We are what we know: the failure of journalism, or the news business - small "n", capital "B"

If you spend any time on Twitter - particularly news and politics Twitter - you realize very quickly that it can be detrimental to your mental health, but then again, that reaction really isn't any different from the way people first reacted to the internet when we were first getting to know it in the late '90's and early 2000's. It's a fair reaction - the one that says, "These people are nuts!!!" There's nothing wrong with coming to that conclusion, but even if that's not always the case, as there is plenty of intelligent and thoughtful content to be found, it still isn't exactly spiritually uplifting or even a terribly accurate reflection of anything other than itself.

Why is it like that? Well, if you buy into the chaos theory argument that end results depend on minor differences in initial conditions (and consider me on board with that one), then you can make a great argument that the second it simply became the way we did things online that nobody actually used their name... that that, by itself, birthed nothing but monstrous behavior in people that probably would not have exhibited said behavior before. Giving people anonymity - removing personal responsibility for their statements was beyond naïve. I think there's a term for when something goes awry like that... Oh yes! I believe that's referred to as a "mistake", and that one was a whopper.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves, the main thing we notice increasingly - on Twitter and everywhere else - is the... anger. There's a lot of that and you can't help thinking... this has been coming on for a loooonnnng time and social media and the internet are just the great amplifier and distorter to what's already been simmering. We're at a point where we can't agree on anything - there are undoubtedly folks out there that probably believe that 2 + 2 could equal 5 if you just look at the equation in the right light or at the correct time of day.

I do not claim to have all the answers here, but... I would be happy to submit something that I think got us kicked off on this rather awful direction we've been on for as long as many of us can remember. 35 years ago the Fairness Doctrine, something enforced by the FCC - when the FCC was feared by broadcasters because it had teeth - was revoked by a GOP administration. The GOP hated the Fairness Doctrine and the FCC. The Fairness Doctrine simply made sure nobody was lying on the evening news. Imagine that! THAT was a real problem from the GOP perspective... To them, we clearly didn't have enough lying and they didn't believe in anybody policing that because... that would be good governance and we can't have that either!

As that calamitous bit of news was taking place something else started going on that pretty much ruined... news! In the early 1990's news divisions lost their independence from their corporate masters as a result of the erosion that came from repealing the fairness doctrine. An effective FCC with the power of thumbscrew was a thing of the past so there nobody to keep the bosses from meddling in the news. This is something that we had already escaped from earlier in the 20th century when the political propagandizing of the Hurst papers and yellow journalism had been the norm for decades. Now it was decided by the corporate stakeholders that news divisions weren't there for the public good... (something big business didn't believe in anyway), they were there... to make money. Their primary job was to be a profit center... beholden to shareholders. Because... who cared about fact??? What mattered, and the only thing that did... was money.

Since that time broadcast and especially cable news has undercut it's own credibility at every opportunity. Hype has been the order of the day - actually that's not accurate - of the hour! EVERY hour! News has to have loud graphics... shorter soundbites... and the one constant (to keep everybody hyped and on the edge of their seats) is that everything... and I mean everything... is falling apart and that you... and your family... are under constant threat from... Who? Whomever seems like the easiest target today, that's who. It's gotten so bad that not only can you not trust the news... you can't trust the Weather Channel! They'll throw to their intrepid reporter on the scene of the current monster storm and you'll quickly discover that although they'll tell you it's the end of the world... by all indications it's really not all that bad outside. Hmmm... It really has become about believe me... or your lying eyes.

The result is a sort of a schizophrenic public that can't tell what to believe any more and when there are real problems - and we have some doozies right now - we're too anesthetized by the information overload to do anything.... but we're scared as hell! We have a climate crisis, but... we can't decide if we even believe in that. We have a fascist movement in our country, but... a lot of us are pretty sure that's just hype. We have a pandemic and people are convincing themselves that vaccination - something that rid us of polio and smallpox amongst others - may all be bullshit.

Have we always been this dumb? Well... we've always been pretty stupid, but we're now at a real low for modern times. But the bottom line remains the same: we are what we know... and we know what we're told... and when the machine that gives you the info... stops doing so accurately or responsibly for 30 years... this is where you end up. We'd probably be doing a better job of handling all of this if we had better information or if we demanded better information, but that won't begin to happen until we recognize the issue. Maybe we need to get back to having a robust FCC that would start closing down some "news" outlets and made yellow journalism not a profit maker but a financial liability. Hey, maybe we try that?

Artistry vs craftsmanship, the arrow of time and why jazz in its current incarnation is irrelevant

I've been doing some heavy sledding lately in terms of thinking about defining one's terms in relation to a lot of artistic ideas (and I suppose probably shouldn't because it only gets me in trouble), but... I do feel compelled. And I do because it's sort of an important/a big deal to have worked out what you're all about and why you're doing what you're doing and I'm finding that a lot of things that I've held to are simply... morphing into other things and aren't what they used to be.

What am I talking about? Well, to get there, let's start with the best definition we can come up with for somebody who is an artist in the musical sense. To be that, you need to create your own music and usually, although not always, be able to perform it. The key element is that you create, but even then, I'd go a step further; there's the matter of what you create, of course, but also whether it touches the public... at all. Is it all about popularity? Hardly! I wouldn't define the obvious sellout and panderer as an artist, but... there is a need to have some effect on the culture in which the artist finds one's self or... they're rendered fairly irrelevant.

Let's compare that with craftsmanship. Craftsmanship is the skill that people have - the level of their technique - that allows them to realize things... that already exist! You can admire the craftsmanship involved in the making of a Tiffany lamp, while recognizing that the person making the lamp... didn't invent the lamp, or even the style of the lamp (Tiffany did!).

Now, it would be great if our definitions held firm and fast because it makes any conversation easier to have, but when you try to apply definitions to the arts it can be fraught territory to be sure. For one thing, artistic pursuits, by their very nature, are an area of intense subjectivity - the very idea of trying to split hairs in an area so personal and necessarily idiosyncratic can become a fool's errand and yet we need some common ideas about what we're discussing to even do so at all coherently. Thus I made those definitions above just to sort of plant a flag so that you understood this key differentiator in my thinking. It's a starting point.

Keeping the above ideas in mind, let's talk about jazz. The audience for it is incredibly small and getting smaller. Covid isn't helping, but of course, there's no place in the performing arts where is it is helping because it... cancels performances. So, a music that barely exists in the public realm is even more invisible. But here's the interesting thing, in many respects, the jazz world only partially cares... it's hard to hurt your performances... when there weren't all that many in the first place. Jazz has become, mainly at this point, something that exists in colleges and schools far more than it exists in the popular imagination, if it does that at all. Since there isn't an audience to play for... jazz musicians for decades now have become comfortable with playing for each other and within academic settings. Jazz has increasingly become about the craft of playing it correctly (what colleges excel at) rather than creating new music that would be heard by and effect... regular people. Jazz people have long since given up on anybody outside their scene and that pretty much by definition, makes you self-indulgent.

The paradoxes don't end there though - nor does the lack of self awareness. The nature of jazz makes it one of the highest forms of live music - musicians able to improvise over its complex harmony, elastic rhythm and doing so in real time - where no two performances can ever be the same, is what makes it extraordinary and not terribly accessible. It IS an amazing thing - one of the great feats of intellect, and at its best, artistry. But for some time, those of us who have spent a lifetime listening to it and practicing it are noticing an odd - and again paradoxical - thing. The greater the emphasis on craft... the less you seem to get emotionally from performances. Young player after young player are coming up with extraordinary command of their instruments - better than anything that has come before - and they can play all the music that has come before them. It's extraordinary. But what's even more extraordinary is that... it leaves you totally flat. They all sound very similar - like somebody playing an etude perfectly... but soullessly. But they're BETTER???? But... it doesn't work. It's an amazing display of technique... that comes across as musical masturbation.

Why????

I think there are a few reasons. For one thing when somebody plays the music of Charlie Parker or Clifford Brown now... they're sort of like the craftsman making the Tiffany lamp referenced above. Bird and Clifford and 'Trane and Monk... invented this stuff AND played it, but their achievement, first and foremost... was that they created it. And they were creating something that at least some people listened to... and was a reflection of the culture that they lived in. That culture hasn't existed in 60 or 70 years, so... music reflecting that time wouldn't exactly be relevant or important if it was invented today.

Look, there are orchestras put together to play music with period instruments so that you can hear the music as it must have sounded when it was originally composed centuries ago when there was no ability to record anything. This is a worthwhile endeavor from an intellectual point of view, but even if you get everything right - and even if you see it in the same sort of building and everyone were to wear period clothes... it wouldn't matter. We'll never here Mozart the way people in Vienna did in the 1780's, because... we're not them. Things have happened since that time that have influenced us - their culture, knowledge and experience was entirely different from ours - and we can't process it the same way those audiences did. We've heard jazz and funk and rock and everything else... all of that is in our head because those things happened and are part of our experience. None of that happened to the Viennese of the 1780's. In short, the arrow of time neither stops nor ceases moving forward.... ever. It's he same reason thinking that laws can be made that don't evolve is an intellectual dead end. It's impossible because language and meaning constantly evolves as do the societies which they were meant to order. Judgement and nuance have to take over along with the realization that no style can last forever... because styles are reflections of where a society is at any given time. The ideas that animated and laid the groundwork for jazz haven't existed in a very long time. Recreating jazz now is, for the most part, an act of craftsmanship, and rarely one of creativity.

So, where does this leave me as a lifelong jazz musician? Well, I've always had a problem with this now ascendant, pedantic and essentially conservative approach to a music that was in its heyday, neither of those things. When I was learning jazz, many of my teachers always thought that we were learning this music not so that we could endlessly repeat it, but so that it could be the foundation of more new music to come - that we learned jazz to enhance future creativity... not to forbid future creativity, which seems to be the current mantra. So, I'm fine with the fact that within much of what constitutes the jazz world I don't have a home. Again, that's okay - I don't want to be involved with what they're doing they've essentially betrayed what they're supposedly supporting... by staying still. I also have no interest in the "technique at all costs - technique equals expression" school that has taken over in the jazz and classical music worlds - and in much of the composition scene as well. Although I love harmony and delving deep into the weeds on those topics, my musical output is not something I want to be like some sort of dissertation. Complexity by itself, doesn't necessarily provide a payoff. If it ends up being about head vs heart, heart has to win every time. The emotional payoff is still why I'm involved in music and so these days I find myself veering towards tonality and simplicity more and more in everything I do and in finding a style of my own to further explore, because that... is a creative act.

The Power of the Reboot

There are few things more underrated in our pursuit to master virtually anything than the inherent power of reframing the entire exercise, looking at it from as close to 30,000 feet as possible and, as many a meditation teacher has said over the years... begin again. In other words, when stuck... reboot!

My ability to appreciate this "starting from scratch" sort of idea is probably due to my being a trumpet player. It's in the nature of playing brass that we have to rebuild the foundations of our technique daily through practice exercises designed to work the musculature so that we are ready for whatever demands may come our way. Trumpet players probably spend more time getting ready to do the job than actually doing the job. That may seem a tad odd, but that's a big part of the way it is. What's interesting also is the teaching of it - very often various teachers describe the same physical phenomenon so differently that students and the teachers themselves frequently misunderstand one another, only to sometimes find out later that they were describing the same thing. Not only do we need to look at our problems through a variety of lenses we must remember that our teachers, by themselves, are different lenses.

My favorite way to do this kind of mental reboot is with musical composition. When going there, I like to make things as simple as possible. Part of composing, as it can be in writing or any other number of disciplines in which communication is the key, is to embrace a degree of simplicity. Beethoven's 5th is one of the great examples of this. Four notes. That's it. And everybody responds to it and is on board immediately. It's a bit paradoxical that people like me, coming out of a background in jazz that revels in the complex, have to relearn the importance of big structures and allowing them the space and the time to develop. Jazz musicians find ways to complicate everything - to constantly make things increasingly busy, and this can be an aspect of jazz composition as well, although to my ear the best vehicles for improvisation have often been simpler tunes (think Maiden Voyage or So What).

But what it we want to write outside of jazz? In fact, what if we simply want to write... without regard for genre? Talk about a reboot! Take all of that genre-specific stuff out of the equation as much as possible too. When you go in that direction the entire enterprise seems much more like classical composition than anything else, but that can be a pitfall - much of what we consider classical composition has turned into a pedantic, academic society more interested in observing a tradition than doing anything that hasn't already been done to death a million times. So, to really pull off the reboot... try not to be too influenced by that crowd either.

I took composition and arranging classes in college and feel I got a great deal out of it actually, but one of my favorite books on the subject was simply entitled "Composing Music" by William Russo.

Russo, was an extremely eclectic cat, and a free thinker - the sort of person we don't have nearly enough of these days. Russo arranged for Stan Kenton's big band, which was an openly experimental group, but also wrote in more classical settings and was also a part of the "Third Stream" movement - an attempt to fuse jazz and the classical tradition via composed works. Frankly, he was a fascinating man who did not fit neatly into any category in which the world tried to place him and clearly lived on his own terms. It's hard not to like Russo. And just as Russo was by all indications incapable of being boxed in, the same was true as to his ideas regarding his chosen path: composition.

Russo's book was designed so that even those without a background in writing music could grasp his ideas. This is achieved via a series of exercises in which the student is given very strict rules as to what they can do, and more importantly, what they can't! Whole pieces have to be constructed using only whole notes and half notes, for instance. Harmony is extremely limited as well - the idea, over and over again, is to emphasize the need for YOU to get creative, rather than rely on complex structures to give an illusion of creativity. People are at their most creative... when they have to be because resources are limited! Something that's true across the artistic spectrum.

There is a tendency for people to react poorly to this! It's reminiscent of meditation students who go on a retreat and can't stand the idea that seemingly - to them anyway - nothing is happening, when, in fact... the nothingness and your finding yourself within it, is at least, in part, the point. I remember first reading Russo's Composing Music in the early 90's and being a little of two minds about it. I understood what he was suggesting and liked it, but... there was a part of me that longed for what I thought were the rewards that came with complexity. Today... my musical world is much different and I re-read Russo fairly often and try to stick to fairly strict restrictions, especially on my current project which I want to be a series of accessible pieces that have a groove, some ambient tendencies, are subtle and yet resonate with a certain kind of listener fairly easily. Stuff like this exists and I like it and I want to dive into that pool for a time, but it only works... if you can keep yourself from allowing your ideas to take off to such a degree that you've left your listenership behind. One of the great benefits of writing this way - with fewer instruments (perhaps just an acoustic piano) is that there is nowhere to hide. You are forced with dealing with the generation of new ideas in the most fundamental of ways and this process, by itself, can lead to greater creativity.