“Codex, Series III,” by Bill Dixon

A sad mes­sage from Scott Men­hinick of Impro­vised Communications:

“I’ve just been asked by his estate to deliver the sad news that trumpeter/composer/educator Bill Dixon died last night in his sleep at his long­time home in North Ben­ning­ton, Ver­mont after a two-year illness.

“He was 84 years old.

“Dixon is sur­vived by his long­time part­ner Sharon Vogel and two children.

Infor­ma­tion about a memo­r­ial ser­vice and where to send dona­tions in his name is forthcoming.”

I’ve been ter­ri­ble about cit­ing and link­ing to reviews of my recent album, Not Cool, but they have been com­ing in and I’m glad to say that they’ve all been quite com­pli­men­tary. The most recent is by Michael Ander­son at Gear Diary, who says of  Not Cool, “this is great music in the so-called ‘free jazz’ tra­di­tion,” and of myself, “he’s a witty guy and a heck of a player and bandleader.”

Burnt Ambu­lance is writer Phil Freeman’s new online/print jour­nal of jazz and other eso­teric musics. On Day #16 of his series, “31 days of Album Reviews,” Phil sur­veyed Not Cool. I’d rather not excerpt the review and risk doing an injus­tice to Phil’s inim­itable style, so I’ll just say that he rec­om­mended it highly and let you read the rest your­self. My fel­low blog­ger Tim Niland does con­sis­tently good work at his Music and More blog. Tim wrote about Not Cool in very pos­i­tive terms a cou­ple of months ago, as I’m just get­ting ’round to point­ing out. Derek Tay­lor has long been one of the unsung heroes of online jazz jour­nal­ism, so for him to praise my work as he does at his blog, Mas­ter of a Small House, is grat­i­fy­ing, indeed.

As I’ve writ­ten else­where, self-promotion isn’t my strength; I’m even a bit embar­rassed to call atten­tion to such kind words writ­ten about my music. But it serves a prac­ti­cal pur­pose, and any­way, it’s just com­mon cour­tesy to acknowl­edge the praise when writ­ers take the time time to offer it. Thanks, gen­tle­men. Much appreciated.

Philip Roth’s novel I Mar­ried a Com­mu­nist is the tale of Ira Ringold, a left-wing radio per­son­al­ity active dur­ing the HUAC/McCarthy inqui­si­tion of the late ‘40s/early 1950s, and his pro­tégé Nathan Zuck­er­man, a teenage writer aspir­ing to career as a radio drama­tist along the lines of such esteemed politically-progressive writer/producers as Nor­man Cor­win and Orson Welles. Roth’s mas­ter­ful por­trait of the trou­bled Ringold is at the book’s cen­ter, yet just as com­pelling is his account of Nathan’s growth, as he rec­og­nizes and even­tu­ally chafes under the lim­i­ta­tions that come from using one’s art pri­mar­ily as a polit­i­cal tool.

“Who taught you art is slo­gans?” asks Leo Glucks­man, the col­lege instruc­tor who incites Nathan’s shift. “Who taught you art is in the ser­vice of ‘the peo­ple?’ Art is in the ser­vice of art — oth­er­wise there is no art wor­thy of anyone’s attention.”

“What is the motive for writ­ing seri­ous lit­er­a­ture, Mr. Zuck­er­man?” Glucks­man con­tin­ues, before answer­ing him­self: “The motive for writ­ing seri­ous lit­er­a­ture is to write seri­ous lit­er­a­ture.”

It is serendip­i­tous that I read the above pas­sage the day after hav­ing seen this video … brought to my atten­tion, as so many inter­est­ing things are these days, by Peter Hum at Jazzblog.ca:

Of course, I’m tempted to rend The Lit­tlest Marsalis with­out mercy (for instance: How ironic is it to hear some­one who presents him­self like Steve Urkel on prom night call some­one else a nerd? Elaine to George: “You’re bald!”). Child­ish sim­pli­fi­ca­tions and gen­er­al­iza­tions abound, yet rather than decon­struct every line, let’s instead address Jason’s over­ar­ch­ing theme, in which he pre­sumes to under­stand, then dis­miss, some­thing that appar­ently eludes him, to wit: The over­rid­ing moti­va­tion to cre­ate seri­ous art is the com­pul­sion (need, desire, obses­sion) to cre­ate seri­ous art. Enter­tain­ing peo­ple; per­pet­u­at­ing and nur­tur­ing a folk tra­di­tion; mak­ing a liv­ing — these are wor­thy goals, yet have as much to do with cre­at­ing seri­ous art as the abil­ity to wig­gle one’s ears.

The not so sub­tle sub­text in Jason’s mes­sage is that a will­ing­ness to con­form is the most impor­tant trait a jazz musi­cian can pos­sess. Every jazz musi­cian must play “stan­dard songs … that hun­dreds upon hun­dreds of peo­ple (have) sung along and learned …,” or he’s a pre­ten­tious nerd. And the audi­ence is equally cul­pa­ble, affect­ing a lik­ing for some­thing they can’t pos­si­bly under­stand … since, accord­ing to Jason, the musi­cian doesn’t under­stand it himself.

Jason comes off as the leader of some high school clique intent on enforc­ing the shal­low behav­ioral norms of ado­les­cence (woe to the kid who wears the wrong brand of sneak­ers). Like any teenager who knows it all by age 16, Jason assumes he can divine the moti­va­tions of peo­ple whose expe­ri­ences are in fact totally alien to him. In fact – and this I wish could go with­out say­ing, although it obvi­ously can­not – no one can truly know the moti­va­tions (to say noth­ing of the likes and dis­likes) of a fel­low human being. It is cer­tain that not every­one is suited to flow with the main­stream. Of course, some mem­bers of that main­stream pre­sume that because they do not under­stand some­thing, it is beyond under­stand­ing and there­fore ripe for mockery.

The funny thing is, I have no doubt (though I can’t know, wink-wink) that Jason makes music for essen­tially the same rea­son that I do — because he must. He has the need/desire/obsession to play what he plays. Jason wants to com­mu­ni­cate with an audi­ence, and he feels it impor­tant to respect his elders and the jazz tra­di­tion. So do I, but none of those fac­tors are any­where near the pri­mary rea­son I make music. I sus­pect they’re not the main rea­son Jason Marsalis does, either, even if he doesn’t know it him­self. Any seri­ous artist does what he does the way he does because he’s hard-wired to do it. Some of us like to color out­side the lines, oth­ers don’t, but we’re all as seri­ous as your life.

[A fol­lowup: It’s been pointed out that Jason’s rant was in part an attempt at humor. That fact was not lost on me, yet in the writ­ing I con­sid­ered it hardly rel­e­vant. Granted, I may be only a poor, comedy-illiterate free jazz musi­cian, yet as I under­stand the con­cept as taught to me by Com­man­der Data of the U.S.S. Enter­prise, humor’s most cru­cial ele­ment is to be funny or at least witty, and Jason’s lit­tle stand-up rou­tine falls way short.]

Just lis­ten­ing to Terry Gross inter­view­ing the late Hank Jones. Sur­prised to hear that he was the pianist on this …

Hank and Mar­i­lyn spent eight hours in rehearsal for this. “A very try­ing expe­ri­ence,” as he described it to Terry, not unkindly.

From Jaz­zTimes’ Lee Mergner via pub­li­cist Kim Jones I get word today that pianist Hank Jones shed this mor­tal coil yes­ter­day in New York at the age of 91. It’s sad he’s gone, but nine decades is a good run. Musi­cally, Hank cer­tainly made the most of his time, and was play­ing great right up until the end. His 2008 album Our Delight with James Moody showed that nei­ther had lost a step. Mr. Jones was the star of last year’s jazz Jour­nal­ist Asso­ci­a­tion awards shindig; I got to shake his hand and thank him for his music, which was pretty cool. He was as gra­cious as could be. If you believe in heaven, you gotta think that our loss is Jehovah’s gain.

For more evi­dence that I’m a maroon, totally bereft of skill in the art of self-promotion, wit­ness that I had a gig last night and failed to men­tion it either here or on Face­book. It wasn’t my band, but still, I should’ve said some­thing. By the time it occurred to me to do so (my wife asked me if I’d posted it on FB sec­onds before I walked out the door on my way to the gig, prompt­ing a men­tal slap on the fore­head and a Homer-esque exple­tive) it was too late.

I encour­age those of you who own time machines to set it to last night at 7:30. Hike over to Park­side Lounge in NYC, on Hous­ton Street between Avenues B & C. There you will wit­ness a set by the ter­rific young Mon­treal gui­tarist Matt LeGroulx lead­ing a group that includes the excit­ing young Por­tuguese drum­mer Joao Lobo; my friend and bassist Fran­cois Gril­lot; and yours truly on the alto sax­o­phone. Since it’s already hap­pened, I can tell you that the band’s ver­sion of Ornette’s “Blues Con­no­ta­tion” burns like a ’69 Ford Torino’s pleather seats on the back of your naked thighs in the mid­dle of a blis­ter­ing Okie sum­mer. I use my orange Run­yon 7 mouth­piece with the Spoiler insert, which turns my old ’53 Wurl­itzer Lyric alto into the aural equiv­a­lent of an acety­lene torch, thus rais­ing the heat sev­eral more degrees. A good hot time was had by all, and can be had by you if you pos­sess your own per­sonal Way Back machine and set it back a mere 18 hours or so.

After the gig, Matt tells me he’s been read­ing my jazz writ­ings since he was a teenager, which kinda makes me yearn for a time machine of my own.

Ah, but age is just a num­ber … a num­ber which, sub­tracted from another num­ber between 80 and 100, will give you a rough idea how few years you have left on the planet (bar­ring a vio­lent and/or unex­pected passing).

Thanks Matt, thanks Joao, thanks ‘Swa! And thanks to Park­side Lounge, which strikes me as an unusu­ally friendly place to play music.

My lit­tle dust up a cou­ple of months ago with a cer­tain aggrieved gui­tarist over the rel­a­tive worth of an expen­sive jazz col­lege edu­ca­tion had an unin­tended but wel­come effect, in that it got me to think­ing about how we need to edu­cate young lis­ten­ers at least as much — if not more — than we need to train new pro­fes­sional musi­cians. It occurred to me that, as the proud pos­ses­sor of a Bachelor’s Degree in Music Edu­ca­tion, I’m actu­ally in a posi­tion to do some­thing about that. As a result, I was inspired to dust off my diploma and take the nec­es­sary steps to get my teacher’s certification.

The State of New York makes aspir­ing teach­ers jump through more than a few hoops to get cer­ti­fied, which is prob­a­bly as it should be: I sus­pect that only the truly moti­vated sur­vive the ordeal. I cleared a cou­ple of impor­tant hoops yes­ter­day when I received notice that I’d passed the first two cer­ti­fi­ca­tion exams. All that’s left is one final test, which I’m sched­uled to take next month. After that, I’m at the mercy of the indi­vid­ual review process, which I hope doesn’t take too long, but given that NY licenses some­thing like 100,000 new teach­ers a year, who knows?

Of course, get­ting cer­ti­fied is only a means to an end, which is to actu­ally get a job teach­ing young ‘uns. But first things first. Wish me luck, and if any­one out there knows of any open­ings (espe­cially in the Hud­son Val­ley region), drop me a line …

I read this morn­ing at Peter Hum’s blog that the Cana­dian valve-trombonist/arranger Rob McConnell died yes­ter­day at the age of 75.

I doubt there are many jazz musi­cians who played in a col­lege stage band in the early 1980s who didn’t at some point wres­tle with the knotty chal­lenges of a Rob McConnell chart. As a sax­o­phon­ist in at Cen­tral State Uni­ver­sity from 1982 – 84, I had McConnell arrange­ments thrust in front of me on a fairly reg­u­lar basis, and while I didn’t lis­ten to his Boss Brass big band on my own time, I had to admit, his music was fun to play. I haven’t played or even heard those charts for years, but I remem­ber them as chock full of mul­ti­ple feels and intri­cately inter­leaved ensem­ble pas­sages that demanded con­sum­mate pre­ci­sion. Attain­ing that exact­ness was an enor­mous chal­lenge, and when accom­plished left me with almost the same feel­ing of exhil­a­ra­tion I felt when mak­ing a great play on the base­ball dia­mond. There was a phys­i­cal­ity to McConnell’s music – not just aggres­sion, though it could cer­tainly be aggres­sive, but also in how it demanded such extra­or­di­nary coor­di­na­tion of mind and body.

McConnell’s fame rests largely on his appeal to the once-young musi­cians like me who cut their teeth on his charts in hun­dreds of high school and col­lege big bands from the 1970s-on. I’m sure many of those now-middle-aged men and women feel a lit­tle bit older today. I know I do.

“It’s not easy to impro­vise. It’s the most dif­fi­cult thing to do. Even when one impro­vises in front of a cam­era or a micro­phone, one ven­tril­o­quizes, or leaves another to speak in one’s place the schemas and lan­guages that are already there. There are already a great num­ber of pre­scrip­tions that are pre­scribed in our mem­ory and in our cul­ture. All the names are already pre-programmed. It’s already the names that inhibit our abil­ity to ever really impro­vise. One can’t say what­ever one wants. One is obliged, more or less, to repro­duce the stereo­typ­i­cal dis­course. And so I believe in impro­vi­sa­tion, and I fight for impro­vi­sa­tion, but always with the belief that it’s impos­si­ble.” – Jacques Der­rida, unpub­lished inter­view, 1982, quoted in the film Der­rida.

The late French philoso­pher Jacques Der­rida is the father of Decon­struc­tion, a the­ory that is noto­ri­ously hard to define, in no small part because of its insis­tence that lan­guage is inca­pable of express­ing the lit­eral, and that the reader’s role as inter­preter is at least as impor­tant as the author’s. Decon­struc­tion posits that our under­stand­ing and use of lan­guage is lim­ited by our absolute inabil­ity to divorce it from con­text. My under­stand­ing of the the­ory is far from com­plete. In watch­ing the film Der­rida, how­ever, I was struck by the above quote’s appli­ca­tion to impro­vised music.

Der­rida sug­gests that impro­vi­sa­tion can never be pure, that it is by neces­sity gov­erned by habits, ideas, reflexes, sys­tems. I’m no philoso­pher, nor am I espe­cially well-read on phi­los­o­phy, but as some­one who’s spent most of his life think­ing about and prac­tic­ing musi­cal impro­vi­sa­tion, I feel to my mar­row that he’s right.

To impro­vise music involves recall­ing and rear­rang­ing pre-existing ele­ments. The ques­tion seems to be how deep the impro­viser chooses to delve into and dis­sect the con­stituent parts. The free-est impro­vis­ers dig the deep­est, engag­ing the process of manip­u­lat­ing sound and silence on the most minute level. Yet even they are ulti­mately faced with the apo­ria, the final impasse, wherein the com­po­nents resist fur­ther dis­sec­tion, and the impro­viser is unable to tran­scend what is known – what he knows. There are no quan­tum leaps.

All impro­vised music is there­fore man­nered. It’s just a mat­ter of degree. My truest nature is to flail against that man­ner­ism, even when I know that the effort is doomed. Per­haps that was Derrida’s nature, too.

Yes­ter­day I wrote that I felt more aligned with music to be pre­sented at this year’s Vision Fes­ti­val than that being hon­ored by my fel­low crit­ics at the upcom­ing Jazz Jour­nal­ist Association’s Jazz Awards.  On Face­book,  JJA Pres­i­dent Howard Man­del called my post a “cri­tique” of the awards, and while it wasn’t meant as such, I under­stand why he might feel that way.

At the same time, if I’m going to get charged with hav­ing cri­tiqued the Jazz Awards, I want to get my money’s worth. My ini­tial post wasn’t a cri­tique. This is a critique.

In a recent blog post, Howard calls the Awards “our Pulitzer Prizes.” That seems a bit of puffery, but per­haps it’s true. To me, they’re more akin to the Acad­emy Awards, albeit on a smaller and pre­sum­ably less craven scale.

The aver­age movie­goer might well place a fair amount of stock in the Oscars. A cinephile, on the other hand, takes the awards with a lick of salt. No hard­core film buff actu­ally believes that the Oscar for Best Pic­ture goes to the best movie in any given year. Heck, some­times it doesn’t even go to a pass­ably good movie (remem­ber Crash?).

Instead, Best Pic­ture goes to a film which, thanks to a con­flu­ence of fac­tors — eco­nomic, cul­tural, polit­i­cal, and, to a greater-or-lesser degree, cre­ative — appeals to a plu­ral­ity of the film indus­try lif­ers who vote, and they not atyp­i­cally reward a high-middlebrow work made by a Hol­ly­wood insider. Hence, the Acad­emy has years like 1938, when a divert­ing piece of fluff like Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take it With You won Best Pic­ture over Jean Renoir’s anti-war mas­ter­piece La Grande Illu­sion (at least the Renoir was nom­i­nated — the first time a for­eign film received a Best Pic­ture nomination).

I’m sure there are aes­thetes among the Oscar vot­ers, dis­cern­ing types who cham­pion the Her­zogs and Kau­ris­makis, who care that  late Woody Allen is a sad car­i­ca­ture of his early work, and who wouldn’t be caught dead watch­ing a James Cameron flick except as an oblig­a­tion to their pro­fes­sion. These benighted and besieged snobs, how­ever, are out­num­bered by Acad­emy mem­bers with less rar­i­fied tastes, who are appar­ently moved beyond mea­sure by such steroid-enhanced schmaltz as Titanic. Hence, the cinephile’s vote is like that of an Okla­homan for Obama — which is to say, it basi­cally doesn’t count, and he’s forced to bear wit­ness while main­stream enter­tain­ment is exalted at the expense of what he con­sid­ers more wor­thy fare.

The well-adjusted among the epi­cures surely spend min­i­mal time rail­ing about the system’s injus­tice. Instead, they prob­a­bly go to the watch par­ties and drink a lot and make snarky com­ments to their smarty-pants friends and have a fine time. They under­stand that the Oscars are merely Hollywood’s yearly exer­cise in self-congratulation/aggrandizement and not to be taken too seri­ously. In the long run the awards are rather harm­less, and on rare occa­sions actu­ally do high­light great work that might be oth­er­wise ignored.

If you feel an over­whelm­ing urge to point out all the ways in which the Oscars are dif­fer­ent from the Jazz Awards, save your breath. I doubt you could come up with some­thing I haven’t con­sid­ered. What’s more, I’d prob­a­bly agree. The com­par­i­son is inex­act and in some ways does an injus­tice to the Jazz Awards. For one thing, there’s almost cer­tainly less self-interest in play with the JJA, if for no other rea­son than there’s essen­tially no money at stake. There is some ego grat­i­fi­ca­tion involved, par­tic­u­larly in the awards for jour­nal­ists, and at least one of last year’s nom­i­nees turned-in a bal­lot nom­i­nat­ing him­self, but in the musi­cal cat­e­gories, vot­ers are extremely con­sci­en­tious. As a jazz ver­sion of the afore­men­tioned benighted and besieged movie snob, I might not share the tastes of a plu­ral­ity of my fel­low crit­ics. I read­ily con­fess, how­ever, from what I can tell, they par­tic­i­pate in good faith with laud­able motives.

As I see it, the Jazz Awards are most sim­i­lar to the Oscars in the way they skew to the mid­dle. (Obvi­ously I speak of jazz’s mid­dle, which is to the left of pop culture’s. The mid­dle for jazz crit­ics is still fur­ther left … and I reside on the fringe of  that.) There are many rea­sons for this. I’m not espe­cially inter­est­ing in exam­in­ing them here. It’s sim­ply true, the way a state­ment like “the sky is blue” is true before you start decon­struct­ing it.

As a card-carrying, chin-stroking free-jazz-o-phile, I accept this real­ity. My tastes are unusual. The music I dig is not for every­body. It’s true that I wish jazz crit­ics were, in gen­eral, more rig­or­ous. In the past I’ve crit­i­cized what I per­ceived as large-scale incu­ri­ous­ness by indi­vid­ual crit­ics, specif­i­cally in regard to end-of-the-year Top Ten lists. I issue cen­sure as a nudge, the flut­ter of a butterfly’s wings that might trig­ger an even­tual tsunami of eso­teri­cism. But I hon­estly do not expect that to happen.

The edge can’t exist with­out a mid­dle, and that mid­dle is what the Jazz Awards rep­re­sent. I might not find the mid­dle very inter­est­ing, but there’s no law say­ing I have to live there. To tell the truth, I’ve found that some­times it’s actu­ally a fun place to visit.

And visit I did: last sum­mer, when I attended the Jazz Awards pre­sen­ta­tion at The Jazz Stan­dard in NYC. I went with my best smarty-pants friend — my wife, Lisa — and even made a new one — Lyn Hor­ton, whose tastes in jazz exot­ica resem­ble my own. We sat at the kid’s table and watched as the grown-ups handed out awards. We ate bar­be­cue and drank wine and laughed and made snarky com­ments. I shook Hank Jones’ hand and talked to Sheila Jor­dan. My wife intro­duced me to Ira Gitler, who she didn’t really know, but she’d once worked with his son, Fitz. I’d been told I was to present an award, but some­how Pres­i­dent Man­del left me off the list of pre­sen­ters, which was actu­ally fine with me, although it really pissed-off Lisa. All in all, I dug what it was — a time for a bunch of jazz folk to eat, drink, and be merry, and give them­selves a col­lec­tive pat on the back. Lisa and I had a good time in a Twi­light Zone/Outer Lim­its kind of way, and even though not many of my favorites won and I doubt I’ll go this year, I’d have to say the whole thing was a net pos­i­tive experience.

Some­one once called the camel “a horse made by com­mit­tee,” and I guess that’s how most collectively-derived deci­sions strike me, the Jazz Awards being no dif­fer­ent from the Oscars or Pazz & Jop or the First Con­ti­nen­tal Con­gress. They sel­dom yield the best of all pos­si­ble out­comes, yet the results can be ser­vice­able. Just ask the Bedouins.