Salieri, anyone?

Have you ever heard of Tom McKinley? He is a pianist/composer in Boston who used to teach at the New England Conservatory. When I was a freshman there, he and I would play duo in private lessons. I also played in his ensembles and he eventually played gigs with me, Miroslav Vitous and other luminaries. He was the first pianist I had ever played with who had the McCoy and Chick language down – tremendously exciting and opened entire new worlds of harmony to me. One day, about 2 months in, even though I was so in awe and shy around him, I finally mustered up the courage to ask him what had been in my thoughts since I had first heard him.

“I don’t get it, Tom.”
“Don’t get what, Michael?”
“How can you play so amazingly and you’re not famous?” I thought he would wet himself. He howled delightedly, coughed up the 4th Lucky Kool menthol of the morning, spilled some more coffee on his tie and regained his composure.
“You are still under the impression, Michael, that somehow fame and talent are connected. Let me tell you, in every major city and even some minor ones, there are truly great players you will never have heard of, and there are people on the cover of Downbeat who have no business being there!” In my experience, those were some of the truest words ever spoken.

Let me throw some more names out at you. How about Dave Creamer? Maybe John Stowell? Andre Bush? I’m thinking of Bob Meyer, now…Paul Nagel? Jamie Fox? These are all world-class musicians living in various degrees of semi-obscurity in various towns. I won’t, but I could easily name 100 or so musicians I know of who are better, more creative players than many of the usual suspects we read about in Jazz Times, Downbeat, NY Times, etc…I have also seen the reverse. I have seen a number of players leave here for fame and fortune in NYC and some were truly deserving of the fame and acclaim they received. Others, quite frankly, weren’t even close to being the best, most creative folks in the Bay Area, let alone NYC but, through persistence and promotion, have become darlings in the tiny little subset we lovingly call modern jazz. (No, I will not name names – no Elia Kazan here…but I am sure everyone has their own list.)

It brings me to this morning’s musing…Salieri, anyone? If you recall, Salieri was the acclaimed court composer who, in Peter Schaeffer’s brilliant imagining, recognizes the overwhelming spark of divine creation in Mozart and feels deeply threatened that the young pup will take his sinecure. The older Salieri befriends Mozart and proceeds to frighten and poison the genius to death, even as he takes down the feverishly directed score for Mozart’s the requiem.

A wonderful movie and who’d a thunk that Tom Hulce would do such a stellar job as Wolfgang. At any rate, it was lovely fiction, but I started thinking about real life Salieris and wondering if they really exist. Not the part about undeserved acclaim, but the part about the undeserving one recognizing that the unrecognized genius is more deserving.

My experience has been that, the better the musician, as a general rule, the more generous they are in giving it up to a fellow talented one, regardless of whether or not the fellow talent is acclaimed in the jazz press. Conversely, many of those in the mediocre middle make no distinction between, say, a Pete Christlieb (a fine bopping craftsman) and a Wayne Shorter (a true and innovative artist) other than to say "Christlieb made the changes better and played more in tune." "Hello trees, meet forest," I reply. This is not a hard and fast rule, but I have seen again and again that many musicians tend to view someone’s artistry through the lens of their limitations. I have heard bopping alto players completely clueless on a Jarrett or Shorter tune, and utterly unaware that their worked out bop licks missed the point of the piece they were playing.

I have also experienced the contrary, where some friends of mine who are really good players have practically prostrated themselves before other friends of mine who are really good and FAMOUS players, ala the “I’m not worthy” shtick. I’ve even seen some friends of mine change their tune about me when they find out someone they revere thinks highly of me, even though nothing about my playing has changed. In aesthetics they call this institutionalism – using some “authority” to validate one’s view. Downbeat gave it 5 stars, it must be good. MOMA is hanging it on the 5th floor, must be good. Alternately, I am quite convinced that if Trane came back from the dead and was playing a dinner jazz gig for those clueless yuppies at one of the trendy San Francisco restaurants where the music is window-dressing, the only reaction would be the manager telling him to keep the volume down.

(Semi-tangential aside: In the everything goes full circle department, I see the jazz listening progression this way: Fans, mainly non-players or played a little in high school and college – tend to be the most open, and respond viscerally to the spirit being communicated. Little to no knowledge of the grammar of the music, so really responding intuitively, or maybe “I can play an E A and B chord, gee, that’s purty hard to do on guitar.” Next are the jazz authority fans, bookers, agents, critics,collectors – again usually not musicians of any particular strength, but the music speaks deeply to them and they tend to impose sociological and/or ideological matrices more. Prone to sweeping judgments on the value of this or that artist. Often have larger record collections and better stereos than do musicians. Usually the ones who make the actual decisions on what the rest of us get to hear, which is often a shame. Next are the serious jazz students, hanging on every note, trying to steal what they can from the players they are hearing. Listening for licks and lines they can work out, hoping for a connection maybe, or a lesson. Next come the journeyman jazz players, the craftsmen, the ones who have worked out a compendium of licks, bags, etc…the kind who lift Trane’s solo on pursuance from a Love Supreme, break it down into licks and work them out in all 12 keys so as to be able to play “out” on modal tunes. These folks tend to be the ones who will critique the pitch of the Ellington band or look for triad pairs on a Herbie Hancock solo. After that come the artist/craftsmen. They have absorbed all of the important historical influences, always understanding that craft and creativity are concurrent and complementary. Whether or not they have an original voice, they can hear and appreciate someone who does. Lastly, are the master creative musicians, the Liebmans, Dejohnettes, Shorters, Towners, etc…they are supremely secure in their own voices, questing and questioning, in the moment musicians, and truly humble. They actually have the most in common with…drum-roll, please…the fans. The masters have come full circle and are in a space where they respond viscerally and intuitively to the spirit being communicated.)

So how do we get to Salieri? I got there following a very interesting conversation I had with my wife, Carla. The premise in Salieri’s case is that he knows that Mozart is a greater, less-recognized talent than him. My question was, is that real? We all can think in our mind of player X, widely hailed and feted (fetid?), gushed about by Giddins and Ratliff et al, who can’t hold a creative candle to player Y, toiling in relative obscurity. I think of my current favorite player Y, John Stowell, and at least 4-5 player Xs who don’t compare but receive more acclaim, better gigs, etc. Please understand, John is doing well, and among those who know his playing, he is universally admired, respected, even revered. Still, he would be the first to admit that he is not the household word that this, that or the other player X is. Here’s the key query:

Do the player Xs recognize this, or have they created various constructs wherein they can explain away the discrepancy between acclaim and talent? In other words, do we have a number of Salieris in the jazz world (not that they are trying to poison their Mozarts), who understand the common disconnect between talent and acclaim, even in the jazz world? I have not really witnessed this much. But then again, I can’t get inside someone’s head to know what they are really thinking. The closest I ever got to hearing someone admit this was getting a cab ride to Carnegie Hall with a composer who had become newly famous, getting commissions from a number of prominent national orchestras and so on. He had worked so hard to achieve this fame, and after years of head being banged against the mysterious glass ceiling, the trap door had opened and he had risen up. “Michael”, he said, “it is just so weird. All these years I was under-recognized and all of a sudden I am over-recognized. I don’t know how to deal with it.”

I am in a pretty unusual situation with regard to the jazz world and fame, because so many of my friends and playing compatriots have gone on to become stars in its firmament. From Wayne Krantz to James Genus to Rachel Z to Drew Gress to Bruce Barth to Dave Kikoski to Mark Feldman to Dave Douglas and so on and so on, I have witnessed these talented friends have copious ink spilled on them. Everyone had a different path, but here is the commonality. Just like my composer friend, my friends were terrific players before and after they were recognized, and they would all be the first to tell you that there were literally dozens of equally gifted peers we all played with whom your basic jazz fan has never heard of. I am grateful that New York gave me that gift of perspective, because it gives me a wide-angle view that I think some of my Bay Area musical friends, infected with institutional awe and not having worked up close with their icons, don’t have. They remain invested in a meritocracy which is a fairy tale.

Now that I think about it, I do believe that most of the great players, the ones who can really play, have no trouble admitting someone else’s strengths as a player, regardless of that player’s prominence. It seems to be the ones who have moved ahead through connections, promotion, etc…rather than appreciable talent, who have trouble giving it up. So that leads me back to my initial question: Do these latter-day Salieri’s, as they look in the mirror before going to sleep at night, recognize all the under-recognized Mozarts in their midst? Or is Sammy Glick a better description? How do they sleep at night? (Pace Lennon).

It is odd to think it, because we all cherish the mythology, but jazz is not a meritocracy. There is so much that the casual fan does not see that goes into who gets booked where and why, so much in the way of networking, schmoozing, promotion, social skills, demographics, even low level payola, in our jazz world nowadays. It is a happy accident when someone of true gifts becomes prominent. There is not any necessary connection. So keep your eyes and especially ears open, cause you never know if, while the current Salieri does a week at the Vanguard, the current Mozart is playing for 7 people in a dive around the corner – Salieri’s not likely to tell you!

PS –on a semi-related aside, I am going to see Chris Potter at Yoshi’s tonight or tomorrow. I am disappointed that Wayne Krantz didn’t make the tour with him, since he was always fun to hear and play with, but am still very much looking forward to this one.

I have only met Chris casually when Dave Douglas introduced us at the Yoshi’s bar a while back, so can’t say I know him at all - just his playing. I hear a lot of Sonny in his sound and swing, plus some Brecker, utterly prodigious chops and a very interesting rhythmic sophistication that is his own. I am especially impressed by his comfort level with (it seems) just about any metric configuration. He, along with Mark Turner, has also sent hundreds of budding sax stars scrambling to become more fluent in the altissimo register. He and Mark are the most influential sax players of the under-40 generation. Chris is an example of one of those wonderful bits of serendipity where someone truly talented and deserving is getting his just reward. In a world dominated by W and G, Trump and Idol, Chris’s well-deserved success is really nice to see.

On humane executions and other oxymorons…

So the state has decided to halt the planned execution of Morales, being unable to find anesthesiologists willing to play the part of government-sponsored murderers. We stand proudly unique among the “developed” nations in our trifecta of state-sanctioned murder, no national health care and rampant gun use. Occasionally we have partners in one of the three, such as Japan in the death penalty or Switzerland in the gun nut deal (and I'll take my chances with the Swiss on guns), but we are the kings of the barbaric triple play.

How odd that we try to prettify death. I think we were a lot more honest about the blood lust when we had public hangings and invited the young ones to come along and observe. It’s been said that no one who worked in a slaughterhouse would eat beef or pork again. I know that isn’t true, being acquainted with a fellow who told me about working in a pigslaughter facility as he chowed down on a BLT, but I think for many of us that would be the case. My philosophy? Ask yourself what you could personally kill and eat only that. For me, right now, it’s poultry and fish. Not pleasant at all, but there are levels of sentience. However, I think it’s a way station for me on the road to a no-kill zone. I had been eating “humanely raised and slaughtered” beef and pork for a while, but on a road trip back from Ashland saw a calf frolicking delightedly in a large sweeping field and it hit me: That calf is at least as aware as my brainless black lab, Duke, so what’s the distinction? Of course, in some cultures they don’t make the distinction, and we are horrified. What kind of barbarians can eat dogs, we exclaim, as we munch on our grass-fed, free-roaming Niman Ranch.

In the same vein, we are horrified at the barbarism of the Islamo-fascist beheadings, as we neatly pump our victims with a 3 drug cocktail, safely out of view, or drop smart bombs from 3000 feet on a distancing black and white video screen, so we don't see the carnage on the ground, or simply turn the other cheek as our multinationals aid and abet the most vile treatment all over Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. I am glad that the judge called the state (us) on our shit vis-a-vis the Morales murder. Camus still has the best essay on capital punishment I have ever read, “reflections on the guillotine.” In it he argues that the only way that execution is a deterrent is if one is able to hold the freshly severed bloody head in front of the potential murderer as he is about to commit the vile homicide. Even then…as for the standard boilerplate “but wouldn’t you want to kill someone who killed your family member?” the question that flummoxed a flu-ridden and too programmed Dukakis. OF COURSE I WOULD! I would want to tear the son of a bitch in half. However, I know rationally that would not bring my family member back, and fess up: How many of you have had momentary homicidal urges toward the prick who cut you off on the highway, or screwed you over for a job promotion? One of the ways we have allegedly evolved past fossil brain status is that we don’t act on our immediate emotional impulses to wreak havoc for every imaginary (or real) wrong. We have, all too imperfectly since W is in power instead of behind bars for war crimes, drawn up a system of laws to deal.

I think, as we watch manipulated forms of mass insanity such as embassy burnings over cartoons, entire demographics played like marionettes on such faux issues as gay marriage and such, that the least we can do is not have the state in the business of murder. Am I an absolutist? Of course not. If I had the chance and I were brave enough, I would have taken out Hitler. Not sure it would have changed the culture of noxious anti-semitic hate that had grown, plague-like in Germany ever since Martin Luther started the whole deal, but it might have. That is justifiable self-defense. A dude locked in max security for life is no threat to anyone, so at that point, all we are doing is revenge killings, and that, as they say, leaves the whole world blind.

So you go, Judge Fogel. There is no way, barring medical intervention, to guarantee an execution that does not bring excruciating physical pain, and I think torture is supposed to be barred under the Geneva convention (though W and Cheney differ.) Since our doctors are increasingly refusing to be drafted as our modern day Mengeles, let’s just be honest about it, have public beheadings and leave the severed skulls on pikes as warnings to trasngressors. Burgers, anyone?

quick take on the all-star game

Well, it came and went, and as far as all-star games go, was about as entertaining as they get. 122-120 coming down to the final shot in T-Mac's hands, and when was the last time you ever saw KOBE!!! pass up an open shot to feed someone else. Also shows to go that, no-nothings to the contrary, basketball is indeed a team sport filled with ever-evolving plays. Check how the 4 pistons came in and owned the all-stars of the West. A clearer illustration could not be given of why the Euro teams, practicing all year, beat far more talented US squads that practice perfunctorily for 2 weeks prior.

On a broader note, Stern continues to try and make the game safe for a nervous white audience. Hard to do when the entire squad of the East is Black and the only 3 whites on the West are Nash, Nowitzki and Gasol, a Canadian, a German and a Spaniard, respectively. Pan the crowd and there's Snoop Dog, Jay Z, Beyonce and Mary J Blige. I loved that both squads sent up the Houston Symphony, brought in by David Stern as one of his lame attempts to MTGSFC*, during the player intros. Both squads of starters did variants of hip-hop dancing moves during their intros, and doubly wonderful was that the West's improvised response was choreographed by Victoria, Canada homeboy Steve Nash backstage as they watched the East's seditious skewering of the setting. I am sure huge fines are on the way from Stern, who also seems to feel that letting players wear their own uniforms is a challenge to his control. 1/2 time showed the insipid Trisha Yearwood, yet another attempt to placate the red state crowd, and the equally insipid John Legend, the Kenny G of Urban Soul. What WAS the deal with the plasticized dancer "fans" surrounding the stage ala the exhumed Rolling Stones at the Super Bowl, anyway?

What's next in Stern's desperate attempt to get the golf and quail-hunting demographic? A mini-Nascar rally at the break? Roll Deadeye Dick Cheney on to the floor and see if he can flush some gangbangers out of the luxury suites with his Perazzi? The NBA brass reminds me so of the equivocating and weak-chinned DLC, Lieberman-types, frantically trying to out-GOP the GOP with Kerry on a hunt and Dukakis in a tank. They end up with republican-lite, and obviously if you have choice between Fried turkey and tofurkey, those of you who like turkey are going to go for the turkey every time. (Sorry vegans, that's just the way it is. my wife is one of you and has dragged me to some of the most expensive vegan joints in the bay area. I'm really glad you dig it, but I needed to go buy a garlic bagel with lox spread for 3 bucks after dropping $45 at the new Cafe Gratitude in Berkeley. The dishes all come named with things like "I am beautiful" "I am enlightened" and so on. Got the bill and commented "I am expensive and I am still hungry.")

To bring in the tinge of jazz here, the folks who object to the urban street rhythm and whirlwind improvisation of high-level bball remind me of the legions of polyester jazz ed types who used to be ubiquitous, but thankfully seem to be slowly disappearing at the college level. They are still the vast majority at the high school level. You know the type - maybe they played a bit in college, maybe even gigged on 3rd trombone with the Glenn Miller reunion band for a year or two before settling down in their sinecure. They can't play, conflate jazz with big band, get lost during the drum breaks, grit their teeth through the solos, and play charts exclusively by white arrangers, with a special place in their hearts for Stan Kenton and Sammy Nestico. They would rather hear Doc Severinsen than Miles (I am not making this up, I’ll introduce you to some!) They despise Trane, Herbie, Wayne, Monk, Joe Hen, you name it. I am not saying they are all racists, at least not consciously, but comments such as "Ellington's band was so sloppy and out of tune" are indicators of some profound baggage. I see the people who pine for the old Princeton 4 corners offense having some of the same baggage. Glory Road was a flawed Disney film, but it did show the same underlying bullshit baggage that Kenton-firsters (that cat is SO irrelevant to any discussion of jazz) and NBA-haters have in common.

As for the NBA, Stern should realize that he will never get the red state Nascar crowd, cause no matter how he dresses it up, it is an urban, Black-dominated game and that is as threatening to the Nascar-crowd as is John Conyers, as is Miles Davis. The NBA is beautiful precisely BECAUSE it embraces the cultural and poetic values and rhythms that are antithetical to W's base. So keep on swinging, NBA ballers and get the Houston symphony and Trisha Yearwood off the stage.

*Make The game Safe For Caucasians

Rebecca Solnit on the Walmart Bienniale

I read this today and felt that Solnit, once again, has managed to marry outrage with empathy, love and hope. It's a rare writer who can do such a thing, and she consistently hits the mark. In the dark days following the Brechtian comedy of 11/2004's kabuki election, her words of hope were profoundly moving to many of us who were feeling, well, hopeless. Here is her sketch of Walmart's heiress, her art acquisitions and implications for all of us.

The Wal-Mart Biennale
By Rebecca Solnit

It isn't that, when Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton purchased Asher B. Durand's 1849 painting Kindred Spirits last year, she got the state of Arkansas to pass legislation specifically to save her taxes -- in this case, about $3 million on a purchase price of $35 million. It isn't that the world's second richest woman and ninth richest person (according to a Forbes magazine 2005 estimate) scooped the painting out from under the National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which had banded together to try to keep it in a public collection when the New York Public Library decided to sell it off. It isn't that Walton will eventually stick this talisman of New England cultural life and a lot of other old American paintings in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Walton family museum she's building in Bentonville, Arkansas, the site of Wal-Mart's corporate headquarters -- after all people in the middle of the country should get to see some good art too. It might not even be, as Wal-MartWatch.com points out, that the price of the painting equals what the state of Arkansas spends every two years providing for Wal-Mart's 3,971 employees on public assistance; or that the average Wal-Mart cashier makes $7.92 an hour and, since Wal Mart likes to keep people on less than full-time schedules, works only 29 hours a week for an annual income of $11,948--so a Wal-Mart cashier would have to work a little under 3,000 years to earn the price of the painting without taking any salary out for food, housing, or other expenses (and a few hundred more years to pay the taxes, if the state legislature didn't exempt our semi-immortal worker).

The trouble lies in what the painting means and what Alice Walton and her $18 billion mean. Art patronage has always been a kind of money-laundering, a pretty public face for fortunes made in uglier ways. The superb Rockefeller folk art collections in several American museums don't include paintings of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre of miners in Colorado, carried out by Rockefeller goons, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles doesn't say a thing about oil. But something about Wal-Mart and Kindred Spirits is more peculiar than all the robber barons and their chapels, galleries, and collections ever were, perhaps because, more than most works of art, Durand's painting is a touchstone for a set of American ideals that Wal-Mart has been savaging.

It may be true that, in an era when oil companies regularly take out advertisements proclaiming their commitment to environmentalism, halting global warming, promoting petroleum alternatives, and conservation measures, while many of them also fund arguments against climate change's very existence, nothing is too contrary to embrace. But Kindred Spirits is older, more idealistic, and more openly at odds with this age than most hostages to multinational image-making.

Kindred Spirits portrays Durand's friend, the great American landscape painter Thomas Cole, with his friend, the poet and editor William Cullen Bryant. The two stand on a projecting rock above a cataract in the Catskills, bathed like all the trees and air around them in golden light. The painting is about friendship freely given, including a sense of friendship, even passion, for the American landscape itself. In the work of Cole, Durand, and Bryant, as in the writing of Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, you can see an emerging belief that the love of nature, beauty, truth, and freedom are naturally allied, a romantic vision that still lingers as one of the most idealistic versions of what it might mean to be an American.

Cole was almost the first American painter to see the possibilities in American landscapes, to see that meaning could grow rather than lessen in a place not yet full of ruins and historical associations, and so he became an advocate for wilderness nearly half a century before California rhapsodist and eventual Sierra Club cofounder John Muir took up the calling. Bryant had gained a reputation as a poet before he became editor-in-chief of the New York Evening Post and thereby a pivotal figure in the culture of the day. He defended a group of striking tailors in 1836, long before there was a union movement, and was ever after a champion of freedom and human rights, turning his newspaper into an antislavery mouthpiece and eventually becoming a founder of the Republican Party (back when that was the more progressive and less beholden of the two parties). He was an early supporter of Abraham Lincoln and of the projects that resulted in New York's Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum -- of a democratic urban culture that believed in the uplifting power of nature and of free access. Maybe the mutation of the Republican Party from Bryant's to Walton's time is measure enough of American weirdness; or maybe the details matter, of what the painting is and what Wal-Mart and its heiress are.

Kindred Spirits was commissioned by the wealthy dry-goods merchant Jonathan Sturges as a gift for Bryant in commemoration of his beautiful eulogy for Cole, who died suddenly in 1848. Bryant left it to his daughter Julia, who gave it in 1904 to what became the New York Public Library. It was never a commodity exchanged between strangers until the Library, claiming financial need, put it and other works of art up for sale. So now a portrait of antislavery and wilderness advocates belongs to a woman whose profits came from degrading working conditions in the U.S. and abroad and from ravaging the North American landscape.

Maybe the problem is that the Crystal Bridges museum seems like a false front for Wal-Mart, a made-in-America handicrafted artifact of idealism for a corporation that is none of the above. The museum will, as such institutions do, attempt to associate the Wal-Mart billionaires with high culture, American history, beautifully crafted objects -- a host of ideals and pleasures a long way from what you find inside the blank, slabby box of a Wal-Mart. One of the privileges of wealth is buying yourself out of the situation you help to make, so that the wealthy, who advocate for deregulation, install water purifiers and stock up on cases of Perrier, or advocate for small government and then hire their own security forces and educators.

Walton, it seems safe to assume, lives surrounded by nicer objects, likely made under nicer conditions, than she sells the rest of us. I have always believed that museums love artists the way taxidermists love deer. Perhaps Alice Walton is, in some sense, stuffing and mounting what is best about American culture -- best and fading. Perhaps Crystal Bridges will become one of the places we can go to revisit the long history that precedes industrialization and globalization, when creation and execution were not so savagely sundered, when you might know the maker of your everyday goods, and making was a skilled and meaningful act. One of the pleasures of most visual art is exactly that linkage between mind and hand, lost elsewhere as acts of making are divided among many and broken down into multiple repetitive tasks.

Perhaps she could build us the Museum of When Americans Made Stuff Locally by Hand for People They Knew or perhaps that's what Crystal Bridges, along with the rest of such institutions, will become. Or Walton could just plan to open the Museum of When Americans Made Stuff at some more distant date, though less than half of what's in Wal-Mart, sources inform me, is still actually made here -- for now. The world's richest woman, however, seems more interested in archaic images of America than in the artisanry behind them.

Walton has already scooped up a portrait of George Washington by Charles Wilson Peale and paintings by Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper for her museum. That museum, reports say, will feature many, many nineteenth-century portraits of Native Americans -- but it would be hard to see her as a champion of the indigenous history of the Americas. The Wal-Mart that opened last November in Teotihuacan, near Mexico City, is built so close to the Aztec's Pyramid of the Sun that many consider the site desecrated. The Wal-Mart parking lot actually eradicated the site of a smaller temple. "This is the flag of conquest by global interests, the symbol of the destruction of our culture," said a local schoolteacher. Thanks to free-trade measures like NAFTA, Wal-Mart has become Mexico's biggest retailer and private-sector employer.

Imagine if Walton were more like Sturges, supporting the art of her time. Imagine if she were supporting artists who actually had something to say about Wal-Mart and America (and Mexico, and China). Imagine if, in the mode of the Venice Biennale or the Sao Paolo Biennale, there was a Wal-Mart biennale. After all, Wal-Mart is itself China's seventh-largest trading partner, ahead of Germany and Russia and Italy; if it were a nation, it would be the world's nineteenth biggest economy. If it's on the same scale as those countries, why shouldn't it have its own contemporary art shows? But what would the Wal-Mart nation and its artists look like?

Rather than the open, luminous, intelligent architecture Moshe Safde will probably bestow on Bentonville, Arkansas, imagine a shuttered Wal-Mart big box (of which there are so many, often shut down simply to stop employees from unionizing) turned into a MOCA, a museum of contemporary art, or better yet a MOCWA, a Museum of Contemporary Wal-Mart Art. Or Wal-Art. After all, Los Angeles's MOCA was originally sited in a defunct warehouse. You could set the artists free to make art entirely out of materials available at Wal-Mart, or to make art about the global politics of Wal-Mart in our time -- poverty, consumerism, sprawl, racism, gender discrimination, exploitation of undocumented workers.

Imagine a contemporary artist, maybe with Adobe Photoshop, reworking Kindred Spirits again and again. Imagine that Cole and Bryant are, this time, standing not on a rocky outcropping but in, say, one of the puzzle and art-supply aisles of a Wal-Mart somewhere in the Catskills, dazed and depressed. Or imagine instead that it's some sweatshop workers, a little hunched and hungry, on that magnificent perch amid the foliage and the golden light, invited at last into some sense of democratic community. Imagine paintings of Edward Hopper's old downtowns, boarded up because all the sad and lonely people are shopping at Wal-Mart and even having their coffee and hot dogs there. Imagine video-portraits of the people who actually make the stuff you can buy at Wal-Mart, or of the African-American truck-drivers suing the corporation for racism or of the women who are lead plaintiffs in the nation's largest class-action suit for discrimination. Against Wal-Mart, naturally.

Imagine if Alice Walton decided to follow the route of Target with architect Michael Graves and commissioned some cutting-edge contemporary art about these issues: videos and DVDs you could buy, prints for your walls, performance art in the aisles, art that maybe even her workers could afford. Imagine if Wal-Mart would acknowledge what Wal-Mart is rather than turning hallowed American art into a fig leaf to paste over naked greed and raw exploitation. But really, it's up to the rest of us to make the Museum of Wal-Mart, one way or another, in our heads, on our websites, or in our reading of everyday life everywhere.

Rebecca Solnit's Tomdispatch-generated Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities is out in a new and expanded edition. Her other recent books include A Field Guide to Getting Lost and, with Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe, Yosemite in Time: Ice Ages, Tree Clocks, Ghost Rivers.

On listening to Keith Jarrett’s The Out-Of-Towners and ruminations on melody

I have been giving close listen to this CD by Jarrett with his longstanding trio of Peacock and Dejohnette and have been deeply moved by parts of it. In particular, I Love You, I can’t Believe that You’re in Love with Me and It’s All In The Game jump out at me.

It’s all in the game is an unlikely source for Jarrett’s genius. It’s always seemed to me a rather schmaltzy tune, especially as performed originally. Check out the lyrics:

Many a tear has to fall
But it's all in the game

All in the wonderful game
That we know as love

You had words with him
And your future's looking dim
But these things your heart can rise above

Once in a while he won't call
But it's all in the game

Soon he'll be there by your side
With a small bouquet

And he'll kiss your lips
And caress your fingertips
And your heart will fly away

You had words with him
And your future's looking dim
But these things your heart can rise above

I mean, pretty moon-june – and the original is quite a maudlin version for sure. It’s been top of the hit parade at many a bad wedding gig.

However, in Keith’s solo version from his concert in Germany, the piece is almost devastating in it’s simple, Bill Evan’s Peace Piece approach. Jarrett’s touch, liquid phrasing, everything - it brings tears. Keith finds the fragility and heartbreak in his understated reading. He is able to get inside a song like Miles, Trane, Wayne, Sinatra – astounding.

That leads me to a few thoughts on song, melody and in particular the great American Songbook, a tradition that started with Berlin and Gershwin and I think has continued on with such folks as Joni, James Taylor, The Beatles (I know, not American) Paul Simon, Elvis Costello (again, not American), etc…

What do we know about all of the following musicians? Louis, Bean, Lester, Bird, Diz, Monk, Miles, Sonny, Dexter, Getz, Desmond, Bill Evans, Herbie, Wayne, Keith, Pat, Chick? Well we know they are certainly included in any discussion of greatest and most moving jazz soloists. We also know that every one of them was/is symbiotically connected to the great American Songbook. Almost all of them, it is true, have written wonderful tunes of their own, but whether or not they did, they all played and wonderfully reinterpreted these superbly constructed melodies and harmonies. Whether or not they formally studied composition, by the very act of playing and interpreting these masterful songs, the soloists ingested an intrinsic and intuitive understanding of melodic structure, and I believe that is why their solos have such coherent and affecting shape. I think among newer players it is no coincidence that the folks who are reaching beyond the student jazz players to connect with lay audiences are people like Mehldau, Lovano and Frisell (just to name a few), who have found their own way to draw on and elaborate on the songbook tradition. Mehldau does it by mixing in Beatles and Radiohead, Lovano covers Sinatra, and Frisell draws on Americana.

I know every generation bemoans how the next generation has lost this and that, and jazzers have complained since Louis Armstrong how this crop of kids just doesn’t get it. I don’t want to go there and won’t. My experience in teaching is that the current generation is incredibly well-equipped and trained, with access to real players who can teach, reams of transcription, method, theory and play-a-long material and legions of jazz camps and programs. All of this is a dramatic change, and largely for the better. However, focusing on triad pairs, intervallic this and that, chord/mode relationships, working out slavishly precise lines of others in all 12 keys, etc…makes for a drier, less organic and esp. less melodic approach to soloing.

There is a coherence and singable melodicism to the work of our best-loved jazz icons (just think of Miles’ solo on So What, Cannonball’s on Milestones, Trane’s whole body of work on Crescent, Sunship, etc…) that speaks to a multiplicity of listeners.

The reality is, 99% of the audience members we play for couldn’t tell you what was in a C Maj 7#11 if their lives depended on it. They are bemused and rather indifferent to the endless lines of 8th notes, have no idea if a tune is in 4 or 13, and as for “free” or energy jazz, it is off-putting and alienating to most. These elements are inside baseball that speak to a small subgroup of trained jazzers. And let’s face it, most of us want to be on the guest list and want our friends to give us Cds for free! The great unwashed, so to speak, respond on a visceral level to emotion, melody, rhythmic pulse and the interaction they can see on stage. (On a side note, I can understand this audience antipathy to certain free playing, because I will confess that while I love collective free improvising with folks who have mastered the elements of jazz, such as Liebman, John Stowell or Dave Douglas, I find it painful to listen to or play with folks who play free because they can't speak the common rhythmic and harmonic language which runs from Louis through the Miles mid-60s quintet. "Free" playing requires such a deep understanding and mastery. While I believe it should be encouraged in apprentice players, student free playing should NEVER be a substitute for, but only a secondary corollary to a powerful commitment to the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic common language discussed above. There are no shortcuts.)

Yes, we all need to know the grammar of complex rhythm, harmonic superimposition, transcription, etc… to be competent improvisers in today’s world, but we also need to breathe melody, something that a lot of today’s jazzers seem to have abandoned, along with harmony. Even in the case of Brecker, Liebman or Bergonzi, three players whose lines are scrutinized like they are the Rosetta stone to "hip" playing, I know for a fact that these great players have an encyclopedia of melodies coursing through their musical DNA. I used to have a sign in my sax case, inspired by the 1992 election slogan, that said “it’s the melody, stupid” and I think it is even more timely today…the fact that most contemporary pop radio outside of soul and country has abandoned melody and harmony means our up and coming have to search harder, but it is still out there, and Gershwin or Lennon/McCartney or Jobim is as beautiful a place to start today as it ever was.

Just like Miles with Kind of Blue, Trane with Crescent or any great art, Jarrett is able to communicate transcendent truths that speak to our head and heart, esp. in his handling of the songbook. I tell all my students they should memorize the melody, harmony (and hopefully lyrics) to 500 standards. Even if they don’t formally study the structure at all, they will internalize the idea of melodic structure into their souls, and, along with all of the other work they need to do, will be able to create memorable, melodic improvisations which can move us on all levels…just like Keith does over and over again. (Say it.)

jazz and basketball

A guilty confession… I am a fierce critic of the corporate mediacracy, believing strongly that there is a powerful agenda to numb, drug and distract us from the ultra-rich pillaging at the public trough while we do the Pavlov on everything from Gay marriage to whether or not Paula Abdul was shtupping an American Idol contestant. However, I have a deep passion for basketball, holding it to be the sport most akin to jazz on the planet. Why? Think about it – any player can pass, rebound, shoot, set screens, block out, etc…the play is constantly fluid, there is a clear set of criteria (call it the form and changes) and it is fascinating to see how the players work their magic inside those rules. Baseball types love to trumpet the complexity of the situation in their sport, how the infield and outfield shift on every pitch in the count. Hell, you want to talk strategy, every time someone tries to drive to the left and is defended the situation changes. There is more strategy, and fluid change of same in one minute of great basketball (say any game involving the Phoenix Suns) than in an hour of baseball. The famous study (can’t recall it now, look it up) that posited about 3 minutes of genuine action in a 3 hour baseball game is a mighty contrast with the soaring, virtuoso, thrilling and breakneck ad lib show in hoops. Basketball, like jazz, is an urban game requiring split second decision-making, true improvisation and some of the most astonishing athleticism one can imagine. Baseball is a bucolic 19th century game with sometimes 20 minutes between balls being put in play. As for the assertion that it is a more cerebral game: Really? Those who say so have no idea of the intricate offenses and defenses called in every basketball possession, with, pace Grace Paley, enormous changes at the very last second on many plays. I also believe there is a racial subtext to some of the critiques of roundball. It, like jazz, has a strong representation of Black culture and rhythm, and while there are many many outstanding white players, from Nash to Nowitzki to Peja to Ginobili to J.J. Reddick, today’s basketball, like jazz did in the 1930s, counts blacks as the substantial majority of its best practitioners, and I believe that is troubling to a largely white viewing audience. That is by no means to say you can’t be a conservative republican basketball (or jazz) lover or a lefty baseball or nascar lover and jazz/hoops hater. However, even among my progressive baseball loving jazz friends, I hear code words about “street ball”, no teamwork, “natural athletes” and “I like the college game better”. When you scratch away, a lot of the antipathy some have towards basketball is because of the cultural disconnect and because, while most armchair jocks can leg out a double in a softball beer league, it’s pretty hard to deceive yourself that you could have played college or high school basketball.

You can even analogize to styles of jazz playing with bball.

The Suns with Nash and the Pistons with Chauncey are thrilling equal access teams ala the Jarrett trio or the Miles mid-60s quintet and teams with ball hogs like Kobe are like the sax player who treats his rhythm section like an aebersold CD, something to be used to practice his solipsism over (and no, I won’t name names.) So here’s to bball, the sole reason, along with Jon Stewart that the cable conglomerates occasionally get a toehold in our house…and c’mon Montgomery, let Ike play some more, for God’s sake! I love this game…peace, MZ
PS – check out www.youtube.com very cool site…

why a blog?

well, all the kids are doing it...semi-seriously. I have been out of the business of long set pieces for quite a while, but so many people have asked me to write more, and this seems like a fun and informal way to give you a snapshot take of what I am playing, hearing and experiencing out here on the left coast. I like this format in that it is very akin to a jazz solo. You don't massage and edit it, which is something I do very much in my other published writing, so what you get is the very first draft, unexpurgated, unedited (aside from spellcheck), unchanged - so who knows where that will lead.

Two somewhat (well completely) unrelated takes start this one off.

Dick Cheney - man with a gun...too good, too delicious and if I'm the sneermeister's buds, I am running straight for the witness protection program. More ink has been spilled on the psyche of those who kill for sport and pleasure, so I won't add to the mix other than to throw out that, as has been observed, we are warring with ourselves as both chimp and bonobo (also known as the pygmy chimp). Are you hip to our two closest relatives in the primate world? Chimp: warlike, meat-eating, aggressive, monogamous, patriarchal...bonobo, vegetarian, nurturing, matriarchal and polygamous - women love every part of this theory except for the polygamy, which perhaps not so coincidentally is the big selling point for a lot of dudes (by the way, a word that has infected my vocab as I have become Calicentric.) Anyway, what can you say about Cheney that hasn't already been said other than that the motherfucker will probably be forced to walk the plank as a last ditch attempt to cover W's ass. You know, I am one of those who doesn't buy at all that W is some brainless puppet of Cheney and the rest of the PNC. I think he is doing the same shtick his old man did - playing the bumbling inarticulate fool, but I don't think a damn thing happens that he doesn’t want to have happen. Meanwhile, since Libby has said he was told to leak classified docs by his superiors, if you do the math, that would be Darth Cheney and er...W - so yeah, they'll have Cheney take a bullet (maybe get "peppered' in a hunting accident. Not sure what need here is since it is highly dubious they'll be on the up and up in vote-counting this time around. Oh, and in case you are wondering, some of my best friends are Republicans and no, I am not a Democrat. My father used to observe that it isn't true that the only alternative to 5 punches in the gut is 12, but then again, Clinton sure looks a helluva lot better now - or as the billboard says "can someone give that man a blow job so we can impeach him?"

As for topic two, Rachel Z is a good friend for 25 years now, since we were both undergrads at New England Conservatory. She played in my band in NYC with Genus and Tommy Igoe (sometimes Rodney Holmes) in the late 80s, early 90s and is on 2 of my CDs. she was out with her trio to play pearl's in SF and we had a blast playing together when I sat in on their second set. She has a very cool mix of standards and originals, mixing pop/rock reimaginings and originals and mixes a deep harmonic thing with a wonderful and open sensibility -and she sings! I dig it...her husband Bobby Ray is her drummer and is a very kind and soulful cat who also plays great. here's hoping we do some more...today they came over to my neck of the woods (East Bay) we hung, sat at an outdoor cafe, I showed them around and we took a nice walk by Albany Beach. They were blown away at the beauty, the chilled vibe and the stunning weather - I understand. My wife Carla and I came out to SF in january 1991 for a visit, at a time when NYC was gripped and groped in 10 degree freezes. It was 65, sunny and gentle here, and I think that was the clincher for us as far as deciding we would some day come to this area...I am truly grateful that Rachel and I have remained friends for a 1/4 century, and it is always a pleasure to reconnect. They may come to LA at some point this summer so maybe we'll hook up then again. Peace, do what you love to do and do it well - MZ

I leave you with this quote from Walter Moseley...

"America has carried the notion of property and power to such
an intensely negative degree that we have very little room
left for humanity and art in our hearts. We work long hours,
eat bad food, close our eyes to the atrocities committed in
our name and spend almost everything we make on the drugs
that keep us from succumbing to the emptiness of our
spiritual lives. We gobble down antidepressants, sleeping
pills, martinis, sitcoms and pornography in a desperate
attempt to keep balance in this soulless limbo.

In a world where poetry is a contest at best and a
competition at worst, where the importance of a painting is
gauged by the price it can be sold for--we are to be counted
among the lost."

present company excepted - MZ