Dial "M" for Musicology

Happy birth of the cool day!

Phil Ford

It's Claude Thornhill's birthday today. Friend of the blog and jazz radio hipster extraordinaire David Brent Johnson just turned out a Thornhill centenary episode on Night Lights, although David points out that it has just been discovered that Thornhill was actually born in 1908 (in Terre Haute Indiana, no less). David and I just had breakfast this morning and DBJ pointed out that Thornhill is one of those guys who jazz buffs always like to call "unjustly neglected." Ah, the trope of unjust neglect -- where would we be without you? But jazz arrangers really do get the shaft -- no-one but the hardcore jazz geeks remember who they are or what they did, even though they are often responsible for what we remember about our favorite albums. Case in point, Thornhill had as much to do with the much-mythologized "Birth of the Cool" sound as Gil Evans did. 

Anyway, DBJ and I decided that hipsters need a national holiday, and August was wide open. So we have deemed August 10, Claud Thornhill's birthday, to be Birth Of The Cool day. DBJ and I celebrated by loafing around at the Runcible Spoon, which seemed appropriate. Those of you playing along at home might not have an institution of such unimpeachable hipster credentials in your town, but be inventive. You could get a six-pack of PBR or bake some cupcakes or something. (Is that still hip? I actually have no idea.) Whatever you do, it should involve

• not working
• aimless socialization and BSing 
• listening to jazz or some canonically hip substitute. Dylan is good, but maybe a bit obvious. How about Bruckner? Don't be afraid to try new things on Birth Of The Cool Day! To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, hip is whatever you can get away with. 
• consumption of drugs -- well, caffeine, anyway. Cigarettes recommended only for historical reconstructionists and original-instrument fetishists. Mormons and Straight-Edgers can substitute chocolate. 

The dress code for Birth Of The Cool Day is naturally a rather complicated matter. DBJ wore a Lester Young T-shirt, which is cool, while I wore my Stanford T-shirt, which is uncool, but I was hanging out with DBJ, so it was OK. You have to kind of play these things by ear. Hang out with someone cooler than yourself and watch what they do.

So, onto other news. Dial M is growing! After three years of writing Dial M, Jonathan and I want to keep it going but don't want it to be just our show. The original conception for Dial M was that it be a forum for multiple voices within the discipline of music scholarship, so in the next few weeks we'll be seeing some posts from new folks, who I will leave to introduce themselves. 

Getz Postscript

Jonathan Bellman

I decided to write my old friend Charles for more information about the piece Stan Getz played at Stanford, mentioned here.  He said:

 

Re the piece for Stan, sure: Tenor Rhapsody, by William Thomas McKinley of the New England Conservatory.  His wife was some sort of Wiccan who cast various spells and hexes before every rehearsal, and the concert, sitting in the front row for the purpose.  Altogether nuts.

 

Charles also recalled:

 

I well remember that concert. When we started the first half we had no idea whatsoever if we would have a second—but Mem Aud was full, and even Herb Caen was there. Toth and I also cajoled Stan like the sycophants we were…

 

I was the one who spent night after night at his home…pounding out his notes on the keyboard—but that’s yet another lamentable story.

 

Fun days!

 

After I stopped laughing and wiping my eyes, I searched “Tenor Rhapsody McKinley” and found the following program notes to a recording of the same composer’s work Night Music, which is apparently a rewrite:

 

Night Music

 

This work owes its existence in no small part to the legendary jazz tenor saxophonist Stan Getz. It was Getz who, after having heard some of McKinley’s music in the mid- to late 1980s, approached the composer with an invitation to write a new piece for tenor saxophone and orchestra, which McKinley quickly accepted. Almost immediately it became clear to McKinley that the work would be a dramatic, rhapsodic composition of significant proportions. After consulting with Getz, it was further agreed that the solo part would be fully notated, even as it evoked Getz’s improvisational style. The Tenor Rhapsody for Solo Tenor Sax and Orchestra was completed in April of 1988, and its premiere followed less than two months later on 10 June 1988 in Palo Alto, CA. Getz was the soloist with the Stanford University Symphony Orchestra, with Andor Toth conducting. There is no record that Getz ever played McKinley’s Rhapsody again in public, and less than three years later, on June 6, 1991, the jazz giant lost his battle with cancer.

 

In the small world department: these notes are by my friend Scott Warfield, whose work I quote in the second edition of my Short Guide to Writing About Music because he’s so good at it.  My wife has done notes for MMC also.  And, to come full circle, I find this review of the CD by David Denton for Fanfare at the bottom of the same screen:

 

This is Volume 12 of MMC’s indispensable anthology of world-premiere recordings of 20th-century North American music. At the core of this new release is a work by the founder of MMC, William Thomas McKinley, one of the few composers who have successfully brought jazz and classical music together, and to such an extent that you can no longer find where on [sic] ends and the other begins. ‘Night Music’ is a reworking of the 1988 score ‘Rhapsody for Solo Tenor Sax and Orchestra’ originally intended for legendary saxophonist Stan Getz. The work came late in Getz’s all-too-short life, and McKinley subsequently decided to rewrite the score to take into account the exceptional skills of Michael Rossi, the remarkable soloist in this highly enjoyable performance.

 

So the redoubtable McKinley, founder of MMC, must be the guy I met backstage at Memorial Auditorium.  And the event was a couple years earlier than I thought, when I was a lad of but 30.  The composer’s notes to the piece are found on pp. 78–79 of this Googlebooks link.

 

I only heard the original Tenor Rhapsody, be it said, not the Night Music rewrite.  To be totally honest, my unfortunate meeting with the composer aside, I enjoyed the piece; it was like post-Gershwin, a style that I have always felt had much more in it than we ever heard.  I would welcome more performances of it.

Me and Stan Getz (and a Concerto for Tenor Saxophone and Orchestra)

Jonathan Bellman

OK, Re-Pete: by popular demand, here is my one rather unfortunate connection with the late Stan Getz.  Late in my time at Stanford—I believe it was the last year of my doctorate, 1989–90—I got an eleventh-hour call from Charles Barber, a friend and at the time a conducting student there.  He was organizing the Stanford Orchestra concert, which was some kind of mixed program with Stan Getz, the titular head of the Stanford Jazz Program.  Getz had, I think, almost nothing to do with Stanford other than showing up periodically, being a figurehead, disseminating misinformation about the Jazz Program on Johnny Carson, and so on.  There was a commissioned work on the concert, a symphonic Jazz concerto for tenor sax and orchestra composed for Getz by I can’t remember who (it is NOT THIS ONE, but MAYBE THIS ONE, though I don’t think it was by Bill Holman).  This piece, as it turned out, had a small piano part.  Since a Jazz combo was going to do a few numbers with Getz early in the program, the pianist had agreed to play the part, until…he saw it, and demurred.  He doesn’t read much, he’s an econ grad student, he’s really busy.  Jon, please, could you…?  It’s not that hard…

 

It was true; the piano part was not that hard—just some strummed chords and stuff, so I agreed.  When I showed up, though, I found that the combined insecurities of Getz (who didn’t like playing from music), the conductor Andor Toth, Sr. (who was not comfortable with Jazz, though he was called upon periodically to do it), and the logistics of the Jazz combo earlier in the program meant that I was to be playing with my goddamned back to the conductor.  To see him, I would have to look backwards over my left shoulder while simultaneously, one presumed, playing from my unmemorized part.  I tried to object, but no, Jon, we’re sorry, we can’t do anything, you’ve got to understand, you’ve got to work with it, Andor is already upset enough, no don’t bring it up to him, Getz has decided he won’t even play the piece anyway, feelings are running so high…

 

Apparently Getz was not confident about his music-reading ability.  Another Stanford student had made him a tape of the solo sax part played on piano, so Getz could learn it by ear, but he was still insecure, and had decided at the last moment not to perform the work.  Everyone was at sixes and sevens, and in walks yours truly, unhappy enough for my own impossible situation, completely uninvested in Jazz per se and neither knowing nor caring much about the fact that Getz was bona fide Jazz Royalty.  Backstage, I meet…the composer, whoever he was.  He sounded to me like a fast-talking Hollywood Mr. Smooth-It-Away type, full of strutting self-promotion (“I mean, you can see what I’ve accomplished with this piece!”), with his tux, big pink tie and equally strutting adolescent son by his side.  Since I was the only ear this guy could get, he began playing me: I should go talk to Stan, get him to do the piece, I’m in the piece, he’ll listen to me, it’s fine really, Stan should just improvise the cadenza rather than play the one written (complete with fulsome faux-flexibility: “That’s the feel I wanted anyway,” he claimed), etc.  I was raised in Los Angeles county and have a lifetime’s experience with the L.A. type, but still couldn’t fend this guy off.  So, somehow, I—a largely Jazz-ignorant doctoral-candidate last-minute walk-on—was given the assignment of convincing The Great Stan Getz to please play this guy’s concerto.

 

Well!  Wasn’t this a recipe for success! 

 

What tack to take?  Getz doesn’t know me from Adam, and he wasn’t even there for the rehearsal.  Maybe friendly familiarity… [those of you thinking “Uh-oh; cue the Don Giovanni D Minor chord” have it exactly right.]  So, I go to jolly him up; he’s nervously talking to the strutting, oh-so-cool Jazz combo (you know how Jazz guys can get when a classical musician is in the room).  He’s reluctant, and I’m trying to jolly him up (this is a stranger, remember) and I wound up with, “Oh, come on, schmuck…”

 

FREEZE-FRAME.  PLEASE.

 

In my mind, I have always heard “schmuck!” in my father’s voice, kidding and above all affectionate.  Yes, thanks, I do know what schmuck means literally, but in my family it always had a kind of “ah, geddadda heah’ ya joik” sense; Dad would say “you’re a schmuck!” when I scored a point on him about his driving or an unsavory aspect of his youth or my mother’s zinging him or whatever.  So for me the word was always a slight elbow in the ribs, always warmly meant.  OK, so my house was the only one I knew that had any discernible yiddishkayt in it, and so I thought our unique take on the various family dialects was standard, government-issue American Yinglish.  Wrong again, Jon!  This was brought home in a very uncomfortable way when Getz snapped back

 

“DON’T YOU CALL ME A SCHMUCK, SON!”

 

Oh, sh--.  So I apologized, immediately, profusely, and resentfully, turned and walked away, mentally washing my hands of the entire situation.

 

The order of the program was changed, to put the concerto at the end so Mr. Getz could change his mind at any point.  Piece by piece the concert progressed, and at the end we all went on.  Getz played, improvising during the cadenza rather than playing the written one. I craned my neck wretchedly throughout and (if I recall correctly) made hash of the piano part.  After the concert, I was about to exit stage left, and turned around once more: there was Getz in the stage right wings, looking at me fixedly. 

 

I thought this at the time, and it looks this way in my memory, and for the rest of my life I will believe: there was regret in his face.  Probably I’m giving myself far too much credit, but that’s what I saw: he was looking at me, sadly, as if knowing our previous contact hadn’t gone right.

 

A mensch would have walked gingerly up to him, expressed regret at our previous conversation, and congratulated him on his performance.

 

I turned back and left, sick of the entire situation: sick of blowing my conversation with him and getting dressed down like a fourteen-year-old (I was probably 32 or so), sick of the stupid, manipulative composer's having put me in that position, and above all sick of the way I had been forced into embarrassing myself on the piano.  Two years later Getz was dead. 

 

What was I saying about the strutting pride of those awful stuck-up Jazz musicians?  God knows classical musicians never present any such behaviors.

 

It’s a shameful story, I freely admit.  I was insecure and unhappy about my own inglorious role and the untenable position I was put in, and I was resentful about the way he snapped back at me—but this does not belong in the category of That Stan Getz and How He Treated People.  One ought to know better than to call a stranger, particularly someone of Getz’s profile and accomplishments, a schmuck of all things!  I have always been a slow learner, though.  This one was my fault, not his, and it is a memory I will forever be ashamed of.  I do, however, hereby publicly own it.  And yes, I warned you that it was a long story.

Wordless jazz

Phil Ford

Thomas, one my students in my American music course, sent me this:

Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, "Leap Frog." What a great routine. You have to admire the skill that went into making this little video: his gestures follow Parker's and Gillespie's incredibly intricate lines perfectly, but what's more, the physical gestures seem like perfect analogues to the musical ones. It's like King Pleasure in reverse -- not vocalizing horn lines, but  devocalizing them, but with paradoxically the same result.

Can you do anything like this with any other kind of music?* It wouldn't work as well with, say, a Bach invention -- you need the asymmetry and disruption of bop to make it seem sufficiently like human speech. This was one the things that made midcentury literary intellectuals care about jazz when they wouldn't otherwise have paid a lot of attention to music -- something in the patterns and shapes of jazz lines made it seem as if literature and jazz share a common destiny. One of the things I'm writing about in my book is the bop-era project to put words and music in the same space, whether it's Kerouac trying to do in prose what he thought jazz musicians were doing in sounds, or King Pleasure setting famous horn solos to words, or the Kenneth Patchen reading his poetry to jazz, or Ken Nordine trying to find analogues to jazz improvisation in concepts (and then setting them to jazz). The consistent idea seems to be that jazz communicates something almost like words, but not quite (or vice versa), and that the point where they touch is the point where some new art might be found, not a third-stream sort of fusion of art forms but some entirely new way of conceiving and representing experience, where the flow of experience itself, the whirls and eddies of life as lived in the moment, would be not so much represented in writing as traced, like the vibrations of a seismograph registered on a piece of paper.

*except, of course, for hiphop. And, come to think of it, recitative, though that seems to be a cheat.

Where is the edge?

Phil Ford

Another day, another Oblique Strategy: "Where is the edge?" is the card I pulled this morning. I confess that this isn't the first one I pulled, but it seemed most relevant to the day's business. (Am I doing this wrong?) I'm going over to WFIU later today to do and interview with David Brent Johnson on the 1957 film noir The Sweet Smell of Success for an upcoming Night Lights show. This is one of those miraculous films where absolutely everything went right: a crackling script by Clifford Odets, gritty black-and-white location photography, a great charismatic villain in Burt Lancaster's JJ Hunsecker, Tony Curtis's turn as a corrupt, brilliant, doomed press agent "running a fifty-yard dash with both legs cut off"  -- and, of course, the jazz score, which like I Want To Live had both a crime jazz underscore and a first-rate diegetic jazz performances, here by the Chico Hamilton quintet. So it's an obvious great subject for a jazz show, but there's something less obvious as well. It's a hip movie --  hip in the sense of knowing, but knowing in a particular way. It's not just smart but wised-up, spinning fantasies of hidden power, wheels within wheels, luxuriating in the mechanisms of conspiracies,  finding and following the hidden boundaries and lines of force between things: parts of the city, angles of conscience, connections between people, official stories and secrets. There is an edge to everything, and noir finds it.

More Blue Note covers, since you can never have too many Blue Note covers. How could I have forgotten the inspiration for this blog's name?

I had this cover, not the Hitchcock film, in mind when I came up with "Dial 'M' for Musicology." Its just so cool: Sonny Clark's photo on a desk blotter with a notepad and uncradled phone, like a clue to a crime investigation or a Person of Interest in an ongoing investigation, maybe our source in the street, Our Man In Jazz. Commenter Rootlesscosmo writes that he tends to imagine Blue Note covers "as always including an upward-drifting plume of cigarette smoke under a strong spotlight in a darkened space." I think this says something about the way Blue Note draws noir imagery into its overall aesthetic. The Blue Note look (which is to say, the look Reid Miles created for it -- notice how different the post-Miles, post-1967 albums* look from what we think of as "Blue Note") is a compound of different influences -- black vernacular culture, Bauhausy design modernism, and film noir. Some more noir-ish Blue Note covers:

And of course there is the wonderful 'Round About Midnight at the Cafe Bohemia cover in my previous post.

*Generally a sad scene, although this McCoy Tyner album from 1970 makes a rather witty move within the Afrocentric space of the time:

Make room for squares

Phil Ford

In response to my "Taboo" article David Cavlovic suggested I should check out LP Cover Lover. Whoa. That's a lot of crazy covers. How to pick? Out of so many extremely strange and grotesque covers, I kind of liked this one:

But actually I want to direct your attention to another, more specialized album-cover site. A couple of months ago my student Alisa (who is writing a dissertation on the Blue Note jazz label) sent me a link to a Japanese site that has every Blue Note album cover (recto and verso) scanned in at pretty high resolution. So you get both the album cover art --  Reid Miles' designs for Blue Note are justly legendary -- and the liner notes, written by heavyweight jazz critics like Leonard Feather and Nat Hentoff. So this is quite a find!

Once again, I find myself with an embarrassment of riches on my hands. But how could I not include the cover for No Room for Squares?

Or 'Round About Midnight at the Cafe Bohemia?

Or Judgment!

There are the bold experiments in using typography as an element of abstract design:

And, it must be admitted, the occasional plagiarism:

Cf. The Man With the Golden Arm (from this post)

Though god knows the Blue Note look has been plagiarized often enough:

I assume that most of these borrowings are intentional -- either homages or else attempts to recreate something the cultural mood associated with the original design. One of the albums I've been listening to a lot over the summer is Madlib's Yesterday's Universe album. Madlib is a hiphop producer probably best known for making the beats for the Madvillainy album with MF Doom. A few years ago Madlib making records as "Yesterday's New Quintet," playing and multitracking together all the instruments of a fictional early-1960s Blue-Notey jazz group a la the Three Sounds. What's always been interesting about Yesterday's New Quintet is that the music doesn't really sound like the music of the era it samples even though it perfectly conveys the ambient flavor of that era -- or at least period flavor as someone like myself, born a few years later and armed only with grainy low-fi memories of the time that followed a few years later, might imagine it. Yesterday's Universe moves the frame of reference forward to the late 1960s and early 1970s -- there's a lot of Mwandishi-era Herbie Hancock in the sound  -- and splits Madlib's alter egos into a number of different imaginary groups, each outfitted with its own album cover (complete with wear marks and discount stickers).

Here is a good blog post about the album design from The Cover Up, yet another excellent album cover art site. The writer of this post points out that the Stones Throw art director, Jeff Jank, did a neat homage to an old Ornette Coleman album on Atlantic, Ornette!

As the guy at The Cover Up says, Jank (like Madlib) is "creating identities for artists that don't exist. The covers have a vintage feel that would have some to believe they are long lost albums from the 70's, found in someone's dusty basement."  This is very cool.

In the mix

Phil Ford

I really meant to make myself scarce for a few weeks and get out of the way of our guest bloggers. (Good lookin', Brent.) But Ralph Locke is joining DIal M later (after May  25), so I figure I might just poke my head up from my Secret Undisclosed Location and do you all a favor and point out that one of the best blog posts in the history of the music blogosphere is up at Do the Math, the blog of the jazz trio The Bad Plus. I've never mentioned the Bad Plus here before, despite the fact that they're teh cop show. Their drummer, Dave King, was a mainstay of the Twin Cities music scene back when I lived there. His other big group, Happy Apple, played everywhere in town, including a festival I helped organize at the Weisman Art Museum, and it pleased me when I picked up Give a few years ago and heard King's immediately recognizable (BIG) drum sound. I like how unaffectedly sweet The Bad Plus can play (like on "Frog and Toad," which pays homage to a lovely series of books I've read to my kids since they were small), and I like their Ornette moods, but I also like the fact that every now and then they just want to kick you in the nuts. How does an acoustic jazz trio play a cover of "Iron Man" that's almost as heavy as the original? Like this:

Download Iron_Man.mp3

Anyway, Ethan Iverson, the Bad Plus pianist, wrote an 18000-word post on Lennie Tristano at Do the Math, along with a constellation of side posts, including an email from Stanley Crouch that's more thoughtful on the subject of Tristano than you might expect. As Matthew Guerrieri has commented, these posts on Tristano comprise about as good a use of the blog medium for music as can be imagined: "A lot of the promise of the Internet circles around hyperlinked and non-linear texts, but this illustrates what is, to me, an even greater virtue—a platform to stretch out and explore a subject without having to worry about restrictions on length or scope or focus." (Although the fact that Iverson has linked to so many wonderful pieces of music and video clips is also not to be sneezed at.) This sort of thing just makes me realize how little I care about major newspapers cutting back on their arts reporting. Folks have been saying, yeah, I don't like Bernard Holland, but at least the NYT had someone covering classical music, and they won't now that Holland's retiring. But who cares? The arts pages of the NYT (to say nothing of lesser dailies) suck, and they suck in the same way as the comics pages: everything that ends up there is deformed by the pressure of having to fit some abstract notion of consensus culture.* The people who have particular cultural interests -- for example, an interest in classical music -- are going to find it, and a better version of it, on the internet. If I want to read something interesting about music I can click through by blogroll and I know that I'll find something good. The only thing I'm only sorry about in Holland's imminent departure is that the Detritus Review won't have him to kick around anymore.

Anyway, back to my point. This glorious wide-screen Technicolor appreciation of Tristano is entertaining reading even if you don't care about Tristano (though I do). But more than that, it's a meditation on race in jazz that has the particular virtue of not seeking to apportion blame or take sides, but simply to understand. Of course we're all thinking a lot about race just now, with Barack Obama the almost-certain Democratic presidential nominee and some pretty ugly racial dynamics floating up from those dark places that a lot of Americans pretend don't exist.

It's been infuriating to watch obvious racial double-standards come into play over Obama's candidacy, and how whenever someone points them out (and of course there are always Americans who will point them out) people act shocked, shocked, that anyone could possibly impugn the good will of Americans, who are TOTALLY NOT RACISTS anymore. We've worked through it! What's up with you, anyway? Think you're better than us?

The thing I can't let go of is the whole Jeremiah Wright stupidity, even though it seems to have died down lately. (Though you can bet your bottom dollar it won't stay down.) The 24/7 media saturation of Wright's diatribes demands some comment, because it's so obvious that the real problem wasn't that a radical pastor was saying crazy stuff: it was that it was a black radical cleric was saying crazy stuff. A post from Washington Monthly the other day makes this point: John Hagee, a white pastor associated with Republican politics, was caught on tape saying that the Holocaust was God's punishment for Jews.** Kevin Drum writes "of course, this whole thing is just garden variety white crazy," so don't expect to see this clip in heavy rotation on cable news. But this is maybe a bit blunt, and this is where the social-commentary dimension of Iverson's post might come in handy.

It's true that there is a garden variety of white crazy, and Americans are used to hearing it from this or that radical pastor. And every time there's a dust-up, some people do get a bit mad about it, like they did when Pat Robertson said that hurricane Katrina was God's punishment on an impious city, but the thing is, I think a lot of Americans don't get mad about it because they understand that this is crazy talk and filter it out. A lot of Americans understand that seeking approval from fire-breathing pastors is a political ritual, that every serious American political candidate is expected to make a "statement of faith," (i.e. kiss the ring of conservative religious ideologues), and they're not really going to hold it against a politician for currying favor with pastors who say crazy stuff, because they assume that those politicians are in on the game, just as they themselves are. The majority extends a charitable interpretation to politicians and assumes that they, like us, are just kind of acting out a script. (An very American script.)

What seems very clear is that this charitable assumption was suddenly withdrawn when the radical pastor in question was black. The (white) majority can hear Hagee's sermon and say, well, yeah, he's nuts, but I don't believe that John McCain really believes anything he's saying. But Obama and Wright . . . well, who knows what black people believe!

Now, my first impulse is to say that this is straight racism, though a lot of people who might have been inclined to care about the Wright affair would object. You could say, there is a difference between saying you won't vote for someone because he's black and saying you're not sure that black American culture has the same complicated, compartmentalized way of interpreting the statements of radical preachers that white American culture does. The one is a straight statement of prejudice, while the other is simply a product of the limits of cultural understanding. But I don't think that settles anything. Appeals to "culture" and cultural difference can become a blind for racism: I remember shortly after 9/11 James Lileks saying he wasn't an anti-Muslim racist because he though Muslim culture was inferior, not that Muslims themselves were inferior. But when everyone subscribes to a kind of cultural maximalism where "culture" determines everything about a person, this becomes a distinction without a difference. In other words, if the tacit distinction people are making between a crazy black pastor and a crazy white pastor is not racism, it's not not racism either. You see how this gets complicated.

This is why I like Iverson's coinage: "in the mix." Writing about racial tensions in the jazz world (and impolitic statements from white and black jazz musicians and critics), he acknowledges that those tensions have always existed and are fundamental to understanding critical debates within the jazz world. You won't really understand what's going on with an artist like Tristano if you don't start from the fact that he was a white guy in a mostly black music. Iverson also acknowledges that calling people "racist" or "crow-jim" or whatever doesn't get the conversation moving. So he dials down the tone a bit and comes up with a new expression for racial tsuris: "In the mix." I like this because it acknowledges the shades between racialized discourse and racist discourse, and acknowledges the impossibility of always telling them apart: it's all in the mix. Quoth Iverson:

Racial stereotyping is best avoided in elevated dialogue, but nonetheless racial stereotyping will occur in any serious discourse about jazz eventually.  At that point valuable discussion is often suddenly halted when one side or the other perceives racism or is worried about being racist. 

I actually don’t mind racial stereotyping too much.  America is the melting pot of diverse cultures, and all good American art has race “in the mix” somehow.  Hopefully my earnest and underdone phrase “All in the Mix” doesn’t shut the door to further discussion the way “racist” does. 

 

*Achewood is a particularly good example of the kind of honest-to-god funny strip that could never, ever, in a million years, appear in a major daily comics page, despite the fact that not one of those strips -- NOT ONE -- is funny. Chris Onstad talks about online vs. print comics here and points out that the only funny strip in memory was the Far Side. Well, I liked Calvin and Hobbes too, and Doonesbury was funny in the 1970s. But that's pretty much it.

**Audio here, framed in such a way as to play the same guilt-by-association game with John McCain as has been played with Obama. My own feeling is, two wrongs don't make a right. This soft McCarthyism of are-you-now-or-have-you-ever, this game of six-degrees-of-separation-from-Hitler, etc., can't end soon enough for me.

Geekin' High

Phil Ford

David Brent Johnson, host of WFIU's ineffably hip jazz show Night Lights, has posted on the bankruptcy of the International Association of Jazz Education and the attendant cancellation of its annual meeting in Seattle. For forty years the IAJE has been the main institutional carrier of jazz in musical academe, and as David notes, its conferences have been a necessary meeting-place for jazz musicians, educators, scholars, and music industry people. Those of you who have never attended an annual meeting of any scholarly or professional arts society might wonder what the big deal is. But for a lot of people, especially those who feel a certain isolation from the mainstream of American culture -- i.e. those whose music of choice is some variety of relatively unpopular music -- such things are sort of like what comic book conventions or Renaissance fairs are for other tribes of geeks: places you can let your hair down and let your geek flag fly. 

And I'm saying all this in a geek-positive way. I don't have a problem with being a geek. Geeks make the world go around. Geeks get things done. Three years ago Neal Stephenson, whose gigantic SF/historical novels are Baroque edifices of geek obsession, wrote a great NYT piece on geeks -- well, actually about the Star Wars movie Revenge of the Sith. He points out that basically no-one could follow the details of galactic politics that motivate the plot but also didn't seem to care, and this bothered him. Why not sweat the details? That's what geeks do. It's pretty much their defining trait. The new Star Wars movies* don't offer a self-standing narrative: "they are akin to PowerPoint presentations that summarize the main bullet points from a much more comprehensive body of work developed by and for a geek subculture." It's the geeks who understand the context because they're the ones who have been reading all the spin-off comic books and watching the Genndy Tartakovsky Clone Wars cartoons and boning up on the fine points of Galactic Trade Federation politics on Wookiepedia and generally just sweating the details.

The Star Wars movies were pre-sold to geeks because, as Stephenson notes, the Jedi themselves are Ur-geeks: "they have beards and ponytails, they dress in army blankets, they are expert fighter pilots, they build their own laser swords from scratch." And, as geeks, they are in a precarious though hidden condition (a phantom menace, you might say): "the masses and the elites both claim to admire them, but actually fear and loathe them because they hate being dependent upon their powers." Which might remind geeks right here on earth of our own phantom menace:

Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable and free are being taken offline to countries where people are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some foreign exchange left to send their way. Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out.

OK, so jazz geeks meeting at IAJE or musicology geeks at AMS or pop culture geeks at EMP might not be keeping us alive, comfortable, and free in the same way as a guy who codes the program that keeps a satellite in orbit. But there is a family resemblance between different forms of geekery, and I think Stephenson's emphasis on sweating the details is the key. It's what makes geeks objects of mingled admiration, pity, scorn, and envy, and it's what makes geek pursuits sort of tenuous, and why they need institutions like IAJE. You need to see other people doing things like what you're doing, and above all you need to see what details other geeks are sweating, so you can incorporate them into your own sphere of geekitude, or at least stay humble in mind of the wider sphere of knowledge you don't possess. Hanging out with other geeks keeps you on your toes.

And you need moral support. Stephenson's emphasis on the sometimes adversarial relations between geeks and non-geeks is on point, and this is what unites Star Wars obsessives and jazz freaks with guys who build code and spaceships and stuff.  This is one reason why I still like to blog, despite my misgivings: I can be into my stuff and I can "talk" to those out there who care about it (there's a community for everything). Alex Ross wrote recently that classical music has experience a modest boom on the internet, and not for no reason. "If, as people say, the Internet is a paradise for geeks, it would logically work to the benefit of one of the most opulently geeky art forms in history." It's interesting to think about why classical music might be considered geeky, and perhaps it's simply that it's a music that, like jazz, offers unlimited scope for detail-sweating. Actually, a writer for a blog called Classical Convert has already made this point in a post titled "7 Reasons Nerds Should Listen to Classical Music."  Point 1: We love discovering and understanding how things are put together. Point 2: We love classifying stuff. Point 6: We like having long and detailed discussions/arguments about stuff. (This is why we need conferences and blogs.)

There's probably something uniquely (opulently!) geeky about classical music, if only because there's so much of it over such a long period of time, and the genealogy of its forms and styles provide such a rich field of minutiae. But jazz scratches the same itch: anyone who ever caught a recondite musical reference in a Dexter Gordon solo or got in a slangin' match over "Blue Skies" contrafacts will know what I'm talking about. And given the hyper-egalitarian, anti-elitist tone of contemporary society**, such pursuits will always seem a bit . . . suspect. So, long story short, it's a sad thing to see one of the bastions of geekery fall. It's one of OUR bastions; even if you never listen to jazz and never heard of the IAJE, it's still one of OURS.

*Which I execrate, if only for the single reason that Lucas's idiot rationalization of The Force -- "midichlorians," FFS -- undoes the point of the whole universe he constructed. 

**But as John Stewart said of Obama's supposedly "elitist" tendencies, "doesn't 'elite' mean 'good'?"

The Voutians!

Phil Ford

I'm doing a talk at next week as a part of an art-and-politics-themed week for Bloomington Artsweek. The panel I'm on will also include presentations by Eric Drott, Bruce Durazzi, and Peter Schmelz. (I haven't met Bruce, but Eric's a friend from Texas who does fascinating work on Paris '68 and the avant-garde, and Peter and I were both on the AMS cold war studies panel back in November. It'll be nice to see them again.) My own offering deals with the peculiar way that hipness is not exactly politics, and not exactly style, but (as I've said elsewhere) and stance where style becomes political. But in the early postwar years, before Howl and On the Road, this rather abstract and dialectical nuance was lost on most people. Thus a funny 1948 Life magazine article on "voutians," which makes hipness out to be something like the collegiate fad for swallowing goldfish. "Voutians" were fans of Slim Gaillard, a jazz guitarist who invented his own hipster slang called "vout." (This clip gives you a dose. Basically it's a hipster pig latin, heavy on the suffix "-orooney.")

Anyway, should be fun. In the meantime, another bleg. Do any of you smooth-jazz-savvy people out there (Charles Carson and Gabriel Solis, I'm looking at you) know what this thing is?

Rediscovered Ginsberg tapes

Phil Ford

A wonderful discovery -- a tape recording of Allen Ginsberg reading Howl in 1956 at Reed College for a small audience. Much to their credit, the college made the tapes available for free this morning. The whole unedited tape contains seven other poems and a certain amount of informal chit-chat before Ginsberg begins Howl (slightly after the midpoint of the recording). I'm not the biggest Ginsberg fan -- don't hate it, don't love it -- but audio postcards like this always interest me. Ginsberg's reading style in Howl is self-consciously intense, in marked contrast to his very introverted style in the 1949 Holmes acetates. He says in his introduction to Howl that he's trying to emulate the feeling of chorus piled on top of chorus in bop -- he references a fabled Lester Young performance of "The Man I Love." Interesting to hear him trying for a jazz style; it's intense but it's actually not very jazzy. His reading doesn't have the musicality of Kerouac's readings, which are really very beautiful.

An unintended, but lovely and poetic touch -- the drone of the passing airplane (a prop plane -- this is 1956, after all) just as Ginsberg begins to read Howl. Don't know why this sound is so perfect -- mechanical but dolorous, like a train whistle.