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To all concerned:
I was asked to inform you of the regrettable death of vibraphonist Walt Dickerson, by his beloved wife, Elizabeth. Walt passed away on May 15 from cardiac arrest. He was 80 years of age and lived in Willow Grove, PA.
In sympathy,
Andrew Cyrille
"A MAN IS NOT A SEPARATE ENTITY FROM HIS MUSICAL PROJECTIONS. They're one and the same. Treat them as such, view them as such and then you get the complete picture. Isolate them, and you'll get a distorted picture, subject to your assumptions, which are erroneous 90 percent of the time." - Walt Dickerson
Digg"Young" John Young, a stalwart local pianist has passed away. Perhaps best known outside of Chicago for appearing on 5 of Von Freeman's albums, he accompanied innumerable musicians as a house musician at a number of local venues.
Obituaries:
I've been thinking about my vocabulary and how to approach reviewing recorded music. I enjoy writing about music and I like spreading the word about music that I'm listening to that others might enjoy, but I've been struggling with how to best convey a sense of the music. My goal is to somehow do it justice outside the conventional framework of criticism, in the sense that I don't see myself as a critic or frame my approach to the music in what would be conventionally understood as critical. I know what I like and I know what ends up on the cutting room floor, but I'm less concerned with letting people know about the latter. I don't mind pointing out what I perceive as blemishes in the former either, or else I risk overly laudatory prose. I think it ultimately comes down to a desire to write creatively and in doing so put some of the real creative energy and risk into writing that I hear in the music. In that spirit I've been doing a lot of reading, what amounts to writerly pedagogy I suppose, but I keep coming back to the notion that the music itself is the best teacher. I don't think I've found the answer yet and I'm not particularly satisfied with my progress on the matter, but with that said, I have a few reviews I'll be posting soon.
Recently, Mwanji posted a short but provocative piece about so-called music criticism, and in doing so raised a host of issues about music writing in general.
It's an issue I've raised before in regards to my own views about so-called music criticism specifically, and more broadly the issue of writing words about music.
My basic view is this: I do think there are serious barriers to writing about music descriptively, but that those limitations are best confronted creatively. I confront them through the occasional misuse of vocabulary to convey feeling and connotation rather than meaning and denotation. If I'm writing a review of a concert or recording, I'd rather end up with a piece that described what I heard and how it made me feel than what I heard and what my opinion of that was, or what I thought of it. I'm more interested in writing about what I find value in, instead of attempting to determine if something else actually has value in any objective sense.
With that said, while I believe transparency is a good thing, it can also be crippling.
I find value in the notion of creating a relationship between author and reader where the reader comes to know the taste of the writer enough to develop a sense of their tastes, and as a result engage in something known as trust. This shouldn't be confused for being predictable, and that's where the job of the writer comes in, to have an open mind so that they can surprise their readers by finding value in someplace unexpected, and explaining that value to the reader.
Does a writer also have to pan a few pieces of music to develop that trust? Don't we have to say something is worthless in order to create a sense of worth?
I don't think so.
Then again, I'm not a critic, and nor do I have any interest in becoming one.
A reader of this blog might notice that I don't write about all the music out there. I listen to lots more music than I write about here, that's for sure. I only take the time to write about music that I:
- Enjoy enough to listen to regularly, and believe that I will continue to listen to in the future.
- Believe that readers of the blog, based upon their repeated readership, might enjoy as well.
- Believe that I can write about cogently enough to convey some of its essence to the reader.
I'm also of the opinion that negative reviews of music are of less value than any piece of music ever made. So there. At least a mediocre musician is putting themselves out there to get a crappy review.
It's not that I believe that there's no such thing as bad music. There is. I've heard it, and I don't like it. I just have no interest in devoting any energy into spreading the word about bad music. I'd much rather spend my time and energy talking about music that I think is worthwhile and engaging. Similarly, I'd rather be pointed in the direction of transcendence than be told to stay out of what someone else believes is the musical gutter.
I do believe that there is a fruitful method of writing about music, and for me that involves putting music into some kind of social and cultural context. I find that to be an extraordinarily illuminating practice, and one that simultaneously allows the music to speak for itself while also enriching our experience of it through better understanding of its context. I find more value in this style of music writing than in blow by blow analyses.
What do you think?
Now that labor day has passed, and along with it my most laborious time of the year, things should pick up around here soon. I've got some backlogged reviews to write and some essays that I plan to adapt for the blog format.
As I'm sometimes prone to do after a period of stress and long days working, I've caught a nice end of summer cold that I'm currently nursing with tea, soup, and good music.
I caught some great shows at the Chicago Jazz Festival this year, and just saw Yusef Lateef in Detroit on Labor Day.
I can't wait for fall to really hit here in Chicago. I've always been oriented towards the fall as a time of renewal and beginnings. I'm not sure if that's the student or the Jew in me, but either way, I always find the fall to be a period of transition that I welcome.
More later - maybe even today.
George Bowering, Canada's first poet laureate on NPR's This I Believe:
I believe that the human intellect is the closest thing we have to the divine. It is the way we can join one another in spirit.
Sometimes when you are listening to a great jazz musician performing a long solo, you are experiencing his mind, moment by moment, as it shifts and decides, as it adds and reminds. This happens whether the player is a saxophone player or a bass player or a pianist. You are in there, where that other mind is. His mind is coming through your ears and inside your mind.
The first time I heard Charlie Parker playing "Ornithology," I was delighted. I was about 11 years old. You are so much alone with your mind as a kid, so when you hear someone else's mind improvising, you feel an excitement you will never get from some music that just wants to keep a steady beat.
I got that delight again when I first heard great improvisatory poetry. When I read "The Desert Music" by William Carlos Williams, the book fell out of my hands and made a loud splat on the library's concrete floor. Later I would hear the poet Philip Whalen call this kind of poetry "a graph of the mind moving." Yes, it is.
What would one day be called ‘the modern’ was, at least as far as its sharpest and most hidden point is concerned, a legacy of the Buddha. Seeing things as so many aggregates and dismantling them. Then dismantling the elements split off from the aggregates, insofar as they too are aggregates. And so on and on in dizzying succession. An arid, ferocious scholasticism. A taste for repetition, as agent provocateur of inanity. Vocation for monotony. Total lack of respect for any prohibition, any authority. Emptying of every substance from within. Only husks left intact. The quiet conviction that all play occurs where phantoms ceaselessly substitute one for another. Allowing the natural algebra of the mind to operate out in the open. Seeing the world as a landscape of interlocking cogs. Observing it from a certain and constant distance. But what distance exactly? No question could be more contentious. Adding this last doubt, then, to a trail of other gnawing uncertainties. - Roberto Calasso, Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India
I thought this quote, culled from Robert Calasso's masterful tapestry of Indian mythology, might be pertinent to some recent discussions going on about the issue/concept of post-modernism in music. I don't have much to add to the conversation, because post-modernism has always struck me as be little more than a conceptual dead end, and ultimately it has proven itself of little use to my own thoughts and writings. I think, like many other theories, if taken to an extreme it is definitely a dead end, but it can be of use conceptually as an ingredient rather than a main course.
The issue of quality as it relates to post-modernism reminded me of another quote, this one from Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, page 290:
"When you're not dominated by feelings of separateness from what you're working on, then you can be said to 'care' about what you're doing. That is what caring really is: 'a feeling of identification with what one's doing.' When one has this feeling then you also see the inverse side of caring, quality itself."
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