Secret Society

Disco Inferno

Was disco the last musical genre that absolutely everyone had to get in on? It wasn't just the likes of Rod Stewart and the Rolling Stones and Wings-era Paul McCartney and the Grateful Dead and Kiss… a surprising number of major jazz artists also made disco-inflected records. There's Ron Carter's 1976 Pastels, which opens with the glossy string-sweetened "Woolaphant." Also in '76, Dizzy Gillespie put out a record called Dizzy's Party — here's the title track. Sonny Rollins even put out a tune called, of all things, "Disco Monk" — it's from 1979's aptly titled Dont Ask. (Rembmer, Thelonious was still around at this point and consequently had no grave to spin in.) Almost all of the big bands had their disco moments, too — Buddy Rich, Woody Herman, Thad & Mel — but nobody embraced disco with as much gusto as Maynard Ferguson. I still vividly remember the time when my teenage self first heard his disco version of the theme to Battlestar Galactica — I think my jaw still hurts from where it hit the floor.

The above tracks (and more) were all referenced in a recent Twitter discussion of jazz-disco crossovers — I'm grateful to Jacob Garchik, Dave Sumner, Mark Stryker, and everyone else who chimed in with their suggestions.

The discussion was instigated somewhat by the fact that Secret Society is going to be appearing this Saturday, August 25 at the Ecstatic Summer Festival, where we'll be joined onstage by the 17-piece neo-disco band, Escort. In addition to separate sets, we'll be bringing both bands together for a few tunes, including an original of mine called "Penumbra" (think late 70's Quincy Jones meets Guillermo Klein's rhythmic filter) and my arrangements of two influential disco-era tracks recorded by Donald Byrd, "Stepping Into Tomorrow" and "Change (Makes You Want To Hustle)" — both of which will feature special guest soloist Tim Hagans.

This isn't a vein of music that we in Secret Society get to tap explicity very much, but that doesn't mean we don't love it or aren't deeply influenced by it. So let's take a minute to get a few things straight:

• DISCO IS AWESOME. Notwithstanding the ill-advised crossover attempts listed above, the decades-long knee-jerk "Disco Sucks" backlash is lazy and tired and needs to stop. Yes, there is bad disco. There is bad everything. But disco was the natural outgrowth of 70's funk and Philly soul, and there's no shortage of deeply grooving disco tracks that easily stand up today. For the skeptical, I recommend and endorse this Sound Opinions podcast on disco's early years. For the advanced class, y'all need to get Nile Rogers' amazing autobiography, which came out last year. GQ has an extended excerpt, and the story of Chic's first single, "Everybody Dance," is one of the best things you'll ever read.

• ESCORT ARE AWESOME. Disco was always more of a product of the recording studio than the live stage, partly due to the nature of late 70's nightclub culture but also due to the huge number of musicians required to make that music happen. Escort does it up right, wtih a full 17-piece band including multiple strings, horns, percussionists, guitarists, and backup singers. They groove hard, and their lead singer, Adeline Michele, is a force of nature: Exhibit A.

• TIM HAGANS IS AWESOME. I don't think this is a particularly controversial point, I just want to remind everyone that Tim Hagans is a bad motherfucker and we're incredibly excited to feature him with us on this show.

• DONALD BYRD'S 70's RECORDS ARE AWESOME. Seriously, these records are nothing like those embarassing jazz-disco cuts by other artists referenced above. Unlike most of his peers, Donald Byrd made the transition to electric groove-based jazz successfully, and a big part of that success was his longtime association with the Mizell Brothers.

Larry and Fonce Mizell met Donald Byrd while they were students at Howard, where Byrd was on faculty. Larry earned a degree in electrical engineering and worked on the Apollo Lunar Module. Fonce went out to LA where he was a founding member of The Corporation, the Motown songwriting and production crew responsible for most of the Jackson 5's hits, including "I Want You Back." Larry eventually went out west to join his brother and together they founded Sky High Productions. The Mizells contributed to Byrd's 1972 Ethiopian Nights, but their big breaktrhough was Black Byrd, which became the best-selling Blue Note record of all time.

Larry and Fonce Mizell continued to produce all of DB's 70's output for Blue Note, including Street Lady (1973), Stepping into Tomorrow and Places and Spaces (both 1975) and Caricatures (1976). When the Mizells and Byrd parted ways, things start to go a bit astray — 1978's Thank You… For F.U.M.L. (Funking Up My Life) has an unbeatable title and is still a fun listen ("Your Love Is My Ecstasy" almost made the cut for the August 25 show) but without the Mizells' guiding hand, the cheese factor ramps up precipitously.

The Mizell-era Donald Byrd records were reviled by jazz critics and by many of Byrd's peers, who branded him an apostate and a sellout for abandoning the acoustic hard bop style he helped define. But they are seriously beloved by DJs and soul and disco afficionados, and have been widely sampled by hiphop artists — if anything, Donald Byrd is probably held in higher esteem by them than he is by jazz fans. (When I first sat down to talk repetoire with Escort's co-founders, Dan Balis and Eugene Cho, they already knew all about these records.)

It's easy to hear why — the playing, writing, arranging, production, and recorded sound on these records is just brilliant, particularly on Stepping Into Tomorrow and Places and Spaces. The music is concise, soulful, and unpretentious, qualities a lot of other 1970's recordings by jazz artists could maybe have used a little more of. The rhythm section is anchored by the unstoppable team of bassist Chuck Rainey (one of the most-recorded bassits of all time, probably best-known for his playing on Aretha Franklin's Young, Gifted, and Black, plus all of Steely Dan's best records) and drummer Harvey Mason (Headhunters, Brecker Brothers).

The tunes are full of inventive details, like the incredibly hip descending minor 9th bassline in "Stepping Into Tomorrow," or how the chord progression in"Change (Makes You Want To Hustle)" passes through the bII MA7 in the turnaround. And Donald Byrd himself is in fine form on all these records — and he doesn't just play, he also contributes lead vocals! So okay, no one's going mistake him for Donny Hathaway, but seriously, he acquits himself just fine.

The Red Bull Music Academy released this excellent video interview with the Mizells:

If you jump to about 1:19:10 you can check out a fascinating breakdown of the groove on "Think Twice," a song from Stepping Into Tomorrow. It starts with just Harvey's bass drum mic solo'd, and gradually brings in the hihat mic, snare mic, and overheads, and then finally bass, congas, rhythm guitars, and piano. More than a master class in rhythmic authority, this breakdown also lets you hear the players interact in real time. They're constantly embellishing around the basic rhythmic structure, trading fills, etc, all without stepping on each other or getting in the way of the groove. This is the best kind of rhythm section playing: it's selfless, unshowy, and relentlessly badass.

Want more? Here's a rare recording (never issued on CD, so far as I know*) of Donald Byrd & co. live at the Roxy, absolutely destroying on "(Fallin' Like) Dominoes":

Donald Byrd's 1970's records with the Mizells succeed because of the authentic and profound craft that went into their creation. They weren't carelessly tossed-off in a crass attempt to try to cash in on current trends, they were meticulously shaped by master muiscians at the very top of their game. They were made by artists who were engaged in a real conversation with contemporary muiscal culture, and even helped define it: "Change (Makes You Want To Hustle)" was a legitimate hit on the dancefloor. And the legacy and spirit of these groundbreaking recordings is alive and well — just look at the albums Robert Glasper and Esperanza Spalding released this year.

Some of you may still be thinking "Yes, but is it jazz?" To those people, I say, "Seriously? That is literally the least interesting qustion you could ask about this music."

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* UPDATE: In comments, Neil points out that the live version of "(Falling Like) Dominoes" is available on this compilation.

UPDATE 2: Relevant reading in the LA Times.

Open the blinds to our complicated lives

So, having more or less recovered from last month's Secret Society+Newspeak Ecstatic Merkin Hall Extravaganza (now streaming, y'all) only to suffer a catastrophic computer crisis (old laptop officially expired, brand new very very nice laptop I totally can't afford now in hand), my return to blogdonia begins.

Truth be told, my hand was forced by Ethan Iverson, who said he wanted me to come over to his place last night to play some Jim McNeely records for him, neglecting to mention until I got there that I would also be encouraged/required to document our confab for the people of the interwebs. But I am glad he dragged me back into it -- it was a fun listening session and I'm happy to be able to share it. Our conversation is cross-posted at Do The Math, but it's also reproduced below the fold (click the "Continue reading" link).

Spirit Music: Bob Brookmeyer at 80

Bob Brookmeyer turns 80 years old today. 

To anyone with any interest in large-scale jazz composition, Brookmeyer is a figure of near-idolatrous worship. He's earned his place in the pantheon of great large ensemble composers many times over, alongside figures like Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Gil Evans, Thad Jones, and George Russell. The breadth of his work is astounding -- he has never stopped searching for new sounds and new directions to explore. Over the past several decades, he has also been an extraordinarily influential teacher -- Maria Schneider, Jim McNeely, and John Hollenbeck have all studied with Brookmeyer and have been deeply and directly influenced by his compositional philosophy. I was fortunate enough to get with Brookmeyer as well, from 2000-2002. I blame him for enabling my ruinous bigband habit.

Brookmeyer one of the greatest living composers, full stop -- that's not hyperbole, that's just how it is. He is also a tremendous soloist on valve trombone (Bob gave up the slide instrument at the earliest opportunity). His swing feeling is unstoppable and as authentic as it gets: he grew up in Kansas City in the 1930's, and first heard the legendary Walter Page-Jo Jones edition of the Count Basie band live when he was all of eleven years old. (Bob says the experience "gave me my first full-body thrill.") He is a true improviser, never reliant on stock licks or patterns, and is consistently inventive and surprising even on the most timeworn standards. (His only peer in this regard is Lee Konitz.) Unlike the overwhelming majority of musicians of his generation, he is as comfortable playing free as he is playing over song forms. When I was at New England Conservatory, I heard him play some spontaneous duets with guitarist Mike Gamble that turned everyone's head right around, Exorcist-style.

And yet, despite his towering influence, outside of the community of bigband fanboys/fangirls, Brookmeyer's music isn't widely known. Today's 80th birthday milestone isn't being celebrated with a week at the Village Vanguard or a gala at the Rose Theater. (To be fair, Brookmeyer once compared the construction of the Jazz at Lincoln Center complex to the US invasion of Iraq -- he deemed them both absurdly hubristic, misbegotten, and doomed to fail, was basically the gist of it.) Instead, the official birthday celebration happened a couple of weeks ago, up at the Eastman School of Music. This was not something I wanted to miss, so ended up taking the train up to Rochester for the big event, which took place December 2. It was really moving to hear these fresh-faced Eastman kids play their hearts out, performing works that spanned almost five decades' worth of music -- especially with the man himself seated next to me. Bob also joined the band for the closing numbers, "Sweetie" and "Seesaw" -- his time and his sound remain undiminished and unmistakable.

 

You can read Brookmeyer's account of this concert on his own site. I can attest that the goodwill he shows towards the young Eastman musicians is sincere and well-earned. Bob has a not-entirely undeserved reputation as being a bit of a curmudgeon (one of his best war stories involves getting ejected from the audience during a 1981 performance of Satyagraha at BAM... for standing up on his seat and booing at the top of his lungs... a mere 45 minutes into the opera)¹, but that has honestly never been my experience with him. I've always found Bob to be warm, generous, and encouraging, even when I've at times pursued directions that run counter to his own deeply-held musical convictions.

 
Dave Rivello, Ryan Truesdell, Bob Brookmeyer, and yrstruly

 In honor of Bob Brookmeyer's 80th birthday, I'm going to post five tracks from his immense and varied discography. I'm very grateful to Bob for giving his blessing to this, and granting me permission to post these cuts for your listening/downloading pleasure. It is of course impossible to do justice to the scope of depth of Brookmeyer's career with just five selections -- even limiting myself to his bigband works, there's too damn much and I love basically all of it. These are just the five tracks I happen to be feeling today. They are all longtime favorites, but three of them were on the Eastman concert, which is still fresh in my mind. There is some chance this may have tipped the balance in their favor.

Big City Blues - Gerry Muligan Concert Jazz Band
MP3: "Big City Blues" - Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band (right-click/ctrl-click to download)

Solos: Bob Brookmeyer, piano; Gerry Mulligan, clarinet; Jim Hall, guitar; Clark Terry, trumpet
Recorded December 18-21, 1962.
Originally issued on Gerry Mulligan '63 (Verve). Currently available on Verve Jazz Masters 36 - Gerry Mulligan.

The Concert Jazz Band had Gerry Mulligan's name on it, but Brookmeyer was the group's unofficial music director, "straw boss," and chief arranger. "Big City Blues" is classic Brookmeyer, looking backwards and forwards at the same time. It opens with the composer at the piano, playing an impressionistic prelude before walking an angular, harmonically ambiguous bass line. Then Jim Hall comes in with some Freddie Green-style quarter notes on blues changes and we're suddenly back in Kansas City, with Bob giving us his best Basie-inspired plinking. Jeru enters a chorus later on clarinet(!), and things begin to simmer. The band lays down some territory band-style punches, but then the head takes some sharp corners over the IV chord. The whole chart maintains a perfect balance between old-school bigband tropes and self-conscious modernism -- the apex of which is the disjunct brass line and grittily harmonized saxophones that follows Jim Hall's solo. (This passage sounds a lot like mirror-inverted Thad Jones.) Don't sleep on Clark Terry's searing, buzz-muted choruses, either. The drummer here is Gus Johnson, a veteran of both Basie (early 1950's) and Jay McShann (late 30's - early 40's).

Willow Weep For Me - Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra
MP3: "Willow Weep For Me" - Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra (right-click/ctrl-click to download)
(Ann Ronnell, arr. Brookmeyer)

Solos: Thad Jones, fluegelhorn; Bob Brookmeyer, valve trombone; Richard Davis, bass
Recorded May 6, 1966.
Originally issued on Presenting Thad Jones/Mel Lewis & The Jazz Orchestra (Solid State). Currently unavailable -- it's on CD in the amazing, long out-of-print Thad/Mel Mosaic Box Set if you can find anyone willing to part with it.

I can never decide which of the charts Brookmeyer wrote for Thad & Mel is my favorite. It usually comes down to a dead heat between this one and his version of "St. Louis Blues" -- but "St. Louis Blues" is on YouTube, while "Willow Weep For Me" is almost impossible to find these days. This chart was adapted from an earlier version Bob wrote for the Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band -- but Gerry hated it(!!) and they never played it. The opening, with its mysterioso harmonies and aqueous tone colors, is pure Brookmeyer, as is the series of emphatic on-beat quarter notes at 2:15. That line Thad plays in the stop-time break immediately following is something fierce. I love the way the intro material is refashioned into a solo send-off for Bob, and Mel's brushwork here is to die for. The four-way improv on the final bridge is a deliciously surreal touch, but you can always count on Richard Davis to take things completely over the top. A lot of people have observed that Davis would have been fired from any other bigband for playing like that. The fact that Thad and Mel didn't keep him on a leash is a big part of why this edition of the band is so good. The final E minor voicing Brookmeyer deploys in the coda slays me every time. 

The Nasty Dance - Mel Lewis and the Jazz Orchestra
MP3: "The Nasty Dance" - Mel Lewis and the Jazz Orchestra (right-click/ctrl-click to download)

Solo: Joe Lovano, tenor sax
Recorded January 7-11, 1982.
Originally issued on Make Me Smile and Other New Works by Bob Brookmeyer (Finesse Records). Currently unavailable. (Try eBay. Vinyl is easier to find, but for a hot minute, there was a CD reissue available on Red Baron, which I once made the mistake of lending to someone.)

Brookmeyer left New York for California in 1968 and basically spent most of the 1970s attempting to drink himself to death. Thankfully, he did not succeed. 1977 was his first clean and sober year, and the year after that he returned to New York, where he began studying composition with Earle Brown. The first fruits of Bob's return to composition came with the release of an album's worth of new material for the (now Thad-less) Mel Lewis Orchestra in 1980. That record is overflowing with joyous reinvigoration. (Apart from a notoriously bleak take on "Skylark," that is.) The followup, two years later, is called, wryly, Make Me Smile, and it is an altogether darker affair. "The Nasty Dance" comes roughly 20 minutes into this hour-long suite, leaving only scorched earth in its path. The chart is full of long, indeterminate glisses and trills, unsettling squeals and shakes, and aleatoric harmonies, much of it over a relentlessly pounding low C pulse. But ultimately, all this serves as a ten-minute extended concerto/blowout/meltdown for a 29-year old Joe Lovano. The written tenor parts are so well-suited to Lovano's language, and he plays them with such balls-out intensity, that it's impossible to tell just by listening exactly when the notation gives way to improvisation. When Jim McNeely, Marc Johnson, and a downright fearsome Mel Lewis are finally let loose, they sound nothing like a bigband rhythm section -- more like the bastard stepchildren of Elvin Jones's  Live at the Lighthouse. But even in the midst of all this madness, Brookmeyer manages to slip in the hoariest of plunger-muted trumpet riffs -- and somehow makes it fit.

Say Ah - WDR Big Band
MP3: "Say Ah" - WDR Big Band (right-click/ctrl-click to download)

Solo: John Abercrombie, guitar
Recorded March 1991.
From Electricity (ACT). Still in print, praise the FSM.

Yeah, Bob made a fusion record. In 1991. With the one and only Danny Gottlieb on drums. And not one but two synthesizers in the mix, both sporting ultra-bright DX7-type patches. (Bob has continued to use synthesizers in his ensembles ever since.) This should not work at all. But it does, somehow -- in no small part because the groove is a kind of shuffle (swung 8ths, not straight), so the rhythmic connection to Bob's past is less tenuous than it otherwise might be. The insistent low A quarter notes are a bit like the low C's in "The Nasty Dance," but transformed from pulse into groove by a simple anticipation once every other bar. (The bass vamp from "Say Ah" has a tendency to pop up elsewhere in Bob's work -- you can hear it on "Boom Boom" from New Works, for instance -- but it sounds wildly different each time he uses it.) The unremittingly sequential theme feels a bit like a nursery rhyme with Asperger's syndrome. Abercrombie manages to keep the thread going throughout his solo without being too slavishly literal about it, and it's great to hear him and Danny go to work on this stuff. Brookmeyer has stripped down his harmonic language here, focusing instead on horizontal motion, a trend that continues till this day.

Seesaw - New Art Orchestra
MP3: "Seesaw" - New Art Orchestra (right-click/ctrl-click to download)

Solos: Bob Brookmeyer, valve trombone; John Hollenbeck, drums
Recorded Jan 6-8, 2001
From Waltzing With Zoe (Challenge). In print.

Since the late 1990's, Brookmeyer's primary outlet for his compositions has been the New Art Orchestra, his own hand-picked ensemble of mostly youngish, mostly European players. This is actually the first bigband Bob has ever led under his own name! The group's drummer is the amazing John Hollenbeck, who necessarily plays very differently here than he does with his own excellent ensembles. "Seesaw" was written to feature Hollenbeck -- the chart's final three minutes and forty-five seconds are given over to what amounts to a classic drums vs. band battle, as filtered through Brookmeyer's recent, somewhat deconstructive sensibilities. A lot of his music for the New Art Orchestra works in a similar way -- stripping musical ideas down to their most essential components, then reconfiguring those components for maximum effect. Brookmeyer's deep emotional connection to rhythm comes through as strongly in the little details (like the placement of the piano-and-bass hits under his solo) as it does in the big moments (like the elusively displaced ensemble hits at the climax of the tune). "Seesaw" is one of Brookmeyer's most consistently propulsive works, and that is saying something.

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1. Bob emailed me with the following correction: "it was after the interval for Glass and I didn't stand on my seat -- HOWEVER, it makes good theater that way so leave it."

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Happy 80th Birthday, Bob! Thank you. For everything.

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Further reading...

Bob Brookmeyer's ArtistShare site

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Marc Myers' superb five-part interview with Brookmeyer, published earlier this year:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

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Ben Ratliff's Listening With: Bob Brookmeyer piece from 2006.

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Inside The Score by Rayburn Wright -- the classic, micro-detailed analysis of eight bigband compositions, including three of Brookmeyer's. (You own this, surely?)

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Changes Over Time: The Evolution of Jazz Arranging by Fred Sturm -- this book famously uses four tunes as a lens for the history of jazz arranging. One of those is Jelly Roll Morton's "King Porter Stomp," which Brookmeyer arranged for octet in 1958. A new arrangement was commissioned for this book. Brookmeyer told them "I cannot guarantee one recognizable note" and he was not kidding.

Now, did you fall at first sight or did you need a shove?

I'm grateful to Greenleaf's Michael Bates for drawing my attention to practicesightreading.com, an incredibly cool random rhythm generator that supports multiple levels of complexity, and both single and mixed meters. As the name of the site suggests, it's intended to generate customized exercises for rhythmic sight-reading, but the compositional possibilities of a user-configurable random rhythm generator like this shouldn't be overlooked either.

My only quibbles so far is that it would be nice to be able to input any time sig instead of being limited to preset choices (also, I really want to turn off display of the metric subdivisions for 5/8 and 7/8), and everything is very downbeat-centric -- there are not nearly enough tied notes, even at the highest levels.

Not perfect grammar always perfect timing

Sweet Jesus I hate The Elements of Style

Here's why:

50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice

By GEOFFREY K. PULLUM

April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a commemorative edition has been released.

I won't be celebrating.

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.

The authors won't be hurt by these critical remarks. They are long dead. William Strunk was a professor of English at Cornell about a hundred years ago, and E.B. White, later the much-admired author of Charlotte's Web, took English with him in 1919, purchasing as a required text the first edition, which Strunk had published privately. After Strunk's death, White published a New Yorker article reminiscing about him and was asked by Macmillan to revise and expand Elements for commercial publication. It took off like a rocket (in 1959) and has sold millions.

This was most unfortunate for the field of English grammar, because both authors were grammatical incompetents. Strunk had very little analytical understanding of syntax, White even less. Certainly White was a fine writer, but he was not qualified as a grammarian. Despite the post-1957 explosion of theoretical linguistics, Elements settled in as the primary vehicle through which grammar was taught to college students and presented to the general public, and the subject was stuck in the doldrums for the rest of the 20th century.

Read the whole glorious thing.

I'm not trying to knock you out, or what's it about

It is a source of constant frustration for me that the music world has such a dysfunctional relationship to genre. Genre is easily the most superficial and least-useful frame to use when thinking about music, but genre divisions are so entrenched and taken so much for granted that lots of otherwise intelligent and sophisticated listeners have internalized a whole constellation of completely stupid beliefs about music and genre. Especially about genres that are outside of their usual comfort zone.

I often find myself looking at the film world with envy, where people who get all hung up about genre are rightly regarded as morons. (Or, to be charitable: people with a very limited and superficial appreciation of film.) Which makes the American Film Institute's recent list of Top 10 movies classified by genre incredibly annoying and regressive.

Ironically, the Fresh Air broadcast "saluting" the new AFI list actually features a full-throated assault on the practice of trying to wedge films into little genre-boxes. The segment (click the "listen now" link) opens with a 1997 conversation between Roger Ebert and Martin Scorsese, in which Roger delivers a righteous smackdown to genre essentialists:

EBERT: Frequently people will -- they know I'm a movie critic -- they will discuss the subject matter as if that is what the film is about. "Oh, it's a film about boxing..."

SCORSESE: Yeah, I know.

EBERT: Or, "Oh, it's a film about gangsters" or...

SCORSESE: Right, right.

EBERT: A film is not about its subject. It's about how it's about its subject.

SCORSESE: Right, in fact when...

EBERT: The subject is neutral. People don't understand that. Whenever anybody makes a statement, "I don't like to go to movies about..." and then fill in the blank... my response is, "Anyone who makes that statement is an idiot."

SCORSESE: No, it's true. It's true, it's true.

[Applause]

EBERT: "I don't want to go to bad films about cowboys..."

SCORSESE: Yeah.

EBERT: "I don't want to go to bad films about boxers..."

SCORSESE: I know.

EBERT: "I would like to see a good film about a boxer" might be a more intelligent statement.

(What follows is an unbelievably great and fascinating technical discussion of how Marty filmed those spectacular inside-the-ring shots in Raging Bull, so make sure you go listen to the whole thing.)

Of course, in the music world, you not only have people -- powerful, influential, respected individuals -- who not only never listen outside of their own preferred genre or genres... on top of that, they sincerely believe that anything outside of that isn't even art. And yeah, okay, that view is now slowly fading -- but it might fade a little faster if we had more strong oppositional voices ruthlessly mocking the genre-fundamentalists for the idiots they are.

Soundly situated in obscurityland

Andrea LaRose poses an excellent question, in the wake of my post on fanservice:

I'm not sure I understand where the fanservice line gets drawn musically. My mom doesn't like hardcore metal, but is that because it's self-referential fanservice music or because she just doesn't like it? I mean, couldn't you chalk up any taste preferences to fanservice?

"Fanservice" doesn't just mean music with a cult following that a majority of people happen to find alienating -- that would, after all, condemn virtually everything I have ever done musically as fanservice. (Although maybe that's actually a fair assessment, I dunno.) Similarly, "fanservice" does not cover all music that is deliberately constructed to alienate people^[1], nor does it cover all music that might be a bit of a tough slog for the uninitiated.

Fanservice is more specific than that -- it's a marker or signifier that serves no legitimate aesthetic purpose, but is there to stroke those in the in-crowd while simultaneously alienating even the most sophisticated and open-minded newbies.

Of course, the devil is in the details -- what counts as a "legitimate aesthetic purpose"? -- etc, etc. There is also the inconvenient truth that fanservice works -- it's fun to be part of a clique, even if your clique is widely regarded as uncool. (Sometimes especially if.) It's fun to spot obscure in-jokes or references that go over everyone else's head. It's fun to feel like you and your friends are musically knowledgeable/sophisticated/progressive/hardcore and everyone else is a bunch of pikers. Basically, it's fun to be pandered to.

So here are some examples of what I'd consider fairly unambiguous musical fanservice:

• ensemble orchestrations of classic jazz solos (Supersax, Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, etc). The only example I can think of where this actually works is Hal Overton's chart on "Little Rootie Tootie" from the Thelonious Monk Orchestra at Town Hall record.

• stopping the opera dead in its tracks just so the tenor can sing nine more high C's.

• Mamma Mia!, We Will Rock You, Across The Universe, and every other jukebox musical ever.

• Dread Zeppelin, Hayseed Dixie, Is It Rolling Bob?, Gold Sounds, etc.

• all of the hoary rituals surrounding classical concertgoing -- the no-clapping-between-movements rule, the taboo against speaking to the audience, the ridiculous tuxedos, various and sundry other bits of formalized pandering.

• playing the head to "Donna Lee" displaced by one beat.

• the spiteful parody of Shostakovich 7 in the fourth movement of Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra, which is never actually funny. (Okay, almost never. But it's still a nasty bit of fanservice that seriously detracts from my enjoyment of what is otherwise one of my favorite Bartók works.)

• that new Weezer video.

• Milton Babbitt. "The Composer As Specialist" (aka "Who Cares If You Listen") is essentially one long defense of fanservice.

[And here is the official fanservice component of this post: add your own examples in comments!]

Keep in mind, some of the above I have actually enjoyed at one time or another -- I am certainly not immune to fanservice. And if the thing as a whole is good, it's easy to forgive the occasional burst of fanservice, even if it detracts or distracts. It's only when the entire work/subgenre/scene is built around creating and rewarding fanservice that we start to have a problem.

A commenter going by the name of medrawt said something else that I think is very pertinent:

Somewhere online I read someone say that essentially the "ideal" reader of Iron Man or Spiderman has ready every issue of the comic, has read all crossover issues with different titles, recalls all of them, and has the additional capacity to spontaneously forget those issues whose continuity would render the current issue unintelligible, until such time as some future writer chose to reference them in some way.

Here's one failsafe way you can tell if you, as a artist, are indulging in fanservice -- if you ever find yourself thinking anything remotely like this:

The ideal listener of my music has heard and analyzed everything I've ever created, is intimately familiar with all of the works that have ever influenced me and everyone I've ever collaborated with, has read all of the written statements I've made about my music, recalls all of this, and has the additional capacity to spontaneously forget those works and/or statements which have no bearing on my current output, until such time as I chose to revisit that creative period in some way."

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1. Okay, if you clicked that link, I know you want to listen. I have been "enjoying" The Most Unwanted Song for many years, long before it became an internet phenomenon -- Society co-conspirator actually owns the CD, and likes to break it out at parties.

The In Crowd

Isaac and I had coffee earlier in the week and got to talking about the problem with the aesthetics of exclusion, or, more accurately and less pretentiously, the problem of fanservice.

I'm not talking about the gratuitous panty-shot variety of fanservice. I'm talking about the impenetrable, continuity-heavy storytelling-fanservice that plauges mainstream superhero comics -- the barrage of needlessly insular and obscure references that make it impossible for the average reader to pick up an issue of a big-label comic book and have the slightest fucking clue what is going on. This kind of incomprehensibility isn't just a side-effect of long-form serial storytelling. It is deliberate -- a conscious strategy to reward hardcore comics readers who come to the table with an encyclopedic knowledge of the last 20 years of comics continuity, and to drive away everyone else.

Let's say you are a smart, sophisticated, cultured person who nonetheless enjoys a well-crafted bit of pop culture entertainment, like, say, the Iron Man movie. And let's say you happen to be walking by Rocketship and think, "You know, that movie was really cool -- I don't normally read comics, but what the heck, why don't I just step in here and pick up a comic that has Iron Man in it?" In all likelihood, you will quickly regret your decision, because mainstream comic books are, by and large, not set up to reward people who like exciting, tight narratives and vivid characterization and witty banter and engaging visuals and all the other things you'd normally want from your slice of pop culture entertainment. They are set up for one thing and one thing only: fanservice. Mainstream superhero comics are a closed loop, catering only to the specific nostalgia needs of longtime fans, and everyone else can go screw.

Of course, smart comics fans who would actually appreciate the opportunity to read some superhero comic books featuring exciting, tight narratives for a change are as pissed off as anyone at the way blatant fanservice drives away any potential new readers, and has almost completely supplanted actual craft.

What does this have to do with music? Well, nobody except the most hopeless, pathetic mouth-breather actually thinks the preponderance of fanservice in superhero comics is respectable or defensible. But when the exact same variety of insular, exclusionary, pointless pandering to the the in-crowd goes on in our favorite music (jazz, improv, new music, indie rock, hiphop, whatever), the people being pandered to -- that would be you know, us -- tend to get their backs up whenever anyone suggests that there might be something unsavory about circling the aesthetic wagons, or wondering whether practices that are deliberately designed to alienate intelligent, sophisticated, open-minded listeners from outside your little scene are really such a good idea.

These thoughts were sparked by a post [via Phil Freeman] by the English music critic and author Simon Reynolds on the "anti-epiphany" he had back in 1989:

I got a most peculiar sensation reading the Epiphany column at the back of the latest (June) issue of The Wire--an account of a life-changing gig written by improvising cellist Mark Wastell--which was I went to this show, didn't I? In fact it's a gig the whereabouts and whenabouts of which I've been trying to remember for a while now. Now I know precisely: March 12th, 1989, the Royalty Theatre, Holborn, London; Evan Parker as support act to the headlining trio of Anthony Braxton, Adelhard Roidinger, and Tony Oxley.

Reading the column, the mirroring effect was quite uncanny: Wastell's reactions to the performances correlated bizarrely with my own (but how he reacted to those reactions ultimately being totally different). An unusual venue, never been to before, never been to since? CHECK! Slightly aghast at the audience, an all-male miasma of thick sweaters, brown cardigans, bad hair, face foliage? CHECK! Bemused bothered and bored witless as Parker's fingers run rapidly up and down, up and down his soprano saxophone for approx 40 minutes, the resulting shrill, gratingly sibilant patterns repetitious in the extreme yet never falling into anything that resembles groove or melody? CHECK! Very very slightly more taken by the abstrusities of the headliners (at least there's three levels of incomprehensibility going on at once) but literally pained by Oxley's compulsion to swipe his drumstick against his cowbell every few minutes, producing a really nasty metallic scraping sound? CHECK!

[…]

Where Wastell rose to the challenge, I sank from it, shrank from it. The show was an anti-Epiphany, a Turning-Off Point. Well, not quite as dramatic as that, but certainly it helped to cap and confirm a mounting feeling of being not-attracted/not-convinced by that whole area of music (which I'd dutifully checked out, as you do--a Company recording here, an Incus release there--because some smart people with otherwise sharp taste are really into this shit). The gig at the Royalty Theatre contributed to the turn-off partly for sociological reasons (having had a good up-close sniff of the audience, would I really want to be the kind of person into this thing? Or even stand in the same room as them on a regular basis?), but mostly for musical ones: I honestly could not hear the music in it.

I'm sure Reynolds's post will make a lot of readers of this blog furious, but he is no slouch and much of what he says is worthy of serious consideration -- you should read the whole thing, of course -- as well as Phil Freeman's response -- but I was especially struck by this bit:

My interest was actually piqued by a piece in another issue of The Wire, a few months back, the March cover story on John Butcher. I really warmed to the opening quote from Butcher:

"This music is here in opposition to other music. It doesn't all co-exist together nicely. The fact that I have chosen to do this implies that I don't value what you're doing over there. My activity calls into questions the value of your activity. This is what informs our musical thinking and decision making."

Interestingly, given his earlier comments, Reynolds actually likes this oppositional, exclusionary attitude. I think it's completely appalling. It reeks of the worst kind of fanservice.

UPDATE: Here is an excellent example of the not-atypical reactions of someone jumping back into superhero comics after a long absence:

Up until about ten years ago, if DC Comics published something with Batman in the title, I bought it. It was about this time, a decade ago, that I well and truly left comics behind, seemingly forever. Things change.

[…]

Except for some of the early issues of Superman/Batman, I’d not bought a Batman comics in ten years when I bought Batman #676, the first chapter of “Batman, R.I.P.”

So, naturally, I was confused out of my skull.

I’m sure something happened in this issue, but I’m not sure what. There’s a moody introduction with a secret society. There’s a car chase with the latest incarnation of the Batmobile. There’s Tim Drake asking Alfred if Bruce is completely mental. There’s Bruce Wayne’s new girlfriend (whose name isn’t given for several pages, so if you didn’t know who she was, the first page with her is going to be confusing as hell). There’s a scene of Bruce and his girlfriend at the Wayne family cemetary plot. And then there’s a sequence with the Joker, which I’m not entirely sure was a dream or reality. I’m thinking dream.

It sounds like a lot, and I suppose it is. It’s all set-up.

[…]

For a first issue of a storyline, questions are raised and none are answered. For a new reader, there’s a lot here that’s impenetrable; there are undoubtedly things that I’ve completely missed.

And this is an issue written by Grant Morrison, who is usually one of the better comics writers around.

Whether we are talking about comics or music or any other artform, taking pride in creating work that goes out of its way to be deliberately impenetrable to the non-initiate is perverse.

Never ending math equation

[This post is related to the recent, suprisingly popular "irrational" rhythm posts -- Part 1  & Part 2. Since (A) I can't sleep, and (B) apparently y'all love this stuff, here is the followup I promised.]

Maria Schneider runs in very different circles from the metametric/totalist crowd. Her music doesn't sound anything like  Michael Gordon's (he of the infamous Trance bassline), Mikel Rouse's, John Luther Adams's, or Kyle Gann's. But I think you can see, in some of her works, an interesting example of convergent evolution. Her own approach to "feelable/performable rhythmic complexity" (which, of course, has been a part of jazz since the very beginning) is informed primarily by flamenco, and South American music, but it has led her to stretch those traditions in ways that are, in some respects at least, recognizably similar to the rhythmic techniques used by the above-listed metameric composers.

Let's take a look at Maria's Bluería, Soleá y Rumba from her 2004 release Concert In The Garden -- specifically, the initial bulería section. The bulería is a 12-beat flamenco rhtyhm. It comes in a couple of varieties, but the version we're interested in is the one with accents on beats 3, 7, 8, 10 and 12:

Note that the pattern begins on beat 12, and beat 1 is a weak beat. If you're not versed in flamenco (and/or if you're a white kid from suburbia, like me), you'd probably hear the bulería pattern like this instead:

Since Maria isn't trying to write authentic, traditional flamenco, but instead to use bulería as a jumping-off point for her own personal expression, she opts to use the shifted form above (which, as you will see later, makes her subsequent rhythmic twists and turns much easier to read). When you look at the shifted bulería rhythm above, you can see it implies a 6/8 + 3/4 feel — which is, of course, also ubiquitous in a whole range of South American music:

The first thing Maria does is to subdivide the "6/8" portion of the bar into four parts instead of two parts -- which, if we go back to the 12/8 notation, looks like this:

Does that combination of dotted eighth notes and non-dotted quarter notes in 12/8 remind you of anything?

No, it's not "irrational" like the Michael Gordon bassline -- if you wrote it out in 4/4, you wouldn't have incomplete triplets -- but the rhythmic profile is similar.

Anyway, in her score, Maria chooses to augment the bulería rhythm, doubling all the rhythmic values — again, out of notational convenience:

This makes it possible for her to notate the entire bulería section without resorting to any sixteenth-note subdivisions. But you can see that the underlying pattern remains the same, only instead of 6/8 + 3/4, it's now 12/8 + 3/2.

Here's the initial theme -- check out how it sometimes reinforces and sometimes pushes against the 12/8 + 3/2 bulería foundation:

(I took the liberty of making some slight alterations to the beaming patterns in the original notation, in order to make the 12/8 + 3/2 pattern explicit.)

Here's the audio of the above, from the original recording:

MP3: Bulería, Soleá y Rumba, Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra (excerpt) -- click to listen, right-click/control-click to download

A bit later on, Maria introduces triplets, a new rhythmic element that creates 3-against-4 and 6-against-4 relationships to the bulería pattern:

She also frequently uses this rhythm, a string of quarter notes starting on the second eighth of the bar:

There's also an incredibly striking moment beginning in m.19, where the 12/8+ 3/2 pattern is temporarily suspended in favor of an eight-quarter-eighth sequence, whose binary profile strongly implies a superimposed 2/2:

These are a lot of different, non-obvious ways of carving up the 12/8 bar! But even so, we have only just barely begun to scratch the surface.

For instance, I like what happens when you play the bulería pattern followed by its retrograde (in other words, play it forwards, then backwards):

Or, in classic metametric fashion, you could mess around with multiple simultaneous juxtapositions:

Finally, if you're interested in acquiring the score to Bluería, Soleá y Rumba -- which trust me, rewards close study -- you can buy it from Maria's site.

Fighting vainly the old ennui

Is there anything more boring than virtuosity?

I mean, when you're young and you first make that ill-advised decision to seriously dedicate yourself to your instrument, hearing someone with superhuman technique is thrilling beyond belief. Also daunting and depressing, for sure, but mostly thrilling. And chops envy is often the only thing keeping you going in the practice room, because honestly, why else would you voluntarily spend countless tedious hours drilling scales and patterns and those godawful Hanon and Czerny exercises if you didn't desperately want to be more impressive than your peers? Yeah, yeah, "passion for music," whatever -- we are talking about kids here. And kids whose music-making takes place within the constraints of long-established, adult-approved institutions, at that.

But at a certain point in your musical development, you come to realize that technique is a means to an end, not an end in itself. You become aware that there's no such thing as objectively, universally "good" technique -- you might need one set of skills to excel at one type of music, but other musics present completely different technical challenges. You also realize that music that requires the performer to clear large and obvious technical hurdles is not always better than music that seems easier to play. You learn that the flashiest elements of virtuosity -- like the ability to play very fast with a lot of accuracy -- are not necessarily the most important, and that subtlety and nuance are both more meaningful and more elusive. You recognize that musicians that have developed a highly idiosyncratic and individual technique (i.e., musicians that play "the wrong way") are often playing the right way for them -- their unorthodox approach might actually be perfectly suited to their individual voice as a musician.

At least, I hope you come to realize these things. Not everyone does. When you've devoted a significant portion of your formative years to the single-minded pursuit of virtuosity, it can be dispiriting to learn that better technique doesn't make you a better musician. But you can't actually become a for-real grown-up musician unless you are willing to suck it up and admit to yourself that chops aren't everything. Otherwise, you will continue to live your life believing truly perverse things -- things like "Theolnious Monk wound have sounded better if his technique had been more like Oscar Peterson's" or "Buckethead is a better guitarist than Albert King" or "Charles-Valentin Alkan's music is more meaningful than Erik Satie's."

Because the reality is, a pageant of virtuosity for its own sake is skullfuckingly tedious. For anyone who has a post-adolescent relationship with music, fearsome chops alone don't impress, not even as pure athleticism. To make an impact, the virtuoso also has take genuine risks, and all all that skill has to be in the service of real musical expression.

When John Coltrane first recorded "Giant Steps," that was thrilling because it was new and daring and original. The energy of discovery is all over that recording, and it remains vivdly etched into the tracks even if you weren't born until decades after Coltrane recorded it. But nobody cares how deftly you negotiate "Giant Steps." These days, everyone and their dog can play over "Giant Steps" changes. It doesn't mean anything anymore -- especially not when it's coming from someone who has nothing of his own to say other than, "Look, Ma, I can nail 'Giant Steps'!"

Same goes for Gaspard de la nuit, Rach 3, the Liszt Transcendental Etudes and all the other legendary finger-busters -- nobody cares. Seriously. 

Look, I know this repertoire is fearsomely difficult and you have dedicated your entire life to getting to the point where you can credibly negotiate these works, but in case you hadn't realized (because you were too busy practicing) -- lots of people can and do play the shit out of this stuff. I don't care if you are even more flawless and even more polished than the currently reigning heavyweight champion of polished flawlessness, this stuff is just not impressive anymore. Even if your sole objective as a musician is to blow us away with your l33t skillz, the only way you can actually accomplish that is by doing something we haven't heard done a million times before.

The question of the perception of virtuosity and its relationship to new music was very much on my mind during two recent concerts: an all-Rzewski recital by pianist Lisa Moore last week, and an all-Meredith Monk concert by The M6 earlier tonight. Monk and Rzewski are both members of an increasingly endangered species -- the composer-virtuoso. But they are both the best kind of virtuosos -- in fact, their virtuosity is the only kind that still actually registers as such, because their respective musical languages involve techniques that only the composers themselves and a handful of others in the world have mastered. This also makes it extremely daunting for anyone to attempt a piece by Rzewski or Monk, because the composers themselves are such fearsome and authoritative performers of their own works.

I'll have more to say about those two concerts -- both of which were extraordinary, and virtuosic in non-boring ways -- in a couple of follow-up posts.

There's a growing feeling of hysteria

The hottest thing in classical music right now, by a country mile, is 26-year old Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who made his NY Phil debut a couple of nights ago. I couldn't make it, although I loved his account of Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra at Carnegie just a few weeks ago, and if you haven't yet seen that jaw-dropping video of Dudamel conducting the Mambo from West Side Story from the BBC Proms, you must. Dudamel is a product of the remarkable state-sponsored music education program called El Sistema, which enrolls more than 250,000 Venezuelan youths -- "Venezuela already has more schoolchildren in orchestras than on soccer teams."

Two good writeups of that hit -- one from Tony Tommasini in the NYT, and one from Peter Matthews at Feast of Music, who might just have been the only person in the audience at Avery Fisher Hall who had also attended a Todd P.-curated show the night before. Both reviews are notable for being among the few accounts of a Dudamel appearance that do not include a paragraph or two of hand-wringing about how the young conductor is morally compromised for not publicly denouncing Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez.

This is, as you may know, a bit of a hot topic in the classical sphere. In in his New Yorker column, Alex Ross writes "I wondered about the wisdom of putting on such a patriotic display at a time when other Venezuelan students have been protesting Hugo Chávez’s increasingly anti-democratic regime," and in a follow-up post on his blog, entitled "The Venezuela Problem," he adds: "What disturbs me [...] is that when politicians throw money at music, some in the classical business tend not to scrutinize the politics too closely."

Steve Smith, in reference to Chávez not being mentioned in a pre-concert discussion at Carnegie, writes:

[José Antonio] Abreu [founder of El Sistema], whose achievements in Venezuela unquestionably deserve respect, went on to say that similar programs were being launched in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston, and told the audience that he had urged the Carnegie Hall board to start presenting its artists in Venezuela.

Not that I wanted [Ara] Guzelimian [host of the chat] to get all Lee Bollinger here, but I did hope that some political context might be provided for the remarkable progress -- on both artistic and humanitarian levels -- that "El Sistema" has caused in Venezuela.

Instead, this was something like Dumbledore talking about opening Hogwarts franchises all over the world -- while He Who Must Not Be Named simply wasn't.

Neither Alex nor Steve take Dudamel himself to task for being insufficiently anti-Chávez, but Bob Shingleton (aka Pliable) of On An Overgrown Path has been far more vocal and persistent in his criticism. In this post, he writes: "The two photos show Venezuelan riot police facing university students during protests against Chavez’s decision to shut down opposition-aligned television station RCTV in May 2007. Perhaps DG will use them on the next Dudamel CD sleeve?"

Let me be clear -- I am not a fan of Chávez. Although democratically elected, his administration has taken a decidedly authoritarian turn, and people are right to be troubled. If Dudamel were to use his newfound international celebrity to take a strong public stance against Chávez's antidemocratic policies, I would certainly welcome it.

But I am also troubled by what I see as a certain double standard. It seems to me that many in the classical blogosphere are following the lead of conservative pundits in vastly inflating both Chávez's importance in the world and the extent of his antidemocratic activities. This led me to make some intemperate comments on certain threads, but I am frustrated by what looks an awful lot like hypocrisy.

I am not arguing that Hugo Chávez is a good guy. He is not. But compared to, say, Vladimir Putin, he's chump change:

Voting starts in Russian election

Polling stations have opened in the Russian capital, Moscow, as the country continues to vote in general elections over 22 hours across 11 time zones.

Eleven parties are competing for places in the lower house, the Duma - though it is not clear how many will secure the 7% needed to qualify for seats.

President Vladimir Putin's party is predicted to win, boosting his bid to retain power after leaving the Kremlin.

Opposition parties have accused the government of stifling their campaigns and of intimidation.

Independent monitors say their attempts to observe the poll have been hampered.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has abandoned its plans to send a big team of election observers to Russia after accusing the Russian government of imposing unacceptable restrictions and of deliberately delaying the issuing of visas. Russia has denied the claims.

Only a much smaller group of MPs from the OSCE's parliamentary assembly will be in attendance.

That means just 400 foreign monitors will cover 95,000 polling stations.

[...]

The largest party in the Duma going into the elections is United Russia, and it will be hoping to maintain its dominance against the challenge from the Communist Party, the Liberal Democratic Party, the Yabloko party and others.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is at the top of the United Russia party list - opening the possibility that he could keep a grip on power from parliament even after stepping down as president next year.

During the run-up to the election, demonstrations were forbidden, and opposition coalition leader (and former World Chess Champion) Garry Kasparov was jailed for five days for his role in an anti-Putin rally. He has called the election a "farce."

And who happens to have made an appearance at Carnegie Hall last night? Why, it's Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra! And what does Maestro Gergiev have to say about Putin?

But the biggest boost, says Gergiev, "comes from the sense of stability which Putin immediately brought to the country. We worked together in the most difficult years. Today the country is in better shape […]."

In this same article, we learn that Putin was personally responsible for directing $184 million worth of state funds towards the renovation of the orchestra's home, the Kirov-Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg.

Or how about this charming personal detail, gleaned from the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra's website:

He [Gergiev] reputedly has a direct line to Russian president Vladimir Putin (a fan of Gergiev's), and he and Putin are godfathers to each other's children.

Have any of the critics and bloggers writing about the Kirov Orchestra's current tour mentioned how they are troubled by Gergiev's "direct line" to Putin? (Especially given the farce of a Russian election currently underway?) Has anyone asserted: "Supporting [Gergiev], his [Kirov] orchestra, and other [Russian] cultural products is akin to saying that we love the produce of a nascent dictatorship"?

Anyone? Anyone?

I do not like to play the "if you are outraged about this, why aren't you outraged about that" game. But in this case, the parallel is too clear and the double standard too glaring to let pass without comment.

UPDATE: I did not know, at the time I wrote this, that Leterland proprietor David Adler had recently posted on both Gergiev/Kirov and the Dudamel-Chávez question. He has since weighed in in the comments to this post and on his own blog -- as always, David's thoughts are well worth reading.

UPDATE 2: Patrick J. Smith (The Penitent Wagnerite) responds.

UPDATE 3: More responses: Pliable (On An Overgrown Path). Matt Guerrieri (Soho The Dog).

Also -- I mentioned this in the comments, but just so nobody gets the wrong idea: It was certainly not my intention to single out Alex Ross or Steve Smith for opprobrium! The passages I quoted from Alex and Steve are, taken by themselves, entirely reasonable. But in order to point out the institutional double standard, which is hardly the fault of any one individual, I needed to pull some representative quotes from someone. I could have citied any number of critics, but I chose Alex and Steve precisely because (I hope!) they both understand that I have tremendous respect for their work and that no personal slight is intended.

UPDATE 4: MK (Tonic Blotter) has a humane and insightful take:

Dudamel is no Furtwängler or Shostakovich because Chávez is no Hitler or Stalin. But the basic choice is the same: Either: 1. confront the regime and risk retaliation which may force you into exile or worse, which will cause you to lose all influence at home and risk the undoing of all your previous efforts; or 2. find a way to deal with the system so that you can build something that will outlast the regime.

Read the whole thing.

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I'm out of phase and you're all stereo

MP3: Music for 18 Musicians, Section VI - Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble

The GVSU recording of Music for 18 dropped a few weeks ago. Since then there's been renewed interest in the ensemble, especially their 5 AM performance of this hourlong Steve Reich masterwork at the Bang On A Can Marathon earlier this year. A lot of people are surprised to learn that the Grand Valley State kids played for an audience of some 400 people -- "for reasons that no one could quite understand" to quote Alex Ross.

Well, speaking as one of The 400, it honestly did not occur to me that there was anything unusual about the size of the audience, even given the, ah, nontraditional timeslot. Of course, I'm the guy who thought it would be fun to liveblog the entire 27-hour marathon, so you may not want to put too much stock in my idea of what "usual" is. But I have received some email inquiries by people who are genuinely curious about what motivated those who turned out. (Perhaps some are thinking of launching their own 5 AM music series?)

It's tempting to be glib and say 'What part of 'The City That Never Sleeps' don't you understand?" On any given Saturday night in NYC, there are lots of people still out getting their fun on at 5 AM. (Obviously, it's not just NYC -- back in my callow youth, when we would hit Montreal's afterhours dance clubs, by 5 AM the party was just getting started.) When you've got close to a thousand people who came down to the Winter Garden to check out the free shows, including sets by The Books, Juana Molina, and a live version of Brian Eno's Music for Airports, it didn't seem that surprising that many of those listeners would choose to stick around for the "afterparty" (or drift in after a night on the town).

The 5 AM set was planned to coincide with the rising sun -- the opening Pulses began cloaked in darkness, but by the work's end the Winter Garden's glass-enclosed atrium was flooded with daylight. (You can see the progression in the photos I took.) This experience now seems inextricable from the piece's story arc -- the maracas in Section VI will hereafter always evoke dawn for me.

•     •     •

Music for 18 Musicians is not an easy piece, and Grand Valley State University is not exactly a magnet school for young virtuosi. The students there mostly have their sights set on teaching gigs, not whirlwind international careers. But that actually makes the piece a better fit for them, in a couple of important ways.

First, given a certain basic level of competence, its difficulties are the same for everyone. It's no easier for a Juilliard wunderkind to learn to play Music for 18 Musicians than it is for anyone else. In fact, because the music allows so little room for individual showmanship, it may even be harder for the young hotshot to put aside his ego and submit to the demands of the music. (Kyle Gann talks about this equalizing effect in his post on coaching minimalist and postminimalist rep.)

Second, like all of Reich's music, Music for 18 Musicians is impossible to perform unless everyone involved has a highly developed sense of rhythmic authority. You need to be strong enough in your own sense of time that you can play your part securely and accurately, but you also have to be hyper-attuned to where everyone else is feeling the time, and sensitive enough to adjust your own placement to match what is happening around you. Without a conductor, a drummer, or a click track to impose the beat, it's almost inevitable that you will end up with an 18-way tug-of-war. Learning to play the piece is largely about everyone learning how to pull in the same direction. For these young musicians, being forced to take personal responsibility for the time in large group context... and then being forced to keep up that intensity of concentration for an hour or more -- this is the best, more important and relevant lesson you could possibly teach the next generation of music educators.

•     •     •

I've often found it a bit curious that for a composer who is both hugely influenced by jazz (especially Kenny Clarke's sense of forward motion and Coltrane's single-minded motivic transformations) and is himself hugely influential far beyond his own musical turf (to cite but the latest of countless examples, Radiohead's In Rainbows has at least two tracks that are explicitly built around Reichian techniques) -- Steve Reich's influence on jazz musicians has been practically nonexistent. There are exceptions, of course -- Pat Metheny, John Hollenbeck, Joe Phillips, and, uh, yrs trly -- but an awful lot of jazz musicians, from arch-traditionalists to ostensible avant-gardists, find Reich's music anathema. My own mentor, Bob Brookmeyer, drips contempt for all things minimalist. (He once had to be escorted out of a performance of a Philip Glass opera.)

A few weeks ago, I gave a workshop on Reich's music for some jazz majors out at Queens College. I started by having the class attempt to read through Clapping Music, which I hoped would (A) be fun, and (B) give everyone a first-hand taste of some of the difficulties involved in performing Reich's music. It's fair to say there was a wide range of reactions to this, from "enthusiastic curiosity" to "are you fucking kidding me with this shit?". The skepticism intensified considerably when I played them the first few minutes of Come Out. I was definitely expecting some pushback on that one, but I'd also hoped that the kids would at least be somewhat impressed by Piano Phase, especially with the help of these nifty video aids:

(Unfortunately, at the time the Aidu clip wouldn't load.)

Anyway, at this point the battle lines were clearly drawn, but we had a productive side discussion about the value of the avant-garde generally, and the merits of studying music you can't stand. I'm glad the people who were not into this music spoke up -- it's always much more fun when people say their piece instead of just gritting their teeth in silence. And I think even the skeptics found a little relief when we moved on to the comparatively lush Music for Mallet Instruments, Organ and Voices and the openly jazz-inflected New York Counterpoint. But the experience made me wonder how much grief GVSU New Music Ensemble director Bill Ryan got from his students when they learned they would be devoting the year to learning a piece that doesn't offer many of the obvious rewards most players expect when they perform music. It also got me wondering how and why the virtues of Reich's music -- propulsion, clarity, patience, audible development, complexity via the manipulation of simple materials, the gradual construction of an effective large-scale musical narrative -- do not seem to resonate with very many of my fellow jazz musicians.

Irony, man

[Okay, sorry, couldn't resist. Let me make it up to you -- here's a link to the awesome trailer. You don't get fanservice like that every day, let me tell you.]

Promoted from the comments on this thread:

In my opinion, a lot of the Broadway and Tin Pan Alley tunes that became standards were appropriated by jazz musicians the same way TBP appropriates their covers: in a kind of lovingly humorous way. For example, I find Sonny Rollins's duet version of Surrey With the Fringe on Newk's Time pretty funny, as if Sonny knows the song is corny, but still loves something about it, and is making fun of himself, in a way, for loving it. He shows us something about the tune that maybe no one else really heard, or thought to listen for. He also turns it into an amazing piece of music. I think this is what TBP does with their tunes, covers or not; these guys all have a sense of humor. A lot of people can't really hear humor in instrumental music, and/or don't want to.

MSK nails it in one. Stop and think a bit about some of the tunes that have become vehicles for jazz improvisation. I mean, "Tea For Two"? "I'm An Old Cowhand"? "If I Were A Bell"? "Someday My Prince Will Come"? "There's No Business Like Show Business"?? "My Favorite Things," fercrissakes??? (Let alone "Chim Chim Cheree"!! "Inch Worm"!!! Okay, you get the idea.)

Jazz musicians have been doing ironic covers since the very beginning.

However, viz. MSK's final sentence, I don't think it's that people can't hear humor in instrumental music. Obviously, most people have no trouble at all hearing the humor in The Bad Plus's covers, most of which "read" as at least a little bit ironic, despite the band's protestations. (I should add that I don't think irony in any way precludes sincere appreciation.) I think it's that some people have a rotten sense of humor. They are unable to perceive that music that is fun and clever and wry can still be artistically meaningful and serious in intent. They get that there's something funny about it -- but that's all they get.

All of the standards I listed above would clearly, clearly have been understood by audiences at the time as being ironic choices. But through a combination of the passage of time, the ascendence of the "Jazz Education" industry, the museumification of jazz, and and the overblown mythologizing of the "Great American Songbook," they have somehow been drained of their ironic bite and cultural significance. Most people today just hear them as melodies and chord progressions, divorced from any larger meaning.

This is impossible to do with a song like "Iron Man" or "Smells Like Teen Spirit" -- their cultural associations are still vivid and inescapable. For reasons that I think are relatively obvious, it makes a lot of jazz musicians, critics and fans very uncomfortable to think about issues of cultural significance. We are much more at ease when talking about craft -- whether the rhythm section is hooking up, or whether the improvisers are listening to each other closely enough, or whether the surface qualities of the music are "complex" and "innovative" enough to satisfy our discriminating tastes. Most of us really, really do not want to think about questions like "what does this music mean?" or "why are we doing this?" or "how does this music relate to the culture at large?" That is, unless it's in an insular, oppositional way -- i.e., "our music is capital-A Art and contemporary popular music is shit." (Now there's a stance that both Wynton Marsalis and the Vision Festival crowd can agree on!)

Most jazz musicians and fans today don't know the original source of standard tunes -- they only know them through the jazz covers, and so they all get lumped into one big undifferentiated catch-all mental category -- "standards." So today, we often don't get the irony of jazz musicians covering tunes from Oklahoma! or The Sound of Music or South Pacific, because these songs have no non-jazz associations for us. How many jazz musicians/critics/fans born after 1965 have actually watched an entire classic musical, or own any Original Broadway Cast recordings? It doesn't really matter where they are from, or even what year they appeared -- they are all just "standards" to us.

But for audiences at the time, these songs were not "standards." They were covers -- reinterpretations of recent pop songs that had specific, current cultural associations. It's not just that the songs were familiar, it's that they meant something. When audiences in 1961 heard Coltrane's "My Favorite Things," they immediately thought of The Sound of Music, the Trapp family singers, "Doh, A Deer," "Edelweiss," Broadway kitch, Austria, WWII, all the rest. The show had been playing on B'way for less than a year before Coltrane recorded his cover version. (The movie version with Julie Andrews would not be released until 1965.)

So if we are going to encourage people to "respect the jazz tradition," maybe it's worth unpacking that idea a little bit. Is it respectful to Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane to bite their covers -- to play exactly the same damn songs they covered 50 years ago, even though the cultural significance of those songs -- a big part of why they chose to cover those tunes in the first place -- has almost totally evaporated?

Also worth considering: why is it that when Trane and Sonny use irony as part of their art, we understand that there is an underlying seriousness to what they are doing, but younger musicians can't touch irony with a ten-foot pole, lest they be dismissed a joke?

Brave New World

If you've been reading this blog even semi-regularly, you know one of my persisent obsessions is "rhythmic authority," a term I stole from Ethan Iverson and have been plowing into the ground ever since. But it's an incredibly useful concept to refer to when talking about the disconnect that too often exists between even very highly skilled conservatory-trained musicians and, well... basically every other skilled musician on the planet. It's a disconnect that a lot of classical players do not perceive, partly because they have spent many years intensely focused on the development of a very sophisticated and deep emotional connection to pitch. But not only have many of them not invested the long hours of work required to develop an equally sophisticated emotional connection to rhythm, often they are not even aware that they don't have one, or that they might need one. They -- rightly -- consider themselves among the most highly-trained musicians in the world, so it can be very humbling to realize that they still have a lot to learn about something as fundamental as rhythm.

This disconnect leads to a lot of frustration when musicians from a nonclassical background try to collaborate with classical musicians, since the latter are not generally used to (and worse, do not generally respect) putting such a premium on rhythm. This is slowly changing, as the minimalist and post-minimalist works of the past 30 years are not playable by musicians who lack rhythmic authority. But, unsurprisingly, the slowest organism to adapt is the symphony orchestra.

I have to say, as a listener, I find this intensely frustrating. It's not just recent works that would benefit from being played by orchestras where everyone has solid time and can lock in together. There are lots of passages in the standard rep that would be greatly invigorated if orchestras and conductors made an investment in rhythmic authority. How great would it be to hear a rhythmically authoritative Rite? Or imagine if every orchestra played Bartók's rhythms as convincingly as the players in the Hungarian State Symphony.

But I have more or less given up attending orchestral performances, even though I love much of the repertoire -- partly because decent seats for the NY Phil are prohibitively expensive, but also because I find their lack of rhythmic authority kills the experience for me.

Some people don't believe it's even possible for a large orchestra to achieve the kind of rhythmic authority I'm talking about. Steve Reich gave up writing for orchestra in 1987 because he was convinced they were just fundamentally incapable of playing with the requisite rhythmic clarity. But it can be done -- watch:

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Uploaded by gtltornt

That's the Simón Bolívar National Youth Orchestra, who are basically ambassadors for Venezuela's El Sistema, a national music program that for 30 years has been providing free instruments and music education to kids we've taken to euphemistically calling "at risk."

Here's one story:

At just 12, Legner Lacosta was on the streets. Leaving school, his mother and stepbrothers, he started hanging out in Pinto Salinas, a notorious Caracas barrio where bullet-ridden shacks pile on top of each other in a ravine nestled beside the motorway.

By 13, Legner had a crack habit and a .38 calibre gun and a regular role as a drug-dealer and thief. "I got trapped by money," he says, "when I was high, I felt as if I were somewhere else; you clear everything out of your mind and start to invent your own world." By 15, the police caught and beat him, and he was sent to a young offenders' institute in Los Chorros, east Caracas, among 150 glue-sniffers and abandoned or abused children.

Forced to go cold turkey, Legner withdrew into himself. "I was bored and didn't want to do anything," he says. But one day, the Youth Orchestras Project turned up and he had his first meeting with a clarinet. "When the instruments arrived, the director told me there was a clarinet left. I didn't know what it was. I was fascinated when I saw it. He taught me the first four notes. I played those four notes all day."

By 17, Legner was back at the detention centre, but this time in a smart polo shirt and trendy thick-rimmed glasses, there to teach clarinet. "Music saved my life," he says. "It helped me let out a lot of the anger inside. If music had not arrived, I wouldn't be here today." He has now moved to Germany to continue his studies.

The conductor is the 26 year-old Gustavo Dudamel, himself a product of El Sistema. He made a big splash earlier in the year when he was appointed the next music director of the LA Phil, beginning in 2009. He and the Simón Bolivar NYO are currently all over the classical music blogosphere, with the general consensus being that they pwned every other orchestra at this year's Proms.

American orchestras, feeling the crunch of reduced ticket sales and an aging audience, have been wracking their brains trying to figure out how to turn things around, but many of the proposed changes are of the "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" variety. It seems to me that when you are getting your asses handed to you by a bunch of Venezuelan street kids, it's time for everyone involved to take a long hard look in the mirror. And then maybe reach for that tambor mina and start shedding.