Jazz

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?

Some of these points reflect a difference of opinion about what art is, can be, or should be and how it ought to be shared. Others more simply reflected my inability to write coherently at the time, my failure to clearly articulate my arguments. Hopefully now, after some time to reflect, and with greater brain capacity I will be better up to the task.

First, I would like to address my subject matter. I had intended to write solely on art, concentrating specifically on art music, as differentiated from entertainment. It was not, nor is it now within scope of the essay delve too deeply into the nature of this distinction, but it is important to establish, even if crudely, the subject matter at hand. I am fairly certain that there is no clear line that can be drawn, however it might be possible to articulate some of the qualities associated with art but not necessarily with entertainment.

My essay is concerned with art whose understanding goes deeper than simply the sensory experience of looking at it or listening to it. One can listen to a Britney Spears song, but there is not much to say about it beyond 'what it sounds like'. To the extent that there are deeper things to be said, they concern sociological phenomenon like the commodification of art as personal identity more than they concern engagement with an artistic tradition. Stravinsky's Firebird, on the other hand presents a creature whose understanding is greatly aided by knowledge of the harmonic structure, historical context, even simply by contemplating the elements of the work. I know that there is a continuum and do not cling to these distinctions dogmatically. However, it is works whose appreciation is skewed towards involving greater contemplation, knowledge, intelligence that I am addressing here.

What's the Point?

When I wrote Art in the Cloud, I had several nebulous points in mind, but failed to make any clear. Here I believe I can do better. Technology generally, but specifically the internet has reshaped our society. We are only first experiencing the consequential changes to the way information is shared, commerce is conducted, and intellectual property, if at all, is protected. I argue that these changes demand that artists change the nature of their interaction with the mass audience along several dimensions, and for several reasons. One is that the CD is nearly obsolete, and we no longer need to marry ourselves to its product cycle. Another cause for change, I believe, is that art ought to reflect the times in which it is created. As concerns these changes and the sharing of music, I believe most artists are embracing the crudest aspects of the new media, turning to Myspace to turn the sharing of music into an exercise in exhibitionist social networking, rather than taking cues from the open source movement and using the internet to share something more substantive than they ever could have without it.

First, concerning the compact disc. Just as the LP lifted constraints, allowing musicians to record longer songs, the internet too potentially changes the game, altering the dynamic between recording artist and audience. Still, few musicians have bothered to claim any degree of freedom from the product cycle of the CD. Many artists release individual tracks ahead of records on their Myspace pages. And many others post a track or two from live performances. But very few people have embraced the internet as the avenue of distribution, making it the primary focus, ahead of the album. To a large extent this is understandable; the product cycle of the CD provides a degree of structure that is useful and difficult to replace artificially. People regularly cling to vestiges of outmoded methods when they prove useful in the creative process. Writers regularly write distinct drafts even though computers allow for a continuous revision process. Still, I believe musicians collectively have yet to realize the potential to take ownership of the method of distribution. There are no longer any size, time, or logistical constraints in the distribution of music. More people can distribute more music on their own terms. Artists will have to turn their attention towards the creation of art to be distributed through the internet and not be so narrowly focused on the creating of albums and marketing them through the internet.

But in the scheme of things, this past point is minor when compared to the larger issue at hand. I was asked repeatedly, why must artists share more information, expose their process, just because the internet allows them to? I cannot honestly say that all artists must or will, but I feel confident in suggesting that many will, and that whether or not artists choose to participate in this new way of sharing information, it will necessarily be something that they will have to acknowledge. Art has always been reflective of its cultural surroundings. And when major technological shifts have altered cultures, they have always had multifaceted effects on artistic traditions, directly by altering the nature of the interaction of artist and audience, and indirectly by so radically altering the world that art must reflect these changes creatively. As concerns the internet, both these things are at play.

Above I briefly attempted to discuss one way in which the interaction between artist and audience has been altered. But there are others. By removing all logistical obstacles to the sharing of information, the internet not only makes it so that artists can share music in whatever quantities and at whatever times they want, but also allows them to share whatever text, video, and other supplementary information they want. As concerns an artist like John Coltrane, whose goal always seemed to be more to document a process than to produce a glowing nugget of perfection, the internet provides the ability to share all stages of the artistic process, all steps in thought and performance along a path. But still I haven't fully accounted for why it is that artists ought to expose the process to the audience, to their peers.

One of the internet's most notable effects across society has been the demystification of nearly everything. Our times are characterized by an unprecedented degree of transparency. Sure, an artist today can decide to ignore this, but even then, the decision in this climate to withhold transparency is a conscious rejection of what has become the norm, just as a college student must consciously decide not to join the Facebook. I do not suggest that artists should strive less for perfection, concentrating instead on the documentation of a process with no regard for where it leads. Rather, I contend that in a society characterized by open source software development and grand experiments in groupthink like Wikipedia, where embarrassing video exists of every politician in office and every teenager has immortalized some statement on a Livejournal that in years past might have ended a career, art no longer needs to maintain the illusion of perfection, of seemingly emerging from nowhere fully formed. I argue that the proper way to share art in times characterized by borderline exhibitionist transparency is to do it transparently. I have written a number of truly terrible essays on this web site, and will soon begin posting some truly terrible music as I attempt to swiftly rise towards a lofty goal while originating from a humble beginning. In the past, musicians were very careful about how they debuted, what information they shared, what the public was allowed to see. Today this runs contrary to the nature of our society.

Recently, able to think and play again in a way that has eluded me for years, I have been devoting a lot of thought to the bigger picture concerning my art. What constitutes a justification of art? Is it emotional expression? Can a justification of art be generated by an extrapolation from some simple axioms? If there is a justification of art, does it demand that art be original? I should preface this discussion with the disclaimer that this discussion concerns only an investigation of my personal notion of what constitutes a justification for art and not a judgment on whether or not any work that doesn't meet the criteria that I will set forth has redeeming value.

While thinking about these matters I spent some time trying to apply these ideas to some of the music that to me by identity achieves the ends of art. I also tried to apply these ideas to music that I feel fails convincingly as art.

First, the failures. At risk of compromising the intellectual integrity of this post I'll abstain from a direct discussion of what music it is that fails and proceed to a discussion of my conclusions. It is not sufficient to emote. Emotion, immediacy, these things are important and perhaps essential to the creation of meaningful art, but they are not sufficient. Everyone emotes. And a good deal of them emote honestly and passionately. But for me to identify a work as art, I demand more than simply the pouring of one's heart into one's craft. Something in the conveyance of the message must demand further thought than that required to initially experience the work. This is not to say that great art has to flow from a formal education; it certainly doesn't. But it cannot simply be literal. What you see is what you get can accomplish expressive but not artistic ends.

So, what explanation of art can account for this missing piece which is lacking in works which accomplish only expression but nothing more? Can there be some abstract answer for what quality art must possess? Many people have tried to put forward some such explanation. Nietzsche famously discussed the artist's interaction with tradition. Only after conquering some such tradition can an artist then assert their creation. But, even then, we must consider what makes any such tradition great. Nietzsche refers to tradition in Zarathustra, characterized as a dragon, on whose scales shine "Values, thousands of years old". He further asserts "to create new values--that even the lion [he characterizes the would-be creator as a lion] cannot do; but the creation of freedom for oneself for new creation--that is within the power of the lion. The creation of freedom for oneself and a sacred 'No' even to duty ... To assume the right to new values--that is the most terrifying assumption for a reverent spirit that would bear much."

Great art, in my estimation is that which creates new values. It is the act of creation as described by Nietzsche. Robert Johnson's music did not flow from an academic understanding of musical theory, but it also did not merely consist of emoting as many had already emoted. His music created new values. The act of creation, of an idea, and not simply an artifact - an idea manifest in an artifact or in many, this is the act of creating art.

As for justification, I argue that the creation of new values is in and of itself the justification of art. At risk of being dismissive, and I am sure that worthy counterarguments abound, I am inclined to think that any attempt to derive art's significance or raison d'etre from basic axioms will either fail or be useless except as an academic exercise. These discussions, invariably, lead to the tangle of what constitutes significance, what are our ends? Sidestepping these potholes, I think we can evaluate art more successfully by considering it only in regard to itself, and in the context of the tradition that it follows, extends, or rejects. Art is significant, justified, and vindicated as art, as a contribution to the dialogue, if only it can be shown to be significant within the art, that it asserts something that must be acknowledged, whether or not it fails aesthetically. The only way, I argue, that this can be done is through the act of a creation of something so thoughtfully and completely it cannot be ignored.

I should also here clarify that in my interpretation of Nietzsche's rejection of the tradition, this 'rejection' is not a rejection of disdain, nor one motivated by an inability to achieve the demands of the tradition. Nietzsche himself asserts "[the lion] once loved 'thou shalt'", pointing to the embrace of the tradition that must precede its rejection. Also we must carefully consider a separation of the evaluation of art as art from any other context in which it might be considered. Jazz that swings but is devoid of conceptual weight could might not be art, yet still represent an achievement of craft. On the other hand music lacking he same degree of craft might still represent a serious achievement in art.

As an example, much controversy surrounds the saxophonist Mark Turner and his significance in jazz. Many of his critics consider him to be incapable of playing with the feeling of the blues while many of his followers assert that he is the most recent great saxophonist in the lineage. I make neither assertion here, but point out that his vision, regardless of whether or not it accords with a sense of what must be 'correct' in jazz, is so specific, explored, and developed that even by his critics, it can't be ignored. His decision to express himself in the absence of dynamic contrast, without inflection, confining himself to a purity of tone and a specific sort of technique is unique, an act of creation, if only a minor one. Here I might argue that even if one considers the music to fail expressively, which I don't, it still survives as a conception that must be considered.

More apparent artists that I considered as exemplars of artists whose work is clearly justified as a creation of values are Bach, Charlie Parker, Picasso, and Dostoevsky. Bach, clearly, in his creation of much of what we call counterpoint, created a world so maddeningly and meticulously ordered that his music serves as the basis for much of what occurs to us as logical or intuitive in music. This is not to say that there is no biological basis for our perceptions of these sounds in this way. But Bach's chosen orderings are not unique. Many cultures have arrived at markedly different melodic conceptions. Charlie Parker, in his innovation of bebop clearly forces forth an idea that all jazz musicians, even those who came before him, had no choice but to acknowledge. The work of Picasso similarly followed the mastery of a tradition with its rejection, creating a new set of rules by which it operated. Dostoevsky, too shattered conceptions of the novel that preceded his work, creating modern prose, according to James Joyce.

The question then must still be raised, why is it sufficient to create new values? It is difficult to answer this question without putting forth an identity response, simply defining the creation of values as constituting justified art. One possibility would be to require that these values are not simply assertions by their creator but values that must be acknowledged, if not employed by others. Still there is something unsatisfying about this explanation. In this case there could be no art in a world consisting of only one being. Perhaps there can be no real objective justification of art in a comparative sense. But I do believe that through the act of creation, the putting forth of an idea so cogent and ordered that within its own universe its rules seem to make sense, to possess a quality of 'rightness' is as close as we can come to justifying art.

A lingering question is whether or not art, true art, not merely the execution of a craft, must be original. I argue that it must. I don't believe that originality is essential to the creation of music, but to art I believe it is. Playing bebop well could constitute great music, enjoyable music, entertaining music, but I don't believe that it can now constitute great art any more than could the production of proficient cubist paintings.

As a jazz musician, I think that the next step must involve, as in any art - and as it has at every major step in jazz's history, a rejection of tradition. Yet something seems lacking in much of today's jazz music that parts from tradition. The problem, I believe is not with the rejection of tradition but with the failure to create new values. A rejection of tradition is abundant, but the creations themselves sound like rejections, not creations. Producing endless records that have no bigger idea than "this sounds cool, we'll put it on the record" does not create new values. John Coltrane had a broader conception in mind than "maybe it would be cool if". He single-handedly developed an aesthetic, following ideas over the course of years, creating an elaborate system of thought, a new theoretical basis for improvisation. Sadly, this is lost on most of those who try to replicate his accomplishments not by pursuing an analogous quest but instead by repeating moments from his, chasing not his goal but merely the aesthetic of having a goal. This attempt to create a 'searching' sound without actually searching for anything - besides an audience - perverts the accomplishments of Coltrane, and certainly fails to capture any of his achievement.

Perhaps most current rejections fail only because most attempts to create lasting art must inevitably fail. But I think the past thirty years have seen far less progress than the preceding thirty. I think this can be attributed to two things. Firstly, a true rejection of tradition requires a thorough understanding of the tradition. Charlie Parker's rejection of swing was not born of an inability to play swing, nor was it born of a distaste for it. Instead it reflected a bold decision to depart from a set of cherished norms and create new ones. The growth of the tradition at each step might yield less people in each generation able to scale to the top and then overthrow it. Additionally business models catered to a decreasing attention span have led many to try to market themselves by a sound and not by an idea or conception.

Having presented this notion of art as creation and a critique of the abundance of failure, it would seem to fall upon me to present an alternative myself, or at least to offer a direction. As for my own endeavors, I am rapidly recovering in recent weeks, repossessing skills that have long been in atrophy, but I am still flirting with Nietzsche's proverbial dragon, not near striking distance of slaying it. As for direction, I offer only that emphasis needs to be reassigned to the act of creation and to understanding. So many jazz musicians today possess incredible skills, but too many use these skills as an athlete does, abilities are cultivated thoughtfully, but broader considerations of the direction of music, of the nature of music, and of its structure are ignored. There are obviously notable counterexamples. Jason Moran is one that comes to mind quickly. Keith Jarrett, while not entirely of the last thirty years has presented many musical ideas. I think that we ought to regard our music as J.S. Bach, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane among others did theirs. Part of this, I believe, involves reasserting the role of intellect in jazz. For all the complaints of how jazz has become overly 'brainy', very few musicians today use their brains even half as much as did Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk. I think the big problem is that the music has become too pseudo-intellectual. The appearance of intelligence, or the difficulty of performance is used unsuccessfully as a proxy for the intelligence of the concept. If musicians step back in scope, thinking not about how they sound on a particular chord change, but instead about what ideas they use to frame their entire musical conception, I believe new values remain to be created.

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."

Doug Wamble:

"Hard to get past the first paragraph, really. Your entire premise is kind of false. I think artists have been at the forefront of utilizing the internet. Where is the evidence for this "stiff resistance?""

"Besides all that, you're making these grand proclamations that aren't really based in anything specific. What is art music? What is boldness of concept? What is confrontational honesty? Do you just know it when you see it?"

Response:

First of all. Thanks for taking the time to attack my half-formed ideas. As I'm still not quite all together, I hope you'll forgive my approach of being somewhat deliberately provocative even when my arguments are not well-formed enough to support the conclusions.

Bart, concerning your idea that the extra information detracts from the whole, that's a very good argument and I have no great answer for it. In fact, I don't think that I want all art to become open in the way I'm suggesting. I think what I'm putting forth is more of a crude first stab at one particular view that I think will become more prominent as a consequence of the way technology is affecting the experience both of art and of life in general.

Secondly, Doug. I don't think that artists have been at the forefront of using the internet. I think if anyone, software developers, computer scientists are way ahead, granted they have an unfair advantage. The things happening in the open source movement are pretty remarkable. That said, I think you guys here (www.mydamnforum.net) are probably among the best examples of artists really taking advantage of technology. Perhaps not as portals for the public to access your individual art, but in the sense of information sharing.

Concerning confrontational honesty, boldness of concept, you are right, I have been horribly vague. These ideas need to be fleshed out. I should point out that they do not come from music. Rather, they come from what I perceive as general characteristics of communication through the internet.

People seem to be captivated by the quality of being exposed. Look at some of the blogs that have commanded millions of hits solely on the basis of the bareness with which people lay out their lives. I think this is one of the defining characteristics of our times and that it will necessarily in some ways become manifest in art. The way in which I envision the manifestation is the loss of the pretension that art springs forth fully formed, the separation of artifact from process. I see people accepting humanness even in higher art in a way that is, in my opinion, new.

Thanks to Bart and Doug Wamble for their thoughts and challenges.

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.

I should clarify that I am referring in this essay to the mechanisms of distributing and communicating about art, not the intrinsic properties of the art itself. I do not suggest that the future consists of technologically driven concept art produced through artists' dynamic interactions with an audience in cyberspace. I do, however, assert that the internet is the new media. It is not simply a marketing tool; it is the product.

The Business Model is Dead

I will not attempt to hazard a guess at the exact ratio of mp3s that are obtained illegally as compared to those uploaded from CDs or purchased legally on the internet. But I do not feel squeamish about assuming that it is a lot to a little. Still, despite the overwhelming proportion of distribution occurring on the internet, the majority of revenue is still captured in the conventional ways. Record sales. The music industry finds itself in the same position as AOL found itself at the end of the twentieth century. Rather than capture the traffic by distributing the music themselves, artists cede influence over their audience to peer-to-peer file sharing services. It is holding on to dying product, preferring to die slowly rather than quickly. In this essay, I will not address the future business model for music; I believe that the business model and the direction of art, while related, are determined by different sets of factors. Here I will focus on what the growing convergence of technology and art means for art, specifically music, irrespective of the business model.

For a long time, technology facilitated the dominance of music as commodity. Specialization of labor, mass media in the form of television and radio supported the model. Find a niche product for a niche market. Put it in a clearly labeled box. Sell it through the appropriate channels. The pressure on artists has been to define themselves as narrowly as possible. What television and radio did to make us stupider, however, the internet is beginning to reverse, allowing us at least the option of choosing a more intelligent course. With access to billions of sources of content, rather than a few tailored to the lowest common dominator, the discriminating audience, however small, can find the deeper good. Additionally, from the artists' perspective, the internet provides an unprecedented opportunity for growth through more robust communication.

Sure, one can point to the videos of pandas making hand-farts while playing the flute that dominate Youtube as an indicator of the 'internet culture.' But these are distractions. The existence of inanity on the web has no bearing on its potential as a medium for art. Plenty of people wrote stupid things down on paper in the past. This would never be taken seriously as a condemnation of books. The internet has brought the world information sharing, both in and out of academia, in a way that has never been seen before. It spawned the open source movement: collectives of software developers collaborating with no profit motive to accomplish some of the greatest feats in software engineering. Think of the Linux operating system, which is dominant in the cloud, powering the majority of most people's computing experience, whether they realize it or not.

Myspace is not the Answer

Musicians suffer from a variation on Stockholm Syndrome. They've been liberated. The record companies are dead. And while the internet has yet to produce a great business model to replace them, the channels of distribution, the capacity to share knowledge, method, process, and product are all there. What is our response?

“Well, it's comfortable in the box.”
“We've learned how to market ourselves, this is how it's done.”

In the presence of a technology that allows us to share everything, the entire creative process, where do we go? MySpace. We express who we are as artists through a short, self-congratulatory bio, a list of influences, and who our “Top Friends” are. Some are so enthralled with MySpace that they forego the luxury of an independent website.

Other musicians flock to the Dynamod web portal. Here the information from a MySpace page is thrown into a Flash application. In a world driven by text and search, musicians post unsearchable content. This is not only a failure to realize the internet's power in exposing the artistic process, it is also bad marketing.

Open Source Art

What is the alternative? Now I stumble onto more nuanced ground. Some people are instrumentalists and that is all they want to be. They make records, polish them, sell them. They do not like to talk about what they do, share the process by which they do it, or explore where it is that they are heading. From the internet they seek only a means to advertise where they play, what they are selling and a way to let prospective employers know how to contact them. In these cases, MySpace is fine, forget everything I said.

Select others have sufficient fame that they share more than records and dates even if not through their own channels. Interviews are published on journalistic web sites. For them the need to embrace the new order is not as urgent, but still beneficial.

For the rest of us, the internet presents the opportunity to be artists in the way that we, as musicians, have always understood it, not the way record labels and the business model have shaped us. Coltrane's music, Bird's music, Miles's music, were always about the process. The artifact was secondary. It was a glimpse, a snapshot. To Columbia records, Kind of Blue was Miles' crowning achievement, Bitches Brew another milestone. To Impulse, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme was his defining achievement, Crescent another burst of creativity. To those of us who know better, these were gems along a bigger path. We love the records, but we care about the path. Who, in possession of a bootlegged Bird record prizes it less than its official counterpart? We cherish the raw. The development of the idea. The snapshots along the way are great, but the path captivates us.

Our moment has arrived. The internet is the new media. Radio was great for selling records. Television was great for selling records. The internet is great for sharing everything. The process can now be exposed. Imagine having access to John Coltrane's mind when he was practicing ten hours per day. Imagine knowing exactly what he was practicing, what he was reaching for.

For some, this proposition might seem scary. Not having to explain what it is that we do makes it easy not to have anything to explain. How can one pass off mindless harmonic super-impositions in the absence of a deeper concept as intellectual art if expected to explain what it is that they are doing.

Still, any resistance to the new media is futile. The old media is disappearing. The live concert is not going anywhere, but the mass audience is in the cloud. The CD is done. It will probably not be sufficient in this world to share nothing besides a business card with several attached mp3s. An artist must also be a thinker, a writer.

Great art is always of its time. Bach, Dostoevsky, Picasso, Miles. I believe that in this time, the creative process must be laid bare. How else can we reflect the times in which we live? Jazz, without the trite attempts to commercialize, has been perfectly suited to benefit from this paradigm shift for at least sixty years. Instead, the territory is ceded to Indie rock musicians who have managed to be more savvy and demonstrate themselves more literate in spite of the intellectualism associated with jazz. Art music will become the dominion of ideas again. The highest art in this age will be characterized not by the illusion of perfection or the air of intellectualism but by boldness of concept and an almost confrontational honesty.

Many things inspire uneasiness, hesitation. Often these are things no one ought to do. My fear of crossing the street in Boston is a well-founded pillar of self-preservation. My reluctance to show up late to a gig is well placed. But there is another category of thoughts that provoke a similar but distinct emotion. In these cases, the aversion occurs despite a deeper gut feeling compelling the action in question. Kissing a girl for the first time. Auditioning for a competitive ensemble or conservatory. Here it is a fear of failure or rejection, not self-preservation, that inspires the hesitance. Generally, in these cases, the greater the aversion, the more there is to be gained by the act.

As a jazz musician, I've encountered many such moments of queasiness. Dealing with the language of Charlie Parker has always been tortuous in this sense. His music offers so much invention, melody and harmony, but also an insurmountable feeling of inadequacy. Similarly, there have been many times when I felt an initial disinclination to sit in at a jam session solely on account of how talented and accomplished the other members of the band were. Clearly, in these cases, the fear serves as an indicator of value to be gained by opposing it.

My grandfather, Issachar Miron, a composer of klezmer and Jewish liturgical music, has continually insisted that I compose music to lyrics. Every time I visit him, he demands that I write lyrics. The thought is terrifying. Presenting myself naked, without the cover of intellectualism or virtuosity, subject to embarrassment. He is clearly right. This is not the same survival instinct that keeps me from eating sushi at the supermarket. My visceral reaction to his proposition is the surest evidence its rightness.

My first record contained competent compositions. I tried to get at something structurally beyond the repetition of one section of music (whether it be 32 bars of 4/4 or 43 bars of complex meter). I employed a few two-decade-old techniques. Cue-based forms, deriving coherence from melodic cues which signal new sections. Songs featuring sections for improvisation that are related to but distinct from those over which the melodies are played. Both techniques were used frequently, and more effectively, by Wynton Marsalis on records like Think of One and Black Codes from the Underground. While these remain ideas that I am open to, my new material breaks in concept.

I cannot as easily identify or describe the specific methods by which I currently seek reprieve from the monotony of the standard jazz paradigm. The approach is more nuanced than last time. One idea that preoccupies me is the use of fragments. Both in writing and composing I have become fixated on the possibility of ripping an idea from its functional surroundings, putting it on display with no syntax or grammar to dress it. Treating it as an object situated like an item of furniture. The songs I write now employ many such fragments, forming contrasting sections, connected in concept but not necessarily in time.

On another front, the motivic development of music through the recycling of melodic material is an idea I find underemployed in jazz. In the improvisations of Sonny Rollins, such motivic development is abundant. But in composition it is rare. Partly this is due to the shortness in scope of most jazz compositions. When constructing a melody and harmonic rhythm to fill a 32 bar form, there is only so much one can explore the development of a motif. The compositions for the next record are longer in scope, more through-composed and make use of recurring, evolving motifs.

Another idea that I am exploring is the juxtaposition of fast-moving functional harmony with warmer, fuller chords, all within the same section. The presence of this functional harmony has presented a challenge in adapting the music from the piano, where it is composed, to a band. First of all, the dense contrapuntal passages involving fast-moving chords do not lend themselves to a typical “tune plays itself” arrangement. A piano interpreting chord symbols at the clip of one chord per beat is unacceptable. This has led me to explore ways to compose a third voice for the piano, allowing for a greater degree of contrast when the “self-playing” sections are introduced. Also, the presence of these dense, rigidly functional passages requires a pureness of sound in the horn, in this case the soprano saxophone. My technique, half-formed as it stands today, is insufficient to capture the sonority and cleanness demanded by the music I am writing. I will work to increase my technique, further classical study is necessary.

Keeping this public record of my thoughts and experiences has forced me to consider the issue of anonymity. Originally, instinctively, I posted anonymously. The more prudent route. Eventually, two things inclined me to reconsider this choice. First of all, several discussions with friends lead me to wonder whether anonymity or exposure presents a greater obstacle to honesty. Also, as my ability to play the saxophone and compose music resurfaces, I have thought about the role that these writings, thoughts, experiences have in my art.

Honesty

Issues concerning anonymity and honesty occur to me along along two dimensions. The first is the conflict of interest. Situations in which one's public association with writing could affect what is written. The second is accountability. By having to put one's name on an argument, a writer must carefully consider what is written. Perhaps this extra validation serves a purpose besides to create conflicts of interest, forcing the writer to refine an argument, making sure that he/she will be able to defend it.

Faceless writing removes many conflicts of interest. Firstly, it affords a writer the ability to put aside his reputation. Without fear of exposure, a writer needs not fear the specter of association with any particular thought or view. Everything is on the table.

Equally important, in more personal writing, anonymity removes the incentive to lie for vanity's sake, underplaying shortcomings, overplaying achievements. The writer can lay bare his life, knowing that he/she isn't going to gain or suffer in life for having depicted himself/herself in any particular way.

On the other hand, an exposed writer can benefit from the added scrutiny that accompanies taking credit for one's work. Having his/her identity tied to his/her writing could actually serve to keep a writer honest. In the absence of any consequences for flawed arguments, to what standard is a writer held? Exposure and the accountability it entails could force a writer to refine arguments, trim the fat off of unnecessarily heavy-handed or offensive offerings.

This raises the issue of omission. There are times when exposure and the prudence it requires push a writer to withhold an argument, point, or even an entire paper. Three questions need to be asked. How damaging are these omissions? Are the sorts of things that would be omitted better left unsaid? If these omissions compromise the work, is the effect damaging enough to override the benefits of exposure?

I think the answers to these questions are highly dependent on context. A writer in a country with a stifling lack of freedom might find it impossible to write in the open without sacrificing everything he/she has to say. In other situations, it is conceivable that one might unnecessarily aggressively attack an idea or person when not filtered by some degree of judgement. As concerns my writing about art, for example, I think the things I could say that might compromise me are probably better left unsaid, not necessary to assert my ideas.

Art

On a more personal note, as concerns my own identity, I face a consideration external to my writing. As a saxophonist and composer, I necessarily lay bare who I am to some degree. As an artist, I believe strongly in the openness of the artistic process. Especially in jazz where process triumphs over artifact, I believe that the process and all that inform it are relevant to the experience of the art. To that end, my writings, both on and off the topic of art, inform my art. Even if hiding my writings were to present no obstacle to their honesty, would it compromise the honesty of my art?

After much consideration, and with even greater ambivalence, I have decided to incorporate the former home of my writings, spinachcrazyhotel.com, into my artist site under a Writing section.

Think of the smartest dog you know. Let’s call him/her Einstein. Now the dumbest. This one we’ll name George. Perhaps Einstein knows how to do more than a hundred tricks. He can smell the difference between a treat and a something he ought not to eat. Perhaps he can figure out the difference between ’sit, then roll over’ and ‘roll over, then sit.’ But that’s probably pushing it. George, on the other hand, isn’t so gifted. He’ll drink water laced with pine sol and will only respond to one command before forgetting that he should be paying attention, at which point he goes running after his tail.

Einstein is a whole lot smarter than George, right? That’s a matter of perspective. Inside the dog community, I’m sure they’d agree with that assessment. But in a room full of humans, dogs, beetles and whatever else Noah managed to save, Einstein and George might not look so different from one another. If you lined the animals up by intelligence, dumbest on the right, smartest on the left, Einstein would probably find himself standing right next to George, to the right of all the pigs, monkeys and men but left of all the beetles skunks and hamsters.

As the smartest animals on the planet (if you’re really confident that we outclass seafaring mammals), we often overplay the differences between human intelligences. It’s easy to make that mistake. We have no neighbor to the left. I think this mistake is most evident in the deification of individuals of ‘genius.’ Bach, Newton, Mozart, Dostoevsky, Charlie Parker, Einstein all engender an aura of perfection and immortality.

As concerns the sciences, this reverence is usually harmless. Reverence for Newton might have delayed many scientists from casting aside the notion of absolute time in favor of Einstein’s relativity, but the concession was going to be made whether people felt queasy about it or not. The presence of incontrovertible truths that tower above the scientists who discover them keep any hero-worship in check.

However, as concerns art, deification has a tendency to get out of control. The glorification of the individual leads some to an unconditional acceptance of the life’s works of their chosen heroes. This has the danger of promoting an unthinking complacency that stymies creativity. Of course one should study the works of the masters. And some degree of emulation is healthy. But does someone need to play every note of every Charlie Parker solo and commit it to memory in order to become a great jazz musician? Should the chief virtue of an artist be the ability to perfectly produce a work that seems like it might have been drawn by Picasso?

The question we need to ask ourselves is why we’re studying the masters. Is it because we want to know what they figured out on their quest so that it might aid us on our own? Or is it that we elevate the masters in a religious way, treating their accomplishments as the end itself. This, I contend would be the same as substituting the work of great physicists for the field of physics. Imagine academies full of scientists who did nothing but study the life’s works of their predecessors, seeking to understand every idea and theory each master wrote, however mistaken the majority of them may be. More importantly, imagine that they thought the entire field of physics, all that was worth knowing, was contained in the work of those giants who came before them.

In art, the argument made by the staunchest traditionalists is that one needs not be original to be good. I think this statement contains some truth. Nothing that I’ve ever found worth studying sprang from a vacuum. And I’d sooner pay attention to art that is rooted in a tradition but unoriginal than art that is original for no other reason than its lack of influences. That said, the study of masters should be a means to an end. It’s important that we step back and realize that even the most accomplished geniuses in any field are analogous to really fantastically smart dogs. If we seek communion with something greater than individual humanity – some kind of truth that transcends our individual existence, we should set our sights on something greater than the people who’ve done it well in the past. We should be chasing what they were chasing, not chasing them.

A lot of artists suggest that “we are nothing but the sum of our influences.” That might be true if we include as “influences” all the sensory input, both artistic and not, that a human encounters of his lifetime. But in the sense that they mean it, this can’t be true. I suggest the more modest alternative, “we are nothing if we are devoid of influences.” As concerns accomplished art – forgive this metaphor – I have to believe that we are linearly independent. There’s more to art than a well-chosen cocktail of influences, mixed in a sufficiently talented vessel.

What ails jazz? Where is the audience? There are a handful of popular answers to these questions, both in the press and in the community of jazz musicians. Jazz lost its audience when it stopped being dance music; the music is too complex to appeal to more than a niche market of intellectuals; the music needs to embrace the sensibilities of its twenty-first century audience. One problem plagues all three explanations: they’re wrong. The music was relevant for years after ceasing to be dance music; when I look around jazz clubs, it’s not intellectuals I see; most ‘young lions’ (forgive me) of twenty-first century jazz, albeit awkwardly, have bent over backwards to try to adapt to their audience’s sensibilities. Lacking any clear purpose, too much of the jazz I hear is neither danceable, intellectual nor in touch, occupying a no man’s land cohabitated only by other jazz musicians.

There are myriad creative ways in which jazz musicians manage to take themselves too seriously. Some logical groupings of the offenders are ‘Jazz Athletes’, which consist of both ‘Jazz Contortionists’ and ‘Muscle Jazz’, and ‘Wankster Intellectuals’ which consist of ‘Jazz Mathematicians’ and ‘Makers of Stupid Rules’. While these four groups are not distinct - there is a little Jazz Athlete and Wankster Mathematician in each of us - what they have in common is shortsightedness, a failure to see the bigger picture. Devoid of an existence apart from the literal, most jazz lacks humor, irony, story and, more generally, a raison d’être.

Jazz Athletes

Assuredly, even in a perfect world, some aspect of playing jazz, as with any other physical activity, will be athletic in nature. Sound and technique constitute the means by which any loftier artistic ends can be accomplished. The problem that I perceive in a lot of what I hear is a conflation of means with ends. The point of the music becomes indistinguishable from the point of going to the gym or playing basketball: to become stronger, faster, better. The experience of listening to this music is reduced to hearing how good someone is. While this is enough to get me to watch a basketball game. I find this, personally, to be a resoundingly unsatisfying reason to listen to music. Sure, as a musician myself, I care about what people can do with their instruments. But I don’t care enough to listen to someone repeatedly solely because their sound is big, their beat wide, and their technique facile.

There is a division worth noting within Jazz Athletes. One way of playing, sometimes referred to as ‘Muscle Jazz’ claims followers who’s music sounds like a feat of strength. In the trade-off between sound and dexterity, they choose sound religiously. Thick reeds, open mouthpieces, high action, and loud drums characterize these players. On the other side are ‘Jazz Contortionists’, a stupid name I’ve made up t describe musicians who choose the other fork in the road. They tend to be consumed more with virtuosity than sound, allowing themselves to play on easier setups to achieve greater feats of jazz gymnastics. Flurries through the saxophone’s altissimo range, bass solos that sound like horn solos, and staggeringly intricate guitar runs tend to characterize these players. Again, there’s nothing wrong with having a huge sound or being incredibly dextrous. However, the fascination with method to the exclusion of motive in most of today’s music is destructive, forcing jazz into a meaningless insulated existence.

Wankster Intellectuals

While most other forms of art tend to be engrossed in a constant evolving discussion about what art is, can be and, should be, jazz often seems left out of the conversation. For a long time this wasn’t a problem. The music was young, and it came from a particular place. Jazz of the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties grew in a fairly linear way from the blues. It was clearly and distinctly an African American art form. Today there exists a raging debate within the jazz community. Traditionalists insist that jazz, by definition, must be a direct outgrowth of the blues, and must be played with a sensibility that reflects the values that defined the music at its inception, bled and swing. Others, while not necessarily dismissing the tradition, take a far less Hegelian view, considering jazz to be more the expression of an individual, not the act of advancing or participating in a greater-than-human tradition. Whether this approach is truly jazz or not is a silly matter of semantics and doesn’t warrant a discussion. If nothing else, it should suffice to observe that these two groups are part of the same continuum, The point I’m making is that while some people have sought to codify the qualities that defined jazz in its formation, many others have sought elsewhere for an intellectual foundation for their music,

While for some this search produces wonderful results, Jason Moran comes to mind, others follow one of a couple predicable paradigms, leading their music down the path of becoming bad philosophy, John Cage comes to mind. In jazz today, a lot of these ‘intellectual’ experiments are so profoundly unintelligent that I almost envy the place contemporary classical music finds itself in.

‘Jazz Math’ is one of the most egregious offenders. This is not a condemnation of musical theory, nor is it a condemnation of any attempt to use math to solve musical problems. Bach, Coltrane, and about a million other people have done so in brilliant ways. The mathematical relationships found in harmony are unavoidable, and on some level probably are truly correlated with the reasons why music sound the way it does. What repulses me is when trite pseudo-math is applied mindlessly to music, with no regard for what it actually sounds like. Basing a melody on the fibonacci sequence, or any other pattern found in an eighth grade math curriculum doesn’t assure the melody musical significance. It might lead to a new idea. But the results should ultimately be judged by musical standards – because they definitely aren’t impressing any mathematicians.

Equally bad are the musicians who create ’systems’ of playing. These ‘Makers of Stupid Rules’ construct rules for playing based on strict association with particular scales and harmonies. Some such popular systems involve the use of triads imposed on chords based on type. These systems are then played and people are expected to listen to them and care about what they are hearing. Imagine a book constructed in this fashion. The author cycles though a series of sections, filling each section with words selected from a particular list depending on what section is being filled. Then imagine this author expecting people to read his book.

Notable Exceptions

The portraits of bad jazz musicians depicted here are archetypes and I don’t think most jazz musicians fall squarely into any of the categories. However I believe that they represent real maladies that explain a large part of the increasing marginalization of jazz. Nevertheless there are many exceptions to my characterizations.

Jason Moran is one of the few musicians I’ve encountered with demonstrated capacity to construct songs that function as thought experiments without losing their immediacy. His intellectualism is neither trite nor simple, and his music is compelling. Wynton Marsalis, among the most fundamentalist jazz traditionalists, defies the mold as well. His sound is huge and his technique is dexterous but his music has a purpose beyond showcasing either. His music contains humor, and his compositions have a narrative quality, whatever one thinks of his musical philosophy. Keith Jarrett, a true genius of improvised music, in my opinion, transcends the technical and theoretical details of his medium to make art as well as just about anybody ever has.

Conclusion

If jazz isn’t just about sound, technique, harmonic complexity, or following rules, what is it about? Like all art, I think jazz ought to express something beyond its immediate qualities. ANYTHING AT ALL!!! I don’t worry much about what exactly art ought to express. That’s not for me or anyone else to say.

So many musicians are afraid of writing or playing something corny that they spend careers writing music devoid of consonance. For others, the idea, it seems, is to write music so difficult that the goal in its performance is like that of gymnastics, to stick it. There is a cultural of literal jazz, devoid of the sort of metaphorical meaning that generally attracts us to art. When Ahmad Jamal plays something ‘corny’, he is no more ‘corny’ than Dostoevsky is a buffoon because he wrote buffoonish dialogue to be recited by Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov.

More jazz used to possess a narrative quality, unafraid to incorporate something unhip to create interest in the plot. Imagine a book in which the author only wrote ‘really hip’ sentences. The result would be a terrible book filled with a lot of cool-sounding bullshit. Concerning the direction of jazz, the tradition we should most fear losing is not the tradition of big sounds or heavy swing. Those would be terrible losses, but far worse would be the capacity for abstract thought that jazz once exemplified and now seems to eschew.

One year ago I was 21 years old, on the verge of turning 22. I had just graduated from an Ivy League university and was about ready to delve back into the music career I had long pushed aside.

I was always an obsessive personality. Generally, I threw myself into things with a manic sense of urgency and was able to compensate with natural ability and force of will for whatever obstacles I had created for myself

In school, balancing gigs with schoolwork, friends, random side projects, girlfriends, I could always summon some extra burst of energy to recover from any hole I dug myself into. I was the sort of student that would enroll for a class without completing any of the prerequisite coursework, would go see a concert the night before a test I hadn’t studied for, but would then pull an all-niter and set the curve.

As I rounded through the my senior year en route to graduation, I lost the ability to focus in class, get better at the saxophone or stay up all night studying. It didn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out my problem: I had a raging case of senioritis (inflamation of the senior). I had plenty of justification to be distracted. For one, I was in love. Some degree of my neglect for all things I formerly considered holy must be attributed the relationship I was engrossed in. Additionally, I was graduating. It's normal to spaz out to some degree. So I spazzed. When I really had to pull it together I still could.

The summer of 2007 came. I hopped a plane to Israel, so did my girlfriend. I intended to get away, focus on music again, get some serious practicing in. I had some extremely intense emotional experiences, but the focus never came. Weirder yet, I had some difficult with things that had always come very easily. I couldn’t focus when practicing to save my life. As a high schooler I could have practiced while the building I was in burned to the ground. But suddenly I would get lost counting the sixteen beats I intended to hold long-tones during sound exercises. Clearly I was out of practice, or lazy, or … maybe just not meant to play music after all.

I came back from Israel in July. Some time whiled away. I’m not sure where it went. I intended to practice, attend jam sessions, same as I had my whole life. Instead I slept fourteen hours a day. I also watched some Star Trek. Eventually I stopped watching Star Trek, I couldn’t maintain focus throughout an entire episode. I got a Blackberry. I played “BrickAttack” a lot. I wasn’t proud of it. I had always been obsessive, but never addictive. Neither drugs nor video games ever had that sort of hold on me. Only once, driven by escapism resulting from the worst summer internship in the history of the world, I succumbed to the soul-leeching allures of cell phone Tetris, sacrificing entire train rides, lunch breaks and even trips to the toilet to its irresistibly captivating repetition.

Then I got a call to play a gig on a cruise ship. That’s a whole story in itself. After realizing that Norwegian Cruise Lines had little to offer me besides first-hand knowledge of life as a third-class citizen, I jumped ship in Ketchikan Alaska, caught a flight to Anchorage and then to New York, and tried once again to get my life together.

I still couldn’t practice. The problem, I decided this time, was my parent’s house. I needed to get out. There’s no way I could focus while suffocated by the expectations and demands of my well-meaning parents. So I got an apartment.

Rent was hard to make, but between a few gigs and a steady engagement tutoring Math, it was almost doable. I lived in a modest apartment and the rent was moderate (by Manhattan standards). I wanted to go to grad school. That would make me get my life in order. The process of applying would make me get it together now. Once I had gotten in to school, I would have school to solve my problems for me in the coming years.

The application deadlines approached. Juilliard, Manhattan School of Music, New England Conservatory. I read the audition requirements and began to prepare. A month went by, I didn’t really practice anything. I hadn’t been to a jam session in many months. But I went into the studio with some friends and recorded my audition tape. I sounded terrible. Out of tune. No technique. I didn’t even really care anymore either.

I sent off the tapes, and didn’t touch the saxophone again. Maybe music wasn’t the path. And why the hell should I force myself to be a musician? The only reason to suffer as a musician is because one has no choice, because some inner voice will haunt you eternally if you forsake music. But suddenly I had a choice.

So fuck jazz. A shitty way to make a living. I still had a brain. An easier life would appear the moment I asked for it. I had a degree in Mathematics and Economics. In spite of myself, I was devastatingly employable. I still had confidence in my ability to acquire skills, even as I was losing them faster that I could gain them.

I always loved computer science. I hadn’t really given it the time of day since a bold foray into the field during my junior year in college. Still, I had always gotten As, professors inquired into my future plans in the field, and peers of mine from those classes were now working at companies like Microsoft and Google. Surely I could get some job as a computer programmer somewhere. I taught myself a few popular languages for programming for the web and within a week of posting my resume, found myself employed
developing back-end features for the website of a prominent New York City newspaper.

It was January. I finished my first week at work and went out to dine with my new colleagues. Everyone was really nice. We went out to Brooklyn for sandwiches the Friday after my first week was completed. Something was wrong. Really wrong. It was my mind. I couldn’t follow the conversation I was having. After 22 years of packing hidden meaning and spoonfuls of sarcasm into every exchange I had, I was unable keep up with a simple conversation with my project manager about the sort of run of the mill stuff you share over beers and a turkey club.

Maybe a few beers would make it go away. I had a few beers. I felt a little better.

A few weeks went by. I went with my mother to Carnegie Hall. She told me of plans she had on Tuesday and Thursday. I didn’t know what Tuesday and Thursday meant. I could have told you that they were days of the week. But I couldn’t visualize where Tuesday came in proximity to Thursday. I could recite a definition, but it lacked meaning. All the imagery associated with language vanished. I could remember sentences, but I couldn’t paint the picture in my head, even with all the pieces laid out before me.

I still had a little lucidity left. If I dedicated that which remained to finding out what was wrong with me, maybe I’d still make it through this intact. Reading became arduous, work near impossible, but I slogged through pages upon pages of internet medical content, hoping to find some clue to explain the decline of my cognition.

I don’t remember enough from the time between late February and July. My memory of the time is two-dimensional, a collection of images, dates, facts. Sometime in February a strong sensation of pressure behind my right eye became a regular part of my life. In March I went on a work trip to Boston. While on the trip I hit rock bottom. I was incapable of following a basketball game on the television. The pressure expanded, occupying much of the right side of my head and occasionally punching through to my forehead, about an inch above my nose. When I got back to New York, my life devolved into a series of Doctor’s visits punctuated by feeble attempts to keep working despite my veiled affliction.

My girlfriend didn’t understand why I stopped talking to her. My friends didn’t know why I never picked up my phone.

With the few wits I had left I planned a catch-all strategy to salvage what was left of my life. I developed a diet/treatment plan to cure me of any disease, real or fictitious, that could be responsible. I had antibodies to gluten: wheat barley and rye were out. Dairy supposedly causes some mild brain fog in some people: away with it. According to a slew of obviously disreputable web sites, illnesses like mine could be caused by strange fungi that could be killed by depriving the body of sugar. I was desperate. Away with sugar. If real medicine had no answers, perhaps voodoo did.

April came and I could no longer drive. I tried, but I probably shouldn’t have. I found myself at the Vitamin Shoppe one day unable to figure out how to ask the employee behind the counter where the vitamins I wanted were kept. Following the plot of an episode of Law and Order was beyond my capacity.

Finally, in May, five months after losing any semblance of a normal life, one doctor found an answer. Treatment was drastic and started right away. Where the world had seemed in fast-forward, lurching ahead of my ability to comprehend, it began to slow down.

More to come.