Quick-typed Reflection on a Quick Trip to NYC

I returned to New York. To my surprise, the jazz scene had not collapsed in my absence. Not bad! I gave New York a dose of my charm; in return it gave me a dose of the cowonaviwus. Fair enough.

My June 2024 assessment persists in its accuracy. The squeeze of tax and inflation tightens one notch at a time and the expectations levied against musicians get ridiculouser and ridiculouser. One new thought struck me, though, as a result of my having paused music in order to swim around in the world of education technology. That new thought: musicians, as a group, comprise an undertapped resource of technical skill and executive functioning. These days I get to meet directors-of-this-and-that, entrepreneurs, and ~*gasp*~ investors. They are often rich. They *own* things. But let me declare in no uncertain terms: *these are not impressive people.* Yeah, yeah, a couple of them are. But nothing compared to my friends. My creative, smart, broke friends.

I wish I could fix it. I ain't got enough marbles to fix it, at least not yet. Hey, billionaires: 1) start reading my blog — it'll be good for you; 2) here's your new scheme: dump ten million doubloons into a hedge fund. Don't hire economists — I know you're not that stupid — *or* physics PhDs, either. They are expensive! Hire musicians. Jazz musicians might just be the ultimate pick here! They can learn the ins-and-outs of an arcane, technical language. They can show up on time and think on their feet. You can get 'em for a quarter of the usual quant trader salary, I promise. In three months they'll be as good as any Caltech-dweeb-turned-quant-dweeb. I will help you pick them! We just need like, six, man...that'd inject enough of the ol' Kapital to buy out a couple sweet-ass venues. Some studio time. A new dojo to rival those stupid schools.

I promise you the Python you need to build a trading app or to do a little ML pales in comparison, complexity-wise, to the rigors of harmony and voice leading. It's easier to talk to an investor than to one of the brainfriend bookers who dangle our fates in front of us. The zillionaire who figures this out is gonna smile at their preposterous returns while picking up a legitimate mitzvah along the way. Not my quest — I'm about $9.9999 Million short — but the idea's free. You're welcome. If you're feeling generous, cut me a check for the cost of an old Buescher.

No zillionaires out there? Too bad. What can we do right now? IDK. Maybe learn some Python anyway, or at least some Excel. Work 16 hours a week thinking circles around some donut-munching normies. You'll still have time to shed. To what end? The million-dollar question indeed.

Truncating this post before it drips into the sadness that tempts me every time.

One highlight in NYC: walking through Sunnyside, then Astoria, then to the northern tip of Queens where industrial equipment slumbers and the wind whips the smell of wastewater treatment away from your nostrils. Double back to Abuqir and finish with a coffee at the arch-Variety by McGolrick.

A lowlight: the worst opera production I have ever seen. It reeked of money, perversion, depravity...and yet, the chardonnay-addled yentae of the UWS cackled it right up. Sigh. My sense of superiority over these people compels me to brandish two YouTube links with no further comment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B1kv4v4o9I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMY3Ou9L5xE

Until next time.

Next time: spill a bean or two about my next record? Fukubukuro of game reviews? The once-and-for-all treatise on video game music? Grandpappy’s writing tips? Whatever,

What to do...

Seven months ago, my wife and I moved from NYC back to Los Angeles, where we both grew up. I could have squirted out a sappy letter to the city and lamented the inevitable lower-quality jazz here in LA and everywhere else. I could have sliced off a blistering takedown of my NYC-musical discontents despite the city's prestige. Or a post that would boil down to "times are changin'...". But nothing came.

"It won't be the same without you."

It will! That's kind of the point of New York: get the best people together so that if you lose one or two, your scene persists. The scenes intermix and the top people blast the ceiling off what you think is possible.

The basic formula still works. New York is a city of masters. But the margin for error shrinks every day and meanwhile the chicken-and-egg problem of so-called talent grows.

"How do you make it in New York?"

"You have to be good."

"How do you get good?"

"Move to New York."

The open secret was always that the city provides ways for hustlers to scrape by even at low income levels, despite all the glitz and flaunty wealth. But there are limits. Good luck pushing your monthly expenses under $2,000 per month: that's twenty $50 gigs and ten $100 gigs. Yeah right! Not enough calories in a drink on-the-house and complimentary baby carrots...

My solution was always "day job." So too for many peers. Music can survive on nights and weekends. But we demand more than dormant survival from the tip of the spear! Music blossoms when its roots have time and nutrition to take hold. Maybe it's an uncomfortable truth but many musicians are at their best living princely lives, as if supported by aristocrats with only a sprinkling of deadlines and "real life." Rich parents play this role in more cases than anyone admits. Your own personal aristocrat!

Long overdue: the admission of just how bourgeoise jazz is. How irrelevant it feels like music has become! God, no! Please! But ask anyone over 30 about the cultural impact of music "back then"... The Zoomers don't have their answer to Michael Jackson or The Beatles, and worse, their cultural soil couldn't support such a figure in the delicate dance between expectation and declaration. "Don't give them what they want...they don't know what they want...give them what they should want..."

What to do, what to do... ugh! It's so bleak.

Here I am, heart full of music, a battery bursting, no way to make myself useful. Put out a record? Why? Play a gig? Who cares? Start a YouTube channel? Come on.

The creaking demise of music as an actual cultural force seems overdetermined from the perspective of today. An inevitable consequence of the passive nature of musical activity (listening), set in motion by the advent of recording technology? A loss to the more-competitive attention grabbers: videogames and social media? The fruits of the evil labor of music-tech companies, particularly Spotify et al?

Yes, yes, and yes. We may be able to win some fights against those forces. But we have to attack with our strongest weapons and toughest soldiers. Now the painful part: musicians share some blame too.

I'm tighter with the weirdos who have never even attempted commercial music: the jazz people, the classical people, the avant-garde people, the computer nerds. Not only did we not stop the moustache-twirling bigwigs from digging our graves; we shoveled dirt, too, and jumped right in the hole.

We did too much for too little: uncompetitive pleasantness concealing deflation in the value of music.

We clung to conservative ideas of what music is, missing all the irony of doing so as progressive, often esoteric artists. We still make songs and albums and pay for legacy studios and scratch our heads when nothing leads anywhere.

We did not teach people how to dig what we do. "Accessibility" has become a loaded and stupid word. But you want people to access your music, one way or another. You are an exhibitionist in some unignorable way!

"How much money would you need to be paid to never release a record again?"

"How much to never play a live show again?"

What's it all really about? Is your music about you? About, uh, love? Technique? God? Sex? Respect?

Answer that question — not easy — and then ask the harsh followup: "Am I working towards that? At all?"

As my own answers develop, they reaffirm my hopeful predictions about music: that it should/can/will return to its nature as an activity: an activity valid without producing objects, valid as a way to spend time.

Spend time, the ultimate currency, on music. That transaction is enough.

I'll follow up. I have more to say about the economics of music. Long story short: the big picture is dark indeed but if that's enough for you to quit, get out of the kitchen.

On the Compositions of Ferment Below

I wrote a post telling the story of the experimental editing you hear on the record. That editing is really the "main idea" of the project: more significant than the details of the tunes or the performances, I'd argue. But of course the project began with standard jazz fare: tunes, read off lead sheets, with blowing. A core of more-or-less traditional jazz, modulo my own special interests, sits within the music. I want a transparent record of how this album came to be, so as a counterpart to the post on editing, here's a reflection on the (jazz-) compositional thinking behind the 6 tunes on the album.

0. Big Picture

Jazz is night music. Even a morning person like me has to admit it. Jazz creates a luscious backdrop for smokin' and drinkin' and seducin'. You even see it in the venues; the Village Vanguard, the best and most famous jazz club in the world, is self-consciously dingy.  High Firmament opposed the nocturnal spirit of jazz by drawing on Mozart and constructivist, mathematical thinking.  Ferment Below instead embraces and celebrates the nocturnal jazz spirit. Trade coffee and carbohydrates for booze and fat. The tunes: simpler but more open. The mix: murkier but more romantic. The performances: rougher around the edges but more verklempt.

And as High Firmament's abstract narrative unfolds over the first half of a day, Ferment Below's spans afternoon-to-late-night.

Mini golf under a sagging sun;

Holdin' hands, on a walk, as that sun dives below the horizon;

Dionysian group dance, ushering in the night;

Flirtation and romance, chemically hazy;

A delicate touch after all is said and done;

The late night trip to the deli, suspended in impossible fluorescent light.

Not the healthiest night of your life. But if the candle's already burnin', might as well light up the other end too.

1. Hole in One 

It doesn't get more fun as a player than diatonic free jazz. Rip the scale up and down. It's meant to sound good over itself! A key is much richer than just its notes and the steps between them; it's more like a city, full of landmarks but also back alleys and weird little neighborhoods.  Hole in One visits the landmarks of A major and mostly travels well-worn paths...but I know some shortcuts. The main idea is a quick trip through IV, then I, then V, then the minor side: vii, vi, ii; you can guess where that ii leads. 

But why? Why not just declare "go nuts in A"? The answer is more about psychology than the exact musical outcome. I want everyone's ears open and perked up for the tonal moves that give diatonic music its rich structure. The secondary dominants, the modal shadings that leak in from nearby keys. The safety net of generic A major noodling remains underneath it all. But to give in all the way to the entropy of free jazz is to trade away a lot of what we love about lots of other music. On a formal level, the same thinking applies. Nothing about this tune screams "I need a bridge," but just having a bridge at all opens a little mental space. A little opposition, a little voltage. 

The bridge stacks two sharps onto the key signature, one at a time, to pave the way clear-as-day B major scale. This enables the trick of F♯-as-V, not just of B but also of D, the chord of the downbeat of the [A] section. Relative to D, F♯7 hits the most delicious and beautiful notes of a dominant: the ♭9 and the 13. This ain't exactly a new idea, but it ain't gettin' old either. When I play this tune live, I encourage the bass player to really push ahead, to anticipate changes. One semi-coincidence of this harmony is that the changes sound especially beautiful if the bass is one chord ahead. As in: F♯7/D; D/E; E7/A; A/B; ...

2. Short Way Around the Hill 

Children find it intuitively clear that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But that idea only applies in flat Euclidean space (a fiction), where the notion of "straight line" actually makes sense. Picture a tall but narrow mountain. Imagine you are at its base and you must travel to a point on the other side of its base, a 180 degree revolution around the peak. What's the shortest path? A "straight," direct line, all the way up and back down, is clearly not the best move. Should you instead walk around the base of the mountain and never climb at all? Or is there a compromise: a little elevation in exchange for less wraparound? The technical word for the kind of path we are looking for is geodesic, and if this puzzle erects your neck hair, dust off your calculus and drink down some differential geometry. A musician may take inspiration from the rock-climberly oblique paths a master voice-leader takes, the non-obvious moves that balance parallel and contrary motions in high-dimensional chord-world. Now I wish I could reveal my lovely and unexpected harmony-algorithm of Einsteinian phlegm. In no pocket do I possess such a thing. And in fact, most of the harmony of this tune is rather pedestrian. The cutest move, the one most in line with my mental image of a young-love stroll, is the meager brightening of a minor-7 chord into a dominant by raising its third. 

Those moments get a little extra weight from "mini-fermatas" that break up the pacing of the form, like a little skip to realign your gait with your girlfriend's so that you don't have to let her hand go. Another effect that surprises me, if only a smidge, is how those dominant ninth chords both lead to A♭ø7 despite being built on different roots. A♭m7, A♭9, A♭ø7 makes sense right away to me; Schumann pulls that kind of trick with aplomb. G♭9 to A♭ø7 feels fine too — Strayhornish — but I can't put my finger on why both moves kinda sound the same...I don't feel any tonal whiplash from one or the other. It likely has something to do with the near-symmetry of the dominant chord opening many ports to many nearby islands in the sea of harmony. The middle section exploits another old trick: two phrases whose melodies start the same but whose divergent harmony lead them away from each other. 

Finally, just to clear the air, it is not without some guilt that I write double flats. But I believe in the rules, and on top of that, as a transposing-instrument-player, I would rather see music written "correctly" in an ugly key than confront horrendous OJ-and-toothpaste-sharp-and-flat mixing just to accommodate a snowflake who can't lower the pitch of an F by a semitone. I even wrote out two versions of this chart, one in G♭ and one in F♯! But it's in G♭. The same G♭ as dovunque al mondo and un bel di, vedremo; you could not force me to call those F♯ at gunpoint.

3. Hot Rain Dance 

It's an eight-bar vamp. 

If anything, this is more of a game than a tune. Charge up energy — tension, friction, heat — by looping the hypnotic upbeat-only vamp. Once in a while, release the energy, Beyblade-style, with 16 bars of walking over an admittedly stupid twist on some bebop changes. 

Repeat, but do not rinse. Stay dirty. The ancestors of Hot Rain Dance are tunes like St. Thomas that build up energy and then let it rip with hard swing. I'm no Sonny Rollins but boy oh boy do I try.

4. Moments Away 

Opera: a world of contradictions. At once the most intimate and romantic art, but also inaccessible, snooty, anachronistic. To a composer's eyes, opera scores so often look dreary and basic, but the sound seduces and bewilders the ear. The illusion of objective time wilts away under the three-way-negotiation of singer, conductor, and orchestra; they all push and pull against each other, but the miracle is that it works. And not only does it work; the spaghetti-flow of time twangs your spaghetti-heartstrings in a way no other music can. A jazz quartet starts from a different place and commands different resources than an opera production, though. We can be more nimble and we can improvise. We can read tricky rhythms and then nudge them away from mathematical precision, into romance territory. This was the compositional puzzle of Moments Away: simulate some of the huge-lumbering-organism rhythmic tilt of romantic opera with a jazz quartet playing funky tuplets, and stride the harmonic line between Italian opera and American jazz.

The trick as a player is not to tense up for the tuplets. They must flow. It's tough and I admit that I regret my strategy for improvisation on this one as it appears on the record. I thought I could compound the operaticness by floating doubly over the floaty surface of the tune. If that band loosened up to the mega and followed me through the changes this could have worked (it may have devolved into a generic rubato wash, though), but better yet would have been playing it fairly straight over the form, lining up where you're supposed to. Better luck next time, self. The second [A] varies the first a little bit, cycling back to the home key rather than ending on V.

The bridge flips the scheme from the [A]s. Instead of the melody following the shifting rhythm section, the melody in [B] pushes against the beat and sits over a more stable and conventional harmonic rhythm.

I stooped not so low as to write this in F♭.

The last [A] provides another variation on the first two, embracing triplets even more and centering on the pungent-piquant-purple-power-punch chord ♯ivø7.

That chord really functions viiø7/V, here and elsewhere.

The Coda is just the sad and then briefly angry version of the bridge.

Stayed on the flat side here. Thought I could get away with it.

I will not be apologizing for the E𝄫 chord — you can stop asking.

5. Soft

This composition doesn't require a whole of explanation. It's Tchaikovsky-jazz: melody-driven, unafraid to loop, shamelessly conventional in its accompaniment layer. 

This oughta have a two-flat key signature. Apologies.

If only because there isn't much else to talk about, I will point out the E♭ major 7 chord — the IV in B♭ — in m. 7. I find this sound difficult to pull off.

"How could that be true? That's the most basic, week-one tonal destination in major!"

Correct. I find it hard to deploy IV as a pre-dominant, as an active lubricant, not as a destination. IV-to-V appears constantly, ubiquitously in rock and pop. The Classical version, ii6/5, is almost the same chord. But jazz likes its ii-Vs with 2 in the bass — understandable! — and chords built on 4 struggle to plug into the usual Hotwheels-track that shoots you to a resolution. Maybe just to my ears. Anyway, in this case, IV prolongs ii from the bar before and slows down the pace of harmonic action. I wouldn't know how to make this work on a faster or more aggressive tune!

6. Delicatessen

Looking back, Delicatessen and Moments Away form a pair that surrounds Soft — naked and simple — with shifting-ground semi-advanced classical-derived modern jazz. If Moments Away reaches for Puccini and Soft for Tchaikovsky, then Delicatessen reaches for someone German. Mahler will do — final answer. And indeed, this melody could be better commanded by a violin section or a solitary trumpet over strings than by an operatic soprano. It's just a bit too clever to earn the voice. 

Try out the ♯6 on a half-diminished chord. Sour and salty, like a pickle. 

In blowing, we played around with and ultimately committed to compressing the [break] bar to 7/8 so as not to interrupt the lithe 7/8 flow with a flabby 4/4. As in Moments Away, the bridge smooths out the harmonic rhythm so that the melody can sway. 

Four-times-two bars of the circle of fifths. If you don't like this chord progression, you don't like music. 

The 4:7 tuplet is not so much about its own sound, but rather psychology and strategy. A rhythm that forces you to tighten up and lock in saves the tune from getting too dreamy and moreover perks up our confidence when we all rendezvous there. That mental effect matters much more than communicating exact double-dotted eighth notes, or whatever. Jazz composition is about psychology and strategy! Beautiful music ain't enough. Write something that unlocks and strengthens the skills of your players. Don't get in their way. That's not to say musicians don't rise to challenges. But there's a difference between a rewarding challenge and a tedious one. I'd rather grapple with a math problem than a jigsaw puzzle.

~ ~ ~

Email me for sheet music if you want it. Read the corresponding post for High Firmament here.

On the Compositions of High Firmament

I wrote a post telling the story of the experimental editing you hear on the record. That editing is really the "main idea" of the project: more significant than the details of the tunes or the performances, I'd argue. But of course the project began with standard jazz fare: tunes, read off lead sheets, with blowing. A core of more-or-less traditional jazz, modulo my own special interests, sits within the music. I want a transparent record of how this album came to be, so as a counterpart to the post on editing, here's a reflection on the (jazz-) compositional thinking behind the 6 tunes on the album.

0. Big picture: 

This record is one of a pair. Twelve tunes in total, not specifically composed for the project; rather, compiled from my list of compositions across 2021-2022 or so. Cleaving the twelve into two groups didn't take much effort; I had a clear-ish vision of the two aesthetics and the tunes sorted themselves. The vision for High Firmament: bright, Apollonian, big-C Classical, positive. The grace and elegance of both Mozart and Bird counterbalanced, as influences, the contrapuntal thickets of the editing. Clear, familiar composition supports — opens space for — density and entropy in other areas of the music.

The narrative of the album took shape once we sequenced it.  High Firmament is dedicated to the "morning mindset" and so one may imagine the album as chronicling the first half of a (good) day: Wakin' up and stretchin'; Thinkin' through some mathematics, visualizin' something strange and twisty; Enjoyin; a hearty breakfast; Hikin' up to a cliff where the wind whips around and the morning sun shines into your eyes; Practicin' the fundaments of bebop; Playin' baseball with the sun right overhead, and hittin' it out of the park.

I'm a morning person. I love this stuff. I get the sense that most jazz people are night people. If that's you: don't fear the morning! It's great! Try it!

1. Stretchin' in the Mornin' 

This straightforward tune has two main ingredients: 1) a wide-open, frothy meditation on F-major-7; 2) a rubato melody and form, supported by fast-moving chord changes. The two ingredients alternate in a sort of sparkly rondo. Gas and brakes; exertion and rest. Not much to say about the F-major froth. The only composition there is a suggestion of a cute little wrist-roll for piano or bass: 

The tune itself starts with as bright and positive a phrase as I could come up with. The sound of moving from I to V as a secondary key area dominates Classical sonata form. "Applying a sharp" to a key brings Mozart and Haydn to my mind, every time. But this move doesn't happen much in jazz. One could argue there are not secondary key areas in jazz with the same status as their Classical counterparts; but even so, standard jazz harmony, as inherited from Tin Pan Alley, seems to lean a bit more to the flat site. So many tunes go to IV. Very few go to V and hang out there. V is usually a stop along the way, whereas IV often feels like a destination of its own. But I love the brightening effect of going to V. The other classical device in play here is the so-called "cadential 6/4," which instantly signals classical music and especially opera. The sound of jazz is the sound of the ii7 — V7. Classical music prefers ii6/5 — V6/4->5/3. (Or if you prefer, I6/4—V. Who cares?) 

I'm not exactly the most extraverted bubbly guy. I can't just let a phrase like the above go, uh, uncontested. The rest of this tune slips through jazz chords, accelerating before alighting back on the tonic. 

The pacing is something like twisting into a tough yoga pose and then taking a moment to breathe and relax afterwards. The voice leading in the middle section is what I call "melty:" lots of chords that are close to each other — mostly related by small downwards steps in individual voices — but that move fast so that you end up "far from home;" or in this case, back home after starting far away. (One day I will write up a precise theory of the differential calculus of voice leading — that is to say, quantifying rate of harmonic change as a ratio of distance traveled to time. The only tricky part is defining the proper notion of distance in harmonic space. But it's not that hard.) At first glance, it may seem foolish to attempt to improvise on changes blasting by so fast, especially without a consistent pulse. But the proximity of the voice leading picks up that slack; most of the notes of a given chord work or nearly work over the previous chord and the next. And "smearing the changes" is indeed one of the lovely sounds of jazz. This is just to say it's easier and lower-stakes to blow over this tune than the lead sheet would betray. Plus, confident rhythmic phrasing will pull the rhythm section along. If your ears are open, you'll never get too far off.

2. Toroid 

Don't sleep on Mozart's slow movements. A lot of famous slow classical music is heavy on gravitas and the epic, icebergulous sounds of e.g. Mahler. But few musical moods are quite so tasty as an andanteor adagio that doesn't take itself too seriously. The strawberries-and-cream of the ballroomy second movement sandwiched between two vivacious dances. Of particular gustatory delight are the fast bits of the slow music: the delicate little flurries that bubble out of the harmonies, the hemidemisemiquavers that tickle you with a feather. Coleman Hawkins, a guy who surely met people who met people from the eighteenth century, has an appetite for little flurries too. One can go back even further, to Couperin, for the pinnacle of ornamentation. None of us can even hold a candle to his conception of ornamentation, but it doesn't stop up from trying.

Big fan of the sound of piano and saxophone getting through the second half of that phrase semi-together. It's all about poise, more so than strict accuracy. The most fun rhythmic feature of this tune comes again from Classical music: the two halves of the form are punctuated with little cadenzi, time-freeze breathers between the stately plod of the harmonic motion. You can think of the candenzi as unshackled elaborations on the idea of the ornaments that happen over the pulse (as in m.3 above). The big-picture tonal strategy of Toroid is to take inspiration from its namesake and twist around the circle of fifths. The opening chord, G, is IV of D, the tonal center of the first twelve bars, up through: 

That last chord is one of my favorites, and certainly part of my "sound:" V7 but with I in the bass, an ambivalent almost-resolution that opens the door rather than closing. Indeed, that chord allows a sneaky lean towards a brighter key: the next four bars point towards A major and indeed land on A. But that A turns out to be the IV of E, just as the opening G was IV of D. The last phrase of the form is an abridged version of the first phrase, up a whole step. That last phrase ends on B7, the V7 of E, setting up the toroidal twist that brings us back to the top (G as IV of D). B7 is awfully close to D7 — those two chords are equally spaced around the D#-F#-A-C diminished axis — and indeed, in jazz, playing something like B7 over D7 is not only allowed, but encouraged. You "pick up" the flat-9 and the 13: salt and sugar. Bottom line: yes, B7 does a great job leading back to G. The two most scrumptious moments in the harmony of Toroid perch the melody a minor ninth over an important note in the chord:

B over A#.

And, from the Coda, 

E over D#. 

Speaking of which, the Coda is a half-beautiful, half-humorous statement that compresses the main form's tonal moves and equivocates between E major and D major.

3. Maple

 I have written a handful of tunes with the same basic format as Maple: long, medium-swing forms with standard but meandering harmony. Think Cedar Walton or Benny Golson. No individual harmonic moment in Maple rocks any boat. It's an AABA' form. The only experimental ingredient is the on-the-fly tempo-switching. We discontinuously switch between two tempos, a few metronome-notches apart, as part of the form. The main hook of the tune is always slow, and everything else is fast.
That main hook relies on one of the oldest tricks in the book: tonal chord changes over a pedal. 

File this one in "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." 

The rest of the tune exploits the natural closeness of four-note-chords related to each other by minor third. The four members of tonic axis F-D-B-Ab all send representatives over the course of the tune. If you prefer not to think in terms of symmetries but rather individual tonal moves, chain together parallel and relative minors/majors for the same effect: ||: F-d-D-b-B-g#-Ab-f :|| (And of course, it's a bit boring and on-the-nose to stick exactly to that plan. Much classier to jump around and stretch the formula.) That's about it: the tempo-switch game plus the corresponding gas-and-brakes of pedalling versus twisting through key areas. A long form — a bit tricky to pace — but otherwise not hard.

4. Zephyr Point

This one's as bright and boisterous as I could make it, and as self-conciously Mozartian as anything on the record gets (except for a truly idiotic deleted "saxophone-concerto" tune whose score you may request for 0.001 BTC). The tempo marking is "galant swing." Whereas we feel and guess approximate tempo changes on Maple, the trick at the heart of Zephyr Point is a proportional relationship between two tempos. The opening gambit teases that relationship: 

Bars 3 and 4 are notated wrong. The top line should be whole notes and the bottom line should be quarters, but writing it this way "feels better" (and could be corrected with an admittedly clunky 'half tempo' marking). I repeat the same mistake throughout. 

If you're asking yourself, "what in the gosh-darn heck is that 3 doing in that denominator," first things first: settle down. It is legal, I swear.
Math time: 2 measures of 4/4 comes out to eight quarter notes or two whole notes. (Typesetting fractions in Squarespace will kill me — forgive the one-linedness.) You can see the equivalence via the equation

2 * 4 / 4 = 2 * 1 / 1,

both in the format

(number of bars) * (beats per bar) / (size of each beat).

3 bars of 2/3 is the same amount of time, equivalent to the length of a breve. What is the meaning of the 3 on the bottom?  Third notes? Yes. A third note is equivalent to a half-note-triplet, which divides a whole note into three equal pieces.  6 third notes, 2 in each bar times 3 bars, comes out to the same amount of time as two whole notes.

3 * 2 / 3 = 2 * 4 / 4 = 2 * 1 / 1.

In the notated example, the top line is equivalent to three notes in the space of 2 full-length 4/4 bars, i.e. whole-note triplets. The bottom line is filled in with 12 sixth notes, each of which is equivalent to a quarter note triplet. Because this weird division still lines up with the original pulse, a drummer could play through those bars in 4/4 and pop out the other side unscathed. We break that pattern in the next phrase. 

This cheeky pair of phrases toys with the above ideas. The 5/6 bar does not line up with the original pulse — you "lose a triplet." But the 6/6 bar is equivalent to a 4/4 bar populated with 6 quarter note triplets. I'll be the first to admit that it's hard to stay slick when you're blowing over this sort of thing. The real puzzle is to what degree you commit to the tuplets as being in a new tempo, so that you swing in that tempo. In the context of the whole tune, these flashes of a slower, triplet-based tempo can be seen as premonitions of a more definitive switch, in the [B] section: 

The standout bar is m. 22, which I originally wrote as bar of 4/4 + 2/4 (and indeed, that's how Kayvon plays it). The effect is essentially the opposite of what happens in the [A] section. The duplet tempo flashes in amidst the context of the triplet tempo: th converse of [A]. The [C] section explores the faster side of the otherwise slower-feeling triplet tempo, ending with a merciful finisher: a quick fermata and a rubato phrase to let us re-align. 

3/4 and 9/12 are equivalent. 

That realignment opportunity is important. All too often, you come across challenging jazz compositions that never relent, that seem to take some masculine pride in bucking off rhythm sections and soloists alike. Fuck that! Leave the jazz school tuplet-measuring contests behind. Throw everyone a bone. Or two!

We blow over this form with no modifications. Hard but not impossible! In fact, not as hard as I'd've expected. My improvisation goal was to highlight the Classical flavor of "high bebop" a la Bird, Bud, and Brownie. Max Roach was in my ears. The harmony is nothing too special. Once again I tonicize V in order to conjure the Classical spirit. [A] works its way from G to D; B minor is the pivot point (or maybe E minor uh idk). [B] is mostly in D but turns back towards G at the end. [C] implies G at first but reveals that G to be VI on the way to F#: V in B minor, which gives way to secondary chords surrounding D major. A year-and-a-half later I can still giggle at a legitimate claim to a diminished second, E-flat to D#, in the snakey voiceleading near the end: 

Yum! Pedantry!

5. Plucky

This bebop blues is a point of pride because it's one of very few of my tunes that has been played without my presence. I'm not going to quit my day job just yet, but several unpaid sessions in Brooklyn have graced Plucky with their blessings, just sayin'...

Charlie Parker is one of the greatest jazz composers ever. Obviously. But unlike Duke and his children Mingus and Monk, he didn't write original changes or song forms or any large-scale compositions. It's just short, perfect, bouncy bebop heads. Potato chips and chocolate, not a veggie in sight. Bird and Miles represent a spectrum in early high-bebop composition. Whereas Miles is an abstract and harmonic composer, prone to long, sinewy lines, Bird's tunes just pop off the page, short phrase after short phrase, like a boxer jabbing and weaving around the beat. My own study leads me to identify the following primary features of Bird-as-composer:

1. Short phrases of irregular rhythms (no long streams of eighth notes).

2. Syncopation, especially of a 3-against-2 type (clap dotted quarters along to any Bird head).

3. Occasional but not frequent moments of strange harmony, subverting or extending the changes. Major sevenths on dominant chords, tritone substitutions, or other weird superimpositions.

So there's the homework assignment that generated Plucky. The 5/4 time signature was to lock myself into a challenge of stretching bebop vocabulary into odd time signatures, whose checkerboards of strong and weak beats threaten to buck you if you're not careful. A slight adjustment to bebop blues changes that I first heard on Gerkin for Perkin (ew) off Study in Brown: resolve to bII major in the ninth bar before twisting back to I in the eleventh. In bebop, the eighth bar of a blues is often biii to bVI, interpolating a chromatic ii-V between iii and ii. I prolong that out-of-key chromatic move by resolving the middle ii-V. In D, that means sandwiching Fm7—Bb7—Eb between F# and E minor chords (I actually use E7 instead of E minor 7 to intensify the feeling of a dial spinning through the circle). 

But this tune ain't about harmony. It's about emulating the crunchy, push-and-pull bounce of a bird head. 3-beat units fit differently over 5/4 than they do over 4/4, but in a way, they don't. In particular, a 3-beat phrase puts you "1 beat behind" a 4/4 pulse, and a doubly-long 6-beat phrase puts you "1 beat ahead" of 5/4. Similar effect relative to the strong-beat-weak-beat checkerboard.  Plucky also plays with, lightly, the triplet-as-new-tempo idea that Zephyr Point fleshes out.

Lastly, the bassline rubs against the melody in spots, cracking open a window to some future blossoming of contrapuntal bebop. ELEW is on that mission — take it away, man. 

6. Hometown Hero

The set closes with a triumphant and cheeky tune that juxtaposes the heavy and the light, but both with a positive attitude. Shedding light on this tune feels a bit like explaining jokes, but oh well... Many clave-esque rhythms can be loosely described as "fit in as many 3s as you can, then correct for the meter." For instance, 3 + 3 + 3 + 4 = 16; shuffle those 3s around and you get four variations on a tasty syncopation over 4/4. That's the trick of the first half of [A]. 

The melody floats to obfuscate the trick, which otherwise may have come across as harsh on account of the seconds in the piano voicing. Back to our formula for a moment.

3 + 3 + 3 + 4 = (3 + 3) + (3 + 4) = 6 + 7.

3 + 4 = 7 fits over one time signature better than all others: 7. Duh! The joke of the second half of the [A] is to make 7 feel like the regular, symmetrical pulse as opposed to the asymmetrical 4 in the first half. 

Humor notwithstanding, that section is a lot of fun to play over, especially for drums and saxophone. It's heavy and syncopated but not without lilt and bounce. But that heaviness evaporates at the gossamer [B] section: 

Those held chords look ugly, I know, but they too are the result of a simple trick. The first chord is all seven notes of the D major scale. The bass moves diatonically down, swapping one pair of notes in that seven-note collection. To illustrate, from the first bar of [B] to the second, bass moves from D to C#, so the C# in the chord moves to D. Then bass moves from C# to B, so the B in the chord moves to C#, preserving the macroharmony. The result is a light-blue glassy blur of the diatonic scale. That little moment of slow harmony sublimates into a faux-Classical piano-bass duet, sitting on a cloud, finishing off the scale descent in the bass. (Consult the discussion of Zephyr Point if the 5/6 time signature disturbs you.) The last two bars, like a splash of cold water on the face, re-enliven the tempo and reinstate the heavy syncopation. Nothing like a cannonball to truncate a daydream. And that's the form. All that's left is the long Coda after the head out. The cold-water-splash doesn't land this time; instead, the triplet time signature remains through the end of the piece and we enter a less-ironic-than-you-might-think episode: dollar-store Brahms in the key of middle school: B-flat. 

Not notated: the clarinet figure that sits on top of the tenor melody. But come on, it's, like, the major scale.

The second-to-last joke is to stack more triplets on the triplets, in the bass. Math puzzle: how would you describe the values of those notes relative to the original 4/4 pulse? Rev up those denominators!

The ending of the whole album: oblique and uncertain — just how I like it — a drum solo on shaky ground. Whereas earlier, 7 represented a symmetrical alignment of hits, now it returns to its usual unstable character. One cannot help but giggle at a 3:7 polyrhythm in 7/3 time. Your gut tells you they should cancel out...but the ear says otherwise.

~ ~ ~

Email me for sheet music if you want it. Read the corresponding post for Ferment Below here.

Happy Pi Day.

Shedding Light on the Editing of my Two Records

The development in style, technique, and meaning in jazz's first century stands as one of the great examples of achievement in music.  The century of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane — wow! — and all of those men were born before 1930.  The basic pattern that brings us to day is an alternation between technical development and reward-reaping: sowing and harvesting.  The 50s and 60s, easy to point to as the two golden pillars rising high in the middle of the historical curve, each grew their own fruit which hung low and ripe.  Bird blows open the door; we all walk through.  It would be harder not to!  It is as if a vacuum sucks us into the world of bebop.  So too with modal jazz; the theory is too easy not to learn and you are expected to know how to rip chord scales even as an 18-year-old entering jazz school today.

But as always happens with low-hanging fruit, the pickings get real slim real fast.  The old vectors of progress have dried up and I am both surprised and disappointed that new ones haven't been picked up with as much fury as I'd've hoped.  What do I mean?  Well, for one, jazz harmony has not gotten any better in a long time.  The list of viable time signatures is finite as heck.  We are still playing more or less the same instruments in the same ways.  All of this is OK — I still want to produce a beautiful tenor saxophone sound and play 9ths and 13ths over romantic chord progressions, swinging in 4/4.  I hope that never goes away.  But that is not all we are here to do.  

Jazz relies on both conservative and progressive spirits.  The most exciting musicians intertwine both.  Mingus as multi-dimensional psychedelic Duke Ellington, or Monk as Duke in a hall of shattering mirrors.  We inherit this tension and are duty-bound to confront it, to pull on it and intensify its components.  But it is far from obvious how to proceed 100 years into the story.  It's not hard to come up with new harmony, but to get jazz musicians to digest that new harmony enough to improvise with it — that's a ton of work.  As for rhythm — what a tricky puzzle to attempt to deepen the idea of swing!  You can, of course, stack tuplets and odd times into a house of cards, but once again the improvisation challenge rears its head.  It is hard to convince even an open-minded band to forget everything they know and rebuild jazz improvisation from the ground up, especially considering the economic conditions of jazz in the 2020s.

Let's take stock.  Quick, back-of-the-envelope:

 - Harmony leaves not much room for development, for a number of reasons.

 - Rhythm is the same; the difficulty of new ideas diminishes their worth so that they pale in comparison to the exuberant swinging past.

 - Composition struggles to transcend the formula of head-solo-head, or more generally, alternating two modes: written melody supported by semi-improvised accompaniment; and group improvisation with focus on a soloist.  And the truth is that most listeners do not perceive or care about large-scale compositional decisions.

 - Instruments have hardly changed at all.  The electric guitar has enjoyed some development, and the Fender Rhodes eked out a place in the uncontroversial roster.  But jazz is still more or less a game of saxophones, trumpets, acoustic piano, upright bass, and the drumset as it existed in the 1950s.

 I can come up with counterexamples to all of the above, and I'm sure you can too, but they are exceptions to the status quo.

 Zooming out: 

 - Jazz musicians play ~50 minute sets, likely two a night, of about 7 tunes each.

 - They record albums that represent one such set.  Recordings take place in fancy studios with expensive microphones, and the mixing engineers make sure they are as undetectable as possible.  You are supposed to be able to pretend you are in a club, hearing every detail exactly as it would happen.

 - Nobody buys the albums, but young students seek out hot, fast solos on standards they recognize.  You gain notoriety if someone can excise a YouTube clip from a larger performance and bless it with a violent verb: "destroy," "kill," "obliterate," ...

 This status quo will spiral itself into the dust if we allow it.  But that is sad.  It will make me sad and I am already sad enough.

 I wish I could answer questions like:

 - Where are all the synthesizers and other new instruments?

 - Where are all the computers?

 - Where are all the records that don't sound "like that?"  (You probably know what I mean!)

 Or, asked in another way:

 Where is the new low-hanging fruit?  Where are the areas of (jazz) music where technology and culture have ripened new vectors of progress, so that our progressive wing gains some ammunition in its fight against the embalming forces of jazz schools and boomer-dominated audiences?

 Before your answer, remember not to neglect the conservative restoring force.  The new music still has to sound like jazz, at least to the people who like jazz.

 I have an answer.  The fruit I picked didn't hang so low and I ain't got the saxophone talent to complete the package I envisioned.  But now that I am out of New York and in a state of negative relevance, I don't even feel bad about my complaints and misgivings.  My goal is to crack open a door that has been shut long enough.  My answer is not the only answer.  But it got me out of bed enough times in a row to dump my bank account into a tar pit and to birth not one, but two new links on Bandcamp dot com.

 In a word: dismantle the illusion of realism.  Get wild with editing.  Pull your imagination out of your head.

 ~ ~ ~

These recent two records, _High Firmament_ and _Ferment Below_, took a lot more time and energy than the last one, _Connectedness_.  Click around for four seconds and you'll hear why.  What is going on?  Why?  How?  For the sake of posterity if nothing else, I'll walk through the process.

 -1.

 A few months go by after _Connectedness_ comes out.  I take some saxophone lessons. As a result, I rethink my embouchure and start using the softest reeds.  I hatch an idea of being a "Lester Young dissident"/"Coleman Hawkins zealot."   Sibelius files keep popping up on my desktop (that used to happen a lot — now, not so much).  I play with some new people and a saxophone player a million times better than me utters the magic phrase: "sounds great, man."  I believe him in that moment — I *had* just played really loud.

 These are the conditions under which new-album-projects are undertaken.  I am especially motivated because my wife and I have come to realize our time in New York would come to a close sooner than later.  The usual pursuits ensue: compile and edit the tunes, find the band, work out a budget.  Rehearse, book the studio, then show up and turn on the mics.  Straightforward enough.

 0.

 But the little devil on my shoulder asks — no, *begs* — for *more*.  "You will feel like such a hypocrite if you record *just* an album."  I call Lee.  We work out details pertaining to reality — set up two versions of every microphone so that we can play with two mixes for two albums — and dream past reality.  

 "What if you, like, changed train tracks from one take to the other? And you feel all the sparking, grinding friction on the way there."

 "You won't know til you try."

 We chat intermittently.

 "I don't want to throw away anything good from any take.  I want it all to be there."

 "I get that."

 1. 

 We record thirteen tunes over two days.  One comes out so bad I put it on its own hard drive, delete it from all others, and then drive over that one with a hippopotamus.  Twelve is way more divisible by two than thirteen is, anyway.  As for the rest, we played the way we played.  Honest accounts, live, one room, few takes of each.  Casual.  No need to reveal my schemes when I don't know what they are yet or if there will be schemes at all...

 And yet, in the back of my mind... _we're rippin' *all* the meat off these bones._

 2.

 First things first: make it sound good.  Make it sound like jazz.  More work than usual: two mixes for two albums.  One brighter and crisper, the other smokier and boozier.  Nothin' but minor hiccups along the way; Lee and I have done this before, together.  A few weeks of work and it sounds good indeed.  Like jazz indeed.

 3.

 The little shoulder devil raises his voice.  "More...more!...Not enough!"

 OK, OK.  Let's get serious.

 ~ digression ~

 One of my main theses is that jazz musicians underuse the studio.  There is so much you can do, so much money we leave on the table, over and over.  The whole point of these albums is to take a big wobbly step into that frontier.  But that's not all.  I've been lucky enough to stick with music into an age where everyone still playing is pretty good, where the trials of professionalism can melt into afterthoughts.  But skill in the fundaments of music doesn't translate to *managerial* skill.  It feels like bile coming out of my mouth, but I have to admit that jazz musicians have something to learn from (some small part of) the corporate world.  Every jazz record is on a shoestring budget of both time and money; that is where a...*puke*...startup manager thrives.  I'm not saying you should plan a trip to Patagonia's vest wing.  Not at all.  We are all so much cooler than that, I agree.  But there is art and science behind managing people, managing time, managing money.  **It will make your records better.**  Do not fear the spreadsheet.  Call people on the phone.  Talk *for real*.  Timelines, budgets, itemized rehearsal schedules... please, believe me! I ain't the man, man; it's not about turning jazz Silicon-Valley; but when you are piloting that big ship into these choppy, unforgiving waters, you need to be sure you have the right crew and the right resources.  You are a manager _whether you like it or not._

 ~ back to story-time ~

 Lee is on board.  I allude, to the rest of the band, to the idea of "crazy editing" but don't get much response.  My impression is that they are not proud of the session or otherwise not proud to be involved.  The people I hire are used to playing with *really* good saxophone players who play both gigs and fast.  An Instagram-account-sized hole in my resume further shields me from impressing anyone.  

 So the band doesn't care.  No problem — I paid them to play, not to care.  My secret weapon Lee is locked and loaded.  But the wild empty space in front of us sends a shiver.  We stand at the edge of a cliff on the side of the mountain of a century of jazz recordings.  An Ornette-gust whips by.  We see, in the distance, the great river Charles and its tributaries: Mingus, Parker, Ives.

 But what the **heck** do we, uh, actually do?  Talk is cheap!  Open ProTools and get to work!

 4.

 The cheapness of talk means we can afford lots of it.  I spray metaphor after metaphor at Lee on the phone.  Not enough — gotta get the hands dirty.

 A strategy from mathematics: solve an easier version of the problem first.  Compress it down to a lower dimension then build it back up if you must.

 First up in the lab, _Hot Rain Dance_.  It is the perfect choice because it is:

•  Repetitive and self-similar — only 8 bars of melodic content;

•  Energetic — hard to imagine "too much drums" on that one;

•  "Over-recorded" — we got five takes, none of which is a complete dud.

 In the language of information theory, _Hot Rain Dance_ builds in a lot of redundancy so that it can support a lot of entropy.

 But studio-recorded music (especially how we did it, with twice the mics we needed) can get unwieldy on account of all the separate tracks, effects, automation curves.  Plus, Lee is a big ProTools boy and I am a little Ableton baby.  We ain't about to figure out that translation process.

 I will hew it rough and Lee will grind it smooth.  Or something like that.

 5 rows in Ableton: each one rough mix of _Hot Rain Dance_.  Start stupid: line up the first notes and press play.  *gulp.*

 Whoa!

The lightning bolt hits Frankenstein's monster. My built-up doubt bursts and melts away.  **It's going to work.**

 5.

 But of course it sounds like garbage.  What did you expect?  No click track.  Open form.  And, duh, each take is not aware of the others.  But if there's anything I'm good at, it's fishing babies out of bathwater.

 ~ advice ~

 If you are hired to be an editor, a critic, a cleaner-upper — yeah, be a dick.  Critique without remorse.  Without any ruth whatsoever.  You can and should do this to your own music, too, of course, but only _after_ you have tried on the opposite hat.  The hat of curiosity, forgiving, wonderment.  Find the best moments, the diamonds in the rough, and expand outward from those.  The generator and the editor play dual roles and they *need* each other despite their rivalry and personality-mismatch.

 ~ sorry ~

*Five* _Hot Rain Dances_.  What sounds good?  Four are close to the same tempo and one's a bit faster.  The composite sounds good in two ways: the muscular, choir-like almost-unison of the four beefs up the ritualistic sound of the composition.  The fast black sheep #5 phases against the others.  That sounds good too!  When your entire tune is E-flat minor 7 to A-flat 7, over and over, everything sounds good on everything.  The phasing hypnotizes — "I could hang out here forever."  The [B] section shatters the mellow: driving swing, clever changes, not starting even remotely together.  Not going to work.  But that's alright.  One win already: the hypnotic phasing vamp — put it in your pocket.

Line up all the [B] sections to start together.  Cacophony.  Disgusting.  How about just two?

*Hey, this ain't half bad.  There's something here.*

Jazz + Jazz = Jazz.  That formula is true only if Jazz is zero or represents a kind of infinity.  I will leave that call to you.

6.

I hack together a composite _Hot Rain Dance_ with big, rough, ugly cuts.  The result is covered all over with blemishes but to my ears, the gems speak for themselves.  

"Lee, check this out."

I sympathize with him in advance.  It's one thing to butcher up a few rough mixes to highlight a moment or two of novelty; it's another to be responsible for scrubbing out the nasty bits and to hone the promising parts into confident, gleaming statements.  But Lee is the man for the job, and boy does he understand the assignment.

The job gets so much easier with "one on the board."  I unleash Lee and offer a few guidances:

• Don't leave any good music on the cutting-room-floor.

• This time, less is *not* more.  More is more.

• Use the "main" take — i.e. the best one — as the timeline, replacing the sterile absolute-time ruler of the DAW.

And most of all, **trust your ears.**  And so the process unfolds, two tunes at a time (so that we never slam too hard into one wall).  I send a hypothesis, in words, of how to tackle a tune.  Lee sends back an audio file, a first pass.  More often than not, the main idea works: the approximate proportions and mix of the layers strike something resembling balance.  Lucky, but not unearned — you have no idea how many times I listen, imagine, re-listen, re-imagine, ...

7.

We work, slowly but steadily.  Our confidence compounds as we knock 'em out.  Patterns — I won't go so far as to say *theorems* — emerge:

• The free-time stuff is the easiest.  The "rhythm section rumble" texture sits on itself happily.  Rumble-on-rumble is just more rumble.  Lining up beginnings or endings of melodies gives enough togetherness to convince you that it's still real music.  Then the problem becomes one of mixing: sound rather than content.

• You can get a lot out of playing with the axis of focus.  If a single stream is mixed loud and in the center, it will come through as such even if there's a lot going on behind it.  Spread the focus across two or three streams so that none dominates: totally different effect, much blurrier and dreamier.  In the end, something like two-thirds of the project adopts the first style (singular focus plus support), and the other third skews blurry, in the second style.

• You ain't as creative as you might think.  We all ended up playing a lot of the same stuff.  "Pure" improvisation is a total myth.  In the multi-layering game, you can leverage this "as coincidence" or to create semi-imitative counterpoint.  In the final version of _Plucky_, for instance, the tenor solo begins with two takes at once, and in both, the very first phrase starts *and* ends in the same place.  No planning — I promise — but it sounds great as a twisty stack.  Own it — that's your style, not a weakness of imagination.

• Panning really matters.  Much more than I realized.

• Short-transient sounds like cymbal hits can be dangerous.  Two saxophone notes, with all their weirdnesses of envelope, can sit next to each other and sound great, but two ride cymbal pings that are a little off: not great.  They compete and interfere.  Pushing the "second drummer" way into the back of the mix helps — sounds more like delay than sloppy flams.  A strategy we liked: stretch secondary takes in 1/2/4 bar chunks so that their downbeats line up with the main take's.  Nip and tuck, readjust as you go.  It still swings even with the micro-phasing that happens in the middle of phrases.

• Don't fear the bleed.  We recorded everything live in one room.  This was so that we could have fun and feel good (important!) in the session, but it also pre-inoculated my mind against the temptation to get too surgical with this whole layering game.  Music is so much more than a sum of individual instruments playing things.  Timing, tuning, drama: these are all *relative* phenomena, meaningless without context.  That context comes from the other players.  Yeah, bass is tricky.  But most people mix bass way too loud and way too clear anyway.  As an example, the final product of _Short Way Around the Hill_ used zero of the many instrument mics we set up.  We used only the room mics.  Two takes, side-by-side the whole way through, continually adjusted so that they don't get _too_ far off.

• Don't die by your own principles.  We came up with all sorts of heuristics and high-level plans for each tune, and those got us about 75% of the way there.  But we broke every rule we came up with too.  This boils back down to *trust your ears.*  Your ear will tell you what to do.  It may be faint and diffident at first but the answer is there.  The pride of sticking-to-a-plan simply ain't worth it.

~ ~ ~

Lee can comment on the details of the technical and organizational work that made this possible at all.  Maybe I can even persuade him to write his own account of the process.  I won't pretend to know how he did what he did, how he balanced the boldness of the editing with the watchmakerly touch of a mixing engineer.  But he did it.  

After seven months of continual work, we finished off two albums, one "bright" and one "dark."  Twelve tunes, none of which was merely a single take as it happened.  We felt that just about everything good we recorded was in there.  Maybe not up-front and in-focus, but in there somewhere.

The whole story, start-to-finish, took a bit under a year.  The idea to record something at all grabbed me in the summer of 2022.  Unlike with my last record, I didn't compose specifically for this project — just picked out tunes that I had been playing and workshopping and arranged them, rather loosely, into a couple sets.  We rehearsed like four times, late summer-early fall.  We recorded October 16-17.  The first stage of mixing took around a month and then all the wild editing was another six.  Printed the record May 2023.  A lot of work (which means money too), but that's how it is — this project emboldened my faith in some kind of "conservation of energy" that applies to musical work.  There is no magic bullet...not even the computer!

I bring up the timeline only to exhort others to work more on their records in more ambituous ways.  You can do so much, in not that long, dropping a coin of work into the jar every day.  I dream of a continual stream of "I've never heard anything like this before" releases.  It bugs me to no end that all the creativity and progressivism of jazz musicians seems to wilt away the second they step foot in a recording studio, as if they are ignoring the hyper-multi-dimensional world of possibilities that opens in those holy spaces.

Be warned, though: once you acquire a taste for studio-rat behavior, it won't leave your lips without a fight.  _High Firmament_ and _Ferment Below_ could have been put together by a strange elf with scissors and tape; _Leavin' Town_ won't be — no, not at all! of course not — "normal"; the big box of many dice — the **COMPUTER** — enters the fray.

The Pornification of Jazz

Why come back to jazz over and over again?  You can get your fix of harmony from Wagner.  Just about every musical culture east of Vienna focuses on improvisation.  Get your blues from Blues.

An answer: *mystery*.  It is for the same reason that we spin the roulette wheel, or pray in a language we do not understand, that we allow jazz to overcome our discontents and draw us in.

How exciting it must have been to attend a live performance of a yet-unrecorded up-and-comer back in the days when records were scarce!  A generation later, the record-shop ritual: walk through the aisles, put out your antennae, let a good record come to you.  Better yet, a recommendation from a salty patron a few paces over.  You rush home, unburdened by your wallet, and spin the plate.  

Then the quest begins: *let me find something to love*.  Not every record can be expected to begin with its very best material!  This is the fun game of appraising a recommendation: _why did they recommend this, anyway?  What moment do I *need* to hear — on what are they betting their credibility?_

We chase the same magic when we improvise — this is a big part of _why_ we improvise — and indeed we expect the magic to tear through the clouds when, well, we are not actively expecting.  The function of the multiple interlocking technical systems of jazz — harmony, rhythm, form — is not just to give the practitioners constraints and context to leverage; a listener subconsciously expects an ambient soup of digestible, familiar music as a background to the lightning-bolts of inspiration.  It is a tradeoff that entropic free jazz has mismanaged, so that it is just another kind of ambient music.  Another win for Duke Ellington.

OK, OK — but it's 2024, boomer.  I'm not going to drink milk and read the newspaper and wait for the *good stuff* to lurch out at me!  Give me the gold, straight to the dome.  *Intravenous* triumphs of jazz improvisation.

Your back sags and you thumb open YouTube.  "10 times John Coltrane went BEAST MODE" — the lotion's at arm's length... this is gonna be good.

But does it work?  Consider a 24-hour looping video of 86,400 individual one-second clips of hot, bronze people orgasming with gusto.  Does that work?

But why not?  Seriously!  Can we not refine centuries of musical tradition — a bush of tasty green leaves — into a fine powder, ripe for the nostril?  Into a rock, as hard as it is potent?  Why can't you, like, tritone-sub the tritone-sub, dude?

For crack-rock pornified YouTube jazz to work, it would have to repudiate millenia of music _as ritual_.  The conservative answer is something along the lines of "it ain't broke, so don't fix it."  The progressive answer is probably a valid complaint about a corporation stepping in as a profiteering drug dealer, a warning about frying your neurons and such.  Neither answer satisfies me all the way; both seem right but a morbid curiosity eggs me on.  Why _can't_ we pornify jazz? Why is jazz porn so bad?

Why can't I cut out those pesky repeats in the Mozart sonata?

Why can't I practice without warming up?

Why do I have to stand for the national anthem before the first pitch?

A question with no answer is an opportunity.  But what if there is an answer, and you're just not ready to hear it?

This I fear.  Did I debase my brain on the internet so that Sonny Rollins and I are now different species, neurologically speaking?  Can I get it back — can I microdose equanimous 20th-century boredom and use a Thomas Guide until I swing *for real*?  Or will the twirling currents of the time-river really force me to come up with something...*shudder*..._new?_

It's all a bit much.  "I wonder what's happening in Ga—"

No!

Read Jaron Lanier.  *Resist* the algorithm.  You're not a mule — you shouldn't have a _feed_.  The days of 'search,' as the main verb of the web, are numbered.  So go ahead, search — seek, desire — do not let the sludge merely dribble into your open mouth.  If you can't think of what to search, then don't search at all.  Your inquisitiveness is your humanity.  Slurping down the feed is hog-like.  David Hume will be real pissed off at you — he will emerge as an apparition from a cloud of Philosophy 101 pot-smoke — if you outsource your goddarned _desires_ to a computer program whose aims are to make money!

The battle ain't gonna get any easier, either.  Steel yourself now.  It is good to retreat if Hell is the battlefield.

////////////////////////////////

I have a buncha saxophone posts brewin' too.  One on the first big three: Hawk, Pres, and big boy Benny Webster, which should set the DNA-foundation for appraisals of Bird, Sonny, and Trane.  The first three are Bulbasaur, Squirtle, and Charmander: a perfect algebraic trefoil, the structural basis for everything that follows.  I guess that means Bird is Pikachu — perfect design, perfectly contained.  You fill in the rest. 

Keep Gambling Please

I once declared, "jazz is a gambler's music."  My old post identified the essential ingredients of danger and surprise in jazz.  We like challenging, risky music pulled off with confidence because there lingers a chance to fail.  That post was written in a good mood and it succeeded if it exhorted someone to push their music a little harder past the realm of the safe.

My mood this morning could be better and as such the unavoidable dark side of gambling creeps into my head as I do my best to prepare for my last show as a NYC resident.  Don't worry; we'll be taking risks and I consciously picked a band whose vocabulary does not include ‘caution.’  And so we could fail.

The blessing that prevents music from being a degenerate activity like gambling proper is how it is judged.  Musicians are not judged by their "bankrolls;" they are judged by the heights of their peaks.  This is amazing from a gambling perspective for it further incentivizes risk and aggressive artistry.

Nobody cares about John Coltrane's worst recording.  There is literally no music you could unearth bad enough to cancel out his legacy.  Jazz in our time is short on big masterpieces.  We need more heroes and the movements that coalesce around them.  Where are they?  The seeds are all around us but we're facing a resource problem.  Sadly, the resource in short supply ain't something as poetic as talent or motivation.  I know tons of people with all the internal firepower one could ever need.  It's money and even more so, time.  

But not time as in, "I need more time to practice."  What we really need is more times to roll the dice.  More chances to hit the bullseye.  

Reading stories of jazz's golden ages leave me in awe with just how much they were playing.  Playing so much that rolling up to a studio with no plan was OK because 1) who needs rehearsal when all you do is perform? and 2) there will be another chance to hit big sooner or later.  But then today any recording turns into a massive expenditure unless your goals are pitifully modest.  And on top of that, very few bands have the chance to put in the reps so that a recording is anything but a white-knuckled, stressful experience.  Certainly not the right psychology for music that feeds off sensitivity, confidence, and interconnection.

I never played a single gig with the band on my upcoming recording.  Here's an easy argument to make: the record would have turned out better if we had played 100 gigs together over the course of a year.  But the economics just weren't there.  I would have gone all-in every time.  We would have had bad nights.  Believe me, I know exactly how to sound terrible on my own music.  None of that would have guaranteed a masterpiece but it would have been the next best thing.  Nothing can guarantee a masterpiece, after all.

I dream of a medium-quality recording setup that fits in a backpack.  Record every session, rehearsal, and gig you ever play and you'll have enough for a few records a year.  If nothing else, you can make the killingest demos to prepare for your expensive studio moment.

Play with the same people ten times in a row.  Play the same tune every time.  Talk about it.

It disturbs me not to hear or overhear much serious music talk between musician friends.  There's a sad, defeated fog in the air.  Note to self: don't let yourself romanticize the simplicity of a 1940's jazz life whose non-music time is filled in with narcotic sludge.  

It didn't work out the way I thought it could've.  Too late...

Do I care as much as I thought I did?  Do these other people care as little as it seems like they do?  Where are the moments where all the variables line up, where all the little wins compound into a big win?

Guh.  Even the biggest win from the best band in town, uh, moistens the eye.  They shoulda made 1000 records and released the best 10. Are all the cool rich people really that dead?

Statement

It was an easy test, and you failed.

High Firmament: Liner Notes

Below are reproduced the liner notes to my album High Firmament, which will come out March 3, 2024.

The sun rolls up its track and the outside world shivers awake. The early morning blesses the mind; the light of consciousness solidifies into logic, coherence, and structure. This is when we attune our muscles. Tingle into readiness. This is also when we do mathematics, when we compose, when we _create_.

The constructive mood that reappears each morning lies at the root of so many of humanity's great accomplishments. One imagines the miracles of Bach springing forth, fresh-faced and confident; the architecture of Vitruvius, embodying firmness, utility, and beauty; the geometry of Euclid, freezing the flow of thought into concrete facts and figures. In this mood, the only limit is your own mind. You climb the tower of construction, abstraction, and symmetry until your grip begins to loosen; then you build more. But to ascend to the heavens of theory is also to plumb the depths where contradictions and paradoxes lurk.

Thousands of years of conjecture and agony have led us to conclude that our world diverges from Euclidean geometry in unresolvable ways. Relaxing a single postulate in Euclid unlocked whole realms of geometry, where the very measurement of distance bends away from Pythagoras' Theorem with the curvature of space. It took a long chain of geniuses to uncover the connection between these geometries and our observation: the nineteenth-century work of Gauss and Riemann on differential geometry inspired Hilbert, Poincaré, and Minkowski to concoct new conceptions of space, culminating in Einstein's 1915 theory of General Relativity. Gravity, the easiest-to-observe force in the universe, is nothing real at all --- a mere artifact of geometry.

At the same time, Planck spearheaded investigations into the nature of reality at the smallest conceivable scales. Unsettling truths crept out of the formalizations of Dirac and von Neumann and the wide-open minds of Heisenberg and Bohr. In 1964, Bell tackled an outstanding paradox in quantum mechanics head-on and produced a theorem showing that the universe is "not locally real" --- particles can become entangled and moreover seem to covertly transmit information across boundaries of space and time. Every moment is just a wave in the sea of what is possible. Experiments as recent as 2017 confirm Bell's Theorem --- a death blow to those who maintain the universe is exactly as it seems.

Music always dances with ideas long before mathematics comes along to force them into bondage. By the mid-eighteenth century, music had rejected the white-hot truths of Bach. Bach's music is saturated and perpetual, like a fire burning through oxygen, choking the empty space. Any rejection of Bach needed light and space and more sensual pacing. Mozart, the prime exponent of the new style, indeed exemplifies grace and elegance, and these words are not mere euphemisms for simplistic, provincial tendencies. Mozart replaced Bach's continuous-through-time contrapuntal puzzles with a one-at-a-time grammar of harmony, a grammar sophisticated enough for poetry, prose, and humor. The thickets of voice-wise democratic composition wilted to make space for hierarchical music with foreground, middleground, and background. At the same time, in mathematics, Euler learned to tame infinite series and uncovered the space inherent in the complex numbers. One finds that elegance, focus, and heirarchy defined the achievments of the eighteenth century. The jazz I play today carries this flame: harmony and form support the melody, the star of the show; rhythms bend and breathe with the spirit of the players. Looking back to the era just after the surge of research into quantum mechanics, Charlie Parker reignited the spirit of Mozart, giving melodic elegance a new home in the mathematics of syncopation and swing, where half-symmetries of the beat rub against each other, kindling new flames. To this day, there is no system --- no vehicle --- of jazz deeper than bebop. But Mozart's first successor, Beethoven, opened up new spaces as well, just as his contemporary Gauss did in geometry. Beethoven recast beauty into the sublime, extending patterns _beyond_ their logical conclusions. Jazz thrives here, too; when one cannot understand a phenomenon, one is forced to _feel_ it for what it really is.

The unifying factor in these human peaks is the clear-headed morning-mindset, the wellspring of Apollo where intuition, logic, and abstraction twist around each other, reaching higher and higher until one forgets the ground ever existed. Some part of this spirit exists in all of us. An awakening pose, stretching towards the sky. The effort of imagining a shape that cannot be drawn. Coffee, steaming into the air; a many-layered pastry crunching and flaking between your teeth. A brisk hike, wind whipping and twirling, feet pushing off the fractals of the Earth. The mental challenge of structured improvisation, grabbing hold of chords and meters to propel yourself upward. Eye-on-the-ball focus, putting everything you have into a swing, the sun pushing your shadow straight down into the ground. In these moments, the sharp corners of logic and the vibrating fuzz of reality turn from unbearable to inviting. Play the game. Think it through. Build.

The music we recorded --- live, all in one room --- ties together these images with the thread of the morning-mindset. You hear not just a carved-marble, idealized final product, but also flashes of our imaginations, open doors we peek through, nearby parallel paths the music could have taken. No, music is not real; but neither is mathematics or any other human creation. All that is always has been. We imagine structures and patterns so that the infinite coheres into something we can grasp; we pull on the firmament so that it pulls back and lifts us off the ground.

Ferment Below: Liner Notes

Below are reproduced the liner notes to my upcoming album Ferment Below, which will come out March 3, 2024.

Left in the sun, the sugars in fruit will bubble and transform. Sweet becomes toxic; toxic becomes gourmet, fragrant, transcendent. It is in the very nature of sugar to ferment, to reach for dangerous yet alluring chemicals. All it takes is time.

Jazz happens at night, along with drink, dance, and seduction: human activities where you give yourself up. None of these activities work in solitude, and none of them work if you rush through. In conversational games like these, only a fraction of the ideas bubbling beneath the surface ever materialize. Every word, every note, every step conceals a hundred others that could have been. And so there is no purity or perfection; every idea, like every person, is somewhere along a process, never in one place for too long. A jazz composer may draw inspiration from a brewer who wields forces outside of his strict control. An improviser may draw inspiration from a dancer whose steps are never quite determined until the very moment they land.

It feels dangerous to offer yourself up like that. You can trade in your individuality for religious cohesion or Dionysian rapture, but those come with no guarantee, no warranty. The sublime slips out of all but the most humble grips. It's fun to gamble, though. Every moment in jazz lives on a tightrope, just as every fruit lives somewhere between unripe and rotten. What a miracle it is, then, that the giants of jazz bet big and never miss! Every moment of Thelonious Monk sidesteps disaster by the tiniest sliver and lands right on the money. Every line Coleman Hawkins weaves tempts the mechanisms of music to crash his ambitions, but he never flies close enough to the Sun to burn. It is like a coin landing on its side, every time --- a human affront to probability. Ornette Coleman deployed melodies-as-Trojan-horses: the veneer of singability softens the chaos of democracy, makes palatable the inherent dissonance of four people traveling through time, semi-together. The perverse truth is that we prefer art that flirts with failure. No danger, no stakes; no fire, no urgency. This is why a deterministic algorithm, no matter how opaque, will never replace a living, breathing musician. A machine may learn in some sense of the word, but it can never _yearn_.

Moreover, humans are farthest from machines when the nocturnal spirit takes over, when chemicals from within and without corrupt the rational, deterministic daytime mood that enables us to act as economic agents, workers in corporations. Jazz musicians smoke, drink, and otherwise damage their bodies not out of masochism but out of a dark sort of humility; a perfect body is a fiction, an impossibility. So too a perfect soul, a perfect thought, a perfect solo. The imperfect spark of chaos -- the highest degree of sensitivity -- is irreplaceable in right-now music. Indeed, the music we play and hear is, in so many ways, coincidental: just the rare bubbles that breach the membrane of consciousness.

So are we foolish to record jazz, to get up early and commit to tape individual performances for no audience? Am I insane to even attempt to simulate the multidimensional psychology of jazz, the continuous flow of half-decisions and big bets? Perhaps. But we are no more foolish than the listener who gambles her night off on untested music that has never happened before and will never happen again. I am no more foolish than a sculptor whose art is to _subtract_ from a natural and perfect stone until it reminds him of flesh. A fool can learn to swing. An angel cannot.

Three Incompletions

This is my first piece of fiction writing since a fourth-grade assignment wherein I described a guy running down a volcano, barely outpacing a flow of lava.

[Nov 19-20, 2022]

1. 

A black crescent of a man looms, tilting and wavering on an axis that itself slowly revolves.  He orbits the group, protecting them, a three-dimensional parenthesis, his posture sweeping out a forcefield.  Every time his friends laugh, his blue eyes dart around the bar.  A quick shoulder rotation -- half-open, half-closed body language -- hoping to take credit for the mirth of the party.  To be responsible.  His gaze should not meet anyone else's; he should merely  scan, soaking in outside admiration.  What should we admire?  That you have friends?  That you stand while they sit, that you are big?

Not too big to fall.  Your attention is split, thinly laid across the night out.  Playing a role; hearing what the laughs are about; gazing around; imagining yourself lookin' tough.  The swirl of ego, surely.  How else could you act like that?  Like what, exactly?

A sigh leaks out undetected.

Is it my problem that I am irrationally angry? The last bubble escapes the beer in front of me, and floats over towards him.  It does not make it through the forcefield.  His back shuts it out.  The right hand inches forward and grips the glass all-too-deliberately.  Hunched so that my lips are already at glass-lip-height.  Tilt the glass so that beer splashes against my mouth, but do not really drink.  Cannot afford any strength to be impaired; nothing can leak out anymore.

The friction of the ground against the chair means I can prepare the motion of pushing off against the bar without really moving.  Rehearse it over and over:

"Hey, buddy."

No good.  "Buddy."  But how ridiculous is to conjure up an elaborate scheme just so that we can fight?  How would that make it just?  Earned?  No bar fight comes down to morality.  No bar is moral.  If the clouds parted and God shone down on you, you would not see it.  The windows are in the worst possible place, the worst possible angle, to transmit God's light.  

A diversion -- a bottle smashed on the ground, a fall, a spill -- no.  A diversion from what?  A stranger having a night out?  Stranger indeed.  I am the stranger here: the stranger stranger, rumbling alone, stewing, sliding my thumbs over the back knuckles of my index fingers.  If he walks over to me, he's in my court; I'd have the upper hand.  But no; I'd have to spin around, get out of the chair; it wouldn't be my good hand anyway; his hand would literally be upper.

"Don't talk to her like that."

Talk to whom like what?  You're not saying much at all, just tilting around jaw-first, posing for a camera that isn't there.  Glinting in no sun at all.  I could crumple you.  All you need is an opportunity to act as bad as you are.  Show what you really must be made of.  I'd be ready to spring up, protect everyone else from you.  Nip the situation in the bud -- one swift, decisive, punch.  Out cold -- total control, no spite.  Pay for the drink beforehand.  Don't owe nobody nothing.

"Hey!"

Simple.  Better.  Get your attention -- un-split your attention, fold it back into a single moment wherein I punch you in the fucking face.  Feel every molecule of air giving way to fist.  The heat of compression an instant before cold, hard contact.  The first and last word you'll ever hear out of me.

Across the bar, the crescent-man hugs his friend as he stands from his chair.  He sucks the twisting friend into the hug. Two firm pats, but he cannot help his eyes from scanning yet again.  He does not detect the pathetic, sputtery rage seven chairs away, deeper into the bar.

The friend automatically pats for his wallet, his keys.  

"Bye!" with two fingers awkwardly extended, backing out of an improper and meaningless salute.  The blue-eyed man takes his friend's old seat; his defensive convex posture wilting into a straight line, leaned back against the chair and the floor.

After a few cycles, everyone's conversation becomes everyone else's.  Nobody is talking about anything at all.  The world before tonight is indistinguishable from the world after.  A full revolution; one point in the middle never moves at all.

The scrape of the chair against the floor blends with the guy's nod to the bartender, and both blend into the texture-devoid sea of conversation.  Every step, ostensibly towards the exit but in actuality towards the target, reverberates internally.  His heart beats up into his throat.  His fists wrap his thumbs and wobble like bad pendulums.  

Nobody has any idea.

Nobody has any idea.  Dozens of scenarios flash out.  Someone always ends up on the ground.  Someone yelling.  Women sobbing reflexively.  Not out cold -- wind knocked out of him, to be sure -- but enough life left to admit defeat.  

"Ahh, he got me..." a defeat that begs for sympathy.

Three chairs away.  Just as many steps.  Stepping with the left foot now puts me right on track to throw my whole weight right down onto him.  Each motion bolder than the last -- the bend of the knee slingshots up the chest, generating energy for the eventual, inevitable swing.  No second punch necessary.  Even better than "hey": silence.  Make yourself known in an ancient, tribal way.  Command respect.  

It is actually unfortunate that I have to counteract my inertia, that I cannot merely keep moving through this asshole.  Stamp proudly on the left foot; deliver the silence loudly.

"Hey, buddy."

His blue eyes wheel around and then stop for the first time all night.  He twists outward, his back concave.  He waits for the next part, lightly bemused.  But as soon as the stranger had appeared, he is on his way out the door, stomping meaninglessly.

The door lets in a cold gust that dissipates into the bar, melting away under the stagnant warmth.  All of the acceleration, the negative thermal energy, flattens into nothing.

"I don't think he was talking to you."

2. 

At exactly the midpoint of the bar, three women sit in a row.  The two outer women have adjusted their chairs inward and the inner woman has scooted back so that all three of them face each other.  Their backs-out defensive formation protects them from weak-hearted suitors, but the outer women's crossing gazes can pick up attractive men across the bar.  Their system had formed naturally, never actually described in words.  Single women do not hang out at bars if they are totally, unshakably, opposed to sex.  Sex was the pilot light way back in their brains: the initial source of both passionate flares and directed mechanical energy.  Try on three outfits before picking; predict what the other girls might wear and try to stand out.  A Rock-paper-scissors that nobody wants to play.  Every week, the same quip: "not looking for anything."  A perfectly degenerate answer, right in the middle of two realities.  

A cosmic rule prevented the three women from sharing the same sexual fate.  Two would find someone, or one would.  On nights where none would have, the cosmic rule would step in early and cancel their plans.  But once they took their formation at the bar, the future condensed into two parallel streams separated by a coin flip.  Nothing special in the air tonight.  The right-side woman has little to scan for: an irrelevant loser with bad hair, sulking; two indistinguishable men wearing vests and loafers, rattling off names of athletes.  The left-side woman, looking past the bored face of the right-side woman, shuffles through a mirthy party.  A mixed group: a tall, slouchy guy floating around, glinty blue eyes clumsy and insecure; a blocky guy with rectangular fingers and a cone for a neck; the closest guy, back turned, mysterious; and two women who would lean forward with arms crossed and necks craned as if to remind the men they were three-dimensional.

"I'm like, so over it."

"Yeah."

"Me too."

"Me three!"

"Here's to us," says the left-side girl, extending her vodka-and-cranberry steadily until the mystery man's revealing twist sends a tiny wave down her arm and onto her face.  The other two women, detecting the sudden ping, instinctively spin around in slow motion, flipping hair as a pretense.  His clothes are generic but the contour of his profile lights a fuse.  

"I'll do one more.  Thanks."

A strong jaw, waggling with some heft as he orders.  A smile that curls up and back into crow's feet.  Un-combable hair, evidence of an independent and defiant personality.

The right-side woman swivels back to face the other two.  Her face flattens into an impartial brick wall, ready to adjudicate.

"Um, yeah," gulps the middle woman, giving her friend to the left license to giggle.

A quick double-check.  No ring, just a watch that slides gently up and down.  The shoes: hard to see but obviously fine judging by their heels.  

The right-side woman has figured the whole story out just reading the two other women's faces: her adjacent friend would entertain this guy's advances, hypothetically, but she isn't tingling in her seat; the left-side woman is already half-drawn into a fantasy.  A Sunday drive where they both wear sunglasses, a strong grip when he helps her up a forbidden path.

"Go for it."

The middle woman stands up and walks over till she is directly behind the man, then calls out to the right-side woman, summoning her to the bathroom.  She scurries over, handbag dangling, and right on cue, the man turns to the left.  The remaining woman's calculated posture, her chin balanced on the backs of her fingers, gives him space to look at her, and he takes it.  She stares out into a not-there distance, her neck soaking up his gaze.  When her eyes shift fifteen degrees and focus on him, he doesn't recoil.  She shows a millimeter of teeth.  His eyebrow crinkles and his nostrils fill with air.  He lays his hand on the blocky guy's shoulder for a moment and then pushes off.  She looks down for just a moment, so that when she returns to him she can smile bigger, so that he can look down into her.

"Let me buy you another."

She nods gently and the bartender obliges, stepping away to peel an orange.

Her fantasies start to collapse and fade; he does not have the voice of a Sunday driver nor the hands of an up-helper.  Reality seeps into their place.  He works nearby but hadn't been going out for a while.  He recognizes the origin of her name.  He lies innocently:

"I noticed you the second I stepped in here."

Fine.  It's better than being called "ravishing" or being the butt of a dumb superlative.

"What did you notice?"  She turns her head away and blinks three times before waiting for his response.

"I noticed that you were the most beautiful woman at the bar."

As superlatives go, this was acceptable.  Down-to-Earth, realistic.  Perhaps even factual.  He had earned a chance to say something else.

"I don't want to pull you away from your friends, but--"

"Why not?"

"Well, OK, I do.  May I?" 

He extends his arm towards the chair on her left; she swivels anticlockwise, as if rolling along the arm.  He settles into the chair, turning his back on the bad-hair loser two chairs away.

"Have you ever been married?"

Her eyes widen.  What was he implying?

"Umm, no.  Do I look like I've been married?"

"You look great."

"Is that a yes?"

"No."

Mercifully, the bartender returns and plops down her drink.  

"I'll do one more.  Thanks mate."

He brandishes a bill that had obviously been sitting in his hand for a while, judging by how moistly it unfurls onto the bar.  The bartender accepts the order and walks back over to his station.

"Mate?"  She is hoping he is funny.  Tell me a joke, mister.

"Uh... It's a habit from my pirating days."

"You used to download movies for free?"  She cracks open a fresh smile.

"Well, I didn't want to risk the eyepatch."

If that was a joke, it didn't make any sense.  It didn't make any sense if it wasn't a joke, either.  Her fantasies becomes fleshy, less romantic, yet more urgent.  She sees him from above, a conduit for a transaction between herself and her loosely-defined needs.

"I think you'd look hot with an eyepatch."

"Well, yo-ho-ho then."  He clinks her glass and speaks.

"I think you look hot right now.”

His breath is unobjectionable -- about as good as breath can be -- and his lips are elastic, absorbing pressure and fitting to hers.

"I live five minutes from here."

"Let's go.  Let me say bye to my friends."

"Yeah."

An inoffensive man.  A template onto which she can project any number of full, complete lives.  He sends sparks only when she has decided to receive them; he could never overcome one of her bad moods.  He drives his Lexus safely.  Can safety be hot?  She answers his questions -- questions she has answered countless times -- while she summons up a vision of his apartment, his bedroom, his abdomen.

He balances out every mistake with a good move.  She likes the feeling of his hand low on her back; she can ignore his college-bro utterances.

"Alright!  Home sweet home!"

Oh God. At least take my coat.  He takes her coat, peeling it off in consort with gravity.  A miniature kiss on the slope of her neck -- something she could never do for herself -- lights her back up.

"You have beautiful legs, now that I get to see all of you."

He might as well have said "you have legs." She laughs at herself and at him, and at the vision of her friends grilling her tomorrow, prying out inconsequential details just so they have something to text about.

She gambles: "you play the guitar?"

"Sure do."

He grabs the instrument by the neck and spins it onto his lap as he sits on a gray-blue couch.  He plucks surprisingly softly: no all-at-once chords, just one-at-a-time arpeggios.  She wonders if this, whatever 'this' is, is Spanish, then lets the thought float away as he moves onto a new sequence.  She fixates on his index and middle fingers, oscillating in alternation, nails clean.  His thumb looks heavy.

The song progresses, turning like a gear, drawing them both in.  She can no longer tell what has been repeated and what is new.  The music as a whole has become familiar.  He no longer looks up from his fingers to check on her.  She no longer looks at anything in particular.  She tilts her head five degrees so that the weight of the music lands on her at a different angle.  She sees the music through a lock of her own hair.  She uncrosses her legs and balances them on her heels, toes up like blades of grass.  Bubbles escape the can of beer he had cracked open, drawn to the music hanging in the air.

Their movements shrink to the absolute minimum: his fingers stepping through an algorithm; her chest expanding and contracting; her right ankle swaying.  For the last time, she accepts a sexual fantasy through her mental gate.  His heaving seems so unnecessary, his grin so barbaric, so stupid -- she would have to close her eyes, to transport herself to the place of masturbation.  He had already fulfilled his role.  The only way to toy with destiny is to deny a foregone conclusion.

His music spins outwards, towards a new song, less hypnotic than the last.  She can see that he wishes he could go back; her body language is all wrong, impossible to fix.  

"Hey."

He keeps his left hand firm so that the strings keep ringing.

She listens to the notes' retreat, then says, "Thank you.  I really enjoyed that.  You should keep playing."

"Like right now?"

His delicate left-hand grip loosens so that it merely holds the guitar's neck, no longer ready to play.  His right hand is awkwardly stuck between reaching out to her and not.

"No.  Just, like, in general."

"Oh, OK." 

He sets the guitar an arm's length away, and impulsively shifts his weight, ready to pounce.  But he is not that dumb.  He sits back upright, looks into her eyes, and offers a tiny nod.

"Goodnight."

3.

One man gets there early, the other is 'running behind.'  Probably not actually running, thinks the early man, lackadaisically, as he slides his jacket off one shoulder at a time.  The sweat under his arms will have time to evaporate, but his torso will stay warm.  The vest is the perfect garment for a sweaty guy who is self-conscious about his big nipples, said nipples being prone to icy-hard erection.  Warmth plus padding plus armpit ventilation make his vest essentially non-negotiable in fall and winter.

It's been so long, he thinks.  Their misadventures stand out like lightning bolts through the mist of his repetitive adult life.  That last year of college felt like they had stolen it away.  No responsibilities formed any memories.  Only billowy reddish-purple long nights of marauding, yelling, grinning.  Drinking as an ambient activity.  Infinite physical stamina.  Jamais vu: the continual renewal of familiar, played-out scenarios. Every drive a maiden voyage, every shot a bristling, brown lumpy swallow, peeling the lips back into an adult's grimace.

Crystals; long stalagmites in the memory cave.  But since then?  Nothing solid at all.  Soft spirals of showin' up, gettin' paid, goin' home.  Was his old friend's life going to be vastly more exciting?  Doubtful.  He stayed in the same town, took a just-as-predictable job, maintained the same perfunctory online presence...

The sweat wicked away by the bar's heater-dry air is replaced with anxious, apprehensive sweat.

The door opens on the other side of the bar, and the late man struts in, upright with anticipation.  The early man stands up and casts aside his perspiratory fears.  Both men tilt thirty degrees clockwise and embrace.

"Man!"

"I can't believe it."

"Are you tellin' me that we both lived here for this long, and never did anything about it?"

"I know, I know."

"So how the hell are ya?"

"Oh, you know -- can't complain."

"Well, ya could!"

Both men lean back and release hearty laughter -- the heartiest they will release all night -- in a show of conviviality.  Their bellies very nearly touch.

"Whatcha drinkin'?"

"Beer, dude."

"I coulda seen that comin'."

They both laugh once more, at a fraction of the power of their previous laughs.  The late man unzips his jacket, revealing a vest underneath.  The early man internally sighs in relief that his vest is black, instead of dark blue like his old friend's.  The late man snuggles into his chair and the early man reflexively -- empathetically -- shifts around in his.

"Can you believe the season we're having?"

The early man is not sure if his friend is talking about the weather or basketball.  He defaults to basketball, wary of the cliché about weather.

"It's insane, man. Iverman put up--"

"I bought a fuckin' snow blower.  I feel like my dad."

"Oh.  I know, dude.  My brother lives in Florida now--"

"Nice."

"-- and every time I talk to him on the phone, he makes a point of telling me the temperature.  I'm like, 'yeah, good luck with the 'gators!'"

Both men laugh at low intensity but for a high duration, taking as much time as possible to pity the early man's brother.

Just before the laughter fully dissipates, the late man grabs a menu from an arm's length and pretends to read it carefully.  The early man gives him all the time he needs and unfocuses his eyes.

"I can't believe I'm actually givin' a shit about which beer to drink.  Man, we used to drink piss.”

Another round of perfunctory laughter bubbles out of the men.  The late man extends his right hand from his crossed arms and the bartender walks over.

"I'll have the lager."

The bartender nods, but before he turns away--

"You want another?  Hate to keep ya waitin'."

The early man measures his drink visually.  The glass is literally half empty.

"Nah, that's alright.  Still working."

Both men watch the bartender walk to the tap and lean onto the handle.  The beer forms an almost-trapezoid in the glass, and both men nod with approval as the bartender expertly rotates his wrist back so that no beer spills and barely any foam puffs up.

"Hey, it's good to see ya, buddy."

Their glasses clink and they each swig their beer.  Both men resist the urge to peel back their lips into a grimace.

Mercifully, a TV is on in a visible spot.  Both men hunker over their beers and peer upwards, rocking back and forth.

"This guy's unreal.  Scorin' like fifteen, twenty a quarter."

"I know.  Imagine what he could do on a real team."

"We're a real team!  Just gotta fire that loser Hoblansky."

"If only it were that simple."

Both men parrot thinly disguised opinions they had heard on TV.  It would be beyond impossible for either to admit their unfamiliarity with coach Dean Hoblansky; whether or not he had done a good job is for others to decide.

The men fixate on the TV, waiting for a moment that deviates from the ambient average of basketball.

"There we go!"

Minutes later, the third quarter ends and a commercial begins.  Then men unplug themselves from the screen and face each other again.  An inkling of dread springs up in both of their hearts. One stimulus gone; one conversation-starter gone.

"Man, do you remember that night where that girl's cousin came to the dorm?"

"Oh, uh, ... Kimberly?"

"All I remember was that she was a redhead.  And those--"

The early man's lips fold inward at the same time his eyebrows and chin both lower.  His look suggests an "Oh, please."

The late man's elbows move out to the sides.  Just before he completes a breast-holding motion, he hesitates, realizing how dumb and old he must look.

"She was so hot, dude."

"You know what they say."

Neither man knows what they say.

"You ended up--"

The early man cracks a toothy, impish grin, putting on a guilty face.  At the same moment, a hazy memory of that night enters his head.  The redheaded cousin had vodka-stumbled into his dorm room and stirred his penis around while moaning in order to emulate pornography.  He had tilted his head backwards and upwards to signal ecstasy.  The rest of the memory starts to disintegrate and slip away.  He cannot remember a single word she ever spoke.

The late man raises his glass to his old friend, who clinks it while masking the banality and directionlessness of his memory.

"Wasn't that the same night that Murph puked out of the window and hit some girl?"

Both men begin to laugh but then recoil in disgust, mildly ashamed to find any humor in the situation at all.

"Crazy times."

They were not crazy times.  The men's college experience could have been easily transposed to any of the tens of thousands of matching experiences that had happened at the exact same time.  Their lives had unfolded in parallel -- details differing, but essences indistinguishable.  They are two tiny organisms in a huge, flat colony.   There are no individual corals.

A flare of mirth across the bar distracts both men and twists them towards the action.  The early man notices the ellipse of thinning hair on the back of his old friend's head and instinctively reaches to the back of his own head.  At that moment, he feels that his nipples are are at least as large as his friend's bald spot, and growing rapidly.  The terror of this image dilates his eyes until he realizes he is absently staring directly at a woman's ear.  She is thankfully preoccupied with a stirring straw.  

The woman, in the middle of the bar, seems to be at an age exactly halfway between the man's current age and his age during his college memories.  She does not lean one way or other; he cannot claim her for either side.  She looks at nothing in particular.

The late man spins back around, looking almost disappointed that no trouble had stirred.

"Let's get another round."

"If you say so," says the early man, who feels only the vaguest intimation of alcohol in his system. 

Each man extends his outer arm for a menu -- a piece of paper sandwiched between two thin panes of plastic resting on a rectangular base -- and semi-reads the list of beers and their prices.

"Man, do you remember when five bucks could get you a beer and a hot dog at Shimmy's?"

"Oh, I know."

"Just don't ask where the hot dog came from!"

The men desperately need to laugh.  Only the late man's laugh is audible; a lopsided smile rolls across the early man's face.

The bartender's internal clock correctly nudges him back towards the men.  The late man flashes two fingers, intercepting the bartender, who wheels around back towards the tap.

"I'm gonna hit the restroom."

The late man walks away.  On the TV, the basketball resumes.  The remaining man balances his weight evenly between his elbows and folds his arms, praying that some breeze will wick away the residual moisture just outside the holes of his vest.  His neck tilts forwards and his eyes roll up, centering on the TV screen.

The bartender returns.  The man begins to reach for a dollar, trying not to compromise any airflow past his armpit, but then pauses and returns to his previous position.  The debit card will take care of this.  The bartender retreats.

"Thanks."

~ ~ ~

Alcohol is a poison that shrivels the space between people.  Other rituals build bridges -- strong, clear, proud -- that connect human beings through shared memories.  New experiences flow through these nodes and get absorbed, a little bit at a time, until they cohere with the rest of the network.  But people only get closer when they drink because the world around them wilts and dies.  If it screams out, no one hears it.  You latch on to someone -- can you maintain that grip as the world rehydrates and expands?  Or does the memory snap, like a rubber band trying to do two things at once?

Jewishness as a Model for a New American Federation

Ben Webster has appeared in my recent listening more often than any other saxophonist.  A titan deserving of his stature: accessibly romantic and urgent but also more than subtle enough for the aficionadi.  But Ben Webster presents a challenge to the modern school(s) of saxophone.  Growing up, teachers exalted the virtue of versatility, and being able to do many things certainly leads to economic rewards in the current vulture-landscape of the gigging musician.  Woodwind doubles, trad-jazz cosplay, wedding bands, the ability and means to drive a car…

But stylistic versatility comes at a cost to purity.  (For what it’s worth, I still value technical versatility, by which I mean two things only: a wide dynamic range and many options for articulation.)  Ben Webster is not particularly versatile; he has essentially two modes: boozy, whispery, melt-your-heart romanticism; and growling, exuberant swing.  I haven’t heard Ben Webster leave his comfort zone — but I’m not particularly hungry to hear that either!  I listen to Ben Webster for the Ben Webster stuff.  There are other places to go for everything else; such is the marketplace of music.  I dream of being so narrow, so distilled.

~ ~ ~

“Antisemitism is on the rise, again.”  

I have heard the claim trotted out, again.  It cannot be true on average over multiple generations; despite the best efforts of both far-right and -left goofballs, the Holocaust remains unforgotten, singular, and relevant.  Ugly flare-ups come in spite of the long arc of history.  Still, Black-Jewish tension is particularly heartbreaking to me.  The two funniest groups in America, the greatest contributors to American English.  Some of the most musical people in the universe.  And ripe history for solidarity: fundamental origin stories of slavery and oppression, triumph against all odds.  Impossible to kill.  No one who has bet against the Jews has ever won.  Black American identity is younger, but I will similarly bet with it and against the haters.  My blood is Jewish and my heroes are Black.  Push forward, not back.

What can these groups learn from each other?  What can they teach the rest of the world?  I ask the question in the context of a less-and-less-unlikely global catastrophe — “experts estimate the probability of nuclear war remains under 50%’’ — in which the death rattle of The Empire could wipe out far more than we are prepared to lose.  (Want to spoil your mood?  Listen to this.)  And even if we evade WWIII or a financial apocalypse or a random solar blast, the surviving futures look mostly grim:  Chinese-communism-style surveillance state, antinatalist hyperenvironmentalism, delusional internet cults awash in Christian nationalism… oy.  I can’t help but add that all three flavors of dystopia are particularly bad for the Jews, but then again, we have gotten through worse.  Don’t bet against the Jews.

Is there any way to zig against all those horrible zags?  Better yet, any way to cherrypick whatever scraps of progress might live within those dystopias, to wrest a more temperate and egalitarian future from the clutches of many extremisms?  Let’s see: a communist surveillance state can only exist on a substrate of technological interconnectedness, which could be a net positive if handled with some delicateness; the environmental zealots are right about the twin plagues of cars and trash, despite their extreme wrongness about energy and the value of life; OK, it’s hard to find the sunny spots of the QAnon world, but I will give them this: they hate the government the right amount.

Does any system carve these positives out of the unignorable negatives?  For my money, the principles and implementation of Bitcoin come closer than one might think.  Forget NFTs and tech-bros and high-risk speculative trading; that shit all sucks.  Bitcoin 1) resists surveillance; 2) puts energy to good use and incentivizes cleaning up its sources; and 3) weakens the government.  A zealous argument might include Bitcoin as a necessary condition for human flourishing, but even the most maximalist pundit would not call it sufficient.  Money is not enough.

Another common word in these circles: decentralization.  Being against centralization, I am pro-decentralization.  But what does that really mean — where does it lead, taken to its logical conclusion?  I find it hard to disagree with this article from June 2016 — before the election of Trump, before we took the portal to reality-TV reality.  (Many many strong arguments against the American Empire have come screaming to the foreground since then.)  The national-divorce-meiosis could even chain-react further than the level of the states.  NYC residents feel little in common with inhabitants of the rural parts of New York; California makes no sense as a politically unified place — we are more ready for this than we might think.  But breaking an egg is again a necessary but not sufficient condition for making an omelet.  Enter the Jews.

Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness have existed in so many different situations across history, despite the best and worst efforts of many villains.  Jewish identity is bigger than ethnicity, religion, geography, politics, and even culture.  It is just that — identity: what makes you you.  The secret to the survival of Jewishness is the selective running of different blocks of code in different situations.  Judaism the religion is only a subset of Jewishness, and moral guidelines comparable to the teachings of Christ or the Buddha are only a subset of Judaism.  The Tanakh also contains genealogy and civil laws — features not necessary in the texts of a religion like Christianity, which came to exist in the context of the Roman Empire, which had its own civil laws.  Modern Jews selectively and purposefully “gray out” huge blocks of Judaism, and do so flexibly according to the times and places in which they live.  Modern-day nutritional science does about half the job of the laws of Kashrut; the existence of weekends pushes Jews and non-Jews alike towards the profound value of the Sabbath; slavery is out, period.  The discourse of the Talmud moreover upgrades Judaism by clarifying it, but not too much; it also shows how to upgrade thinking and interpretation — a precursor to the academic system as well as online message boards and Wikipedia.  All of which is to say that Jewishness has morphed greatly over the generations and will continue to evolve and diverge.  The only unbroken commonality is the continuity itself of the legacy and identity of a people.

Jews had their own kingdom once and they have their own state now, not without its flaws.  But the vast majority of Jews in history have existed as minorities, religiously, ethnically, and ideologically.  Attrition due to forced conversion and mass murder has always existed, but the flame never goes out.  My hope for every individual person in the world is to feel a sense of belonging to some sort of group like this.  The sense of belonging is the sufficient ingredient that will make a decentralized future work.  In particular, one will need a flexible, larger-than-necessary identity that can scale up or down as needed.  More likely, many such identities will coexist and compete, dancing in one’s soul.

America fragments — then what?  The Jews will be ready, or will get ready quick.  No time for the dough to rise.  I worry for those who attempt to exist primarily in the Twitter-level national “conversation”: the people for whom the government acts as the arbiter of culture and belief.  I worry for the YouTube atheist who purports to see all of humanity as one big team and therefore associates with no one at all.  I worry for the TV-addled consumer for whom entertainment is religion and vice versa.  I worry for the immigrant who makes no effort to learn English, who digs their heels in against any assimilation.  I worry for the teenager whose whole life is mediated through three or four tech companies.  I worry for the system-hacking arch-capitalist — when systems disintegrate, so do loopholes — no more “number go up.”  

Each person needs a small handful of identities, a simple web of languages they can speak.  Bitcoin can perhaps create a substrate of money and energy that acts as neutral economic piping.  The threat of violence can perhaps create a substrate of mutually-assured security.  But that’s not enough.  If we ever become a zillion isolated points — the trivial and disappointing discrete topology — we lose.  Human culture evolves in groups, and super- and sub-groups above and below.  Inclusion and exclusion are equally important.  Culture needs texture, and the big forces that smooth out that texture — corporations, governments, violence — deserve to go.

~ ~ ~

For the first time in my life, I have been experimenting with reeds below size 2.  No spoilers, but I recommend you try it.  At least once.  A revelation — an ice-cold mirror held up to bad habits; a new path forward, or at least somewhere else.  Stickshift.  I will have something to show off soon but not too soon.

"Jazz is a Gambler's Music."

The thought bubbled up randomly, as all thoughts do.  Perhaps this puts jazz in opposition to the Mozart-Beethoven-Schubert thrust of Classical music: incredible music but not risky anymore.  Performances, recordings, and interpretations of e.g. Mozart have been homogenized so as to embalm the legendary composer.  As if a musical vision of Mozart’s strength could not withstand a risky interpretation — sad!  The forces behind this embalming are the usual ones — economics and institutions, plus the passage of time.  These same forces are at play in the jazz world, and there is moreover a conscious effort to embalm jazz too.  Preserve the tradition, arrange it in the museum of cultural consciousness.  From within jazz, the embalmers fly the flag of “authenticity;” how dare you play _______ when you haven’t firmly established your mastery of (conservative) bebop?  But the embalmers are doomed, for jazz is a gambler’s music.

Mozart’s main deliverable was the score.  Fairly immutable written music that enables performance and interpretation but does not contain them.  He wrote code but didn’t provide the interpreter; recipes without the cook.  The greatest recipes ever can still be McDonald’s-ified.  Plus, Mozart never could have predicted the advent of recording technology.  To all non-musicians, trust me on this: it is generally a far more gratifying experience to play Mozart than to merely hear it, even when you suck at playing.  It is like cooking and eating simultaneously, but also like communing with the elegant god of geometry and the sensual god of rhythmic tactile experience.  All that said, sheet music is no longer a scalable or approachable consumer product.  And there’s nothing wrong with listening to recordings — shadows they may be, but still mighty and lovely.  Nonetheless, there is much more to the total Classical Music experience than clicking PLAY and chillin’ out.

Jazz players get this.  In fact, I can trace back many of the aesthetic and economic failures of jazz to the simple fact that playing jazz is generally way more fun than listening to it, especially listening with an untrained ear.  I really wish we could all admit this and just split inward- versus outward-facing jazz.  But what is the source of that fun?  It cannot be just indulgence in the real-time audio outcome of the music, for then recordings would be just as fun and easier, too: a strict upgrade.  Part of the answer has to do with the social/conversational aspect of jazz.  The high barrier to entry, steep difficulty curve, and technical sophistication of jazz relative to other musics attract introverts and nerds running autistic personality modules.  This kind of person is probably not destined to be a social butterfly, and yet the sensitivity and nuance of improvisational music scratches the social itch all humans possess.  The social side of playing music with friends without any consideration of audience or outcome is consistently underrated, I think.

But there is another source of jazz fun.  It is the danger — the gamble.  The mad dance of the dice, the twist of fate riding on the river card.  Will she stick the landing?  Will this note work?  Where am I in the form?  If you don’t see the fun in that, stay away from jazz and from Las Vegas.  But either way, as with the social-fun-aspect, outsiders face a problem.  It’s not fun to watch someone else play Blackjack.  It’s even less fun if you don’t know the rules!  Herein lies a paradox: as jazz musicians, we work hard to come off as suave and professional, to minimize mistakes, to play with confidence and poise; but overly-perfect jazz erases the blazing excitement of the dangerous gamble: the can’t-tear-your-eyes-away; the gut-wrench as the acrobat flies across the stage; the incredulity-plus-admiration when someone pulls off the impossible. 

And yet, it would be incredibly lame to begin a concert with a disclaimer: “What we’re about to do is gonna be really hard, we promise!  We could mess up at any moment!”  It has to be implicitly detectable: an unspoken undercurrent of probabilistic tension; a source of ever-increasing heat.  A few suggestions for makin’ it happen:

Clarity.  Sharp lines, homophony, togetherness.  Nothing like a good rest to remind the audience “we’re making all of this happen right now!”  Unison work counteracts noisy entropy.  Entropic free jazz has its place, and may well reflect some thermodynamic truth of the universe, but it’s not nearly as dangerous, subversive, or delicate as we delude ourselves into thinking.

Discipline.  “There are no mistakes in jazz.” — fuck off; nobody actually thinks that.  Every mistake, especially every mistake that is not retroactively contextualized (a jazz superpower), imparts a cost on the listener.  It tarnishes the glow, reminds us a bit too much of the fallibility of the musicians.  But of course, as mentioned earlier, flawless jazz is usually conservative, safe jazz.  The deepest balance is circumvent a dense thicket of possible mistakes: give the audience the impression that anything but what you are playing would suck.  You don’t want to be merely plucking the prettiest flower in the garden, nor selecting the least of many evils.  Be like the figure-skater whose elegance belies the fact that a tiny imperfection would unfurl into a catastrophe.

Virtuosity. Ironically, not a virtue on its own.  Shredding is tiresome, emotionless precision is basically worthless.  At least we tell ourselves that — partially to shield our egos and partially because it’s true.  But equally true is that technique is easy to admire, and executing something extremely far outside of the layman’s abilities is impressive.  Music is not meant to be just impressive — if that’s it, you’re doomed to the realm of the shallow and vapid — but impressive shit elevates musicians towards that transcendent, ever-so-slightly-superhuman position that makes them celebrities.  Virtuosity is a non-inconsequential appeal of Art Tatum, and the dearth of virtuosity holds back Vijay Iyer even though it seems like he probably has some good ideas.

~ ~ ~

Again and again, a paradox viciously grins at us from deep within the churning heart of music.  We strive to give the impression that we are escaping the laws of probability over and over.  That it could go horridly south at any moment, but never does.  Confidence in the face of danger.  Bet it all on black.

Jazz is a gambler’s music.  Unfreezable, unkillable, unpredictable.  Keep it that way, and show it off!

A Tale of Three Stories

A magical moment: clicking “run” so that a window pops up and displays a single room of a videogame.  My wife drew all the art by hand; I inhaled enough tutorials so that I can handle the coding.  The player character for now, Dimbil, can walk around the room, and what’s more, can talk to some NPCs.  When you make your own game, the NPCs can say whatever you want them to say.  Anything!  A blue squiggly guy, Gros, just yells “Gefilte!” when you interact with him.  A sprite of the clay model of Teddy from Mother 1 says “Cube Root!” for no reason.  No reason, indeed — it’s meaningless as of now, just a playground to work out the tech.  But there is something just so tantalizing, so absorbing, about the little shred of agency and control a player gets.  It’s a massive artistic opportunity, replete with responsibility, to tell a story in a videogame.  It gets one thinking about when it works and when it doesn’t, and how…

Consider three games: Red Dead Redemption 2, Dark Souls, and Disco Elysium.  An American game by a gigantic AAA corporation; a Japanese game made by a renowned mid-sized team; a European game from a small indie team of games outsiders.  While all three fall under the huge umbrella of ‘RPG,’ the approaches to storytelling could not be more different.  There’s much to learn from all three, and learn we must, for the “problem” of telling a story in a videogame is far from solved.  In fact, it is so unsolved that with but a handful of exceptions, the best such a story can be is “good for a videogame.”  Blech.  To be fair, it’s a hard problem — much harder than for books or movies (obviously).  But hard does not mean impossible, and someday we will coronate games as having simply “good” stories and writing, without qualification or apology.  In the meantime, let’s scratch at the three examples I brought up.

I have elected RDR2 as the representative for the big-budget (and therefore somewhat conservative) Western approach — perhaps quite a bit better than most of its points of comparison, but not fundamentally different.  A beloved game — in many ways a masterpiece to be sure — but I’ll say up front that it didn’t quite land for me.  RDR2 is great the way the Hoover Dam is great: huge, impressive, a technical achievement.  But the Hoover Dam doesn’t make you feel anything more than admiration for engineering — so too RDR2.  The graphical fidelity and the animations are unreal; the tech behind the lighting and sound is stunning.  More generally, the systems of the game — both the interactive and non-interactive/background systems — are exceedingly well done.  Hunting, horseriding, shaving/haircuts, … all balance realism and fun + convenience.  Bravo, engineers.  But how does the game communicate its narrative on top of all those interlocking systems?  The storytelling basically breaks down into two layers: the explicitly-told layer and the ambient/background layer.  The former category consists of the cutscenes and the dialogue surrounding the main missions; the latter covers the details of the world design, the actions of minor NPCs, side-quest tidbits, and so on.  Let’s go one layer at a time.

The explicit cutscenes + dialogue layer follows the standards that videogames set long ago.  Banter during missions doesn’t interrupt gameplay, but said missions are generally bookended by cinematic cutscenes where player control is turned off so that story exposition moves along at exactly the pace, with exactly the camera angles, that the game wants.  It’s fine.  But it does bug me that in a game advertised as extremely open-world and extremely accommodating of the player’s whims, the cutscenes and dialogue are totally frozen, locked in with no real possibility of role-playing.  For unless you are playing as the version of Arthur Morgan whose morality is perfectly gray, you’re going to rub up against some nauseous tonal discontinuities.  Arthur’s disposition, his response to all things, boils down to a cool-guy combination of “I’m getting too old for this shit” and “Someone’s gotta do it” with a strangely capitalist sprinkle: “I’ll do it for a good price.”  Like Joe Biden, he scoffs at  difficult questions and plays the fool, but is also perfectly willing to murder dozens of innocent people to protect his boss’ financial interest.  Arthur having essentially zero capacity for critical thought is a necessary precondition for the story’s confused morality.  “What if the big boss ‘good’ guy (who continuously kills and loots rivals and civilians alike) actually is … gasp… bad?  ‘I never could have seen it coming, even though he has been greedy, corrupt, and bullying for the entire game!’”   The Honor slider, a single number that represents the sum of all deeds, is anemic at best, offensive at worst — especially since the game more or less forces you down both “good” and “bad” paths.  As far as I know, it’s not really possible to commit to either a purely angelic or psychopathic evil run (at least one that makes any sense), and your Honor value is in fact capped for the first half of the game.  To be fair, the designers do shade the dialogue and banter ever-so-slightly based on your Honor.  That’s pretty cool, but I can’t help but feel it’s overshadowed by the broad-brush stuff; like, it’s a nice touch that you’re more polite to passersby if you… uh… kill slightly fewer people…?  Hmm.  I think it boils down to a case of having your cake and eating it too: you can have a silent protagonist, a blank canvas for role-playing, or a fully preconceived character, but when RDR2 tries to mix those options, it produces a protagonist who is essentially a bumbling, morally incoherent idiot, simultaneously a “don’t fuck with me” badass and an utter bitch who will go on a crime spree on behalf of a gang leader or deliver a love letter to a teenager with equal gusto, just because they asked “pretty please.”  Likewise, a morality system left to a simple computation, tallying up debits and credits in the eyes of the Lord, is dare I say utterly at odds with, well, actual morality.  Giving players choices is great, and giving weight to those choices by tying them up with moral quandaries is also great.  But leave it at that!  Morality is what you do when nobody is watching or keeping score.  The watchmaker’s desire to have every feature of the game interconnected in a web of computations leads to stupid design decisions like getting discounts at stores because of high Honor and looting better items from corpses because of low Honor.  To the extent that Honor becomes just another system of transaction begging to be optimized, it is not actually about “honor” or morality.

The background storytelling is pretty standard Rockstar fare: everyone on the street is kind of a dick for some reason, and the world is about 10% sillier than you’d expect.  The environment has some really nice touches — two competing farmers, and you can see whose crops are doing better on the border between their fields, for instance — but none that really tell a story.  There’s some underlying theme of “the world’s a-changin’ and us outlaws are a dyin’ breed,” but like, OK, so what?  I am supposed to feel sympathy for the thieving, murderous bandits?  And yeah, yeah, it’s poetic and humorous that the authority figures are incompetent dumbfucks, that the black sheep of the rich family is the only cool one, and so on.  But the bottom line is that the story, in all its forms, simply does not realign your real-life mindset or reflect back a vision of the world.  The choices don’t feel like they matter, even when they do on some mechanical level.  Perhaps it’s an obvious point, but killing versus sparing one guy in one sidequest is meaningless when you will be forced to execute dozens and dozens of equivalent guys just to reach the end credits.

To summarize before moving onto the next game, RDR2 is astoundingly fleshed-out and also polished, but succumbs to the narrative issues we have come to expect from games. The models, animations, and textures are supreme so that the game feels weighty and the locations are actually kind of believable.  And the writing isn’t even that bad! — no worse than a Marvel movie or an airport novel.  But the game fails to avoid the pitfalls that plague traditional videogame storytelling.  The subtlety of little moral choices building up over time is completely obliterated by the senseless violence.  The temptation of the designers to build out a tough, cool, and darn handsome protagonist overrides the opportunity for meaningful role-playing.  The narrative arc itself — “We are bad, but good, but not as bad as the guys who are also bad, but really bad” — is dumb, par-for-the-course Hollywood drivel.  But in defense of Rockstar as a videogame studio rather than movie studio, it’s nearly impossible to pace an idiosyncratic, personal story alongside all these open-ended systems.  The final point is not that RDR2 sucks.  It’s fun, significant in the history of games, and has quite a lot of stunning moments.  But at the end of the day, it didn’t solve The Story Problem.

~    ~    ~

Dark Souls, the game to which all others are now compared, resists the standard storytelling style that RDR2 embodies.  After the intentionally cryptic opening, there are very few cutscenes; most are just a few seconds long, introducing a boss, usually with no words at all.  NPCs offer up grim, confusing prognostications, but the player character is a mute zombie so there’s not much dialogue in the strictest sense.  Is the game narratively anemic — a Byzantine hack-and-slasher thinly wrapped in enigmatic dark-fantastical imagery?  You might be forgiven for believing so, at least in 2011 when Dark Souls’ wildfire of popularity and influence was just being kindled.  But then what of the countless YouTube videos dissecting the lore, what of the slightly paranoid feeling you get when you play, that the world does in fact cohere in some meaningful way?  The answer is that Dark Souls does not necessary “tell” a story in the active sense, but rather contains a story; I’d go even further and claim Dark Souls conceals its own story: a narrative puzzle that compliments the puzzle of the combat and equipment systems.  The twin puzzles of the game both juggle many threads of interlocking systems.  In a single moment of action in Dark Souls, you may have to consider an array of statistics: the weight, base power, damage type, stat scaling, and moveset of your weapon, plus the frame and hitbox data of its several moves; analogous bundles of information for shields and armor; and the corresponding data for your opponent, not forgetting topographic and other spatial concerns.  The lore of the game is similarly complex and multivariate, and also breaks down into interwoven systems: NPC advice; item descriptions; environmental clues; and the narrative implications of the active gameplay itself (such as how if you beat The Great Grey Wolf Sif to within an inch of his life, he will limp and cower like a puppy — oof).  

The end product is a story that could only exist in a videogame; books and movies are simply too linear.  You experience the plot more archeologically than literarily, but on top of that, the amount of story you experience varies by playstyle, proportionally to the amount of detective work you’re up for.  The lower limit for the amount of story you can choose to experience is essentially zero but the upper limit is sky-high, nearly unreachable as a solitary person.  On one hand, this must have been a source of pain for developers: the knowledge that potentially a majority of players wouldn’t even really engage with the narrative (imagine releasing an album where half the tracks were concealed by a puzzle that most listeners would not solve).  But I dig it, and I commend the bravery.  The difficulty of fully accessing the story relies on the incredibly strong and complete action mechanics; you could not get away with this in Final Fantasy.  The upside of the risky move is the sense that there exists even more than there really does: it always feels like there’s more to uncover, more to discuss.  It’s frankly Talmudic if you factor in all the online commentary and interpretation!  But it’s also a bit of a hoax: of course there is some bottom; the game’s data is finite.  One wonders how the developers cultivated this effect. With full knowledge and control over the story, it’s quite tricky to put yourself in the mindframe of an eager first-timer.  Once you hear Piano Phase, you can never recapture that first moment: “this is it? … Wait, what…?!!”  But FromSoft pulled it off!

So how does the story come together, anyway?  The most significant source of information is the item descriptions (another bold move by the designers!).  Because these descriptions have to be accessed through a menu while no action is underway (there is no pausing in Dark Souls), they are separated from the main gameplay.  You could conceivably play for an hour, impaling dudes and rolling around for fifty-two minutes and then taking a break from the impaling by cozying up with some flavor text for eight.  Totally different modes of playing.  One problem is that not all of the items will be obtained by the player.  Another is that the descriptions are not exactly crystal-clear, nor do connections between them make themselves readily known.  To be fair, many are self-contained little poems on the theme of bleakness, and do not advance the story per se.  Exhibit A: 

"Dried Finger with multiple knuckles. Shriveled but still slightly warm.

With this many knuckles, surely it cannot be anything human."

Or a little bit of tough motivation, from the Parrying Dagger (from Dark Souls II, which has even better descriptions overall):

Accomplishments are forever out of reach

to those who constantly fear failure.

A true warrior hones his body and mind,

and peers far beyond immediate hardship.

Woo!  That makes you want to fight!  Other descriptions, the juiciest story-wise, reference characters and histories that you may or may not encounter, but collectively form a big jigsaw puzzle of lore.  Take, for instance, soul spear, a powerful spell from one of two (generally opposed) schools of magic:

Sorcery developed by Big Hat Logan. Fire piercing soul spear.

A symbol of Logan's strength, the soul spear is referenced repeatedly in the legends, and is said to be on par with Lord Gwyn's lightning.

Not so meaningful in isolation, but a little context goes a long way here.  Lord Gwyn is the ultimate figure of faith-based magic, whose thematic imagery includes lightning and fire and the sun.  Gwyn is known to have slayed the primordial dragons, whose otherwise impervious scales happen to be weak to lightning (indeed, dragon-/drake-like enemies are generally tough but handily dispatched with lightning damage in-game).  In other words, he’s a Bad Motherfucker.  Big Hat Logan is an NPC you can rescue and ultimately learn from; he’s the top sorcerer in the land, focusing on intelligence-based magic instead.  Magic that rises to Gwyn’s level, the game would have you believe, should be impossible, and the spells you acquire earlier in the game are nowhere near that level.  But soul spear casts some doubt, adds a fold of intrigue…

Without getting too far into the weeds, you can see how complex the project of unspooling the story from these little fragments becomes.  And the item descriptions are just one piece!  NPCs can be pretty chatty, and some even react to your possession of certain items with unique lines of dialogue.  Fan-favorite Solaire of Astora is first encountered proudly gazing into the setting sun: 

"Oh, hello there. I will stay behind, to gaze at the sun.

The sun is a wondrous body. Like a magnificent father!

If only I could be so grossly incandescent!”

This is early into the game, but his words take on deeper meaning once you uncover the thematic thread of Gwyn, sunlight, and lightning. (Indeed, Solaire is an expert in powerful lightning-based magic, namely a miracle (spell) called “Sunlight Blade.”)  For what it’s worth, Solaire utters perhaps the most poetic tutorial of online multiplayer ever uttered: 

"The way I see it, our fates appear to be intertwined.

In a land brimming with Hollows, could that really be mere chance?

So, what do you say? Why not help one another on this lonely journey?

We are amidst strange beings, in a strange land.

The flow of time itself is convoluted; with heroes centuries old phasing in and out.

The very fabric wavers, and relations shift and obscure.

There's no telling how much longer your world and mine will remain in contact.

But, use this, to summon one another as spirits, cross the gaps between the worlds, and engage in jolly co-operation!

Of course, we are not the only ones engaged in this.

But I am a warrior of the sun! Spot my summon signature easily by its brilliant aura.

If you miss it, you must be blind!"

Lovely.

The third prong of the story is perhaps the most subtle: the unspoken environmental clues built into the world.  Just as how the charred stones on the bridge to Undead Parish warn you of the fire-breathing dragon lying in wait (a gameplay signal), many details in the game signal information of narrative significance.  A particularly well-fleshed out example: if you take a wrong turn about 30 minutes into the game and descend a locked watchtower, you will encounter a knight in ridiculously heavy armor wielding a ridiculously giant club, and he comes straight for you.  Murdering him grants you his ring: Havel’s ring (hence his name should be Havel), with the following description: 

This ring was named after Havel the Rock, Lord Gwyn's old battlefield compatriot.

Havel's men wore the ring to express faith in their leader and to carry a heavier load.

Interesting.  Why did Havel try to kill you on sight, when Solaire, presumably on the same “team,” was but a big chiller?  Wait, was that actually Havel, though?  The ring’s description mentions “Havel’s men” — perhaps Havel himself was strong enough to wield the heavy equipment, but his men needed a magical boost.  Would that explain his kill-on-sight attitude?  The game doesn’t drop any more information. A loose thread, for the time being.  But if you thoroughly explore the beloved mid-game area Anor Londo, you can come across a secret basement.  For context, Anor Londo is a sunlight-bathed castle easily seen to be Gwyn-related.  In the corner of the secret basement sit a few treasure chests containing copies of Havel’s weapon (the Dragon Tooth), shield, and armor.  Makes sense — Havel hid his prized possessions in his boy’s fortress. But in the same basement, guarded by a trap, there is a very puzzling item indeed: an Occult Club, a weapon enchanted with magically that specifically counteracts the faith-based magic of team Gwyn.  Huh?  To make a long story short, the hidden club implies that Havel may have been involved with a plot to betray and overthrow Gwyn, and this may be why he was locked away in the tower, left to “go hollow” (Dark Souls’ way of saying go insane/lose humanity).  If you really dig through the data, you can uncover even more juicy details: Gwyn actually cooperated with a rogue dragon named Seath, which may have angered Havel, the avowed dragon-killer, hence his plot of betrayal.

The point is that none of this is spelled out in an on-the-nose cutscene or anything.  The meager act of placing a perplexing item in a hidden basement opens up a vast world of speculation.  Even more delicious is that there isn’t really a final answer; as with many plots in Dark Souls, you ultimately have to commit to an unfalsifiable theory.  Let the imagination run wild.  Maybe check on what other fans are saying online… now we’re talking!  To be clear, Havel’s side story really has nothing to do with the main actions of the game, and can be totally skipped.  It’s just one little thread in a big tapestry.  This kind of storytelling, again, simply doesn’t work in a movie; it’s too off the beaten path, too obscure, too multimedia.  But for a gamer with archaeological impulses, the game world rewards all that exploration, digging, theorizing.

Perhaps it’s a bit unfair to compare the two, but I’ll take Dark Souls’ interconnected lore-puzzle over RDR2’s movie-emulation any day.  It’s more creative, it’s more “at home” in its medium, it’s more modular and adaptable, and it engages the imagination more.  It’s a fresh solution to the Story Problem.  It’s only fair to point out shortcomings, though: as rich as the lore is, there’s not much actual narrative thrust, in the sense of tension/release, problem/solution; similarly, the characters are not particularly deep as you encounter them in the game — all the depth comes from backstories you must sniff out.  As such, the story of Dark Souls is not really emotional at all.  And the opacity of the lore really is a valid criticism, as bold as the design choice is.  In other words, Dark Souls probably ain’t gonna do it for an RPG player who prefers a story-forward experience and doesn’t want to wade through all the loosely connected flotsam of the story.  What is to be done for such a gamer?  If you believe in the medium’s capacity to tell a meaningful, emotional, character-driven story but cringe at the campy anime trappings of e.g. Final Fantasy or Xenoblade, where do you turn?

~    ~    ~

The best game of 2019 was Disco Elysium, an RPG with a non-standard but inspiring development backstory: a writer/musician pulls himself out of alcoholism and depression to rework a failed tabletop game + novel into an even more ambitious format.  He just so happens to create an utter masterpiece, a videogame for the ages.  That DE was produced by outsiders to the game industry is one of its great strengths.  An actual oil painter directed the art; an actual rock band recorded the soundtrack; most of all, the developers did not settle for “good for a videogame” writing.  It’s just GOOD WRITING.  It is impossible to overstate how profound of a difference this makes; I would go so far as to say that DE paves the way for the 21st-century novel, not just the RPG — well-written (action-light) narrative games might save the novel from slipping into whimpery irrelevance.  Indeed, all “readers” ought to at least try out DE.  But I digress.

Disco Elysium’s basic gameplay formula is nothing particularly unprecedented: it is a computerized tabletop RPG à la Dungeons and Dragons adapted into a single-player format and without quite so much freedom of character creation, at least on the surface.  You walk around a detailed, gritty, magical-realist world and the outcomes of interactions are most often decided by dice rolls weighted according to particular stats and environmental factors.  However, the bold move that separates DE from DND etc. is that there is no combat at all, no RPG battles, random or otherwise.  The challenge of the game instead lies in 1) making sense of the story itself, which centers on an unsolved murder case, and 2) bolstering your chances of succeeding in the dice rolls, many of which must be passed for the story to progress.  No reflexes, no grinding; you just look into your heart and try to say the “right” thing.  (“Right” could go in so many different ways, though, depending on the role you play or how you value consistency in your character; the game still “works” if you role-play as a disastrous fuck-up.)  But what elevates DE to masterpiece levels is the writers’ anticipation of thousands of ways to (role-) play the game.  In RDR2, there is a single floating-point number that represents your place on the Honor spectrum, which influences the game’s systems, sometimes in admirably subtle ways, but you can’t, say, give up the life of crime the game pushes on you.  Dark Souls presents the player with a small handful of narrative-influencing choices, but the real flexibility lies in building out your stats, weapons, and armor according to your combat style.  But for every equipment/stat build in Dark Souls, DE has a kind of “emotional build” — the results of your choices in conversation and even what you choose to think (there is a superbly-done “Thought Cabinet” mechanic that allows you to customize and develop your character’s basic life philosophy..!).

Let’s dig into these systems a bit more.  The intellectual motherboard of DE is the imposition of formulaic systems onto (semi-) real-world scenarios.  Other “real-world RPGs” like Persona and Earthbound share this core: the almost religious claim that the way the world works can be decomposed, understood, and predicted as a complex, ultimately computational, system, itself made of numerical subsystems.  I bet that jillions of kids who grew up with RPGs feel this somewhere subconscious.  You can imagine a 12-year-old introspecting, perhaps taking pride in his self-identified intellectual stats — math prowess or reading speed — but lamenting lower physical stats like athleticism or height.  And you know what?  For better or for worse, this is how the world, or perhaps more specifically the economy, works!  We accumulate currency and experience, we identify with our possessions, we play to our strengths and minimize our weaknesses, we grind to develop new skills, and so on.  As reductive as the model is, it is pretty dang robust: not a totally crazy way to view your place in society.  But earlier semi-realistic RPGs inevitably drag us through some cognitive dissonance, for in non-violent society, it doesn’t really make sense to think of yourself as having “attack” and “defense” stats, for instance, but those stats are necessary for a game that features combat.  Enter Disco Elysium — you know the game is on some other shit when you first lay eyes on your list of skills — 24 individual skills in four categories: Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics.  I’ll let the masterstroke of design speak for itself:

Man O man, this is good!  What a balance between familiarity and surprise.  You have a pretty good sense of what “Logic” and “Hand/Eye Coordination” should mean, but what about “Inland Empire” and “Half Light”?  And now here’s the kicker: each of these skills not only influences probabilistic computations (the aforementioned dice rolls), each one is fully voice-acted as a distilled module of your character’s personality.  DE does not merely impose computational rules on the economic world, it imposes a psychological theory: that you are made up of many interlocking yet ultimately individual motivations, sub-personalities that synergize and/or compete to weave together the tapestry that is you.  Indeed, the skills you pump points into will chime in as internal thoughts mid-conversion, and two skills might even argue amongst themselves.  For example, Electrochemistry is essentially your inner drug addict, impulsively lunging at any opportunity to imbibe; your Volition, on the other hand, is more Superego than Id and will resist the whirlpool of alcoholism dangled in front you; these two will literally fight it out in your character’s head.  Artistic games change how you see the world after you play them, and DE does just that on the level of psychology, calling into question your free will and your view of your own ambitions.  The skills make up just one of the game’s systems, and the others — the dialogue trees, the aforementioned Thought Cabinet,  the political affiliations, … — are generally just as deep.  Getting back to the main topic of storytelling, DE’s success as a narrative stems from the trio of 1) these fluid, grown-up-RPG systems, 2) engaging, emotionally mature writing, and 3) a sufficiently intriguing premise set in a well-thought out universe complete with history and mythology.  It is, dare I say, a jazz-like cocktail.  We play pre-composed melodies and forms that bring with them certain cultural aesthetics and baggage, but we improvise our way through them, but the improvisation is not totally unrestricted — our vocabulary and strategies signify our identities as much as our spontaneity does.  Just as millions of performances of Stella by Starlight  live in the changes, waiting to be coaxed out, millions of earnestly role-played Disco Elysium playthroughs live in the soul of this computer program.

In summary, Disco Elysium was a miracle waiting to happen: a condensation of philosophies floating in the background of other RPGs, ripe fruit picked by an outsider with the perfect skill stack.  Millions of novels centered on the same basic premise; countless gradations of character development; thousands of paintings comprising a world we will never visit yet cannot escape; the soft-yet-firm assertion that the both the economy and your own psychology are like computer games.  The best videogame storytelling ever and it’s not even close!  In fact, Disco Elysium’s solution to The Story Problem is so good that it might have also solved the “but novels aren’t fun anymore” problem along the way.  DE has nothing on RDR2 or Dark Souls when it comes to athletic game mechanics or challenges, but that’s not even a valid criticism because that’s not what it’s shooting for.  Conversely, RDR2’s forced narrative is almost embarrassingly shallow in comparison; Dark Souls’ story seems needlessly opaque and incoherent, as fun as the archaeology is.  The takeaways: it is worth getting REAL writers to do some REAL writing; we the players can handle real storytelling, real emotion, real depth — we’re not all a bunch of pimply digital gunslingers coursing with skeet and Mountain Dew; and lastly, the basic nature of the RPG imposes a structure — a philosophy — on the world, that, if handled gently, can meaningfully shape your outlook.

~    ~    ~

Shoutouts: the Mother series was probably the first set of games to feature truly engaging, personal writing.  It’s probably no coincidence that the genius behind the series, Shigesato Itoi, was a games outsider and therefore never even thought to settle for middling quality in his writing.  (Undertale is OK but overshadowed by its ancestors.)

The games of Jack King-Spooner are lovely and artistic and, for the most part, excellently written.  Dujanah is awesome front-to-back and the newest Sluggish Morss game (Pattern Circus) plays with an ambitious shuffled-narrative structure.  SM: PC didn’t quite land the way I had hoped, but I probably owe it another quick playthrough.

Inscryption was an unexpected recent standout.  Single-player deck building seems lame on the surface, but the game-within-the-game is actually pretty fun and the story with all its meta trappings is quite well done: not too indulgent but not too obvious either.  The middle act sags a bit but the beginning is awesome and the end is cathartic enough.

Elden Ring is the new big boy in town.  It triumphantly towers above pretty much every other open-world game but the story is basically exactly the same as the other Souls games.  Stuff seems to have happened but the digging needed to make it cohere is a bit much especially when the exploration and combat already demand so much.  Not exactly disappointing — the open-world format is almost a death sentence for good storytelling — but this game will be remembered for its other systems, not the story.

~    ~    ~

Presented without comment:

https://youtu.be/a_0FHyF3Pyk

https://youtu.be/kLU2JA1XBG8

Year End Thoughts

Hot nose breath; early bedtime; unaromatic seafood.  “Is today the day?”  Well, one of them was.  I got it, along with seemingly every other sinner in this small town.  Truth be told, it’s not so bad.  I am more bored than I am sick.  Some combo of the vaccine doing its job and the virus mutating into a highly-transmissible yet non-deadly variant.  Well, whatever.  They lied to us over and over and they keep lying.  This moves money around, and you know which direction it’s flowing.  Up and up.  Sad!

2021 was not a big year.  Overall, a whimpery, achy year.  I am proud of my debut jazz album Connectedness but that doesn’t feel like it “lives in” 2021.  I started writing the music in 2016 and finished by summer 2017.  The record came out real nice but I’m a little annoyed that I didn’t record it a little later, for mere weeks after we recorded, I set out on a path of saxophone improvement.  In particular, my absolute man Caleb Curtis, the big bad wolf of the alto, master of huffing and puffing, graciously took me on as a student and lit me the fuse of Joe Allard.  Without indulging the whole self-loathing mode, I’m not there yet.  But flashes of true saxophone competence make themselves known; I have begun to unlock the next level, where air really becomes sound so that sound can become music.  Fuck the prideful idiosyncracies and technical errors we rationalize as “personal style.” In really learning to play the instrument the right way, one blasts open the cobwebs of self-delusion and confronts the screaming, ice-cold truth of whatever it is one does.  It is no coincidence that as a result of my study and reworking of my lingual technique, I am even less tolerant of mediocre jazz than before, less accepting of the truisms and the default modes of playing.  Alongside breaking down saxophone-playing into its barest objective pieces, I have been naturally asking questions that break down jazz performance and composition.  Why improvise?  Why play a/the melody?  What makes a good solo?  Who cares?  Such questions are profound in their stupidity (they don’t have answers) and stupid in their profundity (overwhelmingly huge).  The ultimately egoistic and yet occasionally healthy mode of re-dredging these basic questions totally hinders creative output but potentially slingshots into a fruitful period, ideally that points in a new direction.

Just before I got COVID, I played three gigs in a single weekend (a first), rehearsed some new/old original music, conducted a piece of avant-garde music (gigantically poor judgment by my nameless friend who asked me to do this — did my best nonetheless), and produced a recording that features players so good they would never even think to call me.  All good stuff, notches in the belt.  How was it?  Eh, meh.  The meek-yet-truthful voice way in the back of the head: “that’s not what it’s about, man.”  So what is it about?  That remains to be seen.  But my interest in jazz made outside the tiny, shrinking pantheon diminishes ever so.  Classical music, thank God, still hits pretty Goddamn hard but I feel the stretch of universe that separates me from Vienna ca. 1791 expanding.  The flames of love will burn through my log at some point, right?  *shudder.*  And indeed, Bartók doesn’t quite arouse me as he once did, nor do I have the patience to even press PLAY on Mahler.  Mozart and Bird are still safe, for now.

And yet!  I am further emboldened in my predictions about the future of music.  The slothy irony is that I haven’t done/made much computer music this year.  I suppose if I really believed in what I believe in, I’d peel my ass off the armchair and actually go for it.  I could say “easier said than done” but that is too easily done, let alone said;;;,,,... no excuses.  Somewhat lamely, I probably have to squirt Another Jazz Album [2022] out of my system before I go full Neuromancer — *sigh* — but I’ll keep preachin’ in the meantime.   My imagined future of music moreover offers an escape from the quagmire of Spotify et al.  Indeed, Spotify is choking out the talent that undergirds the whole  industry — but I would not call it the “Music Industry.”  There is more to music.  Spotify is in the Instantly-Accessible-Through-Your-Device Audio Recording Industry, which is the humongous glutton sitting on the throne in the palace of music.  But that industry only ascended to obese dominance in the 20th century, an exceptional century in music.  Before then, it was about BEING THERE, IN PERSON, PARTICIPATING IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, with no replacement.  And to a lesser extent, sheet music and the pedagogy that enabled a person to make music themselves.  If we resign ourselves to repeat the 20th century of music over and over again, then music will just get worse and worse and Spotify will win harder and harder.  But audio recordings need not be the standard of music.  They will never disappear — of course.  But I optimistically envision music in 2094 not as being “consumed” (ew), but just played.  Nobody is not a musician.  It’s a matter of tools and communication and opportunity — it’s got COMPUTER written all over it.  In 2094 I hope that the youngsters snarkily look down on the boomers of the future, hitting play on their devices then just sitting there, the way we would laugh at someone who listens to baseball on the radio.  Pure audio will be seen as the aural equivalent of 2D black-and-white imagery.

Perhaps.  My prediction requires a generally active and curious population, or at least one whose addictive tendencies can be weaponized into action and curiosity.  The 20th century way of ingesting music is well-suited to the flabby world of Wall-E, which may well be our reality.  Time will tell indeed but I do not believe the future is determined historically or determined at all.  We need artists and technologists to, like, do stuff, ideally as unimpeded as possible.  Hence my proselytizing but also my COVID-etc-induced dismay.

That said, damn! Thomas Ades is a good composer.  An heir to the Beethoven-Brahms-Bartok-Ligeti lineage.  Unpretentious music coming from an environment with infinite tolerance and even lust for pretentiousness.  On the other hand, Giacinto Scelsi really is of the most essential thinkers of the 20th

century — exceedingly pretentious, but it was just a matter of time before the “one note” guy came along and actually did it right.  I can’t wait to play the Scelsi videogame.  Tigran Hamasyan released concert footage from 2010 — I was in the middle of high school, at peak Tigran fandom, and this video reminded me why.  Red Hail is still the best Tigran album and this performance legit brought a single tear to my eye.  The perfect youthful cocktail of confidence, naivete, and indulgence — that music just works, undeniably.  My wife and I were listening to a ton of tracks produced by Zaytoven the other day, the side-mission being to track the development of Trap from its primordial turn-of-the-millenium roots to its Obama-era flourishing, to its unfortunate yet predictable appropriation by the likes of Sprite.  You know someone’s getting P-P-P-Paid when the corporate overlords slither in and decide that a musical style isn’t just for “gangsters” anymore but is in fact suitable for their imagined “general public.”  Congratulations, OGs of Trap — ya did it.  Enjoy the bread, but if you’re not going to make something cool and fresh, at least seed the next generation.  Least you can do.

~    ~    ~

2021 was also not amazing for video games.  Metroid: Dread was probably the best new game I played this year.  They did everything right.  The music lacked the magic needed to take it to the top of the mountain, but all the “Metroid-y” stuff was right on.  Less memorable than I would have hoped, but my memory of the compact, straight-to-the-point game is warm.  

The real masterpiece I played this year, though, was the “Final Cut” of 2019’s Disco Elysium, which is to Baldur’s Gate what The Witness is to Myst.  Long have I dreamed for an RPG with no combat but just dialogue.  Distill and perfect that mode of playing and existing in a fantasy world.  The bleak yet funny politico-economic world of Disco Elysium is perhaps less fantastical than one would hope, but they nailed it.  The pure-dialogue RPG with real role-playing.  None of the garbage of paths that seem to branch but then rejoin like 20 minutes later; no lip service, no bulshitty filler.  Actually good writing (not “good for a videogame”); real characters (no juvenile anime bozos); beautiful art (not just pixel-per-square-inch overdose).  A dream come true and one that makes an important, oft-overlooked philosophical point, and very forcefully at that.  Namely, that life and your character as a person can be modeled and/or decomposed into interlocking, often quantitative and yet random systems and statistics.  It’s a tacit assertion in most RPGs, but the brilliancy of Disco Elysium is to 24-furcate “your” personality into modules that interact, compete, and importantly are not created equal.  More than just being an engaging game system, the 24 skills, which are personified and voice-acted as inner impulses, implore you to decompose your own personality as such.  Are you the person who wants a cigarette right now?  Are you also the person who empathizes with the stupid little dog in the video?  The verb “to be” is, as usual, deployed sloppily here, but the real point is that questions of identity can indeed be more interesting, and more importantly useful, than they were in dumb into philosophy class or in dumb Twitter thread where a child all-caps yells at you because of the geographical happenstance of your great-great-great-grandmother’s birth.  I bring up The Witness again because that’s the other semi-recent game that made me see the world differently.  Where The Witness’ commentary is about the visual world, problem solving, nature versus technology, and scientific discovery, Disco Elysium gets its hands dirty with society and interpersonal communication.  A must-play for many gamers.  And many non-gamers!  Disco Elysium makes me optimistic about the future of literature in a time when it is so easy to feel that no good books will ever be written or read ever again.

In COVID isolation I began playing Metal Gear Solid V: the Phantom Pain, indeed my first earnest foray into the franchise.  Having never gotten into war-based games or even first-person-shooters generally, I must admit that the gratuitous and at least somewhat realistic violence does make the stomach quiver.  I was surprised to feel that.  It’s a great game, though.  Its interlocking systems play well together and its storytelling could never work in any non-videogame format — good.  To pick some nits, Quiet’s outfit is utterly retarded and I have no idea why there is an online component at all (I am several years late, though).  A few frustrating moments due to checkpoint mechanic, too.  Highlights: C4 on anything; the unbelievable smoothness of the animation; the cassette tapes instead of codecs.  I love some of the details of the control system that make the action extra visceral: hitting R2 repeatedly instead of just once to choke out a dude in your clutches; the fact that Snake’s body moves when it would have to to achieve certain neck-craning camera angles; the hilarious moment of Fulton-ing a waking-up solider back to Mother Base at a jillion miles an hour.

Sluggish Morss: Pattern Circus disappointed me slightly if only because I loved Dujanah so much.  Never really “got” this new one but enjoyed my time nonetheless.  More than any other developer, Jack King-Spooner makes me want to get up and make games.  Living proof that someone with non-generic tastes in music, art, and writing can step up to the plate.

~    ~    ~

The one morsel of mercy 2021 leaked onto us was the return of Survivor, the only good TV show ever.  Season 41 had like two-and-a-half bad episodes but several good ones and a couple great ones.  My #1 “rootin’ for you, baby” character fell victim to a questionable strategic decision but I really dig the winner and predict her game to be seen as a gold standard for a certain type of gameplay that thankfully opposes some of Jeff’s seemingly unending appetite for Big Moves™.  Someday I will write my own treatise on Survivor.  I have to.  Mario J. Lanza is the best Survivor writer ever if you have seen the sho, but I think that with a chunky handful of hours I could produce an essay that would do the job of enticing someone to take the plunge into Mark Burnett’s sacred realm.  [For what it’s worth, I put M.B. as the great genius of the early 21st century — even greater than Trump (who Burnett sharpened, if not created as the figure he was during the lead-up to his election).]

Hopefully the producers are at least beginning to learn their lessons about all the twists and advantages.  The episodes focusing on those flopped, the more “classical” episodes soared.  Sadly, the most interesting strategic twist, the Shot in the Dark, had about as much impact as a fart in a jacuzzi.  They probably never would have even mentioned it if Sydney (incredible character — a travesty she wasn’t on the jury) hadn’t played hers.  Whatever.  Glad to know they’re leaning towards non-returnee casts as well, which are ultimately better, as fun as it can be to root for old favorites.  Best moments of the season: Xander executing (what was obviously) Tiffany’s and Evvie’s idol plan; Shan’s arc; honestly JD shouting “money!” as he fumbles the bag as hard as anyone ever has; Naseer “un-throwing” the challenge; and honorable mention: “Baruch HaShem we’re eating.”

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Eh, here’s to a MUCH better 2022.  Bar’s too low to wish for anything less.  Keep swinging out there.  Here’s my link to music you’ve definitely never heard.

Technical Notes on Connectedness

I usually love reading musicians’ words on their own music.  Both illuminating and opaque reflections are fun and telling in their own ways.  My liner notes to Connectedness lean more opaque, at least with respect to technical musical details, since my audience (hopefully) contains non-technical but open-minded listeners who take in music for its emotional and aesthetic properties rather than its nuts and bolts.  But of course, there are those like myself who also hunger for the secrets up the magician’s sleeve, as it were.  What follows is for you guys.

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An overarching and also permeating principle of the album is duality: the two-ness of opposites that are also the same.  The concept of duality’s home in mathematics but is, of course, right at home in music.  Major vs. minor, tritone substitutions, notes vs. rests, …  So much music is about maximizing contrast but also interrelationship, and any process or concept that generates new music from old is eagerly welcomed into the musician’s bag o’ tricks.  In the case of Connectedness, the tracks were composed in dual pairs, symmetrically arranged around the center track, “Reflected off the Water” (which is indeed self-dual).  The introduction, “Opening Up,” is outside of this structure.  Specifically, “Ordinary” and “Long Line” make a pair, then “Boiling” and “A Crack in the Ice,” then “Zenith” and “Nadir,” then “Indigo Conjunction” and “Viridian Forest & the Night Sky.”  There’s nothing particularly fancy going on here; the duality was more of a general principle in the back of my mind as I composed, not a specific procedure.  I bring it up so that it makes sense when I break down the tracks in pairs (except for the two un-paired ones).  

0. “Opening Up”

Sonny Rollins is my god; Way Out West, The Bridge, and Alfie were strongly in mind when I worked on Connectedness.  One of Sonny’s amazing tricks is to pit bluesy/modal/folkloric playing against rigorous, elevated bebop, a sort of call-and-response between two modules within his own musical personality.  On Way Out West in particular, his blues playing takes on a cowboyish hue.  I wanted to lift some of that for several reasons: my own “western” (Californian) origin, as an affirmation of the validity and depth of American folk culture, a nod to Robert Stillman’s Horses as well as Way Out West.  But instead of bebop, of which I am obviously not a Sonny-level master, Middle Eastern melodic improvisation/composition comprises the other pole in my juxtaposition.  (“Middle Eastern” is an extremely broad category; I am most familiar with Armenian, Persian, and Turkish styles/ideas, and I freely draw from these without over-sweating “authenticity” or consistency.  Bulgaria and Albania, more Balkan than Middle Eastern but not without overlap, will end up creeping in later on, too.)  

The outline of “Opening Up” is: 

• An antecedent blues-cowboy melodic phrase that alternates between adjacent notes in the D minor pentatonic scales as it weaves downward from the top of the saxophone range to the middle, punctuated by two fat (subdominant-implying) rhythm section hits.

• The consequent to the previous phrase, which works its way to middle D; the rhythm section punctates again and confirms D minor.

• A dualized repetition of the first two phrases — D minor is transformed into D♭ major and subsequently D♭ minor.  (Neo-Riemannian theory characterizes this move as an L-P-R transformation followed by just P — whatever, dude.)  Very few listeners would identify the slippery half-step modulation as important, but one cool thing about idiosyncratic instruments like the saxophone is that nearby key areas can take on strikingly different colors because of the unevenness of the instrument and the technique it requires — that’s what I’m going for: pitting an “easy” key against a “hard” one.

• After the 2+2 cowboy phrases, I present another version of a descending modal pattern that highlights adjacent notes.  The descending “up-down-up-down” flourish is ubiquitous in Middle Eastern music and it’s part of my melodic repertoire.  First I do it in A lydian (a cousin of D♭ = C♯ minor), then passing through F major/D minor (recalling the top).

• The third primary color of “Opening Up” is rubato free jazz.  The end of the Middle Eastern pattern twists from A over D to A♭ over C: an implied tritone relationship, another instance of duality.  The washy, bubbling moment where the band comes in for real on the A♭ dominant chord is, to me, like color flooding into a previously black-and-white scene.  The band nurtures the roiling texture and acclimates us to some bona-fide jazz harmony, preparing the final thrust.

• The last phrase sequences a nearly-even melodic shape through quick, chromatic harmonies (more tritone games).  The arpeggio contorts a little bit in order to grab the harmonic footholds the chords allow — this is one of my favorite harmonic effects, and indeed a very old one.

The final two chords serve three purposes: 1) recall the descending minor-third rhythm section statement from the very beginning; 2) exploit the near-symmetry of the dominant chord that smoothly connects it to minor-third neighbors; and 3) set up the F major center of the following track, “Ordinary.”

1. “Ordinary” and 9. “Long Line”

The exciting gambit of “Opening Up” is a bit of a fake-out; the album “truly” begins with a simple, calm, mysterious song.  Likewise, the finale, “Long Line,” is more of a ride-into-the-sunset moment than a bombastic “and the curtain falls!” one.  They share the same basic setup, too: an active, through-composed bassline underneath an operatic melody, bathed in a cowboy atmosphere.  The second halves of both songs are basically the first halves transposed by tritones, and each composition finishes with an on-the-nose 1-over-I preceded by one of the two strongest tonal cadences: iv-I in the case of “Ordinary;” V7-I in the case of “Long Line.”  (The voice leadings of those two moves are essentially the same; they are indeed dual.) 

“Ordinary” is more tender and diatonic, the only tricky harmonic move being the slide from F major to B major, negotiated by a D♯ half-diminished chord in 3rd inversion.

The rest of the harmony is by-the-book: a good-ol’ American dollop of subdominant, particularly as the non-standard downwards resolution to V7/V, and the welcoming of the sixth scale degree as a happy member of the tonic major chord.  The outro G♯ minor vamp is a nod to the title track of Robert Stillman’s Horses, whose Americana-inflected opening track, “The Dance 1,” is part of the DNA of “Ordinary” as well.

*    *    *

“Long Line” is more adventurous.  The placid opening bassline is indeed stolen from Majora’s Mask, but it starts to morph as soon as the melody enters.  The first chord progression (supporting the initial 10-bar melodic phrase) is more or less taken from a Bulgarian musical, but truncated so that C#7 returns to D major rather than the B-major-to-B-minor-to-F♯-minor cadence in the musical.

I love this chord progression and it appears elsewhere on the album as well as later on “Long Line” albeit transposed).  The second chord progression, supporting the second, snakier melodic phrase, functions as a connector between D major and B major.  (“Long Line” interpolates D and A♭ between the F-B poles; it spends time in all four key areas while “Ordinary” employs just two.  The basic outline of “Long Line” is: 1) D major intro/melody; 2) B major solo section; 3) A♭ major melody; 4) F major outro.)  The solo section is basically centered on B, with two quick trips to D major and G# dominant.  My favorite part of the section is the cowboy counterpoint at the end; on the subject of “obscure Zelda melodies I stole,” yes, the bass plays “Sheik’s Theme” from Ocarina of Time starting in m. 66.

Taken together, “Ordinary” and “Long Line” moreover highlight the (somewhat subtle) difference between 6/8 and 3/4 time signatures, the double- vs. triple-meter duality present in so much music.  While “Ordinary” cleanly separates the dotted- vs. non-dotted-note streams into melody and bass (leaving drums to glue them together), “Long Line” features a melody that flirts with both subdivisions as it floats over the repetitive 3-bar bass shape.

The “cowboy bookends” of the album surround the “real” jazz; “Ordinary” allows the listener to settle into the sounds of the instruments via an unchallenging melody; “Long Line” caps the journey with an unhurried operatic flourish and the final sparkly embers of the album’s harmonic world.

2. “Boiling” and 8. “A Crack in the Ice”

“Boiling” was actually the first completed composition of the album, and was in fact probably what gave rise to the project in the first place.  On November 10, 2016, Simón, Avery, and I played as a trio for the first time, and I brought in my then-brand-new tune, untitled but with the descriptor “boiling” for the opening out-of-time section.  Long story short, the band just worked, Simón told me “that’s the title, man,” and the second we finished playing, I bolted for a piano to write more.  “A Crack in the Ice” came later, after I had settled on the duality theme.  So in some sense, “Boiling” is the original material and “A Crack in the Ice” is a purposefully contrasting response.  These two are far less obviously connected than the cowboy pair.  “Boiling” is all about improvisation and interaction, alternating between aggressive out-of-time jazz and aggressive in-time jazz, while “A Crack in the Ice” is rather tightly constrained and cloaked in a cold, foggy demeanor.  I suppose in this pair I am leaning towards the oppositional qualities of duality, de-emphasizing the samenesses.

“Boiling” begins with one of my favorite “jazz games:” out-of-time group improvisation trying to hit chord changes together.  It’s somewhere between Simon Says and Chicken, game-wise, and you get these blurry harmonic edges that are impossible to compose directly.  The first chunk, leading up to the in-time melody, once again exploits tritone symmetry and two different shadings of the dominant chord; I personally listen for the subtle chromatic inner voice leadings rather than “the chords themselves,” lest I find myself flipping the tritone coin with F and B in my ears.

The subsequent “A” section, where the real melody begins, takes a circuitous path to B major, the loose home key for all of “Boiling.”  (B is honestly just such a great key.  The comfiest key on the piano, fun and “grippy” on tenor with all the side keys, and the bass’ open E string makes for such a warm subdominant, even more pleasing than open-E-as-tonic.)  There’s some sneaky harmony in the form, but nothing too special — relatively straightforward jazz fare — even a couple ii-V-Is!

Melodically, “Boiling” is essentially built of three pieces: 1) the pattern of 4 descending notes then an ascent that begins the whole track, kicks off the melody, and comes back several times within it; 2) the up-down-up-down Middle Eastern scale pattern that first appeared in “Opening Up,” placed in a double-time swing context; and 3) the whole-tone bassline that will re-occur throughout the album and be dualized itself: 

The central metaphor of “Boiling” is best embodied by the transition at the end of form, where the time breaks down (“boils over”) and we move into out-of-time improvisation à la the intro.  Anyone who cooks knows the moment: the pot is suddenly bubbling up like crazy, and you rush to run down the fire, hopefully saving yourself from a big mess or worse.  In this jazz context, the in-between moments are the most exciting to me: feigning an ametrical melodic twist before the rhythm section really gives up the pulse, or bending a rubato phrase into the freshly reestablished tempo.  All in all, it’s jazz with a bit of an edge.  On our particular recording, I’m especially proud of Hayoung’s Herbie-esque solo.  It’s just perfectly constructed and so swinging.

*    *    *

“A Crack in the Ice” dispenses with the extroversion and bubbly loquaciousness, generating tension through mystery instead of loudness.  The opening melody, harmonized in elevenths (a trick I lifted from “Paula’s Theme” from Earthbound, itself a rearrangement of “Youngtown” from Mother), appears elsewhere on the album, most obviously on “Viridian Forest & the Night Sky,” but this is its most complete, straightforward presentation.  One interesting thing about jazz harmony is that because chords often have many notes, it is possible to voice thirds-based chords in fourths; in fact, using ninths and thirteenths to “quartize” the sound of, say, a tonal seventh chord, is a classic recipe to make your functional harmony sound like jazz (or French Impressionism).  The move from “Boiling” to “A Crack in the Ice” abstractly represents this thirds-to-fourths shift.  The second harmonization of the melody in “A Crack in the Ice” tempts the listener to recover a tonal context from the neutral gray fourth-chords. 

“It’s like G minor, but it smells weird!”

The final harmonization of this melody, near the end of the track, is even more melty and diabolical.  Imagine repeatedly strumming three guitar strings tuned a fourth apart but also constantly detuning them so that the composite chord squirms ever-downward.  “Boiling” has a couple of analogous squirms, but they are all tempered by good ol’ tonality and hence are less infernal.

A more direct thematic connection comes at the sudden shift from in-time to out-of-time.  The descending figure that initiates “Boiling” is flipped upside down and sequenced from the bottom of the saxophone’s range to the top.  We play another rhythmic game: start and end a long phrase with (almost) the same number of notes together, but don’t line up along the way.  The  Intermediate Value Theorem guarantees that our emergent tempi pass through each other. 

The brief solo-piano moment before the bass improvisation has a similar (“Boiling”-related) motivic idea under the surface, made even more symmetrical and obvious (this one’s for you, Béla).

The last major piece of “A Crack in the Ice” is the slow rubato melodic passages with tenor way up high and bass pedaling an open string and a thumb-position melody (parallel with tenor) simultaneously, arco.  The sonic effect is cold and foggy, the piano and brushes accompaniment acting as little ice crystals, small bits of hard texture floating in a vapory mass.  The melody appears four times, and each time Simón pedals a different opening string: four different shades of dark blue-gray.

Lastly, I will mention the modal trick behind the bass solo and the outro of “A Crack in the Ice.”  The instructions on the page say “Locrian/Lydian” over the same bass note.  Locrian and lydian are the two modal extremes of the diatonic scale, and at first glance may seem to be as different as can be.  For instance, E locrian comes from the F diatonic scale while E lydian comes from B (raise your glass to the mighty tritone once more).  But what may appear as opposites can often be reinterpreted as dual partners: stacking ascending fourths on E produces the E locrian scale, while descending fourths (or dually, ascending fifths) creates lydian.  None of the other modes have this property of “maximum quarticity/quinticity.”  Another beautiful game you can play is to transit through the modes over a single root note.  So, for instance, C lydian — C ionian — C mixolydian — C dorian — C aeolian — C phrygian — C locrian.  Each move only requires one note in the scale to move down by one half step.  It would seem at first that the game must finish at locrian, but if you “de-privilege” the note C, you can continue the pattern indefinitely by gluing B lydian to C locrian, which are indeed just a single half-step shift away from each other.  Then, the cycle loops back on itself after 84 moves, hitting all seven modes on all twelve notes.  A consequence of this that I use in “A Crack in the Ice” is that any locrian voicing can be transposed up a half step to become a lydian voicing over the same bass.  Try it!

“Boiling” and “A Crack in the Ice” both play with in- versus out-of-time sections, exploit harmonic symmetries, and share motivic material.  On the other hand, they represent the opposing extremes of “temperature” on the album and are paced very differently than each other.  

3. “Zenith” and 7. “Nadir”

Moving inward, we arrive on the two “episodic” tracks, each of which juxtaposes two totally different musical characters and jumps back and forth between between them.  Both tracks have a dark, spidery character; “Zenith” compares this to a light, bouncy groove, while “Nadir” pits it against hard rock.

The musical machine that sets “Zenith” in motion has three layers: 1) free-time drums playing almost-triplets accelerating and decelerating like a gentle breeze; 2) bass + piano freely but slowly arpeggiating triads; and 3) a saxophone melody that weaves downward in huge leaps — imagine the big, slow, careful steps you’d take from foothold to foothold descending a mountain.  The melody itself purposefully steps around chord tones, only coming to rest when it has to land on the shifting harmonic platforms.  The supporting triads move by major third (mostly): E major — C major — A♭ major — C minor — A♭ major — A♭ minor (= G♯ minor) — E major.  There are few extra chords in there to disguise the naked symmetries and to keep it from being a total neo-Riemannian wet dream, but the major-third-related poles comprise the main structure.  Compare to the tritone/minor-third symmetries of “Ordinary”/”Long Line,” as well as the upcoming harmonic symmetries within “Zenith” and of “Nadir.”  The out-of-time-yet-accelerating transition to the first solid tempo of “Zenith” indeed relates triads (and one seventh chord) by minor thirds (note that triads are always more smoothly connected by major thirds, while four-note-chords are always more smoothly connected by minor thirds).  The C♯ — E — G — E twist is a bit more jagged to my ears than the initial E — C — A♭ one.

In any case, saxophone, bass, and piano come down to a whisper while the drums crescendo, setting up a new 5/4 triple meter.  A delicate 11-bar interlude, a moment of alignment, juggles pretty much all of the harmonic considerations seen so far and also plays the triple-vs.-duple rhythmic game.

The reverie ends quickly enough — a couple of long saxophone scales and a cadential fake-out bring us back to the out of time “mountain-descent” melody supported by major-third-related triads, this time with a bit more volume and edge.  The first complete arc of the composition comes to a close on a restful E major moment, as if the tune so far had never happened or was just a dream.  But then the drums once again push into 5/4 triple meter for the solo section.  The first half of the solo form is a gentle and conservative tonal elaboration of E major.  The second half is the Bulgarian chord progression (this is its first complete appearance), complete with the (missing in “Long Line”) IV-iv-i cadence in F♯.  The tempo disintegrates in the final bars of the saxophone solo, leading to an important piece of thematic material that has popped its head out earlier but fully reveals its true form here for the first time:

This four-note “down-down-up-up” motif is sort of the Beethovenian counterpart of the Middle Eastern “up-down-up-down” figure.  It moreover executes a wonderful negotiation between diatonic and chromatic spaces, and also smoothly connects to itself (a major third away) after five cells:

The whole figure, fourteen cells moving through three keys, is essentially the melodic opposite of the beginning of “Zenith”: all fast stepwise motion rather than huge slow leaps; generally ascending rather than descending; nestled in a diatonic scale rather than tiptoeing around one.  The line functions as a sendoff to the climax of “Zenith”: one last round of the spidery melody, supported by the major-third-motion and then the minor-third-motion, starting fortissimo but dying to a whisper by the end.

*    *    *

“Nadir” has a loosely comparable arc but the details are, of course, quite different.  The opening machine, this time, is more rhythmically aligned: 1) A 3+3+2 bassline that you might find as the “Cave” theme in a GameBoy game; 2) drums playing a repeating 3/16 figure (cf. the almost-triplets of the introduction to “Zenith”) that goes over the bar lines, sometimes lining up with bass, sometimes opposing it.  The spidery rubato saxophone melody offers another level of “misalignment,” floating over the beat, almost lining up at times but not strengthening the meter at all.  While the ionian mode has more or less conquered major-key music, (Western) minor-key music is still amenable to variation in modal shading, and consequently, it is easier in minor to draw inspiration from the highly sophisticated modal systems of e.g. Persian and Turkish musics.  I fully admit that I am not at all using a particular dastgah or makam anywhere on this track, but I am thinking about how various pitches/intervals sit on and resonate with the open canvas of a minor triad.  The first section of the “Nadir” melody is G dorian or D aeolian depending on if you privilege the bottom bass note or the whole triad the bass outlines.  (For what it’s worth, I can hear it both ways, a bit like the “rabbit-duck” optical illusion.)  The only deviation from G dorian/D aeolian is the E♭ upper neighbor to D in the transitional phrase that links the G minor bass triad to the B minor bass triad.  In the “B zone,” the modality of the melody expands: both raised an natural sevenths appear; raised, natural, and lowered fourths appear; there are likewise two different seconds and fifths.  I also sneak in a couple of microtones to further juice up the modality.  

The modal ambiguities of the B minor section create tension, and in the aftermath of the saxophone melody, drums crescendo while the bass line slips through a neutral quarter-tonal triad to B♭ major, preparing an unadorned V-I to E♭ while Avery shamelessly plays the Phil Collins fill and Hayoung explodes forth with a fast arpeggio, straight from the Beethoven playbook.  Woo!

(Not my most subtle music.)

No fake-out here — it is time to rock.  I have lots to say about the relationship between jazz and rock — when it works, when it doesn’t, how it works — but suffice it to say for this post that I’m throwing my hat into the ring as such.  One outstanding issue is jazz’s appetite for lush (usually functional) harmony versus rock’s retrofunctional norms (rock harmony often moves the “other way” on the circle of fifths compared to classical/jazz; for example, the rock progression I-♭VII-IV-I mirrors I-ii-V-I) and its general avoidance of thickly-voiced chords.  My compromise in “Nadir” is to rely on a strong descending bassline that only slightly “nerdifies” I-♭VII-IV, and to change keys quickly to satisfy modernistic/jazz cravings.  Mm. 30-31 I more or less stole from the fourth movement of Mahler’s 9th symphony; it is a chromatic alteration of the “Pachelbel scheme” that fits in perfectly with the triads-related-by-major-thirds theme present in both “Nadir” and “Zenith.”

In any case, the rock section only lasts long enough for the listener to not realize I’m huffing and puffing on an acoustic wind instrument and that the band is extraordinarily over-educated for the music it’s producing.  The “turn” motif I brought up in “Zenith, which is also rather Mahlerian (see the aforementioned movement), reappears as the time disintegrates and our free jazz “mode” re-engages.  The two triads of the opening come back as tremolos underneath a rough-and-tumble saxophone line, capping the aggression set alight by the flames of Collins and Beethoven.  A quarter-tone interpolated between B and A♯ recalls the earlier modal antics, preparing the solo section.

The first chapter of the solo section is an expansion of the opening “GameBoy cave level” feel: brooding and not-quite-symmetrical, receptive to expressive modal shadings.  The major-third wheel is completed via the addition of an E♭ minor area.  After 8 segments, we move on (via Collins again, of course) to an expansion of the rock section: the second chapter of the solo section.  This time, the minor-third wheel is closed by continuing the pattern through A and F♯, so that the harmony seems to always descend on average but, as harmony does, ends up right back where it started.  After a couple of loops, we get out of the solo by reprising the Mahler transition and the free jazz segment.  What follows is an acquiescence of the original bassline to the demands of tonal resolution: a perhaps-slightly-ironic iv-i in G♯, diminuendoing towards a fake “dot-dot-dot” ending.  But, “Nadir” being the climax of the whole album, we rock once more and for all.  A totally barbaric whole-tone bassline (as opposed to e.g. “Boiling”’s rather pretty one) walks us down an up-escalator, and we freak out until the admittedly somewhat nerdy ending.  But if my listeners can tolerate some rock, they can tolerate some prog rock too.

In summary, “Zenith” and “Nadir” both juxtapose episodes of totally divergent music.  The lightness of “Zenith,” its musical representation of altitude, comes from the cautious, rappelling melody over a breezy base, plus the effervescent 5/4 triplet groove, more diaphanous than sturdy.  On the other hand, “Nadir” skews dark and heavy: a cavernous, eerie melody over a gravelly pair of linked ostinati, plus a hard rock avalanche — the climax of the album.  In my mind when composing both was the complex exchange between harmony and modality, or stated as a puzzle, how to get more pitches to “work.”

4. “Indigo Conjunction” and 6. “Viridian Forest & the Night Sky”

Having now rehearsed, played, and recorded this music a few years after its initial compositional period, I admit that my ears no longer signal a strong dualistic link between these two tracks.  Both of them morphed a bit over time as well, blurring some of of the conceptual linkage.  In any case, some shared DNA survived: both feature pedal points, tritone-based harmonic relationship, divisions of beats into 5, and high-energy solo sections.  The narrative inspiration comes from an iconic moment that many gamers my age remember: in the first generation Pokémon games, Viridian Forest is the first little dungeon the player reaches, connecting Viridian City and Pewter City.  The forest itself is notable for is winding structure and its blunt, almost abrasive tritone-based theme, but the area it leads from, Viridian City, is interesting because it serves as both an introductory area just after the player’s hometown, Pallet Town, but also the site of the final gym and the lead-up to Victory Road and Indigo Plateau, the climactic section of the whole game.  That is to say, the whole game loops back in on itself, and fun childhood “wow” moment inevitably pops up when you realize that you walked right past the biggest, baddest enemies mere minutes into your adventure.  As a kid, I imagined Viridian Forest as a long, circuitous hallway of grass flanked by tall columns of trees, and it always seemed to be night time there; to this day I can emulate my young imagination tilting my head back and looking up at the stars, the long trunks and leaves in the corner of my view, receding into the distance.  This image, plus the astronomical thematics of “Zenith” and “Nadir,” conjured the image of the stars aligning before the climactic moments on Indigo Plateau — as epic in my memory today as they were in ca. 1998.

As for the music! Though “Indigo Conjunction” and “Viridian Forest & the Night Sky” form a dualistic pair in the larger context of the album, they serve secondary functions relative to other tracks.  “Indigo” bears resemblance to “Boiling” — energetic, swinging, jazz harmony — and “Zenith” — 5/4 swing and the descending-leaps melodic idea — so that the first half of the album is the “jazz half”: a bit more approachable (at least to a jazz-steeped listener), less abstract, faster-paced.  On the other side, “Viridian”’s darker tone and episodic form, as well as some of its specific motifs, connect it to “Nadir” and “A Crack in the Ice,” fleshing out the “non-jazz (or ‘less jazz’) half,” where rock, opera, and videogame music push back on the jazz aesthetic.  

The 5/4 in “Zenith” is light and bouncy; the upcoming 5/4 in “Viridian Forest & the Night Sky” is plodding and heavy; the 5/4 in “Indigo Conjunction” is somewhere between: a repetitive pedal figure but not strictly symmetrical, and the swing tempo admits the duple v. triple game I mentioned before.  “Indigo” opens with a short drums improvisation over the pedal then launches into the melody, which was totally freely composed without motivic connections to the other tunes save for the “Zenith” melody shape in the send-off and the coda.  The melody line twists and turns without much respect for the barline, and possesses a more improvisational character than some of the other, more straightforward melodies.  Perhaps a bit of Tristano peeks through.  Harmonically, the scheme is essentially “Inner Urge”: a pungent, evocative half diminished chord to start (in this case, D half diminished in 3rd inversion); a series of lydian chords moving in a strict pattern (up-a-minor-third instead of down-a-whole-step); then a final episode of quick harmonic moves exploiting the symmetries that connect jazz chords.

The above snippet — the end of the melody going into the blowing section — shows off some of the rhythmic tomfoolery and the pretty chord progression that sends off the head.  The descending-leaps shape is quite like the opening motif of Bartók’s first quartet, and moreover, the chords supporting this instance of the motif are quite like the chords he uses at one equivalent moment in the first movement of the quartet.  The “big harmonic reveal” at the climax of that movement is an arrestingly beautiful voice leading pattern that connects major and minor on A, F♯, E♭, and C — the diminished octagon that probably brought more than a single tear to Ernő Lendvai’s eye — but the same melodic shape is supported with slipperier and somewhat more opaque harmonies earlier in the movement.  My version is not-so-symmetrical, closer to the latter option, but still fits very comfortably under the hang if you take a moment to compute good voice leadings.

After the send-off, the solo section echoes the opening, pedaling C.  But it is really the beginning of an eight-bar phrase alternating between C and F♯ pedals.  (Yes, a harmonic scheme like those in the cowboy tracks is at play.)  This anxious vamp admits modal playing more than harmonic; one is free to play octatonic stuff or emphasize major/minor subsets of that big scale.  For what it’s worth, this is always a very fun but also dangerous section to blow over: there are many possible modal/harmonic choices, and if Hayoung and I guess clashing options at the same time, we can get into hot water.  This is where we test our telepathy and sensitivity (she has insanely good ears and I’m not an aural mega-slouch either).  In my opinion, harmonic areas that feed off these kinds of symmetries (see Bartók again) always build tension and creepiness, like infinite mirror hallways or mazes in the woods.  That’s the idea here; we charge up energy on the pedal-vamp and then release it in the second chapter of the solo form, where the walking starts.  The harmonic scheme here is simple: a four-bar phrase connecting A major to F♯ minor followed by its transposition down a minor third, connecting F♯ major to D♯ minor (the last chord being muddied up as a dominant♯-9, minor’s angry cousin, to launch into the next phrase).  The third phrase supports a non-necessarily-played instance of the “Zenith” leaping motif with some more snakey late-romantic harmony, and the fourth phrase slows down the pace of the root movement, re-setting up the pedal section.  As you might have learned to expect by now, when the form resets, it is a tritone away from where it started.  Both solos are twice through the form, but the first pass begins on C while the second begins on F♯.  But because the opening pedal episode alternates between C and F♯ anyway, it’s a bit tricky to find footing here, both as listener and player.  That’s the point!  Unlike other solo forms on the album, this one, to me, kind of encodes the narrative a soloist ought to take, though hopefully not too strongly.  The sections are so distinctive, though, that to approach them all in the same way would be harder than just catching their waves and riding along.

The large-scale form is quite simple: intro; melody; tenor solo on both tritone-halves of the form; piano solo on the same form; piano begins the melody and tenor joins for the second half; coda out.  Excuse the immodesty but I am quite proud of the harmony of the coda; I think it’s the most romantic and magical chord progression of the whole album, and it really breathes along with the melody.

The dark, impish character of the pedal points under the rest of the melody is replaced by a warmer, fluffier pedal-point moment in the final measures.  I just love the sound of parallel diatonic chords over a bass pedal.  I also really like the transition of D♭/A♭ to G minor across the 3rd and 4th measures, though I’m not quite sure why it works so well!  If it were not for the G chord, the D♭ chord might be more appropriately spelled as a C♯ chord connecting A major to F♯ minor (the two subdominant(-ish) key areas in C♯ minor, which is probably what I’d call the loosely prevailing key area from the beginning of the coda).  But a C♯ chord after an A chord could also reasonably connect to an F♯ major chord (instead of minor) with A♯ in the melody; recontextualizing the A♯ as B♭ but then switching the support back to a minor chord produces G minor.  Chalk it up to a little Neo-Riemannian flourish or just accept smoothly-voice-led chromatic movements as inherently valid, or, perhaps better yet, don’t worry about it too much.  If it works, it works, and this works to my ears!  Plus, who isn’t immediately won over by a warmly-voiced D♭ major ending?  It’s the velvetiest of the keys, the luxurious connoisseur’s tonal vacation home.

*    *    *

Even the tense moments of “Indigo Conjunction” are in relatively upbeat humor; it’s probably the most fun tune overall.  “Viridian Forest & the Night Sky” is more or less the opposite — quite tricky to play and rather demanding on listeners who seek out a thread of coherence.  That said, the composition is indeed playing with some of the same elements in “Indigo Conjunction,” and the overarching form is relatively straightforward and  symmetrical, though more segmented than “Indigo”’s.  The opening atmosphere  is essentially a one-beat loop: bass drum bumping along underneath quintuplets on brushes.  Compared conceptually to “Indigo,” this is about dividing a single beat into 5, rather than a whole measure (which is itself a sort of larger beat).  This rhythmic setup, sometimes called “small fives,” is something of a hackneyed modern jazz trope at this point, but if I may offer an explanation as to why my version is better, it is because I did not commit Avery to a fixed sub-subdivision (like 3+2 every time, say).  He phrases his accents unpredictably so that the more open and abstract “five-ness” prevails over the perhaps more common 3+2 or 2+3 options, which are certainly constricting.  There are 32 distinct ways to accent or un-accent five notes in a row, and if you expand to include three options per note — accented, unaccented, or rest — the number of possibilities shoots up to 243.  Which is just to say there is so much variation in phrasing afforded by big subdivisions; it is therefore a shame to stick to just one or two basic patterns.  My man Avery knows these numbers and it shows!

Returning to the subject of the texture of the opening, the original version of “Viridian” included a bass pedal with the bass drum, but it was determined to be a bit too heavy and obvious, so the first melodic statement is just a duet of tenor and drums.  The tenor melody is very rhythmically basic, but its “natural phrasing” is delayed by an eighth note so that what would have been its downbeat attacks lay in the tiny gap between the third and fourth quintuplets.  The effect is intentionally unsettled, tempting the listener to switch over their perceived pulse.  (On top of that, Avery, being the nerd king that he is, throws in other subdivisions of the pulse.)  The full band snaps into action after three melody statements and a break; the second melody idea enters at [B]: an almost-banal diatonic melody “creepified” by supporting parallel chromatic thirds, the whole-tone bassline from the coda of “Boiling,” and the quintuplet grid churning underneath.  (The first two melodic sections indeed comprise the melodic material from “A Crack in the Ice,” if they seem familiar.)  The third melodic section, this time expressed by piano, brings the quintuplet grid into the melody in a rather on-the-nose way that nonetheless feels pretty good in the hand.  It’s all five-finger ascending scale patterns, moving between segments of B lydian (except for one E-natural) and F lydian (except for one B♭): like corrupted Hanon.  Underneath that, bass simply tiptoes down the B lydian scale twice in a row. 

The three-segment arc comes to a close with bass and piano fading away so that the tenor + drums duet can initiate another round at [C], this time a tritone away, of course (the B pedal in the bottom staff got replaced, as before, with just bass drum).  The second melody idea returns, too, but the “Hanon” section does not; instead, the piano solo section starts over the quintuplet grid plus bass pedalling for real.  The changes exploit the same locrian-lydian trick I explained before, so that the resulting diatonic collections keep playing the tritone game but the root stays fixed.  The musical challenge here was to not let such an admittedly boring bass figure bog down the energy.  Simón deviates, mercifully, and Hayoung and Avery do an excellent job of obscuring the grid without sacrificing too much groove: the result has forward propulsion but also a certain foggy uneasiness.  Chapter one of the piano solo sits on the B pedal, alternating locrian and lydian.  Chapter two introduces D as an alternative bass note and switches the chord-scale possibilities to G lydian and B♭ lydian (though not at specific times — Hayoung can freely choose when to switch between the macroharmonic areas, which, to be fair, share many notes).  Chapter three keeps the same chord-scales but transposes the bass notes (by tritone) to F and A♭, but more crucially “flattens out” the grid into sixteenth-notes.  The eventual goal is to reconceive each individual beat (~75 bpm) as a full measure of 4/4 (at ~300 bpm).  The rhythm section is setting up the lone episode of blistering swing on the album, but the kraken is not to be released straight away.  The piano solo builds in intensity but then diffuses some energy and dovetails into a new section, a new texture with a new perspective on the beat and its subdivisions.

Avery avoids his cymbals, opting instead for a light sprinkling of pure drums; Hayoung floats on the dissipating updraft of momentum from her solo; Simón hops on to a through-composed walking pattern that expressed the new tempo but also reminds us of the old slow pulse.  I’m very proud of the texture they cultivate here: it’s very relaxed and open but also breezy and just a little agitated.  The imagine in my mind was riding Epona, galloping through Hyrule Field in Twilight Princess, the weird dull-yellow light enveloping Castle Town in the distance, perhaps an eagle drifting through the sky without a strong purpose, the impossible cliffs standing proud and abrupt in defiance of realistic physics and geology.  To that end, the upcoming saxophone melody takes its opening shape from one of the main leitmotifs in Twilight Princess.  What can I say?  I’m true to my roots if nothing else.

The section I’m talking about is essentially four repeats of a twenty-four-and-a-half measure phrase driven by the bass.   The first time through, Hayoung offers a patient, wide-open (frankly American) harmonization of the bass line, Simón briskly chugging underneath — no melody.  The tenor+piano melody enters on the second repeat; it moves at its own slower pace, tugging on the meter of the bass+drums (I wrote it as floating non-metrical individual noteheads, loosely arranged on the staff). 

For the third repeat, the bass transposes up a minor third but the melody stays the same (except for two notes adjusted a half step to avoid a couple of ugly clashes).  To my ears, the transposition is not immediately obvious, but the long arcing run (around the 6/4 bar) sounds much more extreme in the higher key.  For the final repeat, the melody catches up to the bass, transposing up a minor third too.  The section sneakily flows into a transition where the beat expands into 5/4, recalling the earlier quintuplet grid.  Tenor foreshadows two melodic coming up in the second half of the album and flashes back to two others from the first half, then launches into the solo section.

The opening section of the tenor solo is two loops through four minor chords with a composed bassline that continues the earlier bass trajectory.  The subsequent main chunk loosen’s Simón role and Hayoung momentarily drops out so that she re-enter with gusto for the climax.  The harmony of the section is not really important at all but for what it’s worth, it’s basically a Hans Zimmer-esque plain minor triad sequence.  We really push, flirting with the high-gear free jazz mode of e.g. “Boiling,” shooting towards a big payoff after a couple hundred measures of gradual build-up.  The climax after the solo is the return of the original theme and the recontextualization of full bars of quick 5/4 as individual beats of slow 4/4 — undoing the earlier metrical transformations.  Or, almost-undoing; if you’re keeping track, the original tempo was quadrupled (75 → 300 bpm), then the time signature grew from 4/4 to 5/4 but the tempo did not change; so, when we cut the tempo by a factor of five after the solo (300 → 60), we end up 20% slower than the opening.  Which is fine, and arguably a bit more epic anyway.

The remainder of the track reprises the original melodic material (a tritone away), but in a more aggressive voice.  (The mighty Kevin Sun calls this “The Virgin Sacrifice.” No virgins were harmed in the making of this album.)  The final vamp is like that of “A Crack in the Ice” — the lydian/locrian game over a tritone pedal.

Despite its length and many sections, “Viridian Forest & the Night Sky” is pretty straightforward as an arc, and looking back, it’s almost in a kind of sonata form: an initial section with a primary and secondary theme group; a long, sequential, tension-building development, then a return to the original material with a little extra gravity.  One of the oldest tricks in the book!

5. “Reflected off the Water”

Finally, we have reached the cornerstone track of the album, the self-dual central jewel.  The two surrounding tracks I just discussed are both rather sophisticated in their own ways; to counterbalance the demand on the listener I wanted this middle track to be simple, beautiful, approachable.  My model was therefore “Love Theme” from Robert Stillman’s Horses: an unhurried rubato melody bathed in a warm, heavenly light that glues the album together.  I knew moreover that the central track would not have a dualistic complement elsewhere on the album, so the overall form was easy to come up with: two earnest statements of the melody, a tritone apart, separated by a fulcrum moment where time essentially stops and the trajectory of the rest of the album realigns in a new direction.  Simple enough in theory, but it is not a trivial task to write slow, simple music without any irony or flashy tricks.  And to imbue that natural character — to make it feel like the melody “already exists” — is even harder.  To me, it amounts to fully trusting the basics of the systems of music, to faithfully submit to elemental ingredients: diatonic triads, V-I progressions, quarter notes, four-bar phrases, …  Hipness and irony corrupts the holiness of those elements, but on the other hand, composing something that’s too basic is itself an ironic, degenerate act.  It’s an exercise in balance, where every note takes up space and the total amount of space is very finite.

So how did I fare?  Well, it’s not for me to decide, but here was my strategy: 

AABA form — tried and true.  The A sections feature a repetitive bassline that is a bit like the whole-tone bassline from earlier, but smoothed out into a diatonic mold.  The harmonic implication of the bassline is bland: A♭ for six bars, then an F minor scale that lazily connects back to the top, taking two beats longer than it should to switch directions and set up a (rather nonchalant) V-I.  On top of the bassline sits the melody: even slower and completely diatonic except for a single E-natural connecting the sixth and fifth scale degrees of A♭.  (On some repeats, I omit the E-natural; on others I bend it by about a quarter tone to segment the F-to-E♭ gulf)  The top line is ionian with a downbeat-accented major seventh in measure 3, but the bassline features G♭s so that it comes across as more mixolydian until the F minor scale, which is aeolian, featuring a G-natural.  That modal mismatch creates a little bit of rub, but it’s pretty subtle because the two versions of G are never simultaneous.  Hayoung’s job is particularly tough because any chord could be an imposition on the simplicity of the counterpoint, but she also has the opportunity to add a third stream into the mix, so she ought not be too shy.  The rhythms on the page are beyond basic, readable by a day-one music student.  We added some variation by playing a game, led by Simón.  On paper, he’s just playing quarter notes, but he is allowed to freely (but smoothly) vary his tempo, so that the pulse breathes, mirroring (or contradicting) its melodic momentum.  The rest of us play a guessing game, trying to be as perfectly in unison with him as we can despite his outward unpredictability.  The result is a sort of Brownian motion of tempo, a tidal cycle of rushing and dragging, and a chance for us to flex whatever telepathy we’ve developed from playing together and being friends.

Simón generally pushes and pulls on the tempo more and more as the tune proceeds, and especially during the bridge, which sequences a hyper-simple IV-V-I progression through the home key of A♭ then C♭ major, a minor third up.  The minor third tonicization is peeled off when a scalar descent that sounds like it should begin on C♭ and end in F♭ lands instead on F-natural minor, at which point the scalar descent is reversed; Simón painstakingly and diatonically climbs from his lowest F up two octaves, then turns the other direction to reset the [A] section back in the home key.  The end of the last [A] section is similarly extended by a scale; after the six bars of A♭, Simón climbs stewise down the F minor scale back to that bottom F as the rest of the band fades to a whisper.

So concludes the melody and moreover the first half of the album.  We experimented with the following moment, the exact center of the whole record.  It was always going to be some kind of improvisation — we tried a full-band version, a trio version where I get out of the way for once, but the choice was essentially made for me when, in a single take, Hayoung improvised an interlude that ended up being what got printed.  It was just so arrestingly beautiful, so crystalline, so absolute.  The heart rate of the music slows to hibernation so that the collective organism we comprise fades out of the picture, revealing a lush yet meek ambient backdrop — a partial memory of a melody; a hopeful daydream; a moment of burbling water transfixing a once-hyperactive child.

Words do no justice to such an uncorrupted moment of inspiration, so they end here.  The second half of “Reflected off the Water” is essentially identical to the first.  The new key imbues saxophone and bass especially with a new registral timbre, and we play the Brownian motion game slightly differently on the way out.  But that’s it — the composition is identical except for a tritone transposition.  (On that note, Hayoung’s interlude is even more impressive in how she connects A♭ major and D major. A continuous, casual stroll through the circle of fifths gives the feeling of waking up from a nap on a train, consciousness seeping in as you realize you’ve reached your destination without being aware of the details of the journey.)  The four tonicized key areas of the whole track are, in order of appearance, A♭, C♭/B, D, and F, the same square as in “Long Line,” the other semi-operatic track. 

In terms of album sequence, I view the first half of “Reflected off the Water” as a moment of respite, like a save point in e.g. Final Fantasy, after the heated energy that builds up through the first half of the album.  The second half of “Reflected,” then, is a well-wishing departure, a pushing-off towards the darker, more abstract second half, which is best approached with a recently-cleaned palate.  In 2021, where TikTok and other ADHD-paced media dominates, it’s quite a big ask to have listeners sit through an album of instrumental music.  My hope is that “Reflected off the Water” segments the experience somewhat, without cleaving it into disconnected chunks.  For what it’s worth, it is often these “and now a break from the action” moments that stick in my mind in long musical works (especially operas).  The humming chorus in Madame Butterfly; the waltz sequence in Der Rosenkavalier; Ornette Coleman playing “Embraceable You” on This Is Our Music.  It’s a delicate balance in music between consistency/continuity on one hand and variation/development on the other.  I really value long continuous experiences that draw you in deeper and deeper, but a well-placed, perhaps shocking discontinuity is sometimes just what the doctor ordered!  Music, being infinitely deep and sacred, admits no magic formula other than the musician’s own personality.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

If, by some perverse miracle, you’ve read this whole post and have more questions or want to see more sheet music, please do reach out.  I am happy to send complete scores. (Moreover, if you’ve read all this, I think you’re entitled to a free copy of the album — send me an email and I’ll send back the files.)  If any of my musical techniques or ideas appeal to you, take them!  Counterbalancing the joyful and fun process of generating music is the somewhat painful process of excluding ideas from a project; the pain is abated by the faith that someone else somewhere else will draw from the same source or elaborate on a similar idea.  Almost any musical idea is a portal into a deep, unending well of expression.  The worst thing that can happen to music is when it’s never played/heard at all — take that as a command to play, hear, and explore!

CONNECTEDNESS Liner Notes

Listen to Connectedness and purchase on Bandcamp.

If you let it, music will soak into every part of your life.  Music mirrors the universe — mysterious, rigorous, emotional, sublime — and thus naturally glues together one’s whole experience of life.  It has something to contribute in every area: the intellectual, the social, the sacred, the corporeal; and yet, despite all these prongs, music is an inseparable mass, a continuous fluid that resists any attempt to discretize or classify it.  That we can harness the energy of music at all is a human miracle, an endless source of gratitude.  The composer-builder Harry Partch is right on when he declares, “Music is Magic.”

The power to conjure music, then, is proof of the majesty of humanity.  Along with language, religion, and mathematics, music brings out the human spirit’s tendency to bite off more than it can chew, to create and wield technology that we don’t fully understand.  Abstraction meets urgency; the heart directs the hand.  Mercifully, no one is alone in any musical quest.  We absorb and filter knowledge from teachers living and dead, and then we combine our efforts in ensembles.  With friends, music turns into a simultaneously challenging and forgiving group ritual that strings together millions of moments, countless half-decisions carried out by an emergent democratic organism.  What we capture on tape is a projection of that process, recompiled and refracted by the listener’s ear — which is to say that you, the listener, are not merely an observer; you are playing with us, letting it soak into part of your life, which surely has something to say about our music, consciously or otherwise.  And whatever you say or feel about a recording sheds new light on what one might naïvely think of as “the same” piece of music. This generates a new variant for each listener’s experience.  Musicians know that the identity of a piece of music contains all of those variants, past and future — a vast, multidimensional web that far overshadows whatever composition or planning went in originally.  These webs, moreover, have structures and textures that bewilder and inspire in equal measures.  

The mathematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot, in the 1960s, revealed that many natural as well as mathematical phenomena are characterized by a fundamental infinite “roughness." One cannot simply measure the straightened-out length of a coastline nor the flattened-out surface area of the sea that defines it. There is detail at arbitrary levels of zoom, and hence the universe is not solely made up of 2- or 3-dimensional slices — the world is fractal in nature, with dimensionality floating somewhere between the counting numbers.  So too with music: try to find where a note truly begins or ends, and you will come up against a rough, undefined barrier, more like tree bark than a man-made knife’s edge.  Whole continuous lifetimes pass during phrases, and the spaces in between are just as pregnant and fragile as the notes they surround. 

It's all one thing — one big action in defiance of sterile, boring silence.

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The music on Connectedness — born in Boston, reared in New York, with ancestry in Armenia, Austria, and Japan — is both for and about my friends Avery, Hayoung, and Simón.  I wrote the music because they are my friends, but they are my friends because of the music.  I accept the paradox in order to express something of my own personality through these special people.  They judge me not when I bring in a transfiguration of music from Pokémon or a saxophone aria in a half-Persian, half-cowboy style.  And in fact, they intensify such visions; they ripen the fruit of the heart and the mind by being open, musically conscientious people.  For that I am immensely grateful, as I am to you for listening and thus being a part of the music-making process.

Jacob Shulman

Brooklyn, NY

Spring 2021

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Special thanks first and foremost to the band: to Avery, who shaped and texturized the music on big and small levels alike; to Hayoung, who pushed us all to make every moment the best it possibly could be, who didn’t take any detail for granted; to Simón, who played bass.  Thanks to Kevin for watching over us, for trusting us when we earned it but weighing in when we most needed it.  Thanks to Knar, who really heard the album for what it was and produced artwork that wasn’t just beautiful but also perfectly matched to the music.  Thanks to Josh for creating a smooth, natural recording environment, and to Lee who fought valiantly both for and against me in order to produce the best sound I could have hoped for.  And thanks to all family and friends, teachers and collaborators, inseparable characters in the great web of music.

Reaching and Grasping

My day job finds me explaining math at various levels of rigor.  At one end of the spectrum, math manifests as a game, not to be played but rather hacked.  “What is the path of least resistance to the correct multiple choice answer on the SAT?”  Honestly, not so fun, as all the beauty and structure and glory of math is sucked out by the greedy and lazy test-taking mindset.  When I am fortunate enough to engage with students at the advanced high school or college level, warm coals of that glory start to radiate through, especially to receptive students.  All math-lovers wish that love of math were more contagious, that teenagers could learn to truly dig humanity’s greatest accomplishment rather than just transact with it.  Realistically, it’s probably impossible to devise a worthwhile “romantic” math curriculum, and in any case, it’s more important for students, young ones especially, to earn basic skills in arithmetic and reasoning.  That said, I gripe about the rather ahistorical treatment of math in high school and college.  Math biographies and timelines are not so interesting, but the history and development of the concepts themselves reveals a side of math that students rarely see: its fluidity, its improvisational and searching nature, its fundamental arbitrariness despite its miraculous and unreasonable effectiveness.  

Take geometry, which is in many ways the black sheep of the high school curriculum.  Geometry is typically the first and indeed only subject where a student is exposed to proofs.  Proofs dismay and discourage most students too; they require strategic and formal yet open-ended thinking, unlike algebra, which is mostly about symbolic manipulation and “tricks of the trade.”  One might rightfully ask, “Why should geometry be the home turf of abstract reasoning?”  Its domain of objects -- shapes, pictures -- is less obviously ‘mathematical’ than the domain of algebra -- equations, variables.  But such a question betrays a lack of historical perspective. Geometry predates algebra by an order of magnitude; symbolic manipulation is a far more recent mathematical style than geometrical (i.e. visual) argument is.  In fact, most algebraic ideas are, in one way or another, abstractions/crystallizations of geometrical ideas.  Also, algebra, at least at the high school level, is relatively devoid of theorems, while geometry is all about its theorems.  There is lots to do in algebra, but not all that much to prove.  But the value and legacy of mathematics lies in its magnificent, vast collection of true statements derived from (nearly-)self-evident axioms: its theorems.  Theorems undergird all the practical techniques and applications as well as the aesthetic internal theorizing. But that doesn’t answer the question.  Why learn logical arguments in a pictorial medium?  Or, equivalently, why do the foundations of mathematical reasoning go back to Euclid, a geometer (rather than, say, Diophantus or al-Khwarizmi, the OG algebraists)?  

My own answer hints at the hidden, fluid nature of math I brought up earlier.  The supreme power, the miracle of math, is to lift situations and patterns from the real world into the transcendent abstract realm where mathematical technology can perform its work.  True equality does not exist in the physical world, but an equation can capture and generalize the notion of a balanced scale, or two things of the same type, or a fair transaction.  Likewise, circles and triangles are fictions of the mind, austere and perfect yet rigid models we try to squeeze real shapes into.  Real shapes, i.e. any visual thing at all, are infinite and totally ubiquitous, even more ubiquitous than the phenomena captured by equations/algebra, which makes them the ideal starting ground for this mathematical procedure of abstraction and generalization that unlocks the potential of reasoning.  The genius of Euclid and other Ancient Greek geometers was not just the treasure chest of theorems and propositions they proved, but the messy, playful compromising between real and abstract that enabled those theorems to 1) exist, 2) cohere, and 3) link together in an astounding beautiful and smooth way.  It’s almost impossible to imagine, but there was a time before such a concept as “square” existed, and obviously yet amazingly, some human mind had to be the first to come up with that concept.  But it’s not like once one person thought of “square,” it was immediately understood by everyone else.  This is the battle frontier of math!  A word must be chosen.  What does that word refer to?  Is a “square” merely a four-sided figure?  Does it need more structure?  Equal sides, equal angles?  (Sides and angles are already abstract terms, relatively easy to intuit but not so easy to pin down with enough precision for mathematics.)  If something is like a square but does not have equal sides, does that need a new word?  Where does that conceptual bubble begin and end?  (Think of rectangles and rhombi, distinct yet overlapping and both under the umbrella of parallelograms.)  There is simply no way there was instant consensus.  Early mathematicians must have wrung out these ideas and fought endlessly, internally and externally, consciously and subconsciously.  And it’s not like this is some effete, silly, cushy-armchair philosophical game; the stakes are staggeringly high, for mathematics cannot recover from even a single successful attack; it is both the strongest and most delicate human creation.

Once the dust settles and a concept takes form in a rigorous and complete way, the usual mathematical muscles can get involved.  Cold, logical reasoning stacks statement upon statement, never worrying about foundations.  Despite the existence of innumerable beautiful and powerful theorems and techniques, this mode of mathematics impresses me less.  I am instead in love with the mathematician whose reach initially extends beyond his grasp, who wrestles with dirty and mysterious half-formed ideas until he can confidently display an austere, coherent conceptual gem that plays nice with others.  The domestication of the beasts of the mind.

The histories of mathematical ideas are not taught in school, so students don’t get a sense of that process.  We enjoy peace earned through the battles of the past.  But as concepts stack up, often precariously in the adolescent mind, so grows the implicit weight of abstraction.  Teenagers, laden with thousands of years of sophisticated scholarship boiled down into extremely efficient mathematical/linguistic machinery, inevitably hit some point where a new idea simply does not fit into their model.  The notion of, say, graphing a quadratic equation is both 1) needlessly complicated and 2) seemingly arbitrary.  

“Why do we care what it looks like?” 

“Why should the solutions, which sometimes you call ‘roots’ and sometimes ‘zeroes’ and sometimes ‘factors,’ have anything to do with crossing the x-axis?!”  

“Why do these so-called parabolas only smile and frown but never tilt to the side?”  

Most teachers dismiss these questions because they cannot answer them satisfactorily.  

“You’ll get used to it.” 

“It’s not about the math per se; it just makes you smarter.”

“You’ll need this next year.”

The subtle tragedy in all this is that the students are right: it is totally arbitrary, at least at the most foundational level.  Math is not real.  It could have been something else.  But, the greatest minds of the past fought hard, not for the flawless definitions, but for the best compromises.  The most comfortable perches on the tightrope between abstract generality and practical specificity.  The concepts were designed to solve problems, as much as homeworks would have one believe that problems are designed to explain concepts.  To chime in on an admittedly inconsequential debate, mathematics is certainly invented and not discovered.  Being right on this question brings me no joy, but I would like to see this truth acknowledged by the education system.  It can be acknowledged gingerly at first: take 25 minutes in a geometry class to dissolve Euclid’s fifth (parallel) postulate and peel back the curtain to non-Euclidean geometry.  Show 7th graders what kind of nonsense you can come up with if addition is no longer commutative.  Convince a college freshman that the additive identity (0) and the multiplicative identity (1) cannot be the same number.  An informal discussion of paradoxical statements like “this statement is false” could open the door to Gödel’s mind-bending work.  A similar project could be undertaken to demystify computation, which to most people might as well be sacred yet unapproachable magic we cannot live without.  Music theory is often viewed as a frustrating game of puzzles devised by nerds in lieu of making real music, but one could instead view music theory, and indeed music itself in many instances, as a solution to puzzles that arise naturally.  Tonality is a compromise between tuning, modality, and symmetry.  Why should parallel fifths and octaves be forbidden in counterpoint? (What “proof by contradiction” can you come up with if they are allowed?)  Chord-scale jazz thinking is a somewhat-fast algorithm for finding the right notes -- what are its weaknesses that offset its speed, and why?  When is it worth it?  (To be fair, I think music theory actually does a better job, on average, of presenting itself as a series of historical developments compared to math.)  

I bet that acknowledging this intuitive, historical, imperfection-embracing mindset wouldn’t just tantalize the especially curious students but also bridge the gap to abstract/theoretical/technical topics for struggling students.  Pull back the veil, demystify, show the cracks in the armor -- if for no other reason than to make math (or whatever subject) less intimidating.  Wouldn’t it be empowering if a teacher acknowledged a student’s complaints about mathematics as valid, but then worked with her to see why things are the way they are?  The answer would not merely be “by decree.”  On a related note, Common Core math has lots of issues, especially at the elementary level, where students need to build up fluency in math through repetition and memorization.  CC’s goal of making math more intellectual and less mechanical is misguided for young kids, but by the late middle school/early high school level, forays into history a la the examples I mentioned above would accomplish these goals better than the silly renamings and fragmentations of ideas that currently comprise CC.  If nothing else, give kids a little buzz of excitement now and then by telling some of the rare tales of math being exciting.  Archimedes running nude through the street shouting “Eureka!” upon discovering his principle of water displacement; Turing cracking the Enigma code; Eratosthenes calculating the circumference of the entire freaking Earth using nothing but wells and shadows.  My own middle school math teacher spun some great tales and we as a class were transfixed.  It is far more engrossing to work hard on problems when you feel you are tapping into some great ancient legacy, gliding along the swift river of ideas and accomplishment.  That’s part of the joy of music transcription or even just reading sheet music, or playing chess, or celebrating an old holiday.  Zoom out and appreciate the magnificent edifices upon which we stand!

~ ~ ~

Long Coda: the Example of Continuity

To put my money where my mouth is, I’ll do my best to build the formal notion of continuity from the ground up. It’s one of my favorite examples of mathematicians pinning down a slippery concept precisely without sacrificing flexibility. Also, many teachers never define continuity satisfactorily because the somewhat vague intuitive notion of its meaning is sufficient for most purposes, even through calculus. If anything, students are merely given examples of non-continuity and expected to intuit the definition from there, as if swimming were the act of not drowning. But it is rewarding to wrestle directly with an evasive concept that seems so obvious at first! Without further ado:

“Continuous” in everyday speech means something like “smooth; unbroken; happening always.” In a mathematical setting, this notion naturally applies to the idea of a smooth, unbroken curve in the plane or in space, but also the idea of a shape or quantity smoothly morphing over time. Think of a candle melting, a tree growing, or water swirling around in a cup. This is already tricky for a mathematically conservative and uncreative mind: firstly, how does one reconcile the paradox of a smooth curve made of individual infinitesimal breadthless points? and secondly, how would one extend that notion to 2-, 3-, or N-dimensional, potentially physical objects like candles, trees, or water?

To the uninitiated, the answer is complicated, baffling, likely meaningless:

Let f : [a,b] → R and x₀ ∈ [a,b]. f is continuous at x₀ if for

every ε > 0 there exists δ > 0 such that | x − x₀ | < δ implies | f(x) − f(x₀) | < ε.

Not helpful. Let’s step back, way back, and find the path there ourselves.

First things first -- let’s focus on the idea of a smooth curve with no gaps. A curve that can be drawn without lifting your pencil. An unbroken string of pearls. Recall that most often, plane curves are generated from equations relating X and Y, as in the X- and Y-axes of the coordinate plane. More specifically, one typically considers functions relating X to Y. A function is a rule (an equation) that allows one to plug in an X-coordinate and generate a Y-coordinate so that a point on the plane, having an X-coordinate and a Y-coordinate, represents, potentially, a solution to an equation. The simplest possible example is the function Y = X, which tells us to draw a line through all the points where the Y- and X-coordinates are the same. An infinite diagonal line from Southwest to Northeast. Y = 2X + 3 is a slightly steeper and higher line including points such as (0, 3), (10, 23), and (-1.5, 0), as well as everything in between and beyond. More exotic functions generate curves rather than straight lines, but the principle remains the same: plug in X, return Y, plot the pair. Already we can see the roots of continuity: we are assuming X and Y are real numbers, which is to say we are allowed to plug in any value from the continuum of all possible values. Not just whole numbers, but fractions and irrational numbers too. An infinitely fine grain, the smoothest sand on the beach of the mind. The fact that there exists so many damn numbers, an infinitude between even the smallest gaps, gives us a clue as to how we might capture the notion of drawing a curve without lifting the pencil. Maybe there’s a way to do it “one point at a time” but leverage the infinitude of points into a suitable definition for curves, which is to say functions.

However, the problem with that approach is obvious. A single point “knows nothing” of the curve it’s on; it doesn't “know its neighbors.” A point is very slim on data: just two individual numbers, bundled together. Darn. But we do like how “zoomed in” a single point is; a continuous curve should be unbroken even at atomic scales and beyond (it would be a shame to discover gaps between the pixels). Can we have our cake and eat it too -- compromise between the global shapeliness of a curve and the local specificity and numerical properties of an individual point? Herein lies our first big strategic move: we will take the indirect approach of calling a function continuous at a point rather than over its whole domain. An approach that seems backwards at first, but the convenient fact is that if we do this successfully, we can call a whole function continuous if we know it is continuous at every point individually. In other words, we employ the smoothness of the numbers themselves to do work for us. We, as mathematicians, can zoom in to a specific location and analyze behavior there rather than having to juggle a whole snake of points all at once.

But we aren’t there yet. How do we imbue a point, a naïve and minimal chunk of data, with more structure and awareness of its surroundings? The key is to zoom out from the point, in the slightest way possible, to a “neighborhood” around the point. One can imagine a little blob surrounding a point on the plane. But we must be more precise, and we must appeal to the curve itself, not merely the space on the plane. We also must be extremely careful not to zoom out too much, for even a tiny segment of a curve is as infinite and unwieldy as the whole thing. Hence the foundational innovation undergirding limits, continuity, calculus, and the whole subject of mathematical analysis: ε. This measly Greek letter (epsilon) represents an arbitrarily small yet finite value. Think of the game you can play with any child:

“What’s the smallest positive number?”

“1.”

“What about ½?”

“Oh...well then what about ½ of ½?”

“Now you’re getting it.”

The notion of ε scales to whatever resolution of tininess we need at the present moment. Let’s see it in action.

To draw a curve without lifting the pencil, each point on the curve must be close enough to its neighbors that no pencil-lift is necessary to get there. On the pencil-scale, a distance of, say, .01 millimeters will surely do: that is, if there are no gulfs in the theoretical curve longer than .01 mm, we will be safe dragging our pencil across any smaller gaps. In this case, ε stands in for .01 mm. On the extra-thick Sharpie scale, a full millimeter might be sufficient for ε. On the electron microscope scale, ε would be on the order of nanometers. The magic is in the flexibility of the idea of ε. Let’s break it down further and get specific. Call whatever point we’re zoomed into, on whatever curve, p. p has an X-coordinate and a Y-coordinate determined by its X-coordinate. Call its X-coordinate x₀ and thus its Y-coordinate f(x₀). (Formally, “f of x-zero;” i.e. the result of applying the function f to the number x₀.) We want to encode the idea of minuscule intervals around p in both the X- and Y-directions. Mathematically, all points on the curve a distance less than ε away, where ε can be any small positive (greater than 0) number. In order to disambiguate the X- and Y-directions, we introduce δ (delta) as another arbitrarily small positive value, to be used shortly. We are ready to put it all together.

We can now make precise the notion of sliding an infinitesimal amount along our curve, starting from the point p with coordinates (x₀, f(x₀)). The neighborhood around x0 consists of all x-values less than δ away, which is calculated through subtraction. Mathematically, all values of x such that | x − x₀ | < δ. (The absolute value just turns all distances positive in order to defend against the semi-nonsensical notion of negative distance.) Likewise, the neighborhood around f(x₀) (now we are oriented on the vertical Y-axis) is all those values of f(x) such that | f(x) − f(x₀) | < ε. δ and ε can be freely specified at any point; we imagine in the meantime numbers like .000001. To finally define a continuous function (and thereby a continuous curve), we play a game. Imagine your adversary encloses point p within a small vertical box of size ε, and challenges you as follows:

“Your curve must not change more than ε. If you slide left or right along the curve and the y-value jumps more than ε, the curve is discontinuous and I win.”

Let’s imagine the two scenarios. If the function f is indeed continuous as we imagine it, that is smooth and unbroken, we should be fine. Imagine p is attached to a smooth line on both sides, and say ε is .001. Zoom in super-close to p and mark a ceiling and floor .001 above and below it. The smoothness of f implies that the ceiling and floor will cut off a box such that a minuscule segment of f with lies totally within. Call the width of the box δ. Here is a picture:

The adversary is defeated for now. He is free to shrink ε even further, but we can counter with a smaller δ that does the job. We believe in the smoothness of the real numbers to win this battle for us. Because ε can shrink to any microscopic scale at all and we can still find such a δ that encloses our smooth curve, we confidently declare that f is continuous at x₀.

How do we know this definition is working? We check the other scenario, where f has some gap or jump, and hope that the adversary wins the game. So pick p somewhere where f jumps; let’s say that to the right, it is attached to a smooth curve, but has a gap on the left:

The adversary sets a small ε and challenges us to ensure that f changes less than ε vertically within a horizontal interval of δ. On the right side, we are OK. Tiny rightward nudges produce only tiny upward nudges, so our quest for δ begins swimmingly. However, on the left side, we run into a major problem. Even the smallest leftward nudge pops us downward far more than ε. We cannot find a small yet positive δ that closes the box; we fail! f is discontinuous at x₀. Exactly as planned -- the definition “feels right.”

Note that we would have won our continuity-testing game anywhere else on f, even in the second scenario. It thus makes sense to say that f would be continuous on intervals that do not include that pathological point p. Remember, f being continuous as a whole curve/function amounts to all its individual points having the continuity property individually.

All that is left to do is summarize the procedure of this game in mathematical notation. One step at a time:

Let f : [a,b] → R and x₀ ∈ [a,b].

All this is saying is that our function, our curve, is defined as mapping x-values on an interval of the real numbers ([a,b] means every number from a to b) to a real-numerical output. It’s a fancy way of placing us on the X-Y plane. Our special point has to have its X-coordinate, x₀, in the domain of f. Read ∈ as “belongs to.”

f is continuous at x₀ if:

for every ε > 0 there exists δ > 0 such that | x − x₀ | < δ implies | f(x) − f(x₀) | < ε.

Now the meat. “For every ε > 0” means that the adversary is free to challenge us with an arbitrary small positive number to box us in. Our job is to find, i.e. show that “there exists δ > 0 such that” the horizontal neighborhood around x₀, i.e. the x-values fulfilling | x − x₀ | < δ, don’t pop us out of the vertical neighborhood, i.e. the y-values fulfilling | f(x) − f(x₀) | < ε.

In summary: the adversary assigns ε, and if we can always counter with a δ that keeps f comfortably in the adversarial box, we establish continuity at that point.

Deep breath. We have successfully defined an intuitively clear but mathematically slippery notion: continuity of a curve (represented by a function). The point here was to show that these definitions don’t just appear from nowhere; they are earned through head-scratching, compromise, and creative workarounds to paradoxes and imprecisions in intuition. While the definition may at first seem needlessly technical, abstract, or indirect, it turns out to be instead an ingenious balance of specificity and flexibility. We, counterintuitively, zoom into single points to define a global property of a curve; we play a recursive game with simple individual steps involving finite, definite numerical values that generalizes to infinitesimal scales so that we are satisfied without having to appeal to the paradox of zero-length nudges or zero-area boxes. Better yet, this definition is totally agnostic to the properties of f: it tells us whether points or intervals are continuous or not no matter how wild our curve gets. It also easily generalizes to higher dimensions with a rather minimal amount of mathematical massaging. In fact, it generalizes to domains beyond numbers in the case of general topology. An even more abstract definition, presented without comment or explanation:

Let (X, TX ) and (Y, TY) be topological spaces. A function f : X → Y is said to be

continuous if the inverse image of every open subset of Y is open in X.

(The real puzzle here is the meaning of open.)

I would have loved to grapple with this stuff in high school. Sure, it’s difficult. Merely presenting the definition and expecting a student to understand it would have been an obviously stupid idea. But with an hour of mental wrestling, led by a teacher, working through examples and trying out some hypotheses, this becomes a rewarding exercise that reveals the glorious, dirty, living, breathing, miraculous nuts and bolts of mathematics, the hard-earned truths that unlock our simple computational methods. Not exactly “light afternoon reading,” but instead of the ten-thousandth arcane, soulless symbolic manipulation of the sort that pervades high school math? Yes please!

If you read this far, good for you and please accept my gratitude.  I hope you don’t feel I wasted your time.  Some music recommendations to make up for it:

• An arrestingly beautiful Horowitz performance of Bach

• RIP Sophie.

• Willie Nelson’s version of Stardust - wow!

Be well and keep it real.

Where Two Streams Cross

November 2020: It’s impossible to be anything but dismayed at the overall state of things.  Approximately zero progress has been made on the pandemic; the institutions that should have protected, informed, and healed us have totally failed, and miserably so.  The “election” was (and still is) an utter embarrassment.  The two groups of people I regularly work with, kids and musicians, are both suffering as greatly as ever; the initial shock of the collapse has been replaced with a gurgling sense of dread accompanied by the withering-away of invaluable time.

~ ~ ~

The first two gods of jazz tenor saxophone are Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young.  Any jazz fan knows this and most are familiar with the narratively convenient dichotomy of their styles: Hawk, the bold, fiery lion; versus Prez, the cool, melancholic hipster.  Seemingly every aspect of each man’s style is at odds with the other’s.  Hawk’s sound is fat and fluffy in the low register, growly and rough in the middle register, and blasting in the relatively rare moments where he goes up high.  Lester, on the other hand, is comfortable to hang in his silky high register, but will descend to his throaty middle register and occasionally to his whispery bottom notes.  Pre-war Lester’s sound is buoyant, while post-war it’s brittle; early Hawk is bulbous and strong, and later he is rough, almost plasticky.  Moreover, Hawk’s sense of harmony is remarkably advanced for a pre-bop improviser: his default harmonic statement is the arpeggio, but he liberally sprinkles in adjacent chromatic tones and chord substitutions, and hiding within his arpeggios is often a smoothly voice-led composite melody, like a tasty inner voice from a pianist or a big band.  Lester’s harmony is less sophisticated; essentially everything he plays is diatonic or the blues, and he is generally unbothered by quickly moving harmony so long as he can find a note or two to milk while the band shifts underneath him.  A dominant chord replaced with a spooky augmented triad is about as fancy as Lester gets.

If you need a refresher on Hawk vs. Prez, listen to the most famous, recognizable solo of each character: Coleman Hawkins playing “Body and Soul” in 1939, and Lester Young playing “Oh Lady Be Good” in 1936.

Like any two diametrically opposed forces, Hawk and Prez define a spectrum, on which one can locate every jazz saxophonist since.  Indeed, there is no worthy player who is not a direct descendant of both giants, in one way or another.  This is of course true for the saxophonists of the generation just after Hawk and Prez, and in particular for two of my personal gods: Sonny Rollins and Warne Marsh, born 1930 and 1927 respectively. At first glance, the ancestry seems clear cut: Rollins, a vocal devotee of Hawkins with a comparably muscular tone; Marsh, perhaps the only tenor player with an ever darker, featherier tone than Prez, who literally played Lester Young transcriptions on stage.  Sonny is Hawk’s next evolution, and Warne is Lester’s, right?  

Not so.

Before I make my case that Sonny is actually closer to Prez and Warne is actually closer to Hawk, I want to explain why I would spend time on these comparisons at all.  The goal is to show a path towards piecing together one’s own personal style.  You nor I will ever do anything truly original, but we can each come up with a unique cocktail of the features of the masters.  Importantly, almost none of these features are incompatible with each other, even if they may seem so at first.  With a creative, open mind, it’s possible to fuse and blend seemingly opposed musical attributes.  You could play like Paul Desmond and Chris Potter at the same time.  You could play like Gene Ammons and Mark Turner simultaneously with a spicy dose of Don Byas.  You could play fast swing like Stan Getz but play ballads like John Coltrane.  And so on.  Though I do not yet have a convincing solution, I strongly believe that the best of my own personal style will emerge as a crossing of Rollins and Marsh, and later on I will outline an exercise I use to deliberately cross their streams.

Up front, I will admit that Sonny Rollins is the far superior artist to Warne Marsh.  Sonny is, by all accounts, a deeply thoughtful, enlightened person, a continuously unsatisfied artist continuously reaching beyond his grasp, despite a vast and diverse career.  Warne became almost instantly complacent due to the deadly combination of exceptional talent and self-destructive habits.  The sad truth is that one could delete Warne Marsh from jazz history and it would be relatively undisturbed, but Sonny Rollins is an obviously foundational figure, the Saxophone Colossus indeed.  

However! for listeners in the know, Warne is a dark and prickly yet delicious fruit and an alluring yet dangerous influence on saxophonists.  And his lackluster career was not a foregone conclusion; Sonny’s illustrious career was not either, especially considering his addiction and imprisonment in his early twenties.  Both men, in fact, blossomed early into promising if not downright artistic saxophonists, and the 1950s shaped each’s career and eventual legacy.

Therefore, it is fair to compare Rollins and Marsh at the crests of their 50s waves, when their talents were freshly honed and surely disarming to a hungry listener or fellow saxophonist.

Conveniently, both Rollins and Marsh recorded “I’ll Remember April” in trio formats, in 1957.

Sonny’s is a live recording from the immortal Blue Note album A Night at “The Village Vanguard” and Warne’s is from his self-titled Atlantic release (the title of the track is merely “Excerpt,” which likely allowed the dodging of licensing fees, made possible because Warne doesn’t play the melody).  Both are masterful 5-star takes; the point is not to rank them but rather to analyze them and in particular trace the Hawk and Prez influences from a generation upstream.  Let’s listen.

* * *

First, consider Sonny.  Listen at least until the trading.  As with any saxophonist, Sonny makes his first impression through his sound.  He blows hard and tongues even harder; even his most open notes fly straight out the end of the bell.  The little bit of grit at the start of the accented notes creates an obvious transient; i.e. the beginning of the note, and therefore its placement with respect to the beat, is crystal clear.  The aggressive tonguing itself comes more from Coleman Hawkins, who could really smack his high notes too, but musically, the pre-head intro is a two-note riff around which the time coalesces — that’s pure Lester Young.  

Semi-side note: the way Sonny plays the melody is an exemplar of what makes him so special to me: every note, every phrase is articulated in a different way.  From smooth legato to chirpy staccato, from beefy straight tone to wiggly vibrato, it’s all in there.  Sonny’s advantage over all other saxophonists ever (except for perhaps Bird) is his gigantic toolbelt of articulation.  His air, tongue, lips, and fingers can play the same “note” in a million different ways and his unsurpassed artistry is picking out the perfect one, every single time.  (Lester had lots of articulations, too, though not quite as vast a palette.  Hawk even less so: I hear his default tonguing style change and develop over his career, but I don’t hear the cornucopia of articulations within a single solo to the same degree as Sonny or Prez.  Vibrato is another story for another missive...)

The solo is more or less what one expects from Sonny Rollins in 1957: incredibly swinging, serious bebop, perfectly nestled in the changes, juxtaposed with levity courtesy of cute melodic commentaries and quotations.  A delightful, unassailable formula.  Where does this performance lie on the Hawk-Prez spectrum?  Neither of the two OGs ever really embraced bebop, so we must retrodict the 1937 analog of Sonny’s use of bop as his main vehicle in 1957.  What “kind” of bebop is Sonny playing?  I’d call it prime, uncontroversial bebop.  Rhythmically, lots and lots of eighth notes plus the classic eight-note triplet arpeggios/turns, and the upbeats are heavily accented.  Melodically, the lines are full of all the lovely twists that push and pull on the beat: inner groupings of both even and odd numbers of eighth notes, expressed through articulation differences and melodic contour.  Harmonically, it’s on the conservative side, relishing the glory of bop that outlines the changes as they are.  The most adventurous side-steps are brief octatonic moments that intensify dominant chords, but Sonny does not leave such moments unresolved.  I’d argue that this style of high bebop is to 1957 what groovy diatonic playing is to 1937; viz. Lester Young.  Yes, the rougher sound indicates Hawk, but the material actually being played strikes me as coming from Lester’s philosophy (if not his style): don’t mess with the changes; don’t be esoteric; don’t forget the sweet melodic moments; let your tonguing imbue the beat with bounce, variation, and energy.  An ultimately rhythmic conception with a side dish of melodic sentimentality.  Another point in the Prez column: what does Sonny do at 1:43, 2:29, and 3:52?  Riffs, baby!  Sonny doesn’t chill on the riffs for as long as Prez would have, but that device is as Youngian as it gets.  Simple, repetitive riffs deepen the groove and charge up energy to be released in subsequent bursts of melody.  That was never Hawk’s style; he was always overflowing with energy and wasted no time deploying his serpentine lines straight into the foreground.

In short, while Sonny’s aggressive tone reminds us of Coleman Hawkins, the contents of his solo, and even more so his overall approach to improvising, place him, in my view, much more on the Lester Young side of the spectrum.

* * *

On to Warne Marsh.  His rendition of “I’ll Remember April” is hardly a rendition at all — it is an incomplete performance, solely a tenor solo over the changes with no reference to the melody, and no beginning nor ending except for the briefest studio fade.  Marsh fans are used to this sort of thing; arrangement and presentation were not skills Marsh or any of the Tristano people possessed.  Perhaps bothersome for the listener who wants a bow on top of his improvisation, but not really a problem for a saxophonist investigating the craft or a collector amassing material.  

In any case, the first impression of this take is strong, despite the non-beginning, because the bass and drums are swinging hard right out of the gate.  If you listen closely, you’ll notice that Warne does not actually begin with the easy-to-hear A—F# descending third; in classic Marsh form, there is an almost-imperceptible blur of a few indistinct notes just before the beat, like a drag on a snare drum made of marshmallows.  The dichotomy of clear(ish) notes and ghostly shadow notes is a hallmark of Warne’s style, in a certain sense a replacement for the drama he loses by basically never tonguing.  It’s not even clear if the second phrase goes straight into the third or if there is a breath between them.  Listen just before the ascending triplet arpeggio at about 0:04 — does the sound stop, or is he continuing to release the slightest drip of air as a gossamer thread between two helical phrases?  The mystery is tantalizing and essential to his turn-on-a-dime style.  This tiny example leads us to consider his articulation more broadly.  In some ways, Warne’s way of playing is simpler than Sonny’s (I think it’s easier to emulate, though also a bad idea to emulate more than just a little bit — more on that another time).  It’s simpler because Warne does not have nearly the arsenal of tonguings that Sonny does, and the way the notes come out is a result of the contour of the line, which is, in general, a spontaneous creation (Sonny, though certainly spontaneous himself, has more vocabulary and often plays things that he’s clearly worked out in advance).  Another way of describing this is that Warne is a “fingers-first” player while Sonny is a “tongue-first” player: Warne’s fingers think the notes and he blows through them as they come out; Sonny articulates complete ideas, complete phrases, and his fingers follow, conforming to the scales/changes/quotes so that the story his tongue tells makes sense.  (Indeed, I’d argue that Coleman Hawkins is more of a fingers player and Lester Young is more of a tongue player.)  My theory of Warne Marsh-style articulation is based on a visual metaphor: a moving surface, perhaps of the ocean, through which notes can either breach or descend.  Notes that are higher in register or blown harder pop out; lower/softer notes stay submerged.  The net effect is like watching a dolphin leap out of and back into the water as it traverses the waves — you watch, in alternation, its majestic body but then just a watery shadow.  A natural follow-up question is “how much of this effect is intentional?” My guess is that it is mostly a byproduct of the lines he plays, which is to say Marsh is not really choosing when to pass through the “surface;” the direction, jaggedness, and momentum of his lines (i.e. the choices of his fingers) push him above and below naturally.  This is in direct contrast with Sonny, who could play the same piece of melodic material with totally different, specifically-chosen articulations, imbuing even the most familiar line with a twist.  To finish on the subject of articulation, I want to argue a somewhat subtle point: although Warne’s notes can come out in wildly different ways in terms of timbre, volume, and emphasis, the technique behind them is rather homogeneous and is subordinate to his melodic, finger-led thinking.  And despite his generally warbly sound that is at odds with the beefiness of Hawk, Warne’s overall approach, the order of operations to getting notes out of the horn, is more aligned with Hawk than with Lester.

With respect to harmony, Warne Marsh is almost inarguably more advanced and adventurous than Sonny Rollins, at least at this point in their careers.  That is not a value judgment, though.  There is certainly a glory to Sonny hitting all the right notes all the time and a satisfaction to reciting bebop vocabulary that Warne never gives.  Nonetheless, Warne’s harmony is surprising, edgy, and utterly progressive for the 1950’s, and therefore a treat for any listener attuned to it.  The whole solo is full of goodies, but listen to the chorus from about 0:54 to 1:45.  He is juggling forbidden fruit the whole time but is nevertheless playing the changes.  You can hear alterations of the basic chords, superimpositions of new chords, and delightful sidesteps into neighboring harmonies that swivel back home in a frankly sexy way.  Without getting into pages of analysis, the fact of the matter is that Sonny did not play like that, and Lester Young even less so.  However, Coleman Hawkins’ playing is full of comparable moments — tasteful flirtations with remote harmonies, gracefully packaged within lines that begin and end inside the changes.  In fact, until Warne, there was not really a saxophonist as harmonically adventurous as Hawk, and there have been few since.  Warne and Hawk are further connected by their reluctance to regurgitate.  Neither player has characteristic licks; they improvise more on a note-to-note basis.  Sonny and Lester, of course, were unafraid of vocabulary.

So, let’s tally up the final scorecard.  Sonny’s burly tone — yes, more Hawk-like; Warne’s feathery, high-register-centric tone — yes, closer to Prez.  But Sonny’s overall style: highly varied, well-curated articulation; conservative diatonic harmony; a mix of linear playing and melodic/riffy playing; and an ultimately rhythmic conception — that’s Lester Young.  By contrast, Warne’s overall style: a finger-first approach with articulations as byproducts of the lines; progressive, adventurous harmony; a constant flow of abstract ideas without appealing to fossilized vocabulary — Coleman Hawkins, through and through.  Perhaps not the initially expected result, but that’s the point — great players take lots of little things from other great players, and superficial influences need not box one into a narrow style.

* * *

Frankly, it doesn’t really matter if Sonny/Warne is more like Hawk or more like Prez.  It is not so hard to argue the opposite of what I said above (though I still think I’m right of course).  My large-scale goal here is to prove that saxophone playing, and indeed any complex craft/artform, is built up from a large amount of small components, many of which are independent of each other.  This is a deep fact because it shows that there can be a truly gigantic number of different styles even without coming up with something “truly original” (the originality, I’d argue, would come from the choice of how to combine these components).  It also indicates how one might improve their playing.  In my opinion, there is not really such a thing as “general improvement.”  Rather, one can crank up individual skills a little at a time through exercise, then make an artistic judgment about how to compile them into a musical personality.  Transcription is great, probably indispensable, but you must break apart what you transcribe into its pieces: pitch content, articulation, time feel, pacing, tone, etc.  Otherwise you’re missing the full benefit and you’re doomed to merely amassing vocabulary.  Not to mention it takes a little pressure off if you transcribe a solo for a purpose, say, to feel how Freddie Hubbard places his notes relative to the beat. In that case, it’s fine if you miss some notes or leave out the double time!  Moreover, this way of thinking, factoring great players/solos/records into their components, can alleviate some of the anxiety of falling in love with seemingly incompatible styles.  From the perspective of a young saxophonist in 1940, Lester and Hawk must have seemed incompatible, but every great saxophonist since has taken from both! A generation or two later, one might have felt that one had to choose between, say, Zoot Sims and Joe Henderson; nowadays, Chris Potter and Mark Turner, but no.  There is no single choice to be made — follow the heart and cherrypick.  It goes deeper: if you play jazz but you love to listen to Sting or Tchaikovsky or Umm Kulthum, figure out what small piece of those outside influences you can appropriate and coherently integrate into your jazz playing.  Go beneath the surface.  Don’t just copy — analyze, abstract, experiment.  So much more is possible than any of us realize.  

* * *

Coda: I love the two “I’ll Remember April” cuts because the changes and the trio format act as a kind of scientific “control” relative to which one can experiment.  A fun exercise is to play along.  There are four basic ways to do this: play like Sonny with Sonny; play like Warne with Warne; play like Sonny with Warne; play like Warne with Sonny.  And when I say “play like,” I mean “take some element of that player’s style and try to incorporate it;” the point is not to be a carbon copy.  Articulation, time feel, harmonic approach: all good individual options.  I usually start by playing like Sonny along with Sonny — the intro and melody make a good on-ramp and the solo is nice and long so you can take little breaks to listen then dive back in if need be.  Once you get cooking and you feel your Sonny Rollins impression is at least passable, switch over immediately to the Warne recording and play along with him.  As best as you can, keep the Sonny approach going, but keep your ears open to Warne at the same time.  How do the eighth notes fit together?  Can you compromise on the fly, find some novel mixture?  What usually happens to me is Warne takes over my ears after a couple minutes and I start playing more and more like him.  You could do another round of Warne-style over Warne, then switch to Sonny, and play like Warne over Sonny.  And so on and so forth; it’s like alternately dunking in hot and cold baths.  After five or six rounds (~20 minutes), I like to just play on my own, maybe with a metronome, and see what comes out.  You’ll surprise yourself!  Sometimes this particular combo comes out sounding kind of like Chris Cheek; sometimes it’s more like Joe Lovano; sometimes something totally weird.  Most of all, it’s really fun and also challenging — the best kind of practice.

One can easily play this sort of game with Sonny and Trane using “Tenor Madness,” or with Stitt/Ammons, or with Miles/Cannonball/Coltrane.  A slightly different game: play a single tune for a long time and try to “time travel.”  Pick something easy — I like to start by playing Lester’s “Lady Be Good” solo verbatim — and try to move through the styles of various players as continuously as possible.  I say continuously because the liminal spaces between styles is where you’ll discover the most exciting stuff.  Start with Lester, then try to play some Hawk, then maybe jump to Bird, take a detour to Lee Konitz or Hank Mobley, then Sonny, or maybe go straight for Coltrane, then Joe Henderson, then Dewey Redman, then maybe tread back to Ornette, then Albert Ayler… Over the course of ten minutes, you’ll get a physical and mental workout, and also probably play things you’ve never played before.  

~ ~ ~

Bonus recommendations:

A Fire Across the Deep by Vernor Vinge: sci-fi novel that I have dragged my feet on but enjoyed nonetheless.  The greatest strength is the world building and believable dialogue.  Some of the political machinations of characters are pretty boring, and the plot doesn’t really begin until page 150 (also really slows down around p. 300), but it’s been a good read before bed and on the train.

Into the Breach by Subset Games (known for FTL: Faster Than Light): really excellent turn-based strategy game, less stressful than FTL but more to my taste.  Chess-like in several ways but with tons of variation due to the various squads you can play as.  Relatively small number of enemy types and missions but they mix in interesting ways and a two-hour playthrough can go by in the blink of an eye.

Duke Ellington: duh.  Just particularly in the mood these days.  I mean come on man.

Neil Luck, British composer: a brilliant madman I recently discovered.  Thinks bigger than just the music, really fun and zany without coming across as gimmicky.  This video got me hooked.  Read some of his writing on a blog too and enjoyed that.

Late Flowerings

I recall reading the following statement from the Wikipedia article of Richard Strauss: “Along with Gustav Mahler, [Strauss] represents the late flowering of German Romanticism after Wagner.”

Fair enough - a good way of putting it. Indeed, I love listening to Strauss for the same reasons I love listening to other German Romantic masters, but on top of those reasons, there’s a bonus to Strauss: a sort of “new-and improved,” boiled-down efficiency afforded to him by his lateness relative to the Beethoven-Wagner arc. Listening to Beethoven entails some listening to Mozart; that is to say, if you’re in the mood for some penetrating romanticism, Beethoven serves it as a sauce on top of a Classical base. Listening to Wagner entails wading through literal hours of sludgy voice leading and heavy-handed leitmotific “development” (insofar as repetition is development). Strauss cuts to the chase, and to put on Salome or Ein Alpensinfonie is to put on a compact, juicy dose of romantic modernism — all the bells and whistles one loves without much fat. The “late flowering” Strauss represents marks a great moment in that particular musical tradition, where Strauss, looking back on the past, picks and chooses his favorite techniques of the old masters and dresses them up, repackages them for an audience who doesn’t want to sift. A “Wagner’s Greatest Hits” album, if you will.

While German Romanticism has come and gone, other traditions are coming ‘round that bend, where the accumulation of early masterpieces affords the creation of refined, retrospective masterpieces. My gut tells me that jazz is not quite there; instead, jazz may be in awkward period after the initial thrust but before the seeds of late flowers blossom. I therefore predict excellent albums resurrecting the best ancestors of jazz a few years from now. Perhaps important centennials (Bird’s being less than a month away at the time of writing) will set the stage, make the time feel right. Right now, my generally low opinion of contemporary jazz comes from the mixed messages sent about the past. Some jazz musicians throw out the baby with the bathwater; they reject past idioms (swing, tonal harmony, blues) without innovating to fill in the gulfs left by removing the DNA of jazz. We can all conjure memories of limp, tepid straight-8ths modal jazz featuring arbitrary forms, unmemorable melodies, and gratuitous cookie-cutter solos. Reject the past, subvert it, fine. But you better put something in its place. On the other hand, puritanical jazz musicians lament the de-emphasis of swing, harmony, and blues a la Ellington, Parker, Monk, etc., but all too often, the music of these contemporary jazz Luddites merely imitates and dilutes the masters they revere. Did you really need to record Inner Urge in 2016 and quote Joe Henderson’s solo to prove that you’re a “student of the music?” Has anyone ever said, “wow, this Charlie Parker cover is so much better than the original!” No. Figure out where you stand, jazz boys, and whatever you do, do it right. There are many pairs of ears that would be receptive to either a) truly innovative, probing music descended from jazz, or b) truly loving, detail-oriented treatments of the great moments of the past, i.e. late flowerings. For what it’s worth, examples of the former do exist, though few and far between. I just heard some of Jacob Garchik’s new big band album Clear Line, which is innovative and subversive: a big band album with no rhythm section (yes, that means no dumb tinkly piano intros, no over-the-top drum fills, no ironically un-interactive solos). Dana Saul’s Ceiling is stunning start-to-finish: real composition, real playing, stylistically unfettered by jazz “best practices.” Innovative, beautiful, and polished. But, I have not yet heard what I would call a late flowering of jazz (or bebop, swing, or whatever, if you want to get specific). I wait eagerly for jazz’s answer to Death and Transfiguration.

The reason the phrase “late flowering” came to mind in the first place actually has nothing to do with music. I think we are currently in a period fertile for late flowerings in video games, despite how quickly the history of video games moves. A decade is an aeon in games, and accordingly, one can look on the watershed games of the 90’s as artifacts of an ancient Golden Age. My most recently completed game, Ghost of Tsushima, has essentially zero innovation on any fundamental level. Yet, it is great. It is a late flowering of the broad “adventure game” formula, essentially a grown-up Zelda game. Late flowerings are especially valuable in games because the main agent of poor aging in games is frustrating carry-overs from the arcade era plus technological limitation. We don’t need finite lives anymore, and 16 colors just doesn’t seem like enough these days. But there is more to what makes Ghost of Tsushima great, for it is not just a piling-on of big, new features. Skyrim pushed the open-world concept to its 2011 limits, and it is surely great and important, but the fact of the matter is that much of The Elder Scrolls is repetitive, artificially bloated, unrefined, and ultimately boring. One wades through Skyrim the way one wades through a Wagner opera: the great moments are enough to keep one sucked in, despite some of the slog. Ghost of Tsushima’s brilliance is a result of its advantage of being able to look back on those old games trim the fat. The world is not overwhelmingly huge, but there are not many empty regions — the nature itself, the wind blowing through the pampas grass and the sun glinting off a decapitated Mongol’s helmet, is beautiful and obviously lovingly crafted. There is not an infinite number of quests, but most quests in the game have some novel story or gameplay element, so the game circumvents the creepy feeling of RPG deja vu. The collectibles only come in a few types, and there’s none of the bullshit of inventory management or encumberment; there’s no frustratingly arcane crafting system. One gets the sense playing the game that the developers respect the player - a fantastic and all-too-rare feeling.

Persona 5 is another perfect example: perhaps the greatest big JRPG of all time if one factors out nostalgia. Hundreds of JRPGs have come along since the first Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, each with its own blend of successful and unsuccessful experiments in gameplay and presentation. FFVII had an engaging story and a generally cool world, but it really dragged during the corridors of random battles. Paper Mario has a timeless and lovely style, but the gameplay is almost trivial. Earthbound is genuinely funny, with excellent style and music, but the graphics don’t exactly hold up today, nor does the relatively uninspired turn-based combat. By contrast, Persona 5 has it all. The art and music is on point, the writing is surprisingly good, even in translation, and the interface generally is smooth, intuitive, and engaging. There’s a healthy dose of the kinds of complex systems some of us love in RPGs (in this case, the creation of new personas, the social links, the “one more” chain attacks), but the systems never get too arbitrary or opaque, nor are they strictly required to play the game. There’s essentially no grinding or throwaway characters, no complicated yet forgettable lore. In other words, Persona 5 is the late flowering of the JRPG because it distills the genre’s strengths and ameliorates or solves its weaknesses.

The Witness is a late flowering of the first-person puzzle game a la Myst. Hollow Knight is the late flowering of the Metroidvania. Hyper Light Drifter is the late flowering of 2D Zelda. None of these games are masterpieces because of innovation; they are masterpieces because of refinement and good judgement.

I wish late flowerings would pop up more in music, as they have in games. At the same time, games, the primary artistic frontier of the early 21st century, tend to lean into nostalgia too much since the artform progresses so quickly: good for these late flowerings but perhaps at the expense of true innovation. I am not sufficiently expert enough in other fields to judge the innovation versus late flowering balance, but it certainly is fascinating to consider. What will be the last great novel? Has it already been written? Could a genius chef innovate say, Italian food, which is so recognizable and beloved for its basics? What is the most innovative garden in the world? Have there been late flowerings of earlier styles of blacksmithing?

Sadly, progress is slow due to the seemingly unending low flame of misery known as COVID-19. Fingers crossed that energy is being stored rather than diffused, so that whenever the floodgates open, there’s a real flood of creativity waiting to burst, not just a dribble.