Photo courtesy of reddit, dottylemon

When I logged into my WordPress account for the first time in a few weeks this morning, I was greeted by a cheerful note:

Happy Anniversary with WordPress.com! You registered on WordPress.com 4 years ago! Thanks for flying with us. Keep up the good blogging!

Wow — not only is that a lot of exclamation points, but four years is, like, a really long time. For those keeping score at home, that’s one seventh of my life, and the same amount of time that I spent pursuing my B.A. It also reminded me that this blog has roughly coincided with my return to academia as a graduate student — in fact, my first post was also a paper that I wrote for my first class at Rutgers (and later became the introduction to my MA thesis.) I’m not sure quite what to make of the milestone, but I’ve been meaning to put up a stuff-I’ve-been-up-to-recently post anyway, so here it is! 

It has been about six months since I wrote the last update on my scholastic activities; the intervening months have been fruitful but exhausting. I feel like I’m on the tail end of a particularly grueling regimen of academic hoop-jumping, which has left me with less energy to write than what I’ve grown accustomed to since I began this blogging journey in 2009. Fortunately, the seminars that have been demanding most of my attention have been tremendously valuable: Grant Writing, Practice Theory, Composition, and Improvisation in the Baroque Era.

Even though writing has been sporadic, I have been inundated with opportunities to try new things, and rethink old ideas in new ways. This has included some exciting new musical endeavors: learning to play sackbut for the Baroque Improv seminar, and joining the Music of Bali ensemble (turns out I strike a mean gong!) It also included my first return trip to Latin America in five years, when the Charles Mingus Ensemble performed in Mexico City as a part of the Encuentro de Musica y Danza Global held at CENIDIM in November:

This work has also involved a lot of conversation — I’ve learned a lot about how I process ideas verbally, and it wasn’t just the seminars that gave me space to make that happen. Also in November, the Jazz Journalists Association invited me to share my thoughts for their webinar on jazz blogging, and last month I joined an esteemed cohort of LA-based jazz writers to talk about the state of the scene today for the Break the Mold Podcast, produced by Alex Sadnik. I also experimented with a more verbal style in the improvised concert review of Tigran Hamasyan’s solo piano show in February at blue whale.

And thank goodness for the great music that I have been able to enjoy this year! Tigran’s hit was a welcome reprieve from an intensely busy winter quarter grind; last week’s double-bill at Royce Hall featuring Brad Mehldau and The Bad Plus was similarly impressive. The Bad Plus, joined by saxophonist Joshua Redman, gave perhaps the most spellbinding live performance that I’ve ever heard — Chris Barton summed it up well for the LA Times.

I’ve also enjoyed working as the new Managing Editor for the open-access ethnomusicology journal Ethnomusicology Review. In particular, I’ve been working on the new Sounding Board page, which features more frequent updates than the annually-produced journal, and includes a page called “Space is the Place,” which is dedicated to the overlaps between ethnomusicology and jazz studies. In March, I published an interview with Dr. Mark Lomanno at the site, in which he talks about his experiences writing about jazz with an ear for the ethnomusicological and his new blog, The Rhythm of Study. If you’re reading this and think that you’d have something to contribute to the page, please don’t hesitate to pitch me something!

Reflecting on these past few months — indeed, the past four years that I have had the immense privilege to write and talk about the music that I love — keeps leading me back to a tremendous sense of gratitude. To everyone who has visited Lubricity over the past four years: thank you for reading, listening, commenting, arguing, disagreeing, sharing, encouraging, and everything else. Here’s to four more years!

Tigran Hamasyan, photo by Rob Gaudet

On Wednesday night, I finally made it back to my favorite LA jazz club, blue whale. Pianist Tigran Hamasyan was playing a solo show, and I knew that it was going to be something that I’d regret missing. So I carpooled with two friends, Alyssa Mathias and Kristin Gierman, to check it out—and we sure weren’t disappointed! Rather than write a straight-ahead review, though, I thought I’d try something different: an improvised concert review. So after the set, I fired up my audio recorder in the car, we asked each other questions about the set, and I transcribed the result. Check it out after the jump, lightly edited, minus our typically Angeleno debate over which freeways to take home:

These two were a great pair of discussants: Alyssa is a singer, violinist, and MA/PhD student in ethnomusicology at UCLA studying music of the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Armenian music has been a particular interest for her — Hamasyan is Armenian — so she heard this set from a unique perspective. Kristin is a filmmaker and yoga teacher with wide-ranging musical tastes — not to mention a superb chauffeur!

We arrived partway into Tigran’s first set, and stayed for the rest of the night. Hamasyan added a sprawling electronic rig to his piano halfway through, giving him a wider sonic palette for the second part of the evening.

Here’s what we had to say about the show:

AWR: I don’t know about you guys, but that last tune where he was beatboxing over himself playing a piano groove . . . I’ve never heard anything like that before, the extreme virtuosity.

AM: Yeah, I’m curious—I’m not too familiar with jazz since 1970, so I have no idea how novel the sort of stuff he was doing was.

AWR: What I noticed from the very beginning of this first set was how precisely he was subdividing rhythms and creating rhythmic contrast. In that first set, he was just hinting at it with his piano stuff, but then when he got his electronics out it was even more intense. I think there’s something to that vibe he was doing—some of it is an extension of the experimental things that fusion guys were doing in the ‘70s, but it’s in conversation with EDM kind of stuff in a way that I really haven’t heard—in a way that my jazz nerd ears were just freaking out the whole time. I think that has to do with his rhythmic concept. He has a ridiculous command of how to put rhythms in conversation with each other. That is a hallmark of what jazz musicians have always done, but he’s doing it in a different kind of beat context.

AM: Yeah, it was cool that he wasn’t just laying down a beat and then going with it—he was really messing with it, in a way that would sort of throw you off but then he’d get right back on.

AWR: You were saying after the second tune in the second set that he’s basically doing a gospel thing with Armenian church music.

AM: Yeah, that was so cool! So he starts out with this church hymn—or a part of the liturgical service—and he takes this little part of it, and before you know it, it has this gospel vibe!

AWR: I think that same sort of zoomed-in rhythmic command that the modern gospel guys really nail, it was that same kind of sensibility that he was putting in his sound.

AM: And I think if you’re going to do something crazy to Armenian liturgical music, which really hasn’t seen a lot of change for centuries, you have to mix it with something that’s going to make sense, even if you’re changing it dramatically. If he was just turning it into an EDM piece, or hip hop, that might not necessarily be appropriate. But the fact that he was drawing on other religious music, other Christian music, made that experimentation a lot more meaningful. I think the audience would appreciate that more, and it was a largely Armenian audience.

AWR: Yeah, and not just the Armenian thing—a lot of jazz musicians talk about how the music has its roots in the church, and that’s what it’s about, you know? And it seems like he was tapping into that, too—some kind of mixture of those two spiritual roots, that was really interesting.

Also, I’m curious: right after we got there, the second tune that he did was a treatment of an Armenian folk tune—how did that contrast or was it similar to what he did there [with the church song]?

AM: Yeah, that tune is on one of his CDs, Red Hail, and there are quite a few Armenian folk songs that he takes—folk songs that were “approved” by the people who were classifying them in the 19th century. His treatment of those songs seems to have a wider range of emotional intensity, or at least he takes advantage of a lot more harmonic and dynamic possibilities, than in the liturgical piece. Also, part of me is like, “okay, you’re an Armenian jazz musician, so why do you have to do an Armenian folk song?” I’d love to talk with him and ask him why he chooses to do those songs, but jazz musicians improvise on standards, and an Armenian folk tune can fill that role. Others have done that before him—I feel like the next innovative Armenian jazz musician would be innovative simply by not adding an Armenian folk tune. But he does it so well that it seems to come from a creative place, rather than, I don’t know, paying lip service to the idea that Armenians need to keep those songs alive.

AWR: I got a sense that he was really trying to find the edges of what he could do with that. It was, “okay, Armenian guy doing an Armenian tune, okay we get it,” but once that wore off—throughout the whole set, not just with that song—he really took things in unpredictable directions. He was always going for it—you know how we were talking in our class earlier today about just going for it? He was fucking going for it all night.

(Alyssa and I are taking a class at UCLA on improvisation in 16th-17th century European music)

AM: I’m curious about the electronic setup that he had—is that something you’ve seen before?

AWR: No, not ever. He did mention that he hadn’t even done that before, so it seems like this is somewhere he’s going right now.

KG: He even pulled out a melodica!

AM: I think the Armenian tunes might also offer new melodic and rhythmic possibilities to a jazz musician.

AWR: It seemed like his way of pushing the edges of that material was rhythmic: he would find certain asymmetric grooves that worked with that, and then push it around and take that groove to totally different places.

AM: And those little melodic figures that I was pointing out to you [during the set] function as a way to tie those experimentations together, to tie them to the piece. That [three note pattern] just screams out Armenian music to me. I’m sure it’s in some treatise somewhere about what makes music Armenian, in the list of ornaments. That’s just a clue for me right away, and it’s interesting that he highlighted that figure.

KG: How did you guys interpret the mallets on piano strings?

AWR: Oh, that was cool. It’s sort of a philosophy, pushing things to the limits. Like, “what can I do with what I have? What can I do with my instrument? What can I do with my body? What can I do with electronic media—in a solo improvised live context?” Like you said, it wasn’t just laying down a beat and putting some loops on. He had the little glockenspiel, he had the melodica, he had ostinatos on piano that he would get going, and then put something else on top of it. The layers worked really well—he was searching for something, exploring.

AM: He must be well-versed in extended techniques—using the strings of the piano in unusual ways is not too uncommon in jazz and classical music. But again, he chose it carefully—it wasn’t “hey look, now I’m using mallets on my piano!”

AWR: Yeah! I loved that.

AM: He was very subtle about a lot of his boundary-breaking.

AWR: And it was musical: he always found the timbres that were appropriate for what he was trying to communicate musically. Like at the very end of the first set, he was playing “Someday My Prince Will Come,” and he did this riff that moved up the piano—it was part of the melody, but he just kept transposing it and moving it up the piano, up the piano, up the piano. And he got up into the very top upper register of the piano . . .

KG: It sounded circus-y!

AWR: . . . and it sounded like toy piano, like circus music! He just hung out there for a little bit, and then stopped—like the wind-up toy had just stopped. It was the perfect way of taking that timbre and doing something creative with it. There were a lot of moments like that throughout the set.

KG: When he left, he just walked right down the aisle, and people were like “ohhh that’s him!”

AWR: That was a very interesting way of ending the set—he set up that loop and just walked off the stage while it was still going.

AM: Alex, have you seen a show there that had such standard rows for the audience?

AWR: I was actually surprised that he set it up sort of conventionally—that’s the standard setup if there’s a combo or something like that. But with a solo set, you have an opportunity to move things around with the space a little bit differently. I know that another (Armenian!) pianist who plays there a lot, Vardan Ovsepian, has done some other stuff with the space, like setting up the piano in different places, putting the cubes in a circle around the piano, stuff like that. It would have been interesting—but it was also packed! I think part of it was just that they had to pack the room in.

Thanks again to Alyssa and Kristin for being a part of this little experiment! Thanks also to Rob Gaudet, bartender-in-chief, for the excellent photo. I hope that this was interesting to read, and look forward to trying something like this again soon. I’ll close by just saying one more time: WOW. What a fantastic display of what jazz musicians can do in the 21st century. Keep it up, Tigran!

In MLK Days past, I have shared a famous quote that outlines Martin Luther King, Jr.’s love of jazz, a passage that has been something of a mantra for me ever since I first came across it in 2009.

Today, I’ve linked to it again but also want to share another, perhaps less-well-known quotation that ought to resonate with what jazz can mean for our continued struggle against racism in the United States and around the world.

I first got hip to this quote via the prolific and oftentimes hilarious antiracist advocate John Randolph, aka Jay Smooth. Here’s his video of ten OTHER things MLK said: 

That first bit about creativity caught my ear, so I went to find the larger quotation that gave rise to that unforgettable phrase “creatively maladjusted.” Here it is one place where it cropped up:

This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists. Our planet teeters on the brink of annihilation; dangerous passions of pride, hatred, and selfishness are enthroned in our lives; and men do reverence before false gods of nationalism and materialism. The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.

What were Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelnious Monk, and on and on and on, if not exemplars of creative maladjustment? It’s no wonder (to me at least) that Dr. King entrusted the project of human salvation in this “nonconforming minority.” I hear the fruits of this project in the work of so many jazz musicians today: a deep respect and understanding for this lineage coupled with an unflappable will to sound out that tradition in the 21st century. Today, I think, is a good day to take stock of that.

The first UCLA cohort of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance with new UCLA professors Wayne Shorter (bottom left) and Herbie Hancock (bottom right)

A Brief History of Jazz Education: Part 1 and Part 2

By Alex W. Rodriguez for A Blog Supreme/NPR Jazz

The second half of my latest contribution to A Blog Supreme is now online — part one was posted in November — and I learned a lot from putting this together. It turned out that part two went up on the same day that UCLA announced the appointment of Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter as Professors of Music there — auspicious times for jazz education, indeed!

Former UCLA Professor Charles Seeger

With another year of graduate coursework well underway now, I figure it’s time to take a minute to reflect here at the blog on the various writing, musicking, and writing-about-musicking activities swirling through my calendar these days.

The title of this post refers to former UCLA musicologist Charles Seeger’s apt description of musicology: that scholars of music are “in a linguocentric predicament,” that is, that we are stuck talking about music when the music expresses so much all by itself. I’ve done a lot of talking about music recently, which has been a lot of fun and has also reminded me of the stark limitations to the word’s capacity to convey musical meaning. 

At the same time, I remain convinced that “speech-communication,” as Seeger called it, is not only inevitable but invaluable to the process of making music meaningful. Two weeks ago, I presented a pre-concert lecture for The Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA’s double-bill of the Robert Glasper Trio and Ron Carter Quartet. My talk, “Leading from Below: Bassists as Bandleaders,” discussed the ways in which bassists–often consigned to “supporting” roles when we describe jazz–are powerful musical forces and essential creative collaborators. Of course, Ron Carter and Derrick Hodge offer prime examples of this, and I suspect (at least I hope!) that the audience of eager concert-goers took some useful conceptual tools with them into the show.

Later that week, I flew to New Orleans for the once-in-a-decade combined academic conference of AMS/SEM/SMT–that’s the American Musicological Society, Society for Ethnomusicology, and Society for Music Theory. I presented an updated version of my paper on “the hang,” entitled “Urban Spaces and Jazz Improvisation: Hearing the Hang in the U.S. and Chile,” on Thursday morning. The panel went great–with the lone exception that the title, “Innovation Through Time: Latin America and the Jazz Tradition” was misrepresented on the program as “Innovation Through Time: Latin America and the Jazz.” My advisor, Steven Loza, chaired the panel and gave the first talk on the Latin American musical currents present in Louis Armstrong’s early work; my colleague in the UCLA PhD program Leon Garcia offered a fascinating description of Mexican trio romantico musicians’ incorporation of jazz elements into their acts; and James Newton gave a stirring follow-up as panel discussant that beautifully tied everything together. It was such a pleasure to share the stage with such fantastic speakers–not to mention brilliant musicians in their own right–and to talk about this music we all love.

Ah, but the talking-about-music doesn’t stop there! Tomorrow, I will participate in a panel discussion for the Jazz Journalists Association on jazz blogging–where I’ll be joined by fellow Jazz Internet denizens Veronica Grandison, Angelika Beener, and Jonathan Wertheim. The online panel is free, but you need to register in advance by clicking on this link! The party starts at 8 pm EST–that’s 5 pm for us West Coasters–and will run until about 9:30 EST. I hope to see some of you there, and look forward to basking in the linguocentric predicament with you soon.

Just for kicks, though, it probably doesn’t hurt to share a little bit of music with you, too. Here’s one of the first clips of me playing trombone since my self-imposed musical hiatus in 2010, performing Steve Coleman’s “Attila 02″ with the UCLA Charles Mingus Ensemble (led by the aforementioned Prof. Newton) last June:

That’s Jonah Levine with the trombone solo, by the way–a relentlessly creative player. It has been both humbling and inspiring to sit next to him every week for the past year. When he graduates, look out jazz world! I’m sure he’ll give us all something to talk about.

(Again, register here for the online panel on jazz blogging tomorrow!)

Kid Ory

As the quarter gets underway again here at UCLA, I have added a new wrinkle to my academic grind: being a Teaching Associate for the Department of Ethnomusicology’s undergraduate survey course, Jazz in American Culture.

In fact, this is the first time that I have actually sat in on an old-school undergraduate jazz history survey, so I am learning a lot about how certain stories about jazz are told and retold. The real fun, though, lies in being able to supplement the text with some of my own perspectives during the two discussion sections that I lead on Fridays. As an experiment, I have been posting links and outlines on the course website, which are also viewable to the public. Tomorrow, the topic is early jazz in Los Angeles:

Your textbook talks about the popular myth that jazz “went up the river” from New Orleans to Chicago, but doesn’t mention that some of the first recorded jazz was made right here in LA!

Los Angeles, in fact, was the first place where the word “jazz” was used in print — in April 1912, not 1913 in San Francisco as your book states. You can read more about the origins of the word jazz at this blog written by one of my former professors, the great jazz scholar Lewis Porter:

Lewis Porter on the Origins of the Word “Jazz”

There, you can see a copy of the first newspaper article that printed the word, in our very own LA Times — and not describing music, but baseball!

But it’s not just the word that has important early history here — one of the first jazz recordings, made in 1921 by the New Orleans-born-and-raised trombonist Kid Ory, was pressed here by an independent jazz label that had just started up in Santa Monica. Read more about that here:

Floyd Levin on Kid Ory’s first recordings

Here are the two sides that were recorded on that day. The first is “Ory’s Creole Trombone,” which showcased the trombonist playing a series of glissandi, or slides from one note to another:

The “B” side, recorded on the other side of the disc, is called “Society Blues”, which follows the 12-measure blues form that we have discussed in class. Try and listen to this and count through the 12 measures:

I’ll try to repost my section material here for the rest of the quarter. In the meantime, wish me luck as I get the hang of this new gig . . .

Hitomi Oba, Dominic Thiroux, and Jessica Jones at Blue Whale

Jessica Jones, Hitomi Oba — Blue Whale — 7/24/12

By Alex W. Rodriguez for LA Weekly West Coast Sound

This was is my first piece for LA Weekly — and what a great set to review! Jones and Oba, her former student, brought all original music and sounded fantastic. It also featured a cameo from Ambrose Akinmusire, another former student of Jones, who sounded amazing even as a last-minute addition.

Alex Pinto and Laura Maguire, co-founders of the SF Offside Festival

Six Creative Presenters Finding New Audiences for Jazz

By Alex W. Rodriguez for A Blog Supreme/NPR Jazz

I wrote this about a month ago for NPR Music, and in the midst of end-of-the-year shenanigans forgot to link to it here at the blog. In case you missed it, do have a look: the piece gives an overview of six jazz presenters that are finding new ways to reach out to jazz listeners.

The most recent example of me parting with money in exchange for music

This weekend, NPR Music intern Emily White wrote a well-meaning (and well-written) reflection on her relationship to music — namely, the fact that she never purchased any, given the free and easy access with which she has grown up.

I, too, have purchased little music since my regular trips to the Used Jazz CD shelves at Everyday Music in high school, unless you count pre-ordering a few things through Kickstarter campaigns (the latest of which, Darcy James Argue’s new record, has four hours left and has reached its goal!) In fact, I think the last piece of music that I directly purchased was Argue’s previous album, back in 2009.

But that’s largely because I have had the good fortune of falling into the jazz journalism world, where I am given promotional copies of music for review. Given the excellent stuff that comes across my desk, I am rarely compelled to reach out and buy more.

But this strongly-worded and well-argued rebuttal to Emily’s confessional has me thinking a little bit more closely about the ethics of my music listening habits. And with your help, I’d like to publicly lay out a set of guiding principles for my future listening, and check back later to see whether or not I was able to live up to my aspirations: 

1) I uninstalled Spotify, and will never use it to stream music. It seems pretty clear to me that this organization is not interested in being a part of a sustainable solution for artist revenues. Those ads were annoying, anyway.

2) I will only use a file-sharing program to download music that is not released digitally in any form. This is rare, but applicable occasionally to some early jazz and other obscure things that I have needed to track down for research.

3) I will spend at least 1% of my annual income on directly purchasing music or supporting artists in some way financially (such as Kickstarter). This is approximately the same amount of money that I give to the local meditation community of which I am a member. I wish it could be more, but the reality is that my grad student budget affords me almost zero disposable income — and $20/month is the best I can do right now. I will also, whenever possible, make an effort to purchase music through whatever channel benefits the artist most directly.

4) Starting in July, I will review at least 3 CDs per month — either at this blog or elsewhere — supporting the artists who are making great music and are generous enough to send me promotional copies for review by touting their awesomeness for all the world to hear.

Is there anything else that I should include as I consider what principles will guide my listening in this digital age? Am I being too easy on myself here? Too strict? Please share your thoughts in the comments — I’d love for this to be the start of a conversation about what reasonable and ethical baselines can be established for music listeners today, and will add any provisions that are good additions to what I have laid out. Thanks for being a part of the conversation!

UPDATE: Lots of well-reasoned responses to the debate are cropping up — I’d recommend Erin McKeown’s post that stakes out a solid middle ground, and also another Emily White’s defense of the NPR intern’s initial post. Also, David McCarthy’s call for everyone to appreciate the complexities of the situation, and not boil things down to “personal responsibility” arguments, and Wesley Verhoeve’s spirited takedown of Lowery. I agree with all of these, and still hope that the conversation can move beyond name-calling and melodramatic blog trolling towards some small steps that can be taken towards artists making a sustainable living making great music, and actually connecting meaningfully with people who enjoy that music.

Fred Wesley at the Oceanside Jazz Festival

In case you were wondering, Fred Wesley still knows how to get down. At the tender age of 68, the Funkiest Trombonist of All Time overcame a long cross-country flight and a bout with acute bronchitis to serve as the guest artist for the Oceanside Jazz Festival, an all-day celebration of local college and high school jazz ensembles.

I drove down to Oceanside to catch the final concert, which featured the Mira Costa Jazz Collective and Mira Costa Oceanside Jazz Orchestra (operating under the clever acronym MOJO) directed by Steve Torok with Wesley as the guest soloist. 

Fred was gracious enough to chat a bit before the show, although he was clearly exhausted from the day’s medical adventures. He had participated in an earlier Q & A session with the students at the festival, many of whom had read his autobiography, and seemed heartened by the energy and the questions that the students had offered. He seemed to enjoy being in the role of lineage-bearer, which was especially clear when he was rehearsing the band before the concert.

I also have to admit, this was probably the most star-stricken I have ever felt in my life. Even with two years of experience interviewing jazz musicians under my belt, sitting in Wesley’s presence reduced me at times to a speechless fan-boy. The asymmetry of the exchange — with me knowing so much more about him than vice versa — was palpable, but Fred was gracious and patient.

Finally, the band took the stage to get the show rolling. The concert was much too long — I had to leave after two and a half hours while the big band played their penultimate song. Both ensembles performed 3-4 of their own material before inviting Wesley to join them as a guest soloist. Each time that he stepped on the stage, though, the level of musicianship and intensity throughout the ensemble shot through the roof.

Both bands were solid — the Collective especially played some really nice stuff. But it was Fred’s originals, such as “For the Elders” and “Pass the Peas,” that stood out, with Wesley coolly sailing through improvised solo features with his characteristically dark, round tone. Watching him live, I was reminded of Count Basie (Welsey was a member of the band briefly in the 1970s) in that he seemed above the fray, grooving impeccably with a brilliant nonchalance. He puts just the right amount of slide in his pitch inflections, making his lines bluesy but not brash. And even with a college band that occasionally struggled to lock it in, Wesley put everything so deep in the pocket that he brought everyone down inside with him.

Congratulations are in order for everyone involved with this festival — events like these are an excellent way to honor the jazz tradition and inspire young musicians. The whole evening had a great vibe, full of animated youngsters (yes, I’m 27 and I get to say that for once!) and presided over by the generous spirit of one of the music’s living legends.

There was also this, one last treat for that hopeless fan-boy:

Thanks, Fred! And to Joya Wesley, Fred’s daughter and manager, as well as to Steve Torok for putting it all together — and of course to the many students whose enthusiasm for the music laid the foundation for this wonderful event.