My recent shot across the bow of crit­i­cal ortho­doxy — that one very fine jazz com­poser was less inno­v­a­tive than another in his approach to the for­mal com­po­si­tion of his works — has been opposed hither and yon as hereti­cal, elit­ist, reac­tionary, bes­tial, pre­ten­tious, jeal­ous, frac­tious, mis­an­thropic, mis­aligned, mis­guided, unre­quited, overex­cited, unin­vited, and alto­gether dam­ag­ing to the col­lec­tive morale of jazz crit­ics every­where, who in the main believe that to ven­ture such an inde­pen­dent opin­ion is a sign of intel­lec­tual bug­gery, the likes of which jazz can­not abide if it hopes to sur­vive into the mid­dle years of the 21^st century.

To such crit­i­cal crit­ics of my cri­tiquing I can only say: mine is but a hum­ble jazz blog and I am but a mere free jazz saxophonist-slash-writer, who knows what he likes but doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily like what he knows; who in his quest for cre­ative ful­fill­ment searches for music that sur­prises and delights him; who also hap­pens to be his own favorite musi­cian and can there­fore cre­ate music that he finds excep­tion­ally appeal­ing, even if no one else does; and who derives much sat­is­fac­tion from play­ing and lis­ten­ing to music that places a pre­mium on unmedi­ated spon­tane­ity and emo­tional expression.

I wish to remind those greatly offended by my opin­ions that they are hardly a dan­ger to any­one, given that I am per­pet­u­ally in the minor­ity and vir­tu­ally bereft of influ­ence. More­over, I do not wish to impose my views on any­one, nor do I pre­tend that they are in any way defin­i­tive or supe­rior to any one else’s. They are merely my own.

Fur­ther­more, if I occa­sion­ally express skep­ti­cism regard­ing the integrity of cer­tain insti­tu­tions, keep in mind that they are but peb­bles flung in the direc­tion of an impreg­nable fortress. Surely such a struc­ture is of suf­fi­cient strength and majesty to with­stand my fee­ble attacks.

A few years ago, the Ford Motor Com­pany and the State of New York part­nered in a pro­gram to lease a fleet of elec­tric cars — not hybrids, but fully battery-powered — to folks liv­ing along the Metro North com­muter rail line. My wife (who rides into New York every day, and is rather the tree-hugging sort) man­aged to fina­gle one of the lit­tle zero-emission beast­ies for our per­sonal use.

The car was called a Ford TH!NK (yes, that is an excla­ma­tion point in place of the “i”). It was a tiny two-seater, about the two-thirds the size of our Honda Civic, maybe even smaller. The body was com­posed of high-grade tex­tured red plas­tic. Where the gas cap would’ve been, there was a plug that accepted a charge from a spe­cial elec­tri­cal out­let installed in our garage.

The expe­ri­ence of dri­ving the TH!NK was almost exactly the same as dri­ving a car with an inter­nal com­bus­tion engine. You turned the key, put it in gear, pressed the accel­er­a­tor with your foot and drove. The TH!NK was qui­eter than the Civic. In fact, it was essen­tially silent except for the sound of tires on pave­ment. It wouldn’t go as fast, but it made the speed limit, which was fine for dri­ving around town.

In most respects, the two cars served an iden­ti­cal func­tion equally well. The dif­fer­ence between them was in their engi­neer­ing. The TH!NK was pow­ered by a new exper­i­men­tal tech­nol­ogy, whereas the Civic used a vari­a­tion on the same gasoline-fueled engine that’s pow­ered auto­mo­biles since Henry Ford was in dia­pers. I doubt the TH!NK was nec­es­sar­ily a more com­plex piece of machin­ery — the Civic cer­tainly had more bells and whis­tles — but under the skin it was revolutionary.

In fact, I would scarcely hes­i­tate to say that, of the two auto­mo­biles, the Civic was the more con­ven­tional. That’s not to say the TH!NK was nec­es­sar­ily a bet­ter car. It was a fairly exper­i­men­tal vehi­cle at the time and there­fore had its share of bugs. But it rep­re­sented a major tech­no­log­i­cal leap, with the promise of fur­ther inno­va­tions to come. That for me made it the more inter­est­ing vehicle.

Just some­thing I’ve been TH!NKing about today …

One of my posts appar­ently became the sub­ject of a minor ker­fluffle while I was away, so I thought I’d cel­e­brate my return to blog­ger­dom with an appro­pri­ately pedan­tic response.

The offend­ing piece – “Begrudg­ingly Sub­mit­ted for Your Approval: My Annual Top Ten List,” in which I bemoan what I per­ceive as a lack of imag­i­na­tion among crit­ics when com­pil­ing their annual end-of-the-year Top 10 lists – con­tained the fol­low­ing passage:

“How, for exam­ple, does John Hollenbeck’s Eter­nal Inter­lude—a per­fectly fine, skill­fully writ­ten yet for­mally con­ven­tional big band album released on a small indie label — show up on so many lists, while Gra­ham Collier’s direct­ing 14 Jack­son Pol­locks—a vision­ary and inspired work that’s utterly unlike any big band album released since the death of Gil Evans (except for, I assume, those made by Col­lier himself) — has yet to appear on a sin­gle one that I’ve seen?”

That para­graph stuck in the craw of David Adler, who wrote the fol­low­ing when dis­cussing a sep­a­rate blog post by Col­lier:

“Col­lier quotes my JJA col­league Chris Kelsey in call­ing John Hollenbeck’s Eter­nal Inter­lude ‘a for­mally con­ven­tional big band album,’ which nearly sent my morn­ing cof­fee through my nos­trils. If Hol­len­beck is con­ven­tional, then maybe his friend and col­lab­o­ra­tor Mered­ith Monk is con­ven­tional. Her music employs con­so­nant melody, after all. And that’s what I sus­pect Chris means. For ‘for­mally con­ven­tional,’ read ‘not free jazz,’ not explic­itly tied to the post-Ayler school of skronk.

“We’re all enti­tled to our opin­ions — indeed, we crit­ics live by them. But Chris’s remark seems pretty close to an out­right error.”

The error … no, make that errors, are David’s. Let us set aside for a moment his ridicu­lous pre­sump­tion that I value only dis­so­nance and/or ‘free jazz,’ and the awk­ward non sequitur where­upon the name Mered­ith Monk is dropped into the con­ver­sa­tion. Let us instead focus on Mr. Adler’s appar­ent mis­un­der­stand­ing of a fun­da­men­tal aspect of music theory.

By glid­ing past the word “for­mally” and land­ing hard on the word “con­ven­tional,” David’s take begs one of two inter­pre­ta­tions: either he ignored my ref­er­ence to form in order to will­fully dis­tort my mean­ing, or he didn’t under­stand what I meant by the phrase “for­mally con­ven­tional.” I once would’ve found it hard to believe David would inten­tion­ally mis­in­ter­pret a point in order to make one of his own. Now I’m not so sure. All things con­sid­ered, how­ever, I think the sec­ond con­clu­sion is the one to be drawn.

“For­mally con­ven­tional” in this con­text can mean but one thing: a con­ven­tional approach to musi­cal form–form sig­ni­fy­ing the over­all orga­ni­za­tion of the musi­cal com­po­si­tion, i.e. the man­ner in which a com­poser orders his music in smaller sec­tions to cre­ate a larger work.

In call­ing the music on Eter­nal Inter­lude “for­mally con­ven­tional,” I meant that John orga­nized his com­po­si­tions in more-or-less clearly defined sec­tions in a fixed order, in a man­ner typ­i­cal of com­posers trained in tra­di­tional, European-based styles.  In the past John has used min­i­mal­ist tech­niques, which are also derived from the Euro­pean Art Music Tra­di­tion, U.S.A. Divi­sion. In any case, my point is that his approach to form is time-tested. In other words: con­ven­tional. This in con­trast to Col­lier, in whose hands form is mal­leable, an ele­ment of impro­vi­sa­tion in the con­text of live performance.

Of course, a case can be made that, within the con­fines of the tra­di­tion in which he works, John’s use of form is not at all con­ven­tional. For instance, his com­po­si­tions are a great deal more for­mally imag­i­na­tive than the typ­i­cal Sammy Nes­tico or Phil Wil­son arrangement.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not con­ven­tional in a wider sense, and that’s where the issue of con­text enters the dis­cus­sion, for when I called John’s music for­mally con­ven­tional, it was in rela­tion to  Collier’s work, which in terms of form is decid­edly uncon­ven­tional — not just com­pared to Hollenbeck’s or the his­tor­i­cal par­a­digm of big band jazz, but within the entire frame­work of West­ern composition.

It seems appar­ent that David mis­in­ter­preted “form” to mean “genre” or per­haps “style,” which is frankly a rookie mis­take, not one I’d expect from an expe­ri­enced jazz jour­nal­ist. Speak­ing as a musi­cian, it’s just the sort of gaffe that causes us to dis­trust and even dis­dain critics.

In the spirit of our esteemed POTUS, Let Me Be Clear. I con­sider Eter­nal Inter­lude a very fine album.  Form for John is a ves­sel into which he pours melody, har­mony, and rhythm (and, I might add, tonal color) – the aspects of com­pos­ing that most incite his cre­ativ­ity.  I pre­fer Graham’s approach, but there’s plenty to like about John’s music, as well. Cer­tainly oth­ers can pre­fer the Hol­len­beck and have very good rea­sons for doing so.

My orig­i­nal point was two-fold: first, Hollenbeck’s use of musi­cal form is less inven­tive than Collier’s (which as far as I’m con­cerned is an indis­putable fact); sec­ond, the pres­ence of Hollenbeck’s album on so many Top 10 lists and the absence of Collier’s has noth­ing to do with qual­ity and every­thing to do with extra-musical influences.

My lack of regard for crit­ics who are overly sus­cep­ti­ble to said extra-musical influ­ences is eas­ily inferred by read­ing the rest of the orig­i­nal piece. You might even spec­u­late that such infer­ences prompted David’s crit­i­cisms. Of course I wouldn’t, but you might.

As much as I’m dis­ap­pointed by David’s weird attack on my Hollenbeck/Collier com­par­i­son, and that he uses it as an excuse to bash my per­sonal aes­thetic (which he oddly – and mis­tak­enly – feels qual­i­fied to define), it’s best looked at as a form of ret­ri­bu­tion for the blan­ket pan of crit­ics in my Top 10 arti­cle. In other words, I more or less expected some­thing like it to come along. In fact, I prob­a­bly would’ve let it pass with min­i­mal com­ment were it not for some­thing he wrote later in the piece regard­ing a review I wrote eight years ago (!):

” … it puts me in mind of 2002, when one of my picks of the year was John Ellis’s Roots, Branches & Leaves. Chris Kelsey, review­ing for either Jaz­zTimes or Down Beat, dis­missed it as a neo-bop record, going so far as to sug­gest that the play­ers sound like they per­form in suits and ties. Per­haps he got this idea from the fact that Jason Marsalis was the drum­mer, I don’t know.”

He con­tin­ues: “To me, Roots, Branches & Leaves remains one of the most poignantly per­sonal jazz state­ments of the last 10 years. But Ellis got dogged for it in print, and I’d be sur­prised if it appeared on a sin­gle top 10 list besides mine. That’s life.”

I’d for­got­ten the album, except for the fact that I felt it unex­cep­tional. For­tu­nately, the review is avail­able on the Jaz­zTimes site, so I was able to revisit what I’d writ­ten (it’s excerpted from a col­umn, which explains the odd tone at the end). I encour­age you to read it, and decide if it’s as cav­a­lier a dis­missal as David states. It’s clear that David takes per­sonal offense to my crit­i­cisms of music he espe­cially esteems.

What ulti­mately set me off, how­ever, is the Marsalis com­ment.  For the record, the per­son­nel list­ings on an album don’t influ­ence what I write about the music con­tained therein, and for David to sug­gest as much is B.S.  in the extreme. If I sound angry, well, I am. My esti­ma­tion of Mr. Adler, who I gen­er­ally respected before (evi­dently with­out just cause), is now in the toilet.

Oh, MAN!

Who woulda thought writ­ing a book could be so much work? Not me, I’m embar­rassed to say. After crank­ing out a thou­sand words a day for mag­a­zines, Web sites, and blogs all these years, I fig­ured it was a small mat­ter to stretch out … a 50,000 word book in 50 days, right?

Wrong.

There’s a lot more to it than that, and rather than bore you with the details, suf­fice it to say that the last chap­ter alone took me two weeks, and its not even that long. I once remem­ber read­ing someone’s apol­ogy for writ­ing a long let­ter “because they didn’t have time to write a short one.” I can relate.

Any­how, I fin­ished the book last Fri­day. It’s ready to be sent out to agents and pub­lish­ers; if you are one or the other and would like to check it out, by all means, drop me a line.

So after a month or more of hardly blog­ging, I’m ready to jump back into the water. First up will likely be a response to being called out by one David Adler, of all peo­ple, who appar­ently has the rare power to divine hid­den mean­ing in my writ­ings. (Did you know that I think any­thing “not explic­itly tied to the post-Ayler school of skronk” is “con­ven­tional?” Nei­ther did I, until David told me.) More on that soon …

With every sub­se­quent stage, the writ­ing of my book becomes expo­nen­tially more dif­fi­cult. I have a cou­ple of ideas why that is, but not enough strength to write about them here. Suf­fice it to say I’m close to the end – I began the final chap­ter this morn­ing. It should be short. The end is in sight, hal­lelu­jah! Send psy­chic energy my way. I can use all I can get!

I’ve men­tioned my for­ays into elec­tronic music in the past, but I’ve sel­dom put any­thing out there for pub­lic con­sump­tion.  But yes­ter­day I down­loaded the newest ver­sion of AudioMulch, long my favorite sound maul­ing soft­ware, and I thought I might cel­e­brate by com­pos­ing an audio blog.

When I say com­pos­ing, I use it in the Gra­ham Col­lier sense (read his book!). It was a two-part process. Last night I recorded a tw0-and-a-half minute impro­vi­sa­tion on soprano sax. This morn­ing I loaded the sound file into Mulch and had my way with it.

My Mulching skills are a bit rusty, but I kinda like what came out. It’s def­i­nitely the aural equiv­a­lent of how I write here – a spon­ta­neous, unmedi­ated state­ment (a lit­tle long, per­haps), raw mate­r­ial for fur­ther elab­o­ra­tion, maybe, but more likely a way of spurring my imag­i­na­tion in a par­tic­u­lar direction.

Please let me know what you think! Every once in a while I’m struck by this bug. One of these days I’m liable to do a full-fledged project along these lines.

The lo-fi treat­ment is inten­tional, as is the fact that it’s recorded in mono. I find both qual­i­ties pecu­liarly attrac­tive. I’ve never been the audio­phile type …

Stream WDNSD, a Theme and Vari­a­tions for Soprano Sax and Computer.

Given that it started with me shov­el­ing my dri­ve­way out from under four inches of snow, yes­ter­day – Jan­u­ary 2nd, 2010 (that’s “twenty-ten”) – turned out much bet­ter than I had any right to expect.

The plan was to drive or ride the train into the city for a ses­sion at the loft of  all-purpose jazz mas­ter Con­nie Crothers. Also there would be my reg­u­lar rhythm sec­tion, drum­mer Jay Rosen and bassist Fran­cois Gril­lot, and trom­bon­ist Steve Swell, with whom I’ve played a fair amount.

I decided to take the train, which meant I’d have to limit myself to one horn. Know­ing I’d be on foot in the city all day, with a long trek from the near­est sub­way sta­tion to Connie’s Williams­burg address, I thought it smart to take the soprano, which is of course the eas­i­est to carry. With the like­li­hood of ultra-high energy free jazzery on the agenda, how­ever, I set­tled on tenor … which is, of course, prob­a­bly three times heav­ier than the soprano. The bet­ter to huff and puff and blow the house down.

The snow storm was not unfore­seen, but it would frankly have taken a bliz­zard of ice age pro­por­tions to keep me home.

Eight years of shov­el­ing my dri­ve­way have helped me to develop a tech­nique for get­ting max­i­mum snow clear­ance with the least pos­si­ble (though still sig­nif­i­cant) effort, so it only took about fif­teen min­utes to clear a space big enough to get my car out. The nar­row road lead­ing into the vil­lage was not in great shape, but I gave myself plenty of time to get to the train sta­tion, know­ing my top speed for the two-mile drive would barely exceed 20 mph.

I reached the sta­tion with about fif­teen min­utes to spare. As I got out of the car, I thought to check the pocket of my tenor case to make sure I’d remem­bered to bring some­thing to read on the hour-and-three-quarters train ride.

D’oh!

For­tu­nately, my lit­tle town has a a nice book store close to the train sta­tion. I ran over, grabbed the first Von­negut I saw that I hadn’t already read (God Bless You, Mr. Rose­wa­ter) and made it to the train in plenty of time.

(If given the choice between rid­ing the train or dri­ving into the city, I’ll ride every time. Hav­ing so much guilt-free read­ing time is a rare and won­der­ful thing.)

It wasn’t snow­ing in the city, but it was cold as a mutha. From Grand Cen­tral, I walked over to Sam Ash for some reeds, then took the N train down­town to Union Square. From there, I walked an addi­tional two blocks south on Broad­way to visit my favorite retail estab­lish­ment of any kind, The Strand bookstore.

For those of you who don’t live in NYC, The Strand is the world’s great­est dis­count book store. For twenty bucks, you can go into The Strand and come out with enough great read­ing mate­r­ial to last you a month or more. That’s exactly what hap­pened yes­ter­day, only I spent an addi­tional five dol­lars, thanks to a copy of Steinbeck’s Trav­els with Charley (one of the few of his books I haven’t read) that I saw on the way to checkout.

After lunch at Dojo, an afford­able Japan­ese restau­rant near NYU to which I’ve devel­oped an inex­plic­a­ble attrac­tion bor­der­ing on obses­sion over the years, I headed out to Williams­burg. The sub­way line run­ning clos­est to Connie’s is the J train, which fea­tures some of the crap­pi­est sta­tions in the entire New York City Tran­sit Sys­tem. Cer­tainly the Cham­bers Street BMT sta­tion, where I ended up trans­fer­ring after a snafu too long to explain, is one of the very worst in Man­hat­tan. It resem­bles some Twi­light Zone-like vision of a New York sub­way sta­tion after the last hydro­gen bomb has reduced the city to rub­ble and forced remain­ing humans to live under­ground where they mutate with the rat pop­u­la­tion to cre­ate a race of rat peo­ple, only one would hope that the rat peo­ple would take bet­ter care in main­tain­ing their liv­ing space than the City of New York takes in main­tain­ing the Cham­bers Street BMT station.

The walk from the Marcy Avenue sta­tion in Brook­lyn to Connie’s loft took about 15 min­utes. I got there at exactly the appointed time of 3:30. I took the ele­va­tor to her floor. The vestibule door was locked and there was no buzzer. I pulled out my cell phone so I could call and have her let me in.

As I did, I noticed I had a new voice mail mes­sage from Jay. It seems that Fran­cois was sick and couldn’t make it, so Jay decided to can­cel, too. Con­nie came to the door. She had been out most of the day and hadn’t got­ten the mes­sages until about an hour or so before, at which point it was impos­si­ble to get in touch with me – not that it would’ve mat­tered, since I’d got­ten on the train at 10:48  AM, after which there would’ve been no turn­ing back.

Con­nie was exceed­ingly cool about it, though. She’d already called Steve and told him we’d resched­ule. But since I was there, she sug­gested we play a duo ses­sion. I said I thought that was a good idea.

We sat around an talked a bit before­hand. She filled me in on her plans for build­ing a big jazz com­mu­nity cen­ter in Harlem (it’s a tough slog, but if any­one can make it hap­pen, it’s Connie).

We also talked about the cur­rent state of jazz in gen­eral. Not sur­pris­ingly, we see things in much the same light (although Con­nie is much nicer and more gra­cious in her eval­u­a­tions than I am). We both share a cer­tain opti­mism about the open­ing up of jazz in the post-music-biz-bust era.

Our talk moved to more strictly musi­cal sub­jects, at which point I did a great deal more lis­ten­ing than talk­ing, because her sto­ries are a lot more inter­est­ing than mine. She talked about her the­ory that Louis Armstrong’s scat­ted duo with gui­tarist Lon­nie John­son  on “Hot­ter than That” was maybe the first exam­ple of truly free impro­vi­sa­tion in jazz (she played the record for me, and she’s got a point).

She also spoke of her friend­ship with Roy Eldridge. She told how she once played a free impro­vi­sa­tion with Roy in the audi­ence, and Roy came up after­wards and told her how much he loved it. He told her how he had done some free impro­vis­ing him­self with Chu Berry in the ‘30s but they couldn’t get any record com­pany to record it. She recounted a con­cert Roy him­self played with pianist Dick Katz as part of Jack Kleinsinger’s High­lights in Jazz series, in which they played out. Con­nie also recalled hear­ing Roy play some very hip, very atonal impro­vised piano.

Think about that: Roy Eldridge play­ing free jazz, not just before Tris­tano and Ornette and Cecil, but before bebop! The dis­cus­sion led us to rumi­nate on the schism that’s so long sep­a­rated the in and out jazz crowds. Con­nie is the rare musi­cian who bridges the divide. “I used to catch it from both sides!” she laughed. “The straight-ahead cats say­ing, ‘that free stuff is B.S.’, and the free cats say­ing, ‘play­ing those tunes isn’t true improvisation.’”

The time came to play. I was a lit­tle sad I hadn’t brought my soprano instead of the tenor. I am capa­ble of much greater sub­tlety on soprano than I am on tenor. In my hands, the tenor is strictly a free jazz horn – my broad brush, used to paint large swaths – whereas on the soprano I’m capa­ble of much greater pre­ci­sion. The soprano is also my bebop horn (strangely enough, since I picked up alto and tenor again with a mind toward using them in a straight-ahead con­text), and I would’ve liked to have played some tunes with Connie.

Play­ing was nev­er­the­less a joy. Con­nie is infi­nitely flex­i­ble, well-able to adapt to the loud, scrawl­ing hyper­ac­tiv­ity that’s a char­ac­ter­is­tic of my tenor play­ing. ‘Scrawl­ing’ is indeed the oper­a­ble word. Impro­vis­ing has always felt like a kind of aural drafts­man­ship to me. Con­nie con­trasted my extremely lin­ear­ity with tight, per­cus­sive clus­ters, ener­getic and pow­er­ful, com­ple­ment­ing and fram­ing every­thing I did. I would’ve liked to have moved in more sub­tle direc­tions, but that’s just not me on tenor. It any case, it didn’t seem to bother Con­nie a bit. We both laughed like kids at the end of every improvisation.

We parted with smiles and a hug, with the promise to get the band together before the end of the month.

The walk to the sub­way seemed a lot shorter. I missed my train home by about five min­utes, so I had a bowl of chili in Grand Cen­tral and buried myself in the pages of Von­negut. I caught the next train, where I fin­ished God Bless You,  Mr. Rose­wa­ter (a great satire of free enter­prise and a med­i­ta­tion on the pathol­ogy of wealth). I pulled out a book of short sto­ries by T.C. Boyle, who’s new to me. I’m not sure I’m going to like him, but it’s always excit­ing to dis­cover some­thing or some­one new.

It should snow like this every day.