. Many own instruments that are worth the price of a car. Some of their record collections are worth more than that. In an age when "the best thing for America" is to earn as much money and buy as much plastic shit as humanly possible, they refuse to comply, even though many of them possess exceptional intellects and would have no trouble distinguishing themselves quickly in a more lucrative field. That is pretty damn subversive, but it is only indirectly related to continuing concerns about race. I don't think white people purposely infiltrated the ranks of the working stiff musician in order to hijack the subversive power of the jazz community away from race and towards their own agenda. I think it's merely a symptom of the quality of "real jazz" that it inevitably attracted such arduous followers from all over the place. In any case, subversive people are more dangerous than subversive music. If the current situation somehow represents a failure to fans of subversion, I think they have missed the point.

Conclusion/Full Disclosure/Considering The Source:

I am white and had a comfortable middle class upbringing, but my parents did not shelter me by any stretch of the imagination. I went to inner city public schools for all but 6th through 8th grade, including an elementary school that was at one point 70% black. That doesn't make me an expert on or a member of the culture (although a good high school friend once jokingly elected me and another white friend as official black people), but it does mean that I have more than just a cursory grasp on the past and the present of black history. Maybe it is insensitive to say so, but I do in fact feel downright victimized by much of what I've read over the last several weeks, if not in a rather minor way. It is genuinely disheartening. Why is it even worth complaining about from my end? Take these five exhibits together and you have an impossible situation. Go your own way and you are an ingrate, co-opting the jazz label without any justification. Follow tradition and you are simply stealing from black innovators. It's a catch 22.

Notice that only one of these five people take the position that white people are innately incapable of playing jazz, but that the various others lay out a web of demands which, taken together, cannot possibly be met. Simply by being white and playing most any form of American music, you are prone to run up against one of these objections. That's not the attitude that I see in the people I play with, nor is that an attitude I feel entitled to take towards European music. No, the race issue in jazz is not dead, but resolving it has got to be a two-way street. If there's anything I can do, I will, but I will not stop transcribing black musicians, nor will I stop working in avant-garde or "classical" influenced groups, and when pressed by a well-intentioned (if annoying) inquisitor about what kind of music I play, I will not hesitate to answer "jazz". "Full understanding" sounds more like "hidden agenda" to me. I have no agenda in doing these things other than to relieve the constant urge to make music, and I'd like to think that this attitude transcends all racial and social boundaries. I don't seek to understand my musical inclinations, only to translate them into tangible high-quality musical products (the establishment of that criterion being, of course, highly subjective and mediated only by my own value judgments). I take offense to no one who does the same, and I ask only the same treatment in return.

My Composition Lessons with Bartòk (Part 1)

The best composition lessons I ever had were the ones with Bartòk. In only 45 minutes, he would show me how to write counterpoint, how to orchestrate, how to manage large-scale form and orchestral forces, and even how to keep a sense of humor throughout the process. I came back every few days for a couple of weeks and we would go over the same material and the same concepts. Despite this, I never got tired of the lessons, and in fact, they just kept getting better. Strangely enough, the fact that he was not alive at the time didn't seem to have any adverse effects.

I'm talking, of course, about playing Bartòk's Concerto for Orchestra when I was in college. Why do I think this single experience (or set of experiences) was more helpful than spending 4 years earning a degree in composition? Many reasons.

•First, when performing a work as part of a large ensemble, one does not hear the music as the audience does, nor does one approach it the way a scholar does. The experience is unique, for you are required to listen across the ensemble for pitch, style, and dynamics in a way that makes you hyper-aware of the most intricate details of the score. Your position on stage "inside" the ensemble also gives you a unique and valuable acoustic perspective (I'd rather listen to music from there than from the audience or on record).

•Second, at least in a student ensemble, the work will be rehearsed many times, perhaps even too many for your preferences as a player in that ensemble, but this affords you many hearings not only of the whole piece, but of movements, sections, and partial instrumentations. You simply can't help but absorb (or at least notice) some of the salient compositional features of the work. Your heightened level of engagement and awareness throughout this process makes it all the more effective.

•Third, the rehearsal process and the conductor (presumably someone who knows a little something about the instruments in the orchestra) reveal an incredible amount about the capabilities of each instrument and how the piece in question does or does not use them effectively both individually and in combination with each other.

•Fourth, it is fun as all get out and keeps you intellectually and spiritually alive as a musician. If as an orchestral composer you have never actually played in the ensemble yourself, I say that speaks poorly on behalf of your compositional pedigree. If you have never even had any such desire in the first place, I say you have chosen the wrong profession.

I was merely skeptical of formal composition study before I played the Concerto for Orchestra. Having now had several such experiences in addition to this, I'm ready to dismiss all of you academic composers outright. Be honest: how many of you who write for orchestra play an orchestral instrument well enough to make it into the orchestra at the school(s) where you earned your degree(s)? How many of you actually did this? And how many of you actually got to play works from which you felt like you could learn something of significant value to your development as a composer? (sadly, the programming in the college orchestras I played in was rarely of the kind I am describing)

Let's stop pretending that just anyone can learn to read score like Pierre Boulez and that a feeble attempt at climbing this mountain is just as good or better than taking it in through your ears. If I ran the world, I would make performing in the ensemble of greatest interest to the student a part of all composition degrees. I would also demand that college orchestra directors program more works that are capable of serving this purpose effectively. During my college years, I played for one who did and one who didn't. The former experience was an absolute unqualified joy and is where the "lessons" I'm jokingly referring to took place. The other was an absolute unqualified disappointment where I learned nothing useful as either a composer or a performer. Do you think it's a coincidence that the former conductor was also an accomplished composer?

The majority of "great" composers have also been virtuouso performers, going back at least as far as Ockeghem and continuing through Bartòk, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev. It has been pointed out recently and frequently that Steve Reich has played an important role in his own success by performing many of his works himself. And the jazz world speaks for itself on this matter.

People like me really should not accept the "autodidact" label from the credentialed elite. The next time one of them asks me who my teachers were, I'm going to answer "Bartòk, Debussy and Thelonious Monk among others. You?"

Your Musical Talents Needed

For only the third time in my adult life, I went to a protest/demonstration/rally last weekend. Such events were held worldwide to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War. The event included a march of roughly a mile during which my fickle ears (hyuk hyuk) took note of some curious musical phenomena, including:

•a trumpet player playing "Charge" on the wrong partials (you can play it correctly on any brass instrument using any fingering if you start on the third partial and end on the sixth partial; somehow, this person was consistently ending on the fifth partial);

•a spontaneous a capella rendition of We Shall Overcome which modulated not only chromatically, but also diatonically (!) so that it ultimately landed in a key noticably below where it startedand ended on scale degree 7 instead of 1;

•a variety of solo and ensemble percussion music which displayed an exceptional rhythmic ineptitude.

To be clear, this is obviously my problem and not theirs. No one notices or cares about these things save for the few of us public conservatory-educated music dorks, and you can hear them anywhere and everywhere that large crowds gather and attempt to make spontaneous functional music (major league baseball games are the worst in my experience). It's not life and death by any means, but I am always intrigued (and call me an elitist, but also very disappointed) at the overall level of musicianship of the average Joe. I'm quite tempted to show up to the next one wearing a sousaphone, and if any of you other musicians out there ever have the time and inclination to attend such an event, please bring your instrument and musical talents along if at all possible. They are in high demand.

Another Pet Peeve About Music Blogs...

...is when they don't deal with music. I'll grant an exemption to politics given the dire events of the last several years, but that's it. I'll pass on literature, film, sports, literature, food, literature, literature, and most of all, the freaking LITERATURE!!!

For pretty much my entire life, I have had what could fairly be described as a pathological aversion to literature, or at least to fiction. I can only guess at the underlying reasons, but one might be that I do not desire nor have I ever particularly desired to escape reality. That's not to say that I'm content with the state of things, just to say that I generally struggle with the willful suspension of disbelief. Actually, I hated music from an early age also. It was a sheer accident that I ended up playing music in the first place. I've been hooked from the start, yet I've since had more extensive exposure to literature and theater without ever shedding my aversion to either. Not surprisingly, abstract visual art is the only other medium I feel a natural affinity for. There something about twisted piles of scrap metal and arbitrary smears of color that appeals to me much the same way that music does.

Maybe it's not so important to know why, but I do wish I could offer an explanation if for no other reason than that it is hard to defend a narrowly focused interest in abstract art. It has always irked me that whenever the "value of the arts" is under discussion, the last thing out of people's mouths is anything about enriching our lives aesthetically. No, instead it's always about making kids smart, keeping kids off drugs, keeping kids off the streets...come to think of it, it's almost always about kids period, always portraying "the arts" as the means to an end rather than an end unto themselves.

What is missing from the picture is any discussion of the mechanism by which the kids are to be engaged by the art. Is it too much to assume that this is accomplished through aesthetic means? And if it is accomplished some other way, what is the value of art, then? Nothing! Any old diversion can occupy (detain?) little Johnny and Susie, including knitting, bridge, and forced manual labor. If the results are any different with art, then there must be a reason.

The function of art as a means of keeping kids out of trouble or of clarifying or commenting on some social issue is indeed valuable, but it tends to overshadow the fact that any of these secondary functions of art are dependent on the art itself appealing to and engaging some audience. Would we be debating Wagner's anti-semitism today if his music had been average? We wouldn't even know who he was if that had been the case. (How many mediocre composers can you name who were active in the 1860's?) Whether or not it is acknowledged as such, the aesthetic experience is the source of all interest in art. Trace your way back from the co-optation du jour and you will arrive there every time as if tracing Earth's energy resources back to the sun.

Speaking of co-optation, the value of art may be an entirely separate discussion from the value of the arts at this point, the latter phrase being not only too broad to have any real legitimacy, but also having come to stand for something shallow and dishonest. If we really are willing to embrace the whole unwieldy collection of "the arts" as a unit, it follows that there is something for everyone hiding somewhere in that massive pile crap. That is where their eminent value lies. The trivial whiling away of the hours can be accomplished equally well by means of any old diversion, but where there is the potential for the unique form of engagement known as aesthetic experience, the arts have contributed something unique and important to the world. Artists themselves should be the last people to take that for granted.

We all know that the reason this value is never emphasized in any public arena is that granting agencies and elected officials are unimpressed by it. Hence, as a mere survival skill, artists have learned or been groomed to fall back on all of the secondary functions of their art, especially the ones involving kids. (What can we say? Everyone loves the little buggers.) My questions are: how much longer can we go on living on a little white lie? And with so many people in the art community actually believing this themselves, what is the value of "the arts" to the people who actually shape them?

Sadly, the kids don't dig my atonal orchestral pieces or my free jazz excursions. If I'm going to keep them away from drugs (and I might be the only musician I know who's actually capable of doing that), it's going to have to be some other way. Not only is it better for them that way, but it also gives me the freedom to continue wallowing in the realm of the abstract. There is no intuitive certainty strong enough to guarantee that our artistic output is valuable enough on its own to excuse us from any other efforts towards leaving the world in better condition than we found it in, and in fact, most of the time its probably more tenuous than we'd like to admit to assume that any old person in need would even like what we do. It is all too convenient to think that we can simply tie other obligations in with what we "really" want to be doing by giving our latest masterpiece a provocative title. Unfortunately, that only works if the work is world class, or if it has mass media hype behind it.

Who gets to go?

There was a time when I refused to show any inclination whatsoever towards moving to New York City. Every midwestern jazz player practically drools over the thought whether they've ever been there or not, which meant that my need to be different just for the sake of being different was in full effect. Sadly, I've still never been there, but now that I know a little bit more and have had some frustating experiences here in middle America, I have finally started thinking seriously about taking the plunge. What else is there to do?

The level of playing has never really intimidated me. That's not to say I expect to fit right in, but no matter where I live, I expect that I'll have to confront it anyway at some point in my career. If I don't, that will mean that I either got complacent or failed entirely. Competition is healthy and inspirational; why not embrace it?

What bothers me much more is the money question. A 2006 Worldwide Cost of Living survey conducted by Mercer Consulting named New York as the most expensive U.S. city and the 10th internationally. Rent.com says:

The overall cost of living here is 364% compared to the national average, making it just slightly less than California's Silicon Valley, the most expensive area in the nation. Average apartment rentals go for $1,600 per month, with utilities costing an average of $189 per month.

So, has money become the greatest determining factor in who among us naive young musicians is able to actually get up and strategically place ourselves in the center of the action? It's hard to believe that it hasn't. That's a dire situation in my opinion, not nearly as dire as the larger question of access to music education generally, but it is a result of the same deplorable phenomenon, namely of middle and lower income people being priced out of music on some level. One way that the internet will never really be able to bring us closer together is by facilitating in-person collaborative musical performance. Geographic isolation is a tremendous barrier to musical collaboration, so it's not so far-fetched to think that there really ought to be a "musical capital" of the world or country where we can all be available to each other. An astronomical cost of living, however, kills the whole thing.

It's not that wealth and artistic vision necessrily preclude each other, but in order to continue being a Mecca for artists of any kind, a scene must select for the latter and not the former. What's the consequence of the opposite case? A fetishized rat race dominated by brats with more money than talent. That's what college music programs are. That's what I want to get away from. That's what kills music. The thought of encountering a "real world" manifestation of that is nauseating. I'm crossing my fingers now.

I'm somewhat on the fortunate end of things. If I decide to go, I will find a way to make it work financially. However, none of the possible scenarios look easy. Maybe that means that the people who do manage to survive there are exceptional in many different ways. Maybe that means that there's a grain of truth to all of the idealization and mythology surrounding the place. On the other hand, that's part of the problem: mythology » co-optation » commodification » fetish, and then it's entirely too late to really get in on the action because there is no more action.

Having never actually been to the place, I probably don't know what I'm talking about, nor am I saying that music has to be made by poor people to be any good, nor am I slamming native New Yorkers. (although before posting this, I did check with a friend of mine who grew up there, and she made many of the same observations). It's something that makes me wonder, and the more I think about it, the more apparent it gets that as long as the cost of living remains so disproportionately high in our musical capital, and as long as the country as a whole continues to hemorrage decent-paying jobs to the third world, wealth will continue to eclipse talent as the primary determining factor not only in who gets to go to NYC, but in who gets to play and even listen to music in the first place. This is the major issue facing American music right now and it is seldom if ever discussed. The topic that does get discussed semi-regularly is the cost of going to jazz clubs. Maybe that will eventually lead to a more comprehensive discussion.

Pattern Recognition

The ability to recognize patterns varies in individuals and is not universal. It is a skill that can be honed, but it does not come to everyone with equal ease. The people who design standardized tests seem to think it's quite important. I remember that in elementary school, there was always that question where you would be given a sequence of numbers and asked to say what the next number in the sequence was. For some reason, I had a knack for these things from an early age. A knack that is, not an interest. Fast forward about 15 years to my first encounter with Schoenberg's statement that sequences in music are worthless and serve no particularly important function other than to take up space. There was a time when I might have disagreed, but by the time I read this, it served not as a challenge to but as an affirmation of my own feelings towards sequence in music. Sequence grates on me like few other devices. Particularly with regard to jazz musicians, it truly has become nothing more than a fallback, a way to take up space and avoid embarrassment when the player doesn't know what else to do.

It's no mystery how this happened: jazz musicians are taught theory largely through sequence. Instead of taking the most direct route towards studying the way past musicians "used"scales, students today are constantly nudged towards constructing patterns in order to internalize the sound and feel of scales and keys. I myself worked out of Coker's Patterns for Jazz and Nelson'sPatterns for Improvisation quite extensively in my late high school and early college years. As well asaccomplishing the afore mentioned objectives, it helped build my chops tremendously.

We must, however, be very careful in defining the word "use." Does anyone really "use" scales or scale patterns? It depends on what that means. A phrase that happens to only use C's, D's and E's could be said to "use" the C major scale, but did the player really arrive at it this way? If this observation is not supefluous, it should be. Obviously, some players do actually think of themselves as "using" scales and some don't. I should not necessarily be predisposed to prefer one group over the other, but in fact, given the situation, the "use" of scales equates directly to the "use" of sequence in a way that I consistently find distasteful.

To put it another way, very few musicians who play sequences truly "use" them, as this term implies some certain intent on the part of a sentient being. Instead, they have spent so much time practicing scale patterns that when nothing else comes to mind, they habitually lapse into regurgitating a literal statement of what they have been praticing, even if it was never intended to be "used" this way in performance.

My point? Sometimes an etude is just an etude. In classical music, there are etudes that are performed (like Chopin's) and etudes that no one would dare allow to be heard outside the practice room (like much of the Arban book). Jazz could learn something from this practice. Patterns build chops and help the player conceive of keys, but they make poor materials with which to construct a solo, or any piece of music for that matter. (And I have to add that I have about the same feelings toward "materials" and "construct" in this context as I do toward "use.") In my mind, technical exercises that were constructed solely for their value as technical exercises and not as "real"music should not be available to be "used" (or abused) at all. They are of a fundamentally different nature than any "lick" a musician might pick up from others, which originated as a spontaneous and effective musical statement and retains at least a small amount of this potential over time. That's my opinion, at least. I am appalled that some musicians apparently do think that their practice of scale patterns serves to literally prepare "material" for"use" that they can pull out at any time while "constructing" something. I have no problem with such perparation, only with the chosen material. As an early teacher of mine wisely told me, use patterns with "extreme caution and restraint."

But what of the ability to recognizepatterns? If it was more universal, musicians would not get away with these shenanigans as often because more people would understand what they are doing and hear right through it. I hypothesize that my loathing of sequence is at least partially a consequence of it being so easy to recognize, and perhaps also that the ability to view something as sequential even if it was not intended that way has ruined my ability to enjoy a good deal of music. But the ability to recognize sequence is not the only variable: the other is how the listener responds to success or failure in this activity. Hence, I further hypothesize that some people must be gratified simply by recognizing sequence in music (i.e. by "getting it") and some people (like me) are indifferent or putoff by it. Given two two-way variables, that makes for four groups of listeners who will each approach the issue differently