A Salute to Musicians in the Community

As everyone knows, this was a dismal week here in Boston. The denouement could have been much worse, and we should be grateful for that, but the reverberations will continue for a long time. Bostonians are putting up a brave front, but something like this can't help but linger in our collective psyche. 

There are also ways to rebound from an event like this-lingering tete a tetes over tea or whiskey, bedroom escapades, bowling a couple of strings... Or my favorite: playing or listening to music in the street. 

We had already planned as a band to play on Saturday and we walked onto what was an odd stage, in its way. People had been shut in their houses-under siege, really-for several days. There was still a skittish quality to people's attention. Traffic helicopters drew more than the usual casual glances. Unexpected sudden movements startled more. But, after we finished, we heard how much people had gotten from our music and from our rough, spontaneous choreography and I'm confident that we had helped replenish a vital force that had been drained out of our city.

So too does the music of musicians who go into the streets, the parks, the projects, the nursing homes, the schools-anywhere their communities can access what they have to share. Your work is incredibly important and I dedicate this post to you.

Traditional Jazz and Storytelling

My last post(see just below) got a thread going on the Yahoo group of my band. Much of the conversation is about why young people-even those getting into jazz-don't pick up on the New Orleans tradition.

Brief History
The style we now call Traditional New Orleans music was a vital force until about the mid-late 1920's. Its influence was felt in all the branches of jazz that sprouted across the U.S. and it helped bifurcate popular music into "sweet" and "hot."

In the 1930's, this style began to be widely seen as out of date-by musicians and the audience. Then, in the late 1930's, some of the earlier N.O. players were "rediscovered." This re-established the music and also marked the start of what became the war between the "moldy figs" and the beboppers.




Since that time, Trad seems to have joined the list of jazz styles that continue to survive, with more or less vitality, or been absorbed into hybrid forms. I.e.,  barrelhouse/boogie-woogie, big bands, "free/New Thing," "West Coast," "soul-jazz," "hard bop..."

While traditional jazz is foundational for what we now call "mainstream" jazz, its influence is not easy to hear.

The Nub of the Matter
Like almost all musicians who grew up post-Bird, my musical influences played a lot of notes. At this point, I find it very challenging to pare back and find fewer and better notes. Harmony has obviously grown more complex and that is a double-edged sword. Our technical vocabulary has grown so large that we can justify playing almost any note at any time. It's incredibly interesting to wander one's self or to hear someone else wander into an improvisational blind alley and try to get out. New musical options-chromatics, passing tones, "off-the-horn" sounds and substitutions allow you many ways to do that. But is the process like going to the supermarket and being able to choose between 100 kinds of dishwashing soap? Does having so many choices drain meaning from each choice?

There's no right or wrong, of course, and I'll continue to listen to and love Bird and others with a fluent and enormous musical vocabulary. BUT, story-telling has always been at the center of Jazz. At certain points in our musical culture, the stories jazz musicians told were the stories many people wanted and needed to hear. In eschewing an older, simpler and more direct language-traditional New Orleans music-are we missing an important chance to connect?