Thirsty Ear

A while back I posted about an interview with the founder and owner of Thirsty Ear and he brought up some interesting points I wanted to go back to. First of all, there is this quote:

"If there’s a problem with music and jazz in particular today, it’s that [jazz] is caught up in form and structure. And that should come later, after you’ve done the innovation. If we start with form and structure then you can’t ever get beyond that—it becomes your prison. What we encourage at Thirsty Ear is to just let it go."

I'm going to take this thought in a different direction, if you will indulge me....

Michel Foucault published a fascinating book in 1975 called Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison - in it, he examines the birth of the penal, disciplining culture, and the spread of this ideology into other institutions, such as schools. Before prisons, public torture and humiliation were the most common forms of punishment for crimes, usually scaled based on the crime committed itself. There were still traces of the eye for an eye tooth for a tooth idea, in the sense that the crime that was committed was to be meted back upon the criminal in some form. It was certainly corporeal, in that it focused on the body as the receptor of punishment, where the modern prison, while holding the body hostage, was more oriented toward the psychological - the more generalized thesis stating that the punishment moved from the body to the soul.

The public executions and humiliations were too costly politically to go on. It was such a brutal display of sovereign power that they sometimes lead to revolts and riots if there was a broad base of support for the criminal or he was believed to be innocent by a percentage of the population.

When reform began, they didn't move to a prison system immediately, and it wasn't done for any humanitarian reasons. Rather, it came from a sense that the punishment had to be more even, and the belief that only then would it carry the weight that discipline must have.

Now we get to the interesting part, which deals with this concept of discipline. Foucault believes that discipline didn't really emerge as a value or construct until the 18th and 19th centuries, emerging in tandem with the new economy of industry.

Part of this creation of discipline was putting people into roles, jobs they do that keep the machinations of industry and economy running, cogs if you will. Roles are very clearly defined, and straying from those roles is seen as deviant.
The goal is the creation of what Foucault terms "docile bodies" who can fit into roles and structured environments such as: classrooms, factory jobs, military roles, etc. Predictability.

Okay, okay, where was I going with this...oh yes. What I really want to take away from Foucault's thesis is that he believes the concepts of Prison, of Discipline, and of Punishment, crept their way into our entire institutional structure, into all of these entities that encourage sameness and uniformity. There is a tendency to create orthodoxy, in line with the sovereignty, which in turn creates delinquency, which heretofore had not existed.

When there exists an institution that has no defined orthodoxy, no standard by which to compare and create a delinquency, it is the modern social equivalent of a vacuum which must be filled. And whomever fills that vacuum is handsomely rewarded with the support of the bourgeoisie.

Of course the creation of an orthodoxy will favor the clearly defined structure (harmony, rhythm, swing) over any kind of disorder (free), as it is difficult to define roles in the latter, while the former creates a very tidy, clean sense of discipline. Have I taken this idea too far?

Okay, now I've officially lost my train of thought. Perhaps I will indulge myself and ramble more later.

There's a nice interview with Peter Gordon of Thirsty Ear Recordings up on AAJ, talking about the industry, the music, and the birth of the Blue Series that Matthew Shipp and Mr. Gordon have cultivated.

I'm always appreciative of people who are documenters of the music and who release recordings whose artistic potential is inherently greater than its commercial potential. I guess potential isn't the right word there - I'd like to believe that the commercial potential is huge, but the commercial reality isn't remarkable.
A few quotes I like from the interview:

"If there’s a problem with music and jazz in particular today, it’s that [jazz] is caught up in form and structure. And that should come later, after you’ve done the innovation. If we start with form and structure then you can’t ever get beyond that—it becomes your prison. What we encourage at Thirsty Ear is to just let it go."

"We have our great masters and no one can escape our big masters—it’s like a quicksand we fall into. You have to force innovation because it’s not promoted as greatness. If you look at the essence of jazz—that’s the original punk rock back in the day. These guys are the bad boys, these are the guys that were saying “screw you” to music, doing their late night sessions and cutting the cloth in a different way. [Jazz] has become so institutionalized it’s become antithetical to its original roots."

"Jazz doesn’t succeed because it’s not in the common culture. The common culture is about today not about yesterday—yesterday is history. And if jazz wants to be alive and it needs to be alive, it needs to relevant and it can’t be relevant if you’re always tipping the masters of fifty years ago. It can only be in historical society then. The masters are great and the masters will never be topped and that’s precisely the problem—they never will be topped. So let’s try something new! Let’s try something fresh."

Emphases mine.

More later....