new blog

Here's the URL: http://thesoulandthesystem.blogspot.com

moving on

I've been hacking away at this blog for over two years now.

When I began, the idea behind Stop the Play and Watch the Audience was to create a space where I could explore ideas on creativity, the nature of artistic space, the inner life of a selective performer and how musical intentions relate (or not) to audiences, criticism, real life, etc.

While I can't say for sure whether or not I've succeeded, the blog has at least become a welcome repository for my not-always-cheerful observations on pop culture, high culture, underground culture, anti-culture, politics, education, fatherhood, shows, and dumb stuff in general, as well as an opportunity to reblog some of the good things I've found amidst a very fertile jazz blogging community that already seemed to be fairly well-connected before I got here.

And then there's the dark side of the musician-blog: shamelessly talking about my own gigs, tours, gear, reviews and recordings. I have to admit, the idea of maintaining a blog just to say "Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!" (as in, check out my new tune/review/picture/video/etc) doesn't interest me all that much, contrary to how things may sometimes seem. I'm not trying to be apologetic here, but increasingly I feel that if I'm writing in the first place, I'd much rather be writing about what's behind the music than what's been going on lately.

I think my main issue is this: it's difficult to be prodigious and profound at the same time. While trying desperately to live-blog the last Empty Cage tour as I was also juggling a fairly hectic schedule on the road and at home, I wound up being more than a little frustrated that all I was able to manage was a bit of trite, prosaic writing to go along with the pictures (I must admit I'm getting more into the photo essay format with minimal or no commentary (which I half-assedly tried out on a recent post) for that kind of thing, and I've also been inspired by Nate Hubbard's Pennebaker-esque documentation of his last West Coast tour as a rather shrewd use of the YouTube format for making a tour journal).

Don't get me wrong, writing this blog has been a rewarding effort, albeit a very time-consuming one. Let's face it - with fatherhood, teaching, composing, practicing and touring pulling me simultaneously in several different directions, spending three hours writing a post about Elvis Presley or even fifteen minutes dwelling on an experimental tofu dish may not be the most efficient use of my time.

I might revive this particular soapbox at some point (and the archives here will remain active), but for now I am moving on to something new. The intention is to take the blogging project much more seriously, to offer fewer and more concentrated posts that will be distilled from a series of essays that I've already been poking at for years.

I'll be keeping roughly the same layout and format, but the prevailing attitude will be more focused, less eclectic, not so much a personal diary or scrapbook but more an effort to build a body of writings that will be integrated into the development of my own music and that of the ensembles I contribute to.

It seems the artists I have always admired most are those who have been able to write cohesively about their work - in music: Anthony Braxton and Wadada Leo Smith of course, but also Sun Ra, Charles Ives, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Morton Feldman; in the plastic arts: Robert Motherwell above all others; in literature: Henry Miller, Albert Camus, Umberto Eco, the Transcendentalists...

If I could bring just a fraction of that kind of illumination to the work I am now doing I think it would be time and energy put to good use. Hopefully this effort will challenge me a bit more in the way of developing and presenting ideas that are more central to my own concept of music. If you want to know what I think of Elvis or spicy tofu, drop me a line...

Otherwise, please join me over at THE SOUL AND THE SYSTEM.

woody lives!

WOW - an unheard live album by Woody Guthrie comes out in a few days, and here's a great NYT article to boot, focusing on Woody's ever-growing legacy. The article judiciously quotes Guthrie's daughter Nora, who is responsible for the estate (and some 2,400 lyrics that were never set to music):

"...I could put these lyrics behind glass cases, but I think it’s truer to Woody’s spirit to bring them to life as new songs.

“Some people thought it was blasphemous to have other people write music to these lyrics. I said it would be blasphemous to have the lyrics sit there where no one would hear them.

“I’m trying to bring the most unusual suspects into these projects,” she said. “I’m not doing it to be cute but because these people write to me or get word to me that they’ve always loved Woody’s songs. Pete Seeger sings an old gospel song called ‘Twelve Gates to the City,’ and I’ve always thought of the city as a place of great art. Some purists will tell you that there’s only one way into that city, but I don’t believe it. My job is to keep the gates open.”

I don't know what it is with folk singers lately, but it's been kind of an obsession for me. I like the radical kind, the kind that actually live the way they talk about in their music, which pretty much limits it to Guthrie, Leadbelly, Bob Dylan and a few others. I never could understand why the hard-core folkies in the '60s could be so ready for revolutionary change in just about every other aspect of society, but they couldn't see that Dylan was about to bring a radical and much-needed change to popular music, far from selling out to become a rock star.

I like to think that Woody Guthrie would have done the same thing. He had, after all, a knack for speaking in the vernacular of his own time. There was really nothing traditional or conservative about him - he's been called the first real punk musician, the first alternative musician, etc. So it's fitting that, in these copyright-crazy times, his lyrics are being made available to artists who will further extend that legacy and spread his message.

time out

This weekend I've been at the Montalvo Arts Center up in Saratoga, serving on a panel to select their residency participants for next year. So nice to get away and enjoy some peaceful time in such a serene, idyllic place.

Here are some photos from the location and from the drive, without comment.

today's moment of truth

...is brought to you by Joseph Hughes (and the New York Times), proving that clarity is not as elusive as you might think.

MeTube

I've been a bit more lax than some of my colleagues in harnessing the brobdingnagian (look it up) power of YouTube as a musical marketing tool... and frankly why should I, when this stuff practically sells itself, right?

Anyway, I've created a YouTube channel for the Empty Cage Quartet. Up there now, beside a couple of pitifully short clips from our recent San Francisco performance, is this brilliant three-minute film by our friend Tony Datillo called Trouble With Modern Painters, which features one of our tunes as the background music to a very bizarre chase scene (sped up, of course, because we all know that's a sure-fire recipe for comedy):

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Datillo is the one who is making a new film around our recent recording of The Mactavish Rag, and that will be on YouTube the minute it's finished. It's going to be big... very, very big.

I also got around to adding a few things to my own YouTube space, like this clip from a 2005 performance with Vinny Golia:

Finally, here's a guy who's got the right idea. Nate Hubbard has made a video collage of clips from his recent tour up the West Coast, and if you watch closely you'll see a brief cameo by me and Braxton the Wonder Dog:

all shook up

Andrew Durkin links to an article in the Guardian declaiming against the status of Elvis Presley as the so-called King of Rock & Roll. I was going to leave a comment, but didn't feel that was appropriate given that the bulk of Andrew's post was a right-on-the money assessment of Max Roach's role as a jazz artist and the meaning of Money Jungle. It's a masterful post; you should read it.

It was Wadada Leo Smith who first hipped me to Elvis. No, really, it was. I'll never forget coming into Leo's Creative Orchestra class one day when I was a student at CalArts as Leo was showing off his new conducting move. It was pretty fantastic - a two-handed sideways cue complete with hip-twisting and knee-rocking action. He told us he stole it from the King. "King of what?" we asked, by that point completely disoriented. "The KING! King of music! King of Rock & Roll, don't you know who that is?!", he chided us. Of course he meant Elvis, but that was the last thing on our minds. I figured after that rehearsal that I'd better seriously check this Elvis guy out.

I tend to think of Elvis (and others like him; the article mentions white heroes Clapton, Astaire and Sinatra) in terms of being a great synthesizer. He wasn't much of a creator but he was able, mainly by studying the performances of others, to put together styles that were popular and relevant at the time in order to fashion something that was novel and extremely marketable. Laying aside the fact that Elvis wouldn't have accomplished any of this without the guidance of people like Sam Phillips, I think it's proper to look at those early white rock & roll stars like Elvis, Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, etc. as having been able to borrow just enough from black music so as to make their inborn country thing sound new and fresh, if not completely original. Thematically, white rock & roll was scandalous enough to appeal to teenagers looking for a way to rebel against their parents but not so over-the-top (as Big Mama Thornton, Joe Turner and other black rock & roll prototypes could often be) as to prevent their music from hitting up the mainstream airwaves and the popular charts.

To be fair, folks like Chuck Berry did the same thing, only in reverse. Berry would probably have been known only as a mediocre blues performer had he not happened upon the novelty of singing and playing country tunes in a rhythm and blues style. His innovation begins with the fact that he was one of the few black musicians willing (or able to discover the means) to "cross over" to areas of popular culture and venues that were traditionally reserved for whites only. His superlative skills as a songwriter and his idiosyncrasies as a front man and guitarist sealed the deal. It's sad that plenty of black musicians like Little Richard, who were generally sticking to a more pure form of rhythm and blues, got cut off on the way to success by white singers (businessmen, actually) like Pat Boone and Bill Haley who were quick to appropriate and "clean up" black material to suit the tastes of popular (white) audiences.

So by the time Elvis got there, the groundwork had already been laid, and the game was ripe for somebody to come along and take the whole pot. Historically we see Paul Whiteman in a similar situation by the late 20s with the increasing popularity of jazz, Benny Goodman (or Glenn Miller or any number of white bandleaders) with swing music in the 30s, and the Beatles in the early 60s when the relatively static rock & roll scene had people just waiting for something new. But with Elvis, again, it wasn't so much about creativity as it was the fact that he was in the right place at the right time, and he pretty much did what he had to do.

As disgusting a self-caricature that Elvis eventually became, some of those early records are really smoking (Andrew seems to agree). Take a performance like "Heartbreak Hotel" - he's able, in the course of just one line, to fashion a decrescendo from all-out rhythm and blues shouting ("Oh since my baby left me...") to Bing Crosby-esque crooning, to just the faintest whisper ("...so lo-honely I could die."). This guy embodied the clean-cut, white image of celebrity sexiness, with all the unabashed musical libido of rhythm and blues bubbling underneath. What's not to love?

Of course I'm speaking in gross generalizations and musical stereotypes, but take into account that there was nothing much else operating in 1950s American popular culture. People weren't concerned with authenticity, they were obsessed with sensation. This goes back perhaps to the virtuoso performers of eighteenth-century Europe, to the overnight success of groups like the Original Dixieland Jazz Band at the beginning of the Jazz Age in America, through rock, disco, hip hop, you name it... and it is probably even more so today.

Americans want to embrace superstars that reinforce their own value systems and their images of themselves, whether real or imagined. Elvis was every white teenager's fantasy in the 1950s - the girls wanted to have him and the boys wanted to be him. As these kids grew up and faced reality, so did their hero for better or worse, and in a way, he became an image of all the false comforts of the whitewashed 1950s as our social fabric began to unravel in the succeeding decades.

So how is it that a fairly talented kid who laid down some pretty good records is now, 30 years after his ignominious death, remembered (and imitated) more for the laughable character he became than the innovative, irresistible performer he started out being? In other words, why in God's name is this even thinkable, let alone acceptable:

No, I don't consider Elvis the King of Rock & Roll (that's Bo Diddley's title if you ask me). I'm not even that much of a fan, really. But come on, it's been 30 years, let's give the man some respect...

today's listening

One of the first jazz records I ever owned was At Basin Street. That quintet with Max on drums, Clifford Brown, Sonny Rollins, and Richie Powell just knocked me out. Here were five guys in total support of one another, navigating the most burning of tempos with total, conversational ease. Especially when Clifford solos, the rapport between his inexhaustible flow of ideas and Max's rhythmic fluidity was so tangible you could almost see it; these guys weren't just playing a session, they were exploring a musical relationship with one another on stage, right there in the moment.

A lot of things I used to be into I can't listen to anymore, but there's something timeless about everything that Max Roach ever laid sticks on. Today, for me, it's the Roach/Braxton duo, Birth and Rebirth that's still knocking me out. This is probably one of my all-time favorite Braxton records. As much as I love the earlier quartets with Altschul and the later ones with Hemingway, we rarely get to hear a drummer pushing Braxton (the improviser, as opposed to Braxton the composer or Braxton the theorist) with such intensity. And yet that unwavering support is always there; it never becomes a clash of egos or a conflict of artistic concepts. This is my favorite kind of jazz, you can't call it bebop, hard bop, free jazz or whatever - it's really about personalities in communication, in continuous, tandem motion.

Darcy has the complete roundup, so I'll refrain from any further eulogizing here about what a tremendous jazz icon Roach was. I will, however, add my voice to the chorus of folks like Darcy, Taylor, D:O and others in pushing further recognition of the fact that Max was not only an innovator in bebop; he continued to create new music, seek out forward-thinking collaborators, and take up some of the most pressing social themes of his day. As Darcy points out:

Many of the obits so far have focused on Max Roach's well-deserved place in the pantheon of the greatest drummers of all time. There is no question that he deserves every last one of those accolades. Hell, he deserves them for the first five years of his career alone. But Max Roach was so much more than "just" a brilliant, innovative, prolific, sensitive, massively influential, swing-your-ass-off jazz drummer. He was an artist — a great one, and, paradoxically, an underrated one, despite all the accolades. His most personal and creative works aren't widely known, even amongst jazz musicians and aficionados.

This is a guy who could have easily just reified his status as a legend of jazz (especially given the conservative cultural climate of the past couple decades), but instead he chose to advocate for some of the most controversial innovators and stylistic developments in the music. There are many who simply "push boundaries," but very few who do so with such a powerful, visionary spirit and with such consistently joyous creativity.

This fragment from a 1999 interview with Max Roach came through the Braxton list yesterday (via Jason Guthartz). I think it pretty much cuts to the chase:

[Max Roach] proceeded to horrify the sort of people who hold on to the past for dear life when he recorded duos with the avant-garde musicians Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton.

"You used to play with Charlie Parker. How can you work with those guys?" he was asked by those who should know better.

"I answered this way," Roach said. "A person like an Anthony Braxton is more like Charlie Parker than a person who plays *like* Charlie Parker. Bird was creative and different and looked inside himself. He knew what Johnny Hodges and Benny Carter and the rest of them had laid down. That was the foundation. Bird built on that foundation.

"Now you have people like Phil Woods who preserve the tradition. And then there are people who push forward, who perpetuate the continuum by trying out things. Cecil Taylor is more like Art Tatum than a guy who plays like Tatum. It may not always come off, but that's what creativity's about."

If only so many of those who will be lauding Roach from the lofty edifice of jazz education would recognize that he didn't just help to create a style, but that he continued to push the music, and continued to recognize and support others who were pushing the music, far past the crystallization point of bebop in the 1950s.

oh, the irony

My wife used our Angry Vegan mug to drain the grease from our taco meat last night... and she says I have a weird sense of humor.

updates

Nice to finally have some vacation time this weekend to get a few computer projects done...

I just updated the mp3 Archive on my site to make it a little bit more current. The two 2003 MTKJ Quartet self-releases (Who Knows the Wicker Man and Live) are gone, as in no longer available, so if you're holding a copy of one of those you are now one of the elite few. To compensate, I've made available our entire set from the gig at 1510 Performance Space in Oakland last week, no doubt the high point of our recent tour.

The Tiner/Baggetta/Filiano/Ligeti Brooklyn gig from last January is still up there, as is the final set ever performed by my collegiate ensemble The Big Red Peaches Coalition. And of course, the demo recording by the ill-fated electric Miles tribute band Evil/Live rounds out the collection, and I've finally properly edited those six tunes into two suites as they were performed.

Once you're done taking in all the free music (and before you start thinking about all the better ways you could be spending your time), hop over to my CDs page and you'll discover that most of my recent releases on the pfMENTUM and Nine Winds labels are now available via iTunes, and are linked as such.

Of course not everybody's a fan of the digital revolution, but I'm doing the best I can...

back in the city of angels

These Cafe Metropol shows always seem like the best kind of homecoming for us. This is the third one we've done in conjunction with visual art shown by our friends Allen Glass, Kio Griffith and Misato Nagare (collectively known as Lick the Beaters). Allen and Kio have both contributed art to our album covers, and Misato is the mastermind behind our famous series of T-shirt designs. Rocco Somazzi books the music at Cafe Metropol these days, and as I've mentioned already, it was at his previous space in Hollywood that we made our performance debut almost five years ago. Plus, it's a thrill to play our new music for all our friends that come out for these very special gigs - even more so after we've developed it for several nights on tour.

With three-quarters of the band now living outside of Los Angeles, it's not without irony that we still consider this town our home base. I think it's more a sentimental than a geographical consideration at this point. So it may be that there's a bit more pressure when we're playing for our own people - Jason and I were talking this afternoon about how it actually makes us a bit nervous to play here. But most of all it's just fun to share this music with a friendly audience, and I think both sets tonight were notable for the sense of variety that we brought, going way back to play some of our earliest tunes as well as some of the very latest; touching on styles from mellow modal funk to a circus march and from lowercase electronic explorations to high-strung bebop.

I recorded everything but the Bakersfield show this week, so one of my projects before summer ends is to work on this audio and post a couple of these sets to the mp3 archive on my site. We had several photographers there tonight also, so real pictures are coming (we haven't had an actual group photo taken in three years), but here are some of the better digital shots we got right away...

more catching up

Thursday morning Jason and I had a nice breakfast and a healthy walk around downtown San Diego with Kaiser before we drove up to meet Paul and Ivan in Long Beach. The Long Beach gig was at a killer coffeehouse/performance space called Portfolio, and it was set up by Chris Schlarb, a very creative guitarist who runs the Sounds Are Active record label out of Long Beach. I played on an album on that label a few years back called A Prospect of Freedom, with Lynn Johnston, Ray Raposa (from the Castanets), and the members of Chris's other band, Create (!). Chris and I have been trying to set up a double bill with one of his groups for a while now, so it was good to finally do it. He played the first set with drummer Tom Steck in a duo they call I Heart Lung:

Their hypno-meditative improvisations set up a nice contrast to our set, which was strong coming off that good energy of the San Diego show the night before:

I like coffee. And I like playing in coffeehouses, at least once each tour. The staff at Portfolio hooked us up, too, so we were all properly caffeinated before this one...

catching up

After the customary breakfast with Greenlief at Lois the Pie Queen in Oakland, we set off back down the I-5 for Bakersfield. That evening's gig was at the weekly Bakersfield Jazz Workshop that's been going on at the Nile Theater downtown. It's a very hip, newly remodeled space, although the acoustics there are more typical of an airplane hangar than a jazz club. We hosted a workshop with some of the student musicians who come down for the early jam session. This was one of the more positive things that has come out of the tour - all of the students were very open and excited about the kind of modular cueing ideas we were demonstrating with a couple of our charts.

After the workshop we played a set on our own, and while the crowd was enthusiastic this was probably the musical low point of the tour thus far. It must have been some combination of not being able to figure out the room, not being able to get a vibe with each other on stage, and being pretty much rinsed from the loooong schlep down the I-5 earlier that day. No pictures or audio from this one, which is probably for the best...

As we moved on down to San Diego the next day we were expecting even more hassles. The gig was originally booked at a place called Desi'N'Friends, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, there was a last minute scheduling mishap with that venue. Apparently the club owner had double-booked that night, and when it came down to it the San Diego Parrot Head association (or something like that; it's the local Jimmy Buffett fan club) won out with their karaoke night over our program of avant-jazz music. Too bad, too, because our pal Nathan Hubbard had busted his hide getting us press and radio promotion for the gig. But thanks to the intervention of SD/NY bassist James Ilgenfritz, the concert was moved to a black box space at CRCA (Center for Research in Computing and the Arts) at UC San Diego. As it turns out, we had a decent audience that stayed put through three sets - first was Ilgenfritz with NY saxophonist Jonathan Moritz:

Next was a new Nathan Hubbard project with saxophonist Gabriel Sundy and electric bassist Harley Magsino:

I took a few moments at the beginning of our set to speak about the passing of Paul Rutherford, and in recognition of the fact that on our very first gig with this band we opened for Paul, we dedicated our set that evening to the great trombonist...

Despite all the crap that went down in order just to make this gig happen in the first place, it ended up being one of the best of the tour. All the music that evening was inspired, there was a good feeling among the audience (with esteemed attendees including pfMENTUM boss Jeff Kaiser and SD jazz DJ Miff Mole), and the hang afterward with Kaiser, Moritz, and Ilgenfritz was a much needed break from the rather hectic schedule of the last several days.