It's Not How Well the Dog Dances

Happy Birthday to Me

20 February, 2015

Today on my 47th birthday I am going to say thanks to Mom and Dad for raising me right (to the extent anyone could have, anyway).

Things I got from Mom:

* My determination to believe, sometimes in the face of the evidence, that people are basically good and that we are all made of the same stuff — put another way, that it is wrong to blame people for their bad circumstances when external forces are almost certainly to blame

* My “What, me worry?” optimism

* My love of animals

* My belief that I can do more or less anything if I put my mind to it

Things I got from Dad:

* My love of music and my musical ability (although I think Mom may actually have a better ear). Some kids get praised for throwing a ball — I didn’t even have a ball, I got praised for singing on pitch. (n.b. if you want your kid to know how to throw a ball, you should get him one and throw it with him.)

* My inclination, tamed by two years of beatings in graduate school but still present, to use five syllables when one would do. Put another way, my love for words and playing with words and everything wonderful about language.

* My intolerance for bad music and bad taste in general. This of course flies in the face of Mom’s proletarianism, which makes for an interesting internal tension.

* My belief that I can do more or less anything if I put my mind to it Mom and Dad fought through some rough years bringing us up, but no matter what they put looking after us first, perhaps to a fault (my memory on this is fuzzy, but I’m fairly certain that Dad, after a long string of defeats, finally lost his partnership at the large lawfirm he was at because he took two weeks off to direct the music for my junior-high-school production of The Mikado, starring me.) I’m only now beginning to really appreciate how difficult that business of putting your kids first can be, as I watch parents around me go through the same traumas Mom and Dad did.

Anyway: Thanks, Mom and Dad. I am a lucky, lucky boy.

No Upgrades Available…

18 February, 2015

… on my flight to Tel Aviv this weekend. I thought about pleading with US Airways that it will be my birthday and I really, really *need* a lie-flat seat and complimentary alcoholic beverages for that 11-hour trip, but I don’t think it would have worked.

The nice thing about US Airways is that it is often possible, for $300 and 30,000 miles, to float yourself into that privileged area up front. I mean look there is no way it’s actually worth $300, but on the other hand I almost always try, so that must mean it actually is worth it by some definition.

The fact that my Quaker grandparents would consider all this insanely self-indulgent is not lost on me. I try not to think about it when I glide serenely past the masses waiting to board coach.

Stop Equating Music and Sports

17 February, 2015

On a plane home from Europe the other day I watched a movie called Whiplash, about a jazz drummer at a fictional music school in New York and his battle with this asshole band director who just about kills him by… well, being an asshole.

It wasn’t a bad movie for a jazz lover like me. There were a lot of good tunes, albeit mostly big band stuff which isn’t necessarily my thing, but still good tunes. I started off as a drummer myself before I switched to keyboard percussion, so I could relate pretty well to the specific physical issues the kid was wrestling with as he tried to push his fastest swing tempo ever faster. And certainly any musician who has been to music school has seen or heard about abusive teachers or directors, people who genuinely believe that they are doing their students a great service by humiliating them in public. The portrayal of this particular band director was exaggerated to drive the plot of the movie, but sure, there was a grain of truth there.

There was something that bothered me about the movie though and I didn’t really put my finger on it until a couple days later: Despite having a lot of music in it, the movie wasn’t really about music. It was much more about equating achievement with physical struggle and pain — lots of shots of the bandaids on the kid’s hands, blood on the cymbals, sweat everywhere, etc. In other words, the plot could have been lifted from any sports movie. Talented young kid thinks he’s all that, runs headlong into abusive coach who sees potential but insists on “breaking him down,” followed by humiliation, struggle, and eventually some level of victory.

Now, there is nothing wrong with the idea that achievement requires hard work and discipline, and achievement in music is certainly no different. But in focusing on all the physical suffering this kid goes through to achieve, the movie entirely misses an essential thing about music, and jazz music in particular: great music is an art, not a sport, and it requires above all else listening. A great musician listens intently to herself, to the other players in her ensemble, to the room she is playing in. This is particularly true in jazz, and I would argue even more true of jazz drumming. The drummer’s entire role is to support the other musicians in the band, to feed off what they’re doing in a solo in real time and make it into something greater. In-the-moment creativity and art is what separates great music from merely good music, not just in jazz but in chamber and orchestral music as well.

So in the end I found myself dissatisfied with Whiplash (although kudos to the filmmaker for making any kind of jazz movie at all, and doing a credible job with a lot of details). I wanted it to be about the musician’s never-ending search for art in the moment, and instead I got Top Gun.