Music

Teaser track from EP that I will release when the skies clear.

World, meet Ojama.

http://www.facebook.com/zacharychaselipton?sk=app_2436915755

Band on the recording:
Sullivan Fortner - Piano
Dylan Shamat - Bass
Kassa Overall - Drums

Recorded: August 2010

Oh yeah: and "Like" us on facebook so club owners will mistakenly think us popular.

I love music. I have loved music for as long as I have played it, and even before then. As a child learning to fundamentals of the saxophone and encountering jazz, this love manifested as a single-minded devotion. Music was not simply a passion, a fascination, and an avenue to self-expression. My love for music was religious; music was sacred. If someone quoted John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” over a corny funk tune, it was not simply heavy-handed and distasteful; it was sacrilegious. Music was not just an art; it was a spiritual experience, and it demanded not only serious study, but reverence.

As a high schooler, I subscribed earnestly to this notion of jazz musician as hero. John Coltrane was this master samurai who honed his talent to honorably push forward the musical zeitgeist into a new realm of consciousness. He was a messiah who would bring about change on earth through the comprehension of his improvisations, the study of his harmonic theories, the inspiration of his dedication. Jazz music was serious business, and had to be treated as such. The Bad Plus, at the time a newly formed jazz trio with a penchant for interpreting pop anthems, was heretical. They dishonored jazz - I thought then.

It's midnight. I sit in the beautiful lobby of Hotel St. Nicolas in the heart of La Rochelle. Next to me is a new friend, D'Arcy, a warmhearted and sharp-witted Canadian expatriate, who I met between sets at a May 6th concert. This trip has been a story of chance encounters, new friends. It has been characterized by adventures both exhilarating and exhausting but also by the warmth and tranquility of home-cooked meals.

I normally find it easy to write about recent experiences, but I find myself struggling to process the last two weeks, and to contextualize it in the wild adventure that has consumed the last three years of my life.

Self-promotion is the part of professional music I'm least comfortable with. It's always been an awkward process for me. The most offensive component has always been the bio. Musicians, artists, and everyone else trying to compete for the limited leisure-time attention of America's distractible public all find themselves, willingly or reluctantly, having to write self-congratulatory bios lauding their own prodigious talent, notable associations and historic achievements. To make it palatable, the standard form is for bios to be written in the third person. Here, I will try to account for who I am in a way for which I'm not ashamed to take credit.

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.

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?

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.