Iverson brings up the point that Marsalis is a polarizing figure. Within this, I don’t think that people necessarily like OR dislike Marsalis, or the idea of someone in his position, or ‘rationalizing’ jazz, or whatever else he might stand for. People have the option of being polarized within themselves, liking AND disliking this figure at the same time. I find this quote of Iverson’s from “The J-Word” to be profound:
“If I had the chance to study with Wynton Marsalis, I certainly would, and hope that most younger musicians would want to study with him too. He is like jazz aspirin: take two once in a while to remind yourself of the basics. “
Marsalis (and all he stands for) has his place. We should have a strong foundation -- but let’s not have it ground us. We need to know the rules before we can break them. There is nothing wrong with learning your standards, your turnarounds, your tradition, (although Marsalis is bigger than this conception), but it should not come at the cost of your expression, your aesthetic, which ultimately you will have to teach yourself. The rules should only serve your expression and not bind it.
I honestly think you can help teach someone aesthetic, or good aesthetic. You can’t teach it in the way that you can’t be definitive, you will only shoot yourself in the foot if you call something totally terrible, and you can’t grade it, but you can show someone a better way of thinking about it, avenues and ways in which something is good or bad. I can’t tell you definitively what is good or bad, but I can give you my liquid opinion, which is likely to change within a year. Pop music, although it is slandered as ‘non-legit,’ did something right, that’s why people like it, the beat and the catchy melodies. I don’t think these stereotypical top-40 songs are entirely in bad taste, but are often not very thoughtful. People are not stupid, but sometimes don’t think. In a vague way, I do believe there is such a thing as a good aesthetic, because we practice and get better. There is a way to get better, you wouldn’t jam out to recordings of yourself as a 10-year old -- or maybe you would, I don’t know, Bill Frisell had his young daughter’s scrawl on the front of his CD cover, kid-art (totally honest art) can be oddly stirring -- but I sloppily digress. So we do have this concept of….well, that was ok, but this is great! Yes, we compare.
There is such thing as shitty aesthetic, but I prefer to think of this as non-thinking aesthetic, when the artist is just running fast notes or mindlessly fabricating tracks. Artists are not stupid but sometimes don’t think. There is such a thing as shit. Aesthetic is up to you, I can’t tell you what it is, but I think that if we stop trying to figure out what is good or bad we lose so much education. That is where a good teacher comes in. Someone who can help you think about the choices you are making with your music, both in logistics and emotional direction, bring to the consciousness what you might be doing subconsciously. This comes after the first though (the rules approach), because I personally think you have to have enough direction and humility to be open to enlightenment and to take in this kind of education. I think a good balance is for students to gradually do more and more on their own, search for new communities, “real-life” communities, teachers in their field, maybe spend some serious time in New York and feel the clubs, the talks, the personality being funneled through art successfully.
To sum up, I think jazz benefits from JALC and the ‘legitimatizing’ of the music. But let’s take the good and not forget how much of the music was learned not in schools but from great teachers in the real world and from great concepts of thinking-aesthetic.
post by UrbanDiction, not by Jazz Heresy
Good teaching is very important to pretty much anything in music. I think the reason why people might not be particularly fond of Wynton is probably because they are jealous. There might be other reasons that they might not like him, but from past experience, half of the time when I didn't like someone is due to the fact that I wish I was in their shoes. I also might not like them because of something they said. Honestly, I think it's ridiculous to HATE someone because of a disagreement.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the statement of wanting to study with Wynton...honestly, if I had a trumpet student in need of help and had the opportunity to give him one lesson with Wynton....well, off he goes! Branford on the other hand...eh. I heard what he thinks of his students, and that honestly made me upset that a teacher would say that. Why!? It's like having a puppy come to you asking for food and love, and then you drop-kick him...it's completely uncalled for! Then again, look at it from Brandford's side.
He probably gets hundreds of people asking him for lessons, and if he says 'yes' to one of those lucky kids, you can bet I would be holding my chin a bit higher. My head would probably be the size of a manhole cover as well (for those who didn't catch that, it means I would have a big ego). Then put yourself in Brandford's shoes: you now have this student who, after a couple lessons, now thinks they are the cats pajamas because of a few lessons. Their cocky attitude shows in lessons, and it frustrates you.
Who are those students of Brandford to say that they are good? Themselves? The little bubble world they live in? It's always easy to think you're good when you have a "jazz great" giving you lessons. Then again, now that I think about it, it could be Brandfords fault. Maybe bad teaching is to blame here? If anything I remember form past lessons with former teachers, they always kept my head in check. There is always something to work on, and those teachers will not give you the satisfaction of letting you leave that room knowing that, "Okay, you're good!"
But who knows really. I've never met Brandford or Wynton for that matter, so it's tough to say what a lesson is like with one of them.
Moving on...
A good teacher will give you a good foundation with what you need to know. If they care about you and want you to succeed, they'll give you the best education possible. There are also teachers out there who have very good intentions about what they teach, but in reality have NO CLUE what they are talking about. They could also not care at all about what happens to you, which is the worst thing possible. After you've learned from those teachers and you're ready to go out into the world, those good teachers will also teach "examples" of how to express yourself. Last thing I would want from one of my students is to realize that I never taught them how to explore the music world. GAH! What an awful thought.
In the end, this comes down to students. Teachers can only do so much to guide them to become great ambassadors of jazz, but it's solely up to the student and what they want to do.
In response to Mr. Hamilton:
ReplyDeleteI’m sure that some of Wynton’s critics are indeed envious of what he’s accomplished. And it’s true that both Wynton and Branford have been outspoken and provocative (to put it mildly) in their viewpoints. Both have done so from positions of great strength, both in terms of the artistic statements they’ve made in jazz, and the financial and professional capital that they’ve amassed. Both men have achieved positions of extraordinarily high visibility, which also exposes them to criticism. (This is the fate of any leader, as Obama might tell you right now.)
I think there’s a bigger, more complex set of issues at play than just professional jealousy. It has, in part, something to do with how and why the Marsalis brothers came to speak for jazz – big word – a selective vision of jazz. This has something to do with constructing a certain kind of jazz, one that is institutionally friendly, consumer friendly, politically expedient, suitable for corporate sponsorship. There is a certain kind of story that’s being told about what the music is, and what counts and doesn’t count, and a lot of our work here so far has been about teasing out the aspects of the music’s history that get left out of the story. (I wonder how effective Monk or Mingus might have been in this kind of a role? Or Sun Ra?)
To UrbanDiction:
ReplyDeleteThe program of artistic development that you lay out – knowing the foundations of a discipline, but also investing time, thought and effort in a process of the development of an individual voice – rings true to me. I’m wondering how you think Marsalis and Iverson might weigh in on this. I’d wager that they’d agree with one another, and with you. Where, then, do these sharp tensions arise? I argue that they arise in large part over issues of race, and a campaign for racial uplift that sees jazz – a certain kind of jazz – as “the greatest music and musicians the world has ever known” (to paraphrase Marsalis quoted in Iverson), and an exalted signal of African American achievement.
You start by talking about Iverson and Marsalis, but the rest of your content references jazz education and training practices, suggesting you were also responding to the Ake reading. It’s great to draw lines between the two, but you could afford to be more clear about this. J@LC’s educational campaign is a different thing to the broadscale—largely white-led—project of institutionalized jazz education that we had discussed earlier in the semester.