improvising guitar

seven things about TIG

2009-01-29T17:19:00.004Z

Another meme (this time lobbed from Mixed Meters). Rules:

Link to your tagger and list these rules on your blog.
Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog - some random, some weird.
Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blog.
~~Let them know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.~~
~~If you don't have 7 blog friends, or if someone else already took dibs, then tag some unsuspecting strangers.~~

Okay…

I am a lapsed composer.
…a club-runner by necessity.
…writing five articles this year (for reasons that I don’t quite understand (since my income (hahaha) does not dependon it)).
I have been blogging occasionally under my (non-pseudonymous) name for several months.
I am thus almost tempted to ‘come out of the closet’ on this blog.
…learning how to teach improvisation by learning how to be a student.
…discovering that I can be, especially with people whose help I need but have no respect for, diplomatic (and Machiavellian (and devious)).

Tag: DJA’s Secret Society, Force of Circumstance, HurdAudio, Scratch My Brain, soundslope, SpiderMonkey Stories, Stochasticactus…

Methinied Morricone

2008-10-20T22:23:00.001Z

I’m not averse to Morricone here at IG (I do, after all, suggest Cinema Paradiso as a melodic atom for prac tici ng gu itar…), but here’s something out of my normal orbit:

I would, however, never recommend Metheny’s technique as a starting point to any of my students.

Video via The Jazz Guitarist.

an sms conversation between two teachers of improvised music

2008-10-01T16:14:00.000Z

SOH: Any tips for dealing with the hopelessly terrified?

TIG: Ritual humiliation? ;-)
     Seriously, i recommend getting everyone to make
     the "least musical sound". Invariably what they do
     is still quite musical (and/or boring and loud),
     so you can push them to do better.

SOH: That sounds like a good idea.

TIG: Honestly, students - they think they should
     preempt the music.... :-)

SOH: These guys seem to think that they could be silent
     when they're asked to perform & somehow the
     improvisation fairy will visit in the night.

TIG: Improv fairy? Mwhahahahaha.

SOH: Haven't you heard of her? She brings freedom & fun
     & exemption from effort & lots of good shit like
     that.

TIG: Substitute the improvisation sandman who comes at
     night to take away your muse if you haven't played.

SOH: Yes, I will rule with fear! Maybe I should get a
     scary costume.

classical dynamics

2008-05-07T17:45:00.001Z

Okay, Devin Hurd manages to lob me a meme. I’ll bite—anything to inject a little actitity into this (temporarily) neglected blog.

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Wish I had a more (overtly) musical book at hand, but here goes:

Jerry B. Marion and Stephen T. Thornton (1995), Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems 4th ed. (Fort Worth: Harcourt).

As it happens, the would be fifth sentence occurs at the very end of page 123. Thus, taking the first three sentences of page 124:

Example 3.2
Consider a pendulum of length l and a bob of mass m at its end (Figure 3–12) moving through oil with θ decreasing. The massice bob undergoes small oscillations, but the oil retarts the bob’s motion with a resistive force proportional to the speed with Fres=2m√(g/l)(lθ̇). The bob is initially pulled back at t=0 with θ=α and θ̇=0.

Hmm… If this has a link to Devin’s book, it’s in that it reminds me of flipping through Braxton’s Catalog of Compositions.

Okay, I’ll tag a couple of musicians—Dominic Lash and Taylor Ho Bynum—who always seem to be looking for a good read (and might have a more interesting book at hand then a physics text book), and, just for a measure of insanity, I’ll tag sjz. I’m also going to lob this over to roboflutist even if, between taxes and recitals, I suspect she won’t have the time to respond.
Finally, to atone for the choice of a science text book (of the positivist, empirical variety), I’ll tag Zuska.

the grant application algorithm rev. 1.0.0

2008-04-08T22:17:00.002Z

For FS.

A very simple algorithm:

1. Choose ‘edgy,’ trendy words and phrases that the arts organizations currently love (e.g. ‘collaborative’, ‘sustainability’, ‘interdisciplinary’, ‘defamiliarize’, ‘hybrids’).

2. Lay those words down as if on a scrabble table.

2.5. Optional: get intoxicated / stoned.

3. Try linking those words to make sentences (actual resemblance to grammar is purely coincidental).

4. Make sure targets and goals are not measurable (how exactly can you compute ‘artistic practice’?).

5. Voila! A completed grant application for the arts.

…Yeah, I was talking to a theater stage manager who hit the nail on the head: “arts funding is turning artists into liars.” Too true.

opportunities

2008-04-05T17:56:00.001Z

There’s no such thing as a wrong note, just (missed) opportunities.

well, this is depressing (addendum)

2008-02-10T15:04:00.000Z

Dan asked for some background on the London Musicians’ Collective vs. Arts Council of England dispute. Most of what I know, I’d heard on the grapevine. While others have also blogged about it, possibly the most reliable info I have is from the LMC website itself. Look at the two articles ‘LMC Funding Crisis: January 2008’ and ‘LMC Funding Crisis: UPDATE 5 February 2008’. An except from the former article:

The LMC currently finds itself among nearly two hundred arts organisations who are having their Arts Council funding severely cut back. In December we received notice that Arts Council funding, which has always been fundamental to the LMC’s survival, will be cut off from 1 April 2008.

And the update:

Sadly the LMC has not been reprieved by the Arts Council of England, and our funding will stop from 31 March 2008.
We wrote to the Arts Council answering their points of criticism, but clearly failed to dent their intentions…. The fact is that events like the LMC Festival cost a lot of money, eg just one visa for a visiting musician runs into hundreds of pounds.

You may also want to have a look at some of the letters of support for the LMC.

BTW, apologies for not responding to all those who have left comments recently, I’ve been a little overwhelmed (if you can be a little overwhelmed) with stuff (including an upcoming performance with a former teacher of mine… time to practice).

well, this is depressing

2008-02-08T19:08:00.000Z

From l-m-c.org.uk:

We [the London Musicians’ Collective] sense that no one in the ACE [Arts Council of England] Music Department actually supports the kind of work the LMC does, and that this, rather than the war of statistics, may be the true reason why we are being cut off. This is further evidenced by the fact that no one from the ACE Music Department has attended an LMC event for the past five years, in spite of repeated invitations.

how dumb are guitarists

2008-01-28T23:07:00.000Z

How dumb are guitarists (at least according to marketing)? Apparently very, very, very (perhaps up to 11+ on the dumb-o-meter).

“Re-issue”, “classic”, “special re-creation”, “original… formula”, “celebrates a return”, “vintage tones”. (Not bad for a 130 word press release).
But seriously, ladies and gentlemen: strings that are “hand-wound slowly”? “vibrate completely”? with “maximum sustain”? and “warm”?

Give me a break.

the three ages of jazz pt. 1b: the nursery

2008-01-21T23:30:00.000Z

Continued from pt. 1a…

the early bird (continued)

We’re joking about jumping up on stage and playing free jazz for this extremely hip ’bop club audience.

   …At least, I assume we’re joking.

Yet another conservatory band later, MH comes and shouts something into BC’s ear. It’s loud in the club so I don’t catch the conversation, but as MH struts towards the stage, BC, while opening the sax case, turns to me and says, “I think we’re on.”
I barely have time to parse what BC’s just told me. Before I can ask for confirmation, BC’s picked-up the soprano and headed for the stage.

   …Like I said, we’re running on pure adrenaline.

I fumble with my guitar, throw the case onto a crowded table, realize I don’t have a strap (I’ve been a sit-down player), hope there’s a chair I can use on stage, almost collide with TL and the bass, stare blankly at a wall of amplifiers that (apparently) every band has contributed to. I plug into one amp, can’t figure out the controls (goddamn high-tech, German engineering), try another… TL launches into the bassline for ‘Lonely Woman’, I stagger from the amp wall, hoping that the level ain’t too high or low, and realize I’m sans volume pedal. Oops.
We don’t stick with ‘Lonely Woman’ long; BC half-heartedly blows the first A of the head, but gives up for some post-Coltrane ‘free blowing’ (I realize later that I’ve never heard BC be so straight). I’m far, far, faaar too loud.
And I have no idea what I’m doing…

   …at all.

We’re done, the audience, to my surprise, cheer. BC turns ’round with the biggest smile you’ve seen in your life.

At Free Jazz Central, I kept asking TL if my volume level was too high, and now I’m apologizing again to the bass player for being waaaay too loud. TL says “not at all”, but I’m unconvinced, and BC laughs that I’m the only guitarist they know who worries about being too loud. I make a mental note: try and be a little less concerned about my volume level in the future. (I’ll be reminded of this many days later when some of my less capable students demonstrate a inflexible sense of volume. But that’s another story….)

the vertical guitar(ist)

2008-01-08T01:13:00.000Z

Well, in the guitar / guitarist / luthier sphere there’s that never ending quest to finally reengineer the posture. Considering how old the problem is, there’s surprisingly little in way of lateral thinking solutions.I’ll admit I’ve managed to be ignorant of Paul Galbraith until a few minutes ago, but he does seem to have an interesting solution.

the three ages of jazz pt. 1a: the nursery

2007-12-13T16:27:00.000Z

the early bird

Running on pure adrenaline from the gig (I don't realize this until it start wearing our a few days later), we march off to to hear one of MH’s pal’s performances.
We arrive at the venue. The contrast with Free Jazz Central is stark: the age of the Early Bird’s audience is, on balance, approximately half that of Free Jazz Central. They are younger, but otherwise more visibly diverse (in terms of race, gender, but possibly not in terms of class and education ). There’s also a lot more of them: it’s a noisy club where conversation competes with the band.

The band.

Well, it’s not often you can hear the Aebersolds quite so clearly. I haven’t encountered such copybook ’bop licks in a long, loooong time. Kinda refreshing, kinda stale; kinda cool, kinda sad… also oddly mind-numbing. BC and MH tell me that the Early Bird is the platform for the local music school students. Ah, I think, that explains it.
The conversation later turns to the fact that, when we were students (in formal education), we were never particularly good with changes.

I’ll confess it now: I was terrible in my attempts at ’bop.

Another confession: I get a real kick from hearing guitar players who can play those long ’bop lines. Really, I love ’em. Maybe it’s ’cause I sacrificed/neglected that facet of guitar playing for others. (I hear a little of those long lines in some non-’bop players such as Berne, of course, but that’s a pretty difficult trick… and a story for some other time.)

To be continued…

the three ages of jazz pt. 0: middle age

2007-12-11T00:52:00.000Z

free jazz central

This gig was, well, not exactly hard work, but it definitely wasn’t effortless. Fun and educational, but it kept me on my toes.
Just before we start, I confessed to JS (the other guitarist) that it’s been about ten years since I shared the stage with another guitarist. Before the gig, I’d expected that impressing (or at least not pissing-off) the elders (one of whom a friend referred to, half-tongue-in-cheek, as a ‘giant’) in the ensemble would be my main concern, but by the end of the first set, I’m surprised as anyone that just about all I was worried about was staying out of the other guitarist’s way.
Actually, that’s pretty much sums up my tactic for the evening (and, I believe, JS’ as well).
Electric guitars are mid-range heavy. That’s fine in that ’bop setting in which the ride fills up the top end, fine in ’metal where the mid’s scooped out, but in this drummer-less improv setting, JS and I are in danger of creating an oppressive sound (especially as neither the horns nor the bass are going to add much above a few kHz).
After the gig, MH (who was there listening) tells me that all guitarists seem to have a love-hate relationship with their instrument. I respond that I love the physical/physiological relationship with the guitar—not every instrument rests against (hugs) your body while allowing for more-or-less full mobility of your arms—but the ‘sound’ (the raw audio content), well, that’s the problem; it just doesn’t always sit very well in an ensemble.
By the beginning of the second set, both JS and I feel like we’re running out of ideas. Between, Arto, Berne, Bill, Derek and Fred, say… or Annette and Keith… or Jimi, David and Sonny… isn’t that pretty much the scope of improvising guitar(ists)? What I mean by that is, as far as breeds of latter-day improvisers go, electric guitarist have a relatively small pool of models. At one point JS plays something, and I think, wait, I could do that too. I stop myself; it’s tempting, but I don’t think I would have been adding anything to the mix by aping JS doing a pseudo-Derek.

By the way, how’s this for the economics of free jazz: I sold a few CDs, but gave away just as many. Conclusion: it’s a good thing I’m not an accountant.

After the gig, a few of us journey on to witness jazz’s adolescent stage…

this is not an obituary

2007-12-08T19:31:00.000Z

Regarding the recently deceased Dead, White, German Dude, I’m not about to say

he was a swell guy
his music rocked
he will be missed

because

you gotta be joking me
okay, maybe exactly two of his pieces really did (and, granted, a lot of the rest were fascinating failures), and
hey, if there’s a post-War Avant-Garde Composer underrepresented and underdocumented, he ain’t it.

However…

…anyone who could compel the Arditti to make fools of themselves has more than a little going for them. Every time this Nut From The Dog Star managed to squeeze more funds from institutions ’round the world for his crazy plans, my respect for the man would skyrocket, but my view of those institutions would go down the drain.

the three ages of jazz: preamble

2007-12-07T14:54:00.000Z

the jet-set improviser

As the plane approach the destination, I’m looking over The City at night. All those lights, I think. Beautiful as it is (the interconnection of metropolitan and suburban street patterns, for example), I wonder how much fuel we’re burning to get that effect. Then I wonder again what my carbon footprint from this journey is going to be.
I’ll be reminded of this sometime later when I hear CH’s description (and critique) of the latter day “jet-set improviser”; I am, after all, flying in to sit-in with a band.

artful and artless

2007-11-22T23:00:00.000Z

In fact, just to double the article count this month, here’s something cool, strange, painful, funny, silly, as-serious-as-cancer, artful and artless:

tig’s november: blog 1, music 11

2007-11-22T22:55:00.000Z

Apologies for the lack of blogitivity of late (no articles since October, tsk tsk). Ever had one of those months where you’re seemingly up to your eyeballs in work (almost all of musical genera thankfully)? Alas, don’t worry, work is fickle and I’m unlikely to become rich doing this anytime soon, so tig will be back with more unplanned collections of thoughts and stories.

spammers: word verification on comments

2007-10-30T19:56:00.000Z

Why spammers should target, in particular, ‘the worst gigs of my life’ is beyond me, but since they are, I am (temporarily) putting word verification back on.

My sincerest apologies,

tig

lessons learned and have yet to learn

2007-10-29T23:52:00.000Z

Playing half a dozen gigs ain’t gonna kill me, but curating and co-organizing two-thirds of an event is really taking a lot of time and effort. The cautionary tales from AF and MP are echoing in my head (you don’t have to remind me). This blog has suffered from this administrative load, but, to remind myself that I still do musical things, here’s a short list of things I’m learning at the moment.

lessons learned

it’s okay to start in the same place (a lesson learned from listening, watching and following George E. Lewis)
The start point for an improvisation can be as significant or as arbitrary as you want. It is, after all, the journey (what you make of the situation) that we’re really interested in.

it’s okay to repeat yourself (from Keith Tippett and Julie Tippetts)
Let’s face it: even if you did exactly the same thing the context is going to be different. (That’s the reason trying to get the same effect as last night is going to end in disappointment.)

what i’m just discovering

sometimes the simplest interactive strategies are the most effective (from Cecil Taylor and Tony Oxley)
They are some of the hardest things to understand and the easiest to hear.

what i’d like to learn

take your time (from John Butcher)
It should be a privilege to experience the performance; why rush it?

something i’ve been trying to learn for over ten years

you don’t fill the spaces (from Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith… and Pauline Oliveros… and Morton Feldman… and Luciano Berio… and Miles Davis… and Noh… and Alfred Hitchcock)
I feel no closer to this than ten years ago: I have this terrible habit of filling up spaces.

w00t

2007-10-15T22:56:00.000Z

listen

Bob Ostertag’s new record is out. From the page:

In March of 2006, I put all my recordings to which I owned the rights… up for free download…. w00t is my first release to skip the CD-for-sale stage and go directly to free Internet download…. Please download, copy, send to your friends, remix, mutilate, and mash-up. And please support this attempt to build free culture by sending a link for w00t to your friends. w00t consists of a 50-minute sound collage…. w00t is a free, internet-only release. w00t was composed entirely from fragments of music from… computer games….

clouds of garbage cans

2007-10-09T18:45:00.000Z

I’ve heard that another teacher of improvisation finds that new students in their class play ‘chaotically,’ and that their lessons initially proceed by pulling back from that cacophony. It may be that this teacher (who, I think it’s fair to say, comes from a more composerly background) has different tastes / sensibilities / politics than I, but I have the opposite problem with new students: I seem to be spending a great deal of time pushing towards noise, encouraging the class to produce (to use that Braxtonian term again) “clouds of garbage cans”.
Maybe a better way to put it would be that I try and stop them from stopping themselves; I try to get them to exercise less a priori ‘tastefulness’. Many students come with a tendency to preempt the musical play (if that makes any sense). If a musician comes from a certain tradition (jazz, rock, country & western, circus music, whatever), I want to be able to hear that—I don’t want, nor feel the need for, their histories to be suppressed. And if the result is apparently cacophony, chaos or turbulence, well, I figure that’s at least an interesting place to be, and an interesting condition to interact with.
Citing Robert L. Douglas, George E. Lewis writes that

…Eurocentric music training… does not equip its students to hear music with multidominant rhythmic and melodic elements as anything but “noise,” “frenzy” or perhaps “chaos”.

George E. Lewis (2000), ‘Too Many Notes: Computers,
Complexity and Culture in Voyager’, Leonardo Music Journal (vol. 10), p. 34.

Recently, MLM commented on the similarity of approach—a heterogeneous sound world—in both the free jazz of The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959), and the Art Ensemble’s rendering (or appropriation) of Monteverdi’s ‘The Lament of Arianna’ on Les Stances A Sophie (1970). Listening to these, I can imagine a critic, intoxicated on the ideals of unity, coherence and integration, complain that the tuning of the voices are not aligned, the rhythms are not locked together; both Coleman’s group and the AEC are just not together.
Well, maybe, but beyond those losses—loss of unity, coherence and integration—what do we gain that may be of value? Both those (pre- and after-) harmolodics sound worlds are deliberately heterogeneous ones, or, maybe more accurately, practices in which difference, dissent and contradiction are not silenced (deliberately). Perhaps the (West European Concert Music) composerly approach leads to a kind of composition-as-censorship. In contrast, the AACM’s composer-performer approach, say, is one of of composition-as-facilitator, or the N.Y. Downtown’s composition-as-play.

Anyway, as a belated celebration of improvising guitar’s first anniversary, I’ll throw up that first quote:

What happens is what happens; is what you have created; is what you have to work with. What matters is to listen, to watch, to add to what is happening rather that subtract from it—and avoid the reflex of trying to make it into somthing you think it ought to be, rather than letting it become what it can be.

Anthony Frost and Ralph Yarrow (1990), Improvisation in Drama (London: MacMillan), pp. 2-3

an (unanswered) question

Is this analogous to the old debate in algorighmic composition which, to caricature it, revolves around two approaches to generative processes: start with some arbitrary noise, rich with possibilities, and systematically filter out the undesirable elements, vs. start with processes that ‘intelligently’ generate complexity?
The results, sound or reception wise, may be surprisingly similar, but the discourses embedded in these—the rhetoric that supports them—are maybe analogous to the debate I’m talking about.

And incidentally…

Isn’t The Shape of Jazz to Come a fantastic record title? What formidable ego could stand under that moniker? Is it tongue in cheek? Simultaneously humbling in front of the artform (yes, jazz is something worthy of a future), egomaniac (and this is its future) and pompous (Jazz-as-Art), it borders on the apocalyptic (who knows, maybe Darius Brubeck is right; maybe that was the moment jazz died ;-)

charging for free music?

2007-10-01T21:48:00.000Z

Just a quick question: would you still pay for a CD if the music was free to give away (e.g. covered by a Creative Commons Sampling License)?Would the opportunity to show (financial) appreciation for the musicians’ labor, and to own a beautifully packaged (limited-edition) artifact, be enough to offset the fact that the audio content might be available at no charge (and you can copy and distribute it yourself)? Either way, I’m about to start a little experiment.

Normal blogging will resume shortly… and this time I mean it ;-)

improvising coherence

2007-09-17T15:36:00.000Z

Just read a review: I’m apparently less “coherent” than the next musician. Should I be insulted? After all, I’m not the biggest fan of coherence.
…Or at least the pursuit there of, for, in a sense, there might be no such thing as coherence. And that’s the thing—there’re discourses, and there’re discourses—if the terms ‘coherence’ and ‘incoherence’ don’t describe reality (whatever, and wherever, that might be), but construct a dichotomy (present / not-present; have / have-not; coherence / lack-of-coherence) through which we make value judgments, then, back to my first question: should I be insulted?

And is coherence something that you can hear?

the worst gigs of my life

2007-09-14T02:55:00.000Z

Having put a downer on that event, maybe it’s only fair if I recount (confess) my least enjoyable and endearing moments. A set of snap-shots into the life of a musician / performer / improviser, I humbly present to you, in chronological order, the worst gigs of my life.

attack of youthful, humorless megalomania

AMC and I have been roped into a segment of a larger event by B.
Let me describe B as ambitious and far-sighted… but B is also overreaching and a perfectionist; a problematic combination that means hardly anything gets finished. In fact, I never heard any of B’s finished projects / pieces / compositions, only the proposals and pitches.
On this occasion, B had proposed a grand, bells’n’wistles composition / piece, but (surprise) it didn’t get finished in time. So B decides to rope in some improvisers so we can, like, jam, man.
AMC and I manage to persuade B out of the B’s original plan—one 30 minute improvisation—and propose several shorter improvisations.
No rehearsal.
Soundcheck takes far too long. I feel we’re pissing-off the sound engineers; not good, I think, not good at all.
The performance is a disaster. Humorless, shapeless, disaster.
AMC—even AMC—cannot inject any humor or lightness into the proceedings.

I fear that even our friends in the audience are ready to pretend they don’t know us.

I’m ready to pretend I don’t know us.

Recorded for posterity, I play this recording to myself (although I can very rarely sit through all of it) whenever I feel like reminding myself of my own mortality. (Maybe I’ll play this to my students.)

the stink

We’ve been invited by K to this ‘guitar and computer’ showcase (high-concept: let’s, like, get some guitarists paired up with laptopiteers, and, like, they can all jam, man).
I arrive at the venue with MK, the laptopiteer I’d been working with, and two friends. The venue is a dive. I speak as someone who loves dusty venues with an interesting vibe, colorful clientele, and a good PA system, but this place—let’s call it The Stink—has no vibe, no clientele, shit PA (and, I swear, a crack-head sound-engineer). It’s the end of summer, and The Stink has no ventilation—it’s hot and dusty in there—no windows, very little lighting, no bar. I just hope that the wiring in this place is good (I subsequently acquire a habit of carrying a power outlet tester, and wiring my gear with RCDs).
Nightmare. This is not why I became a musician.
There’s a guitarist plus computer-operator pair (I recognize them as K’s friends) who have decided to start their warm-up by doing a whole performance there on the floor. Noodling away. It ain’t pretty: it all looks (and sounds) very amateurish.

I go up to K. “Where do you want us to setup?”
K doesn’t make eye contact. “Oh, I don’t know.”
“Are you in charge?”
“I think we should wait for [the Big Stars] to show up….”
“Well, if you know where they’re going to setup, we’ll just stay outta the way—setup elsewhere.”
“Yeah?” K looks distracted, looks away. (Looking back on it now, I wonder if K was stoned.) “But we should check.”
Check with who? I think we’re running late here.
I propose a tiered setup—last act near the back of the stage, first act at the front—that way as the evening proceeds, we can just hop out of the way of the next act. K thinks that’s reasonable, but, in a moment of anxiety, adds, “but we should check with [the Big Stars].”
The big Big Stars are nowhere to be seen!
We’re scheduled to start within an hour. I try to make eye contact: “Are you in charge?”
“We should wait.”
“Okay,” I turn away, “you’re not in charge.”

MK and I setup on what appears to be the stage. If we need to move later, we can move later.
Because K’s prevarications, we start a whole hour late. The Big Stars, being Big Stars, of course do not turn up until their start time and K has delayed the setup and soundcheck until then.
I didn’t sign up for this: this is not why I became a musician.
The two noodlers who were warming-up for an hour, dutifully open the ceremonies by doing exactly what they’d been doing for the last hour for an audience that had been (unbelievably) patiently waiting, having heard it the first time around (thankfully, they only play for twenty minutes).

I cannot believe how patient and forgiving the audience was on that night.

At the end, as we exit The Stink, we get paid cash—pocket money—pennies. Deduct transport, deduct the meal before hand….
On the journey back home, I loose it, and scream that we’d been fucked, and that the audience had been screwed and taken for a ride. This is not why I became a musician.

Thankfully, there is no record of this event. (Although, prior to the actual event, it got listed as, if I remember correctly, the Jazz Event of the Week in the local free tabloid. Hahaha.)

free labor

New place, new people. Not getting paid, but the new place might offer future possibilities. (I’m being the optimist; you’d think I’d learned by now.)
Exciting.
I turn up. Nice venue (an art gallery), and the curator’s very friendly (although the initial phone call had rubbed me the wrong way: “Yes, I must have your music”).
Set-up is smooth—I get carte blanche on how and where. Meet the artists (I’m playing for an opening). Interesting people; we banter without doing too much of the odious networking stuff.

Then the moment It Turns.

The curator calls to me. “You know about computers, don’t you?”
“Er…um, well….”
“Well, let me show you….” The curator invites me to the office. “I need to lay this out in a nice way.” There’s some page layout that needs to fixed for the evening's festivities. “You know how to do this…?”
“Well, uh… maybe… um,” I can’t quite believe what I’m hearing. “Are you going to pay me for this?” I remind the curator that I’m not being paid for the performance, that the performance is already a Big Favor.
The curator is pissed.
“I’ll show you,” I add, “talk you through what to do, but… but I’m not going to do this; I won’t do this unless you pay me.” I still can’t quite believe what’s happening.
Bad feelings all ’round for the rest of the evening, but I still don’t understand why the curator was pissed.

On the other hand, I think my anger was justified.

No more freebies (I wish I could say that with a little more conviction).

thoughts from another concert

2007-09-13T20:34:00.000Z

This one is a bit of a contrast to last time.

preconcert

Er… where is everyone?

Uh-oh. I hope this isn’t going to be one of those gigs that starts an hour late because the ‘star’ is not here yet.

Great. It is going to be one of those gigs that starts an hour late.

Correction: it’s going to be one of those gigs that starts an hour and a half late.

Audience demographics: about 50/50 male-to-female, fairly broad age range (again, not many below their twenties, however), predominantly white.

performance

What the hell? Is that the best you can do?
Maybe it’ll get better.

Points out of ten:
enthusiasm: 9
skill: 3
awareness of improvising traditions: 1…

…That last one might have to be downgraded to 0.5.

…Maybe zero.

That was lame.

This is lame.

I’m reminded of my college days when, punch drunk on (re)discovering ’6os/70s Miles, a bunch of us tried to recreate the vibe of In a Silent Way. That was, in retrospect, lame, lame, lame (not to mention silly, silly, silly). I had though, until now, that the only reasons you’d do this was because you’re young and stupid and/or high on psychotropics. This night’s lesson: apparently I was wrong on both counts.
…And, anyway, that vamp-on-one-chord really doesn’t work without the formidable ego—a Miles—at the center.

Don’t show-off. Please, don’t try and show-off. You’re not fooling anyone except yourself (at best).
I can be a big a fan of muscular, machismo virtuosity as the next person, but if you’re going to do a mindless physical workout, why do you have to handicap yourself with changes (and we’re not talking Coltrane changes here)?
…And, if you had Miles—the ego—there, there would be no point in showing-off (in fact, you’d probably get fired for showing-off).

And why is everything in four?

upside down zawinul

2007-09-11T19:52:00.000Z

No, I’m not going to do an obituary here, but (via Night After Night)…

Here’s footage of ‘Black Market’ in which you can clearly see Zawinul’s keyboard with the reverse pitch-mapping. I’d heard that the piece, and that twisty, meandering, unusual melody, had been devised/written on an upside down keyboard, but I hadn’t realized that it was also performed that way (although, a little disappointingly, Zawinul reverts to the right-way-around for his solo). A pretty interesting example of a deliberate physical de-familiarization, and maybe an unusual instance of a body-conscious, technologically mediated gesture decoupling.

warmup: comments and responses

2007-09-06T16:50:00.000Z

Now that all that paperwork is done (at least for the moment), I can get back to this much neglected blog. (I haven’t posted anything here in about three weeks!) Thanks to those still reading this despite the sporadic posts.

…And thanks for all the comments (which I’ve also successfully, and with admirable consistency, failed to respond to).

In answer to my question about warming-up, David Ryshpan responds by listing some musical (“a major scale… that you go through different subdivisions of the beat”), borderline-musical (“first few exercises of Hanon”), and some extra-musical (“stretches I learned when I used to play tennis”) activities.
Another pianist Alex Hawkins picks up on the mention of Hanon, but finds that “the patterns [are] too ‘conventional’… they beguile… into complacency…”.

Incidentally, way back, when I did play the piano, my choice of warmup came from Brahms’ 51 Studies for Piano. Some combination of the position shifting exercise:

and changing hand shape:

There’s also the thumb pivot exercise, but this would be a riskier warmup since it could lead to injury if you over did it (it’s number 46, if you’re curious).
The position shifting exercise maps onto the guitar reasonably well. It corresponds to the one string melodies I’ve posted here—Jim Hall makes a similar suggestion in Exploring Jazz Guitar—or some upright bass intonation exercises that can be adapted to the guitar. There’s no real equivalent to the second exercise though (unless you subscribe to a Holdsworth-esque extended position). What’s interesting comparing the Hanon and the Brahms is that the Hanon is a little more mechanical—there’s an assumption that just physically following the tasks will lead to virtuosity—while the Brahms exercises won’t work unless you know what is being exercised.

…My teacher CL, however, swore by the Hanon. Go figure.

David’s reason for warming-up is

…not for any technical or musical reasons—it’s purely physical, to get the muscles primed, to avoid injury, and to get used to the instrument.

Seems reasonable, but does anyone disagree? A question might be, do the technical, musical and physical fall into neat discrete chunks? Let’s just say for the moment that they do not. If that’s the case, and warming-up is a combination of all three, what’s the difference between a warmup and a (public) performance? I mean, I’m assuming that none of us would warmup in front of an audience.
Well, as it happens, Alex finds that, “as a working musician”, he gets “from gigs all [he] would otherwise get from Hanon (i.e. a bit of a muscle workout).” This isn’t as strange as it maybe sounds, and I have on occasion integrated the warmup into the opening of my performances. (On the other hand, Peter Breslin, yet another pianist, notes the possible consequences of this no warmup approach.)

Pat, being a horn player, has a totally different take on the warmup process. There’s a part of me that envies wind players (and vocalists) in their approach to warming-up, but it’s an approach that doesn’t translate to a guitar or piano—we just don’t breathe in the same way.
That raises questions about the ‘character’ of instruments and the effect on the instrumentalist. Jeff (I assume this was Jeff Albert) remarks that

…extravagant and extrovert come out of a trombone much more naturally than subtle and introspective. That's does however open the issue of do we chose it because we are the way we are, or does it makes us the way we are….

Yes, it does raise that question, but maybe the answer lies in Jeff’s first sentence. What if I reworded it a little: the trombone rewards extravagant and extrovert playing. What I mean by that is that the electric guitar, for example, generally rewards (despite rock machismo theatrics) the delicate touch, maybe even “subtle and introspective”. There’s a kind of rule of diminishing rewards with electric guitars: playing with, say, broader gestures (e.g. picking harder) doesn’t necessarily translate sound-wise—something that guitar pedagogy sometimes neglects. As I’ve said before it’s often better to, turn up the amp, and pick lighter.
Which is not to say that instruments don’t come with culturally encoded expectations. Take, for example, the various possible identities encapsulated in the pianoforte. The instrument associated with Keithy-poo Jarrett’s tantrums, and consequently the debates about whether to read it cultural-semiotically as an enactment of class differences, or as a consequence of the ideology of genius.

It’s good to be back.

warmup: the rudiments

2007-08-17T14:57:00.000Z

File this away with Airto’s tambourine solo, Bennink’s shoe solo, and maybe Prévost’s snare ‘piece’.

I’m not in the habit of writing obituaries here—many bloggers have done better elsewhere—so I won’t other than to add that one of the things I found fascinating about Roach was his complex relationship with pedagogy and technique.

What I do want to do is a little more modest: I want to talk about warming up. I don’t buy the idea that playing, say, scales across the guitar’s fingerboard counts for much of a warmup (those who disagree, please let me know). I’ve used various warmup routines over the years (some of which I plan to write about at some point), but none seem particularly well suited for the task for the improviser- guitarist. However, watching drummers warmup, going though simple rudiments (single strokes, double strokes, flams, etc.), I’ve begun thinking about possible transpositions of these techniques onto the guitar…. I’ll report back with more when I’ve explored this further.

In the meantime, a question: how do you warm up? and why?

recovering from keithy-poo jarrett

2007-08-13T21:16:00.000Z

Apologies: this is a scatterbrained post that I managed to fit in my break from the paperwork.

Hopefully the above youtubified clip will help all of us (perhaps including DJA who feels he “inadvertently opened a can of worms”) relax after The Keith Jarrett Incident. (…But, no, I don’t know why Williams’ hands are never shown.)
Talking about pianists, thanks to the ‘HurdAudio Rotations’, I got introduced to the music of Paul Plimley who has a track entitled ‘We Got Noh Rhythm’.
This reminded me of when I was a (young and stupid college student) Composer (capital ‘C’), and I had this silly idea that, if I could fuse the ventilated rhythms of Feldman with the dramatic tone-deafness (and I mean that in the nicest way) of Xenakis, I’d have found my niche. ’Course I failed (anyone who’s ever tried even a cursory analysis of the above score-makers’ works will know why). I did eventually manage something a little like this, but in improvisation, not in composition. The sound world I arrived at was on parallel docks with Noh (what Zappa called Science Fiction Music)….

Apropos of nothing, Jeff Albert offers some fine audio recordings for download.
(Incidentally, in light of Paul Rutherford’s passing, a question: what is it about trombonists improvisers? why do they seem (grossly generalizing for a moment) more extravagant and extrovert? and why are half my—a guitar player’s—favorite improvisers trombonists?)
Finally, Andrew Durkin (under the perhaps unfair label ‘navel-gazing’) has a personal/political/idiosyncratic take on bodies and music (something that interests me also, but under a much more straightforward label—‘body’).

That’s my break from my administrative duties over: back to work….

the carbon footprint of musicking

2007-08-12T20:16:00.000Z

After all that angst, my schedule for the next few months is, despite losing a couple of dates, turning out better than I had expected. Some exciting performances coming up—new people, new places; old friends, new contexts. The only real bummer is that they aren’t in any kind of logical configuration, geographically or temporally: a gig here, a gig there, back to fulfill teaching duties, over for another gig, etc. Still trying to patch up some more dates to make this a little less wasteful, but I shudder at the thought of how many carbon points I will be burning up doing this.

Anyway, ho-hum, back to the paperwork… :-(

brought to you thru the miracle of electronovision

2007-08-09T22:42:00.000Z

From the mouth of the director of The Blues Brothers: “This is probably the greatest film performance of James [Brown].”

More commentary from John Landis: “Leslie Gore… was the biggest star there. She got the biggest ovation; she was the hottest act.”

“The guy who blew me away… was James Brown and the Fabulous [Famous?] Flames. I’d never seen anything like that before. This was one of the first U.S. performances of the Rollings Stones who were kind of boring after James Brown.
“…Mick Jagger looking 12 years old. …Who is this English twerp?”

Watch the trailer with or without commentary.

the audience vs. keithy-poo jarrett

2007-08-08T16:38:00.000Z

Apparently there’s a little hoopla about Keith Jarrett’s crowd control skills. In response Daniel Biro writes an open letter to chastise Keith Jarrett (via DJA). Like another seemingly trivial story flagged up by On An Overgrown Path, there’s something fascinating going on here.

I’m not questioning whether people were bruised by the incident, but who exactly is upset? It seems that those taking ‘the audience’s side’ are put into a difficult position of simultaneously having to say that each audience member is individually responsible for their actions (“it is a gathering of individuals who are put together by chance…”) while speaking on behalf of ‘the audience’ as a corporate entity.
And why exactly are they upset? Is it, as some are phrasing this incident, a matter of offense, or is Jarrett’s behavior disturbing?
I have (a) complex relationship(s) with ‘my’ audience(s). Not difficult, necessarily, and certainly not unrewarding, but complex. I think we all do, and maybe those that don’t see complexity (or want to wish it away) are hiding behind unwritten rules that may prove fragile at best.

As an artist Jarrett is sublime, but as a person he leaves much to be desired. It was unfortunate that we had to witness the schizophrenia of these two aspects.

There’re discourses and there’re discourses: I’m not so much interested in whether The Keith Jarrett Incident was troubling because it was insulting (the truth of which will no doubt be debated elsewhere), but because it represents a kind of transgression—a boundary violation.

I reserve the right… and I think the privilege is yours to hear us, but I reserve the right….

Jarrett didn’t know his place as far as the audience (or those vocally audience-identified) was concerned. The flip side: the audience didn’t know its place as far as Jarrett was concerned.
MLM points out that the modern concert going culture in the West, emerging from the context of aristocracy, gets inherited by the bourgeoisie—the cultural elite and the economic focus. In this model, the audience embodies the ruling class; the performers, their servants. Is Jarrett’s behavior being perceived by those offended as a revolt by the servant class? As MLM asks: do the aristocrats fear their performing monkey becoming uppity?
When Biro states that “antagonism breeds antagonism” is there an underlying fear of a kind of class warfare mapped onto musical practice? That the ‘ideal’ state of things is that we should all be friends? That (materially expressed) love (“people pay lots of money… to see you play because they love you!”) should be reciprocated?

I see that red light there, and that means you, you, you….

Alarm bells go off when we hear this story: the many is found guilty of, and ‘punished’ for, the actions of a few. We know this injustice all too well in our post-9/11 political paranoia. We smell an abuse of power. We can map this easily: many = the well behaved majority in the audience; the few = the small number of pesky photo junkies.
But who or what does Jarrett stand for in this case? The “sadistic schoolmaster”? The colonial taskmaster? The White House? What exactly is resonating here?

…Tell all these assholes with cameras to turn them fucking off right now.

Once, MET, one of my teachers, was obliged to attend a meeting with wealthy patrons. I suggested that getting drunk, turning up with a half-finished bottle of whisky, and trying to start a fight would make the proceedings less painful, but MET pointed out that they would probably respond, “how wonderful: a real artist!”
We would never have expected ‘gentility’ from Miles Davis, of course. The Davis I witnessed, even mellowed in old age, performed someone from ‘the street’ (conveniently erasing his privileged upbringing), pumped full of a dangerous male, African-American sexuality. If Jarrett’s ethnicity and sexuality were, from a reception standpoint, less veiled and confused we would surely have an easier time.
The ‘unacceptable’ language in question: why should that be a shock? Is it because we all thought we were in the presence of a ‘classical’ musician—a musician with ‘class’—who’s suddenly revealed to be 50 Cent? This is, after all, a performer who famously recorded the Goldberg Variations, whose catalog is sprinkled with classy sounding titles such as The Köln Concert, and who appears on that classy label that boasts “quality… at all levels… [and] has been widely recognized and… has collected many awards”. A label which, nonetheless, is transparent (read: identity-free) and user-friendly (“All that can really be said about ‘ECM sound’… is that the sound that you hear is the sound that we like”).
Who do we expect our performers/artists/musicians to be? And why? And what happens when they don’t perform as expected?

btw…

The phrase in the title of this post (“Keithy-poo Jarrett”) is taken from Cecil Taylor (“…I don’t listen to Keithy-poo Jarrett, I’m not particularly interested in that”) quoted in Brian Priestley (1991), ‘florescent stripper’, Wire (issue 82/3, December/January), p. 24.

playing irresponsibly: addendum

2007-08-07T15:58:00.000Z

One more borderline irresponsible thing I did that I forgot to mention in the last post: at one point in the performance, I set up a steady little pulse (a simple additive ditty). We went with that a little while, but when the drummer joined in, I switched to a much more elastic time feel.
By this time I had a feeling that the drummer tended to follow the ‘leader’—autonomy was not the strong point of the evening—and had a taste for the regular pulse (nothing wrong with that, I do too). I suspected they wouldn’t, but I hoped that the drummer would pick-up on that pulse, keep it going, even as I and the rest of the ensemble (who also tended to play sheep) dropped it.

Didn’t happen.

In the end, the drummer just sheepishly dropped out altogether.

Was I being a stinker?

playing irresponsibly: a moderately weird situation

2007-08-05T19:53:00.000Z

Just did a gig. The group / collective / band in question, for whatever reason, couldn’t get their numbers up. So I get a call: I get to be the outsourced labor.
In the end I only play for, I don’t know, five, ten minutes—one ‘piece’.

Weird feeling.

My playing of late has been divided between the solo context; ad-hoc, getting-to-know-one-another musical meetings; and reunions with old musical comrades. If you’re playing any significant duration of time (a performance that lasts, say, twenty minutes or longer), you really need to pace yourself. Especially in solo playing, it helps to be judicious with the deployment of atoms / gestures / lexical elements (a lesson learned from For Alto). And there’s a certain tactical advantage in holding your cards close to your chest in novel musical encounters.
On the other hand, the gig I just did (those five, ten minutes) was weird. Knowing that I had only a few minutes, knowing that I was unlikely to be invited back up on stage, I let rip—threw everything (well, not quite everything) out there. With all the chips on the table, I could afford to play a little recklessly. I mean, what did I have to loose?
Bizarre. Was that a responsible thing to do? Probably not, but it felt oddly liberating.

post-modern jazz guitar pt. 0b: 10 seconds of post-modernity

2007-07-20T18:03:00.000Z

…But before I go I’ll let you in on the exact track I was talking about: ‘Snagglepuss’, track 7 of Naked City’s self-titled debut. What was my introduction to post-modern jazz guitar occurs at around 1' 40" of the track and lasts barely 10 seconds.Incidentally, the partial album (22 out of 26 tracks) is available on iTunes (with the complete album promised). Comically, this comes with an “explicit content warning” label which, I presume, is for the album artwork rather than for Yamatsuka Eye’s vocalese (but, hey, what do I know; I have no window into the workings of the RIAA). At ¢99, and clocking in at 2' 20", ‘Snagglepuss’ works out at just over ¢1.4 a second. That’s not much byte-for-your-buck, but much better than paying ¢9 a second for one of the 11 second tracks.

we all scream for, er, paperwork

2007-07-20T17:53:00.000Z

“What’s not a priority… is those matters which are of less of a… not that they’re not important, but… if you’re going to have a front burner—which is where you want your priorities—it’s like cooking: there needs to be something sitting on the back one.”

from John Sayles dir. (2004), Silver City.

Call it applying for grants, fishing for funding, or begging to perform, paperwork by any other name would still be odious. Most people have death and taxes, musicians get additional administration (and don’t talk to me about college loans).
Anyway… the paperwork I talked about previously is in need of my attention so blogging will unfortunately be taking a back seat again.

tig will be back (with some luck) shortly.

But before I go…

post-modern jazz guitar pt. 0a: comments and responses

2007-07-18T15:41:00.000Z

A little while ago, PB commented that

…one could argue that all ‘jazz’ is post-modern, using found materials, drawing from the street as much as the academy, appropriating influence wildly… perhaps even improvisation itself is a thoroughly post-modern conception.

But, if anything can be thrown under that label, is it at all useful?
Mwanji Ezana asks if Jason Moran a post-modernist? I’m tempted to paraphrase Mwanji’s question as, is anyone a post-modernist? Or, in a form that might be easier to answer, is labeling anyone a ‘post-modernist’ useful / illuminating / fun / playful? My answer is a tentative no, it isn’t. On the other hand, if we’re interested in the condition rather than a post-modern aesthetic (whatever that might be), maybe we would usefully look for the post-modern in our listening / witnessing.
So, another question: does, or do the performances of, Agossi, Frisell or Moran elicit a post-modern reception?

Pat Donaher at visionsong expresses reservations and skepticism on the grounds that the post-modern tends towards valuelessness:

…Post-modernism… rests on the idea that no art has true intrinsic value…. And if you're ironic… you don't have to be honest….
…It's the guest at the party that oozes coolness, impresses the herd, says witty but empty things, and ultimately contributes nothing to the event. If that is where art is, or is headed, it's something I want no part of, and want to show up as a clothesless emporer.

And to paraphrase visionsong’s question (which relates to PB’s observation, and is similar to Mwanji’s question), is Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn post-modern? Well, maybe not, but, with a little work, we could hear it as such.
I am sympathetic to Pat’s desire for value in art, but I don’t agree that a post-modern reading necessarily lends itself to a valuelessness, its just you have to work much harder for it—you certainly cannot take it for granted, nor can you ever assume that its shared by others. I agree that post-modernism (like its cousin post-structuralism) offers a potential for a lazy libertarian relativism, but with a little care, I think it can also be culturally, politically liberating.

More to come…

post-modern jazz guitar pt. 0: electric authenticity

2007-07-16T16:27:00.000Z

Continued as promised…

When asked, in an article in The Guardian, if she gets frustrated by other singers’ approach to standards, Mina Agossi answers:

…Some people sing standards in the way that the greats did, with such conviction, love and authenticity that, really, it touches me. But if you ask me whether I learn something from that, or if it is something that opens a door, I would say no. It's beautiful, it's nice, but it doesn't touch me.

What happens when Agossi evokes, say, Billie Holiday (or any number of others) in her performance? What happens when I hear something of Holiday in Agossi—a singer/vocalist with much greater range than Holiday ever had? Not directly quoting Holiday, not mimicking Holiday (well, not exactly), and certainly not pretending to be Holiday. Nevertheless, what’s happening, and why is it electric?

visionsong impossibly (and fantastically) managed to get ‘postmodern’ and ‘authenticity’ to sit next to each other:

If there is such a thing as postmodern authenticity, then he's [Bill Frisell’s] it. He was embracing an eclectic mish-mash of Hendrix, folk Americana, thrash and bleep and blurp long before most of them were in vogue, and the times seem to have caught up with him, in a good way.

I recall the first time I became aware of ‘post-modern jazz guitar’ (or maybe that should be ‘‘post-modern’ ‘‘jazz’ guitar’’ or something) even though I wouldn’t have been able to call it as such at the time.
Bill Frisell’s sound I knew from some sporadic, and sometimes eccentric, appearances as sideman, most notably (to my ears at the time), as the quirky, independent-minded ‘other’ guitarist in Bass Desires (hey, anyone remember ‘Twister’?), but it’s his appearance on the self-titled Naked City debut recording (1989, Nonesuch) that marks my introduction to post-modern jazz guitar.

On some mundane, obvious level, Naked City was scatter-brained. Certainly critics at the time of its release, possibly because of a concern for material rather than practice, had difficulty hearing anything other than post-modern collage. On the other hand, in retrospect, it’s perhaps surprising that so little of the band had an overtly post-modern agenda: Fred Frith would return to that hybrid rock experimentalism; Joey Baron had no difficulty retaining his all-purpose bounce; Wayne Horvitz continued to walk the tight-rope act of downtown traditionalist; maybe even John Zorn’s taste for bricolage and sampling had more to do with the collision of Experimentalisms, African-American ‘noise’, and hardcore.

And then there’s Frisell.

Frisell’s interest in Americana, and, latterly, in cross-cultural (mis)understandings, displayed a concern for history that went beyond the temporal agnosticism of post-modernism.

Or did it?

Frisell’s deployment of those ’bop licks acknowledges history—of precedence—but it is not about authenticity, nor does it purport to be authentic. It ain’t authentic in either the sense colloquially used in the domain of historically informed performance (of which jazz neo-classicism might be a special branch), nor in the sense of an embodied authenticity as Simon Frith-ites might discuss in the context of popular music. This enrollment of jazz guitar history and practice is a strage and fascinating, perfectly crafted piece of… of what?
I’m not sure what I’m hearing when I spin that track (I’ll let you in on the exact track in the next part of this thread). Am I hearing a condensation of history (a collapsing of time), or a meaningless token (albeit free from the pretentions that dogs neo-classicism)? Is it a form of due-paying, or is it mocking the jazz traditions’ emphasis on cultural lineage? Or something else? or something in between? or a rapid-fire oscillation between states? I don’t know what I’m hearing, but the effects are dramatic (in that microcosmic moment) and electric.

To be continued…

an (unanswered) question

Does Frisell cultivate that shy, gawky, slightly goofy mid-western persona?
MLM and I used to joke that Frisell would meticulously practice his awkward delivery in preparation for introducing his band/pieces. Are questions of authenticity relevant to Frisell’s persona? Is it an act? Is persona (or identity) performance?

…and two questions from last time

What is, or what is constructed by the label, post-modern jazz?
Is, or do you find, post-modern jazz to be a positive development?

thoughts from a concert

2007-07-09T20:44:00.000Z

preconcert

Does TA know everyone in this town?

Audience demographics: about 3-to-1 male-to-female, fairly broad age range (possibly not many below their twenties, however), predominantly white (although I’ve seen worse).

support act

That’s a strange choice for a support band.
Do large (very much formal) venues have separate committees for the A and B acts? Do these committees program their acts largely independently, and then try and match the acts as best as possible?
I enjoyed performances by this band in the past, but I’ve brought the wrong set of ears tonight.

MLM’s comment: “I’d hate to be in their shoes.”

Oh god. I hope those balloons weren’t meant as a homage.

main performance

I am so glad I could witness this. [Warning: upcoming tasteless comment] I am in the presence of giants.
Interesting tactics: elements that ‘sound’ serendipitous are actually prepared, each musician picking-up on, and capitalizing on, cues from the other, (retroactively) making it sound like their individual gestures are internally consistent while ‘magically’ matching each other’s.
I know a lot of their moves. Not enough for it to be useful if I were (heaven forbid) on stage with them, and certainly not in the way they can (ir)rationally respond and anticipate each other, but, nonetheless, I know a lot of their moves.
I wish my students were here.

Wow.
Wow! That was cool!

They’re using a tape…?
Is that a tape part…?
…no…?
…that’s the clarinet?!?
Oh. My. God. If you can do that with a clarinet, why would anyone want to (or be compelled to) use a laptop?
I am in the presence of giants. [Apologies for that second tasteless outburst.]
I am lost in the moment.
Questions: does being in the position of having played with the two nominal ‘leaders’ (with formidable egos) put you in the position of negotiator / mediator? Does that position endow you with privileges / powers / controls / responsibilities—look one way, one possible ensemble; look the other, another?
Power flows though the negotiator. MLM: “But he’s hardly playing anything.”
This is dense: compelling, complex, and flying dangerously and dramatically close to the moosh.
I see logic in the choice of reeds. During this dense moment, a sopranino will hover far, far above the rest of the ensemble’s sound space, out of everyone’s way.
How the hell do you break out of this noise? What could possibly put the breaks on this system without creating an anti-climax?
That’s how.
A ‘false’ ending, and / but a little tactical flourish to put the breaks down. (And—feels almost magical—the audience conspires on this ending.)

Man, it doesn’t get much better than this.

final comments

MLM: “So many people walked out.”

I recall AF (a fine sound engineer for this and related genera of musics) critiquing engineers who mix with the expectation of a foreground (solo) and a background (accompaniment). Same problem dogged some of the earlier moments of this performance. Flatten the levels and let the audience do the mixing.

post-modern jazz guitar (preamble)

2007-07-06T14:35:00.000Z

I’m out of town (always a little strange to be traveling without being weighed down by a guitar and amp) so I’ll be offblog for a few days. When I return, I plan to write on the subject of ‘post-modern jazz (guitar)’, so…

a couple of questions for y’all

What is, or what is constructed by the label, post-modern jazz?
It’s not at all a straightforward thing to use the ‘post-modern’ moniker in place of other labels (‘classicism’, ‘expressionism’, ‘orientalism’, etc.). The (informal? tenuous? hostile?) relationship between (cultural) modernism and (social) modernity finds no correlating expression between post-modernism and post-modernity. How can the post-modern stand for an aesthetic or sensibility? it is, after all, a condition, not a era or a milieu.
Of course, none of that stops us from trying.

Is, or do you find, post-modern jazz to be a positive development?
I’m curious about your reaction to post-modern jazz (whatever that is, and if such a thing exists): positive, negative, indifferent?

i declare this myspace

2007-07-04T17:53:00.000Z

What better way to mark the 4th of July but by announcing improvising guitar’s pledge to be part of Rupert Murdoch’s Empire (albeit a small, confused peninsula somewhat removed from the centers of colonial influence)—the Empire responsible for possibly the silliest expression of patriotism. (I almost can’t believe that I’m doing this; am I not getting a little old for this stuff? social networking? pah!)
Nevertheless, it is with almost patriotic pride (of the “patriotism swells in the heart of the American Bear” variety) that improvising guitar announces a MySpace presence:

www.myspace.com/improvisingguitar

my little downbeat readers poll

2007-07-01T18:08:00.000Z

Hey kids! It’s that time of year to try and think of obscure stuff to clog up the pipes at DownBeat Central. I list my weirder and more odd-ball [ed. can things be more/less odd-ball?] choices. Now ‘weird’ and ‘odd-ball’ in this situation means that these will never get past the first stage (not that that’s exactly difficult in regards to DownBeat Central).

1. Hall of Fame: Pauline Oliveros
2. Jazz Artist: Mina Agossi
3. Jazz Album: Anthony Braxton & Fred Frith, Duo (Victoriaville) 2005 [pdf] (Victo)
…
5. Jazz Group: Green Room [pdf]
…
17. Electric Keyboard/Synthesizer: Bob Ostertag
…
21. Percussion: Thomas Strønen
…
23. Miscellaneous Instrument: Laetitia Sonami (everyday and not-so-everyday technologies)
…
25. Female Vocalist: Petra Haden
…

I’m sure you kids can do much better that I did, but remember, you have to follow the letter of the law (to hell with the spirit, eh).

index 06–30–2007

2007-06-30T17:45:00.000Z

A partial and selective index of articles, posts and other detritus. Only covers posts up to and including June 30th 2007.

labels/keywords

tutorials

harmonics

harmonics pt. 0, the physics of
harmonics pt. 1: where are they?
harmonics pt. 2, the picking hand and
harmonics pt. 3: cataloging and improvisation
harmonics pt. 4…

playing in position

training (the) quartet

training (the) quartet pt. 0: why four?
training (the) quartet pt. 1: protocol of mirroring
training (the) quartet pt. 1.1: protocol of affinity
training (the) quartet pt. 2: network topologies
training (the) quartet pt. 3… (forthcoming)

articles

the closed laptop

the closed laptop pt. 0: a cautionary tale of performance practice
the closed laptop pt. 1: i/o? what i/o?
the closed laptop pt. 2a: deliver us from our bodies
the closed laptop pt. 2b… (forthcoming)

practicing

practicing: the journey (and the destination)
practicing: systems, routines and shake-ups

solo

solo: alone together
solo: writing about music is like…
solo: niche in the ecology
solo: my humble lexicon
solo: primary territories

technological dramas

technological dramas pt. 0: piano mobility
technological dramas pt. 1: performing ‘normal’
technological dramas pt. 2… (forthcoming)

what’s in a name?

what’s in a name: free improvisation
what’s in a name: non-idiomatic vs. pan-idiomatic
what’s in a name: non-idiomatic improvisation
what’s in a name: the j-word

informal threads

canons and canonizing

an application of the principles of canon formation
an application of the principles of canon formation II
race: how many of us are just visiting?
the best of jazz of the 2010s
ten reasons lists might be trouble
See also ‘what’s in a name?’.

cyborgs and cyborgism

the (finite?) instrument
the instrument: of cyborgs and performance
keith rowe: an appreciation
See also ‘solo’ and ‘technological dramas’.

society in miniature

group improvisation: a question of leader(ship)
structur(e|ing): towards a music(ology) of verbs
society-in-miniature: diplomacy
‘society-in-miniature’? but where does the stage end?
mob behavior and the hegemonic impulse
See also ‘why improvise?’, ‘cyborgs and cyborgism’, ‘tactics and structurings’ and ‘training (the) quartet’.

tactics and structurings

limits and boundaries, purpose of
limits and boundaries: wikiality
structur(e|ing): towards a music(ology) of verbs
from the road: novel social structur(e|ing)s
endings: or engineering serendipity
learn a few moves, and make up the rest
engineering ritual: a curious case of the body in concert
structure|ings: engineering serendipity
contrasts and juxtapositions
mob behavior and the hegemonic impulse
the art of persuasion
‘responsible’ listening
See also ‘cyborgs and cyborgism’, ‘solo’ and ‘training (the) quartet’.

why improvise?

why improvise?
why improvise? redux
why improvise? the leap off the edge

most commented

society-in-miniature: diplomacy
structure|ings: engineering serendipity
what’s in a name: non-idiomatic improvisation
daily recommended traditional intake
an application of the principles of canon formation II
some observations i brought home

labels/keywords

audience, body, composition, group, guitar, identity, instrument, interaction, listening, pedagogy, score, social, solo, strategy, technique, terminology, tradition, tutorial

sidebar links, overhaul of

2007-06-29T14:14:00.000Z

Here’s the long overdue overhaul of the sidebar links.
Blogroll: Since I don’t like to remove items from it, I’m maybe a little overcautious about adding stuff to the blogroll. Talking of which, it’s farewell to Bagatellen since I discovered that, while it dutifully arrives in my feed reader, I only ever read an article once in a blue moon. For the moment, the sidebar blog links starts at AvantUrb and ends with Settled In Shipping, but there’s some other music related stuff in my sand box, so more will be added….
I’ve deleted the links to the AACM, the LMC, European Free Improvisation, etc. I figure that most of the readers of this blog knows about them anyway, and there are much better hubs for these kinds of links anyway. (I’ve, however, kept the links to various guitarists for the time being.)
Anyway, enjoy, but remember, links are not to be taken internally.

tig

thumb as fulcrum

2007-06-28T18:50:00.000Z

Well, I have to admit this is a pretty good introduction to string bending from (and I can’t quite believe I’m citing this) Berkleemusic.

Only (very minor) point I would make is that it isn’t really your wrist that’s doing the bending, but your arm while using the thumb over the neck as a fulcrum.
(Via A Guitar Teacher’s Lesson Notebook.)

doppelgänger from a parallel plane

2007-06-25T15:46:00.000Z

By the way, earlier this year something very much like this happened…

“You were at Barcelona!”
“Uh, Barcelona? Er… no.”
“Yes, ICMC 2005.”
“Heh. Uh, no, you’ve got the wrong person.”
“Yes.”
“Uh, no….”
“Then where did we meet?”
“Did we meet?”

And a couple of months later…

“Hi. How’re you doing?”
“?”
“We met in Barcelona—ICMC…?”
“Okay, Okay. You’re confusing me with someone else….”
“No… really?”
“I know this for a fact ’cause I’ve never been to Barcelona nor have I been to an ICMC.”

That’s happened twice so, although it’s not quite like the other incident, now I know I have an evil twin sibling.

technological dramas pt. 1: performing ‘normal’

2007-06-20T20:10:00.000Z

Continued (after delays ’caused by various reasons) from part 0…

There’s a remarkable scene that closes David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence in which, without giving too much away, a group of people go about the business of being a (white, heterosexual, middle-class, middle-American, nuclear) family. A classic elephant in the living room moment, the family performs normality despite pressures and stresses that have conspired to prevent it. In the most accomplished Cronenbergian fashion, the normal Hollywood trope of a ‘family overcoming despite insurmountable odds’ is given a simultaneously beautiful, almost unbearably sweet, tragic, elegiac, vaguely sinister, vaguely comic portrayal.
The thing that makes, in my mind, the scene stand out (in comparison to the multitude of similar moments in cinema) is that the characters know—are fully consciously engaged in the conspiracy—that this is performance. This pantomime act is no less real than the middle-Americana presented earlier in the movie—the earlier performances of heterosexuality, of middle-classness, of whiteness, were always already performances—but the stresses and strains have blown open the invisible markers of ‘normality’ making a return to it a deliberate and methodical process.

As I explored in part 0, Steinway & Sons’ (‘For over 150 years, Steinway has made the world’s finest pianos—and inspired the artists who make them sing’) myth is relatively straightforward, if, perhaps, at first glance bizarre in its own way. In contrast, Yamaha Pianos’ (‘Over 100 Years of Tradition and Innovation’) story, though seemingly straightforward, turns out to be a little more oblique and interesting.
Load up the ‘Piano & Digital Pianos’ page of the Yamaha Corporation of America, and you will be greeted by one of three images:Who are these characters? Why, and how, are they being enrolled into Yamaha’s narrative(s)?
Who’s that in the tux? Is that a concert pianist? A cocktail pianist? A lounge entertainer? I can’t imagine that that image is supposed to attract musicians, but perhaps it resonates with hotel owners. Who else might this image be decipherable to?
The image on the right: a woman admiring the keys while her companions chitchat and sip white wine (champagne?). This may be one possible expression of (imagined) white, middle-class normativity.
What’s depicted in that left-most image? A family, sure. A nuclear family: yes, a representation of a heterosexual ideal. A white, nuclear family. And judging from the architecture, an (upper?) middle class, white, nuclear family. In impressive shorthand, this image seems to encapsulate an idealized, hoped-for, form of identity.
Idealized in the sense that it doesn’t really matter if this image corresponds in any way to what we might find ’round here, or out there. (It doesn’t matter in the same way that the ‘real-world’ status of the ‘silent majority’ doesn’t matter; or whether Good Christian Families really hold the key to Salvation™; or whether ‘freedom’ corresponds in any way to the American Enterprise.) It’s a story, a myth, an emblem, an archetype; something that comes into existence precisely because we’re waiting for it (and, in the wings, Yamaha Pianos are waiting to help you get closer).
Idealized, also, to the point that the girl at the piano could well be Debbie—Frank Zappa’s name for the progeny of self-identified “Average, God-Fearing American White Folk” (Zappa and Occhiogrosso, 1989, p. 191).
Idealized and, to freely riff-off of Foucault, via the family unit, regulating (hetero)sexuality, and perhaps by extension, whiteness and middle-classness.

All, however, is not quite straight in Yamaha’s world for what queer things are on display here?

Not only, next door to the displays of middle-class, heterosexual normativity, is there (a respectable and unthreatening) gay representative in the form of the Elton John Limited Edition Signature Series Red Piano (‘Yamaha's First-ever Artist Signature Series Piano’), but there’s something lurking in those three images themselves: things here are playful and contradictory. Like Lynch’s suberbia, or, better yet, RoboCop’s existential schism, something lurks under the surface.
Or at least under the piano lid—have a closer look at the dashboard of the pianos: what do you see?Debbie’s parents have gifted her not with an upright, but a simulation; the dashboard on Tux’s piano reveals it to be a cybernetic hybrid; and the route to middle-class, bohemian sophistication is assisted by latter-day player pianos.

Cyborg dreams or cyborg nightmares?

To be continued…

on the other hand…

…the piano is also the instrument of Fats Waller, Teddy Wilson, Thelonious Monk, Cecil Taylor. In African-American performances the piano can be called upon to be the emblem of self-fashioned nobility (Duke Ellington), a tool for the revolutionary (Taylor), the sexually subversive (Little Richard), the playful (Monk), the joyous (Stevie Wonder). Is it, furthermore, any coincidence that women pianists would transform the instrument so closely associated with the domestic, the private—the spheres sanctioned as feminine—into something loud and unruly? The sounds of, say, Marilyn Crispell, Myra Melford, Irène Schweitzer: un-domestic, un-private, un-bound.
…It’s no wonder that Annea Lockwood was inspired (tempted?) to drown or burn these things….

references:

Pfaffenberger, Bryan (1992), ‘Technological Dramas’, Science, Technology, & Human Values (vol. 17, no. 3, Summer).
Zappa, Frank and Peter Occhiogrosso (1989), The Real Frank Zappa Book (New York: Poseidon Press).

in front of a live studio audience

2007-06-16T18:06:00.000Z

I hate recording.

…Well, no, that’s a little simplistic.

I have a hard time performing for recordings.

Hmm… that’s not quite right either.

I have difficulty playing for the purpose of recording.

I wouldn’t have this problem if I were actually performing.

I have no comparable or corresponding problem when performing for an audience (which is probably why so many of my more successful recordings were done ‘live’).
Some musicians are skilled with studio recordings (and by studio, I mean without an audience—the studio in question could be a loft, basement, garage, or bedroom). They love the process and/or they have (I’m not sure how to describe this) ‘recording chops’.

I don’t.

I can’t seem to discipline myself into making every take count. At the back of my mind is the voice that says, “don’t worry, there’s always take two”, except that ‘take two’ tends towards take seven, take eight, nine, ten or take forty. Each take comes with ever diminishing returns; further and further removed from that compact, concise, information-rich play that I was aiming for. The problem, for me, comes from not having an audience, not having the pressure of performance, and this process is exacerbated if I’m recording solo. (The only recording, which was, incidentally, in a trio setting, in which I managed to avoid falling back on the psychological safety net of the next take was when I was suffering from the flu, and I was far to sick to be doing more than one take: that take, the one we just did, was going to have to do.)
This got me thinking, what if I just set up a faux-public-performance (like sitcoms ‘recorded in front of a live studio audience’), and recorded the results of that? All the technical resources would be geared up for recording, but the performance vacuum would be re-pressurized with a minimal audience. In the end, only three people constituted this audience, but (I haven’t heard the tape yet) the play felt more focussed.

improvising economics

2007-06-13T17:48:00.000Z

Marc Ribot contributes a fine (not sure what to call this) analytic-polemic on economics and music (via be.jazz). DJA and PB come up with some contrasting follow-ups. (And all the while, there’s uncertain stirrings in the funding world….) I don’t have much to add to the discussions above, except to argue that the ‘objectification’—a specific form of commodification—of musicking adds to the problems.
One of the ways in which performance and, as a consequence, improvisation is marginalized is in the treatment of music as an object by funding bodies. To put a neo-Marxist spin on it, funding organizations increasingly treat arts and musics (‘serious’, ‘entertaining’ or otherwise) as objects (product) rather than as processes (labor); emphasizing, and placing value on, the unchanging, durable, repeatable thing as opposed to the transitory, contingent, performative practice/identity.
Unless you happened to be an employee of a largely fixed institution (e.g. a symphony orchestra (although, even in those cases, the musical ‘laborers’ may be the first in line for a cutback)) which is in itself a ‘product’—a focal point of national/regional worth—funding can be hard to come by. For those of us interested in informal, ad-hoc, freeform meetings of performers, for those interested in creating spaces for practice, we’re at the mercy of occasional, specialized festivals or value/clubs, neither of which can, in this post-Reaganomic world, guarantee successful funding.
The fact that the AACM, BAG or LMC (and the love of acronyms surely dates the origins of these organizations to a certain socio-political milieu) operated in economically unfriendly environments is a testament to the tenacity and ingenuity (and perhaps a measure of good luck) of the practitioners, but I wouldn’t wish anyone to experience those same difficulties. I’ve argued in a past post (somewhat in response to the discussions surrounding the Lincoln Center) that I “want cultural participation by all (or the many)” and “economic factors stand in the way of this cultural participation”. ‘Full-time’ (following the example of Eddie Prévost, I refrain from using the word ‘professional’) participation in music, and real-time performance-based practices in particular, should not become a luxury of the independently-wealthy, nor should ticket prices be inflated to the point where only the economically privileged can be in the audience: if you don’t need state funding, I suggest you may have a neighbor who does.

an (unanswered) question

Are we willing to package our musics into a recognizable ‘brand’?
It seems to me that the successful (by measure of their financial ‘sustainability’ and relative popular and institutional recognition) improvisative traditions ‘made it’ by, to some extent, freeze-drying the process, and creating a product. For those of us in / from / around traditions that have avoided / resisted / subverted this impulse, are we now, for economic expediency in this current climate, also willing to do this? And, if we did, what would we loose? (But, hey, what do I know: we’ve already had our lists and our canons.)

practicing: systems, routines and shake-ups

2007-06-07T15:20:00.000Z

Taylor Ho Bynum can practice while watching television. HTP, a bass player, used to practice by playing along to every spot during a commercial break (which has a kind of scatter-brained, post-modern logic to it). I’m impressed (and a little dizzy with the idea), but, really, I couldn’t do that. I need both sets of ears and eyes: I’m afraid that I’ll miss something and screw-up if I let my attention drift.

Okay, as I’ve said before, I’m a systems junkie.

My routine (which goes through the occasional, irregular shake-up) right now consists of ‘natural’ harmonics; scalar patters that alternate open and stopped strings; clusters and ‘pseudo-clusters’; and ‘touch’ playing. (Did you noticed that this resembles humble lexicon?) Thrown into that mix are articulations via the volume pedal. (I also live by the metronome, but that’s another story….)
’Cause there’s not enough hours in the day, and you can only do so much practicing without hitting a physical / physiological / mental / spiritual wall, my practicing ‘regime’ (maybe ‘ritual’ is a better word) has, at the moment, a four day cycle. This also means I don’t practice the same thing more than once every four days. I do, however, try and cover all the bases each day, so I’ll have four sets of harmonics exercises, four sets of cluster based patterns, etc. to cycle through.
Now that all looks frozen and durable, but of course it ain’t. These elements are “exercises to followup on technically curious… gestures and structurings. …These exercises evolve not through some grand plan, but by adding kinks and extra complications.” In his own post about practicing, Dominic Lash makes a similar point:

A given practice regimen for me tends to last a few months before I rearrange things but the broad categories remain the same…. But the regime has to feel fresh for me to feel excited enough actually to pick the bass up, and the best way to do this is change things about periodically.

And recently (and whenever it happens, it comes as a surprise) I’ve found myself at the early stages of going through one of those shake-ups. I’m equal measures excited and anxious about this….

the closed laptop pt 2a: deliver us from our bodies

2007-06-06T14:58:00.000Z

After much delay (caused by various not-very-musical reasons), continued from part 1….

a (techno)science fictional invocation

Once upon a time,
there was The Dream:

The Dream to emancipate us from corporeality.

In this heroic quest,
machines will be engineered to enable,
and technologies developed to aid,
the exodus from embodiment
—the slavery of bodily confinement.
Towards The Future
where labor will become a thing of barbarism
—music will be made effortless.
Towards The Future
where minds will be minds
without the shackles of clumsy, disabling wet-ware
—the sea that we carry with us
from the bio-chemical oceans of origin
(our unfortunate, ad-hoc chemical laboratory).

We deny that Bodies R Us.
We deny the spectacle of performance.

Technology will deliver us from our bodies,
    from context,
    from inequality,
    from difference,
    from culture
—deep down, we are the same—
for we are the mind, the heart and the soul
—the disembodied entity.
We seek freedom
—unimpeded, unrestricted, unbound—
and choice
—unfettered, limitless and infinite.

Our mission is to access The Timeless.
Our program is to touch The Universal.

The Dream became Desire,
and The Desire will be made (Arti)Fact.

To be continued…

organ jamming

2007-06-02T13:55:00.000Z

Well, this has got to be one of most spectacular pieces of culture jamming done within/by a mainstream media outlet/producer. As reported by Reuters:

The announcement that it was a hoax was met with stunned silence by the audience but this later turned to laughter as clips of condemnation were shown.
The show had set off a storm of criticism, both at home and abroad….

Topical, sensational, exploitative, sick and in bad taste—what more could you ask for?

ten reasons lists might be trouble

2007-05-27T16:19:00.000Z

sjz: More lists please!
tig: I’m happy to oblige.

Do lists tell us we’re different?
Do they help us tell each other apart…?
…Or do they confirm that we are the same?
Nothing wrong with vibrators of course, and the devices in question can evoke playful responses (they fire-off ideas of technosex and cyborgism in me).
However, if list-making is a form of ‘big dick daftness’ (like men comparing themselves), it’s entirely appropriate that Sequenza21/ (whose discussions often border on the juvenile) would ask for pieces of music to “drive the adventurous iGasm user into sensory [sexual] overload”. For Sequenza21/ thoughts of self-stimulation sans penis can only lead to list making. (Susan McClary would have a field day.)
There’s no canon—certainly no The Canon—there is only canonizing.
I hope there is a difference between history (rich, convoluted, complex and contradictory) and list-making (simple, neat, reductionist and positivist)…
…but I sometimes fear there may not be.
What inconvenient complexity do we need to sweep under the rug to make our lists? Do they privilege objects—static (‘unchanging’) and durable (‘timeless’)—and devalue performances—process, practice and labor?
As the Great Derek Bailey (you see? I’m not immune to the canonizing impulse either) pointed out, over the years, the number of Greats in the jazz tradition reduce in number. I don’t want to see people disappear and communities get erased.
And why 10 (or 40 or 100)? Why would 10 (or 40 or 100) be (more) complete?

the best of jazz of the 2010s

2007-05-23T23:21:00.000Z

AMM, Unbroken (Oslo, 2013)
Archie Shepp and Frank Zappa, The Shepp/Zappa Tapes (archival)
Darius Brubeck, Darius Digs Da HarmoloDics
Kenny G, Spirits Rejoice
Lee Ritenour, Kelvin System Structures
Eugene Chadbourne, Eugene Chadborne Plays the Music of Wynton Marsalis
Lindsay Lohan with Joëlle Léandre, The Lacy Songbook
Aebersold et al., Company, Play-A-Long Vol. 182
Butch Morris/Ensemble InterContemporain, Z and R
Ankhrasmation & Fitch, With Apologies to Destination:Out

thoughts from a jazz recital

2007-05-22T14:39:00.000Z

Still crazy here at TIG & MLM central, so the blog posts will be erratic at best for the time being…. Anyway, I was listening in on a student recital in the jazz division (not my class you understand—I was just an audience member), and a few things caught my ear.

complex heads, simple heads

I admired the group’s courage in tacking some pretty tricky material (a Joshua Redman piece which I wasn’t familiar with). A bit of a gamble by the performers since the head was pretty intricate, and, as I suspected, their solos didn’t quite live up to that level of complexity. It did get me wondering about some of the harmonically elaborate compositions of Coltrane and (earlier) Shorter, say, and how the melodies of those were often quite simple.
Take ‘Giant Steps’ or ‘Countdown’: were the simple ‘melodies’ (which, given their simplicity, almost seems like the wrong word for it) engineered to subdue expectations about the solo? Given the difficulty and, as Evan Parker calls it, ‘problem solving’ nature of the changes, did Coltrane create low-key melodies so that the solo would be a shock of energy? Did he fear that writing complex melodies would make the soloist’s job, given the experimental nature of the changes, untenable?

(Later, most notably in jazz-rock and fusion, you’d start getting intricate ‘melodies’ (and considering their complexity, that also seems like the wrong word for it) over similar changes, but with the promise of solos that were of an even greater bravado of virtuosity, but that’s another story….)

(Another solution might be, admittedly from a rock sensibility, Zappa’s in which the solo only tangentially had anything to do with the ‘head’. The rhythmic and harmonic riot of ‘Approximate’ followed by a riotous guitar solo over a relatively straightforward r’n’b groove, for example. That’s, however, definitely another story….)

jazz: year zero

Listening to the bass player walking in a pre-Carter, pre-Holland manner, the question that came to my mind was why does so much of jazz pedagogy take its year zero as 1945 (±10 years)?
Okay, we all learned jazz guitar from, say, Freddie Green onwards, but does that make sense in terms of careers—in terms of developing an individual sound—in this latter-day jazz context? We could take the model of Tal Farlow as the starting point, or Wes Montgomery. But there’s also a certain logic to taking, perhaps, John Abercrombie as a starting point. As far as I can hear (and I know I’m on very slippery ground saying this), we are living in an after-Abercrombie jazz guitar environment.

(Hey, I might be tempted to start with Nix or Sharrock, but that probably disqualifies me as a jazz guitarist ;-)

There’s an argument that goes, well, the earlier traditions—their methodologies, their practices—shaped what followed, and to understand the latter entails first learning the former (e.g. Abercrombie’s sound was informed by his models). Well, fine, however, although we could arbitrarily turn the pedagogical clock as far back as the historical record enables, we don’t do that in practice for pragmatic reasons: life, at school and after, is too short. Neither Charlie Christian nor Django Reinhardt feature much in orthodox teaching literature, for example, for, I imagine, this reason. (Tangentially, I’m not sure that learning to ape Palestrina, as interesting in itself as it may be, is going to help a budding West European composer find their place in an after-Lachenmann sensibility.) We all learn by choosing some arbitrary (historical) starting point, and shift and skip (forwards/backwards) as the learning experience takes us.
Additionally, we (mainstream jazz audiences) don’t generally expect young(er) jazz musicians to sound like old-timers. We expect them to come from an after-Shorter, after-Jarrett, after-Carter, after-DeJohnette common practice. Very few young(er) jazz musicians are asked to perform in the ‘older-style’ unless as some kind of post-modern pantomime act, or as a house band for visiting elder luminaries (and, as that generation departs to that great club in the sky, I’ve heard less and less of these over the years). Certainly very, very, very few of the jazz musicians I know play ’bop anymore (but maybe I just have weird friends).

Even the neo-classicists take (and now I’m on extremely slippery ground) The Jazz Messengers (c. 1960) as their year zero.

Furthermore, a vibrant local scene gains international recognition, not through its ability to pastiche, but through its display of some distinct take on this common practice (e.g. the recent rise in visibility of many Scandinavian jazz musicians).
So why is so much of formal jazz education still stuck in the Aebersold time-line?

(BTW, I’m talking about ‘mainstream’ jazz here, sidestepping the question of how, as Bailey asks, Ayler’s music could be distilled into a ‘method’. Also, I’ve only witnessed formal jazz education at three institutions (admittedly in three different countries), so this might not be representative.)

it’s electric, dummy!

The notion that an electric guitar is just an amplified version of an acoustic has done no good whatsoever to the teaching of that instrument. Come on, man, turn up the amp, and pick lighter!

great moments in elvis history

2007-05-11T23:13:00.000Z

Mythologies abound in all traditions. It may be the thing that defines a tradition. Big Computer Music has narratives of ‘the future’ (to which, technoculturally assisted, we inevitably(?) escape); it’s hard for me to imagine an Early Music which doesn’t enroll ‘historical informants’ (whether present-day constructions or not); and latter-day improvised musics have stories about ‘freedom’ (stuck in a contradictory oscillation between individualism and collectivism)….

Hmm….

Let me bring in a visual aid:

Intertextuality has, or anachronisms have, rarely been so much fun (or stupid (or funny)).

Bonus question: Is the Elvis portrayed above, an imperialist?

bailey, the problematic pt. 0: preamble

2007-05-10T15:49:00.001Z

This started out with my flippant remark (I should stop doing these in the semi-public sphere of a blog) which Dominic Lash rightly flagged me up on. I left that discussion with what I’ll take as a kind of mission statement for this thread:

…Although [Derek] Bailey is one of my models… I think I should flag up the problematic in (some of) his rhetoric….
…The non-engagement with (and consequent invisibility of?) the issue [of race], I think, is actually part of the problem….
One last thing before I go: I was avoiding the word ‘racist’ in this discussion. I did this not because there’s no such thing, but because it can put an hard-edged boundary between ‘the good guys’ and ‘the bad’—between ‘progressives’ and ‘reactionaries’—and that’s not really the politics I wanted to be discussing in this context.

Like many improvising guitarists, I owe Derek Bailey a great deal (my humble lexicon is a kind of transplantation), but I also find his work (his writings in particular) a problematic.
Perhaps I was being unkind to Bailey in my remarks: re-reading Improvisation (Bailey, 1992) has been a bit of a revelation—it’s not quite the troublesome book I remember. I have, however, a complex relationship with this text. On the one hand, I cite it often (including in this blog), but it is a book steeped in a certain sensibility that I intersect with but don’t wholly endorse.
Before I continue with this discussion, I want to lay down what I hope to avoid: I don’t want this to become a character assassination, nor give the impression that I am guilt-free in comparison to Bailey. I’ve been guilty of many ill-considered and/or foolish statements—remarks that make public my private prejudices—and I don’t wish to give the impression that Bailey was a unique case. I certainly do not want to single out Bailey as a sacrificial figure head—a scapegoat—for what is a broader systemic problem.
With that out of the way, I want to look specifically at the statement that opens the first Jazz chapter in Improvisation:

There is no doubt that the single most important contribution to the revitalization of improvisation in Western music in the 20th century is jazz…. But for the Western musician its greatest service was to revive something almost extinct in Occidental music: it reminded him that performing music and creating music are not necessarily separate activities and that, at its best, instrumental improvisation can achieve the highest levels of musical expression.

Ibid., p. 48.

To be continued…

references:

Bailey, Derek (1992), Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (London: British Library National Sound Archive).

‘responsible’ listening

2007-05-07T21:50:00.000Z

I was introduced to (for lack of better word) ‘responsible’ listening by some of my teachers, and, as I begin to teach, I’m returning to these ideas, trying to get my students to listen this way.
By ‘responsible’ I don’t mean to evoke an ethical dimension to listening (although that can certainly be a part of it), but I mean parsing, and engaging with, the social function of what you are listening to. It is a form of analysis, but, unlike Music Theory™, we’re listening out for the social.

It’s simple:

Put yourself in the position of the players.

I don’t necessarily mean this in the sense of putting yourself in, say, Marilyn Crispell’s shoes in a ‘what’s my motivation?’ kind of way, nor anything like an interpreter ‘channelling’ (dead) composers. I’m not asking you so much to understand the psychology or ‘intentions’ of the musicians, but I’m asking you to imagine what your choices might be under similar circumstances, stimuli and context: what would you have done surrounded by A and B? Or between B and C? What’s the effect of A doing bloop-bleep in this context of B doing bleep-bloop (while allowing for contrasts and juxtapositions)? What are the implications and consequences of their actions (keeping in mind the performative in all of this)? How does that shape what is to come? How does that (re)contextualize—(re)invent, (re)construct—what has already happened?
As you learn more, you can hear more. As you learn to recognize, for example, the pitfalls and hazards of collective music making you’ll begin to hear how these pitfalls and hazards that are (perhaps deftly, perhaps dramatically) circumnavigated or subverted. Musicians might have their standard responses—you’ll learn to recognize these—but among these you’ll find many surprises. I have little concern for whether these choices are good or bad, but getting to grips with each choice/tactic can open up new possibilities, and that’s the important thing.
Hopefully you’ll learn to recognize these surprises in your own playing—those moments when you escape from habit and formula. Maybe you’ve already been making out-of-the-box choices without recognizing them. These surprises don’t come as often as maybe you might wish, but I think you’ll find they come more often then you think. Whatever the case, once you can spot these moments, you’ll be able to capitalize on them—feed it back into your playing. (I’ll return to this topic in a future post.)

Incidentally, when I’ve caught Fred Frith in performance, I’ve felt (and I hope he won’t mind me saying this) I could almost (but not quite) anticipate his choices. I had similar experiences listening to George E. Lewis: I knew (some of) his moves even though his were made quicker, and with greater fluidity (if that makes any sense) and ease, than I could ever manage. And knowing Lewis’ playing (I still have a lot to learn, but I think I know his sound reasonably well by now), I was still bowled over—struck by the fantastic (and fantastical) choices and tactics that were being made and executed.

(This post is a bounce-off from ‘the face of the bass’ at Bottom Lining.)

woodshedding & paperwork

2007-05-05T15:09:00.000Z

Sorry for the sparsity of posts of late. Been doing some low-grade woodshedding and planning a recording (and chasing up old recordings and other documentation)…. And I really oughta get around to catching up on my reading. (sjz says he’s been stuck reading a couple of chapters for six years, but frankly that’s nothing compared to having read and re-read the first half dozen pages of a book for that last eight (count ’em) years.)
Anyway, another thing that is occupying my time is only peripherally related to music.
I swear a musician’s life is 20 days of paper pushing for one day on the road. When you’re up on stage, it’s all worth it, but I doubt any of us chose to be musicians based on our love of paperwork. (Incidentally, I’d just like to say that sympathetic and skillful promoters / managers / producers are very rare figures. I’m privileged to have worked with a few earlier in my career (ha ha ha—can I call it that?), but right now, I’m afloat on my own.)
However, I do plan to get back to this blog. In addition to the tutorial material and usual unplanned collection of thoughts, I want to continue the discussion of laptops in performance (including a more positive and optimistic look at the practice), and the upturned piano (eventually turning to look at the technological dramas surrounding electric guitars).

tig will be back shortly.

bailey & lewis

2007-04-29T22:00:00.001Z

No particular reason to post this other than it’s a pleasure to see two of my models (would it be presumptuous to say elders?)—one in regards to the instrument, the other in regards to tactics and strategies—captured together on video…

…although I can think of few improvisers who differ so much ideologically and politically.

comments and responses

2007-04-27T15:46:00.001Z

Just got back from outta town (a trip that, as always, was a learning experience) and I find the comments have been pretty active…. Thanks to all for the feedback, and apologies for not responding sooner.

On ‘training (the) quartet pt 2: network topologies’ both Devin Hurd and Daniel Melnick address the question of whether the results of these exercises are ever ‘musical’. Devin points out that ‘pre-determined intent’ can ‘open up a range of composed improvisations/interactions’ (a line of reasoning that, perhaps, informs the composer-improviser practices of, say, the AACM). The effort required to make these exercises musical, I think, makes it training for the stage; for when you may be called upon to make-the-best of a less-than-optimal situation. A tactic that might be applicable to all improvisations, and maybe to all performances (perhaps to life in general).
Dan makes many of the same observations, but adds a note of caution that treating these exercises “as a systemic ideal” can lead to problems. I think this has to do with the purpose of engineering such ‘constraints’. The hazards that Dan sketches out are very real: it’s all too easy to turn such strategies into a “Demonstrations of Limits”.
Yet, on the other hand, responding to ‘practicing: the journey (and the destination)’ Herr Adorno (mediated by sjz) makes a cameo appearance to apparently plead for a more ‘abstract’ or ‘free-floating’ sense of ‘musicality’ (of material and approach).

Not sure, however, what to make of the statement of skepticism (other than to say, well, try it and see for yourself)….

Anyway, thanks again for your thoughts, and thanks for reading.

training (the) quartet pt 2: network topologies

2007-04-22T17:20:00.000Z

Before we delve into (re)engineering the protocol, let’s have a look at some simple combinations and topologies. We’ve already been introduced to the clockwise arrangement, so it’s a relatively trivial matter to come up with variants.(Incidentally, there are 6 possible ‘closed-loop’ networks in which all members of the quartet are sharing affinity with one other and none are orphaned.)
Now, recalling the subgroup formations of a quartet……we can now begin to implement these.In your experiments, you are likely to come across further possibilities; take each possibility and see where it leads you. (A simple variant is to individually select your source of affinity without sharing this information with the group.)

some (unanswered) questions:

Same question as last time: can interaction ever be so simple?
No… but why not?

Do we ever use these schemes in ‘real-world’ performance?
Yes… no… well, maybe. My guess is probably not, but why the exercises? How might they be useful? What might they be articulating?

Are the results of these exercises ‘musical’?
Possibly not, or at least not without a lot of work. Given that these schemes do not lead effortlessly to musical ends, and given that we’ll probably never use these schemes on stage, why might this training be of use?
And never mind if the results ever approach ‘music’, does it ever make sense—are they culturally decipherable?

How do we start?
…?

practicing: the journey (and the destination)

2007-04-19T14:46:00.000Z

Is practicing (as in ‘exercising’, ‘training’ or ‘preparing’) improvisation a peculiar concept?

It’s a topic that fascinates me. What do you practice? That question elicits a spectrum of answers from improvisers. Take a couple of drummers: as far as CC’s concerned improvisation has no place in practicing. Rudiments and exercises, sure, but improvising? no. On the other hand, EK only practices by improvisation (no rudiments for EK).
My practicing is a little closer to CC’s (although I probably admire EK’s more). My current practicing ‘regimen’ is arranged as a four-day cycle. A lot of it, actually all of it, consists of exercises to followup on technically curious (there really isn’t particularly good terminology for this) gestures and structurings. By ‘curious’ I mean that there seem to be possibilities even if the gestures and structurings are, at the moment, musically incomprehensible. Additionally, these exercises evolve not through some grand plan, but by adding kinks and extra complications.

sjz, via a (mis)reading of Adorno, asks if “musicians who play repertoire” and those who do not, share the same musicality? Perhaps, in regards to practicing, the two musicalities are very different.
Here’s the deal: if I were a repertoire based musician, I would have some kind of known outcome—a destination, a goal—in mind as I practice and as I design exercises; but as a musician that has, at best, a very irregular relationship with repertoire, the possibilities, implications, or outcomes of practicing are never clearly evident. I’m not so much going on a hunch (which would at least imply that I had some vague notion about a goal), but mostly just interested in the journey itself. The journey ends when these gestures and structurings become musically comprehensible (at which point it’s time to abandon it or add another complication or two).

As far as uncertainties in this line of work goes (and I have no sympathy for those who glamorize the financial precariousness of a musician’s life), this one can be exciting and productive. Most of the time this journey (and the destination) was worthwhile…

…and that’s good enough for me.

great fools’ minds differ alike, seldom think

2007-04-17T18:03:00.000Z

There must’ve been something in the air. Check out the following:

‘learn to shred part 6 : harmonics’ (shred guitar, 11-21-2006)
‘harmonics pt. 0, the physics of’ (improvising guitar, 10-06-2006)
‘harmonics pt. 1: where are they?’ (improvising guitar, 10-09-2006)

Or…

‘learn to shred : part eight; finger independence’ (shred guitar, 11-25-2006)
‘playing in position pt. 4: what about finger independence?’ (improvising guitar, 11-17-2006)

Almost like I’ve discovered my doppelgänger from a parallel plane… ;-)

playing in position pt. 10a: spanning a third

2007-04-15T22:50:00.000Z

Remember these?We first encountered these in ‘playing in position parts 7a’ and ‘7b’. It was in the latter article that I said that “the three patterns that we marked A, B and C (and the corresponding hand shapes) recur. There’s nothing particularly magical about this, it’s simply a side effect of how a major mode is constructed…”. Well, there isn’t anything magical about the patterns and shapes, but they do not come about purely by chance. As we cross the fingerboard, we’ll be encountering more and more of these recurring patterns, so to understand them, let’s have another look at the fingerboard hand.

Question: what is the distance between the first and fourth fingers?
Answer: three or four frets.

In other words, the fingerboard hand spans either a minor third (= 3 frets = 3 semitones) or a major third (= 4 frets = 4 semitones). Imprint this in your mind-body: the distance between the first and fourth finger is, in the case of the ‘finger-per-fret’ shape, a minor third or, in the case of the ‘extended’ shape, major third.
Keep this in mind, and many recurring patterns you’ll encounter on the fingerboard will make better sense. We’ll continue this in part 10b.

technological dramas pt. 0: piano mobility

2007-04-12T03:15:00.001Z

I came across this story (via Sequenza21/, via The Overgrown Path) of an accident while moving a Bösendorfer (‘Viennese Culture of Sound since 1828’) grand piano.MLM and I could not help wondering if dropping a 9 foot grand sounds like those Tex Avery cartoons. The Guardian report, tantalizingly, seems to suggest that it does:

As its [the piano’s] wooden casing splintered, it gave a death rattle described by Ms Adie [artistic director of the Two Moors Festival] as “a deafening noise like 10 honky-tonk pianos being hit by mallets”. Her husband John, the festival’s manager, said: “It made an incredible racket—like something from a cartoon.”

You don’t get images that are this overdetermined—overloaded with meaning—very often; simultaneously tragic and comic. For all its mundaneness, it’s nevertheless a fascinating story (news.google.com flags up 49 articles).
What’s happening here? The tragedy seems self-evident, the comedy is obvious, but how are the two operating together? What makes this so much more fascinating than any other dropping-a-heavy-piece-of-hardware accident? Why is it so goddamn (guiltily) funny?
And why does Tex Avery drop pianos, not pipe organs?

Perhaps no other musical instrument encapsulates the middle-class dreams as does the pianoforte. I certainly cannot think of another instrument that acts so clearly as a carrier of the desire for socio-economic mobility.
This story really has a little bit of everything: (neo-bohemian?) cultural aspiration (a startup music festival), redemption and rebirth (a regional economic initiative in response to an agricultural crisis), not at all straight forward class issues (does anyone outside rural Britain understand these dynamics?), the distant glamour of aristocracy (The Countess of Wessex), individual/familial heroism (Mr. and Mrs. Festival Organizers), Buster Keaton-esque buffoonery bordering on farce (G&R Removals: ‘the longest established piano carriers in the UK’), and a cautionary tale of cost-cutting (the instrument was not fully insured).

Incidentally, in the various articles, the Bösendorfer (‘Viennese Culture of Sound since 1828’) is alternately compared to a Stradivarius or a Rolls-Royce (‘Design without compromise’). I’ll return to these particular tropes later….

According to Bryan Pfaffenberger, technological artifacts, such as the piano, are “discusively regulated by surrounding it with symbolic media that mystify and therefore constitute… political aims” (Pfaffenberger, 1992, p. 294). If mythologies are being performed in, via, through or by the piano, let’s see if we can catch some of these semiotic fingerprints in action: let’s do a little name and marketing line survey.

Bösendorfer: ‘Viennese Culture of Sound since 1828’
Steinway & Sons: ‘For over 150 years, Steinway has made the world’s finest pianos—and inspired the artists who make them sing’
Yamaha: ‘Over 100 Years of Tradition and Innovation’
C. Bechstein: ‘C. Bechstein gives a voice to great musicians’

What is being sold here is not just the artifact; these companies are in the business of selling dreams and aspirations: they each have a brand of myth and narrative. I’m intrigued, in particular, by Steinway’s and Yamaha’s stories.Take a little trip to Steinway & Sons. At the bottom of the page is a banner.Click through the banner, and, via a linking page, you can get to The Steinway Collection (‘The Name Says It All’):

For over 150 years, Steinway & Sons has been dedicated to the ideal of making the finest pianos in the world. Handcrafting each Steinway requires up to one full year—creating an instrument of rare quality and global renown. Not surprisingly, Steinway remains the choice of 9 out of 10 concert artists, and countless pianists, composers, and performers around the world—a name synonymous with the highest standards.
It is in this spirit and tradition that we proudly present The Steinway Collection—Classic Casual Sportswear, available in a vibrant melody of styles and colors—and a select assortment of famous Golf Accessories. Whether you are a Steinway piano owner, professional artist, student, or enthused listener, we recommend that you experience The Steinway Collections.
The Name Says It All.

Corporate myth making doesn’t come much clearer (and less imaginative (although it hits 190 on the surrealometer)) than that.
However, who is the target for this corporate myth making? Do you believe that the Rolls-Royce (‘Design without compromise’) owning classes will purchase the $45.00 Executive Putter Set? or are these Steinway branded balls for those who aspire to be chauffeur-driven?

To be continued…

references:

Pfaffenberger, Bryan (1992), ‘Technological Dramas’, Science, Technology, & Human Values (vol. 17, no. 3, Summer).

the art of persuasion

2007-04-10T14:05:00.000Z

There I am, at the far end of the venue, listening to members of the class performing. It’s (more-or-less) a public performance, and the group is a little nervous—a little on edge. They’ve also been pushing themselves a little hard; everything’s a little longer, a little bit more complex. They’re sometimes loosing concentration; momentarily, but I can hear it, and I think they can too.
Inexplicably, four of the five performers drop out, leaving EC in solitude.
The quartet executed a textbook ending; except, well, it was a quintet on stage—one got left behind. You know how it goes: the texture—the density, the noise level, the information concentration—goes from 100% to 20% in a blink of an eye. If you’re left behind, you can feel vulnerable; if you’ve stopped, you feel like you’ve goofed up. (The key to this is that you cannot be left behind, nor can you have goofed up, but that’s a story of another post.)
I’m there willing EC to go on—go on—do a solo! I’m willing the rest (in rest) to resist the temptation to jump back in. Show some backbone. Come on, people, I think, I’ll give you As all ’round if you pull this off.
Unfortunately they don’t. The four join back in, and not even abruptly, but gently—tentatively. I’m left unconvinced (as I guess is the rest of the audience). It takes nerve; nerves that this group is a little too exhausted and nervous to call upon.
I realize, then, that so much of teaching improvisation is akin to teaching rhetoric—the art of persuasion.

listening with our bodies…?

2007-04-05T23:07:00.001Z

A little while ago Chris Chatham at Developing Intelligence listed ‘10 Important Differences Between Brains and Computers’. I hope Chatham will not mind me quoting item 10 in full:

Brains have bodies
This is not as trivial as it might seem: it turns out that the brain takes surprising advantage of the fact that it has a body at its disposal. For example, despite your intuitive feeling that you could close your eyes and know the locations of objects around you, a series of experiments in the field of change blindness has shown that our visual memories are actually quite sparse. In this case, the brain is “offloading” its memory requirements to the environment in which it exists: why bother remembering the location of objects when a quick glance will suffice? A surprising set of experiments by Jeremy Wolfe has shown that even after being asked hundreds of times which simple geometrical shapes are displayed on a computer screen, human subjects continue to answer those questions by gaze rather than rote memory. A wide variety of evidence from other domains suggests that we are only beginning to understand the importance of embodiment in information processing.

This strikes me as potentially relevant to the business of theorizing an embodied, or corporeal, listening….

solo: primary territories

2007-04-04T15:10:00.000Z

Given that my lexicon is so pared down, what do I do—what can I do—with, or within, it? I could atomize theses elements further, but I prefer to see these as regions in which I have a certain amount of mobility. Here again is where the language metaphor breaks down: to borrow (admittedly out of context) a term from Anthony Braxton, these three elements—harmonics, clusters, and ‘touch’ playing—are primary territories.
I can get a certain amount of movement within each territory. Natural harmonics can be, for example, melodic or rhythmic, concerned with intervalic color or timbre.

listen

Clusters and ‘displaced’ clusters (pseudo-clusters which I’ll explore in more detail in future posts) can be approached, say, pianistically (à la Tippett), or more guitaristically (à la Frith).

listen

Circular-breathing wind players (e.g. Parker, Mitchell) get incredible creative milage from constructing illusions of polyphony and lines that are impossibly long. And while, I admit, it’s strange to bring these tactics to bear on a polyphonic instrument that doesn’t need to breathe, two-hand ‘touch’ playing nonetheless gets me within, maybe, commuting distance of this neighborhood.
In addition, since, without radical techniques that are alien to me, I’ll never be able to deploy clusters to approach the complexity, density or noise-level (I’m not talking about loudness, you understand) of pianists like Taylor or Crispell, a variant of ‘touch’ playing is maybe as close as I can get.

listen

But none of this gets me very far, certainly on stage. Time to perhaps renegotiate boundaries….

[BTW, the audio recordings were made quickly, so apologies for the quality (or lack there of).]

updates:

04-05-07: Use the XSPF Flash Player. Please let me know of any problems.

listening: feeling the string tension

2007-03-30T14:09:00.000Z

Towards the end of Chan-Wook Park’s Lady Vengeance (Chinjeolhan Geum-Jassi) there’s a forty second close-up of the main character.It’s an extraordinary scene in which you see the face of the main character (played by Yeong-ae Lee) crumple and contort, hovering uneasily between expressions of despair (mourning, perhaps?), relief, triumph, and half a dozen undefinable, unspecifiable states. It’s extraordinary also because, as you watch the scene progress, you can almost feel her muscles working under her face. It’s as if your face (not your eyes, not your brain) is responding to the scene; telling you what is happening, what to feel, how to empathize.

Listening to the radio last night and MLM asked if I could identify the type of guitar by ear. Well, beyond the obvious, all I can identify is a cloud of possibilities—probable combinations—that might be deployed to get a certain sound. The obvious: acoustic/electric, nylon/steel strings, finger/plectrum, etc. The probable: how its mic’d-up, pickups used, recording technologies, etc.
What surprised me, however, was that I could hear the string tension. Actually, scratch that, I could feel the string tension. On the guitar of a track on the radio, for example, I could feel that the strings were of higher tension than what I’m used to: an acoustic guitar with probably a higher action, maybe heavier strings. Later, listening to a recording by Bill Frisell, I could tell that he has much lower string tension, on the electric, than I do (even though Frisell tends to tune slightly sharp of Concert): Frisell probably uses lighter strings.
The funny thing is, it really is (almost) a bodily reaction—feeling the string tension—it does register in my fingers, arm, etc. (MLM, being a vocalist, has analogous reactions to recorded voices.) And, like watching that shot in Lady Vengeance, I know—I think I know—that it must be my sensory and cognitive mechanisms (ears-nerves-brain), that is constructing this model, but the (empathetic?) effects seem to be in my sinews and my muscles.

Does anyone else have similar responses? And does it seem to register in your body?

the closed laptop pt. 1: i/o? what i/o?

2007-03-28T16:55:00.001Z

Continued from part 0….

Leaving aside the issue of narcissism for the moment, what is it that you witness at a laptop performance? What does it mean to ‘perform’ in this context?

…In live [electro-acoustic] performance situations, most people in audiences are not clear what us happening when a performer plays a [MIDI] controller. Most listeners, I believe, actually suppose that what they are hearing is an instrument in the traditional sense. They watch the performer, they experience the action/response phenomena, and they imagine that what they see is what they hear.

Schrader (1991), p. 101

Barry Schrader was writing this in a techno-historical moment before software plugins (VST, b. 1996), when sampling, on the whole, was done at resolutions coarser than 16-bits, and live computer music, more often than now, entailed the use of ‘alternative’ MIDI controllers (remember those?). Despite this technological distance from our current practices, similar issues, I think, are relevant to laptop performances. Specifically, the issue of decoupling bodily gesture and sound production: what you see is not what you hear.

Having not been paying much attention to laptop-based performance for a little while, one of the thing that struck me about the laptopping I’ve witnessed over the past few months was the familiarity of the sound manipulation techniques (reverse, vari-speed, splice, granulation, etc). We’ve increasingly grown accustomed to these techniques from, say, the sound effects of fantastical cinema, trip-hop, or experimental rock productions, but, in the case of laptop performance, the results are, at least to me, oddly alienating. While, on the one hand, there’s a sonic familiarity, there’s a gestural alienation.
This strikes me as almost the reverse effect of a prepared piano or turntablism. In the case of the prepared piano, for example, gestural familiarity (pianist at the keyboard) is coupled to sonic novelty (well, that doesn’t sound like a piano). A (pleasurable?) schism exists because the stimulus and response don’t quite match up.

Just Outside asked about the relative unpopularity of EAI and related musics in comparison to the (postulated) corresponding visual arts. Although laptopping constitutes only a part of EAI and related musics, I think it may be instructive in this discussion. In particular, much of the visual art cited leaves intact the methods, techniques and media—paint, brush and canvas. The shock of the new, in this context, is in the form, the encoding, the process. A gallery goer will have no difficulty trying to figure out the hows or whats of artistic practice. What EAI does, in a sense, is the opposite.
Let’s sketch-out this, as Schrader calls it, action/response mechanism: in acoustic/mechanical performance, there’s a relatively close coupling of action and response in sound production. Pluck a string on a chordophone, and you get a certain class of sound. Even mechanical mediations (the key-hammer-and-damper-string mechanism of the piano, for example) are largely fixed, simple and/or culturally coded. However complex the action/response mechanism, audiences can, with experience, come to learn these (the piano, for example, has an idiot’s interface: left side of keyboard = bass, right side = treble; play lighter = quiet, play heavier = loud).
However, with electronics, and with software mediation in particular, the practitioners (software engineers) gain the ability to more-or-less arbitrarily hook-up action and response. From an audience’s perspective, the action/response mechanism becomes, at best, obtuse.
Okay, but what does this alienation from action/response have to do with alienation in general?
If, having learned the sound of a saxophones via the official Berkelee team, you hear a saxophonist sound like a hair-dryer there’s a possibility of a terrible / unpleasant / joyous / mind-expanding / life-changing surprise. Someone turns a soprano sax the ‘wrong’ way ’round: you don’t know what to expect. On the other hand, someone moves a MIDI slider, hits a QWERTY key, taps on a trackpad, or any number of gestures, you have no (low-level mechanical) expectations, so how can you be surprised.
The problem, in a sense, is not that ‘what you see is not what you hear’, but that the relationship between what-you-see and what-you-hear is being reeingineered (arbitrarily?) before your eyes and ears. Which is all fine—a potential source of interesting and creative contradictions—but how can we, in this context, develop connoisseurship?

What amplifies (or, depending on you point of view, exacerbates) this alienation in laptop performance is that the audience is inanimate. Contrary to the club in which the ‘audience’ is in motion—in full-bodied dance—much laptopping takes the concert recital as its model (albeit with some of the visual trapping of the club). What does this model (captive/captivating) mean in the context of gestural alienation? What does it mean that the audience is (expected to be) disembodied (‘all ears’) while the performers arbitrarily re-map bodily actions to sounds (effortless, virtual exploration of sounds).
Since I’ve written elsewhere about bodies, performance and the ‘music itself’, I won’t go into much more detail here but to say that this dislocation of gesture and sound ultimately leads to the amplification in importance of the ‘music itself’.

As each discouragement draws the listener’s identification away from the physical, it directs it towards the imaginative mastery of all possible combinations embodied by ‘the music itself’. Socially mobile, freed from physical work, seeming to encompass all possibilities in a unified whole… a sonic experience of the middle-class self.

Cusick (1999), p. 495.

Too often in electro-acoustics practice is one of the last considerations; bodies are one of the least concerns; and audience is a canvas or recipient—an after thought.

To be continued…

references:

Cusick, Suzanne (1999), ‘Gender, Musicology, and Feminism’ in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (eds) Rethinking Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Schrader, Barry (1991), ‘Live/Electro-Acoustic Music—a Perspective from History and California’, Contemporary Music Review (vol. 6 pt. 1).

race: how many of us are just visiting?

2007-03-25T20:38:00.000Z

I apologize for the lack of proper referencing, and the disjointed nature of this post. Most of these fragments were for separate articles, all in very rough form, but in light of Mwanji Ezana’s excellent articles on race and the jazz ‘avant-garde’ (‘don't say it too loud… part 1’ and ‘part 2’) and the blogospheric responses, it seems like a good opportunity to put it out there, ready or not….

“Let me ask you something… we Italians, we got our families, and we got the church; the Irish they have the homeland, jews their tradition; even the niggas, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Wilson, what do you have?”
“The United States of America; the rest of you are just visiting.”

from Robert De Niro dir. (2006), The Good Shepherd.

I’m going to assume the following: discrimination and inequalities exist in these musics, and the (political and economic) systems in which these musics operate. Maybe in my most blinkered moments I hope that ‘we’ are different from other traditions (say, West European Concert Music), but I know that we’re embedded in a systemic problem.

A couple of anecdotes (both relatively recent):

A micro-festival: two non-white performers (neither black), one woman, out of a pool of maybe two dozen performers.
A small, single-day academic conference on experimental music: one woman speaker, no non-white faces.

Beyond this, however, is the the inability or reluctance to acknowledge, never mind tackle, this issue. Do we even want to take note of this? I wish I could say this was an exception….
I also know that propping up a mirror can be difficult and painful; that our first instincts may be to deny, deny, and then deny some more. It’s not our fault, we’ll say, and maybe later, well, we didn’t do this deliberately—with intent.
But none of that is going to get us anywhere.
Improvisative practices and traditions thrives on diversity, difference and, maybe, contradictions, but good intentions alone will not suffice. (I doubt Goodman, Wilson and Krupa came together by good intentions or by blind luck.)

exclusion from stories and contexts

‘Avant-garde’ does not mean one thing, but one of its meanings might be ‘transcending’ the mundane reality of historical, social, political specificity. Experimentalism (with or without the capital E) might mean flights of fancy ‘unrestrained’ by tradition and individual or collective identity.
Now, let me interpolate something here: those that are able to transcend historical specificity (class, race, gender, etc.) do so from a position of privilege.
I’m not saying that only white, upper/middle-class, heterosexual men can be avant-garde or experimental, but I am saying that it may be easier for those of us who fit that description to be seen as avant-garde or experimental. Maybe these terms have been defined with that in mind….
How often have we heard the lazy line that jazz follows in the footsteps of West European Concert Music. (Oh, we’ve laughed at that, but I digress….) What do you need to sweep under the carpet in order for that model of pre-ordained, inevitable, cultural evolution to work? Are musicians such as Fred Anderson or Bern Nix largely excluded from the (white sanctioned?) canon of avant-garders because their approach does not scan with experimentalist ideologies? Bern Nix’s approach to the instrument is as radical as anything I know, but, free from the screeches’n’scrawls and technological paraphernalia of officially sanctioned Radical Guitar™, is evidently not worthy of the canon. (Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith once critiqued the expression ‘extended technique’ as a way in which white, european avant-garde composers could appropriate the ‘novelty’ of techniques that have been well known—perhaps well documented, perhaps antique—in non-Western cultures.)

How does this match up on the avant-garde scale: John Zorn vs. Steve Coleman?
Or Reid vs. Frisell? So how come Vernon Reid, nominally (weren’t they all?) part of that Downtown scene, was so readily seen as a sell-out—just a rock musician who could have been—or a cross-over artist?

I remember, vaguely, in the middle of an angry, sometimes barely-veiled-racist, letters pages exchange regarding Public Enemy in Keyboard magazine in the early ’90s, one (black) writer asked when we would be able to talk about Duke Ellington as a great composer, and not a great jazz composer.

I’ve already done the Grove Taste Challenge, so I don’t need to repeat myself, but I recall George E. Lewis’ story about composer-performers Anthony Davis and Gerry Hemingway attampting to register as a composer with their publisher. Hemingway (in my mind the more performerly of the two) had no problems. Davis (closer of the two, perhaps, to the composer end of the spectrum) was prevented from doing so, and had to change publishers in order to achieve this.

beyond education that echoes colonialism

Questions of education and outreach tend to focus on, to put it bluntly, ‘bringing black folk back into the fold’. Well, beyond the patronizing, neo-colonialist streak, unless we accept major institutional revolutions we may still be in a situation of a token few black professors teaching white students, or that of white folk educating black folk about their own (African-American) self-worth. Do ‘we’ want ‘them’ to come to ‘us’, or are ‘we’ to go to ‘them’? ‘Outreach’ and ‘education’ can be the most misleading of words: who’s needs to educate who? Who needs to reach out to who?
We need a radical overhaul of how we talk and discuss education and outreach; what its ultimate societal aims are. Unless we do this, don’t see much success in a system that would ultimately keep ontological power—the power, in this case, to define the aims and objectives, the qualities and shape of, the avant-garde—in the hands of white hegemony.

Imagine a white guy barges into NAACP meeting and saying “don’t worry I will liberate you!” (Some people come very close to this.)

I have, however, a modest proposal to the overhaul of music education: let’s not call Charles Ives a Great (American) Composer, let’s make sure he’s identified as a white, male, middle-class, American composer. Let’s make sure that actors identified with positions of privilege cannot escape their markers. The New York School? White Men’s Club. Post-War European Avant-Garde? The same. Let’s stop pretending that we have a cultural (social and economic) meritocracy. Let’s see how much longer the system can bear up under such explicit hi-lighting of inequality.

follow the money

Race intersects with class in complex, but seemingly inexplicable, ways (if we’ve learned anything from the discussions surrounding Obama). This whole issue is tied up with funding, ticket prices, artists’ sustenance (to put it unglamorously), and access (including even less glamorous subjects such as public transportation and venue location). Does the music (and ‘unfettered’ experimentation) become a luxury for the middle-classes? The wealthy?

Try these for size:

We want cultural participation by all (or the many).
Economic factors stand in the way of this cultural participation.

If you disagree with A and B, you may as well stop reading now….
The bad ol’ days of the aristocratic patronage of the arts are over. However, the funding objectives have, in many respects, reverted to a pre-20th century model.
Let’s get a few things out of the way. In the context of music, the funding and subsidies that jazz and improvised musics receive is dwarfed what is received by institutions such as, say, national/regional orchestras and opera houses. Modern orchestras cannot exist without some form of subsidy. Indeed, I doubt ticket sales would sustain a big-budget, technicolor, bells’n’whistles staging of the Ring cycle (something that is done periodically). Yet, by and large, these are the venues and cultural forums for the white (and ‘almost-white’) middle-classes and, particularly in the U.S. and England, the rich. Music as it stands is becoming too much of a playground for the wealthy.
If we agree with points A and B, arts funding needs to be re-thought-out. As it currently stands, funding (including through taxation) is often used to subsidize the vanity projects and playthings of the haves and have-mores. (Hmm… am I sounding awfully socialist here?)

And what are the goals of the Lincoln Center—what are the dreams, desires and aspirations that the Lincoln Center (sees itself) embodying?

meanwhile, off the black-white axis

What does this mean for those of us who are not black, but not (quite) white either; those of us who have had the luxury of some choice in which ‘side’ to play for (in many cases, for unfortunate political expediency)? ‘White’ when convenient to do so, not-white, when otherwise. We can’t/won’t/shouldn’t sit on the fence, that’s for sure.
And what of those of us with (in some circumstances) perhaps less mobility than African Americans? e.g. Latinos in Southern California, Pakistani in England, Moroccans in The Netherlands?

and what about gender?

One final question: when is the equivalent debate on gender and jazz about to hit the blogosphere?

training (the) quartet pt. 1.1: protocol of affinity

2007-03-22T16:42:00.000Z

revision notes:

It’s not everyday that I post up a revised version of a post, but having sat on this a while, I think it’s worth it in the long run. The previous version of this article was titled ‘protocol of mirroring’ and I’ve pretty much simply substituted the word ‘mirroring’ with the phrases ‘sharing affinity with’ or ‘creating affinity with’.
Looking back on my old scribbles and notes on these exercises, I noticed that I used ‘affinity’ to describe the main protocol, and that’s the word that I use to describe this in practice (in rehearsals and in class), so I don’t know what stroke of anti-genius (what is the antonym of ‘genius’ in this context?) made me choose ‘mirror’ instead. Whatever the case, having re-read Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ recently, I was struck by the following:

Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling. I like to imagine LAG, the Livermore Action Group, as a kind of cyborg society, dedicated to realistically converting the laboratories that most fiercely embody and spew out the tools of technological apocalypse, and committed to building a political form that actually manages to hold together witches, engineers, elders, perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists long enough to disarm the state. Fission Impossible is the name of the affinity group in my town. (Affinity related not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear group for another, avidity.)

Donna J. Haraway (1991), ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge), pp. 154–155.

Not political alliances because we are the same, not alliances because we are related, not an alliance based on some intrinsic quality, but alliances borne out of contingency and necessity, because we can work towards some collectively desirable outcome. (I am reminded of the recent anti-war demonstrations which I’ve tangentially blogged about.)

revision 1.1:

Having specified the quartet formation, let me introduce the protocol in the context of this ensemble: affinity. Well, I’ll be calling this thing ‘affinity’, but when one is sharing affinity, or creating affinity, with another, it can, for example, mean any of the following:

imitating
impersonating
mirroring
creating similitude
corresponding with
correlating with

This is the elemental behavior within these exercises. When one improviser shares, or creates, affinity with another, the improviser modifies their behavior to correlate in some way to the behavior of the other. Affinity may be implemented as imitation or impersonation, behavioral or stylistic equivalence, etc. Don't get too dogmatic about this, improvisers will find various (creative) ways to implement this idea.
A simple arrangement of the quartet is in a circle in which each improviser creates affinity from the behavior of the improviser on one side (behavioral information is passed in the opposite direction).This sounds simple, and it is, but we’ll be developing and twisting this idea as the training continues.

some (unanswered) questions:

Does the concept of affinity hold up to scrutiny?
Given that improvisative interaction may encompass juxtapositions, contrasts and contradictions, how can we engineer, or justify, such simple interaction? Affinity is somewhat an arbitrary protocol, but I find it easier that others to explain and implement. I’m, however, very interested in hearing of alternatives.

Is the dualism embedded in this protocol (similar OR different) culturally restrictive?
Yes, it is, and this will come to haunt any ensemble, particularly those composed of inexperienced improvisers. Does anyone have any solutions?

Can interaction, under any circumstance, really be thought of as unidirectional?
Of course not….

i have no idea what I’m doing

2007-03-16T17:35:00.000Z

A little while ago, away doing a performance, I was in the neighborhood, so I arranged to meet an old mentor of mine who I hadn’t seen in several years.
Let me tell you a little about CL. Although not affiliated with any institution, CL was my first (semi-formal) teacher who was seriously navigating this murky but exciting territory in the intersections of jazz and experimentalism, improvisation and composition. During our lessons, I took my first baby-steps in thinking and listening analytically about these musics and these practices (no more letting the sound of, say, Cecil Taylor wash-over me in a soft-headed fashion). In retrospect, I see that those lessons were the beginning-of-the-end of my lackadaisical fooling around with, and casual engagement with, in particular, the act of improvisation.

And there we are, I’ve lost my pony-tail since our last encounter, and CL is distinctly grayer. Older, hopefully wiser, but I still feel like the student in this relationship: twenty minutes into our meeting and CL will be listing things I should be listening to, musicians I should be checking out, and avenues still open for exploration.
But I’m jumping ahead in this story.
So there we are, standing in line to order our coffees and I tell him about the fact that I’ve started to teach. What a joke: “I have no idea what I’m doing,” I confess.
CL laughs, “I would have been worried if you said you did.”

daily recommended traditional intake

2007-03-14T16:42:00.000Z

I try and stay away from freejazz.org (life is far too short), but I was perusing the pages and I came across this ridiculous piece: ‘Percentage Analysis Free Improvisation/Jazz Incl. Free Jazz’. Here’s an example:

SUN RA 21% Free Improvisation 79% Jazz

I marvel at how neatly free improvisation stops at the 21/100 mark and jazz begins there.
Maybe I’m missing a joke here, so, if this is some kind of a conceptual art exercise, why not go further and propose a package label for each musician?

Tradition Facts
Performance Duration 65' 00"
Amount Per Performance
Improv 48' 20"	From Jazz 25' 00"
Total Improvisation	74%
Non-Idiomatic	8.5%
Jazz	55%
Hard-Bop	0.5%
Free Jazz	40%
Trans-European	15%
Euro-American	10%
Rock/Pop	35%
Folk	20%
Nomadic	8%
Non-Western	12%
Musician may be nuts. Jazz content may be higher than taste suggests.

But seriously, if the value of improvisation—as a skill, as a craft—is partly, perhaps primarily, to do with its adaptability—to cultural contexts, to social networks—then how can we ever hope to tentatively, never mind categorically, state that, say, “Ornette Coleman [is]… 13% [not 12, not 13.5] Texas Blues”, and “Albert Ayler [is] 18% Free Improvisation”?
The mistake, I think, is that we are thinking of idiom and tradition as something fixed. That there are stylistic traits written in stone which shape, or act more-or-less unambiguously as markers for, categories. That’s fine, if you believe that we’re studying cultural fossils, but if these are dynamic, living idioms/traditions which are, by definition, impure hybrids, then the actors (musicians, audience and, yes, theorists) themselves encapsulate these idioms/traditions. Is not the labor of a jazz musician, whatever they do, by definition, 100% pure jazz (as a hybrid form)? And is not the act of improvisation also, by extension, 100% free?

what’s in a name: the j-word

2007-03-11T22:22:00.000Z

Jazz is dead, long live jazz.

This one is a little bit more personal in its politicals than my previous ‘what’s in a name’ posts. As what started off as a comment to ‘Jazz Death?’ at Stochasticactus and ‘Jazz historiography versus jazz reality’ at Soundslope, this is my partial, subjective take on ‘jazz’.

Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny.

Frank Zappa on ‘Be-Bop Tango (Of The Old Jazzmen’s Church)’, Zappa/Mothers (1974).

‘Jazz’ is the name of the political system that controls and dictates African-American information dynamics.

Anthony Braxton quoted in Lock (1988), p. 92.

I’m stuck somewhere between the implications of the Zappa quote (in a sense who cares if jazz is dead) and the Braxton (well, if that’s jazz, they’re welcome to it). Yet I head straight to the J-word section in record stores since, for better or worse, right or wrong, much of the music I love and study is to be found there; I find the results of the labor of many of my cultural elders filed under that moniker.
Reading some of the debates here and there, it occurs to me that there are at least two issues here: one is, for lack of better word, ‘authenticity’ which comes under threat from diversification, intertextuality, marketing and reception. I’m not a huge fan of marching under this banner: I’ve seen what it (or the pursuit there of) can do to traditions of musicking.
And if the lack of ‘authenticity’ leads to an uncomfortably high dosage of ‘jazz’ of the—choose your prefix—smooth-, cocktail-, comfort-, easy-, light-, yuppie- brands, I can live with it. At least Kenny G does not pretend to tell the whole story—the one true story—of jazz.

The other issue is the ‘official stories’.

…It [jazz] was seen as that [subversive and culturally corrosive] a long time ago because of race. That’s the only way you could see Louis Armstrong as a subversive figure, or Charlie Parker, or Duke Ellington. Their message was always one of humanism….

Wynton Marsalis on The Daily Show, March 7th 2007 (watch the video).

So Marsalis claiming that, once stripped of its historical, political and, yes, racial specificity, jazz can stand for a universal humanhood. But is Marsalis also arguing that, having developed colorblindness, we can now appreciate the colorless message underneath the black faces? And isn’t this identity-free, discorporate, humanism a luxury of the wealthy? the white? the male? the heterosexual? Is Marsalis in fact saying that underneath the black faces is the music of/for whites?

…Jazz is the product of the whites—the ofays—too often my enemy. It is the progeny of the blacks—my kinsmen. By this I mean: you own the music, and we make it. By definition, then, you own the people who make the music. You own us in whole chunks of flesh.

Archie Shepp (1965).

What motivates Marsalis’ odd-ball desire for colorblindness (‘once we get rid of the race element, we shall see the universal value of the music’)? Of course this music was subversive and culturally corrosive. Surely you’d have to be come kind of reactionary, wingnut not to want it to be. Why would you want to neutralize this music? Does Marsalis want it to smell less—to smell better?
You wanna know about ‘official stories’? Misha Mengelberg gets to be a composer, but Ornette Coleman—well, Ornette?—is a jazz musician. Wanna know where Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith is found in Grove Music Online? In Grove Jazz. How about John Zorn? John Zorn gets two entries: one in the vanilla, mayonnaise, real Grove, and the other in the ‘jazz’ subsection. (Macy, accessed March 11, 2007.)

If Pulitzer Prize winning neo-classicists want the J-word, they can have it. …Or they can’t: it’s not theirs to own, and its certainly not mine to give. But if jazz becomes Jazz™, fine, have it. Just leave the rest of us alone and save your sermonizing to yourselves—to your little ghetto—and stop staking claim to the names, works and labor of those you wish to forget; wished hadn't been born; wished did not pollute the perfect, flawless, immaculate, clean, purity of your fictitious history. Stop speaking as if the music of anything after hard-bop has any relevance to what you do. In fact, fuck off.

You have to give Wynton [Marsalis] and those guys credit for insisting that black people should have a very important voice in outlining what African American culture is all about. I think that’s a good thing to do. But then, I have a pretty expanded view of what the African American tradition can be. I’ve learned from some really amazing individuals representing a pretty diverse take.

George E. Lewis quoted in Corbett (1996), p. 40.

But whether or not jazz is dead, I don’t share many of the feelings underlying expressions of pessimism. And if the youthful musicians of today appear timid, maybe that has more to do with the fossilized tradition’s elder guardians’ constant proclamation that there will never, ever be another genius of the status of Duke, Parker, Monk, Coltrane. Ever.

What’s important to me is that my work is seen in a particular context, coming from a particular tradition. I don’t really care what people call it but I would want is to be clear that I was inspired to play by listening to certain people who continue to be talked about mainly in jazz contexts. People like John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Cecil Taylor—these were people who played music that excited me to the point where I took music seriously myself. That continues to be the case. That’s where what I’m doing has to make most sense, if it makes any sense at all.

Evan Parker quoted in Lock (1991), p. 30.

I’m happy to be labeled under the J-word; I’m happy not to be. The musicians I work with orbit the traditions of improvised musics (free or otherwise), the Blues, of Rock, of R’n’B, folk musics (regional or nomadic), and Experimentalism (from its various forms, branches and chapters). However, it may be that the single most common cultural lineage we hover around and intersect with is encapsulated by that J-word. That, to me, is the testament to the legacy of African-American… actually, let’s not tip-toe around this in our current Obama fueled condition: the legacy of Great Black Music.

The tradition is dead; long live the tradition.

references:

Corbett, John (1996), ‘Interactive Imagination: George Lewis’ Wild Trombone’, Down Beat (vol. 63, no. 8, August).
Lock, Graham (1991), ‘speaking of the essence’, Wire (issue 85, March).
______ (1988), Forces In Motion: Anthony Braxton and the Meta-reality of Creative Music (London: Quartet).
Macy, Laura, ed. (accessed March 11, 2007), Grove Music Online, http://www.grovemusic.com.
Shepp, Archie (1965), ‘An Artist Speaks Bluntly’, Down Beat (reproduced at http://www.sterneck.net).
Zappa/Mothers (1974), Roxy & Elsewhere, CD (Rykodisc re-release of Discreet).

playing in position pt. 9: fingerboard geometry

2007-03-06T20:06:00.000Z

To simplify things, there’s basically three ways to change the pitch on a chordophone like a guitar: change the tension of the string, change the mass of the string, or change the effective vibrating length of the string. On the guitar the tension of the string is altered by ‘bending’ the strings or via mechanical means (e.g. tuning machines, a mechanical ‘detuner’ or whammy bar). In the context of position playing, however, it’s the latter two (mass and length of the vibrating string) that we’re interested in.You can view the fingerboard as a two dimensional space in which pitch is dependent on the position both longitudinally and transversally in relation to the strings. Pitch is altered by moving up and down the string (changing the vibrating length of the string) or by moving perpendicular to the string, across the fingerboard (selecting strings of different mass and, to some extent, tension).
In our exploration of playing in position, thus far, we’ve really only concentrated on the first of these dimensions, but we’re about to extend playing in position across the fingerboard. (Or, recalling my earlier metaphor of the guitar fingerboard as “a set of single-pole, multi-throw switches”, having concentrated our efforts on the individual switches, we are about to practice moving between the switches.)

One of the interesting side effects this 2-dimesional arrangement is that the same pitch may appear at multiple coordinates on the fingerboard:Another is that shapes derived from the comfortable hand shape (the diagonal fretting pattern that, from first to fourth finger, moves bass to treble across the strings, and bass to treble up the frets) tend to maximize the pitch interval available, while the reversed diagonal shape tends to minimize them. (These factors will become significant in, for example, the playing of clusters.)Keep these ideas in mind as you approach the 2-dimensional fingerboard: you’re about to take a step towards what some players describe as the fingerboard ‘lighting up’….

diabolically inspired and hilarious

2007-03-04T02:06:00.000Z

Okay, I’ve linked to YouTubified clips to (respectfully) critique an elder of guitar improvisation, discuss a problematic reengineering of performance ritual, and, the last time, to simply point to a beautiful and charmingly sweet little ditty….
Well, this ain’t charming or sweet, and it’s definitely ugly… but it is inspired and hilarious (which is, as far as I’m concerned, an appropriately diabolical combination). Enjoy!

who needs record labels?

2007-03-01T19:20:00.000Z

As a possible reply (or response or counterpoint or tangential-example or interesting-but-irrelevant-aside) to ‘Ramblin man’ at SoundSlope, ignore the U.K.-centric language, and have a read of ‘Record labels lose out as bands become brands in fierce market’ from the Guardian Unlimited. In particular:

Although sales of CDs are falling sharply… artists are riding the crest of a creative wave—live music has never been more popular, festivals are selling out in record time and brands are paying millions to associate themselves with up and coming acts.

The rest, however, with its predictions of markets driven by cottage industry ‘brands’, reads a little bit like a poor imitation-William Gibson novel (when did business sections of newspapers start getting their tone from Wired, eh?)…

solo: my humble lexicon

2007-02-27T19:14:00.000Z

Having critiqued the music as language metaphor, I’m now about to talk about lexicons.
Let’s be clear here: by lexicon I don’t necessarily mean a kind of musical building-block—the atoms by which a performance/piece is constructed—although, interestingly enough, atomizing tends to be the first step in creating a lexicon (but that’s a discussion for another time…). I find lexicons—vocabularies, palettes or classifications of gestures, relationships, tactics or sounds—are useful not so much for generating material, but as a “temporary acknowledgment of one boundary [that] allows for [the] renegotiations of others” (Devin Hurd made a similar comment in regards to two-note scales).
My vocabulary has changed significantly over the years, and substantially over the last four years or so during which I began to seriously explore the solo context. And although there’s a kind of (irrational) logic to my vocabulary, much of the choices are arbitrary and ad-hoc—it’s what I can practice and train practically.
My vocabulary is also, for lack of better expression, non-formally multi-dimensional (but more on that in the future). However, in its bare-bones, ‘flat’ form, in the solo guitar context, I have only three elements that make up my improvisative vocabulary: open strings plus natural harmonics; chromatic and ‘displaced’ clusters; and two-hand ‘touch’ playing. Never mind Anthony Braxton’s hundred or so ‘sound classifications’ (Braxton, 1988, pp. v–x), ‘impoverished’ does not begin to describe my lexicon (it’s a small part of why ‘lexicon’ is entirely the wrong word for it).
I’ll take closer looks at these elements from various angles in future articles; discussing some of the (irrational) logic behind it, and exploring some of the implications of it.

references:

Braxton, Anthony (1988), Composition Notes, Book A (distributed by Hanover, NH: Frog Peak Music).

sexuality ≈ the improvisative?

2007-02-25T16:58:00.001Z

It’s been a little while since the last paraphrase, but here’s a potentially provocative one:

First, the improvisative can be understood as a drive, an impulse or form of propulsion, directing a subject toward an object. …Second, the improvisative can also be understood in terms of an act, a series of practices and behaviors involving bodies, organs, and pleasures…. Third, the improvisative can also be understood in terms of an identity. …And fourth, the improvisative commonly refers to a set of orientations, positions, and desires which implies that there are particular ways in which the desires, differences, and bodies of subjects can seek their pleasure.
As a concept, the improvisative is incapable of ready containment: it refuses to stay within its predesignated regions, for it seeps across boundaries into areas that are apparently not its own. As drive, it infests all sorts of other areas in the structures of desire. …As a set of activities and practices, it refuses to accept the containment [of place and context]…. It is excessive, redundant, and superfluous in its languid and fervent overachieving. It always seeks more than it needs, performs excessive actions, and can draw any objects… any number of subjects… into its circuits of pleasure.

paraphrase of Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. viii.

Replace ‘the improvisative’ with ‘sexuality’, and you’re back to the original text.

the closed laptop pt. 0: a cautionary tale of performance practice

2007-02-22T23:30:00.000Z

I’m taking a little detour from the bread and butter subject matters of this blog, and having a look at laptop computers in the context of live, and, in particular, improvised, performance.

Before I start, as my position is partial, and by no stretch of the imagination ‘objective’, let me sketch out a few background details. I’m a guitar player—an improviser. Nine times out of ten, that’s my identity (function, assignment, designation) on stage. On the other hand, I have worked around, from, and within, the loosely defined field that enrolls laptops for live, music performance. I’ve intersected with these practices long enough to witness various monikers and prefixes—‘plunderphonics’, ‘EAI’, ‘new media’—come onto the scene, and others—‘live’, ‘real-time’, ‘interactive’, ‘new media’—fall out of favor. I’ve performed several times with laptopiteers. I’ve even sat behind a laptop on stage a few times, although not recently (and if you think I have an axe to grind, maybe it’s in my self-conscious abandonment of that last position).
However, I feel alienated from performances with laptops on stage despite (or maybe because of) my background—my prior experience, my prior contact, with these practices.

There’s two issues I will be hovering around in my discussions (I’ve already posted a version of these, and they originally started in discussions with AF):

The laptop interface encourages a narcissistic attitude.
Significant fraction of laptop performers are interested in computer science issues at the expense of issues of culture, tradition, stage presence, or the body and the corporeal.

Okay, let me unpack these a bit….

That clam-shell interface was designed to create a virtual, private office space in, say, a semi-public airplane seat. That's not an inescapable or inevitable position, but very few laptopiteers are either aware of this, nor are they actively deconstructing it. Which is related to point B.
Okay, this is a caricature: you cannot neatly separate the technical, on the one hand, from these other issues. This dualism, however, underpins much of laptopping. And, although I'm very much interested in the technological, to simply transpose that into performance space (the concert hall, the club) leaves a lot to be desired.

Combining, A and B, I find, as an audience member or performer, the whole experience problematic. I don’t believe laptopping to be a unique case, but I think it is an example that starkly demonstrates the problems of performance practice and audience engagement. As a cautionary tale of technological music practice, it's interesting and instructive.

To be continued…

some observations i brought home

2007-02-20T22:56:00.000Z

Things I’ve learned from, observed during, and affirmed by, my recent excursion:

Your best performances are not necessarily when you feel most confident, positive or focussed.
Nor are they necessarily when you feel most relaxed or comfortable.
If there’s one person in the audience, that’s the most important person at that moment.
Improvisation gives you enormous scope to interact with the audience.
Maybe all interactions between audience and performer are improvisative.
Maybe all interactions are improvisative.
It’s a difficult skill to accept praise gracefully.
Electro-acoustic improvisation is performed by, on the whole, young-ish, white men.
Laptops are the instruments of the socially inept.
The quality of an electro-acoustic improvisation is inversely proportional to the number of laptops visible on stage.
The rhetoric that supports much of live computer music remarkably resembles that of post-Reaganite, free-market capitalism (e.g. ‘choice and freedom’).
A significant fraction of experimental musicians (“we’re artists, dammit”) refuse to take into account, or learn from (the mistakes of), the vernacular (“we’re avant-garde, dammit”).

Right now I’m just glad to be home, but I’m sure I’ll return to look at some of these issues in depth….

music ⊄ language?

2007-02-14T16:38:00.000Z

Talking about music as language isn’t something I’ve heard much since my college days, so it came as a little jolt, albeit not an unpleasant one, when I came across ‘The Semanitcs of Music’ at Musical Perceptions. I left a question there which asked:

…Why are we consistently looking for links between language and music?
Exactly when did we start to theorize music as a subclass of language, and under what circumstance? Why is this hypothetical relationship so much more compelling and durable than others (e.g. in comparison to a hypothetical link between dance and architecture)?
I don’t think I’m the only musician who’s come to believe this ‘is-a’ relationship is not particularly helpful, or, some quirky scholarship aside, illuminating.

I have no idea how, or when, the link between language and music was initially postulated. Some musicians have managed to get significant mileage out of this postulated link, but I have, on the whole, found it less than advantageous.
As an exercise, let’s take some of the minimum requirements of language and see how music shapes up. Does music have syntax? Well, yes, sorta, except apparently having no discernible syntactical structure does not stop you from ‘understanding’ something as music. How about a lexicon? Well, er, under certain circumstances it might. Semantics? Hmm… Hard to say, maybe only when you find something analogous to a lexicon, and the lexicon seems to have some sort of associated… er….
Conclusion: music is sorta, kinda, maybe, almost, sometimes language.Perhaps the confusion is to do with the ‘is a’ relationship. Thus, if I were to make a link between music and language, I might be tempted to formulate it the other way around: Music is not language, but language is a very limited and specialized form of music. (Or, taking a leaf out of the cladists’ book, I might say that music and language share a common ancestor.) Whatever the criteria that could conceivably bound music, whatever common denominator that could possibly define the multiplicity of musical acts, language can easily be accommodated within it. Really, compared with the range, diversity and variety of music across cultures, language is, by comparison, oddly homogeneous.

Anyway, I’m off-blog for a few days, but, you never know, I may bring back some wondrous (or not) traveler’s tales when I get back….

training (the) quartet pt. 1: protocol of mirroring

2007-02-12T13:11:00.001Z

Having specified the quartet formation, let me introduce the protocol in the context of this ensemble: mirroring. Well, I’ll be calling this thing ‘mirroring’, but when one is mirroring another, it can, for example, mean any of the following:

imitating
impersonating
sharing affinity with
creating similitude
corresponding with
correlating with

This is the elemental behavior within these exercises. When one improviser mirrors another, the improviser modifies their behavior to correlate in some way to the behavior of the other. Mirroring may be implemented as imitation or impersonation, behavioral or stylistic equivalence, etc. Don't get too dogmatic about this, improvisers will find various (creative) ways to implement this idea.
A simple arrangement of the quartet is in a circle in which each improviser mirrors the behavior of the improviser on one side (behavioral information is passed in the opposite direction).This sounds simple, and it is, but we’ll be developing and twisting this idea as the training continues.

some (unanswered) questions:

Does the concept of mirroring hold up to scrutiny?
Given that improvisative interaction may encompass juxtapositions, contrasts and contradictions, how can we engineer, or justify, such simple affinity? Mirroring is somewhat an arbitrary protocol, but I find it easier that others to explain and implement. I’m, however, very interested in hearing of alternatives.

Is the dualism embedded in this protocol (similar OR different) culturally restrictive?
Yes, it is, and this will come to haunt any ensemble, particularly those composed of inexperienced improvisers. Does anyone have any solutions?

Can interaction, under any circumstance, really be thought of as unidirectional?
Of course not….

mob behavior and the hegemonic impulse

2007-02-09T16:20:00.000Z

I remember, vividly, my first encounter with the mob. Afterwards I was an angry, upset and, most of all, confused (novice) improviser. Licking my wounds, I was attempting to piece together what exactly happened; trying to figure out exactly why I was angry.

…People who use anarchy of collective improvisation will interpret that [‘freedom’] to mean ‘Now I can kill you’…. …Any transformational understanding of so-called freedom would imply that you would be free to find those disciplines that suit you, free to understand your own value systems; but not that you would just freak out because ‘the teacher’s not there’.

Anthony Braxton quoted in Lock (1988), p. 240.

Let’s get a few things out of the way. By the mob, I don’t mean noise. Noise is that super-saturated, information rich, contradictory musical experience—really, I can’t get enough of it. Nor do I necessarily mean ‘playing as fast as you can, as loud as you can’—another standard complaint against improvised musics. Velocity and power are things that… well, that’s a story for another time.
No, what I mean by the mob is, to put it ineloquently, the moosh. You want the evil mirror image of contrasts and juxtapositions? Well, there it is: We are all the same, we are marching lock-step, we never ask why, and if someone does, we won’t hear them and we’ll make sure that they can’t be heard.
Mob behavior, in improvised contexts, is a strange thing. Sometimes I think that it shouldn’t exist at all, other times I’m surprised that it appears so infrequently. It’s as if the twin, seemingly incompatible, rhetorical ideals of improvisation (at least among many ‘part-time’ improvisers)—of individualism and collectivism—collude together to construct the mob.
So, do we want to be leaders, or do we want to be sheep? Maybe these are not as distinct as may appear. Maybe to be seduced by the notion of leadership is to become unquestioning followers.

You’re either with us, or against us….

George W. Bush, November 6th 2001.

What happened that evening of my first encounter with the mob? Those that could blast out, did; those that could not, had their voices taken away.
So I’m watching, for example, a couple of brass players who were, by day, straight laced orchestral types, now ‘free’ from the discipline of the idiom (score?), ‘free’ from the command of the ‘teacher’ (conductor?), were doing their best to drown out others whose instruments were not as capable of such volume. The irony being that I couldn’t make out what they were playing either.
After that bruising and disorientating experience had finished, an excited percussionist came up to the instigator of the event. Many mutual congratulations were exchanged. The percussionist talked about the symbolism of the group playing with one voice, and drowning out—indicating my little amp—the symbol of power. (I was too angry to say this at the time, but, oh, man, you couldn’t hear me ’cause I wasn’t playing. And anyway, you know I had the volume of my amp at the one quarter mark—I could have drowned out every single one of you easily: as easy as turning a dial, as easy as pushing a button—boom.)
All this was for a ‘consciousness raising event’ to stand against, I kid you not, the mob in Bosnia. How’s that for irony?

How many sins have been committed in the name of political purity?
…How often have we heard that Communism, or Socialism, or free-market economics, or cost-benefit analysis, or monetarism, would bring the good life (for those who remained) if only they were systematically imposed and all the deviant elements were rooted out?

Law (1994), p. 6.

We’ve been trained not to like difference or contradictions, or at best to keep it safely bound and fenced off. We may desire to be the same (we want coherence). We may desire societies composed of the like, rather than the different, because we believe that a heterogeneous society is no society at all. If we start believing that, we might just start to act like the mob. We’ll become sheep or (mythical) lemmings because we cannot, or will not, take responsibility for our actions. But that’s a subject for another time….

some (unanswered) questions:

How does Taylor do it?
Is it just me, or does Cecil Taylor’s larger scale performances fly close to mob behavior? How does he manage to navigate clear of it? Or does he? Is it that there is such a charismatic figure in the middle of it that prevents it swinging out into that moosh?

What can you do in the middle of that mob?
In subsequent encounters with the mob, my solution was to walk off stage. That never seemed to me to be an entirely satisfactory solution. It always felt dishonorable….

Does the lack of an explicit idiom act as a catalyst towards mob behavior?
Just informally, I’ve encountered this mob in the form of orchestral players and/or neo-boppers (exceptions in both cases of course) more often than others. Is it that they, more than others, feel that, when the safety-net of the score or idiom is taken away, the ‘teacher’ is out? Alternatively, does this become a collective therapy session to let loose and (primally) scream? Is it then unfair of me to say that this becomes ‘freedom’ for people who take freedom for granted?

references:

Law, John (1994), Organizing Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell).
Lock, Graham (1988), Forces In Motion: Anthony Braxton and the Meta-reality of Creative Music (London: Quartet).

huh? did i read that right?

2007-02-06T21:25:00.000Z

If you get beyond the corporate-speak, this is surprisingly radical (for a corporate ramble that is).

playing in position pt. 8b: one string melodies (yet again)

2007-02-04T19:37:00.000Z

In part 8a, we looked at playing our melody with variable hand shapes in a diatonic context. Despite the variable shapes—‘finger-per-fret’ or ‘extended’—depending on the underlying intervals, those exercises were not much different in principle from our previous work.
Now, for this part 8b, let’s try something different. Same melody (from Morricone’s Cinema Paradiso), same idea (shifting position for each tone), but in this case, we’ll be sounding the fret under the middle fingers (i.e. fingers 2 or 3).As in previous examples, I’ve indicated, in each case, the position of the first finger with the (lower) diamond notehead. However, in this case, I’ve additionally indicated the notional position of the fourth finger with the (upper) diamond notehead. By ‘notional position’ I mean that, were all the fingers of a given position be placed on the strings, this would be the position of the fourth finger. Simply put, by notating the positions of the first and fourth fingers, I am notating whether the ‘finger-per-fret’ or ‘extended’ shape is applicable to a given situation.
You may get this one straight away, you may not—this is certainly one of the trickier exercises we’ll be covering—either way, take your time and make sure that you continue to keep in mind that in position playing the guitar player gets their bearing from their first finger. However, in this case, not only should you be thinking of the position of the first finger, you should also keep in mind the (notional) position of the fourth finger.
If you’re having difficulty with this, try variants like the following:A little like the second example in ‘playing in position pt. 5: one string melodies (again)’, the above should aurally remind you of the positions of the first and fourth fingers in relation to the melody tone.

an application of the principles of canon formation II

2007-02-03T14:33:00.001Z

This is nowhere near the same league as the other case, but I have to admit to some ambivalence to the Behearer project.
Okay, I’ve been sitting on this for a few days, wondering if I should post this: I am not here to diss Behearer, or discourage the project, or preach from on high. I’m mostly just trying to examine my own responses—some of it irrational, some of it, perhaps, not. If I frankly interrogate my own reaction, I’m not sure I can honestly say that there isn’t more than a little exclusivity about my reaction. I hope not, but it’s possible. I certainly hope it’s not sadness about leaving the cultural ghetto.
Nevertheless, there is something else that worries me about this: that we are not only creating a canon, but very much following the established models of canonization. We love these musics, these practices, these practitioners. We love and value them for, among other things, their iconoclasm, for their resistance to the norms of dominant culture and ideology; but are we now doing exactly the opposite? Are we now adhering to, giving into, dominant culture and ideology? It’s right that this (semi-fictional) transnational tribe of musicians should leave this cultural ghetto, that we should be seeking escape from marginalization, but I worry about the public face that is being constructed.

So I was reading John Fordham’s blog entry about Behearer (I got to the article via ‘samiland is my land’ on be.jazz so thanks to Mwanji Ezana):

"Multiplicity" is the key word, and it may help explain why the 70s was such a black hole for informed jazz commentary about all the fascinating stuff that was really going on. Taking their lead from the American free-jazz movement… jazz musicians around the world realised they could make their own music, with their own local materials, without necessarily having to copy the licks….

Well, fine, but….

…I, and a growing band of like-minded writer-fans…came in.

‘Like-minded’? Hey, wait, what happened to ‘multiplicity’?

…The story finally begins to take its proper place in the cultural history of the late 20th century.

What would a story’s proper (rightful?) place in history be? And by whose reckoning? And by what process of judgment? Perhaps (at this time and place) the entries in the canon are not conventional, but is this not the rhetoric of the (conventional) construction process of a (conventional) canon? Does anyone else smell a hegemonic impulse?

Not for the first time, Dave Douglas has made a big difference.

Uh-oh. Did Fordham just reduce the work of the many to the one? Do we really want to be in this synecdochic business in which the whole is boiled down to the most easily identified appendage?

We need a context, we need a history, and we can’t always trust others to write it for us—we desire self-definition—but if the practitioners and practices of these musics were as diverse as we are making out (and I think they were), I worry that any historiography (no matter how well intentioned, how well researched) will not capture that diversity: canonization has, in other cases, led to an ever diminishing number of ‘greats,’ not the celebration of a community. …but I’ve got no answers, and I have no solutions.

solo: niche in the ecology

2007-01-31T20:52:00.000Z

After confidently kick-starting this thread, by the very second entry I had to admit difficulty in writing about the solo context, and I still can’t quite figure out how to crack this. Well, gotta start somewhere (I’m prepared for this ending up as the most confused and lamest of entries…).

Our idom is an open field. If I were to play bebop guitar, well, it’s pretty crowded in there….

John Scofield quoted in Mandel (1988), p. 33.

At It Is Not Mean If It Is True there was an interesting discussion that touched on the crowdedness of instruments. sjz asked if “all the instruments [are] crowded now,” and I think the answer is yes, but they’ve always been crowded—they’ve always come with personal and collective histories.

I prefer the kind of object which… have some kind of inner life. …The ‘conservation’ of certain contents in objects which people touch under conditions of extreme sensitiveness. The ‘emotionally’ charged objects are… capable of revealing these contents and touching them provides associations and analogies for our own flashes of the unconscious. Thus, in several of my films I used an object or a whole group of objects which I ‘heard.’

Jan Svankmajer quoted in Hames (1995), pp. 110-111.

This intersects with cyborg identities (Haraway, 1991) in which, perhaps, “the guitar forms the interface (both the surface boundary and communication channel) between the guitarist and techno-cultural narratives. Narratives that enroll trans-corporeal characters such as tastes, sensibilities and tradition, and corporeal characters such as luthiers, audience members and other guitarists.” Whatever the case, however, let me, for the moment, talk about this crowd.

…I thought about the space, the niche that I could look for was somewhere between Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, with… the way John Tchicai played. …not exactly a synthesis, but I could work my way through the gaps that were left between what those people were doing. …It sounds very mechanical but I was actually emotionally moved to want to be in that space. It wasn’t just a calculation, I felt an impulse.

Evan Parker quoted in Lock (1991), p. 33.

Who’s in this crowd? In my case, there’s a trinity of improvising guitarists who I look towards in navigating this space—this particular socio-cultural intersections of guitar and improvisative performance. In no small way I get my bearings (technically and culturally) from this constellation. Additionally (non-guitarist) improvisers inform my socio-musical approach and position within the performed ecology (there is, for example, a trombonist who I think of every time I play in a group situation). There’s also an assortment of pianist whose techniques and strategies I’ve begun to transpose into the context of the guitar(ist). And somewhere in that crowd—a group that is very much partial and not innocent of issues of identity (class, gender, race, nationality, etc)—is me. In retrospect, this might be a good reading of the title I gave the first entry on the ‘solo’ context: “alone together.”
And that, people, constitutes my niche (or at least the self-conscious, visible aspect of it). It is pretty crowded in there (I would be lying to say that I have an easy time negotiating within it), but I feel like there’s enough space to breathe and maneuver, and, on a good day, a ‘sound’ that I can (tentatively) call mine (and ours).

references:

Hames, Peter (1995), ‘Interview with Jan Svankmajer’ in Peter Hames (ed.), Dark Alchemy: The Films of Jan Svankmajer (Trowbridge: Flicks Books).
Haraway, Donna J. (1991), ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge).
Lock, Graham (1991), ‘speaking of the essence’, Wire (issue 85).
Mandel, Howard (1988), ‘Hard Pickings: John Scofield’, Wire (issue 53).

context (redux)

2007-01-30T20:00:00.000Z

The context is (only as good as) what you can make of it: what resources, techniques and technologies you can deploy.

context

2007-01-29T20:47:00.000Z

You’re only ever as good as your context—who (or what) you’re playing with, the audience, the space.

contrasts and juxtapositions

2007-01-26T20:41:00.000Z

You like potato and I like potahto,
You like tomato and I like tomahto…

Scene: an improvised music ‘master class’ given by a trio of musicians of varied backgrounds. Among the trio is OLEI—one less-experienced improviser. OLEI is a West European Concert Music performer specializing in the interpretation of high-Avant-Garde repertoire. Also among the cast of characters is CASI—a capable and sophisticated improviser.
A student asks, “how do you know what to play? Are there any… do you plan… Do you have ideas where to go—what to do?”
OLEI answers, “well, sometime you can obviously contribute to what’s… what the others are doing, or obviously sometimes you can destroy—undermine what is happening.” OLEI continues by attempting to demonstrate this concept at the piano.
CASI, who has thus far been relatively quiet (despite being the most theatrical and flamboyant in performance) now stands up. “On the other hand, you can also take two ideas that are,” considering the available wordings, pauses, “that seem incompatible, and if you play those two ideas together,” hands raised, CASI starts to move them closer to each other, “play them side-by-side long enough, it will generate its own logic.” Hands brought together, sketching a fusion—a melding.

I do A, you do A'; you do B, I’ll do a B'….

One of the hardest things for an aspiring, novice improviser to grasp is the idea of juxtapositions, contrasts and contradictions.

Green follows blue follows purple follows red follows orange follows yellow follows green follows blue….

Specifically, it’s not easy to grasp the idea that things may not be incompatible.
They just might not be.
The compatibility or otherwise of ‘material’ (oh, words don’t get much more composerly than that) is not a concern for some improvisers. Or, better, things can be made compatible. Or, better yet, compatibility is not something you (on stage) have any more control over than they (off stage) do.

I offer my hand, you spit; you give me flowers, I take a base ball bat to your head….

George E. Lewis: “Inexperienced people think that structure in improvisation consists of call and response. In other words, you follow what the other person is doing. The thing is, you need to be able to establish a link without following totally. So you investigate a potential point—a point of commonality. And then you investigate points of difference….” (quoted in Deborah Wong’s liner notes to George Lewis and Miya Masaoka (1998) The Usual Turmoil and other Duets, CD (Berkeley: Music and Arts Programs of America).)

Green follows basil follows red follows carpet follows red follows red follows ‘Louie-Louie’ follows snails….

There’s a naive idea (many of us have believed this at some point) that interaction consists of (a) imitation, emulation, mimicry, enhancement, supplementation, and completion, or (b) impediment, inhibition, frustration, hinderance, interference, destruction, obstruction, and sabotage.
Well, no, that doesn’t quite work, not in the field, and not in the laboratory. What we are collectively creating, rather than being about ‘material’ (that may, like ice cream and gravy, not go together), is a relationship.
Try it; try CASI’s experiment: You play tweedledee—characterful and distrinctive—and while you’re doing that, I am going to play tweedledum—something equally distinctive, but which is ‘incompatible’ with tweedledee. Keep it going and see if it doesn’t “create its own [aggregate] logic”.

updates:

01-27-07: Add sentence that starts “What we are collectively creating…”.

training (the) quartet pt. 0: why four?

2007-01-23T00:10:00.000Z

I say ‘training,’ but what follows will hover somewhere between exercises, tutorials and a kind of improv meet and greet. These are not autonomous ‘compositions’ or ‘works’: they were never designed for public performance. They are teaching tools and also a way to train/rehearse an improvisative ensemble together in a relatively short space of time. Relatively novice improvisers can spend upwards of ten weeks on these; experienced improvisers can run through these in a couple of afternoons. Either way, after a group has run through the exercises, the strategies and tactics presented will affect an ensemble's collective behavior in improvised performances—some of it good, much of it problematic (but more of that later).
Although I am, and will be, more-or-less responsible for the (bloggified) written account, I can’t claim any kind of exclusive authorship of these exercises. What I will be presenting was developed with PH, AMC, DW, KN, SCL, EK, WW, SR and others, and I’ve borrowed some additional tactics from work with POD and PR. (Apologies for the code names, but, with some luck, the individuals involved will recognize themselves.)Why quartets? Why not duos? Trios? Quintets? Sextets? Dectets? Why not improvising orchestras? The short answer is a variant of the Goldilock’s response: It ain’t too big, and it ain’t too small.Additionally, the quartet is the smallest unit in which you start getting interesting sub groupings. Trios too easily break down into solo-plus-accompaniment (1+2); duos are duos (2) or two solos (1+1); and solos are, well, solos (1). Quartets, on the other hand, can be reconfigured as six double-solos-plus-duos (1+1+2), four solo-plus-trios (1+3), three double-duets (2+2), one quadruple-solo (1+1+1+1), and one quartet (4).

some (unanswered) questions

Is there really something special about the quartet?
Do the qualities that I’ve attributed to the quartet ring true to you? Is that Goldilock’s response just lazy dogma on my part?

The straight man: how do quartets break down socially?
Has anyone else observed the phenomenon of the ‘straight man’ in a quartet? A individual who doesn’t hang-out in the same places, doesn’t share the same sense of humour, has distictive dietary requirements, tends to play ’bop licks more (or less) than the rest of the quartet?

structure|ings: engineering serendipity

2007-01-21T00:04:00.000Z

Some discussions with students in class, and Peter’s comment on ‘endings: or engineering serendipity,’ got me thinking again about this tight-rope act that we do as improvisative performers (to borrow a term from George E. Lewis).
I’ve been trying to get my students to throw in everything and the kitchen sink—all their resources and techniques—into their playing: I want, as Anthony Braxton is quoted as saying, clouds of garbage cans. Yet there’s a strong impulse to create ‘coherence’; to subdue ‘noise’ (in the behavioral sense, if not the acoustic one). The consequences of this is that we end up afraid to jump in and do. The play often ends up as uniform and slowly-evolving gestures; consistent if predictable. We’re, to paraphrase a student, waiting for the ‘mood’ to settle.
There’s complex forces and desires that conspire (cohere?) to do this, and one of the issues has to do with form. In a way, I think, the students are caught between twin ideologies of form; form as a property that is emergent, and form as a framework that is (pre-)composed. The former has, for example, its well-known and vocal proponents in the neo-Cagian camp, the latter is very much, well, a composerly dictum. (I’ve talked about some of the ideologies of form/structure before, so I won’t get into much more detail here.)
I don’t want to get into an debate about, to caricature it for a moment, the denial of agency versus authorial prescription, but it strikes me that, in the context of improvisation, the interesting and practical stuff lies between these dual ideals of form. (So, I find myself back to fuzzy boundaries again.) For whichever of these two formulations we adhere to, form and structure are given to you—handed down rather than forged in real-time.
Sure “what happens, is what happens,” but it is about accepting (the outcome of) your own (and your partners’) actions. You are the one who makes it happen, and it may be unproductive to wait for external dictation.

If you go

bloop bloop bloop bloop…
bloop bloop bloop bloop…

Well, yes, that’s audibly ‘coherent,’ and, yes, you can wait until the ‘mood’ settles. On the other hand, there’s nothing stopping you from throwing yourself into it and going

crash-k’BANG… b-b-bloop-pah-pah shwoop…
bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz… bzzz-CRASH!
k’bleep…

In the end, you’ve just fashioned the mood. Coherence be damned, accept it, and it’ll all make sense later (but that’s another story).

playing in position pt. 8a: one string melodies (yet again)

2007-01-19T17:07:00.000Z

Despite what I’ve said, we’re going to visit the one string melodies one last time before entering into a very brief discussions on physiology and posture.

Let’s deploy the extended hand shape into the one string line/melody (still Morricone’s music from Cinema Paradiso). If you’ve been following this thread and these tasks, you should have no difficulty with the following:This is largely the same as the first example in ‘playing in position pt. 5: one string melodies (again)’, merely shifted into a diatonic context. Note that we’re variously alternating between ‘finger-per-fret’ and the ‘extended’ shapes depending on the underlying scale structure. As before, you can also play the line alternately with the first and the fourth finger:There’s actually a lot of information to assimilate here, so take your time with these, and we’ll continue in part 8b.

harmony is politics by other means

2007-01-17T23:46:00.000Z

3 quarks daily has this little provocative jem. Anyway, the article quoted (‘Mapping Music’) is unfortunately tantilizingly vague due to the fact that it’s for a fluffy, light-weight, magazine.
So, it looks like I’ll have to wait until I can get my hands on the printed journal article which, I suspect and hope, will be a little meatier and less prone to ill considered and/or simplistic generalizations and comments (“sheet music… tells musicians very precisely which notes to play and when”). As it is, it’s impossible to tell whether Dmitri Tymoczko is an idiot who’s strayed way past his league, or he’s produced interesting work that’s much more reasonable, intelligent, and modest in its claims, than the fluffy, light-weight article makes out.
Either way, it would be fascinating to do a Latourian close reading of the work….

…By the way, the pictures do remind me, vaguely, of some psychoacoustics article/paper/book I encountered years ago. Any suggestions…?

‘society-in-miniature’? but where does the stage end?

2007-01-15T20:38:00.000Z

Before a note of music has been played, the building and its mode of organization have created among those present a set of relationships, which are a microcosm of those of the larger… society outside its walls.

Small, 1998, p. 36.

Thanks to sjz and Peter, I got myself into a complete twist a while ago. The problem revolved around words like ‘diplomacy,’ and in retrospect that entry was prescriptive and consequently, ironically enough, totalitarian. Even in retracting my implicit prescriptions, however, there are still problems.
Many of these problems, I think, come from my gung-ho attitude to language. Some of the confusion stems from using ‘sociological’ terms such as ‘compromise’ and ‘diplomacy’ in discussing life on the stage, but the serious issues come, I think, from my use of the expression ‘society-in-miniature’ to describe the acts and relationships that take place on, and constitute, the stage.
Let me take that latter point first. I think, in retrospect, ‘society-in-miniature’ is, at best, a kludge, and, at worst, a discursive liability. It implies that the social (the world off-stage) is clearly separate from the stage. Consequently, what happens on the stage can only mirror the off-stage world.
So that’s what I’ve been saying all this time….

Oh, crap.

I’ve been implying that there’s some hard-edged border between the constitutive and the discursive; between the ‘real’ and the ‘fictional’; between the off-stage and the stage.

Pure, 100%, distilled, idiotic garbage.

And, as a result of using this short hand—‘society-in-miniature’—I’d been implying a causal relationship between the macro-social and the micro-social (something that I had already disputed).
Okay, if I were smarter, what could I have said?

Stage as the place where the artist can be and function in any way the artist wants…. Being real…. A place to act 'as if' at the very least.
Stage as place where audience can be as concerned with the world as little or as much as they want.

sjz, Dec-6-2006

The stage is not separate from the social. The stage is not (necessarily) a fictionalized version of the off-stage world (there’s no ‘as if’). On the other hand, the off-stage world is no more real (non-fictional) than the stage. If I use ‘sociological’ terms to describe the stage it is not to make the stage mirror society, but because the stage, and what happens on it, is sociological: it is the (dis)orderings and (de)structurings of agents and relationships.

What happens in a ‘theatre’ or other ‘performance space’ is important in the context of the world ‘outside’. They exist in some sort of dialectical relationship with each other, rather than in separate compartments.

Frost and Yarrow, 1998, p. 3.

However, to put on my prescriptive hat back on for the moment, I don’t think that we do ourselves any favors by claiming any kind of political innocence on stage.

references:

Frost, Anthony, and Ralph Yarrow (1990), Improvisation in Drama (London: MacMillan).
Small, Christopher (1998), Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press).

2007: improvising guitar new year’s resolution

2007-01-13T19:14:00.000Z

Well, it’s nice to finally be back here. I would have returned sooner except for having to finish off that ‘real’ writing task, and then having to fish for funding (I don't expect anyone became a musician because of their love of bureaucracy and red tape). Anyway, I’m much better now, so let me gently break into 2007 with not, I think you’ll be glad to hear, another list, but a proposed outline of what I’ll be writing about….

Okay, as far as pedagogical topics go, I’ll continue with the studies in playing in position (with, despite my reservations, an excursion into talking about posture), with the eventual goal of returning to natural harmonics (which was really the exciting stuff), and then clusters.
In addition, I want to open a thread on group improvisation. Specifically, I’ll start with a set of schemes for quartet. These schemes hover somewhere between exercises, training and tactics. Nothing particularly original or earth shattering, but I have found these schemes useful, and they bring up, for me, problems of conceiving interactions and issues of pedagogy.
On the flip side, I will continue to discuss (or at least try and find out how to discuss) solo improvisation. (I say “on the flip side”, but of course that’s a false dichotomy.)
Back on sociological ground, I want to tackle in more detail the idea that improvisation is ‘society-in-miniature’. Topics that I hope to address are utopias and the distinctions between the micro-social and the macro-social. I got into a bit of a twist in regards to ‘diplomacy’, and I hope Peter, sjz and others will continue to keep me on my toes, and prevent me from making broad generalizations.
I also want to flesh out the subject of the body. Recently, MLM, PE and myself, among others, have got ourselves into rhetorical funk trying to talk about bodies in the context of music and performance. It’s tricky to avoid that neo-Cartesian impulse (our language conspires to reinstate that distinction and that hierarchy), but bodies, as Butler might say, surely do matter.

I’m sure more stuff will present itself as the year ambles on (I hesitate to say ‘progresses’), but as a starting point, these suit me fine… for the moment (and that’s the important thing).

charming little ditty

2006-12-30T03:22:00.000Z

Well, so much for that being the final post for 2006…

…ahem.

Anyway, not that I believe in aesthetics, or want to claim that beauty is the be-all and end-all of music, or that the value of art/entertainment is found through some kind of nonsensical list-making big-dick daftness, but… just have a listen to an ol’ YouTubified clip, and maybe I think it’s one of the prettiest things I’ve encountered in a while.