Outside looking in
This week the marlbank podcast returned after a few weeks in the wilderness when my phone was broken. Happily now I have a new iphone to help me put it together so things should improve. I think it’s our longest (a whopping 8 minutes, irony fans) but who has time to go through or actively listen to podcasts that last 3 hours. The banter might smother you to death. The Rest Is… Enshittification.
Don’t get me wrong I have taken to them a good deal in recent years, mainly non-music related and even if they are ridiculously long. But perhaps audiobooks are an even better format for music related audio projects. For instance I listened belatedly to one by Elvis Costello which told me more about the great singer-songwriter related in his own voice than any number of tedious articles about him in the NME ever managed. I also have developed a penchant for musician autobiographies and don’t even mind if they are ghost written. They are more revealing in some ways than biographies even when at their worst they are extended press releases but usually a bit more polished. Who wrote the last major jazz autobiography? Not a question (answer: Brad Mehldau) that will ever be asked by Bradley Walsh on The Chase.
Inside Peering Out
Do we look to musicians as some sort of multi-talented species who can do everything, play concerts, compose, act, write books, paint, curate their own brand of tequila, grow their own beards?
Behold, I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth!
Nietzsche
I don’t think so although a few happy players can do lots of different things very well indeed. The main controversial point here – and it probably isn’t even that controversial – is that while jazz musicians can often call themselves composers (unlike classical musicians who don’t and wouldn’t usually, as sitting members in a chamber group or orchestra playing age old repertoire) is that most jazz players while releasing tunes they have written are not really that exciting a force as composers although many are. I have lost count of the number of albums that have say 8 originals and 2 standards and more or less reliably the best bits are the interpretations of the standards even when the new tunes and amiable ditties prove half decent and passably hummable on the way back to the taproom of the Reverse Ferret to ponder what’s just been heard.
Who are the great jazz composers of today, anyway? Off the top of my head and it is really hard to pin this down: Pat Metheny, Django Bates, Mike Gibbs, Terence Blanchard, Wynton Marsalis, Mike Westbrook, John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Herbie Hancock, Fred Hersch, Nikki Iles, Maria Schneider – to name but a few. The composers who are also top performers also gain bonus points if you think about it as again it brings that individuality an invisible writer who isn’t really a performer of note can never quite attain in small group settings when there is no conductor available to polish the composer’s absent image and there usually isn’t in jazz.
It’s a point I keep coming back to and do forgive me if you have read it all before that the jazz present’s most unforgiving competitor isn’t other genres, isn’t the problem of earning a living or being good at what you do, it’s the past.
The finding your own context conundrum
Competing with the past takes a lot of skill. This is where A&R is so important. Choose tunes from the past that haven’t been done too much. Do them in a different way without being obtuse. Do them because they make sense within whatever framing it is you choose to enclose them. Simon Spillett playing Led Zeppelin doesn’t make sense. Alan Barnes playing Anthony Braxton doesn’t either. Tim Berne playing Abba is nonsensical as is the Vindaloo Stompers down the Mad Bishop and Bear tearing into Wet Leg complete with banjo, washboard, optional spoons & spontaneous caterwauling if preferred vocalist William Tell is back from taking the cure – all day long, on the chaise longue. But Emma Smith singing Barbra Streisand does, Alexander Hawkins playing Misha Mengelberg also infiltrates a modicum of meaning, Orphy Robinson tearing into San Francisco by Bobby Hutcherson ditto. However, is there added value artistically in any of this happening even if there is a hook like an anniversary to hang it on?
I don’t really love concerts billed as such and such sings Ella or such and such plays Monk. OK, they aren’t tribute bands like dressing up as Elvis and aren’t impersonation. But unless the person is completely forgotten but somehow still intriguing despite the neglect then doing the sort of greatest hits sets you might find done by the original artists on a streamer is probably just as satisfying. You will probably end up returning to the source anyway and forgetting why you turned up there in the first place.
But a concert like such and such plays Elmo Hope is interesting – when was the last time you saw that on a poster? And I’ve seen ambitious ventures in my time but playing Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert as a concept concert – is that really a good idea especially if your chops aren’t even in the same solar system let alone country as Jarrett’s? Getting bums on seats is one thing. Hubris is another. It’s worth the risk however – worse things happen at sea. In the words of Oscar Wilde drawn from his poem ‘Icarus’: Never regret thy fall, / O Icarus of the fearless flight / For the greatest tragedy of them all / is never to feel the burning light.
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