I just remembered about responding to your essay a few months ago,
thanks for the reply. It’s interesting actually, I’ve heard that the CI program I am in is really different than what it was with Allen Chase, because Hankus Netsky runs it now. I bet it was very different under Ran Blake. It’s interesting how Ran is the teacher people don’t know as well personally recently.

- Mark

JC: you misunderstand: it’s not the case that Requisite 1 is “not working” for me. It’s that it’s not being fulfilled. this is a very different thing. I perpetually search for its fulfillment, but i find too often in the situations labelled as ‘jazz’ it’s not fulfilled. but then again, this might be a produce of my own self-imposed pressures.

who’s what now: why are you here?

Corey: excellent point, who’s to say what the geographic locus of jazz is? but i don’t think that was Matt (Pavolka)’s point. He’s a friend (and terrific bass player & composer) and colleague here in Brooklyn, NY, so i believe he was talking a bit more locally to our (his and mine) perspective. but yes, i would say you’re very right that being geographically blinkered is a real problem right now.

Matt (Pavolka): well said. but again, i just don’t feel a part of this tradition (and again, given that i used the ‘f(eel)’ word, this might be uselessly subjective). and i don’t perceive jazz as being subversive. if it were, i’d hear more questioning of tacit assumptions. now jazz is underfunded, misunderstood, undervalued and mistreated. absolutely. but subversive? i think we differ on that. and i’m talking about ‘jazz’ as a word defined by its self-described practicioners. not non-players, non-critics & non-listeners. i’m talking about the people involved in jazz on a daily basis. i just don’t think i’m a part of this club. or if i am, it’s in such a periphereal way that it’s negligible.

Mark: did 2 years in the CI program. great faculty, but the fact that i left that program for my next 2 years at the same institution should tell you something about my feelings regarding that community. and maybe jazz is an ‘umbrella.’ until recently i thought it was a large one, but now i hear it as a fairly small and isolationist umbrella. again, that’s just my subjective opinion, so it and the facts are subject to change, but that’s what i hear now.

Corey and Peter: wish I could say i feel the same exact way as Ellington and Threadgill (goddamn do i wish i could!), but they and i come froms such radically different backgrounds and grew up in such radically different times. their personal definitions of jazz didn’t jibe with their creative outputs, so maybe in that way (i hope) we have some common ground.

Daniel: what indeed? this is what most perplexes/disturbs/worries me. so many potential voices feeling preternaturally silenced. it’s not right.

[btw, didn't realize i was putting in a nod to the Reagan-era definition of porn. honestly, that really wasn't intended.]

just to be clear, i fully recognize that given my education, my appearance and the instruments i play, most of the planet is going to define me as a jazz musician. i have no truck with other folks assessment of me. BUT, i do perceive jazz to be a self-administered community wherever it pops up. and currently where i’m at, some folks might call me a member, but i certainly don’t FEEL like a member.

yes, cultures change, feelings changed. but here and now, looking and listening i around, i do not personally feel an affinity for the jazz community. Artistic community? yes, absolutely. jazz community? not really.

When I fell in love with jazz (as you’ve written, I, too, found a music that made me want to play all the time!), I fell in love with a broad spectrum of music and musicians. As a teenager I discovered Charlie Parker, Albert Ayler, Steve Lacy, Duke Ellington, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, Art Tatum, Warne Marsh, Jelly Roll Morton, Ornette Coleman, et. al., all within the same month. I loved them all (and many others!)I couldn’t tell you exactly what made jazz, jazz, but like you (with your porn analogy) I could sure recognize it when I heard it.

But I grew tired of the lexical war to gain control of the word “jazz”. So I instead started thinking of what I did within a broader context: “New music”, “improvised music”, “creative music”, etc. But I personally came to realize that these labels had their owners, too. The strange irony to me, would be when I would be touring to play my music. I can remember that, in some of the venues I’d play, there would always be an audience member or two (themselves often the local “creative music” authorities) who would pay me or somebody else in my group the backhanded complement of saying we were jazz musicians. This was always said with a certain amount of condescension. I remember being surprised by such responses, because I thought what my group was doing was quite different from what most people would call jazz. I certainly wasn’t trying to sound like a “jazz” musician.

But as the years passed I came to realize that I was indeed a “jazz” musician. Emotionally and lexically, jazz was my mother tongue. And although I had studied and absorbed other musical traditions since discovering jazz (I spent a good deal of time studying Balkan music, as well as contemporary classical music), it didn’t change the fact that jazz was the music that made me want to learn to play in the first place.

So nowadays when people ask what my music is, I say, “jazz”, without blinking an eye. If somebody hears my music and says it isn’t, I’m fine with that. To me, how a person creates context by labeling something in a particular way says much more about the person than the thing. I hear my own music as being part of the “jazz” idiom because my conception of the jazz idiom is broad enough to include it.

Finally, I really enjoy your blog. I just discovered it, and now I have to hear your music! I can’t be certain until I hear it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I called it jazz, even if you don’t. And I mean no offense.

I like (and listen to, and go see) all kinds of music. Most of what I see does not fit the label it goes under in many places, nor the standard programming of where I go to see it.

I find very few other people are that adventurous and that most tend to move in what I’ve come to call “tribes” since I see it so clearly as exactly that. So I go to a more “straight-ahead” “jazz” show and run into one small group of people more or less often and at an “avant” “jazz” show I see another small group of regulars. Every once in a while the “avant-improv” and “avant-jazz” people will turn up at the same thing. None of them go to anything remotely resembling “rock” or “progressive” or “folk” or “singer-songwriter”.

For me (at least) your Requisite 1 above is really all that matters (since I’m not a musician and don’t have to try to survive being one). I find Requisite 1 in a few practitioners of many (or even most) forms (as labeled) of music. Sometimes I think all these people with tunnel vision need to expand their minds a bit. Some of those MMW “jam-band” kids need to get out and see some post-AACM players and try to wrap their minds around what’s going on with that… but they don’t. And the “jazz” clubs won’t touch most of that sort of thing either…

My big concern with what you wrote is the part about Requisite 1 not working for you. I go to quite a few shows where it is very clear the musicians are fully in that zone. I think if that Requisite is taken care of the rest happens. People will find out. Good things will happen. So work for that. Do what you feel. Easy for me to say I suppose, but I mean it.

Thanks for sharing.

I’ve just had a chance to listen to your trio (with Jonathan Goldberger and Mike Pride) from Red Hook Jazz Festival 2011 (thanks to Dime community) and must say that I’m very impressed. Really nice concert with beautiful music! In my humble opinion you can hear Bird inside your tunes… Fantastic!

Thank you very much!