Standard Time
I believe it was Alabama that sang "If you're gonna play in Texas, you gotta have a fiddle in the band."
Another musical truism is that if you're gonna play the trumpet, you're gonna have to play some jazz. I really think that most trumpet players have to come to some sort of reconciliation with the jazz idiom at some point. It's like every serious pianist will inevitably be exposed to Chopin.
There are some pretty iconic figures in the jazz world who played trumpet, the most revered and recognizable of whom would probably be Louis Armstrong. But under him you've also got the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, pretty recognizable guys in their own right.
But my first exposure to jazz was a fellow by the name of Wynton Marsalis. His album
Standard Time Volume 1 was a real musical education. I don't think I had heard anything like this stuff before! The album starts off with a crazy ride-cymbal-driven drum groove and then the piano comes in with what seemed to my young ears to be the most arrhythmic, dissonant-yet-laid back piano chords ever. And then, after all that settles in to your psyche as acceptable levels of noise, Wynton bends into the long held out first note of "Caravan," the old Duke Ellington standard.
It seemed that once again, my ears hadn't yet grown appendages evolved enough to capture all of this music. Once again, this was music from another planet. A planet of "cool," where everything was made up as they went along. I remember having the gall to tell my trumpet teacher at the time that Wynton didn't play very accurately, and I'm sure he just chuckled. There were all kinds of botched notes and seeming mess-ups that even
I, in my two years of playing could hear.
I didn't realize at the time, but this kind of music was a recording of a "controlled experiment." These guys didn't read music off of paper. They let it just come out of their heads. There are amazing lessons to be learned from these captured "moments." One, the freedom. Man, it must be like the freedom a visual artist feels when looking at a blank canvas or a lump of clay. That silence is to become whatever they decide to make it. But with this Wynton music, I have enough experience playing music to realize that the freedom is tempered by trust amongst the musicians. There are four guys in the room all trusting each other to support each other's ideas as they're coming out. That's music-making at a pretty vulnerable level.
All of these revelations and lessons learned and analysis are all after the fact. To be honest, when I first heard Standard Time, I didn't really "get it." (I'm still not sure I really "get" jazz all the time.) But even so, by the seventh grade, this album was my favorite. I can pinpoint the year because I remember writing that in my seventh grade French class. "Le album de mon favorite es Le Standard Time de la Wynton Marsalis." Or something to that effect.
I still have problems realizing what it is about the performances on this album that just feel so...good...to me. I know it has something to do with how the rhythm section is playing-sort of reserved, but tight at the same time. (I had a friend in college point out to me that, for Wynton's band at this time,
tempo was even up for group improvisation. And so, in some songs you'll hear all four musicians moving together to higher tempos and back down. That's some sensitive playing! It's kind of like in one of those early black and white Disney cartoons where Donald Duck is zooming down the mountain in his car without any brakes and with a trailer and whenever he hits a bend in the road he comes
this close to falling down a cliff.) That Disney image might create the impression that this is wild and crazy careening music, but it's not. For the most part, this is really subdued playing. The harmonies that Marcus Roberts is playing on the piano sound hollow, as if they are leaving some breathing room for the soloist. But yet, all of this subtlety doesn't devolve into generic "smoky club music." This music is still somehow alive and present; it doesn't fall into the background for me. I don't know, man, you just need to
hear this stuff to know what I'm talking about.
Wynton is still my favorite trumpet player and I came to realize that he is a true "cross-over" artist as some people in the biz would call it. He has had success in both the jazz and classical worlds, which is quite rare, since both sides have more than their share of purist snobs. (And Wynton's a bit of a snob in his own right, since he apparently hates the rock n' roll that the kids are so crazy about. But I forgive him for that.)
Like I said, I can't say that I always understand what jazz musicians are up to. Their harmonic language is pretty close to incomprehensible to me. I understand the concept of swing and I can play that feel pretty competently but I usually refrain from faking jazz out of respect. But I still enjoy listening to it a lot of the time, thanks to my introduction by Wynton Marsalis' Standard
Time Volume 1.
Big Bad Bill is Sweet William Now...
Congratulations to Aaron Copeland and Christina Becker on their name change to Aaron and Christina Copeland over the weekend.
The marriage ceremony was quite a surprise and one of the most bizarre things I've ever witnessed in my life. Bizzarre in a good way, though.
I wish you guys much luck and I'm very happy for you, my friends.
Love,
Mike
Join Together with the Band
So, growing up, it was mostly Pink Floyd and Van Halen battling for supremacy over my musical soul. (Pink Floyd had a real setback around ninth grade when I thought that the devil was talking to me through the album
Animals. But that’s a story for another time, I suppose.) It’s funny; the very first instrument I learned was actually the trumpet, since that’s one you can learn in school, even though I had a heart for rock n’ roll. Neither Pink Floyd, nor Van Halen had a trumpet player in their band. And let’s face it, there’s not a single band instrument that can touch the coolness inherent in an electric guitar. Not even the clarinet. Can you imagine some long-hair strutting around, ready to shred on a tuba?
No, of course not. Because it’s not
cool. (Incidentally, there is a band on Ani Difranco’s label called
Drums and Tuba that attempt to refute my theory, but only partially succeed. I'm pretty sure that they are only “cool” to music-geeks like me. But I digress.)
The fact is, around seventh grade, the trumpet was not only an instrument of farty-type noises. It would also prove to be the instrument of my social doom. I still have not recovered from the depths of uncoolness that playing the trumpet in band brought me. To try to put it simply, band kids, I mean the ones who really like being in band, sort of live in an alternate reality-
just barely removed from everyone else’s reality. It probably has to do with all that time dressed in wool with a giant feather sticking out of your hat.
So there it is. Being in band either: 1) made me a nerd, 2) helped express the inner nerd that was there all the time, or 3) a little of both.
Since I’m concerned with the development of people’s relationship to music, particularly my own, I will now set aside all of the social humiliation that comes about from being a “band geek” or “orch dork,” (and I’ve actually had a foot in both of those worlds.)
For the overwhelming truth is that learning to play musical instruments and the focused study of all that, had more of an influence on my aesthetic assumptions than any “great albums” or “great songs” I heard growing up.
I remember the revelation in fifth grade band class when I realized that not everybody was always playing the same notes. “What?! Only chaos can result!” my orderly little absolutist mind recoiled. I was besieged by a genuinely worried feeling over the prospect. “If everyone’s not playing the same notes, how does each person know if they’re right?” (Oh, man! the grown-up lessons that could be taught from that simple little thought. Ideas like trust, intuition, self-awareness, the other. You could even use that as a stepping-off point for a discussion on ethics: “how do I know I’m playing my part right? Amidst all these other people and their own notes?”)If my 28, soon-to-be-29 year old self could have somehow been around at the time of my fifth grade self, I would have given myself a kiss on the head for that concerned question.
Anyway, I’ve spent a lot of time in my life learning the rules of music: from how to play a D below the staff in tune on a trumpet to how to write 4-part harmony so that each part is smooth. How to play a diminished chord on the guitar to memorizing the notes of a harmonic minor scale. And there’s still so much to learn and listen to. I know that I tend to listen to music in a manner so as to put this head-knowledge to use. And so my nature is to pick apart music that I hear. I am almost obsessed with trying to articulate what exactly it is that strikes me about a piece or a song that I like. I approach music in a very heady way.
But, as you can see from the beginnings of this blog, there are other times when the value of music comes more from externals, like where I was at the time, or what I was feeling, etc.
This all raises some pretty big questions I would appreciate some discussion on: Does music or art have any intrinsic value other than what we bring to it? For instance, does Beck’s
Sea Change have any value separate from the fact that I heard it one time in the middle of the desert and was moved? If not,why the consistency among different kinds of people's pleasure over a certain piece of art or music? Or is there something “in the notes themselves?”
Are artists more equipped to appreciate art than other people?
Wish You Were Here
Pink Floyd was also responsible for another revelation in my young life as music appreciator-the idea of instrumental music. If I’m not mistaken, my first “wow, this music doesn’t have words!” experience was with the Pink Floyd album
Wish You Were Here. It’s another one of those albums that I came to realize was pretty widely regarded as a “classic.” But to my eight or nine-year old ears and mind, I may as well have had the only copy. It might as well have been the band playing for me only in that bedroom when I first heard the opening minutes of “Shine On, You Crazy Diamond.” The first song on the album, it faded in very slowly, as if it had been playing for all eternity and I was being blessed with a private performance.
Well, maybe I’m getting a little carried away, but as I said before- the idea of
pure music for music’s sake, that was a pretty phenomenal kick in the pants for me. It was so mysterious! “Why,” I asked, as minutes passed with no vocals. "Why aren’t they saying something?”
I talk a lot about shifts in your aesthetics when presented with something new, something that doesn’t follow all of the rules you’ve just started to figure out. Well, I hadn’t developed any Piagetian connections in my little brain to assimilate this new idea. I didn’t know it at the time, but “Shine On, You Crazy Diamond” forces a listener to ask some pretty big critical questions. What is a “song?” Does a song have to have singing? Is music any more or less valuable if it doesn’t have words?
At that time, I guess I was a miniature absolutist, because I decided from that point on, that instrumental music was superior to music with words. So, the parts of “Shine On I-IX” without singing were infinitely more enjoyable than those sullied by vocals. (Even though it’s been years and years since I’ve heard that album, I now think that the contrasts between the two types of music and how they are connected is much more interesting than the either/or discussion. For instance, I can still hear in my head the jarring shock when, after a long time of wordless atmospherics, a voice comes from out of nowhere, singing “Remember when you were young…” What?!? All that time going by, of uncertainty of what’s coming next, of trying to figure it all out, and here comes this voice, giving a simple command? That’s pretty messed-up.
Wish You Were Here, as an album, gives you a pretty nice mix of the long periods of instrumental gooey-ness and some actual traditional “songs,” like “Have a Cigar,” the incredibly creepy “Welcome to the Machine,” (even at my young age, I got the feeling they were singing about deep things I’d never understand), and of course, the title song-which is fairly simple, but is one of the more beautiful songs in their catalog, I believe. Again, it’s the Gilmour voice, this time sounding sort of resigned.
Through the rest of my childhood and into high school I came to really revere the rest of the music of Pink Floyd. In fact, one of the coolest moments of my sophomore year of high school was getting to go see the Roger Waters-less version of the band in Dallas with Mark. It was one of those rare, independent-feeling moments as I was allowed to skip school and get on an airplane by myself into a big wide world for the approximately 45 minute flight to the biggest city I had ever seen. I remember keeping my suitcase under my seat because I couldn’t figure out what else to do with it and I remember the lady sitting next to me, giving me a very pleasant, understanding look when I stammered out to her, where I was going and what I was doing.
Right around the same time as I discovered…No. Right around the time I was discovered by
Wish You Were Here, Mark showed me the most recent Floyd album-
A Momentary Lapse of Reason, another soundtrack to my childhood. That album is a perfect gray, rainy-day album. Recounting all of this makes me wonder whether I can blame Pink Floyd for my naturally melancholy disposition. To be exposed to all of that heaviness at such a young age….well, it can’t be good. Did those bastards rob me of life? It’s like the beginning of
High Fidelity. Did I listen to the rock n’ roll because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to the rock n’ roll?
Have you ever been in a public bathroom, perhaps sitting in the far right stall, and listened to someone walk in to take a pee at the urinal and seem to enjoy it too much? For me, it's embarrassing to listen to someone make those kinds of noises, regardless of if they know I'm in there or not.
So, come on people, have the courtesy to keep your pleasure internalized when taking a pee in public.
What's the Big Idea?
I’ve got another memory involving Mark and music.
Like I said before, my brother and I are very different types of people. I said I never did anything wrong as a kid and I meant it. (Now, I realize that there are sins of omission, but that’s a wholenotherthing.) But I can remember one moment where our differences didn’t keep us apart. It turns out Mark wasn’t a total “rawk” purist; he also had a softer, sensitive side.
I’m interested in perspective changes that come about with exposure to different kinds of music and I was still just a little kid when I had my second lesson in musical aesthetics; the soundtrack was Pink Floyd’s
The Wall.
I have this indelible memory of Mark and I hanging out in his bedroom one afternoon, a rarity since we were so far apart in age. His room always smelled like a sweet mix of stale cigarette smoke and some awful green cologne, maybe Brut. I can remember lying next to him listening to The Wall, while he repeated lines from the songs to give them special emphasis, as if they were profound or poetic. And all around me there were these strange sounds like cars rushing by and people knocking on doors and dramatic sections and strings and a rock band. It really sounded like a movie without pictures to me. Even though it sounded a little scary, and it had to be bad for me if Mark was listening to it, I was intrigued. And the tape case had these strange cartoon drawings on it!
So, what was it about
The Wall that was so new, so interesting to me? I think it was designed for people about 10-15 years older than I was at the time-someone like Mark, who hated school and authority. Those were the kinds of people who would get anything out of lyrics like “We don’t need no education” and a story line of a rocker’s descent into madness and building some kind of psychological wall up between himself and other people. Obviously, that’s all lost on an 8 year old kid.
But what I took from it was the idea of rock music as some kind of art. Some kind of epic, extended story that’s trying to say something important. For some reason, that appealed to me as a curious little kid just as much as Eddie Van Halen’s crazy virtuosity. This was obviously rock n’ roll, the guitars were dirty-sounding, the drums were pretty loud, but it was much bigger than anything I had ever heard before. It was a dichotomy. (I said that to myself as a little kid-“This Pink Floyd music is a dichotomy between important art and rock n’ roll, performed by regular guys.) That’s not true, I didn’t know the word dichotomy and I know now that Pink Floyd weren’t “regular guys.” For one thing, they were English and everybody knows there’s no such thing as a regular English guy. For another thing, Roger Waters had a pretty messed-up psychology, God help him. And above all, they were artists.
But all this belies one of my secrets-that I believe rock n’ roll can be art, not just rebellious devil-music. I’ve always felt uncomfortable when critics pigeonhole rock music as strictly a music of rebellion. They always cite the likes of early rock n’ roll and they probably hold Iggy Pop as their savior. While I have no problems with basic, no- frills rock, I wouldn’t dare claim that as the only way to go about expressing one’s self with a guitar and drums. I obviously decided fairly early on that rock could come from the head and heart as well as from the crotch.
So the time was 1979 when
The Wall came out. One year after Van Halen’s debut, a couple years after the Brits learned about punk music and here we have this anti-punk mixed into the stew. So I look back and I see that
The Wall is pretty much musical theater. When the Floyd played these songs live, it was an “event”-stage dressing, the whole album played as one “piece” and they actually built a wall between themselves and the audience during the show. These are “big ideas,” not just “a bunch of catchy songs that we wrote.”
Another nice element you get with this album is the contrast of singers’ voices. Roger Waters’ voice just sounds like a crazy man-nasal and very rarely even singing, more like dramatic acting-talk or Sprechstimme, to put it in classical terms. But then you have David Gilmour’s buttery voice: mannered and constant and soothing. It was only recently, with their reunion performance at Live 8, that I realized just how special his voice is. “Comfortably Numb” is a terrific song that captures what I’m talking about, but it’s really all over the album. Gilmour is almost literally the calm voice of reason to the drug-crazed paranoia of Waters.
I thought, on that day listening with my eldest brother, that I had just heard something “really important,” (and I realize in the grand scheme of things today, a silly album by a silly band is not “really important.”) But I think, as an appreciator of popular music, that we could use some more “big ideas” pulled off so well.
The Last Word on Van Halen
It’s an age-old discussion, (well, really more of a 21-years-old discussion.) When talking about Van Halen front-men, who’s the better: David Lee Roth or Sammy Hagar? (I’ll leave Gary Cherone out of it since he seems more of an apocryphal Van Halen member.)
I’ll let you know that I am of the Roth school, I dig that music more because of its overall happy go-lucky vibe as opposed to the aching drama of Hagar’s voice. Which is not to say that Van Hagar didn’t come up with some stuff that affects me, most of it kind of ballady love songs, but I’m a sucker for that every now and then. “Why Can’t This Be Love?” “Love Walks In” And I guess there’s a rocker here and there that I like—“5150”, some stuff off
For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. As always, I’m a bit of a centrist.
But Roth was the voice of my childhood so I have to go with him for the final vote.
What say you?
Brother, Let Me Be Your Servant
Continuing on in my recount of first musical influences, I can remember several moments with my oldest brother Mark. When I was a little kid, Mark was the rebellious one of the family. We are 10 years apart and we might as well be light years apart in personality. I still contend with my parents to this day that I never did anything wrong growing up because I observed how much trouble Mark got into. Drugs and drinking and smoking-all of this while he was still under my parents’ roof in high school and probably before. We were pretty much polar opposites. I liked school and I liked to please my parents. (It is sort of amusing to see how domesticated Mark has turned out-with a wife and two kids.) We’re no longer polar opposites, just regular opposites. He talks a lot and is always telling jokes. I’m pretty quiet and reserved.
Anyway, all of that to say that if my mom was the angel on my musical shoulder Mark was the devil. Mom may have given me The Carpenters but Mark introduced me to the ROCK, and I’m not talking about the actor/wrestler. I remember spending one week engaged in the project of dubbing off copies of his Van Halen tapes totally secret-like, because if Mom found out that I was listening to Mark’s music she would have freaked! In her mind, I’m sure that if Van Halen and Kiss and AC/DC weren’t a direct
cause of his rebelliousness, they were at least a symptom. I also had to keep the secret from Mark, because I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea about me and try to proselytize me to the dark side of bad boys. Just because I was a good kid it didn’t mean that I couldn’t listen to bad-ass music. At least that’s what I thought and I had no faith that Mark or Mom could figure that out.
And I spent that week also engaged in a separate artistic endeavor- drawing Eddie Van Halen’s electric guitar. He and that guitar were a fixation for me. It was like everything cool about music could be expressed quite succinctly in this little image-a long-haired guy and his Frankenstein guitar. Eddie totally changed rock n’ roll guitar. (Some would say for better, some for worse-since he was the catalyst for all manner of 80’s hair band guitar-players.) I know this now, but back then, I just knew I liked the unmistakable “skill” that he showed-off. “Eruption” was the coolest thing ever! It was like what an alien would sound like if he came to earth and picked up a guitar. Crazy-fast notes. Dive-bomb howling. It’s all in there.
Oh, yeah. There was also some guy named David Lee Roth in the band. I didn’t care much about him or his words. In my young mind, the words just get in the way of the cool music. I suppose that never left me.
I’ve listened to a lot of music since then. And I’ve been inundated with the doctrine of what kinds of music are “cool” to listen to. The 90’s pretty much killed all discussions of instrumental technique, at least in rock music. It became grotesquely uncool to play like Eddie. Two-handed tapping and whammy bar histrionics are a laughable absurdity from a by-gone musical era. It’s like extolling the musical virtues of the hurdy-gurdy. But I have no problem saying that the first Van Halen album is the sole reason I ever picked up a guitar in the first place several years down the road. Highlights:
“Runnin’ With the Devil”-still feel kind of bad that one of the big musical influences of my childhood, the first Van Halen album starts with this title. Maybe Mom was right and I had reason to be secretive as I began my life-long descent into hell, all brought about by rock n’ roll.
“You Really Got Me”- even as a kid I knew that they were taking an old song and DESTROYING it.
“Jamie’s Cryin’”-Oh, oh, oh Jamie’s Cryin’ It’s a chorus you can’t forget once you’ve heard it. I was a little kid, so the talk of male-female relationships was lost on me. (As it still kinda is.)
“Atomic Punk”-what more do you need to know? The tile pretty much says it all. “Nobody rules these streets at night but me- the ATOMIC PUNK!”
Speaking of which, it is interesting to me how an Eddie Van Halen-led band came about at the same time as punk rock, when their aesthetics have some pretty big differences. Like I said, Eddie was a god on the guitar, playing all kinds of weedly-weedlies on the west coast, while the Ramones could barely play their three-chord songs in New York.
Today, I have most of the Van Halen catalog on CD, gathering dust in my bedroom but, ironically, I no longer have that first album- the one that kinda started it all. But I can still hear it in my head.
Any Van Halen fans out there?
Dear Old Mom
I suppose I was first exposed to music the way most people were- sitting in the backseat of Mom's poop-brown station wagon, listening to late 70's-early 80's radio while she drove around town running her errands with her fabulous baby boy. "My Baby Takes the Morning Train," "Thank God I'm a Country Boy," all manner of Motown hits... I'd listen to my mom sing along to the radio and I can still hear her voice and the squeaky-ness of the vinyl-covered seats, which had withstood quite a bit of abuse over the years from my two older brothers' pens and the sharp ends of graphing compasses. But these were the days when it was just me and mom. Mark and Todd disappeared during the days, going to some strange thing called "school," and my mom had me all to herself.
So, anyway, those are the first musical memories for me. And mom's eclectic musical tastes were passed onto me as much as the twisted strands of DNA containing her sense of humor.
So, even now, I can't hear The Carpenters "On Top of the World" or Simon and Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson," or Carol King's "Too Late Baby" or Billy Joel's "She's Always a Woman To Me," or the Supremes' "Where Did Our Love Go?" or Chicago's "Saturday in the Park" without hearing mom's voice in my head and getting a little wistful for my youngest days, when life was simple--me and mom cruising the town in the middle of a bright, hot, Savannah day.
All of that to say that I think our parents are our first signpost in developing a musical aesthetic language- a baseline, if you will. At least mine were.
So, what about you? Early musical memories?
A Musician
All right. As anybody who is actually reading this most likely knows, I am a musician. I play guitar in a crazy rock and roll band that sounds like a cross between They Might Be Giants and oh, I don't know, Queen? David Bowie? Alice Cooper? Who the hell knows? That's always the toughest question: "What kind of music do you play?"
Why don't you just go to the web-site and decide for yourself:
www.grandpagriffith.com. We're getting desperately close to that second album coming out and I can't wait for people to hear it.
I was telling a friend yesterday that the image I get of the band up to this point is that of a funnel, funell, funnell, (however you write that) that we just pour money into. But it's a lot of fun regardless.
So, I was thinking a sort of musical biography would be a good way to produce some material for this here blog. You know, "what are the albums that have caught hold of you over the years?" (And there's a lot of them for me.)
I really do believe that, for musicians at least, the music we discover and listen to can affect us in pretty powerful ways. And I'm not just talking about dancing to the Grateful Dead's _American Beauty_ with windswept abandon. I'm talking about the basics of our assumptions of what art is and isn't and how those assumptions can be affirmed and challenged upon exposure to new stuff.
And I think it would be awesome for you guys to do likewise and tell me what has rocked your world in the past-not just music, but books and movies and ideas, too.
So, let me get my thoughts together and I'll be back with one...
Who IS That Mysterious Masked Man?
I'm going to get the preliminaries out of the way. I work a desk job. It's pretty low-pressure. The bulk of my job description is to answer the phone and schedule old ladies for mamograms. Yes, I get tired of talking to women about their breasts.
But not as tired as I get around three o'clock every day. That's when my lunch usually hits me and I really need a nap.
The bulk of my job is to talk to people on the phone about stuff I really don't care about. This is all not meant to complain. This is an easy job that pays the bills and I very rarely ever think about work when I'm not here in the building.
But I'm very intentional in calling what I do from 10:30-7 a
job. Not a
career. (I have a feeling this is going to be an issue in future posts.)
But let's get into some specifics about this job, after all, I've got some cyber-space to fill:
I can count on being called "ma'am" on the phone at least once a day. Which is sort of amusing since I have the voice of God.
I hear the non-word "mammiogram" at least twice daily and about every other day I get asked to schedule a monogram. When you talk to people on the phone regularly, you just sort of give up on REALLY listening and correcting and just get the call done as quickly as possible.
When I'm not talking on the phone I'm usually reading stuff on the internet or writing. It's too frustrating to try to read an actual book in the middle of the day. Too many interruptions.
Right
Ok. So it looks all right.
I'm mostly a rationalist, so I have a set of rules that I feel I need to abide by with the content for this little bloggy experiment:
- Not too much emotion-laden gobbledy-gook. It's better to err on the side of too boring than to just post potential emo lyrics.
- Not just boring recounts of the events of my dull life. In this blog I want to address the life of the mind- ideas, music, art, philosophy-life on a grander scale than just "I had yogurt for breakfast this morning." (Which happens to be true, by the way.)
- I reserve the right to ignore 1 and 2 if the mood strikes me.
A Beginning
In the beginning was the word. And the word was "In." The boredom at work just got to be too much. It's soul-crushing.
So, I have entered the blogosphere like so many others.
Hopefully, I can come up with some stuff worth reading. And typing. So, let's stop for a moment and see how that looks.
