Category: Thoughts

He’s been dead for over a decade, and he’s still ruffling people’s feathers. He’d probably dig that.

Miles Davis is being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Miles Davis – Jazz – Music – New York Times

The program essay for tonight’s induction ceremony does not acknowledge the oddness of Davis’s induction; it simply describes his accomplishments. But the view of Davis as rock star is not unanimous. Ahmet Ertegun, chairman of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, said in a telephone interview on Friday that as a member of the nominating committee he did not vote for Davis, because he felt that his most significant work had nothing to do with rock.

Mr. Ertegun, a cofounder of Atlantic Records with a lot of jazz in his past, said he did vote early and strongly to put Davis in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame, where he thinks he belongs.

“I love Miles Davis,” he said, referring to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction. “I also love John Coltrane and Jack Teagarden, but I’m not voting for them either.”

Do you ever get the feeling that music, like race relations, would be better off if we quit trying to segregate things to make ourselves feel superior?

If I want to take my kids to a place to expose them to the history of American music, it would be cool if it was ALL there.

Son: It says here that Miles was into Jimi Hendrix.
Me: yeah, he was, but we have to go to Cleveland to see the Jimi exhibit. The jazz folks wouldn’t let him in here, and the rock folks wouldn’t let the jazz guys in there.

That’s a scary possibility.

Check out the cool interview with Dana Gioia, the chairman of the NEA, that appeared on last Thursday’s Soundcheck on WNYC.

WNYC – Soundcheck: You Can’t Learn A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing (January 12, 2006)

I like where he talks about well rounded artists: poets that support music, musicians that go to galleries, etc. How can we as artists expect people to support our art, if we don’t support the art of others?

From Gerard McBurney’s article Guardian Unlimited | Arts features | In from the cold:

Any western European like myself, brought up within the highbrow aesthetic consensus of the cold war period, will remember their teachers and mentors dismissing Shostakovich as more or less worthless. His music was “undercomposed”, we were told, and he was as at best second rate, a kapellmeister in the wake of, but not as good as, the likes of Hindemith and Prokofiev. He was not to be considered in the same breath as the great and glorious gods of modernism like Schoenberg, Bartók and Stravinsky. Many thought him far worse than mediocre, angrily deriding him as a dreary and bombastic court-bard to Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, a time-server, a purveyor of cheap and diluted film-music masquerading as art.

This article made me think about the concept that much of musical criticism is driven by extra-musical factors. In the case of Shostakovich it may have been his politics. The knock on him that his music was really just film music posing as a symphony reminds me of the way some jazz snobs put down certain electric or rock influenced music.

Recently on The Bob Edwards Show, the guest was a writer whose name I am spacing at the moment. They were discussing literary criticism, and the point was made that critics end up having to write lots of words, when all they really want to say is, “I liked this. Read it.”

The day arts criticism is based on taste instead of agenda, the world will be a better place. I like Shostakovich. His music moves me. That doesn’t make me lowbrow, any more than the fact that you like the LCJO version of “A Love Supreme” makes you hip.