Tag: audience building

Jazz Audience Development: The Gender Factor

Posted on March 26, 2014 by - Analysis, Articles

International Sweethearts of Rhythm

The saxophone section of The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, one of the most successful all-women jazz big bands from the 1940s, from the website for the documentary film, The Girls in the Band.

Growing the audience for jazz has long been the most critical issue facing the music.  Writing about jazz for nearly forty years has provided me with certain perspectives from a purely music standpoint.  Presenting jazz performances, including curating concerts and festivals for over 30 years, has brought an interesting balance to those perspectives.  Critics often discount audience and staging factors in their calculus.  I’ve often wished more of my writing colleagues had a broader sense of what it takes to bring the music to the stage and, even more importantly, a healthier respect for the critical issue of jazz audience development, audience being such an essential part of the entire equation.

With jazz as with other forms of music that require a deeper listening immersion from its consumers, there is often plenty of conversation wondering aloud why there isn’t a healthier listenership—lack of exposure being the go-to causal factor.  Much of the “Oh jazz, po’ jazz, woe is jazz…” conversation that always hovers around the music may focus on some perceived lack of advancement on the part of the current generation of musicians, a certain sense of stylistic stasis.  Still another part of that diagnoses may focus on suspicions related to the fact that today’s jazz musician has arrived largely from the academy, as if to suggest that the perceived absence of the old oral tradition of jazz mores passed down via the relative informality of “the street” is problematic.  The issue for still others breaks down to the loss of the traditional record industry structure, or the scarcity of jazz on the terrestrial airways.

It’s certainly not for lack of arriving musicians.  Somehow the music continues to attract future generations of players.  We continue to encourage and produce more than enough capable, even stimulating new jazz artists.  The biggest issue remains the need to develop the jazz audience, to produce new generations of listener/consumers to meet the supply of the musicians who continue to grow the ranks of jazz players.

As an educator I’ve often been fascinated by the responses of students to this music, the great majority for whom this is a new phenomenon.  Teaching jazz history and related courses mainly to non-music students, I stopped counting how many students for whom the course represented their first exposure to jazz.  “This course opened up a new world of music for me…” is a common response to their first exposure.  So perhaps the biggest piece of the puzzle missing in jazz education is educating new audiences, providing jazz insights and exposure to the people who will comprise future audiences.  While so many young aspiring musicians are learning to play the music in jazz education classrooms, only a small percentage will eventually play the music professionally.  So perhaps they’ll be the future audience core.  But frankly, not even that desired nucleus is enough to grow the jazz audience to levels that will better sustain the music’s artistry.

Casual observation of the audience for jazz reveals that it is predominantly male, which also reflects the average jazz band personnel, though there is an emergent corps of women on the bandstand.  The most hopeful element of that shift is in the increased ranks of female instrumentalists.  The vocal ranks of jazz have pretty much always been female-dominated, dating back to the old days of the “girl singer” and the all-male big band; meanwhile the ranks of jazz instrumentalists has always been overwhelmingly male.  Shifting hats for a moment from the journalist-observer to the curator-producer concerned with audience development to justify the presenting work, one wonders aloud whether consumers witnessing more women on the bandstand might ever translate to an increase in women in the jazz audience.

Given the more welcoming portals of the music academy–versus the almost completely male-centric academy of the streets where so many of the greats cut their teeth–women are arriving at a fair pace.  No longer is the scene like that described by trombonist Frank Lacy at a recent Mid-Atlantic Jazz Festival during an onstage interview, where the specter of Melba Liston playing her trombone in an audacious manner in Dizzy Gillespie’s big band was such an unusual inspiration.

Leading pianist-composer Geri Allen told Jazzwise magazine (Nov. 2013) in a group interview with her ACS trio mates, drummer Terri Lyne Carrington and bassist Esperanza Spalding, “I remember hearing Terry Pollard – the great pianist from Detroit – when I was a teenager, and that moment changed my life.  She was totally focused and brilliant.”  In the same piece, Spalding remarked, “Women have made a profound contribution to jazz, one that can sometimes be overlooked.  Seeing an all-female trio playing at the highest level and headlining major festivals will offer huge inspiration and encouragement to younger female players.”

Clearly the rising gender parity of instrumentalists on the bandstand is an inspiration to other women to perform the music, but the question remains open as to whether their presence can equally translate to women in the audience for the music. Attend any jazz performance and, unless there is a celebrated vocal element onstage, the audience will likely be predominantly male.  This leaves one wondering if more women would turn out in numbers parallel to the female turnout for vocalists in exchange for the promise of women instrumentalists onstage, particularly in leading roles.  I recall positively thrilled women in the audience for performances by saxophonist Tia Fuller’s uplifting and fashion-forward all-women quartets.  Just recently a performance by the very special Spring Quartet, which included three prominent jazz bandleaders—Jack DeJohnette on drums, Joe Lovano on saxophones, Esperanza Spalding on bass—plus Leo Genovesse on piano and keyboards raised similar questions.

From the standpoint of a keen audience and performance observer, that Saturday evening at the Warner Theatre in downtown D.C. was remarkable on several fronts.  The audience was robust for what I suspected would be an evening of original, uncompromisingly creative music given DeJohnette and Lovano’s well-established proclivities.  That expectation may have been different from that of many audience members, particularly since the audience demographic reflected what one would more likely experience at one of Spalding’s concerts than, say, a DeJohnette or Lovano gig.

The Spring Quartet performed several knotty originals, like Spalding’s “Hystaspes Shrugged,” Lovano’s “Le Petit Oppurtune,” and DeJohnette’s “Priestess of the Mist, ” including lots of edgy, near freely improvised passages.  Questions were raised as I gazed around the audience and spotted an unusually high number of women and African Americans (that audience equation a topic unto itself).  My sense was that both audience factors were owed primarily to the presence of Spalding in the band.  Likely a certain percentage of the audience came anticipating Spalding’s winning mix of instrumental virtuosity and precocious vocal exploits related to her own recordings.  I’d hazard an educated guess that some entered the theatre not realizing that in this instance the bassist was part of a cooperative ensemble.  The evening featured only one sung performance, a wordless ingredient in Spalding’s original composition that was decidedly different from the flavors of her Grammy-winning recording.
Despite what for some may have been a disconnect between ticket-buying expectations and onstage evidence, there was no mass exodus between tunes, nor was there any sense of audience disappointment in the air.  Audience response was enthusiastic throughout the evening.  Contacted later Lovano remarked, “That was a great audience in D.C., we really felt inspired.”  I was motivated to wonder aloud whether the presence of exceptional female instrumentalists like Spalding on the bandstand, regardless of the creative content of the performance, might conceivably beckon additional women to a given jazz gig.  Following the Spring Quartet concert the buzz in the lobby was palpable, including overhearing a multi-cultural klatch of women marveling at Spalding’s bass facility, with not a discouraging or disappointed word related to pre-concert expectations.

Thus encouraged, for a purely anecdotal, small sample perspective I posed the following question to an informal group of women who are ardent observers of jazz and frequent audience members, including musicians, music educators, and professional women in other walks of life: Would an increased number of women on jazz bandstands be one means of growing the number of women who attend jazz performances?


Twin Cities-based editor and music writer Pamela Espeland feels the most important element in encouraging more women to attend jazz performances lies in the audience composition and the basic environment in which the music is performed. “It matters if you walk into a club and the crowd is all or mostly men.  So maybe it’s partly about making a venue more attractive to women,” Espeland submits.  Bassist-vocalist Mimi Jones, who frequently attends her husband, pianist Luis Perdomo’s performances, believes the manner in which women on the bandstand comport themselves has much to do with their impression on women audience members and a subsequent desire to attend performances.  “There tends to be a different type of energy added to the mix making it really fun to experience if she is throwing down as hard as the guys in the band,” Jones asserts.  “Women also like to study other women by nature.”

Sarah Wilson, a musician and administrator at the Levine School of Music in the D.C. area (formerly at the Thelonious Monk Institute), spoke from an education perspective on the prospects of not only increasing women in the audience but on the bandstand as well. “I think having young female students see female jazz musicians on stage definitely makes them more interested in participating, not just attending,” she suggests. “They see someone like themselves onstage, which makes them think it’s something they could do.”

Pianist/composer/bandleader Michele Rosewoman recalled her experiences interacting with parents of impressionable youngsters.  “I have had many mothers and fathers tell me that they brought their daughters out to see me perform, or that they wanted to do so, because they felt it would inspire their daughters and offer them an example of how they can and should be all of and whatever they wanted to be.  Often, these parents are concerned with showing their daughters alternatives to traditional female roles in society and countering the images that mass media pounds into their heads,” Rosewoman asserts.  “I am always struck by the way women in the audience so often express that they are moved to see me on stage holding my own with all male musicians and even more expressive of a personal pride they feel to see me at the helm,” she says, mirroring Mimi Jones’s assertion that not only seeing women on the bandstand is inspiring to women audience members, but witnessing women holding their own among their male counterparts is potentially the biggest thrill for women audience members, inviting their return as ticket consumers.

Meanwhile some women in the music business expressed healthy skepticism about whether an increase of women on the bandstand would attract increasing numbers of women in the seats.  “Any woman I have ever turned on to jazz has been floored by the beauty, sexiness, and confidence that exudes from the men truly playing this music,” says music publicist Kim Smith.  “They are turned on by that.  The only exception was Alice Coltrane, who raised the bar higher than any woman ever has and makes women cry just as hard as a man.  I can only speak about the women I have personally turned on and it is still the case.”
Robin Bell Stevens, executive director of the Jazzmobile organization, sees no correlation between women on the bandstand and increased numbers of females in her audiences.  “My audiences come for the music.  Personally I have never observed any indicators to imply that gender makes a difference; it doesn’t for me, a lifelong jazz enthusiast,” offers Robin.  When this writer suggested that perhaps Ms. Bell Stevens comes from a somewhat altered perspective on this question since jazz is in her blood–her dad was the late Ellington bassist Aaron Bell–she admitted that might be a factor in her thinking.

From the newest generation of women jazz instrumentalists is the saxophonist Melissa Aldana from Chile.  Aldana, who won the Thelonious Monk Competition prize (the first woman instrumentalist to do so), is blessed with a rich tenor saxophone tone and a deeply communicative sensibility with her male band mates. She deferred a bit from the other respondents, offering a more general and philosophical perspective on the question.  “I think that one thing doesn’t have anything to do with the other.  Music transcends genders, age, and cultures, and people that love jazz are ones that are going to be the supporters.”
But musician-composer-educator Monika Herzig, who is a Jazz Education Network (JEN) board member as well as a contributor to NewMusicBox this month, was enthusiastic in her affirmation that more women instrumentalists on the bandstand would translate into more women in the audience: “An absolute yes; for social reasons it’s easier to identify with the performers, for musical reasons the musical product will be transformed, for psychological reasons it feels more like a community–and the performers will become role models for the audiences.”  Fellow music educator and JEN founding member Mary Jo Papich suggests a more basic sensibility, that audience members may tend to gravitate towards artists “like them” on the bandstand. “The band should look like the audience they want to attract,” she says.

Cultural anthropologist Jennifer Scott, with whom this writer collaborated on a Brooklyn Bed-Stuy jazz oral history project, spoke of her level of anticipation for who is on the bandstand as a potential additional attraction.  “If I know in advance that there will be a woman vocalist or instrumentalist in the band, it’s an added draw, and the same for most of the women I know.  Self-identification goes a long way.”  But she’s uncertain about those audience members not similarly immersed in jazz.  “As for those [women] who don’t typically go out to hear jazz, I’m not so sure that would be the case, because I’m not sure why they don’t go hear jazz in the first place.”
Last May during their annual Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival, an event originated by the late jazz renaissance man Dr. Billy Taylor out of his profound desire to uplift women’s profile on jazz bandstands, the Kennedy Center announced that henceforth the festival would no longer be completely woman-centric.  Festival MC and vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater was outspoken from the podium regarding her dismay over this decision (a sentiment shared by some in the audience as catcalls indicated).  On the other hand there are those who feel such an event is in essence a sort of ghetto-ization of women on the bandstand.

In her reflections on our basic question, longtime jazz and arts administrator and presenter Sara Donnelley eruditely included such events in her consideration.  “Women are undoubtedly appreciating the increased inclusion of women both in bands and leading them.   I also agree that women need not be singled out in “women in jazz” fests.  The organic increase of women populating [jazz] bands just makes the music broader, more realistic, and adds staging that is more visually interesting,” she said, mindful of aesthetic factors that might appeal to potential women audience members.

So what’s your take: Would an increased number of women on jazz bandstands be one means of growing the number of women in attendance at jazz performances?

Audience Cultivation In American New Music

Posted on November 20, 2013 by - Articles, Commentary

“Isn’t it amazing, that we can all sit in the same room together…and not understand each other?  It could only happen in America!” —Richard Pryor

Introduction

Historically, new music has sought to confront general audiences with unexpected sounds and forms.  The present, however, sees the milieu of new music splintered into factions, each with its own loyal but marginal audience. One is more likely to find these groups at odds with one another than in dialogue, and many groups congratulate themselves for being the most marginal or esoteric. These divisions within the new music community foreclose on its original mission of confronting traditional audiences, as the factionalized groups that most new music now attracts already support and expect the work in question. All of these groups believe that they have meaningful formulas for creating provocative work, but what good is that work if no one outside the communities where it is generated has access to it?  In order for new music to remain a meaningful category of cultural production, it requires successful strategies for cultivating newer and bigger audiences.

While often used to refer to the experimental within the world of classical music, the term “new music” can be more broadly applied to any music that employs innovative, unexpected sounds or forms with the intention of challenging audiences to examine their assumptions about music, performance, and the consumption of musical experiences. When approached so broadly, new music is vast and hugely varied, but the central division within the array of new music practices is that between new music that is practiced in institutional settings and new music that does not receive institutional support, corporate sponsorship, or financial backing from investors.  The latter creative communities of practice often operate off the grid and, at times, outside of the law.  I will refer to these two areas of practice as “institutional” and “DIY,” respectively.  This classification is necessarily reductive, as there are many groups and individuals that embody hybrid forms of new music practice. Nevertheless, integrating these modalities remains difficult, and dominant traditions within new music lean toward one style of practice or the other. Similarly, each constituency represents a strong but discrete audience base—the concert-going, classical-music-based community, and the DIY community, which is aligned with band culture. This bifurcation suggests that the divide is of special relevance when considering the project of audience cultivation for new music in America today.

Current engagement with audience cultivation often finds expression in terms of collaboration and dialogue, not only within respective communities, but also between them. Audience cultivation strategies centered on cross-communal new music programming are often developed around a set of axioms, which may best be expressed as follows:

  1. The music of multiple new music communities, though touted as different from one another, actually has a lot in common.
  2. Each new music community has its own audience.
  3. The composite of all new music audiences, though never manifested as a single audience, would be bigger than any one new music audience.
  4. Collaboration between multiple artists from diverse new music communities will lead to a bigger audience for all new music communities.
  5. This will happen because collaborative programming will lead to a combining of multiple new music audiences.
  6. Bigger audiences for new music mean greater impact of progressive ideologies as mediated by the music in question.

These axioms carry theoretical weight, but despite the prevalence of this thinking—visible in the programming of many new music presenting organizations—the super-audience promised by such a collaborative spirit is not materializing. Even in New York, a veritable hot bed of collaboration and dialogue within new music communities, audiences—communities of fans!—remain, for the most part, segregated.

For the past decade I have played in ZS, a band which has had the lucky misfortune of being resident outsiders in multiple new music communities—most notably at the fringe of the underground noise or DIY scene, while also at the periphery of the institution and the academy. Our deliberate compositional method and disposition has garnered us an air of otherness in the underground community, and the abrasive dynamic and timbre of our performances has set us apart from our classical new music counterparts. ZS has charted this course deliberately, and it has afforded us a unique vantage point which may prove to be useful in the ongoing dialogue around the cultivation of larger audiences for American new music. My aim in the following discussion is to use this vantage point to explore the various factors at play when attempting to mobilize collaborative strategies for audience cultivation.  These factors cover both the practical and social features of musical performance, as I believe it is the attachment to these specific means of creating that is at the heart of understanding why the multiple communities have a hard time becoming one audience. To form an understanding of such attachments, one must consider the community structures at play wherein specific means of creative production become useful. These considerations must be addressed if we hope to bring about lasting and increased meaning, for more people, vis-à-vis the challenging and refreshing musical content created by multiple new music communities!

Videos featuring Eli Keszler, Tristan Perich, and Patrick Higgins accompany this article. I chose to feature them because their practices as musicians, composers, and artists embody something that works with the strategies I’m presenting here. All three of these artists operate with ease in many contexts, including the institutional new music setting and the DIY.

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Concert and Show

When considering the sound artifact—record, CD, mp3, etc.—the differences between classical or institutional new music and the new music produced by the DIY scene are present but not so pronounced. It is not hard to imagine someone who likes Tortoise recordings enjoying Steve Reich’s music, or a person listening to both Xenakis pieces and Wolf Eyes or Black Dice records. It is harder, however, to imagine a person who frequents Miller Theater for Steve Reich concert programs catching a Tortoise show at the Empty Bottle in Chicago. The similarities between these kinds of music are easy to notice when stripped of the social context that the performances take place in, but what can be said about listeners and the sound artifacts they consume cannot necessarily be said about concertgoers and the performance rituals they engage.

Ideally, performances are constructed frames in which, for a brief period, every detail serves to articulate something about a particular version of, and vision for, the world. Considering such details, then—how the audience is positioned, what the performers are wearing, the audience’s attitude, the atmosphere within the performance space—expresses the values of the environment in which a given performance takes place. A good place to begin is with a simple examination of terminology. The colloquial difference between classical “concerts” and noise “shows” are indicative of deeper disparities, and while similar in construction, the two questions, “How was the concert?” and “How was the show?” ask about different things. The former question is used to request an evaluation of the musical quality and content of a performance. The person who asks the latter, however, enquires about a broad range of elements: Who was there? Did it start on time or run late? How was the venue? How was the sound? Did anything crazy happen? The quality of the band’s performance and an individual’s response to the music are factors within a much larger set of elements that are at issue when describing a given show. When asked to describe a concert, details about whether Prosecco was served at intermission and whether or not you met anyone you knew are often not at issue. Rather, there is a privileging of the musical performance as the meter stick for determining the quality of a given concert.
In a classical setting, audiences must sit and be quiet. Those visibly doing something other than watching the concert are discouraged in the space where the concert is happening. The ensemble and the conductor wear uniform clothing so as not to distract from the event of the music making, and so on. Compare this setting to that of a show: members of the audience may be doing any number of things besides watching the bands—catching up with friends, consulting one’s phone, or participating loudly in the performance are all acceptable varieties of audience participation.  Regardless of preference where these settings are concerned, it is clear that there are different paradigms for audience-ship afoot in the different musical milieu in question, and these differences present clear obstacles for those attempting to combine new music audiences.

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Band and Ensemble

The different expectations placed upon audiences in the social frames of “show” and “concert” are matched or even preceded by structural differences within the generative processes of different branches of new music. Where institutional new music is concerned, it is ordinarily the work of a single person, the composer, who has designed a specific musical experience for the audience to have. The content is chiefly communicated to the ensemble via sheet music, a set of instructions that expresses the musical design of the composer. While the balance of creative contribution may vary from ensemble to ensemble, it is clear that the role of the composer is the most generative, while the ensemble and conductor chiefly perform interpretive and executive labor, serving as vehicles for the composer’s content. Importantly, this division of labor is performed before the audience. The conductor stands with her back to the audience and presides over the ensemble; the ensemble is most often seated, wearing all black and performing for the audience, whom they face. Composers are often not visible but are generally identified in a printed program; if they are in attendance, they are acknowledged by the conductor and/or ensemble at the end of the performance of their work.  In this setting, there is a commitment to a lack of mystery surrounding individual contributions to a given performance; the place and role of the practitioners involved within the ensemble is clearly demarcated, and the composer’s authorship is clearly acknowledged.

Conversely, in a DIY setting, all generative mechanics of the band often lie under the hood of the band name. Whereas the ensemble divides the labor of music-making into discrete specialties and hierarchical execution, the band model is largely typified by a pervasive lateral quality. Band members act as composers, interpreters of material, and performers; every member is able to contribute to the musical content of the work being generated, and these contributions are happening constantly throughout the process of writing, rehearsing, and performing. Additionally, leadership in the band setting is often nebulous, and though a band may have a front woman or man, this is not understood to mean that they are responsible for authoring the musical material they render.
We have already noted the many differences between the concert and the show setting.  The divergent generative practices engaged by bands and ensembles serves to deepen the divide between these performance rituals—audiences at shows and audiences at concerts, though both viewing live performances of music, are consuming radically different culture products.

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Audiences in Social Space

Where institutional new music practitioners disguise their bodies and individuality so that the audience may receive the design of the composer with extreme clarity, bands disguise notions of agency and authorship by not crediting work to specific individuals.  Instead, they foreground individuality in performance and group dynamics. By not calling attention to authorship and highlighting agency in performance instead, the band and the show create a different kind of space for the meaning-making practices of the audience. Audiences at shows understand that bands create the music that they play, however the audience’s focus is often not on the intentions of the band and its members, but on the audience’s own style of participation at a given show. Audience members may stand silently while the band plays, yell out phrases or sounds during or between performances, respond bodily, even throw a cup or bottle onto the stage (depending on the show you happen to be at!). The finished product of the show is a composite of the musical performance and the audience’s response.

Audiences at concerts and audiences at shows are thus not only consuming different culture products, but they are playing different roles where the construction of meaning is concerned. The decision that audiences make when they choose between attending a concert and going to a show can be couched in terms of consuming and creating. Concerts and shows are more than specific means of presenting music, they are cultural spaces where rituals of social identification are practiced and expedited. Concerts provide conditions for repose to be struck by connoisseurs, while shows create platforms for cultural actors who will shape their experience via participatory style. The idea that show-goers and concert-goers are seeking out different experiences impacts heavily upon audience cultivation where multiple new music communities are at issue. The real concern is no longer what music people are encountering, but how and where they are encountering it, and what their role is in the production of meaning while doing so. Traversing this invisible boundary is the real work of audience cultivation and expansion.

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Obstacles and Best Practices

It follows, then, that those who wish to expand audiences in new music must consider what might make such different communities of listeners wish to widen their experiences and practice different methods of cultural engagement.  A good frame for an inquiry about best practices for audience cultivation is the interrogation of assumptions.  Both of the communities in question are able to manifest flexibility in prescribed areas of practice, but remain rigid where core values are at play.  In proper dialogue it is important for participants to enter their most deeply held core values as possible assumptions, and subsequently interrogate those assumptions in order to determine whether or not they are meaningful in the context of our current project of audience cultivation.  A widely held assumption about music in general is that audiences separate along lines of aesthetics.  In this essay I suggest that audiences of new music listeners separate not because of aesthetic barriers, but due to the specific mechanics through which music is created, presented, and consumed.  In order to address this point, every aspect of a musical production must be considered, not just the specific musical content being presented at a concert or a show.

Over the years I have encountered and enacted a variety of strategies for growing audiences for new music.  Some of them work, some of them don’t, a few of them are discussed below.

For the Institution

Institutions are responsible for many of the programs that pair diverse communities within new music.  This programming happens under relatively ideal circumstances, with significant financial backing, proper facilities, and cogent marketing teams representing the programming to the public.  Often this work manages to create pairings of artists that would otherwise not be “possible.”  That said, we have noted that this programming is not substantially expanding the size of the existing audience for new music.

One of the greatest assets that institutional support brings to the endeavor of audience cultivation is the ability to provide respectable fees to musicians. However, rather than being used to incentivize artists to engage in otherwise unlikely collaborations, funding may serve better if used to reward artists who engage in self-elected collaboration. By shifting the allocation of funds from the financing of unlikely collaborative projects to the support of existing collaborative projects, festivals and institutions will foster an overall valuation of cross-communal collaboration within new music.

There are many examples of large institutions opening their doors to a broad array of practitioners from the DIY underground. There are far fewer examples, however, of members of the institutional new music community coming to DIY venues and concertizing there.  Institution-based new music groups who wish to expand their audience base would be well served by performing in such settings, however familiarity with institutional support leaves many practitioners expecting to be compensated at rates which are unfeasible in many DIY situations. Of course it is possible to write grants, appeal to patrons, and lead Kickstarter campaigns in order to secure what is regarded as the required funding to make individual concerts happen, however I recommend against this. Musicians in a given ensemble being compensated at a rate that differs from that of other musicians on the bill at a DIY show creates social distance which defeats the purpose of this exercise.  Where the institutional new music practice is chiefly premised on aesthetics, methodology, and philosophical bent, the DIY scene is, fundamentally, an expression of something social, a fellowship among people, a community.  In order for the institution-based new music practitioners to cross over and gain awareness in this world, they must find a way to participate as a member of that community.  Accepting the terms of the DIY community—financial and otherwise—is one way for classical and institutional new music practitioners to expand social depths, form relationships with musicians in bands, and expand their audience base.
Unfortunately, there are often other obstacles for institution-based new music groups that would like to concertize in the DIY setting.

I have spoken with multiple new music groups for whom audience expansion is a priority, but whose hands are tied due to extreme exclusivity clauses imposed by large-scale classical presenters, or who face management and publicists resistant to the notion of concertizing for so little money and even less prestige.  This resistance is of note: it highlights that while there are many people within institutional new music for whom younger, broader audiences are of central concern, in many cases, the question of whether or not the general public likes new music is simply not of value to many involved.  Institution-based new music practitioners who are concerned about expanding audience size must do some campaigning within their own milieu if they wish to experience success in this endeavor.

Most importantly, institutional new music must bring an end, at least partially, to its most beloved practice—enforced silence.  There are many people who do not like being forced to sit still and be quiet.  This practice, and some of the other rituals endemic to the concert setting, need to be reconsidered and applied only selectively.  The performance of musical hierarchy described above is also inscrutable if not off-putting to listeners not familiar with the customs of concert music.  A more casual setting and presentation will benefit institutional new music practitioners seeking to expand their audience base. Acceptance, even valuation of these attributes when concertizing in the DIY setting is a good way to begin thinking about bringing some of that spirit to the concert setting.


For DIY Communities and Organizations

The DIY community has its own responsibility in the matter of audience cultivation, and equally as much to gain from an expanded audience for new music.  As far as communities of practice—artistic, professional, and social—go, the DIY community tends to value “openness,” that is, awareness of and curiosity about the values and practices of others. This said, there are sacrosanct core values within the DIY community around which little or no variation is tolerated. For the DIYers to participate in the cross-communal project of audience cultivation, it will first be necessary to reframe the rigid nature of these ideologies as more fluid aspirations that are shaped by the particular projects that they engage with.

Within the DIY community, there is skepticism, bordering on dislike, of hierarchical power dynamics, especially when the allocation of resources is at issue in the context of a supposed meritocracy.  It should not be hard to see why this vantage point presents difficulty for collaborations that pair DIY organizations with official cultural institutions. The DIY community places value on conducting business in a way that is transparent, lateral, and democratic, while the institutional milieu places emphasis on clearly articulated standards for excellence and cogent processes of becoming involved. These two strands have much to learn from each other—DIY communities could stand to become more cogent and efficient, while official culture organizations could imagine new ways of preserving and presenting standards that do not locate the project of determining quality and allocating funds at the top of a hierarchy. Instead, official culture organizations might look more readily to the ground level of their operations where the people most aligned with the audiences they seek to reach dwell. This mutual learning will require a softening of the DIY’s ideological position in order to facilitate dialogue.

Operating within their dislike of the edifice of power, DIY communities at times engage in subtle social maneuvering for devaluing dominant practices, often resulting in a communal habit of “becoming minor,” that is, seeking to frame any given practice as “most other” or “least dominant.” Within a seemingly homogenous community, subdivisions occur over any number of major or minor social differences—those who come from money, those who have been to prestigious schools, those who have good jobs but go to punk shows at night, those who did not attend college, those who are unemployed, those who come from familial backgrounds of little means—each splinter group seeking to become minor. Rather than fostering a broadening of social depths to include more and more cultural actors—a task we have seen is necessary for the project of audience cultivation—this practice forecloses on collaboration with entities outside of the DIY and causes discord within. The attitude of “becoming minor” is complexly associated with questions of power and privilege, but it is important to note that anyone who is in a position to be able to entertain the concerns expressed in this essay is already in the category of the extremely privileged.  Whether university professors or crusty punks who have renounced the shower and covered their hands with tattoos, we all exist within and embody the ostentatious wealth of our nation, replete with its power and influence. These assets can advance the agendas of communities of practice, and for this reason, divergent communities such as DIY and institutional organizations are well-served by identifying points of similarity and overlap rather than engaging in the factionalizing attitudes that value becoming minor.

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The discussion of obstacles and best practices in this section is far from comprehensive.  It is easy to imagine further discourse on matters including the architectural space, geographic location, gender dynamics, ethnographies, or more nuanced discussion of the socio-economic dimensions of cross-communal collaboration.  My hope is that this essay will help to begin dialogue around all of these subjects and many more not named here.  Cross-communal dialogue is our first best hope for addressing the matter of audience expansion in new music.

Recently, I was on tour with ZS in Europe, where the distinction between grassroots communities of practice and institutional communities of practice is much less pronounced, and of lesser import to practitioners.  Our booking agent, a master at negotiating between these communities, informed us that the new prevalent slang was not DIY (do it yourself), but DIT (do it together).  Yes!  What an excellent and obvious evolution for our thinking about cultural musical action in the world.  As Americans, we do not have cultural homogeneity of participants in our communities of practice.  The word “American” itself connotes a lot.  However one interesting take on being American is that the designation implies that somewhere in your relatively recent past or ancestry there is “someone originally from somewhere else besides America.”  This makes the project of American DIT more compelling, and more important!  Through dialogue, the interrogation of assumptions, and by not turning ideals into expectations in the cases of our core values, new music can arrive at hybrid forms of practice, both aesthetically and in terms of mechanical production and generative practice.  These hybrid forms can lead to bigger audiences for American new music, if we are willing to do the often uncomfortable, often exhilarating work of getting to them.
See you at the performance!

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Special thanks to Hannah DeFeyter for her assistance with this article.

A Temple for the Familiar

Posted on May 20, 2013 by - Columns

Though I’ve lived in New York City all of my life and Newark is only a 20-minute train ride away, I’ve hardly spent any time there. Aside from a workshop performance of a piece of mine there over a decade ago, I have pretty much traveled to Newark only to get on an airplane and go somewhere else. But over the weekend, my wife Trudy and I ventured there to hear one of the East Coast premiere performances of Steven Mackey’s piano concerto Stumble to Grace at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC). Although Trudy—who was born and raised in Hong Kong—had been there once before, this was actually the first time I had ever attended a concert at NJPAC which is now in its 16th season.

Acorda de Marisco

Going to Newark this weekend not only was my first experience of NJPAC, it also introduced me to Açorda de Marisco

It’s never too late to rectify a sin of omission, however, and it was a great trip. NJPAC is quite an impressive hall, and it was thrilling to hear a live performance of Mackey’s piece—which received a committed and exciting performance by the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra (led by Jacques Lacombe) and soloist Orli Shaham—after having studied the score in some depth last year. Equally thrilling was our brief exploration of the nearby Ironbound district before the concert, especially our dinner at one of the neighborhood’s celebrated Portuguese restaurants, Seabras Marisqueira. I’ve yet to visit Portugal and have not eaten Portuguese food in decades. As far as I can remember, it was the first time I had ever tasted two of the most famous national dishes: Carne de Porco à Alentejana, which is cubed pork and clams braised in a garlic, white wine, and fresh coriander sauce; and Açorda de Marisco, a traditional Alentejo “dry soup” consisting of shrimp, clams, mussels, scallops, and cubed Portuguese bread crowned with a poached egg.

I’m making a point of all this because I’ve devoted my life to exploring things that are unfamiliar to me. It’s why I am always excited to hear a new piece of music, read a new book, visit a new museum or art gallery, try a new cuisine, or to travel to a place I have never before visited. And every now and again that unfamiliar place is practically right next door. However, I am often made aware—remarkably, at this late date, often much to my surprise—that most people do not share my unbridled enthusiasm for new experiences and derive the greatest pleasure from reacquainting themselves with things they already know.

Case in point: the centerpiece of the concert on Saturday night was not Steven Mackey’s concerto but Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, a piece of music that is performed almost every season by virtually every orchestra in the world. The concert was, in fact, titled “Tchaikovsky 5,” and it almost escaped my radar because that was also the subject line in the initial press announcement I received about the concert. Don’t get me wrong here. I actually like much of Tchaikovsky’s music, particularly his operas and songs; however, understandably, a concert advertised as featuring a performance of his Fifth Symphony would not be the event that would finally get me to visit NJPAC for the very first time. However, I have to admit that it was Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony that most of the people in the audience wanted to hear. Mackey’s piece and its performance deservedly received resounding applause, and the composer was on hand to take several bows. But after the Tchaikovsky, which was on the second half of the program, the audience was ecstatic. Nearly everyone was standing and the cheers did not let up for what felt like five minutes, until Lacombe started to lead the orchestra in an encore: yet more Tchaikovsky—an excerpt from The Nutcracker which the audience seemed to appreciate even more. It was as if I had been transported to the final game of the World Series and the home team had just won.

Now the question is: Do orchestra audiences love Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 and the The Nutcracker so much because they are the greatest pieces in the repertoire? Or do they love these pieces so much because they’ve heard them so many times before?
Despite my aforementioned admiration for much of Tchaikovsky’s music, I am always suspicious of something that someone describes as “the greatest,” so I’m more inclined to believe the latter. And I see corroborating evidence to support that view in how the general public responds to most things in our society—e.g. the popularity of everything from “oldies” radio stations (which play songs people already have heard a zillion times over and over again) to the success of fast food restaurants all over the world. (There has been a line at every McDonald’s I have walked past on six continents.)

In such an environment, a Temple for the Familiar if you will, new music—by its nature that which we have not before experienced—is doomed to failure, so the fact that Mackey’s piece, as stunning as it is, got any applause at all is a minor miracle. But what can we do to change that? For years I have harbored the belief that there is nothing more exciting than discovering something new, so it has been difficult for me to come to terms with the reality that few people agree with this particular world view. If most people want to relive experiences, whether in order to get a deeper understanding of what they have previously encountered or simply to enjoy a sure thing, then contemporary music needs to be presented differently. I’ve written about this issue many times before, even once in an essay with a name very similar to this one. But this time I’ll go out on a limb and suggest a possible new paradigm.

The new music community needs to make less of an emphasis on premieres and put more energy into making less familiar repertoire (e.g. recent compositions) more familiar by programming the music tons of times. A new piece should get programmed several times during the course of a season, not just one time or for a single consecutive run of performances. A new piece of music played during a season should be rehearsed throughout the season, not just the week before the gig. This, of course, will entail behavioral changes for all parties involved. The orchestra administration will need to re-allocate budgets to ensure there is ample time to do this. Musicians will need to rid themselves of the belief that they can truly do justice to any piece of music that they’ve only read through a few times. Publishers will need to be more flexible with how they rent materials to orchestras. Composers can’t miss deadlines and in fact should be held to tighter deadlines—if a piece being performed during the course of a concert season is not ready before the start of that season, it will have to be bumped to the following season or cut entirely.
Of course, emphasizing the potential familiarity of a new piece over its newness could have drawbacks as well. Perhaps a new piece won’t seem as fresh somehow if it’s done several times over the course of a season. Then again, no one seems to tire of The Nutcracker and everyone seems to have forgotten that once upon a time, it too was brand new. But of course that was back in the days before we had radio or Big Macs.

When Stage Presence Happens

Posted on April 4, 2013 by - Columns

Stage View
I want to raise another topic that is relevant to the good performance/bad performance discussion we’ve been having, prompted by the article “A Great Live Music Performance Requires More Than Being Rehearsed.” What makes a live performance really great? The linked article above is an interview with live performance producer Tom Jackson, in which he talks about the need for bands to develop and refine their concert performances in order to thrive. It’s focused on the rock and pop music worlds, but the concepts essentially apply to any kind of performance. A successful performance of contemporary music is subject to similar criteria, in that ideally there is a real connection between musician(s) and audience. In our musical universe, performers face some very real (literally) obstacles in this regard: music stands.

Just because what an artist plays on stage is musically good, it doesn’t necessarily mean that a live performance of that music will make a good show. Knowing what works musically…. and knowing what works on stage are two different things.

Not only do music stands create a physical barrier between musician and audience, but presumably the music stand is there because the musician needs to read from the pages it holds. If attention is focused on the music stand, there’s not much left to give directly to the audience. It can certainly be done, but it requires some seriously outrageous charisma.

Musicians who memorize the pieces they play are at a distinct advantage when it comes to performances. They have the music at their fingertips and can move that focus to creating a connection with the audience. Memorization is business as usual for eighth blackbird, and the results show. Another performer, cellist Joshua Roman, insists on memorizing as much of the music he performs as possible, because he feels constricted when blocked by a music stand. Obviously everyone can’t be expected to memorize all of the music they perform, and orchestras and choruses definitely are different beasts (however, things seem to go well when the conductor has memorized the music). It does make a difference, though. Music groups in other genres go on tour and play two-hour sets from memory. Major touring bands have likely rehearsed eight hours a day for several weeks before they set foot on a stage. Opera singers memorize their parts. Actors memorize all of their lines. Yes, all of that takes a long time, a lot of effort, and many rehearsals, but the impact is clear. Just imagine if they were carting their scripts and scores around the stage with them.

As the article states, being well rehearsed is not enough to guarantee a great performance, and that’s where stage presence comes in. Some people naturally have it, but it can also be taught. Not only would I love to be a fly on the wall watching a training session by Tom Jackson, but I would love to know what a session would be like for a classical music ensemble that does perform with music stands. How does that work? I think it could, and I believe that it is an important ingredient (possibly the number one ingredient?) in the “audience engagement” recipe that too often goes unacknowledged.

New Marketing for New Art: The Mondavi Center Google Hangout Experiment

Posted on March 19, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

In 2003 and 2004, the Concert Companion, a device designed to enhance the concert experience, was tested during several orchestral concerts around the country. The user response recorded in post-concert focus groups was quite positive. The goal, said creator Roland Valliere, was “to attract new listeners to come and attend concerts, much like audio guides do in the museum world,” and many of the concertgoers who beta tested the device reported learning new things about a certain piece or aspect of the orchestra. They felt more connected to the music than they ever had before. Yet despite this positive response, which was accompanied by a flurry of press, the Concert Companion faded from sight.

There were issues with the service itself. The creation of content for the CoCo, as it was nicknamed, was extremely labor-intensive, and special technicians had to be flown in to coordinate the device with live orchestral performances. But perhaps more lethal was the disdain with which the Concert Companion was received by musicians and orchestra administrators. Pianist Leon Fleisher refused to allow its use during his performance at a trial run by the New York Philharmonic, and John Summers, chief executive of the Hallé Orchestra, described it as “patronising.” “For me, music is an aural experience, about being there,” he said. “I would be absolutely staggered if these devices became part of the regular concertgoing experience.”

Here in the Bay Area, the Oakland East Bay Symphony tested the CoCo, and music director Michael Morgan could only muster up a half-hearted, if pragmatic endorsement. “As a professional musician I am, of course, somewhat ambivalent about such devices. But I am also smart enough to know that if using this brings people, particularly new and infrequent concert-goers, closer to the music and provides a more enjoyable experience, then it could be a wonderful tool.”

The Calder Quartet. Photo by Autumn de Wilde

The Calder Quartet. Photo by Autumn de Wilde

The brief rise and fall of the Concert Companion—and its goal of bringing audiences “closer to the music”—was in the back of my mind when I attended a Google hangout with members of the Calder Quartet on January 30. The hangout was part of a new audience engagement initiative supporting the Studio Classics series at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts in Davis, California. The series showcases new music and I was curious to know why the Mondavi Center chose Google hangouts to promote the series, and what they hoped to accomplish.

For those who are unfamiliar, hangouts are a feature of Google+ (Google’s social network) and are free video chats for up to ten active participants during which everyone can see everyone else on screen. The Mondavi Center also uses the On Air feature that streams hangouts live on their YouTube channel so that those not actively participating can still view the stream, and then an archived recording of the session is made available for later viewing. I asked Rob Tocalino, director of marketing at the Mondavi Center, why the decision was made to use hangouts. “Our intent was to find a way to bring new music fans and artists together in conversations,” he said. “We wanted a tool that was cost-effective, provided real interaction, and allowed us to archive those interactions, in whatever shape they took.”

Lara Downes, pianist and Mondavi Center artist-in-residence.

Lara Downes, pianist and Mondavi Center artist-in-residence.

For more on the appeal of this type of audience outreach, I reached out to Lara Downes, pianist and artist-in-residence at the Mondavi Center. Downes assists in the programming of the Studio Classics series and was the moderator for the hangout with the Calder Quartet. “The goal is to reach out beyond the immediate physical perimeters and to invite in an audience from the much wider community,” she explained. “This is an opportunity to cast a much wider net and really reach out and allow people who aren’t able to physically even be at the performance to at least experience the interaction with the artist.” This is one of the advantages of the hangout, to both audiences and marketers—the personal, visual interactions with artists, what Tocalino called “real interaction.” In hangouts you can chat (if you’re one of the active participants) with composers or performers while sitting in your living room, hear them speak about new works, and get to know them as fellow human beings—a riff on the pre-concert talk in which anyone (well, up to ten people anyway) can participate.

Providing real interaction between audiences and artists is laudable, but does that translate into ticket sales when this technology allows and even encourages participation by people all over the world? Thinking about Downes’s statement about “casting a wider net,” I wanted to understand the benefit to the Center of engaging someone who might live too far away to actually buy a ticket and attend a show. I posed this question to Tocalino and he said that connecting new music fans and artists is the main goal, regardless of whether or not those fans ever attend a concert at the venue. If this seems unusually altruistic, it helps to know that the hangouts are funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation specifically for online audience outreach.

For a complimentary perspective on the free content issue, I reached out to friend and colleague Scott Harrison, executive producer of digital media at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, which streams free webcasts of its performances at www.dso.org/live. I asked Harrison how providing all that free content helps the orchestra. Regardless of where viewers are tuning in from, he noted, many are returning for multiple performances and are forming a relationship with the orchestra, and that is what’s important. “I think that it’s not just about reaching people or having a huge audience,” he said, “it’s about having an audience that’s very connected, whether that’s a new connection or rekindling an old one.” I asked Harrison if fostering this sense of connectivity is a higher priority then generating revenue. “If you were only worried about revenue,” he replied, “you’d never get off the ground because you’re never going to make money in the beginning.”

Like the Mondavi Center’s hangouts (and the Concert Companion), the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s webcasts are grant-supported, which allows Harrison and his colleagues the freedom to experiment. (He compared the grant funds to the revenue a for-profit company would invest in R&D.) It provides them with a “runway” to get the Live from Orchestra Hall webcast series—currently in its second season—up and running and then start to think about how to make it first self-supporting, then ultimately a revenue contributor to the DSO. Plus, Harrison says the resulting videos are a great resource for promoting the orchestra. They bring the DSO to a worldwide audience at a time when touring is becoming more and more expensive. And while this isn’t marketing specifically in support of new music, performances of some new works the DSO has performed recently, like “Acrostic Song” from David Del Tredici’s Final Alice and Mason Bates’s The B-Sides are archived on their YouTube page for anyone to hear. Even if you can’t experience the DSO live in concert, you can experience it online in more ways than you previously could.

The Mondavi Center’s Google hangouts also generate digital materials that can be used by both the Center and the artists, and while they differ in content, both the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s and the Mondavi Center’s marketing efforts aim to create a sense of community by providing more opportunities to connect with them in the arena in which so many of us spend our time—online.

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The Studio Classics series is one of many at the Mondavi Center, which is part of the University of California Davis campus about twenty miles west of Sacramento. Like many large performing arts centers, it hosts a broad range of regional, national, and international performing artists and also serves as the performance space for the UC Davis music, theater, and dance departments. The 2012-13 Studio Classics series consists of three concerts, each with a hangout preceding the performance. The Calder Quartet performances were the first of the series and featured works by Elliot Cless, Lei Liang, Nicholas Omiccioli, Ryan Suleiman, and Tina Tallon along side classics by Bartok, Mendelssohn, and Ravel. The second concert pairs pianist Lara Downes with composer Matt McBane’s band Build, while the third features The Paul Dresher Ensemble performing Dresher’s works for invented instruments as well as works by John Adams and Martin Bresnick. It’s an appealing, eclectic mix, and Downes said she often uses the word “laboratory” to describe the series. “It’s a place where we are able to push boundaries when it comes to crossing genres and developing partnerships between artists who are working in different genres or different disciplines.” The Calder Quartet certainly fits that description; they are the quintessential gnarly-music-playing, rock-band-accompanying, omnivorous new music group.

In order to participate in the hangout I had to revive my previously deleted Google+ account, and after a bit of poking around the Mondavi Center’s Google+ and Facebook pages I was able to join. Other than Calder Quartet cellist Eric Byer and violinist Andrew Bulbrook, moderator Lara Downes, and San Francisco-based PR pro Maura Lafferty, who is also part of the Studio Classics marketing team, I was the only one there. Given that this was the Mondavi Center’s very first hangout a low turnout was not unexpected, but the lack of outside participation stifled the half-hour conversation a bit and forced Downes to carry it all herself. Even so, there were also some really interesting moments, like when Calder Quartet violinist Andrew Bulbrook spoke about his quartet’s role as an interpreter and curator (7:25) and about how participating in the creation of new works is the best way to expand the string quartet canon (11:35). “There is something to a consensus that builds around things and weeds things out,” he said, “but to get to that point you have to create. Things have to be generated; they have to be made and they have to be explored and interpreted and discussed. The canon and what is being created now are completely intertwined.” You can view the full hangout below.


Its clear that it’s going to take the Mondavi Center some time to grow their audience for the hangouts. They just had a second hangout on March 5 with composer Matt McBane and it too lacked outside participants. If the goal, as Mondavi Center Marketing Director Tocalino says, is to create connections between audiences and artists, then I think Google hangouts are an ideal format to help them accomplish it. For me, many pre-concert talks can be a passive experience—a one-way flow of information from the stage to the audience—but I found the hangout to be a surprisingly intimate experience. Perhaps the fact that I was sitting at my kitchen table had something to do with it. While this particular hangout with the Calder Quartet was hampered by a lack of participants, I feel that the format itself encourages free-flowing, informal conversations that have the potential to go beyond the standard Q&A. All the Mondavi Center needs now is an audience.

When asked about the value of new forms of audience outreach like Google hangouts, the Calder Quartet’s Bulbrook said, “as an artist you have to always be searching, trying new things. It’s such a thrill to make one’s life in music, and in picking up a stringed instrument you are entering into a tradition that spans centuries. It’s great to have the opportunity to experiment with new ideas of reaching people with an art that is rooted in such history.”

Ultimately, Tocalino and his staff are figuring out how to better market new music on the fly, and experimenting with new modes of audience outreach is part of the process. “We have tools that we rely on to market the better-known artists on our season; there can be tactical challenges, but they’re usually fairly easy to overcome,” he explained. “But with new music, we are often bringing artists and works into the area for the first time. And, sometimes, you are selling work that is “difficult” in the best sense of the word. But it feels great to work on the front end of trying to grow an audience that, we hope, will continue to value and trust our programming over the years.”

There will always be a need for experimentation in the marketing of new music, and of classical music in general. The use of supertitles in opera, while commonplace now, was quite controversial when it began in America in the 1980s. When Beverly Sills introduced them at the New York City Opera in 1983, she was called a “philistine” in The New York Times. In 1985, James Levine famously replied “Over my dead body” when asked about the possibility of supertitles at the Metropolitan Opera, and yet ten years later there they were, Met Titles in the back of every seat, and in standing room, too. While Google hangouts certainly don’t impact a musical performance the way supertitles affect the experience of opera, they have the potential to achieve what the Concert Companion never did: to allow audience members to connect directly with a composer or performer as a person before connecting with them onstage. Perhaps this is exactly what the Mondavi Center’s Studio Classics series needs, perhaps not, but they won’t know unless they try.

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Dustin Soiseth is a conductor and co-founder of The Loose Filter Project. He lives in Oakland.

Granting Audiences, Pt. 1

Posted on July 20, 2012 by - Columns

Over the last week I’ve been going to a lot of jam sessions. The reason for this has to do with three of my blog entries (May 25, June 1, and June 8, 2012). I’ve been talking to some of my colleagues about them and find that I’m no longer savvy about contemporary jam sessions; I only know of a few that seem to specialize in jazz. So I’ve given myself the task to learn as much as I can about as many regularly occurring jam sessions as I can. The jam sessions that I’m starting my research exercise with are Manhattan-based and occur “after-hours”; that is, beginning after, or very close to, midnight. So far, I’ve attended three from beginning to end and three in part. I plan to re-attend the ones that I only attended in part.

I’ve played at some, and not played at others. At first I thought that I would not play at any of them and take the role of “armchair anthropologist,” but that didn’t last long. Fortunately, the rule at the sessions I’ve attended so far is for bass players to play one tune and then let someone else play. I have stayed after the sessions are over, though, to talk with the other remaining musicians about why they come to play and what they think the experience means to them. The most striking thing I’ve noticed so far about this exercise is that the level of technical proficiency displayed by the instrumentalists, singers, and dancers (one of the sessions was a tap dance jam session) is much higher than when I was regularly playing at sessions some thirty years ago. Another is that there actually seems to be a fairly large amount of sessions going on, so this exercise might take quite a while; at least several weeks.

Another thing about these sessions is that they are primarily social events; rather noisy and with a high degree of interaction between audience and performers that continues after one stops playing. I found myself talking with complete strangers on a wide range of themes that the music seemed to inspire. Most of these people were musicians, but some were not. One gentleman from India started talking to me and a few other musicians who were mulling around in front of the session’s hosting establishment about whether or not the principle issue of music making was modern vs. traditional or supra- vs. sub-cultural modes of expression. The conversation quickly morphed into one about caste-based society and the myth of classlessness. It was refreshing to listen to a non-professional musician talk about the music of India in terms of the purpose of unifying a culture designed to be socio-economically stratified. His description of the music emphasized the ritualistic and religious elements of ragas and talas; things that are not generally regarded as essential to American music, although absolutely fundamental to European art music (as in the little bird whispering into Pope Gregory’s ear).

One thing our conversation did was remind me of how easy it is to think of music as existing separately from the society it’s performed in, as if it weren’t a cultural phenomenon. I understand that, since music has a way of “transporting” people into a state of consciousness that can bypass what some consider left-brain thinking—basically suspending, or deflecting, our attention on word-based mental activity (although I think it’s more a matter of integrating, or synchronizing the left-brain/right-brain dichotomy), we might find it distasteful to consider music as a part of a construct that torturously takes up our attention at other times. But it is, and always has been, just that: an activity human beings engage in to foster a sense of identity and unity within given cultural contexts. To understand another culture, one learns some of its language, eats some of its food, and listens to some of its music. And, like language and culinary preferences, we are conditioned to understand music within those contexts.

Last week this idea was introduced vis-à-vis the quest to “(re)build an audience” for various kinds of music that have waned in popularity to the point that it becomes difficult to sustain regular performance opportunities. Because I tend to be identified (and, thus, tend to reflexively identify) with jazz, the entry’s excellent, in-depth, and lone comment focused on that music (to be fair, my examples skewed the discussion in that direction). But, really, the idea of (re)building audiences isn’t just an issue with jazz. It is also one for the more Eurocentrically focused Western art music that tends to be labeled “classical” by Joe Bageant’s “people.”

The comment reminded me of the event that led to my decision to relocate to New York in 1977. I had been there for a week to lend moral support to my girlfriend, whose father had been diagnosed with a terminal condition. On the last day we were there, we had heard about a new restaurant that had opened on 7th Avenue that featured live music and decided to go to the Sunday (or maybe Saturday) brunch. As we were sitting at our sidewalk table, I heard some of the best music I had ever heard in my life emanating from the stage of the restaurant, which was located behind me. I turned to see a guitar trio featuring Joe La Barbera on drums, Michael Moore on bass, and led by Jim Hall on guitar. At that moment I realized that, if I wanted to experience that kind of situation again, I would have to live in New York. This wasn’t to say that San Francisco lacked for great musicians, just that they weren’t being featured as regularly. That paradigm is changing there as we speak, but this isn’t the case for most communities in the United States. As last week’s commentator pointed out about his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (a city that used to be one of the epicenters for jazz): he now counts himself “lucky to be able to experience jazz at all.”

The idea of “rebuilding” an audience for music is something I don’t really like to consider, at least not literally, because the term includes an inherent re-establishment of societal values that were the nest for the music and its audience that would be rebuilt. I would hate to see a return to the abysmal civil rights milieu that hosted jazz in its “golden age,” but I would also hate to see jazz become sustained solely through a “concerted effort by various cultural and academic institutions.” Given the corporate-ness of these institutions’ vision statements, I seriously doubt that they can ever get it right; at least not until they adopt a fundamentally community-based archetype to emulate. Because the underlying principle of jazz, like all American music, comes from a network of community-based musicians that have gently coerced their nationalistic supracultural elite to include the sub-cultural identities of African, Asian, Middle-Eastern, and Native Americans, as well as those of Eurocentric Americans, in our modern American musical identity, an identity that is just starting to come into its own.