Sorry if this doesn't fit my blog "beauty and inspiring" theme but I can't help myself.

If we have some better music in these crazy videos, would more people believe this stuff? C'mon guys, if this looks unprofessional and sounds like some beginning film composer student did it on a DX-7, how can anyone take you seriously, except people who already believe you? Please, is there some birther believing composer out there who help can them out? Free bumper sticker...

Thank you Rachel Maddow for calling them out...

POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 8:06 AM

Last week I read the Daily Beast article, "America's New Racial Reality" about what is happening in the so called post-racial era of Barack Obama. I was reminded of that article as I read the comments section of a post a few days ago by Matt at Twenty Dollars, "Just Make Us Look Cool", in which Vijay Iyer writes,  

"so you seem to be highlighting this phenomenon wherein white people wield the privilege and power to insult the disempowered, underfunded genre of jazz in all-white, multimillion-dollar hollywood films and tv shows (thereby empowering millions of mostly white viewers to do the same); to gleefully flaunt their own ignorance and hatred of this music; and to revel in the degradation of people who know or care about it.

this suggests to me that maybe this “coolness” problem is really about the freedom of white americans to publicly loathe jazz. maybe the music is a reminder of black american achievement and therefore of white guilt, so it is just easier and more satisfying for white americans to categorically, if unconsciously, reject it."

Jeff Brock, also in the comments, counters with, 
 
"To categorize the rejection of “jazz” as an act of “white america” is silly" and goes on with, "After all, 'jazz' audiences are predominantly white." 

While I do agree with much of what Jeff goes on to say about the topic of why jazz isn't "cool" and more widely embraced in the wider world (not going to get into the discussion about what is jazz, which is another can of worms), frankly I don't find the possibility of some subconscious sub rosa bias "silly" at all. It isn't what is fully going on with the rejection of jazz, but that doesn't dismiss it as an ingredient in the possible causes. With the Tea Party "movement" and Joe Wilson's outburst, it is like I said earlier in September in a comment on Andrew Durkin's Jazz: The Music of Unemployment,  

"Until the Obamaphobes have some kind of 'intervention-like' revelation and come to question what they hear and believe on their own (and for many, certainly not all, to own up to how much race has to do with it all), they will continue down the road believing more and more illogical and specious arguments."

And should add, possibly act on those arguments. As I see it now, in the climate of today's American new reality maybe the unspoken and unlikely now seems quite utterable and probable. So Vijay's postulate, to me, seems worth considering and exploring. Could "I don't like jazz" be a some kind of coded phrase representing some kind of bias, like the "I just don't like him" or "there is something about him I don't like" answers that some voters gave about Obama during the primaries? I don't want to get into any detailed, point-by-point Glenn Beck Da Vinci Code-like analysis of what is behind the words, for no one can know for sure except the person. Maybe more people do feel like they just don't understand it or are not part of the club, as Nancy said in the comments to the Twenty Dollar post ("I have to say that the reason jazz isn’t cool is because the jazz nerds have effectively shut the rest of us out of it. The way jazz fans fawn over and talk about jazz makes it unwelcome to any casual fan") but I can see that unconscious bias could also be there too. Because the people in the majority often do not see (or can even imagine) that some of biases are systemic and deeply ingrained. No matter how sophisticated, urbane, and fancied suited Wynton Marsalis and the J@LC crowd are, to some in middle and rural America (and yes, even in cities) they are no different than the baggy jeaned, white t-shirted "urban" youth seen hanging out on street corners. Where does something like that come from? It is certainly deep rooted. It's much like a thought experiment I heard about years ago: if you were a two dimensional being, you could never really see or understand the third dimension-much like we can't really "see" or wrap our brains around a fourth dimension. Oh sure, you could hint at it and speculate on it, but to really know it and see it. No. So to some people, believing the possibility that there is bias and prejudges in people (or that those "others" are like you), is like trying to see that fourth dimension. Often, inconceivable!

I'm more inclined to see these issues with jazz, though, as one of economics and class, rather than race. And it certainly has to do with where the power (and hence the money) is. While today much of urban or black and Latino culture and music is fairly mainstream, the power or control in what people see, hear, and for the most part do, is not in the hands of minorities. A small group of tastemakers and insiders lets us know what is cool by what is covered, advertised, or showed. How many minorities are part of this group? Not many. Why?

I tend to agree with Vijay in an earlier comment in the same Twenty Dollar post, that if you threw more money and cultural influence behind jazz or, I believe, at least had more minorities in positions of control you would see more brown, black, and yellow faces in the mainstream, which hopefully would lead to a rise in jazz coverage and thereby more people identifying with jazz, and those that make it, and feeling part of the fraternity. Where is the modern day Johnny Carson, who back in the day at the Tonight Show helped to give millions of non-fans a least a little exposure to hardcore jazzers such as Freddie Hubbard, Dizzy, MJQ, Miles, Ella, Sarah Vaughn by booking them to perform and interviewing them? what would happen if Oprah decided to do a Music Club, like her book club and feature people like Robert Glasper, Maria Schneider, Gretchen Parlato or Vijay (or even some contemporary classical types)? what if Jay Leno did something similar? or if there was some icon like Bono or some other younger adventurous, hip and cool artist/personality/star that could host a new web or TV program featuring different strands of jazz and other creative musicians from other genres, like David Sanborn did in the late 80s with Sunday Night?

Certainly, just throwing money at the jazz exposure problem is not a viable solution because no amount of money will help if people just don't like or want to hear the product or producer (Mitt Romney, I'm talking about you) or the problem is too complicated for simple solutions (urban education and the so called achievement gap). Money can help, but it won't solve the jazz (and classical) cultural relevance gap by itself. For the most part, people like what they already know, they live and associate (mostly) with people they already know or think they know because of similar backgrounds, and they are reluctant to break through that inertia of complacency. Add to that, if the makers don't allow the humanness to come through the music ("too cool for school" attitude) or help to find ways to make connections with the listeners they hope to have, then we deserve the cultural hinterlands. If you didn't grow up with jazz/new classical/whatever art music genre or enthusiastically guided to the music by someone you know and trust or have the openness to come to it on your own, how will you know of the beauty, excitement, mystery, fun, joy, sexiness that can be in the music if we don't help others see it? 

POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 11:31 PM

On this one year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, I just listened, on WNYC here in New York City, to a mesmerizing radio play about their fall. The Day That Lehman Died by Matthew Solon was produced by the BBC World Service along with WNYC. The play seemed to hark back to those long ago halcyon days of radio drama during the 1930's and 1940's. I found myself riveted and upon reflection, one thought, a reworking of Winston Churchill's famous speech during the Battle of the Bugle in 1940, keeps going through my mind after listening to the fascinating dramatization of the fall of the smartest guys in the room: Never was the distress of so many caused by so few.

POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 8:43 PM

It has been 8 years since the events of September 11, 2001 and recently I've been thinking about John Adams's, and subsequently my own, musical response to that day. John Adams in an interview originally posted on the New York Philharmonic website, talks about his trepidations when asked to write a work, "On the Transmigration of Souls", to have been performed almost exactly one year after the attacks of 9/11:

"I didn’t require any time at all to decide whether or not to do it. I knew immediately that I very much wanted to do this piece–in fact I needed to do it. Even though I wasn’t exactly sure what kind of a shape the music would take, I knew that the labor and the immersion that would be required of me would help answer questions and uncertainties with my own feelings about the event. I was probably no different from most Americans in not knowing how to cope with the enormous complexities suddenly thrust upon us. Being given the opportunity to make a work of art that would speak directly to people’s emotions allowed me not only to come to grips personally with all that had happened, but also gave me a chance to give something to others."

I started the composer group Pulse in May 2004 with an initial meeting of six other like-minded composers. From this initial fellowship gathering, all through that summer and fall, we worked on organizing our premiere performance to be that December. For that first performance, I knew I wanted my piece to be based on 9/11, but was unsure of what direction to take. Like John Adams stated, it felt too big and too raw an event to process my feelings enough in order to create something decent let alone meaningful. After a few sketches and false starts, which looking back now, tried to do and say too much, I decided that the best way for me to approach the composition was to reflect on my own experiences that day. To create something with simple and direct expression that did not tackle 9/11 directly, but tangentially; something not exactly programmatic but still able to convey the story of an unexpected pulchritudinous moment that day.

I was in Brooklyn at the time of the attacks, substitute teaching a high school math class at the Brooklyn International School, in a building next to and overlooking the Manhattan Bridge. I first noticed something was wrong when I casually looked out the window to see the usual bustling rush-hour car traffic flowing over the bridge was non-existent. Someone eventually came to the classroom I was in and said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Many of the students became visibly upset. I looked out the window again and where just a few minutes before no one or thing was coming over the bridge, now the bridge was beginning to fill with people streaming from Manhattan eastward across the roadway. The first tower had fallen before I had a chance, during my prep period, to run out onto the bridge toward Manhattan (just before the police stopped anyone from traveling westward) to see what was happening for myself. I reached the center of the bridge and could see the top of the second tower in flames. Less than a minute later the second tower, hauntingly silent and seemly in slow motion, imploded upon itself with audible gasps and cries of horror from the crowd which turned to look.

After retuning to the school, you can imagine that it was difficult to focus for the remainder of the school day. With people passing in front of the school, it was a constant reminder of the enormity of that morning's events. The fear and confusion was particularly palatable in the students. As the news coverage slowly uncovered the terrorist plot, this being a high school of all recent immigrants (many of whom were Muslim and wore Islamic veils and scarfs), it was hard not to control my own fears of what would happened to the students when school let out and they would have to pass through the crowd on their way to the subway. Despite the police presence, would they be blamed and suffer verbal or physical abuse from the understandably bewildered and upset crowd coming over the bridge? At the end of the day, many of the teachers, myself included, decided to walk with some of the students to the subway to make sure they were ok leaving the school.

Later in the early evening with two other friends, I was on a townhouse roof in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn surveying the entire lower Manhattan cityscape. I watched as a distant flickering mass seemed to be coming closer toward us from the World Trade Center site. At first it looked like a swarm of white butterflies, glittering in the evening sun, but as it got closer we realized that it was paper rising with the heat from the site and floating toward us from lower Manhattan. An immensely beautiful and ethereal sight, none of us spoke as the swarm came directly over us with some of the many pages from law books and computer printouts fluttering above and some landing all around the roof. We watched as the swarm passed over us and quietly continued farther into Brooklyn. No more than five minutes, this small and ephemeral moment, still resonated with me all those years and when I was ready, found outlet in my composition. Inspired by a short poem by Li Po, I wrote the text for my piece:

High in September's winds
Drifting white butterflies
Passing silently by
With a shadow of autumn in their eyes
we may never know

© Joseph C. Phillips Jr.

"The Spell of a Vanishing Loveliness" premiered at the inaugural concert of Pulse on December 1, 2004 and you can hear it here. The performance featured Amy Cervini (vocals), Sebastian Noelle (guitar), Jody Redhage (violoncello), Diana Herold (vibraphone), with me conducting. It was one of those moving performances where everyone in the audience and the musicians (including myself) were wrapped inside an all-encompassing bubble of the moment. After the piece ended and we were changing over to the next composer, Jody remarked "Did you feel that?" and indeed, the air seemed charged with something tangible and indescribable during and just after the performance (I realized had goosebumps during the end of the piece as the vibraphone and guitar drifted into their final nothingness). There was something magical and real about the performance with the events of 9/11 only three years removed and still so close to people's emotions. It still remains one of my most special musical memories so far in New York.

(photo by Marcy Begian at Pulse concert December 1, 2004)

POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 8:46 AM

A few weeks ago I came across these 1970's era Morton Feldman lectures at the University of Buffalo, where he taught for many years. These are short little audio gems, which are also transcripted. And while many fans of his music probably already know the background in the development of his style, hearing his slight New York lisp as he discusses Christian Wolff, John Cage, and "Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety" is still a fun listen.

POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 5:07 PM

After reading this disturbing New Yorker article about wrongful execution, it was good to know about there is a program in Texas to compensate and help wrongfully imprisoned inmates who are later exonerated. Not an excuse for all of the years these men spent behind bars but it is comforting to know that justice and fairness does live. Maybe Texas's generous program, and the cost to strapped tax-payers and governments, will make all prosecutors remember William Blackstone's principle "better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" and get things right BEFORE convicting.

POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 11:36 AM

While this has been a summer mixed with fun home projects, wonderful travels, and unexpectedly dolorous turns of life, I have been able to sit down and just listen to music at various points along the way. As mentioned in an earlier post, my summer began with a potpourri of CDs to go through. I've listened to all of them and immediately enjoyed a couple (Earl Greyhound, TV on the Radio), intrigued by some but still processing (Janelle Monáe, David Lang, Hans Rott) and not wholly satisfied by others (The Dallas Wind Symphony performance of Percy Granger's band music-love the source material, not so much all of the readings; some interpretations seem a bit mannered, stiff, or surprisingly considering Granger's music, flat). On my trip to the western part of the country last week, I was going through my iTunes library to listen to a few things I hadn't in a while and came across "Pilentze Pee" performed by the Bulgarian The National Radio And Television Chorus of Bulgaria (the so-called Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares). I first heard the song, one of my all-time favorites, years ago on one of my all-time favorite CDs: Late in the 20th Century: An Elektra/Nonesuch New Music Sampler.

Sampler.

From the Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary, a sampler is defined as "a decorative piece of needlework typically having letters or verses embroidered on it in various stitches as an example of skill" or "something containing representative specimens or selections." And how do you show a good "example of skill" in a sampler? Well like the mix tapes of yore, whose creation seems to be a lost art ("And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth."), it depends on the maker, the listener, and the purpose. Sometimes a sameness of style and tone is required, whereas sometimes vertiginous diversity is needed. But for samplers from record companies, a more utilitarian and obvious function is necessary: to get people interested in purchasing albums from artist on the sampler. And before there was a Napster (which for me, when I discovered it sometime after it was more widely known, was a music sampler--trying on different artists I read or heard about (Radiohead and Björk are two examples) before I needed to commit), a good radio station/show or a CD sampler was the way to do it. The Nonesuch sampler, which a few years after release spawned a Volume 2 that suffered the curse of the sequel, was a thrilling overview of music, that up to that time, I had little to no knowledge of. What was it like to experience for the first time John Coltrane, Le Sacre du Printemps, or Charlie Parker. I wondered if it was similar to my virgin listening encounter with the music on the CD.

Bought at Tower Records in 1987 when their CD section was a couple of small bins and the disc packaging was a profligate waste of cardboard called a longbox, Late in the 20th Century was among one of the handful of CDs I first owned, having just bought a CD player at the beginning of that year--one which I still have and still plays CDs, although the quartz display long ago went blind. (As an aside, it was an old Technics which had a great function that you didn't see much of in later years: an A/B button. You could specify a particular section of the CD to loop and repeat for as long as you wanted. I wished future CD players had had that as it was handy when learning saxophone solos like "Mr. Magic", the first I completely learned).

Anyway, I'm not sure why I bought the CD in the first place but it deserves this humble encomium for in those long ago, rapacious listening days of a beginning composer, the performances and compositions on Late in the 20th Century not only provided immense joys, ever protean surprises, and glorious inspiration, I now realize that they also were a palimpsest on which I started to slowly build my own musical voice and style upon. It was the trail head for many paths of musical discovery, of which I'm still traveling.

Track 1: "White Man Sleeps #1" by Kevin Volans performed by the Kronos Quartet from album White Man Sleeps
(love the energy of the piece, with it's loping, asymmetrical opening rhythm; I didn't buy the album, but was introduced to Kronos Quartet, of whom I did subsequently buy other albums)

Track 2: "The Chairman Dances" by John Adams performed by Edo de Waart and the San Francisco Symphony from the album The Chairman Dances
(upon reflection, this piece might have been why I bought the CD in the first place because I remember reading at the time something about the Nixon in China premiere in the paper. I think this was the first piece of John Adams I ever heard and this performance is still my favorite of one of my favorite pieces. Full of Gershwin-esque life and jazzy motion and a cinematic scope, it was a visceral combination and a lighthouse to a gestating composer groping his way in the musical fog. It was years later before I assimilated the lessons stolen (ahh...learnt) from the piece and over the years, it certainly lead me to padding Nonesuch's sales figures as I discovered (and bought) more and more works of John Adams)

Track 3: "Pilentze Pee" from Le Mysterie des Voix Bulgares
(I don't know what the words they are singing mean but I love all of those close intervals and otherworldly wailing and had to buy the CD)

Track 4: "Spillane (excerpt)" by John Zorn from Spillane
(my first auditory exposure to John Zorn after reading about him in downbeat (I actually had a subscription way back then); with it's flighty shape shifting between styles, as well as its' noir-ish voice over, I didn't listened to this piece too often, although it didn't turn me off to Zorn's work. I just didn't like this)

Track 5: "Hattie Wall" by Hamiet Bluiett performed by the World Saxophone Quartet on the album Dances and Ballads
(Hamiet's bari sax bass line just tears through you with the funk; got to hear this live at the 27 hour! Bang on a Can Marathon in 2007)

Track 6: "This New Generation" by Wayne Horvitz from the album This New Generation
(kind of an electronica lounge music with the cooing tenor saxophone and 80's drum machine and beat, I could see this on the soundtrack to Twin Peaks which premiered a few years after the CD)

Track 7: "Garota de Ipanema" by Antonio Carlos Jobim/Vinicius de Moraes performed by João Gilberto from the album João Gilberto Live in Montreux
(beautifully calm and moving reading with just João Gilberto and a guitar)

Track 8: "John Somebody (Part 1)" by Scott Johnson from album John Somebody
(got to love this fun piece for solo electric guitar and tape; "you know who's in New York, remember that guy, J...John Somebody, he was sorta...b")

Tracks 9 and 10: "Company (Part 1 and 2)" by Philip Glass performed by the Kronos Quartet from the album Kronos Quartet
(full of a quiet, yet almost romantic yearning tone, this is still one of my favorite Philip Glass pieces)

Track 11: "Ionisation" by Edgar Varese performed by The New Jersey Percussion Ensemble from album Percussion Music
(someone needs to arrange this into a drum line feature for marching band or drum and bugle corp)

Track 12: "Chohun and Gyamadudu (excerpt)" from album Dances of the World
(this track recorded in Ghana grooves, but was always one track I skipped as it never grabbed me like some others)

Track 13: "Tonggeret" composed and performed by Idjah Hadidjah from the album Tonggeret
(love this song and even after all of these years, Idjah's voice still drips with passion for me. Like the song from the Bulgarian choir, I don't know the meaning of what she is singing, but it moves me every time)

Track 14: "Drumming (Part 4)" by Steve Reich performed by Steve Reich and Musicians from the album Drumming
(although this wasn't my first exposure to his music, it was one of my early experiences. And maybe interestingly knowing how other later Steve Reich compositions affected me, this was one of those tracks I really didn't listen to; Drumming is much better to embrace live)

POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 1:00 AM