New "Album" Hard Listening and Easy Listening

"I sit at the piano and write at the piano. I will freely improvise for an hour or two, to try and get this stuff out of my system. I'm writing a piece right now that has an orchestral feeling to it, with bursts of sound and energy. When I compose a piece it has to have a few elements to it. It has to be beautiful whatever that word may mean to you. Part of what that means is that it might have to be ugly in places, in order to be beautiful. I look to develop enough contrast. I also think in terms of color and texture, and will often write a piece of music where I will stay on one chord to develop it and really violate that chord. I'll take that chord and play it inside and out, then throw a pop thing in there, or something Elton John did. i'll do it consciously in a way to irk or disturb the listener who isn't expecting it. Or maybe I'll bring you to 1933 with Harlem style piano. I like breaking down boundaries and making a single piece of music feel like it has the whole history of music within it. I want people to be reminded of what musicians have done in the past. So it's almost a way of honoring the past. My goal is not to reinvent the wheel but rather for the music to be interesting and exciting and reflect the past. I think we as humans have to understand that we humans make and create stuff. We could debate about whether what we make is the Sistine Chapel or some junk, but what's most important is that humans create things." (from bdcwire interview, Mitch Hampton)

My last post was on that most important of themes Love, last February, on Valentine's Day.

You might be tempted to ask what I have been doing over the spring and summer. Well mostly I have been working on my music. After months of deblogging I am back to do a little promotion and little philosophic reflection.
http://bdcwire.com/list/know-your-neighbors-back-bay-pt-i-mitch-hampton/
Now when that great of an amount of time has gone by, especially given the rapid rate of change you could worry about all of the newness that you would feel pressured to reflect, assuming that it could even be processed.

Luckily I am back to discuss music, in particular the release this month, on October 14th of my first solo recording work in, well, over fifteen years. It is called Hard Listening, I suppose to reflect the influence of Easy Listening. I am most happy with it. Not only are all of the pieces original, they were all recorded on the most beautiful piano I could ever hope to find, and for the most part were done in a single take, "live" with no digital manipulation.

There were so many inspirations for this particular album. The oldest and most important inspiration was studying with the great pianist and composer Stanley Cowell, at New England Conservatory of Music. he taught me so many things, chief among them was the truth that though a pianist should be a good ensemble player and comp in a rhythm section, the central focus should be on a pianist's ability to be a complete solo pianist. Doubtless this conviction was in part inspired by the fact that the greatest pianist of them all, Art Tatum, played on Cowell's family piano when Cowell was still a child, in Ohio.

Cowell would have his students come in and prepare any piece of music as if that piece of music were meant to be written and performed by the piano alone, regardless of the original material. He wanted to hear good bass, and the full orchestral range of the piano and all registers. I cannot underestimate the spiritual and aesthetic value of studying under a master like him. It was the kind of experience for the ages, like a real apprenticeship from an older world. Here was a musician that could and would go from something as funky and "contemporary" as this:

 to this:

Maybe my so-called extreme eclecticism is similar.

One inspiration for Hard Listening were those album covers from the past.

Another inspiration was an obscure indie film by Pamela Corkey called Easy Listening.

The other inspiration was the fact that I consider a lot of what is called easy listening music to be good or enjoyable music and was curious about it being considered dated or irrelevant and also curious about why it was demoted or rejected by so many people.

I almost want to write an essay called the Myth Of Relevance.

The most recent inspiration was from rewatching the movie Lifeguard from 1977, about which I wrote on this very blog a few season ago herehttp://themoderatecontrarian.blogspot.com/2012/10/towards-aesthetic-of-1970s-cinema.html One scene depicted a woman bringing a man home and her worrying that her female singer-songwriter album with a pensive and mellow piano and guitar would offend her date's presumably more masculine tastes.

She says, "if you don't like that kind of music I can put something else on". It was very effective that this was Anne Archer delivering the line.

My heart and brain reeled. Kind of music. Something else on. Appropriate music. Good music. Bad music. Cool music and uncool music. Music for "getting it on." Easy listening music. Mellow music, Art music. THAT kind of music. What does this all mean?

I'm a trained musician and I have played just about every kind of music you can think of. I don't like all of it, much of it is not even my favorite. Little of the music I like as much as the music of my mentor Stanley Cowell. I am not as eclectic as this album might have you guess. But I can't but help respond to the world's music and find in it a limitless fount.

I do have preferences. I would really rather listen to any Soul Train show from the 1970s that practically the whole corpus of "classic" rock. I really find the trumpet and flugelhorn of Freddie Hubbard more inspirational to me than many pianists. I would rather listen to Duke Ellington than Brahms. I would rather listen to Patrick Williams' television scores than most contemporary concert music! Influence is a mysterious thing.

I agree with Miles Davis that art and life are "all about style." Styles are made up of little gestures or details.

For example the late and very great Bobby Short had a habit of punctuating in between the musical phrases he sung these wild upward arpeggios on the piano. Even more remarkably, he would often hit or slap the top C key of the keyboard as part of these arpeggios, seemingly in indifference to whatever the key of the song was.
In a similar vein, the pianist Bill Evans would start a solo portion of a piece with the most glowing and radiant statement of the dominant of the key, usually with added extensions, really usually what some call a sus chord of some kind. It set the tone, the stage for the piece, it always struck me as like a plant and the sun meeting in sympathetic harmony. Both of these ideas were the initial inspiration for the very first piece on the recording, The Royal Blue Trickle. Yet I doubt anybody listening is going to think necessarily of either Bill Evans or Bobby Short even though both, in so many ways, are guiding spirits behind this whole recording.

I grew up watching Soul Train every Saturday so that would have to be a spirit or a soul guide on this album as much or more than anything else especially as Don Cornelius passed away recently.



As a result of such inquiry, forms of pop made their way in, but on my own personal terms. Yes you might hear rock in here but I hope the articulation will be more Cedar Walton than Steve Winwood. (Nothing against Steve Winwood).



Even though I have some sympathy for Stravinsky's hyperbolic claim that music doesn't express things, especially in a contemporary climate in which tendentious and irresponsible musical scholars try to claim that there is a spirit of sexual pathology or masculinist flaws in something as wonderfully abstract as Beethoven, I nevertheless wanted to make a philosophical argument but in musical language, in the most abstract musical form no less, music without words: piano alone. Music might not have the specificity of narrative representation but it is the most highly expressive art of which I am aware perhaps because of the very absence of such specificity.

Thus, when I write and perform a twelve minute work called Feminist Singer-Songwriter Without Words it is a nod to Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words, a musical interpretation of the story of women's liberation in the Berlioz programmatic mode, a way for me to "wrestle" with cliched folk material about which I have some ambivalence, a way to celebrate political feelings that I endorse, and a way to embrace "Americana", folk rock, and 1970s culture more generally - all at once. I asked myself - philosophically, conceptually, rhetorically - if I didn't have any words and I were a woman in the mid to late1970s and wanted to do something instrumental and though unconstrained by any particular stylistic restrictions but still acknowledged my love for Bob Dylan and Carole King and Elton John like a lot of my peers, and by some fluke I got assigned to write a "classical" piece of music for some feminist anniversary of some kind, what would the resulting music sound like? This imagined hypothetical though experiment of a woman would be confronting many things at once: love for the identity and meaning of a certain music, need to stretch and expand out of an alleged comfort zone, the need to communicate as well to a wider public than her sisters in the revolution.

Except there is a catch. That piece doesn't end like that. Now the way I would write it is to take the end result I just described and hand it over to Charles Ives or maybe through some ideas of Bill Evans. I like to go out once and a while and I do like dramatic contrast. As much as I experiment on this album with trance-like ostinatos and repetitions, I do have to deliver some contrast. Music for me is a very delicate matter; the end result may have a rough texture at times, but it has to be right, and I might spend a long time indeed to get it to where I am satisfied.

A lot of my love for things has very little and at times frankly nothing to do with all of the things surrounding that thing that I love, all of that context that academics and now popular audiences go on so much about. That is why, in the end, when I hear a Patrick Williams or Henry Mancini piece it matters not in the least that it was intended to accompany this or that banal or forgotten television show because I find the music to be itself so good. I am using my ears to hear what was created and am not interested in having my attention distracted unduly by all of the stuff surrounding this musical creation. The world needs both a Patrick Williams and Gustav Mahler. It needs both a Pedro Coasta and Sam Peckinpah. It matters not whether we call it high or low or popular or unpopular, but whether in some way, in the most generous sense, it moves us.

I do hope everybody enjoys the music on this album as much as I enjoyed making it, I even enjoyed writing about it on here, which is a rare thing for me.

On Love

Since this is Valentine's Day I should like to attempt to make an inquiry into what Love is. Everybody knows that Love takes different forms; some of which may be the most exalted, say, the love for God, the love for a loving and supportive family, if that is your good fortune, and the love between committed partners who have genuinely decided to share their lives with one another for the "long haul", as they used to say. Of course, I should mention that there is an earthy, lusty side of love that is often less exalted, though a constant and ineradicable drive of its own and making claims upon us in a all sorts of pleasurable, painful, mischievous and benign ways. Yet all of these different things are associated with the single word love: the choice of having a single word may be a truthful expression of some underlying or overriding unity or, conversely, it may be a "reductionist" denial of separate needs.

The picture you have before you is the very first Valentine's card I received, in response to the first of such cards I ever sent. I can say now, and did say then (much to the chagrin and even consternation of this young girl, for we were both children, though precocious children) that I "loved" this girl.

Note that in the card she made it a point to admit that she received other valentines, in spite of mine being her favorite, and that, though she was learning to play the flute, also made it a point to thank me for drawing an electric guitar. Drawing the electric guitar was my own dim and stunted attempt to acknowledge her, and the world's, love for rock&roll, a love I did not share; I had though this took some imaginative comprehension and sympathy on my part. Yet note also that she mentioned that I left out her instrument which was the flute, which she in turn drew in the form of a self portrait. She clearly wanted my picture of a rock band, which was what I thought it was, to perhaps resemble Jethro Tull rather than the Rolling Stones or Kiss. In my overemphasis on the importance of rock, as it seemed to me the world was drenched in guitars, in oversight I left out the very instrument she was learning to play. This omission was innocent on my part but she certainly took notice and it was significant for her. Though we were friends for a while after that our lives took very different paths. She haunted me as we both grew older, though I played the smallest role in her consciousness.

As a freshman in high school I took the initiative to ask her out on a "real date", though we would not have used such a formulation. It was our first of such dates and was to be our last. I remember that she picked me up in a car, as she was a couple of years older than me, and I was not yet driving. When she was a child she a "Waltons" and hippie style of dress, with lots of overalls and plaid flannel shirts (and this in the Florida climate!) and lovely, naturally curly hair. This was the style of her mother. Yet now, a few years later she had remade herself into a very Glam sort of New Wave girl. This was appropriate because our date movie was the movie Valley Girl. She was very similar to Cyndi Lauper and had hoop earrings and a loud magenta dress and three inch heels. I was simultaneously confused that somebody could undergo   what I mistakenly took to be a fundamental personality change and was incredibly aroused by this change. In the parking lot, after the movie, I took hold of her and planted a kiss on her mouth, the very first intentional kiss I ever had or gave. She pushed me away and said some thing about not wanting me in "that way" in a language that was as incomprehensible to me as Farsi. This response was not what any boy or girl who had such feeling and initiative would ever expect or want. Awkward is a word that might not fully express this event, though that would be a good start.

There is is much that can go wrong in Love, so much potential for misunderstanding. Practically all of love, including the non-romantic familial and friendship kinds, is constantly plagued by a rarely considered, though innately challenging fact; that it must involve the contact, the meeting, and , alas, the the opposition of two utterly singular, thoroughly independent, free and separate wills. These two wills are always, already pursuing projects of all kinds - whether personal plans or public work. These pursuits of one of the two wills may or may not involve the other, and in fact might have been developed prior to the very meeting of both wills. There may be a difference of taste, maybe profound and radical. however much is held in common there will always be two selves attempting to interact with, deal with, even simply understand one another. These two wills must constantly negotiate, take the other into account, now with grace, now with power or aggression, now with ignorance or inattention, now with mutuality, now with something that feels like full union and integration, though even in this latter, the underlying or overriding separateness of two whole selves is always a constant, however much union is achieved.

This last fact, our sense and experience of ourselves as self regarding and freely choosing actors and agents is actually one of the most important and valuable parts of being human. Indeed, the revolutions which eventually brought about our highly imperfect, flawed democracies were precisely predicated upon this individualized humanity as I have been describing it here. We are not part of some undifferentiated mass of people, without our own private wills, nor should we be. Yet our very embodies sense of having and needing boundaries and pursuing what interests us alone often conflicts with ideas and ideals of love. Perhaps all humans are ever striving to accommodate both the freedom and dignity of separateness (Kant's "dare to use your own reason", "declaration of independence") of what is mine alone, with the opposing need and claim of merging and sharing.

This then might be a good provisional and working definition then of love: this difference or working through the problem of such difference is itself what Love is: a dialogue or relationship between two differing claims upon our humanity: to honor what is private and what is shared and hold the two in some kind of balance. In conclusion, this very process is what we could give the name Love.

New Year Resolutions and Vintage Self-Help/inspirational/motivational Literature and Ephemera

They say (or used to say) that a picture is worth a thousand words. This peculiar post promises to be heavy on pictures to look at and light on words to read.

As 2014 arrived I had thought it would be an excellent idea to write an essay on trends in self help or self improvement. I had also wanted to write a philosophic critique of what I call moralist exhibitionism (which is not the same as narcissism), a long-term trend only increased by the internet and social media. This trend and now way of life is one in which large masses of people flaunt their virtue and personal life-changing stories, their moral political activism, their fights and struggles against The Man, their dietary and nutritional (newfound) discipline, beliefs and practices, their success at having overcome vices and privations against great hardships and obstacles, their battle against Patriarchy and, if they are a right-winger of some stripe, what the secrets are to becoming that prosperous CEO or entrepreneur or how to take down that pesky activist government that conspires to take your prosperity away. But that longish piece will wait for another day. All of these exhortations and pronouncements are commonplace these days and are simply  so many effects of a culture of teams and group identities, rather than individuals, and "oversharing", rather than reserve,  in short a culture that values "intimacy" (I leave aside the question of whether it is in fact a genuine intimacy or not), at the expense of older values like distance and privacy.

Partly as a side effect of being a lay 1970s scholar, I have amassed quite a collection of ephemera and literature documenting the emergence of various popular psychologies, religious sects and self-help movements. In this all too brief and rushed post I will display but a few of these. Hopefully more will follow at a later date.

As you can see a lot of the presumptions and beliefs contained within these have now become mainstreamed and common sense (or nonsense),  ideas about individual agency and power, for example, or how even the universe itself works.  The first example is a classic and foundational text of the genre, Harris' I'm O.K.-You're O.K. Note the heavy, sometimes turgid jargon. One of the curious things about the language is its mixture of vernacular slang and scientific sounding technical jargon. They even use graphs. Graphs give the aura of being more realistic and authoritative, making you feel as if you were back in school, albeit probably a private, alternative school.

The Handbook To higher Consciousness appears to be associated with a particular religious/spiritual sect, having been published in 1975 by The Living Love Center. I have not yet done research on this particular group but I surely will and get back to you dear reader.

Even Born-Again Christians got in on the act, borrowing the tone and style of secular self-help as in this curious example:

Presumably it was now not enough to love or Praise Jesus, one must now "hang loose" with Him. Had this book been written a few years later it might have even spoken of "getting down with Jesus". This was published in 1973 and, though a thin volume, the author rambles on about how so many Christians are too uptight, serious and "heavy" about their faith and should simply relax and let Jesus do His thing, in short, to hang loose. In other words, with the emphasis on easing up and letting go, this is very much a Christianity for the 70s. The tone and even the content at times resembles a Women's Liberation tract, not in the sense of moral critique of existing or traditional society but in the intimate, candid and relational nature of the approach. The subject of women's self help or inspirational writing merits volumes of study and appraisal.

Hunter writes: "As a new Christian, I was so afraid that everybody would think I was religious that even thought the thirst had begun in my life for the living water, I still didn't want people to know about my avid reading of The Bible. So each Saturday morning I carefully covered my Bible with Playboy magazine because i wanted everyone to think I was a real 'swinger'."

At the opposite extreme from this nice and friendly, almost innocuously banal Christian example is one of my more dated and outrageous finds: an example of a pro-drug, indeed pro-Cocaine book! The illustrations alone are worth the price of the $1.50 I spent on this. I hasten to add that one theme in this book is how the authorities are all wrong about drugs, how safe cocaine is when used responsibly. Literature like this is truly captive to its time.

 This page tells you how to snort cocaine, complete with an illustration.

I can't imagine anything being produced or published like this today. Doubtless much of what we currently regard as truthful, or appropriate, or timeless is as much captive to current transient fashion. I wonder what current mores will be found as dubious by future generations. One thing I'll bet though is that, whatever is in today that dies out, it won't appear as embarrassing or even shameful, as extreme as The Pleasures Of Cocaine.

There were satirists and critics of all of this while it was going on. My personal favorite is the masterful novel of Marin County called Serial, by Cyra McFadden. I feature here the back cover of my first edition if only because it mixes together all of the buzzwords, catch-phrases, jargon, neologisms  period. Some of this has lasted to now, some of it is undeniably dated, all of it evidence of the American, or perhaps human quest for inner development tied to group identities of various kinds.

I love the phrase "Martha who cannot Get Behind ironing boards". Note the capitalization here and throughout. One of the brilliant stylistic and rhetorical strategies of McFadden is to have an omniscient voice speak in the insular language of this world, written totally straight and without any explanation as in this sample. Indeed, this book was originally serialized in the Pacific Sun.

This book was made into an interesting but now forgotten film starring Martin Mull and Tuesday Weld. It has always irritated me that Armistead Maupin's Tales Of The City got such love and acclaim rather than The Serial. Part of the reason could be Maupin's commercial instinct to flatter the reader. McFadden flatters nobody. In my view it is as great  a work of social satire as other more well known works: on a par with the current George Saunders or even the late Stanley Elkin.

And here is one comic author's answer to the "I'm o.k., you're o.k" mantra.

I don't want to go into a long analysis of all of this. I don't want to condemn it and I don't want to praise it. None of the things I have excerpted here are trivial detritus from a bygone age. All of it is interesting. It ought to be important to students of American Studies and History to be sure. But it also should be of continuing interest artistically and aesthetically. Part of the reason is that so much of what we now take to be common sense or take for granted has roots in the period represented here. Another reason is that just as much of what I have excerpted here has been rejected. That is, we should reflect on why we have rejected what we have. Were they right and we wrong? Were they wrong and we, if not right, then, more evolved? How can we tell or know? To me all of it is all one great example of an American form of emergent, evolving Romanticism; the breaking free of the old strictures of traditional society, an expansion of the individual, the expression of a Democratic sensibility. Detractors of these things, those of an older bent, will call it individualism or narcissism, but they are perhaps revealing more about themselves than about the objects of their diagnosis. That is, they do not want the hazards of  this Democratic Romanticism. They fear the bad taste, the outlier Cult, the chaos that may result. I have some sympathy for their fears, but I would never want to live in a society that doesn't at least partly allow such a wild flowering of what philosopher Thomas Nagel calls the "inner tropical luxuriance" of human beings. Interestingly, we now have the technological means for such creative output but the net result is less interesting, more conformist people. It is as if the flattening and abundance of all those voices renders all of it so much white noise and none of it very conspicuous.

To me, any kind of dogma is problematic, no matter how virtuous the intention. A lot of the stuff here has a cult-like feeling about it. Some of it does sound like common sense. Some of it is sentimental in the worst sense. But all of it was actually produced and made and eventually consumed. That fact alone should be a marvel to us. One thing is sure: the human comedy is never boring and, hopefully, will continue, so long as we have some modicum of a so-called civilization.

Happy New Year