Reading Ethan Iverson's long, detailed interview (does he do any other kind?) with saxophonist-composer-arranger-author Bill Kirchner got me thinking about the valuable things I got out of the arranging class I took with Kirchner, which in turn got me thinking about all the myriad lessons I've learned from many teachers/players/friends over the years, and BOOM! A new blog feature idea was born.

So I hereby inaugurate a new semi-regular gig in which I'll talk about some lessons I've learned from a variety of people—some of whom I studied with directly, some I shared the bandstand with, some I hassled for a few minutes in a club, and probably even some who died before I was born. Partly I want to do this to pay tribute to these people and give credit where it's due, but also I think it'll be a good way of thinking about my own development, how I got here (wherever "here" is), and maybe reminding myself of advice I may have forgotten, and which might be worth a second look.

So I'll go with Bill first since he indirectly gave me the idea.

Lesson #1: There Is Some Very Happening Music Out There You Don't Know About

It is shocking to me to realize, but there was a time I didn't know who Jimmy Giuffre was. He was just one of the musicians and writers whose records later became touchstones in my development which I was introduced to in Bill's class. I heard Jimmy Giuffre, Denny Zeitlin, Johnny Mandel (Bill played us a version of "The Song is You" which felt like the musical equivalent of falling in love with a beautiful woman who then punches you in the brain), Bill Holman, Bill Russo, Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto, and many others for the first time, and I remember he really got us beyond "Wow, man" and into thinking about how they did what they did.

Lesson #2: You Write for the Band You Have

I believe the instrumentation of the students in one of my classes with Bill was something like trumpet, tenor, guitar, drums, and vocals—and we wrote for that group. Really challenging, but it resulted in some very unusual sonorities, and got me thinking about counterpoint in a way I might not have if we had a more conventional rhythm section. I'm not sure we pulled those charts off, exactly, but it was a worthwhile challenge and helped break us out of the idea that you needed x, y, and z to have a band. (He might dig The Holly Martins.) I’ve used this same approach when working with composition/arranging classes several times since then, and it always generates some really unexpected and interesting results.

Writing for the band you have also means writing to a particular player's strengths—as Bill said while looking over my would-be-magnum opus big band chart (see below): "Don't give Rich Perry a clarinet solo!"

Lesson #3: You Have to Put the Notes on the Paper

The final assignment in the second semester of Bill's class was a big band chart based on an original tune, to be read by a pickup band of outstanding readers and jazz players. I had written a (decidedly lightweight) big band chart for my previous year's class (with Mike Mossman), so I knew it was possible, even if it resulted in sleepless nights, cramped hands, and a few embarrassing copying errors—I didn't own a computer at the time (believe it or not, there actually was a time like this!) so Finale & Sibelius weren't an option. (I don't miss those days at all.)

My first-semester septet project had been well-received, and several teachers had said they were looking forward to hearing what I came up with next. I was full of big ideas based on all the heavy theory classes I'd been taking, and fell victim to the "Next Big Thing" trap—this chart was going to upend the paradigm, reinvent what a big band was capable of, etc. It was going to be a passacaglia, based on a theme from a Purcell opera, and incorporate just about every badass technique I could imagine (short of resembling a conventional big band chart in any way). There probably were some interesting ideas in there—I put hours and hours into sketching and planning, getting 8 bars together here, 4 bars there—but somehow the closer the deadline got, the further from completion the chart looked. Bill became increasingly less convinced each time I showed him what I had, until 48 hours before the charts were due to be read, I realized there was no way in hell I would finish along the "plan" I had and undertook a drastic simplification, which I finished the score for about a half hour before the reading session began—with no time to copy the parts. Failure.

Bill was understandably bummed, and I felt like I'd crashed and burned in the one area I was getting some attention for—but he told me the most important lesson in composing (which I think he said he heard from someone else, maybe Bob Brookmeyer?)—it doesn't matter how big your ideas and plans are, you have to put the notes on the paper.

It took a while for the message to sink in, but eventually I got his point—the problem wasn't that I was lazy or untalented, I had just set my expectations too high ("Cmaj7—how dated is that?!"), so nothing I came up with was good enough to keep working on. You have to put the notes on the paper, not because they'll be perfect, but because once they're there you have something to work with. Or as Adam Benjamin wisely said (somewhere, I can't find it at the moment but I'm pretty sure I'm remembering it correctly because it made a big impression on me at the time), "don't try to write the next big thing, just write a thing, and then write another thing..."

Thanks to that lesson, any period of writing (music) for me always starts with trying to get a bunch of notes on the paper as early in the process as possible, since I know I can come back and decide what has potential later on. Unless you're Beethoven, it's much harder to edit and develop music in your head.

Thanks Bill! I.O.U. a passacaglia sometime! (Update, 2016: Here it is!)

Stuff like this can really help.

Once again, the Jazz/BAM internet is abuzz--abuzz, I tell you!--with opinions on how the music can grow its audience and remain a culturally relevant art form in the 21st Century. Well, I'm happy to say they're all wrong! Musicians and fans, just follow these few simple steps, and before you know it, Jazz will be partying like it's 1959!

• Provide iPods at every gig so audience members can listen to their own choice of music during the show

• Bring contemporary audiences in by covering tunes by hot new pop bands like like N'SYNC, The BeeGees, and Scott Joplin

• Have the band begin the set naked, and offer to put on one piece of clothing each time someone claps

• Three words: ZOMBIE LOUIS ARMSTRONG

• Play more standards

• Take advantage of social media platforms by limiting your solos to 140 notes or less

• Build a "Jazzyland" theme park in Orlando, featuring thrilling attractions like Sun Ra's ArKoaster, the GraviTrane, the Tilt-A-Wayne, Jazz Argument! (with Animatronic WyntonBot), Keith Jarrett's FLIP-OUT! and the Bitches Brew Album Cover House of Horrors, plus exclusive shopping at The Ahmad JaMall and a hot dog stand run by Anthony Braxton

• Reinvigorate jazz by incorporating elements of rock, hiphop, Salsa, polka, Bluegrass, Tango, Death Metal, Tibetan throat-singing, New Wave, Death Bluegrass, Drum and Bass, Drum and Bass and Mariachi, Thrash Electro-Industrial Housegrass, anything with tubas, the "Dukes of Hazzard" Theme, jazz, and Paul Anka

• Get every jazz group in the world to play nothing but "Misty" for the next year, over and over, just to cure people of wanting to hear that $@#*%! song (Next year: "When the Saints")

• Accrue thousands of dollars in debt getting a degree in jazz from an accredited educational institution--once people learn how qualified you are, they'll have no choice but to buy your CDs!

• Book non-jazz acts to headline every major jazz festival in the U.S. for several years, until audiences forget what jazz is--just kidding, that would never happen!

• Play fewer standards

• Make the music more palatable to a wide audience by avoiding unpopular elements like improvisation, swing, acoustic instruments, "blue notes," syncopation, harmony, melody, and rhythm

• Three words: PRESIDENT NICHOLAS PAYTON

• Save yourself the time and effort of practicing by just running "Kind of Blue" through the house speakers while your band pretends to play

• Start an island colony to raise a new jazz audience from childhood in isolation, exposing them solely to the highest quality of musical influences; watch them grow into passionate and knowledgeable listeners, only to see it all go to hell when a crate of Justin Bieber CDs washes up on shore

• Stop playing all that noodly stuff--people hate that.

Last year I inaugurated a feature where I talk about music which, while not necessarily hot off the presses, is still New to Me--since it's been a while since the last installment, here are a few albums which have recently been turning my crank:Geri Allen — The Nurturer (1990) & Maroons (1992): I once got to go hear Geri Allen at the Village Vanguard after a friend who worked at an artist's credit union discovered money for her which she'd forgotten about, and going to her show seemed like the best way to get in touch. She was off my radar for a while before a friend loaned me an album last year, which led to me digging up more. These two are  both fine early 90s efforts, with really interesting tunes and her own deeply personal blowing--and of special interest to trumpeters, great contributions from sidefolks like Wallace Roney and underappreciated legend Marcus Belgrave. ("Number Four," an Allen/Belgrave duet on Maroons, is worth the price of admission itself.)Derek Adlam — Masterpieces for Clavichord by Bach (2005); Christophe Rousset — Bach: Italian Concerto; Partita in B minor etc. (1992): Since stumbling on to Johnny Reinhard's "Microtonal Bach" show during WKCR's annual Bach Festival while I was in college, I've been hooked on recordings of my favorite composer made on instruments in historical, non-equal-tempered tunings--even though I love Bach on piano, once you've heard how colorful and interesting baroque modulations can be in nonequal tuning, hearing the same pieces on an equal-tempered instrument can be like going from technicolor to black & white. Rousset's rousing album features a strident harpsichord in the Werckmeister III tuning, and outstanding versions of several Bach staples, including one of my all-time favorites, the Chromatic Fantasia & Fugue in D minor (check it out here). Adlam's disc features the much more subtle clavichord (made for quiet performances in small rooms) in a tuning called "Young 2," and a program of lesser-known (to me) pieces. (Couldn't find a video but here's Adlam playing some William Byrd in nonequal tuning.) If you want to get a great intro to historical tuning and the kind of color effects I'm talking about, check out this page featuring the same baroque piece played in Meantone, Werckmeister and equal (modern) tunings. Herbie Hancock/Wayne Shorter — 1+1 (1997): It's embarrassing, but I never got around to checking out this album until recently, when a friend put on the sublime "Meridianne/A Wood Sylph" at a listening party. (We had a great time imagining the Verve execs' reaction in the studio--"Uh, are you sure you guys don't feel like throwing in a version of 'All Blues' or something?") With these giants, you know it would've been incredible even if they'd phoned it in, which they unquestionably did not. An outstanding reminder of the towering peaks still remaining to be ascended in this music. On the off chance that I'm not the last person in the world to recommend this record, I strongly suggest you pick it up.

The always-interesting Ronan Guilfoye has a great anti-pop music screed up today over at his site, Mostly Music. The gist:

This music... this sticky treacly manufactured international pop goo, whose sticky effusions have polluted the entire planet, springs from no culture other than money. It represents only the international corporate business behemoth that has taken the name ‘music’ into its title, despite having no interest in the concept of what music really is. It is unprecedented in human musical history – a music without any culture. A music without any message. And ultimately a music without any true humanity.

Tell us what you really think, Ronan!Seriously, though--although I have a great fondness for this kind of crotchetiness, and I don't like most of the music he's talking about either, I have three objections to this critique:

• This stuff is immensely popular and important to millions of (mostly) young people and serves as the anthems of their generation the same way that the popular music of your generation or mine did for us. YES, it's shoved down their throats by multimedia conglomerates, but the fact is that people have access to a whole world of music, and a great plurality if not majority of them are choosing to listen to this, because it resonates with them. To deny the music's humanity is to deny theirs, I think. And I would say there are millions of fully human, vibrant, intelligent young people in the world who nonetheless have crappy taste in music. (If you disagree, read this guy's blog for a while. He writes incredibly intelligently about what does not, to my untrained ears, seem to be especially intelligent music. But that makes me think twice about writing it off!)
• I'm pretty sure the major purveyors of music, art, and literature throughout history have pretty much never cared about quality as much as they have about capital (at least since the end of the patronage system). Singling out today's pablum for special condemnation smacks of end-times-ism.
• In spite of the incredibly annoying production values of most of today's top 40, there are still plenty of catchy tunes out there being written by actual human beings. It makes me angry sometimes, since they're so annoying, but I defy you to not get something like this stuck in your head. (And it even has a repeating modulation! Suck it, Jerome Kern!)

All that said, I really do think Auto-tune is going to ruin peoples' ears for real singing, and I do think the globalization of pop is going to continue to weaken a lot of regional music (as globalization has in every other aspect of culture, as inexorable as that is).Thinking about all this did make me think of my dad, however, who likes to respond to any overheard pop, hiphop, etc. by saying, "they've finally come up with music for people who don't like music." This from a guy who listens to Schoenberg!

Ted Panken (who I used to listen to on WKCR all the time) has a great new blog, which has already featured some gems–among them, this classic interview with Kenny G, in which Mr. G advances the curious claim that Charlie Parker was nicknamed "Bird" because his reed squeaked. The jazz Twitterverse jumped on this with a vengeance, and has since been abuzz with hundreds of other surprising #kennygjazzfacts. Arcane jazz-nerdery meets humorous lists? I'm there!

My contributions (so far) to the fact-fiesta:

• They called Louis Armstrong "Pops" because he founded the Boston Pops, and ate Corn Pops, and had so many children.

• They called the album "Kind of Blue" because Miles was suffering from hypothermia.

• "Birdland" was actually named after the movie "The Birds" and Harold Land.

• They call it the saxophone because the first one was actually made out of a phone.

• "Take The A Train" was supposed to be either "Take The Train" or "Take A Train," not both!

• Few people know that "Songbird" was actually a reharmonization of "Ascension."

• Who knew that jazz would grow from its beginnings in David Lee Roth's "Just a Gigolo" to become a worldwide phenomenon?

• No family has done more for jazz than the Jones brothers--Elvin, Thad, Hank, Tom, James Earl, and Barnaby.

• Coltrane called his tune "Giant Steps" in honor of Wilt Chamberlain's feet.

• Chick Webb was an inspiration to every chick with with webbed feet who dreamed of playing jazz.

• Few people know that Herbie Hancock got his nickname because he Goes Bananas.

• Jazz evolved in the late 1800s when rustic field hollers began to incorporate synth bass, DX-7s, and QuadraVerb.

• WC Handy was such a big sports fan that he named his most famous composition after his favorite hockey team.

• The word "jazz" was a common American slang term meaning "as exciting as basketball in Utah.”

• I used to think Charlie Parker was great, until I found out he was just reading all those solos out of the Omnibook.

• Jelly Roll Morton changed his name because "Croissant Morton" sounded too fancy.

• Coltrane took such long solos because he had lockjaw, which is how he got the nickname Eddie "Lockjaw" Coltrane.

• King Oliver's nickname came from his favorite movie, "Oliver!"

• Joe Henderson wrote "Inner Urge" after waiting in an especially long line for the mens' room.

• Everyone knows Kenny G invented jazz, but few remember Wynton Marsalis invented classical music.

More of my questionable attempts at internet humor can be found here.

UPDATE: Some of my favorites from other folks:

• Is that the "Jazz Masters Cemetery" up ahead? Good–pull over. I gotta pee. (@AtmosTrio)

• Tina Brooks is a huge influence on me, both as a saxophone player and as someone who constantly gets mistaken for a woman. (@keithflentge)

• Trumpeter Booker Little was not only a librarian but a dwarf as well. His real name remains a mystery. (@peterhum)

And I'm grateful to WBGO for giving a shout out to this list! (I'd be even more grateful if they'd give my CD a spin.)

**No really, why have I had more luck getting attention on the web by being funny than by playing jazz? Is the universe trying to tell me something?

Last winter, in lieu of a "Best of" year-end list, I wrote a "New to Me" Top 10--the idea being that these days we're all introduced to music through a wide variety of sources including radio, blogs, YouTube, live shows, word of mouth, dudes shouting on street corners, etc., and albums which jump up on my radar these days are less likely to be "new releases" as such. "New to Me" means exactly that--an album may have been around for years or decades, but I'm sharing it because it's new to me. I also promised to make this a regular series, which I've been less than diligent about. Until now!Here are a few artists and albums which have lately been getting a lot of play around my house, car, ears, subconscious. (Two of them are even literally new!)Ambrose Akinmusire - "When the Heart Emerges Glistening" (2011), "Prelude (to Cora)" (2008): Ambrose grew up around here and has been known to frequent the same jam sessions I go to when he's in town, so it's just bad luck I haven't heard him live yet--but his recent media firestorm is well-deserved. I'd been looking forward to checking out "When the Heart" since his Blue Note deal was announced, and was even more interested after reading some interviews. A few things he said actually blew my mind a little--for example: "I can sound like the most articulate trumpet player... But at the other side, I want to be able to sound like a beginning trumpet player. I want to be able to sound like I can't play. I'm thinking of that spectrum." For a jazz musician, this is kind of a shocking statement--it shouldn't be, since that whole unpolished, raw quality has been part of the music since its earliest days--but I think players devote so much (necessary) time and energy to becoming masters of technique (playing the "right notes," having a clean sound and execution, etc.) that they don't often give themselves permission to be messy and raw (and play some clams if necessary). I recently wrote that I really enjoyed David Smith's playing due to the unapologetic "trumpety-ness" of it, and Ambrose really takes this ball and runs with it. Obviously he's not the first player to combine that fondness for the messier side of the horn with solid chops (I think Dizzy, Don Cherry, Lester Bowie, Dave Douglas, and early Wynton are probably all in his artistic genealogy somewhere--he might like my hero Shake Keane too), but the adventurous unpredictability of his ideas is what really makes it stand out for me. I really enjoyed "Heart," which is pretty evenly happening (although the production sometimes gets a little weird, like when overenthusiastic use of panning gives the impression Ambrose is flying around the studio on a wire)--so I also checked out "Cora," which I think I might like even better, since it comes across as having even less studio-polish (despite a fair amount of synths) and the fearless blowing comes to the fore.Clare Fischer - "First Time Out" (1962), "Surging Ahead" (1963): Fischer first cropped up on my radar in college, when my arranging teacher Mike Mossman touted his big band charts. But I never really checked out his piano playing until recently, when I found a $5 LP of "First Time Out" after doing a gig at Bird & Beckett's and was inspired to dig deeper. So I managed to track down a used copy of "Mosaic Select: The Pacific Jazz Trios," which includes the complete tracks from "First Time," "Surging," and some unreleased odds and ends from Fischer's early 60s trio featuring the young Gary Peacock, plus other great material from West Coast pianists Russ Freeman, Richard Twardzick, and Jimmy Rowles. Fischer comes across on these albums as a really interesting improviser, tons of chops (his octave lines alone should win over the bopheads), melodicism, with an arranger's ear for harmony and plenty of daring. Highlights include "Free Too Long," a brisk free-blowing tune (over steady time) which is an interesting comparison to Peacock's (slightly) later work with Paul Bley, or Keith Jarrett's early trio albums; a burning version of "Lennie's Pennies" (Fischer was obviously working his way through Tristano's language and finds interesting, personal things to extrapolate from it); plus straightahead smokers like "Without a Song" and intricate originals like "Strayhorn," heard below:Fischer is still very active and I look forward to checking out more of his work from the past 40 years; I also came across a great podcast which includes plenty of his early playing and arranging work--check it out here: Extension: Clare Fischer in the 1960s.Avishai Cohen - "Introducing Triveni" (2010): Another strong record from a young(ish) trumpeter. Cohen has lately been playing with the SFJAZZ Collective--don't be confused by the name, the group's only connection to San Francisco is the address on their W-2s--but I hadn't really checked him out before I picked up this disc in Vancouver. (Canadian CD stores are a lot better for jazz than American stores.) (But not even close to Japanese stores.) My first band out of college was a trumpet/bass/drums trio, so I can appreciate how challenging it can be for the chops, but I remember it also encouraged interesting, less chord-dependent writing, and that's certainly the case here. The band is swinging, loose, and sound like they're really enjoying themselves. Cohen's playing is impressive and imaginative throughout (and like Akinmusire, full of raspiness, vocalizations and other effects). Highlights for me were a great version of Don Cherry's "Art Deco" and an absolutely killing live track called "October 25th." With Cohen and Akinmusire, plus other folks like Kirk Knuffke, Jason Palmer and David Smith (not to mention the badasses here in the Bay Area!), it's become clear to me that there are entirely too many happening young trumpeters out there. May be time to switch to the mellophone or something. (Nope, too late.)Well that does it for this installment of "New to Me"--those are three artists which have been floating my boat lately, and maybe they'll float yours, too. On a final cheesy note, why not take a second and Like my Facebook page? It's quick, painless, and I swear I will never fall for any of those click-through viruses which flood your wall with posts about working from home. (I mean never fall for any of them AGAIN.)