Tag: jam sessions

Granting Audiences, Pt. 1

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.

More on Including and Excluding the Listening Class

Last week’s blog was a great example of reflexivity in the editorial process. I had originally used a non-word, disincluded, to describe listener participation in certain Eurocentric American performance traditions, which NMB’s editorial staff questioned my use of, since it is not technically a word. In my rush to get back to setting up my equipment at work, I acquiesced to replacing the non-word with a real one: “excluded,” but, missed the part of the phone conversation where the entry’s title would be changed from “Yet Another Night On The Town” (or something like that) to “Including vs. Excluding the Listener.” To be clear, I’m not complaining about the decision, which was a great improvement on the title I had tossed out. But I think the replacement word isn’t what I meant, that I probably should have taken Father Williams’ “bill-and-the-bones” approach and argued about how to describe negation of inclusion.

While not included in Webster, “disinclude” is a term used in common speech that has a slightly differing semiotic shading from “exclude.” The latter suggests a condition where something is prevented from occurring while the former suggests that something is expected to occur. So, in my thinking, the exclusion of audience participation means that measures have been taken to keep it from happening, but its disinclusion merely means that it was never taken up for consideration. In the time I’ve spent attending orchestra concerts and the like, I’ve never seen any set of rules banning audiences from applauding a passage of a violin concerto they might find particularly spectacular (although I have seen programmatic requests that applause be held until the end of a multi-movement piece), so the idea that audience participation is traditionally forbidden at orchestra concerts is not what I intended to convey, but rather that it’s not considered as essential to the music’s performance. But the new title has also shifted the blog’s direction from the intended discussion of how the jam session might be becoming supplanted by the academic institution as the principle proving ground of jazz pedagogy towards one about the necessity of audience participation in American music.

I see such a discussion as touching on the heart and soul of what American music is about. Thinking of Antonin Dvořák’s edict on what should be the basis for American music: slave songs, African-American spirituals, and Native American melodies, one sees the inclusion of audience participation, even if Dvořák never saw this salient feature as pertinent. When these musics were performed—whether in the field, the church, or the tribe—the audience was actively part of the music making. We might think of everyone as performing simultaneously, like at a Southern gospel service, but a round-robin approach was also employed, like in the Native American (peyote) Church. Like their ancestor, the ring shout, jam sessions have soloists featured against a group of accompanists, so both approaches occur at the same time. Ideally, a jam session is comprised of musicians who come to play, whether or not they actually do so, and the sense of communal music making is in full swing. Because the audience includes (sometimes exclusively) musicians who are there to play, there exists a potential for immediate critical and creative input that is absent from more Eurocentric musical traditions. Audience members might talk to a performer to offer support or suggest a musical direction to take. An audience member might become inspired and begin to play before it’s his or her turn even get up and replace one of the performers who are playing. There is a lot of laughing, sometimes yelling, and, occasionally, fights break out. And while this might sound like the audience isn’t listening to the music being played, rest assured that this isn’t the case. The focus of the jam session is the peer-to-peer interaction of best-effort music making between relatively inexperienced and more experienced performers.

Jam sessions exist primarily to service the imaginations of the musicians who attend them. This might be something that some people might find questionable or even improper, but consider that the social playing field that gave rise to the jam session was one that traditionally saw the culture of the jam session as comprised of less-than-human beings, as incapable of playing music of worth. The opportunities for artistic development and expression that these musicians were offered were none, they had to make their opportunities. Those who played professionally were often playing for dance bands that performed for audiences they would never know or associate with outside of the job. Society was segregated. Jam sessions were a place where these pros could demonstrate their playing skills without having to entertain an, at best, tacitly hostile audience. It was also a place where new artists could demonstrate their burgeoning skills so that they might become employed by these groups.

There’s a story about how tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins was playing at a jam session in Kansas City and became engaged in a cutting contest with the then relatively unknown Lester Young. The session went on so long that Hawkins nearly missed his next engagement with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra. When Hawkins left Henderson to pursue a solo career, Henderson called for and hired Lester Young sight unseen. Young didn’t last in Henderson’s prestigious group because his sound was too “sweet” for Henderson (but not for Count Basie). But Young’s ability to hold Hawkins captive at a jam session opened the doors for a career that left an indelible mark on American music. At another session in the same city, a young alto saxophonist experimented with sets of alternate chord changes during his solo. The drummer, Jo Jones of the Count Basie Orchestra, couldn’t stand what he heard and is said to have taken one of his cymbals and thrown it at the feet of the soloist, a certain Charles Parker, Jr., to dissuade him from continuing, proof that the adage “what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger” has some merit. These tales were told by people who attended these sessions. Recordings that were available at the time weren’t very long. A 78-rpm record only held around 3 minutes of music on each of its sides, so extended solos could only be heard at live concerts or jam sessions.

One can see how jam sessions could attract a non-musician audience in the same way that powwows attract non-Indian audiences who are appreciatively curious about an art flourishing primarily outside of mainstream culture. The inclusion of musicians at varying stages of artistic development is what makes the jam session a learning environment that existed—if one includes the root ring shout and Native American circle dance as part of the ancestry of American music—outside of the Eurocentric American academic community for several centuries. (Even if only considering the jam session culture of jazz music the period is one-hundred years old—the first recording of a jazz band was in 1917 and the first written use of the word was in 1912.) And although some American academic institutions offered a smattering of jazz concerts as part of their humanities programs since 1932 (1928 in Germany), it wasn’t until 1941 that the New School for Social Research offered courses in jazz history and 1947 that a degree in jazz performance was offered at the University of North Texas. (The Berklee College of Music, founded in 1945 as the Schillinger House of Music in Boston, didn’t grant a degree until 1966.) It wasn’t until the first jazz-focused summer camps were founded by Stan Kenton (in affiliation with Ken Morris, founder of the National Stage Band Camps) in 1959 that anything like an academic institution-style learning environment included the jam session as part of its curriculum. I’ll be teaching three courses in bass playing at Jazz CampWest this summer and am very interested in how jam sessions are treated there.

Now that jazz-studies programs are nearly ubiquitous in American academic institutions, my discussion of jam sessions includes a concern that institutional-based jazz-studies programs have the potential for disincluding the relatively experienced performer from their learning environment. This is part of a shift in how education is viewed and carried out in recent years. The idea is that expertise in a given field is unessential to teaching any part of that field. I wish I were exaggerating this, or that I could say that I’m merely paraphrasing someone’s interpretation of the situation, but I took a course in “effective” higher education that stressed this not only in the classroom, but in the course’s written hand-outs and published study materials. It is worth noting that non-performance-based courses offered in these programs can be and are often taught by instructors who are not jazz musicians and sometimes not musicians at all. While it is possible that one can teach a college level course in algebra without being a mathematician, I think I would not want to study composition from someone who doesn’t compose. It’s like letting bartenders with degrees in phys-ed who like collecting records run jam sessions. While they might know what they like, they probably don’t know much about playing music. There might be an overlap of interest between this bartender and the musicians who, after spending years studying and practicing, came in to show their best, but there’s no real affinity because they come to music with different goals and tools.

I would (and always have) studied improvisation with the best improvisers I could find. I also think this would hold true for anyone engaged in studying the plastic arts, but the current trend in education for making larger classes taught for less money disagrees. So, revisiting my last thought from last week, I think that this trend will ensure the necessity of the jam session as a proving ground and learning environment for emerging talent.

Another Night In the Big City

The most valuable performance tradition in American music—more important than subscription orchestra concerts, new music series, musical theater, rock concerts, and the opera—is the jam session, where musicians of any age, stature, and stylistic bent will agree to improvise at least one song together with the intent of making the best music possible. The audiences at jam sessions are mostly musicians, aspiring musicians, or music aficionados, so the pressure to please a non-music savvy clientele is minimized, while the pressure to play well enough to attract musicians who want to play is maximized. I should mention that I’m talking about public jam sessions—where a musician can walk in off the street, put their name on a list, take care of the required cover or minimum charges levied by the hosting establishment, and, when called to play, play for as long as they’re permitted—and not the private sessions usually held in a pianist’s home or at a rehearsal studio, where a clique of musicians might audition new members, practice improvising on new and familiar material, or just try out new ideas. The latter is valuable for building relationships and for working out strategies for the artistic infiltration of the Culture Machine, while the former has a much more subtle role in the shaping of what we call music in America.

These sessions originated in American ghettos, especially early-to-mid 20th Century Harlem, as places where professional jazz musicians could play together without the stylistic restraints imposed on them by their work in “mainstream” American musical establishments (i.e., dance halls). It’s important to remember that jazz music of the ’30s and ’40s was different than what is called jazz music today and that socioeconomic restrictions based on skin color and national identity were more panoramic as well. It was the restrictions on place that made the public jam session an important part of the American musical landscape. In these sessions, musicians could play for as long as the audience would allow and, more than occasionally, they would turn into “cutting contests” where a few players would go toe-to-toe in an attempt to outdo each other. It is in these sessions that America’s National Treasure, jazz, developed stylistically as well as having the bar of technique raised to new standards. This was the inspiration for director Gjon Mili’s film, Jammin’ the Blues, the Oscar-nominated short released May 5, 1944. On July 2 of the same year, the film’s technical director, Norman Granz (who was also dating the film’s female lead, Marie Bryant) presented the first of his famous Jazz At The Philharmonic concerts. Granz (who also founded Pablo Records), kept the series touring in the United States and Canada until 1957 and in Europe and Japan until 1983. The JATP concerts were basically all-star jam sessions, with little or no rehearsal of material and a wildly varying artistic success rate. In a single tune one could hear Roy Eldridge, Flip Philips, Illinois Jaquet, Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown, Herb Ellis and Jo Jones extemporize on a blues.

This week I have the honor of taking pianist and scholar Monika Herzig on a short tour of some of the jam sessions I (in)frequent. (To use Bob Russell’s explanation, “I don’t get around much anymore.”) Dr. Herzig is a professor at Indiana University; after earning her doctorate in jazz education there in 1997, she has been engaged in producing and organizing jazz-related concerts and educational programs. She is currently working on a project with her mentor, Dr. David Baker, about the jam session, its history, its protocols, its influence, and (I assume) its future. One of the topics that their project will be surveying is the repertoire of the jam session; what tunes are used to improvise on. Although I’ve been playing at sessions as either a house player or an attendee since 1970, I had never really given this subject much thought until Dr. Herzig brought it to my attention. She was explaining how Survey Monkey works. The names of the tunes can be correlated to demographic markers such as socioeconomic status, sex, region or age. I realized that when I was starting out, my friends who attended those sessions and I never “called” tunes; I never called a tune at a private jam session until I moved to New York in 1977 and at a public one until 1989. I imagine that is explained by protocol issues that involve age, familiarity of persons, and type of instrument. (Since I play the bass, and am rarely expected to play melodies, the main concern would be whether or not I knew the tune being called.)

At the time of this writing (Thursday), we went to the jam session at Cleopatra’s Needle, a restaurant and bar that has been presenting jazz seven nights a week since at least 1989. We might go to the sessions at Smoke, Small’s and/or Somethin’ jazz clubs, or not. (We are, after all, improvisers.) I’m pretty sure I’ll be interviewed at some point, since I was a house bassist for three relatively high-profile jam sessions in New York during the early 1980s: Barbara’s, led by Jimmy Lovelace and Monty Waters; Joyce’s House of Unity, led by Mark Elf; and The Lady’s Fort, led by George Braith. These sessions were attended by the likes of Leo Mitchell, Junior Cook, Mike Gerber, John Hicks, Tom Rainey, Steve Coleman, Rashid Ali, Herman Foster, Ricky Ford, Fred Hersch, and Jack Walrath. The playing that occurred at these and other venues helped to shape the way jazz has been played ever since. The influence was subtle. We played with and listened to each other work on presenting what we thought were our best efforts. Sometimes a single tune would last over an hour because everyone was inspired by what was going on. Sometimes one soloist would chase everyone else away after five minutes.

Needless to say, this will have to be continued next week.

Being Vocal On the Instrumentality of Cliques

On April 16, St. Peter’s Church was hired to host a memorial for one of the masters of the Great American Songbook, Barbara Ann LeCocq, a.k.a. Barbara Lea. A native of Detroit, Michigan, Lea’s career began in the 1950s upon her graduation from Wellesley College. Her first recording was in 1953 under the alias of Midge Barber. By 1956 she was named Best New Singer in the International Critics’ Poll of DownBeat magazine. During the 1960s, though, she recorded nothing while she pursued a career as an actor, ostensibly to overcome stage fright. She returned to singing in the 1970s and soon became highly revered among aficionados of American cabaret as “The High Priestess of Popular Song.” She, like most cabaret singers, worked primarily with jazz musicians, which was reflected in the list of speakers and performers who attended her memorial, including jazz pianist/vocalists Daryl Sherman (who hosted the event), Ronny Whyte, and Bob Dorough, as well as vocalists Marlene VerPlanck, Melissa Hamilton, Karen Oberlin, Sue Matsuki, Annie Dinerman, and Joyce Breach. Impresario George Wein and cabaret entertainer Steve Ross played piano and sang. Pianist/composer Dick Miller played and remarks were delivered by cabaret clubowner Jan Wallman, impresario Jack Kleinsinger, journalists Roger Schore, David Hadju, Peter Wagenaar (read by Hamilton), and Nat Hentoff (read by Sherman), jazz scholar and musician Loren Schoenberg (also read by Sherman), and talent agent Lewis Chambers (who was also Lea’s acting coach). Pianist Tedd Firth, guitarist James Chirillo, saxophonist Harry Allen, and bassist Boots Maleson were the house accompanists (although Dorough played for Hamilton’s closing “I’m Glad There Is You”).

I only met Lea a few times in the cabaret supper club Judy’s while I was playing bass there, usually with pianist/composer David Lahm and his wife, the late Judy Kreston. She would usually be sitting with Jan Wallman, who previously ran Judy’s when it was called, appropriately, Jan Wallman’s. One of the things that struck me about her was how other cabaret singers gravitated towards her table to socialize and talk about their milieu, their cabaret clique. This was when I realized how insular the world of cabaret performers, especially the singers, is and how necessary this clique of artists has become in identifying and preserving a tradition of American popular song that has informed so much of the music industry of the 20th century. One of the speakers at Lea’s memorial (I probably should have been taking notes, but wasn’t) said, “Music without lyrics isn’t really alive.” Although I don’t agree with the statement, I do agree with his assessment that the way a melody is delivered to our culture is with the words that are ascribed to it. I flashed back to discussions I had had with Anne-Marie Moss, who dedicated an entire evening to explaining why a great tune like “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most” is almost never performed as an instrumental and with Betty Carter explaining why she put the song’s introduction in the middle. It was about a point of view, described as universally in the song’s words, being personalized by the performer. This was driven home in Lea’s performance of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” as a poem-like dirge during the memorial’s video presentation. Jazz singers like Lea, Moss, and Carter define a large portion of our social conscience as a musical clique.

But it is a clique that is larger than any group that might assemble at Judy’s or The Algonquin or Feinstein’s or Zeb’s Place or Kitano or Roulette. It is a clique that is identified by the way it produces music, by what Melissa Hamilton calls “sustained speech,” by singing, and includes artists like Tom Buckner, Judi Silvano, Jon Hendricks, Fay Victor, Theo Bleckmann, Andrea Wolper, Miles Griffin, Vicky Burns, Lezlie Harrison, and so many more. On Saturday afternoons I play at an open-air market on 116th Street between Adam Clayton Powell and Malcom X Boulevards with the Satchmo Manaan Quartet. This is a vocalist intensive group that plays music from the Great American Songbook usually associated with African American culture. While there are, inarguably, rifts in American society associated with concepts of racial inequality, it is also a fact that one of the “places” where these rifts are forged is in music, especially sung music. But most of the jam sessions one goes to in New York, or anywhere else for that matter, feature instrumentalists. This seems to illustrate an attitude among musicians where singers are considered “less than” by those who play upon the technological marvels that were originally designed to accompany voice. This has an effect, I fear, of amplifying the sociological rifts mentioned earlier. Looking at the Great American Songbook, how rarely African American composers (not to mention Native American composers) are represented beyond Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. Oscar Brown, Jr., Stevie Wonder, and Billy Holiday are given token mention, but too often their messages include commentary about the rifts and are dismissed as “political.” This cliquing from the outside, by the culture machine that benefits the most from these rifts, is what gives the idea of cliques a “bad name.”

To be continued…