When music matters most

I finally had a chance to see Heavy Metal in Baghdad (2008) last week.

In spite of my reputation as a composer whose tastes run to the comic, I have always been fascinated (and driven) by the role music plays in contexts of exigency, crisis, or suffering -- whether we're talking about African-American spirituals and work songs, or an ensemble playing "Nearer My God to Thee" on a sinking ship, or the Quartet for the End of Time, which (in Alex Ross's telling) seemed to offer momentary respite from (and thus resistance to) a pinnacle of twentieth century barbarism:

The premiere of the Quartet took place on January 15, 1941 [at prisoner-of-war camp Stalag VIII A]. Several hundred prisoners of many nations crowded into the camp's makeshift theater, with the German officers sitting up front. The work bewildered much of the audience, but a respectful silence prevailed. [...] Like Britten in The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, Messiaen responded to the mechanized insanity of the Second World War by offering up the purest, simplest sounds he could find.

The music of Acrassicauda (the subject of HMiB, and Iraq's only metal band) is anything but "pure" or "simple" -- instead, it sounds like an angst-soaked, rapid-fire reflection of the war-torn landscape of Iraq. And why shouldn't it? After all, as bass player Firas puts it, in Iraq, "headbanging itself could take you to jail forever." And, later:

Dude, I mean, I'm in a big risk right now, wearing this [Slipknot] T-shirt, because it's an American band... that could get you killed in Baghdad.

Back in high school I once had a conversation -- it was a typical high school conversation, I guess -- about whether suffering was a necessary prerequisite for true creativity. At the time, I took the devil's advocate position, arguing that the two weren't necessarily linked. (Ironically, I was suffering a lot at the time, while trying my damnedest to be as full-on creative as I could.)

Of course, "suffering" to a white lower-middle-class teenager in suburban 1980s America is not exactly comparable to the suffering of life in a war zone. I mean, my bands never had our practice space destroyed by a Scud missile, as Acrassicauda does in this film. There's a gap, as HMiB director Suroosh Alvi reminds us:

If you think about bands in the West, bands in Brooklyn, where our office is, they're all so spoiled, compared to Acrassicauda. In fact, we're all spoiled compared to these guys.

True enough. Still, I think most good artists, no matter how comfortable their material existence, strive for the level of creative urgency that is so clearly on display throughout this documentary.



Of course, there are degrees. Maybe the search for creative urgency does not typically include trying to make something so raw it can inspire fisticuffs. But most artists could probably find some point of resonance in sentiments like these (uttered by Marwan, Acrassicauda's drummer):

It just feels like you've been caged, like there's chains all around you. So you just want to, for two hours, for three hours, the practice time or, like, the live performance, free yourself from that chain, just like get that rage out. If I didn't play drums as hard as I can, as fast as I can, I was gonna kill someone. Each one of us will turn to be a killing machine.

Music born out of violence, so powerful that it can prevent violence: is there greater evidence of the power of this medium?

And in that vein, I'll close with this excerpt from the liner notes to Chris Schlarb's brilliant solo record, Twilight & Ghost Stories (which I got as a perk of our mixing session a few weeks ago):

Four years ago I was a sleeping ghost in an empty home. After quitting my job as an insurance adjuster I found myself working through a devastating separation which soon ended in divorce. Aimless and unemployed, I lost all structure and contact with the world outside. [...] Four years and fifty collaborators later, Twilight & Ghost Stories seems an odd choice for my first 'solo' album. There are hundreds of moments taken from their chronology in time and set alongside each other anew and I have acted only as the conductor of a giant, magnificent orchestra. To that orchestra, in some small way, I owe my life. [emphasis added]

And so say we all.

[Photo credit: US Army]

Music of the future

I was in beautiful Long Beach, CA, last weekend, to mix the new IJG album with the inimitable Chris Schlarb, who is also producing. I will have more to say about the specifics of this collaboration soon (I first hinted at it here), but for the time being let me say that the trip was fantastic (contrary to what you might think, I actually miss southern California sometimes), and I'm very excited by the work we got done and the shape the record appears to be taking. (The working genre description we came away with was "demented dance music" -- but don't hold me to that.)

Anyway, Chris works in Logic, which is unfamiliar to me. At one point, while I was observing him expertly fly through a rapid sequence of mixing moves, I was also completely lost as to what exactly he was doing. And so I allowed myself a momentary daydream about how records might be mixed in the future (say, fifty years from now).

At that point, I surmised, engineers will be able to plug their brains directly in to a given track, performing fades, EQ adjustments, quick edits, compression, and other processing, at will, and in real time. The music and all its characteristics will be represented by a hall-of-mirror-esque array of floating holographic screens that can be physically manipulated in the air around the engineer's head -- but the real key will be his or her total neural integration into the track. (Don't ask me why, but I found that to be a fairly compelling -- though not necessarily appealing -- concept.) The mix itself will become a kind of performance, almost to the point where the end result (the record) doesn't matter so much.



Or so I imagined. A few hours later, reading a bit of my Fellini book before heading off to bed, I came across this passage:

My greatest advantage in working at Cinecitta [a Roman film studio] is the freedom I have to direct my own way. Like a silent-film director, I talk to my actors as they perform their parts in front of the camera. Sometimes the actor doesn't even know what he's supposed to say, or the script has been changed too much at the last minute for him to have learned the lines, so I have to tell him his lines while the camera is rolling. [Fellini overdubbed all his dialogue later.] Obviously, in Hollywood with microphones this would be impossible. I would need a telepathic medium to communicate my last-minute instructions to the actors.

Interesting. Though I am big on the notion of collaboration, sometimes I think art can be defined as an attempt at (or desire for) total obsessiveness by a single author, who directs everything from a centralized location -- not unlike an air traffic controller or a juggler.

(Also, I promise not to keep quoting Fellini forever on this blog.)

Separated at birth?

Against the grain

When it comes to being a music fan, there is a side of me (the left side, I think) that is inherently curmudgeonly, and that likes being contrary for the sake of being contrary.

There, I said it.

Sometimes I am able to override this character flaw, because of course I recognize the silliness (or, I guess, the futility) of shunning something that everyone else likes -- something "hip," "in," or "hot" -- particularly when I have a sneaking suspicion that I am shunning it in part because everyone else likes it.

Alas, already I've stumbled onto shaky intellectual ground, because the notion of "everyone else" is fundamentally arbitrary -- sometimes I might use it to mean "most other listeners in the world," and sometimes I might use it to mean "most other listeners in a subset of most other listeners in the world" (jazz fans, say). In neither case am I literally talking about "everyone else."

But who cares? Sometimes I just want to go with my impulse as a music fan, and rationality be damned. I want to enjoy music, and ultimately I'm not particularly concerned with the question of whether my enjoyment is justified. And I'll admit that sometimes I'm (irrationally) terrified of getting lost in the mass commodification of culture, even when the culture being commodified is good. So to the extent that we choose (consciously or not) to like certain kinds of art as a matter of personal identity, I want to choose things that are, by some obscure criteria that may appeal only to me, different.

(Of course sometimes I go against the grain of the act of going against the grain, by publicly talking about my affection for certain kinds of music that are wildly popular.)

All of which is just a rambling prelude to this article, helpfully entitled "Your Favorite Band Sucks: Bands and Artists Bullz-Eye Writers Just Don't Get." In it, contributors to a trashy, mediocre, and mildly NSFW webzine attempt to argue against certain conventional wisdoms in the world of rock. Is it strange that I found the arguments unconvincing, but was nevertheless entertained by the piece?

On the Doors:

[...] they did indeed create a sound like no other band. But was that because no other band could successfully replicate their sound, or because no other band wanted to?

On Springsteen:

Perhaps Jello Biafra put it best when he referred to Bruce Springsteen as "Bob Dylan for jocks."

On Beck:

Beck is one of those artists, and one who critics use the word "groundbreaking" to describe. Yeah. If I took a sledgehammer to some concrete and took a shit in the hole in the ground I'd created, that would be groundbreaking too, wouldn't it?

On Pink Floyd:

But overall, their approach to music is decidedly non-musical; the bulk of their work feels like it was conceived mathematically or something…which, considering that three of 'em (Waters, Nick Mason, Rick Wright) were architecture students, should come as no surprise.

On Elvis Costello:

[...] when you're listening to Costello's collaboration with Allen Toussaint and suffering through track after track of Costello vocals while knowing that a perfectly wonderful soul singer was sitting right there at the piano while they were being recorded, it's just as hard not to want to muzzle the guy.

On Nine Inch Nails:

[...] a little Trent goes a long, long way. I have often tried to subscribe to the idea that he's some sort of genius. But I'm not buying it. A true genius won't subject his audience to 90 minutes of temple-pounding, unreasonably angry industrial rock without giving any sort of dynamic reprieve outside of "Hurt."

On Talking Heads:

Overall, they were good, but not great. Eccentric, but not head and shoulders above their peers. It's time to give up the charade and let the Talking Heads float down the river of East Coast artsy fartsy obscurity from whence they came.

On Frank Zappa:

Zappa's one of those guys where, if you tell one of his fans that you can't really get into his music, they generally find a way to let you know that it's probably just because you're too stupid to appreciate it. Now, I have never claimed to be a genius, so it's very possible that those Zappa aficionados are right on the money, but for my part, I've always just thought that Zappa's work too often felt like he was being weird solely for the sake of being weird.

Weird for the sake of being weird. I guess that brings me back to where I began.

[Photo credit: CarbonNYC]

[UPDATE]

Fellini, qtd. in I, Fellini:

All my life I've had a natural resistance to whatever everyone likes, or wants, or is "supposed" to do. I never was interested in soccer, either to play or to watch, and for a man to admit that in Italy is almost like admitting you aren't a man at all. I do not like to belong to political parties or to clubs. Partly this is probably in my black-sheep nature, but I think another very real reason is I remember the Black Shirts.

I was a child in a time when we wore the outfits of our school, or we wore the black shirts of fascism, and we were supposed to question nothing. That has made me question everything. I was always suspicious, not wanting to be one of the sheep going to the slaughter. So sometimes I may have missed out on a pleasure the sheep enjoyed which I could have had without becoming a lamb chop.

Sometimes...

...religious kooks (and in this case I say that lovingly) are more interesting than annoying.

I confirmed this when I watched the Danielson documentary last night.



I have admired this group for a while now. In fact, I posted something about them a few years ago, mostly regarding the fact that they are from New Jersey, where I grew up. (It's a place usually considered annoying, and rarely considered interesting.)

Honestly, I was only dimly aware of the religious connection until I saw the documentary. Still, I came away not caring about that particular detail, except in the sense that I can respect when someone is able to believe in something -- anything -- without using that belief to browbeat another human being into submissive agreement (a habit that besets way too many modern Christians, in my humble opinion).

I excerpted a few choice comments -- the first two made by fans of the group, and the last by Daniel Smith (the group leader and songwriter) -- below:

I'm really kinda freaked out by 'em, and I'm in a metal band, and they fucking freak me out. They scare me. So, they're doing something right, because of that, I guess.

Yeah, I listen to music about taking drugs -- I don't take drugs. I listen to music about taking Christ -- I don't take Christ. But I like the music, I like the sincerity of the message, I like that someone sincerely thinks that taking lots of ecstasy will make this a happy world, or that taking lots of Jesus will make this a happy better world.

Getting myself out of the way of these songs being made, so the lord can construct them himself -- that's the goal. I'm involved, but I try to remain humble and keep my ego, you know, out of the way. So in that sense I think it's the most natural way to create. But it's also humbling. But I think it's the most exciting way as well, because you're just watching things happen. Instead of trying to, you know, pretend you know better. [...] and I do struggle with that, of course. I go in there and say "Okay, this thing could go with this," and I do that sometimes, but it doesn't work. It just doesn't work for me. It's best to just kind of wait, and watch things point to each other.

That last bit seems kinda Zen to me. Take out the old-dude-in-the-sky reference, and it's not unlike the sort of thing most composers / improvisers say about their own process.

Attention must be paid

More words picked out from my recent Fellini addiction:

Since music has the power to condition subliminally, I prefer to avoid it whenever I am not listening consciously, as with my work. Music is too important to be relegated to the status of background noise. If I enter a restaurant or an apartment where recorded music is being played, as politely as I can, I request that it be turned off, much as I would ask someone to please stop smoking in close quarters. I resent being a captive listener, a captive inhaler, a captive anything. I don't understand how people can eat, drink, talk, drive, read, even make love while listening to music. Imagine having to chew faster to keep up with the beat. And the situation is getting ever worse. Unwanted music is becoming as pervasive as pollution. In New York, I heard music on the telephone, music in the elevators, music even in the toilets, where the ultimate captive audience is to be found.

I haven't ever thought of it that way, but second-hand smoke really is a perfect metaphor for the music that is forced upon us as we innocently try to go about our lives.

[Photo credit: Dominic's Pics]

Brick logic

I am old enough to remember the American Bicentennial, which was celebrated in 1976. I was in second grade at the time, and I clearly recall being forced to learn how to dance a minuet. I think there is a picture of me somewhere wearing a tri-corner hat over a white wig, and some big black shoes with those awkward Revolutionary buckles. (No, I will not scan or post it.)

How could I possibly have known back then that someday I'd see a variation on this very same outfit worn by grown men at political rallies?

There is of course a subtle message behind the imagery of the "Tea Party" movement, and it has nothing to do with patriotism. When your costume is more than two centuries old, you are, on some level, saying "I sure wish things could be the way they used to be." And I suspect that, for people of my generation, you are siding with your elementary school self (because, you know, we all had to do that Bicentennial minuet, in one way or another). Which probably also means that you're still into KISS.

Most revolutions happen in response to an actual event, imposition or injustice. There are usually concrete causative agents -- physical abuses, documented affronts against human dignity, and other longstanding grievances. Revolutions do not usually happen in response to the possibility of such causative agents.

The Tea Partiers (the artists formerly known as "Tea-baggers") are changing all that. They like to think they are spearheading a new revolution in American politics. But the truth is more complicated. Just as American right-wing politicians once perfected the notion of "preventive war," their Tea-Party base is now perfecting the notion of a preventive revolution. They are, in effect, rebelling against a new law before they even know whether it will work. And in the process, they are throwing out the social contract / common good baby with the no-new-taxes bathwater.

Theirs is a world in which PR exists for the sake of PR, and in which ideas do not deserve to be tested on their merits, but rather on how emotionally they are framed. Because, after all, if the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is such a bad move for America, why not simply let it fail? Let its failure be spectacularly self-evident. November is not that far away. Victory would be all but assured. Wait patiently for a few months, and all your prayers could be answered.

The fact that you are now picking up bricks suggests that you're starting to become cognizant of the idea that the horrors you see in this law are not even remotely self-evident to reasonable people. Worse: they may be complete and utter bullshit on your part.

[Photo credit: a1mega]

I See Hawks in LA

Here is something of a dirty secret about me: I love country music. And I'm not ashamed to admit it.

In fact, I feel that I can, with at least a little authority, proclaim that one of the best country bands in California (hell, in the world) is I See Hawks in LA, co-led by my friend Rob Waller (the band's lead singer, rhythm guitarist, and contributing songwriter). Waller and I met in grad school, where we both taught in USC's freshman writing program. We started our respective groups at roughly the same time, and even played a quirky double-bill together at Hollywood's version of the Knitting Factory (referenced in the discussion that ensues below). Later, occasional Hawks collaborator Joe Berardi played in the IJG for a short time (long enough to hold down the drumming duties for our Industrial Jazz a Go Go! album).

After I left USC, Waller and I stopped running into each other regularly (except for that one time our two bands, heading in opposite directions through the heart of California, happened to stop, mid-tour, at the same rest-stop on the 5 freeway). But with social media, none of us are ever really out of touch, I guess. At least, that was how I learned that the Hawks had released their fifth album, Shoulda Been Gold -- a "best of" compilation, but one that also included several new tracks (as well as a few rarities). I thought the occasion was a perfect opportunity to have an email conversation about this great band, and music in general.

If you've never heard the Hawks, here's a good place to start.

* * * * *

Durkin: Though at first blush it probably appears to the outsider that there could not be two genres more divergent than jazz and country, we've joked in the past about possible points of resonance too. A music historian might mention the existence of folks like Bob Wills, or the musical roots of someone like Charlie Haden, or even Sonny Rollins' cover for the Way Out West album. But I'm thinking too of deeper connections.

For instance: anyone playing jazz today has to deal somehow with the notion of authenticity. The music now has a history, a “tradition,” and a scholarship, and it is understood that each new generation of artists has to respond to that in one way or another (by fulfilling, tweaking, or rejecting certain expectations).

I could be wrong, but it seems like modern country musicians are faced with a similar dilemma. The music’s conventions are so well established that it must be hard for a young artist to maneuver without seeming to be derivative, or else too self-consciously “weird.” Plus, with country, you have that whole “Heartland of America” image to contend with. (Am I wrong in assuming that some audiences take that very seriously?)

Is this minefield real for you? Is it a minefield at all? And if so, how have the Hawks navigated it so elegantly?

RW: Ah, yes. "Jazz and Country, Together Again." I remember our Jazz and Country night at the Knitting Factory in LA some years back. If I remember correctly it went pretty well, our crowds weren't as divergent as we might've expected. But then we worked together and had some of the same friends. But yes, on to your question.

Authenticity is a major goal for us. It's something we aim at. The problem is that it's a moving target. Or, perhaps we're the ones who are moving and the target is getting farther away. I have a suspicion that it is getting more difficult to make authentic music today in any genre precisely because of the accumulation of recorded music (not to mention all the scholarship, 'zines, websites, listeners, authorities, etc.). There's so much music to listen to and be influenced by it's more difficult to just play it and feel it spontaneously, light-heartedly.

We've had the ability to record and reproduce music now for a little more than one hundred years. That's really not that long compared to the history of music. I imagine that if you stumbled upon some band playing music in 1850 you would be thrilled, you'd grab your friends and bring them over, you'd sit dumbfounded and delighted as you watched and listened to them play. But now music is everywhere, in the elevator, on the radio, at the grocery store, stacked in gigabytes in your computer. Its value has shrunk to zero, basically. Music is now free because it's everywhere and there's no need to actually pay for it. This is a real problem for musicians who take years to develop their craft.

Oh shit, I've gotten away from the question and headed into a bitter rant against technology once again. Sorry, let me get back to your question....

Yes. The answer is yes, it is a minefield but a minefield is only dangerous if you walk into it. And pretty much we haven't. It's more like, "Hey, there's a nasty minefield over there. Fuck it. Let's go in the opposite direction." Luckily we've had a group of people who has been interested and supportive of going with us. We take the things we love from the tradition, vocal harmonies, song structure, melodies, a connection to the earth, freak or outsider status (yes, even that is part of the tradition) and ignored the rest (bogus patriotism, xenophobia, trucks, mama).

Durkin: As one who is interested in freak / outsider status, I'd love to hear more about the freaks and outsiders of country music. Because that's not really part of the general perception of country music, as far as I can tell.

RW: One of my favorite aspects of country/folk music is precisely that freak, outsider, drunk perspective. My favorite country artists (Merle Haggard, George Jones, Johnny Cash, Stanley Brothers, Louvin Brothers) are always flaunting their flaws. Whether it's alcohol or being poor or being a criminal or turning your back on Jesus, the theme is often confessional and by association outsider. Here is who I am, here is what I've done, who I've killed, etc. I am guilty!

I first started getting into this music when I started dating my future wife. At the beginning of our relationship she made me a tape of murder ballads. Songs like "Katie Dear" or "Knoxville Girl" by the Louvin Brothers or "Pretty Polly" by whoever wrote that. These songs really got me and that's when I started writing in this tradition. David Allen Coe and Johnny Cash played shows in prisons and related to prisoners because they had been prisoners. It was a genuine connection. When you listen to Live at Folsom Prison, Johnny is one of them. He's not patronizing or clowning, he really feels for their circumstance and knows he might end up back there. He's a freak and a fuck-up too.

To me, classic country and folk often maintained a legitimate connection to real people and real problems. Of course, that's all pretty much gone from mainstream country now. It's mostly about the girls getting wild on Saturday night, kicking Osama's ass, and bullshit nostalgia for calculated, phony family values. It's not just the connection to real people that's been lost but the people themselves have become disconnected from their own reality. We're a nation in denial of how bad we have it, how bad we feel. We can't even properly imagine our own lack of freedom, our own cultural poverty, our own pain. We don't have the words for it. We can't even describe the pickle we're in. In much of the heartland including Minnesota where I grew up, any hint of dissatisfaction is somehow unpatriotic, whiny, and liberal.

Durkin: As a fellow leader-of-a-ten-year-old-band-sans-hits, I'd love to know more about the Hawks' adventures in the modern music industry. Ten years ago I seem to recall all sorts of exciting predictions about how we were entering a new age, in which independent musicians would use the tools of the digital era to storm the corrupt citadels of the music business. (Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little.) Looking back, having survived the decade with a working band, what did you learn about how things actually went down? And where do you fall on the despair / hope continuum when it comes to the future of music? Is Twitter going to save us all?

RW: No, we are not going to be saved by Twitter. We are all going to die. But this is not a hopeless statement. It should be a galvanizing one. We are going to die! We are most likely not going to be rich or famous or even have health insurance. But so what? Everyone on the planet is going to die, the vast majority of them poor and unknown. And all of us are going to attempt to create meaning in our lives. By having families, jobs, growing plants, going to church, doing yoga, eating well, whatever. One of the main ways I create meaning in my life is by making music that I think is good according to my own twisted aesthetics. Ultimately, it's a spiritual practice. I do it with daily regularity to sustain meaning, to keep going back to that place where the muse lives, to avoid loneliness, isolation, CNN. But I don't want to minimize it and make it sound like a hobby. It's not. God, I hope music is never my hobby! It's my spiritual practice, identity, source of inspiration and meaning.

Durkin: That's great. I completely relate. It's interesting that most of the people I admire in music these days have some sort of "second job" to support what they do -- but I also think most of us aspire to be able to play music without having to worry about that distraction. And yet maybe making music into your "career" would kill the very things that attracted you to it (spiritual practice, etc.).

RW: Yes, the tension between day job and music career is ongoing. In that same spirit of contradiction, they do often each make the other possible. I suspect that if I quit my day job altogether, I might be more likely to make more mainstream music, or play more covers, or play more weddings, or be more concerned with being timely and hip. The fact that I keep a day job which provides for me and my family also helps to maintain artistic freedom and integrity, I think (hope). My family's next meal does not depend on the song I'm writing.

Or maybe it just makes me lazy. I also wonder if the day job allows me to be too complacent, too comfortable being a freak, an outsider, an obscure toiling artist. Maybe I'd write better songs, more urgent songs, if I didn't have any safety net whatsoever. It's difficult to know the answer precisely.

Durkin: What was the selection process for including the previously released material on the new album? Were there any hard choices? Did you feel like anything got left out?

RW: Okay, an easy one. We went to the iTunes store and sorted all our songs by popularity then picked the tops ten songs. We wanted to let the fans decide and also avoid having a big band fight. We then added 5 new tunes, and a couple of curiosities for our die hard fans. If I had decided the list myself it would've been different but not that different. We do plan on a SBG: Volume Two down the road so there will be another opportunity to gather some of the left out tunes.



Durkin: The new album, from the title on down, is steeped in metaphors and images of despair, missed possibilities, promises broken. And yet you keep coming back to hope too. The upbeat protagonist in “Raised by Hippies,” the salvation of someone like Robert Byrd, the beautiful melodies and harmonies of “Laissez Les Bontemps Roulet,” all suggest an underlying belief in the possibility of redemption and happiness, even if bittersweet. Is there a coherent philosophy tying these extremes together? Or: as a thoughtful person making thoughtful music in a thoughtless age, how do you cope?

RW: I'm not sure how coherent the philosophy is but there is one. Even our band name is a metaphor. Here in Los Angeles, this concrete metropolis of monoculture, there is still wildlife (hawks, coyotes, skunks, possums, hummingbirds, the occasional condor) there are are still strange country rock bands like ours even though we don't get the kind of attention that say, Britney Spears or some other pop star gets. Yes, on a grand scale things are a bit hopeless. The earth really is headed for an environmental catastrophe. The political system and the economy really have been hijacked by the obscenely wealthy. These are troubling times and the problems are so big it's overwhelming.

But life goes on. Children are born and they shine some light in, some optimism. The hopelessness and the optimism exist side by side. I take some refuge in my own personal contradictions. I'm an environmentalist but I drive a GMC Yukon. I'm a country rock musician and lead singer who wears flashy outfits onstage but I'm also a mild-mannered writing instructor at a university (a job I compare to working in a convent, fashion and other-wise). I'm a parent but I'm still fairly reckless at times when it comes to money and planning for the future. I guess the thing that holds it all together is a belief in the grand life cycle of it all. Things will be born, hopefully thrive for some period, then die. Then something else will be born. In this way, I welcome the coming apocalypse.

Durkin: We're both dads, and in our art, if not our lives, we're both a little wry. I don't think either of us is predisposed to sugar-coating. And yet children, to some extent at least, inevitably require at least a little sugar-coating in their initial understanding of the world.

How do you reconcile these things? How does fatherhood coexist with the hint of nihilism, the vaguely apocalyptic strain that runs through your music? Do you play your music for your kids?

RW: Yes, I sure do play my music for my kids. They also know lots of the songs and sing along. My daughter Zola (5) came on the road with us to Scotland at one and a half. She still likes to sleep in my guitar case. For about six months she listened to one of our albums (Hallowed Ground) every night as she fell asleep. She knows the songs inside out. We recently played a show in Santa Barbara at a coffee house type place and there was a couch on stage behind the drums. Both Zola and her brother Henry (almost 2) danced around for a while then passed out on the couch for the rest of the show, sleeping right there on stage. That's how it's gone. Some of our tunes are fairly dark and require some censorship or explanation but overall there is a great deal of joyfulness present in music and the act of making the music that children pick up on the most. We'll see how it all turns out as they get older. But I do see a real creative spirit in both of them that I take some credit for and that I think will continue to develop. I'd be surprised if they ended up as nihilistic and apocalyptic as their old man just because their lives and experiences are inevitably going to be so much different than mine. Again, I guess I see the apocalypse as a good time!



Cross-eyed hawks: it's too bad they don't have a sense of humor.

Durkin: What is the unlikeliest thing (musical or otherwise) you have been inspired or influenced by?

RW: I think my wife's cooking has really influenced me as an artist. She's an amazing cook. She develops new techniques, explores unusual ingredients, takes her time and develops her craft but it is all done in a loving way that's about nurturing and feeding her family. I hope I can do the same with my music. Often, the dough I do make at gigs, etc goes right to the grocery store and turns into breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That's a good feeling.

Durkin: Can music be effectively "political" (i.e., can it really matter, politically) in 2010, with its 24-hour hyper-media-with-a-vengeance vibe? Do you want the Hawks' music to be political? And if so, how do you know the difference between offending somebody (I'm thinking of the dropped line from "Humboldt") and educating them? [Editor's note: "Humboldt" originally ended with the line "You can have your September 11 / I'm heading off to a Stoney Heaven." According to the liner notes for Shoulda Been Gold, "when we sang the line in summer 2002 at Galapogos club in Brooklyn and the Knitting Factory only a stone's throw from the twin towers site, we could see a moment of hurt bewilderment sweep through the audience like a slap in the face. We dropped the line."]

RW: Hmm, not sure I have a good answer to this one. I guess music can be sort of political but I don't really expect it to change anything in any direct way. So, not too effective. I think the Hawks are a political band in many respects (particularly with regards to the environment) despite the fact that as a band we have diverging view points.

The Humboldt line change was an interesting phenomena. We definitely lost a few fans and one writer in particular who had written glowingly about us before really turned on us because of it. Part of the reason the line was changed (which we didn't mention in the liner notes) was I thought it might date the song too much to include September 11th. I don't know if I was right about that since 9/11 has become a permanent thing, also we kept the Bush line which also dates it but I just didn't have a good substitute for that one. "I quit my job at the 7/11" also seemed to fit the narrative of the song a bit better. Mostly, I think for myself as the the lead singer (the one singing the line) I didn't want to reflect on that event over and over every time we played that song. The song is kind of our big closer and it's a pot anthem that's mostly just about rocking out and having fun. The political element seemed out of place, somewhat. It also seemed cold and unfeeling to those who really did suffer on that day. Also, our libertarian bass player never said anything about it but I knew it was eating at him. His son is in the Air Force in the desert. The personal outweighed the political in that sense and that also lead to the line change. Who knows, maybe it was big mistake.

Raw art in two parts

Part one

Last Friday, I played a funeral for a 95 year-old woman I did not know (or, perhaps more accurately, for her family, who I also did not know). I've been doing this sort of gig regularly for two years now. (Someday, I suppose, I will provide you with a better idea of what it's like to be an agnostic who makes a good portion of his living providing live music for religious services. Hint: it's not a strange as I thought it would be, though of course I have a high tolerance for strangeness.)

Sometimes it's hard to tell ahead of time whether a particular hymn, sung by the church congregation, is going to "work," musically. After all, most of the congregants are in their 70s and 80s. Some of them are hard of hearing. Some possess what could only be called a "delayed" sense of rhythm. And at the funerals, anyway, there is no choir to help guide everybody else's singing. Add to that the fact that I'm playing the organ, from the choir loft -- so the sound is more diaphanous than focused -- and the chances that we're all actually going to be together on any given piece are, I would say, about 50/50.

This is true even for a well-known tune like "Amazing Grace," which was one of the hymns included in Friday's service. And since the deceased was 95, I stupidly assumed that her family had been well-prepared for her death, and that their grief, however genuine, would be pretty muted as a result. In other words, I wasn't expecting a terribly moving performance.

I was wrong. I'm not sure if it was the gloominess of the day, or the tearful eulogy delivered by one of the grandchildren, or the fact that I had been listening to DM Stith on the way in to work, or the possibility that I am basically a big sap -- but I discovered, after a few notes into that morning's rendition of "Amazing Grace," that sometimes beautiful things can happen in a church. It was quite moving, to hear those untrained voices singing strongly, with sad acceptance, and a palpable recognition of the mystery that afflicts us all. I know I am guilty of reading into the sounds I heard, based on my own physical and philosophical vantage point -- but I could swear I detected more poignant uncertainty in that piece than ever before. More importantly, it seemed to me to be vital in a way that I haven't heard in live music for awhile. And not at all because of the organ player.

Part two

One of the cooler features of my daughter's school is that students are encouraged to use drama and performance as a tool with which to understand history. They refer to it as a "living history curriculum." We went to one of the student productions last night.

The show had the typical middle-school flaws -- actors who struggled to enunciate, cheap costumes, the student's tendency to overact, the educator's tendency to over-direct -- and yet there were some beautiful moments. One came halfway through, with a little cotillion interlude that took place in the aisles created by the arrangement of audience folding chairs. The auditorium lights were off, but several spotlights awkwardly followed the student dancers as they moved in procession around the room.

There was something terribly strange and wonderful about this dance, as watched by us "grown-ups" (who, it seems to me, were middle schoolers ourselves only yesterday) -- some of us with our own kids, not yet old enough to be in the play. The music was typical Ken Burns-ish Civil War banjo and dulcimer stuff. Maudlin in any other setting, but somehow, at this moment, in the midst of this very obvious display of the various (fleeting) stages of human existence -- somehow it worked, and was, again, beautiful, vital.

Question

Today I found myself wondering: how can a professional ever hope to make art with the raw directness and vitality of an amateur?

[Photo credit: Jakob Montrasio]

Speaking of birds

This, from David Ocker:



Wonderful.

My favorite part is when the speckled guy comes in (at roughly the 40 second mark).

You get what you get and you don't get upset

A very good friend recently sent me a link to the transcript of a set of health insurance reform interviews Bill Moyers did last week. The whole thing is interesting and worth a read, but for me, this commentary, from Marcia Angell, positively leapt off the screen:

I think the problem is this, Bill. If this plan is passed, and I think there's real doubt as to whether it will be, and there's even more doubt as to whether it would ever be fully implemented, but let's say that it's passed. It will begin to unravel almost immediately. And then what will people do? Well, they'll say, "We tried health reform, and it didn't work. Better not try that anymore."

It'll be like what happened after the Clinton plan failed. There'll be another 16 years before anybody comes up with the courage to try that again. People say, "Too expensive. Just can't have universal care. Tried that, did that, didn't work, good-bye." Whereas if the bill dies now, people can say, "This bill died because it was a bad bill." And the problem is still on the front burner. And then one can hope that we get some version of Medicare for all. And that we don't have to wait 16 years.

Moyers asks exactly what I would have asked: "What makes you think it would come back in 16 years or more? What makes you think it will ever be back on the table?" To which Angell responds:

Oh, I think it has to be. I mean, I think that this system is unraveling so fast, doing nothing or doing the Obama plan, so fast, that something will have to be done. Unless we want to, you know, explicitly be a third world country. So I don't think it's going to wait. But if we pass this plan, it's going to delay.

This whole exchange strikes me as absurd.

Maybe folks like Dennis Kucinich are right, and "the bill" as it currently stands won't address the underlying problems in our health care system. But if the thing goes down, know this. Health insurance reform will not stay on the "front burner" -- at least not by any conceivable definition of "front burner" that I can imagine.

Can I extend the kitchen metaphor? Okay, how's this: like a cooking experiment gone horribly awry, health insurance reform will promptly go into the trash. And we will all need to adjust to the fact that we'll be having something else for dinner. (Sorry, I think I took that too far.)

Note how Angell compares the hypothetical success of the Obama bill to the failure of the Clinton plan. Get it? Since Clinton failed, and since that failure prevented us from revisiting the issue for nearly two decades... the success of Obama will produce the same result.

Call me crazy, but that seems to betray a fundamental misunderstanding of political behavior. "Failure," especially when bombastically proclaimed as such by the media, will lead not to more action but to inertia. I mean, consider the headache it has been to keep the issue on the front burner this year alone -- even though, by some estimations, we are already well on the way to third world status.

"Success" of the bill may not exactly bring "success" as Angell would define it (or, hell, as I would define it), but it will bring momentum. Some people will get a glimpse of a better life. Again, the fixes may not address the underlying problem, but a certain amount of desperation will be removed from the equation. All this birther, deather, Obama-as-Hitler bullshit we've had to put up with over the last year, and which has prevented any sort of reasonable dialogue on the subject at hand? That is mostly derived from desperation. You can't think rationally when you are treading water.

Look, I like Marcia Angell. I think she's very smart. But I wish she (and others like her) understood that, at the moment, we're in a triage ward. Brain surgery will have to wait.



[Photo credits: Redvers (top); Anyaka (bottom).]

"Very impressive, but no one is watching."

It was purely an accident (and in no way related to the untimely death of our chickens, I swear) that my wife and daughter and I ended up watching a documentary about birds tonight. It featured, in particular, the Birds of Paradise, of Papua New Guinea. If you've never seen these critters in action, they are singularly fascinating:



My question: is what the birds do as part of their mating ritual art? Especially once you take it out of its original context, and enclose it in a frame (such as the one provided so graphically by the YouTube interface)?

If it is art, who is the author? (Note that you're not allowed to answer "god," as that would be too trite for my purposes here.) Also, is the work any good?

I'm completely serious, of course.



[photo credit: Zorilla]

Blinders

Michael Faraday, who had little mathematics and no formal schooling beyond the primary grades, is celebrated as an experimenter who discovered the induction of electricity. He was one of the great founders of modern physics. It is generally acknowledged that Faraday's ignorance of mathematics contributed to his inspiration, that it compelled him to develop a simple, nonmathematical concept when he looked for an explanation of his electrical and magnetic phenomena. Faraday had two qualities that more than made up for his lack of education: fantastic intuition and independence and originality of mind.

-- Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

I love this paradox: sometimes ignorance can lead to insight, and even brilliance.

And yet it has to be the right kind of ignorance, doesn't it?

[photo credit: schizoform]

Life is short

Especially, I guess, if you're a chicken.

Oh Billina and Henry, you were entertaining while you were here. You gave us many more eggs than we could ever consume. You were especially comical when you got wet. And it was oddly endearing, the way you would run up to greet us whenever we came home from somewhere. (Actually, I don't know if chickens "run" so much as they waddle really fast.)

I will admit that the Satanic cackling you emitted every time you sat down to lay was more than a little annoying. And the way you abused our foliage was downright obscene. But I guess the thing that finally did you in was your wanderlust. You simply could not tolerate the idea that your entire existence had to be confined to our front yard, where overhanging trees protected you from hawks, and where proximity to humans protected you from the neighborhood coyote. And though we like to consider ourselves the superior species, it seemed that, in the end, even we couldn't devise (read: afford to install) a fence fancy enough to hold you.

The sad irony is that now I'll never have the chance to tell you how much I admired your constant quest for freedom (even though I suspected all along that it would lead to your demise).

For the ghoulish, here's the crime scene:



Correct me if I'm wrong, but it appears that there are two piles of feathers in that image. Which suggests, to me, that chicken A stood by, dumbfounded or unaware, while chicken B was being consumed. And then chicken A was consumed.

Anyway, RIP, ladies.

(Related: a poem I once wrote about a dead bird.)

Senses all a-jumble

I was always interested in art. I used to practice, when I was a kid, drawing dollar bills. A lot of kids do that, I'm sure. Cal Schenkel was so good at it, he drew a five dollar bill one time and passed it. He bought his high school lunch with it.

I'd never seen music on paper. What I had seen had been orchestra parts they give you in high school, beginner stuff. Then I saw a score. It just looked so wonderful -- the very idea that this graphic representation, when translated into sound waves through the efforts of craftsmen would result in music. I said, Hey I gotta do this! So I got a ruler, I went out and bought some music paper, and I just started drawing. I didn't know what the fuck I was doing, but I could look at it. Then I went around looking for people who could play it, to find out what it would sound like. That's how I started out.

-- Frank Zappa, qtd. by Ben Watson

I used to be a bit of a purist when it came to sensory experience. For a long time I harbored a grudge against Western culture's preoccupation with all things visual, because I considered myself primarily an auditory guy. Not because I couldn't appreciate art that was aimed at the eyes -- except for the few years I spent living in propinquity to the oppressive shadow of Hollywood, I have always been a film nut. Rather, I thought our mania for appearances -- no matter how artfully realized -- helped explain why music in general was under-appreciated (and why music that was played by people who looked "good" was more likely to be "successful").

One of my pet peeves has always been the idea that people are more interested in the way things look, than with the way they sound. This, of course, has implications not only for aesthetics but for politics. (It was also, I thought, the primary engine driving the clique-making dynamic I so despised in high school.)

More recently, of course, I have come up against the ways in which visual aspects of a musical performance, when obviously fiddled with in one way or another, tend to trump the musical ones, even when that is not the intention of said fiddling.

I still think there is some reason for harboring a grudge, but nowadays I can admit that I'm more comfortable with the peaceful cohabitation and intermingling of the senses. Because honestly, does one really end where the other begins? When you close your eyes in order to listen to music, do you really stop "seeing"?

What if sight is just another form of hearing, just as hearing (as Evelyn Glennie has argued) is another form of touch? Isn't it all just molecules vibrating in the air, and picked up by some sort of receptor?

I have, like most of the composers I admire, always drawn a great deal of inspiration from the musicians I have worked with: as I have said, I can't write in a vacuum. Some composers are driven by visual inspiration, in that (for instance) they see colors or abstract shapes when they compose. To the (small) extent that I visualize anything when I write, it's usually a fleeting imaginative glimpse of the people I want to play the music, actually playing it.

[photo credit: fPat]

Portrait of the artist as a young ninny

While out east last fall, I found a bit of time to dig through some of the youthful detritus I left behind in 1995 (the year I moved to California). My archive goes back to grade one, and the oldest portions of it are excerpted below.

Yes, the paper really is that yellow.



As my kid begins to fill the house with her own writing (like me, she's pretty compulsive about it -- we're finding her notes, cards, stories, grocery lists, post-its, menus, ballots, etc. all over the place), I've been amusing her by sharing some of my own early scribblings. Her stuff is much better, but she hasn't given me permission to publish it yet.

I like to joke that I was an abnormal child, but maybe I wasn't. Or maybe I was just a normal boy. A sample "story," from a badly-stapled collection entitled "Monsters," reads as follows: "Three monsters where [sic] playing baseball. And they got into a fight! And it got worse and... they KILLED each other!!" (With illustrations, this masterpiece took up four pages.)



I guess it was right around this time that I developed an affection for monster movies. (Did I say "affection"? I meant "affliction." One that continues to this day.)

Also, my first song, "The Shark," with its cryptic lyric: "I saw a shark eat bark."



You've gotta know where you've been to know where you're going.

My angels, my devils

But there my triumph's straw-fire flared and funked;
Their betters took their turn to see and say:
The Prior and the learned pulled a face
And stopped all that in no time. "How? what's here?
Quite from the mark of painting, bless us all!
Faces, arms, legs, and bodies like the true
As much as pea and pea! it's devil's-game!
Your business is not to catch men with show,
With homage to the perishable clay,
But lift them over it, ignore it all,
Make them forget there's such a thing as flesh.
Your business is to paint the souls of men--
Man's soul, and it's a fire, smoke . . . no, it's not . . .
It's vapor done up like a newborn babe--
(In that shape when you die it leaves your mouth)
It's . . . well, what matters talking, it's the soul!
Give us no more of body than shows soul!

-- Robert Browning, "Fra Lippo Lippi"

What is music for? It's a trite question, but one that I find myself wrestling with every time I sit in front of a piano.

Part of me wants to tie up every seam, preserving the illusion of a coordinated whole with a presentation so compelling and forceful that it makes you literally forget where you are. I want to ravish you, dear listener. I want you to believe that a bunch of vibrating air actually means something. (I want to believe it too.) And I want it to be aspirational and positive: this is a glimpse of something higher than the often-horrific, often-ridiculous way life can be. Something beautiful, that speaks to the soul.

At other times that approach feels like a supreme contrivance. An intellectualized put-on. A walking shadow, woven of escapist impulses. Shouldn't music at least occasionally take a penetrating and critical look at its own damned self? Point to the means by which it is made? Take you backstage? Sit you down at the desk upon which it was written? Stop in medias res to reveal the fragile, flawed humanity behind the end result?

[photo credit: "Angels without daemons," by plastAnka]

In defense of quiet

[Apologies in advance. Feeling the doom and gloom angle today for some reason. It'll pass.]

Are you actively marketing and advertising to get more jazz buyers to know your name/brand to generate sales of your CDs, products, services and to get bookings? Or are you waiting around hoping that consumers will come to you just because you think you've got a great product? 



Are you seizing the golden opportunity to get the leadership advantage in this economy or like competitors are you busy justifying fears and cutting back on marketing? It is easier now for you to get higher visibility than ever.

Are you getting the lowest “cost per contact” to reach each jazz buyer? 


Are you implementing ideas, strategies and solutions from marketing professionals to succeed?

(Excerpted from an ad mailer for a prominent jazz magazine that I happen to admire.)

For most of the history of communication, human beings have recorded for perusal or study but a mere fragment (usually a highly contrived fragment) of what they have done, said, thought. Perhaps memory was a different (sturdier) phenomenon at first, and (for instance) words spoken but not written could be recalled, challenged, quoted verbatim when the need arose. But for a long time the recording and representation of human activity (deeds, words, ideas) was a relatively exceptional phenomenon, as compared with the entirety of discourse.

Today, for most people, the recorded and represented self rivals the physical self. Some of these recordings and representations are voluntarily submitted to the world. (Surf through your Facebook friends’ pages sometime. Step into the Twitter stream. Hell, read this blog.) Some of them are captured, the object of surveillance. (Go out to any public space in any American city and let me know how far you get before you run into a security camera.) Some of them are stumbled upon by accident. (Do you know how many other people’s candid iPhone photos the back of your head has ended up in?)

Eventually, our recordings and representations will overtake us.

I suspect that as everyone’s pile of life “tapes” grows bigger, the chance that anyone else is going to review them in any meaningful way grows smaller (making the privacy argument moot from two directions at once: inevitability and apathy). In the dystopian scenario, we will eventually meet the magic, tragic ratio of one-to-one, in which each person only has time to peruse or study the recordings and representations of him or herself. And after that: production only. Like the items that take up vast sections of the Library of Congress, it’ll be stuff that is primarily just there.

So I'm going to take the dog for a good long walk in the woods now.

[photo credit: madmolecule]

Plan B

Or: something to try when, after six months, you still can't get a critical mass of your student band to reliably produce the basic pitches / rhythms called for by the piece you are supposed to be working on.

1. Devise a set of hand signals that correspond with certain musical qualities agreed upon by the class (long, short, fast, slow, high, low, dense, sparse, start, stop, etc.).

2. Allow each student (in turn) to take on the role of composer-conductor.

3. Ask each composer-conductor (in turn) to direct their peers, using the aforementioned hand signals, in an improvised ensemble performance.

Maybe the resulting music is horrible. Maybe it's not. But suddenly the kids are concentrating, cooperating, and smiling. Take your victories where you can find them, and call it a day.

(Maybe this should've been "Plan A'"?)

[Photo credit: Roland Lakis]

Fun facts about the Super Bowl Halftime Show

(This photo has nothing to do with football. That's why I chose it.)

According to that mightiest of mighty sources, Wikipedia:

The theme for the Super Bowl VI Halftime Show (1972) was "Salute to Louis Armstrong." Ella Fitzgerald, Al Hirt, and, uh, Carol Channing performed.

The theme for the Super Bowl IX Halftime Show (1975) was "Salute to Duke Ellington." Mercer Ellington performed.

Arturo Sandoval and Tony Bennett performed at the Super Bowl XXIX Halftime Show (1995). The theme? "Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye."

Other jazz or jazz-inflected Super Bowl Halftime Show acts have included Woody Herman, Pete Fountain, and Helen O'Connell.

Two Super Bowl Halftime Shows have taken Mardi Gras as a theme (IV, XV), and one took New Orleans as a theme (XXIV).

The theme for Super Bowl XIV Half Time Show (1980)? "A Salute to the Big Band Era." The performers? Up With People.

(Ahem.)

Also, this:

The NFL does not pay the halftime show performers an appearance fee, though it covers all expenses for the performers and their entourage of stagehands, family, and friends.

[photo credit: freizeitforum-aachen.de]

40 sentences on 4D

[The new Matthew Shipp album.]

i.

In a perfect world, the third track, "equilibrium," would be the single.

ii.

Though there is a lot of full-on piano pounding here (see iv, below), there is also an amazing lightness of touch throughout. Consider the filigree figures at the end of “the crack in the piano's egg." How can you be playing and sound like you're not playing at the same time?

Indeed, sometimes the music moves almost too fast or too dense to be able to tell what it is.

Looked at another way: some music is designed to work as if it were an Olympic event. Muscular precision that shines at a crucial moment, usually under the glare of the spotlight.

Some music is designed to work like a homemade birthday card. A private exchange that only really has meaning for the two people involved.

iii.

The mechanics of the piano are audible along with the notes. (At least I think it's the mechanics of the piano... perhaps the pads of the fingers sticking slightly to the surface of the keys?)

I'll go further: there's a homeliness to the sound quality that reminds me of how records used to be. (Did you hear Raphael Saadiq's last album, by the way? It was similarly "old-school lo-fi," despite a presumably much higher recording budget. Seems to be a trend with R&B musicians; see too Sharon Jones.)

Shipp: "As a pianist, I love to get great pianos, but I actually think it's probably good sometimes to really have to make bad pianos react to your personality. So I don't really subscribe to the kind of Keith Jarrett baby-ish idea of crying to promoters if the piano's not the greatest piano in the world [...] Thelonious Monk could take any piano and make it sound like himself." (Via Jason Crane's interview for The Jazz Session.)

At times the lo-fi overwhelms, though. The buzzing during "what a friend we have in jesus” is headache-threatening.

Thankfully that piece is less than a minute long. (And as an agnostic, I can't help but read the "bad sound" as a statement about organized religion. I'm sure I'm overreaching, though.)

Incidentally, Shipp performatively grunts probably at least as much as his nemesis, Jarrett (on that score, anyway, they are completely even).

iv.

The music is angry.

For instance, parts of “blue web in space” sound like Shipp is trying to punch the piano in the face. (Ironically, that is one way of getting beauty out of the instrument.)

Hey, I like angry music. Why not? There’s a lot to be angry about.

But maybe I'm guilty of reading this into the music because of Shipp's combative public persona. Which is a subject I don't really want to comment on.

Okay, okay, just one thing: I did like Peter Hum's quotation of Bill Evans, in his own article on the subject: "[...] it just didn't bother me that much as long as there was a little niche that I could find for what I wanted to do."

Problem is, what happens when it becomes hard to even find a niche?

v.

Not sure whether I like the inclusion of the standards. If that's not what you do, why do it?

(I'm not counting "greensleeves" as a standard.)

vi.

While listening (eyes closed), a line from Apocalypse Now popped into my head: “You must make a friend of horror.”

Not because this CD is horrible (it's exactly the opposite), but because it seems to be informed by horror (modern-day weltschmerz-type horror, to be exact).

Consider the gorgeously thunderous version of “frere jacques,” which reminded me of the cinematic technique of employing slightly discordant children's songs in order to create high anxiety during a climactic moment.

[photo credit: wharman]

Boulez on Boulez

Years later, in conversation with Joan Peyser, [Boulez] casually dismissed his early ventures in total serialism, saying that Structures 1a had been not "Total but Totalitarian." He also brushed away the formerly dire necessity of the twelve-tone composition. "I've often found the obligation to use all twelve tones to be unbearable," he said in 1999. In the end, the notion of musical progress proved to be contingent and subjective, its definition changing with the seasons. The philosophy of modern music was unmasked as the rhetoric of taste. All the same, Boulez adroitly maintained the illusion of being out in front -- the signature of a master politician.

Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise, p. 434

Who says pop stars invented music marketing?

[photo credit: jonrawlinson]

Everything eventually becomes obsolete

A comic, via Oliver Chesler (proprietor of the pro-audio blog, Wire to the Ear.)

You probably already know this, but that iPad-ish looking thing in the lower right-hand panel is one of these:



Why? According to the inventor:

"In days gone by, a musical instrument had to have a beauty, of shape as well as of sound, and had to fit the player almost organically. [...] Modern electronic instruments don't have this inevitable relationship between the shape, the sound, and the player. What I have done is to try to bring back these [...] elements and build them in to a true musical instrument for the digital age."

I play some guitar, some horn, and some drumkit, but the piano was my first (and remains my primary) instrument. And though these days I tend to do most of my writing away from that particular axe, I still suspect that my basic conception of pitch is horizontal.

Which is just another way of saying that the tools you use affect the things you make.

Coo-coo for Gaga

I was happy to avoid the Grammys last night. Why? Oh, you know: the usual reasons.

Still, now that the is show is over, I suppose it's as good a time as any to "come out" with respect to my admiration for Lady Gaga. I realize that I say this at my own peril, and at the risk of losing whatever sliver of jazz credibility I may still have, but what the hell: for my money, this chick is the most interesting thing to emerge from the "mainstream" popular music scene in a long time.

I'm aware of the Madonna comparisons, but I don't know. Whatever her other talents, Madonna could never really sing. Lady Gaga, on the other hand, has got some pipes, a sense of pitch, and a refreshing mistrust for melisma. She takes the direct approach with each song, and yet seems able to change the color of her voice at will. I dig that.

Also unlike Madonna (not to mention visually interesting but musically effete peers like Marilyn Manson), Gaga actually has more than a few decent songs. "So Happy I Could Die" is a good song. "Bad Romance" is a very good song (despite the bad grammar). "Paparazzi" is a fucking great song; perhaps because it's also disturbing as hell:

Baby, you'll be famous
chase you down until you love me
Papa, paparazzi

It would be hard to appreciate that sentiment (or indeed the entire Fame Monster album) outside the context of the carefully staged death-wish that is modern celebrity culture. And unlike an earlier paean to obsessiveness, the music of "Paparazzi" doesn't hide the song's more sinister content; arguably, it amplifies it. Yet the tune generally inspires no shortage of getting down. That has to be some sort of coup.

Which is not to say that The Fame Monster is flawless. It's an insistently loud record, for one thing. And though I admire the varied production (which runs the gamut from glam rock to full-on electronica), let's face it: any autotune is too much, even when it is not being used for pitch correction per se. (Still, I get it: this music wasn't intended primarily for solitary headphone listening, and, for better or worse, autotune has become the principal signifier of modern dance music.)

But the thing that really intrigues me about Gaga is her knack for pointing toward a nexus between two seemingly opposed musical ideologies. (I'm reminded of the political theory that "extreme right" and "extreme left" are, but for a few rhetorical quibbles, more alike than different, and that the political continuum is more circular than linear.) With her music, it's the peaceful (and seemingly effortless) coexistence of the so-called "avant-garde" and the so-called "mainstream" that fascinates.

Now, if you read this blog at all you probably know that I think these aesthetic terms are bunk. Still, I recognize that they have a certain utility in discussions of culture: for instance, they help us organize our perceptions. Which is great, because, as it turns out, the social organization of perceptions is useful material for an adventurous artist to play with.

Consider the video embedded below -- perhaps with these questions in mind:

If "avant garde" is characterized by weirdness, is there anything weirder than this happening in music right now?

If "mainstream" is characterized by popularity, is there anything more popular than this happening in music right now?



I realize that isn't the most provocative Lady Gaga video out there, but come on. Is there not something vaguely unsettling, even dystopian, going on here? What with the metallic themes, the hard-edged synths, the robotic dance moves, the leather-gloved middle finger, the roaring crowd? Gestures and tropes that would be merely boring in the hands of another mega-concert practitioner (the Black Eyed Peas, say) take on a whole new valence. And it's one thing to experience this music from the safety of the internets, but I doubt there are many fans of even the most thorny "new" music who could put themselves in the middle of that crowd and not feel at least a little uncomfortable.

And isn't interesting art, to some extent, about being at least a little uncomfortable?