For musicians, a little self-respect can be empowering! Guess what? Allow yourself that more often!

Balance! It comes up a lot, particularly for musicians. Musicians are natural explorers and getting lost and a tad untethered in the world of ideas is practically a professional obligation. This makes balance, sometimes... a problem! We're free thinkers and it's a source of strength creatively and troublesome professionally at the same time.

Why do my thoughts run in this direction? Because recently I've seen a lot of advertising aimed at musicians in which the attitude expressed towards them is one of exasperation... by people trying to sell them on promotional services. It may be the strangest sales strategy I've ever seen: "Let's browbeat and put down our potential customers! They'll love it!" It sounds crazy, and perhaps it is, but I imagine I see it so often because there's a degree of success associated with it, which is fairly dispiriting. The argument goes that musicians are poor at business, that being able to promote one's work is at least as important as making said work in the first place and that musicians are failures in an overall sense because they don't have spectacular business sense besides their ability to make music (which apparently holds no value whatsoever to the brilliant entrepreneurs making these assertions).

Look, the argument isn't totally without merit. Musicians have a deserved reputation for having no business acumen. The litany of artists popular and unpopular that have been bilked over he years by the unscrupulous is legendary. Musicians have learned to be more careful, even timid, and you can't really blame them, but that very cautiousness can be a problem too. Yes, you need to be aggressive but... there's a way to do it, and that means... understanding business at least to a degree. And musicians don't. Fine, let's add to this mixture/situation PR people and those that work on one's social media presence. Now you can argue that if you're the tops of the tops in that world you're probably not dealing with the music industry because there's no money to be made there... but, let's let that consideration slide for the moment. Let's at least pretend that there is an industry of professionals that are all about the promotion of music. Let's further agree to consider as valid that they do have a degree of frustration dealing with the musical class, much of which has problems with the tactics and strategies of selling stuff for a wide variety of ethical reasons, but still can't figure out why nobody is digging their stuff. And let's be straight about this, the business of selling... just about anything, borders on coercion. Can you ethically sell? I'm not entirely sure, but I don't think that if you do that somehow you're the lowest form of humanity - we have to allow ourselves enough ethical space to get the word out there... somehow.

So, the business world of sell, sell, sell!!!, finds themselves terribly frustrated with the musical class who they can't seem to politely cajole into doing things in their long term best interests. It's no shock really, we're congenitally stubborn. Look, I get the argument and I get the frustration, but... the latest iteration of getting the attention of musicians, producers and composers has tuned into abuse! "Let's yell at them! Let's tell them how we're tired of them! Let's tell them we're not appreciated enough! Let's tell them that their music doesn't matter and neither does whatever talent they have! Let's tell them that all that really matters is business!!! Let's tell them what we really think!!!"

And that's what they're doing... They've really let their hair down and they're giving it all they've got, and you know what? All that caution musical people have about business people? it's fully justified when you see these sorts of ads and messages!

Why in the world would anybody put up with this stuff? If you have an ounce of self respect as a musician or simply as a human being, you know what utter garbage this is and... you're insulted! And you should be. You're being sermonized and talked down to! It's beyond condescending, they think you're stupid, and they're saying so! They really believe that all that matters in life is keeping score... and a ledger... That's it! They've BS'd themselves into thinking that they're following the highest calling known to humanity. There's nothing higher on the almighty ziggurat than being a snake oil salesman! That's it! The zenith! The capstone!

I'm sorry... we know better. Yes, they may have some professional skills, but whatever they've learned... I bet we can learn it too! Their heroes are guys like Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos. That's fine, but we have Miles Davis and Beethoven and I'm sorry, there's no real comparison there. We make art. We're going for immortality. We may not get there , but at least we're going for something... But the guys selling likes and follows... THEY'RE the ones who've got all the answers...

Uh-uh... Not buying.

Learn some business skills? Absolutely! Balance! At least keep one foot in the regular world just so you can operate there when you have to, but... don't let people talk to you like this, and when they do, feel free to fight back a little and tell them just how out of line they are... because they are!

"Why does everything have to get political?" Because... everything we do... is a political act.

People are tired of politics and I understand the sentiment, but... I also feel it's a bit of a cop out - a cop out by the last few generations of Americans most of whom have been apathetically copping out for some time. Not copping out (what used to be called doing your civic duty) requires taking a bit of a stand, and these days, it pretty much means alienating half the people you know. It is uncomfortable - I get that people would just rather not be bothered, but it's also the price to be paid for living in a democracy. Has it always been this ugly? No, it hasn't always been this naked and this raw, but it's always been there simmering under the surface.

Because things are so raw, it's probably a good idea to make it known where you stand. Most people seem to think that the stakes are really high politically these days, and I agree so... now would seem the time to make it perfectly clear what you're in favor of and what you oppose. Sitting it out doesn't really help anybody. We all have convictions. Trying to keep your head down hardly empowers your own ideas and can only embolden all sorts of philosophical principles that you may find dangerous - when reasonable people cede the field to extremists... the extremists essentially win and are in charge, and we've been doing that for a while. And if things are as dire as they seem, being politically agnostic only hastens less discussion and a greater crisis, no matter where you sit on the political spectrum.

I think one of the reasons people are so careful, and even fearful, of expressing their politics is precisely because the stakes are so high. Liberals are immediately deemed communists and conservatives fascists when, in the main, neither is true of most people within those blocks. In fact there is a lot going on politically these days and it's a lot more mixed up then I think people realize. To get into this and try to elucidate the point, I'm going to have out myself politically, but if you've ever seen my stuff on Twitter, and I'm not hard to find (https://twitter.com/DavePainchaud), then you already probably have a pretty good idea where I'm at.

The truth is I'm pretty hard to the left, but I remain an independent and could never be a Democrat. The Democrats tend to squabble amongst themselves at key moments when they could actually accomplish something and never seem nearly as committed to their goals as those on the right. To me, that's totally disqualifying as an organization - I'm not joining a group of incompetents. They can have my vote but that doesn't mean they get my approbation or membership. They do get things generally correct from a philosophical point of view, but are far too quick to compromise with their opponents who frequently take them as suckers and never seem to make an argument in good faith. I'm hardly alone in this - plenty of people on the left feel the Democrats have failed them and even failed the rest of the Democrats. You can count me among them. It's also true, however, that I have conservative friends who feel that the GOP is not the party of which they used to be a part - it's gone into a deeply paranoid, nativist/nationalist zone. It's almost as if we have four parties at this point - the ultra right wing as exemplified by the current GOP, conservatives who feel they have no place in either party, the Democrats (a fairly center-left thing) and a then a host of additional leftists who see no true political home with the Democrats.

Although I clearly have a side in all this, I'm sure I have plenty of views that those who are totally partisan on my own side don't want to hear, but... if you're totally partisan you're also probably incapable of being an honest political actor and that's another good reason to not belong to a party. At any rate, you'll often hear the argument that the parties are essentially the same - that it's all corrupt equally etc. This is one of the places where I think we lose our perspective - the two sides are remarkably different and the situation is asymmetrical at this point. If you want to argue that the if you're far enough to the left you're a communist and if you're far enough to the right you're a fascist, I wouldn't disagree with you, but I would ask you, how many out and out communists do you see on the left? Yeah, there are probably a few here and there, but they have no power. And while we're discussing extremes, let's be abundantly straight-forward and say that if you're espousing either communism or fascism you have gone completely 'round the bend and that there really shouldn't be a place for you in politics. By virtue of my leftist tendencies, I lean closer to the communists I suppose, but communism... has never worked and probably can't. You could probably argue that it's never really been tried either, as it's been co-opted by some genuinely evil regimes, but frankly I'm not sure it matters. It can't work. You see, there's thing called human nature... and we like getting ahead. So, on the left you don't see communists, the red menace, etc. Socialists? Sure! Plenty of them, but don't confuse one with the other because they are nothing alike.

Okay, let's reverse things and see where this asymmetrical aspect comes into stark relief. Is there fascism on the right? Uh... yeah! In everything but name, because the name is poison... but philosophically... is much of the GOP and the Trumpist agenda fascist? Yeah... Pretty much 100%. It's all about their tribe, the leader being incapable of making mistakes, because... he's the leader... There's a whole nationalist loyalty thing (loyalty to leaders and uniforms but never to ideas), where authoritarianism is not only encouraged, it's acceptance is a prerequisite for membership in the group, and of course all the grievance politics and the bringing in of the religious right to make that part of the con. There's a lot of purity tests on the right and in general nobody passes them forever. Relationships within the party machinery are particularly transactional there. It's very scary stuff and although the part of the left that's given up on the Democrats sees the threat, Nancy Pelosi will tell you that she wants to see "Republicans take back their party" - well, keep dreaming, Nancy.

What does any of this have to do with the title above? Well, I'll tell you. People would like to believe that they can live in a world untouched by the hand of politics - where they're decisions are essentially agnostic and can't be questioned. It's a nice idea, but more than a little foolish. It's like wanting to live in a world that doesn't have weather. Too bad. It rains. Deep down every decision we make is based upon... what we value! What we buy, where we buy it, how we feel about our neighbors, where we get our information... you name it - all of these decisions comes down to what we think is a good thing and what's really important to us and all of that is a form of cultural voting. Our values and our politics are the same thing! It's actually one of the things that keeps everything from totally falling apart - plenty of leftists end up living in predominantly right wing areas. The same goes for conservatives living in leftist congressional districts and the mixing of all this stuff - the fact that leftists sometimes have surprisingly conservative views and right wingers will occasionally go completely against the orthodoxy is good. No, it's not all one way or another and that should give us a degree of hope, but still, our choices can be seen through the prism of our values. It's inescapable and since it is... let's stop the hand-wringing about getting away from politics. You can't. Instead, be a good citizen in a marginally functioning democracy and get involved and informed.

Oops! I said it, didn't I?

Get informed! Well... good luck. Our media environment - and I call it that as journalism as it once was has long since been killed off - is one of the reasons we have this crisis of confidence in... everything, in the first place. We think everybody is lying to us all the time and we think that because a lot of the media is clearly not on the up and up, or that they're stretching things. Of course, they will do and say pretty much anything to get engagement on their online platforms. What's really ugly is that we've gotten to the point collectively wherein the most basic of facts - things we really do know have to be true - even that stuff, for the more paranoid, is suddenly just conjecture. You can blame our educational system (and a society that won't fund or value it) but you can also blame the institution of journalism, an institution that has long since given up on the idea of serving the public. Yes, I recall when journalism was a public trust and I watched it turn into purely business... where the public... was on it's own, because, "We need to make a buck around here!" Cable news is a disaster on the right and the left and print journalism isn't much better. It seems like everyone with talent has been bought off. Thankfully, you can still get a fairly straight story from the New York Times (leaning left), the Wall Street Journal (leaning right), the Washington Post (leaning left) and the wire services such as the AP and Reuters. Having confidence in the info you're getting usually still requires cross-referencing the facts, but if you do that, you can have some idea what the hell is going on.

Because trust in the media is so low, this has allowed the unaffiliated blogger to become... somebody that can, under the right circumstances, be the human with integrity! Telling it like they see it! Are these pieces more like columns and less like straight news? Yes, totally, but... considering where we're at, good columnists and political thinkers are desperately needed to inform and educate a public long since lost at sea. I've found a few since becoming a bit of a political junkie on Twitter. Politics Twitter is an amazing place - it's all out there and I've met a few folks who really know their stuff. So much of political reporting has essentially become making predictions as to what's going to happen - almost all of which are wrong, but nobody seems to be keeping score and the fear-mongering and free for all continues. But... there are some folks who get it right. And they do so repeatedly. Well, guess what, I am keeping score and I have a few recommendations for you. Read anything you can get your hands on by Joseph O'Neil (https://twitter.com/JosephONeillx). Joseph had a distinguished a career as barrister in England and then decided to become a novelist. Absolutely brilliant cat currently teaching writing at Bard College in New York. Similarly, James Gleick (https://twitter.com/JamesGleick), who I've been reading since the early 90's when his book on chaos theory was a must read (I had a few girlfriends who didn't know what to do with me at that time because I kept seeing chaos theory in everything, including a cup of coffee one morning). My last one is the columnist John Stoehr (https://twitter.com/johnastoehr) who has written for US News and World Report, the New Haven Register and is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative. John has a column and blog that I highly recommend as part of your daily political intake and edification called The Editorial Board (https://www.editorialboard.com/). John gets it right more often than anybody has a right to and you may find yourself realizing he's articulating an idea that's only partially formed within your own mind. Definitely do yourself a favor and check him out.

There's no real way to escape the political moment. Right now, it's omnipresent - we really don't get to run to our silo and make believe it isn't happening. Solipsism isn't the answer, kids. Our collective issues go away faster and we're all more free and secure when we confront the real threats before us. So, let's do that... so we can have the luxury of not living in a crisis.

Jazz and classical music in 2021: dedicated to craft and embarrassed by, and devoid of, expression

Maybe I was taught too well. Or maybe I felt things too accurately too early. Whatever the case, I was drawn to music for the same reason I think many people have been. They felt an emotion from a particular sonority or perhaps from a bit of melody that made them just feel some emotion... very strongly. These things can be extremely powerful and I'd argue it's an even more profound experience when it happens in the absence of a vocal with district words that you can understand. Words make it a tad too easy - without the words, you realize in an even more obvious way, that the clashing of tones, by themselves... means something! That the mixing of notes can create emotions and feelings that are impossible to resist. That's something else, isn't it? It's still a bit of a miracle whenever it occurs. And it does, or can, occur, if we have exposure to it without distractions.

I remember feeling music very powerfully from a young age. The first real live performance I ever took in was by the Stan Kenton Orchestra at a ballroom in the Portland, Maine area when I was seven (probably 1973). My dad was a major Kenton-ite and we had a front row table (yeah, it was set up that way). I was blown away by how loud it and dense it was (although I couldn't have told you I was reacting to dissonant harmonies at the time, of course). The thing that hit me more than anything else was the trumpet section - so loud, piercing and powerful. The lead trumpet's notes felt like they were fired directly into my skull like some sort of pure, diamond bullet. That was it... I wanted to play the trumpet. My folks probably figured that this would go away in time, but it didn't, and I had an older brother by five years that was very involved in the school band and I wanted to do the stuff he was doing, so eventually, when I was deemed old enough, I got a horn. I was nine. What I wanted to understand was how to make music that made you and an audience feel that... incredible emotional thing when it was being played really well. Yes, I was a precocious kid in many ways, but I realized then that you learned an instrument (something I was told was extremely difficult) so you could eventually get to a point where you could get to the expression. Because... the expression was clearly the destination. Getting there was the reason why one would do it in the first place. It was the thing for which I craved an explanation. Surely, how it effected people and some discussion regarding this would be something that we would get into at school. It was the first, most obvious thing to be learned.

And it almost never came up. It didn't come up in middle school. I clearly recall my middle school band playing Christmas pieces at some community center or some such thing and we were playing chorales. I was on 2nd trumpet and found that I loved that part with it's notes blending in and giving definition and context to the melody so much that I just oozed out every note. It was simple, it was beautiful and I was loving it. I was thoroughly moved by its beauty while playing it and I'm sure I played better as a result. I remember looking around and realizing I was the only one that had been touched by this arrangement. Nobody else cared. Nobody else had heard or felt what I had. I started to realize that I had a kind of sensor - a capability to hear and be moved by this beauty - that most people simply did not posses. I found that terribly sad and it made me feel even more alone than I already did.

It rarely if ever came up in high school. On occasion you would hear this come up during an all-county or some other band festival, but always in the vaguest of terms - still, whenever it did, I was elated and wanted to hear more, although the conversations were never as in depth as I would have liked. School music programs teach students how to play an instrument and how to play in an ensemble and... that's it! Imagine taking an advanced high school English course in which you get heavily into Shakespeare but never discuss the meaning of the plot or the themes the drama is exploring, as if words, by themselves, and being able to pronounce them correctly, was all that mattered. Imagine if understanding what you were reading was considered... rather unthinkable. You'd find that to be an insane way to approach the subject and you'd be right. Welcome to most high school music programs.

College (for me at Berklee - a good school, mind you) wasn't all that much better - there were some that embraced the topic but others that saw any discussion of this, by itself, as a sign of weakness. It was the thinking of the hard core playing crowd that If you cared about expression, it was clear that that, by itself, was a cover for a person having inferior technique. Artistic concerns were seen as a kind of cop out. Oh, my - I had run headlong into the never ending conflict between the forces of the the pedantic vs those of the dilettantes. I've been making the argument to musicians ever since that there needs to be some sort of rapprochement, but there has been no such movement in that conflict - in fact, people are dug in deeper than ever.

I want to plant a flag right here - right at this particular juncture - and explain the schism I'm discussing, so that we can come back to it and recognize the context it gives to today's musical environment. Just do me a favor and keep in the back of your mind the fact that I've been searching for some discussion into the psychological and emotional effects that the music transmits to a listener, and that the subject is in large part off limits to the academic mind.

The marvelous trumpet professor Frank Gabriel Campos, formerly of Ithaca College, explained this divergence (the pedantic vs dilettantism) spectacularly. Campos argued for a balance between these two extremes, but let's define our terms. In short, a pedant is somebody with spectacular technique on their instrument, but incapable of expressing much of anything because expression isn't even a consideration. The pedant plays great... and yet you find none of what they perform memorable. It's an empty display. Musical masturbation, in short. The opposite is the dilettante, somebody with a great deal to say artistically but lacking in the proper command and technical competence to express it. We see this all too often and it's a bit embarrassing - a ton of emoting... by somebody that simply can't perform well and is constantly making errors. Neither is desirable, of course, and most people are to some degree a mix of these two things, which gets us back to Campos's point about achieving a fair balance - having something to say and being in possession of enough expertise to do so in a competent or even expert way.

Unfortunately, there comes a point where you have to decide, even when these too extremes are balanced within an excellent musician, which gets emphasized just a little bit more. In the end which one is simply just a tad more important. Even if the percentages are 51% to 49%.... what gets the 51%? To me, the choice has to be for the content or the emotional message that the piece is trying to convey. Art has to win out. The emotional connection to the listener remains the destination and our technique is the superhighway we build to get there. This is a tough one for many of us, because few things are harder to stomach than dilettantism - the dilettante and their tendencies are so loathed, the backlash so strong, that there is a tendency to go to the other extreme. This leads us to a bit of art/music politics. Let's go there next.

Although there are a lot of folks that want to gloss over it, there has always been a bit of a culture war between popular artists and those that are going for high art. Popular artists do something that is easier for the masses to handle - the music is simpler and there is a high level of theatrics involved. That's always been the case, but check it out now. A great deal of pop music when done live is an extravagant stage show. The performer who is the main focus of the show is often dancing as well as singing. In fact, singing properly while running around dancing is so impossible to do (even when well mic'd) that the singer (if we're talking about a pop singer, for instance) is often singing to a track - meaning that they're singing to pre-recorded music so that they can take a break here and there and get through the performance. In short, it's a bit of a fake. It is, at best, a kind of halfway performance. It really is pretty awful that this goes on and that people either think it's the real deal or know enough to know better and still don't care. People willingly being sold snake oil... doesn't say much for anybody involved. But, let me be clear. There are plenty of people in pop music who don't do these sorts of things - there remain bands in various styles that go out and perform and everything is on the up and up, but they're not the biggest acts and it's doubtful that they're in the majority.

How do you think people in classical music and jazz have felt over the years about the kinds of pop music I've been describing? Often, they're horrified, but there is another reaction altogether. Often, they don't even consider any of that... music... at all. And you can't totally blame them. Cancel culture, anyone? Long before the term was invented people in the classical world have been canceling out everything... except other classical music. Jazz musicians aren't much better, but again... I think they can be forgiven to a degree. In the broadest possible terms (and I admit readily that I am speaking in a general sense and that there are, of course, exceptions to what I'm describing), pop music is all about an endorphin rush - it really is bubble gum. Everybody loves bubble gum. And it's not put together by the finest chefs in the land - it's a massed produced thing with no nutritional value. On the other hand, being a jazz or classical musician is very tough. Classical players are all about playing within they're chosen style... perfectly. It truly is pretty much the gold standard as far as technical expertise on an instrument is concerned. Jazz musicians are a whole other thing - they're amazing players, but also have to have an incredible harmonic vocabulary to be able to spontaneously play new and fresh music within the improvisational rules of jazz. The jazz musician is a hyper-sophisticated musical animal who is playing and composing simultaneously with virtually no preparation. It requires a great deal more from a listener to get into jazz and classical music - there's a lot more to understand, it requires your attention and the pieces take greater time to consume. It's not bubble gum, it's more like a four course meal.

The result is that the really great stuff out there musically... is basically unknown to most of the population, but they all know whomever the pop sensation of the moment is. And that's been the case since I was a kid. The level of resentment from jazz and classical people used to be very high, and although many people feel that that has all sort of eased off, and it has in large part, something else has happened that may be even more destructive to these art forms and it's happened from within. Just as pop music has become increasingly a theatrical production less connected to the actual performance of music (and that's been a really bad thing for pop), the opposite has happened in the worlds of jazz and classical. As pop music has become even more the land of the dilettante, the jazz folks and the classical peeps have become even more pedantic.

Part of the reason for this is fairly straight ahead. As mentioned above, the audience for jazz and classical is extremely small. Both forms are on life support for the most part, requiring endowments, art institutions and fund raising to keep them going at all. We're now at a point where the only places to really learn about either kind of music is via music schools and conservatories. As I learned during my own time at college, the degree to which the pedantic was prevalent was high then, but now? Now, it's taken over, and you can hear it if you listen to any of the current music in either scene.

If you're looking for absolute stunning virtuosity, you can find it in copious amounts from a wide variety of sources in jazz and classical music. And then the great paradox kicks in with full effect: if you hear them, you'll be impressed by the playing and then realize... you're utterly unmoved! It's incredible, really. I was listening to a top tenor saxophonist recently - the guy can play anything and... I never detect an ounce of sincerity to any of it. It sounds like a guy playing a bunch of patterns and I suppose that's because... It IS a guy playing a bunch of patterns. It touches... nobody, from what I can tell. I suppose other tenor saxophonists care... but I'd guess that's about it. We're generations in on people doing impressions of jazz from previous periods - and doing it nearly perfectly. And yet, if I want to hear good jazz I don't check out much from the past 20-30 years... I still check out Charlie Parker and Miles and Monk and Count Basie and Sonny and 'Trane... Is that purely generational? I don't think so. The great jazz musicians of the middle 20th century were inventing the music and developing it and they were making a personal artistic statement about their lives and the things they were going through in an effort... to reach people! They were playing incredibly difficult music and they were also expressing themselves and connecting to regular people. I remember being told by an eminent bassist that Miles Davis probably couldn't have a career today. That probably applies to Monk as well. The reason? Not technically proficient enough. Can you imagine thinking that the world would be better off without Miles and Monk? That's where we're at now. Having an artistic message is kid's stuff - it's naïve - all that matters is chops.

I mentioned earlier that I went to Berklee and I went there because jazz was my thing and guys like Miles, Monk, Wayne Shorter, Chet Baker and Art Farmer were very high on my list of the sorts of people I wanted to emulate. They all had a personal message - music infused with grace and emotion, so that when I see the state of jazz today, I truly find it unrecognizable. The cult of chops has won. The collective insecurity of musicians - the fear of being told you're not technically brilliant enough - the ultimate dagger to the heart - has long since won the day. The result is jazz has become in large part something cloistered to colleges and universities where people within the scene play for each other, long since having given up on the idea of bringing the music to a wider audience. Yes, there are jazz festivals, but the vast majority of those programs are, at best, "jazz light", or simply popular music that may occasionally use a 7th chord. Lots of blues and funk at the jazz festivals, and the jazz you do get is of the utterly unmemorable kind - more like going to symposium then hearing live music. There is very little out there at this point that I would cross the street to hear... for free. And I love this music! If this crowd can't entice me - who wants to like them - how are they going to say something relevant enough to regular people to garner some kind of an audience? The answer is they won't and they can't, but also... that they don't care!!! They have the sanction and approbation of academia... and that's all that matters to them at this point. You can make a very good argument that one of the worst things to happen to jazz is it being appropriated by education, and my own education is a result of that I'll admit, but I'll leave that one for another day.

I have friends in the classical music world who tell similar tales. Classical music, like jazz, is a form that is barely able to sustain itself at all at this point, and that undoubtedly plays a part in all of this. Here too, the pedants have won the day. My friends, some of whom are older than me and have now reached the elder statesmen stage of their careers, speak of amazing musicians coming up, but something being slightly off about them and the new crop of conductors. They play great - virtuosity seems to come easily to them - and somehow because of that, they're not nearly as invested in the product as their predecessors. They have a lot of other interests, are probably fairly well rounded human beings and they tick off every box imaginable in the professional sense and yet... the music never seems to have that extra "oomph" - that sense of commitment that was the hallmark of the great orchestras. A generation has come up believing, in essence, that if you simply play the music on the page that all of the necessary emotion is encoded in the notes and that interpretation is some sort of slippery slope. Sterility is a goal rather than something to be avoided.

I saw this personally a few years back when I saw Alan Gilbert conducting the New York Philharmonic in a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. Gilbert is known for being excellent in the realm of modern works and smaller, more delicate pieces - it seems to be his favorite area and it's something he excels at. Nobody can knock the fact that he's an incredibly intelligent person - he really does know his stuff. But... on the night I was there, he was utterly slain by Russian romanticism. What I witnessed was a conductor doing his utmost to hold back the orchestra. It was as if the sheer sumptuousness and grandeur of Rimsky-Korsakov was too much for him - embarrassing even. The performance felt perfunctory. I found myself saying during the piece's big moments under my breath, "More!" and I knew they had more in them... but the conductor and the orchestra refused to give that. Romanticism was just too much for their late 20th/early 21st century sensibilities - you got the feeling that they felt that much of the music of which they are the custodians, is, in their opinion, in really bad taste.

So where does that leave me? I've been passionately committed to jazz since I was a kid. I think it's capable of being one of the highest forms of art we have and I've had the pleasure of playing it in the Village and around Manhattan during the late 80's and 90's as I was trying to figure it, and myself, out. Plenty of people have made careers out of it, although many more who are equally and often more deserving, have not. I was always under the impression that we were supposed to take this music forward - that it had to continue to change and grow into something vibrant for different times. On rare occasions that has happened, but they're fleeting moments. To my sensibilities, the music has too often reverted into an impression of a previous time, almost as if people were intentionally trying to turn the clock back and not live in the world as it is. Do I really want to be a part of that?

I recently had some time to reflect on this during a family trip when I had some evenings alone on the porch of a beach house and I thought about these issues at some length and came to the conclusion that I do not. I was reminded of trying to get that answer to the "emotional meaning" of what music could do since childhood... and never getting an answer from an academic community that had, in large part, failed to take a swing at what was essentially a hanging slider. Of course, I know the answer now and it's pretty simple. It's art! That seemingly magical and transformative quality is art - it's art when it's a verb! It's what happens when all that craft gets transcended and you feel something in the depth of your soul that opens up your mind and makes you feel connected to the whole world. It's wonderful, right? Of course it is... and it's the last thing the pedantic scene wants to admit exists. For them... art is a threat. It's no surprise, really, that growing up, my teachers didn't want to touch art. Most of them never made any and most of them couldn't if they had tried. I met a few teachers at Berklee that would discuss it... because Berklee hired some artists as well as more traditional teachers.

Thus, a jazz and classical world dominated by pedants remains in large part hostile to anybody with a new or artistic idea, so... why would you try to work with entities that resent your interests in the first place or won't even have a conversation with you? You wouldn't. And some other thoughts crossed my mind. New art - relevant, interesting art - almost never is birthed by institutions and a conservative, closed-system approach to what art can be. It almost always comes from outside - usually born of human experience on the front lines of life, as it were. Jazz came up that way. It was a celebration of life despite terrible inequities - a direct reflection of the African-American experience created by African-Americans. As we've seen it can be interpreted and played by people all over the world, but no music or artistic movement can be frozen in time. It has to evolve. Today's jazz has voluntarily decided to freeze itself - to some degree out of reverence for its own past. The inclination is laudable, but the result is self-immolation.

I also thought about where I am as a listener, which really is the ultimate arbiter of your own musical compass. Where have I been finding inspiration? Where do I still hear that thing that I could identify as a 6th grader playing Christmas chorales? Most of the cool-sounding and seemingly relevant ideas - things that actually get me - have come from composers and producers working in instrumental electronic music. I'm not talking about EDM and rave stuff - I mean people and groups like Apparat, Boards of Canada, Kiasmos and a host of others. It's smart, it's subtle, it sounds like now, you feel informed by it and... it hits me the way I need it, emotionally. I'm sure my musical friends who buy into the current trends in the jazz and classical words will not understand this and continue to push various videos of technical expertise my way as if... that's all that matters, but... I don't buy into all that anymore. And I don't think I ever really did.

When I first started recording music at home, I had already to some degree crossed this musical/artistic Rubicon. There was no real way to record jazz at my house, but I could create music through the magic of software synths augmented by me either playing the trumpet/flugel or singing and I found that I was comfortable doing it. On my second project, which was for a modern dance ensemble, it got less electronic and more compositional and I enjoyed that experience as well and the music had a degree of success, but it was even further removed from jazz. I've not given up on the idea of playing small ensemble jazz - in fact if the opportunity came up I would jump at it, but my approach to the music will not be the "chops at all costs" emptiness that pervades the scene today. I was too well trained and come from an era where a connection to the originators of the music still prevailed. In a jazz situation, I will keep faith... with them. But in the meantime, I will go where my ear, my sensibilities and my common sense dictate. Over the summer, I took my son to the interactive Van Gogh exhibit in Manhattan in which Van Gogh's work is displayed moving all around you projected on the walls and floor of a large space. It's very effective and I couldn't help but think that one of the lessons of Van Gogh's career, for me, was that he was utterly misunderstood by his contemporaries and that his work was not in any way something that conformed to the artistic dictates of the time. Of course, that's one of the reasons why it was so good in the first place. Van Gogh was concerned with art - even then academe wasn't able to recognize groundbreaking art when it was right there living along side them. I don't have pretensions to be a Van Gogh, but the example needs to be taken to heart by far more of us. Know thyself, be thyself and be unafraid to have an identity apart form some institutional mandate.