Southern Bells and Pop Music

I have been wanting to blog for a week or so, but like other tasks I have been avoiding blogging at times heightens awareness a bit too much.  I will call it an invasion of privacy.  Abstractly refusing one's mind it's need to function, to operate, to think and solve problems, to fight for one's survival is a bit Southern.  The South after all is genteel.  It is a land dotted with plantation front porches, glasses of freshly squeezed lemonade, and bells.  I don't mean the kind that are found in church towers.  I am talking about Southern women or matriarchs as Chef Vivian Howard calls them.  Disparaging Southern Bells is and was not the intent of this blog entry, although I have a few things to say about the subject.  They do enjoy a passive man, a man who smiles, shag dances, and otherwise blows sunshine up their asses.  If you are connected, grew up with money and influence, you may not need the skills about which I am going to write.  The skills I have learned throughout my life with an undergraduate degree from Chapel Hill (in 1985, which means far more than it does today), a graduate degree from the Gamecocks at USC, and all DMA coursework at Ohio State has both taught and inspired me to excel in the field of music.  I would have done it anyway had I not attended any of these places.  My father was an exceptional musician, and somewhere along the line I decided being the best musician I could was the right thing to do.  It has gotten me very little.  In fact nothing.  Unless you are part of the in crowd as Ramsey Lewis would say, finding a job in academia is political.  UNC didn't teach me this.  Politics is taught within the family unit as children observe their affluent and influential parents' wheel and deal through their lives.  Many of the people I went to school with were stupid.  They did not do well in high school, but amazingly they all seemed to have grown up to be their parents.  They have yuppie jobs, children, and still enjoying shagging, pink and green, and the company of other Southern socialites.  If that is what floats your boat, playing dress up, smiling, pretending to be something, because you don't have the gumption to actually do something with this time, okay.  We differ.  Socializing in Fayetteville, North Carolina purely is politics.  It is a small town with very little room for new blood or money.  I overlook this fact, and it continues to cause me grief because I don't like to soak cork. I mean be Southern.  Be passive.  Smile.  Act the fool to blend in and not challenge the set way of thinking.  If you have that good job, then it would be easy to do that.  That is what the South has been doing for over a century.  If you are looking for work, looking to enjoy your on life without the influence of power and money, it is a different story.  The way I became good at music, although I have reaped almost nothing from my exertions, was to be excited about it.  I was a mover and shaker and took no prisoners.  This worked well until I met a girl name Geraldine.  It continued to work well for three years, until she grew up.  I don't know whether she became unattracted to me or the the opposite, but we separated on a sour note.  The three years of musical excellence we experienced together at my behest came to an abrupt end, when she decided to end my life.  I never really knew it at the time, that one person's opinion can destroy another person's life.  That is politics, and I have experienced it a few times in my life.  Once I had words with Cruise Director Sammy Baker, and she picked up the phone and blacklisted me with the Carnival Corporation.  She told their musical hiring professional not to hire me again.  I quit her gig two weeks shy of my contract completion date, because she did not see, understand, or acknowledge how I had contributed to the Regal Princess.  When life becomes a time when you are working far above and beyond what is reasonable, and someone begins to criticize you for it, it is time to go.  I had to end a seven year relationship with my first love for the same reason.  I learned that such behavior is an inability to make a decision that is difficult.  They could not sever the bond that needed to be severed, so they mistreat you enough until you do it for them.  Criticism in the midst of great effort and love.  It is a conundrum.  Geraldine was a prickly pear, and decided in her adolescent glory to take my success for herself.  Until that point I was allowed to be a successful musician. The parties at large around us were summoned by the wives, and their influence was great.  It is one reason why my band Quintessence won the semi-finals of the Hennessy Cognac Jazz Search.  She and John Glancy's girlfriend accompanied us to New Orleans to compete at Storyville.  When we played these two blond beauties whooped up the place like groupies we never had had, and it worked.  Doc Severinson and the judges liked their tight white pants, and the band, and our music.  We would not have won without the Southern Bells at work.  Needless to say I was not given two extra plane tickets to Los Angeles, and no one paid us any mind at the finals even though a young Chris Potter was fronting the band.  It was politics.  Music is politics.  I listen to WCPE pretty often, and there are times when thoroughly I enjoy the music.  The rest of the time they play music from the Classic Period, and if anyone is interested the Classical Period was during a time of court.  Papa Haydn worked for the Esterhazys.  When you hear this music by nature of its emerged definition, it is polite, symmetrical, and a bit stiff and square.  It sounds like court.  Certainly it doesn't sound like individual freedom.  When they play classical symphonies I feel the same way as I do when confronted with the American South.  Someone else is controlling the party, and it is their party.  Music for my is MY party.  It is one of the things I can do that allows me the freedom and expression to be an individual, rejects society's  norms and stereotypes, and tell the story that I am thinking and feeling.  It is not unlike writing a blog entry, yet it is more visceral. Music if given the opportunity can be pure feeling. Schoenberg and other great composers disagree including Mr. Stravinsky.  They say music has no inherent emotion, and Mr. Babbit would agree wholeheartedly.  If it is embraced and appreciated for its ability to do this, music can be pure feeling.  For me it is.  It always has been, and that is why I excelled at it.  If you tap into expression, emotion, and if it means something, then you are making an artistic statement.  I listened to myself playing lead trumpet in my Governor's School wind ensemble in 1980, and it was transcendent.  The entire group new what we were accomplishing, and we have Terry Mizesko, the bass trombonist with the North Carolina Symphony, to thank for this. He didn't look like Leonard Bernstein in his white tennis shorts, but he understood what we were trying to accomplish.  It was an exemplar education experience, as it should have been being The Governor's School of North Carolina.  I am grateful to have been allowed to have participated.  I almost didn't make the cut.  The original GSNC in Winston Salem was an orchestra.  When they expanded to St. Andrew's College there weren't enough string players to go around, so they made a wind ensemble.  Because wind ensembles have no strings, they use trumpets and cornets.  This is a lost art, and I am not sure any traditional musical concepts are being taught today in education.  Our musical educational system has sold out just like Apple.  They teach pop to kids and parents who demand the shag.  One interesting thing is the South helped create great music in America. The "Jazz Highway" is an interesting map that shows the history of jazz just in the Carolinas.  It includes Cheraw, SC, Hamlet, NC, and Rocky Mount.  A diagonal line connects the birthplaces of Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk.  (There is one other person on the journey, but I can't remember them.  Oh, it's me!)  At least my birthplace of Mocksville, NC is in proximity.  I quit aspiring to be a great jazz pianist years ago.  Interestingly when you quit trying to be great at something, it gets easier.  Truly if you have an interest, you will continue to pursue your interest out of desperation.  We must do something.  I am not sure if picking what you love so you will never work a day in your life applies, but music feels a bit like that to me, until now.  I am not liking music at the moment, because of what has happened to music in America.  Surely it is because of Simon Cowell and the Norwegian television producer who came to America and destroyed professional music.  As television continues to do they would rather exploit  the common man, pay them nothing, build them up, and then revel in their subsequent failure.  This is the definition of pop.  Pop does not even seek to find the suitable expression.  If it did, it would require talent, musical knowledge, skill, and technique.  Most of all it would require an intellectual and spiritual understanding for which no one has the time.  Pop in a nutshell took the easiest rhythmic concept, the one that is the most simplistic and requires the least amount of feeling or time, and exploited it.  I used to really dislike Motown.  I disliked them, because Barry Gordy exploited soul music.  Soul music has the feeling and spirituality of which I am talking, and it was embodied at STAX records.  Motown instead used the pop groove as the vehicle for their music, because like shag music seemed to communicate with the masses.  It is simplistic.  It is what we have today, silhouettes of guitar players strumming those infernal machines with no understanding that other rhythms are possible.  That visual representation of pop, that up and down strumming of the guitar, is so limiting.  It is limiting, because by definition it cannot create an emotion.  If you strummed a string of eight notes in perfect time and generated an emotion within your body, it would be possible to convey feeling.  That string of notes, that strum on the guitar that has become the metaphor for pop music, does not possess the ability to move listeners.  It is a beginner's roller skate, which functions at an elementary level and allows aspiring pop musicians to create a facade of greatness.  At least when you listen to classical music, reggae, or jazz in the pure forms they use instrumental music to convey feeling.  It is accomplished with the things you learn in a good music education.  Phrasing, dynamics, taste, rhythm, and the rest.  You cannot substitute desire for the elements that create great music.  Hence we have mediocre pop music, and if it continues surely it will disappear.  Unlike Wynton Marsalis I will not buy a ticket on the pop train.  I will not buy a ticket, because after almost two years of study and exploration of the pop idiom, I have no desire to change my learned piano technique.  I now know how Stevie plays, how Elton plays, and how Leon Russell plays.  Even one musician I admire, David Foster, is exploiting the pop rhythm.  America seems to know nothing else these days.  It was extremely fitting that Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature.  At least he was doing the right thing.