Leonard Slatkin's Reality Check

[Michael Weiss]

Washington Post

[Larry Kart]

I don't get it -- this means what about what? First, the operative factor probably is not the kind or the quality of the music Bell was playing but "the fog of a D.C. rush hour." Second, as Wayne Shorter once pointed out, many if not most people take in musical performances primarily in visual terms. If Bell had had a striking "look" of some sort going for him, he would have had more success cutting "through the fog" of rush hour indifference to just about any damn thing this side of an on-going ax murder. Finally, anyone who travels the subway system of any major city runs into lots of buskers. Thus the inclination of most people -- again, minus any striking visual cues -- would be to lump Bell into the class of other players of his type of music one encounters on the subway system on a semi-regular basis.

P.S. F--- lazy-ass/cute features journalism. And I say that as a former journalist in what used to be (and may still be) called "the toy department."

[Larry Kart]

By "lazy-ass" I meant not that there was no effort involved in reporting the story but that the concept was a "lazy-ass" one IMO. That is, if the editor or the chief writer had thought much upfront about the likely factors involved (some of which I spelled out in my previous post), they would have realized that the results that they and Bell got were what one would expect. And the high-toned references aspect of the story -- Kant, Ellsworth Kelly, et al. -- strikes me as what we used to call being a "culture vulture." That is, quote who you will, but only in order to advance a line of thought that otherwise could not be advanced by you, not to pump up the story's status quotient. Do any of those quotes or references tell the reader something that he or she otherwise wouldn't know or that the reporter himself couldn't have figured out and explained to his or her readers? (I'm on the losing side of a long journalistic battle here, but I can't stand "quote whores" and the editors who won't rest easy until you cite an expert who says what you already know.)

About most people not getting who Bell was and/or not recognizing (or even noticing) the quality of his playing, far more alarming and revealing to me than this rush-hour subway platform test are the experiences I've had in jazz clubs where people pay substantial cover charges to hear name acts and then proceed to talk at a fairly high volume level throughout the performance. Here, one would think, the "frame" would be in place, but for many people it obviously isn't, or at least not in the way that you or I might want it to be. Thinking about this one very noisy weekend night at the Green Mill in Chicago several years ago and watching the people around me, I think I made some progress toward figuring this out. For me, paying close attention to good music is both absorbing and, for want of a better term, fun. As for the talkers around me, they were of course socializing with each other and drinking and smoking, but they were not wholly oblivious to the music -- they acknowledged the end of each tune with applause and, so it seemed when I began to look closely, they also acknowledged the beginning of the next tune with facial expressions and bodily gestures that suggested they were taking in things like tempo and mood. But after that initial "estimating" moment, the rest of that piece (judging by their behavior) pretty much receded into the background of their consciousness, while to me, if the playing is good, it's this moment and next moment and the next moment and the next that I'm persuing and hanging onto -- with lots of pleasurable-to-me curiosity. Why people like me have that taste or approach and to what degree it's innate or learned is a question for another time, but I know that a lot of people don't have it and that some of those people use the art that I'm forcefully drawn to pay attention to as the (to some degree and in some ways necessary to them) "frame" for other pleasureable-to-them activities. That is, you might think that all those people at the Green Mill that night who were talking over Tim Hagans et al. would have been just as content if they'd been among a similar bunch of people at a bar of comparable nature where interesting live music was not being played. I'm pretty sure, though, that the "frame" that the Green Mill and, that night, Tim Hagans amounted to in their minds was far from incidental -- that if a band that didn't in some sense matter had not been there, most pf these people wouldn't have been there either. I might have tried pursued this further if I had still been a journalist at the time, but I decided that beyond the point I'd reached or thought I'd reached, I really didn't care. Besides, my head hurt.

Edited April 8, 2007 by Larry Kart

[Guy Berger]

I read only about half the article. It didn't seem like there was much of a point.

Guy

Edited April 8, 2007 by Guy

[JSngry]

Put a token booth in the lobby of a concert hall 5-10 minutes before the gig begins & see how much business it gets.

[7/4]

no lyrics, old story.

[David Ayers]

So what? A long-winded and dull-minded article.

[Larry Kart]

Hi Mark --

Been watching the Masters too. Didn't realize until your previous post that you were a fellow laborer in the vineyards where I used to press grapes. Googled you, and there you are. Is there an accessible archive of your stuff at the Free Press?

Edited April 8, 2007 by Larry Kart

[umum_cypher]

As parochial and colonial cringe-worthy as only the US press can be.

A writer who will co-sign (in the name of woe-is-us, hell-in-a-handcartism) such flagrant, hyperbolic bullshit as '"Chaconne" from Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita No. 2 in D Minor ... is not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history', is asking for it.

[Chuck Nessa]

The entire piece could have been one paragraph. BFD. We be stupid. End of story,

[Bill Nelson]

A wager with Slatkin for, say, Joshua Bell's usual concert fee, would've taken him to the cleaners. (Now everyone knows Lenny's an easy mark.)

[Chas]

The entire piece could have been one paragraph. BFD. We be stupid. End of story,

While I agree that the article suffers from overlength , and reports on an 'experiment' of questionable value , your gloss , " We be stupid " , misses the point . It's not that we're dumb , but rather that we're too busy , too harried as a result of the increasing prioritization of work at the expense of leisure required by American competitive consumerism . I read the article as an attempt to demonstrate that the collateral damage from this not only impairs our ability to discharge our familial and civic responsibilities , but extends into our ability to appreciate art . As to why it matters whether one exercises one's aesthetic sense or not , I suppose that might depend on whether one feels that art stands in a reciprocal relation to The Divine , in the sense that art can be a gateway to spirituality , a spirituality which can itself inspire artistic achievement .

[Claude]

The entire piece could have been one paragraph. BFD. We be stupid. End of story,

It's not that we're dumb , but rather that we're too busy , too harried as a result of the increasing prioritization of work at the expense of leisure required by American competitive consumerism . I read the article as an attempt to demonstrate that the collateral damage from this not only impairs our ability to discharge our familial and civic responsibilities , but extends into our ability to appreciate art . As to why it matters whether one exercises one's aesthetic sense or not , I suppose that might depend on whether one feels that art stands in a reciprocal relation to The Divine , in the sense that art can be a gateway to spirituality , a spirituality which can itself inspire artistic achievement .

Well, I think the result would have been a lot different if Bell had chosen a different location and time. You can't blame people for being busy in the morning on their way to work. It's a question of priorities, and has nothing to do with the lack of appreciation for art.

If instead of the metro at 7:50 AM (where and when people have no thoughts for leisure and art and no minute to spare) he had played on a market plaza at lunch time, I'm sure many more people would have stopped to listen. Maybe some would have skipped their usual lunch break routine. But you can't expect them to risk arriving late at work and tell their boss that they had to listen to Joshua Bell ...

Would Joshua Bell have stopped if he were late for a very important business meeting and Sonny Rollins was playing saxophone solos on the sidewalk?

Edited April 9, 2007 by Claude

[ghost of miles]

Just to throw in an extraneous quote of my own, "Why so much shuck for so little nubbin?" (I always thought this came from Sherwood Anderson's first sight of the smallish William Faulkner wrapped in a huge overcoat, but it turns out Anderson lifted the quote from Abraham Lincoln.) By nearly any journalistic standard, the article does indeed seem far too long to me. Part of the problem is that it's hardly surprising that nobody in a subway anywhere would know who Joshua Bell is. Fellow Bloomingtonian Mark Stryker can certainly attest to Bell's high profile in the world of classical music ever since he was an adolescent, but "the world of classical music" is nearly as culturally circumscribed as a cultural world can get. Bell is undoubtedly one of the best-known--perhaps the best-known--musicians from that world, and still it's relatively meaningless in the world at large. Not that jazz is much better... if you stuck Wynton in a subway, a few people might recognize him, but that would be because he's been so successful at getting his mug all over PBS.

Do classical musicians busk in the East Coast subways? I mean, maybe they should. Why keep the music as exclusively a concert-hall experience?

Larry, that "frame" of which you speak stems, I think, from the perception among some that jazz is a hip, sophisticated experience... that by conducting one's social activities in a jazz setting, one is showing that he/she is more culturally in-the-know. Not saying that on some level these folks don't have some kind of appreciation for the music, but it's ultimately superficial. When I was in my early 20s I worked in a downtown Indianapolis restaurant, and on Friday and Saturday nights we'd close the kitchen at midnight and head down the street to a local jazz bar called the Chatterbox. We went there primarily because it was open till 3 and we wanted to build on the momentum of our shift drinks, but also because it was a jazz club--and it made us feel even better to be drinking at such a place. So that "frame" was definitely part of the picture. I was not a jazz fan then, had the same five or six jazz LPs that many an indie/hipster kid might have, and I shudder to remember how much WE talked, how much everybody talked, at that bar while the musicians were playing.

[Larry Kart]

Do classical musicians busk in the East Coast subways? I mean, maybe they should. Why keep the music as exclusively a concert-hall experience?

I've run into them IIRC in New York, the London Tube, and the Paris Metro.

[7/4]

I think the real news - and I didn't read the entire article - is that he didn't get arrested.

[Simon Weil]

Larry, that "frame" of which you speak stems, I think, from the perception among some that jazz is a hip, sophisticated experience... that by conducting one's social activities in a jazz setting, one is showing that he/she is more culturally in-the-know. Not saying that on some level these folks don't have some kind of appreciation for the music, but it's ultimately superficial. When I was in my early 20s I worked in a downtown Indianapolis restaurant, and on Friday and Saturday nights we'd close the kitchen at midnight and head down the street to a local jazz bar called the Chatterbox. We went there primarily because it was open till 3 and we wanted to build on the momentum of our shift drinks, but also because it was a jazz club--and it made us feel even better to be drinking at such a place. So that "frame" was definitely part of the picture. I was not a jazz fan then, had the same five or six jazz LPs that many an indie/hipster kid might have, and I shudder to remember how much WE talked, how much everybody talked, at that bar while the musicians were playing.

But isn't that the dread secret of any music going - that it's basically about "conducting one's social activities in a [musical] setting" - or with music as an enabler to them. I mean why do so many people go to concerts in groups rather than solitarily? Because music, for them, is not about the solitary experience of listening to music, it's about getting it on socially in a musical environment.

The you have stuff to do with the "frame" - which, in itself, is part of the enabler nature of the music. I mean "look who we are, we go to jazz" is more or less the thought. Like you say, made you feel even better. But what happens if something in the music gets to you? Then you're not paying (full) attention to the social group of which you're part, but are being distracted and listening to the music. In other words the music and the social activity are in competition.

This why people talk so loud in Jazz clubs, to blot out the competition. The implication, then, is not that people only have a superficial understanding of the music - rather it is that it is, potentially, good enough to be in competition with the social activities that are the real basis for most people going to jazz clubs.

A(m/b)using, huh?

Simon Weil

[Rooster_Ties]

I probably wouldn't have recognized that it was Bell -- but if it had been during afternoon rush hour (and NOT in the morning), I'm sure I would have stopped to listen.

In the morning, I'm lucky to get anywhere any less than 5 minutes late, and I'm sure I wouldn't have had even 30 seconds to stop and listen if I had been on my way to a meeting.