polemic time

I've been feeling crappy for a whole day so now it's time to take it out on the internet.

This is something I've been getting for awhile. You see, I'm a bit of a guitarist, and I try to play jazz, and I like to think I can play the blues with some measure of ability. And I listen to this stuff, and I love it dearly - you know, Stevie Ray and Miles Davis and John Coltrane and the Marsalis Brothers and whatnot. It's the great music of our century. So when I tell people, usually musicians, that I kind of like Lady Gaga they usually give me a look of disbelief. Naturally most of my musician friends don't like that all her songs sound the same and have silly lyrics and they pretty much assume I'm rationalising some kind of primitive connection to the music that's beneath my intellectual heritage. I mean, having listened to the Coltrane, how can you - to take a line from Christgau - continue to push that second-rate shit?

And there goes pretty much all of the great pop music that's being released today, at this very moment. The Black Eyed Peas. Lady Gaga. Outkast (good god, Outkast. I love them). Make no mistake - I do not rationalise the irrational. My attraction to pop music is not a guilty pleasure. Sure it's not a Love Supreme - but why need it be? Pop has sociological complexity which comes of the form rather than of the music. It's like how Yoko Ono's room full of sawn furniture pretty much lacked any classical beauty, but still managed to say something. Good pop today transcends phoniness the same way the experimentalism of the no wave and noise movements transcended ugliness. We miss that, us Serious Musicians with our 20th-century theory and our heads full of Schoenberg and African music.

And them come the accusations that I'm over-analysing. Bullshit! My material comes from the artists themselves. Elton John : The best pop is disposable. Andy Warhol. Madonna. Michael Jackson. Sure nobody can accuse Britney or Hilary Duff (neither of which I really like) of having an intellectual justification, but the beauty of it is that (as Yizhe rightly pointed out) modern pop is a collaborative effort more than any music in the past. It's producer, artist, song-writer, marketing team, record label. They sell an image. Phony, yeah - but definitely self-aware. And we who spend all our time listening to so much great music have made the mistake of only hearing music. That's the prejudice John Cage talked about when he said we discriminate against non-musical sounds - only now our concept of 'musical' is loftier. But we've missed the forest for the trees. Art is the overarching aim, not music. Music exists in the service of art. Pop is a sociological construct and I think it qualifies for any definition of Art anybody cares to challenge me with. We listen to Poker Face's 4 chords and silly lyric and we think 'oh, that can't be good. it has no musical value'. And that's a damn shame.

EDIT: Here's a great one. 'Fire Burnin' on the Dance Floor' - Sean Kingston. Haven't been able to get it out of my head since last year.

mental note

i'm sure this proves somehow that I'm slowly losing it, but I need to write this down.

I have chased the ghost of the moment down the byroads of rationality. I know them like the lines on my palm now and he cannot hide there anymore.

adam

hypothesis #2

That Pirsig book is a good one.

Here's another one: art is a product of personhood, which means it's a product of genuine understanding. Pirsig writes : to paint a perfect painting - make yourself perfect, then just paint naturally. That's an interesting thought. And I doubt he means personhood in the wishy washy, let's donate to charity sort of sense, but personhood as in the genuine commitment to quality in all aspects and in understanding foremost. I don't mean just the nuts and bolts business - scales and harmony and structure and all that (which is important) but I'm really trying to get at that Nietzche thing, the assigning of value. That defines a person - the willingness and ability to assign value based on experience.

Additionally, a deficiency in art is not a deficiency in skill, although that is a factor. It's also a deficiency in understanding that nobody is exempt from. In that sense our modern worldview is a bit twisted in its arbitrary division of art from everything else. Life and Art are just two sides of the same coin, and living itself is an art. That's just something I should write down before I forget it.

hypothesis

Here's a thought, brought on by Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -

We always think of musicians as performers. A musician's work is validated by his performance on stage. It's a widely held opinion that the defining act of musicianship is the stage performance (in the case of jazz players, the improvisation) and that practice is just a necessary preparation for that one act.

I think though, hypothetically, that the defining act of musicianship includes practice and the act of searching for what Pirsig calls 'Quality'. In fact, it could just be more important than the performance itself. In that sense, practice is as much a component of the art as performance. I think the musician should be distinguished from the performer - a musician is a performer but a performer is not necessarily a musician.

Just musing, what do you all think?

adam

I only had hopes for achieving some sort of necessity with music. Or maybe i just want to play the fucking guitar. That's the best sort of guitar, you know? but why is it so difficult.

adam

Lionel Loueke

That was probably the best concert I've watched this Mosaic season. I don't really want to compare him to Branford, who's almost an institution in the intellectual landscape of today's jazz scene, but I enjoyed the concert thoroughly. The spirit displayed was something rarely seen nowadays - a sort of urgency - i think necessity is the word, of the music. The best music sounds inevitable rather than contrived - it sounds like it's been around forever and all the musician had to do was discover it.

It brought to mind something Ornette Coleman said in an interview (and this is the smartest man ever to be completely unable to explain himself, mind) - that a B flat on a saxophone or a trumpet is not the same as a B flat on a piano or a guitar. What he meant is that pitch is only one aspect of the note, and that sound must be considered in its entirety - timbre, rhythm and placement being equally important and (in his own music) equivalent. Jazz is notorious for putting emphasis on the pitch of the notes. The more modern jazz gets, the more interchangeable its instruments get. I've heard the Coltrane solo from 'Giant Steps' played on steel pans, of all things. So last night it was a new thing and indeed a relief to hear Lionel Loueke not just play jazz on the guitar but play the timbre of the guitar as well as the pitch of the strings. Everything fit into his sonic conception, which had the joy of the African pop musics (a language I must learn) as well as the sophistication of jazz.

A night to remember.

adam

branford

I'm listening to him do 'A Love Supreme' now - and naturally, to compare anything to the original is futile. I think he sounds much more...vernacular than Trane. I think he's probably incapable of the spirituality of the original (who IS?) but he's an excellent saxophonist nonetheless.

He seems to be highly original within the context of that vernacular though. I watched his concert a few days back and was very impressed. He and his brother are capable of wielding the entire history of jazz as intellectual material. For example - listen to his treatment of the standard 'Cheek to Cheek' on the Contemporary Jazz album, where he dices the melody. It might sound like another bebop workout, but I prefer to see it as a reimagining of the concept of 'dancing' in the new era of music, and I think that intent was not lost on him when he was playing it.

I think my frustration with his 'A Love Supreme' is that it copies entirely the form of the original but misses the intent. Taken for what it is though, rather than what it tries to be - it's still by any form of reckoning a fine example of modern jazz. I'll listen to it any day.

adam

good ol' Neil

Old man look at my life,
I'm a lot like you were.
Old man look at my life,
I'm a lot like you were.

Old man look at my life,
Twenty four
and there's so much more
Live alone in a paradise
That makes me think of two.

Love lost, such a cost,
Give me things
that don't get lost.
Like a coin that won't get tossed
Rolling home to you.

Old man take a look at my life
I'm a lot like you
I need someone to love me
the whole day through
Ah, one look in my eyes
and you can tell that's true.

Lullabies, look in your eyes,
Run around the same old town.
Doesn't mean that much to me
To mean that much to you.

I've been first and last
Look at how the time goes past.
But I'm all alone at last.
Rolling home to you.

Old man take a look at my life
I'm a lot like you
I need someone to love me
the whole day through
Ah, one look in my eyes
and you can tell that's true.

Old man look at my life,
I'm a lot like you were.
Old man look at my life,
I'm a lot like you were.

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Even as I've dedicated the next few months to Jazz, it does me good to dust off some of the other records and have a listen. I love Neil Young dearly.

adam

Dear Joel

I just met you the night before you had to go, so it isn't up to me to put you at peace or to set the record straight or anything. But anyway epitaphs are written for the living. There is a kinship among musicians - I hope I don't presume too much - and any death in this tiny little community is a big one: It saddens me to think that now I'll never know you or hear you play.

Please give my love to Trane and Miles and the Duke. I don't really believe in the afterlife but who knows? For what it's worth, I hope you're somewhere jamming with them.

Rest in peace man.

adam

things i have learned from my friends

1. It is possible to listen to shitty music and still be in a loving, committed relationship.

2. people may, on occasion, when the season is due, in the fullness of time, have their uses.

adam