Yet another fresh start.
As I near the end of my university degree, I naturally take stock of other facets of my life. This is a discernible point on what is indeed a cycle. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I have encountered wonder, learning, understanding, and then frustration, because I have an intuitive sense of something beyond that will not be looked upon directly. When this feeling is inescapable as it is now (I don’t even value my usual favourite solitary run, from fear of being alone with my thoughts), I understand it is time to stop, question, and plot my next move.
Why do I write? Ideally, I would apply myself and make good records of my life as it unfolds. I should love to look here and find a collection of apt descriptions, distinguished dialogue, and perhaps a bit of contextual illustration. Well, maybe next time. This journal is obviously a last resort for my troubled mind. Or is it so troubled? Am I always going to feel unfulfilled? Do I need to try harder to be happy? Is this normal, and is there intrinsic value or goodness in normal? Or am I simply someone unlucky enough to have been born with a relentless need to create and understand but none of the direction, discipline, or talent to match?
Perhaps writing isn’t the way to learn one’s own mind. Or, maybe it’s that knowing your mind is not equivalent to knowing happiness. At twenty-two years old, I can see my future life’s work dancing about peripherally, nothing more than licking flames and flickering shadow, that denies me each time I get close. I am aching to go, do, make, discover, but what?
I’m about to graduate.
Okay, so I’ve got another summer semester to go, but tomorrow morning is the last time I perform three hastily arranged standards that I learned the changes to tonight. I’m excited for some time off, although what that means, exactly, I’m not sure. I still intend to go in to the school and practice my ass off. I will have some time for other things; for example, I want to start blogging on a regular basis. Hopefully, remaining faithful to the writing process will also prompt a return to taking pictures. I used to bring a camera with me everywhere, but the past four years of my life have flown by. I have this degree, and a lot of memories, but it would be nice to have a photo album or two lying around to remind me of the little things one easily misplaces.
There’s a two or three year plan, and we’ll see how it goes. Basically, I don’t want to start “real life” (that is, become a mortgage-slave) right away. I want to work a couple of years and work as hard at learning the guitar as possible. This includes taking lessons and attending whatever advanced workshops I can find. I am also making an objective of living abroad again. This depends on my significant other’s plans, too, but we’re at least on the same page. I think he wants to attend graduate school a little sooner than I do, and that’s fine with me.
I have a half-baked yet extremely insistent idea floating around my head about studying library sciences. I know I’d like to work at a university (or a cultural institution with similar values), and I want to remain deeply connected to the music community so that I can be assured of continuing to perform as jazz musician. On the other hand, I’m not really sure I want to have a degree in some specialized realm of musicology. I don’t seriously consider a performance degree, since this doesn’t seem to guarantee you any gigs, anyways (that’s what becoming a great player is for). I like research and language and finding patterns and understanding systems. I also have a pretty demanding activist side, too, so I have to feel socially conscious about what I’m doing. Specializing in non-Western music would speak to this need to bring improvement to our society.
I’ve always liked the idea of being some kind of a renaissance scholar, and I am, as the title of this blog suggests, kind of all over the map. For all these reasons, it seems like becoming a music librarian (to be balanced with working as a musician) could be a viable option for me. I am going to attempt to contact some people in the profession and see what they think.
In the meanwhile, I just need to focus on playing and performing and making my life worth it every second.
The Jazz Casuals →
Two other students and I have organised a vocalist trio. We’re specifically interested in playing at private functions, although small restaurants and public events are also ideal. We have already performed frequently together, including a date at Hermann’s Jazz Club in Victoria, but we have decided it is a good time to formalize the ensemble and promote ourselves. Check it out!
A book review: Ian Carr
The late Scottish author Ian Carr enjoyed a unique career as both musician and journalist, which culminated in his widely acclaimed biography of Miles Davis. Born 1933 in Dumfries, Carr grew up in England. As an autodidact, he had been casually learning trumpet, but it wasn’t until after some military service and youthful travels through Europe that he began to pursue music seriously. He joined his brother Mike’s hard bop band, which occasionally featured John McLaughlin on guitar, and toured and recorded regularly throughout the Sixties. The end of the decade saw the group increasingly experimenting with free and electric jazz and fusion, a biographical detail that sheds some light on the structural bias of his book. Throughout his life, Carr worked as a writer. His biographies of Miles Davis and Keith Jarrett, among other works of non-fiction, became celebrated both within England and abroad, and he took a job teaching at Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Near the end of his working life, he also contributed as a consultant for documentaries and other productions centred on jazz. Alzheimer’s eventually claimed his mind, and Ian Carr passed away in 2009.
As a young trumpet student, Carr idolized Miles Davis, something that becomes immediately apparent in both his writing and personal musical pursuits. Carr’s greatest claim to fame, first published as Miles Davis: a Critical Biography, is a meticulously researched anecdote to Davis’ own biography, from which he also openly borrows extensively. The book attempts to reconcile the reclusive, headstrong, and often very contradictory innovator with his glamorous public image, his legacy as a mentor, and an endless list of seemingly self-inflicted private obstacles, all the while putting Davis’ musical output front and centre.
The work opens with a look back at the Davis family history, especially the pride and overachieving attitudes of the men. Miles’ earliest experiences with music lessons and his mother, who did not allow him to leave school to tour with the territory bands, appear to have resulted in much consternation for him, hinting at the impatience and relentless determination to follow. Carr follows his muse as Miles has a child, makes his way to New York, enrolls at Julliard, and finally jams with Charlie Parker. Davis’ recording debut replacing Dizzy Gillespie marks the first of many, many elaborate descriptions by Carr of his improvisation, tone, and emotional interpretation of the music. Decade by decade, each release tends to produce two to three pages of euphuistic commentary in this manner, but more on that later.
The extremely influential Birth of the Cool sessions, Davis’ crippling drug habit and subsequent recovery, and his work with Prestige form the basis of the next few chapters. Throughout, Carr tends to focus mostly on what occurs within the recording studio. Davis’ positive experiences in Europe, the collapse of his first marriage, and the mundane routines of every-day life are brought up incidentally. The Fifties and the first Miles Davis Quartet blow past and the following hundred or so pages make quick work of the following decade, too. Although attention is of course paid to Sketches of Spain, the appearance of Wayne Shorter, and Davis’ growing celebrity, the excitement seems to perceptibly intensify at the end of the Sixties, where we find Davis growing frustrated with his perceived musical stagnation and experimenting with electronic instruments.
A new period in Davis’ life clearly begins here, and Carr is in his journalistic element. The inevitable march from Filles de Kilimanjaro to Bitches Brew is illuminated by multifarious excerpts of press, critical reviews, interviews, and more, supplemented of course by Carr’s independent analyses. The continuous cycling of innovation and stagnation, excellent health and close calls, and public interest and apathy towards Davis is a major theme in Carr’s treatment of his life, and the Seventies provide no shortage of examples from which to work. As the Eighties take hold, the biography seems to lose a little steam in a manner fittingly parallel to its subject. Davis’ late successes, celebrity endorsement deals, and universal appreciation provide the story with a sort of closing victory lap, sure to end in a Hollywood-style sunset freeze frame. Or so it seems, until the anticlimax of Davis’ final moments and the subsequent redistribution of his personal estate are disclosed with almost clinical restraint. Some of the finest features of the book, however, are found not in the main text, but following it: the appendices include detailed transcriptions, a robust discography, and Carr’s touching obituary for Davis, which ran in the Independent on the 30th of September, 1991.
My feelings surrounding this book are by no means uncomplicated. First and foremost, I believe Carr deserved every accolade he got in terms of his investigative focus and commitment to understanding the way Miles Davis’ mind worked. That being said, I found numerous problems in his approach and execution. Carr spends what feels like about a quarter of the book waxing rhapsodic about the music, or, more specifically, Miles’ soloing. I find his prose unexceptional, and he also purposefully avoids using overly technical language so as to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. As a musician, I understand that I can’t expect the academic nitty-gritty from a popular biography, but on the other hand, I don’t see the use in the descriptive language he chooses to employ, either. Here follows a much abbreviated list of terms: feminine/masculine (in reference to rhythms, not biology), buoyant, melancholy, starkly brooding, powerful, seductive, delicate, massive, exquisite, laconic. At the risk of coming off as a curmudgeon, I think that this flowery, subjective language has its time and place. Sure, once in a while would have simply cultivated a personal dimension in Carr’s study of the music, but it quickly became tedious and I found myself skipping entire paragraphs of meaningless magniloquence.
To continue, I also feel that much greater attention should have been paid to the societal context of Davis’ music, and his actual personal life. His experience of racism is relegated to a few key instances. His wives come and go with little note, and in general there are just a few women interviewed in the book. Davis’ infamous misogyny and his violent streak are either glossed over or ignored completely, and his bisexuality and brother’s homosexuality are discussed in one brief paragraph near the end of the book. Given the social context, I think this is a major oversight on the part of the biographer. Even his children are treated as afterthoughts or incidental details. Being completely estranged from his eldest sons for most of his life (they were dropped from the will) must have had profoundly painful consequences for Davis, but much more is said of his break with George Avakian.
Finally, at no point did my mind wander more than in the final few chapters, which depict Davis’ last hiatus and pop/jam band come back. I think a disproportionate amount of the book is spent describing his electric and fusion eras, at the expense of the Sixties. This is, of course, a matter of my own personal bias opposed to Carr’s. I suspect it is also due in part to the availability of biographical material and personal interviews from certain timeframes.
The strengths in Carr’s biography lie in his unabashed admiration for the great trumpeter. You can tell that the author lives and breathes music, especially that of his idol, and his enthusiasm for every single period of Davis’ career is so warm and sincere, it almost makes up for the resultant repetitiveness in his writing. Furthermore, the fact that such a huge number of jazz superstars were at one point members of his groups allows this biography to conveniently double as a survey of post-bop history. Two defining points in his career, including his modal masterpiece Kind of Blue and the seminal Bitches Brew are sumptuously explored in great detail, but I most enjoyed discovering the back story behind Davis’ relationships with Jimi Hendrix, Marcus Miller, and Jack Dejohnette and his wife, Lydia. Despite its flaws, I would ultimately recommend Miles Davis: the Definitive Biography, perhaps a little more warmly if an abridged edition is released.
Audio post reblogged from The Jazz Message with 18 notes - Played 62 times
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]Chick Corea ~ Now He Sings, Now He Sobs
Source: somemushrooms
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Going, going…
Everything is rushing past me, and it’s at such a speed that I can’t help but know I’m going to look back at this time in my life and think that it was great. I’m learning so much, and most of it has come directly from making music with really great players. I also feel like I have real friends in the program, people who I am going to miss a lot when we graduate and disperse. Did I mention?— I am so happy with my new combo! It’s the perfect combination of challenge/reward/diversion. I really get along with the guys, and their musicianship is inspiring. Deciding to learn jazz guitar is one of the best decisions I have ever made.
Being taken for a ride.
Although the title of this post is an expression that has, quite naturally, rather negative connotations, I would like to approach it as a positive thing. Playing music with people who have a lot more experience than me means that at least several times a night, I will have a moment during which I have absolutely no fucking idea what the hell is happening. So, I am learning little by little to be constantly aware. At this point, being constantly aware usually results in my noticing mistakes, making a mental note, and then doing the exact same thing the next tune. It’s okay. This is the best and fastest way to become a better musician.
On a somewhat unrelated note, I am in kind of a weird place in my life right now. I feel more and more that my time living at home with my parents is coming to a close. I love their company, I have no student debt, and the house (my childhood home) is in the university neighbourhood, so staying here for my undergraduate degree seemed a great decision. And for the past two years, it’s been comfy. I think that I’m ready to go, though. I have another year and a half before I earn my B.Mus., and who knows what after. All I can say, is that almost all at once, I really feel like an adult.
Just venting.
I am feeling gloriously incompetent right now. The problem with doubting myself is that I tend to falter as soon as the negative thoughts begin to gnaw away at my confidence. This sets off a well known and much feared cycle of performance misery. Stupid, but it’s not even the audience I am worried about, it’s my fellow musicians!
I hate that things are happening for me that I have always wanted, and that I can’t feel like I even deserve it, because I am simply “not there” yet. Certainly, I’m outside the realm of a beginner, but I just haven’t been playing a long time. And I feel it in every fibre of my being, especially when people around me are doing what they do extremely well, and I want to feel like I belong there, too. I am currently suffering from a hideous sensation of mingling guilt and embarassment, which is about as far away from conducive to enjoyable music making as possible. What a drag!
“Don’t wait for everything to be perfect.”
Someone left this message on my car’s windshield when I was parked up at the university one day.
New year’s greetings.
I have been working on my picking technique a lot lately. I am a left handed person who plays guitar standard, and I’ve always had a very strange picking style. Anchoring never made sense to me, and rather than moving at the wrist, my hand always seemed to want to bob in and out, as though I were performing some sort of closed fist Shaka sign. After various people suggested to me that I try something else, I started pinky anchoring. There appears to be a lot of controversy about this, and a lot of anonymous online types claim that it is improper technique. If I had some degree of accuracy before, why would I make the switch? Well, my former method of picking resulted in a lot of wasted movement. My overall sound was less controlled, lacked finesse, and even verged on unintentional staccato. As soon as I began to anchor my pinky, the muscle groups at work shifted from those of my forearm to those of my much more localized wrist. I now, as someone put it, “pick like a normal person.”
Of course, as this is only week 2 of my experiment, it’s difficult to be sure of a strong improvement. Overhauling one’s picking technique is demanding and requires great patience, even though I have only been playing for about three and a half years. Luckily, I’m no stranger to this kind of challenge. After having studied classical flute for twice that amount of time, my teacher in the Netherlands all but forced me to adopt a new embrochure, rendering my playing almost unrecognizably altered. This was an amazing thing! My tone was so much more resonant, accurate, and markedly improved. Everyone comment on it when I returned to Canada. I will never forget how exasperated I became in those early days, however, when I had abandoned the old style and had no idea what the new one would feel like.
So far, this musical U-turn has gone a lot easier. Although I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions, I feel like this is a positive change that just happened to coincide with the dawning of a new year. Cheers to that!
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