Monday, May 19, 2008

Friday May 23rd @ Jazz Underground

The Words Project

live at Jazz Underground

Neighborhood Church
269 Bleecker St.
NY, NY

sets at 9 and 10:30

featuring:

Monika Heidemann-voice
Sam Sadigursky - saxophone
Nate Radley - guitar
Danny Fox - rhodes
Gary Wang - bass
Bill Campbell - drums

FREE!

David Doruzka's Silent Dawning

One of the big motivations in starting this blog was to occasionally plug exceptional records that come my way, things that I feel stand out in the jazz world. It was with much anticipation that I received David Doruzka's new CD Silent Dawning last week, which is new out on a Czech label called Animal Music.

David is a guitarist originally from Czech Republic who studied in Boston and afterwards lived in New York briefly, where we met and played quite a bit. From the first time we played together, David became one of my musical heroes, one of the most committed and dedicated musicians I have known. Despite that fact that we are just about the same age, I always felt I was playing with an elder when playing with him. He always displays such patience, focus and restraint in any situation.

After just a year in New York, David decided to move back to Prague and has lived there since, with a brief period living in Paris. I had the joy of spending a few weeks there with him in 2004 and he told me about his search for a new direction in his music and his desire to record a group with a Swedish singer named Josefine Lindstrand whom he had met while touring with British pianist Django Bates.

Four years later, he has released Silent Dawning, an album of song settings and original songs based around Lindstrand's beautiful and haunting voice. Included are four settings of Emily Dickinson poems, as well as songs in Czech and Swedish.

David's ability to set these poems in a complex and interesting sound world without detracting from the texts is astonishing. He has taken some weighty material that most would shy away from, very little of which is in his native tongue, and brought an incredible sensitivity to it. There's a lot of sophistication in this writing, but it never intrudes on the poem, and the musicians on the record (also on it are Lukasz Zyta and Michal Baranski, both Polish I believe) also know how to stay out of the way of the text. Lindstrand brings an astonishing voice to the music, one that reminds me ever so slightly of Rebecca Martin's coarse but slightly fragile delicateness, especially on some of the more folksy tunes on the record. The playing is great throughout, and David's sense of harmony, form and sound is quite profound.

For those of us on this side of the ocean, the CD is available at CD Baby and is beautifully packaged, featuring a booklet with all the texts translated into Czech, Swedish and English.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Strindberg and Helium - now on youtube




Perhaps one of the most strangely brilliant, moving and funniest things I've seen in recent years has resurfaced... I found these four short videos entitled "Strindberg and Helium" about four years ago and quickly showed them to everybody I knew. A few months later most were taken down apparently because Comedy Central had acquired the rights to them. I don't know if Comedy Central ever did anything with them, but they're now on YouTube.

Sunday, May 4, 2008

Jazz and poetry

*This article originally appeared in the Megaphone section of All About Jazz in June 2007.


When most people think of jazz and poetry coming together, they immediately think of the jazz tradition of poems being read over a musical background, the famous image of the quintessential beatnik (you know, the beret, striped shirt, funky glasses...) fronting a band that plays a cool cool blues behind him. Though limited, this spoken-word tradition has helped to highlight the common ground that exists between jazz and the mostly beat (sometimes freestyle) poetry that accompanied it. However, its' prominence in jazz has too often overshadowed the art of actually basing composition on poems, which has long existed in other genres and is relatively uncommon in jazz.

Basing a composition on a poem presents a multitude of challenges artistically and musically. A poem, regardless of form or verse, exists on its own, its own entity, possessing a rhyme, rhythm, and a music within. I constantly ask myself whether poets actually want this done to their work. It can often feel like clothing a great nude sculpture or framing an unframed work of art, and thus must be approached with great delicateness.

After selecting a text (sometimes the most difficult part of the process), the composer must dig to find the essence of the poem, the unshakable, immovable aspects of the work that transform it from a collection of words or ideas into a work of art. This is deeply connected to a musician's art, bringing creativity and vitality to a work without ignoring the intents of the composer, much like an actor brings himself to a character without compromising the script.

In setting the poem, the composer must pay careful attention to preserving the clarity of the work, its flow of ideas and subtle manipulations. He/she must caress each word, each line, as if the poem were being read to an audience hearing it for the first time. Balance is key, as music can easily distract from the poem, especially if the work is dense and abstract to begin with. No matter how much I wrestled with them, some of the greatest poets, such as Hart Crane (whose poetry is so full of references and has to be read almost backwards to be understood) and Sylvia Plath (who wrote some of the most powerful and evocative lines of the English language) were unappealing candidates due to the density and sheer intensity of their work (though I could not resist writing a spoken-word setting of Plath's beautiful poem to the child being conceived inside of her, "You're"). Conversely, works that have too literal of a tone, especially narrative poems, did not contain the aura of mystery that I like for a composition to have. Poems with too simple a rhyme scheme felt constricting musically, and length was also critical, since my goal was to create songs with simple forms for improvisation rather than any extended works. Much like great music, ideal poems for settings, though they can be enjoyed on the first encounter, leave room for re-imaginings and reinterpretation, and may leave one conflicted with what the subject or message of the poem is, or perhaps wondering there is one at all.
I must confess at this point to having never been a serious reader of poetry before starting The Words Project, nor do I tend to even listen to song lyrics attentively. I have always had an analytical mind, sometimes rather impatient, one that first tries to discern the meaning of what I read before appreciating its more visceral or sensual aspects, always hungry to get to what is next. Poetry teaches us to slow down, to quiet the mind, to enjoy the subtleties of language, its' sounds and minute expressions.

The deeper I have gotten into poetry, the more I have found it shares with jazz. Though many people have tried to define jazz over the years, its' definition remains murky and unattainable, leading me to think that its closest definition is its precious indefiniteness. The most sure way to ignite controversy in the jazz community has always been to try to rigorously define it. Similarly, what defines a poet, or a work of poetry? Many passages of literature are considered "poetic" but are not classified as poetry, while William Carlos Williams' sixteen famous and simple words about a red wheelbarrow (The Red Wheelbarrow) stands as one ot the pillars of modern poetry. As a novice to poetry, I am not qualified to delve into this topic nor I am the least bit interested in an objective definition of jazz. However, this sense of indefiniteness intimately weds jazz and poetry as art forms.

I am certainly not the first to use poetry as a vehicle for song, and am much indebted to a great tradition of combining words and music. Hymns, opera, folk song, art song, musical theater and popular song, have been doing it for years, and a number of jazz artists have preceded me, most notably Steve Lacy (listen to his version of Herman Melville's "Art" or his settings of Lao Tzu), Fred Hersch (his recent Leaves of Grass CD, which is quite programatic in scope, is a marvel), and Frank Carlberg (his numerous recordings for Fresh Sound New Talent are extraordinary). Certainly the lyrical depth and inventiveness of people like Patricia Barber, Bjork (whose own setting of an e.e. cummings poem on her album Medulla was an initial inspiration), and Monika Heidemann (one of four singers on the Words Project ), as well as singer/songwriters like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, can be considered poetry itself and is certainly advancing modern song.

The use of words in music can provide a much needed entry point for the average listener and an interesting challenge for composers. Despite the complexities of the process, I hope my music can be enjoyed with or without taking in the content of the poems. After all, it is a vehicle for some of my favorite musicians as well as four distinctive, beautiful voices (Monika, Heather Masse, Becca Stevens, and Noam Weinstein)... Skillfully used, jazz and poetry can complement one another, especially when the complex meeting of the two does not overshadow the truest and deepest components of jazz: creativity, interaction, and spontaneity.

The New Independent Music World

Things have changed a lot recently, and it is virtually inarguable that musicians have been emancipated over the last decade by a number of social developments and new technologies. With the collapse of the major record labels and the the emergence and of online sales of music and alternative distribution, any artist can now promote their music via their personal websites, MySpace, blogs, and a myriad of other online opportunities and can thus compete for the attention of the consumer. The current vacuum of major labels has also helped several small labels become larger players in the jazz scene, several of whom have taken some of the big names recently abandoned by the major labels and given them a fairer deal than they had before. On the consumer end, this liberation has come in the form of the option to now hear samples of most anything that is available, to read (and contribute) extensive reviews, to obtain previously obscure items at the touch of a button, and to purchase singe tracks at a reasonable cost.

This is all very exciting, but, perhaps because of the speed at which the music world has changed, very few people seem to be asking the question of whether this will be good for the music itself, and if there is long-term sustenance for musicians in this new world. When the day is done, there is still a bottom-line that must be met in order for music to thrive and maintain a high level. Many artists can dig deep into their own coffers for that pivotal first recording, but how many second and third recordings will surface given current sales numbers? What are the true economic realities of releasing your own music these days, and will these realities really allow for artistic growth?

A lot of media attention seems to go to the independent rock scene, which, at least by jazz and classical standards, is thriving. Obviously, this scene has a larger, more mainstream audience to tap into, but there is another important difference that allows this scene to thrive. Due to the musical nature of most indie rock, it can be recorded on a very small budget, often at home recording studios, without compromising the integrity of the music itself. Chamber music and jazz, however, are acoustic styles that demand that the players play together, at the same time, in a carefully designed space that complements the natural sounds of the instruments involved. To record this music well, the costs are quite substantial. Aside from paying the musicians on the recording a respectable amount for rehearsals and the session(s), a good recording studio that offers adequate tracking rooms, quality gear, a good piano, and a good engineer starts at about $1000 per day. Mixing can then cost another few thousand dollars, and mastering, the final step that makes a bunch of varied songs seem to fit together into a unified body, another $500-1000. Add to this graphic design, printing, licensing and various logistical and basic distribution costs and you have arrived at a substantial sum, often over $10,000 for a basic small-group release.

A lot of talk also is about established artists who are beginning to skirt the big labels by releasing their own music. These artists, most notably Branford Marsalis, Dave Douglas, and Bill Frisell, are likely thriving with the new model. However, unlike emerging artists, these musicians have substantial reputations to draw on and a wealth of invaluable recording experience making CD’s for sizable labels over the years.

Despite this new restructuring of record production and sales, an outdated consumer mentality still dominates the marketplace and is keeping sales figures quite low. This mentality is dominated by the conviction that there isn’t a connection between true listeners and the people at the top deciding what is produced and that artists are not seeing anything from sales. As the corporate structure bent on short term gain took over the record industry, many buyers felt that a record purchase only went to pay for the next bubble-gum music production, lucrative reissue, or fluffy adult-contemporary album, leaving serious music listeners without a voice in the marketplace.

Given the high cost of production and the marginal sales most artists are experiencing today, much of it due to this old mentality and the sheer glut of music on the market that this democratization has produced, today’s climate is decreasingly viable for emerging (and many established) jazz artists. With the vast amount of music that one can hear for free through promotional downloads, MySpace, artist websites, and, let’s face it, rampant burning of MP3’s and file-sharing, it is easy to take recorded music for granted and to forget that there are economics involved in its production. If the consumer wishes to hear a continuing crop of adventurous, noncommercial, and developed jazz recordings, it is essential that they shift their attitudes and see the direct impact their purchases now have in the marketplace. Unless sales increase, there will come a point where worthy recordings will disappear, and we will only be left with recordings by the top players and rookies willing to lose money in order to gain some crucial initial exposure.

The new, independent movement in music (if one can still call it a movement - I think it is more simply the reality for most artists) clearly offers something wonderful and liberating to the consumer, something that drives the people involved with New Amsterdam Records, the artist-run label with which I am affiliated with. Now that the artist is getting a fair share of the pot, proceeds from sales will directly allow them to continue to record and release music. Without the corporate structure and vast number of middlemen previously involved in music production and distribution, the general public now becomes a true arts-supporter when they purchase the music they hear. No, purchases won’t be tax-deductible, but the listener now enters a relationship and becomes an integral part of this brave new continuum by purchasing music. Next time you hear live music that you like, read a glowing or intriguing review of a new release, or are trolling the internet listening to music samples and find something that captivates you, please remember the important role you can now play and do your part in ensuring that artists continue to be able to produce the high level of music that you demand.

Lee Konitz - Conversations on an Improviser's Art

After several rave reviews from friends, I finally bought a copy of the new book on Lee Konitz by Andy Hamilton, which is the result of several years of interviews between Konitz and the author, who is an amateur jazz pianist in England. After about the fifth page, I could not put this book down, and have since been incredibly inspired by it and hope that many people read it. In the book, Konitz shares candid opinions and feelings about himself and others, his career, approaches to music, improvisation, the saxophone, his influences, Tristano, and much more, all with a deep humility and sense of humor. In addition, the book contains interviews with other musicians about Konitz which are equally fascinating. I strongly recommend this book to anybody who has ever listened to Konitz and appreciated his unique offering to music. Personally, I can't think of any artist more demanding on himself and so eager to put himself in new settings.

Personally, one of the most resonant parts of the book was Konitz's distinction between "emotion" and "feeling" in music. He downplays many musicians who he feels are too emotional in their playing, who he feels put their particular emotional and expressive needs before the music itself. (Konitz, who also briefly talks of his Jewish roots in the book, loves to use the word "schmaltz.) Instead of emotion, Konitz places value on feeling in music, something that is more universal and not as based on the individual. Emotion assualts the listener, entrapping them, while feeling leaves the listener the freedom to bring him/herself to the creation at hand, and perhaps experience something different on each listening.

The balance between craft and emotion/feeling is one of the most artistically challenging things, and I think if one dedicates themself to transmitting feeling within their craft over emotion, something much deeper and more indicative of a lifetime commitment is produced, and perhaps this is part of what keep Konitz (now eighty years old) so inspired dedicated to improvisation.

I have been fortunate to see Konitz play many times over the last fifteen years and it has always been memorable, sometimes transcendant, and I even took a lesson with him while in college, something I was not ready for at the time but am thankful to have experienced. These are some of my favorite recordings of Lee's:

Live at the Half Note
Motion
Lee Konitz with the Gerry Mulligan Quartet
Paul Motian - On Broadway Volume One
Strings for Holliday
Lee Konitz and the Axis String Quartet

I also want to take this chance to recommend a recent book by Jason Weiss (a Brooklyn resident whose kids are students of mine) about the late saxophonist/composer Steve Lacy called Conversations, which is a collection of interviews and articles compiled and translated by Weiss. Though I am not as versed Lacy's music as I am in that of Konitz, this book was amazingly inspiring and beautifully put together and reads like an autobiography. Lacy was never a dull interview subject, and possessed a uniquely individualist and thoughtful dedication to his art and played a role in some pivotal periods of the music. Pick this on up - it is well worth the read.

Health Insurance and the music community

Some very sad situations in the jazz world recently have put this at the forefront of my mind, and I would like to share some thoughts and information. In the past month, two great jazz musicians, bassist Dennis Irwin and saxophonist Andrew D'Angelo were both diagnosed with spinal and brain cancer, respectively. Both are acclaimed musicians who have established themselves both in New York and internationally, are widely recorded, and still unable to afford health insurance. While there has been an outpouring of support for both musicians, including numerous benefits for both around the world, fellow musicians and fans can not carry the weight of this problem and give others the money they need to get through these ordeals. (For further reading about both cases, there is an excellent article by Nate Chinen in the New York Times about Irwin and D'Angelo and the larger problem at hand. You can contribute to both via websites set up for them that can easily be found. D'Angelo, who I don't know personally, but lives in my Brooklyn neighborhood, has been keeping a very candid diary about his recent diagnosis, surgery, and treatment that is very brave and powerful).

It is not news to anybody to say that this country urgently needs to create a universal system like the rest of the civilized world. Sure there will be problems and it will reek of ugly, ugly socialism, but we are at a point where this issue is bankrupting the country and affecting lives. Unfortunately, the wheels of a government run by special interest money grinds slowly. Though some degree of change seems to be on the way, I do not have much hope that even a new, possibly Democratic administration in the White House will take the leap to create something truly visionary and profound in the near future. It will take a continued pressure from the outside, and a real mass education in the way that the rest of the world is operating on this issue and the deep cost our bankrupt system inflicts on our society before we move towards a single-payer system.

Meanwhile, what is a freelance musician or artist to do about things? Few of us make enough money to pay the ridiculous monthly premiums here in New York, and the high deductible plans leave people with substantial bills to pay and only moderate savings every month. Personally, over the past few years sporadically I would do enough union work to temporarily qualify for their bare-bones plan which does not cover hospitilazation and has a $5,000 annual cap, but it had way to many holes in it for anyone to rest assured, so despite having it I was living largely uncovered for a while. However, I recently found a program in New York state that not many people seem to know about called Healthy New York. If you have not had health coverage for the last 12 months, make less that $25,000 a year and are ineligible to receive coverage through an employer, you can get full coverage through a choice of private insurers through this program. Once you qualify (the application is very easy), the state subsidizes your coverage by agreeing to pay for catastrophic coverage (over $10,000 a year I believe), thus substantially lowering your monthly premium. You get the same private health plan that you would get for a lot more money otherwise. I registered through a provider called Atlantis and my monthly premium is $200, still a substantial sum of money and beyond reach for many, but far less than any other coverage options available. Even the popular and widely advertised Freelancer's Union coverage costs far more for a higher deductible plan, and much more complicated to apply and qualify for.

This Healthy NY plan is definitely a band-aid and not a permanent solution. It still does not address the enormous waste in our system, but it is there and is a small step forward, and I hope more people check it out so we don't have to see too many more stories of uninsured musicians facing life-threatening health emergencies and huge medical bills to pay.

Here is Andrew D'Angelo's website: www.andrewdangelo.com

The Vanguard Jazz Orchestra has set up a fund for Dennis Irwin: www.vanguardjazzorchestra.com

Here is the Healthy New York website:

http://www.ins.state.ny.us/website2/hny/english/hny.htm

New York Mills

In many ways, New York Mills, Minnesota (pop. 1200) is your typical Midwestern outpost town. A train practically runs through it, almost every thirty minutes around the clock, which you can hear from Main Street, where you will find the local diner, library, post office, bank, bakery, Lutheran church (one of three in the town), town bar, antique shop, and hair salon. The town struggles with many of the typical problems of small towns in America... the decline of small farming and the joblessness and social problems that result, an aging population resulting from much of the young population leaving for the cities, the behemoth Wal-Mart that has moved into the neighboring town, and possibly a feeling some people have of being trapped, not to mention the harsh, seemingly endless Minnesota winter.

However, New York Mills has something that makes a truly exceptional place... Housed in the most beautiful building on main street is the New York Mills Cultural Center, a haven for culture in a place largely devoid of public venues for art. Thanks to the dedicated work of its employees, volunteers, and members, the center presents art exhibitions, community events, concerts, classes, and also brings artists to do retreats in the town, which are generously sponsored by the Jerome Foundation.

Thanks to my friend Anat Fort, a pianist and composer in NYC and former artist-in-residence there, I was introduced to their retreat program and was chosen to participate and recently spent two weeks living there. The cultural center owns a small house, just several blocks from the town, that they use to house the recipients of the grant. Other than eight hours of community outreach over the course of the two weeks (they also offer one month retreats), artists are given full freedom and solitude to do their work, as well as access to the resources of the cultural center. Partly because of the name of the town I suspect, they place a concentration on bringing artists from New York City, but also bring many local Minnesotans and people from other parts of the world as well, poets, writers, painters, and sculptors among them.

Why would an artist living in one of the cultural meccas of the world want to go live in a remote town of 1200 people? I am sure everybody who has participated in the retreat would give a different answer. Personally, small-town life is something very novel to me. I grew up in suburban Los Angeles, in a relatively populated place that did not have much history to it, and little identity, where people live at a fast pace and there is little that ties them together. Although I have traveled through most of the U.S. and seen much of small-town America, I had never really lived in it for any length of time, and saw this as a great opportunity to do so.

Also, there is the general need to once in a while escape the maddening pace of living in a big city, the constant noise and stress of everyday existence here which can provide a wonderful edge, but can be incredibly overwhelming and distracting. As a musician here, you live surrounded by people on all sides, forcing you to tailor when you can make noise and the type of noise you can make. Living in the retreat house, I had total freedom to play any time of day or night, to listen to music at whatever volume I wanted and not have to think twice about it.

Most of all though, the retreat was an opportunity to pare things down to the basics and really look inward, to embrace the solitude and ask some deeper questions, and, when ready, really dive into creative work more intensely than usual. Having a period of time away from any of the distractions of everyday life and having little to no responsibility is an extraordinary gift that this retreat and others like it offer, something that I hope to make a regular part of my personal and creative life.

And on top of this solitude, you do meet a truly unique breed of people over the course of your stay there. Many creative people and artists call rural places home, and have learned to thrive on the solitude, away from the ambition and noise of the urban world and the general rat-race of our culture. Beyond this, however, among the general population of the town, there is a wonderful sense of community, of "we" and not just "I", of calmness and simplicity, and a powerful sense of place that is difficult to find in cities. As far as the culture that the center brings, there are certainly people in the town whom are largely indifferent to it. However, enough people care about it to allow the center to survive and to serve not just the town but also be a sense of pride for the larger region.

In case you were wondering, I am not writing this just to encourage others to apply for the retreat program, but also to give my thanks to all the extraordinary people who make this program both possible and richen it with their warmth and generosity. Giant thanks to Lynn, Jamie, Marcia, Alice, Pam, Gary, Hope, Bob, Beverly, Elisa, Cheryl, Dennis, and the many others, and the Jerome Foundation for their generous support.

To find out more about the New York Mills Regional Cultural Center and the retreat program there, visit www.kulcher.org.

R.I.P. Dennis Irwin

Dennis Irwin, jazz bassist and one of the most remarkable and humble musicians and people I have ever met died this week. I saw Dennis play so many times over the years, with such a huge variety of musicians. Once when somebody asked him how he can so easily go from playing straight-ahead music to playing free music while maintaining his incredible sound and musical identity, Dennis replied "I try to make the inside guys play more out, and the outside guys play more in."

My fondest memories of seeing him play were in Los Angeles when I was sixteen or so. He did a week playing in a quartet with Joe Lovano, and a friend of mine and I went at least three or four of the nights. At the end of each night, Dennis was there talking to us as if we were peers, hanging out and telling us stories about getting to New York and developing his career. Besides being a great musician, he was a very funny guy to be around, and extraordinarily positive.

Here is Ben Ratliff's obituary from the NY Times.


Dennis Irwin, who for more than 30 years was a much-in-demand New York jazz bassist and whose recent illness became a rallying point for jazz musicians without medical insurance, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 56.


Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos
The jazz musician Dennis Irwin performing in 2002.
The cause was liver failure as a result of cancer, said his son, Michael Irwin.

He died the same day as a benefit concert was presented in his honor, staged by Jazz at Lincoln Center and including performances by Wynton Marsalis, Tony Bennett, Jon Hendricks, Mose Allison, Joe Lovano, Bill Frisell, John Scofield, and many others. Part of the concert’s proceeds will go toward Mr. Irwin’s medical expenses. The rest, in line with his stated wishes, will go to other musicians in need, through the Jazz Foundation of America, which has helped many uninsured musicians — including Mr. Irwin — pay for healthcare.

Two New York City jazz-club benefits in February, one at Smalls and one at the Village Vanguard, also raised money for Mr. Irwin’s living expenses and for alternative cancer treatment.

Mr. Irwin’s swing was deep and dependable, and he played on more than 500 albums. Since the early 1980s, he had performed almost every Monday night with the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra at the Village Vanguard.

Born in Birmingham, Ala., Mr. Irwin attended North Texas State University (now University of North Texas) as a classical musician studying the clarinet, switching to jazz and the bass during college. In 1973, while still in school, he got a job as a bassist playing with the pianist Red Garland; he moved to New York in 1974 without graduating and quickly found work with Ted Curson, Betty Carter and Mr. Allison, among others. In 1977 he began a three-year stint in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers.

In more recent years, he played in bands led by Johnny Griffin, Mr. Lovano, Mr. Scofield and Matt Wilson.

His case has already brought help to uninsured musicians. Michael Pietrowicz, vice president for planning and program development at Englewood Hospital and Medical Center in Englewood, N.J., said in an interview on Tuesday that the hospital, in conjunction with the Jazz Foundation of America, would create the Dennis Irwin Memorial Fund, making free cancer screenings available to veteran jazz and blues musicians who are uninsured. (Mr. Irwin was initially evaluated and treated for cancer at the hospital late last year.) And Adrian Ellis, executive director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, said Tuesday that the organization would produce an annual concert to benefit jazz musicians in need.

Besides his son, Michael, of Manhattan, Mr. Irwin is survived by his companion, Aria Hendricks; his brother, David Irwin, and his mother, Daisy Godbold, both of St. Petersburg, Fla.; and his father, David E. Irwin of Monticello, Ga.

Liner notes

In his recent review of the Words Project, Budd Kopman writes:

"The Words Project raises many questions. Why these particular poems? Does listener response to them matter? What if the listener is repelled by a poem's message? What if the listener does not comprehend them at all?

Should the poems be read before listening? Should the liner notes be read while listening? Is it even possible to keep a poem in one's mind when only hearing it, especially when part of one's attention is directed towards the music? Since the music presumably came second, as settings of the words, is its function to help bring forth the poem's meaning? Then again, how can that be when the music draws attention away from the words?"



Though I am thrilled to sell copies of the record in any form (digital, hard copies, singles...), those who buy the album digitally are unfortunately missing out on the ability of being able to read the poems that the songs are based on, which I believe essential to the experience with this music. If you are like me and tend to listen to musical content over lyrical content, it is very important to have a visual when listening to vocal music, and thus I made it a point to include all the poems in the liner notes of the CD. Many people have told me over the past year how much this has enhanced the music, and it saddens me a bit that those who bought the record digitally are not experiencing this.

If there is anybody who has bought the album online and wishes to have a copy of the poems, please contact me through the site and I will be happy to send you a PDF containing them.

Albert Einstein

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed." - Albert Einstein

Lucia Pulido on YouTube



I just found this while wandering YouTube and want to share it. For those of you who don't know Lucia's singing (and those of you who do), check this out. Originally from Colombia and now a resident of NYC, Lucia Pulido is one of the great voices of the planet, period.

R.I.P. IAJE

The jazz world was taken aback this week by the announcement that the IAJE (International Association of Jazz Educators), an organization that grew from humble beginnings to become a major force in the jazz world, has declared bankruptcy and ceased operation. As jazz has become more institutionalized over the last few decades and has taken a firm place in the educational world, the annual IAJE conference became a major place to present music, knowledge, concepts and products. It became the Cannes of the jazz world, where for a meager $300 conference fee you could walk down the halls proudly wearing your conference badge and mingle with the biggest names in the biz, and perhaps feel like one of them for a few precious days every year.

Personally, I attended three of the conferences, one in Chicago as a high-school recipient of the IAJE/NFAA Clifford Brown/Stan Getz Fellowhip and two conferences in New York while I was a student in college. The first conference was any jazz-obsessed eighteen-year-old's dream... I probably hardly slept and ate over the course of those four days, eager to take it all in. The fellowship program offered many aspiring kids an incredible opportunity that I remain thankful for and do not wish to seem ungrateful for in what is to follow.

Over the years what I saw at the IAJE conventions increasingly bothered me and made me feel uncomforable, to the point where if I knew the convention was in New York I made it a point NOT to go out that week to hear any music. The conventions came to symbolize to me just how insular and out of touch jazz is with the mainstream world. Instead of coming together to celebrate the music and figure out ways of expanding its place in our world, I felt like I was seeing thousands of people there fight over the crumbs that exist in the current music marketplace. So few people seemed to be asking the deeper questions that plague jazz currently... What are the literally thousands of people who graduate every year from iniversity jazz programs worldwide going to do in a world largely indifferent to this music? Shouldn't we have been asking why people aren't listening to this music, why is there an ever decreasing number of performance venues that offer artists a real possibility of advancing the music and perhaps bringing it back to a place of social relevance again? How can we create real jazz listeners for the future, and make what we do more digestable to the general public without compromising the art form?

Eventually, any educational world artificially constructed to fill a void of opportunity will topple if it does not teach something relevant to the society in which it operates. From my limited knowledge of what was or was not happening at the IAJE conferences (I didn't go to one since 2000 or so) I think this depressing realization drew the most promising and vital people away from the organization and eventually led to its demise, probably along with some bad financial management, which the courts are now left to decide on. I do believe that teaching jazz in schools passionately and effectively does help create audiences for the future, and I am sure this originally motivated the people who created IAJE. However, I think it eventually was hijacked by a number of short-sighted individuals who saw the organization as a vehicle for self-promotion instead of a place to train effective educators and engage in a serious and broad-minded dialogue. I hope that the jazz world can learn a lesson from this and create something more effective and sustainable in the future.

Kiva.org

Once in a while the internet really does challenge our view of the world, becoming something more than just of way of looking up old friends from high school, checking the weather, and ordering things we don't really need. (Just this morning, I bought online two books, a collar for my cat, and a pet fountain for the water-deprived little princess as well.)

A few months ago, the NY Times did a story about a website called kiva.org that arranges interest-free microloans to entrepreneurs and small businesses around the world, many in countries that don't have institutionalized and supportive lending practices. What this means is that ordinary people with a bit of disposable income can make loans to people anywhere in the world, allowing impoverished people who otherwise would not be able to start or sustain their business access to non-predatory credit. Ordinary citizens can now band together by loaning often trivial amounts of money and help somebody in Sierra Leonne who wishes to invest in his small pharmacy and thus bring needed medicine to his community, or a Bolivian father of three wishing to start an auto-repair business to support his family. Over the course of the loan, you can track the recipient's progress and once the loans are repaid (they have a very high repayment rate), you are notified by Kiva and can either withdraw your money or redistribute it to others in need.

Beyond charitable-gift giving, Kiva offers a vision, one of ordinary citizens bucking the monetary systems of the globe and lending one another a hand, with very little organizational overhead. Part of the reason we live in a world of such horrible inequities of wealth is due to corruption and corporate control of the marketplace, which puts emphasis on quantity and global markets over community. Kiva and the micro-lending movement that the internet is now making possible has the potential to impact this.