Category: Thoughts

RIP Andrew Hill

Andrew Hill passed away today April 20, 2007. Peter Margasak has a nice piece about Hill’s life on his Chicago Reader blog called “Post No Bills.”

My first exposure to Hill’s music was instigated by a comment from Ed Petersen. I was taking composition lessons from Ed and he told me a piece I wrote sounded like something with an Andrew Hill vibe. I wasn’t very familiar with Andrew Hill’s music, so I bought Point of Departure. I liked it and more albums followed. I don’t know that I have written anything else reminiscent of Hill’s writing, but I sure have enjoyed listening to his music.

Slate Magazine on improvisation

What Thank God You’re Here gets wrong about improv. – By Dan Kois – Slate Magazine

This article is really about comedy improv, but it quite interesting in its anaylsis of what makes improvisation work.

My response wasn’t particularly witty, but it laid the groundwork for a scene that quickly became very funny as she went to greater and greater lengths to convince my character of her devotion. Through agreement and elaboration, improvisational performers invent relationships, emotional stakes, and dramatic and funny scenes out of nothing but their own teamwork.

Pearls Before Breakfast – washingtonpost.com

Pearls Before Breakfast – washingtonpost.com

“On Friday, January 12, the people waiting in the lottery line looking for a long shot would get a lucky break — a free, close-up ticket to a concert by one of the world’s most famous musicians — but only if they were of a mind to take note.”

A fascinating Washington Post story on world famous violinist Joshua Bell busking for an hour in a DC metro station. It is long, but worth the read. I tend to agree with the Kantian interpretation, that the results were as much about context as taste…at least hope that is the case.

(Via jw.)

A Lesson From the Jazzmatician – March 27, 2007 – The New York Sun

A Lesson From the Jazzmatician – March 27, 2007 – The New York Sun:

“The 61-year-old Mr. Braxton seems to do everything possible to present his music in a way that makes it sound serious and artsy, which is to say foreboding and inaccessible. Even his physical appearance —bespectacled, sweater-wearing, pipesmoking — is outwardly academic. But when you open your ears to what he’s playing, Mr. Braxton’s compositions are surprisingly listenable. Granted, there are long interludes of screeching and shrieking on his various horns that naught but a hardcore avant-garde admirer would relish, but for all his academic posturing, much of his music is playful, swinging, witty, and — dare I say it? — fun.”

We should let more music be fun, or better yet, realize that more music is fun.

(Via Soundslope.)

DJA out in blaze of glory (at least for a minute) and home jazz recording

Darcy is putting his Secret Society blog on a bit of a hiatus. He’s acting like he has to actually do some work or something. His most recent post however links to enough stuff to keep you reading until May anyway. I won’t link to all of it, just go over there and see for your self.

One discussion that I would like to add to is the one about home recording as it relates to jazz. It started with Daniel Melnick, who writes at Soundslope. He wrote:

What it really made me think about and wonder is if jazz has moved towards having more home based recording environments, as many rock musicians and producers have, and if it hasn’t, why is that the case? Recording technology keeps getting cheaper, so why is the studio even in the equation? I wonder if it has something to do with the technical difficulties of recording jazz. I would assume, based on my own rudimentary knowledge of microphones and recording technology, that making a good jazz recording requires a higher level of mastery than the average home recordist possesses. Nevertheless, I think it makes sense for jazz artists to look beyond the traditional studio environment as a means of making records if there is really value in being able to spend more time recording.

Then DJA replied:

A few factors that may partially explain why home-recorded albums don’t happen more frequently in jazz: [1] Lo-fi, as an aesthetic, lacks widespread acceptance in jazz circles — when you’re recording acoustic instruments, there really is no substitute for a good recording engineer using good mics in a really good space. [2] The buy-in and setup costs for a home studio, while falling, are still well beyond the means of many jazz musicians, especially young artists … [3] In New York, at least, many if not most musicians do not live in spaces where they can play (especially when there is a drummer invovled). [4] As a corollary to [3], many New York musician apartments are barely large enough to serve as functional living spaces as it is. Where are you going to put the home studio?) [5] The number of home-recorded commercially-released nonjazz CDs is vastly exaggerated — unless you count things like Prince records as “home recorded,” which is obviously absurd. The overwhelming majority of successful and semi-successful albums are still cut in professional recording studios.

To me the biggest issue is that you can’t record jazz one player at a time. I could pretty easily cut a pop tune on the gear I already have here in my house, especially if I used programmed drum sounds, and I don’t have a huge setup here. It would be much harder to do a jazz record, because I can’t have the bass player play, then track the sax, then the trombone, etc. It is also very hard to engineer and play any sort of session, and that is just magnified on a jazz session. There are two very different types of mental focus required, and they almost cannot exist concurrently. If I were doing a home CD with my rock band one of the other guys could engineer while I laid my parts.

I have done one album completely DIY on my laptop with two mics, but it is a duet album with only trombone and guitar. Not having to record drums makes DIY much easier. It is a download only release, and you can check it out here. Interestingly, that album is the only project that I have done that was in the black in any sort of reasonable time after its release, because it cost nada to make.

Offbeat doesn’t get it, or just saying “thank you” would be fine

offBeat Magazine has this interview with Harry Connick, Jr., Branford Marsalis, and Anne Marie Wilkins. The interview was conducted by Jam Ramsey, the publisher, and Alex Rawls, an editor.

Rawls: Does it strike you as odd having a Musicians’ Village where musicians are, at least at this stage, the minority?

Marsalis: There is a federal statute that says you can’t build homes with public people’s money, and say that they’re reserved for 100 percent of anybody. There was a time when you could do that, but we’ve gone past that time. We get 2,000 applications, and of those 2,000, 10 percent are musicians. So what do we do with the other 90 percent—“Sorry, not a musician. See ya”?

[It’s not obvious how the Fair Housing Act would prohibit an all-musician village. While that would certainly go against general notions of fairness, Section 804 (a) declares it unlawful to “refuse to sell or rent after the making of a bona fide offer, or to refuse to negotiate for the sale or rental of, or otherwise make unavailable or deny, a dwelling to any person because of race, color, religion, sex, familial status, or national origin.” Throughout the act, those are the conditions under which discrimination is illegal; occupation is not mentioned.]

The last bit in italics is an editor’s note. That is exactly how it appears online and in the print version. I hope I am misreading this, but it appears to me that the editors of offBeat are quoting Federal statutes to make the point that it is not technically illegal to deny housing to someone because they are not a musician. Even though the editors admit, “that would certainly go against general notions of fairness,” it seems that they are badgering Connick and Marsalis about the lack of musicians who have qualified for housing in the Musicians Village, and in the process making the implication that non-musicians should be denied housing in favor of musicians.

I am not sure what offBeat’s motivation could be in doing this. It seems to be in vogue lately in New Orleans to find anyone who is trying to help, and give them crap about not helping “fast enough”/”the right way”/”the way we used to do it”, etc. This approach obviously makes everything run better (where’s that sarcasm emoticon again?). Why don’t we find everyone that wants to do some good in New Orleans and f*** with them until they get fed up and leave? Then we wouldn’t have any more carpetbaggers like Harry and Branford coming in here and trying to provide affordable homeownership for a city that has a dire housing need.

To even suggest that we should discourage non-musicians from receiving Habit for Humanity assistance is ludicrous. That is in no way different from saying that you can’t live here because you are black, white, straight, gay, or a writer for a mediocre music magazine. To make Harry and Branford defend this issue is appalling. It is a non-issue, and should have been from first glance. Those guys don’t have to do what they are doing. We should be thanking them, not giving them the 60 Minutes treatment.

Rawls: I understand what you’re saying about the housing rules, but this has been pitched as “the Musicians’ Village.”

Marsalis: It’s a musicians’ village in a peripheral sense. You can’t find me a single piece of documentation that says, “We’re building homes only for musicians.”

[True, but New Orleans musicians have a reason to think otherwise. That was certainly the tone of the initial message, so much so that none of the stories written about the Musicians’ Village printed in New Orleans mentioned that the village would not be reserved strictly for musicians. Only one Associated Press wire service story raised that issue; it quoted Jim Pate, executive director of New Orleans’ Habitat for Humanity, as saying, “Habitat cannot reserve houses for a specific group, and non-musicians would also live in the village.”]

I remember from the beginning hearing that the Musicians’ Village could not be reserved for musicians only, and it made perfect sense to me then. If the New Orleans press missed that part of the message it is because they are either incompetent, irresponsible or both.

After offBeat ran their first 60-Minutes-wanna-be piece on this, the Times-Picayune ran a big story on the injustice of musicians being denied homes in the Musicians’ Village. It was presented in a way that led one to believe that because our city flooded, we should take all of the irresponsible musicians with lousy credit that never could have bought a house before, and buy them all houses. They talked about how hard it is to get gigs post-K and how tough it is on the musicians. The photo used on the front page of the story showed a musician sitting in a FEMA trailer with a large TV that barely fit in the small trailer in the background. If you want to spend your Red Cross money on a big ass TV, that’s fine with me, just don’t make me listen to you bitch about your credit afterwards. Not long before that story ran, I received a last minute call from the premier local jazz club to bring in a band the next night, because the act they had booked cancelled the day before the gig. This is a good guaranteed money gig. The guy that cancelled was the guy in the paper in the FEMA trailer with the big ass TV. “Times are tough, but it’s easier to whine about it than to get my business together enough to do the gigs I have,” is the message that is being sent.

I’m not in any way saying that we should not be helping people. We should be helping people. As Harry said about the Habitat staff in the offBeat piece:

These guys are bending over backwards to help people, doing more even than I thought they would: There are legal services available; they’ve got credit counseling. It was actually a surprise to me how available all this stuff was to the applicants. It’s just a matter of calling, setting up an appointment, and doing a little bit of work.

offBeat stirring this pot in this manner is irresponsible. If they want to stir the pot, why not get on the city about the crime. A student of mine was robbed at gunpoint, and bound and gagged in his own home last weekend. Stir the pot about that. One annoying French Quarter resident/irritant is trying to get one of the few modern jazz venues in town shut down. Stir the pot about that.

offBeat won’t say this, but I will. Harry and Branford, Thank you very much for what you are doing. It is people like you that have the best chance of saving New Orleans from itself. Don’t let the bastards get you down.

Standards or originals?

This post at Rifftides is an interesting peek into the challenges of hearing all the new music that is being made. This is an issue for me as a fan, I can’t imagine how bad it is for well known writers who are sent hundreds of CDs. I commented on the post, but it was a comment by Ken Dryden that got me thinking.

BTW, I loved Ken Dryden when he played for the Habs. Actually I am pretty sure it was this Ken Dryden.

Anyway, Ken wrote this:

Many writers complain about artists who insist on recording nothing but originals, despite the fact that even media veterans (print, web or radio) who’ve been immersed in jazz for decades have never heard of any of the musicians. With a backlog of hundreds (or more) jazz CDs awaiting a hearing, the chance of rising to the top for a review or airplay is made considerably more difficult by such releases. At least one familiar song or composer might help a CD get a hearing.

I guess I can see his point of possibly playing something if it had a name I recognized on it, even if it is a song name, but to be honest, I really don’t need to hear another recorded version of Stella By Starlight, or Giant Steps, or My One and Only Love.

When I play live, I often play classic jazz tunes from Monk, or Mingus, or Ornette. I don’t plan on recording any of those tunes. One reason is financial, and it goes back to the plethora of indie recordings that started the whole conversation. If I record someone else’s tunes, I have to pay the mechanical license fees for those tunes. Three covers that are 8 minutes each just added several hundred dollars to my budget. Granted if the best musical result comes from a few covers, then we should pony up for the mechanicals.

For me as a listener, the best musical result rarely comes from the covers. I want to hear something new. Oddly, as I am writing this I am listening to Available Jelly’s In Full Flail, and as I wrote the words “I want to hear something new” their version of the Beach Boys’ “Catch A Wave” came on, and I am totally digging it, not that their version is much like the Beach Boys… Anyway, I don’t want to compare all musicians on the equal turf of standards, I want to experience each in a setting of their own creation. Maybe that’s just me…

The Indie Jazz Conundrum

The recent J@LC presentation of John Zorn’s Masada and the Cecil Taylor Trio has stirred up some thinkers…not to mention John Schaefer.

Dig Darcy James Argue and Taylor Ho Bynum‘s thoughts on the subject.

All of this thought eventually led DJA to write this:

While I’m obviously all for the proliferation of independent, artist-owned, do-it-yourself labels and young musicians trying to pull off ambitious projects even in the absence of institutional support, the problem is (as I have said elsewhere) if everyone’s just doing their own thing, how does a collective scene emerge from that? How do we get people excited about the vanguard of independent, creative, contemporary jazz as a movement, instead of just gravitating towards the handful of stars who somehow emerge to wider acclaim?

DJA is concerned with scene development. I am more concerned with how we are to find our audiences. I think they are similar, if not the same issue. Scenes are a way to find music that we like. I like Ken Vandermark. Jeb Bishop was in his band, I’ll probably dig Jeb. I know Jeb plays with Keefe Jackson, maybe I should check out his stuff, etc. (Ok, that is a made up example, I actually have the pleasure of working with Jeb and Keefe, so maybe that was a blantant name/link drop.) Another example might be the scene that is happening around Barbes in Brooklyn right now. There are things I will check out because of their proximity to other things I like.

Again DJA asks:

“How do we get people excited about the vanguard of independent, creative, contemporary jazz as a movement, instead of just gravitating towards the handful of stars who somehow emerge to wider acclaim?”

While many of us as artists have found our way out of the old major label model of making and distributing music, most of us as listeners have not found our way to a new model of finding good music. In the old days we knew about what we read about in music magazines or newspapers, what we heard on the radio, and we saw in the record store. Record stores barely exist now, and won’t exsist as we know them in the new system. Radio and magazines are still stuck in the old mind set. They play/write about whatever they are told to by the labels. There is a perceived legitimacy that comes from being on a label, and media outlets still depend on this perception to make decisions of taste and quality for them. This is an issue for indie DIY artists, but only if that is still our method of reaching our audiences.

When I released “One”, I did limited runs of the CD. I think I made 200 in the first run. This was purely a financial decision. It meant I could pay the band more, because I had to come up with less for the manufacturing. This meant that the discs were burned instead of pressed. Other wise the rest of the package was the same. The method of putting the 1’s and 0’s onto the disc still carries a stigma. Cadence put their review of the disc in a special ghetto called “CD Ring” that is reserved for CD-R releases. This isn’t a knock on Cadence, just an indicator of their mindset on the indie issue, and they are one of the more progressive publications out there. No one else even reviewed it. Did they listen to it and decide not to write about it, or did they look at it and make that decision? I don’t know…

What if I decide to do a free download Creative Commons licensed album? Will I be able to get it written about in DownBeat or JazzTimes? Will it be viewed as less legitimate because I am not charging for it? Will people listen to it and write about it based solely on the musical content?

I think the music blogs that are hosting these conversations are part of the answer. Individual artists and listeners can help us find new music and new scenes. Those of us that teach need to make sure that we turn our students on to The Bad Plus and Steve Coleman, as well as Trane and Bird. We have to expose the now as much as the then. As performers we need to be willing to explore new venues and ways of presenting ourselves.

Most importantly, we need to support each other and create our scenes by talking about the music we like, and telling anyone who will listen about the killer new homemade indie disc we just picked up.

It would be great if J@LC had a New Improvisers Series every Thursday, and DownBeat had dedicated space for indie/DIY CD reviews, but we better not hold our breath. We probably just need to find the new way to make it work.

Both literally and figuratively

In an online discussion about the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, an African-American friend of mine who grew up in north Louisiana wrote the following:

I remember the park across from my house being segregated. I remember walking out of our house as a child and seeing a sign in the park that said, Colored Area. When I go home to day, the sign is gone but the metal post upon which it rested is still there.

Here is an NPR story with several recorded versions of th song.