Tag: misperceptions

Up Against the Ceiling

It’s a fact that to pursue music as a vocation in America requires a sense of dedication and commitment that defies what most reasonable people would consider sound decision-making. It is common knowledge that the opportunities for gainful employment as a musician are scarce, making it an all too commonplace occurrence for an artist to be asked, “What do you do for a living?” by a member of his or her audience. I believe that this is a result of Western civilization’s need to fragment its over-populated societal units into specialized castes that barely understand how the others perform their function to the world’s greater good.

What does the average mail delivery person know of the diagnostic procedures practiced by the veterinarian reading the latest issue of The Veterinary Journal. And what would that veterinarian know of the sorting system required to get that publication to his or her office (or home). It takes quite a bit of training and research to master the techniques of sorting mail or identifying a heartworm infection, but one is treated as if it is more important to society than the other in terms of monetary compensation. According to one source, the average veterinarian in 2010 was paid $82,000 per year, but only the highest paid postmaster or mail superintendent earned that much. (in 2011 the average mail sorter earned $48,400). Musicians, though, average around $34,000. (Of course, stellar performers like Madonna or Bruce Springsteen demand much more for their services, but whether or not what they do is more about musicianship or showmanship is debatable.)

I was inspired to do this humbling research after reading Isaac Schankler’s excellent post, “A Wholly Factual Account of a Failed Attempt to Transcend Gender Through Electroacoustic Music,” in which he describes how replacing (out of necessity) the head of a mannequin with a human being as the stage prop for his off-stage electronically altered singing infused an element of gender specificity into his—and possibly his audience’s—reception of his Concerto for Mannequin Head. The shift transformed the ideas of “identity and technology” addressed through the music into ones concerning “power and control.” In this situation, the substitute for the non-human “performer” was gender specifically female. I wonder if a male performer would have countered Schankler’s “Pygmalionesque” perception of the transformation. Another scenario would be created if Schankler were female; would the perception still hold, or would it have become something quite different? I find Schankler’s observation of gender specificity being valuable to music performance rather important, especially in improvised American music. [1]

Because Schankler’s contribution was inspired by Alex Temple’s “I’m a Trans Composer. What the Hell Does That Mean?,” which describes how one deals with the feelings of exclusion that come with presenting oneself to society in a manner that falls outside what are accepted as its overarching “norms,” I was reminded of Joanne Brackeen, a virtuoso pianist, composer, and improviser, who calls her BMI publishing entity New True Illusion. During the time she took to help me to be included in the jazz scene when I first arrived in New York City, she described how she went largely ignored when she started playing music. She and her husband, saxophonist Charles Brackeen, raised four children and managed a building on the city’s Lower East Side during the 1960s. The building was home to many up-and-coming avant-garde musicians (such as Larry Coryell, Jim Pepper, and Bob Moses) who were experimenting with alternative lifestyle issues, especially drugs and promiscuous sex. Although an insider amongst the tenants of the building, being a high-energy improvising pianist in a racially mixed marriage made her an outsider in the music world. (Perhaps being six-feet tall was also a factor.) It took her until the mid-1970s to finally begin getting the critical recognition her formidable piano playing deserves. Another thing she told me was that nothing in the business of music is what it seems. While I was revisiting these memories, I remembered another post, Frank J. Oteri’s “Associations are Inevitable but Sometimes Misconstrued,” which recounted his experience of “being fooled” by a CD he purchased in Chile by a group named Los 4 Ases. He assumed he was listening to a group of Chilean singers with excellent English diction until he realized it was the Philadelphia-based singing group, The Four Aces.

I was fooled recently by a recording that I was hired to transcribe. The job was not horribly involved: supply a piano/voice lead sheet of two songs recorded by Diana Gitesha Hernandez for her gig at the Westbeth Community Room tonight at 7:30 p.m. Hernandez is a poet who has been active with the Nuyorican Poets since 1977. She relocated to the Pacific Northwest and Alaska during the 1980s while on a spiritual quest and took on the name Gitesha. She discovered that she has a strong affinity for improvised music, possibly a result of her early exposure to jazz through her parents (her father was a working musician and her mother a dancer until they gave up performing to raise a family) and tap dance classes. When she returned to New York City in 1986, she took regular classes with pianist-educator Barry Harris and worked hard to support her singing. She ran a jazz singing workshop at the University of the Streets in 1989 but had to withdraw to work in public education. She is now “retired” from her job and dedicates her time to music, painting, and writing. She will be on a bill that includes singers Mary Lovelace and Joanne Genomie accompanied by pianist Lee Tomboulian, drummer Walter Williams, bassist Lorenzo Sandi, and melodicaist Santiago. In 2011 she recorded a set of music in a home studio belonging to singer-pianist-flutist Sarah James. Gitesha says that she likes what came out of the sessions and wants to recreate her improvisations.

I wound up transcribing some of the music when Tomboulian found himself too busy while in the process of moving into a new abode in New Jersey to finish six songs in two days. The first piece I transcribed was her version of “Alone Together” that incorporates an original poem, “Inside the Moon.” I was happy that her version used only two chords and to hear how good her singing is. Her improvisations aren’t the bebop scat of Anita O’Day fame, but rather highly lyrical—long phrases, reminiscent of Miles Davis’s trumpet extemporizations, that operate in parallel meters and come to rest on “weak” beats. Thinking that Hernandez will most likely be using the transcriptions as a guide for her improvising, I tried to be as accurate as possible in the writing of the rhythms, something that can be difficult to do in jazz improvisation. I am admitting that I can see why she is fond of the recording. Even though it isn’t very “jazzy,” it’s a fantastic performance. I was not only impressed with her singing, but amazed at how well the drummer on the date followed her phrasing while keeping the pulse underneath. But that’s where I was fooled: the pulse was supplied by a drum machine and the part that was reacting so well with her was actually her playing drums! I was surprised to find, when I delivered the chart, that there were only three musicians playing: Hernandez, Sarah James, and Nick Spadelleto, who was the engineer and guitarist. With her permission I include the track.


Brackeen’s being an outsider made it necessary for her to work twice as hard as she thought a man with similar musical abilities would to achieve similar financial rewards. It was something that my mother described to me as she struggled to raise two children as a disabled single parent. Although “glass ceiling” was a term yet to be coined (Gay Bryant first introduced it in 1984), I was painfully aware of how the concept of gender-based inequality in the workplace, especially regarding income, negatively impacted more than half of the world’s population. As a result, I am deeply impressed by—and have great respect for—the resolve it takes to follow one’s inner voices and make a potentially socially downward transition from male to female. I am equally impressed (although with very little respect) by how the Great American Culture Machine continues to be ruthlessly male dominant. I feel that it allows too much leeway for incompetence and mediocrity to replace the higher standards that should still dictate how we, as a species, conduct our affairs. So I am always heartened to hear about great things being done by great women and the men who work with and for them; it gives me hope for us all. Artists like Brackeen, Gitesha, and Sarah James should be heard more often and given the same opportunities as guys like me. Brackeen has achieved enough recognition that she has a teaching post at the Berklee College in Boston, but so many others are struggling to be heard. I hope that changes.


1) I’m not trying to replace the term “jazz” with “improvised American music,” but rather indicate a larger scope of American music genres that are primarily improvised.

Grist for the Mills

I’ve been engaged in a Facebook discussion about professional respect among jazz musicians. One of the points that came up rather early in the ever-growing thread engaged the participants’ ideas about misconstruing or misunderstanding statements said between musicians in public settings. I can remember misconstruing something that one of my idols, bassist-pianist-singer-composer Red Mitchell, said to me at Bradley’s, a now defunct nightclub that was once an epicenter of the jazz community in New York. I had gone out alone that night to hear Red play with a friend of mine, Scott Hardy, and his wife Leslie Pinchick. I hadn’t heard Red for a several years and had previously only heard him when he was collaborating or acting as a sideperson. But this night he was the featured headliner at Bradley’s.

When I arrived, the first set of the Mitchell-Pintchick-Hardy collaboration was already underway—it was normal then for jazz artists to play four or five sets a night over a period of five to six nights a week—with Leslie at the piano, Scott on guitar, and Red on contrabass. (Red tuned his instrument in fifths an octave below the violoncello—only one of the unorthodoxies of his playing). It was their opening night and Bradley’s was packed, so when they were done I schmoozed around the bar a bit—talking with colleagues, prospective employers, and music fans—and didn’t bother with fianchettoing my way up to the band area, since I planned to hear another set anyway. During the next set, Pintchick sat at a front table while Red played piano and sang and Scott played electric bass. Red, a fine pianist, prolific composer, and distinctive vocalist, did very well and kept the group working for several years. (Eventually Scott mastered the upright bass and now he and Leslie work as a team.) I was deeply impressed by Red’s seamless switch from bassist to pianist/singer; one could say that I was even intimidated by his talent. The club had emptied out somewhat during the next break and Red was walking about the room, talking with people. He came up to me and I told him that I thought his sets were great. He responded by asking me, “Can you do this?” I was floored! I always thought that Red was my better, and had approached him for lessons on a few occasions, but did he have to rub my face in it? I never went to see Red again and felt terrible when I heard he died of a heart attack in 1992. A few years later, I was talking with his nephew, the late saxophonist Brian Mitchell, during one of our all-night Monopoly tournaments and mentioned the incident. He informed me that I had entirely misconstrued his uncle’s intentions and that Red was actually looking for someone to sub for him! Since that painful enlightenment, I have endeavored to cultivate and keep an open mind about questions that are asked of me.

This melancholy tale is illustrative of how misunderstanding can almost blind us to what is really going on. I was baffled nearly to the point of hilarity when several people decided that my less-than-glowing opinion of the “jazz” compositions credited to the pen of Paul Whiteman included Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, but trying to explain that, since Whiteman didn’t write the piece, and was, therefore, not part of my opinion was an exercise in futility that transformed that hilarity into a state of depression. When it was pointed out to me by my betters in the field of jazz reportage that Whiteman “never wrote anything,” I was relieved that my misunderstanding of the American copyright paradigm removed any need to stand my ground, although I still hold my opinion of the pieces, whoever actually wrote them. But that sense of relief also fell to the wayside with the realization that one cannot rely on the official record of the Library of Congress for points of fact. This is the case of Miles Davis’s copyright of “Solar,” a piece of music that is so intertwined with his legacy that it appears on his tombstone, even though he didn’t compose it. I didn’t intend to brand Miles Davis as an out-and-out plagiarist when this was originally posted. I tried to include a sense of conservative balance by including a reference to Charlie Parker’s plagiarizing Davis’s “Donna Lee.” It was in this spirit of apologia that I mentioned how Duke Ellington obfuscated the authorship of what may have been his collaborations with Billy Strayhorn, Rudy Jackson, and Irving Mills. Some have misconstrued this criticism of Ellington as an attack on one or more of the others. For a very brief moment I found this hilarious, but now my soul plumbs the depths of despair!

For the record, I was not attacking Billy Strayhorn, who clearly had a very special relationship with Ellington that involved quite a bit of negotiation on several levels, including matters of authorship. Nor was I attacking Jackson, a person who I think probably took a fall for the misattribution of “Creole Love Call” after King Oliver sued Ellington over its authorship; it’s possible that the portrayal of Ellington’s shock over the plagiarism is a fluke of the historical record. And I was definitely not attacking Mills, who clearly was a very important figure in Ellington’s career nor was I suggesting that Mills was ineffectual to it. I posited only that, even without Mills’s influence, Ellington would have still been a successful musician, but I would agree that he would probably not have been as successful. Furthermore, I do not dispute Mills’s authorship of anything. I don’t know much about him other than what I’ve read and heard from reliable sources. Any assertions about Mills included in last week’s post are not mine, but theirs. Sadly, those reliable sources don’t include copyright or publisher records, which, for reasons mentioned previously, have become somewhat dubious. However, I do find it interesting that one of Mills’s sons “can’t tell you for a fact” what the tunes were that his father wrote lyrics for, while his other son offers that the elder Mills lyric writing process included “sometimes using a ghostwriter” to collaborate with. It leads one to wonder what the names of the ghostwriters were and why they’re not included in the copyrights.

My point is that misunderstanding is a powerful thing, indeed. What if trumpeter Freddie Keppard had not misconstrued the offer to record for the Victor Talking Machine Company as being potentially detrimental to his career? Would the Original Dixieland Jass Band have faded into obscurity? Would the music we call “jazz” be known by a different name? Would modern universities be offering programs in “Dixieland studies”? I think that rhetorical questions such as these, or what Miles Davis’s music would have been like if he had never met Teo Macero, or what Benny Goodman’s music would have been like if John Hammond wasn’t a socialist, are worth thinking about from time to time. What was the poetry of Irving Mills really like? What would the modern jazz festival be if Norman Granz had gone to Princeton, as he originally intended? What would the Beatles have become if Brian Epstein had become a barrister? What would the music of the Doors have sounded like if Tim Buckley never existed? Or what if Cristóbal Colón understood that sailing westward was not the most efficient way to get to Asia?

These questions, from a rhetorical lot, are for the reader to ponder or not.
Any proposed answers to them are moot, as most of my opinions are to boot!