Monk on the Air

I’ll be the guest on WILL (Illinois Public Radio), on the AM 580 morning show “Focus 580” with David Inge tomorrow at the 10:00 hour, chatting about my book, Thelonious Monk, and jazz history. For those of you not in the WILL listening area who want to check it out, it’s podcast here: http://www.will.uiuc.edu/am/focus/default.htm Not sure if it comes through live streaming there or just after the show airs.

Here’s a permalink:

http://willmedia.will.uiuc.edu/ramgen/archives/focus080125a.rm or
http://www.will.uiuc.edu/media/focus080125a.mp3

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Lacy in Action

Since a lot of people haven’t heard Steve Lacy, here’s a youtube video of the Steve Lacy 4 (Steve Potts on alto and Jean-Jacques Avenel on bass; I think it’s John Betsch on drums). Two things about Lacy that this really brings out nicely: first, I think his is the best sound on soprano sax in all of jazz, and second I think he plays remarkably un-cliched solos. The sax sound thing is a sax-player-geek thing, but so be it. As a player (of minimal skill), I listen to the sound of the horn as much as the content of the melodies, etc. Lacy’s sound is really distinctive and I think it’s eminently listenable.

Also a nice example of Lacy’s writing, the tune, “Prospectus,” is sweet and shows his interest in counterpoint.

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Steve Lacy

I was listening to a recording of Steve Lacy and Roswell Rudd playing “Monk’s Dream” (on their 2000 release of the same name) this afternoon, and thinking about how much I like Lacy’s approach to music and to the soprano sax in particular. But I wonder a little whether I mostly like to listen to him because he was one of the most awesome people in jazz I’ve ever met. He was a beatnik from the old school, and without question one of the coolest people I’ve ever met. Generous, kind, worldly and urbane, happy to be interviewed, though I think he must have said many of the things he said to me over and over. I remember thinking, that is what I want to be like when I grow up.

Perhaps the thing that impressed me most at the time is that his way of playing and his way of conversing were so similar. It’s hard to find a way to explain to students, without looking utterly irresponsible, but I’m pretty sure that’s why I like him so much.

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Charlie Haden, Part 3

Just found this in an interview with Charlie Haden from downbeat’s website. He and the interviewer are talking about bassists he learned from, and when they get to Wilbur Ware (who played, among others, with Monk) the interviewer says what a great soloist he was. Haden says:

You forget sometimes that you are playing music, not just playing jazz. It’s good sometimes to remind people of the musicality of the moment by going to just one note and letting them hear it.

Nice, on the power of genre.

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Wow

I love Philly, as anyone who knows me can attest; and this is one of the reasons why:

(For those who didn’t catch it at the beginning, that’s Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter.)

Thanks to Charles for bringing this to my attention.

Compare with MC Rove at the president’s press dinner last year. Also makes me wonder: what is it about “Rapper’s Delight” that makes it THE thing for non-rappers to perform (or emulate)? Is it just it’s position as an iconic first rap to be nationally prominent? Or is that there’s something about the rhythm that is easy to accomplish? Or perhaps that it’s just such fun to say “Hip hop, hippy hippy hop”?

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Music, Race, and Presidential Politics

A friend just brought Maureen Dowd’s recent column on Barak Obama to my attention, for this:

“…Obama’s vague optimism and smooth-jazz modernity came together in a spectacular fusion with the deep yearning of Democrats who have suffered through heartbreaking losses in the last two elections with uninspiring candidates.”

It makes me wonder what she is accomplishing or attempting to accomplish with this off-hand reference. Am I making too much of the “smooth-jazz” toss-off? It is impressive as short-hand for so much, but with plausible deniability. What is “smooth-jazz modernity”? The article is hard to parse–she seems dismissive of Obama, but impressed with his ability to mobilize Iowans. The reference to smooth jazz is part of what gives me that feeling: by linking him to smooth jazz she may signal to some readers a placement within the black middle class (which is, of course, quite accurate), which has been denigrated and dismissed by commentators, black and white, for years. Think LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s harsh words in Blues People. One wants to hear from Charles Carson about this, whose paper on smooth jazz at this year’s AMS promised to unpack the making of a middle class music for the black middle class in the 80s and 90s.

The other funny thing about this smooth jazz reference is that Obama seems not to want to be heard as smooth jazz. Phil Ford’s post on the candidate’s song choices at Dial M for Musicology shows Obama to have avoided smooth jazz entirely, in favor of (primarily) soul and R&B that is much less explicitly middle class-identified. It’s a pretty good list, incidentally, if predictable; and mercifully free of Bachman Turner Overdrive.

UPDATE

Another friend points out that the reference allows Dowd to suggest (without quite having to say it) that Obama is “all hope and style (without substance).” That’s about right, I’d say–totally what people who love to hate smooth jazz hear it as representing.

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Captain Beefheart Again

There was some interesting discussion of Cpt. Beefheart back in the Fall, because I was playing him in the rock seminar. At the time I think I neglected to mention that I had programmed him largely because I think Robert Christgau’s and Lester Bangs’s approaches to writing about him so nicely encapsulate the differences between their whole ways of going about doing rock criticism (probably possible to find other musicians for whom this is true, but Beefheart works so well and does give an opportunity to talk about old man Van Vliet as well…). The posts are here and here.

In any case, I got a smile from this online comic piece on Beefheart from Scary Go Round. I particularly like the question, “Have you been buying records from the rag and bone man again?” The celebration/deflation of the record collector/Beefheart fan is pretty spot on.

[Thanks to my brother, Jeremy, who writes read-in, for pointing me to this.]

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More on Charlie Haden

Not sure why I’m writing so much about jazz right now, except that I’m listening to a lot of it–though I’m not sure why that’s the case, either.

I suppose this is the sort of piece that would have made sense in 2005, but I’ve been listening to Charlie Haden’s latest Liberation Music Orchestra release, 2005’s Not in Our Name, a beautiful piece in protest against the Bush administration’s activities at home and abroad. The sense, as the title suggests, is that there are plenty of Americans who refuse, who must speak out so as not to be seen as complicit with the government’s uses and abuses of power. Since it has been so long, I won’t feel compelled (not that I ever do) to write a proper review. Rather, I would say this:

The piece, like those I wrote about in the last post, strikes me at times as somehow stretching beyond genre constrictions–Carla Bley’s approach to arranging has a great deal to do with this. The imaginative use of what is basically a big jazz combo or a small big band is an extension of the Ellington/Mingus tradition, and in that tradition, has aspirations to (and achieves at times) a kind of singularity of effect that is notable. But, aside from a version of the Barber “Adagio” (which is achingly beautiful) and refs to Dvorak, this piece is more clearly jazz-oriented than those. The use of drums to play time, if nothing else, places the music.

What seems most intriguing about this album, to me, is just how retro it is–conceptually, that is. I listen to this and think, is it possible that a jazz project (and really, I think this is a jazz project) can be a vehicle for old-school, anti-establishment protest music??? It is, though of a sort. It’s not loud or brash or harsh or rough, the common signifiers of protest in music so often. It is sweet and gentle, soft and low; it is refined and even careful–the first track, “Not in Our Name” is a waltz, for heaven’s sake. It seems like protest by people who have lived, and learned, through a great deal.

It also makes me reconsider something I was asked last winter, when I was giving a talk about Tom Waits. I was making some case about his use of melancholy and how effective it is, and a grad student in the audience asked, “what are the cultural politics of melancholy?” Now, at the time, and in subsequent months I had principally thought of melancholy as basically politically retrogressive–it is such an inwardly directed affect, and one that seems to involve giving up in a sense, turning away from action. I continue to think that it is a basically apolitical (and thus not progressive) gesture in most cases, but I am impressed that much of this album (especially the “Adagio,” placed as it is at the end) is melancholy, or at least sad. I could probably spin out a theory for why melancholy here doesn’t sound like a refusal of responsibility, but it would be too mockable, so I won’t.

Anyway, I heart Charlie Haden and Carla Bley right now.

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Herbie Hancock, Charlie Haden and Genre in the New Century

 Two items I’ve been listening to lately, Herbie Hancock’s tribute to Joni Mitchell, River: the Joni Letters and Charlie Haden’s album with Pat Metheny, Beyond the Missouri Sky, have made me think about an awful lot of my favorite music right now and the issue of genre in contemporary music.

What are they? Jazz? They both involve extended improvisation, “jazz” instrumentation (i.e., saxophones, guitars, bass, drums, piano in various combinations), interpretation of songs by creative musicians, with or without vocals, extended tonal harmony, a preponderance of “groove-based” rhythmic and metric sensibility, an apparent desire to communicate with an audience and the sense that we are listening to a communication between musicians. But each in its way also seems like pop music, and each perhaps even more seems like contemporary classical music. And it’s not just Hancock and Haden–Ornette Coleman, Julian Velard, The Bad Plus, E.S.T., Bobo Stenson, Elvis Costello to name just a few have made recordings that share some or all of these qualities.

This seems compelling to me–that this music might be good jazz and good pop and good classical music all at once, without giving up anything. This stuff isn’t “fusion” in the sense that term has been used in the past (both inasmuch as it’s not generically like the 70s and 80s-era work by post-Miles musicians and proto-smooth jazz practitioners, and inasmuch as it doesn’t really seem to be an attempt to fuse distinct things). Rather, I think it’s a synthesis, it represents musicians finding the things that are in common between multiple traditions, or perhaps playing in the cracks between them.

Jazz musicians have said, for some time now, of course, starting probably with Ellington, that what they’re doing isn’t bounded by some narrow frame; many have rejected the genre label outright. In teaching jazz history I always bring this up, but I think I’ve failed to fully grasp its importance; I bring it up but dismiss it, because, after all, it is jazz, right? Even if the term is hard to define, slippery, a thing you can only see if you don’t focus on it, if you let it exist in your peripheral vision. And it is true–there are lineages, there is a semi-closed circle of a scene existing over the course of the 20th century, making a music that has characteristics of a single genre or tradition; but the potential is always there to see it as a genre that is its negation. In a sense it seems like these musicians are moving past a host of dying traditions. Jazz is doomed, I think, if it is understood just as a set of sonic markers (ii-V progressions, bop melodic lines, swung eighths, and so on), as it is taught in colleges and universities; contemporary classical music is a language that speaks to almost no one; and frankly, pop singing is capable of so much more than industry people often allow it.

These new recordings follow that and even suggest that what might be called the tyranny of genre in the 20th century is cracking in the 21st. In an interview on NPR with Tavis Smiley, Hancock said of the Mitchell album that he is just trying to make music–it’s a little jazz and a little classical and a little pop and a little of this and that; genre has become (and maybe always was) an industry short cut to sales. It is also a tool for communication with an audience, I think, but the possibility that all the musics of the 20th century with their rigid or at least semi-rigid race and class associations, might be let go in the new century, and that musicians, black and white, old and young, rich and poor, American and from elsewhere, male and female might come together to search out new paths is genuinely inspiring.

UPDATE

Joezer Mendonca, a professor and musician at Sao Paulo State University has a nice follow-up to this post on his blog, Nota Na Pauta.  His point that similar processes of synthesis, crossover, etc. have happened in Brazil and are continuing to happen is well made.  I particularly like the point that in the Brazilian pop scene sub-generic fusions (samba-reggae, samba-cancao and so on) have been important and different from super-generic fusions (like those I’m writing about above, and like figures like Pixinguinha or Caetano Veloso).

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