Oy, what I week … get­ting cyber­stalked (there is a law against that, right?) … deal­ing with this lousy Smarch weather … try­ing to fig­ure out what the hell is going on with “Lost” (why are the sur­vivors “can­di­dates,” and for what? Mayor of the island? In that case, I vote for Hur­ley) … it’s been a strange and not alto­gether pleas­ant few days.

Ver­ily, though ye be plas­tered by Yang, Yin will soon appear to pick you up. My pick-up came this morn­ing in the form of  a very nice write-up of Not Cool by Greg Edwards over at Gap­ple­gate Music Review. “Chris Kelsey shows that he is at the fore­front of the fiery reedists today. The music is exhil­a­rat­ing, over­flow­ing, bril­liant,” says Greg, a line  sure to inspire exces­sive blush­ing and/or preen­ing. Even if you don’t read the review of Not Cool, head over to Gap­ple­gate and check out Greg’s reviews of Con­nie Crothers/Michael Bisio, Albert Ayler, Toby Dri­ver, Roy Har­ris (yes, the clas­si­cal com­poser), Evan Parker, and many and sundry other intrigu­ing musi­cians. To be con­sid­ered in such com­pany is an honor, indeed.

[Par­don the self-promotion, but if I don’t tell you, who will?]

My per­form­ing career (such as it is – I’ve never been the world’s most pro­lific con­cer­tizer) took a big hit in 1998 when I moved with my wife Lisa and infant son Jasper to Mount Ver­non from New York’s Lower East Side. Mount Ver­non is almost a sixth bor­ough, but it isn’t Downtown.

Being off the scene had a price. The num­ber of live gigs I played declined pre­cip­i­tously. They dried up almost com­pletely when, three years later, after the birth of our daugh­ter Meret, we moved even far­ther – much far­ther – upstate. As it turned out, the lack of per­for­mance oppor­tu­ni­ties did not augur the end of my musi­cal life’s work, but for a while I was concerned.

New York had been my home since 1986. All of my musi­cal col­lab­o­ra­tors lived there. Many if not most of the per­for­mance spaces that skew to my type of music are located there. Leav­ing the metro area and mov­ing to Dutchess County was like being cast out of par­adise … a smelly, fetid, skanky par­adise, but a par­adise all the same.

I stopped play­ing alto­gether for a time, but that proved unten­able. After a year or two of self-imposed jazz exile, I real­ized I needed to play if I had any hope of stay­ing sane.

If I wanted to play, I’d have to go where the music was. It wasn’t com­ing to me. There are vir­tu­ally no free jazz per­for­mance oppor­tu­ni­ties in Dutchess and its envi­rons. There are a few nice play­ers in the area, for sure, and I played with some of them and enjoyed it. But most of my guys lived in the city. I guess I’ll always be a New Yorker … musi­cally, at least.

It’s hard enough to ask a guy to cart a bass or a set of drums upstate for a well-paying gig. When the occa­sion is  a mere rehearsal or an infor­mal jam, for­get about it. You can’t do it.

Con­se­quently, for the past decade I’ve mostly had to make the trek into the city if and when I want to play music. Dur­ing the week, I have kids to pick-up from school and cart to Brownie meet­ings and soc­cer prac­tices. My wife works in the city and doesn’t get home until after 7:30, so I often have to cook for every­body and get the kids ready for bed. That’s my day gig, and it’s a great one, but tem­po­ral con­cerns  demand that low– or non-paying musi­cal gigs and rehearsals (“Are there any other kind?” asks the jazz sax­o­phon­ist) wait for the weekend.

I spent a few of those week­ends in Man­hat­tan and Brook­lyn this past sum­mer, rehears­ing my band and record­ing our recent album, Not Cool. I spent another in the city over the Thanks­giv­ing hol­i­day, rehears­ing for and per­form­ing my first NYC gig in I-don’t-know-how-long at The Brecht Forum. I had a great time, and it reminded me of some things I occa­sion­ally for­get: namely, why I moved out of the city in the first place, and how lucky I am to still be able to go in and play.

Any time I spend in front of an audi­ence is pre­cious, but Sun­day night at Brecht was extra-special. It was the first time in many years that I was able to take my two chil­dren — Jasper, now 11 and taller than his mom, and Meret,  a very pre­co­cious eight — to one of my concerts.

Jasper first attended one of his dad’s free jazz gigs at the Knit­ting Fac­tory in 1998, when he was only a cou­ple of months old. He seemed to dig it, in that he stayed awake and didn’t cry dur­ing my set, but he hasn’t been to many since. Meret says she remem­bers hear­ing me play in a library once when she was very lit­tle, but I’m not so sure. Maybe her mem­ory is bet­ter than mine. In any case, Sun­day was def­i­nitely the first time they had heard me play my orig­i­nal music in pub­lic in a long time.

We piled into the car at 5 pm on Sun­day — mom, dad, two kids, three sax­o­phones with assorted equip­ment, and a big goofy yel­low lab beg­ging to come but fated to be left home alone — and drove the one-hour-forty-five-minute schlep to Lower Man­hat­tan. We parked on an ancient brick-paved street a block away from Brecht Forum and unloaded my stuff.

Back when I only played soprano, car­ry­ing gear was a breeze. Now that I’m play­ing three horns, I’ve dis­cov­ered that a lit­tle help is a won­der­ful thing.

Jasper grabbed my alto, Lisa my soprano, and I car­ried my tenor and bag of assorted nec­es­sary things. Meret car­ried my sax stand — a long, ungainly con­trivance with hold­ers for alto and tenor, and pegs for soprano and clar­inet (the lat­ter goes largely unused) — without com­plaint. Watch­ing lit­tle Meret stride pur­pose­fully down West Street in her skinny jeans, haul­ing that strange con­trap­tion that’s almost as long as she, her long blond hair blow­ing in the autumn breeze, is a sight I won’t soon forget.

We arrived early. Since my band was slated to fol­low tenor sax­o­phon­ist Ras Moshe’s Music Now! Ensem­ble, Lisa and the kids went off in search of a place to eat. I stayed behind to set up, so I missed my kids’ first time din­ing in one of New York’s famously mediocre Chi­nese restau­rants. Appar­ently, it was a hoot. My son, in his usual way, was com­pletely against it until he became adamantly in favor of it. My wife says the food wasn’t very good, but just the fact that the kids enthu­si­as­ti­cally ordered spicy squid in black bean sauce says some­thing about their chutz­pah (or the Szechuan equivalent).

They returned to Brecht Forum (essen­tially a large, well-lit gallery a few steps above street-level, with white walls and hard­wood floors, a com­fort­able couch in the lobby, a small kitchen in the back, and left­ist lit­er­a­ture scat­tered about — a very nice, unpre­ten­tious place to view art and hear music) just as Ras’ group began. The kids sat through the entire impro­vised set with nary a whim­per or a whine. On the con­trary; they seemed very engaged, as if wit­ness­ing some­thing important.

When Ras & com­pany fin­ished, I entrusted my lit­tle dig­i­tal video cam­era to Jasper and asked him to record my set. Besides being put-off that I wanted him to use my cam­era instead of his own, he accepted the assign­ment with his char­ac­ter­is­tic sar­donic enthu­si­asm (yes, an 11 year-old boy can be sar­donic, espe­cially if he’s being raised by me). I pointed out the zoom but­ton. He basi­cally said “Duh!,” at which time I left him to his own devices. I had music to play.

I’d been a bit con­cerned that I wouldn’t be able to get my head in the proper place — that the pres­ence of my fam­ily might prove exces­sively dis­tract­ing — but I had a sur­pris­ingly easy time segue­ing from daddy to saxophonist/bandleader. Lisa helped, of course, but the kids were so good, so glad to be there and so inter­ested, there were no imped­i­ments to my con­cen­tra­tion. The per­for­mance largely unfolded in the same man­ner as any other, which is to say, it was a won­der­ful experience.

As always, the jolt of play­ing to a live audi­ence, how­ever small, ener­gized the music. Not Cool is a ter­rific album, but to play those tunes in live per­for­mance was another expe­ri­ence entirely. Except for a brief, hour-long rehearsal the pre­vi­ous day just to refresh our mem­o­ries of the tunes, the band (Chris DiMeglio on trum­pet, Fran­cois Gril­lot on bass, Jay Rosen on drums, and me on soprano, alto, and tenor saxes) hadn’t played together since the record­ing ses­sion in June. The chem­istry of this group is such that we picked up right where we left off. There were a few moments of semi-awkward exe­cu­tion, and my direc­tion of the impro­vised form was a bit rusty, but the energy, pas­sion, and cre­ative syn­ergy were at an out­ra­geously high level.

This is a great band. There, I said it. I’m a critic. I should know.

In the moments imme­di­ately after the last note was sounded, as I came down from the high of per­for­mance, the first things I saw were the faces of my kids.

Meret pre­tended to be annoyed at being forced to wit­ness the entire event, but she did it with such a huge smile on her face, I could tell she was impressed and maybe a lit­tle bit proud of her dad. Meret is like that. She teases me about my increas­ingly decreas­ing hair­line (“Daddy, you are so bald, you should really wear a hat when you take me to the bus stop. It’s get­ting cold!”), com­plains about my bright orange throw­back Adi­das run­ning shoes (“They’re so nerdy!”), and feigns embar­rass­ment when I dance (well, maybe not feigns). But she never passes-up a chance for me to carry her down­stairs in the morn­ing (“I’m too tired! Carry me!”), and always comes to me first to show off her lat­est artis­tic tri­umph (there have been many, my favorite being last year’s Father’s Day card, truly a vir­tu­oso dis­play). Often after rav­ing about some­thing deli­cious Lisa has pre­pared for din­ner, Meret — always con­sid­er­ate of my feel­ings — will tell me how much she likes my cook­ing, too. She can’t fool me.

Jasper’s smile was just as big. Whereas his sis­ter some­times tries to cam­ou­flage her affec­tions, Jasper — while some­times shy about express­ing him­self — sel­dom tries to obscure the way he feels. “It was really cool,” he said when I asked him how he liked it. “But at the end, how did you know when to play that song, and how did you know how to end it the way you did?” [That’s a ter­rific ques­tion, by the way.] The music wasn’t exactly unfa­mil­iar to him and his sis­ter. Both have heard me play music like this around the house all of their lives. They’d been hear­ing this par­tic­u­lar set of com­po­si­tions for months. “I rec­og­nized all the songs you play at home, and I real­ized I was expect­ing one song to fol­low the next [like on the album], only that didn’t always hap­pen,” said Jasper. We had played loud, louder, and loud­est, but it didn’t bother him a bit. “Luck­ily, I’m used to hear­ing you prac­tice and play music so loud at home,” he said. “One thing, though, Daddy: Do you think that now maybe you’ll write some new songs? Because you’ve been play­ing these same songs a long time. I like ‘em, but maybe some­thing dif­fer­ent would be cool.”

I can dig it, son.

It was well after 11 before we got home. I can never sleep after a gig, so I stayed up after the rest of the crew had gone to bed. I plugged the cam­era into my com­puter, put on the head­phones, and watched the video. My first thought? Jasper was right. I should’ve let him use his own cam­era. My cam­era shoots at a higher def­i­n­i­tion, but doesn’t have a sta­bi­liz­ing func­tion. Jasper’s does. The video was wob­bly. Oh well.

The cam­era was held with love, how­ever, and Jasper did a good job get­ting the essen­tials. The video cap­tures the imme­di­acy of the music, and the visual aspect (while occa­sion­ally seasick-making) height­ens the inten­sity. Another video­g­ra­pher also recorded the per­for­mance, and I might use her footage for pro­mo­tional pur­poses. I haven’t seen it yet. The hour-plus Jasper shot, how­ever, gave me some­thing a bought-and-paid-for video couldn’t; I was able to see it right away, before the rush of per­form­ing had faded, which is an amaz­ing way to review a per­for­mance. More impor­tantly, it allowed me to share the cre­ative expe­ri­ence with my son, and that’s no small thing. I might have other video shot of me in years to come, but I doubt it will ever mean as much.

It’s that pos­si­bil­ity of shar­ing what’s impor­tant with our chil­dren that brought Lisa and I to this place. There are many advan­tages to rais­ing kids in the city, but you have to be the kind of par­ent that I most emphat­i­cally am not.

Rais­ing Jasper and Meret in New York would’ve been like an artist try­ing to paint a pic­ture of some­thing very spe­cific and very beau­ti­ful in the midst of utter chaos, strug­gling against the con­stant stream of passers-by try­ing to deface his masterwork-in-progress. It’s all I can do to take care of myself in that envi­ron­ment. When it came to rais­ing our kids, it’s bet­ter that we found a qui­eter, calmer place.

It’s a fact that mov­ing upstate threw a wrench into my jazz play­ing, but only for a lit­tle while. As any­one who’s raised chil­dren knows, time passes so fast. The 11 years since we left the city have gone by in the blink of an eye. In that eye-blink, I’ve watched my kids learn to walk and talk, carted them back-and-forth to nurs­ery school, waved to them through the school bus win­dow as they rode to their first day of kinder­garten and ele­men­tary and mid­dle school. I’ve cheered at their base­ball and soc­cer games and applauded their school choral con­certs. I’ve awak­ened every day for nine years to the sight of a small, beau­ti­ful moun­tain right out­side my front door that’s so close it seems like I could almost reach and touch the sum­mit. Any­time I want, weather per­mit­ting, I can step onto my porch and watch a seem­ingly infi­nite vari­ety of birds eat­ing from a feeder in our front yard. The air is fresh, the water cold and clear, and if I have to shovel sev­eral feet of snow a few times a year, or if the local taxes seem a lit­tle high, it’s a small price to pay to live in such a place.

It’s not like I’ve accom­plished noth­ing musi­cally, either. Over the last nine years I’ve made sev­eral records of which I’m proud. I haven’t per­formed as often as I might’ve liked, but liv­ing within dri­ving dis­tance of New York has allowed me to fos­ter reward­ing and long-lasting rela­tion­ships with superb musi­cians. I’ve had a unique oppor­tu­nity to grow and develop artis­ti­cally — not only as a musi­cian, but as a writer. If you were to sug­gest that I have the best of both worlds, I wouldn’t argue.

Who knows where we’ll go from here? As the kids grow, I have more free­dom to pur­sue my cre­ative pur­suits. At times over the last 11 years I’ve thought I’d have to give up music, but I can see now that that doesn’t have to hap­pen. To be able to do what I did the other night — drive into to New York, play great music with great friends, share it with my fam­ily and come home to our pretty lit­tle town and big goofy yel­low lab … well, to ask for more than that would just be greedy.

Below is a sam­ple of Jasper’s videog­ra­phy from Sun­day night …

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.

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!

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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.

With min­i­mal prompt­ing, any work­ing musi­cian will gladly recite a per­sonal litany of bad gigs. Until or unless you get so big that you don’t have to worry about play­ing hell holes (or get so dis­gusted with the musician’s lot that you give up music for your “dream” job – sell­ing GPS sys­tems at Radio Shack … which I did once,  for one soul-sapping month), the list never stops grow­ing. While it’s true that good can be found in almost any sit­u­a­tion — that no gig is a bad gig as long as you’re doing what you love — the con­verse is also true: there’s no gig so good that some­thing can’t go ter­ri­bly wrong.

I’ve played too many gigs in venues where the pre­dom­i­nant aroma was of industrial-strength bath­room dis­in­fec­tant in mor­tal com­bat with stale urine. I’m not sure I’d know the ideal gig if it grabbed me by the ‘nads. But I’ve got no com­plaints. I pre­fer my dives hon­est, not tarted-up. Fancy doesn’t equal good, not by a long shot. I found that out early.

My own worst gig was my first as a leader. It was also one I was hap­pi­est to get, in a nice (or what passes for nice in jazz cir­cles), respectable (or what passes for respectable in jazz cir­cles), non-disinfectant-smelling night club.

I can even remem­ber the date: Feb­ru­ary 14, 1985.

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The joint was called Bianca’s. It was sup­pos­edly Okla­homa City’s only jazz club. (In ret­ro­spect, I doubt the verac­ity of that claim. There were prob­a­bly jazz bars in the city’s black neigh­bor­hoods, although they remained unknown to the likes of post-collegiate, lily-white me. But I digress …) When it first opened, Bianca’s was run by the brother of a local jazz pianist, so it was at least some­what accom­mo­dat­ing to musi­cians. The jazz biz being what it is, how­ever, it soon passed into the hands of a man­age­ment that was markedly less talent-friendly.

That management’s face was a guy named Larry. Larry’s per­sona was that of a cowboy/gangster, an unholy mix­ture of Lee Van Cleef and Edward G. Robin­son. Rumors of unsa­vory busi­ness deal­ings buzzed around him like flies in Beaver at cow-chip-throwin’ time (Google that, you non-Okies out there). Larry’s income was reput­edly aug­mented by cer­tain extrale­gal activ­i­ties, although that could’ve been idle talk by jazz musi­cians, a noto­ri­ously conspiracy-minded ilk. In any case, he was a creepy guy, best avoided.

I worked at Bianca’s as a side­man dur­ing the pro-musician admin­is­tra­tion — indeed, my first real gig was with the club’s res­i­dent big band. After Larry’s ascen­sion, I played there on week­ends in a group led by a gui­tarist. One night after we’d fin­ished, Larry approached me. He needed some­one to play Thurs­day nights. I checked my busy cal­en­dar and informed him of my avail­abil­ity. He assented.

The pay would be neg­li­gi­ble. Thurs­day was one of the least-busy nights and there­fore one where the club would pro­vide min­i­mum rec­om­pense. Still, Bianca’s was seen as a pres­ti­gious gig by OKC’s minor­ity of local young white jazz geeks. I was frankly thrilled at the oppor­tu­nity. Larry offered half the money from the liquor sales, which I took gladly.

I have almost no mem­ory of how the evening went, musi­cally. I had put together a quar­tet for the occa­sion. Our reper­toire came from the Real Book. In addi­tion to alto, my usual horn, I remem­ber I played a bit of soprano – a fact that would be burnt into my con­scious­ness at evening’s end.

Ordi­nar­ily, the place would’ve been a tomb on a Thurs­day night. Bianca’s was located on the upper level of a second-rate shop­ping mall. It didn’t get much walk-in traf­fic, and any­way, Thurs­day was the calm before the week­end storm.

This wasn’t an ordi­nary Thurs­day, how­ever. It was Valentine’s Day.

It doesn’t mat­ter what day of the week Valentine’s Day falls on. Cou­ples go out – often to night clubs – and cel­e­brate. On this night, many cou­ples went to Bianca’s.

My good friend Larry obvi­ously hadn’t counted on a packed house when he promised me half of the liquor sales. Indeed, I sus­pect he (being a car­toon­ish exploiter of musi­cians) secretly cher­ished the thought of the bands in his employ mak­ing chump change.

But this night Larry had messed up. He had for­got­ten about the hol­i­day. The unex­pected non-stop flow of cus­tomers had his inter­nal cash reg­is­ter work­ing over­time. Also run­ning over­time was his twisted lit­tle club-manager’s mind.

How, he won­dered, am I going to get out of pay­ing these guys?

I remem­ber watch­ing out of the cor­ner of my eye as the crowd grew ever-larger, and think­ing that this was my lucky night. Bianca’s was a good-sized joint. There were prob­a­bly 200 peo­ple there, maybe more, and they were dig­ging the music. Fig­ure two drinks per sat­is­fied cus­tomer, at three bucks a pop (est. 1985 prices), and you’re talk­ing at least $1200 in booze sales. A con­ser­v­a­tive esti­mate of the band’s take would’ve amounted to $150 bucks apiece – not a king’s ran­som, but a decent haul for a night’s work in those days. By the end of the last set, I was already plan­ning how I was going to spend my jazz-gotten gains.

Not so fast there, Kimo Sabe.  Lit­tle Cae­sar Larry was in the house.

The last set ends, we pack up our instru­ments. Next item on the agenda: get­ting paid. Talk­ing to strangers has never been a strength of mine, and Larry was plenty strange. Plus, there was money involved. Fuhgetaboutit. I started feel­ing like there was a tiny lit­tle con­struc­tion worker build­ing a Wal Mart in my colon. Such is the life of a band­leader and this was my first stab at it. I ven­tured to the back of the club and knocked on the door to Larry’s office.

“Come in,” says Larry.

“So, pretty good turnout tonight, huh?” I say.

“God­damit, what the fuck were you doin’ up there tonight?” Larry snarls.

“Wha’ … what d’ ya mean?” I stam­mer, shocked at his hos­tile tone.

“I mean, god­dammit, that you sounded like shit up there tonight. That was the worst god­dam thing I ever heard in my life. It was ok when you played the sax­o­phone, but when you picked up that lit­tle gold clar­inet, it was fuckin’ awful.” Larry was refer­ring to my soprano. Larry ran a jazz club, yet God help him, he couldn’t ID a freakin’ soprano sax.

“Here’s your god­dam money. You’re lucky I’m pay­ing you a god­dam thing.” He stuck a damp wad of crum­pled bills in my hand.  “Now get the fuck outta here before I throw you out.”

I stum­bled out of the office almost in tears. I wan­dered back to the band­stand, where my guys were wait­ing for their bread. In a daze, I counted the money. It came out to $120. Not $120 per man. $120 total. I remem­ber think­ing how that was odd, con­sid­er­ing all the peo­ple who came into the club. But my senses had been dulled by Larry’s hos­til­ity. My mind was on his attack, not on the pal­try sum I’d been handed. Which was, of course, as Larry intended.

Later, I real­ized what had hap­pened. I’d been ripped-off.  A vet­eran musi­cian would’ve got­ten it imme­di­ately and fought for what was right­fully his, but I was a cal­low youth, inex­pe­ri­enced in the hard ways of the world. Larry knew that. He pulled the ol’ mis­di­rec­tion play – berat­ing me so I’d either not notice or not care that he was steal­ing from me – and I fell for it, big time. Did I feel stu­pid? Oh yeah, I felt stu­pid. Angry? Homi­ci­dal, in fact. Did I do any­thing about it? Well, kinda.

Hard as it is to believe, we were sched­uled to play again the next Thurs­day. Screw that, I thought. I told the guys to keep it under their hat, not to tell any­one, but when next Thurs­day came around, Bianca’s was gonna be one jazz-less jazz club. We wouldn’t show up. That’d show that hillbilly-mobster piece of shit.

The next Thurs­day after­noon, I get a call. “Chris, this is Larry,” the voice said. “I heard from [he named a musi­cian acquain­tance of mine] that you’re not show­ing up to play tonight. Is that true?” Undone, I could only man­age a fee­ble “Yes.” “Awright, that’s all I wanted to know. See ya.” Click.

It seems that word of my plan had leaked to Musi­cian Acquain­tance, who – jazz gigs being scarce – saw it as a chance to play. Evi­dently, he called the club, told Larry of my scheme, and offered his ser­vices. Larry assented.

To be fair to Musi­cian Acquain­tance, I should point out that he was – like me – prob­a­bly imma­ture, eager to play, and not ter­ri­bly hip to the real­i­ties of the jazz biz. Add the fact that I had once wronged him in an affair of the heart (replaced him as the object of a young lady’s affec­tions), and I must admit, he didn’t owe me a dang thing. Indeed, from that per­spec­tive, it’s easy to see the entire episode as a kind of karmic payback.

The real vil­lain is Larry Van-Cleef-and-Arpels … but I might as well let him off the hook, too. Hell,  he was old even then. He’s prob­a­bly dead by now, either of gen­eral decrepi­tude, or whacked by some mem­ber of the Clam­pett crime fam­ily, pissed-off  ‘cuz Larry wouldn’t serve Granny’s “Ten­nesee Tran­quil­izer.” I’m sure his rea­sons for cheat­ing me were far from altru­is­tic, but hey, I learned a lesson.

And he gave me at least one life­long chuckle. These many years later, there are still times when I look at my soprano sit­ting on its stand and think of it as “that lit­tle gold clarinet.”

Peo­ple who dig jazz, good lib­er­als they mostly be (if you’re not, you may want to skip the rest of this arti­cle — you might pre­fer this), usu­ally have the empa­thy thing down.  We empathize with the poor, the polit­i­cally oppressed … the musi­cally oppressed. We adopt shel­ter dogs and stray cats, give money (when we have it) to Feed the Whales and Save Ebbets Field, vote for Obama (again, Wing Nuts can go here), and root for the Mets. We’re empa­thetic by nature, quick to feel the pain of the down­trod­den, eager to spare the feel­ings of the eas­ily offended.

That’s all won­der­ful, really it is. But I can think of one area where our empa­thy comes back and bites us on the ass — when we try to shield the un-hip (let’s reach into jazz’s proto-beatnik past and call them “The Squares”) from the hor­rors of our music.

You know The Squares. They’re the peo­ple you encounter in your non-jazz life – your Barry Manilow-loving aunt, for instance. Your co-workers: the woman at the Help Desk who thinks Char­lie Parker is some fella who parks char­lies (“What is a ‘char­lie,’ any­way?”); the guy in the stock room who, when told that you play jazz gui­tar, says “Oh, you mean like Ste­vie Ray Vaughan?;” the woman in Human Resources who tells you as she hands you your pink slip, “Maybe you can get a job with that Wyn­ton Marsalis. I just loved his iPod com­mer­cial!” We’re talk­ing about mem­bers of Con­gress who decided to replace smooth jazz with Sousa marches for callers on hold, since Boney James is appar­ently too mind-bendingly rad­i­cal for ordi­nary folks peti­tion­ing their gov­ern­ment [“Pres­i­dent Garfield’s Inau­gu­ra­tion March (Opus 131), that’s what the good cit­i­zens want!”].

Now, you might say, “No way, man, I don’t shield any­one, I love jazz and want to share it with every­one,” and maybe you do, but tell me you’ve never felt a twinge of irri­ta­tion when some Square asks you, um … shall we say, an unin­formed ques­tion about jazz, and rather than embar­rass him, you’ve mum­bled a few mealy-mouthed words and tried to change the sub­ject. Espe­cially you Free jazz peo­ple; I know all too well how hard it is to explain the appeal of Ornette Cole­man to some­one who wouldn’t know Don Cherry from Cher­ries Jubilee. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve man­aged to avoid talk­ing about jazz to some­one who knows noth­ing about it but expressed an inter­est–how­ever naive – I could buy a full set of Selmer Mark VI sax­o­phones, soprano to bari, with money left over for a new crack pipe.

Who am I help­ing? Not myself, and cer­tainly not the per­son ask­ing hon­est ques­tions. By stum­bling and stut­ter­ing and equiv­o­cat­ing, I’m not sav­ing them from a hor­ri­ble fate, but rather depriv­ing them of an entirely new and uplift­ing expe­ri­ence. Sure, some of them will think me weird, but who cares? Oth­ers might feel appre­ci­a­tion, or even some­thing more pro­found. Maybe one or two of ‘em will feel the same way I felt the first time I heard Eric Dol­phy (“Hot House” from The Berlin Con­certs on the Inner City label; it blew my mind). In that case I will have given them one of the great­est gifts imaginable.

Empathy’s cool, but not at the cost of your psy­che. As for me, I think it’s been the last refuge of a weeny. I’m gonna try to do better.

I’ve been doing a lot of writ­ing lately, most of which has found its way onto this blog. But I’ve got another big project near­ing com­ple­tion on which I’m also spend­ing a great deal of time: Not Cool (not in the Urkel or Revenge of the Nerds sense, but musi­cally … as in the oppo­site of Paul Desmond and Gerry Mul­li­gan), the soon-to-be-released new album by my band, The Chris Kelsey 4.

“The 4″ is my lat­est group, which greatly resem­bles my pre­vi­ous group, with the addi­tion of the superb young trum­peter Chris DiMeglio. Join­ing the two-horn (or four-horn, if you con­sider that I played soprano, alto, and tenor saxes on the ses­sion) front line are my long-time bud­dies and rhythm sec­tion, Fran­cois Gril­lot on bass and Jay Rosen on drums.

The music on Not Cool is the nat­ural cul­mi­na­tion of every­thing I’ve done in my career so far. It melds the non-tonal, free­bop­pish com­po­si­tional tech­niques I used on prior CIMP record­ings (Wish­ing You Were Here and The Crookedest Straight Line, Vols. 1 & 2, among oth­ers) with the loose, expres­sion­is­tic, high-energy neo-Ayler-esque energy music I played in my early days on the Down­town NYC free jazz scene (none of which had a com­mer­cial release). In some ways it’s the most chal­leng­ing music I’ve ever pre­sented to my lis­ten­ers. It is undoubt­edly the most emo­tion­ally charged and direct I’ve ever recorded. Lest you infer that it’s just a unstruc­tured free blow, fear not. Despite its no-holds-barred nature, this is  my most sophis­ti­cated work in terms of com­po­si­tion and form. I think it is, quite sim­ply, the best thing I’ve ever done.

Of course, you might have some­thing to say about that. The album will soon be avail­able as a CD and in var­i­ous down­load­able for­mats (includ­ing a free option … that’s right, the entire album gratis, cost­less, given away freely), which I’ll explain in greater detail in the next few days. Much is still up in the air, but the music itself is mas­tered and ready to go. I’m look­ing at an Octo­ber 1 release and cross­ing my fingers!

I was a musi­cian long before I ever thought about being a writer. I began writ­ing in my mid 30s, as a way to counter the neg­a­tiv­ity sur­round­ing free and exper­i­men­tal jazz in the main­stream jazz press. My nat­ural impulse was to jump, ass-first, into the fray, on the side of the musician.

These days, with the advent of blogs and a pro­lif­er­a­tion of writ­ing musi­cians, that’s easy to do, but in the olden days — the mid ‘90s, when get­ting pub­lished meant writ­ing for a small num­ber of estab­lished out­lets that endeav­ored to main­tain that amor­phous some­thing called “jour­nal­is­tic objectivity” — it was a lit­tle more involved. Edi­tors expected you to keep an absurd dis­tance from your sub­ject. I was never allowed to write in the first per­son, not even when review­ing CDs (a ridicu­lous con­ven­tion that as a blog­ger I now take great joy in ignor­ing; indeed, I believe I shall vio­late it as many times in this sen­tence as I pos­si­bly can … yeah, that felt good)!

Using my writ­ing to either explic­itly sup­port outré music or in gen­eral bash jazz’s ram­pant con­ser­vatism of the time was essen­tially dis­al­lowed, unless one had a col­umn. And if you wrote a col­umn, you were still sub­ject to the con­cerns of an edi­tor, who, even in those times of rel­a­tive pros­per­ity in the pub­lish­ing busi­ness, nev­er­the­less had to be care­ful of alien­at­ing the folks who paid the bills. (Of course, if your “objec­tive” writ­ings blew with the pre­vail­ing wind, you were given lat­i­tude.) There were occa­sion­ally other con­cerns, as well. One edi­tor declined to run a review I’d writ­ten because he felt it “too mean.” The musi­cian was a friend of his. So much for free­dom of the press.

Don’t get me wrong. Jour­nal­is­tic objec­tiv­ity is a good thing. Total objec­tiv­ity might be a chimera, but it obvi­ously must be attempted if jour­nal­ism is to serve its pur­pose of inform­ing the pub­lic. I don’t want the New York Times’ Dex­ter Filkins, report­ing on the war in Afghanistan, act­ing as an advo­cate for one side or the other. I want him to clearly lay out the facts and events in as unbi­ased a way as pos­si­ble. Let me inter­pret them in my own way.

But objec­tiv­ity doesn’t have much of a place in the writ­ing of crit­i­cism, which is nec­es­sar­ily directed and gov­erned by the writer’s per­sonal tastes, val­ues, and learn­ing. Use­less is the review writ­ten by a critic who uses his forum to set­tle per­sonal scores, yet I’d almost pre­fer that to read­ing some­thing which pur­ports to enforce some uni­ver­sally accepted stan­dard of aes­thetic truth in the sacred name of objec­tiv­ity. There is no uni­ver­sal stan­dard, only an infi­nite num­ber of per­sonal stan­dards — as many as there are crit­ics — some of which occa­sion­ally con­geal into some­thing resem­bling a con­sen­sus. Why pre­tend that per­sonal taste doesn’t enter into it, when in fact it’s the basis of the entire pur­suit? If objec­tiv­ity is the prime cri­te­rion for being a jour­nal­ist, then a critic can­not be a jour­nal­ist and do his job, as far as I can see.

I dig crit­ics who evi­dence a range of knowl­edge about a wide vari­ety of sub­jects — not just jazz (or even music), but visual art, lit­er­a­ture, pol­i­tics, world his­tory, phi­los­o­phy, reli­gion … really, the num­ber of influ­ences a critic can bring to bear on his work is lim­it­less. I don’t want to read a critic who merely checks off qual­i­ties he admires and sum­mar­ily passes sen­tence. Bet­ter is one who takes a fresh approach every time out, who brings together far-flung, seem­ingly unre­lated ideas that might inspire me to lis­ten or think in new ways.

Not only does that kind of critic present a dan­ger to con­ven­tional wis­dom, he also makes him­self a tar­get by court­ing incon­sis­tency. By exam­in­ing some­thing from the per­spec­tive of the present moment, he can reach new, orig­i­nal con­clu­sions that might con­tra­dict some­thing he wrote last week, last month, last year. A cynic might point to that, and charge the critic with a lack of integrity. In fact, such incon­sis­tency is the ulti­mate expres­sion of integrity, in that such a critic is will­ing to face ridicule in order to express him­self with absolute hon­esty. Objec­tiv­ity barely fac­tors into it, except as a tool for the critic to reg­u­late his darker impulses. A critic who uses every tool at his dis­posal to fig­ure things out, and doesn’t stand by judg­ments in which he no longer believes for the sake of fool­ish con­sis­tency (as Emer­son called it, “the hob­gob­lin of lit­tle minds”) or to con­form to con­ven­tional wis­dom, that’s the kind I like.

I aspire to be that kind of critic (no kid­ding!), so if I occa­sion­ally write some­thing that seems to con­tra­dict what I wrote yes­ter­day or last week or last year, it’s not because I’m a craven oppor­tunist or a feeble-minded idiot sub­ject to whims, but rather some­one who’s try­ing to fig­ure out how we got here, using every scrap of accu­mu­lated human knowl­edge he can access and wrap his mind around.

Whilst over­haul­ing my Web site, I’m also re-writing my “offi­cial” bio in a man­ner more suit­able to my cur­rent sta­tus as an “inde­pen­dent artiste” (mean­ing I no longer feel a com­pul­sion to feign respectabil­ity in order to pla­cate or attract the inter­est of  mag­a­zines or record labels – be they new or those with which I already have a rela­tion­ship [Jazz.com, Jaz­zTimes and CIMP], although the lat­ter group are all good sports and I don’t think they’d really care). I’ve decided to share it as I write it in blog-post form. It can also be found on my bio page. This is the sec­ond install­ment. The first can be read here.

Chris didn’t play much music dur­ing the first cou­ple of years he lived in NYC. A for­mer col­lege class­mate had enrolled in the New School’s fledg­ling jazz pro­gram, so Chris hung-out there for the bet­ter part of a year (under the aus­pices of the department’s preter­nat­u­rally gen­er­ous founder, Arnie Lawrence), until he got kicked out for good by the school’s preter­nat­u­rally pain-in-the-ass admin­is­tra­tor (“You’re tak­ing prac­tice room time from peo­ple who pay good money!”). That was about it, as far as play­ing music went. Chris spent most of his time work­ing a day gig at the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Museum of Art and court­ing his future wife in a romance for the ages that he will some­day record for pos­ter­ity (but not here). Nights and week­ends he spent going to see old movies and dig­ging the incred­i­ble jazz the city had to offer. For a time he con­sid­ered becom­ing a visual artist and actu­ally pro­duced a small num­ber of works that to this day he doesn’t hate but prob­a­bly wouldn’t show to any of his real artist friends.

After a few years liv­ing in Queens and the out­er­most reaches of Brook­lyn, Chris moved to the Lower East Side in late 1989. Being in a neigh­bor­hood chock full of experimentally-inclined artists spurred Chris to begin play­ing again. He hooked-up with a crowd of non-idiomatic impro­vis­ers almost imme­di­ately — musi­cians who played extem­po­ra­ne­ously but for whom jazz was largely anath­ema. Their home base was a float­ing (from venue to venue in the East Vil­lage) Sun­day night con­cert series called the A Mica Bunker Series for Free Impro­vi­sa­tion. There Chris made his ear­li­est NYC per­for­mances, play­ing with musi­cians of vari­able skills but an invari­ably gen­er­ous spirit. They played cas­tanets and decrepit old ana­log synths and bal­loons and heav­ily processed gui­tars. Some of the sounds they made were on the far side of being even remotely musi­cal. There was one alto sax­o­phon­ist who did noth­ing but bite his reed and blow as hard as he could for an hour or more at a time, emit­ting a deaf­en­ing high-pitched squeal that prob­a­bly did as much as Rudy Giuliani’s war on street crime to rid the neigh­bor­hood of crack deal­ers. Over­all, how­ever, it was a great les­son in open­ness, and helped to alle­vi­ate Chris’ recur­rent jazz-snobbism.

Try as he might, how­ever, Chris never fit in with the free impro­vis­ers. His nat­ural incli­na­tion was to play free but with jazz chops. He needed to con­nect with oth­ers of a like mind. By the mid ‘90s he’d done so, play­ing in count­less ad hoc groups of Down­town NYC free jazzers, most of them affil­i­ated with the nascent Impro­vis­ers Col­lec­tive, which was even­tu­ally to morph into the Vision Fes­ti­val crowd. Chris had also begun writ­ing jazz crit­i­cism, which did won­ders for his head but not much for his rela­tion­ship with his fel­low musi­cians, who — once it became clear he intended to do his job and not flack for them — in many cases came to loathe him.

In 1992, Chris recorded his first album—Stomp Own It—on his own dime. Unfor­tu­nately, a scarcity of funds led Chris to make it a cassette-only release at a time when cas­settes were going the way of Allen’s Thirteen-lined Ground Squir­rel (that is, extinct or nearly so). His next release didn’t come until 1996, when he par­layed a demo he’d made of an impro­vised duo with trom­bon­ist Steve Swell into a date with the fledg­ling CIMP label. The resul­tant CD, Obser­va­tions, was fol­lowed by a series of record­ings for the label, includ­ing, among oth­ers, The Inge­nious Gen­tle­man of the Lower East Side, Renewal, Wish­ing You Were Here, and The Crookedest Straight Line Vols. 1 & 2. The lat­ter sev­eral were made with Chris’ cur­rent rhythm sec­tion: drum­mer Jay Rosen and bassist Fran­cois Gril­lot — top-notch NYC free jazzers who he had some­how man­aged not to alien­ate over the years.

Chris and his wife Lisa left NYC after the birth of their first child, son Jasper, in 1998. They lived in Mount Ver­non until the birth of their sec­ond child, daugh­ter Meret in 2001, after which the happy fam­ily moved fur­ther upstate, to Pawl­ing in Dutchess County. They still live there, Lisa com­mut­ing to the city for her glam­orous job as art direc­tor for Fam­ily Cir­cle mag­a­zine; Chris stay­ing home with the kids, writ­ing for var­i­ous jazz pub­li­ca­tions and Web sites, and engag­ing in var­i­ous musi­cal activ­i­ties, the most recent of which is his lat­est, soon-to-be-released album, Not Cool, on his own Tzazz Kry­tyk label. Chris is happy to report that the fam­ily lives in a very hilly area in close prox­im­ity to many nat­ural bod­ies of water. Fur­ther­more, Chris and Lisa are able to pur­chase the occa­sional alco­holic bev­er­age at a wide range of area restau­rants and tav­erns. Life is good.