cult of stuff.

It is strangely wearying, this restless search for a better life through the acquisition of objects; although we now know happiness can be bought. As outlined in the last post, I had it in writing from a local spiritual leader that a fixie titanium audax frame would cease the endless slow but exceedingly fine grinding of the wheel of karma, and help me lose my pod, all for just £899. And now it has happened again, with the discovery that after callously abandoning my first love, tenor sax, for the last three years to play alto, mainly because I "... just wasn't, like, hearing it any longer, man..." (what was I thinking? like someone who throws over his whole life; job, relationship and family, and ends up waking up in a fly-blown motel with an excruciating headache to find that a fickle piece of tall Estonian brass has left him sans wallet or car keys when his money finally ran out....)

please, please: Newk, Trane, Prez....forgive me.

So after my tenor sat, sullen and accusing in the corner of my room for a couple of years, I guiltily gave in and started practicing the damn thing again after purchasing a new (and pricey) mouthpiece a couple of months ago. This is not unlike couples who hope an expensive holiday will help them find the magic they lost somewhere. And because these kind of hopes always prove foolish and desperate, I've always fought shy of getting involved in the 'new mouthpiece' arms race that all players can succumb to; all too often they end up with bags of expensive mouthpieces that they thought were going to change their life at some point. My stand was always this: buy something decent and learn to use it. Like bicycles, it's the man not the machine.

However, my tenor sound had been getting woolier and woolier, and I seemed to have trouble projecting when compared to anyone standing next to me. Ultimately embarassing for someone whose one-time point of pride was scaring guitarists with a 1960's duckbill Brilhart Level-air. (sorry, very obscure, I know, but once the last fucking word in 1960's rock and roll space-age sax technology; complete shite to play)




This is all caught up in sad guy stuff; such as almost keeping senile Italian motorbikes running, and, with a tight smile and a little self-depreciating chuckle, gamely taking on modern 200 mph carbon-festooned Japanese rockets at the lights (and always losing, plus having to go back and collect the trail of small bits that vibed off when I revved too hard)
Or stomping my aging converted fixie up a hill without getting out of the saddle trying to drop tri-guys riding with the latest pricey kit, jabbering about their iphones and playing with their 'on-bicycle sat-nav'. Sad, sad, very sad aging guy stuff, I kept telling myself. Not very good at all; girls are so not impressed - time to let that stuff go and grow the hell up, for Christ's sake.

But surprisingly, the new mouthpiece was good, and did change my whole sound - my old set-up must have been quietly becoming crap over a number of years. Now to address the underlying problems: the fact that my rhythmic accuracy has also slowly degenerated over the last few years when I made a conscious decision to let my playing slide a bit to finish my post-grad studies. This is not entirely a bad thing - I have now come back both in a wildly different mindset, and realizing that the idea of purely virtuoso playing is not quite enough. But we are talking hours of metronome stuff; wildly boring. The real excitement is in the composing and realizing of new textures, trying to break from being the "...the fastest tenor player..." (which I never was) and think about compositional issues, which is far, far more interesting and engaging. (Or so I tell myself?)

Ted Gioia points out in his excellent book The Imperfect Art, (after which he sadly never followed up some of the points he raised, concentrating since then on history rather than aesthetics) namely that jazz has long been, aesthetically, a somewhat immature art form because of its over-reliance on virtuosity at the expense of structure; the cult of the virtuoso soloist over the that of the composer. When younger, I could never see what the problem was, but after years of gladiatorial pick-up gigs and head-to-head tenor battles, you start to realize that the attraction of what is primarily spectacle begins to pale; this insistence of technique over content has long been banished from the aesthetic of other art forms.

but hey, none the less, I can now play really loud on tenor again, and that feels good - for all the wrong reasons. Now to get a new set of wheels for the fixie. And now that I've more or less finished the cello piece and my weird singing piece for solo viola + voice, I can start messing with The Holy Goof again, and prepping up for the Ruth Padel gig on the 30th.

external vs internal....

Just like the conjunction 'too much' and 'garlic' really doesn't exist, in most people's minds, music cannot be too 'expressive'. Ask any punter why they think a particular piece of music is good, and 9 times out of 10 they will say something about how expressive the singer was, and generally discuss the lyrics. But, in a sense, this tends to emphasize the external manifestations of emotion, just like there are external styles in the martial arts, which seem quite flashy and active, if slightly hysterical. In most martial arts, the ones they began teaching to young fighters are always the external ones, with lots of movement and power. This is opposed to an internal style, which looks mildly boring and it would appear you could run up while giggling and kick them quite hard without much trouble. Likewise, the logical extension of this in a performance would be writhing on the ground while screaming and rending your garments, preferably blaming everything on your unhappy childhood. And of course, as we all had one, so we'd all understand. Sharing catharsis as art? The word is also used to refer to a purging of the bowels.... more on this in a moment.

Anyway, these observations come after the recent round of very successful gigs we did with Riprap, featuring, for the first time, Malcolm Guite's poems. The gig at Anglia Ruskin went extremely well, after a personal pre-gig panic (which did nothing to leave me in good place) about PA and recording problems - the tech-guy had left, and there seemed to be no way of hooking up a mike for the reading because the fact that all the pre-amps for mikes in the studio were down, and allowed only the most obscure of work-arounds to capture any of the gig, and that not in the most satisfactory manner. A very deep and heartfelt ojigi to Roger from Kite Studios for recovering anything at all from the evening. I will post some of the clips on the website later today, once I do a bit of editing.

The group gelled around Malcolm's reading, and put to rest any hesitation I might of had about mixing the two disciplines, and becoming even more obscure and pretentious( later note: and I think I am succeeding). We all came away on a high, looking forward to further collaborations with more poets. The next step is to collectively hunt up a few more gigs, and start the tiresome-but-necessary process of getting some funding to offset the costs of performing at smaller venues.

This mention of external and internal, maybe we can discuss in it more Western terms of Apollonian versus Dionysian (although not really the same thing at all; perhaps objective vs. subjective? ...and that's different again) , was precipitated by the second gig the following week. We were preceded by various younger guys (and that includes just about everyone around me these days) doing personal takes on free - improvs in the Micheal House space in Cambridge. There was a very good, extreme-minimal violinist in a Feldman-esque kind of way, and a flute player exploring timbral variations in a quiet fashion. However, there was one party who decided that they had to "get something going" and inject some of his emotive energy into the proceedings, even though this generally had little to do with the other improvisers' contributions to the textures; and I say this without judgment, we've all been there (say, in my case, around 1976 in extremely obscure peripheries of the Soho loft scene, inspired by people like Braxton and Sam Rivers - avoiding eye contact with angry uptown guys a lot older than me, and trying to make up for in energy what I lacked in technique) . There's always been an on-going debate about this kind of thing in improv circles, with no clear outcome but lots of polarization, like in left-ist politics of the possible. People with no hope in Hell of ever affecting change spend enormous amounts of energy splintering into ever-smaller cliques.

The problem was that Dave had spent about an hour sorting out the piano and doing a bit of repair tuning and minor 'preparations'. That was put paid to by a short sharp sessions with drumsticks inside the new grand piano just prior to us starting. Bent damper felt rods, stuff in the action, and back to (even more) out-of-tune-ness. Ted Gioia, in discussing how jazz might still fall within the immature arts, with it's emphasis on expression as opposed to structure, anticipates this young Free improv player smashing my bourgeois preconceptions . I saw then and there that I had dispose of the usual 'plutocrat' outfit I use for gigs, with shiny top hat, cut-aways and spats, and realized it was time to don some very tight black jeans and "Chuckie T's". Apollo, with his light and symmetry, gives way to frenzy and intoxication.

Back to being sullen, thin and bearded -

k