The ruin of many a poor boy

(Note: I try to stay away from PG language in my posts, but here it seems appropriate. Hide the little, little kids)

I've written before here about my contempt for American Idol, what it represents culturally, and how to tip it over. (In probably the only moment I ever agreed with Howard Stern, I wanted Sanjaya (sp?) to win to show the show for the ridiculous s*^tstorm it is)

Apparently, Andrew Fenlon had the same idea. Or at least that's how I interpret it. For those of you who (like me) missed it, Andrew is (to date) this year's American Idol villain, he who drew the ire of the judges, not for being bad (I actually think by Idol standards, his performance is OK, not great, but not bad by any means. And I'm sure his odd diction in intentionally ironic), but for being a little punkass who pisses the judges off. (Side note- does he not look incredibly like Christopher Reeve's Clark Kent? It's a doppleganger)

I have mixed feelings about this one, partially because I actually know Andrew casually. He's a very good trombone player, and he was a contemporary improvisation major at NEC when I was studying there with Brookmeyer. He and I worked for the great Ran Blake at the same time, and worked together occasionally on stuff for Ran. On the one hand, I think it's strangely laudable that someone would stand in line for hours in the blazing (not rising) sun in July at Gillette Stadium in Foxborogh for the sole purpose of pissing Simon Cowell and Victoria Beckham off. To my eyes, there is an element of Warhol-ish performance art in that video. And he will undoubtably become a momentary hipster icon. And as someone who wants to see Idol crash and burn, I enjoyed it to a degree.

On the other hand, he does come off as a total dick, which in my experience isn't much of a stretch for him. (To be clear, in my experience he's not a jerk at all, a nice guy, but if you don't know him he can come off as stand-offish, a little cocky, or worse. I've heard similar complaints about myself...) I hope to explore the relationship between Brooklyn hipsterism and '00s jazz in future decade in review posts, but I'm not real high on it. To me, looking in from the outside, a lot of what's come out of Brooklyn in the last five years is irony without context, looking sarcastically at things the hipsters don't really understand at all. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you have to, or should. And it isn't going to work- my hunch is the blogosphere will love Andrew, he'll have any interview he wants (to his credit, he's turned them all down), but middle America will be confused, and forget him when the next KFC ad comes on.

I know Andrew isn't a Brooklynite, but I imagine if American Idol did their audition at Brooklyn College, there would have been fifteen Andrew Fenlons. And part of me says, "go for it, stick it to the man! And get your 15 minutes doing it!" And part of me says, "oh, grow up!"

It ain't at Lincoln Center, yo

Fresh on the heels of the latest Shaq-Kobe feud, today (via Alex Ross) we find... a new music rap confrontation, courtesy of Hybrid Groove Project in Baltimore. Not quite as catchy as "Umbrella", but not bad either, and certainly funny if you know the in-jokes. Up here, I don't think Levine or Gil Rose are exactly quaking in their boots.

But why take shots at the new music groups, even in jest, and ignore those most ripe for smackdown, the composers? I've been out of the new music scene as a player for a few years now, but I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to smack a composer around a little bit, even (especially) some of the bigger names, for writing really dumb crap. (I still operate under the illusion that this is a family show, which makes it harder to be all gangsta.) What better venue than rap feuds?

"John Harbison/at it agin/ getting five commisions and then mailin' three in."

"And then there's P Glass/ your time has passed/ twenty years you pull the same three notes out your A&%."

(Just in case anyone wonders why I mostly do text settings of other people's poetry) Someone with more skills than me, please, bring it on!

I thought about including the jazz scene, but everyone's hurting right now, so I'm not sure feuds are the best idea. Plus, we all know what happened when Wynton rapped. (click on "Where Y'all At, if you must...)

have you got to be post-modernistic?

TIG continues to ponder the idea of "post-modern jazz". I was fascinated when he first posed the question, but have only now started to chew on it.

I should start by saying that I have a long-held distrust of the term "post-modern" and all that comes with it. I first came across it in a post-1945 music history class, in reference to Berio, Rochberg, the minimalists (I'll spare you the argument- I thought it a stretch) and- wait for it- Zorn's Naked City, among others. We got a good dollop of the signified and signifier, simulacrum, and the other gobelty-gook that comes with the term. The teacher also pointed us to Umberto Eco's Travels in Hyperreality, which I did enjoy thoroughly, and his idea that somehow wax museums are recreated castles were seeking to be "even better than the real thing".

My distrust is partially academic- the professor teaching the class did some things that I found academically, er, questionable in terms of sourcing and the like to justify his arguments, and in at least one case (Rochberg), what the professor opined about a particular piece and what the composer said about the piece were profoundly at odds. None of the (admittedly little) reading I've done in the field improved my opinion of postmodern scholarship. Further, there has always been borrowing and retooling in all the arts, not just music. Are we going to call Brahms' Variations on a Theme by Haydn post-modern? Renaissance recasting of Greek mythic figures? The hundreds of retellings of the Odyssey through western culture?

More importantly, though, my understanding of post-modernism is that it rests on the idea that no art has true intrinsic value, only that which one, person or culture, bestows on it. If you take that argument back far enough, it leads to the idea that no person, no soul, has any intrinsic value. Which can justify any number of heinous crimes against humanity, which I always thought the creation of art was the opposite of. (Maybe I'm too harsh- please chime it) And if you're ironic (one of the hallmarks of "great postmodern work"), you don't have to be honest, which again I always considered one of the hallmarks of art. (Note irony is not the same thing as satire, though the two are obviously connected) I can say for sure that most of the explicitly "post-modern" music I've either played or heard in performance is definitely more fun for the player than the listener, and has always left me ten minutes after it ended.

That's why I could never get into Naked City, which TIG mentions explicitly; it's a tremendous accomplishment, no doubt, but to what end? I've always thought (and what little I've heard from musicians involved backs this up) that the players thought of it as a game, a lot of fun and a very demanding music, but didn't put too much into what it meant. And it's why I've never thought much about Bill Frisell, featured in TIG's post (or many jazz musicians, actually) particularly in a postmodern context, though I don't disagree with TIG, (since he did quote, well, me) Hence my use of the word "authenticity". I don't consider what Frisell's done with language a whole lot different than what Miles did when he (by his own claims, at least) tried to blend the language of bebop, Julliard and Clark Terry with the delivery of Orson Wells.

Is The Bad Plus post-modern jazz? Behind Zorn they'd be the first place I go with that thought- clear mastery of several genres, lots of in jokes, fracturing source material seemingly for the sake of fracuring it? Stanley Crouch, hardly a post-moderninst ponders this in their interview:

"But you (TBP) also don't play anything after the head that that anybody would call pop music. Your first phrase, after the melody, is always totally "out." I find it really interesting how your audience is shocked and exhilarated by the conclusions you come to with a melody they already know.

To me, the conception of The Bad Plus is actually derived from the way Coltrane and his band played "My Favorite Things," which is really far from hearing Julie Andrews sing it. What Coltrane--what everybody in his band--was playing on it is like…[shrugs] "What are they playing?" --"'My Favorite Things.'" --"Where is 'My Favorite Things' here? I don't get it." That's The Bad Plus, too."

Ethan? (In the comments to TIG's post, Mwanji brings up a critic's assessment, very reasonable, I think, of Jason Moran as a high post-modernist as well)

In relation to TIG's comments about Mina Agossi (who I don't know at all), her quote begs the question- what DOES touch her, if Lady Day doesn't? Clearly what she does touches TIG, but does that have to do with what she sings, or what a listener connects to that delivery, or something else? Is that then inherently post-modern?

I used to debate this idea with some heady friends ad nauseum in college, but I grew bored of it- seemed like a fight I didn't need, and didn't have to invite myself to. But the question behind post-modernism always seemed to be, to me at least, is there something in art that is inherently, intrinsically valuable. "Pomo" seems to say no, and that always bothered me. 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 emperor. If not, I need more edjumacation.

To be continued, perhaps- I didn't really answer the question, did I? Feedback encouraged.

paper trail

I guess for creative music to be important, we need to write a paper about it:

"Improvised and creative new musics have been on the upswing in recent years, but listeners, critics and scholars have said little, so far, about the relationships of the various forms and practices of improvisation to gender and sexuality. With an ear to addressing this gap, the second Creative Music Think Tank, presented by Coastal Jazz and Blues Society in conjunction with St. John’s College and the Department of English at the University of British Columbia, is inviting proposals for critical and scholarly conference papers on gender, sexuality and improvisation. "

Now, I'm all for bring more attention (of any type) to what we do. And certainly while there are more, and more prominent, musicians who don't meet the traditional stereotype of the jazz musician (i.e. assumed straight white or African-American male) there are not nearly enough. (particularly in prominence, not necessarily in number or qualiy) But do we really need more papers with names like "Auscultation and other Apparatuses of Audience"?

I had several bad experiences with "The New Musicology" in college (in the classical, not the jazz tradition, but I fear it would carry over). It seemed like it was trying to hard to be cutting-edge, and seemed to treat the music it studied like a medical class treats a cadaver, as an object to pick apart instead than a living, breathing organism to engage. I think of the Pavarotti quote: "Learning about music by reading about it is like making love by mail."

Idolatry

I try to avoid American Idol at all costs- I always thought it's musical cotton candy at best. At worst, it discourages any kind of musical creativity or inventiveness among it's contestants (the winners always seem to be students of the Michael Bolton/Celine Dion school of power balladry, only with weaker voices) and rehabilitates bad songs that probably shouldn't have been recorded in the first place. And then there's the indentured servitude part.

But when you teach 30+ teenagers it's hard to completely avoid. So I actually watched about 20 minutes of it this week. It's even more annoying for me in person. They cut up the songs, rarely good in the first place, into 1'30" chunks, which limits the agony but does nothing for the music. The lighting gives me a headache. And worst of all, the singers also seem to think pitch is limited to somewhere you play soccer.

I watched because the kids were talking about the contestent Sanjaya, the first person of subcontinental descent (he's Indian) to make it this far on the show, and by many accounts the worst contestant (period) since the infamous William Hung. Apparently in addition to his actual fans (there are some), and some folks in the Indian community prodded by ethnic pride (understandable), he's been buoyed by Howard Stern (!) and others who want to sabotage, or at least further camp up, the show. Salon's blog How the World Works picked it up yesterday, and the NY Times ran a fuller piece about it today (making it officially old news).

First, based on the performance I saw and the clips on the Idol website, Mr. Malakar is easily that bad. But I think I'll go vote for him this week. Why didn't anyone think of this before- the best way to get rid of these shows is to take them to their logical conclusion- if anyone can enter and win, then we might as well get anyone, and remind people why we pay to go to concerts and pay professionals to play at our events. I don't want to be a music snob, and I'm certainly all for amateur music. I'm just praying for better quality control. (And no, Simon Cowell doesn't count) Anything that will bring ink and attention away from these twits in the long run gets my vote. And this might do it.

That said, I can't believe I'm agreeing with Howard Stern.

white to be wrong?

Interesting find today, relating vaguely to some of the conversations about jazz and race on the web recently. Hitting another side of black music and cultural appropriation, Salon solicited responses to the question "Does Joss Stone sound too black?" (Personally, I think Stone, who I like but don't love, is in the same lineage as Janice Joplin, blue-eyed soul, and pretty good at it) Reader responses posted today run the gamut, and are for the most part intelligent and informed. My favorite:

It all comes down to this: if a reviewer (or anyone else) hates the music that he is writing (ranting) about, or if the music is just too uncool for him to like (as Stone is in some hipster circles), then the musicians responsible "stole" the sound from someone much more brilliant who came before them. The audacity!

But if the reviewer actually likes the music, then those same musicians were merely "influenced" by artists of the past. How wise of them, how creative, to use the sounds of yore in the creation of their unique, modern vision.

-- Heidi

That sounds familiar...

Tweek my tweeters

Odds n'ends from music heard on a Monday morning:

- My god Paul Desmond does play beautiful. The radio this morning was playing some Brubeck I didn't recognize (which is most of it). I've never liked Brubeck's music; I think his touch is terrible, his time on this recording was suspect, and Joe Morello couldn't swing from a tree- but there on top of it is Desmond, every note perfect, redeeming every track he's on. Every time I hear him I'm reminded of Coltrane's comment about Stan Getz- "Let's face it, we'd all sound like that if we could."

- Say what you want about ECM records, but do they ever know how to record a piano. This morning I had the luxury of the yoga studio to myself for an hour, so I listened to the Gismonte/Haden Magico record and some of Michael Cain's Circa. The speakers we have are really great Bose surround numbers, and it really drove home to me how good a piano can sound on record- it captured the whole instrument, the variety of the attacks, etc. I know Manfred is very good and very particular, and not every record should sound like an ECM record, but can it be THAT hard to record a piano effectively?

Diggin on your Grammy

A couple of quickies- the Ana Forrest workshop was hard as hell, but really good. Full report coming. Last night, in my first trip to the theatre in ages, a friend took me to the ART's production of Racine's Brittanicus, a resetting of a classic tale of intrigue, imcompetence and survellience in Nero's Rome. The production was absolutely outstanding, and chillingly relevant. (there is a banner above the stage: "Empire Creates its own Reality.) Today is the last day- see it if you can.

FYI- I am planning to liveblog the Grammy awards tonight . (Or at least, as much of it as I can stomach) I will try to refresh the post every 20 minutes or so. One of my favorite elements of The Sports Guy Blog is his snarky liveblogging of games on TV, so I'll try to follow suit.

Early thoughts- anything Brecker is nominated for, he'll will. He's certainly deserving, but the Grammys' (and really, most art/entertainment awards) pension for necrophilia is a little ridiculous. I hope "Spirit Music" wins the jazz big band, but I don't think it will. I have no opinions about the big pop categories (I don't know who's in half of them) I'm excited, and a little nervous, about the Police reunion. The Earth Wind and Fire medley could be cool too. (Does anyone remember the amazing Sly Stone mess last year, amazing primarily for the sheer number of musicians attempting to play together at once? And Sly looking like a cross between Mr. T. and the Chapelle sendup of Rick James?) I hope Timberlake at the last minute decides to sing "&%^$ in a Box". And the censors go wild... Stay tuned.

Do the Math Invitational, part duex

Ethan and the gang over at The Bad Plus' Do the Math blog have had an interesting project this past couple of weeks, a survey of their friends about music and musicians. Of course when your friends include Tim Berne, Fred Hersch, Django Bates, etc, it's going to be a worthwhile read. They opened the floor, and since I'm always so short of opinions, I thought I'd jump in.

One caveat- as I'm sure it is with most people, this list is totally arbitrary and for the most part could be completely different if you asked me tomorrow. (B & C would be the same, for sure)

GIVE US AN EXAMPLE OR TWO OF AN ESPECIALLY GOOD OR INTERESTING:
1. Movie score. Cinema Paradiso (the best of a certain breed)
2. TV theme. “Suicide is Painless” from M*A*S*H
3. Melody. This Is Always, Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Paul Simon’s “Still Crazy”
4. Harmonic language. Claire Fisher, Bartok (esp. string quartets), James Carney's "Miracle Mile"
5. Rhythmic feel. Prince “Now” from the Gold Experience,
6. Hip-hop track. The Roots “Long Time”, Talib Kweli “Get By”
7. Classical piece. Bartok String Quartet #4, Morton Feldman “Rothko Chapel”, Bach Well-Tempered Clavier
8. Smash hit. The Police “Every Little Things She Does is Magic”
9. Jazz album. Wayne Shorter “Ju-Ju”
10. Non-American folkloric group.
11. Book on music. Toch “Shaping Forces in Music

BONUS QUESTIONS:
A) Name an surprising album (or albums) you loved when you were developing as a musician: something that really informs your sound but that we would never guess in a million years: Tracy Chapman, “Crossroads”
B) Name a practitioner (or a few) who play your instrument that you think is underrated: Billy Drews, Dick Oatts, George Adams, Gary Bartz
C) Name a rock or pop album that you wish had been a smash commercial hit (but wasn’t, not really): Jennifer Kimball, “Veering From the Wave”
D) Name a favorite drummer, and an album to hear why you love that drummer: Joey Baron on Bill Frisell’s This Land, Michael B. on Prince’s “Rainbow Children” (skip straight to the last track)

fifteen minutes in steel town

I honestly was not expecting much to blog about in Pittsburgh (technically, in Carnegie, pronounced car-NAY-gee, a decaying western suburb of Pittsburgh named for, yes, that Carnegie) The trip has been great for family gossip and catching up on sleep, and little else. Except…

On Wednesday I made a trip into town to see the Andy Warhol museum, and to catch a Pirates game in the new PNC Park. (Conveniently, they are within three blocks of each other.) Warhol, born Andrew Warhola, was born and raised in Pittsburgh. He left for New York at about age 18 and, well, became Andy Warhol. The building is a renovated factory (fitting for someone whose workspace was dubbed “The Factory”) Seven modest-sized floors accommodate five floors of Warhol art and artifacts and two rotating exhibitions. The Warhol stuff includes a fairly representative sampling of his career, including a wall montage of InterView magazines (I'd no idea that was his baby), a set of punching bags with Jesus on them he created with Basquiat, and a room of Chagall-ish cat drawings created by his mother (signed, conveniently enough, “Andy Warhol’s Mother”), and a collection of the time capsules he was apparently constantly creating, revising and storing away. The first floor includes a theatre where two or more of his films are shown daily, and a rotating large “important” work, this time around “Twelve Elvises”. The rotating exhibits were a large collection of Downtown and Punk art from New York, which I spent some time parusing, and a gallery called “The “F” Word (female, feminist, feminism)”, which I didn’t.

The word that kept coming up, both in my head and in the literature about Warhol on display, was “obliterate”. Warhol is most famous in his work for obliterating lines between high and low art, commercial and artistic imagemaking, gender distinctions, class lines, etc. And making himself famous in the process. (Some of my favorite pieces in the museum were photo portraits he took of the people he hung out with, famous and not-so. His eye for capturing something very essential in his subject as a photographer is terribly underrated, or maybe just overshadowed my everything else he did and was.)

I had a music history teacher in college who compared some of Warhol’s silkscreens (especially the more violent ones, i.e. Hiroshima) to early minimalist music. By repeating and recasting one image eight or a dozen or more times, he mutes the extrinsic values or meanings of the object, much as a composer blunts the functional or theoretical meanings of a chord or scale by repeating it ad naseum. I don’t know if I completely buy that- I’m not big on reading too much ideology into an image, or a scale- but it’s interesting to think about when you’re looking at an image like “Twelve Elvises”, twelve purplish silkscreen images of Elvis pulling a gun in one of his westerns, some fuzzed up or abstracted more than others, set on a blank grey background. By pulling Elvis completely out of context, he look even more absurd (I always found Elvis absurd to begin with), but it asks you to take stock of your perception of Elvis, in a way that you never would if there were tumbleweeds, or a band behind him. Always a useful notion, I think. (I also think Warhol would never talk this way, which makes me leery about writing this way)

Another unexpected find in the museum were original scores of songs Lou Reed wrote for the Velvet Underground. (I didn’t know that Warhol was an early advocate for them, “presenting” them at downtown clubs along with his films, pushing them toward the limelight.) Reed wrote the tunes, even the simplest, out on big pieces of manuscript paper, in ballpoint pen with phenomenally neat penmanship. I didn’t sing along as I looked at them, but even if I didn’t know the tune (and most of the time I didn’t) I could have. In all, more than worth the time and money if you’re ever, well, somehow in Pittsburgh.

The Pirates game was another unexpected pleasure. The new stadium, which hosted this year’s All-Star Game, is a gem, intimate, well laid out, all the good adjectives we use about post-Camden Yards ballparks. People are friendly without meaning to be, something I’m not used to at all. The whole day cost me $25, including food and a decent beer, a mere fantasy in Boston. And the team, despite its horrible record, wasn’t bad. They won in 11 innings, using a combination of hit and runs, good defense, and even a suicide squeeze (the first one I’ve ever seen in person) to beat a rather hapless Cubs side. Nothing abstract about it; with three more decent arms, this team is competitive in the (I admit, rather pathetic) NL Central next year. And pigs will fly too.

Hassle my Hoff

There's bad, there's truly bad, there's awsomely bad... and then there's David Hasslehoff. I don't know how else to put it. And now, thanks to the magic of YouTube, the Hoff's video library, in all its bluescreened glory, is online. Let me point you to to the, er, highlights.

Hooked on a Feeling- The king of all Hasslehoff videos, by far. He flies, he walks on water, and he has a male chorus singing "ooga chaka". What more could anyone ask for.

Jump in My Car- note the one spot where he's wearing a T-shirt that says "Don't Hassle the Hoff." That will be making an appearance at a No Sale Value gig this fall- you better believe it.

Secret Agent Man. James Bond via Pokemon, if you ask me.

Wings of Tenderness- this one is just straight cheese, I'm afraid. Who writes this crap?

If NBC weren't quite so tight-assed about liscencing (another post is due on this topic) the capper would be the Hoff's cameo appearance on the West Wing, where Donna Moss drools all over him at a cocktail party. Can anyone help me here?

(via Latitude 44.2)