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.