Category: Uncategorized

Reverse blogging

Out here in the Blogosphere, there’s a flurry of activity. I see a ton of hits at my blog site but few comments. People are reading but it’s interesting that there’s not much interaction. Certainly we’re all busy and few have spare time to drop comments at each site they visit.

It makes me wonder if we don’t have this whole blog thing exactly backwards. Wouldn’t it be more interesting for readers to ask questions to guide the writer? It might save a lot of wasted, worthless blog posts which nobody reads.

Until I find the time to write the “Reverse Blog,” can you offer some questions here? I’ll create posts to answer or respond to them manually for now. If it’s a good idea, I’ll work on a software solution.

Thanks and bring on the questions!
Tom

jazz torrent

There’s been a flurry of activity recently. I’m back in the studio writing a lot of music for some upcoming projects.

Which leads me to a confession: the hard work of being an artist is the continual need for energy. There are so many distractions to overcome: business, phone calls, etc. Retaining focus on creating art and maintaining sufficient energy – that’s the challenge.

I’m not really complaining. It’s maybe now I finally realize what all those people meant when they said “You want to be a musician? That’s a hard life.”

The hard part isn’t practicing, touring or performing. It’s managing your life amongst all the chaos.

Practice, practice, practice

We’ve all heard it before: practice makes perfect, or perhaps perfect practice makes perfect .

I’m, as JJ Johnson called it, a “practice-oholic.” I really enjoy working out new ideas on the saxophone and maintaining optimal performance conditions. It’s become a part of who I am.

I recently read a great book by Daniel Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music. Levin mentions some research by Dr. Anders Ericsson. 

Ericsson asserts that “the critical difference between expert musicians differing in the level of attained solo performance concerned the amounts of time they had spent in solitary practice during their music development, which totaled around 10,000 hours by age 20 for the best experts,  around 5,000 hours for the least accomplished expert musicians and only 2,000 hours for serious amateur pianists.” source

So there you have it. Get busy – there are a lot of hours to put in if you want to become an expert.

Moonless Night Ballad

In my previous post I mentioned putting out some music which (perhaps) isn’t so derivative of the Bebop tradition. Here’s a short sketch which fits the idea.

MoonlessNightBallad.mp3

It’s just a cycle of sounds: note clusters which aren’t really voiced in typical chord-like ways. I really enjoy weaving melodies atop washes of sound like this. In this case, the soprano is basically just playing A Lydian throughout. What I find interesting is how the shifting clusters in the piano make such a simple scale seem like so much more than it really is.

To me, the clusters set a vivid emotion and create several layers of musical expectations. They produce a wash of sound at one level. At the next level, they provide a repeating chord progression. At another level deeper, they also form an illusion of something beyond what’s technically there.

Let me know what you think.

a little help?

The bad news just keeps on pouring in. Just this week the Madison Center for Creative and Cultural Arts (web site is http://www.mccca.net) lost its lease on a great downtown space in Madison.

Couple this with the recent venues (such as the Jazz Showcase, Velvet Lounge, Hot House) forced to close or move in Chicago and it seems like there’s an all-out assault on the arts.

At its core, the whole situation is ridiculous. Here in the US we force arts organizations to play on the same playing field (e.g., pay the same rent) as retail businesses.

We don’t manage our budgets in a way to sponsor “ART” as a valued thing. But even worse, we let the business world run rough shod all over the altruistic people who fill the void.

I’m not sure what we can do about any of this. We can’t even stop our government from waging war in any way they like. We can’t even trust our government to come to our assistance in time of need. So how the heck can I expect any sort of assistance for cultural affairs?

Well, quite frankly, if we don’t have culture, what do we have?

finding your own music

There’s an age-old debate within the jazz community about the merits (or de-merits) fthe whole chord-scale theory approach. I was recently reminded of this topic while reading Graham Collier’s article: http://www.jazzcontinuum.com/jc_tnb6.html

I know from my own experience learning chord-scale theory it’s been a difficult thing to overcome. I studied with David N. Baker at Indiana University. He’s done an amazing job codifying the language of Bebop. But, you know, he never once said this is all there is or there’s only one particular way to play.

The idea is to study the music of the masters and use it as a way to find your own music. However, it’s very easy to get addicted to the mathematically beauty and symmetry. It’s also easy to start to believe that the ideas of the masters are better than your own.

I spent a year playing with J.J. Johnson’s quintet. That experience sent me on a quest to find my own music. It was immediately obvious to me that JJ, Cedar Walton and Rufus Reid live and breathe that music. It’s literally a part of them and their experience. My own version of that was not as profound.

How could it be? I didn’t come up during their time.

So reading Graham’s excellent article made me consider this idea anew. Right now I’m experimenting with tonal clusters and less obvious harmonies. It takes enormous effort to write new music that is inspiring. And, of course, that’s the whole point.

Aren’t we supposed to uncover our own individual music? Isn’t that what the true mission of jazz is all about? I’m planning on posting some new music soon here. Hopefully you’ll join me on the journey!

the quiet ending of an era

It may come as no surprise to many of you but it appears the “big band dance gig” is quietly fading out. Sure, this has been going on for some time. But there are two things which cause me to write about this now.

Mainly, I find it interesting that nobody else seems to be writing about it. The death of the big bands received a lot of attention in the past but this is yet another nail in the coffin. I see this as something different than the fall of the big band from the popularity it had during the swing era and beyond. This is generally the loss of a way of life for musicians, the end of the big band dance gig. I guess these situations tend to go unnoticed.

I also find it interesting (and sad) since it may well signal an end to one of the more enjoyable gig experiences for the jazz musician. It’s a rare event to have 18 (or more) musicians on the same gig! The opportunity to hang out and network with so many other players is always great. It is (was) also a great way to learn the craft of performing jazz music. Big band arrangements are often the best way to experience (and learn) the subtle variations in swing 8th note rhythmic feels, articulations and phrasing. They are also one of the few situations where jazz players learn to play together in a larger ensemble.

I wonder what effect this might have upon students learning to play jazz now in schools. Most school jazz programs revolve around the big band. One of the most alluring aspects for me when I was in school was the “aliveness” of jazz: meaning that I felt like I was participating in something I’d be doing for the rest of my life. It gives me pause to think about the change in student attitudes about big bands. If big band music is left as something only practiced in schools, what effects will that have on the music overall? Hmm…

Jazz ™

Admittedly, it’s old news but I find it a real pain in the keester that companies are using “jazz” as a brand or product name. IBM has a new “product” named jazz. There’s Jazz Technologies which recently flopped on their IPO. The basketball team, the airline…egad.

Maybe they never read the million jazz articles saying there’s no money in jazz! It’s kinda funny – except that I have to rewrite all my automated Google searches to exclude all the noise caused by these corporate hijinx.

The major downside which upsets me is that it just needlessly waters down an already watered down word. What is jazz anymore? Even if you just stick to the music known as jazz, it goes all the way from traditional (dixieland) to swing to bebop to mainstream to free to fusion to jazz-rock to smooth (and at least a million variations in between these).

It’s a shame we didn’t trademark “jazz” if only just to keep out the corporate riff raff.