Dr. Rat

Jim- I think, as seems to be usual when we disagree, we don't actually disagree very much. Anyhow, I tracked down some of the ideas I had careening around my head over the weekend and it turns out that the argument that we're having was a big thing in Germany in the late 1850s. (These issues are eternal!). The disputants in the 1850s debate were much more polarized than we are, but I think I am trying to stake out a revised Hanslick/formalist position, while you seem to be taking a more Wagnerian position. Anyhow here's a little summary of angry German musicians, circa 1857: Nietzsche figures in all of this through his first (very much Wagner-influenced) book The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. I was surprised how much you (Jim Sangrey) sound like this Nietzsche sometimes with all your talk of life force, etc. A conscious influence? --eric

I'm thinking that there must be another way of conceptualizing this that gives better place to technique (and the art object itself) that "means." I'm a bit taken up with trying to buy a damned house right now, so I don't have the time to spell this all out. Anyone? Some kind of "formalism light?" Anyhow, I'll continue to ponder, --eric

I've found some web sites on the band, like this one and a :collection at CDUNiverse. Does this have the soprano sax on it? --eric

I don't think it's about representation in art. The above is the author's work, and while it's far from radical, it's definitely modern and non-representational. Part of the point she's making is that art schools are failing to teach young artists basic technique. (Which as I point out is something that jazz and jazz education has largely avoided, to its credit.) The other part of her point, I think, is that the reason technique is not being taught is that the artist has something--a critical standpoint on society, some sort of intellectual/moral/spitiual superiority--that is the real point of art. Technique is merely the means of conveying that "artist-ness" to the audience. In the visual arts, this line of thinking has become so dominant that technique is being neglected--the means is seen as so much less important that the intellectual/critical/spiritual content, that it really doesn't matter a whole lot. So she sees a general drift away from caring about the thingee-ness of the art object, to a deep concern with "being an artist" and "being with the artist" or "knowing the artist." Anyhow, that's my take --eric

How do you fit in all that vibrato? --eric

What's Wade's status? Is he out/seriously disabled for game 6? --eric

Me, too . . . so I tried to log in from a Sudanese proxy, but still no go. --eric

So says the man with 14,000 posts! --eric ← Not yet! ← Well, God willing. And we all got our bad rhetorical and reading habits. Here's a question for you: Say you've got a piece of music you love and have always imagined as a discrete event. You find out it was essentially put together in the studio from several different sessions--that the master looks like a tape collage, etc. etc. I say, so what? You're supposed to appreciate the product here, not the process. It's kind of like the curators who suddenly find faults in vaunted masterpieces when the scientists tell them they are forgeries. --eric

So says the man with 14,000 posts! --eric

Or so it seems to me. What you're talking about is valid in and of itself, I suppose, but it has absolutely nothing to do with what Chuck was talking about. ← Meaning that craft becomes the medium through which this other, more strictly aesthetic, more ontological experience is conveyed, NOT that it doesn't matter at all. And if you think that's a never-stated aesthetic, given time I can provide you with plenty of pretty unambiguous statements. And if what Chuck is writing is not about celebrating the value of the spontaneous in jazz, as the absolute essence of jazz, then you'll have to spell out what it is he does mean. What I am saying is that this is an unbalanced view that, historically, comes straight out of 1960s neo-romanticism, which I'd say is past its sell-by date. Becuase today is today and yesterday ain't coming back. That may be a know-nothing point of view or one that has started to rankle as nostalgia sets in, but there it is. --eric

But is this international music or Indian music? The cd is very good, whatever it is. --eric

"never-stated-or-implied "esthetic" that supposedly values spontanaiety over craft to the extent that craft no longer matters." Where did I, or anyone, say this? --eric

When would you rather it be? --eric ← When would I rather what be? Things are as they are. ← Sorry to be cryptic (had written crypric!). What I mean is: if how things are today is unsatisfactory, what's your baseline for comparison, when was it different/better. --eric

When would you rather it be? --eric

This to me is like a tableau of "What's wrong with jazz today." Somebody (e.g. WM) comes up with their exacting definition of jazz, and the working musician/concert attendee/record buyer says, "Fine, what I am doing/enjoying isn't jazz." Left unstated is "who the hell wants to be seen as playing or listening to jazz anyway?" [NOT putting words into Joe G.'s mouth, I am sure if he wanted to add this, he would have.] What's wrong with jazz today is its defenders. --eric

I referenced this article in another thread about jazz recording practice, and I'd like to clarify that jazz has generally NOT allowed the drift away from technical skill that is described here in the visual arts, but I think it gets to some of the same points I made elsewhere about the rising importance of "being an artist" over and above "making good art," which I think is strongly tied to the overvaluation of spontaneity as an element of art. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i39/39b00601.htm From the issue dated June 3, 2005 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mess By LAURIE FENDRICH For centuries, aspiring artists got their starts by observing and practicing what professional artists did inside their workshops. After mastering enough skills, they would then head off on their own. Modern art, starting in the middle of the 19th century, changed all that by calling into question what constitutes a work of art. Art began manifesting two things in tandem -- radicality for its own sake and self-expression. Aspiring artists no longer needed to go to workshops or studios to become artists because being avant-garde and self-expressive did not depend on learning crafts, techniques, or studio methods. For 100 years, from the mid-19th century up to World War II, artists flocked to Paris in droves, absorbing the spirit of the avant-garde in bars, cabarets, theaters, and salons, and developing their styles either as loners in their ateliers or as members of various bohemian groups convening over absinthe. But after World War II, when the center of the modern-art world shifted to New York, the education of artists began to take place more and more in colleges and universities. In the United States, part of that was due to an influx of government money, much of it disseminated through the GI Bill. Many artists who were perceived as avant-garde, and who therefore couldn't support themselves through their work, found that they could support themselves by teaching in academe. Ambitious young art students gravitated toward college art departments where these avant-garde artists were teaching, if only to hang around other artists and pick up their bohemian attitudes. Although plenty of solid teaching and learning has gone on in art schools and in colleges and universities, by the 1990s, as Howard Singerman argues in Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (1999), art education no longer demanded the acquisition of specific skills, but instead became simply a shortcut to an artistic identity. Now, however, a tug of war is going on over what exactly constitutes an artistic identity. The result is that art education (by which I mean the education of artists for the professional contemporary art world, as opposed to the education of high-school art teachers, which is an entirely separate matter) has become a hodgepodge of attitudes, self-expression, news bulletins from hot galleries, and an almost random selection of technical skills that cannot help but leave most art students confused about their ultimate purpose as artists. This mishmash approach has been going on for so long that it amounts to an orthodoxy. It dominates the education of artists both in colleges like my own and in such art schools as the Otis College of Art and Design, in Los Angeles, and the Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn. In this aleatory orthodoxy, it falls to first- and second-year "foundation" courses to provide any meaningful link to art of the past. Those courses -- "Basic Design," "Beginning Drawing," and so on -- teach line, tone, shape, form, proportion, color, and some fundamental "hand skills." On the opposite side are what are sometimes referred to as "post-studio" programs, which are growing increasingly popular. They, too, offer "foundation" courses, but instead of studying techniques and studio skills, the would-be artists, often fresh from high school, study ideas and concepts -- the putative social, cultural, and theoretical issues having to do with art. This kind of program is the visual-arts equivalent of the liberal arts' "critical thinking." Its premise is that only by shaking off the dust of the past can students become either viable commercial artists or successful gallery artists in the 21st century; it directly transfers what's trendy in the galleries or advertising agencies onto the plates of undergraduates. Its overriding assumption is that although 21st-century art may contain some keystroking and button-pushing references to old-fashioned, handcrafted beauty, most of it will be otherwise engaged. The seeping of more and more theory as well as "critical thinking" and new technology into traditional studio-art courses makes sense if art is seen as the product of a conceptual education rather than the result of the acquisition of creaky 19th-century skills that are attached to now-defunct ideas about beauty. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, for example -- where I did my graduate work in painting in the late 1970s, when video art had just been added to the M.F.A. program -- the revised first-year program instituted last year requires all incoming undergraduates to purchase a laptop computer. Students are even given special lockers for their computers that, in effect, pre-empt space that otherwise would be designated for such messy art supplies as paint or charcoal. What happens at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago matters: It is one of the nation's oldest and largest art schools and is therefore seen as a leader in art education. One of the two required first-semester courses in the new SAIC program is "Core Studio Practice," whose catalog description begins: "Core Studio Practice is an interdisciplinary investigation of technical practice and conceptual and critical skills common to various areas of creative production." The description of the other required first-semester course, "Research Studio I," begins this way: "Research Studio I offers students an opportunity to explore creative research strategies used by artists and designers." The words describing those courses jolt old-school art professors like me who are oriented more toward drawing and painting than theory. Keep in mind that as late as the 1990s, Art Institute first-year students were required to take 12 hours of drawing. Because much of the de facto curriculum at the Art Institute is determined by what individual instructors decide to teach under the loose rubric of course descriptions, there is no way of knowing for sure exactly how much development of studio skills goes on. But by using such terms as "creative production" instead of "creativity" and "critical skills" instead of "skills," and in citing drawing as just one among several "notational systems," the catalog descriptions make the practice of skills appear to be a very low priority. The first-year curriculum seems to promote a Web-oriented workplace full of computers, where students work antiseptically and collaboratively with others, behave like wannabe public intellectuals, and develop "concepts" that borrow heavily from the vocabularies of sociology, computer science, and government bureaucracy. Within this matrix, artists develop "research methods" for their "studio practice." Whatever odd tool is deemed necessary for their "practice" (formerly known as "work of art") -- whether it is colored plastic bags, city-sewage-system diagrams, LCD displays, Webcams, or, however unlikely, a piece of drawing charcoal -- is picked up and used without benefit of prerequisite courses that teach specific skills with a specific tool. Instead of students individually observing art and life, steadily focusing within an art discipline, and working toward developing a signature style marked by self-expression, the "studio practice" has its practitioner busily collecting data, working in groups, constructing theoretical systems, and participating in interdisciplinary projects. "Studio practice" and "creative production" are conveniently nebulous terms -- it is unclear, in fact, if they even need to culminate in a work of art. As uncomfortable as I am with this sort of curriculum and "practice" of art making, I recognize how attractive it probably is to 18-year-olds who have grown up with the ubiquitousness of computers and an industrial-strength popular culture. By patting their most facile drawing protégés reassuringly on the back, art professors cannot really protect the foundation-skills courses that they profess to love. There are, after all, some aspects of the new programs that will prove useful to the next generation of artists, who will grapple with an even more digitized world than our present one. Besides, in a short time many of the same fine-arts students nurtured in the foundation courses offering traditional art skills will invariably turn around and metaphorically slay their old teachers by making their professional debuts not with tenderly painted easel paintings but with sexy video installations or cool interactive Web sites. On the other hand, educators who love traditional art but who, out of fear of being left behind, are jumping onto a theory-driven bandwagon are marching off to a land ruled by dilettante sociology, bogus community activism, and unrigorous science and philosophy. The notion that there could be a fusion of "studio practice" with old-fashioned artistic skills that would yield a wondrous hybrid in the same way that African and Western music together produced jazz hasn't panned out, at least not yet. The reason? Whereas African and Western music, for all their differences, were both about how things sound, theory-driven art and traditional visual art are not both about how things look. In art, the fusion merely strips the traditional art object (that is, one well-crafted physical object) of meaning while replacing it with a jumble of fatuous words. The heart of the problem lies in the fact that ever since the birth of modern art 150 years ago, all artists -- no matter what their visual style or theoretical intention -- have been riding the great wave of Romanticism, which has been rolling across the arts for almost 300 years. With Romanticism, the autonomous self as the basis for all knowledge trumps everything. And even though the Romantic, "authentic" self of Odilon Redon or Lee Krasner has been adulterated by postmodernism and turned into a constructed, artificial self, today's artists remain exactly like their early modern counterparts. Deep down, they consider themselves to be morally superior to nonartists -- more intensely emotional and sensitive -- and pitted against a cold and corrupt society. Artists justified the esoteric nature of modern art with the idea that if something came from an authentic artist, it didn't need orthodox social justification. Modern artists defined their work as worthy, and themselves as special people, simply because they were artists. The audience for modern art long ago gave up expecting or wanting skills, talent, or beauty from artists and willingly acceded to the idea that an artist is a creative outsider whose usefulness lies mainly in being critical of everything. Think "court jester" without the humor. Before modern art, though, artists had to take account of the larger society because they were forced to, by either the limits of patronage or official censorship. Since the advent of modern art, however, few if any artists consider the larger society beyond the art-world cognoscenti. To do so would mean either selling out to some version of Thomas Kinkadian aesthetics or, equally frightening, assuming a massively difficult chore. Yet reassuming that task is precisely what artists must do. The future for thoughtful artists lies in rethinking how art fits into society as a whole -- and not just as a self-righteous, intellectually fashionable social or political critique. The time has come, in other words, for artists to think about how they fit into society. What do they really give to it? Are they necessary to it? Who, exactly, constitutes their audience? In this case the only way to leap forward is to go backward -- to ideas that had credibility before modern art. We need to dig them out, however, from beneath the accumulated rubble of history. The idea I have in mind is one of the oldest of all -- that artists need to consciously consider their audience. The basis for a truly interdisciplinary art education of the future requires art students to read some of the great treatises on the role of art and artists in society. Without turning art students into research scholars, we can guide future artists to be more philosophical and relevant to our culture as a whole than most artists -- even those with the best of intentions -- are today. We need to direct art students to serious thinkers from the past who have reflected on the nature of art and the artist, in philosophy, history, or fiction, and whose historical distance allows us to see ourselves, in effect, from the outside. For example, by having art students read Leonardo da Vinci's paragone (a rhetorical device used to explore the merits of the different arts developed during the Renaissance) on painting -- without an art-historical or philosophical intermediary -- college art professors would expose aspiring artists to an articulate master whose thinking about art led to art's being accepted into the university in the first place. Moreover, younger artists would learn not to dismiss Leonardo as a mere archaeological relic of 15th-century Italy, as so much current theory is inclined to do. When students read Laocoön, written in 1766 by the Enlightenment essayist Ephraim Gotthold Lessing, they are prompted to think about the differences between the spatial and temporal arts (in Lessing's lexicon, painting and poetry). Laocoön contains a down-and-dirty struggle over what constitutes our visceral reaction that something is ugly and whether, or to what extent, we can get around our aversion to specific physical things or our attraction to beauty. If you really want to wake up 18-year-olds, discuss with them why a mole located very close to the mouth (an actual Lessing example) makes so many people squeamish. Talk with them about the risks artists take in using visually disgusting subject matter (which Lessing also writes about) without historicizing Lessing into an "example" from the Enlightenment. Talk about, as he does, the natural limits imposed on the arts by our sense of smell. Point out to them that so-called risky contemporary artists like Paul McCarthy, who uses bloodied meatlike figures in his art, or Karen Finley, who notoriously smeared chocolate over her naked body in a series of performance pieces, implying all the while that she was smearing excrement, are actually not that risky. Both are merely simulators of the disgusting. By teaching students Rousseau's "Letter to d'Alembert on Theater," an attack on the arts that recapitulates Plato's examination of the generally uncritical assumption that art has some inherent social value, students would be prompted to ponder whether art is automatically good for people, in all times and all places. In that context, students could be asked to think through whether becoming an artist is actually closer to becoming a swindler than a social worker. Selected passages on art in Tocqueville's Democracy in America would reveal the particular pressures on artists that result from living in a democracy, compared with living in an aristocracy, and lead them to see the inevitable tension between social equality and excellence in the arts. For art professors whose cup of tea isn't hard-core philosophy, why not teach fiction that puts artists in real predicaments about their purpose? For example, in Balzac's allegorical short story "The Unknown Masterpiece," the lead character, Frenhofer -- a character who loomed large in the imaginations of Cézanne, Picasso, and de Kooning -- gets sucked into the black hole of artistic self-absorption. In John Fowles's The Ebony Tower, two artists clash over the meaning of abstract art in what is clearly a metaphor for the meaning of artistic freedom. R eadings from outside the modern and postmodern box would shake up art students who have learned bromides in high school such as "Art is a form of communication," only to have them replaced by gaseous pseudosociological truisms along the lines of "Art derives from myriad socially constructed 'truths' based on the repression of the Other," or "Global nomadism produces hybridized cultures." Wrestling with perennial questions about how art fits into a good society, or how it might function differently in a bad society, would inject an intellectual and moral rigor into art education. A new reading curriculum such as the one I am suggesting could prove stronger at salvaging hands-on arts such as drawing and painting than the head-in-the-sand, keep-on-trucking attitude now favored by professors who believe in the centrality of drawing and painting. For it was art itself that inspired Leonardo, Lessing, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and Balzac to think so deeply in the first place. In any event, the most crucial job at hand is to steer art students away from the self-congratulatory, self-indulgent deconstructionesque platitudes that increasingly guide their educations. After all, why major in art just to become a half-baked social scientist? When things get this messed up, it's time to go back to the future. Laurie Fendrich is a professor of fine arts at Hofstra University. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 39, Page B6

I think the question is not whether these words have been shiboleths in the jazz world--they have. This is really just our inheritance from Romantic aesthetics, and the question is how far do they really go? The fact that these words have always been valued ones in the world of jazz MAY have to do with something that is essential to the music; or it may just be a reflection of the neo-romantic mindset of many commentators on jazz. I'd question whether "spontaneity" ought to be the sine qua non of jazz, and I'd also point out that the overvaluation of spontaneity has led to an awful lot of crap being passed off as art, not just in the jazz world, but all over the place. I think a balance has to be struck between sponataneity and other artistic considerations. Some value adheres to something that is done and consumed "in the moment," and there is a value in staying close to that, but I think that value can be completely and utterly exaggerated--to the point where the artistic experience is not one of appreciating craft at all but one of experiencing the ontological greatness of the artist or of experiencing the ontological greatness channelled through the artist. That, to me, is a lot of self-serving hooey. Some people may not mind the "artist as Elmer Gantry" drift of this attitude, but I find it to be kind of retrograde. But anyway, suffice it to say that the centrality of spontaneity is as succeptible to criticism as over-contrivedness. There's an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed this week on this general topic that I'll post elsewhere. --eric

I suppose it's the sort of economy where one Scolohofo buys one "label request." --eric

Makes it seem like the "Big Cheese" pushed for this more than it being an organic, self-initiated effort. I'm going to wait until the release comes out, but I've already mentally prepared myself for an R&B tribute album that happens to include Sco, than a real Sco album. I get the impression John Mayer was pushed by the label to be involved in this project as well (and perhaps Herbie Hancock's next record as well?): ← I don't know Mayer's other work very well, but I thought he sounded fairly well at home--I was curious to see how the guitar duo at the end resolved itself, but the producers put the fade on it. Uneventfully I guess is the answer. --eric

We got it in rotation and . . . It's OK. Scofield really doesn't sound like it's what he wanted to be doing. Guest spots are nice, except for the number where everyone gets a few lines to sing a la "WE are the World." Fathead Newman really makes you feel there's a world of difference between "just doing your thing" and "mailing it in" as Scofield seems to be doing on some occasions. Less than what it should have been, not as bad as it could have been, and bound to get loads of spins. --eric

So you, too, are willing to dedicate yourself to the cause of rats? Huzzah! --eric

Interesting writer. Haven't read this one, but read "The Deptford Trilogy" (Fifth Business/The Manticore/World of Wonders) a few years ago. Found a paperback of "The Salterton Trilogy" for 50 cents a few months ago, but haven't gotten to it yet. Anyone else read any of these? ← I read pretty much all the Davies I can get ahold of. Deptford is probably the high point. What's Bred in Bone is part of another trilogy focussed on the art world and academia, which is also first rate. Salterton is earlier and is good, but the focus is more on small town life at the start, then gradually expanding the horizons to Davies' more Jungian preoccupations. I've also read for few other stray books and am thinking about grabbing a collection of his newspaper articles from the local book shop. He's one of the writers I never get tired of. Excellent at the craft, and with an observation of two about life & art that really get me thinking. He doesn't get a big head and neglect the craft, though. --eric

I come here to spread the love of sometimes fiesty rats. We only bite your finger when we think it's food, which it usually isn't with the rest of you attached to it resisting. The snacks ARE good, only hard to subdue. --eric

Of course not! We never play anything that doesn't have a UPC symbol on it and a 50-dollar-bill packed in with the promo stuff. What do you take us for? I can see what you're saying about the fit being a bit of a stretch. I suggest you actually try listening to it sequenced with the rest of the material in various spots that seem likely. You'll find that stuff sometimes fits in in practice in ways unimaginable when you're just theorizing. (Take it from an old DJ). But, also sometimes not. Good luck with the project. I definitely look forward to seeing you guys up here. --eric

Randissimo was in town last night for a gig with the Jeff Haas Quintet (Jeff Haas, piano; George Benson, alto & tenor; Rob Smith, trumpet; Marion Haden, bass and Randissimo giving harmonica lessons). Anyhow, Randy dropped by to kill a little time before load-in and brought along some rough cuts from Organissimo's forthcoming cd. It sounds fat! Can't wait till they finish polishing it and get it out to the massive. We ended up playing a couple of tunes in the funky vein, Wealthy Street and Greaze Monkey (which featured some tasty percussion) The Zappa tune, Peaches in Regalia, was very cool indeed. According to Randy it's on the cusp of inclusion on the CD. Let me urge the movers and shakers downstate: Peaches deserves a spot! Very intertestingly stretches Zappa, and the band's sound, I think. Thnaks, Randy, for the drop-by. You make good radio! Good to see you, and hopefully we'll get to see the lot of you at some point very soon, --eric