This is how it's done: Steve Coleman interviews Dave Douglas in this month's Down Beat.
SC: As an independent label, how do you go about marketing, which is what the majors are supposed to be better at because they have more resources?DD: After the first year of Greenleaf's existence, we radically changed our take. We were doing the traditional brick-and-mortar distribution, but then we started to see the chains and independent record stores closing down. We also noticed that people who listen to alternative music are much more involved with searching out an artist they're interested in. We shifted to a much more Internet-based distribution. We found that easier, but the one concept that's not going to change through all this record industry shifting is an artist having contact with an audience at live shows. We sell a ton of records at shows.
[...]
DD: [...] But the one thing about these new business models is that listeners and people who love music also have a responsibility to support the artist. It doesn't take a lot. With an artist-run web site, you assume the goodwill of people-that they will buy the CD but not copy it for their friends. I see it at gigs. With a group of college guys, where once I'd sell five CDs, now I just sell one. How you purchase music is a political decision. To perpetuate the music, people have to pay back into the system. It's only happened a few times, but I've been approached by fans asking me to sign a CD-R. They don't understand the humor of that.
SC: As far as playing for live audiences, do you think your success has had anything to do with touring a lot? I think of someone like Charlie Hunter who got grassroots notice by traveling around the country in a van and then got signed by a major as a result.
DD: Charlie, yes, and The Bad Plus today. And Medeski Martin & Wood. They got in an RV and crisscrossed the country for years. People used to complain: How did they get so big? Well, they went on the road. If you're willing to put in that kind of work--and it ain't easy playing 200 gigs a year with everyone in the band willing to commit--it's a no-brainer.
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SC: I read a quote from Michael Jackson once where he said he wanted to make music that touched everyone in the whole world. And I immediately thought, that's not me. That sounded bad to me.
DD: (laughs) And he made a record called Bad. Seriously, everyone who reads this magazine loves music and has a strong opinion on what they hear. It's about what moves you. When I hear a piece of music I like I want to capture it so that I can share it with someone. Composing is sharing those moments with somebody who is moved by sounds. That's what I want to communicate. When I write, I try to find those places of spark. My happiest moments come when I'm onstage performing a new book of music and the band plays a tune the way I heard it and the audience hears it too.
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SC: We're all familiar with the 12-tone language, but not everyone is familiar with it conversationally.
DD: But the general listener can put their ear to it and get it. I've been using it for more than 15 years, and you're one of the reasons why I'm using it.
SC: Me?
DD: Yeah, you. I went to Visiones in 1990, and Greg Osby asked me to sit in. So I played on a tune. Then you came up, and I got my ass kicked around the stage by you guys throwing the M-Base language at each other. I went home and was so impressed that you guys had this language I couldn't speak. That was enlightenment. That's when I decided I wanted to come up with my own language for improvisation, which was using 12-tone lines and writing tunes for my bands with that. That's led me to play lines that are not clichéd, not overused.
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DD: [...] The most frequently asked question I get is why I studied Balkan folk music-in the late '80s before the fall of the Berlin Wall and before the records were widely available. I honestly don't know. I wish my family had Balkan ancestry, but it doesn't. I found the music fascinating, and I wanted to bring that language into jazz. I discovered rich, meaty stuff by listening to the brass bands of Macedonia, and looking into the Balkan musical language spoke to my language of playing in odd meters. It was like learning how to play modal jazz, with which I now have a mixed relationship.
SC: We can't let that slide by. What do you mean by that?
DD: In 1987, Horace Silver told me and Vincent Herring, "You young musicians all got the wrong musical lesson from John Coltrane."
SC: (laughs) Now, that's a hell of a statement.
DD: Horace's point was that people listen to Trane play all that stuff over a D-minor seventh chord. They want to know how to superimpose and put the most complex substitution in. In Horace's musical world, what was hip in music wasn't what you played over one chord, but how you got from one chord to the next-voice leading. That lesson has stayed with me. If you look closer at what Coltrane played, the reason all those superimpositions worked was because they were so brilliantly rhythmically voice-led.
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SC: It's all in the details, living moment by moment. There's a lot of detail you don't see by just looking to the past. Looking back to the '40s and '50s is like seeing the highlights of a basketball game on ESPN versus seeing the entire game. We're not hearing conversations that Charlie Parker was having. In the future, no one's going to be writing books about this. It's just a moment, but it may be an important moment to you or me or both. It may be an important energy node in our lives that has a grand effect.
DD: Looking back to the '40s and '50s is fascinating, but looking back to the recent past is just as fascinating.
SC: How recent?
DD: The whole era of the '70s and '80s, between the so-called golden age of free-jazz in the '60s and the reemergence of mainstream jazz in the '80s. That middle period is a hazy area that doesn't get talked about much. A lot of artists from that period have not become part of our generally accepted history of the music.
SC: Like Henry Threadgill.
DD: And Julius Hemphill and even Woody Shaw. I had a conversation with Anthony Braxton about how history is leaving him behind. The official histories being told are not reflecting those viewpoints. I wish somebody would write a book about the post-war jazz scene-and I mean post-Vietnam War. Not necessarily a history that takes a position, but a real survey.
and I hate to be the cruel one who points it out, but I dare say that SC doesn't see the humour in that! His fan was handing him the future, and he spat it back, and that's too bad. In the meantime, Jessica Simpson is reeling in cash selling a share-friendly MP3 that inserts her young fans' names into the mix, which may sound cheesey to some, but it totally defeats the CD-R because it accepts that people buy moments and memories, not swag and product. If one of my fans ever came up with a bootleg for me to sign, I'd be tickled that they thought enough of what it held to want to make it special to their heart. That's a gift they brought him, not 'theft'.
btw, DJA, love your blog, it shines out like a shaft of gold when all else is dark, an example for bandblogs everywhere to tune in and get with life in conversation with our fans. Bravo, well done.
Posted by: mrG | 28 July 2006 at 02:43 PM
Actually, it was DD who didn't see the humour. If it's simply a burn of a friend's or a library's copy of one of his albums, how is that "the future"?
If the fan bought mp3s off Greenleaf or iTunes, then it's different.
Posted by: mwanji | 04 August 2006 at 10:10 AM
Thanks indeed for the kind words, mrG. But I'm with Mwanji here:
how is that "the future"?
Sadly, that is "the future" -- or actually, more like "the present." It's just not a sustainable future, unless you envision a world where only the Jessica Simpsons, etc, are able to make a living in music.
And more to the point... can you imagine someone showing up at a book signing with a stack of photocopies?
Posted by: DJA | 04 August 2006 at 05:59 PM