The first period of a jazz musician’s development is full of input. There is listening, listening and more listening. The young musician might transcribe solos, learn standards, or study a particular set of exercises or system of scales. He or she might study the way a great singer or instrumentalist interprets a standard. Exposure to others is key at this point – old dead masters, living peers, what have you. As the young player immerses himself in a variety of output from other players, he finds that he responds favorably to some music, and negatively to other music. In this way, he develops his own sense of taste, and that taste, which will become increasingly more sharply defined as he grows older, will determine his own style. This process of collecting and discarding can take place throughout a musician’s lifetime, but is more important in the earlier period, because when a musician is exposed to something for the first time, the shock of discovery is more profoundly felt than it is with subsequent discoveries of music in the same genre. The strength of the positive emotional impression will increase the chances that a musician does not discard what he is exposed to, or to put it more simply: He will retain only the music that he loves unconditionally. The first step in developing your own style as a jazz musician is to fall in love with an existing style, to be an absolute fan, with all of the fan-aticism that word implies: to embrace that style fully and unquestioningly, with no constraint, with no reservations. Criticism of that style will come later if it must. But in this first period, the critical faculty is less important and potentially damaging. The young player must initially view his master with no irony; there must be no distance between him and what inspires him. In The Anxiety of Influence, referring to a great poet who is absorbing the influence of a predecessor, Harold Bloom writes, “The strong misreading comes first; there must be a profound act of reading that is a kind of falling in love with a literary work.” Bloom’s singular insight was that great poets ironically misread their predecessors, as their predecessors did before them, and as any strong poet will do with their work after they are gone. By “misreading” Bloom does not mean that they make a mistake. On the contrary, this misreading is a precondition to creativity. He summarizes: “Poetic Influence – when it involves two strong, authentic poets, - always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation.” Bloom’s thesis is a great aid when considering the duality of influence and originality in any creative pursuit. This duality is felt strongly in jazz. On the one hand, jazz is seen as a music that thrives on the spirit of originality, manifested in the act of improvisation: I can improvise whatever I want whenever I want; there is no rulebook. On the other hand, the drama of jazz, particularly in recent years, is found in its narrative of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters: Authenticity is cherished, and authenticity is directly determined by how well a player has absorbed the “lessons” of his or her predecessors. Authenticity and originality are both weak tropes because, on their own, they can only account for weak players. True originality, and thus true creativity, never takes place in a historical vacuum; it is always rooted to something that has gone before. I remember observing the phenomenon of rootless “creativity” in my high school jazz band growing up. There were those of us who were listening to jazz and would go on to try to be musicians. Our fledgling attempts at soloing reflected whatever we had absorbed at that point – a little Bird, McCoy Tyner, Michael Brecker, what have you. Then there were kids in the band who were not going to pursue jazz for their life, had only a passing interest in playing music, and had hardly listened to jazz at all. They would also get a solo feature now and then. What did they play? It was sort of like playing scales up and down the horn. What was striking was that they all sounded the same: One would think that with all the freedom that an improvised context could have, they might all play something different. But collectively, the kids who weren’t really listening to jazz actually encompassed a style of sorts, and that style was dictated by their limitation. The limitation was due to the fact that they hadn’t absorbed anything; they hadn’t begun to even mimic like we were. There is a rule here, to gloss on Tolstoy: Rootless players are all alike, but every rooted player is rooted in his or her own way. Yes, there are tons of rooted players who are not original, but as a listener, give me the unoriginal player who has listened to a lot of great music and absorbed it any day to the player who hasn’t absorbed much of anything. This brings us back to the importance of input again: Without input, we have no model for our own style; without learning a language, we have no model to create our own. There is indeed an international style of rootless jazz playing. In the name of creativity, it expresses banality. In its lazy quest for the original, it finds only unoriginality. The champions of authenticity can take some poetic justice from that phenomenon. All their hard work, all their striving to do justice and pay homage to their forefathers, places them above the lazy, rootless denizens who never engage deeply in the music, who treat jazz like a subsidized vacation and not as a serious discipline. Through their loyal devotion to their influences, the authenticity-seekers have mastered a language; the rootless players merely babble with each other like babies on the bandstand. To be sure, there is justice for someone who devotes himself to the past in jazz: He has the comfort of his craft and the reassurance of deep knowledge. Still, knowledge alone makes him only a craftsman and not a creator. Brad Mehldau
Posted on: Wed, 02 Oct 2013 04:07:03 +0000
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