Internet

A few years ago, during my first period of remission from Autoimmune Encephalopathy, I wrote about what I perceived as a failure by musicians and artists to recognize the importance of the internet and to adapt accordingly. The internet, I argued, fundamentally changed music distribution, and should force intelligent musicians to reconsider how music is made, how often it is made, who it is made for, and everything else in the pipeline between instrument and audience.

Several years later, many musicians, notably indie rockers have adapted somewhat, albeit unimpressively to the new landscape. Sadly, while Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber have seen the potential of YouTube, most jazz musicians remain unrealistically tied to the idea that they can censor their image and tightly control their releases, popping out polished nuggets of final product while hiding the ugly innards of the artistic process from the public.

For a long time, I have felt strongly that I've seen an alternative - a symbiosis between online content distribution and live performance - that could enable musicians, but specifically jazz musicians to reach a wider audience more effectively than ever in the era controlled by record labels. However, while spending huge chunks of the last few years more concerned with reacquiring the ability to know what day it is, and to have feeling in my hands, I've been unable to produce the sort of torrent of artistic output that is necessary to fuel the sort of content volcano I imagine.

Now, with greater stability than at any other point in the last several years, I'm facing the challenge of backing up my assertions by providing the sort of internet-centric experience that I've envisioned.

For starters, my newest work, "Hurricane Suite," composed during evacuation in the suburbs from Hurricane Irene - I've already posted a couple bootlegged clips on the website from our first public performance of the work a quintet. Tomorrow I'll be performing the same work (originally imagined as a duo for bass and saxophone) as a saxophone duet with Lucas Pino at Lasers in the Jungle. I plan to post video from this engagement as well.

Personally, growing up, I couldn't care less about the polished turds of jazz recording. Hank Mobley records never inspired me. However, investigating the work of someone like Charlie Parker or John Coltrane - collecting bootlegs and getting deep into their artistic process, hearing them work out the material day after day, that's what inspired me to become a jazz musician.

I hope to provide the sort of experience that never could exist before this technology - capturing high fidelity bootlegs of concerts and on-the-fly recordings and posting them with regularity - providing a path so that anyone mad enough to follow my narrative can easily jump on.

A profound lack of talent and ability characterizes the majority of music created today. This seems especially true of music that exists outside the mainstream. The surprising aspect of this phenomenon is that the bands taking themselves more seriously seem less likely to offer anything resembling serious musicianship.

A couple months ago, before my last relapse and subsequent progress towards recovery, I wrote an essay published here entitled Art in the Cloud. While it contained the germs of several important ideas in whose merit I strongly believe, it also suffered several major shortcomings. Some people complained of the essay's vagueness, unsure of what tangible things I was advocating. Others outright dismissed the entire essay, suggesting that it was merely a collection of pompous declarations. A few people criticized the essay, suggesting that people do not want a more 'robust' connection to artists, they just want the music. Additionally, many asked of me, why should artists be sharing more information? Simply because they can?

Very few things in this world can claim not to be represented on the internet. Probably the simplest, and crudest, gauge of web presence would be the availability of a domain. Type any permutation of the words New, York, Real, Estate, Apartments, and Buildings as a web address. It will assuredly be taken. But the level of occupancy in domains extends far beyond the economically sensible. Try “horse farts,” “big turkeys”, “apricot recipes” or “toilet plungers”. Truncate the spaces, append a “.com” and you will find a domain owned, if not occupied.

Bart:

"You make some interesting observations and points, some I agree with, some I don't. I don't want to know what Trane studied 10 hours a day. I don't think the creative process must be laid bare for all to see. I think he who wants to know should work for the information, like students centuries ago going to monasteries to seek wisdom. Another thing is that I don't want to know everything about how things are made. It's a bit like the extras on a dvd. Knowing to much about how a movie is made can distract you (me) from what that movie is about. The problem is you don't know what information is helpful, and what info isn't."

The internet is the new media. This may seem obvious, but for most it has yet to sink in. Surely, for encyclopedic content, the internet's primacy is unchallenged by even the most philistine. But for art, particularly music, the internet and its culture of information sharing have been met with stiff resistance. Among more serious artists, at best the internet has been used to moderate effect as a marketing tool. Only among kitschier musicians is the internet seriously contemplated, engaged.