No Balls

Recently, a friend pointed me towards an edition of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick in which the preface contained a number of critical reviews contemporary to the book’s writing. Not surprisingly the critical response was overwhelmingly negative. Naturally, my first inclination was to pooh-pooh the critics and lament their failure to recognize something great in its time. But another, more important idea struck me.

Here were critics, intelligent enough to understand the state of the art as it was and able to recognize that it was being turned on its head. More importantly, they were passionate enough about their art to be enraged by the mauling they imagined it to be suffering. Eventually, I considered the critical response to John Coltrane, which was similarly overwhelmingly negative. As a jazz musician who grew up playing from a young age and surrounded by musicians who had great admiration for Coltrane, I regarded these critics with some combination of spite and vitriol.

However, the current critical establishment has been castrated, and we all are suffering the consequences. Recently, Ben Ratliff of the New York Times mentioned that he was unlikely to write a review of a concert he truly thought was terrible. His reasoning was that he was wary of turning people off to jazz at a time when the audience is shrinking.

I cannot be sure if we are a weak-minded society and consequently spawned wimpy art criticism or if critics went soft first, leading society down a path of complacency. Racking my brains to think of one modern musician who truly made people mad, merely by performing music that challenged the established order, I came up short. A recent premiere of a bold restaging of Tosca made headlines when several people booed the director during bows. Hardly the reception that met Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring…

Unfortunately, in my opinion, people are less concerned than ever with art itself, and principally concerned with how the art reflects upon them. Most non-musicians I know who go to jazz concerts do so because it’s a cool thing to do; smoky room, some people playing instruments. Nearly all non-musicians I know who go to classical performances are similarly not invested.

Blame can be placed on musicians, the critics, laypeople, technology, etc. Perhaps the wedge thrust between popular music and serious music is at fault. But the sober reality is that as concerns art we are increasingly a society severely lacking in cojones. In the last days of record label domination, musicians have become so wrapped up in marketing voodoo that they seem to make headlines more often for wardrobe choices (or malfunction) than for music itself.

People use music to identify themselves, but they struggle to identify what in the music they actually identify with. Insulting a band can make a fan angry, but the bands themselves hardly ever make anyone angry. My goal as an artist is to someday make people care enough that when I throw a wrench into the spokes and change direction, some passionate but behind-the-times critic will unleash a torrent of the likes of those received by Melville and Coltrane.