The Existential Bix: A Good and Proper Review of Yves Francois

Here’s an existential question for an artist—would you prefer a really good review from someone who totally doesn’t get what you’re doing, or a bad review from someone who gets what you’re doing, but points out that you didn’t do a good job of getting it done? Of course the answer is that you want the good review since that will generate more money—oh wait, I’ve just compromised the art. Okay, it’s a tough question, rent be damned.

I only ask this because someone showed me a good review of a CD by Yves Francois, a trumpet player walking along the pathway of Bix Beiderbecke. It was a good review, I don’t know who wrote it, the only thing I know is that the reviewer didn’t know a damn thing about jazz. I’ll insert some of it here:

"In the early '80s, the young trumpeter Yves Francois, who had only been playing his horn for a few years, decided that it was long overdue for saxophonists Eddie Johnson and Franz Jackson to be recorded in a freewheeling setting. He organized and recorded four sessions during 1981-1986, some of which was released on scarce LPs on Jackson's Pinnacle label. Now all of the music is available on one CD. The basic tunes allow the musicians to play swing, bits of Dixieland, 1950s-style R&B, and touches of more modern jazz. The spirit is certainly there and the rollicking feel and the spontaneity are quite appealing. There are missteps, mistakes, and brief lost moments along the way, but this CD succeeds as good-time music. Fortunately both Johnson and Jackson have recorded more extensively since this time and Francois has improved as a trumpeter. But even with its flaws, this is certainly a fun set."

Ah well, that is very comforting. He or she is reviewing jazz, and they find the joy and spontaneity appealing. Thank goodness for that. But doesn’t it seem like the reviewer might still like the music, but be put off by the spontaneity? Turns out that’s exactly what happens in the next sentence. The musicians make mistakes. Well we can’t all be Kenny G now, can we? But this is what happens when jazz is recorded in many takes with many tracks, with lots of dubbing, when it moves and has moved too far from its roots of stick a microphone in the middle of a room and let the guys and gals play. I wish I didn’t have to point this out, but years of highly produced overdubbed music, including jazz, has spoiled listeners so much that real music isn’t real enough anymore. It seems like this reviewer couldn’t recognize heart while watching an autopsy. And regarding soul, well, medical examiners don’t find that either.

Live music is living music. Live music, good music, is alive. Seems simple enough, but that fact is becoming more and more elusive. Popular music has many purposes—even after you get by the main function, which is to encourage sex. And really, it’s no accident that the word ‘jazz’ used to be a euphemism for sex. Of course, sex isn’t just sex either—you know, there are emotions that go with it, that, like it or not, just can’t be avoided. It’s emotions that get you into bed, it’s emotions that are happening during bed, and there are emotions that remain after it’s over. And sometimes, after nine months, there are children and a whole ‘nother set of emotions emerge that you never dreamed possible, if you take your sex seriously—joy and spontaneity that make all music sound shallow by comparison. But it started with music.

I’ve said it before, musicians need to become militant when it comes to emotions. That is, musicians need to fight with psychologists in the quest to define emotions. Emotions should be defined by music, not words. Words are too vague, music is very specific. And different kinds of music create different emotional universes. Louis Armstrong’s emotional universe is different than John Coltrane’s, whose emotional universe is different than Jimmy Forrest’s. In fact, creating an emotional universe is the hallmark of great music. If you listen deeply to Sinatra, there is so much more than just a song.

Yves Francois is a keeper of the flame, the transcendent universe of Bix Beiderbecke. If you read about the life of Bix, there was no other place the music could go but to transcend the daily agony of life. It’s all there with Bix, like a rocket anchored to the ground, ready to take off, and then it takes off. Mistakes do not matter. The spark that ignites the rocket can be a mistake, or not, because it’s the ensuing fire that matters. Yves Francois succeeds in creating that universe that is on the verge of being forgotten. Many people play jazz, enroll in jazz programs, and study Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke as quaint historical figures. They listen like the medical examiner, and choose to play like Miles Davis or John Coltrane whether they feel that way or not. They don’t explore their feelings, so wrapped up in their theory and degree, and peer pressure more than anything. Imagine, jazz squeezed to death from peer pressure. Young Louis and Bix couldn’t have thought such a thing was possible.

But for a musician to listen to someone and fall in love with the music, to fall into their universe and continue to create that universe—that’s a real musician. Here is some Yves, which will speak for itself.



And here's his channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/yvesfrancois

Enjoy--oh, there is spontaneity. Consider yourself warned.

Barney Kessel: The Edge of Soloing

In all honesty, this is a cheap attempt to import some favorites from Dailymotion into the Google system. The favorites are of Barney Kessel, and although there is no correlation to this post and any milestone in his life, I feel he's worth a mention of just what jazz is, what it can be, and what it isn't. In other words, there is so much more to learn from Barney Kessel than guitar.

First, he shows us what jazz is not. There are more myths about jazz than there are bits of real knowledge. The first myth is what we see in movies, the perfect stranger walking up to the bandstand, turning to the big band, giving the minimal instruction, and bang, an Ernie Wilkins arrangement comes out of nowhere. That myth has morphed into the Lone Ranger Jazz Musician, familiar with every tune and can play it in every key. There are some whose ears and mind have such gifted DNA, but for many players, and possibly most players, they find a group of songs that they feel best expresses who they are, songs that are the doorways to the soul, and they play those again and again, trying to find newness each time they play. This was certainly true of Barney Kessel, as their is plenty of footage of him playing his core tunes, such as Basie's Blues, Shadow of Your Smile, what is sometimes called Black Orpheus.

There is also the myth about unbridled creativity, starting from the first note. Not true. Once again, jazz musicians practice, some of them practice their licks over and over. Eventually, a good musician will, usually through mistakes, find new notes, ways to make a simple blues scale or major scale sound just the way they want--and these become known as signature licks, their musical identity. Barney Kessel certainly had those--and from what I've heard, folks never saw him without a guitar in his hand, that is, he was constantly practicing. I believe he knew more about harmony than any other guitarist who ever lived. The trick is finding the creativity, the newness, within the musical world the musician has created.

Many players never get there after creating their universe. That's because to get there one has to step off the edge of their universe, and that takes courage. That takes a lot of courage. But that is what Barney Kessel did every time he soloed, he stepped to the edge of his universe, and then stepped over the edge. There are many times during his solos that the listener, the viewer, the audience member isn't sure Barney is going to finish the phrase in time, find the chord he's looking for. There is genuine suspense in his playing. But he makes it. There is an apocryphal story about him, and then I spoke to someone who claims to have seen it, where Barney is playing and his high E string breaks, he doesn't stop, he (for him) simply reharmonizes the tunes and continues without his high E. But then the B string breaks, and once again he reharmonizes and continues. That, folks, is impossible, but he did it. Whether true or not, it says that he was a fearless player who sought newness on his own. And so when, in the case of the breaking strings, the newness is thrust upon him--it was business as usual. Here are some videos.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2y5x9_barney-kessel-moose-the-mooche_music

Barney Kessel - Moose The Mooche
Uploaded by Delta_Mike

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x28gcz_barney-kessel-basies-blues_music

Barney Kessel - Basie's Blues
Uploaded by Delta_Mike

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2y6w1_barney-kessel-you-are-the-sunshine_music

Barney Kessel - You Are The Sunshine Of My Life (S. Wonder)
Uploaded by Delta_Mike

What I've Been Talkin' 'Bout

Here is Amy Levin and her teachers, forming the Amy Levin Quartet. The song, as you certainly know, is Boplicity. We tried to make it sound old, the way Jazz sounded when there was a real connection between the listener and the player. The music made your toes tap. The group is trying to sound like a unit, not individual players coming together on the same song, and all of the supporting players were simply trying to help Amy sound good. As you can hear, she doesn't need much help. At the time of this recording, she had only been playing the vibes for two years. Enjoy.

Where I've Been and What I've Been Waiting For

Quite simply, I cannot fathom how music critics can stand to be music critics. There comes a point where continuous writing about problems, and Jazz has quite a few problems, becomes a form of nagging and therefore counterproductive. The problems of Jazz are obvious, that so few people listen to or even like Modern Jazz that a confused archaeologist might say that Jazz was part of the lost Mayan civilization. It is not only headed towards extinction but to obscure extinction. It is moving towards a smaller and smaller corner of American culture and seems to be kept alive by the Japanese (thank you, Japan, by the way).

The other thing that music critics do, especially Jazz critics, is to artificially create hype and praise for the latest graduates of Jazz programs--with the understanding that the only people who will buy the CDs or listen to the music are folks who are enrolled in other Jazz programs. The Jazz establishment has simply written off the public, the record companies have written off the music, and so there is virtually no one pointing out the very obvious difficulties.

Jazz is now marketed the same way that a boring church service is marketed, that you must go, it's your duty, if you don't support this public radio station the music will be lost, it's part of the American Heritage and if you don't listen and don't give money folks will forget about the music and it will be all your fault.

In Daniel Levitin's book, This is Your Brain on Music, he makes two very interesting points, among many simply interesting points. The first is that when listening to music, the brain corrects mistakes the musician might make. This means that all the practice you in the Jazz program at local or national University might be doing, got to get that harmonic minor scale right in all twelve keys, going to be graded on it tomorrow--you are wasting your time because even though the professor might notice a mistake, no one else will. Especially the listening public, if they listen at all since you are playing Jazz.

Second great point, music will not register in the mind of the listener unless it is played with feeling. In other words, if you play with feeling, the brain acts as your personal recording engineer and will fix everything. The problem, the book states, is that music curriculums have so much technical 'knowledge' to get through in order to maintain accreditation that they never get to the part about playing with emotion. Put simply, if you wish to play music and go to school for it, you are wasting your money--if you care about the listener. The news gets worse, and this point is not in the book, this is one of those facts that everyone seems to know. The more stuff you store in your head, the more blocked your emotions become--which means that all of the theory you are learning is keeping you from expressing emotion, connecting with the public, and basically providing a genuine human need of making and listening to music.

So what we are doing here, right here in the room that I am now sitting, that will become a small recording studio, is trying to make some music that runs on emotion, we are going to keep the theory to blues scales and major scales and that's it, and we are going to recognize an organ that is not delineated in Grey's Anatomy, the heart. Not the pump, but the soulful heart. Stretch out your arms, fingertip of the right side to fingertip of the left side, right across the chest, that's your heart, one big long organ. We are going to treat it like a horn player treats his horn, the music is going to come out of that, and we will see what happens. There are technological problems we've got to overcome, but we're going to do that.

The preliminary results are quite good. The player is young, her name is Amy Levin, and has been playing for only two years. She plays the vibes, has already had a very simple recording played on the local Jazz Classics show, and folks called in saying that the player could not possibly be a 15 year old girl, but it had to be Milt Jackson. No, it was a 15 year old girl. She will be 16 when she is up on Youtube. People who have bought her EP have told us--you know, it happened over time, but this is what I listen to in the car. These people are not Jazz fans per se. But we are simply providing food for this biological need for music.

This cop even called in, saying he had to call to express his enthusiasm for the songs, for this player, and he'd just let three speeders go by, but he had to call.

And that's what Jazz has done in the past, and it can do it again.

Science Near and Dear to the Musician

Outside of my last, rather silly post, done in about 2 minutes—I’m not making excuses. Well, actually I am, here’s something more serious, elaborating on the theme of playing music from the heart. Here are two recent scientific findings that I think are relevant to jazz musicians, findings about marijuana and about keeping time:

1. Your skin produces a natural form of marijuana. This is from Live Science, July 11, 2008.
2. Your mind controls time, not just the counting of it, but moving both forward and backward in time. This is from Discover Magazine, July 12, 2008.

The first finding states that our skin produces quite a few psychoactive substances, that is, we don’t just think with our minds, we think will our whole body. We don’t have a mind and a body, but rather we have a Mindbody. No news there, other than science is just getting around to finding what we’ve known for a long time. The problem, of course, is that the way we organize knowledge is like a key that only fits in certain locks. The traditional western style of forming knowledge is tailored to fit into the mind only, and that means that musically, we are not unlocking the power of the rest of our being, the skin, the heart. And of course, as we think about jazz, about jazz music in such cerebral terms, the feeling is lost, since we’ve ignored the part of our being, the skin, that literally does both thinking and feeling. The way out of this problem, which has more than a little effect on our pocketbooks, is to reformulate how we think of music, how we teach music, so that every bit of our being is engaged. There’s no one way to do this, rather every musician will have to find their way. After all, we each found our own way to erect the barriers to our hearts, only we can unlock the steel doors.

The second finding is interesting, again it’s something of which we are already aware, but taken with the first finding—it simply means that we can control, create, different feelings with music—and if we can create feelings that are healthy, this will be much better than playing empty mind music. Feelings of joy, love, even pain and sadness would fall into the category of real entertainment—not art. Art has become a cerebral activity, the thing that only the mind can appreciate. However, if we’re not turning on the skin, then what we’re playing is a real turn off. And the public, which used to adore jazz, will accordingly, has been accordingly, turned off.

If You Don't Play with Feeling, You're Screwed

It's science. So it's true.

Now where do people go to learn jazz, and come out of the program playing without feeling? Hmmmm. That's a tough one. Actually, it's a style of teaching, it's an approach that robs the music of feeling. What might that approach be?

I asked my friend Lydian who played so quotidian, and she said she had no idea. Then I asked my friend Dorian who said he was sorry and I'd have to ask somebody else. Then I asked my friend Locrian who said he was broke again and asked me for five bucks for beer. Then I asked old Aeolian who whined I'm on that roll again, about feeling and emotions and tears. So I went to Ionian who said look what I own again, some new equipment he just read about. By now I'm discouraged cause I don't have the courage to go the poker game at night. So I summon some bravery and visit the gamery and then take a look at the room. Well who's sitting at the table but five guys name Lydian--perfect mixolydians, one, who tomorrow will be a groom. Go away, they all said, we like our music to be dead, and I implored them to play from the heart. They said the heart's good but they don't know where it should--be....and besides it's so much easier to say the public becomes queasier when they hear just how hip we all are.

So I walked into the street where the cars made a beat and their windshields reflected the moon and the stars. Some patterns made swirls and I guess this is verse that mentions the girls, and the band played on.

But nobody cared.

The Toronto Chet Baker Fountain Strikes Again

In their never ending quest to make sure no one gets to see Chet Baker film or video footage, and to make sure no one can hear Chet Baker play or sing, once again the Chet Baker Archives that occasionally pop up on Youtube are being purged--with the note that the Chet Baker foundation is stopping such things from being seen.

Add this to the long list of actions by jazz organizations and musicians who do things against their best interest.

Evidently there must have been a spike in record sales that alerted this fine organization that something is wrong somewhere--and Youtube must be the place.