Eddie Palmieri

The great Eddie Palmieri, one of my musical heroes and a formative superstar of Latin Jazz/Salsa/Whatever You Want to Call it, died yesterday.

I'll offer two stories:

Fumigation
I'm at the bar of Blue Note nightclub in Manhattan, circa 1987. I'm an insider there because I play almost nightly at the late after show with trumpeter Ted Curson. Michel Camillo, the latest big-publicity jazz star, is in residence, and he's busily and smilingly outgassing the smoothest and show-off-iest latin-ish jazz imaginable. A friend of mine refers to this style of playing as "Show You My White Teeth Music". The tourists are eating it up, but we musicians at the bar, seeking any possible relief, begin drinking with determination.

The set ends, thunderous ovation, and we eagerly await the second half of the show, featuring Eddie Palmieri's Orchestra. It's a bit like Sandra Bernhardt following Jennifer Lopez. Eddie was not dentally impressive, and his music did not drip with showy glissandi. No smug rich guy suntanned sambas. Eddie was the apotheosis of soulful grit. Eddie was antimatter to Camillo.

The mangy musicians from Eddie's group finally took the stage, tuned, and sat placidly waiting for the drugs to wax or wane, per individual preference. Then Eddie came out, and, as he often did, launched into an extended solo piano intro. Eddie can get quite "out", making Thelonious Monk seem songful by comparison. He always had the soul of an avante gardist, though, unlike just about every avante gardist I know (and I knew many), he could also swing his ass off. But on this night, he played 20 minutes of impenetrable, maddening solo stuff, giving the tourists nothing to hang their ears on. Nada. On and on it went, featuring repeated piddly hammerings on the highest piano key, making the dressing room cat mew loudly in consternation. A number of audience members walked out, though no one in the band could give less of a crap. They just sat there mopily with misaligned pupils, waiting.

Finally—FINALLY—Eddie stands up (adding maybe four inches to his seated height) and screams "ONE TWO THREE FOUR!!!!" fast, and the band just roars into a montuno from a dead standing start that's so instantly swinging and wailing and exasperated (by Camillo) that the entire room forgets to breathe for a solid minute. Whatever it is that metal heads get from having their ears blown out by garish rednecks and their overclocked guitar amps, this was the platonic form of that. This was the mythical Wall of Sound.

The interminable solo had been fumigation. And then the heavy roller machine had gone into overdrive, laying down fresh, inexorable pavement. I actually teared up a little from the emotional release. If only orgasms offered such catharsis!

Dominican Humiliation
My one gig with Eddie was a catastrophe (more for him than for me). We were playing in a brand new Dominican nightclub in Washington Heights, and while you might imagine The Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico as geographic and cultural twins, their musics are like oil and water.

Dominicans dance to merengue, an easy 1-2, 1-2, 1-2 like polka. It's fast and furious and sexy and exciting, but not the least bit sophisticated. Puerto Rican salsa (which derives from Cuba, and, before that, Africa) can be furious, sexy and exciting at times, but it abounds with sophistication and subtlety.

Those not born into it (or made it their lifelong study, as I did) wouldn't be able to even clap their hands to it. Imagine that! Popular music—dance music!—you can't clap your hands to! It's not 1-2, 1-2, 1-2. Instead, it's two short claps and three long. Or three long and two short. And even knowing which is which is a move for insiders only. The difference with Dominican merengue was yet another matter/anti-matter contrast.

So I'm gigging with the greatest salsa band in the world, hideously misplaced in a Dominican nightclub (hey, a gig's a gig, you know? It's not like Eddie's manager would ever say "no"!) and no one is dancing, or applauding, because this crazy Puerto Rican stuff is happening which none of the Dominicans can parse. It's like trying to play a Windows game on a Mac. One of the greatest moments of my life is an abject humiliation for all concerned.

There had, however, been a high point the week before. The rehearsal for this gig marked the first appearance of the young conga player Giovanni Hidalgo, who'd arrived with a reputation as a genius. As he and I both warmed up across the room from each other, separated by over a dozen other honking horn players, his complicated hand slaps suddenly and improbably began to encompass my warm-up. Not that he was tuning in to me, specifically, getting all up in my stuff. it's just that he was a Big Ears Guy, never not listening to—and never not encompassing—Everything. I was the same (most players wouldn't have noticed they were being encompassed). When I engaged back, it was like Fred Astaire cocking an elbow at Ginger Rogers. He complied instantaneously and sumptuously. Beautifully. The back/forth continued for a couple minutes until Eddie hollered to start the rehearsal. Giovanni went on to become a major star, and we'll leave it at that because his story became too sad to contemplate. Best damn warm-up I ever had, though.

Back to the Dominican club, it's intermission and I'm standing in a stairwell, playing long tones to keep myself in optimal condition, when Eddie walks by and offers me a hit off his joint. I refuse with a smile, saying I need to keep my head straight on my first gig. Eddie shrugs amiably and walks away. God, I'm an idiot.

Rest in Peace, Eddie.


Are you noticing a pattern?

Perverse Corroboration

Dave Liebman
As a 21 year old jazz trombonist, I enjoyed the support of a few jazz heavy-hitters. I was clearly no boy genius—nothing like that—but they assured me I was on the right track and expected good things, which is the most warmly effective sort of appraisal. Rather than inflate my ego, it made me redouble efforts to do my very best.

This was the age where one stops being a student and starts calling oneself a professional, but I attended one last polishing program for talented kids my age. Several went on to stardom. And a number of them really liked my playing.

I knew what I was doing, at least. I was coherent, assured, and could get from A to B in interesting ways. I'd done the work of acquiring fluency and control. Though, as with my writing, it wasn't quite like anything else. But I'd always figured that was the goal. A personal, original approach was exactly what my mentors had encouraged.

Saxophone star David Liebman started the first day's class by asking me to improvise. I played with swing, feeling, and lyricism. I told a story. And, when I was done, Liebman didn't look at me. He faced the class, like a surgeon standing beside an excised tumor, and asked, with unconcealed disgust, "Does anyone know what the fuck that was?!?" Even the students who liked my playing shrugged. Geez, Dave, no. We have no idea!

I was confident enough, thank heaven, not to be destroyed (I knew—though Liebman did not—that one of his own idols strongly supported my playing). But, man, was I angry. And I remain angry to this day, though it's not something I revisit often. How could a bona fide jazz veteran be so horrible to a kid?

Les Blank
Thirty years later, I had a chance to interview a guy in Connecticut who was renowned for his cookies. He wasn't a professional, just some guy, and said he'd show me his technique and I could film it with my iphone camera.

So I showed up, and he revealed that he's just using the plain old recipe from the Quaker Oats box, so it's really nothing special, yet he conceded that no one else ever comes close to matching his results. He showed me how carelessly he cooked, and how pedestrian his ingredients were. And when I tasted a cookie, I nearly lost consciousness.

I cobbled it all together into a short film that's a meditation on quality. How it gets in, how it's recognized, and whether there's any objectivity. All the interesting questions! It's very poorly shot, recorded, and edited. It's tediously repetitive, lacks any discernible structure, and never quite states its theme. And yet, it has magic to it.

One of my best friends at the time was the great film director Les Blank. I sent him a copy, and it made him so angry—just spitting mad—that he refused to discuss it.

I instantly realized that if it were legitimately bad, there'd be no anger. Professional filmmakers don't lose their tempers over crappy films. They just wince and move on. Les' rage showed that I'd accomplished something.

Why the rage? Who knows. Some byproduct of Les' tangled inner being (perhaps having spent his life refining skills to create magic, seeing even a bit of magic emanating from guileless incompetence felt infuriating). I didn't need to parse it. It was sufficient to recognize it for what it was: corroboration.

Linkage

But while by that point I'd acquired the insight to parse Les' reaction appropriately, I still carried anger over my Liebman encounter from years earlier, before I knew how to frame it correctly.

In fact it was only today that I put the two together. If my playing merely sucked, Liebman would have been more teacherly. He'd have dressed the wound, given me basics to work on, and sent me on my way with an exasperated eye roll. A jazz superstar only howls "WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?" at an eager skinny 21 year old trombonist in summer camp shorts and tank top if that kid actually has something.

What's the thing? I can't venture a guess. So what set him off? Same. But, at this late date, I see I should have accepted it as corroboration. Not in the sense of twisted, trollish delight at getting under someone's skin and eliciting a reaction, any reaction. Just the level-headed realization that 1. I had something, and 2. It's neither necessary nor possible for everyone to dig every something.


Laboriously Updating Assumptions
But this posting is not about under-appreciation. Nor about celebrity insecurity, nor the chilling subterranean streams of human interaction. Rather, it's about my failure to tie this all together until an hour or so ago.

I try hard to sharpen my thinking and strip away kludge and bullshit. I work to apply lessons forward to future experiences and backward to recollected ones. I generate my share of insights, but must constantly relearn them...endlessly. As I noted while explaining Why My Cooking Isn't Great, it's devilishly hard to distribute insights evenly into all aspects of one's life.

You can't update assumptions and memories in light of freshly-acquired insight en masse. So I remain endlessly mystified by puzzles previously well-solved, and doomed to ceaselessly re-solve it all.

On the other hand, if you're ever bored in old age—no one invites you to dance parties anymore, and your crustily truculent friends can't be pryed out of their easy chairs to come see a movie or whatever, this might be the answer. Spend your time processing mental fodder with ever more lithe framing. Be like an earthworm, improving the soil by passing it through your corpus. I guess that's what old age was always supposed to be for. Perhaps this explains the elder "wisdom" people used to talk about way back when.


For extra credit, watch that movie, and consider how the discussion of quality - what it is and how it gets in - pervades this entire discussion. Creating quality is a sticky wicket, but appreciation is no less tortuous.


Followup: The Waif and the Limo

Chuck Mangione

Chuck Mangione (RIP) was part of a long continuum of good or very good musicians who lost their chops and reinvented themselves as images of musicians...with enormous success.

The gambit works because the public is far more interested in image than in substance (e.g. musicianship). Dropping the "music" part, and focusing on the image part, can actually increase your value...tremendously.

The list includes some names most people—even most musicians—would find surprising. Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong were faint shadows of their younger selves by mid-career (and desperately seeking chop recuperation behind-the-scenes), but did far better as icons than they ever had as musicians. Consider the Rolling Stones and so many more, even aside from more widely-recognized image-pushers ala Kenny G, Herb Alpert, Chris Bodi, Liberace, etc.

Chuck was a serious bebop player when young. By the time any of you heard of him, he could barely play two notes in a row...and made a zillion dollars with the hat and the flower and the beard, playing kitsch ear worms.

Something to consider: I know a very good jazz guitar player who won top price in a Guitar Hero competition (that's a game where you pretend to be a guitar player), and it earned him more money than his entire previous career as a real guitarist.

---

Most singers become singers because they want to be singers, not because they want to sing.

Cleopatra’s Pink Slip

I haven't exactly been a soaring addition to the Portuguese jazz scene. In fact, I haven't played a note outside my apartment. The best players in the country - themselves only barely okay - assure me that there's no musical interest here, an hour from Lisbon.

And how! The live music (besides fado, the hyperdramatic singing tradition which is its own thing) has been muddier than the local espresso.

But wandering around my town's center this week, I heard a guitarist struggling through a Charlie Parker song, accompanied by a play-along record. And for some reason I clicked into form, like a punchy old boxer hearing a ringing bell.

It took me a moment to locate him in an imposing nineteenth century building, which turned out to be the Musician Society. I snuck into the impressive interior, entered the salon, and effortlessly slipped behind a piano to accompany him. I was, at least, sparing him from the karaoke approach - the last resort of musicians with no one to play with.

I play professional level jazz piano. Not good professional, or top professional, like my trombone playing, but reasonably solid by New York standards, which is needle-busting for small-town Portugal (imagine a Broadway actor swapped into your kid's middle school play). In my milieu I'm merely okay, so that's how I frame myself. But everything's relative.

We played together for a few minutes, and I coaxed him into swinging a little harder, and he managed not to stumble on a few of the easier chord changes (by local standards, this constitutes jazz mastery). The song ended and he looked up at me, thoroughly unsurprised, and asked where I'm from.

I said "New York". This is like an Okinawan showing up in a Dutch karate dojo, but he wasn't visibly affected. He just coughed and told me about the jam session every Thursday which I might sign up for a week ahead if I'm aching to play. Perhaps they’ll let me, because I sound pretty good. Then he very politely and courteously told me that he needed to practice, and sent me on my way while he resumed the karaoke.

I was not terribly disappointed by the sudden end to our brief collaboration, but considering it from his perspective, it was like Cleopatra materializing in the bedroom of a frantic masturbator, and having him tell her, as she peeled off her clothes, “Not now, I’m busy.”

This happens a lot, in different realms, though polite courtesy isn't the norm. But I'm okay with it. I view the world with blithe amusement and low expectation, immune from the entitlement epidemic. Enjoy a brief montage of typically surreal experiences:

Two food obsessed guys at my gym were weighing local dining options, and I piped up, shyly, to ask if they'd heard of Chowhound. They replied, with suspicion, in the affirmative, so I introduced myself and offered tips. Without a word, they moved to treadmills at the far corner of the gym.

Upon moving to small town Connecticut, immediately after leaving CNET, I introduced myself to a neighbor, explaining that I'd founded a nationally-known web site. He told me how his nephew, Petey, had a web site selling lawnmowers he'd refurbished, and that, if I'd like, he could put me in touch, so Petey could offer me some wisdom.

There are loads more. Back at the dawn of this Slog, I wrote a posting titled "Kafkaesque", recounting other bizarre tales. It's amusing. Check it out.

A major breakthrough finally occurred some years ago when someone posted a plea for help to a general interest forum where I participated under alias. They wanted advice on launching an online community to cover a specific topic, hoping to attract a particularly expert and passionate usership. My previous replies there had seemed smart to me, but rarely rated a thumbs-up. Mostly just contemptuous snark. But for this, I was uniquely qualified. So I dove in, whipping up 500 words of pure distilled hard-won Truth…which drew nary a thumbs up (there was, however, an errant "go fuck yourself").

This time seemed different. It was a unique circumstance where I could be 100% certain the problem wasn't on my end, being pretty much The Guy for this particular query. I've always suspected that I might be far less clever than I sometimes dare to imagine, but this time my confidence was bulletproof despite having drawn the usual result.

I finally allowed myself to acknowledge the gaslighting, and to muse about how I'd been operating under a "curse" of some sort. I've written several postings trying to account for it, finally explaining it as a hairball of edge-case factors, though I've been unsure of what to do about it.

None of this depresses me. I'm pliable; comfortable being reduced to vapor in anyone's esteem. I don't need to be recognized, much less appreciated, let alone respected. As a karma yogi, I'm fully invested in what I do, not who I am. I used to live on the flip side of that, and, believe me, the weather here is much much better (in Sanskrit, it's called satchitananda).

The Curse makes it hard to feel useful - a conundrum for someone with an irrepressible helpful streak. I've resolved it by realizing that no one actually needs help. It's all aristocrats amusing themselves with theatrical exasperation over Rich People Problems, and the last thing anyone wants is for some janitor to turn up the glaring house lights, spoiling the fun. So, really, it's all going smashingly. And here I am in Portugal eagerly scarfing my nth lovely plate of codfish. Plan A! 

Plan B (let's call it the "Jim Leff project") never happened, despite decades of straining to make it happen, and then coming to grips that it would never happen, and then accounting for why it never happened...and why it's perfectly okay that it never happened. All that meta work was a ridiculous Plan C, leading nowhere, so I've completely stopped Jim Leffing and embraced the cod.


See also "Seemers Always Win: Posing as Someone Like You"

Roy Haynes Meets Mr. Raucous

I despair at the task of making you understand what drummer Roy Haynes, who just died, meant to jazz. You need to really understand jazz and jazz history to fathom the impossible sweep and significance and miracle of who he was and what he accomplished.

This was not just jazz hero #600 dropping dead. Not "he played so well." Not a "long and storied career". Not "beloved the world over." Let me try to explain Roy Haynes via analogy to a realm you probably know better: writing.

Say Roy Haynes anonymously wrote Beowulf. And, as a cohort of Chaucer, composed one of the Canterbury Tales. Say he was an important member of the Continental Congress helping Jefferson revise the Declaration of Independence, and a pioneering author of wicked Victorian political satire who'd given Oscar Wilde his first break. Say he went on to write Emmy-winning screenplays for Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, and sip absinthe with Hemingway (who looked up to him like a hero) in Key West. Then say, at age 90, you found him writing fiendishly intricate postmodern novels as vibrantly modern as any of the young leading lights. Better, even.

Say he did all this not like some crafty operator making strategic pivots - donning a bunch of wigs and making superficial course changes - but that every single step was brilliant and right and slick and AHEAD of the curve. He sounded not just like twelve different guys from twelve different eras, but like the BEST guy from each of twelve different eras.

It seems ridiculous. Nobody ever did that. Nobody ever could do that. It sounds like I'm exaggerating. But Roy Haynes, who'd played easy, lyrical swing with Lester Young and frantic bebop with Charlie Parker and Blues Rock with the Allman Brothers and modern jazz with Chick Corea and fiendishly complex late-stage intellectuality with the smuggest recent youngsters, truly was that guy. Nobody else in jazz ever did anything remotely like this. Nobody in any field of endeavor that I'm aware of ever did anything remotely like this.

Also, there was my minuscule cameo appearance. 

One night Roy walked into my weekly blues gig - my first steady work out of school - in a trashy little gin mill in the ghetto of Roosevelt Long Island where Eddie Murphy, just a couple years prior, had done his first standup (there was an 8x10 glossy in the manager's office made out "To Mr. Hicks' Place, where I lost my comedy virginity, from Eddie") and Roy was, as always, dressed like a million bucks and had his slick sports car parked out front, and I wasn't the least bit surprised to see him there because Roy Haynes was everywhere and into everything and knew everyone (the garrulous bartender at Skylark Lounge where I hung out when not gigging was Roy's best friend because of course he was), and I, a cocky lad compensating for deep shyness and insecurity, especially here in this ghetto bar at the height of a dangerous crack epidemic, overcompensated by rocking the joint with trombone so raucous and funky that our band's guitarist, Bo Diddly Junior (no relation), who played his axe with every part of his body including his crotch, occasionally took me aside to suggest I tone it down a notch, and on this night Roy was joking around in the back room with the club's manager and a small entourage as I ducked in on a break to make sure my horn was out of everybody's way when conversation suddenly stopped and I immediately began to sweat buckets, sensing that I was about to take some focus, and, sure enough, Roy said "Hey man sound good out there" and I froze. Absolutely froze. I couldn't respond, I couldn't acknowledge, I couldn't even let myself imagine that it was me he was addressing. Must be anyone else.

No more Mr. Cocky, just an awkward white suburban kid right out of school feeling mortified that Haynes, a subtle, poetic musician with a sublimely light touch, had walked in to hear me playing the most raucous fatback and collard greens trombone, and, at age 24, I wasn't wise enough to realize that he bloody well knew I was simply playing the gig as it needed to be played - anything but subtle! - and furthermore heard the poetry latently beneath it all, but I was committed to my embarrassment at being caught with my pants down, so to speak, despite the seemingly solid counter-evidence of "Hey man sound good out there", which only confused me further - was he addressing Mr. Raucous? - leaving me unable to respond or look up or breathe or move or live.

I went on to exist in the periphery of a lot of Roy Haynes stuff. That bartender was my buddy, too, though we never hung together with Roy. I was friends with many of the young players Roy hired to play in his band. I caught a bunch of his gigs, marveling at his pliancy and otherworldly, Faust-bargain-level touch and finesse. As he climbed through his 70s, 80s, and 90s, Roy never failed to sound far more modern and youthfully, nimbly energetic than anyone from my generation.

I never exchanged a word with him. I'd botched my chance, but was quietly present in his world, popping up in the little hood joints unknown to fans or jazz writers where Roy let his hair down between concert tours. Part of that furniture. And it never bothered me much, because there are far worse things than being comfortable furniture for Roy Haynes. If you're gonna Zelig, that's how you Zelig.

Insiders knew that Roy Hayne's favorite record of his was "Out of the Afternoon." It was my favorite even before I learned this. I invite you to download it now and listen. It's remarkable. The blind saxophonist Roland Kirk, who is featured, was important to me, though I never got to meet him. At the same time I was blasting the paint off the gin mill in Roosevelt, I was also seeking out Kirk's surviving sidemen, wherever they were, and befriending and playing with them, poetically and subtly. Roy never stopped into any of those gigs, alas (though those farflung clubs were certainly on his radar, because nothing wasn't on Roy's radar for, christ, literally 99 years), so I never got to be Mr. Poetry for Roy Haynes.


So check this out. This guy 1. is EIGHTY SIX YEARS OLD, and 2. started out with Lester Young, who was one generation removed from "When the Saints Go Marching In”:

 

Win By Not Quitting

The most startling insights are simple observations, but one must sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to deprogram false assumptions before one can really understand. Truth is easy...if, and only if, you can chop away the dense underbrush of ignorant assumptions.

The following is like that. The epiphany is so gut simple that there's almost nothing there. I've carried it with me for years but only recently did it reach full fruition. If it strikes you as banal, consider removing some underbrush while you reconsider!


The key to winning is persistence.

Unfortunately, that observation jibes easily with preconceptions, so most people wouldn't give it much thought. Sure! You fight and fight and bash and bash and then, voila, you triumph!

But no. That's not it. Let's back up 30 years and meet a hero.

The great trombonist Al Grey from the Count Basie Orchestra had invited me to sit in with him. Al was an old-timey hard-swinging player without any fancy airs or intense harmonic innovations or slick advanced technique. Al was all about joy and soul. He was one of the last of the Mohicans.


By the early '90s, that sort of playing had nearly died out, except in a few pockets in rough neighborhoods where, by coincidence, I hung out on my free nights, sitting in with the only people who ever really "got" me: octogenarian black guys. Family and friends had little idea what to do with me. My only places of comfort were black bars where men wore expensive hats and the sidemen from my record collection took refuge to ply their art. And, despite my age and complexion, I enjoyed tribal bona fides as well. I, too, was of the Mohican persuasion.

But Al didn't know any of this, so when he invited me to sit in, he - and everybody else in the club that night - expected to see a 70-year-old swinging elderly black dude dismantle a slick, glib white upstart from Planet Music School.

It was impossible to predict that I, too, was a swinging soulful elderly black dude. Not in a Walter Mitty fantasy life way, but in reality. That's how I genuinely felt and played. That was my truth. And I earned it, risking my life for years getting from street parking into those venues amid a crack epidemic, not to mention the one hour+ drives out to the boonies of Harlem or Newark or Jamaica or Roosevelt or Hempstead. Nobody knew how far I traveled. They all figured I was local, and that suited me fine. I was family. Comfortable and kindred for the only time in my life.

But on this night, I found myself in shiny Manhattan at a shmancy jazz club where no one, including Al, knew my backstory. So when he graciously invited me to take the first solo on the first song, I had a decision to make. My impulse was to swing the lights out, but I knew Al wanted a foil; a Washington General he could foxily dribble the basketball around. He was hoping I'd play some glib bullshit so he could blow me up with a warm folksy grin (the guy had no maliciousness in him whatsoever).

So I did. I played the role, spitting out tricky bebop lines to deliberately enstooge myself. Why? Because playing straight man to the great Al Grey seemed like a worthy pursuit. I was showing respect, and I knew I'd treasure the memory of his slaughtering me with swinging soul more than one where I'd made it all about me by matching his game. I led myself to slaughter, but it was joyous, like the privilege of being insulted by Don Rickles.

At the time, Al was enjoying a late-in-life renaissance, releasing records as a leader, headlining at festivals...the whole shebang. After six decades as that cool dude back in the trombone section, he was a grand old man of jazz. During intermission, another musician asked him his secret. How had he orchestrated this rebirth?

Al chuckled the weighty chuckle of long experience and shrugged at the simplicity of his reply: "Don't quit! I just never quit!"

That's all you have to do. Don't quit. Keep showing up.

I've chewed on it for four decades, and, to really get it, I've had to chisel away a great many things Al wasn't saying.

Most of us project a heroic cast on our "trajectory". An American confessing unlofty aspirations seems like a stoic monk at best, and a loser at worst. But Al was never a loser. He always played his heart out. He was trying hard; just not to be That Guy. In terms of career and stature, he merely showed up. The big arc of it wasn't aspirational.

Let me try a different angle. You might have noticed that the world goes in cycles. Up and down. No matter how hard you try and no matter how good you are, it will all sink to failure multiple times! And no matter how feckless and stupid other people seem, they all get their moments. That's because it's all in play. Things get better, and then worse, and then better, and then worse. That's the gig here on planet Earth. And as we build out stories about these apparent "trajectories" and invest them with meaning, we secretly fear that the stories are false, and that nothing (gulp!) has any meaning.

The stories are false and nothing has any meaning. It's true. So, take it from Al: you just need to keep going. Wait it out! And the next time your stock rises, take a quick selfie atop the rollercoaster and pin that peak moment just before the grueling drop, while you're still brimming with buoyant exuberance. But you need to stay on the ride long enough to get there. Don't quit! Keep showing up!

I don't know much about Al's endgame, but few humans besides Alexander the Great die gloriously, so I assume he petered out in a bed somewhere with a wince of exertion followed by a sigh of surrender. Sweet dreams, Al. But that wasn't his pinned moment. It always goes south after you imagine you've arrived - because, yet again, it's all a dynamic churn. But Al, having never quit, could say he'd been the cool guy in the trombone section who became a jazz great.

At some point we all reach some semblance of a win. Not because the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Not because victory is what you truly deserve. And not because your outstanding attributes can't be ignored. That's all story-telling. No, it's just this: if you wait long enough your number eventually comes up (though seldom in the way you expected).

In truth, there are no wins; just flow. But if you must pretend to keep score, do so while the boat momentarily rises. Which requires staying on the damn boat! Heed the immortal Al Grey, and don't quit! Keep showing up!


“Wait by the river long enough and the bodies of your enemies will float by."
-- falsely attributed to Sun Tzu

The Dead Ends of Shitty Mozart

Artists, even great ones - especially great ones! - abandon work constantly. It took me a very long time to shake the shame of unfinished projects and realize that dead-ends are an essential part of the process.

It's only a problem if literally nothing ever emerges. If so, you have one of two problems:

1. You suck

So commit a quintillion times harder! As I explained in my essay "Should You Go to Cooking School?",

"However good you are now, get way way better, and then, when you're certain you're good enough, get way way better still. And then get better. Finally, realize you absolutely suck and triple it. Don't wait for an authority figure to goad you into improvement. Make it happen as a matter of survival.

Not that this requires further clarification, but don’t stop improving when people around you start telling you you’re awesome. That happens at the beginning of this cycle. When friends and family start gasping in admiration, that means you’re like one single notch above completely sucking."

Or...

2. You don't recognize when your stuff is good

So work to develop more detached self-evaluation; come back later with a fresh eye; find a trusted sounding board; and/or learn to distinguish between a sloppy nth draft of a good idea and a crap idea.

The slop/crap distinction is huge for me. Everything I do starts embarrassingly bad (watch me write). As I bash and bash and bash to iterate my way out of my intrinsic shittiness, things eventually clarify. Either there's no "there" there (so I need to fix the thinking rather than the execution), or else I'm on to something that requires a trillion more cycles of improvement.

There was one human being whose every creative gesture was solid gold, and who never discarded anything (he never erased a note, from what I've heard): Wolfgang Mozart.

Don't expect to be Mozart! Settle for becoming Shitty Mozart. Shitty Mozart fakes being Mozart by keeping his non-Mozartian output well out of view (expect a ton of it!), and working his ass off to arduously produce an occasional fleeting semblance of what Mozart effortlessly dashed off.

You need two contradictory faculties: 1. The humility to recognize that you're not Mozart (so don't sweat the size of your reject pile), and 2. The conceitedness to try to fool people into thinking you're Mozart (by hiding your copious failure).

Actually being Mozart, alas, is not an option. So if any of this depresses you - if your dead-ends leave you feeling less than optimally productive - your first task is to accept that unavoidable fact, and then move forward to becoming a Shitty Mozart.

Greatness

I once did a fair bit of teaching of younger jazz players, mostly via seminars in Europe. Often I'd encounter someone with no perceptible swing feel - which is catastrophic. After an hour of hard work and pushing and carrying on, occasionally I might cajole one into swinging, which felt like a revelation, but I'd coach them straight through that threshold to something even higher. Not just swinging, but really swinging! And it was surprisingly common to see a few reach that lofty height...at least for a brief moment.

"Wait! Stop! Freeze!" I'd scream. "You heard what you just did, right? That was really swinging, and it felt super different, right?"

"You cannot ever go back. This isn't your new normal; it's your new baseline. You must never - even in your worst, sloppiest, most unguarded moment - swing any less than you just proved you can. If you hadn't just proved what you could do, you might have doubted your capability. But that was proof-of-concept, and it can no longer be doubted. You know how swinging you can be, so anything less from this point forward would be inexcusable."

"Failing to swing your ass off is now a capital offense. You can no longer protest that, hey, you were trying your best. Now that we know what your best really is, settling for less makes you a lazy, shitty, spoiled baby. You can't shrug off not swinging. Not anymore!"

How many of them powered up, proceeding at this higher level? Very few, of course. Most immediately dipped all the way back to their previous level; to their status quo. Not because greatness was too demanding or draining or challenging, but because they couldn't reframe themselves. Crappy unswinging mediocrity felt comfortable. It made them feel like themselves. It felt like home. Like their own comfy beds. Night night!



But every great once in a while, one would experience some internal snap (something must snap!). Reframing would happen, and they'd power up several levels, renouncing the fluffy pillows and blankets of mediocrity. Swinging hard became their new normal.

Those were the great ones. And this explains: 1. Why there are so few "great ones", and 2. What one needs to do to be great.

See "Why My Cooking Isn't Great"


Their greatness wasn't a matter of latent capability (aka "talent), or hard work (strictly speaking), or even the quality level of their result. It was about two things: reframing and commitment. The two things nobody looks at or worries about or talks about or aims for.

These things constitute the Dark Matter of the human universe, and that's what this Slog has mostly explored all these years.

Luiz Villas Boas: A Ultima Viagem

The film “Luiz Villas Boas: A Ultima Viagem” is debuting in Lisbon this week, about the father of Portuguese jazz (and an absolute force of nature), with whom I hung out on his final trip to NYC in 1994. Here's a brief trailer of the film.

The film's director (excellent trumpeter and old friend Laurent Filipe) included me in the footage, excerpted below. In quick succession, there's me telling my famous "Brooklyn Alphabet" joke in a cab on the Williamsburgh Bridge, orienting Luis from the Brooklyn promenade, blowing a cappella over "Body and Soul", and (off-camera) sitting in with my pal Walter "Baby Sweets" Perkins in the Skylark Lounge out by JFK airport, both sorely missed.

A mere three years later, I locked myself in a shabby apartment and sat down in front of a computer to create an online community (which a million people unexpectedly crowded into) and didn't emerge for nine years. Then picked up my horn and couldn't make a sound.

Search for Walter and for Skylark in old Slog postings for interesting tales. This black bar - the sort of joint where men wore nice hats - was perhaps the only place I ever felt fully at home. And Walter was the only drummer with whom I ever felt complete simpatico (here we are playing in Barcelona two years earlier). I'm actually not quite sure what I'm even doing here with both gone.

Recording Recommendation: "Play"

Bryan Murray is a terrific sax player and composer. For the past few years, he's gone to ground, developing a number of projects mostly involving his patented "Balto!"; a tenor sax rigged up in such a way that it's impossible to play coherently.

Though capable of great coherence, Bryan is a fan of self-compelled incoherence. It recalls the way Picasso started painting with childlike innocence. Except it's not at all innocent.

Bryan has an irrepressible sense of humor, and while he's never gone all the way into flat-out comedy music (humor is always in service of aesthetic expression), there's usually some hilarity involved. His last group was Bryan and the Haggards, a group of NYC downtown avant musicians posing as... Oh, wait, I wrote about them here once, in a posting about "Bands I Like":

It's a little complicated. NYC avant garde jazz guys formed a group to pay tribute to the music of Merle Haggard. But there's a shtick....they pretend they really are Merle's band (sans Merle), but took some bad acid before the gig. And this makes them sound a little like NYC avant garde jazz guys. So...it's basically jazz guys doing an impression of country guys making fun of jazz guys. Woozy-making, hilarious, and well-played. I liked their first record.

Since then, Bryan's been working to incorporate a profusion of unrelated strands into a cohesive whole, while overcoming a tough paradox. Being super-gifted, pretty much everything he does is worth listening to, which makes it hard to really develop stuff, especially since he values edge and spontaneity, which can dry up from over-working. What's the end point? When, exactly, do you deem it fit to release (especially if everything's "good")?

I have the opposite problem. My first drafts are utter moronic slop, which I painstakingly revise and endlessly rework, praying that when I release it into the wild, there will be no remaining trace of vomit, and readers will be fooled into imagining that I'm articulate and clear-headed.

He just released a recording where it all comes together, and he's done the thing that comes hardest for people for whom things come easily: he really really worked it. I'm afraid to ask how much; I suspect even he couldn't say. And to say that nothing's dried-up would be a vast understatement. It's supernally moist.

No seams show. It's integrated and organic and far more than the sum of its amazing parts. Bryan's also a budding abstract expressionist painter (he, too, is a fan of my hero Milton Resnick), and this is the first music I've ever heard that does the same thing a great abstract expressionist painting does.

I wrote the following review on the Bandcamp page (where you can listen and/or buy the digital album if you'd like). This is written for musicians and music geeks; sorry if some of the references are obscure:

Bryan has blown up some cheesy “jam-along” 80s thingee, slobbered it with avante honking-and-squawking, and machine-gunned it with non-contextual Grossmanesque intense harmonic shit (IHS). Plus snippets of some guy screaming and gobs of other stuff feathered in so delicately that I can't honestly remember a thing (even re-listening, it remains impossibly slippery). We've seen similar exploits from the fertile mind of Bryan Murray. The hilarity is here, the fiendish cleverness, and the mind-fuck of parodying chops via still more chops. Deliberately pointless nihilism somehow grows poignant, or groovy, in snaky, untrackable ways. Allegiances constantly shift. Cheesy backdrops turn sentient, then hip. But this time is different. "Play" is thoroughly unified. Worked to a fare-the-well. Murray's signature obsessions painstakingly organized and seamlessly interlaced, dovetailed, and air-brushed into a whole as richly immersive as a great abstract expressionist painting. When the recording ends and the spatter's cleaned up, you've experienced a single solid thing. Frame it as parody, and you'll be cajoled into taking it straight. Framed straight, you'll wonder why you're convulsing with laughter. Bryan's making fun of shit literally every second, but I dare you to hold on to that view, given that he's earnestly killing (the good kind of killing) with everything he's ripping to shreds as he rips it to shreds. This is 27 mins and 16 secs of yin and yang co-devouring. It’s funny, grooving, ridiculous, savage, satirical, touching, raw, repulsive, and catchy with no strand predominating. Trying to hear it any one way is as futile as focusing on the green in a Jackson Pollock. This isn't a recording, it's a *ride*. The uncommon polish applied to this adhoc frenzy ensures that attention is tightly grabbed and never released, even if, god help you, your player's set to repeat it all over and over and over and over. Welcome to madness. You're soaking in it. LET'S JAM AGAIN LATER!!

I'm trying to do something new with my writing. More on this next time.

Chowhounding IKEA

How shocked would you be to learn the potato chips at IKEA are very, very good? They're made from Red Bliss potatoes (like Terra Chips Red Bliss) and have nice, fresh, nutty sunflower oil flavor (unlike Terras, which are fried in olive oil, which, IMO, is the wrong fat).

No negatives. Go figure!

But let's live really dangerously and venture into the IKEA cafeteria.

The Perennial Lure of Miserable Meatballs
There's something deeply revelatory in how I - and perhaps you - misgauge the food [sic] at Ikea.

Whenever I shop there and feel forced to eat (by sheer famishment), I order meatballs. Because, you know, meatballs. That's the thing. The meatballs! And the meatballs are never good, and I inevitably conclude that Ikea sucks.

This time I did something bewildering. I somehow stifled my meatball urge. And that didn't leave many options, so I got the last thing you'd ever order at IKEA: a fat hunk of grilled salmon, plus mashed potatoes.

It was delicious. A solid "7" from my surprisingly non-ditzy system for rating foods (and other things) from 1 to 10.

So why is this "deeply revalatory"?

NPR Hates Fluffy Food Crap
At the height of Chowhound's success, I got a call from a producer of NPR's Morning Edition. She started off doing her level best to make herself obnoxious:

"We want to add some food content. Me, I'm pretty bored with food content on radio..."

I interrupted, understanding full well that, despite my eager agreement, this was not where she was headed (I'm essentially Bugs-Bunnying her):

"Me, too! Absolutely! Let's not do that! Let's find something amazing we can do instead of the usual fluffy crap!"

She was slightly thrown, but not much, and easily slid back on track.

"Yeah, right, they always say that, don't they? But, look, it's been decided to add some food content [eyeroll more than audible], and we figured we'd check in with you. Understand that we wouldn't use you MUCH. In fact, if it were up to me, we wouldn't do food at all. But this is what they want, so...[aggravated sigh]"

Ah, NPR! But I kept Bugs-Bunnying. It's what I do!

"Here's the weird thing. For all my extreme enthusiasm for other food cultures, and my eagerness to dine like a chameleon, I'm a breakfast jingoist. I like homefries and flapjacks. Strawberry preserves. Bacon. With this one single meal, I become Archie Bunker. Wouldn't it be interesting if..."

I was quick on my feet in those days.

"...I filed reports from breakfast locales - while your listeners are eating breakfast! - well outside my comfort zone? Uber-fishy Japanese breakfasts, stewy Egyptian fava beans, etc etc, and force myself to relate?

She heard me out, mostly due to to sheer confusion. And here was her response:

"Yeah. Well. We were thinking you might stop by like on Thanksgiving and like give us your thoughts on turkey. And on New Years, maybe your five food resolutions."

"But that is EXACTLY the usual fluffy food crap!!!"

"Yeah, well, having you on certainly wasn't MY idea..."

Let's diagram this:

I hate IKEA's meatballs.
Oh, meatballs, please!
Yup, and this is why I hate you.
Rinse and repeat.

Bandleaders Hate Tromboney Trombone Crap
Trombone is the Rodney Dangerfield of instruments. Nobody respects it, because while other instrumentalists improvise and delight, trombonists do their tromboney slurpy shtick. Like dancing circus ponies, it's not that they do it well, it's that they do it at all. Good on them for keeping up (sort of) with all that tubing and whatnot!

Me, I actually dug in and at least tried to play music, rather than trombone. Spontaneous! Expressive! Not solving tromboney puzzles, but telling stories which transcended the plumbing. Yet I often had trouble getting hired because I didn't sound like the usual trombonists - the trombonists bandleaders profess to hate.

They wanted those guys.

As with the NPR producer, the aversion is real, but incidental. If your band has an opening for trombone, you'll fill that opening, rationally enough, with a tromboney trombonist. Because that's what a trombone opening opens to!

Specialization

A musician friend who mastered a very difficult thing (Frank Zappa's notorious Black Page drum solo) complained to me that his family was unable to appreciate his achievement. To them, it was just yet more hitting of skins with sticks.

Here, fwiw, is Pablo doing his nerdily impossible thing:



I reminded him that this is normal. When a mathematician makes headway on a difficult theory, or an engineer solves some vexing problem, or a translator finds just the right phrase, none expect friends and family to applaud.

Mathematicians don't force their social and family groups to master the Navier-Stokes Existence And Smoothness Equation so they can join him at his level for dinner conversation. Off-duty engineers chat about their daughter's middle school grades and the family budget, not structural mechanics. People turn off their specializations and preoccupations while off work, becoming more generic - and thus more interactive - humans. That's how the world has always worked.

I, too, struggle to bear this in mind. The silent scattering of Slog readers have some notion of what I think about (though this is only my more accessible stuff). It seems abstruse and confusing for most people, though to me it's fiendishly simple (what's truly difficult are the internal Jenga towers of brooding discontent we whimsically fabricate and nurse as our Big Lifelong Project - not the observation that we do this).

I understand that it would be obnoxious and anti-social of me to derail conversations by debunking fallacious thinking, identifying frozen perspectives, etc. This is a big reason I made food my interface with humanity for a long while. Tacos and brownies, everyone can relate to. The other stuff populating my brain, not so much.

Whenever it feels lonely to keep it all to myself, I remember how unreasonable my drummer friend seemed, expecting his family to get it. He was missing a central truth; one I strive to remain in touch with.

Two differences between him and me, though. First, there are other drummers. He has some people he can talk to about the topic, and who'd emphatically applaud that video. My stuff is just me, alone. Second, while that sort of drumming, like advanced engineering, mathematics, translation, etc., has little to do with most people's day-to-day lives, the stuff I think about is right there, right now, underpinning it all.

Of course, a cosmologist or brain surgeon or linguist or particle physicist or auto mechanic or chemical engineer or endocrinologist might say the same thing.

Sigh.

I see how unreasonable it is to expect my ideas to be of interest to the portion of humanity that's not me - who are all-in on starring in epic narratives where they dodge fake slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. And I see that truth is as welcome as glaring house lights suddenly switching on mid-show, shocking dark-adapted eyes and spoiling the deliberate suspension of disbelief. But I haven't a clue how to make myself - the guy with insight on all that - useful.

I guess just keep gambling. Perhaps that's the only avenue for a 21st century deva. Sure, it's lonely and sparse, but much less so than standing around awaiting lost travelers in Himalayan snowstorms. I guess I've got it relatively good.


I appear to have lost my ability to pull off magic tricks here.

(It's a siddhi, which, btw, has a name: "saraswati", though don't bother googling; the Internet, as I've frequently noted, is both too icily academic and frothily soft-headed to deal soberly with metaphysical/yoga-ish topics.)

Used to be, I'd sit down and start writing and, after feverish work, things would more or less tie together, and a few bonus sprinkles (sprinkles!) of insight would be coughed up in the process (an unexpected gift ala Walter-the-bus-driver's bubblegum).

But lately, I find myself unable to tie strands together, and the insight arrives, to use a salad dressing analogy, on the side, rather than worked into the lettuce. And I can't get it into the lettuce. I keep writing and discarding; writing and discarding.

People in my family lose sharpness in their mid 60s, and while I'm only just 60, this Slog has always represented extreme over-achievement (read through this series, particularly, to see a poor shmuck boxing way, way, way above his weight class). Many readers strangely assume this is all idly tossed off, but, no, I need every single marble (and then some!) to pull this off. So even minor degeneration leaves me incapable.

Fitting in that "Deva" chunk, at the end, was the magic connection. It tied together, along with a couple sprinkles. This time it worked, and I hope it's not the last.

Three Tony Bennett Stories

Gracious Freshness
I played with Tony just once, when he sang a set with Illinois Jacquet's big band at the Blue Note in Manhattan. At the end of the set, the audience, naturally, demanded "I Left My Heart in San Francisco". They weren't chanting it or anything, but they knew, we knew, and, above all, Tony definitely knew what was expected of him.

By this point, I was pretty hooked into the collective mind of the band (they were, after all, my peer group: 80 and 90 year old black dudes). I sensed, and shared, the consensus: "Aw, the poor bastard!"

We all knew the song was his albatross, of course, but this wasn't even his own gig. He hadn't even sung a full concert. And I'm quite sure he wasn't getting paid. Yet the audience wasn't going to let him out of there without obediently performing his little tap-dance - that stupid sentimental novelty song of little musical value which no one actually likes.

The song pattern matches to the guy, that's all. You don't want or need to hear it. Nobody does. But it's mentally associated with the name "Tony Bennett", and Tony Bennett was right there. So, of course, all is not right until he does his Tony Bennett thing (which is not at all Tony Bennett's thing, but everyone else's Tony Bennett thing).

He was gracious about it. Tony, after all, was the exemplar of graciousness. It's got to be weird to be at the top of your profession, 74 years old (at the time), and worth hundreds of millions of dollars and still be forced to dance, varmint, dance everywhere you go. But, from the band eye's view, he was - there is no other word - gracious.

The next thought waving through the communal band mind was "Poor Richard!" The great Richard Wyands was our pianist, and this Tony thing was all impromptu. We weren't working off of music parts. And "San Francisco" has all sorts of very specific and tricky little piano elements, none of which can be missed. And while Richard knows every goddamn song in the jazz and standards playbooks, this one, we all realized with a collective gulp, was outside his perimeter. It's not something he'd be called upon to play on a gig, though even the most grimly unmusical audience member knew every single note like their own face in the mirror. Plus, our bandleader was a raging bucket of irrational sadistic fury known by one and all in the jazz world (though, dear god, never to his face) as "The Beast". So, yeah, there was a wee bit of pressure on poor Richard, who prefers to project an image of cooly elegant authority.

Richard, pro that he is, survived the obstacle course (we heard his shattered nerves but the audience did not). And Tony sang his ass off. While this was my only data point from behind the guy, I took away the unassailable impression that he sang the song fresh.

I can't explain to you what that meant, in terms of actual notes. I'm not saying he broke into some merry bit of scat-singing to make This Time Different. He obligingly sang the song the way his audience (aka his captors) needed it sung. But he sang it fresh. Musicians - especially musicians sitting behind you - know the difference.

Inspirational!

Oxygen-Sucking Karaoke
I had once sat in an identical rear-facing position to the great singer Joe Williams, who'd risen to fame with Count Basie's orchestra.


Notice how Joe holds himself. That's a horn player mentality
- all about the music, not the show biz. To contemporary eyes, it looks wrong.
Why is he not shucking and jiving?!?

After having backed a ton of singers in a ton of contexts, Joe was the first (and last) who wasn't doing karaoke. Most singers suck all the oxygen in the room, leaving the band as their wallpaper. They, alone, are performing, while we're MSPs, music service providers. Like Teamsters brought in to work the musical equipment. Think MRI technicians.

Playing behind Joe was like playing with a musician. Again, I can't explain this in terms of notes. But he locked in with us, it wasn't just us locking in with him. He was in the band, not just backed by the band.

Tony wasn't like this (though I'm sure he, too, loved Joe Williams). He was an oxygen-sucker - which is one reason he died with $200 million, while I assume Joe left a twelve year old Cadillac and a reasonably nice house. But he was such a great oxygen sucker that it was impossible to criticize. The set was so musical that it didn't need to be musical on musicians' terms. Sometimes the suboptimal, done extraordinarily well, is as good as (or even better than) optimality.

Triumphant Reconnection
It's very late in my music career. I may have already started Chowhound. I am out of practice, but my old high school bandmate, Brian, calls in a panic. A trombone player cancelled out of his big band's gig that night, and Brian needed a last minute replacement. Would I do him the favor?

The gig was way out on Long Island, but, by coincidence, so was I at that moment. No time to run home to get my horn, but Brian runs a music store, so I asked him to bring his best student rental trombone to the gig, and I'd fill in.

The horn was a monster. The slide barely moved, the tuning slide was jammed (so everything needed to be played 1% sharp to compensate). It was essentially unplayable, but I'd make it work.

I've told the story of playing a terrible Dixieland gig in terrible physical condition with a terrible band in a vacant field in some obscure corner of rural Spain on three hours sleep, and one of the most important figures in the business of jazz (who, egads, knew me) was improbably present for the performance. Now it was years later, and I thought I'd learned my lesson, but as the band tuned up (I opted out, as my instrument was literally un-tuneable), we learned that Tony Bennett would be enjoying dinner in this cheesey Long Island steakhouse. He'd be present to hear my high school friend's semi-professional big band with me on a student trombone incapable of producing, well, notes. Fun!

Brian is a very nice guy and an excellent musician, though he never broke out of the provincial Long Island scene, or the square swingy music we'd played together in high school. So he did what a very nice guy in those circumstances does: arranged a big feature for me. Naturally, I'd be soloing over Cherokee, the fastest song there is.

"No! NO, Brian! Do not make me play Cherokee with this terrible trombone with Tony Bennett watching me! Please don't...."

"Ladies and gentleman, it is my great pleasure to introduce an old schoolmate of mine...."

"NO!!!!! Brian, DON'T!!!!!"

"...an honor to have him..."

"Ok, ok, but PLEASE, for the love of god, Brian, don't remind him who I...."

"You may have heard him perform with Illinois Jacquet's band!"

From this point forward, I did not once look in Tony Bennett's direction. I somehow got through the extended solo, standing in a spotlight in front of the band, struggling to operate my unmusical instrument. At one point, Brian generously directed the rhythm section to stop for an entire chorus so I could play a cappella. I'd pronounce it mortifying, but some benevolent force inside my brain - who even knew there even was a benevolent force inside my brain? - has erased all specific memory.

Anyhoo, that was the last time I was in a room with Tony Bennett.


Sorry. That last one was a bit of a shaggy dog story, I know. Not the heart-warming pay-off you were expecting to mark the death of a major icon. But, hey, it's music biz stuff (Tony'd have gotten a kick out of it). Remember the time the greatest orchestral trombonist of his time, Ron Barron, utterly butchered the solo in Ravel's Bolero?

Shitty Pizza and Wynton Marsalis

Shitty Pizza
Sometime in the 1980s, New York City slice pizza began sucking. It was an open secret that the mob was forcing everyone to buy their supplies - gluey, tasteless cheese and sweet, pasty sauce. Or else.

A very few bastions enjoyed exemptions for various reasons. Others bought the crap ingredients and threw them away so they could use proper fixings (explaining the puzzlingly high prices in, ahem, certain beloved pizzerias). There sprung up a profusion of "brick oven" places ("no slices!") desperate to work around the monopoly.

No one, to my knowledge, has ever mentioned this in print since a couple brave souls mumbled a few things in the early 1980s (and no one's ever made that last connection, ever). In fact, there was a time when I'd have taken a substantial risk in writing this. You can scour the Internet, and mum's pretty much the word. Which leaves me seeming like a raving paranoid loony.

Because, at this point, the company, which still dominates NYC slice pizza supplies, is considered terrific by foodies who know none of this history. Their crap ingredients are widely considered the good stuff. The serious providers from the 1970s, of course, are all long gone and forgotten.

I feel gaslit. So many of us watched, forlorn, as quality sharply dropped, but, decades later, all is well, and foodies far and wide crow about how FANTASTIC New York City slice pizza is.


Wynton Marsalis
When Wynton Marsalis first came to prominence in the early 1980s, nearly the entire jazz community despised his playing. Despite his connection to a father (Ellis Marsalis) with impeccable jazz credentials, Wynton played like, well, a conservatory-trained white dude. Slick and superficial. No soul. No swing. Remarkable virtuosic chops (technique), for sure, but jazz is about feel, not the showing off of instrumental skills. I remember when Wynton began to pretend to miss notes - intentionally - in order to sound less slick. Yikes. He fooled audiences, but certainly not musicians.

Wynton went on to attain a position of such pivotal power that few musicians and writers would bad-talk him. You can find rather strident anti- commentary from the 1980s (and this fabulous on-the-money analysis by Keith Jarrett), but criticism went suddenly silent around 1996 when Wynton assumed leadership of Lincoln Center Jazz. In fact, I sound weirdly cranky saying any of this. What sort of jazz lover dislikes Wynton Marsalis?

Wynton never got any better. But, at this point, most people both inside and outside the music view him as the consummate jazz musician. Irreproachable. The real deal.


If you don't like New York City slice pizza, you don't like pizza. And if you don't like Wynton Marsalis, you don't like jazz. It's "category" stuff, and there's logic there. When your baseline is nonexistent, the relevence of your opinion is zero.

I'm the one out of synch! I like so few NYC slices, and so little jazz, that I'm barely an edge case in either realm...despite loving both as fervently as any human alive.

Why does every cultivated and refined film critic occasionally single out a mass market movie or two to champion? Because if you hate them all, that means you hate movies, and no one will hire a film critic who hates everything but a weak stream of foreign and indie productions hardly anyone knows about.

Exploring Mystery

I was listening to a trombone recording with a musician friend. It ended with an impressively high note, and we argued about which note, exactly, it was.

It was the recording below. The note, FYI, was a high F# - not one you hear much on trombone, and revealing that it's likely they cheated, recording a bit slower to make the technically impossible passages merely technically difficult.

Neither of us has "perfect pitch" - the ability to instantly identify a given note. So we tried to approach it intellectually, eliminating possibilities that would be much higher or lower than the one we'd just heard. It was likely between a high F and a high A.

There was no piano nearby, so I went into the next room to grab my trombone to fish around for the note. But no fishing was necessary. The moment I picked up my horn, I knew. The mere act of holding a trombone revealed the note. I reported this to my friend, who wasn't the least bit surprised. This was a normal sort of musicianly ju-ju.

Here's my explanation: it's not that picking up the horn revealed truth via trippy telepathic channels. I knew all along, unconsciously, but had suppressed the knowledge. Handling the trombone released the inhibition. It's more credible to see this as a simple case of disinhibition than a wondrous case of revelation. Occam's Razor says to go with the former.

Most mysteeeeeerious stuff - maybe all of it - can be explained with this sort of framing flip. I always flip my perspective to examine the vice versa (there are myriad examples within this Slog...it's one of the thick-headed magic tricks allowing me to project a false impression of intelligence). Go to the converse. The other side of the flapjack. The negative space. Very often, there's useful stuff there (though seldom what you're expecting). Everything might be this or that, but, having grown accustomed to focusing on "that", we often completely miss "this".

My friend Elliot changed my life a little when he taught me that an overly tannic wine might either be overly tannic or else underly everything else. If there's little fruit or acid, normal tannins stick out and seem excessive. That's it. So simple!

I had experimented a bit with this framing trick as a kid. In fact, it was one of the "postcards" I sent forward to my adult self, and I wrote about it here.


That said, there's still one weird area of mystery - unexplainable by science and hidden in plain sight - that I've never been able to explain. I'll write about it later this week.


How did I "inhibit" myself from identifying the note? And how had touching a trombone removed that inhibitian? It was most likely a combination of two things:

1. My acceptance of my limitation of not having perfect pitch ("acceptance of limitation" sounds like a passive thing, but it can change outcomes, as has been pointed out for time immemorial), and...

2. Micro-cues from the physical handling of an object that's spent >20,000 hours in my hands lightly pushed me off the knowing/not-knowing border, or (more likely) physicalized a mental quandary, allowing access to more useful and concrete pathways of knowledge. Sitting at a table thinking about something is a very different thing than picking up a tool and even just starting to take physical action. You're almost another person.

But I knew from the start. I just didn't know that I knew. I didn't receive new information from touching the horn, I just more confidently accessed preexisting information. 

Physicality is a whole other realm. I'm too lazy to dig up the link, but a study once showed that you will be much more trusting of a stranger's words if your hand is warmed while he speaks, by, say, a coffee cup. Those Persian rug dealers knew what they were doing!

Comparison

Regarding the Mark Twain quotation (“Comparison is the death of joy") one posting back, a few thoughts. I won't delve deeply, but you can follow links for more.

The dumbest interpretation of this quote is, naturally, the one most frequently offered:

Don't compare yourself to others. Gauge your life in-situ and without reference. If you dig your Playstation, don't torment yourself with the thought that your neighbor has a better one.

Sooooo true! What an insight! Just wow!

But Twain wasn't talking about a specific sort of comparison. If so, he'd have used a term like "status". Sam knew how to write, and if he declined to modify "comparison", it's because he was discussing comparison generally.

Zen talks about Shoshin (aka “beginner’s mind”). This is when you allow yourself to perceive the world freshly and guilelessly, without weaving momentary experience into some overarching mental model. You can always choose to experience naively. Like a beginner.

Walking into an unfamiliar room, you scarcely notice the chairs, because you've already categorized them. Melted into an abstract class, the chairs lose their unique actuality. There's no need to waste time noticing them. You know what chairs are! Once you've deemed something "ONE OF THOSE", any notion of its essential uniqueness is discarded (we do this with people, too).

Say you hear me play a bluesy lick on my trombone. You might immediately associate it with all the other bluesy licks you've ever heard. "Oh, Jim's kinda bluesy!" The actuality of what I'm playing is lost amid the cross-referencing, comparison, and labeling. You don't need to pay attention. You know what bluesy licks are!

Categorization usurps reality. There is no prospect of being delighted by my unique rendition because, having compared it to previous experience, you’ve bailed out of the immediacy. No matter what, it will not move you.

Name it and it essentially disappears. Just like Rumpelstiltskin.

It's possible to startle people into taking notice of a thing as a unique thing, rather than as a member of a class of things. You can disrupt their mental processes - assumption, expectation, judgement, comparison, etc - coaxing them to perceive freshly for a brief moment. But at this point, artists of all disciplines have tread so far down the gangplank of surprise-conjuring that it feels like there's nothing left to do to jar people into paying real attention. To allow themselves to be entranced.

There's nothing wrong with assumption, expectation, judgement, or comparison. Humanity has accomplished great things with our flair for taxonomy. But that shouldn't be all we do. There are times to compare, and there are times to appreciate. When I offer a bluesy lick straight from my heart and you can't really receive it because you're all up in your head comparing it to previous, superficially similar-seeming bluesy bits, that's a shame. You've killed the joy of it. You're not really listening, you're inhabiting an abstract mental model. You know too much to really get it.

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"Beginner's Mind" covers all that, but it's most often used to help meditators get past a common obstruction. You may feel certain, sitting placidly on your meditation cushion, that you're building to some sort of climax. Enlightenment, or whatever, is right around the corner! You're experiencing some very auspicious and high-powered shit, the sort of thing you've read about in spiritual writings. It matches your assumption of how "it" will happen. And it's about to really happen!

No. It's merely projection and association. Just more wordy/thoughty mental foibles. Meditation is letting go, and you can't let go while hanging on to the tantalizing breakthrough around the corner. The obstruction, hilariously, turns out to have been your expectation of imminent unobstruction; your impulse to compare your experience to a mental model rather than to experience freshly.

If you're meditating toward a shattering revelation, you will subconsciously keep comparing your experience to notions you've harbored of What It Will Be Like. So you're just tediously chasing your own tail. Ugh, what hell!

That, alas, is what many meditators are doing, even the fearsome-looking ones locked away in Himalayan caves. They're "getting good" at this meditation thing - an aspiration that's like the kiss of death.

Zen urges simply letting go of all that (you can use the same "delegation" technique I recommended for insomnia, though it's best if you can refine the move as more of a reframing and less of a mental narrative), and experiencing freshly, come what may. Like a baby. Like a beginner. Stop looking for a target to shoot at. Drop your bow and arrow and let the universe have its way.

Remember the fruit of the tree of knowledge in Genesis? The peril isn't knowledge, per se. There are no bonus points for clinging to ignorance. But if you get so tied up in what you know - processing everything through your mental glut of canned expectations and assumptions - you can forget you ever had the ability to experience freshly. And you will lose the zest of life.

Comparison is the death of joy.

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I noted here that "if trees had never existed and sprung up overnight, people would be driven insane by the beauty." So why do we take them for granted? Because they're "just trees"! We know what trees are, so rather than see each tree as a uniquely gorgeous assemblage of matter, they dissolve into an abstracted cognitive background. We make them disappear.

Thinking You Know leaves you unappreciative. Joyless.

Joy requires the ability to key in on a beginner's earnestness; to clean one's slate. Stop reflexively comparing, and just take it all in. Unmediated reception of the love and beauty of It All is Heaven - a momentary choice of perspective, not a post-death locale.

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Let's come at this from a different angle. Consider my posting on The Visualization Fallacy (which took a sharp detour midway through, spinning up into a whole cosmology outlined over a series of difficult postings). Skipping the detour for now, consider the initial upshot: "When abstract concepts (or concrete concepts with no observable examples) become visualized, we easily become tied to that visualization." Examples will help:

Aliens travel in saucer-shaped ships, right? If you ever spot a saucer flying around at night in the desert, you'd certainly know how to explain it. That's an alien! We "know" this from movies and TV. Some random visualization caught on, creating a false consensus that's utterly non-meaningful.

Alien visitors may or may not be real, but the flying saucer trope almost certainly isn't. We couldn't begin to imagine alien tech, yet most people feel they could identify an alien spaceship because they've been conditioned by some random visualization...

If you walk around an old, dark house at night and encounter a hovering gauzy white presence, your brain will likely tell you - based on movies and TV - that this may be a ghost. Yet, for all you or I know, disembodied spirits look like manicotti, and are delicious, and we've been eating them for years.

It’s possible to clean that slate… at least somewhat. It helps to be a bit more suspicious of the abstract modeling. At bare minimum, learn to recognize that you do it!

It serves a purpose, of course. Faculties such as expectation, cross-referencing, taxonomy, and intellectualization are adaptive, in terms of evolution. They help us cope with a confusing world. You know what's not adaptive? Freshly perceiving each and every fern in the jungle as a unique and gorgeous manifestation, distracting you from the blood-thirsty tiger popping out of the underbrush.

If we inspected each chair with immersive fascination, we'd never get our taxes done. Our senses helpfully deprecate the familiar to starkly emphasize the thing that doesn't belong - which may present danger or opportunity. So it's not "bad" to perceive through a filter of assumptions and shortcuts. I'm just proposing that babies get lost with that bathwater. There are other ways of experiencing.

Add "beginner's mind" to your short list of framing options. It's not a "better" way, but it's a nice magic trick to keep up your sleeve. If you can pause knee-jerk mental comparison, letting yourself experience freshly, you'll find yourself inhabiting a whole other world.

Seeking order amid chaos, we compare to try to understand. It's a fabulous process, but isn't the only process there is. If that's how you habitually place your attention, you'll miss out on feeling galvanized and inspired. Exactly how much pleasure did you derive from the last tree you walked by (not the last one you consciously noticed)?

Comparison peers backward at previous experience. But you can't look back mentally while fully experiencing the present. And all joy is in present experience.

Lost Knowledge

I've always been fascinated by the field of lost knowledge.

We don't know how the Stradivarius family made their fiddles sound so good. More broadly speaking, we've lost that entire era's know-how for this. And we likely will never get it back. No professional classical violinist that I know of plays a modern violin. It's amazing (and humbling) if you'll think about it.

Highly influential philosophers and historians are mentioned in Ancient Greek and Roman texts for whom nary a word survives.

My elderly Swedish friend Sten-Åke lived in a cool apartment aboard the historical tall ship docked at South Street Seaport because he was the only man alive who knew how to tie all the knots.

There are more such losses than you'd imagine. In fact, you could even question the the normally firm assumption that technology improvement has been a straight upward arrow (you can also take this too far the other way, believing that early civilizations with sophisticated tech have vanished into the dustheap ("All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again").

There are so many such points of loss, all the time, that each of us may serve as a final repository of some doomed know-how. I don't mean your knowledge of how Aunt Ethel liked her eggs. I mean significant points of fact. We don't realize we carry such information due to normalcy bias.

Opposing some people's visceral notion that EVERYTHING is significant, the vast majority of us are inclined to deem NOTHING significant (among other things, this accounts for my claim that "If Pablo Picasso grew up in Akron, Ohio, he'd have been considered one of the best painters in Summit County"). We naturally compress extremes, which makes us miss bona fide significance.

Here are two points of nearly lost knowledge I happen to steward.

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In the early 90s, I helped run a few forums on Compuserve, a dial-in computer networking service. And because this wasn't the loosey-goosey Web, where everything can be faked and stats are all approximated, every last click and action were logged; ascribable to one certain user. We forum admins reaped interesting and useful data, like the ratio of posters to mute lurkers.

It always came out to something like one or two hundred to one. So .5 - 1% of regular forum members post something. I believe this metric held true through my reign at Chowhound, and remains accurate to this day. You can spot evidence by comparing YouTube viewing stats to commenting stats (though YouTube is, of course, a different animal; certain types of videos provoke far more or less comments). My informed speculation is that 10% of users like/rate/favorite, and 10% of them comment/contribute/post. And while every forum manager has a loose feeling for this, virtually none of them started from the solid ground of a service like Compuserve, offering data which today's admins could only dream of (even with the modern assistance of cookies, trackers, log-ons, etc).

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We've lost a tempo. It's called "loping" (pronounced "lopin'") and I'll go out on a limb and claim that no jazz musician under the age of 80 knows the term. Loping is between a draggy slow tempo and a medium walking tempo. Not quite walkin', not quite draggin'. Lopin'!

Tempos can't be meaningfully ascribed to metronome markings. A tempo is also a feel. An environment. A habitat. Every musician knows what a "bright" tempo is, but you'll never get two to agree on a prescribed metronome range. Like pornography, we simply know it when we see it.

When the term "loping" disappeared, so did the tempo. Players may serendipitously arrive at loping-ish tempos, but, not knowing how to lope, they either do a slightly-faster version of dragging or a slightly-slower version of walking. No one, alas lopes.

Don't You Dare Use Your Insight to Relieve My Unnecessary Pain!

Last week, I posted "Post-Covid Narcissism: The Unnecessary Extra Effort of Custom-Tailoring". The title was quite a mouthful, so I have a nice clear example to offer...after a quick recap.

Last week, in Jim Leff's Slog....

It's a "new normal". We must earn everything anew every time. There is no credit, no slack, no benefit of doubt or money in the bank. It's all "What have you done for me lately?" Our roiling belchy stomachs are the source of all truth, so we mostly just announce at people, rather than interact in a truly personalized way.
....
Narcissists don't customize. They don't/can't take into account who you are and what you know and what you're like. They don’t temper their thoughts, statements, or actions in consideration of your particulars.
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Most of us, most of the time, are blankly uttering the canned lines we customarily say; dreamily expelling pronouncements from the gastric flares within our seat of truth.
....
This may seem like a bitterly dark observation, but, no, it's actually liberating. It means you're off the hook! Congratulations! To survive this, you must remember that it's always "about them" with narcissists.

A few months ago I received an email from a musician abroad. He'd attended one of my jazz seminars in the early 90s, and told me that my teaching had played a key role in inspiring him to become a full-time guitarist. Thanks for the wonderful insights, Jim!

I congratulated him on his success - he'd shown me a slew of recordings with his smiling mug on the cover - and somehow the discussion turned to the sacrifices he'd made on the way. He'd been through brutal poverty! Once, at his low point, he came home and found that he'd been evicted, with all his gear thrown out in the street! Though we were talking via email, his trembling horror over the memory was apparent. He'd been through the gates of hell!

I figured I'd try to relieve his post-traumatic suffering by offering an alternate framing. Y'know, some of that much-admired insight!

"For 99% of human beings who've ever lived, and a substantial number even today, the very notion of having "gear" would have been unthinkable. Only rich, privileged people owned "gear", and they'd have dearly loved some, even out in the street. In fact, they wouldn't have understood what "out in the street" even meant. As opposed to what? Your palace? Where else would they keep their hypothetical gear?"

Here was his response (not literal - he doesn't speak in American cadences - but it's a pretty fair translation) and final words to me:

"Ok, Boomer."

My Piano Tuner's Romanticism

I've gathered a stable of titans. My massage therapist is a miracle healer (as umpteen of my friends have discovered, you don't need to even tell him what hurts; his fingers find, and rapidly fix, the problem, and that's that). The guy who cleans my car (I originally wrote about him here, and then again, recently, here) can, quite seriously, make cars look better than they did in the showroom (my theory is that he changes how light reflects off the car via a zillion strokes of his cleaning putty - like a Renaissance artist applying dabs of fresco). And my plumber may be the world's best brewer. Actually, he's my ex-plumber, having finally gone pro in the beer world, working here and here, though his full genius has not quite scaled. His commercial output is very good - worth going out of your way for - but not yet as mind-bending as his home brew.

There are others, but let's cut to the chase. My piano tuner, Lou, happens to be one of America's best contemporary composers.

He's also a good piano tuner. The thing you need to understand about piano tuners is that they hate your piano. Doesn't matter what piano. Piano tuners are fussily pedantic perfectionists, predisposed to exasperation, and no piano can be perfectly tuned (they're fiendishly complicated boxes which swell and contract from minor climate variations). This makes the entire proposition - i.e. their livelihood - a complete horror. But Lou is a good piano tuner because he doesn't quite curse my piano out loud. He does his best with my turd of a (very nice) 1959 Chickering baby grand (same year/model Bill Evans kept at home), and he walks away (with fistfuls of my money), his unbridled contempt stoically veiled. A consummate professional!

Louis Pelosi's compositional work merits thorough examination. But while I've played a decent amount of contemporary classical music, it's not really my thing. So I'm not the guy to write it, nor is this the place to publish it. I'd recommend a deep dive into his web site, full of sound excerpts (start with "Twelve Etudes for Piano"). I'll just use his work as a launching pad for some broad thoughts on music, and creativity, generally.

There's a word that frequently comes up with Lou - sorry, Louis. Mr. Pelosi. "Romanticism". Usually it's something like this: "While thoroughly modern in most facets, Pelosi always has one foot firmly set in Romanticism." They say it like he's defiantly holding on to Old Ways. They mean he's a bit conservative, or even - seethingly insulting to a modern composer - traditional.

I’ve never seen a really satisfying definition of Romanticism, so I’ll roll my own. Romanticism, when it comes to art, is the deliberate arrangement of artistic events into a dramatic contour intended to create emotional engagement with the audience.

There's a Japanese word for the pace of unfolding events in an art form, and it's almost entirely unheard-of outside of Japan: "Ma". Think about "Ma" - make it the thing you listen/watch/taste for - and you'll reframe your appreciation interestingly.

More simply put, Romanticism is storytelling. And that's widely considered reactionary, because we're still coming to terms with a rather extreme shift orchestrated (hee-hee) by 20th century composers. Like all extremists, this crop defined themselves by their transgressiveness. For them, Romanticism is your father's music. It's gross.

"You might as well go all the way and don a straw hat and pick up a banjo if you're concerned with emotions and engagement and all that corny showbiz bullshit!" I hear them shouting from their graves.

That generation - primarily snooty academicians, naturally - prized a dryly intellectual approach and produced radical music impossible to listen to. They shunned any hint of romanticism, which struck them as juvenile and unserious as stringing up garish Christmas lights on one's appallingly bourgeois abode.

These days, classical composers find themselves adrift in the backwash of that extremism, and it can be hard to find one's bearings. If one manages to forge a coherent and persuasive compositional style that's modernly unchained yet also emotional - dare I say, Romantic - you'll be seen - even by those who don't share the radical frosty severity of a Schoenberg or a Webern - as reactionary.

I've been listening to Lou Mr. Pelosi's work for years now, and recently realized I'd unwittingly bought into this. All this time, I've been discretely appreciative of the emotional coherence and tasteful unfoldment, which make his output more accessible. More "musical", if that's not another taboo term. But as I listened to the dazzling performance of his work at Merkin Hall in NYC this Spring, I finally realized I'd bought into utter hogwash.

Romanticism is not a trend. It does not connotate an era or school. One may depart from it, or even reject it, but it's been the default approach to art for all eternity, and will continue to thrive forever. Telling stories with a coherent dramatic contour arranged to evoke a given emotional response is not "old school", unless Fire and The Wheel are "old school". If you design triangular tires, I'll salute your creativity, but, when your contemporaries persist in designing round ones, it doesn't make them fuddy-duddies.

Lou Mr. Pelosi's work is "grounded" modernism - free-wheeling, often dissonant, inventiveness arranged in a coherent, engaging manner that Handel might, with effort, find affinity with.

Note that I said "manner", not "structure". Novice composers pay great attention to structure. An etude is, primarily, an etude; a chorale a chorale. But real artists regard structural norms as mere scaffolding; a throwaway framework - a mere propositional excuse, really - for organizing the deeper thing they actually do. A chef might serve a smaller portion of pasta at lunch than at dinner, but it's the same cooking; he's not thinking "LUNCH". A great chef barely acknowledges framework - yadda yadda like whether wait staff wears bikinis or tuxedos. It's all about the food!

Handel would not find a single structure in this music he'd feel comfortable with. He'd experience the full violence of the gradual unchaining by which generations of composers have freed themselves, and with which our modern ears have grown gradually more or less comfortable. But he'd still dig the Romanticism. Not because it's of his time, and thus stuck-in-the-mud, but because it's grounded in the terra firma of humanity's eternal relationship with art.


Mateusz Borowiak, a young Polish-British pianist, is the most frequent performer of Lou Mr. Pelosi's music, and he's a gem. The Japanese "ma" I mentioned above - the pace of unfolding of events in an art form - is something Borowiak has mastered (normally, one must be ancient, with throbbing arthritic fingers; e.g. check out the immortal Michal Hambourg). This comes in addition to his technical mastery - never wielded as a raison d'être - and his delightfully juicy, "go-for-it" gleeful passion (passionate glee?). Check him out, he's about the best guy out there, for my taste (we all keep expecting him to explode into massive fame and champagne and limos, but perhaps 2022 isn't the era for that).


But how does classical piano relate to the cheesy cake of El Salvador? Here's your answer!

My proudest writing on music composition is a piece seemingly no one can get through. But since I do try my damndest to be coherent, digestible, and emotionally engaging (I'm very much a romantic), I'd be grateful if you'd at least take a stab at "Shostakovich, Eddie Barefield, and The Evolution of Western Art"

Here are all postings tagged "music", in reverse-chronological order