Music

No Wrong Way

16 March, 2019

Kim and I were lucky enough to be having dinner at the bar at Les Zygomates last night when a unique (to me, at least) trio came on called The Gatsby Trio. They had a guitar player with a super chill hollow-body, a trumpet/flugelhorn player, and most interestingly a singer in a kind of 20s getup who was keeping time with brushes on a music stand. Turns out she is called Gabriela Martina and she also does a bunch of other stuff than the 20s shtik.

As a drummer I was both intrigued and mildly annoyed when I realized this singer was really going to keep time with nothing but a pair of brushes on a music stand. On the one hand, cool idea — brushes are idiomatic for 20s swing, after all, and good drummers know well that you can play anything that makes an interesting noise. On the other hand, given she’s mainly singing, can she possibly be doing a great job of keeping time at the same time? Doubtful.

Well I was very pleasantly surprised. She did in fact keep good time once she got warmed up and truth be told she’s better with brushes than I ever was. Plus she was a very accomplished singer who did a credible job scatting (hard to pull off with a straight face, much less well) and also took a couple solos whistling. Whistling, no less. All this while also keeping decent time with brushes on a flat music stand. We thoroughly enjoyed the music, which was not at all confined to 20s swing thank heavens but ranged through a whole bunch of interesting styles.

When Kim and I were revisiting the experience later, we realized that the great thing about this trio was that they had pulled together a very non-standard configuration — no bass, no drummer, no keyboard — and made us forget about it. That in turn put me in mind of one of the things I like most about jazz, which is that there is no wrong way to play it. In most cases, you have a tune — a melody — with a suggested harmonization. You’re not bound to play the tune as written and you’re not bound to the suggested harmonization, or to any particular combination of instruments. You play the tune at the beginning of the number and then you repeat (usually) the form while various people improvise over it, and then you play the tune again. It is just enough structure to let you play and bring your audience along with you, without limiting you very much at all. All you have to do to succeed is assemble good players, listen to one another, and not let your mind wander.

(Truly great players, of course, can discard even this meager framework. Coltrane’s Live In Seattle for example is one of the all time great jazz recordings ever, but it pays almost no homage to conventional form. But do not deceive yourself into thinking there is no form or structure — there absolutely is, you just have to be really familiar with jazz to know where to look for it.)

The question is, is it possible to live and work according to these same principles? Can a team at work function like a jazz combo — assemble good people, provide the absolute minimum structure, listen to one another, don’t let your mind wander, and success will follow? In some cases I think yes, and it is absolutely the best way to work when it is appropriate. But be careful: because there is no wrong way to do it, there is also no formula for how it’s done. So as a manager, if you want to assemble the best group you can, you’re forced to improvise every time.

This must be why I like being a manager…

What Makes Us

9 March, 2019

I’m with my brother and sister this this morning outside Philadelphia, waiting to go to my uncle Benson Brock’s funeral this afternoon. I have written elsewhere in this blog about his passing, but I want to go into more detail about who and what he was to all of us.

Benson was born eleven years after my father, so my image of him as a boy was of a much more glamorous and interesting person than my parents were. Benson dropped into our lives from time to time with tales of learning to fly an airplane, tuning pianos for a living (this seemed impossible to me), playing jazz in nightclubs. Living in Philadelphia, he represented the Northeast of my early childhood, left behind when we moved south to Atlanta. If I was lucky, he and Dad would sit down together at the piano and read through duets together — a four-hands arrangement of the William Tell Overture was a favorite. Sometimes he would play Scott Joplin rags for us or tell ridiculous jokes. I knew he was not married, had no children, drove a 280Z, and lived on a house on an airport where he kept his airplane. I think I thought it was impossible anyone could do all these things — whatever they wanted, apparently — without any obvious negative repercussions.

As I grew older and started thinking about my path through life, Benson continued to loom large in my imagination of what I could be and what I wanted to do. When I felt lost in my first year of engineering school at Rice, Benson’s example — switch to music school — was an option in front of me, and in fact what I ended up choosing. When I decided I wanted to learn to fly, it was because Benson had done it so I knew it was possible. As my brother Jeff reminded me last night, Benson’s example was always there as we became men, showing that there was a path for us outside of conventional wisdom, outside of what was expected, and that we should believe that path was something we could achieve even if we didn’t have the skills or the background that other people on that path did.

Somewhere along the way Benson found his way into commercial flying, and over the years he followed that career to a number of different places. He particularly loved flying for Air Wisconsin in Colorado — the routes were short and the pay wasn’t very good, but he loved the mountains and the airplane he got to fly in them. Later, Air Wisconsin moved to Philadelphia and Kim and I found ourselves seeing a lot more of Benson. The highlight of this time was that we finally got to play some jazz together — more than once Jeff brought his bass down from Rhode Island and all three of us played on piano, bass, and vibe. Jeff’s son Sam even joined us on sax once.

Benson retired a couple of years ago, maybe a year after we moved to Brno in the Czech Republic. I was distracted with work and living abroad and I didn’t make as much effort as I should have to stay in touch, but we did still connect every so often. I thought of Benson as young, compared to Dad, so it never occurred to me that he was already older than Dad was when he died — Dad only made it to 64. I was confident we would have time to catch up again, play some more music, talk about flying, tell some more lousy jokes.

Fate proved me wrong on that point last week and closed the last chapter of Benson and Dad’s generation of Brocks. I’m bitter with it, and with myself for not treasuring and caring for that connection a little deeper. But in truth I already learned, long ago, the most important thing I could learn from Benson. It’s quite simple: Remember that there is always another path to the one you are taking, and if you want that other path, a little hard work is all that’s required. Also, don’t be afraid to tell absolutely lousy jokes.

Ciaccona

2 March, 2019

The Bach Chaconne, page 1, with vibraphone

The dance is in three, and it begins on the second beat of the measure. Why this should be I don’t know, but the missing first beat — felt, but not played, rather implied by the emphasis on the second beat — carries through the entire piece and defines my relationship with it.

I don’t recall exactly when I first encountered the Chaconne but it was definitely in 1989 sometime. It was probably the beginning of fall semester at Rice, the beginning of my junior year. If that was it then it was only a couple of months after I met Kim, my future wife. It is not coincidental that she, and this piece, are perhaps my strongest influences, and that I met them both around that time.

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote the Chaconne as part of his cycle of six sonatas and partitas for solo violin, all written between 1717 and 1720. It is 257 measures long — really, 256, because the form ends on the first beat of the last measure and begins on the second beat of the first — and takes around 16 minutes to play. The form is deceptively simple, a repeated four-bar progression with a rapid harmonic rhythm that averages out to about one chord change per beat, returning to the tonic on the first beat of the fifth bar that is also the last beat of the phrase.

My teacher, Richard Brown, was by any reasonable definition out of his mind to hand me a piece of this difficulty. In the fall of 1989 I had exactly three years of mallet percussion study under my not-very-substantial belt. My colleagues in the percussion studio at Rice’s Shepherd School of Music would have had between eight and ten years, including long hours learning to sightread parts in band and orchestra. I had none of these, having gone to a small private school with no band program at all, only chorus. I couldn’t read worth a damn and I had really only been playing seriously with four mallets — required for this piece — for about eighteen months.

Then, later in the fall of 1989, disaster struck — I fell playing intramural soccer, of all the stupid things, and fractured my left wrist. The fracture was not bad but it was in a particularly nasty place with a poor blood supply. The outcome: Three months in an arm cast with no mobility, particularly of my left thumb.

Mr. Brown told me later, after I graduated, that he didn’t believe I would come back from the injury. Given my late start, he didn’t see any way I could recover and still give the two recitals required for a performance degree. Fortunately, he didn’t tell me that at the time…

The Chaconne is renowned among musicians, particularly the violinists for whom it was written, as one of the greatest works of art ever assembled. Johannes Brahms wrote of it to Clara Schumann: “On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.^[1]” Although it is technically demanding for any instrument, that it not what sets it apart. It is the depth of expression in the piece, the range of emotions it evokes, the inexorable drive forward of that missing first beat, the repetitive foundation that supports everything from sweet simple melodies to bellowing, passionate outrage.

When I returned to work on the Chaconne after three months off, my left arm and wrist were horribly weak and I had to spend what seemed like an eternity retraining. Worse, I had missed any possibility of performing my junior recital at the usual time, in the spring semester of my junior year. It would have to be pushed to the fall of my senior year, meaning I would do my two required recitals in the same year. I should also mention that my lack of experience on the instrument was paired with a lousy work ethic… I was never among those who practiced hours a day, or even consistently every day. The only thing I had going for me really was my ear, my memory, and the fact that I loved the Chaconne.

The vibraphone, of course, did not exist when Bach was writing, and I have no idea if he would have approved of me playing his music on it. Of the keyboard percussion instruments though it is I believe the most musical, mainly because unlike wooden marimbas and xylophones, the vibraphone rings. Sustain is absolutely critical to the long phrases of the Chaconne and of all the percussion instruments the vibe has the most. As I was committing the piece to memory I found that I could subtly reinforce the harmonic rhythm by half-damping with the vibe’s damper pedal every beat, and that even though I couldn’t actually crescendo on a single note, I could build phrases by letting the notes ring on top of each other. I visited one of my musicology professors, Anne Schnoebelen, to ask for her help interpreting the piece. She looked at me and said, “This is going to be really difficult, I don’t know if it will work at all on the vibraphone,” but then proceeded to help me take the piece apart and try to make a plan for what I should do with it.

Mr. Brown let me borrow his vibraphone over the summer when I moved up to Cleveland to live with Kim. I think I practiced most days, when I wasn’t working on houses trying to make a buck, but I wasn’t too stressed about the fact that when I got back to Houston at the end of the summer I was going to have about eight weeks to put together a program of 35 minutes of music, much of which I hadn’t even started learning yet. It helped that I was in love of course, not just with the Chaconne but with my future wife. In August Kim and I packed her stuff into my van, a trailer, and her truck, and drove south to Houston for my last year of college.

I have fairly vivid memories of most of my time in college, but for some reason I remember very little of the run-up to my recital. I think somewhere around my first lesson of the fall I realized what a deep hole I was in and pretty much buried myself in practicing. When the day finally came for my recital, though, I felt more or less ready. I remember jumping up and down off stage before I went out to play it to both amp myself up and burn off extra nervous energy. Then I walked out there and I played it. You can listen if you want.

https://itsnothowwellthedogdances.com/chaconne/

I remember thinking I missed a lot of notes, but in retrospect it’s pretty clean. I wish I had taken it a bit slower, and if I was doing it again I would find a way to fabricate the missing high G on the vibe that is the peak of some of the most important phrases.

I played a lot of music in college and since then. I remember most of it pretty well — I still can’t read worth a damn but I memorize really quickly. Of all the music I learned, though, the Chaconne is the only piece I believe I could sing all the way through right now without missing a phrase. I can still feel the notes in my hand, the difficult passages with the sticks… and my eyes still fill with tears when I remember the central section where it switches to D major.

The dance begins on the second beat, and so did I — in music, in my career, in so many things in my life. It is inexorable, unforgiving, filled with motion and passion, but perfectly structured. Eventually it will end, as I, of course, will too. If I’m very lucky, perhaps it will be on beat one.