From: wildman@athena.mit.edu (Timothy Worsley)
Subject: Re: Keith Jarrett in Sun (8/16) NYT
Reply-To: eprice@sql.sybase.com
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 01:37:47 GMT

charless@cory.Berkeley.EDU (Charles R. Sullivan) writes:

>An article by Keith Jarret appears in today (Sunday)'s New York
>Times Arts and Leisure section (8/16/92).  Since it will probably be
>discussed at length on the net, and since I, for one, don't want to
>type the whole long thing in, I suggest going and buying a copy
>before they are sold out. :-)

I type fast (although sometimes not accurately on this &^%^&$^% VT220
keyboard; sorry for any mistakes):

Try to imagine the first musician.  He was not playing for an
audience, or a market, or working on his next recording, or touring
with his show, or working on his image.  He was playing out of need,
out of his need for music.  Every year the number of musicians who
remember why they play music in the first place gets smaller, and the
greatest loss from this handful was Miles Davis, who died last year.
His death, among other things, prompts these remarks.

More recordings are being made than ever before (nowadays a musician
has to record to be taken seriously), but there is less meaningful
music.  We have substituted quantity for quality, and to make up for
the lack of real "voices" on these recordings and to keep people
thinking there are alternatives, new categories are constantly being
invented.  I suppose people say to themselves, "Well, maybe this
alternative will be better than the last.  We're tired of that last
one."  Of course they are.  There was no music there.  We all need
variety sometimes, but when every channel has nothing, shouldn't we notice?

Music has nutrtional value, and without artists who need the music
(and therefore have a "voice"), there will be no value in it.

Listeners are swindled by the music industry's insatiable need to stay
alive no matter what the quality of the music.  If it can find
talented young players, the industry will tell them how great they are
and give them lots of money to keep them satisfied (more correctlly,
buy off their souls, if they have any left).  We must remember that
music is not the music industry.

It's impossible to address the jazz category directly without seeming
divisive, since the media are saturated with only a few names, names
of musicians who seem to have taken over jazz.  This is only a media
reality; it has nothing to do with the music.  Unless radio,
television, newspapers and magazines stop falling over like dominoes,
happy to have a "marketable" story, we will see two separate cultures:
the popular culture and the underground culture (the underground for
the music, the popular for the hype).  Wasn't there a time when
producers became producers because they loved the music (and not
another five-letter M-word)?

Music seems to have slipped out of the hands of the true makers and
into the hands of the producers and promoters, although the promoters
now include the musicians themselves, who seem to love to dress up and
watch themselves in the mirror.  The craft of building a resonating
instrument has fallen into the hands of toy manufacturers, and the
music itself has taken on the character of Disneyland; there are New
Age Land, World Music Land, Fusion (Con-fusion) Land and others.  The
original musician ain't got a chance here.  In fact, human beings
cannot even survive here: there is no food.

*

This is a good place to mention that "Do your own thing" came from
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who actually said, "Do your thing, and I shall
know you."  In other words, you reveal yourself to others through what
you do.  Emerson's statement was not meant to be a kind of carte
blance to follow our shallowest whims; it's not about life style or
fashion or technique or casual choices.  His statement contains a
warning: I will only recognize you if you have your voice; I will not
recognize you otherwise.  Listeners should be more discriminating
(since record companies are not).  Musicians should be less accepting
of the new and, instead, check their own credentials.  John Coltrane
could not have led a television band, and J. S. Bach would not have
appeared on talk shows or showed up at photo sessions to promote his
new harpsichord concerto.  New Age music is Jell-O, world music is a
hoax, and avant-jazz (whatever that means) doesn't exist.  (Please
listen to Ornette Coleman, guys!  There is natural intelligence and
nutrition.)  Hiding behind a new category is the only way most of this
music would ever get into stores.

We live in an age in which only results seem to count, not processes.
An age of objects and and productions, a visual culture of images,
television, speechwriters; a culture that thinks it can create
security with insurance, lawyers and banks.  But life is liquid, not
solid; a process, not a result; the present, not the future.  Ezra
Pound once said: "Nothing counts save the quality of the affection."
Think of this, think of Miles (not Miles's image, his music), and then
think of the rest of the music world.  Where is the music?

Music isn't categories or technology.  It isn't the result of the
market or an image or a theory.  It's not productions or records.
It's not even talent.  (An old jazz player--I think it might have been
Lester Young--said to a young player he had just heard: "You really
can play, but what's your story?")  It is the individual voice,
present to itself, that needs to be heard.  We need to hear the
process of a musician working on himself.  We don't need to hear who
is more clever with synthesizers.  Our cleverness has created the
world we live in, which in many ways we're sorry about.

We need to be smart, as listeners and musicians.  Let's not allow
self-appointed experts to tell us what jazz is when we can hear in
their music that they have no voice.  Let's not let the appearance of
names and faces over and over in the media make us think that these
are the forces in music at present.  Let's remember that music is not
the music industry.

*

The original musician was not looking for his image; he as using his
voice to learn about the world.  He knew the world to be liquid (ie,
not made up of discrete entities).  We see the world as "bits" of
information, either/or, yes or no, digital.  We seem to have no desire
to experience time: it's either 9:19 or 9:20, never almost 9:20.  So
we think that time is a straight line and, eventually, that everything
has edges.  Something stops here, something starts there.  But the
natural world is essentially circular; our heartbeats are not like a
click-track or a drum machine; there are different kinds of time, and
we don't only die when we are dead.

Life is a process.  We're losing the concept of "becoming," because
this, too, is circular.  We have a world in which one "bit" is
reaplaced by another, and the thing we recognize as "value" is our
chase to the next edge, the next "bit."  We hear "bits" of others'
voices instead of real voices.  We hear synthesized sounds ("Waiter, a
side order of natural overtones, please"), market strategies,
position-paper excuses, well-dressed images, travelling-salesmen
(using ethnic musicians to seel their wares) and planetary spokesmen.
We hear young neo-pseudo-be-boppists fresh from the convention,
nuevo-string-quartetists in Armani-wear, computer freaks, deadheads
who succeed by calling themselves the Deadheads, born-again
everythings, lottery winners, opera singers (I don't care if they are
black) trying to sing black spirituals (even I am embarrassed, and I'm
white).  We hear pianists trying to play "acoustic" again, after
trading in their bodies for volume controls and their souls for wires.

We hear jazz musicians dabbling in world music and American Indian
music, Minimalists filling as many sheets of paper as they can before
they run out of "idea," industry reps dressed as players, players
dressed as movie stars, indeed becoming movie stars (their next
"bit"?), black musicians without soul and countless "studio" reading
newspapers in the control rooms (and getting paid handsomely for it,
you might say being paid for their patience).  We hear all this, but
where is that voice, that original voice, that individual, primal
need?  Where is Miles?  Where is the music?

Whatever clothes Miles wore, it was always Miles in those clothes.
Whatever noise was around him, Miles still played from that need, his
sound coming from that silence, the vast, liquid, edgeless silence
that existed before the first musician played the first note.  We need
this silence, because *that's* where the music is.

-Ed (not Tim), eprice@sql.sybase.com (not wildman@...)

PS: As a fanatic about Jarrett's music, and a frequent apologist for
his behavior and even his views, I have to admit that I didn't really
understand this article.  Often when I did think I knew what he was
saying, I didn't agree with it.  Also, I would prefer that he would
talk more about what he loves rather than what he hates--surely there
must be some new music that he finds worthwhile?  I'm a little
confused as to what audience he was writing this for: people who love
music will always find it even if the "industry" does not encourage it
(and has it *ever*?)  People who don't will not care anyway, and will
certainly not understand his arguments.  Maybe I'm feeling more
optimistic than usual, because I just picked up my first issue of
Cadence and sent in a poverty-inducing order... :-) Thanks to everyone
here that recommended them!