Too Much Stuff Out There

[AllenLowe]

Well, I started this elsewhere and want to get some second opinions:

there is just too damn much that is released these days. I have a theory that the advent of independent publishing was, by and large, a bad thing for jazz. When musicians found out they could form their own publishing companies and not share mechanicals with large conglomerates, they decided that they should compose all, or nearly all, the pieces on their CD projects. This had the added advantage of making it much cheaper to release a CD (no Harry Fox agency charges). That, on top of the fact that everybody and his brother (and sister) has decided they need to put a CD out (or, rather, 10 CDs) has just flooded the market. It's like baseball after expansion - who can keep track who's on what team and who is playing what and who is any good any more? Is this the Joyce Carol Oates syndrome?

I say this, as well, as a musician who threw up his hands and stopped recording about 8 years ago. I am, however, about to release a CD with nothing but my own compositions - hypocrite that I am. But I work a day job, have two kids and a dog and just cannot keep up anymore. For those old-timers out there, was it easier in the 1950s and 1960s? Or am I just hopelessly out of touch?

Edited December 31, 2004 by AllenLowe

[Leeway]

I used to feel the same way about books-- so many books, so little time. Plus one is concerned that, in the seeming glut of books, CDs, DVDs that are coming out, quality will be trumped by mere quantity.

But my feelings have changed. As a consumer I should only buy what I want and am only responsible to my own tastes, desires, objectives. Those wo are trying to sell must look out for their own ends. There is no real need to "keep up." I now have come to see it as: the more that is out there, the better the chance of something really good coming out (even if it only sells 10 copies the first year--once born, it has a chance to survive). The more that is out there, the better the chance I will find what I truly want/need, when I truly want/need it.

Maybe the problem is in that "want/need" conundrum. I understand the sense of exhaustion and even exasperation that can set in, but, in the end, having "choice" is the best situation.

[AllenLowe]

True, but making an educated choice is harder. Money is an issue - as is, in my opinion, quality, the necessity for individuals to properly assess their own talents and not exceed their own artistic grasp -

[Michael Fitzgerald]

Dunno - the alternative to independent publishing didn't do so well for musicians.

And large conglomerates weren't the only ones - it was the small labels too (Savoy, Dial, Prestige, etc.) Gigi Gryce may have lost the battle, but he won the war - the recently discussed Wayne Shorter bio has this:

"The first person who hipped me to the procedure of getting your own publishing was Horace Silver," Wayne said. "I put my stuff in Horace's publishing, and Horace has sent it back to me since then; he reassigned about thirteen songs back to me." Publishing was one area where Wayne definitely didn't want to follow in the footsteps of bebop idols like Lester Young, who died almost penniless. Silver was one of the first to take care of the publishing side of business, which made him a baron among musicians. When hip-hop artists started sampling riffs from his Blue Note recordings, Silver claimed that the first royalty statement he received for this usage was more than he made on all his Blue Note records combined.

----

And Horace learned it from Gigi.

Mike

[Jim Alfredson]

I like to think about it this way: The good news is that anyone can release a CD. The bad news is that anyone can release a CD.

It's hard to beat the glut, for sure, but as musicians, the only thing we can do is try to make a product that stands out musically (and as a recent thread suggested, maybe even make it stand out in other ways) and try to get it into the hands of the right people. That's about all we can do.

All in all, I think it's a good thing.

[A Lark Ascending]

I can't see it as a problem, unless you're afraid you'll miss something significant.

I have a batch of musicians whose music I've come to know and so will try to follow up on their releases; other things I buy as a result of a concert or radio performance; sometimes I like the sound of something from a review in a magazine or something I read in a book.

Despite spending way too much on recordings I'm sure I only scrape the surface of what is available. But I'm more than happy with the current deluge that keeps me awash in a warm bath of wonderful music.

I'm sure it must be very hard for anyone approaching music from an academic standpoint, trying to make sense of it all.

But, perhaps, in the same way that jazz itself has fragmented stylistically over the years, I suspect the jazz marketplace has also fragmented. The greater ease of recording and putting out CDs has enabled whole areas of the music that would have found it impossible to get a deal actually being able to promote itself. Much of my jazz buying is of British bands on tiny labels or self-produced recordings acquired as a result of concert going. I'm very grateful this music is getting released so I can enjoy it beyond a single concert appearance.

The days when there were a limited number of recordings available (on a few big labels and a few smaller, specialist labels) might have made it easier to construct some sort of narrative of what seemed to be happening overall. But I'm more than happy with the massive current output that thrives on a more dispersed and often localised jazz world.

Edited December 31, 2004 by Bev Stapleton

[alankin]

All I can say is that I have my CDs are taking over my house. I sometimes think they get together at night and breed. I can hear them moving from room to room or jumping from the shelf to the floor. (Or maybe it's just the cats playing with my mind.)

[AllenLowe]

I don't dispute that the new way of publishing is VASTLY superior to the old - only that it has created several generations of bad composers who write not because they HAVE TO but because they "have to," if you know what I mean - and I appreciate the democratic aspect of self recording - it's the only way that I, personally, could ever get anything out. But just as a writer has to know the difference between a book and a magazine article, a musician has to know the difference between having enough material to be a musician, and having enough material to make a decent recording -

Edited December 31, 2004 by AllenLowe

[Michael Fitzgerald]

Alan - If that's really the case, I have some ideas for genetic engineering.

Mike

Edited December 31, 2004 by Michael Fitzgerald

[Michael Fitzgerald]

Allen - This was covered in a NYT op ed piece a while back (September 28, 2002), on the subject of books. Joseph Epstein was the author:

Think You Have A Book In You? Think Again.

According to a recent survey, 81 percent of Americans feel they have a book in them -- and that they should write it. As the author of 14 books, with a 15th to be published next spring, I'd like to use this space to do what I can to discourage them.

Before I had first done so, writing a book seemed a fine, even grand thing. And so it still seems -- except, truth to tell, it is a lot better to have written a book than to actually be writing one. Without attempting to overdo the drama of the difficulty of writing, to be in the middle of composing a book is almost always to feel oneself in a state of confusion, doubt and mental imprisonment, with an accompanying intense wish that one worked instead at bricklaying.

Why should so many people think they can write a book, especially at a time when so many people who actually do write books turn out not really to have a book in them -- or at least not one that many other people can be made to care about? Something on the order of 80,000 books get published in America every year, most of them not needed, not wanted, not in any way remotely necessary.

I wonder if the reason so many people think they can write a book is that so many third-rate books are published nowadays that, at least viewed from the middle distance, it makes writing a book look fairly easy. After all, how many times has one thought, after finishing a bad novel, ''I can do at least as well as that''? And the sad truth is that it may well be that one can. But why add to the schlock pile?

Beyond the obvious motivation for wanting to write a book -- hoping to win fame or fortune -- my guess is that many people who feel they have a book ''in them'' doubtless see writing it as a way of establishing their own significance. ''There lurks, perhaps, in every human heart,'' wrote Samuel Johnson, ''a desire of distinction, which inclines every man to hope, and then to believe, that nature has given himself something peculiar to himself.'' What better way to put that distinction on display than in a book?

The search for personal significance was once nicely taken care of by the drama that religion supplied. This drama, which lived in every human breast, no matter what one's social class, was that of salvation: Would one achieve heaven or not? Now that it is gone from so many lives, in place of salvation we have the search for significance, a much trickier business. If only oblivion awaits, how does one leave behind evidence that one lived? How will one's distant progeny know that one once walked the earth? A book, the balmy thought must be: I shall write a book.

Forgive me if I suggest that this isn't the most felicitous way to do battle against oblivion. Writing a book is likely, through the quickness and completeness with which one's book will die, to make the notion of oblivion all the more vivid.

There is something very American in the notion that almost everyone has a book in him or her. (In the survey of 1,006 Americans, sponsored by a small Michigan publisher, almost equal numbers of people said they wanted to write a novel, a nonfiction work, a self-help book or a cookbook.) Certainly, it is a democratic notion, suggesting that everybody is as good as everybody else -- and, by extension, one person's story or wisdom is as interesting as the next's. Then there is the equally false notion of creativity that has been instilled in students for too many years. It was Paul Valery who said that the word ''creation'' has been so overused that even God must be embarrassed to have it attributed to him.

Misjudging one's ability to knock out a book can only be a serious and time-consuming mistake. Save the typing, save the trees, save the high tax on your own vanity. Don't write that book, my advice is, don't even think about it. Keep it inside you, where it belongs.

---------------

Predictably, there were numerous responses.

Mike

[alankin]

Yeah, I read that piece.

But wow - 80,000 books per year! Almost 220 a day!

[AllenLowe]

well, with a recent demise - maybe only 60,000...

[A Lark Ascending]

Leaving aside the one person's bad composer is another person's genius argument...

I'm happy to see a lot of music put out and be left with the responsibility of deciding for myself what I do and do not value; far better than having a much sharper winnowing system that is as likely to exclude much that is excellent alongside much that is of doubtful value.

We may wonder why certain music ever got to the recording studio, let alone release; but its more disturbing to think of the wonders that never made it in more frugal times.

[Michael Fitzgerald]

Gee whiz, Allen - Artie Shaw only wrote a few books........

[mjzee]

Some thoughts:

1) Every artist should include at least two standards on every CD. Consider it a touchpost: a listener can better understand an artist's concept through a familiar song. And it fosters a sense of community.

2) Tonality is better than atonality or a personal conception of tonality. Listening to someone honk a Coltrane or play outside the chords a la Ornette, a listener says "anyone can do that." It's like the artist saying "boundaries and discipline don't apply to me."

3) Jazz needs the comeback of the producer. It's the producer that balances what he hears the artist playing with the needs of the listeners. It's like a writer needs an editor and a publisher. The producer should also be forceful and opinionated. Criss Cross, for example, has a producer (Gerry Teekens), but he lets far too much mediocre jazz get released on his label; it's almost like he's afraid to say no to his musicians.

[AllenLowe]

Well, Mike, we can't say Shaw was over-exposed on the recording front -

I once wrote a review which I called "why does bad music happen to good musicians?" in which I discussed this very thing. I'm reminded of what we've seen with sidemen from groups like Ellington's and Mingus's - we saw good musicians play great with those bands, and than go out on their own and do very ordinary things (with exceptions, I understand). I don't have any argument with a musician's RIGHT to play and record as he/she wants. I 'm only suggesting, per that NY Times article, that a musician needs to be his/her most perceptive critic. Otherwise it muddies the waters.

[Michael Fitzgerald]

In a lot of cases, I think new jazz pieces ARE being written/recorded unnecessarily. And I don't think that there is enough familiarity with the repertoire that exists already.

But I don't know that "two standards per album" is going to solve this problem. Does the world need *another* version of "On Green Dolphin Street" or "Stella By Starlight" - probably not. But there are a lot of original jazz pieces that were written 50 years ago that could stand to be recorded and performed more. But I'm not going to mandate this kind of thing.

Those artists who have a keen sense of repertoire will seek these pieces out and hopefully will do creative things with them. Would be nice if there were some added guidance out there - qualified producers with musical backgrounds who could suggest some things, for example.

And then there are plenty of cases when two standards just don't BELONG on an album.

Mike

[mjzee]

Funny that you mention "On Green Dolphin Street" and "Stella By Starlight," since those are two standards that I have never heard sung! Does anyone know good vocal versions of these?

[7/4]

As a musican, I see CDs as a promo tool, something for the press kit and something to sell at gigs.

Now, if I could only get my shit together and record something new. It's not a lack of material, but getting my head in the right place to do it.

[Jim Alfredson]

1) Every artist should include at least two standards on every CD. Consider it a touchpost: a listener can better understand an artist's concept through a familiar song. And it fosters a sense of community.

You know, we got some flack for having a disc of all original material and not any standards. We play our share of standards at gigs, but we didn't see any point in having them on the record. Like Michael said, do we really need another version of "Oleo" or "Kirk's Works"?

That said, on our next disc we may have a rendition of "Tenderly" but only because we're doing something really different with it, not because we think we "need" to have a standard on the disc.

In my opinion, this is the attitude that is killing jazz.

[AllenLowe]

I agree about standards - either find something not played to death or give it a unique spin - and I love standards and know a lot of odd ones - but I think that's a different issue -

Edited December 31, 2004 by AllenLowe

[Jim R]

On Green Dolphin Street...

Sarah- on Mercury (Tivoli) as well as Roulette ("You're Mine You").

Johnny Hartman- "For Trane".

Nancy Wilson / George Shearing- "The Swingin's Mutual" -Capitol

Stella By Starlight...

Johnny Hartman- "All Of Me" -Bethlehem

Anita O'Day- The Complete Verve/Clef Recordings -Mosaic

Sarah Vaughan- on Roulette

Joe Williams- on Roulette

[RDK]

Hey, if Braxton can have, like, 12 discs filled with standards, then everyone should be able to put two friggin' standards on every CD without anyone complainin' about it!

[7/4]

Hey, if Braxton can have, like, 12 discs filled with standards, then everyone should be able to put two friggin' standards on every CD without anyone complainin' about it!

And he has no problem putting a new twist on them!

[Michael Fitzgerald]

Well, I guess the live "There Is No Greater Love" with Circle was the first time Braxton recorded a standard, then there was "Come Sunday" from 1971, then the album on America with "You Go To My Head" (and "Donna Lee") - but for several years there were no standards included.

In fact, it was a principle of the AACM to play "only our own music - original compositions or material originating from the members within our group" (Muhal Richard Abrams - from the George Lewis piece on the AACM in "Current Musicology")

Mike