I Wasn't Shirley Temple

I've always felt uncomfortable writing about music, particularly my experience in my 20s and 30s. I don't want to provoke clichéd impressions. Hearing about a "young white musician hooking up with old black players in their 70s, 80s, and 90s", one conjures up images of cross-cultural mentorship and a tradition being passed down.

It was nothing of the kind. I was not an adorable moppet and my friends weren't Magical Negros.



I wasn't being initiated by the OGs. Hopefully my Major Holley posting conveyed some of the flavor - that these weren't my mentors (though they were always my heroes). They were pals and co-conspirators.

You've got to turn back clocks to understand. Jazz, in the beginning, was supremely naughty. And my circle of friends - the aging second and third generation - held some connection to that original spirit. They were rawly present. They didn't follow musical rules reverse-engineered to feebly replicate the magic  They were singing, unfettered, with their true voices, and they were rascals, one and all.

Young players had begun to stream out of conservatories where they'd been taught How To Play Jazz - an institutional process antithetical to a music that is all about resisting conformity, busting out of formula, and finding one's own unique means of expression. Not only is there no "right" or "wrong" in jazz; the entire game is about challenging complacent assumptions and crossing lines of propriety. A real jazz musician lives to evoke beauty via clever transgression (that, in fact, is how Western Art has always evolved).

I was drawn to the allure of cleverly beautiful transgression, and never lost my affinity for it over the many years it took to learn to fluently improvise. Most of my generation (and those who followed) never understood to begin with, and the few who did were so broken by the machinery of the new "Jazz Education System” that they emerged proudly conformist, eagerly formulaic, and impressively skilled at aping other people's unique means of expression.

I was an aberration; gleefully naughty. And so were my elderly pals. So we co-conspired. I brought youthful energy, they brought experience. Some entirely forgot that I was young and white (because they lived in their ears, not their eyes or their internal spreadsheets). Others never forgot for one moment, but suspended disbelief during the actual playing. But at no point was I presented with the keys to a tradition. Jazz isn't the Stanley Cup. There's no matriculation. It's a spirit, an attitude, a groove, freely available to anyone so attuned. People truly steeped in the music absolutely grok that. It feels strange to me to have to explain it. 

At that moment, in the late 1980s, jazz musicians were doing lots of posing and replication, but the spirit itself was rarely invoked. Holdouts drifted together to huddle for warmth, like family. That's what we were: a family of misfits seeking to constantly renew our attunement. And I was the youngster.

Now, alas, the spirit has extinguished. One can still hear the trappings - the notes, the licks, the skillful aping of other people's unique means of expression. But canned docility has become not just the sad reality, but the overarching goal; the whole ball game. I haven't heard a naughty note - beautifully transgressive - since the 1990s. And, to my shame, I did nothing to help preserve it, my promiscuity having drawn me into other realms.

When I’m old, I’ll be the last Mohican, though no one will have the slightest idea.