Come out and lis­ten! You’ll like it or your money back! (Not really. We keep the money, no mat­ter what. But it’s only $10 for the two bands, so you won’t be out much.)

Writer Brian Olewnick, whose tastes gen­er­ally run to less jazzy fare, nev­er­the­less has some very nice things to say about Not Cool on his blog Just Out­side. You can read it here.

Thanks, Mr. O!

Trumpeter/bass-clarinetist Matt Lavelle and I were talk­ing the other day about our shared prob­lem with mem­o­riz­ing tunes. The con­ver­sa­tion cen­tered on our both hav­ing for­got­ten most of the Char­lie Parker tunes we once knew, back when our cheeks (and prospects) were fuzzy and our musi­cal inter­ests more con­ven­tional than they are now.

In my case, I learned those Bird songs on alto when I was an under­grad. Upon mov­ing to New York in my 20s, I not only stopped play­ing straight-ahead and started play­ing free, I also switched horns, mov­ing from the Eb alto to the Bb soprano. As a con­se­quence, my knowl­edge of tunes like “Con­fir­ma­tion” and “Yard­bird Suite” was essen­tially use­less. I knew them only in the “alto” keys. Over the years I had lit­tle rea­son and even less com­pul­sion to learn them in their tenor/soprano keys. “Ornithol­ogy” wasn’t often called on the free jazz jams I started attend­ing in the ‘90s. My recall of the tunes faded.

It wasn’t easy for me to learn them in the first place. In col­lege, I mem­o­rized Parker tunes (though never Bird’s solos, as a mat­ter of prin­ci­ple) from that sta­ple of the aspir­ing jazz saxophonist’s prac­tice room, The Char­lie Parker Omni­book.  I learned the tunes through a process of brute force dri­ving inter­minable rep­e­ti­tion. I wasn’t par­tic­u­larly good at it, but I could do it. The effort required usu­ally out­weighed the ben­e­fits, as far as I could tell. I essen­tially stopped try­ing to mem­o­rize stuff, think­ing it the antithe­sis of spon­tane­ity … and spon­tane­ity is what I was (am) after. It seems that sub­se­quent decades of per­form­ing mostly as a free impro­viser resulted in a with­er­ing of what­ever ves­ti­gial skills for mem­o­riza­tion I once had.

I bring this up because my band is play­ing a con­cert this Sun­day, with our reper­toire com­ing from our album Not Cool ( … as in, “The Oppo­site of Paul Desmond”). As is usual for a Chris Kelsey per­for­mance involv­ing even the slight­est degree of com­po­si­tional con­trivance, there will be music stands in evi­dence, includ­ing one planted smack in front of the band­leader and com­poser of said free jazz dit­ties. You see, I stink so much at mem­o­riza­tion, I find it dif­fi­cult to mem­o­rize even my own tunes.

Sad, I know.

Lots of jazz musi­cians are good at mem­o­riza­tion. For instance, Dave Dou­glas is reputed to pos­sess a prodi­gious capac­ity for mem­o­riza­tion; he’s appar­ently mem­o­rized every tune in John Zorn’s Masada book, a cog­ni­tive feat of Rain Man-like proportions.

In this regard, I am the oppo­site not only of Paul Desmond, but of Dave Dou­glas, as well. (I’m sure I have other, less use­ful traits in com­mon with Rain Man.)

(Actu­ally, it’s eas­ier for me to mem­o­rize stan­dard jazz tunes than it is my own. Stan­dard tunes gen­er­ally adhere to norms that my com­po­si­tions go to great lengths to con­tra­vene. Inter­nal­ize ii-V-I pro­gres­sions and the 12-bar blues, and you’ve “mem­o­rized” the har­monic under­pin­nings of 90% of all straight-ahead jazz tunes ever writ­ten. In my writ­ing I tend to steer clear of those con­ven­tions like I – as a Mets fan – have avoided lower Broad­way dur­ing NYC’s last five baseball-inspired ticker-tape parades.)

I’m spend­ing this week going over the tunes from Not Cool. Not relearn­ing them, exactly, since they still fall under my fin­gers fairly nicely even these sev­eral months after the record­ing ses­sion, but inter­nal­iz­ing them to as great a degree as pos­si­ble. That inter­nal­iza­tion will likely result in my being able to play the tunes – which in some cases are very dif­fi­cult, I might add – with a high degree of skill. Indeed, if you shut your eyes and you might even think I’d mem­o­rized them.

So why don’t you do that? If you come to Brecht Forum this Sun­day, or to another of my gigs down the road, just shut your eyes and lis­ten. Trust me, your ears won’t see the music stand. What’s more, if the music’s to your lik­ing, they won’t care.

If you insist on mem­o­riza­tion, maybe we’ll pull out Bird’s “Now’s the Time.” I’ll never be so far gone that I can’t remem­ber that.

It’s crowded in here.

It’s becom­ing clearer with each pass­ing day that this site is becom­ing as over­stuffed as Union Square on Eugene Debs’ birth­day, and that I’m going to have to find a more effi­cient use of my screen real estate. This Word­Press tem­plate is pretty and all, but there’s too much wasted space. Anywhoo …

The black bar at the bot­tom of the page is the Stream­pad plug-in, which allows for the stream­ing of audio files. Click it and you can lis­ten to a streamed MP3 ver­sion of Not Cool. The album is still avail­able for free down­load (128 kbps MP3), as well, via the link in the side­bar below the album cover.

In addi­tion, if you’ve bought Not Cool from CDBaby, iTunes, or another down­load site, you do not have the liner notes. To get them, you can either down­load the free ver­sion, or you can click here, or (after this post gets pushed down the page) click on the links in the side­bar. Look hard; they’re just below the “donate” button.

The Swine Flu Sow by “Pan­demic Pete”

Between get­ting my own new record fin­ished and released, work­ing on a book, tak­ing the kids back and forth to the doc­tor (first they get H1 N1, then they get vac­ci­nated for it, how whack is that?), and trekking all over try­ing to get my tenor fixed, I’ve man­aged to fall behind in my review­ing of new releases. That won’t do, not at all, for I’ve got­ten some really nice stuff in the mail over the past few weeks.

So in the inter­est of get­ting back in the groove, in the com­ing days I’m gonna lay some Takes That’re Short on y’all (sorry, but my occa­sional helpers in mat­ters like this, Loony and Lick­spit­tle, are oth­er­wise engaged). It’s pos­si­ble that at some point I’ll write about these in the depth they deserve, but right now I just want to get the word out. Time, as always, is of the essence …

Fay Vic­tor Ensem­ble, The Freesong Suite (www.fayvictor.com)

I almost never review vocal albums, mainly because my mind can’t seem to process words when lis­ten­ing to music. So I can’t much speak to Fay Victor’s song­writ­ing, but I can say she’s got a hel­luva ear for extem­po­rized melody. Some­thing of a free jazz Betty Carter, she doesn’t scat, but impro­vises while singing lyrics. Her band (gui­tarist Anders Nils­son, bassist Ken Fil­iano, and drum­mer Michael T.A. Thomp­son) is first-class in every respect. This inspired admix­ture of every kind of ver­nac­u­lar music under the sun could eas­ily become one of my all-time favorite  jazz vocal albums.

Ben Holmes, Ben Holmes Trio

(www.ben-holmes.com)

The Brooklyn-based trum­peter Holmes leads an exact­ing trio that includes the bassist Dan Loomis and drum­mer Vin­nie Sper­razza. The group inter­prets Holmes’ lyri­cal Klezmer/Easter-European-sounding jazz themes with grace and inten­sity. Holmes has a lus­trous sound, almost clas­si­cal in nature, but imbued with the essence of blues and bop and free and every­thing else that’s great about jazz. The per­for­mances are struc­tured but not stilted. Far from it. There’s ample room for free move­ment. Qui­etly self-assured, more ECM-ish than Masada-ish, this is very attrac­tive stuff.

Myra Melford’s Be Bread, The Whole Tree Gone (www.myramelford.com)

I don’t think my reviews of pianist Myra Melford’s work over the years have done her jus­tice. It seems like I always have a nit to pick. Well, screw that. Melford’s com­po­si­tions for an obvi­ously inspired sex­tet com­pris­ing trum­pet (Cuong Vu), clar­inet (Ben Gold­berg), gui­tar (Bran­don Ross), acoustic bass gui­tar (Stomu Takeishi) and drums (Matt Wil­son) are works of fine art, and her piano play­ing gains more depth with every pass­ing year. Won­der­ful music. Check it out.

Von Free­man, Von­ski Speaks (www.nessarecords.com)

What can I say? Von Free­man is one of the hand­ful of great jazz tenor sax­o­phon­ists in the his­tory of jazz. This album recorded live at Jaz­zfest Berlin in 2002 presents the vet­eran doing what he does best – wring­ing new life out of old swingers like “Darn That Dream” and “Sum­mer­time,” prov­ing with­out a doubt it’s not the tune you play but how you play it. Vonski’s Sonny Rollins’ equal, ok? I can’t say it any plainer than that.

Rodrigo Amado, The Abstract Truth and Motion Trio (www.rodrigoamado.com)

Two albums fea­tur­ing the fine Por­tuguese tenor and bari sax­o­phon­ist Rodrigo Amado at the head of dif­fer­ent trios: The Abstract Truth, with the Nor­we­gian drum­mer Paal Nilssen-Love and the Chicagoan bassist Kent Kessler; Motion Trio, with Amado’s coun­try­men, cel­list Miguel Mira and drum­mer Gabriel Fer­ran­dini. Both albums essay col­lec­tive impro­vi­sa­tion, albeit from dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives. Abstract is the more ram­bunc­tious of the two, with Motion qui­eter and per­haps more detailed in its approach. If I had to pick one, it would be Motion; Mira and Ferrandini’s sparser, more col­or­ful style seems to allow Amado more space to explore sub­tleties of tone and line. That said, the high-energy Abstract has a great deal going for it, as well. For­tu­nately, I don’t have to pick just one.

Photo of Ben Holmes by Valerie Trucchia

John Kane House in Pawl­ing, where Wash­ing­ton Actu­ally Slept (photo by Daniel Case)

I live in Pawl­ing, New York, a lit­tle town in Dutchess County, about an hour-and-a-half north of New York City. For a lit­tle town of 4000 or so, Pawl­ing has a sur­pris­ing num­ber of claims-to-fame. George Wash­ing­ton lit­er­ally slept here dur­ing the Rev­o­lu­tion (not the Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion in Jazz, but rather the big 18^th cen­tury Patri­ots vs. Red­coats con­tretemps). Pawl­ing was his field head­quar­ters for sev­eral months.

In the 20th cen­tury, the town was home to for­mer New York Gov­er­nor Thomas Dewey of “Dewey Defeats Tru­man” fame. Pio­neer­ing broad­cast­ers Edward R. Mur­row and Low­ell Thomas also lived in Pawl­ing. Today, actor James Earl Jones resides here­abouts (my son Jasper and I met him at the local post office the day before Thanks­giv­ing one year, Jasper very psy­ched to get the auto­graph of the guy who voiced Darth Vader), as does — or so I’m told — Sally Jessy Raphael.

How­ever, as I was reminded yes­ter­day in a brief mis­sive from writer/videographer Bret Pri­mack, Pawling’s most famous cit­i­zen was Dr. Nor­man Vin­cent Peale, who in the ‘50s authored The Power of Pos­i­tive Think­ing.

Nor­man Vin­cent Peale

I will admit right here and now that I know next to noth­ing about Mr. Peale, whose death in 1993 pre­ceded our res­i­dence here by eight years.  I’ve never read any­thing he wrote. My wife attends a church here in town where he once preached. His name is all over it, but I don’t go to church, so I’ve never felt the urge to check him out.

Not until a few min­utes ago, when I checked his Wikipedia entry, did I know Peale was one of those short-sighted Protes­tant cler­gy­men who in 1960 opposed the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion of John F. Kennedy, fear­ing the Catholic Kennedy would take direc­tion from the pope.

I know next to noth­ing about Peale’s “Power of Pos­i­tive Think­ing” phi­los­o­phy, other than the title has a nice ring to it. Appar­ently, like so many of today’s self-help gurus,  Peale was con­sid­ered some­thing of a snake-oil sales­man in his time, espe­cially by those in the psy­chi­atric pro­fes­sion (it takes one to know one, I guess … ba-dum-bum).

Per­haps because of Peale and oth­ers like him, the idea of think­ing pos­i­tively gets a bad rap. I myself  was once one of those bad-rappers (not the Vanilla Ice kind) … out of sheer cyn­i­cism, mainly.

These days, such skep­ti­cism seems to be in the air. For exam­ple, author Bar­bara Ehren­re­ich recently wrote Bright-sided: How the Relent­less Pro­mo­tion of Pos­i­tive Think­ing Has Under­mined Amer­ica, a book appar­ently devoted to tak­ing the con­cept of “think­ing good thoughts” down sev­eral pegs. At one point in my life I would’ve jumped on her the­sis and rode it like a hun­gry pig at slop­pin’ time.

But not long ago I had an epiphany.

I real­ized that no one who’s ever accom­plished some­thing great has got­ten there by think­ing, “Well, I’m going to try to do this great thing, but I’ll prob­a­bly fail.”

Untold num­bers of peo­ple through the ages have held that low esti­ma­tion of their prospects. Unless they’re your Cousin Larry or Aunt Myr­tle, you’ve never heard of them. Why? Because (sur­prise!) they failed.

Alexan­der G. Bell

Did Alexan­der Gra­ham Bell invent the tele­phone think­ing, “I prob­a­bly can’t do it, and even if I can, in 150 years, polit­i­cal con­sul­tants will just invent robo-calling, which would suck, so really, what’s the point?”

Did Richard Bran­son start Vir­gin think­ing “Yeah, but it’ll never be any­thing but a mail-order record business?”

Did Beethoven go deaf and say, “That’s it, I’m done, where’s the opium?”

I see a lot writ­ten about how the most cre­ative musi­cal efforts are doomed to obscu­rity, how they’ll never find an audi­ence, how Free Jazz — my par­tic­u­lar pas­sion — was a dead end that never caught-on with sig­nif­i­cant num­bers of peo­ple and never will. Or how jazz in gen­eral is a dying art form, a his­tor­i­cal arti­fact whose only hope of preser­va­tion lies in the formaldehyde-filled jars of well-meaning but mis­guided non-profit organizations.

If those ideas gain trac­tion, espe­cially among those who have a rea­son to refute them, the prophe­cies will ful­fill themselves.

The music world as we knew it a decade ago is falling down around our ears. The changes in the indus­try pre­saged by the rise of file-sharing and the decline of the over­all econ­omy have come to pass. Record com­pa­nies are increas­ingly irrel­e­vant. Jazz clubs are closing.

The truth is, we don’t know how it’s all gonna shake out. We don’t know what form jazz will take, how it will sound, how it will be con­sumed either as a recorded medium or in live performance.

We do know, how­ever, that jazz has a power, and that power will not wane if we refuse to let it. That means we can’t let despair get the bet­ter of us. That means, rather than shoot the mes­sen­ger that tells us jazz is in trou­ble, we should heed his warn­ings and work to devise ways to build that audi­ence to a level com­men­su­rate with the music’s quality.

The other day, Matt LeGroulx sent me an e-mail that said, in effect, years from now peo­ple will look back on this time as a golden age, where musi­cians dis­cov­ered the free­dom to do what they want when they wanted, unfil­tered by old mech­a­nisms that deter­mined what did and didn’t get heard. I think he’s right, and hal­lelu­jah for that, but there’s the ques­tion of pay­ing the bills, and that’s no small concern.

The decline of the scle­rotic music indus­try has led to more artis­tic free­dom, and that’s good, but we need to use our newly found inde­pen­dence to devise viable means of get­ting paid to replace the old, now obso­lete ways. It’s a huge chal­lenge, one that will take great inge­nu­ity and effort, yet I have no doubt it can be done. The recent changes present a new oppor­tu­nity, and we need to take advantage.

“That will be $50, two drinks … and an arm and a leg.” (Photo by Oliver Bruchez)

Hold off on the epi­taphs, and let’s get to work. Peo­ple are smarter than we some­times give them credit for.  The audi­ence for intel­li­gent, forward-thinking music is out there. That audi­ence might not be able to afford the $50 cover and two-drink per-set min­i­mum charged by the big present-day jazz clubs (no won­der they’re going-under right and left), but I’ll bet they’ll be more than happy to pay a rea­son­able amount if we give them some­thing worth pay­ing for. Let’s fig­ure out strate­gies to get the music to them in ways that will ben­e­fit us both.

We might have to hunt awhile to find them. And once we do find them, we might actu­ally have to be nice to them, say a few words, treat them like we appre­ci­ate their appre­ci­a­tion. We might actu­ally have to go to them, rather than have them come to us. But the audi­ence is there. We can’t har­bor even the slight­est doubt about that. If we do, we’re licked before we start.

Fol­low­ing months of antic­i­pa­tion (on my part, at least), I’m happy to announce the release of the first album on my new Tzazz Kry­tyk label, Not Cool ( … as in, “The Oppo­site of Paul Desmond”) by The Chris Kelsey 4.

The album is the first to fea­ture my alto and tenor sax work, and I play more than a bit of soprano on it, as well.

For a  lim­ited time I’m mak­ing an MP3 ver­sion of the album avail­able free of charge to read­ers of ChrisKelsey.com. There’s no catch – I’m not even ask­ing for an e-mail address. I’m hop­ing that, if you like it, you’ll pur­chase the CD ver­sion, and/or a copy of my solo soprano sax disc on Cadence Jazz, Beyond Is and Is Not. You can also con­tribute an amount of your choice by hit­ting the “Donate” but­ton on the side­bar (it doesn’t mag­i­cally take money out of your pocket, but directs you to my bag man, oth­er­wise known as Paypal).

If you trust in my genius and would like to buy the CD ver­sion, music-unheard, that’s ok, too. Just click here (or one of the pre­vi­ous two bold­faced links … I’m takin’ no chances). The album will soon be found on eMu­sic, iTunes, and a bun­cha them other lower-case/higher-case retail­ers, as well. But why go there when you can get it here for free, with my bless­ing? For a lim­ited time, of course.

Down­load the 128 kbps MP3 ver­sion of Not Cool ( … as in, “The Oppo­site of Paul Desmond”) here. Enjoy!

Not Cool ( … as in, “The Oppo­site of Paul Desmond”) by Chris Kelsey is licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

They got Capone for play­ing his C-melody too loud.

As a sax­o­phone player, prob­a­bly the most dif­fi­cult thing about liv­ing in New York was find­ing a way to prac­tice with­out pissing-off my neigh­bors. By neces­sity, most New York­ers live stacked on top of one another, often in what are called “pre-war”(Spanish-American War, in some cases) ten­e­ment build­ings,  in tiny apart­ments sep­a­rated by walls about as thick as a slice of Famous Ray’s. Peace and quiet is a rel­a­tive thing at best, with the sound of traf­fic and all-night cel­e­bra­tions on the street out­side your win­dow a con­stant accom­pa­ni­ment (this being espe­cially true when I lived in the East Vil­lage, which by the mid-90s was well on its way to becom­ing Yup­pie Party Cen­tral). I always felt funny about adding my horn on top of the per­pet­ual cacoph­ony that is daily life in the city. I’d grown up in Okla­homa, where keepin’ quiet and stayin’ out of each oth­ers’ bid­ness was a way of life.

Con­se­quently, I tended to prac­tice in a sub-tone, or with a sock stuck in my bell. And that’s when I felt com­fort­able putting any air at all through the horn. More often, I’d sim­ply work my fin­gers on the keys, the quiet pops of the pads sub­sti­tut­ing for the full-throated sound of a sax­o­phone prop­erly blown.  My great­est fear was to bug some jazz-hating neigh­bor to the point where he’d com­plain to my land­lord and I’d lose my lease. That would be bad. Even then, in the early 90s, there weren’t many $400 apart­ments to be had in Manhattan.

Not a build­ing material.

Not every musi­cian was so care­ful. Any­one who ever walked across the East Vil­lage on a hot sum­mer day back then knows that. The sounds of  invis­i­ble sax­o­phon­ists wafted from open win­dows, one segue­ing into another as you walked around the neigh­bor­hood. When I lived on East 3rd Street between A & B, my next door neigh­bor was a trum­peter who had the unfor­tu­nate habit of com­ing home drunk at 3 o’clock in the morn­ing to argue with his girl­friend and prac­tice his horn (surely the two activ­i­ties were related). Many a night I was jolted awake by angry shouts and the buzz of a Har­mon mute inches from my ear, sep­a­rated only by a wall that pos­sessed all the sound-insulating prop­er­ties of fresh moz­zarella. Some­times I’d bang on the wall. More often I’d let it slide.  I could relate.

Now that I think of it, I won­der if maybe my switch to soprano from alto in 1989 was a response to the prob­lem of vol­ume when it came to prac­tic­ing in the city. At that time I was liv­ing in a base­ment apart­ment in Asto­ria, beneath the house of a Croa­t­ian woman who lived with her two teenage daugh­ters. I know that sounds like the setup to a dirty joke, but there was no hanky panky. They were really just very nice peo­ple. I def­i­nitely remem­ber not want­ing to dis­turb them with my play­ing. The main rea­son I switched was the fact that my alto was banged up and I couldn’t afford to give it the over­haul it needed. But a sec­ondary rea­son might’ve been the fact that the soprano sim­ply didn’t make as much noise.

My sound cer­tainly suf­fered in my early years in the city, mostly because I felt inhib­ited from play­ing as strong as I would’ve liked. I recorded every note I played back then. Today I can’t lis­ten to those tapes. My play­ing suf­fered from a paucity of sound that dri­ves me crazy today. You per­form the way you prac­tice. I prac­ticed wimpy. I was a wimp. I prob­a­bly should’ve been flip­pin’ the bird to my neigh­bors all those years and prac­ticed as loud and as often as I liked. Unfor­tu­nately for my sax play­ing, I never could shake my, um … excessively-considerate nature.

I got my best prac­tic­ing done in Cen­tral Park. For eight years I worked a day gig at the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Museum of Art. For a few of those years, when the weather was good, I’d bring my soprano to work and, on my lunch break, repair to a cer­tain rock for­ma­tion in the park behind the museum. I’d usu­ally get a good half-hour, forty-five min­utes in. I could play as loud as I like, both­er­ing – and both­ered by – nobody but the

Squir­rel, by Franco Folini.

squir­rels and rats scur­ry­ing in and out of the rocks and leaves … although on one occa­sion I got yelled at by a lit­tle old lady pass­ing on a nearby path: “You stop that! You stop that noise!” I smiled and waved, pre­tend­ing not to understand.

When I lived in the East Vil­lage, prac­tic­ing wasn’t as big of an issue, sim­ply because I was play­ing so much with other peo­ple – gigs some­times, but mostly infor­mal ses­sions, held at places like an old aban­doned pub­lic school gym­na­sium (haunted, I swear), var­i­ous decrepit store­fronts and base­ments (when such places were cheap enough for musi­cians to rent as liv­ing spaces), and Con­text Stu­dios on Avenue A (a dump that nev­er­the­less pro­vided pass­able rehearsal space at a decent price). My sound blos­somed dur­ing that era. I was play­ing loud in the com­pany of other musi­cians doing the same, and it was heavenly.

That said, there’s no sub­sti­tute for inten­sive prac­tic­ing, both in terms of sound pro­duc­tion and tech­nique, and that’s some­thing I was only able to do after I left the city. In 1998, a few months after the birth of our first child, my wife and I moved to Mount Ver­non, just out­side NYC, where we rented an apart­ment in a build­ing not unlike the one we’d just left on the Lower East Side, only some­what larger. It was nice to have more room, but the neigh­bors were prob­a­bly even more inclined to be dis­turbed by the free jazz-playing sax­o­phon­ist liv­ing next door. As a con­se­quence, things didn’t much improve, practice-wise. In fact, I stopped play­ing the horn alto­gether for a time, con­cen­trat­ing instead on cre­at­ing weird music on a com­puter, which I could play as loud as my ears could stand, pro­vided I used head­phones. We lived there for three years. Most of that time, prac­tic­ing wasn’t an issue. I didn’t play sax­o­phone anymore.

We almost bought this nice place in Chap­paqua next door to Hillary and Bill.

Things changed. In 2001 our sec­ond child was born. Addi­tional liv­ing space was a neces­sity or at least highly desir­able. My wife and I felt like, with two kids, we were no longer artsy Bohemi­ans. We were grownups, and we should start act­ing the part. We decided to buy a house. Start­ing as near the city as pos­si­ble, we began look­ing for some­thing we could afford. First in lower Westch­ester County, where about the only things in our price range were caves dug out of the ground by home­less junkies emi­grat­ing from the Bronx, then grad­u­ally fur­ther upstate. We looked in upper Westch­ester, then Put­nam County, before stum­bling upon Pawl­ing, a nice lit­tle vil­lage on the Metro North Harlem line, about an hour-and-a-half north of the city. A hous­ing devel­op­ment was going up out­side of town. The houses were pretty big and rea­son­ably priced. We man­aged to get a loan and bought one.

It was the best thing we could’ve done, for the fam­ily, and for me as a musi­cian. I’d never really kicked the sax­o­phone habit. The attrac­tion of being able to play my horn as loud and as often as I wanted – for the first time in my life, really – was too much to resist. Within a few months of mov­ing into the house, I’d put my lap­top  aside and was play­ing my horn again. Soon, I was prac­tic­ing every spare moment, between con­stant diaper-changings and trips to the pediatrician.

I put as much air through my soprano as it could take. When the soprano proved to be insuf­fi­ciently pow­er­ful, I bought a tenor, then an alto. I found the per­fect spot at the the top of the stairs, where blow­ing the horns at full vol­ume seemed to vibrate the entire house to its foun­da­tion. Sud­denly I rec­og­nized the virtues and dis­cov­ered the tech­niques of Albert Ayler (“Oh, that’s how he did that!”). Not only did my sound get big, my chops got big­ger, too. My play­ing evolved and improved more in the eight years after mov­ing to Pawl­ing than it did in any sim­i­lar period in the pre­vi­ous 30 years. In my 40s, I finally became myself.

Look­ing back, I won­der how any acoustic musi­cian really man­ages to reach his or her poten­tial liv­ing in New York City, given the prob­lems involved in sim­ply being able to prac­tice your instru­ment. I guess most peo­ple who do it are less inhib­ited than I am. Who knows? Maybe if I’d stayed in the city, I’d have lost my uptight-ness and began rat­tling the win­dows of my East 3rd Street apart­ment sev­eral hours a day, the way I now do in my house upstate. I didn’t do it in the 12 years I did live there, how­ever, so there’s really no rea­son to believe it would’ve happened.

Any­way, all’s well that ends well. I now live in about as peace­ful and as quiet a place as you can imag­ine … a place where I can play as loud and as long as I want, with­out both­er­ing any­body. Ironic, right?

Even my Yel­low Lab digs my play­ing. She fol­lows me all over the house (I’m a peri­patetic prac­ticer), tail a’ wag­ging – always happy, no mat­ter how hard and fast and loud I play. Turns out, I didn’t have to change my essen­tial nature at all. I found a place where I can avoid bug­ging peo­ple (and ani­mals, like those poor Cen­tral Park squir­rels and rats), yet still enjoy the won­ders of blow­ing with lungs fully extended.

Take that, lit­tle old lady in the park.

“My, that Wyn­ton Marsalis swings his pan­taloons off!”

Yes­ter­day I asked the musi­cal question …

Where do you have to go to find a Con Ed Orches­tra Pit? Or an Agnes Varis Infrared Lis­ten­ing Sys­tem? To what ends of the earth would one have to travel to find The Peter Jay Sharp Arcade, or The Alfred and Gail Engel­berg Grand Stair­case? Any guesses?

Ok, I’ll give you a hint: The same place houses a night­club named for both a founder of bebop and a molar-rotting car­bon­ated beverage.

The answer is, of course, Fred­er­ick P. Rose Hall at Jazz at Lin­coln Center.

***

You don’t have to be a com­mie pinko like me to see that the rich peo­ple in this coun­try have too damn much money. The rich folk them­selves must know it. I mean, why else would they be so pre­oc­cu­pied with find­ing new ways to dis­pose of it?

Money, cour­tesy of the U.S. Government.

The les­son seems to be that the more money ya got, the harder it is to find things to spend it on. There are peo­ple who can and do pur­chase any mate­r­ial goods they desire, live in bound­less lux­ury, and have absolute free­dom of move­ment, able to travel any­where at any­time as fast as the most technologically-advanced vehi­cles can take them. Yet after all that ardent spend­ing, they still have money left over. Lots of it.

What to do, what to do?

How ’bout buy­ing a sure-fire ticket to heaven? Or, at the very least, a ticket out of hell.

That’s where char­ity comes in. Not the kind of char­ity where a rich per­son sees a social need and strives to ful­fill it – that’s called “phil­an­thropy,” and it’s a won­der­ful thing. I’m talk­ing the kind of “cause” that flat­ters a donor into giv­ing his mil­lions in return for hav­ing his or his company’s name writ­ten in gilded let­ters on a build­ing or con­cert stage or an art gallery. The con­struc­tion of Rose Hall, and by exten­sion, Jazz at Lin­coln Cen­ter, was/is exactly that sort of “cause.”

Like every other major non-profit arts orga­ni­za­tion, J@LC’s exis­tence depends on find­ing peo­ple with too much money and ego, and too lit­tle sense. A page on its Web site telling the his­tory of Rose Hall pro­vides a list of such peo­ple under the rubric, “named spaces:” nooks and cran­nies and techie giz­mos and orches­tra pits and stair­cases to heaven that bear the names of their filthy rich donors – tan­gi­ble proof to them­selves and their high soci­ety and busi­ness bud­dies that,  while they may be utterly inca­pable of cre­at­ing any­thing, at least they can buy cool stuff and put their name on it.

Accord­ing to its archi­tects’ Web site, Rose Hall cost $128 mil­lion to build. For that money you could hire 2,560 jazz musi­cians at 50 grand apiece to per­form jazz and teach in every cor­ner of the country.

Imag­ine that. Upwards of 50 jazz-musicians-in-residence for every state of the union. 2,560 jazz musi­cians play­ing weekly con­certs and teach­ing jazz directly any­one who wants to learn, every day for a year. That’s enough musi­cians to fill three pro­fes­sional big bands and untold num­bers of small groups, liv­ing and work­ing in every state, expos­ing peo­ple (espe­cially kids) to jazz first-hand. Not in the form of a once-a-year school assem­bly or con­cert fea­tur­ing a group of trav­el­ing mer­ce­nar­ies head­quar­tered in New York, mind you. These would be artists liv­ing and work­ing in the com­mu­nity, teach­ing and per­form­ing year-round in local class­rooms and audi­to­ri­ums and gym­na­si­ums. That, with the addi­tional ben­e­fit accru­ing 2,560 jazz musi­cians actu­ally being paid a liv­ing wage for per­haps the first time in their lives.

“Prof” John Scofield by Robert Drozd

Of course, a $128 mil­lion build­ing is gonna be around for awhile, while my “plan,” such as it is, pro­vides music for only one year. But what a year! It’s not hard to imag­ine the impact of such a pro­gram to be more pro­found and last­ing than the New York-centric J@LC’s efforts. And it doesn’t have to be $128 mil­lion. Just the equiv­a­lent of J@LC’s annual $31 mil­lion a year oper­at­ing bud­get could fund a pro­gram that employs artists and exposes young peo­ple all across the nation to world-class jazz. A John Scofield res­i­dency in rural Nebraska? Vijay Iyer in Ban­gor, Maine? Why not?

If my plan sounds half-assed, that’s because it is. I haven’t come any­where near close to think­ing up a work­able sys­tem, nor will I. I’m a musi­cian and a writer, not a politi­cian or arts admin­is­tra­tor. But I do know that spend­ing $31 mil­lion a year on J@LC, on top of a $128 mil­lion invest­ment in the con­struc­tion of its con­cert hall, has been and will likely con­tinue to be an appalling mis­use of money.

The goal is pur­port­edly the fur­ther­ance of jazz. The actual result has been some­thing else entirely.

Next: Wyn­ton ain’t the prob­lem with J@LC. J@LC ‘s very exis­tence is the problem.

Where do you have to go to find a Con Ed Orches­tra Pit? Or an Agnes Varis Infrared Lis­ten­ing Sys­tem? To what ends of the earth would one have to travel to find The Peter Jay Sharp Arcade, or The Alfred and Gail Engel­berg Grand Stair­case? Any guesses?

Ok, I’ll give you a hint: The same place houses a night­club named for both a founder of bebop and a molar-rotting car­bon­ated beverage.

Tune-in tomor­row for the answer to this and many other questions …