What is Jazz? (or How Do We Know We Know What We Know?)

The following is a letter I wrote to the host of a CBC radio program. I do this with increasing frequency, as age morphs me into Abraham Simpson. CBC radio makes me want to rant, and my thoughts about people's opinions (the public at large) got me thinking about why we rant. I think "Why We Rant" could be a good serialized blog topic. Apparently, I am a perfectionist, which is why I procrastinate. Truthfully, I'd rather stare down a deadline until the clock is just a tick from zero and then jujutsu the thing into submission. I think Douglas Adams had the best quote about procrastination, or more precisely, dropping the ball. In no way do I condone dropping the ball.

Here we go.

Hi _____:

Something is really bugging me about the show I’m listening to, for the second time. It’s your program about all the music that you don’t have time to put on your show and it’s being re-broadcast during the summer. You’re telling of the negotiation you had with ____ over a piece of “jazz” music (justification for these quotation marks follows). I believe you told ____ that you found this particular piece, a rendering of Summertime (or perhaps jazz in general) “difficult”. It’s the use of “jazz” as a modifier on your program that is troubling me and I’m going to explain why and, while in the process, hopefully clarify for you what should and shouldn’t, reasonably, be referred to as jazz.

I am Canadian and I am a musician. I had a successful career as a freelance musician in Edmonton, before leaving to pursue an international teaching career in high school chemistry. It’s not my intent to fill this space with my CV; I want you to understand that as a musician, a scholar and an educator, I’ve played, studied and taught jazz music and my thoughts are relevant to the discussion “what is and is not jazz?”

First and foremost, jazz is improvisational music. I assume you were sincere in your espoused ignorance of jazz: improvisation, as it relates to jazz, is the spontaneous composition of a melody over a pre-established sequence of chords. Improvisation does not include the playing of a pre-existing part, written or memorized. This ideal isn’t always strictly met, but it is, strictly, always the goal of jazz improvisation. The rendering of Summertime on your show had no improvisational element, at least as far as the saxophone was concerned. Often, we will describe a piece of music as “jazz” simply because a saxophone is present and playing over a harmonic progression we recognize from a Broadway show or a pop song.

Secondly, virtuosic skill is a prerequisite to jazz improvisation. To compose in real time, the very essence of jazz, requires that the performer not be limited by the technical demands of the instrument they are playing. Young jazz musicians spend their early careers (a Gladwellian 10,000+ hours) pushing back the threshold of their limitations as instrumentalists and spontaneous composers, thereby allowing the technical demands of the music to fall away and the music to emerge, unfettered and unique to that moment.

Virtuosity is an absolute necessity for a musician to execute a jazz performance, but not necessarily to interpret a piece of music. For example, compare Howlin’ Wolf to Oscar Peterson, one a master of interpretation and the other a master of execution, each clearly a genius, given the extent of their work. Howlin’ Wolf’s virtuosity manifests in his interpretation of a song, not in his technical execution, whereas the opposite can be said for Oscar Peterson (the subject of a Sunday Edition episode following Oscar Peterson’s passing). Specifically, the rendering of Summertime on your show was an interesting interpretation of an existing written melody, but it is my opinion that it falls short on execution. Listen to any current Mike Murley or Brad Turner CD as a benchmark for execution in jazz. Interpretation alone doth not jazz make.

I’m going to end my letter here: any further writing will become too analytical and too subjective. I know your mandate is not to play Howlin’ Wolf or Oscar Peterson, though perhaps to showcase those aspiring to those heights. The version of Summertime that you played does not meet the standards I outlined above, so it should not be classified as jazz. And once it’s no longer qualified as jazz, it cannot meet your burden of “jazz is difficult”. I think the performance has many of the hallmarks of Punk music. Maybe that is how it is better classified?

Finally, there are hundreds of bonafide jazz artists in Canada who have invested thousands of hours writing and performing their own music, relevant music, fully deserving of wider recognition on “________”: _______ and _______ are two that immediately come to mind, but there are many, many more. These two musicians are brilliant players and composers who, besides not having been enshrined in Wikipedia, don’t receive the national recognition of Mike Murley, Rich Underhill, Kevin Turcotte or Ingrid Jensen.

And then I signed off.

Two final words: Bach/improvisation. Bach was able to improvise over the liturgical music of the day because he had expert knowledge and virtuosic technique on the organ. Bach also wrote church music, over which he would improvise new melodies to create his fugues, a method analogous to the great jazz player/composers: Horace Silver and Hank Mobley are but two examples who don't get the acknowledgment they deserve. Were Bach’s fugal compositions jazz? No, and I think a little logic is necessary to illuminate why not: all jazz music is improvisatory, but not all improvisatory music is jazz.

Now you can abuse my opinion.

Thanks to Emilia for holding me accountable: this was the best I could do ... for now.

postscript: I have not read any Malcolm Gladwell; a colleague of mine relates his work to me over coffee. I don't read Dan Brown either. Malcolm Gladwell is a journalist, not a scientist, just as Dan Brown is a novelist, not a historian.

Happy Day

Hiller scrutinized the label, bristling with umlauts, graves and serifs, and failed, again, to discern their meaning. Each morning followed this same progression: Hiller would pour out the contents of the “Happy Day” box into a glass and linger over the incomprehensible labeling before crumpling up the container and throwing it onto the summit of recyclables that was mounting in the corner of the kitchen. Buttressed by the refrigerator on one side and a kitchen cabinet on the other, the burgeoning mass of land-fill-to-be was spilling out, onto the kitchen floor. As part of a winter doldrums, Seasonal-Affective-Disorder prevention promotion, the “Happy Day” boxes were festooned with rubberized labels that could be peeled away to reveal promised loot, mostly home-based audio-visual equipment, but sometimes deliverance from the enveloping grayness of exhaustion and dissipation of winter in Zombograd. Deflated and flattened, a home theatre system, a moped, an all-inclusive trip to Goa and a three week, intensive program of Zomborian lessons laid beneath the un-peeled labels, unclaimed and awaiting recycling. Hiller returned to his inescapable daily miasma.

Byzantium

An odd thing occurred to me while writing this entry, that four out of the five continents start with the letter A: Africa, the Americas, Antarctica and Australia. Some would argue that the Americas should be considered as two continents. Perhaps, Europe and Asia should also be considered one continent, Eurasia, but then Australia becomes so small by comparison that perhaps it should not be considered a continent at all. It's further of interest that Europe gets first billing in the Eurasian super-continental moniker, given that Europe is the size of the combined four western Canadian provinces. For interests of illuminating my story, I'll stick with my original classifications.

Last summer, I happened to be in Midland, Ontario, simultaneous with the unveiling of the new icon (see above), commissioned by the Archdiocese of Toronto for the Holy Year (2008) of the Apostle Paul. The Shrine of the Martyrs, where the icon was unveiled to the public for the first time (conveniently the same day I poked my prodigal nose through the apse) and commemorates the establishment of the Jesuit Mission in North America. You really ought to watch the joint Canadian/Australian production "Black Robe". I'm sure it's available at your local, urban, Canadian or Australian public library. Blessed are the librarians. After consulting with the presiding Jesuit, I snapped a few shots of Saul of Tarsus, a.k.a. Paul the Apostle. I'm pretty sure I was the first of the laity to snap the photo. I had been aware of icons prior to Midland, specifically the famed example in the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, perhaps the most famous rendering of Jesus from antiquity and I'd been interested in the Jesuits since a newly acquainted Evangelical priest shook my hand for the first time, handed me a book by a Jesuit liberation-theologian who worked with the homeless in Portland and proclaimed; "You really need to read this book". Jesus, what a long time ago. How did he know? So, quickly: the Jesuits are the scholars of God, meaning the God of the Catholic Church (not to be confused with a/the "catholic God" or "universal God". Yes, I meant to type a small "c"). I actually gave the vocation some serious thought for a few days, as recently as Jan. 2008, but given my anti-papist leanings (I'm a tacitly adherent and tortured Lutheran), I decided against it. Celibacy is over-rated.

On Wednesday, I'll be traveling to Istanbul with the Varsity Boys Basketball team (an artifact of American High School jingoism). It seemed like a pretense for heading east, almost into Asia. In fact, so I am told, you can take public transit from the European side of Istanbul, across the Bosporus, into the Asian side of Istanbul. I suppose bagging a continent should be a little more arduous, but I'll chalk Asia with this trip. Growing up in Vancouver, you get a pretty thorough exposure to Asian culture. In April, I'll be driving to Morocco, which will leave only the last two, and perhaps most challenging, of the A's: Australia and Antarctica. There are no international schools in Antarctica, but cruise ships do call there. I'm not sure I'll take any pictures when I'm viewing the Hagia Sophia, as so many exist already. I suspect the Hagia Sophia needs to be felt, in the sense that you need to be present to grasp its full magnitude. I think space can be of great importance and as significant as the icon of Jesus is to culture, an argument could be made for the building itself ranking of equal importance. I think these places need to be felt as much as seen. Never was this more evident to me than Boxing Day of 2007, when I sat, solitary, on top of Temple V at the Mayan ruin of Tikal. Tucan flew, mist was exhaled by the jungle into the morning sun. I was overcome by the need for everyone to sit, solitary, in the place that I found myself and feel life outside of time unfold.

I have to pack now, but I wanted to share one final thought. Find an image of the The Deësis mosaic of the Hagia Sophia on the internet; it's probably the most photographed image of The Christ, certainly within the Eastern Orthodox tradition. I'm not a photographer and, frankly, I think it profane for me to snap a shot of a 1500 years image of Jesus. I knew this opportunity was going to come up eventually and I've been thinking about what I can share of the experience with you and it's not a photo. I will simply be present in one of the architectural wonders of the world, one of the great religious icons of our Judeo-Christo-Islamo age and try to relate the feeling of being present to you.

While I'm away, go check this out:

http://www.blackvelvetjesus.blogspot.com/

I shall rise again

I will be back ... and soon.  I now have a new MacBook so I can work form home again, at last!  It has been almost two months without a computer.  The little G3 iBook that could, it would seem, can't.

Happy 2009 to everyone.  Please, let's all try to fly less, drive less and love strangers more in this year.

Ken

I'm finally beginning to feel like myself again after the viral month of October. I was beginning to lose interest in almost everything except sleeping.

Now that I'm back on top, I've managed to get a handle, or at very least a perceived handle, on work. I finally managed to teach a few decent lessons and also managed to get The Man off my back. We all have The Man in our lives, that incessant obligation that complicates our lives and spoils all our fun. When you're paying - or the corporation that employs you - close to $20,000 USD to educate your child, you're looking for something resembling a quarterly report to the shareholders, especially when you have notions of Yale and Skull and Bones and the White House in mind for your spawn. We had parent-teacher interviews last Tuesday and The Man wasn't nearly as punishing as I thought, confirming my life-long held belief that if you're worried about doing a good job, you're doing a good job. The Man can be just about anything: your boss, your mortgage, your spouse/partner, your stomach or your golf game.

I'm not clear on the genesis of The Man, but I would guess it was the early 1950s. I've been reading a fair amount recently as I didn't have energy for much else. I've followed my tendency for threads, threads that tie and bind, or either get knotted up when you pull them or unravel the fabric of existence. I'm self-schooling myself in American post-modern literature. It was the logical stop after ready quest and odyssey for four years. Semiotics is what I think I'm talking about, symbols that point to things, that allow us to name things. Somewhere in a pile of gmail is the name of a text book I need to read on the subject. My understanding is this, if semiotics applies to questing, then the "The Hero's Journey" (I'm almost embarrassed to utter the phrase) points to or suggests answers, a goal or an outcome. Post-modernism points to another question and things defy labels. This is confusing. In 2004, I thought I knew where I was headed and all I encountered just affirmed that feeling. Now, I know that I'm still headed in the same direction, but everything points away from the appointed journey, the excluded middle. Like an Escher painting, the background implies what is in the foreground. My first clue that I had entered this phase of life was The Crying of Lot 49 and now I think I've found the font of that work, Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. It's a groovy little book and I highly recommend it. Anyhow, I'm starting to understand the point of Finnegan's Wake, though I make no claims to understand it...yet.

Realizing that it would be criminal to sequester myself to my apartment on weekends for the next two years. I have a duty to you, my reader, to get out and explore this wacky place. On Sunday, I finally ventured forth to Hösök Tere or Heroes Square to grab a coffee and walk around the city park, reconnoiter the thermal baths and the museums that await. I really wanted to take my camera, but I forgot. I realize I need some non-work related ritual in my life, so I will head back to the coffee shop on Sunday and take some photos this time. I will resurrect this travel blog, I will win you all back.

With the internet providing all the information we need through a little, tiny fiber-optic cable, I don't really see the point in links, except for this one. Who the hell thought to check whether Scotch tape emitted X-rays? I can see some senior scientist at 3M, hunkered down in a dark room on Christmas Eve, stripping off great lengths of the new-fangled adhesive and making a note to investigate the sparks after he finished wrapping his wife's brand new vacuum cleaner. Has anyone ever tried stripping off tape in a pitch black room? Well, it gives off enough radiation to X-ray your hand!!! Fear not: the air prevents most of the photons from reaching your hand. Still, this is a damn strange phenomenon. Next, I suppose dental floss will be found to fuse hydrogen atoms.

There I stop. I need to ease myself back into this. I'm still a little at odds with writing. Try wrapping this years gifts in the dark but wear a lead bib.

P.S. thank you reader, whoever you are, for completing the poll

I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up

Hi friends: It's a little discouraging for me to face up to an entire month, October, without writing anything. As some of you have suspected, work has been beating me down some. And the isolation of living somewhere new. I've also been struggling with a virus, it seems like almost a month now, that has dampened my enthusiasm for everything except sleeping. The saying goes "you can't keep a good man down" and as my life's ambition is to have "good man" as an epitaph, I'd better get up. Thanks to you for giving me a poke to see that I was still breathing.

It would be too self-indulgent to blather on here about my U.S. Election angst, we all have it and for similar reasons, even if some of us view the next leader of the world from opposite sidelines. Be it enough to say, any change at this point has to be positive. I'm not sure this blog is the place for political rants: there's plenty of cyberspace elsewhere to host that. I think the "success" of this blog, if I can be that self-indulgent has been in the "what I got up to today" spirit of it. So, in that spirit, I will continue, though perhaps without so many links.

Pictured above is me/myself/I and my brother-in-law at Kleine Scheidigg in Switzerland, photo courtesy of my dear sister who takes very good photos of the two of us. As I discovered from Forensics - one of the many courses I have been cajoled into teaching or compelled to teach at AISB as part of my self-styled financial freedom package - I will not name names. Once a student told me the names of my nieces and nephews and my maternal great-great grandmother, I thought it best to refrain from names of family and friends.

I'll let the picture tell its tale: it was a great day and I would visit this place again and I was very happy to share the experience with my family.

The trip to Switzerland was undertaken by rail from Budapest. It was an overnight train and, yes, "Night Train" was resonating through my brain whilst I rode, which may explain why I couldn't sleep better. That and the virus. The coach consisted of several six passenger compartments, lining one side of the car, with six seats within, three facing three. The seats fold down to accommodate the six passengers in bunks. Fortunately, there was only one other passenger in my compartment and they did not snore. It was a surprisingly pleasant way to travel. The main train stations in Budapest are all very close to my apartment, perhaps less than six tram/tube stops, so rail is darn handy and responsible.

Speaking of responsibility, I think the ecological/environmental Armageddonism is getting to me. Please, refrain from sending me anything illuminating this issue further. I've thought about it, which is why I stopped driving a car four years ago and if I can find a way to get to Europe by boat and rail without spending all of the money I'm saving (see above), I'll do it. Frankly, the world just isn't set up for non-air travel between continents. When all those Brits traveled to Australia on P&O in the sixties, were they mortgaging their lives to do so? Maybe. I know the planet and all life on it is screwed, I just don't need any reminders, at least not now. Remind me after I'm over this virus. I suppose the viruses will survive.

I best not push myself too hard, it's 12:30 am, with no election results in sight and I can never be sure that I'm feeling 100% these days, so I'm turning in. I will try to pull it together and get back to blogging. In the meantimes, walk or take a bus, pass on the New Zealand lamb or the apples from Chile; wash your hands regularly and cover your mouth when you sneeze.

Ken

Why We Eat Stinky Food

Work has been killing my enthusiasm for writing.

Outward Bound Camp, somewhere in Czech

I was told to bring a lunch for the bus because it was going to take five hours to get to the camp. We were headed in the vicinity of Brno, a city of approximately 300,000 in the south eastern half of Czech. I'm choosing to call the country Czech, for the same reason I call Canada "Canada" and not "The Dominion of..." Unlike the name Canada, which implies the supremacy of Upper and Lower Canada in the confederation of my beloved country, the name Czech favors neither the Bohemians, Moravians nor the Silesians. Forget Belgium as a precedent for the dissolution of Canada, "The Velvet Divorce" of 1993 was a bloodless, and, by all accounts, amicable schism: Slovakia achieved self-determination and Czech kept the flag. I'm not advocating dissolution of the Dominion, but we might as well have it on the table during the upcoming election. With just under 10,000,000 sq km we've got a long way to go before we Balkanize the Great White North. Somewhere between 500 to 1000 Slovenias, Montenegros or Kosovos could fit into Canada. In fact, only PEI comes even close to Balkan stature as far as land mass is concerned. And we should let them keep the bridge. But seriously, Canada, with nearly 50% of its citizenry claiming neither British, French nor indigenous ancestry, seems to lack the nationalistic inertia necessary for dissolution. We'd be better fretting over the ascent of Sharia law or Eschatological Christian Literalism than separation. French Quebec and English Canada seem to be missing the direction in which Canada is headed...again.

If not for 9000 km of separation, my colleagues would have suspected my lunch had been so expertly packed by my dear mother, individual Tupperware containers filled with paprika salami, olives, cheese, cherry tomatoes and Tejföl. These foods have been the staples of my time here, that and beer from Plsen, the home of the pilsener brewing process. Whereas Magyar has a glut of vowels, Czech seems to work fine without them, thank you very much. Tejföl is a remarkable dairy concoction, coming in a variety of fat contents up to and including 20%. Being mass-challenged (some might say skinny, I prefer wiry) I opt for the full-blown 20% variety. Why I'm so taken by Tejföl is that the taste of it is ever so slightly offensive, offensive in a kimchi, Limburger cheese or durian way. Speaking personally, I've never tried any of these foods, but two of the three have been described to me, Limburger cheese as "toe-jam" and durian as a "pissy, shitty diaper". Perhaps it would carry more weight if a more liberally minded state had done so, but Singapore bans durian from its transit system. These unlikely sources of gastronomical pleasure beg the question: what's up with the obsession with stinky food? I detect a further, more expansive blog emerging, so I'll get back on topic, but think about it: you too have a stinky food that brings you delight. Let me finish this thread with the following: perhaps beyond sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umame there is a sixth flavor, skank?

As I polished off a 175 g container of Tejföl for dessert, somewhere on the road to Czech, around Brataslava, it occurred to me that I was getting a little too fond of the skanky flavor and smell and that, perhaps, even someone of my metabolism is better off without 35 g of dairy fat at the end of an otherwise "heart-smart" meal. You see, I am getting obsessed with my mortality.

In the end, I've temporarily sworn off my daily container of Tejföl, maybe permanently. I have a pretty good suspicion that it's the latter outcome. I'll miss you Tejföl. By the way, "tej" (pron. "tay") is Magyar for "milk", and though Hungarian have virtually no cognates with English, I'm confident you'll figure out the second half of Tejföl.

Viszlát