NYC diary May '07

While the space to stretch out en route is welcome, sold-out trains always wind up being more eventful. I wound up sitting beside two raucous teenagers, one of whom is a budding actor, who obsessed over their vices of smoking and drinking. In the café car, I overheard a loud gaggle of girls gossiping over their lives, and one of them asking if Canadians spoke English (because Mawntreawl is French). To which one replied, “Yeah, like Celine Dion. She’s French but she speaks English too.” The train wound up taking twelve hours instead of ten, and then we all had to get to where we were going. I felt too tired to haul out to NuBlu and check out Butch Morris’ conductions.

I wound up staying at a different hostel this time, in the East Village, a few blocks from Union Square. The immediate area didn’t really suggest anything to do – either walk the few blocks to Union Square or down to the Lower East Side. The vibe in that area was a little strange – it indeed felt like a village with all the small storefronts and restaurants, but it also felt a little lifeless compared to a few blocks down. As I returned to the hostel from the BMI meeting, a guy flew in front of me and wrestled down the guy attempting to steal his bike.

I was able to maintain my Tuesday morning bagel routine, at David’s Bagels on 1^st Ave. Afterwards, my friend had asked me to go pick up some coffee for her at Porto Rico on Bleecker Street. I walked the wrong way out of the subway, again, and wound up standing in front of Bleecker Street Records, a very very dangerous record shop with tons of hard-to-find (in my experience) R&B/soul compilations. In the tradition of many Montreal used book stores, a cat slept beside the entryway to the poster department. My coffee mission took precedence and I forced myself to leave empty-handed. I am convinced that Heaven must smell like the entrance to Porto Rico, with the various rich aromas of their fresh beans mingling together wonderfully.

Mike Holober ran the BMI meeting this time around, and once again gave very specific guidance and places to revisit. It was great to see everyone after my absence, and to hear what they’re working on, from revisions to new pieces. We seem to be having trouble securing a venue for our year-end concert, as Merkin Hall is under construction and some of the rental fees for other halls are astronomical. Watch this space, and/or MySpace, for more information. Given the calibre of stuff I’ve heard in the readings, the concert promises to be a strong one.

In my perusal of All About Jazz-New York, trying to figure out what to do this week, my first NYC visit post-Tonic, one listing jumped out at me: Eli Degibri, Mark Turner, Ben Street and Jeff Ballard at Louis 649 in the Lower East Side. Walking distance from the hostel, one of my favourite drummers ever who I’d had yet to see live, and a killer chordless quartet. I made sure to go. I got there early to secure a seat, which proved to be a truly wise decision, as Louis is smaller than anything I expected and was crammed to standing-room-only capacity. I only stayed for the first set, which consisted of an abstracted “Bye Bye Blackbird,” a backbeat tune (possibly original) that I didn’t know the name of, and a scorching “Walkin’.” Eli Degibri was listed as the leader, whose work I only know from one Herbie Hancock DVD he’s on. He’s a typical post-Coltrane, post-Henderson, post-Brecker modern tenor, with the requisite grasp of false fingerings and multiphonics. He was just flying all over the horn all set, and though there were moments that were interesting and promising, usually during trades with Mark Turner, I found myself paying more attention to Ballard and Street’s hookup. I’ve never heard Jeff Ballard play standards and swing for that amount of time, and he’s a monster at it. The second tune allowed him to unleash his modified Latin-influenced “Poinciana” beat that he does so well, and at one point he hinted at the drum ‘n’ bass groove he’s so adept at (Mehldau’s cover of “Knives Out” or Ben Allison’s “Riding the Nuclear Tiger”) but never went the whole way. Ben Street was really solid, and made walking solos sound interesting. I was fascinated by Mark Turner’s playing; in stark contrast to Degibri, the editing and process he went through was visible and audible, and the precise, intervallically diverse lines he played had such strong conception and conviction.

I ended my stay in New York by speaking a lot of French. At Louis, I was sitting beside one woman who lived in Montreal for a few years, along with two of her college friends from France. Back at the hostel, two French girls had checked in, in addition to the Franco-Ontarienne. There was a lot of confusion over sleeping accommodations, to the point where we addressed another roommate (a guy presumably from the South or Southwest, by his accent) in French out of habit.

PS: Happy belated birthday to Darcy. I arrived in town two days after his concert (which I am about to go listen to) and unaware it was his birthday.

Shutting the lid

In another crushing blow to the independent proliferation of creative arts, Pandora.com has been banned from streaming to various countries, including Canada (as of today). I'd gone through a love/hate relationship with the site. The idea, for those who haven't used it or heard of it, is to create custom streaming stations based on artists or songs with similarities determined by a bunch of music theory geeks in a back room. It can be further refined by user ratings. The concept is great, and has parallels with Last.fm or Yahoo!'s LaunchCast, but it has a vast database of music and may be the only one to purportedly deal with music on theoretical terms. My only qualm with it is in the results, and granted I'm a little picky. It takes a lot of tweaking because the areas isolated by the theoreticians may not be the common threads I hear. (It's also a bit disingenuous to claim all Brazilian music is related because it has Portuguese lyrics.) I had greater success with more minimal and popular forms of music, like the last station I created, seeded from the Jimmy Castor Bunch's "It's Just Begun."

According to founder Tim Westergren, the issue at hand is that Canada does not have an adequate license to cover what they do - it would need to be a nearly exact counterpart to the DMCA/SoundExchange combo in the States. That claim leaves me dumbfounded; between CRIA, CMRRA and SOCAN, we don't have adequate licensing for something like Pandora? My initial feeling is Westergren and co. just didn't know where to look.

The fact that Pandora only recently acquired the ability to associate IP addresses with locations not only befuddles me (as my blog's SiteMeter's been available for free for a long time now), but also raises the question: how does Pandora's service differ from Last.fm's radio features, or David Byrne's radio stream (or Kyle Gann's, or any number of streams I can get through iTunes), or the fact that I can listen and watch webcast material from various NPR affiliates across the US?

I've never come across an industry so entirely out of touch with the desires of its consumers as the music industry. As someone commented on the Pandora blog, "Other industries can only *dream* of treating their customers with the contempt that the music industry does." I've said it before: as a musician and composer, yes, I'd love to be compensated adequately for my work, but as it stands right now, the attention I would garner through having plays on MySpace, Last.fm, Pandora and various college/community stations internationally would only result in further compensation through gigs, potential album sales, etc etc. As a journalist and broadcaster, I get a kick out of programming music for whoever may be listening, and as a music fan I'm always into that one killer track someone sends out over the airwaves that is entirely new to me.

***

I'm going to New York next week after another protracted absence due to prior commitments and inclement weather. Monday the 21st is an embarrassment of riches that I won't be able to catch because of my train's arrival time: Montrealer Francois Bourassa is at Dizzy's with guest David Binney; Butch Morris does a conduction at Nublu; Ingrid Jensen's at 55Bar and Noah Jarrett & Todd Sickafoose's bands are at Bar 4. Depending on what time my train gets in, I may check out Ingrid or Butch Morris, or maybe just head on up to Smoke's jam session as per usual, with special guest Jim Rotondi on trumpet. With the closure of Tonic, I'm at a loss as to what to do on Tuesday night. All About Jazz-NY shows that Eli Degibri is playing with Mark Turner, Ben Street and Jeff Ballard at Louis 649 and Binney is hitting 55Bar again. I may trek over to Barbes and check out Slavic Soul Party.

Tactical manoeuvers

Professor Gann has an intriguing article on the vagaries of teaching and studying composition. He has described my sort of undisciplined nature quite aptly:

Typically, I think - and I ask this as a question - college age composers tend to have tremendous bursts of inspiration, and be almost incapable of composing when not inspired. As your psychology changes in your 20s, you start thinking less of individual moments (or melodies, or motives) and more about strategies for entire pieces (like chord progressions or rhythmic structures). Then it becomes easier to just sit down and start writing, inspired or not, and at some point inspiration creeps in and lifts the piece off the ground.

I tend to start with some sort of catalyst, some sort of initial inspiration, usually a melody or more abstract notion. Once that first melody is generated, then I can work away at it with a little less inspiration. I often find it difficult to return to pieces, especially if I've listened to a lot of music in the intervening time between sittings - my headspace and my relationship to the music is different. One piece of advice I've taken to heart is something Dave Douglas advised me at Banff a couple of years ago: never assume that because it's already on the page it's completed and set in stone, and that the best way to re-evaluate one's decisions is to re-copy the piece by hand. Re-writing it forces a re-thinking: do I really intend this? or is there another, a better way to achieve this effect?

In some cases - more and more frequently, actually - I try to set out objectives for myself to achieve in a piece. Sometimes it is a strictly musical challenge - writing reggae-influenced pieces without resorting to one-drop or dancehall in the rhythm section; sometimes it deals with a sound world or mood I want to achieve; sometimes I try to write a piece the entire opposite of everything I've written, like the one I'm working on now for BMI - uptempo and rocking. The success rate varies, and at certain points the music takes on a life of its own and may move away from the initial concept. I'm alright by that.

Gann wonders if it's even possible to teach composition, and the most successful composition lessons I've had dealt with process and headspace more than anything else. Usually it's one very simple piece of advice that opens a new door of perception. I very rarely write at the piano, or on any instrument, simply because I was advised to write as much as I could in my head and on paper and then move it to the piano if necessary. Later on, I found that if I write directly on Sibelius, I wind up taking the easy way out, whereas with pencil and paper the music is a lot more intentional. Michael Mossman, Don Byron, and Dave Douglas all advocate demanding certain questions of a piece before it is written, and by doing that one narrows down possibilities. I don't always start with those questions, because unlike Douglas I still do hear melodies in my head and indulge them, but once I hear those melodies I try to discover their universes.

I have had some very nuts-and-bolts composition lessons at BMI, courtesy of Jim, Mike Abene and Mike Holober, and usually it's more to do with the "lost in translation" pitfalls of orchestration than anything to do with the structure of the piece itself. Forcing myself to bring in substantial amounts of new material has made me aware of my clichés/formulas/preferences (the term varies depending on how self-critical I'm feeling), which is possibly the best composition lesson of all. I'm starting to self-identify as a composer though not solely so; I love playing too much to ever entirely leave it behind.

Lately, I've gotten into drawing inspiration from literature and film. Not by necessarily writing programmatic music, though. One piece I wrote for the trio, "Bella," was inspired by hearing Caetano Veloso's voice singing the Neruda poem (from The Captain's Verses) in my head. I "transcribed" the first stanza and worked from there. I guess one could call it a text setting, except it's not for voice. I had a similar sensation when I read Jorge Luis Borges' "Heraclito." I still need to set that.

I'm also tempted to try and utilize an organizational process I discovered by reading Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a desire buttressed by watching David Lynch's Inland Empire last night. Both Murakami and Lynch set up organizational structures that initially seem fragmented, but as they progress the reader/viewer becomes aware of their properties, and some sort of unity is achieved at the end. Well, not entirely - the clues are fairly obvious in both Murakami and Lynch, but they still wind up being complete mindfucks.

Square pegs, round tables

A quick link - Carl (Zoilus) Wilson has a rather thorough five part recap of the Experience Music Project Pop Conference, and raises many questions that I'd like to weigh in on at a later date. Go forth and ruminate.

Also, Ethan on this business of creative music. Again, I think we may be at a fallow point in the financial backing of our music, what with label dissolutions, rampant venue closings and the like, but creatively there seems to be so much springing up.

What I take away from both Carl and Ethan is that the rhetoric needs to move away from lamenting the disappearance of the old models - crit-lit in print, traditional venues/receptions/career paths of creative music - and embrace the burgeoning alternatives.

Filling the blanks

Apologies for the protracted absence again, dear readers; between rehearsals, gigs, technical glitches, and life, I've been away from the blogosphere for a while.

Most of my time these past few weeks was spent rehearsing with May Cheung for her final graduation recital. She put together a great band for the event - myself, Dave Watts on bass and Karl Schwonik on drums, with Phil Parenteau guesting on tenor sax on a couple of tunes. It was my first time playing with May, Dave and Karl. The last time I played with Phil was in second year. May chose some fantastic and challenging repertoire - the monster being a transcription of Kurt Elling's recording of "Downtown" off Live in Chicago. Written by Russell Ferrante of the Yellowjackets, the chart we got was actually sent to May by Ferrante himself, and for that alone he has my utmost respect. It's a deceptively tricky tune; it sounds difficult, and it takes a little while to grasp, but on the page it's not nearly as hard as it sounds. (Then again, I didn't have to do that bass-vocal soli.)

Last night, I went to see Fieldtrip, fresh off their Banff Centre residency and a national tour. Full disclosure: Colin, Pat and Mark friends and frequent colleagues. They've got a unique sound - a chordless trio with alto is rare to begin with. Colin's alto tone is very edgy, somewhere between Cannonball and Ornette, though he can get it down to a whisper when he wants to. They play tunes to their fullest and are equally comfortable with free improv; indeed, many tunes would start with a theme, break away into open improvisation, and culminate in a new theme or a re-iteration of the earlier theme. The melodies are quite tonal and almost traditional. Pat spent a year in Africa, and I may be projecting the influence of kora on his bass playing, but objectively, he spent a lot of time in thumb position with open string drones, and his facility has vastly improved since I heard him last (and he was really good then, too). Mark is one of the most sensitive drummers I've had the pleasure of playing with, and I always love listening to colleagues in their other bands, with a little bit of distance. I'm really proud of those guys. I wish I could have stayed longer, but I'm fighting a cold and was fading fast.

Tomorrow night (Tuesday/May Day), I'm playing with drummer Wali Muhammad, bassist James Challenger, and vocalist Sara Latendresse at Winnie's (1455 Crescent). It's a new residency for the month of May, wherein we get down with our bad selves and cover some old-school R&B and neo-soul. Sara and I knew each other back in Toronto, but I haven't played with her much since we've both been in Montreal. It's going to be a fun night.

World Skip the Beat Playlist 4/30/2007

World Skip the Beat - FUNDING DRIVE edition
Hosts: Shawn Kennedy & David Ryshpan

Milton Trio Banana - "Alegria, Alegria" (s/t)
Dom Salvador e Abolição - "O Rio" (Som Sangue e Raca)
Hermeto Pascoal - "Little Cry for Him" (Slave's Mass)
Caetano Veloso - "Blue Skies" (A Foreign Sound)
Curumin - "Solidão Gasolina" (Achados e Perdidos)
King Sunny Ade - "Mo Ti Mo" (And his African Beats)
Angelique Kidjo w/ Joss Stone - "Gimme Shelter" (Djin Djin)
*Autorickshaw - "So the Journey Goes" (So the Journey Goes)
*Kiran Ahluwalia - "Meri Gori Gori" (s/t)
MIDIval PunditZ - "Fabric" (s/t)
Natacha Atlas - "Buthaddak" (Mish Maoul)
Andy Palacio & Garifuna Collective - "Amuñegu" (Watina)
Fanfare Ciocarlia - "Ibrahim" (Queens and Kings)
Ivo Papasov & His Bulgarian Wedding Band - "Byala Stala" (Orpheus Ascending)
Balkan Beat Box vs. Mahala Rai Banda - "Red Bula" (Electric Gypsyland 2)
Shukar Collective - "Taraf" (Urban Gypsy)
Konono No. 1 - "TP Couleur Café" (Congotronics 2)
Ex-Centric Sound System - "Bring Your Calabashe" (West Nile Funk)
Antibalas - "Beaten Metal" (Security)

As evidenced by the link above, CKUT is in funding drive mode. Gift giveaways and pledge info are available at the link above. The goal is $100K, but every little bit counts to keep CKUT on the air. I'll be hosting a special Funding Drive edition of Jazz Euphorium on Wednesday at 8 pm, and I'll be joined in the studio by Gordon Allen (pocket trumpet), Fred Bazil (tenor sax) and Remy Bélanger-de-Beauport (cello) for some live-on-air free improv.

RIP Andrew Hill

The great jazz composer and pianist Andrew Hill lost his battle with lung cancer this morning. He was 75.

I was a latecomer to Andrew Hill's music, only getting into it around the time of his millennial "comeback" with Dusk, A Beautiful Day and Greg Osby's Invisible Hand. His sense of line was invaluable in my development, and something I'm still trying to incorporate into my music.

Remembrances at Night after Night and be.jazz. Mwanji also has a link to one of Hill's final public performances (if not his last).

Each passing year seems to be more and more devastating for the loss of masters. In this young year we've already lost Michael Brecker, Alice Coltrane, Kurt Vonnegut and Hill, among many others. I become increasingly grateful for every note I get to hear, and more so for the notes I'm blessed to create and share.

Have you ever seen the rain?

This nor'easter may or may not put a damper on my travel to the BMI reading on Tuesday. I'll only know early tomorrow morning whether Amtrak is running and whether I'll be able to get a room at my hostel of choice. I'm eager to return to NYC after an unfortunately long absence, due to other commitments here in Montreal. The piece I'm working on is significantly different from anything I've written before, so I'm curious to hear how it sounds. I had a sort of constructional epiphany a couple of days ago, and thanks to Sibelius it was easy to enact. Normally I write pieces top-to-bottom and rarely reorganize anything; that happens in revisions, post-reading. It's also the most "rock"y of any music I've written.

Some gig announcements for the New Yorkers who read this blog:
- Tomorrow at Bar 4 in Park Slope (7th Avenue & 15th St.), guitarist/composer Lily Maase brings her band thesuiteUnraveling, to the stage after a hiatus. She's a really imaginative writer; I got to work with her briefly in Banff a couple of years ago, and her music really pushed the limits of my comfort zone. I've missed her recent hits in Montreal due to conflicts, unfortunately.
- If I make it to NYC, I'm definitely going to be at Ethan's 7 pm Klavierhaus hit, featuring the music of Bach and duos with violist Mat Maneri.
- Tuesday, thesuiteUnraveling's altoist Peter Van Huffel graces the Stone's stage (such as it is) with a new project called Quartetto Cui Bono, featuring Canadian ex-pats Michael Bates on bass, Ernesto Cervini on drums, and Art Bailey on accordion with special guest violinist Alicia Svigals. I'm guessing there's klezmer influences somewhere. They hit at 10 pm.
- Next Tuesday, April 24th, fellow BMI-er Mariel Berger brings her Obsidian Nonet to the Bowery Poetry Club. I always look forward to hearing her pieces at the readings - she's a bright, vibrant soul with some intricate, intriguing music.

Manhattan on the Rideau - 04/11/2007

So, as Mwanji mentioned in an earlier comment, this past Wednesday Indigone Trio went down to the National Arts Centre in Ottawa to participate in a videoconference master class with Kenny Barron. NAC and Manhattan School of Music have this broadband linkup so that people performing in Ottawa can be coached by MSM professors. I had participated in one of these master classes a year ago, when the McGill Jazz Orchestra went down and played student compositions for Michael Abene. I attended as a composer, not playing in the band, so it was a nice change to be playing on the Fourth Stage of NAC.

The attendance in Ottawa was astounding. For the Abene master class there were only a smattering of people; this time it was standing room only, even with additional chairs. There were three other pianists performing: Steve Boudreau, from Ottawa; Hoyuen Lee from Humber College; and Victor Cheng from U of T. Both the Toronto pianists study with Dave Restivo, one of my favourite piano players from my old stomping grounds.

My participation in this whole thing was very last minute, as my fellow McGillian Chad Linsley was supposed to attend but couldn't, due to a conflict; McGill professor Joe Sullivan ran into me before a rehearsal and asked me to do it. I was under the impression that Alex and Phil were not only going to play for me, but serve as a house rhythm section. I didn't realize that the clinic was geared towards solo piano, so I felt like I stuck out like a sore thumb. It was all rather hastily organized between me, Joe, and Pace Sturdevant at NAC, whose assistance and patience were invaluable.

Barron started the master class by briefly talking and playing through his history, starting with a short boogie/blues excerpt, then a piece played in the style of Tommy Flanagan, Monk's "Light Blue" and a Monkish rendition of "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You." I was quite impressed with the quality of the transmission from Manhattan to NAC; it sounded like sitting in the first few rows of a concert hall, if the piano were miked. There were a couple of glitches in the feed, but they were sorted out in short order.

Steve Boudreau then played "How Deep is the Ocean," in a manner reminiscent of Chick Corea's solo excursions, extending and massaging the form. He also played an original impressionistic ballad. Turns out we both studied with Jeff Johnston, which isn't surprising given our similar tastes and biases. Indigone played "Day Dream" as per Mr. Barron's request, and then we played "Not You Again," the Scofield line on "There Will Never Be Another You." Later in the Q&A, Barron revealed that Scofield is one of his preferred guitarists, so we lucked out with that selection - the other uptempo choices we had on our list were "Law Years" and "Enumeration" (my original composition).

Hoyuen Lee played a very minimalist rendition of "It Never Entered My Mind," starting with a series of As in different octaves. It would have fit in well with David Byrne's recent "one-note" concert at Zankel Hall. He followed it up with "All The Things You Are," exploding and exploring the form. His citation of Radiohead as an influence wasn't surprising, but his mention of hip-hop was, as I can't really decipher what about hip-hop had filtered into his playing. Of course, solo piano + Radiohead immediately conjures the spirit of Mehldau, which I know is something I try to escape. No disrespect to Mehldau or Lee, but it seems like Mehldau is the omnipresent comparison for pianists these days, and one that I've gotten a fair bit myself. Victor Cheng closed out the master class with impressive takes on "Tones for Joan's Bones" and "Hot House," swinging hard in appropriate ways. Of all the pianists, he was my favourite.

Barron is a fantastic musician, but he seems to be part of a camp of players who rarely, if ever, consciously tackle aspects of their playing and, as such, do not (I'm hesitant to say can not) address issues in specificity. The comments he had for me were diametrically opposed to what I've been told in the past, so maybe I've fixed my previous problems too much. On "Day Dream," I left a lot of space and played the melody sparingly, as Jeff always said I took up too much room. Barron felt I left too much space. He advised playing with the soft pedal, which to me can often be a crutch. The soft pedal is a specific sound, and isn't the same as a soft or light touch. On "Not You Again," he said the trio didn't have enough forward momentum, a far cry from our days when guitarist Mike Gauthier called us an "energy band" and every tune took off, whether it needed to or not. He didn't really have much to say about Lee's modernist excursions, and the most specific thing he said to Victor Cheng was that his left hand was getting in his right hand's way (which was true at times), but didn't really give much detail in how to go about fixing it.

During the Q&A, after a ridiculously oddball question (some archaic piece of trivia that had nothing to do with the previous hour and a half) and some fluff questions ("When can we see Sphere again?"; "Who's your favourite guitar player?") good questions about technique and practicing came up. Barron admitted he plays a lot and doesn't practice much, and doesn't have a warm-up routine. He also said he doesn't work with his students on technique because he doesn't really have to - all his students have their technique in order. Alex asked him if he had any ensemble rehearsal tips, which he didn't aside from "play together more." Someone asked about balancing one's solo playing and one's trio or group playing, and again Barron admitted that he never really consciously worked on solo playing, he just had a bunch of solo gigs and figured it out on the bandstand. Combined with the physical disconnect of the videoconferencing, the master class felt almost impersonal. I don't mean to denigrate Barron's musicianship, but there's only so much one can get out of generalities. I'd almost rather deal with someone like Wayne Shorter, whose statements often live in their own little world - at the very least it gets the mental gears turning.

After the session had ended, I had the pleasure to meet James Hale, of DownBeat and Coda fame. He interviewed me briefly for a piece he's writing about this whole NAC/MSM interface, I'm not sure for which publication.

God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut

The venerated and controversial satirist, Kurt Vonnegut, has passed away at age 84. Unlike many people, I didn't read Vonnegut in high school. I went on a tear of making up for lost time a couple of years ago, reading Hocus Pocus, The Sirens of Titan, Slapstick and a couple of others, I believe, all in the course of one summer. One thing that always struck me about his writing - besides his casual yet dry wit - was how he sets up these running gags, usually catchphrases that recur at (in/)opportune times. Ethan refers to "So be it" in Slaughterhouse Five; my favourite may be the use of "the excrement hit the air conditioning" in Hocus Pocus.

***

Via Dan, a letter from guitarist and activist Marc Ribot regarding the closing of Tonic (tomorrow) and Sin-é (a couple of weeks ago) and the changing place of improvised and/or experimental music in Manhattan. He links to the collective blog Take It To The Bridge. Unfortunately, not living in NYC, I haven't been able to make many of their meetings nor can I attend the last hurrah tomorrow night at a club that quickly became an important part of my life over the past few months. If you're within commuting distance of the place, show your support for fringe music in the Lower East Side.

***

There has been lots of buzz on message boards and blogs about the social experiment conducted by the Washington Post and Joshua Bell. A quick summary for those who haven't been following: Bell, a fantastic violinist and one-time poster boy for major label classical indulgences, was "busking" in DC's L'Enfant Plaza metro station during morning rush hour. They then surveyed the reactions (or lack thereof) of commuters. The consensus in many a post is how ashamed North America should feel as a culture, that they can't recognize beauty and art when it's staring them in the face. Is there something inherently wrong with classical music that even when stripped of its "elitist" trappings and customs, it still doesn't attract listeners? I don't really feel like that's the point at all.

Personally, I somewhat resent busking. The idea of having music thrust upon me, without my desire or consent, is not one I appreciate. In five years of daily commuting in Montreal, I've learned to tune out the subway musicians and the blaring iPods, or at least attempt to. I make a private note of which buskers are halfway decent, but I rarely tip or even go over to them. (The one recent exception was a kid in Lionel-Groulx metro doing a passable version of "Karma Police," only because I would never expect to hear that by a subway musician.) But quite honestly, because I consume so much music between my own performances and rehearsals, composing, record reviews, radio shows and pleasure listening, I don't want to be bombarded with anything during my commute, be it Rachmoninoff or Crowded House. And if I'm unfortunate enough to be commuting during morning rush hour, the only things on my mind are:
- Where's the metro train? and
- Has the caffeine kicked in yet?

Would I have appreciated the musical quality? Surely, but privately. Would I have recognized it as Joshua Bell? Probably not. Does that make me a horrible person, or uncouth pseudo-aficionado of the arts? No. It just makes me yet another impatient commuter. And in DC especially, time is precious. I don't think some Capitol Hill flunky can afford to be late for work just because some dude was playing nice tunes at a subway stop, and that is the case for many of us. If I'm commuting that early in the morning, it's because I have a very important place to be, and it could be Oscar Peterson at the metro entrance and I'd still probably offer nothing more than mild bemusement.

I have noticed that on the whole, I've experienced higher-calibre musicians in the NYC subways than here. There's this Mahavishnu-sounding violinist in Penn Station when I get off the train, and I've encountered some passable alto renditions of Jobim in various subway corridors.

All I want from tomorrow is to get it better than today

A quick plug/announcement:

Some may know that I'm a big Bruce Hornsby fan, well beyond "The Way It Is." If you haven't heard his music since The Range dissolved in the early '90s, you're missing out on some very inspiring music, and strong piano playing. Today, Easter Monday, is a good chance to rectify that and to do a good deed.

Si Twining, proprietor of the fansite Bruuuce.com has run a "Daily Dose Day" for the past three years, wherein he uploads a live mp3 or other such goodie (rare demos provided by Hornsby himself, videos, etc) every hour on the hour for a full 24 hours. In return for his generosity he asks his patrons to donate to the charity he has linked to on his site. In the past, and again this year, the recipient has been the Merlin Foundation, helping them build a Multiple Sclerosis therapy centre in the UK (where Si is located). This year a second charity has been added - the Carolinas Healthcare Foundation for ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). The addition of this charity is at the behest of Hornsby's long-time assistant, Melissa Reagan, who has recently been diagnosed with ALS. I only had one e-mail encounter with Melissa, but she has been an integral part of the Hornsby organization and everyone who has dealt with her has nothing but praise for her. I wish her all the best.

So go forth and download, and if you're not a Hornsby fan, at least donate whatever you can. Later on today, Si will be activating Caesar Salad, the second edition of two-volume tributes to Bruce's music. Once it's live, you can download my cover of "Valley Road."

Been caught stealing

It saddens me that the 100th post in this blog is dedicated to the theft of instruments.

Patrick Krief, a Montreal multi-instrumentalist probably best known for his role as guitarist in The Dears, has had his jam space cleaned out, which he shares with a guy named Mike Nash. In the bounty were Nash's iMac and backup hard drives and Krief's white 1999 Fender Stratocaster, which family and friends bought him for his 18th birthday. The list, complete with serial numbers, is over at Krief's MySpace and enumerates around $20K in gear. He's offering $1000, no questions asked, in reward for the return of his Strat.

Robbery absolutely sucks, no matter what gets taken, but when it's loaded with original music that can't be replaced (in the case of Nash's computer drives) or instruments filled with priceless sentimentality, it cuts especially deep. Montrealers, keep an eye out in the pawn shops for this gear and let's all be aware and cautious of our gear and its surroundings.

The politics of fusion

Via Ethan and Dan, who got it from Jeff Parker, a great 1968 DownBeat piece by Wayne Shorter, "Creativity and Change." One prescient passage, below, reminded me of similar discourse around the height of the "jam-band" phenomenon, when fans of bands like Phish and String Cheese Incident also started gravitating towards Medeski, Martin & Wood, John Scofield, and Charlie Hunter:

When I hear a jazz musician say, "Well the young people—rock ‘n’ roll is their thing—they’re not going to even listen to jazz"—I think that they’ll change and grow up. Rock ‘n’ roll is changing with them. I’m hearing a whole lot of things from them. The "labels" are being taken off the bottles. As I said about the different scales, Western and Greek, it’s all one big thing. I saw kids with their long hair, beards and sandals sitting right down in front of the bandstand and they were part of a thing called jazz.

Speaking of labels being taken off the bottles, Hot Jazz meets Metametrics: Kyle Gann's impressively honest piece about utilizing external genre influences for his own gain. The discussion of the use of pop influence in classical music (and vice-versa to whatever extent that exists nowadays) hearkens back to Dave Douglas' essays around his piece Blue Latitudes a couple of years ago. The strength of a hybrid is the degree to which it integrates its heritages and traditions into a new creation. Even in the most irreverent music, there has to be some sort of respect for every element, otherwise it's shoddy patchwork.

I feel these essays are related, in the sense that the debate around the validity of pop-influenced classical music (read a few posts back on Gann's blog, or surf over to NewMusicBox) is fostered mostly by the critical, competitive spirit foisted upon art that Shorter writes about. The idea that hybrid music somehow demeans the music it's fusing has more to do with staunch traditionalism from critical figures. I know that in my own work, if I borrow external influences to jazz, I bend over backwards not to make it sound like a parody. One of the pieces I've written this year was inspired by the dancehall-toasting cabbies in Jamaica, but I did not want the drummer, much less the whole band, to play reggae. There's not much music more ridiculous than having 13 horns attempting to bubble and skank away in concert.

Musical discourse also needs to learn to separate the music from the musician. I consider myself a jazz musician, in that the jazz vocabulary and tradition is the bedrock of my musical education, and that a certain jazz sensibility informs everything I play, be it playing keyboards in a hip-hop band or writing for string quartet. That doesn't necessarily mean that my involvement turns the projects into "jazz-rap" or "jazz classical"; I try to approach each musical tradition on its own terms. As Gann mentions, there's a difference between writing a piece about (or a depiction of) jazz or reggae or hip-hop, and writing a jazz, reggae or hip-hop piece. There's a certain amount of dedication that varies between the two.

Late additions

...to the blogroll, that is. I've belatedly added Peter Breslin's Stochasticactus to the list; like me, he's a musician/radio jockey, and often brings up quite challenging issues in the state of improvised music. Also stirring the pot is The Improvising Guitarist (whom I long thought was the alter ego of Stanley J. Zappa - my apologies to both of them), with a fabulous cache of essays on gender, race, and identity within music.

A non-music blog (blasphemy!) has been added: Freshwater Mermaid, a fellow Montrealer with acerbic wit and great insight into local, national and international issues. If you dig deeper into the blog, you'll find excerpts of a novel-in-progress. It may well be complete by now, I'm not sure.

The mighty Helen Spitzer, who helmed CBC's Brave New Waves for 8 momentous weeks before the show's untimely demise, has left the blogosphere for now. Jesse Jarnow is on vacation. Under the Mediatrics banner, a belated welcome to Hank Shteamer.

***

Steve has word that Tonic will shut its doors mid-April. When that headline popped up in my RSS feed, I was stunned. Tonic had become an integral part of my NYC experience, and I will miss it terribly. I'm working on a eulogy for PanPot right now.

***

The final show of Indigone Trio's March residency is tonight at Le Parc des Princes. We've broken in drummer Phil Melanson admirably. 8:30 pm, 2 sets of original compositions by ourselves and other people.

***

The other night, I was working on a new piece for BMI at my local Second Cup, and it was easily the strangest crowd I've ever experienced there: two tourists, above and beyond expecting waitresses at a Second Cup, spouting the most disjointed conservative rhetoric I've heard outside the O'Reilly Factor (accusing the recent Quebec election of not having issues - I suppose health care and education aren't issues enough - as well as accusing Canada of being a lefty-pinko land of lollipops and roses sufficiently out of touch with the reality of the rest of the world as the US sees it)*; two women rather loudly gossiping about the ineptitude of the returning officers and other scrutineers; and one guy who, after intently watching me work, started rambling at me about various quasi-related subjects.

* - the true irony: these guys were sitting right beside me, while the piece I was working on was catalyzed by my friend organizing the benefit concert for Darfur.

Jot notes

- My review of the Boxhead Ensemble's Nocturnes (featuring V5 cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and Atavistic stalwart drummer Frank Rosaly is up at Panpot.
- Tonight marks the last of the dinner/cocktail-hour Indigone Trio sets at Le Parc des Princes (5293 ave du Parc, between Fairmount & St. Viateur). Next Thursday, we start at 8:30.
- Tomorrow, Kids Eat Crayons come out of the sandbox and invade O'Hara's Pub (1197 University). Our drummer/composer, Dennis W. Lee, leads a second life as a ska guitarist in Stepper, who will be joining us.
- Saturday marks another edition of Groove Night, featuring Indigone Trio bassist Alex Mallett making a rare appearance on electric. That's at Bar L'Oblique (1669 St. Hubert).

Les speakers feed et crachent

I went to see Karkwa last night, continuing the tour behind their album Les tremblements s'immobilisent. The last time I saw the band was before Les tremblements came out, so it was interesting to see what two years (give or take) on the road have done.

Karkwa's always been a tight band, and they've only gotten tighter. Guitarist Louis-Jean Cormier is still coming out of a sonic school of guitar playing reminiscent of the Edge or Jonny Greenwood, but his voice - as a singer and a songwriter - has gotten stronger. Their first album, Le pensionnat des établis, owed as much to Rage Against the Machine and Red Hot Chili Peppers as to Radiohead. Last night proved they're developing an original sound, and they've moved away from the funk-rock à la québecois (which they did admirably, I must say) and adopted an indie/post-rock vibe similar to their Montreal cohorts Patrick Watson, People for Audio and Pawa Up First (the latter counts Karkwa percussionist Julien Sagot as a member). Keyboardist François Lafontaine was impressive as always, adding to Cormier's textures and occasionally unleashing an actuelle-inspired rip or two.

Most of the music was drawn from Les tremblements, along with some new songs introduced and "Hold-Up" from Le pensionnat. I was impressed by their consistently creative harmonies and their willingness to extend their song forms. Both sets were introduced with soundscape creations (d)evolving into one of their tunes, and they tacked on an intriguing coda to "La marche."The penchant for odd meters has turned into an embrace of 3/4 or 6/8, and the genre-jumping of their first album has matured into a better synthesis of various influences. From the new songs they played last night, I look forward to Karkwa's future.

The color of memory

As have been rightfully linked throughout the jazz blog world, Mwanji's two essays on jazz and race are fantastic and important reading. I want to touch on a tangent of it that comes up in Matana Roberts' blog, especially in the comment from Jaleel Shaw. He writes:

I believe there are many reasons why we don't have more blacks at our shows. One is education. When I look back to my education in the public school, I wasn't taught about my culture at all. When I think about most of my fellow students, most of their parents weren't either. When I was coming up playing the horn, almost all of my music teachers in public schools were discouraging. They tried their best to make me quit and definitely didn't want to see me make it. ... So if most of the kids today aren't taught about their culture, their music, where are they going to go? What are they going to gravitate to?

There's two points in here that need to be addressed: the lack of respect or awareness of cultural history; and the accessibility of the music.

On one of my recent trips to NYC, my hostelmates were a bunch of gangly Swiss teenage (or early-20s) males. They were graffiti artists, with an arsenal of spraypaint bottles and Sharpie markers, sketching on pads at every turn. They were also avid hip-hop listeners, having gone on a crate-digging trip earlier in the week and playing tunes from their iPods when I got to the hostel. I asked them about the popularity of hip-hop culture in Europe, and they said that it was more popular there than in the States. Now, I'm talking about the totality of hip-hop culture here, the four elements that KRS-One and the rest of the old-school refer to: breakdancing, MCing, DJing, and graffiti. (The debatable fifth element would be beatboxing.) The Under Pressure festival here in Montreal every summer is essentially a block party celebrating those four elements, and at the best of times the crowd is half-and-half, but predominantly white. This is not a rhetorical question, this is one I would love an answer to: what has gone on in black communities that has prohibited them from respecting, admiring, and honouring their own cultural history?

MuchMusic (the Canadian relative of MTV) runs a 30-second spot every Black History Month, flashing the faces of pioneering black artists in jazz, soul, hip-hop, and rock. The idea is that without them, there would not have been any of these genres. It closes with a black kid saying "No way," and fades out to "kNOw the history." It's a travesty that anyone would have to be reminded of Prince's or Hendrix's contributions to modern music. At a certain point, it ceases to be strictly Black History and is more generally History, that shouldn't have to be relegated to a certain month. Christian McBride and ?uestlove both worried, in the wake of James Brown's death, that younger generations will remember Mr. Brown through Eddie Murphy's impersonations. James Brown was and is the lifeblood of so much music - funk, soul, and hip-hop to name but three - that it seems like a ludicrous possibility to me, but it may be a reality.

Shaw also brings up your boy, Flavor Flav, indulging in various incarnations of "minstrelsy" reality-TV style, in the 21st century, and Matana argues that he's essentially tarnishing the legacy of Public Enemy. I agree. Chuck D is still active, but on the fringes; Flav is a household vision, Viking helmet, clocks and all. Shaw and Roberts raise the question: can we no longer recognize minstrelsy? Do we no longer care? Why do so many hip-hop videos propagate the clichés of bling and sex, and any MC with real things to say gets lumped in the "conscious" camp? And this is in hip-hop, the lingua franca of modern African-American culture for 20-odd years. It doesn't bode well for jazz.

I remember something Branford Marsalis wrote a while ago, on his website I believe, essentially saying that jazz was something upwardly-mobile black people were supposed to like once they reached a certain age. That very well may be true, and it would also explain the "'black jazz is stuck in the mainstream and/or past' sentiment." There's a certain type of jazz upwardly-mobile 40-something Blacks are supposed to gravitate towards, and young Black avant-garde artists don't fit that bill.

The second issue is one of accessibility, which I've written about before. Never mind the interest or ability (or lack thereof) to teach students the history of African-American music, instruments cost money. Music lessons cost money. Conservatory training costs a lot of money. LaTasha Diggs responds to Matana's post saying that she had to pass on the Alice Coltrane concert because it was too expensive. Yes, artists should be paid, but I'll reiterate my belief that cover charges plus drink minimums add up to a cost that can be prohibitively expensive for the most interested listeners. It's necessary to supplement these concerts with lower-cost community involvement, like going to the high schools or community centres or whatever the case may be. If the listeners won't come to the musicians, the musicians need to go to the listeners. I remember in elementary and high school we would sometimes have visiting performers that would put on shows that dealt with some sort of knowledge or awareness. From what I've read about Matana's Coin Coin project, a modified version of it would be fantastic in schools. Jazz has to get out of its non-social aspect and engage its communities. That's where the AACM has succeeded.

Tomorrow is the question

Much is being made in the blogosphere of the current state of jazz, vis-à-vis education and marketing. I dealt with some of these issues earlier; re-reading it now, some of my statements about my own education are a bit unduly harsh, but the generalities of it are still true. There's a definite "meta-narrative" (to borrow Dan Melnick's term) being propagated among most jazz educators and students that is rarely deviated from.

Whenever debates about the state of jazz, or music in general, arise, I tend to balk at the amount of overly pessimistic rhetoric. It's not the music itself that's the problem: in fact, on a purely artistic and creative level, I think it's a fascinating time to be a musician. Every time I walk into CKUT, there's a steady stream of great music sitting in the New Release bin. Many of my colleagues are creating original music on a very high level. The problem lies in how music is presented, and as far as jazz and classical/"new music" goes, recruiting from outside.

Pat's right in accusing the IAJE of being insular. I think the annual conference would benefit from being run a little bit more like South by Southwest, in terms of being more open to the public. To attend the IAJE conference, one must be a member, or sign up for a membership upon registration. Music and musicians need to connect to the outside world and the community at large, and I think that's where the jazz/classical-industrial complex is faltering. Increasingly relegated to ivory towers and elite concert halls, it loses touch with the layman - and even a lot of students. Cover charges and drink minimums are often cost-prohibitive for a lot of interested listeners. The Village Vanguard has student discount prices, and I think that needs to go across the board.

I think a lot of people find jazz intimidating - not merely musically, but socially. The sense that prior knowledge of the music is a pre-requisite, that you have to know when to applaud, etc. To combat that, jazz needs to be brought to the people if people are not being brought to jazz. Indigone Trio's played gigs recently to audiences that never would have come to hear us before - in empty "rock" bars or at a quarterfinal of an a cappella competition. In each case, we have reached listeners with our music - not because we dumb it down but because we merely made it available to them. If jazz wants to cultivate younger listeners, bands need to get out to the high schools. Exposure is a wonderful thing, with amazing power. IAJE itself has even proven this -- in 2006 there was a percussion ensemble of middle-school kids ripping the crap out of intricate arrangements of "Spain" and "Caravan," and they had fun doing it! I soared with hope for the future generations.

Hope which is increasing chiselled away as arts education funding in Canada and the US is slashed left and right. I was discussing this with an educator friend, currently teaching at a high school in Montreal. I can't count how many studies have been done showing the importance of music in education, how it improves students' capacities in all areas, etc. Not to disparage maths and sciences, but it's not the be-all and end-all of education. There's a definite decline in the appreciation of culture, and maybe it's due to the lack of attention it receives in the media. I'm drawn to Frank Zappa's quote: "Your children have the right to know that something other than pop music exists."

There's also an underestimation of the potential audience, as listeners and as students. There's these "eureka" moments in music - very strong, almost visceral reactions. The opening of A Love Supreme, for instance. I can only hope to give someone that same feeling. And there's something about the "eureka" moments that arise from improvised music - be it jazz, freestyling MCs, or "jambands" - that are unique; the feeling I got from A Love Supreme was different than how I felt listening to Bartok's Miraculous Mandarin for the first time, but they were both very much epiphanal listening experiences. It's amazing what kids will latch onto if they're given the chance. I was 13 when I heard T.S. Monk's Monk on Monk big band - sitting third row, with the saxophone bells in my face, it was easily one of the best Hallowe'ens I've ever had, and kickstarted my serious interest in jazz.

And people need to be shown that jazz is alive and well today. Monk's music was being played, and re-energized, by living musicians - my introduction to Monk was not merely an artifact, and I think maybe my interest would have been less if it had been. As Darcy mentioned in his comments to Doug Ramsey's post, the biggest detriment to the music is protecting its past without presenting its present and future. [enter your own comment about Ken Burns here] This 13-year-old drummer I met at Cleopatra's Needle a few weeks ago is highly engaged with musicians that are working now; he's far more knowledgeable about the modern state of jazz than I was at 13. Let's hope there are more like him lurking out there in the morass of cultural apathy.

Linkage galore

- Via Dan, an incisive and insightful Vijay Iyer essay at All About Jazz. Finally, someone who can thoughtfully talk about the state of jazz (or any music) without resorting to apocalyptic hyperbole. I take some issue with the idea that music-school graduates are inherently more prone to "safe" music, and that if one struggles one is immediately validated as a musician (which Iyer himself equivocates).

- Via Ropeadope, Peter Costello's layman explanation of new tariffs on Internet radio in the States. Sadly, SOCAN wants to institute a similar thing here, called Tariff 22.

It seems that these changes serve to cast a wider net in order to implicate music sites, audio webcast, webcasts of radio station signals, audiovisual webcasts, webcasts of television station signals and game sites. Tariff 22 proposes a fee of the greater of either 7.5% of the Gross Revenues earned by or 7.5% of the Gross Operating Expenses of the site or service, with a minimum monthly fee of $200.00 for stations in our sector. It is also proposed by SOCAN that these fees be retroactive to January 2006. [...]
Tristis [Ward, National Campus and Community Radio Association representative] says that she agrees with SOCAN in the sense that all art has a value. Artists should receive royalties for the public performance of their music. She believes that stations are diligent about paying the fees to SOCAN. The problem occurs when SOCAN moves to ignore the artists’ desire to have their music promoted — something that stations naturally provide by webcasting their regular feed. The reality of the campus and community radio sector is that stations, faced with increased monthly fees, will simply be forced to pull their Internet feed. Some stations have already done so.
“Royalty collectors should recognize this,” says Tristis. “Stations in our sector are not in it for the money, often the people who are playing and promoting the music are volunteers. There just isn’t any fat to trim to pay for this extra fee.”
She also believes if artists knew about the proposed tariff they would not be in support of it.
“The kind of artists that are played on community and campus radio stations often have few other forums to get their music heard. Most of the time, new artists get exposure because of us. The webcasting offers a broader audience for the
artist but does not bring the station more money.”

Americans, write your Congresspeople. There was an e-mail address at CKUT on how Canadian musicians can protest Tariff 22. I'll get it soon and edit it into this post. Campus/community radio, and Internet radio, is the last bastion of creativity on the airwaves and we need to protect the multiplicity of broadcast voices at all costs.

- Speaking of campus/community radio, my latest Jazz Euphorium playlist is up.

- Indigone Trio hits tomorrow evening at Le Parc des Princes (5293 Parc, between Fairmount & St-Viateur). Our repertoire is growing and we're breaking Phil in quite nicely.

- We're also going to be the judging panel music at the ICCA quarterfinals at Redpath Hall on Saturday night. Two out of the three McGill a cappella groups - Soulstice and Tonal Ecstacy - are in the running this year; Effusion is sitting out after making the finals the past two years. It's always a kick to see what the other groups are doing: last year a group from York University did Kurt Elling's "The Uncertainty of the Poet," and as the judges took exceedingly long to deliberate and Kweku and the Movement exhausted our set, a vocal percussion jam ensued.

As a rule, I have tried to keep this blog apolitical. There's many great resources out there, far more knowledgeable and engaged than I am (like Lindsay or Craig). However, via Darcy, I've come across two very important pieces of legal/political news concerning musicians and artists that bear repeating.

Quick one first: An AFM bulletin encouraging musicians who have had run-ins with damaged gear or unruly airport officials while travelling with their instruments to email tperetti@afm.org with details. Doesn't matter if you're a union member or not, the more voices they have to present to US Congress, the better. I hope this extends to other countries, eventually. I feel especially sorry for any double-reed players who have to explain why they need to have gougers and knives and all sorts of sharp equipment on them when we're no longer allowed to fly with toothpaste in a carry-on.

A more intricate, and more disturbing story, courtesy of Carl (Zoilus) Wilson and Naomi Klein: Music being used as torture at Gitmo, and possibly elsewhere. I'll admit that when I first read inklings of this a few months ago, I laughed at the irony of the US government playing Rage Against the Machine, in any context. But Carl's right - now that torturous music is no longer a metaphor, but very real, it's no longer funny.

Unlike some European legal systems, the anglo-saxon tradition doesn't include droit moral, the "moral rights" of a creator over her work, which (among other things ) includes control over any use of the work that offends the artist's sensibilities. And I'm generally glad that it doesn't. Once a work of art is released into the public sphere, I believe, it becomes part of the collective unconscious, of popular/folk culture; compensation and copyright issues are trickier, but on principle images and ideas should be available for resuse, recontextualization, satire and even misappropriation. I don't think that the Catholic Church should control what artists do with icons of the Virgin Mary, or Muslims the image of Muhammad; and so I don't think Bruce Springsteen should have been able to stop Ronald Reagan from inverting the meaning of Born in the USA for propaganda purposes, though I wish people hadn't been careless enough to fall for it.

But musicians and music lovers' deeper moral rights are violated when the story goes beyond a figurative abuse of cultural discourse to the literal abuse of human subjects. [...] Perhaps the music industry could follow their lead, turning their attention from the "monetization" of music to the weaponization of it for a few heartbeats.

Some artists and composers do have somewhat of a droit moral, though, in the ability to refuse licensing, and I do not begrudge them that. In fact, unlike Carl, I think individual artists should be able to prohibit the use of their work in contexts they do not approve. There's a difference between a specific song and a global folkloric/religious icon like the Virgin Mary or Muhammad. The latter are concepts or models that artists work with - a figure in an artist's original creation, as opposed to an outside institution or corporation using an artist's work verbatim and wholesale. In other words, a more apt comparison would be using a reproduction of Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin for... I don't know, a cocktail mix label or something.