I have chosen to compose, arrange, and perform music that is tonal, rhythmically vital, and dramatically effective. I do not consider my music to be following in a particular jazz tradition. While 21st century jazz often puts off the uninitiated listener with its complex harmonies and rhythms and rough tonal palette, I hope my listeners can fit right into my unique musical world and enjoy themselves. That is why I prefer to call my music alt-jazz (alternative jazz). I hope to avoid confusing the listener with unclear textures and amorphousness and extensive improvisations. Instead, I want to grip my listeners as if they are following a well-paced play, amuse them with unexpected comedic touches and excite them with dynamic instrumental shifts.
Review of Randy Sandke's book
Comments on a review of Randy Sandke's book, Where the Dark and the Light Folks Meet: Race and the Mythology, Politics and Business of Jazz." From http://news.jazzjournalists.org/2010/12/book-reviews/In the Greek myth, Procrustes was a son of Poseidon with a stronghold on Mount Korydallos, on the sacred way between Athens and Eleusis. There, he had an iron bed in which he invited every passer-by to spend the night, and where he set to work on them with his smith’s hammer, to stretch them to fit.” WikipediaThe creation myth of jazz is as follows: 1) it is a music developed in New Orleans by African Americans. 2) it developed from a peculiarly black ethos based on African traditions in which group identity was paramount. 3) This group ethos is reflected in the musical tradition of group improvisation, and it continues to bear a strong influence on jazz even a century later 4) White musicians took to the music very quickly, and the musical result was an unsatisfactory melange based on aesthetic misunderstandings. 5) The white musicians gained fame and financial success at the expense of its black creators. 6) White businessmen took advantage of black jazz musicians for their own financial benefit. 7) Racism has guided the development of the music in small and big ways.All of these points are, at the least, worth considering and I believe that in general they are true. Unfortunately, jazz critics and historians have willfully ignored or reinterpreted any facts or events that contradict any interpretation of jazz that point to a more nuanced view of black culture and American life. Sometimes it is because they cited secondary sources that have proven to be without merit (see Randy’s section on the music in Congo Square) or rely on self-proclaimed experts like Gunther Schuller who famously put African music (as interpreted by A. M. Jones) into his own Procrustean bed so it fit his own idea of New Orleans jazz. Jazz historians tend to ignore the greater American culture that has always existed around black culture. The tendency is to place musical innovations within black culture that really occurred in a broader American culture first. In some instances, the real innovators were whites, but over and over black musicians succeeded in elevating it into a more powerful artistic statement. The tendency is to denigrate music made by whites or speak of their music in a patronizing fashion. Often forgotten is that the proper critical response is to evaluate the music with different standards than one would use with contemporaneous jazz. Jean Goldkette isn’t Louis Armstrong, but so what!Since the civil rights movement of the 1960s a reaction has occurred among several white critics and jazz musicians that is just as disturbing as the Procrustean bed of black essentialists that they wish to expose. These writers begin with a praiseworthy goal: to bring back into prominence the music of brilliant white musicians whose music stopped getting the attention it deserves and to emphasize the multiculturalism of American society. This group of musicians and writers oversteps itself and wishes to overturn the entire jazz pantheon. James Lincoln Collier, please take a bow! Now that the jazz world has in Wynton Marsalis a tastemaker and powerhouse with dark skin, he becomes the embodiment of a situation in which theoretically speaking, the tables could be turned against white musicians for good. As I point out in my book (written in the 1990s when Jazz at Lincoln Center was still new), at a time when the NY Philharmonic had zero blacks in it and very few Asians, Wynton chose to make his band mostly black. Is this bad? Speaking as both a musician and scholar, I, for one, don’t care who Marsalis wants to put in his orchestra, and I’m not sure how significant the black-to-white ratio is in this instance. [p. 10 in my book Jazz in Black and White:] “How obligated is Marsalis to give a race-neutral program? Should he be required to follow standards of hiring adopted by trade unions? Should these standards be required by the sponsors of all cultural events? Should James Brown have been required to hire Korean musicians before permitting him to perform at the Apollo? Should the Juilliard String Quartet have been mandated to add an African-American cellist when their cellist retired from the group several years ago?”So ends my diatribe of the day. I hope you get around to reading my books! (Jazz in Black and White: Race Culture and Identity in the Jazz Community, Salsa! The Rhythm of Latin Music, Cuban Musicians in the United States- Charley
Jazz Jews
My response to Jazz Jews by Mike Gerber:I just got my copy of Jazz Jews. I am looking forward to reading it! I wanted to thank you for quoting me in the book (p. 38) and including my book in the bibliography. So far, I read the introduction and I'd just like to say that Sudhalter's book didn't impress me a bit for several reasons. He failed to discuss two artists whose work is important. Raymond Scott's music failed to get a mention. This is understandable simply because most jazz books neglect him, too. He doesn't discuss Charlie Barnet at all. By itself, this is bad enough, but omitting him by reasoning that his work is just imitation Ellington and Basie is just plain stupid or lazy. Making negritude a primary factor in jazz studies is problematic in the face of several musicians whose racial background is itself problematic. What do you do with George Russell, Jackie McLean, Josh Redman, Etta James and Charles Mingus? What about white musicians like Johnny Otis who are so often described as African American? Keith Jarrett with his afro?I read online about Jews like Gilad Atzmon who refuse to consider their Jewishness as a factor in loving jazz (I just like the music and it has nothing to do with who I am). I recall that my recently departed German-Jewish aunt used to tell people that she didn't consider herself Jewish, as if being Jewish wasn't the central factor in her life! She failed to recognize that before becoming a refugee all of her family and their friends were Jews and their world was quintessentially German Jewish - in Germany as well as Austria and Czechoslovakia. That makes her Jewish in ways that are more important than whether she attended a synagogue or not or celebrated the holidays. Keeping popular music - and even classical music - out of jazz history makes no sense when you're describing the music between the World Wars. George Gershwin's music is profoundly important to American music and more advanced conceptually than most anybody else's. In this era before improvised solos became the defining attribute of jazz, a performance of a Harold Arlen song, say, by an instrumentalist might even be perceived as an interpretation rather than "a jazz performance." Songwriting and composing influenced by jazz might even have reached its height in sophistication outside of the USA. What about Kurt Weill and the Czech Jaroslav Jezek? In some ways, they were better songwriters than Irving Berlin. It seems that you didn't ask Artie Shaw and other musicians the right questions. Jewish culture in the United States doesn't have much to do with klezmer or even synagogue music, as many of your interview subjects point out. In the first half of the 20th century, jazz was three things at least: music that celebrates urban life, music of rebellion, and music appreciated by musical sophisticates that was open to experimentation and cross-cultural exploration. Jews were fascinated by all of these in different degrees. Some of your interviewees like Jane Ira Bloom and Stanley Crouch understand that. Why do Jews get into music? Because there are so many Jewish musicians to model oneself after and, more importantly, because artistic expression is a strong element of American Jewish culture - an aspect which has its roots in German Jewish culture probably more than in Russian Jewish culture. Why are Jews so intrigued by foreign and exotic cultures - such as the music coming from black ghettos? (Remember that black culture was not in the mainstream before the Civil Rights era.) Jews seem to have a love of marginal culture, and that's why Jewish Americans become blues musicians and Latin musicians, and why ethnomusicology has attracted so many Jews, too. Great book! - Charley
Michael Gerber's response and more
Hi CharleyI'm responding to your very welcome feedback on my book from my main email address. I'll respond to the points you make in both your emails in one goCrouch did make a very good point, didn't he, about blacks and Jews embracing the possibilities inherent in urban life? Jews had little or no reason to look back with affection on lands they had come to America from: by comparison, the New World was a release despite the bigotry they had to contend with. Young 1st generation Jews such as Gershwin had every reason to embrace modernity, which in America was very interconnected with jazz or at least people's perception of itWhy are Jews so intrigued by foreign and exotic cultures? Hmm, perhaps because in the last 2000 years Jews have been a diaspora people, assimilating middle eastern, east European, southern European, Balkan, Gypsy, western European, Latin and American and African-American influences, in many case fusing that with Jewish cultures. Kurt Weill - I may do a special edition of my Kosher Jam radio show dedicated to him and by jazz interpretations of his music. I've already done one on Gershwin, and also want to do one on Arlen, and also a more general edition on Jewish songwriters. Picking up on the theme of your book about entitlement to play jazz, I think the fact that the vast majority of jazz standards were composed by Jews, and I think it can be argued had a role in the way jazz evolved, including other jazz standards based on the chord changes of those songs, means that Jews perhaps more than any non-black group surely can claim some title.Also, if much of black music, while dealing with life's blues, is also a life-affirming way of exorcising them, then Jews as a historically outside and much oppressed and racially reviled group can certainly associate with the music in more than just an intellectual aesthetic levelAlso, as David Izenson, one of Ornette's white bassists put it, “I have a few thousand years of tradition to contribute myself. Since I’m white and Jewish, perhaps a Jewish guy is going to realise when he sees me up on the stand with black musicians that this new music has something to do with him.” And if we move it to blues music, Peter Green said something along the lines that, "As a Jew, you can put a lot of your own feeling in"The way I see jazz, pretty much from its inception, is, as I've put in Jazz Jews, it's "a coat of many colors, the dominant thread of which is black". Most of the greatest jazz innovators have been black, in terms of the musicians that have radically moved the music on, that doesn't always mean that they are always the greatest musicians. I mean, my favorite tenor saxophonist is probably Getz, awesome technically but much more importantly, also expressively, but he's nowhere near the influence on jazz that Coleman Hawkins or Lester Young or Coltrane are. All of whom are of course fabulous, but Getz is my pick. And I would reject any suggestion that that's got anything to do with me being white, or because Getz was Jewish. I mean, I've seen a lot of blues/R&B gigs in my time, and listened to a whole lot more, white and black, and the greatest musicians in that genre - Howlin Wolf, Jimmy Reed, Professor Longhair and so on - to my ears are definitely black
Jazz in the 1940s
I just finished teaching a 5-week course on jazz in the 1940s and examined in detail a decade's worth of music with fresh insights. The more I read jazz history and criticism about this decade the more disturbed I become about the jazz-is-black-music paradigm. I'm willing to accept someone's notion that Parker, Monk, Powell, Gillespie, Davis, and Roach are the most important musicians of the period, but there was a lot going on in music in the 40s. While bebop is inevitably regarded as black music, how can you talk about Charlie Parker's music without noting the roll-call of white pianists in his bands: Al Haig, Dodo Marmarosa, Richard Twardzik, Joe Albany, George Wallington? Bebop was just a part of the total soundscape, and the bebopper's ideology was shared by others. The African-American bebop innovators frequently asserted that they took their music seriously and wanted others to treat it as an artistic expression, not just entertainment. But they weren't the only ones in the jazz world to develop this attitude. The idea of taking what had been a popular music as an art form was developed by Stan Kenton in the same period. Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw had roles to play in spreading the word, too. As a historian I think it's more important to represent what was there rather than to focus only on what you like and admire. Stan Kenton's music with all its bombast is important to discuss simply because without Kenton's patronage the composers of film and television music of the succeeding decades (Pete Rugolo, et. all) might never have gotten their careers started. You don't like this music? As a jazz scholar that doesn't mean you can ignore it and pretend that it never existed and that it was without influence.
Trumpets
Trumpet players come in two different forms (at least). The loudest and most aggressive is the lead trumpet player. I thought a trumpet section was like a sax section: you put the most experienced (or strongest player) on lead. But in the trumpet world, the lead trumpet is a particular sonority. The lead trumpet player has a glorious and loud sound and has the ability to play comfortably around high C and can easily move up a fourth above that into the ledger-line note range. As far as jazz soloing goes, the lead player sound is exemplified by Dizzy Gillespie and Maynard Ferguson. Miles Davis really exemplified the anti-lead sound. When the young Miles Davis announced to Gillespie that he could play anything Dizzy could play, the older musician reportedly replied: "Yeah, but an octave lower!" And there you have it. If you want a loud trumpet sound from a section, you populate the section with several other players who could also play lead. But what works best for me is to get trumpet players with a quieter approach to sit next to the lead player. That way the saxophones can play dynamically instead of shouting to be heard.
Changes in personnel
Being a bandleader can sure give you a headache if you let it with musicians agreeing to perform and then canceling and then having to find replacements. You can look at this as an inconvenience or a chance to meet new musicians. Recently the Broken Reed Saxophone Quartet did a concert in Bensonhurst with a musician I'd never met before - Alec Spiegelman. Alec came prepared for the first (and only) rehearsal and he took the music off the page and put in exactly the right nuances. I was amazed! It turned out that his young sister Margaret had been to music camp with my daughter Eva more than 10 years ago! In a few days I'm performing with Compared to That with Daniel Linden, a last-minute sub playing bass trombone. It turns out that he's a longtime musical associate of Alec's. It's great having a frame of reference with a musician when you're meeting for the first time! So instead of getting all uptight about having to use a last-minute sub - Alec- I got to meet a couple of extraordinary musicians and expand my circle of musician friends.
I keep on finding more mid 20th-century pop tunes with Middle Eastern themes.
There's Sheik of Araby, Raymond Scott's Twilight in Turkey, Duke Ellington's Caravan (composed by Juan Tizol), Larry Clinton's Strictly for the Persians, Albert Ketelbey's In a Persian Market (recorded by Sammy Davis, Jr.!), Abe Olman's Egyptia which Sidney Bechet played and copyrighted as his own piece called Egyptian Fantasy. And how about Charles Shavers' Dawn on the Desert, which was recorded by John Kirby Sextet, Tommy Dorsey and even Art Blakey! We'll be playing all of these pieces. The common denominator is an inexplicable fascination with Arabic, Turkish and Persian music and culture. Yes, this fake Middle Eastern music is kitsch, but the more decades we are from its original creation, the more these pieces reveal musical treasures. The way I arrange them and the way the band will play 'em (Tom Olin, Deborah Weisz, Ric Becker, Jared Dubin, Chris Bacas, Lisa Parrott, Dave Smith, Petros Klampanis, Syberen Van Munster, Jacob Teichroew, Jackie Coleman, Mark Morgan, Danny Wolf and yours truly) will add more layers of cultural complexity. And thanks to 21st century warfare and politics (and I say this completely facetiously) we Americans know a lot more about the Middle East landscape than these mid-century songwriters and composers did. For them, the Middle Eastern lands represented exoticism and sensuality; for us, they are our past and future battlefields.