Random (semi) deep thoughts on a (relatively) cold night
So some random thoughts on this cold (for the Bay area) night – the kind of night that makes you want some home-made chicken soup.
A brief post-mortem on Chris Potter’s show…Chris is a tremendous saxophonist, with astonishing fingers and a powerful sense of intervallic structures. Ran into a bunch of cats I knew down there, including fellow saxophonists Larry DelaCruz, Sheldon Brown and Anton Swartz. (You always know a player is hot when a bunch of fellow sax players are there listening. We are not like drummers. As a general rule, we are more selective in our unbridled enthusiasms. You heard the joke about how many sax players it takes to screw in a light bulb? 9…one to do it and 8 to say “nice, man” as they each secretly think “I could have done it better, how come I didn’t get asked to screw in the bulb?”)
Anyway, not the case here. Chris dazzled one and all with his saxophonistic brilliance. Larry (one of the great people in the universe, btw) said of his solo cadenzas “man, makes me want to go and practice some unaccompanied Bach Cello things” and I knew what he meant. Some of what Chris does, esp on the solo sax tip, reminds me of the Marcel Mule and Bitsch etudes I used to practice back in my classical sax days (daze?) many moons ago. Chris underlined a point I have been developing that on each instrument there are two kinds of players - those who are inextricably bound up in their particular instrument and those who are musicians who happen to play a particular instrument. I think of Wayne Shorter, Miles Davis, and Jack Dejohnette as being three examples of musicians who play an instrument and Mike Brecker, Freddie Hubbard and Steve Smith as been examples of a saxist, trumpeter and drummer who I cannot imagine on another instrument. They have, as Carla would say, a love affair with their particular instrument, whereas the Dejohnette model would find anything from a comb to a seashell to express the music in them. No value judgment here on one or the other, as all are amazing players,just an observation on approaches – I would put Chris in the saxophonist side of the spectrum. He is a masterful saxophone virtuoso who is a saxophonist’s sax player…btw, I think the most interesting case in this regard is Trane, who went from being a saxophonist to a musician who played the saxophone, particularly by the Crescent era…
The false choice: I’ve been kicking around this idea for a while and it will probably be the subject of an expanded entry, but here’s a tease: Many aspiring jazz players are presented with a false choice between craft and creativity, and tend to separate into two warring camps – either you are a tradition-bound codifying literalist, or you are a loosey-goosey, patchouli-wearing free jazzer. I think this is reductive thinking. All of my favorite players from Armstrong forward were at once creative and craftsman. Here’s a saying I came up with that has a lot of Cs. You may like it: Craft and creativity are not contradictory but rather are complementary. And they are not consecutive but rather are concurrent.
I have a phrase for the lick-stealing type of jazz: Fear-based improvising. What is more uncertain and in the moment than true improvising? If one has an arsenal of predigested and well-honed licks, especially from the masters, one can’t make a “mistake” and therefore can’t be chastised for same. The fear-based improvisers spend a decade memorizing and regurgitating every tried and true line they can find, emulate player a, b or c, whether Sonny, Trane or Bird down to the amount of saliva on the reed, and then, one day, expect someone to wave a magic wand and “poof”, they have their own voices. It doesn’t work that way.
Go back and listen to the earliest recordings of Miles, of Bird, of Wayne, of Chick, of Jaco – THEY ALWAYS SOUNDED LIKE THEMSELVES. Check out Miles’ solo on Now’s the Time when he is 19. Tell me another trumpet player who sounded like that then! People keep talking about how Wayne used to sound exactly like Trane or Sonny, but I have heard his earliest recorded shit and he always sounded original. He couldn’t help it. I think it is a fool’s errand to cop one player’s language, sound and phrasing, note for note and think that somehow that is the path to your own voice. It is crucial in terms of understanding deep levels of swing and phrasing that you can’t get any other way, but aping another does not help you get your own voice. That is counterintuitive. Kind of like someone saying, imitate Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Crane for 10 years and “presto” you to can be the next great novelist. I think that is why there such a staggering paucity of originality in our huge stable of lick and pattern-fed virtuoisi.
Now the flip side of that coin is the “dude, don’t get so hung up if I don’t know the notes in an F#7#11, or sped up that tempo or dropped that bar –I mean, it’s all about the feeling. Have you checked out my Monk project with Zither, DJ and nose flute? It’s all in 13/8…” These are the folks who never made the necessary effort to learn the common language that is such an intrinsic part of what makes this music so beautiful and deep. One can hear in just a few bars that the “creative music” scene players, as a rule, can’t negotiate harmony, melody and rhythm competently, and tend to construct varied rationales and paradigms wherein this just doesn’t matter. In much the same way that someone with a bad tennis serve will take down the net and paint over the serve lines to make his serve more successful, those who would dispense with the common language craft of jazz take away changes, time, pitch, etc…in order to make their playing sound more successful in context.
To me, the models are endless of those who have showed the craft/creativity debate to be a false choice. They are our pantheon of genius and inspiration. Miles, Trane, Wayne, Herbie, Keith, Lieb, Tony, Elvin, Dejohnette, Jaco, Metheney, Brecker and so on and so on. So I go back to it: Craft and creativity among those learning to be jazz players ARE complementary and concurrent. Depend on it.
I leave you with this: Remember the wonderful poem?
Sir, I admit the general rule that every poet is a fool
But you yourself do prove to show it, that every fool is not a poet.
Here’s my version about the false dichotomy between craft and art:
Sir, I admit, that for a start,
you need your craft to ply your art,
but craft although it has its role,
will not suffice for heart and soul.
Conversely, artistes, don’t assume,
that art alone will build your room.
You need your craft, I cannot stress
enough if you wish to express.
Art needs craft and craft needs art,
like we need love and brain needs heart.
So throw away this falsest choice:
with craft AND art you’ll find your voice.
O.K. – now where’s that chicken soup when you need it?
A brief post-mortem on Chris Potter’s show…Chris is a tremendous saxophonist, with astonishing fingers and a powerful sense of intervallic structures. Ran into a bunch of cats I knew down there, including fellow saxophonists Larry DelaCruz, Sheldon Brown and Anton Swartz. (You always know a player is hot when a bunch of fellow sax players are there listening. We are not like drummers. As a general rule, we are more selective in our unbridled enthusiasms. You heard the joke about how many sax players it takes to screw in a light bulb? 9…one to do it and 8 to say “nice, man” as they each secretly think “I could have done it better, how come I didn’t get asked to screw in the bulb?”)
Anyway, not the case here. Chris dazzled one and all with his saxophonistic brilliance. Larry (one of the great people in the universe, btw) said of his solo cadenzas “man, makes me want to go and practice some unaccompanied Bach Cello things” and I knew what he meant. Some of what Chris does, esp on the solo sax tip, reminds me of the Marcel Mule and Bitsch etudes I used to practice back in my classical sax days (daze?) many moons ago. Chris underlined a point I have been developing that on each instrument there are two kinds of players - those who are inextricably bound up in their particular instrument and those who are musicians who happen to play a particular instrument. I think of Wayne Shorter, Miles Davis, and Jack Dejohnette as being three examples of musicians who play an instrument and Mike Brecker, Freddie Hubbard and Steve Smith as been examples of a saxist, trumpeter and drummer who I cannot imagine on another instrument. They have, as Carla would say, a love affair with their particular instrument, whereas the Dejohnette model would find anything from a comb to a seashell to express the music in them. No value judgment here on one or the other, as all are amazing players,just an observation on approaches – I would put Chris in the saxophonist side of the spectrum. He is a masterful saxophone virtuoso who is a saxophonist’s sax player…btw, I think the most interesting case in this regard is Trane, who went from being a saxophonist to a musician who played the saxophone, particularly by the Crescent era…
The false choice: I’ve been kicking around this idea for a while and it will probably be the subject of an expanded entry, but here’s a tease: Many aspiring jazz players are presented with a false choice between craft and creativity, and tend to separate into two warring camps – either you are a tradition-bound codifying literalist, or you are a loosey-goosey, patchouli-wearing free jazzer. I think this is reductive thinking. All of my favorite players from Armstrong forward were at once creative and craftsman. Here’s a saying I came up with that has a lot of Cs. You may like it: Craft and creativity are not contradictory but rather are complementary. And they are not consecutive but rather are concurrent.
I have a phrase for the lick-stealing type of jazz: Fear-based improvising. What is more uncertain and in the moment than true improvising? If one has an arsenal of predigested and well-honed licks, especially from the masters, one can’t make a “mistake” and therefore can’t be chastised for same. The fear-based improvisers spend a decade memorizing and regurgitating every tried and true line they can find, emulate player a, b or c, whether Sonny, Trane or Bird down to the amount of saliva on the reed, and then, one day, expect someone to wave a magic wand and “poof”, they have their own voices. It doesn’t work that way.
Go back and listen to the earliest recordings of Miles, of Bird, of Wayne, of Chick, of Jaco – THEY ALWAYS SOUNDED LIKE THEMSELVES. Check out Miles’ solo on Now’s the Time when he is 19. Tell me another trumpet player who sounded like that then! People keep talking about how Wayne used to sound exactly like Trane or Sonny, but I have heard his earliest recorded shit and he always sounded original. He couldn’t help it. I think it is a fool’s errand to cop one player’s language, sound and phrasing, note for note and think that somehow that is the path to your own voice. It is crucial in terms of understanding deep levels of swing and phrasing that you can’t get any other way, but aping another does not help you get your own voice. That is counterintuitive. Kind of like someone saying, imitate Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Crane for 10 years and “presto” you to can be the next great novelist. I think that is why there such a staggering paucity of originality in our huge stable of lick and pattern-fed virtuoisi.
Now the flip side of that coin is the “dude, don’t get so hung up if I don’t know the notes in an F#7#11, or sped up that tempo or dropped that bar –I mean, it’s all about the feeling. Have you checked out my Monk project with Zither, DJ and nose flute? It’s all in 13/8…” These are the folks who never made the necessary effort to learn the common language that is such an intrinsic part of what makes this music so beautiful and deep. One can hear in just a few bars that the “creative music” scene players, as a rule, can’t negotiate harmony, melody and rhythm competently, and tend to construct varied rationales and paradigms wherein this just doesn’t matter. In much the same way that someone with a bad tennis serve will take down the net and paint over the serve lines to make his serve more successful, those who would dispense with the common language craft of jazz take away changes, time, pitch, etc…in order to make their playing sound more successful in context.
To me, the models are endless of those who have showed the craft/creativity debate to be a false choice. They are our pantheon of genius and inspiration. Miles, Trane, Wayne, Herbie, Keith, Lieb, Tony, Elvin, Dejohnette, Jaco, Metheney, Brecker and so on and so on. So I go back to it: Craft and creativity among those learning to be jazz players ARE complementary and concurrent. Depend on it.
I leave you with this: Remember the wonderful poem?
Sir, I admit the general rule that every poet is a fool
But you yourself do prove to show it, that every fool is not a poet.
Here’s my version about the false dichotomy between craft and art:
Sir, I admit, that for a start,
you need your craft to ply your art,
but craft although it has its role,
will not suffice for heart and soul.
Conversely, artistes, don’t assume,
that art alone will build your room.
You need your craft, I cannot stress
enough if you wish to express.
Art needs craft and craft needs art,
like we need love and brain needs heart.
So throw away this falsest choice:
with craft AND art you’ll find your voice.
O.K. – now where’s that chicken soup when you need it?
posted by Michael Zilber at 11:20 PM
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