natesmith124's Open Salon Blog

An Open Letter to the Thelonious Monk Institute

Tue, 3 Jul 2012 11:07:34 -0400

Below, a letter I sent last week to the Monk Institute.

Small preface-

As you'll read below, I'm too old to take part in jazz' premier (really "only") competition. I felt there was an argument to be made that by enforcing the age limit rigidly, the Institute was actually undermining the stated spirit of the competition.

Why am I posting online? I was torn about this, and want to underscore that the Monk Institute is in no way obligated to reply to me, and I'm not entitled to a response. That's why I want to make clear that I carry nothing but respect and admiration for the Monk Institute and what they've done to increase the exposure (and financial success) of not only the musicians who've participated in the contest, but of America's Music as a whole. Moreover, as a private foundation, they're entitled to run their contest any way they see fit.

Still, the Monk Organization benefits mightily from being seen as an impartial arbiter of talent, and I feel if they're willing to make decisions that affect musicians' careers, they should be willing and able to face public scrutiny for those decisions. One has to wonder whether a contest that claims to "idenfity new voices in jazz", but only considers entrants under 30, is really doing what it claims to do, and, further, whether we as a society value artists only when their talent is manifest at an early age - if we're willing to allow all institutional "doors" to be "closed" to late-bloomers.

Ok - preface over.

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June 28, 2012

Dear []-

I am a jazz drummer interested in participating in this year's Thelonious Monk Competition. A native of Montana, I moved to New York in 2003 to study with []at []. Since then I've dedicated my life to the study of the drums. Every year the Monk Competition instruments are announced, I've watched eagerly, hoping it would be drums. When the last Monk drum competition took place, introducing the world to Harold Summey and Jorge Rossy, I was 13 years old. The same year, I received my first jazz recording - a cassette tape of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue - as birthday present from my dad.

I think you already know where this is going. Finally, it's time again for the drum competition - the first such competition since 1992. I'm now 33 years old. And I'm writing to make a plea for an exception to the age restriction.

I'm going to make three sucinct arguments that answer three questions I would likely have if I were in your position.

The first deals with sheer logistics. Had the competition for drums been held every 4, 6, or even 10 years, it would be fair to say that I'd seen several opportunities to participate come and go, and made an affirmative decision to sit them out. The 20-year hiatus, however, leaves me in a catch-22. I was, of course, far too young to participate the first time around, and now, by dint only of my birth date, I find myself three years too old.

The second argument is about the spirit of the rule. The mission of the Monk Institute is "to identify jazz' new voices," and to "reveal...promisiong performers." It stands to reason, then, that you would want to limit the competition to participants who are not already veterans of the music. The restriction on performance on a major label serves to confine the competition to "new voices," not those already identified by major labels or already hired by established stars. As best I understand it, the age restriction is another means of ensuring the competition focuses on discovering new talent by preventing performers who might have been gigging on a local scene for many years from using their superior experience to "poach" the prize. There are plenty of opportunities for established musicians. The Monk Competition is meant to focus on the not-yet-established ones.

To begin to explain why I believe I fall comfortably into the category of musicians the competition is meant to discover, a few more details about me. I began to play relatively late in life. Though I had played the drums as a hobby throughout high school, I didn't begin to study them seriously, let alone to study jazz, until I was an undergraduate in college. The work that many musicians arrive at college having done already, I did after graduation. At age 33, I still very much a novice, and lifelong student of my heroes Elvin Jones, and Tony Williams. But I believe I have a unique voice on and exceptional love and dedication for, my instrument. In short, aren't I exactly the type of musician the Monk Competition is designed to identify and support?

The final reservation I could understand your having about granting an exception is fairness. "If I do it for this guy, won't I have to do it for everybody?" And to that, I have no easy answer. It may be that there are other drummers in exactly my boat, and I'd be hard pressed to ask you to grant permission to me and not to them. But the age limit has been different in years past. I understand the Institute has struggled with the very issues I outlined above - how to keep established people from "poaching" the prize without excluding any budding talent that could use wider recognition. Perhaps, especially in light of the 20-year-gap between competitions, you can allow a few exceptions for folks who otherwise meet the criteria?

I make no claim to being a likely winner - I'm only asking for the opportunity to try.

Most sincere thanks,

Nathaniel Smith
New York, NY

Three Records That Changed My Life This Fall

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 13:12:42 -0500

I've struggled to put my finger on exactly why it is that some songs sound perfectly good - they have everything going for them from good beat to clever melody to soulful performances - and others take flight. People have been wrestling with this for centuries - you could as easily ask what made Beethoven's or Brahms' symphonies epiphanal while those of some of their contemporaries were...not. This fall, three records emerged as favorites on the iPod - I noticed I kept skipping other songs and sighing with satisfaction when I landed on these. Whatever the reason, each one of the records I'm going to speak about had the magic combination of creative inspiration, people, shared vision, and right-place-right-time je ne sais quoi to escape the pull of gravity.

Hearts Wide Open - Gilad Hekselman

Gilad Hekselman first caught my attention at a concert a friend was curating. I'd heard his name before, and now know that he "came up" as a member of drummer Ari Hoenig's band. What struck me immediately about Gilad's playing and writing was that it was at once deeply rooted and somehow a little beyond charted territory. The combination of Hekselman, bassist Matt Brewer (subbing for regular Joe Martin, who I heard with the band on many subsequent occasions), and drummer Marcus Gilmore worked for the same reason the music itself did - it was a little deeper than what I was used to, but hit familiar marks. The best way to describe it is to fall on a metaphor I use frequently: cooking, and the way some great chefs get really deeply inside flavor, reconstruct familiar things from the source materials, and are so facile in their craft that they can make subtle substitutions at the DNA-level to give a dish an extra dimsnsion without altering its overall affect or losing the essence that made it familiar. It took me 2 months, for instance, to figure out what was going on in Gilad's deconstruction of Coltrane's Countdown, which in my opinion deserves a place in the canon of the great recordings of that piece. Well it turns out the math works - Trane's head cubized into a mobius of displaced rhythm (and one tailor made for an atomizing Marcus Gilmore solo) - but retaining completely the original form.

I waited eagerly for the release of Hearts Wide Open, Gilad's latest, and when it finally "dropped" I ran through the rain to my corner record store - oh wait I mean I flipped open my laptop and downloaded it in my pajamas - and had listened to it four times already by the close of the day. The record features Hekselman's working trio of Gilmore and Martin, augmented on most tracks by tenor-saxophonist Mark Turner, and spans just ten songs, including the brief intro and epilogue. If you want to get an idea of the essence of this band, listen to Brooze, as I did first when I accidentally set my iPod to shuffle. I'm glad I did. Brooze perfectly exemplifies Gilad's concept - it's amazingly simple. It can be, because his is a band that finds meaning in every subtlety. Gilmore has a huge pocket - his hookup with Martin is loose in all the right ways, tumbling forward beat-to-beat like a good blues song - and he finds ways to throw accents on corners of the beat you didn't think possible. It's a treat as well to hear Mark Turner play so soulfully and unaffectedly on this session - it's hard not to be reminded of Coltrane, completely in his element taking Miles' quintet to unheard-of harmonic places as easily as if he were reading the newspaper.

Hekselman plays inspiringly throughout, but maybe the best guitar solo on the record is on Understanding. Hekselman takes time and space to build his solo, starting from simple melodic strains and gradually ratcheting up the intensity until it's in Guitar Hero territory - there's a spine-tingling moment at the beginning of the second chorus that made me keep coming back to this track. On its surface, Understanding, a simple, slow blues-waltz with a backbeat, is pretty simple. The tune is two parts - one part tension, one part release - and while Hekselman plays twice over the entire form, Turner gets only the goodies - the looped "feel good blues" outro. And Turner - what can I say - you see in every note why he's not a once-a-generation talent but probably a once-every-two-generations talent.

The other facet Hekselman extends just a hair beyond normal range is rhythm. That's probably best explored on Hazelnut Eyes and Flower, both relatively simple in conception, but employing some of Gilad's trademark "tweaks." Listen to the bassline on Hazelnut and see how long it takes you to hear that it's in 4. The tune, like others on the record, is episodic, visiting several "moods" within a single chorus. Hekselman likes to write basslines, and he deconstructs and uses motific material with the deliberateness of a classical composer. (It's as easy to hear Steve Reich in Hazelnut Eyes and Flower as it is to hear jazz and popular influences.) On Eyes, listen to how Hekselman treats the bassline like a "clave", using its syncopations as entry-points (the band enters on the upbeat of 1), and spinning the melody both "with" and "against" the "clave" of the bassline. Flower uses thoughtful variations on a bassline in five (one that itself sounds vaguely as if it were culled from reggae), constructing a nuanced four-bar phrase with surprising "resolution points" by leaving out some notes of the pattern - progressively more with each repitition. A perfect example of what would have been a gorgeous, if conventional, song altered just enough to perk-the-ears, Flower's melody cycles every five measures, not every four. Meanwhile, Martin and Gilmore pay strict allegiance to the bassline, which at times begins with a wink on beat 2, at times on the upbeat of 2, catching resolution points together. That gives the whole thing a slightly "phasic" feeling, which again summons memories of John Cage and Messiaen, and yes, Reich. Most importantly, for all their subtleties, neither tune sounds like a composition exercise - it's possible to listen to both with zero awareness of what makes them special, and they're still beautiful, soulful songs delivered with sincerity and spontaneity.

Crosby Street - Jake Saslow

There's a relatively deep canon of research into the psychology of music, and the wonks have isolated certain common elements in the way we humans respond to it, for instance that tensions resolving one way or another cause feelings of catharsis or pathos, that our brains tend to "tune out" to repetition and be stimulated by surprise, that certain ratios of balance are more pleasing than others. A good composer knows these rules instinctively, and knows when a chord or bassline sounds "sweet", when a section is long enough or repeated often enough, when a surprise is welcome versus when it's disruptive, etc, though he/she may not necessarily concern himself with why. Jake Saslow's music is equal parts concept and "hook" - elegant, at times mathematical, in its construction, but clearly conceived with both an ear for the badass and the patience/perfectionism to make every moment killing.

I heard Saslow perform his original music in 2008 in a quartet that included drummer Colin Stranahan and bassist Harish Raghavan and was humming the tunes to myself for the rest of the night. I begged him for a copy of his demo (same personnel except the bass, with Aidan Carroll holding it down on the demo), and it became iPod boilerplate for the next two years. Like Hekselman, Saslow writes songs, not just tunes, and seems to reach for sincerity and humanity in his meandering solos. Saslow finally released his official debut, Crosby Street, this fall. Crosby Street reprises some of his earlier "classics", fleshed out by years of renditions on the road, as well as a few newbies. Like the earlier demo, but to an even greater degree, Crosby Street does all the work for you. Just hit "play" and let it take you.

To get an idea what I mean, listen to the record's opener, Early Riser. A bluesy bassline with a loose backbeat grabs your attention before the guitar and piano enter, then Saslow's harmonies flood in. It's saccharine and instantly gratifying, like ice-cream-for-the-ear, and meter and rhythm, while surprising, feel ordered and logical. It's actually a palindrome - 4 beats, 3, 8, 3, then 4 again. But you don't need to know that to appreciate it. As harmonies evolve, the repeating meters create a pleasing tension - one that's finally resolved at the end of the bridge. It's high-concept anchored in Motown ethos - pleasing to both brain and dancing shoes. Taiga Forest plays with the contrast between 3-bar and 4-bar phrases, and minor and major keys. It begins with a "searching" melody line, caught in an eddy of 9 beats, that resolves both rhythmically and harmonically. On an organizational level, it's a wonder, utilizing just a few simple motifs, inverting them, varying them, and reprising them in different keys and contexts. An ebb and flow characterizes Taiga Forest, like a boat circling a harbor on a cloudy day, venturing out to sea for a time, then returning to the same harbor to find it sunny. Saslow's music takes risks, but the composer's sense of proportion and innate soul is so deeply ingrained that every moment feels good.

A lot of records lose momentum in the transition between composition and performance because the players are ill-suited to the material, or engage it at only surface level. Saslow could have used a great many different configurations to varying effect, but the band he assembled - Fabian Almazan on piano, Joe Martin on bass, Marcus Gilmore on drums, and Mike Moreno on guitar - share a concept in common, approaching the tunes with an eclectic palate and an unapologetic spirit of adventure. Characteristic of Martin's and Gilmore's idiom is that "signposts" within the tunes are conceived as means-to-an-end, to be incorporated into the performance when appropriate, rather than as rigid edicts. Lucky Thirteen, the record's "toe tapper" is a perfect example - Saslow has written a bassline and melody with certain "anchor points", for instance two ascending quarter notes in the repetition of the melody or the funky dotted-quarter figure at the form's end. Gilmore's genius is that he rarely interprets literally what he's given - rather he plays counterpoint to the written material, floating between and beside the beats, emphasizing certain things and playing against others. Martin functions so well as Gilmore's foil because of his comfort level "laying it down" while Gilmore plays against him. At moments the two decide to oblige an ensemble figure, affording it additional weight by virtue of its contrast to the looseness with which they play their beats. Here, as on Gilad's record, the pair seem to feel rhythm in four dimensions, "opening up" the music in a way few rhythm sections could.

Another mark of a good record is when you can tell the leader just told the musicians "do your thing", rather than micromanaging. Moreno and Almazan both deliver deeply personal performances, "stretching" to meet the material. Characteristic of Saslow's playing in other settings, he leaves the music in a different place than he picked it up. On the title track, Saslow's meandering solo gives way to a great release of tension, and Almazan picks things up in the "valley", with a solo that uses every register of the piano and both hands. Almazan may have one of the largest palettes of any young pianist, at various moments (as on his own fantastic record, Personalities, also out this fall) plaintive to the point of minimalism, but it's Almazan the polyphonist that's mostly on display on Crosby Street, and it's a tribute to his and Moreno's sensitivity that they're both able to play so ambiently and still stay out of each other's way. But the ambience is key, giving Street a huge, open sound (it's hard to believe it's only a quartet/quintet) - one I'm told is even better in the record's vinyl edition.

Good Company - Kerong Chok

The first thing that strikes you about Good Company, organist Kerong Chok's debut recording, is that this is an ensemble. More than almost any record I've heard lately, and certainly to an unexpected degree for a first-release, Chok's band sounds like they've been on the road for years. And if you haven't heard of these guys, you will - saxophonist Lucas Pino, drummer Jake Goldbas, and guitarist Michael Valeanu play with a maturity beyond their years and an enthusiasm you can't fake. After hearing snippets of Good Company both in live performances and on Chok's website, I finally pestered him long enough to get a copy, by promising to review it. As some of my twitter followers can attest, I could not shut up about this record for almost a month after I got my hands on it.

As with Hearts Wide Open and Crosby Street, you get a pretty good feeling about where Good Company is going to take you from the first few bars. Why? Verbal description isn't completely adequate to describe how, but Company has a number of things going for it. For one, it's got the DNA of a lot of great jazz records. There's a way records like Larry Young's Unity and Wayne Shorter's Speak No Evil get under your skin, and Good Company has some of the same essence. (If Chok's love of Joe Henderson weren't obvious he gives himself away during his solo on Rill Son, his reinterpretation of Sonny Rollins' Airegin.) And to an even greater degree than even the other records I've spoken about, Good Company is almost weightless in its whimsy. David Fincher once said, of Fight Club, "it was a bunch of unserious guys wrestling with an extremely serious subject matter," and Chok and his gang lend the same impression to Company - like this is just a bunch of guys who like great Blue Note records from the '60s who decided to get together on a Saturday afternoon and somebody brought a recording studio. Of course there are a lot of records made under similar circumstances that aren't this great. But I'd wager what sets this group apart is the sheer depth of their collective experience. They've all been listening to the same stuff - a lot of it, and they've all internalized it to the point where they're equally at ease taking liberties with it. (And as such, I couldn't shake the similarities between this group and The Black Keys, their arguable counterparts in vocal pop-rock.)

Anyway, to the music - Good Company's thoughtfully programmed ten tracks evoke a number of moods through the prism of the organ quartet (quintet when trumpeter Matt Holman joins them). More about the tune-selection and order in just a minute. The opener, like a good overture, sets the mood for the whole session. In this case, it's a good mood - Black Ice hits you firmly with driving organ funk. The hookup between Chok's Left Hand (playing bass;) and Jake Goldbas is infectious - this strong, quarter-note-oriented, old-school groove will be a recurring character throughout the record. (And not to be underappreciated is the fact that this is a band with a unified interpretation of where the beat is, and a great deal of freedom exploring territory within it.) But it may just after the opening bars that Chok's record distinguishes itself from an average jazz record just as truly inspired comfort food from a top flight chef distinguishes itself from its imitators. Chok, it turns out, has a genius for penning a melody, and like Hekselman and Saslow, manages to surprise you subtlely even while taking you where you ultimately want to go. The performers add the final ingredient, deeply "inside" the tune, feeling the contrast between sections, betraying a love of playing together that makes things crackle.

I'll leave a play-by-play of all the tunes to other reviewers. But the lasting impression Good Company leaves is its strength start-to-finish. There's not one lull over its entire length. You get the feeling Chok wasn't stretching for material - rather, a lot of great tunes probably didn't even make it through the recording studio door. If I had to select a "single" from this collection, it would probably be the understated-but-fun second track, Literacy. When you have a band this deep, the writing doesn't need to be complex to coax inspired performances from the performers. But as I said above, the programming deserves a mention, and Good Company is ordered like a good mix tape. My favorite transition is between probably the most "modern jazz" of the record's pieces, Incessant, and the slow-dancing, cathartic Free and Easy. Incessant slaps you upside the head with whizbang surprises - an odd meter, angular and ominous harmonies, and sublime Hubardesque high notes from Holman's horn. Like a pitcher who only shows you his true heat with the last pitch (and this little leaguer saw more than a few of those), Goldbas delivers a blistering closer straight out of stadium rock. You feel like you're at a live show when the band segues with a wink into Free and Easy. "Thanks for indulging us in our jazz thing, now here's one for the ladies," you picture them saying.

It's not like I set out to champion, or even to like, these three records. But they all quickly won me over. Different as they are, what they share in common makes a compelling case for what makes a record great, and more broadly for why jazz today is as good as or better than it's ever been. They're all seductive at surface-level, but all also reward both educated listeners and repeated listenings with their depth and nuance. It's apropos, I suppose, that in the course of a single week I was privy to two meditations on great art from two of my musical heroes -

Dave Holland, on the checkout - "For me, [a] wonderful way to make the music communicate without compromising on the content [is] by cloaking it in certain things which are very direct and strike people in an emotional way, than then within that you build the complexity which intrigues you as a musician, and you hope inspires the musicians you play with."

Vijay Iyer, in an interview I did with him - "[Audiences mostly] respond to the groove and the energy and the emotional content. I try to make it interesting for myself, but that's just so that it can push me as an improviser -- because people can hear that push. But for me as a listener, it needs to have those other things - groove, energy, emotion - or else it's going to bore me."

If you want to hear what Dave and Vijay are talking about, listen to their records. Then listen to Gilad's, Jake's, and Kerong's.

State of The Music - a brief conversation with Vijay Iyer

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 14:12:10 -0500

The art form we call Jazz just underwent a very public look in the mirror, some of it constructive, some of it - depending on your opinion - not so much. Just days before the start of the brouhaha, I authored a blog post asking whether jazz could use its own Occupy movement, or could at least benefit from a OWS-style "moment of clarity". Even at the time I knew I wanted to talk to Vijay Iyer, one of Jazz's leading voices and deepest thinkers. Iyer has done more than most to silence critics and point a direction for Jazz with his music alone, but he's also an exceptionally lucid and passionate commentator through his writing on the subject.

After some of my own observation and soul-searching, I'd arrived at the belief that the truly productive conversation jazz musicians needed to be having was the big conversation - what external factors are shaping our collective fates, and what can we do about it. (Let's take the helm and deal with this Iceberg before fighting over the fine china in the dining room.) Vijay Iyer, who put the whole dilemma in great context in a 2010 piece he wrote for Jazz Times, was among those who started that conversation.

The Jazz Times piece was itself a response to an earlier article. In 2009, Wall Street Journal arts critic Terry Teachout fired the "shot heard around the (jazz) world", writing that despite apparently ample funding, jazz was suffering a decline in its audience. It may have been a "cheap shot" - evidence of the supposed glut of funding was both dubious and contradictory of even the most casual anecdotal observation, and the survey Teachout used as a source (a National Endowment for the Arts survey) was probably looking too narrowly at definitions of "jazz" and "jazz fans", and in the midst of a recession to-boot - but it started a wonderful dialogue. Pieces written by Nate Chinen and Iyer Himself were some of the most spirited defenses Jazz had seen in decades. Previously underground groups now graced the front pages of Times' Arts section. People were asking productive questions about the meaning/importance of the music, and how to "pay it forward." Like Wisconsin post-Scott-Walker, Jazz had Found Its Voice.

But what of it? The last volley in that exchange was fired over a year ago, and where are we now? Iyer had trenchantly rebutted Teachout's claim that either the music itself or a preternatural lack of audience enthusiasm was responsible for the dismal survey results-

[Teachout] speculated that we musicians had abandoned our audience in moving the music toward an esoteric art and away from populist entertainment. (I suppose he meant to include Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Anthony Braxton and all those other culprits in his accusations.)

I saw this as a reactionary, blame-the-victim argument. The reality is that public and institutional support for the arts in the U.S. has systematically declined over the last 30 years. Meanwhile, as the top 1 percent of private earners amassed unprecedented amounts of increasingly tax-free wealth, they mostly failed to invest in the production, presentation, preservation and infrastructure of jazz.

So we know what jazz is not, but a great many of us are trying to wrap our heads around exactly what this nuanced art form, in a dynamic economy that's seen the real-estate bubble - and with it a great deal of arts funding - evaporate, at the same time as some of the baddest musicians ever are rising to prominence. When I finally got the opportunity to talk to Vijay, I wanted to go right to the heart-of-the matter. What's the economic future of this music? Here's what he wrote in 2010-

At least once a week I get laughed at when a close friend or family member notices the thousands of “friends,” “followers” and “likes” I have accumulated on various social networks. Of course, like my fellow musicians I tend to accept all requests, because music is about connecting and because we do it for the world to hear, blah blah blah. But I have also come to realize that a good portion—perhaps a majority—of these friend-fan-followers are in fact none of these things; rather, they are enterprising young musicians seeking access and opportunities—the same music students and underemployed recent graduates mentioned above.

...

So my question is, can we achieve anything productive with this de facto musicians’ network? Can we marshal this virtual community of ours to confront the current situation? Is it preposterous to suggest that we all work not just as artists but as advocates, instigators, programmers, curators—the musical equivalent of community organizers? Can we imagine a “Field of Dreams” model where we, with our massive network, build the very nationwide jazz infrastructure that we’ve been waiting for?

Dismissing arguments about the nature of the music itself or the enthusiasm of the audiences as either fallacious or irrelevant, Iyer had touched on some of the small number of ideas to have shown actual success in generating new interest and revenue for jazz. The musicians are here, enthusiastic, and making great music. The audiences are here - can we just circumvent the "bottlenecks" the same way podcasts did terrestrial radio? (If "we build it" will they indeed "come"?) I was curious about Iyer's ground-level observations as an international touring artist. Who were the audiences?

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NS: In responding to Terry Teachout's 2009 column alleging jazz audiences were "drying up" you mentioned that you and colleagues had a great many followers on social media, and that many of them were themselves aspiring musicians. My question - from your vantage point, is the primary audience for jazz now other jazz musicians?

Iyer: No, I don't think so, but it's the future audience, in that most "other jazz musicians" under 40 are people who have come out of music schools and have a certain musical literacy. Now it's not possible that they will all have stellar lifelong careers in music, but they will probably always have music in their lives and will always care about it.

But in my travels and in my experiences performing for people, the audiences are all sorts of people. I think certain musicians - Chris Potter, for example - will always have young musicians as a sizeable fraction of their followings, but that's probably more the exception. And let me also say that the main way to keep the audiences from getting and staying old is to incorporate young people into the presenting organizations that put on concerts. That always makes a difference.

In my experience the places with the older audiences are the places that don't have any young people on their staffs, either as curators or in marketing/etc so it's not about geography. It's more about identity. Well it's also about geography. But only in the sense that it matters whether there are places to see music in the first place.
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An optimistic assessment. Jazz students don't account for the majority of jazz fans (phew) but they are mostly going to grow up to be life long jazz fans, whether or not they end up as professional musicians, and that's one of the primary ways jazz' audience is renewing itself. Iyer also answered a question I hadn't asked but had wanted to - "Do you feel that the cultural attitude we have toward, and the value we assign to, jazz, and to creative arts in general in the United States, differs from what you see elsewhere in the world, and does that affect sales/gig attendance/fan enthusiasm?"

"Only in the sense that it matters whether there are places to see music in the first place."

With time for only one other "burning question", I wanted to turn my attention toward the music itself. Teachout, in an argument adopted - uncritically, in my view - by a great many jazz musicians, implies the music itself bears some of the blame for the seeming decline in its popularity. To a degree no one disputes that in making the transition from popular music to "art music", jazz inevitably lost a big percentage of its fan base. But that's ancient history. It's been that way since 1959. More recently, a certain crowd has alleged that it's jazz' inauthenticity that has hampered its sales.

Chinen put it best-

One big subtext of [Ken Burns' Jazz film] was a conviction deeply held by Mr. Marsalis: jazz is a tradition with clear parameters, and absent certain elements it ceases to be jazz. Much the same message lies at the heart of Jazz at Lincoln Center, where Mr. Marsalis is artistic director.

Yet, as Chinen observes, it's the music that lies on the margins of those parameters that's some of the most successful. The music - obviously - does matter, but maybe not in the way Teachout and his ilk implied. That Vijay Iyer plays to large/enthusiastic/diverse crowds seems to contradict the assumption at the heart of the "blame the music" meme - namely that audiences want jazz that's simple, predictable, and repertory, and that they were shunning jazz because it had become too "edgy". One of the reasons I found this so absurd on its face was that practically to-a-one, all the icons of jazz history challenged audiences. Bird. Mingus. Monk. Trane. Sure, it stopped being top-40 radio, but for a long time after that jazz was hip precisely because of its rebeliousness.

But those icons have another thing in common. A sense of rhythm and soul that permeates the music. To a degree (and though it's a cliché, it's a well-founded one) they all played "the blues." By that definition, Iyer fits comfortably within the canon. His music is risk-taking, dense, multilayered, and angular, and yet spontaneous, soulful and inviting. Avant-garde in its affect, yet interpreting many popular songs, from Michael Jackson to Stevie Wonder. Music edgy and challenging, yet universally well-received. I wanted to know if Iyer was consciously aware of this duality, and how it struck him.
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NS: You're a writer and performer of some music that on its surface seems very "challenging". Angular, odd meters...yet there's been overwhelming enthusiasm for your music. Does jazz - nay, good art - need to succeed on two levels - with "lay" listeners and "wonks" alike - in order to be well-received? If so, are you aware of this when you compose?

Iyer: This stuff you're talking about in my music is only evident to musicians. Most people don't [care] about it. They just respond to the groove and the energy and the emotional content. I try to make it interesting for myself, but that's just so that it can push me as an improviser -- because people can hear that push. But for me as a listener, it needs to have those other things - groove, energy, emotion - or else it's going to bore me. I can't speak for others, but I at least try to put myself in the audience's shoes - i.e., would I enjoy this? Bottom line is, I don't try to separate myself from the audience. I try to connect with them.

Can Jazz Learn Anything from the Occupy Movement?

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:11:48 -0500

If you're part of the creative arts and you're viewing what I'm willing to bet is changing about your everyday life and your livelihood as separate from the themes of the Occupy Wall Street protests, you're not seeing the complete picture. The fate of the creative arts not only mirrors the gradual trends afflicting the American economy and personal income relative-to-inflation of the last 30 years, it dovetails almost seamlessly with what's happened to Life in America since the bursting of the Real Estate Bubble.

My discipline, jazz, has been at the mercy of three large scale forces acting on it - two external and the third, I would argue, internal - that mirror the forces acting on the American job market as a whole.

The Decline of the Jazz Proletariat

The first is a gradual, followed by a rapid, decrease in paid performance opportunities. As I'll discuss below, this is distinct from a shrinking audience, the boogeyman critics and musicians alike are wont to blame, usually with scant evidence. It's also distinct from a decrease in the money being spent funding the art, while that's certainly also diminished. Anyone looking to dismiss the theory of Shrinking Opportunities could point to the increase of corporate underwriting for things like festivals (North Sea, anyone?) and growing prevalence of jazz Performance Seasons of a kind that used to be exclusively the domain of Classical Music and Ballet companies (Jazz at Lincoln Center in its shiny new performance space(s)). No, I'm not talking about those gigs either, though later on I'll try to tie their existence to the larger issue of unemployment in the US being a more nuanced picture than is widely understood.

No, I'm talking about Proletariat Jazz. Paid opportunities for Up-and-Comers to showcase and refine their art, and make a respectable bankroll doing it, at the behest of small, independent businesses like clubs and restaurants. Of course I haven't done a scientific survey on this, but I feel the combination of my anecdotal observations as a jazz musician and Basic Economic Common Sense presents a compelling enough case. When I think about everything that's gone right for me as a musician - playing opportunities, opportunities to present my compositions, any time things were looking up - it was usually tied to the success of small business. A new restaurant starts offering jazz one night-a-week for a decent rate, and all of a sudden there's a demand for our services and the phone rings. A new venue starts offering paid slots to original music acts, then all-of-a-sudden we’re writing more music and calling more players to play it. We’re getting experience in two important ways - first, we’re honing our craft. If the Beatles needed years playing in Hambourg strip clubs to get good enough for the British Invasion, creative artists of all ilks hone their skills by rote repetition and gradual refinement. Second, we’re networking. I don't care what anybody says - the best single way to Climb Up and play with better and better players is to call them for gigs. (People are too busy to do jam sessions that don't pay, but when a club is paying people Make Time.)

Now those venues are vanishing. Some are popping up in their place, but the overall trend is that venues that paid for jazz are gradually being replaced by venues that charge exorbitant covers and give the musicians a small cut, if they're being replaced at all. Why? The economy sucks! There's less money floating around - consumers who in better times would have given a music bar a chance are staying home, and restaurants/bars that would in the past have taken the risk and burned the calories necessary to build an audience for their jazz night (and maybe even broken even or taken a slight loss but persevered out of a love of the Music) are operating at so close to the margins they're going with Sure Things like DJs, Indie Rock bands, and acoustic singer-songwriters.

The upshot is there are fewer opportunities for journeyman musicians to hone their craft. I'll commit a Jazz Sin (more on why I disagree with the taboo below) and say the phone has been ringing less these days, and it's no coincidence - every "job" I've lost was tied to a venue closing, or ceasing to feature jazz artists. Musicians are then forced into the Pay to Play clubs, where they inevitably view every gig as an Investment to Build Their Name, and mirror the venues' reticence to hire unproven talent, which creates a Matthew Effect within the scene. Those with Work (musicians already highly employed) are considered assets, both because their name on the bill will increase attendance (and, hence, money and notoriety) and because Every Gig Needs to Kill, and you need proven, reliable people on them. You get better at the music by playing it, but that's getting harder and harder.

But the increasing scarcity of small venues is affecting not only developing musicians, but Already Great Musicians who either because of luck or life choices aren’t part of the “jazz 1%”, and even those who are. All but the most mainstream venues are struggling for funding, and the good-paying tours are a smaller and smaller pie being divided – as I’ll discuss later on – into an ever greater number of pieces.

You don't need a PHD to spot the parallels to the economy as a whole. There used to be two paths to the American Dream - earn your way into the elite, either by being born into it or by working hard and being tenacious (and lucky), and going to the Right Schools, OR get an Honest Job, work hard, save up, buy a house, etc. That "second way" to succeed has been in gradual decline since the '70s and since the economic disaster of '08 has all-but-vanished for all but a handful of lucky folks. The First Avenue is still Wide Open, giving rise to the biggest misunderstanding of the Unemployment Crisis and the Occupy Movement - that because it's still possible to get a job, and to live very well - actually better than ever - if you're (very well) college educated (and lucky), that There Is No Crisis and people should just Stop Complaining. (Herman Cain is probably the most recent public figure to give voice to that fallacy.)

Exactly the same thing is at work in the jazz world. Back in "The Day", you could be a prodigious talent and go on the road with Miles Davis, or you could find the right teacher, work hard, move to a scene, play night-after-night in the clubs until you got good enough to go on the road with a big band (for which there was money), continue to improve, network, play with more-and-more elite artists, etc. When you read the biographies of the greats, you're taken aback by how many decisions were driven by Money. "So-and-so had five nights a week out in LA, so we packed up the car and moved out there, and that's how I met You-Know-Who." (Actually, even the prodigiously talented had to go through this same Dues Paying process, which worked like a Great Leveler - people like Charlie Parker, a once-a-generation genius, shared the stage with a great many musicians whose records we don't buy, but who earned a living, and they all came up together.)

Gradually, since the '60s, the Journeyman Gigs vanished. But even recently, you could still find enough work to develop into a good musician. Now, I contend that that's finally gone. There is now One Fewer Path to success as a jazz musician*, and that's to get one of the exceedingly few gigs with stars, and tap into the corporate money, most of it at festivals, most of it overseas. In short, you're either part of the “1%” or you're un - or at least - under - employed. The only path to success (and it's not success like the 1% of Wall-Streeters, more like a comfortable middle class salary playing music after a lot of hustling) is to Join the Elite. Don’t get me wrong – that’s possible – if you work hard enough and are tenacious enough, but it’s gotten a good deal harder.

(*There is a Third Way I'll discuss below, part of why it's not all bad news.)

The Rising Bar

The second force at work on the jazz and creative arts communities is the ever-better-educated workforce. (And by itself, of course, this is an exceedingly positive thing, leading the music to new heights of talent and creativity.) But the advent of ever-better music education (Booker T Washington? HSPVA?) and, less-frequently-discussed but perhaps an even greater factor, the Church-Based music education system (Gospel Chops?) means an ever-growing supply of prodigious -basically Tour-Ready - 18-year-olds coursing into the market at a time when all opportunities but the most elite, corporate-underwritten, performance opportunities are vanishing, and this means fewer opportunities for musicians who might end up just as great, but who develop later in life. When journeyman musicians forced into the Pay-to-Play clubs are calling people for the gigs they need to achieve entrance to the Elite Ranks, the work is increasingly going to Prodigious Young Musicians when it’s not going to established greats.

The analog in the workforce-at-large is the Law of Diminishing Returns with college degrees. In the 1970s, a Master's Degree was often sufficient for entrance into the upper-middle-class. As more and more people got master's degrees (and as blue-collar and non-management white collar jobs gradually attrited or went overseas), the ante was raised. PhDs and professional degrees (like MBAs, JDs, MDs, DDSs) became the Price of Admission. Now admission to the upper levels of management at a “white-shoe” firm often requires PhD-level math expertise and/or presidential charisma. Admission to the management ranks of the Best Firms has always required a degree from a brand-name school as well as a personal connection and some luck, but now even rank-and-file positions at the best companies are hard-won. Luckily, there's still mostly enough work to go around that you'll likely find a gig with an MBA, especially if you don't set your sights on your dream job. Not So in the creative arts, for the reasons I've discussed.

Complain Less Shed More

Now we come to the most controversial part of this piece - the force that, in my opinion, is acting against the prosperity (or at least the psychological wellbeing) of creative artists, but which is not a force from without, but rather a pathology that stems from within the community, and that's the Complain Less Shed More mentality, and its first cousin the Blame the Musicians (otherwise known as "Mouldy Fig") trope. ("Shed", for readers not familiar with Jazz Lingo, comes from "Woodshed", and just means to practice your instrument.) (See also: "Killing", "Vibe".) Broadly speaking, Complain Less Shed More just means that a lot of players without gigs have no gigs because they Aren't Very Good, and should focus on improving Themselves rather than complaining, and if you're noticing the obvious kernel of truth you're not alone.

But I want to be careful about our nomenclature, and define "complain" as distinct from "observe". To Complain, in the sense detractors mean it, is to waste energy bemoaning something you Can't Change - energy that would be better channeled into affecting something you Can Change. To Observe, however, is to be honest and open about the conditions on the ground before either working to change them, optimizing your efforts to work within them, or simply deciding to opt out. What I see in the jazz community is the proactive taking-stock-of-bad-news-before-deciding-what-to-do being lumped together with sitting-on-your-ass-bemoaning-things-you-can't-change under the banner of Complaint. The Keep Your Head Down ethos evolved for understandable reasons - the arts have always been inherently unfair, and always rewarded inhuman amounts of dedication and willingness to persevere after rejection, to say nothing of the need to avoid dwelling on the ample helpings of Bad News structural to any arts scene.

But today is different. What's afflicting the creative arts community today is no less calamitous than that afflicting the entire workforce - I don't mince words when I say Jazz has an Unemployment Problem - but it's not being owned-up-to or taken stock of. Instead, an entire community of people whose lives are affected by forces outside their control is facing those forces as if they were individual crises, every day comparing their success to that of their peers on Facebook, at each juncture either making the Orwellian vow to Work Harder or simply deciding to Quit.

What to Do

The silver lining is that, contrary to the Conventional Wisdom, the audiences are there. Even as the decline of Small, Paying Venues exerts downward pressure on employment opportunities, there’s ample anecdotal evidence that audiences are not only out there, but hungry for good creative art as an alternative to the mass-produced, one-size-fits-all faire we’re all being fed. As I’ve written elsewhere, the scene today rewards entrepreneurship, because while the number of megaphones is shrinking, the number of people willing to hear what you have to say is steady.

Multiple approaches have shown success, from self-produced CDs and tours to parts of the world with “thirstier” markets, to disabusing ourselves of the need to play jazz exactly the way our forbearers did (just as they themselves disabused themselves of the need to play it exactly as their antecedents did) and making more personal – and hence more sincere, more like to resonate with audiences, more accepted at cross-genre clubs and venues - music from the same source materials, to communities that function like staffing services, offering a built-in audience to potential venues (and in the process broadening the palate of venues) and using the leverage commensurate with that value to negotiate fair rates for musicians. These solutions have been addressed elsewhere, and are tantamount to reinstating Glass Stegal, and campaign finance reform amendments. In other words, finding the solution isn’t the problem. Finding the collective awareness of our problems and collective will to address them is.

And it’s on this particular point that I feel creative arts communities could borrow a page from the Occupy playbook. Not because we’re all entitled to gigs (we’re not), and not because there’s an identifiable villain, like Goldman Sachs, depriving us of them (there’s not). And not because agitating in some kind of angsty, undirected way will improve our lots (it won’t). But the Occupy Movement fostered the gradual awareness of three fundamental truths – 1) Something’s Amiss, 2) It’s bigger than just me - it’s affecting All of Us, and 3) It’s not Our Fault, or at least Not Exclusively Our Fault. (And, I guess, 3b - Just working harder as an individual is no longer sufficient to solve it.) By waking up to the fact that those same realities afflict the jazz scene, and by talking openly about it, we’re taking an important first step. If we recognize that potential talent is going untapped and potential performance opportunities unexploited, maybe can redirect our energy away from the type of “zero-sum” “fighting over scraps” activities hallmark to unenlightened disenfranchised communities. Are stones going unturned with respect to funding opportunities for nonprofits? Should some mentorship be dedicated to Late Bloomers instead of aimed exclusively at Prodigies? Finally, are we in some cases training too many people for a job market that can’t support all of them, because there’s money in music education, and would a frank discussion about that be beneficial? At the very least the community could benefit from an awareness that we’re in this together.

What if the Health Care Bill were actually Socialist?

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 11:03:18 -0400

So Health Care has passed.

And Liberals are getting ready to eat it for the next nine months. To put yourself in our particular frame of mind, imagine you're in a castle (c'mon indulge me). You look outside and you've got William Wallace' screaming hordes of angry Scots amassing outside the gates. Now imagine your own soldiers are over 65, incontinent, and don't particularly give a @#$%.

Finally, imagine you're just house-sitting the castle for your evil uncle who never really did much for you anyway.

We know the bill sucks (though it's "still a vast improvement over the status quo" - quotes aren't because I don't believe it but because it's now kneejerk, drummed into me over months and months).

State Exchanges!!?! No. State exchanges with opt out. (It's truly perverse, because Republicans argued for competition across state lines, but made it impossible to include in the bill.)
Obviously, no public option, no medicare expansion. (While it's true the PO wasn't the "be all and end all" of the bill, it was a powerfully symbollic to Liberals, as one of the few elements not written by and for the corporations.)

The whole thing's a Rube Goldberg contraption, assembled at the behest of the lobbies to avoid offending anyone. (Just watch the comically well-meaning reporters at PBS try to sus it out.) And this is what we're being asked to defend. And this is what's being decried as tyranny, Frank Luntz-ified into a "government takeover."

Imagine, just for a moment, what we could have done with an actual government takeover.

Medicare for all? I'm picturing a parallel universe where Liberals didn't run from the Luntz phrase "government takeover" but embraced it, using the phrase as often as possible to talk about about all the benefits of simplicity, cost savings, portability allowing more dynamism in the economy, the moral imperitives and all the rest. What if politicians (beside Alan Grayson, Dennis Kucinich and Anthony Weiner) would stand up and invert Reagan's mantra: "government doesn't have to be the problem - it can be the solution." God what if we had actual socialists counterbalancing the far right?

What could possibly go wrong?

Would people be oiling up their guns? Would people be throwing bricks through windows? Would Sarah Palin be using none-too-subtle allusions to gun violence in her tweets?

The same mixture of sensible philosophic objectors, militia members, rank-and-file neocons and cynical media stars would be lined up saying exactly the same things (because what else could they say?), and the average people like you and me could pick a position in the true center, deciding which forms of government involvement we wanted (health care) and which we didn't (warrantless surveilance, costly overseas occupations of countries not posing an immediate threat, "too big to fail" corporate welfare).

What's stopping Democrats from adopting such a "radical" stance? Obviously not the polls-

The public option has consistently polled above 50 percent, whereas the Senate Bill polls at something like 35 percent.
According to a recent CBS News poll 54% of respondents believe the Senate Bill will not effectively cover Americans, and pluralities believe it will not effectively control costs or regulate the insurance industry. If, however, you add up the respondents feeling the bill is adequate and those feeling it doesn't go far enough, the equation changes: 54 - 39 covering Americans, 45 - 39 for controlling costs. Across the board, only minorities believe the bill goes too far.

As a Democrat, would you not want a majority on your side? Why would you decide to pass an unpopular bill that could easily be made extremely popular and then run on that in 2010? Do you have any idea how many Liberals would mobilize to reelect to you if you showed even the most cursory interest in pleasing anyone beside Signa?

As a bookend, I received another email from Organizing for America this morning - a champagne-lubricated victory party for New York area supporters. It was the first thing in the morning, and I strained to see the text through blurry eyes.

This Thursday, March 25th, OFA supporters will be gathering in Manhattan to celebrate the historic passage of health care reform -- and our role in making it happen. We'll get together with OFA staff and volunteers to talk about how far we've come and what we've accomplished together.

No offense guys but I think I'll sit this one out.