Facing the Music

Poor Irving Berlin.  “God Bless America” isn’t his best work, but it’s been made to bear the brunt, now, of the boorish, thuggish conformity of the New York Yankees whom, despite the name, are in a lot of ways the antithesis of American ideals.  And to have the NYPD enforce listening to his empty demonstration of empty patriotism?  It’s the non-conformists like me who should be angry and paranoid, not fools like this.

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American Idiot

I’m jumping into this late, but I have to toss in my $20 worth. Now, I love a dog-n-cat fight between a “rock critic” and a “rock populist” as much as the next guy, but the universe of this fight, the world it inhabits, is so limited that I need to get the hose. This is mainly sad, sad in the way of characters who lack self-knowledge to see their own inevitable falls, sad in the way of possibilities left unacknowledged.

It’s not an irony for a “rock critic” to complain about bad popular taste, it’s a tragedy. It’s a tragedy for a person who’s writing and taste are pluperfectly mediocre to declare that other people have bad taste and can’t write. It’s a tragedy for a “rock critic” to complain about about how he wants to be exposed to things while he has no idea at all that the universe of human music-making is vast and rock covers a narrow niche. And it’s personally infuriating to hear a smug hipster in a so-2003-fashionable trucker hat complain about anyone’s taste.

Christopher R. Weingarten writes about rock for The Village Voice and Rolling Stone. Which means he reviews popular, commercial product for two publications which have no idea how middle-of-the-road they are. Can we finally put a stake into the heart of the idea that rock music is any kind of protest or rebellion in the larger scheme of things? Once one gets past Elvis’ hips, the Beatles’ haircuts, Dylan going electric and everyone else swearing and expressing anti-social fantasies, one is left with lots of good music which, for good and ill, fits into our social lives. That’s the nub – popular music gives us pleasure inseparable from the time and place when and where it becomes a part of our sense memories. and the context of those memories includes our peer groups and our sense of self, as an individual and member of a larger whole, and where we straddle the fuzzy line between standing on our own and belonging. Pop music becomes a huge part of that sense of self, that social identity, and as social identity there is a great deal of “us” as better/cooler than “them.” As we mature, we hopefully lose a lot of that oppositional sense and our pleasures become more expansive.

Except of course for the professional “rock critic,” who maintains a health level of immaturity, and listens to music but hears it as a matter of how it fits into their immature self/social image (”I like it”) or how it doesn’t fit (”it sucks”). That’s not criticism and unless one belongs to the critics peer group, it has no value. How one gets paid for that, though, that’s a scam I’d like to get into.

This makes me wish I were one of the people taking away Weingarten’s livelihood, but I’m not, because, unlike him, I hear music and write criticism about it. His project to write about 1000 recordings in 2009 says it all right there – he may be listening to them, but what can he possible hear? Recent sample: “439)Elfin Saddle/Ringing For The Begin Again: Asthmatic Kitties swinging at lightning bugs.#5.5;” words that have no meaning. A tale, told by a tool, full of sound and fury, signifying something awful; and ignorance of and lack of love for the greatest art, the best music.

The best music across all genres reveals itself through time and repeated exposure, it needs to infect the mind and the soul where it eventually uncovers unexpected ideas and reactions. It is an art that exists only in time and demands the listeners time. And with hearing, criticism becomes a matter of discerning meaning and meanings, and evaluating how well the music fulfills both. The best criticism can fit a work into a larger cultural and historical context, meaning it is informed with knowledge and experience, and also makes the question of “like” and “it sucks” irrelevant. Critics cannot and should not ignore their personal tastes, but to be of any worth they must be able to acknowledge that a work does something well, even if what it does is not their taste – it may very well be someone else’s, and the critic should be responsible to those readers.

Please don’t think I’m Crumbler’s crowdsourcing side – I’m not. The crowd is also the herd, and the herd gets things wrong all the time. It is dominated by group-think, conformity and free-floating enthusiasm. Calling the herd “indie” still makes it a herd; “indie-movies,” “indie-music,” the labels don’t actually indicate any independent thinking, more like genres that demand conformity to a certain method, attitude and/or sound in order to belong to the clique of cool kids. Crumbler and Weingarten are really just throwing out signifiers at each other to try and prove how the one is better/hipper/cooler than the other. It’s tedious, childish, shallow, idiotic. But that’s the “rock critic” vs. “indie crowd” food fight. It’s not only not criticism of any kind, it’s a demonstration of the depressing fact that for too many people rock music is the only kind of music that exists in the world. I imagine that these two would sneer at people who only eat at fast food restaurants, but what are they debating, metaphorically, other than the relative superiority of McDonald’s over Burger King? I’ll do my own cooking.

International Palin Blue

In our contemporary terms, this news is old, but the search for meaning is still fresh. The usual professional ignoramuses have been chattering on about why Sarah Palin is quitting the governership, and that’s what they do – speak first, think never.

I prefer to let things stew a bit, and swap their flavors around, because then the meaning comes when you least expect it. Like tonight, during a phone conversation with a friend. Why did Sarah Palin quit? Because she’s this generation’s Yves Klein.

I’ll try and keep it quiet, though; I just don’t see the GOP nominating a performance artist. Shame, because the one good thing she could do is paint the White House International Klein Blue.

#musicmonday

Afternoon playlist from iTunes shuffle:

Fancy Free – Ballet: V. Competition Scene – Leonard Bernstein & Columbia Symphony Orchestra, The Original Jacket Collection – Bernstein Conducts Bernstein

Piano Sonata No.1 in C, K.279 – 2. Andante – András Schiff, Mozart: The Piano Sonatas

Yacht Club Swing – Fats Waller, A Career Perspective 1922-1943

X1 Krashi / Woozzy    3 -  The Venture Bros., The Music of JG Thirlwell
Antiphon – Toby Twining, Chrysalid Requiem
Je sens un deuxiéme Coeur (I Feel a Second Heart): IV. Il fau que j’entre (Let me in) – The Chamber Music Society Of Lincoln Center, Kaija Saariaho, DG Concerts – Chamber Music of Debussy, Stucky, Saariaho & Dalbavie
I Scare Myself – Thomas Dolby, Forty: Live Limited Edition
The Greater Good, Act I, Scene 5: It’s Like That Badinguet (Cornudet, Boule) – Glimmerglass Opera Orchestra, Seth Keeton & Stewart Robertson
The Greater Good, Act II, Scene 8: Good Morning, Madame (Boule, Later Mme. Loiseau) – Caroline Worra, Glimmerglass Opera Orchestra & Stewart Robertson, Stephen Hartke:The Greater Good

Chamber Symphony #1: Mvt 2a – David Shea, Classical Works

Ohio – The Crooked Jades, Shining Darkness
L’Orfeo: Act III: Charon: O tu ch’innanzi – Sergio Vartolo ,  Monteverdi: L’Orfeo
Symphony No. 33 in B-Flat, K. 319: III. Menuetto – Chamber Orchestra Of Europe & Pierre-Laurent Aimard, DG Concerts – Mozart: Piano Concertos Nos. 17 & 18, Symphony No. 33 (Live from Styriarte Festival)
Passions of a Woman Loved – Charles Mingus,  Tonight At Noon – EP
Oh, Bury Me Not (Introduction: A Cowboy’s Prayer) – Johnny Cash, American Recordings

Dream Of You - Django Reinhardt, Django In Rome, 1949 / 1950 (Disc D)
Moro, e mentre sospiro – La Venexiana, Gesualdo: Il Quarto Libro Di Madrigali, 1596
Alyo – Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble

Everybody Love Everybody

I used to be a big basketball fan, and I even played basketball in college (of course, I went to a girl’s school).  I remember when the Clippers played in Buffalo and were called the Braves, and when the Kings played in Kansas City and, decimated by injuries, had Ernie Grunfeld carefully walking the ball up the court for them in a memorable playoff run.  I even remember a bit of the old ABA, and just this evening caught a few funny minutes of “Semi-Pro,” which captures that flavor and style pretty well.  The title comes from that movie, the motivating quote player-coach-owner Jackie Moon uses for his franchise, the Flint Tropics.  Flint Tropics . . .

So, everybody love everybody out there, please.  I’m layin’ this out for you, people, because Matt Rubin at Twenty Dollars hates big band music (h/t Darcy James Argue).  Now Matt can hate all he wants, it’s nothing I would argue with.  It’s the reasoning, the apologies for the hating that I want to tackle.  Rubin explains this all with a quasi-manifesto, a straw-man, a false dichotomy between ego-subverting precision and ego-celebrating improvisation, centered around a big-band with some commercial success, Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band.  Like him or not, and I frankly have never heard him, Goodwin can in no way objectively represent Jazz Big Band music, the genre has too much history and variety.  And hating big band music while loving jazz is self-defeating, because jazz could not exist without the big band.

What on earth is wrong with precision?  Precision is just as worthy a goal for an ensemble as chaos, and is generally a more musically effective one.  The great, swinging bands of the 1930’s were incredibly precise, a dozen musicians or more could not swing without it.  The precision of the horns arrayed on top of the fluid anticipation or laying back of a rhythm section is what makes Ellington, Basie, Goodman and Artie Shaw so physically propulsive.  The ensemble attack and articulation has to work together or else it just sounds incoherent.  What does not have to be precise is color, and it is the variety of personal color, and the space to paint it all in, that makes Ellington a marvel, and I disagree on matters of fact with how Rubin describes the Ellington band – it was not a band assembled from great, ego-based soloists, it was a band assembled from great musical personalities, not all of whom were great soloists, or who we even given much space to solo.  Ellington was a great craftsman who emphasized his players strengths and hid their weaknesses.  When Lester Young was in the Basie band, he was the star soloist, was given a lot of room, and that band played with the precision of a machine, and you cannot keep from tapping your foot when you hear them.

Rubin discusses the Miles Davis/Gil Evans records as exemplars of what he means, and those are great records.  My favorite is “Porgy and Bess,” which is brilliant and beautiful, but it has a real flaw in it that, though brief, is always upsetting to the ear and experience, which is the imprecision of the ensemble on  ‘Gone.’    Rubin also sees this music as pointing the way to a set of rules that will save big band music.  He describes Evans’ technique as contrapuntal and writes “jazz composers must focus on counterpoint.”  Well, only if they want to.  Evans did not write counterpoint, he wrote polyphony, and even that not consistently.  This is an important distinction; jazz is originally a polyphonic music.  In Dixieland style, their are many voices playing at once, and a melody line can be passed around, doubled, commented on, answered, mocked.  It’s fluid and horizontal, but it doesn’t pass as counterpoint, it doesn’t have the precision (yes, precision)  that is inherent in counterpoint and it doesn’t develop harmonies the way counterpoint does.  That’s fine.  But Rubin wants counterpoint as a harmonic method.  If a composer chooses that path, fine for them, but there’s plenty of ways to develop harmony and polyphony in jazz, all of them valid.  It’s the results that matter.

Jazz harmony developed sophistication in the Be-Bop era, where polyphony was left to the old farts and harmony became vertical.  Big band music became less popular, but didn’t die.  There was a great Be-Bop big band after all, Dizzy Gillespie’s, and other important bands and leaders, including Gerry Mulligan’s and Stan Kenton’s.  Kenton’s ‘City of Glass’ record is a completely different and fruitful argument about how to write for that ensemble.  The big band has been essential in jazz pedagogy and also a way for talented musicians to actually get gigs and gain some professional experience.  And composers still write for it.  Rubin argues, also, that composers must write for soloists and individuals, and that not doing so is some offense against the essential ego of the musicians, and that by serving the composer and band-leader “indoctrinates” young musicians into  . . .  I’m not sure what, exactly.  The pleasures and challenges of playing in an ensemble, of creating a sound together, of leaning to listen to others more than yourself?  Big band jazz is music, not re-education camp.

There is more music being made than just that of Gordon Goodwin, and what I hear makes this hatred irrelevant; it escapes both Rubin’s diagnosis and remedy.  There is Dave Holland’s group, which is funky, powerful, capable of great precision, counterpoint and just enough chaos for balance; Matthis Ruegg’s Vienna Art Orchestra which is old and new simultaneously, updating Jelly Roll Morton, Verdi and Satie into the post-Ornette world, and of course the exceptional music of Argue, which is polyphonic in a way that is much closer to Lutoslawski than King Oliver and absolutely shows both the trees and forest in a truly epansive way forward for big band music.  I urge Rubin to see that forest too.  There’s a lot of good music being made out there beyond what he finds so objectionable, and the cure he proscribes has no meaning if the patient isn’t sick.

Experts’ Opinion: Water Is Wet

There’s a follow-up article in the WSJ from the one I mentioned a few days ago, interesting in that it offers, in the exactly-two-sides-to-every-idea concept, different opinions on the question of music and human origins.  I am astonished by the mention that ’some scientists are convinced that music is only noise,’ bit.  Actually, I can see how a scientist studying music as a physical phenomenon could see this; pitch/sound is frequency, and looking at frequency in terms of numbers literally shows signal and noise as the same quality.  But of course, music is something we both listen to and make, and just as novels are made up of letters that we read as a whole work, so is music made up of frequencies that we hear as a whole piece.

It’s a little dispiriting to have a pyschologist explaining that ‘music is a way of structuring sound,’ when John Cage explained that to listeners decades ago, but then this is music as scientific subject.  So we need science to explain prove that music is a human quality, when anyone who has ever sung-talked to a baby knows this innately, in their genes.  Sound exists in nature independant of human presences, but humans organize sound and make it music; composers do that and listeners do that as well, and that sense of organization, or lack, in the listeners mind is what drives the “it is/not music” reaction.  The cognitive archaeologist (who knew there was such a thing!) is speaking truth to me in saying ‘using music to express emotion or build and a sense of group belonging would have been essential to the function of human society, especially before language evolved prior to modern humans.’  It still is essential, that’s why concerts exist.

I do not want to seem too harsh on science, as I’m a lapsed quasi-astrophysicists myself and value the scientific method.  Good science is an act of imagination in that it requires thinking of something and figuring out how to prove it.  Approaching music and its meaning and purpose in human life from the standpoint of signal and noise is simply unimaginative – not everything that is quantifiable gains from being quantified.  What is interesting, and possible to discern, is the effect of music making on the brain, which can be reverse engineered into a cause-and-effect chain in human evolution.  Music making in dance and drill has had an organizational purpose in human society for centuries.  Sing-song babytalk clearly develops language hearing in children.  Searching for a genome for music seems a fool’s game to me, though, comparable to searching for a genome for physics or math; these are things that exist and that we discover, and music is in a sense a discovery.  35,000 years ago, some early peoples realized they were hearing something, and found a way to recreate it.  Where’s the genome for curiousity and imagination?  That’s what I’d like to see.

Playlist, July 4 Weekend

Mozart, Idomeneo

Kurt Elling, Dedicated to You

John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman

Melvin Gibbs Elevated Entity, Ancients Speak

Theo Bleckmann & Kneebody, Twelve Songs by Charles Ives

Steve Lehman Octet, Travail, Transformation and Flow

Cliff Martinez, ‘Solaris’ Soundtrack

William Basinski, The Disintegration Loops, 1-6

Ancient Rites of Spring

This is an extraordinary story to me, the discovery of bone flutes dating back approximately 35,000 years.  I have discussed before how music is the glue of society, and that the making of music coincides with the evolutionary development of homo sapiens sapiens; i.e. mankind became what it is today, imaginative and self-conscious, when mankind began making musical sound and listening to it.  What I find thrilling about this discovery is that mankind didn’t just sing and make percussive beats, but also had some sense of harmony.  If you listen to the tune played on a replica flute, you’ll hear a fairly well-tuned diatonic scale, notes that relate to each other in a way that creates a key, or at least central tone, of sorts.

Harmony is the mysterious, powerful, pervasive and inexhaustable component of music.  It never goes away for long, it’s the “ready made boomerang” as John Cage described it.  It’s harmony, more than anything else, that gives music its abstract structural content and emotional, and changing, context.  And there it was, 35,000 years ago.  The story mentions possible social uses for the music that was played, and that makes sense to me, but I would also argue that with harmony as an available tool, music was also made abstractly, just for its own sake, 35,000 years ago.  It took about 2,500 years of development in Western Civilization to get back to that point.

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Because If You’re Not Loving AlasNoAxis Yet . . .

You should. And you will be after this video.

Eternal Youth

wow . . .

It amazes me to think that Sonic Youth have been making music for almost 30 years. That makes them an institution, yet one that shrugs off that label with refreshing carelessness. Their records and music-making continue to be fresh even as the band follows a now-familiar path, but the bands path has always been both broad and unique. Where most rock expresses a single quality, Sonic Youth express several; aggressive irreverence towards the usual societal targets, but also towards their place in pop culture; swooning, poetic, urban Romanticism; improvisation and musical experimentation; and straight-out thrashing. Since the release of “Daydream Nation,” they’ve arguably been the greatest rock band in the world.

Their new recording is “The Eternal,” and it’s an excellent snapshot of both where they are and where they’ve been, and an excellent record in it’s own right. The band has been going through a purple patch for much of this decade, with a strong of consistently fine CDs. “The Eternal” maintains this line of success and also stands out a bit, positively, from the rest. To my ears, this decade of Sonic Youth began in 1999, with the release of “Goodbye 20th Century,” their terrific survey of avant-garde music by John Cage, Christian Wolff, Cornelius Cardew and others. These pieces are a natural fit for the band – they realize that the fundamental unit of music is not pitch, but sound, and have always been celebrated for the palpably ringing sound of their dissonant guitar tunings. Being sensitive to sound itself means they build their songs from a very different starting point than other rock bands, and led them naturally to group improvisation, and they are a formidable improvising ensemble, as good or better than many avant-garde jazz players. The most important technical ability in improvising is the ability to listen, and their improvisations give the sensation that they are listening to each other with every bit of ear and skin, embracing the challenge, excitement and wonder of making up something together, on the spot. They improvise at the edge of a cliff, which is where that music should always be made.

Experimenting and improvising informs their songs, and their songs inform their improvising and experiments. The point of making experimental music is to discover things that work and make use of them in other contexts. So Sonic Youth, with their compulsively gripping riffs, their plangent melodies, their propulsive rhythms, their appreciation for the benefits and limits of amplification, sound like no other rock band – they literally sound beautiful, the sound is not meant to pulverize, it is not meant to threaten anything other than revelation. There’s an ecstatic, almost utopian quality to what they do even as the forms may seem commonplace. “The Eternal” is a beautiful record to the ear, the sound a bit fuller, a bit deeper, simultaneously lapidary, transparent and excoriating. There are parts that explore improvisation, the dynamics of the group sound, but it’s far less experimental than the fascinating and affecting “NYC Ghosts & Flowers,” an important link between their edges of experimentation and rock. It’s also, if not happier, then more sober lyrical focused than the involving and melancholy “Sonic Nurse.” And no one else sounds like this; the chiming, dissonant chords, the drive pulse that makes you want to pogo, the irreverent lyrics delivered by the endlessly threatening Kim Gordon:

What’s it like to be a girl in a band?

I don’t quite understand

Sacred Trickster

The second track doesn’t let up. ‘Anti-Orgasm’ features the bizarre lyric:

Penetration – destroys the body

Violation – on a cosmic party

Do you under – stand the problem

Anti-war – is anti-orgasm

Their misanthropy is directed everywhere, which is frankly bracing in these times of mewling, fauxtrage. The songs are expressive and lyrically compact. It’s easy to overlook the lyrical content amidst the massive pleasure of the music, but the group has always been serious and attentive with their words, using metaphor, allusion and the sense of various characters that the different singers express. Gordon is frequently in the first person and both portraying and mocking and kind of blank-faced, willful affectlessness – the classic example is ‘Shoot’ from “Dirty.” Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo more frequently comment on the actions of other characters, or express themselves directly in a more vulnerable, wistful manner. It’s an appealing contrast to the listener, this means of using different stylistic aspects of a collective whole.

The musical pivot point is ‘Antenna,’ a confident, sublime distillation of all the things that make Sonic Youth great and important – the processed, distorted, ringing guitars; the simplest of rock riffs in a beat that has just enough groove and just enough thud; a pithy diatonic melody over the top, the ability to change and develop the emotional thrust by adjusting the chords; a well-shaped improvisation exploring all the great sound their methods can produce. It takes the thrilling experimentation of ‘The Diamond Sea’ (listen to that track here via a stunning Max/MSP interface), and yokes it to a rock band’s song-craft. This track marks a sustained high point of the album’s shape, which lasts all the way through the end, continuing the assured blend of experimentation and straightforward playing. The wonderful ‘Walkin Blue’ shows how well this band can lay down a groove now, a real musical development in their long path and practice. “The Eternal” a great new Sonic Youth record, and a great record.

Another excellent and unique rock band has a new record out on the excellent Winter & Winter label, Jim Blacks’ AlasNoAxis. The tendency is to take an electric band made up of jazz and improvising musicians and call it some kind of jazz group, whether electric or fusion, but this is fully and clearly a rock band now, a move that has been taking place since their first release and was emphatically proclaimed in the thrilling “Habyor.” “Houseplant” is a bookend to that previous record, on the surface a little quieter, a little fleeter-of-foot, a little subdued. Underneath though, as always with this group, is tremendous musical and emotional power – they are like the great athlete who makes the near impossible look easy, and leaves us with an awe that’s a touch sublime.

AlasNoAxis fronts an almost standard rock instrumentation; Jim Black leads from the drums, Hilmar Jensson and Skulli Sverrisson play guitar and bass respectively, but in place of a singer there is saxophonist Chris Speed (earlier records have him playing clarinet as well, but this is an exclusively tenor sax recording). They don’t play tunes, or vehicles for improvisation, they play songs, solid, rocking songs. In this interview, Black describes how the melodies are all things he can sing. So these are songs without words, without a singer but with Speeds vocalized horn sound, which is reedy, slightly keening, with a pleasing, throaty quaver. This is a superb ensemble, with exceptionally expressive, musical players – Black’s melodies tend towards short phrases with a touch of lilt, which are then frequently developed into a longer, repeated phrase over an extended vamp which develops the musical and emotional experience, provides space for improvisation and brings the tension and release of a patiently building coda. It’s a non-rock song-craft put into a rock context, and given the expressive power of melody, harmony and rhythm without the confinement of words; the result is complex, quicksilver emotions and body-rocking grooves. The title track in particular lays this out, as does the exquisite ‘Elight,’ which builds from a quiet hesitancy and the slenderest of melodies to tremendous rolling power. This is a record that sounds better and more satisfying with each hearing and is, along with “Habyor,” a real highlight of this band’s career. Their other recordings are fine as well, with more of a jazz flavor, more out-of-idiom improvisation, but I feel that this is the natural voice of the band, and it really is unlike any other. This is gripping music that anyone who seeks out progressive ideas in jazz, rock or improvised music should listen to. You can hear them in person Tuesday, June 23, at Public Assembly in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I’ll see you there.