Morals, politics, crime and music

[AllenLowe]

"And that is George Anthiel, of course."

actually it was Duke Ellington -

[Jim Alfredson]

My biggest crime is playing both major and minor sevenths in the same chord sometimes. OH THE HORROR!

[Joe G]

But that's neither here nor there.

[AllenLowe]

well, I'll tell you, one night at Gregory's Al Haig and Chuck Wayne almost came to blows over the chord changes to some tune -Haig was annoyed because he thought Wayne was usurping his leadership of the trio, Wayne got REALLY pissed, and walked out - never saw him again -

some people will die for the right changes -

[Jazzmoose]

7) Jim Alfredson insists on calling a G minor seventh flat 5 chord a G half diminished -

Yeah, but those things only ruin his music for me. You needn't worry about it. :rsmile:

Maybe so, but you have to draw the line somewhere!

[seeline]

What about a male musician who cheats on his wife and lies about it? Many Americans thought at one time that this could qualify as a "high crime and misdemeanor", an impeachable offense. How many albums could any of us play if that was the standard? But why should the poor wife be dismissed as unworthy of our moral support?

Thanks for this, Ptah.

[randissimo]

Well, geez Randy - not all of Allen's post was a gut-buster!

You're right... This is the one that I was laughin' about..

7) Jim Alfredson insists on calling a G minor seventh flat 5 chord a G half diminished -

[JSngry]

Interesting topic MG!

For me, the opportunity has arisen to be able to study

with the artist Hermann Nitsch. For those that aren't familiar

with him, he was a member of the Viennese Actionists and his

performances were often filled with rituals that involved animal sacrifice.

Mentioning this opportunity to a fellow O-Board member

(who hasn't posted in quite a long time), he was emphatic that not only should I not

consider studying with Nitsch, but that I should, so to speak, completely erase him

from my mind - meaning, of course, getting rid of any music that I have of his,

and not buying anymore and certainly not studying with him.

Tho I deplore any of the animal sacrifice elements of his performances

(add: being a vegetarian for 35 years - bordering on veganism),

the sound and ritual aspect is so wonderfully enticing that this opportunity

sits right on the edge of my desires. In the last couple of years,

I've thought that I'd come to a set conclusion

that since I already had hundreds of pages of his scores and notes and

over a hundred discs of his work that I could just as well become "self-taught,"

when it comes to his compositional ideas, but this excuse for a way of working

can be used for all kinds of endeavors and deflates the need for any type of

apprenticeship which could be considered an absurd idea.

So the idea still sits there waiting to be acted upon (or not?).

Sometimes doing nothing, the answers appear anyway.

Yeah, all right!

Most of this discussion has been focused on the noble but ultimately luxury task of determining how we're going to let ourselves feel about listening to music, often by some dead folks, years after it's been made, and yeah, we've somehow allowed ourselves the conceit that somehow that matters, which outside of our own self-contained universe, it doesn't, Michael Jackson, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jim Keltner, et al notwithstanding. Dead folks have done did what they do, ya' know?

Where it really matters, and where the ambiguity reaches you-gotta-see-it-to-believe-it levels is when you actually have to decide whether or not to work for and/or with some of these "characters", whether or not you're gonna hire somebody because what they bring to the gig is worth more to you than what they may or may not do before and afterwards, and the same for taking somebody else's money, somebody who's a borderline fascist and whose mere presence on Earth makes you queasy, but the cat's got a gig paying the money that you need right now, so what then? Or what about taking money from a club that's an obvious mob front, or maybe even less than a front, where crackheads come in with all kinds of illicit goods (including produce!) and leave with a rock, that's pretty slimy right there, but again, that club got the money you need right now and nobody else is offering it that night, maybe even that week, so if you listen to a really badass Miles side on the way to that gig, what, are you double dooming your soul to eternal damnation that way?

Those of you who can spend more than a quick minute worrying over whether enjoying records good music made by bad - but often dead! - people will forevermore affect your karma to the point of permanent taintation of the soul,, hey, I envy you.

Or maybe not.

[Hot Ptah]

Interesting topic MG!

For me, the opportunity has arisen to be able to study

with the artist Hermann Nitsch. For those that aren't familiar

with him, he was a member of the Viennese Actionists and his

performances were often filled with rituals that involved animal sacrifice.

Mentioning this opportunity to a fellow O-Board member

(who hasn't posted in quite a long time), he was emphatic that not only should I not

consider studying with Nitsch, but that I should, so to speak, completely erase him

from my mind - meaning, of course, getting rid of any music that I have of his,

and not buying anymore and certainly not studying with him.

Tho I deplore any of the animal sacrifice elements of his performances

(add: being a vegetarian for 35 years - bordering on veganism),

the sound and ritual aspect is so wonderfully enticing that this opportunity

sits right on the edge of my desires. In the last couple of years,

I've thought that I'd come to a set conclusion

that since I already had hundreds of pages of his scores and notes and

over a hundred discs of his work that I could just as well become "self-taught,"

when it comes to his compositional ideas, but this excuse for a way of working

can be used for all kinds of endeavors and deflates the need for any type of

apprenticeship which could be considered an absurd idea.

So the idea still sits there waiting to be acted upon (or not?).

Sometimes doing nothing, the answers appear anyway.

Yeah, all right!

Most of this discussion has been focused on the noble but ultimately luxury task of determining how we're going to let ourselves feel about listening to music, often by some dead folks, years after it's been made, and yeah, we've somehow allowed ourselves the conceit that somehow that matters, which outside of our own self-contained universe, it doesn't, Michael Jackson, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jim Keltner, et al notwithstanding. Dead folks have done did what they do, ya' know?

Where it really matters, and where the ambiguity reaches you-gotta-see-it-to-believe-it levels is when you actually have to decide whether or not to work for and/or with some of these "characters", whether or not you're gonna hire somebody because what they bring to the gig is worth more to you than what they may or may not do before and afterwards, and the same for taking somebody else's money, somebody who's a borderline fascist and whose mere presence on Earth makes you queasy, but the cat's got a gig paying the money that you need right now, so what then? Or what about taking money from a club that's an obvious mob front, or maybe even less than a front, where crackheads come in with all kinds of illicit goods (including produce!) and leave with a rock, that's pretty slimy right there, but again, that club got the money you need right now and nobody else is offering it that night, maybe even that week, so if you listen to a really badass Miles side on the way to that gig, what, are you double dooming your soul to eternal damnation that way?

Those of you who can spend more than a quick minute worrying over whether enjoying records good music made by bad - but often dead! - people will forevermore affect your karma to the point of permanent taintation of the soul,, hey, I envy you.

Or maybe not.

Jim Keltner? Did you mean Jim Gordon (who was convicted of murdering his mother, as I recall).

[JSngry]

Yeah, my bad on that one. Sorry.

[Hot Ptah]

Yeah, my bad on that one. Sorry.

Otherwise, a very interesting post. It makes me think of a time when I was in a famous jazz club in a large Midwestern city. A short, fat, Italian-looking man in a black suit came in with an entourage of large, rough Italian-looking men, all in black suits, in the middle of a set by a jazz legend.

Immediately the owner and nearly all of the staff ran over, literally bumping into each other, to force the paying patrons aggressively away from the front tables and to clean up everything as fast as humanly possible to make the best place ready for the great man. I mean their arms were flying over the table tops with spray bottles of cleaner and rags. Their pace of work was about 1000 times faster than I had ever observed before in the club.

Did I inquire of the staff about the nature of the new visitor? Did I mull over the possibilities that something could have been amiss, from a moral standpoint? But then again, maybe nothing was amiss. I didn't want to be guility of offensive cultural stereotyping. Was I so troubled by the possibilities that I could not enjoy the music?

No, I just stayed and dug it, and went back to the club after that.

[AllenLowe]

are you sure it wasn't his rabbi?

[JSngry]

Well, I mean, I'm not immune by any means. I spent years not digging Stan Kenton for all the Great White Hope bullshit that he perpetrated/collaborated/instigated/etced. But I finally realized that, hey, ok, there was some good music there any ways, not enough to make me rethink the validity of the Great White hope nonsense or anything, but enough to say, ok, whatever, that's likable enough, or in Graettinger's case, WOW!!! WTF?!?!? enough, and the rest of it, hey, oh well, I don't need an extra-musical reason to not like it, I just don't, period. It's not good music to/for me, period.

[Hot Ptah]

are you sure it wasn't his rabbi?

Could have been. Then it would be the most outward display of religious fervor I have seen in any jazz club.

[Big Beat Steve]

@JSangry:

Sure, but did you ever consider that if it doesn't matter to your artistic apprecaiation of any of those celebs one bit if they behaved like real creeps as soon as they stepped off the bandstand, then could it be that at the same time you invalidate any appreciations of OTHER artists who were rightfully acclaimed as being "one of the nicest persons you'd ever meet on and off the stage" (remember how often this has been said here, and usually for good reason, I guess). If it doesn't matter one bit if you are just a jerk then why should it matter if you're just a decent human being? (But it DOES matter!)

Or, to name one example, is it that in your book all those who'ved had enough of that "audience blasting" by Keith Jarrett and will never waste any money on his gigs, etc. anymore are dead wrong? (See earlier discussion of that subject here)

I have no problem digging the musical works (provided I like their music in the first place) of those where it is universally known what kind of jerks there were in all too numerous situations in life, but do they have to be elevated on a pedestal and showered with adulation as if they are superhuman heros (you know that often happens too, maybe in jazz not quite as much as in other realms of popular music, but still ...)? IMHO their lousy behavior just reduces them considerably in that respect. Enjoy their music - yes, of course - but worship them as heros? Nah!

Edited June 17, 2008 by Big Beat Steve

[Larry Kart]

Some of this piece about Art Pepper from Ye Olde Jazz Book might be relevant. (Basically, my feeling is that if any artist is a decent human being, that's a bonus. If he or she is not (in any of the usual or not so usual ways), you were looking for something you had no reason to expect to find, though we all certainly have good reason to hope to find that oneness of art and character in a gifted human being.)

[1980]

Like most autobiographies that purport to tell all, Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper is a tissue of genuine revelations and willful posing, in which the desire to speak the truth is at war with the author’s need to paint himself as a romantic victim. But because Straight Life was written by a major jazz musician, the book does tell us a great deal--about the so-called “jazz life” and also about the tensions that affect almost every artist who functions in the modern world.

There are any number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists whose lives and whose work expressed an inner emotional turmoil that bordered on self-destruction--Poe, Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Scriabin, Hart Crane, the list could go on and on. But the hallmarks of Art Pepper’s music are lucidity, grace, and a meticulous sense of order. How, one wonders, can those qualities be reconciled with a life so internally chaotic that much of Straight Life reads like a suicide note?

The title of the book, borrowed from that of Pepper’s swift little melody on the changes of “After You’ve Gone,” is deliberately ironic, because “straight” is the one thing the alto saxophonist’s life has never been. Born on September 1, 1925, in Gardena, California, he was the byproduct of a brief, stormy romance. His teenaged mother wanted an abortion, his father married her only because he wanted the child to live, and much of Pepper’s youth was spent away from both parents, in the care of his stern paternal grandmother.

The account in Straight Life of those early years is grim, but it would have meaning only to Pepper’s friends if it were not for his great musical gifts. From the first he seems to have been a “natural,” with a drive toward self-expression that logically led him toward jazz, although the account of his youthful initiation into that world strikes a note of naïveté that echoes throughout the book. Told by a guitarist that “these are the chords to the blues . . . this is black music, from Africa, from the slave ships that came to America,” Pepper recalls that “I asked him if he thought I might have the right to play jazz.” Musically, the answer to Pepper’s question obviously was “yes,” as it was for Bix Beiderbecke, Pee Wee Russell, and many other white jazzmen. But the fact that Pepper felt compelled to ask (or says that he did--the anecdote sounds a little too pat to be literally true) suggests that emotionally he would forever feel uncertain that his unquestioned ability to play jazz made him part of the jazz community.

While still in his teens Pepper worked in predominantly black bands led by Lee Young and Benny Carter and hung out in Los Angeles’s Central Avenue district, where a free and easy racial comradeship prevailed. “There,” Pepper recalls, “everybody just loved everybody else, or if they didn’t, I didn’t know about it.” Young, remembering that same era, says, “It wasn’t about ‘whitey’ this and ‘whitey’ that. It was about good musicianship and people respecting one another for the talents that they had.”

Pepper’s talents, which evolved further during a stint with Stan Kenton’s orchestra, required him to forge his own style, one that owed a debt to black jazzmen but was significantly different in that his music seemed increasingly to have uncertainty and isolation as its subject. Then, after a tour of Army duty that led to the disintegration of his first marriage, Pepper returned to Kenton and found, in 1950, what was for him to be the “answer”--heroin. At this point in Straight Life, Pepper makes no excuses. Having found “no peace at all except when I was playing,” he felt, under the influence of the drug, that “I loved myself…I loved my talent. I said, ‘This is it. This is the only answer for me…whatever dues I have to pay.’ I realized that from that moment on I would be, if you want to use the word, a junkie. And that’s what I still am.”

If Straight Life were an exemplary tale, Pepper’s career from then until now would be an unbroken account of personal and artistic disintegration. But while he would spend more than a third of the following three decades in jail on various narcotics charges and would involve himself in a mutually self-destructive second marriage, these are also the years of Pepper’s greatest musical triumphs. One answer to this seeming paradox might be that Straight Life is a con job, an attempt by the author to paint himself as a larger-than-life-size rogue. But even if the grimmer anecdotes in the book are discounted, Pepper’s physical presence today is enough to confirm their essential truth. A strikingly handsome man at one time--reminiscent of Tyrone Power, according to a friend--Pepper is now someone whose haunted, ravaged face clearly proclaims that he has never needed to conjure up imaginary demons.

Straight Life finally does give us the information we need to resolve the split between Pepper’s willfully disordered life and his carefully ordered music. Indeed, the answer may be found in an aspect of the book that at first seems quite frustrating--in the author’s reluctance to talk about his music and in his corresponding eagerness to relate the lurid details of his sex life, drug addiction, and prison experiences.

That music is important to Pepper is believable only if we already know his music; otherwise Straight Life might be the story of any junkie. But soon we realize that, for Pepper, music, drugs, sex, and prison life are, in one sense, all of a piece--or rather, they all seem to be jumbled together in one area of his mind, a realm in which instinctual intelligence exists alongside childlike cunning, in which self-determined forms of order and expression blend into the trials of shame and pride that a lawbreaker’s life tends to bring. For example, Pepper states with special pride that he has never been an informer, never turned in a drug connection. From his point of view, that is an honorable, certain, and essentially private act, a matter between peers in a closed society. And in their various ways, both drug use and sex share similar qualities. One gets high or one does not, in the privacy of one’s own nervous system. One satisfies oneself and one’s partner or one does not, also in relatively private circumstances. And so Pepper feels free to boast about all these things.

But music is an exception for him because, like all forms of art, its ultimate meaning cannot be private, cannot be controlled by the artist; other people will take what the artist creates and make of it what they will. Of course, in the jazz world, particularly the world of the black jazz musician, communal agreements have often prevailed between the musicians and the audience , and almost almost always among the musicians themselves . But Pepper no longer seems to trust either of those communities, if he ever did. From his point of view, the comradeship of Central Avenue is gone forever. Instead, the isolated modern artist par excellence, he tries to create his own private world--striving for perfect, spontaneous order because only then will what he creates remain within his control. And, of course, every time he performs, he fails, for his music becomes more lucid and moving to us, and less private to him, the closer he comes to formal perfection.

So, for Art Pepper, the tensions remain; and as Straight Life demonstrates, they periodically become too great to be borne. But for us, one step removed from Pepper, the tensions are resolved. And that is the final paradox, that his music may do more for us than it can ever do for him.

[seeline]

This is becoming interesting - from an ethical standpoint - for (maybe) young musicians.

I wouldn't ever want a young person in the arts (or in any other field) to feel like it was OK for them to do whatever they wanted, even if it hurt other people - as long as their "art" didn't suffer.

Ability at anything doesn't - in my book - trump the very real need to treat others (and oneself) well.

Speaking of those who are dead and gone is one thing, but if you take some of the arguments stated in this thread and apply them to the here and now, well... the moral ambiguity of the message is (to me) scary.

[JSngry]

Yeah, ok, so it's 1968, I was born a lot earlier than I was, and I get a call from Miles offering me the gig.

"Sorry Miles, you're an asshole. Find somebody else."

Yeah, right.

A life without ambiguity is a life without life.

[JSngry]

Or to put it another way - encouraging poor behavior is not the same as not discouraging it in those for whom it is already present & perhaps/probably irrevocable.

All the attempted guilt-trip slinging of "enabling" ignores the fact that if all it took to eliminate bad behavior was to "discourage" it, hey, we'd be living in paradise a long time ago.

The best advice I can offer a young musician is this - know what it is in music that really matters to you and go after it relentlessly, know what it is about being human that really matters to you and hold on to it unyieldingly, and never, never close your eyes to the fact that those are anything other two totally different things that will diverge at least as often as they intersect.

[JSngry]

Yeah, ok, so it's 1968, I was born a lot earlier than I was, and I get a call from Miles offering me the gig.

"Sorry Miles, you're an asshole. Find somebody else."

Yeah, right.

A life without ambiguity is a life without life.

Now, it might well be that I say that after I have the gig for a while. But if I'm a As Serious As Your Life musician, and assuming that there's no musical reasons for not doing so, to turn down that gig at that time for that reason strikes me as cutting off your nose to spite your face.

[Hot Ptah]

George Duvivier, in his autobiography Bassically Speaking, describes the long process which led him to tell off Benny Goodman in roughly the same way that you have described your fictional encounter with Miles Davis. However, George had been a professional musician for decades at the time, and was near the end of his career, and had put up with Goodman for a long time.

Edited June 17, 2008 by Hot Ptah

[Noj]

I'm not big on biographies, so I don't let the events of a musician's personal life affect my opinion of his/her music. It's not on my mind while I listen to tunes.

One of the things I struggled with when I first started studying art is separating my tastes from what is relevant in art history. After coming to grips with that, it became a matter of understanding the intellectual movements despite considering the products of some of them to be absolute crap. On a personal level I might agree that some movements are merely a scheme for maintaining an elitist status quo, but that's not for me to decide for anyone other than myself.

[seeline]

Yeah, ok, so it's 1968, I was born a lot earlier than I was, and I get a call from Miles offering me the gig.

"Sorry Miles, you're an asshole. Find somebody else."

Yeah, right.

A life without ambiguity is a life without life.

I think you misread what I was trying to say. Of course, there's ambiguity in all of life, but I don't believe that "art" is intrinsically more important that treating people well.

To put it another way, I would rather be a so-so musician but decent person than a genius who is cruel and abusive to others. (There are very real reasons for this topic being of concern to me, BTW, but the details don't belong on this board.)

Edited June 17, 2008 by seeline

[JSngry]

George Duvivier, in his autobiography Bassically Speaking, describes the long process which led him to tell off Benny Goodman in roughly the same way that you have described your fictional encounter with Miles Davis. However, George had been a professional musician for decades at the time, and was near the end of his career, and had put up with Goodman for a long time.

Well, that's the thing - the profession of music leads one into areas of ambiguity that just the "appreciation" of it doesn't. Nor does being a "student" prepare one for the realities of The Real World Of Music. One may in fact have aspirations to become a professional only to find out that one is more comfortable with one's self not going there once one discovers all the...

stuff" that is to be found there no matter how much one tries to avoid it. In that, it is no different than any other profession, but it is different in that unlike, say, accounting, there is often a deep-seated passion, a love in the deepest sense, of what one also is hoping to make a living at (accountants, correct me if I'm wrong about this). And as with any love, one has to find it in one's self to forgive/overlook/whatever some things in some people at some times in order to keep the love alive, even if it means alive in a less "pure" (some would say "idealistic", others still, "naive") state than how it started out. Ironically (or not), it's the purity of that original vision that keeps us going, the sense that no matter how much trampling of it and shitting on it life does (including that which we ourselves do), that somewhere there remains a piece of it that remains untouched.

The reality for some, though, may be that such a place no longer exists, wither temporarily, or, worst case, permanently. That must be the darkest of dark places to be, to feel/be convinced that there is no more love to be had in one's life, ever. But its a reality that needs to be confronted, if only to scare you shitless about letting it happen to you. Because you don't know what love is until you know the meaning of the blues.

[JSngry]

I would rather be a so-so musician but decent person than a genius who is cruel and abusive to others.

You say that as if "genius" is something you get to choose. Do you really believe that?

And what about being a genius who isn't cruel and abusive to others, wouldn't that be a fun choice?

Or what about a genius who begins as cruel and abusive to others but grows into being a kind loving person, wouldn't that be something to look forward to?

But you know what really sucks? So-so musicians who are cruel and abusive to others. In some languages they are referred to as "agents".

Of course, there's such an air of....finality to your assertion, a sense that once one "chooses" that the die is cast and that personal evolution, improved musicianship, and just flat out all-around salvation are no longer ongoing possibilities that I have to think that what you said might not be what you mean, exactly.