(First posted as a comment on one of Knoxville Progressive’s fine Friday night Jazz Jam series here. Friday Night Jazz Jam – 4 Nov. 2005)
Hi Knoxville Progressive…
I just want to introduce myself. Arthur Gilroy is a pseudonym, mostly because I do not want by political views to intrude upon my professional life. I simply cannot afford the possible financial hit at present. I am a NYC jazz musician, and have played with (and often written for) just about EVERYBODY in the 30+ years that I have been in NY. Charles Mingus, Thad Jones/Mel Lewis, Dizzy Gillespie, Gil Evans, all of the great latin bands (Machito, Tito Puente, Chico O’Farrill, Eddie and Charlie Palmieri, etc.), Lee Konitz, plus a couple or few thousand OTHER gigs that have ranged from the musically sublime to the ridiculous but financially necessary.
I just want to commend you on your posts. It is rare today that a non-musician is as deep into the music as you are.
(Read on…)
And to say this…
One of the ways that the forces that are presently driving this country and society to destruction have done so is by cheapening the popular music of the society. The Greeks believed that one could change a nation by changing the mode of its music. Now “mode” in musical theory means a certain kind of scale, and I think that on that level alone, this idea is quite accurate. On the most basic of levels, there are scales that produce generally happy and optimistic feelings in human beings, and there are others that produce sadness. But if you take this idea further…as far as the Northern Indian classical traditions has taken it over thousands of years, for example…you find that there are very finely focused scales (Ragas, as the Indian musicians refer to them.) that produce very finely focused responses in human beings. In fact, they are SO finely focused in the Indian system that some of them are only to be played at certain times of the day and/or during certain seasons.
And the same can be said for rhythmic feels on another level.
Now when this country…with ALL of its faults and shortcomings…was in a sort of ascendancy…when no matter how you might feel about the inner workings of the society, it stood up and reformed itself to some great degree and at the same time actively resisted the evil that was in place in the world at the time (Say from the crash of 1928 or even the early ’20s “Jazz Age” through the beginnings of the civil rights movement and the assassinations and riots of the ’60s and ’70s which marked the end of that era.), we created a musical idiom AS THE POPULAR MUSIC OF THE CULTURE that was SO strong, SO deep that it literally spread all over the world. Only 100 years after Louis Armstrong played his first notes into a recording system, “jazz” (I prefer to call it “American music”, but I will use the word jazz as a sort of shorthand here.) has spread all over the world. And is THRIVING in almost all of the countries of that world. There are good jazz scenes in Japan, in Lebanon, in Turkey, in Russia, all OVER Europe. China is opening up to the music. In South America, Central America and the Caribbean, the true popular musics of most of the societies are identifiably “jazz” in many ways and have indeed seriously influenced the “jazz” of America since the very beginning. (“The Spanish tinge” spoken of by Jelly Roll Morton as early as 1914.)
In fact, there is only one developed nation on Earth where jazz is NOT very popular among listeners.
Guess where?
The United States.
And guess why?
BECAUSE THE SAME PEOPLE WHO ACTIVELY OPPOSED THE GROWTH OF THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SYSTEMS OF URBAN BLACK AMERICA BY USE OF FORCE AND COVERT DRUG DISPERSION BEGINNING AS FAR BACK AS THE SIXTIES AND (SUCCESSFULLY) CULMINATING IN THE CRACK DEBACLE THAT FUELED THE WHOLE IRAN/CONTRA THING, THE PEOPLE WHO WERE FRIGHTENED OF WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF BLACK AND MINORITY AND PROGRESSIVE AMERICA ACTUALLY FOUND AN EFFECTIVE POLITICAL VOICE, THE SAME PEOPLE WHO SAW TO IT THAT THE HEROES OF THAT AMERICA…MLK JR., MALCOLM X, RFK, JFK, MUHAMMAD ALI AND SCORES OF OTHERS WERE (ONE WAY OR ANOTHER) SHUT OUT OF THE SYSTEM, ALSO SHUT THE MUSIC DOWN AND SUBSTITUTED SOME FACELESS, NAMELESS, OUT OF TUNE BULLSHIT IN ITS PLACE.
Consciously?
I think maybe, to some degree, yes. And unconsciously, as well. It just flat out scared the SHIT out of them.
Now I am not being a “jazz” purist here.
I’m talking about Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles, about Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin just as much as I am talking about Miles Davis and Gil Evans and Stan Getz and Charles Mingus and John Coltrane. I am talking about positive music.
On ANY level.
Because music from the heart…from the soul (They don’t call Aretha-style music “soul music” fer nuthin’, you know.) is dangerous to controllers like this.
It awakens the sleeper within us all.
So when I see the…rare, all too rare…posts on the left blogoshpere about “jazz”, I am encouraged.
And when I play at the Village Vanguard on a Monday night with the band (The Vanguard Orchestra) that continues the work of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Band (which was ITSELF a real continuation of the swing/bebop tradition by way of Basie and 52nd St. in NYC…for about 45 years of Monday nights at the Vanguard and counting, still alive and still burning.)…and I see a full house every night, people from all over the country and the world, people of all ages, I am encouraged.
And when I play all over the U.S…in the midwest, the west, in the south and the north and New England…with GREAT bands that are working for relative peanuts out of sheer love for the music and see standing ovation after standing ovation, I am encouraged.
BUT…big money is STILL buying the music down. The REAL money is going to Wynton Marsalis and the whole Lincoln Center thing…$14 million and counting this year, and that’s what they will ADMIT to. All of it from corporate and quasi-governmental entities. The PermaGov…foundations and such. Oil money, Big Pharma and Big Bank money. Corporate money that has as its main interest…again, consciously or not…maintaining the ongoing hypnotic trance of the American Sleeple. And notwithstanding Wynton’s obvious talents…that music and that scene is jive. Ask almost ANY real player who is not on that particular money teat.
It’s Bush Jazz.
As real as FEMA or Homeland Security or Halliburton or Enron.
And the Lincoln Center “Jazz” building is just a big jazz mall.
It’s a scam.
So…to my point. (Finally…sorry.)
When you speak of your love for this music, when you recommend the great, great musicians that you have chosen to mention, remember.
Like Miles and Diz and Bird…on one level, they are almost all just another bunch of dead motherfuckers.
Sorry to put it so bluntly, but it’s true.
And there is a LARGER…and equally talented…bunch of LIVE motherfuckers out there, most of whom are getting by on a (s)wing and a prayer.
Talk about THEM as well.
And…TALK ABOUT THE SOCIETAL POLITICS OF MUSIC while you are at it.
Understand…if Germany and Japan had been the possessors of a living swing tradition in the ’30s and ’40s and we had not, we’d all be speaking German now and little moustaches would be WAY in favor.
We SWUNG our way to victory.
And now we have lost our swing.
We have lost it to overproduced country and rap and rock and whatever else is out there. Most of which is ASSEMBLED BY MACHINES with as little fallible human input as possible rather than being sung and swung from human hearts and souls.
Thus it has no positive spiritual power.
And we are a suffocating society as a result.
This inferior music s not the ONLY reason…but it is not just a symptom, either.
The young people who went to hear Gene Krupa play with Benny Goodman, who danced to the Basie Band and listened to the lyric and rhythmic subtleties of Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee and Billie Holiday, who felt the blue notes and the rhythms pull and tug at their very souls, those people went out and put their lives on the line to stop fascism.
The ones who sit chemically zombified through a Britney Spears concert or mechanically “dance” to techno music in a dance club or dream of bitches and ho’s and killing cops behind a nihilistic frustration with their lot as society’s buttfucks…THEY ain’t gonna do SHIT when push comes to shove except jerk off some more and wait for the next load of bad food.
Change the mode of the music to change the society.
It’s the only real weapon that I personally possess, beyond maybe a little talent with words. So I’m using that little talent to ask you to help those with GREAT talent contribute that talent to help change this system.
Pay attention to the living as WELL as the dead.
The music LIVES.
If it is well dispersed throughout the society…and every little bit helps in this regard, which I why I am saying this here…then WE will “live” as well.
That’s the theory, anyway.
We shall see.
Later…
AG