Recently in jazz Category
There are amusing animals—ducks come to mind—and there are amusing words, words I just like, and one of them is "busker." You've probably seen a busker, even if you didn't know it—buskers are musicians who stand on the street to perform. They usually have a hat or guitar case open in front of them, and people put in money if they're so moved. Most buskers aren't that great, frankly, but sometimes you can be amazed. I saw a very cool gypsy-klezmer band called Gadji-Gadjo playing on the street in Montreal once, and years before, also in Montreal, I saw a group of Andean pan-pipe players in traditional costumes. I don't want to listen to that for hours on end, but they were interestingly alien—when you see a group of colorfully garbed Peruvians piping away on a city street, you feel like they might as well have dropped from the moon, and you can't help but check it out for a minute. Then there was the time in Washington that I heard a kid on the street playing drums on those white plastic containers they use for construction materials and the like, and he was really good too. You just have to listen for a few seconds, and sometimes you'll be surprised at the music you can hear for free.
Joni Mitchell was a busker once, before she was famous. Can you imagine? You're walking down the street in Toronto, and here's this young woman on the sidewalk playing guitar and singing, and she just happens to be one of the greatest artists of her generation. Maybe she wasn't then what she would become; maybe she was mostly a kid who sang and played folk songs better than average. But maybe she already had that enchanting poetry in her, and it was there, on the street, not a commodity, but a phenomenon before you, as mysterious and magical as the northern lights.
Or maybe not. They did an experiment a few years ago—the Washington Post sent the famous violinist Joshua Bell into a subway station to play and see if anyone would stop and listen. Few people did, and the columnist Gene Weingarten reacted by basically saying people are pigs. Me, I pretty much think people are pigs too, but I'd be willing to give them a pass on the Joshua Bell in the subway question. Of 1,097 people, seven stopped to listen, and one recognized him. First of all, most people aren't that crazy about classical music. Second, there's a smaller percentage that have a good enough ear to tell an outstanding player from a merely competent one. Seven out of 1,097 isn't bad, actually. It's more than I'd have guessed. And third, a subway station is, by definition, a place you go the hell away from as quickly as you can. Very few people go there ready to be enchanted and you can hardly blame them for that.
All this is a lengthy preamble to the latest news—I suppose that I'm a busker myself, now. I offered my services playing piano in front of one of my town's art galleries during October's First Friday art stroll. And when I told the bass player in the trio about it, he wanted to busk too, and when the drummer heard he signed up as well. So the other night we lugged our stuff in front of the gallery, strung all the wires, and started playing. For a joke, I put the bass case in front of the drums, opened it, and threw a few bills in.
There weren't as many people out that night as there sometimes are, because the local creek was flooding, but there were enough. The evening was crisply cool, pleasantly autumnal, with clear skies that went from blue to indigo to black as we played. Passersby would come into our sphere and their faces would light up—not, I think, because we're so awesome, but at least in part because you just don't hear jazz much on the street or anywhere, really, these days. Also, there was another busker up the street singing and playing guitar who served as a foil for us and made us sound good by comparison. He had a powerful public-address system, certainly, but his sense of pitch and his taste in music were much weaker. He sang songs by Journey and the Monkees, for Christ's sake, in a way that hurried people down the sidewalk to where we were, sort of like the beaters who chase the tiger toward the hunter's elephant.
At any rate, people would smile, stop, applaud, say nice things, and in several instances they dropped a dollar on the velvet lining of the bass case. Each time I looked over at the drummer, who happens to be an architect, grinning and shaking my head at how funny and strange life is, with strangers dropping a dollar in front of three middle-aged men with houses and day jobs and all, but that's busking, isn't it? They aren't paying you a dollar so much as they're paying you a sincere compliment, and even if we thought it was funny we thought it was awfully nice, too. People who were dining al fresco across the street strolled over to say they liked the music, and again, we were flattered.
And a singer the bass player knew stopped by to see us, and she sang some tunes with us and was great, which just made it all the better. It struck me how she was singing on the sidewalk, for free, simply because she liked to sing and was good at it. It was refreshing—it's the kind of thing that makes you think the human race isn't entirely awful.
The folks at the gallery kept sending us glasses of wine to keep our spirits up, and when we were done and packed up, we divided up the dollars we'd earned and then retired to a bar to eat and drink and have a convivial time. We had fun, everyone agreed. And we felt, if not exactly paid, certainly well enough compensated. I just may be a busker again some time. I probably won't play in the subway, or in the lobby of a burning building, say, but if you pick your time and place—I'm talking to you, Mr. Weingarten—people can, in fact, be pretty appreciative.
I'd been aware of the name all my life, but that was all; it hovered on the edge of my known world, since the name itself is distinctive. And the name suggested a singer who has some sort of schtick, like HIldegarde's gloves. But that was it, for all my life until now.
And then two people I play music with had a brief conversation, just a couple of sentences, about Blossom Dearie, so I began checking her out. She's often described in very misleading ways, I can tell you. They call her voice "girlish," "wispy," "small" even verging on squeaky, they say. The former New Yorker jazz critic Whitney Balliett once said that "without a microphone it would not reach the second floor of a doll's house"—clever enough, I will admit, but not a statement that tells you what Blossom Dearie would sound like if you were on the first floor, listening to her.
Most damningly, her voice is often called an "acquired taste." Well, I listened to her and acquired the taste instantly, deeply—I fell in love, if you want to know the truth. The clip below is from the early Sixties, by the way, not the Fifties, but it's pretty representative of what she was doing in the early part of her career. Maybe you'll fall in love too:
Well? Was that magical? Are you in love yourself? She was born in the Twenties in a small town in the Catskills, and she said in interviews that she took "Surrey" at a more relaxed pace than was typical because she remembered seeing buggies going by in her youth. Not that rural roots impaired her hipness much: She studied classical piano but was drawn to jazz in her teens, and went to New York, where she made a name for herself playing piano and singing. Then she went to France after the war and made a name for herself there too, then came back and was invited to make albums by Norman Granz, who ran one of the leading jazz labels. She sang the fast songs with a carefree verve that would give Ella a run for her money, and the ballads—well, I've never heard anyone so affecting, so real, so full of feeling. No other singer. Ever. That's just how I feel. And it must also be said that she comps—accompanies herself—brilliantly, and takes a hell of an intelligent, well-crafted solo now and then. And the other thing that comes through is how smart and fun and deeply cool she is. Well—was, actually. She died last year. But she performed to adoring crowds in supper clubs and concerts into 2006, and she did songs on Schoolhouse Rock, and she did a lot of recording all her life. I could have heard her live, if I'd known. I feel bad about that. But I know about her now. My favorite stuff is from the Fifties. Check it out; you may acquire the taste yourself.
It's not that easy to learn an instrument after childhood, but I sure tried. I practiced all the time, and took lessons. One teacher was a phenomenal musician, but as time went on I came to have some doubts about his approach to teaching, and I wasn't so sure about his approach to life either. The teaching was pure technique, no songs or anything. Scales, chords, sight reading, lots of other elements of music, but no actual music. I asked him when I'd start playing songs, and he thought about it, and said in about two years.
It was hard to argue with him—he was a prickly, irascible person. We were talking in his driveway one day—he lived with his parents—and the family dog came cringing up to him, and he kicked it hard. It stayed by his feet, whining. He looked down—there was some of the dog's fur stuck in his sole. "F---er got hair on my boot," he said. And kicked the dog again.
For sight-reading practice he gave me a book from Bela Bartok's beginning piano series "Mikrokosmos." I'm no expert on musical theory, but from what I've read, Bartok didn't care much one way or the other about tonality. Beethoven and Mozart are tonal, and so is almost every form of music people actually like to listen to. After hearing a Bartok chamber piece one time, I remarked to a musician acquaintance that I just couldn't figure out how to enjoy the piece. He furrowed his brow, thinking. "I don't think it's meant to be enjoyed," he said. He didn't elaborate, but I supposed that he meant the music was an intellectual exercise to which we were to listen in respectful puzzlement. Atonal music provokes that response among most people, if it gets listened to at all. If you haven't heard anyone going around lately whistling tunes by Anton Webern or Alban Berg, believe me, there's a reason for that.
Anyway, I hated the Bartok stuff. It might as well have been random notes. I didn't enjoy it, certainly, and it wasn't all that great for sight-reading practice because I literally could not be sure I was playing the right notes. I said so, and the teacher predictably snarled at me: "Ya want me to give you baby stuff?" I said no. But one day I called him and said I didn't want to take lessons from him any more. He sounded like he was going to cry, said I had a strong attitude toward practicing, but we parted company. A friend saw him in a bar afterward and said the teacher was calling me unpleasant names. Not long after that I was told that he had dropped dead of a heart attack. I sifted my feelings to see if I felt bad about it, and I didn't. I kept learning, and eventually I was good enough to play in Top 40 bands. We'd play jazz for the dining crowd. I spent six nights a week for a couple of years in bars, but eventually the raffish fun of it wore thin and I got out of the business—I realized that I was wasting my life playing bad music for bad money for bad people. But I kept a piano at home.
Life went on, and for long stretches I wouldn't sit down and play more than three or four times a year. But in the past couple of years I've been playing a lot more, practicing every day, and it's coming along. I get together with a bass player friend and people don't run out of the room or anything when we play. And lately I've been practicing my sight reading with easy classical music, because I like the classical at least as well as jazz.
Yesterday I went out and bought more easy piano books, the easiest I could find. Baby stuff, in short. It's what I need to sight-read. You need practice in seeing groups of notes at a time, and reading ahead of what you're playing, and seeing the patterns so you're not trying to read individual notes.
And the music is pretty. This isn't the made-up stuff from the instructional books, you know, "Dance of the Leprechauns" and so forth. These are simple melodies with simple harmonies, but they're also original music by Mozart and Beethoven and Haydn and that gang. Pretty little melodies, and it's nice, awfully nice, to sit down and actually play them. They're like music-box tunes—some cheerful, others wistful, all pretty. And if you really listen, there's something about it, something profound. Haydn, for instance, wrote lots of pretty little tunes. But if you read about him, you'll see he had a pretty hard life, with much that he could have chosen to be bitter about. But instead of kicking the dog, he made pretty music. Baby stuff, some call it. But it's charming. There's delicacy and tenderness in it, and often a trace of poetic sorrow. It's fragile. vulnerable, and your heart goes out to it. And it's meant to be enjoyed, at least, and I do.
The cat came down and installed himself on my lap. The oracles murmured their cryptic phrases, smoke swirled in the crystal ball. And some music started playing in my mind, and if memory served it was one of Bach's two-part inventions. Stately, beautiful, as real and right as the stars in the skies. It's a good thing to have this in my mind, I thought. And I thought of a night two and a half years ago:
6/14/06
A Hole in the Head
My excuse for not blogging yesterday? Sinus trouble. I know, I know, there've been people in iron lungs who composed 67 symphonies and so forth and so on. But I just felt run-down and draggy. Today I'm a bit perkier, and thinking about the concept of "tastiness." Certain musicians will describe another musician's performance as "tasty." The one word connotes a great deal: crispness, economy, effectiveness. A tasty solo, let's say, is played with clear articulation and good rhythmic drive, it's done with confidence, and it uses the most effective sorts of musical phrases to generate an emotional response in the listener. Tasty stuff is often up-tempo—the adjective is rarely applied to minor-key, sad songs, no matter how effectively done—but typically it's not a display of lightning speed, and pointless displays of technical prowess are the opposite of tasty almost by definition. Tasty works, in a word.I was thinking about this because I saw a musician named John Pizzarelli at a jazz festival last week, and I really enjoyed him. Didn't know much about him, just that he's the son of the famous father Bucky, and when he started up I thought maybe he was a cynical sort, because he did a number of swing-style tunes and I thought he was capitalizing on the swing-dancing fad of some years ago. (See below for how much of a trend-follower I am.) But he was good. And the solos, all of them, were tasty. As his set went on, I became more and more impressed. He was smooth, well dressed, practiced patter, all that. But he cared about the music, and about its communicating effectively, far more than many of the other acts who pretended to a greater seriousness and dedication. If music doesn't make you feel something, if it's just the same styles that were fresh 30 years ago that you're rehashing decades later with no real inspiration, well, that ain't tasty. Pizzarelli and crew made you feel something. He did a lot of Brazilian music toward the end of his set, and it just washed over us all, sitting there on the grass in the city park, the night sky overhead and the buildings surrounding us. You just felt a little closer to Rio, for a few minutes, and when he finished I joined the rest of the crowd in honestly clapping and cheering because I wanted him to know he'd done a great job. He acknowledged the applause, of course, but just before he left he looked up, away past the park, where the moon was rising over the buildings to the east. He seemed lost in thought. "Music is good," he said pensively—into the microphone, of course, because we heard it, but mainly, it seemed, to himself.
Warm night, then. Cold night now, the town still sleeping, the cat still on my lap. There's a piano at the other end of the sofa, with books of music on it. I've been playing a lot lately. As Mr. Pizzarelli says, music is good, winter or summer. You wake in the night, your heart not entirely at ease, but if there's a nice little cat on your lap, and snow lies on the lawns and rooftops and sidewalks, and Bach melodies pipe in the background of your mind, somehow your own circumstances otherwise don't seem to matter as much. Ups and downs, like the weather. Music is good, and life is beautiful. It just is. And that's the news from Lake Wobegon, gang.
One of my pet peeves—and if you don't air a pet peeve now and then, you're not really blogging—is when people say the Fifties were conformist. Just like that, they say it. Everyone conformed and was bored and Ike's face smiled like a full moon over the decade and nothing of interest happened. My guess is that the people who say this derive their knowledge of history and the arts from Nick at Nite. So as a public service, I'm going to start a series of examples of not-entirely-conformism from that much- and wrongly maligned decade. Example the first:
