A particular, if not peculiar, form of Humanistic education

My previous post was a look backward as I began a big move forward. I should like to go back to the beginning and discuss certain influences. Any kind of artist or critic has to have definite and definitive influences. These form the imaginative center and in practically all cases this is a psychological theme unique to the individual's identity. The world of the arts is the largest mansion conceivable. The doors are many; some of which are dead bolted, still others unabashedly unlocked, and ajar.

One of the things about art objects is that when you interact with them, if you are doing it correctly - and there are more or less correct or incorrect ways of interaction - the more correct mode of interaction will involve repetition, and ultimately be a form of education. Through memorizing the artwork, even if like I was, a child doing the work and not old enough to even comprehend it in its fullness, the art object will become a part of you. As a result, whether you intend this intimacy or not, by "memorizing" the object you will, learn, if only unconsciously, a lot of things about the arts in general since you are learning about certain patterns, or genres, or styles going back many years, centuries, epoch etc., thus learning about some of the oldest antecedents in an indirect fashion.

1967 being the year of my birth, and my father being a Beatles fan, meant that right out of the womb the record player was playing the Sgt Pepper album. If my earliest filmic memory was seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey twice my earliest music memory was the Sgt Pepper album and, simultaneous with this, some Bach recordings. My parents told me that I would ask to hear Day In The Life over and over again, so fascinated I was by it as  composition and the dissonant orchestral sonorities in that crescendo.


Last month  I saw an original pressing of Let It Be at my shirtmakers' shop and my entire body was transported back to four years old or a few years after as I had not looked at the photos on the album cover since them. I remember, as I had always done, staring for great lengths of time at the photos of the musicians. I did this because I had I thought that my looking was a form of magic that would reveal to me how these songs I enjoyed so much were made, doubtless a cognitive error on my part,  but one that revealed a curious hunger in the context of me being quite isolated for long periods of time - isolated not only from the musical instruments in question but also from relationships with others.  I used to fantasize or wonder about how the music was made and the photos of Abbey Road Studios revealed many technical and technological devices and artifacts about which I was curious and had little or no understanding.

Around this time I discovered the Guys And Dolls original soundtrack. Whenever I found a song I really liked I learned how to manipulate the needle, carefully as to not scratch the record, but, more precociously, how to identify by the visual size of the groove formations, which songs were the ones I liked.

For some reason I was obsessed with Fugue For Tinhorns. Here is the same version to which I listened incessantly.

It was the incessant almost rhythm changes styled form and contrapuntal singing I loved so much, as much as the phrasing of the cast singers. Now you could say this is nothing special, simply a round. But you'd be wrong to say that, because Frank Loesser seems to have the perfect ear for just the right melodic sequence to choose.  I was also learning about melody itself from some great ballads on that album, in particular "I'll Know".


A third record was one of the Bach Bradenberg Concertos. This one in particular I would repeat over and over.


The very first Miles Davis I heard was this soundtrack for a Louis Malle film.

This sparked a life long obsession with slow tempos as well as the blues tonalities. Curiously, the next Miles I would hear was not anything from this period, not Kind of Blue, but In A Silent Way. I was really at the mercy of what I could find in record stores and such stores were at the mercy of what was considered worthy of stocking from the past, what was reissued or not, and what was considered a sure or safe sale. Probably the kinds of groves and sounds on In A Silent Way were more popular than anything from the fifties or middle sixties at least in the Tampa, Florida where I spent most of the year,

I was not exposed to very much rock at this time aside from The Beatles. I remained ignorant of much of it. I was intensely interested in rhythm and blues and soul music however. Seeing The Jackson Five at Madison Square Garden might have been the initial stimulus. Then again there were some old Bessie Smith recordings that were in the house. The only exposure I got to rock was what was overheard at public venues or on the radio and I never really followed it in anything like a systematic way.

But you can't really escape rock. I was on this swim team and my coach kept calling me Frampton because my last name rhymed with Frampton. Actually my swim coach himself looked like Peter Frampton. "Hey Frampton do that lap again!" was a constant refrain. Not only would he call me Frampton but he would blare Frampton Comes Alive from loudspeakers and an 8 track coming from his elaborately designed van.

I actually had a girlfriend at this age (which I understand now is not considered age appropriate since I was child, though she was a child as well, a peer), and she was in love with Peter Frampton, and had a huge poster of him in her bedroom. Because I liked her mother's taste in music so much more and considered her, well, simply more attractive than the daughter, I would sort of hang around the mother more and find excuses to leave the daughter's room and go see the mom in the kitchen or living room, and listen to mom talk about Joni Mitchell and Miles Davis, and gaze at this mom in her halter top, much to the chagrin of the daughter.

I believe listening to these particular musical styles was inculcating me into their ways and their methods. I think the best things you can have for inspiration by, or memorization of, things that are at least good in quality.

When I wasn't restricted to the basically lone experience of record listening I was enormously blessed to experience live artistic performances. One of the hallmarks of every Summer as a child were the several weeks or even months I would spend in New York City. Now this was a NYC Summer in the 1970s. Because of, among other things, my father's deep love for the theatre, I would see practically every production that was mounted in NYC and I mean everything - from Joseph Papp, to commercial Broadway fare to avant-garde off-Broadway fare as well as both musicals and dramatic plays.

For some reason seeing the original production of Bob Fosse's Chicago made the deepest impression on me. Part of it was Fosse's sensibility which seemed to have some spiritual connection with mine. That is, Fosse, like myself, was an aesthete. Everything for him was a matter of sensual form, no matter the particular content or medium.

A great part of my love for his original production of Chicago resided in two women: Chita Rivera and Gwen Verdon as they appeared here. This is the closest thing to a documentation of the two of them as they appeared then as I have been able to find.


I was so taken with Rivera and Verdon that I had a poster of the two of them throughout my childhood over my bed. A video documentation by a cast member - courtesy of Candy Brown - gives you a sense of what the staging felt like:



The erotic in art has always been a matter of censorious contention in many audiences.  This is a pity, for in Fosse we have someone who made the highest art of the erotic, albeit in mass popular forms like movies or musicals. He had no illusions about his subject matter and could be as morally stringent as a Sunday preacher (or Brecht) as in Star 80, Sweet Charity (or for that matter, Chicago) but he was not only a critic or satirist: he was also an unabashed entertainer, interested in the eternal pleasures of life. Work which is interested in such pleasures for their own sake - like the work of Jacque Demy or Radley Metzger - will always have opponents and naysayers of various kinds. But it is all a question of style and not all styles are equally congenial to all populations, subcultures etc.

What do all of the above have in common, aside from their intrinsic excellence? You will note that they are examples of adult culture: that is, they were not specifically designed for a children's audience, and yet I was a child being exposed to such material. Most importantly, all of these works of culture are made by we humans: they are produced, designed, created. They are not simply found falling from the sky or laying on the ground. Things humans create are always set apart from the daily world even as they engage with that same daily world. The designed or created aspect has to do with imagination and representation: two categories that create much misunderstanding as to their ultimate purposes in life. Now imagination and representation have an abstraction from life even as they fully engage with life. They are fictions but have about them much truth and as such are partly nonfictional. It is human to reflect upon life rather than simply survive or suffer this life. I think what I have in mind in this particular post is the cumulative effect of certain reflections and what their uniqueness or aesthetic vastness might mean for a single human life and how it may develop in time.

An immense thank you to Candy Brown for posting her footage on youtube.

Memoirs From Youth, Part Fourteen: School Trip to D.C.

In the year of 1979, at the age of twelve, I found myself stuck in one of those various "free" schools with which my parents were always experimenting. (The word free here is not a reference to the tuition). This particular one was called an Academy which belied the free-wheeling lack of pedagogy, if not outright incoherence of the actual content of the school. The headmaster was an obscenely obese man with a pungent, acrid body odor, given to a fondness for the therapy and life motivational teaching of one Leo Buscaglia.  We called him Principal Bob. I forget his last name.

Principal Bob would wear these Levis bell bottomed denim leisure suits and talk a lot about his parents and how much he loved them, and, well, the importance of sharing your feelings. If you were a kid who didn't "feel" like doing math or didn't "feel" like reading a book, then Principal Bob was a dream of a principal.

Though he drew the line at actually hugging his students in the Buscaglia manner, he loved to talk about love a lot in particular and the expression of the emotions in general, and noted that most of the volunteers for hugging at Buscaglia's seminars were men approaching women for hugs. Yet he reminded us "it was not about that". Then he mentioned that the Phil Donahue Show had Leo Buscaglia as a guest and made an observation that the audience was mostly female and hugged one another much more than they did Leo. At the time I did not understand the point of his observations.

One of his and other teachers' criticisms of me is that I didn't talk about my feelings enough. Indeed, every school I went to, whether Christian or secular, public or private or "free" or independent, would make the same remark. I would usually tell them that I didn't seem to have that many feelings or as many as did other people. In the milieu of these type of schools this was the equivalent of getting an F.

"If you look deep down inside you will find them," they would always say.

"I'm looking. I'm looking," was my usual reply.

One of the academy's ideas was to essentially stick a lot kids from all grades in the same classes or classrooms since the headmaster did not want us to get "hung up about life stages or ages." I had fifteen and sixteen year olds in my class. Then there was me. I think I was the youngest.

We voted for a destination for the annual school bus trip. I insisted that we visit Washington D.C. My real reason for this choice being that I wanted to see the Watergate Hotel where the Watergate scandal occurred and above all to listen those famous Nixon White House Tapes. I also said that I wanted to hear John Birks Dizzy Gillespie sing "Salt Peanuts" with then president Jimmy Carter on the White House Lawn. After my peppy speech, the rest of the student body was stunned into silence and seemed to accept my idea, since any other place desired would have been too far and too expensive to visit anyway like, say, New York or Vegas.

"I am not sure we can accomodate all of your wishes Mitch. I don't know who that man you mentioned is. Dizzy? Is that the man's real name? Is he a rock musician? I do know Jimmy Carter is our president but he is a very busy man and hard to get a hold of. How do you know he is any good as a singer? I mean surely you might want to look at nice and important places like the White House or the Washington monument... but you want to look at..the Watergate Hotel, It's just a boring building. The Lincoln monument is so beautiful, why I'll never forget when my mom took us to first see the..."

"Watergate hotel." I kept repeating as if in a chant.

"Well Mitch D.C. it is. I'll see what we can do."

The school was broke so in order to raise money for a humble greyhound bus tour to D.C from Tampa was to hold a car wash for a week, every day, thus suspending reading, writing and arithmetic for that week. Thus we proceeded into a suburban used car lot with water, buckets and sponges and waited for any Gremlin, Buick, or Pontiac that happened to drive into this lot. I didn't pay much attention to the cars since, as I said earlier, most of the students were older than me and female, and in halter tops and cutoff denims. I really enjoyed that week in the sun, trying to get these folks' cars as clean as possible. I also wondered why you could talk about some feelings out loud and not others and I always seemed to have the sort of feelings nobody else talked about. Feelings, indeed.

Now day after day, up until about Thursday, I had to put up with the other students' musical selections on the 8 Track. After about fifty hours of Foghat, ZZ Top, Alice Cooper, Ted Nugent, Aerosmith, Kiss, ACDC, Foreigner, Queen and heaven knows what else, I had to eventually put my water logged foot down. "Why aren't we playing appropriate music for our car wash?" I pleaded. "you know what I mean! Don't pretend you don't know because they had a movie named just like what we all are doing right now! You mean you haven't seen the movie? You know," I said with a wink.

"No Mitch. No! No disco! Haven't we told you before?" other kids yelled, as if in unison. They had complained before about my predominantly African-American taste in popular music.

"Well business has been slow and the song is about car washes. Maybe Mitch is right," Principal Bob finally said.

Into the stereo went the 8 Track of Rose Royce's Car Wash. I can tell you we were jammed all of Thursday and Friday. And we got a good groove going to our wash too.


Indeed we did so well that we upgraded to an Amtrak train trip!

One memorable event on that train trip, other than the taste of the pancakes that seemed to me so delicious, was that an older girl that I used to have big crush on when I was ten or eleven had decided, inexplicably, to make "sexual" advances on me late at night. She must have been fourteen or fifteen at this time. Now you understand this was just kissing and fondling of course. And it felt very good. But I had other concerns. Not only had I lost interest in her - as a person or potential "friend" - after her rebuff  to my initiative two years earlier, but given that we were in public and on a train I felt it was too risky. I felt exposed. I  rudely knocked her hand away from my lap and pushed her whole body away from mine when she started to hug and kiss me. I insisted that this was not the time or place.

"It is a private manner among adults. I mean Principal Bob is right in the row behind us. You are doing this now on purpose because you don't really want to be alone with me. Why can't you wait till we are home and our parents are at the Winn Dixie or something?" She got up and left without a word, moving to the another car in the train altogether,

Boy was she mad. The whole rest of the trip, and, come to think of it, decades hence, she has not been the warmest soul. I understand she now has four kids and is an aesthetician in Palm Springs.

Nothing prepared me for the sensual joy of landing in D.C. The very first sensations I experienced were aural. This being D.C. and a largely African-American population, for the first time in my entire life I heard the music I loved most played openly and loudly. It was like a reverse of the natural order of things.  Wafting from cars or transistor radios, or record shops I heard simultaneously Earth Wind and Fire, The O'Jays, Sister Sledge, The Ohio Players: that kind of stuff. What joy for me! What kind of magical place was this?

Then it got even better. Not only did I hear all of this great popular music but louder than anything else was something that I thought I would never hear in public. I heard a distinctive tenor saxophone solo, no vocals, not a song but an instrumental. Wait a minute. Was that Dexter Gordon on tenor? Dexter Gordon and Johnny Griffin? "The Blues Up and Down?" I had that record. I had to immediately find where that record was being played.


Following my ears led me to this record store. I fled towards the sound of Dexter Gordon's tenor as if the sound was the elixir of everlasting life.  All thoughts of luggage, my class, our hotel, even the Watergate Hotel and the Nixon tapes were but meaningless inconveniences. Dexter's tenor led me to this tiny record store in the heart of downtown D.C. just two blocks from the station. Behind the counter this middle aged man with an enormous afro asked me, "what can I do for you son?"

"Hello. You are playing Dexter Gordon and Johnny Griffin! Do you like Dexter Gordon too? That's the Blues Up and Down".

"Do I like Dexter Gordon?" He laughed. "Best thing that happened in this country is him coming back to the States. That's very unusual that you recognize that. Well of course we are playing that. This is a jazz store, mainly. My name is Sam and this is my place. I decided to call it Sam's records. This is like a home to me. Maybe someday you can get a place of your own when you get older too."

I kept asking all sorts of questions. Did he personally know any of these musicians?

"Well I'll be happy to tell you that Miles Davis is a family friend. His parents were friends of mine in Illinois. But I'm not that close. Sometimes we do promotional things with musicians. Like Dexter was here last week. I got this record signed by him!"

"When is Miles Davis going to record again?"

"That is a very good question. I think he's getting more health conscious now. He is gonna come back. You'll see. Let me show you something. Look the cover of this record and look at the inside. You ever see a record like that? Now this music is really different. Unusual. The last time he put a horn to his mouth this is what it sounded like. Tell me what you think. Now remember: some people approve, others don't. I'd like to know your opinion." And then he went over and put this record on. "You know," he continued, "I've always said, and I don't care what anybody will tell you but you remember this, that there's good music and bad music not this, that, or the other label of music,  electric or natural music etc. You ever hear a wah-wah trumpet before?"

"What's a wah-wah trumpet?"

I had never seen any drawing like this in my life. It captivated me.

 The spell of this vivid artwork and the hypnotic music was broken when suddenly the record store was invaded by cops and a screaming Principal Bob. I wondered if I was going to be arrested and felt momentary terror.

"Mitch," Bob yelled, "We've been looking all over this damn city for you. How many times have I told you to stay with the group? You stay with the team! With the group! Over and over! You always like to wander everywhere. You just wander. Not everybody is nice in this world or good you know. I'm going to talk to your mother about this and tell her you don't know how to stay with others and that you are selfish, very selfish.  When you took off just now you were telling all of us that you don't love us and don't care about us. Do you realize that? A record store? You have record stores in Tampa! Why do you need to come to a record store? What is so special about a record store?" He stopped and met Sam's eyes in awkward silence.

"It's okay," Sam said, his eyes not leaving mine. "I was just teaching Mitch something about our musical heritage. You can't get much more American than that. That is about as important as Thomas Jefferson or George Washington if you ask me." Sam said.

I don't remember much about the rest of that trip except a bunch of monumental architecture. (Some of this was quite monumental).  I never did get to hear those White House tapes after all. The tour guide talked a lot about them but said they were intended for adult ears only. I spent most of the rest of trip looking at Lisa in her halter tops and cut off shorts and wondering what I would do with my life when I got back home. I knew I was in for some harsh punishment by the school, a punishment which included staying at home and writing some report on responsibility towards others, or something like that. I was to be allowed to return to the school only when I was "in touch enough with my feelings" enough to hand in the report.

Yet what I remember most about that whole trip was Sam. The record store, like so many staples and cultural foundations of our collective past and youth, seems to recede now. I do miss it so.

On the Uses and Abuses Of Labels in Art

I have spoken very little about the musical arts in this blog, this in spite of (or because of) that music is one of my main projects and endeavors. I don't intend to speak about the specificity of music in this particular installment except as as means to, in this case, reflect upon the meaning of categories in our lives and art.

Partly due to the good work radio interviewer and archivist Jake Feinberg has done through his own show in Tucson at KJLL, where he has been conducting invaluable oral histories and interviews with jazz greats (with an emphasis on the 1970s), it was brought to my attention that the great saxophonist Gary Bartz has strong objections to the use of the word jazz to describe his own musical career.

To paraphrase Bartz, calling his music jazz acts as a narrow box into which he is imprisoned, and moreover the word jazz itself has a history of derogation and even racism attached to it. Bartz, of course is not the only major figure in jazz history to have problems with the word. Some have suggested the word African-American classical music as an alternative. Even further, greats like Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie have wanted to describe music in terms of whether or not it was good music. Pianist Bill Evans, on the other hand, when asked about the jazz label claimed to be only too proud to use the J word.

One of the best books I have ever read on jazz music is a book called Jazz Styles by Mark Gridley. It doesn't get too hung up on the word jazz, but, in the words of Dizzy Gillespie himself, it "hits the nail on the head" and attempts to make a close reading of how jazz styles actually function, how they work on the audience, and, in the spirit of "reverse engineering" (See David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson on film) show how the music is put together to create those effects. The issue then is not so much whether a form of jazz is a cool West Coast form or fusion form, but deeper issues concerning the very materials of which music is intimately made.

(A brief digression from literature):

It is not just in jazz but in any art form where there is confusion over what matters. For example, in no place in the course of Middlemarch is there actually a real distinct person named Dorothea Brooke. (Yes, I just said that.) The effect, (shall we dare say illusion?) of such a person is created through assertions on the part of a traditional narrator and parts of her internal feelings and thoughts when reported to the reader, and above all, the mixture of those classes of sentences with those that are applied to those with other names. You might laugh and say this is too basic a matter to discuss. Of course the words and sentences create in us a consistent sense that there is a solid person called Dorothea Brooke and we would be fools to not want to let go of the illusion. Clearly there is a person explained to us in the novel is there not?

Well, yes and no.

But actually how that basic of a matter is handled has a great deal to do with why some of us consider George Eliot a genius and not a mere writer of genre.

Nor is there really a Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Rather Darcy is actually a semiotic function of the need to be contrasted and then alternately and eventually paired with the equally unreal Mrs. Bennett. (And he is a semiotic function of her).

This point is what all ideological critics miss. You need to create drama if your aim is for there to be drama present at all, and the notion of positive or negative role models is secondary to the semiotic function of Mr. Darcey and Mrs. Bennett: chiefly, what their presence will do to each other and the book as a whole. By definition what one possesses, the other must lack, and so on. It is a little like roles in family system theory in modern psychology and much less like psychoanalysis with its deep appraisal of a discrete bundle of complexes known as character. But to think of them as having fully individuated psychologies in the modern sense, outside of their relational or semiotic function as tools to create behaviors, events and emotions in the reader, would be to not in some way fully understand Pride And Prejudice.

And to reduce such effects to an abstraction called "the romance" or "historical novel" is also to miss what is unique in how an Austen or an Eliot makes over and expands upon the crudeness of "genre".

More contemporary artists will make as their subject a most conflicted, even convoluted self who at times appears to not need other selves, (Pynchon, Stanley Elkin, Beckett) or even dismantle the realistic illusion of self. But nevertheless the tools will remain the same: stylistic effects (say by having an uninterrupted monologue with little contrast against which to work).

Rather, the use of certain sentences and paragraphs carefully orchestrated by the writer, creates in the reader an impression of such a discreet and distinct category or personhood. But actually it is the syntax and the style that does this. More interesting writers, to my mind, tend to call into question such arrangements, either through defamiliarization techniques, through experiments in tracing consciousness, but that comes much later in literary history. But it is all a kind of trick or effect.

And, even more astonishingly, it is a trick that ends up revealing some of the most natural and authentic truths about the human condition, truths that would be otherwise completely inacessible if the methods were not so artificial. This is why art is often described as a lie that tells the truth.

When people recoil from my statement that a character driven approach to dramatic art is little better than a plot driven one, that both are less important than attention to style, when they insist upon a reality based interpretation, one that argues from plausibility and belief ("is it true to life or not"?) rather than my preferred stylistic model ("HOW does the work itself work upon us and what can it tell us about anything) what they fail to see is that from my viewpoint it is all a structural hall of mirrors. This color interacts with that color. (In painting). This behavior needs to happen for that reaction over there. (Drama). This note for the other note. (In music). I do think all art works this way whatever the mode or style. But debating that is, again, best left for another entry.

back to Jazz and other things:

If anyone would know the dangers of labels and even genres in how music and arts is discussed it surely is Gary Bartz. Bartz, you see, had a major role in the very Miles Davis period that divided jazz purists from the more open minded. To this day there are many, and not always of the oldest generation, who talk of Miles Davis' so-called jazz rock fusion (another terrible label), and his usage of non swinging groove rhythms like funk and rock as if it were one great mistake, as if the greatness of Davis rests in some essentialistic purity that resides somewhere between the late fifties and mid sixties alone. Here is Bartz in a brief excerpt showing him at work with Miles Davis in that revolutionary period in jazz and reflecting upon that time.

Martin Williams, though otherwise a notable prose stylist in jazz writing, helped fuel this anti - rock or funk groove sentiment when he argued in an essay that when jazz improvisors play over even eighth note pulses some special quality is lost in the leading line. This becomes even more ludicrous when one considers the long history of Latin influenced jazz, even predating the growth of rock, and that music , in all of its varieties is not a swung music in the swing or bebop tradition sense.

As Bartz pointed out there is a practical and benign, indeed helpful way to understand labels. Record stores and then later video stores (with their terrible categories like Western, Romance and so on. I'll get to in a minute why I have problems with such taxonomies) help the human brain to organize reality into distinct emotional states, narrations, patterns and moods, to recognize the importance of certain stylistic patterns and effects. Indeed all art is but the organization of stylistic effects. Given my cognitive neo-formalist tendencies (ask me about that at a later blog) and my general aestheticism, surely I would appreciate the basic need for how the old record store was set up.

But this raises the problem of minds, our own and others. If the stylistic effects are as crucial as I say they are, then the use of the label is a kind of crude reductionism that deflects attention away from interest and surprise, and, frankly, the specialness of certain kinds of mental powers.

The most extreme and sublime form of criticism of genre as a way of understanding any art surely comes from Andrei Tarkovsky, in his own way the anti- Northrop Frye. I quote at length from Sculpting In Time:

"The very concept of genre is as cold as the tomb. And is Chaplin comedy? No: he is Chaplin, pure and simple; a unique phenomenon, never to be repeated. He is unadulterated hyperbole; and above all he stuns us at every moment of his screen existence with the truth of the hero's behavior. In the most absurd situation Chaplin is completely natural; and that is why he is funny. His hero seems not to notice the hyperbolized world around him, nor its weird logic. Chaplin is such a classic, so complete in himself, that he might have died three hundred years ago".

In many views Tarkovsky is being hyperbolic himself. After all, there is that need to organize categories in record shops. We need to see how Chaplin is similar to Buster Keaton or the vaudeville that came before them.

Yet we also need to see the specialness of individual souls as well. And it is precisely where the art lies in what happens AFTER the initial structure of a genre has already been established and something new is done with it.

AN EXAMPLE FROM MY LIFE:

A couple of decades ago when I was in graduate school at the New England Conservatory Of Music, I found myself involved in a class concerning the history of American music or United States musical history. Given my love for the work of Herbie Hancock and his Headhunters ensemble in the 1970s, I decided to engage in a genuine CLOSE READING of his classic Chameleon. That is, I would give it the same attention I would any work of art. At one point in the piece the music radically changes color within the funk context, all by a subtle change in the underlying harmony and beat, to accompany the Fender Rhodes solo. The music grows quiet while not letting up on the funk feeling. I felt this was as important as any moment in, say, classical chamber music. The following example illustrates the moment in performance:

After I was done with my oral presentation my instructor, a fidgety theory bound politico always on the search for ideology everywhere and seemingly without much of an aesthetic sense asked in a tone of irritation:

"But Mr. Hampton is this really GENUINE Jazz? Did he sell out? Is it a sell out? What do you think? You have only talked about the music and its emotional effects on the listener."

"But Mr. Humphreys", I retorted, "if that is not what music or any art is essentially about then I have nothing else to say to you. I leave the question of its popularity or unpopularity or what to call it to sociologist."

"It is rather monotonous and repetitive", Humphreys argued.

"No more so that Ravel's Bolero or Steven Reich. Repetition is as important part of art as surprise, is it not? By having repetition prior to the solo, that change for the piano solo has all the more dramatic meaning, meaning that would be denied had what had come before been filled with variations. And so on."

I received a C that day, I believe. Someone else did their oral on Bob Dylan and received an A, yammering on and on about the fighting between electric and acoustic advocates at Newport folk. Little was said about either Dylan's poetry, (the one quality in Dylan I should think most worthy of our attentions!) nor his crude form of melodic folk. Much was said about the deep cultural meanings of using electronic guitar and the cultures of folk and rock traditions and riots in art history like the response to Stravinsky's Le Sacre.

Maybe more than a little boomeritis was involved.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomeritis

The mania for labels appears to march on in all of the writing on the arts. But maybe like Tarkosvsky we can someday learn to appreciate the mind, the author (and, of course, in the case of, say, studio filmmaking minds) behind a text. Not as psychology or biography but as individual expressions of a moment in time.

A Few Phrases in Appreciation of Ahmad Jamal

Of all the arts music seems to me the most difficult on which to write. One may think that for me, a jazz pianist and composer, the task might be lightened by my knowledge of and ability to write and perform some of the music that would be discussed. But as the jazz pianist Bill Evans remarked, a sensitive layman may know more about music and be able to judge it better than a professional. Ideally a critic should be that sensitive layman.

Also I am often disappointed and weary by much of music criticism. On the one hand it is too sociological, too concerned with a musician's ancestry and what he had for breakfast and what, if any, drugs were taken. On the other hand the criticism writes about music as if music were but a symbol or code for something unmusical. I aim to correct these trends in a few brief phrases on Ahmad Jamal. I hope to create not a mere impressionist criticism, with vague adjectives, nor a technical or cultural criticism with emphasis on biography, politics, or musical theory, but something akin to the aesthetic values that merit a close reading of the artist in question.

Firstly, some general words about Jamal. At eighty years old, and after the recent deaths in the past couple of years of Hank Jones and Oscar Peterson, Jamal is one of the last living masters of the jazz piano, in particular the piano trio form, still working. Jamal can generally be described as working in a modern post-bop style that developed in the fifties and sixties. He will often play standards with somewhat familiar ways of groove making from a bassist and drummer. He had popular hits in the fifties with Israel Crosby on bass and Vernel Fournier on drums, the biggest probably his recording of Poinciana.

But to mention those general signposts is to miss what is really exceptional about Jamal.

Jamal is one of those rarest of jazz artists who is sui generis. This places him in the canonical company of figures like Charlie Parker.

To talk about Ahmad Jamal is to talk seriously about the eternal musician's dream of having a sound that is truly one's own.

Although he works in traditional tonality, with steady grooves of swing, funk or Latin, and though his work bears resemblance at times to rather commercial genres - to the point where some of his music might fit into even a "smooth jazz" format - Jamal, to my ears, is the one of a handful of pianists to have developed an approach to phrasing and motivic development such that I can readily identify him after a few notes of a single bar, in seconds.

It is not so much production of tone itself that makes Jamal so immediately identifiable (tone being a clear identity from so many jazz greats from Miles Davis to Coltrane and Keith Jarrett) but his wildness of phrasing.

Jamal will work figures from all walks of musical life into his improvisations: so heavy with quotations and allusions from the popular to the classical, so abrupt is his approach to musical line, that he can be considered a cubist in jazz. He is doing in jazz something akin to Picasso or Kurt Schwitters in visual art, or closer to home, he is like the Charles Ives of jazz piano.

Like Herbie Hancock, but of a prior generation, Ahmad Jamal's interest is in what Hancock called "controlled freedom", that is, in using an Avant-Garde approach in the context of tonality rather than atonality and regular rather than destabilized form: an Avant-Garde attitude in a decidedly non-avant-garde setting. There is no essential deviation from underlying form yet what is on top is pure deviation, full of bluster, wit, and droll repartee. This interest in keeping with underlying form but deviating in the process is a uniquely American contribution to arts and letters. I find it in literature, in Walt Whitman and Thomas Pynchon, in American Feminist art especially where narration is all important but the point of view is ever so slightly shifted, and in the cinema of John Cassavetes and American neo-realists like Robert Kramer or Hal Ashby. And there are many other examples.

And from African-Americans we have jazz as a most shining example of the principle. In American modernism you will always have a narrative and dramatic conflict but it will be disguised and delayed in all sorts of ways. Like tonality in music, what you less often find, is an outright dismissal or destruction of, say, narrative altogether.

There is nothing Jamal plays that is not worked out from a repertoire of perhaps finite material. But, and this is the important matter, it seems infinite because one never knows which tune Jamal will pick and at which moment. Unlike Hancock, Jamal is not primarily interested in the long, chromatically complex line, but rather orchestral passages more akin to traditional popular solo piano playing or swing and R&B bands from an earlier time. Duke Ellington comes to mind, who had a similar interest in arpeggios and popular tropes. (It is noteworthy that detractors of Jamal liken him to a lounge pianist.) Of course the same was said about Bill Evans). If Jamal does uses chromaticism he will, play, abruptly and most straightforwardly, a chromatic scale, as can be heard below. However anyone doubting that Jamal is a master of melodic line as much as orchestral collage should listen in particular to his solo on "All The Things You Are" on Chicago Revisted: Live At Joe Segal's. It is so lyrical and so subtle and so lengthy line, one might mistake it for a passage of Keith Jarrett's!

James Commack, his current masterful bassist, told me that playing with Jamal is like a combination of playing in a rock jam band like the Grateful Dead and playing with a great string quartet. Ears have to be open because a listener literally does not know from measure to measure which one of those surprise attacks or figures Jamal will pull out of the keyboard. There is a great deal of planning here: Jamal has said he has worked arranged chords from the chordal root up rather precisely, and yet there is the greatest freedom. The resultant effect is of a jazz music that is more full of joy than in anybody else I can think of, and, given the wildness of Jamal's changes from measure to measure, a sense of anarchic comedy akin to the energy of The Marx Brothers or Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn in Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby on screen.

Commentators and critics have all too often missed Jamal as the innovator he was. Arguably he was one of the earliest "fusion" artists, using popular non-swing grooves even before Ramsey Lewis and Miles Davis. He was an incredible influence on Miles Davis to the point where many of Davis' ideas about musical space and surprise are in part taken from Jamal. Ahmad Jamal told me in a brief conversation I was fortunate to have with the man how disappointed he was with the PBS jazz series by Ken Burns, how much was missed by its restriction to a narrow narrative of large and general stylistic shifts and schools.

Today at eighty Jamal has never played wilder, his energy approaches the insane, betraying a tendency one finds in certain artists where they become ever more truly themselves in their "late" periods (Federico Fellini in film and Henry James in prose being the best examples of this happy occurrence).

One of the reasons for Jamal's importance is that he is an illustration of a principle summarized by the English critic Stephen Booth:

"Great works of art are daredevils. They flirt with disasters and, at the same time, they let you know they are married forever to particular, reliable order and purpose."

Here is a most representative example of all of the features of Jamal's playing, in a personal favorite composition of his, "Bellows." Ahmad Jamal: in two parts.