What I Learned from Paul Motian

Paul Motian at his favorite spot - the Village Vanguard

In the weeks since jazz drummer Paul Motian's death on November 22, the response from the online music community has been large, warm and beautiful. On the day of his passing, Motian was trending on twitter in New York. Peter Hum of the Ottawa Citizen compiled a comprehensive list of remembrances by fellow musicians. Photographer John Rogers revealed Motian's generous spirit off the bandstand in a moving piece at NPR's A Blog Supreme. Nate Chinen's New York Times playlist this weekend features all new music that calls Motian to mind. And today, Ethan Iverson has blessed his readers with his own critical-personal appreciation.

So what does that leave me to say you ask?

Well just that delving into Paul Motian's music my freshman year fundamentally altered how I think about and play the drums.

You see, up until about December 2008, I was a Drummer. Yes, capital D Drummer. My first drumming inspiration was Buddy Rich. My first instructional video was Dave Weckl's "Back to Basics" (or, look at that hair!). I was obsessed with technique, spending many hours trying to master the mysterious "secret weapons" of drumming, like the Moeller whip and the push-pull. Speed was the name of the game. My technique intoxication was sort of the drumming equivalent of "chicks dig the longball." And when I entered college, let's just say I thought I had some real pop in my sticks.

I got some real wake-up calls during my first semester of big band rehearsals. I was able to play blazing single stroke rolls around the kit, and so filled up every little space I could with them. Listening back to recordings of myself from that autumn, my drumming sounds leaden and artless (let's not even talk about my time-feel issues). But I couldn't hear that at the time, so when my director told me to dial down the density, I got both angry (why is he getting in my way) and terribly nervous (what is it that I'm doing wrong). My instincts for fixing my problems brought me back to those technique videos and method books, thinking that I just needed more control. Didn't Dave Weckl and Buddy Rich play super dense all the time? Why couldn't I?

In the end, it wasn't more chops that I needed. It was bigger ears and a new aesthetic. No more Drummer with a capital D. No more secret weapons. Just doing a helluva lot more with a lot less.

Luckily I had gotten friendly with a junior trumpet player in the band named Harrison. Harrison convinced me to check out my first-ever Free Jazz show, and then started giving me CD recommendations. First: ditch all that Brad Mehldau and Aaron Parks moody piano stuff. Second: DAVE DOUGLAS! Third: did you know that Paul Motian has a ton of sick solo albums?

I certainly knew who Motian was at that time. I had all the classic Bill Evans recordings from the late '50s and early '60s and had eaten them up when I was learning jazz piano in high school. There was a nice big picture of him in my favorite method book, John Riley's Beyond Bop Drumming. I even had his Bill Evans tribute album, with Bill Frisell, Marc Johnson, and Joe Lovano. Can't say I had listened to it much though. It didn't have all those purdy piano lines that I liked in the Evans originals.

Anyway, I took Harrison's advice and on the afternoon of December 2, 2008, I checked out three Motian CDs from the music library on campus - the Electric Bebop Band playing Monk and Powell, On Broadway vol. 1, and Story of Maryam. I surreptitiously uploaded them onto my computer that night.

Story of Maryam was first on my listening list, due to its 4 1/2-star rating, plus editor's pick, on All Music Guide (this was before I had musical opinions, ok?). I finally got around to it that Saturday afternoon, December 6. It was one of the cold, dry December days, the ones of chapped lips and hoodies worn indoors. I put on the album to accompany my Religion class reading.

I then stopped my Religion class reading.

The opening track "9x9" shot out of my headphones in a blaze of dual saxophones, shrouded by clouds of distorted guitar, and churned about by the stuttering rumble of shadowy drums and the sky-streaking clash of laser-bright cymbals. The music was deeply mysterious, but not incomprehensible. There was a folkish simplicity to the melody, though abstracted by the free-floating tempo. The rest of the album continued in this mode, bringing me into a reverie of early winters in New England. Which is saying something because I've never experienced them before.

What shocked me so much about Story of Maryam was how the first regular, insistent groove only arrived 5 minutes from the end of the record. I had just began to experiment with free-tempo playing with Harrison and thought it was just about playing whatever you wanted at any time. Naturally, I found listening to our stuff a bit boring and saw this free-time thing as a brief contrast to more groove-oriented sections. Motian's playing totally changed my preconceptions. Even without regular tempos, the album was full of momentum and expressive contrast. While Motian's playing on "9x9" was aggressively defined, his playing on the ensuing ballad "5 Miles to Wrentham" was spacious and intently patient, drawing attention to the subtlest shadings on his cymbals. Whatever the mood of the piece, Motian's drumming was totally efficient, which is surprising considering how loose it was. The strokes were seemingly random, but by the end, I could tell that they were meticulously placed.

Meticulous chaos: that's what I learned from Motian that winter, and it's just what I needed to hear at that time.

As I continued to eat up Motian's discography, I began to incorporate his approach into my playing. I cut down on snare drum chatter, started using fatter sticks, tried to strip down each performance to its bare essentials. After 3 years of this (and the addition of 14 more hours of his music on my hard drive), my drumming is fundamentally changed, yet still far removed from Motian's mysterious meticulousness and sound-so-distinctive-you-can-recognize-him-with-one-stroke.

Motian's influence on me probably comes through most clearly on a piece and I wrote and recorded this past spring called "Illyria Suite." The opening and concluding sections feature pointillistic, free-time drumming over a folkish tune. Ok, my drum & cymbal sounds are totally different than his, and the piece heads to some very un-Motian places in the middle, but I would not have even been able to conceptually imagine a piece like this before hearing Motian's music.

[Go listen to "Illyria Suite" here!]

Even after his passing, Motian will never cease to inspire my playing. There are always more layers to peal away from each performance. I'm now going to check back on Song of Maryam and see what else I can dig out tonight.

See you over the rainbow, Paul.

You Can See That Hot Marimba

Now some visually incriminating evidence of my marimba performance at Princeton last weekend.

Enjoy the hilarious corrupted tape edits and the stick toss in the last movement.

Thanks to Mike & Katie Laskey for their videotaping and their whoops.

Can't You Hear That Hot Marimba

The Princeton University Orchestra really let itself go for its first concert this year.

They programmed a marimba concerto for the first time in its history.

They had performed a concerto for cello and pizza delivery guy, a concerto for Norwegian Hardanger Fiddle, a concerto for electric guitar, and, for chrissakes, three viola concertos. But never the lowly, schlocky, beautiful marimba.

I had the pleasure of changing that this past weekend when I performed Ney Rosauro's Concerto for Marimba and String Orchestra on Friday and Saturday. For those of you who sadly missed out, you can find compressed, incriminating evidence here.

Before going on, I make the obligatory sign of the
 Society of Free Marimbists. Photo by Kaki Elgin.

It's been a long road for the marimba from novel exotica to concert hall respectability. In fact, the concept of a marimba concerto was nearly killed before anyone heard a note of one.

Reich at 75: 18 Takes Off

Perhaps Music for Eighteen Musicians would have stayed in its oral form if not for the piece’s instant popularity.  Its premiere at Town Hall in New York on April 24, 1976 created a critical stir.  New York Times critic John Rockwell called it a “remarkable piece of work” and hoped that the premiere recording would the win the piece a larger audience.[1]  Even the so-called “Dean of American Rock Critics,” Robert Christgau, gave the piece a very favorable review, speaking to its genre-transcending potency.[2] While Eighteen was recorded formally in the studio soon after the premiere, Reich’s label at the time, Deutsch Gramophone, sat on the recording and eventually declined to release it.[3] However, Reich eventually got a letter from the German jazz label ECM (who at the time was producing best-selling albums by the likes of Keith Jarrett and Pat Metheny) saying that they wanted to pick up the recording.[4] Upon release of the album in 1978, Eighteen received airplay on college and public radio stations alongside avant-rock artists like David Bowie and Brian Eno.[5] Within 2 years of release, ECM sold over 100,000 copies of the record.  Reich’s music was busting out of downtown New York art galleries and capturing the attention of listeners and fellow musicians throughout the world.

            

In the wake of the popular success of Music for Eighteen Musicians, Reich came across the predicament of other musicians wanting to play his pieces.  Because of the particular manner in which Eighteen was written down and learned, the existing parts would make very little sense to any musician who had not learned the piece in Reich’s group.  If other musicians wished to perform Eighteen, they had to learn it from scratch by listening to the recording numerous times and then using the familiarity of the piece to decipher the shorthand directions on the written parts.  Because the task of learning and rehearsing the piece would take months and was rather unfeasible economically for most professional musicians, only two outside groups took the piece on within the two decades after the original album’s release.[6] One of the performances, organized by the Amadinda percussion group in Hungary, was recorded live on May 18, 1990 and later released on CD in 2004.[7] Because the group virtually learned the piece by rote over the course of several months, they play it as convincingly as Reich’s band.  The performance is louder and more insistent than the original recording.  The tempo is a couple of metronome ticks faster and stays ruthlessly consistent throughout the piece, compared to the slight tempo fluctuations that the Reich ensemble settled into.  It is clear that the performers in the 1990 recording have physically internalized the piece much in the same way Reich’s musicians did.  The subtle differences in performance are due to idiosyncrasies in personal time feel rather than overall familiarity with the piece.

Because of the difficulties associated with performing Eighteen as such, a new decipherable score and parts set was necessary in order for the piece to have a life of its own outside the original recording and periodic performances.  Luckily, this development would eventually become a reality due to the enduring success of both Eighteen and Reich’s subsequent works.  Though Music for Eighteen Musicians was Reich’s most popular piece to date, it did not turn him into a one-hit wonder.  Later pieces like Music for Large Ensemble and Tehillim were also critical successes and helped cement Reich as one of the most well regarded American composers – he was soon receiving many commissions from major performers throughout the United States.[8]  At that time, Reich’s music was growing more conventional in that it could be (and in some cases had to be) expressed in traditional western notation.  Tehillim, for instance, features a regular pulse, but near constant time signature shifts.  Because of this rhythmic complexity, it could not be taught by rote in the same way as Eighteen and so was written down in a more complete fashion.[9] In the middle of these developments in the mid-1980s, the British publishing house Boosey and Hawkes began to publish Reich’s music.  With its worldwide distribution, Boosey was able to bring Reich’s music to new places and allow different ensembles to learn and perform it.  However, even with the backing of one of the world’s largest music publishing firms, it would take the enthusiasm of American PhD student to create a usable score for Music for Eighteen Musicians.

***Next, hear about how Marc Mellits put '18' on paper and how the score changes performances***

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[1] John Rockwell, “The Pop Life,” The New York Times, 17 November 1978, page C12.

[2] Robert Christgau, “American Consumer Guide Reviews: Steve Reich,” http://www.robertchristgau.com/ get_artist.php?name=steve+reich

[3] Zuckerman Interview with Reich.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Zuckerman interview with Reich.

[7] Amadinda & Musicians, Steve Reich: Music for Eighteen Musicians, http://www.amadinda.com/ html/Afelv_10.html

[8] The San Francisco Symphony soon commissioned Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards, and Reich later composed popular pieces for the Kronos Quartet (Different Trains) and guitarist Pat Metheny (Electric Counterpoint).

[9] Steve Reich, Tehillim, London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1981.

Reich at 75: People-Programming the Score

After completing Music for Mallet Instruments, Reich began work on what would become Music for Eighteen Musicians, a piece which would consume his compositional energies for the better part of the next three years.  In an interview with the British composer Michael Nyman around the time of Eighteen’s premiere in 1976, Reich speaks about how the piece reflects changes in his musical personality.  While Reich’s pieces from around the time of “Music as a Gradual Process” were built on impersonal processes (in contrast to the emphasis on personal expression and free improvisation in the downtown New York music of the time), Eighteen is more concerned with expressive effect.[1]  Reich is no longer opposed to using his musical biases to shape the direction of a piece and is less concerned with whether the audience hears the strict processes in it.[2] Music for Eighteen Musicians opens and closes with a series of eleven chords, played in fast quaver pulses by the full ensemble, while the middle sections expand each of the chords into different mini-pieces featuring some of the same rhythmic techniques from Drumming and Music for Mallet Instruments.  However, while these processes are simple and certainly audible to a relatively informed listener, they do not draw attention to themselves.  The listener is much more drawn in by the hyper-rich instrumental textures and the infectious, nearly tropical, groove.

In order for Eighteen to totally envelop the listener, it must be played with a machine-like consistency.  For example, two marimbas play an alternating quaver pulse underneath nearly the entire piece.  If one of the players flubs just one beat, the trance-like groove is broken and the piece instantly looses momentum.  Despite the performance difficulties, Reich could ensure the piece’s performance quality because he had over the past several years assembled a dedicated group of musicians to play his music with him.  While composing Drumming in 1970, soon after a trip to study drumming in Ghana, Reich was introduced to a percussionist named Russell Hartenberger who was also interested in travelling to Africa.[3]  Through his conversations with Reich, Hartenberger was invited to rehearse the incubating Drumming and became the first full-time percussionist in Reich’s ensemble.[4]  To meet the eventual playing demands of Drumming (it requires 9 percussionists), Reich brought in other percussionists, many through James Preiss, a teacher at the Manhattan School of Music.[5] As Reich’s reputation grew within the underground New York contemporary music scene, he was able to draft even more players into Steve Reich & Musicians, eventually reaching the core of 17 (plus himself) in the mid 1970s.[6]  Reich notes in a 2002 interview that most the musicians he was working with at the time of Eighteen were still finishing up graduate school, so it was not difficult to bring everyone in for a rehearsal every 2-3 weeks.[7]

Reich’s working band not only allowed the composer to more tightly control the performance quality of his pieces, it also had a profound effect on Reich’s compositional process as well.  In Drumming, for instance, the human phasing techniques had never been employed in any piece of music before and so it required that Reich learn how to do it himself (phasing against a tape loop) and then teach the technique to his players.[8] Notation alone would not have been able to adequately express the sound of the piece.  This rote method of learning Drumming carried over to Eighteen as well.  Throughout 1974-1976, Reich would work on a particular segment of the piece in his manuscript notebook (see the “pulses” example below), and then would transcribe it out in a shorthand notation on small slips of paper for each player.[9] Most of the details of the piece were worked out during the rehearsals themselves.[10] Russell Hartenberger notes that each part was like a cliffnotes version of the piece, with very personalized directions (i.e. “wait for Jay to sing that pattern, cue Steve.”).[11] At each rehearsal, Reich would bring in corrections and take suggestions from the players.[12] In this way, the composition of the piece and the learning of the piece were one process, much more akin to the members of a rock band composing and learning a song together.  In both instances, the piece or song is composed into the muscle memory of the players, making a written score unnecessary.

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[1] Michael Nyman, “Steve Reich: Interview by Michael Nyman,” Studio International, 1976, no. 192 (November / December): pp. 300-307.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Interview with Russell Hartenberger by Daniel Tones.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Gabrielle Zuckerman, Interview with Steve Reich, July 2002, http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/ features/interview_reich.html.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Hartenberger Interview.

[9] Steve Reich, Music for Eighteen Musicians, performance note, London: Boosey & Hawkes, 2000.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Hartenberger Interview.

[12] Ibid.

Party with Steve

Steve Reich is 75 today! (Why is there no Google doodle?) It seems his birthday has been celebrated for a whole year at this point, but why not celebrate for so long if it's an excuse to listen to his music?

My Reich nerdiness has been well-established on this blog. So it should come as no surprise that there will be much celebration here this week too. Last year, I wrote a paper on Music for 18 Musicians at the Royal College of Music. I talked about the evolution of the piece from its original conception to eventual score to later recordings and how using the score affects performance.

I'll be posting bits of the essay here each day, so come back to here the story behind this monumental piece of music.

Music Metadata: Does a Critic Need to Play?

NPR's Patrick Jarenwattananon just tweeted out an interesting blog post from Roanna Forman's Boston Jazz Blog. In this post, she asks an age-old question: does a good music critic need to play music? What's cool about this post though is how she assembles answers from many tip-top jazz critics from Nate Chinen of the New York Times to estimable Irish bassist-blogger Ronan Guilfoyle to the ever-acerbic Stanley Crouch (get this man a jazz blog!). There was an array of views on a critic's musical chops, all the way from unnecessary to vital. Yet most of the respondents felt that skill with a musical instrument isn't necessary but can be very helpful. Crouch and Guilfoyle say that it allows the critic to hear more of what's going in real time, while Chinen says that musicians certainly trust critics with a modicum of playing experience more.


I find myself in this middle category as well, with the qualification that being a good musician doesn't mean that one will be a good critic. A good critic of any art form is someone who can make the experience of that art come alive in a tactile way. In the case of a music critic, it's about vividly describing what the music sounds like, chronicling the emotional ups and downs, pulling some semantic meaning out of the experience. A good musician may concentrate so much on the technical aspects of the music that the piece of criticism doesn't really translate any of the actual experience.


I feel this idea of translation is the real crux of a criticism, especially music criticism. Certainly every piece of criticism is going to have a judgment call. But a judgment call alone isn't going to make someone want to go out and hear music or see a play. Instead, it's the promise of a memorable experience. If the only thing the jazz critic could think of was how the sax player did these 4ths-based licks over a tri-tone substitution on the bridge, then it probably wasn't an emotionally powerful experience, which would have shut down the analytical side to his or her brain. An overly-technical piece of criticism is what I would call "Lost in Translation," where the critic certainly an aesthetic experience of a sort, but does not have the command of language to translate that experience to a non-expert.


[Short Digression: You can see this problem at work a lot in interviews with musicians, regardless of genre. Some great players and singers have a limited vocabulary of expressing their musical views semantically and give stock answers that don't really illuminate anything. Van Morrison is an especially good example.]


There are problems with too little musical knowledge as well though. The most noticeable aspects of a piece of music are its overall texture and rhythm. A critic who may write well but doesn't know the ins and outs of the music tends to concentrate exclusively on those aspects. With ears like these, Pat Metheny and Kenny G drift into the same category with Yanni and Vangelis. Even if the writing is clever and articulate, this kind of critic isn't much more than a glorified Pandora app.


In the end, a good critic needs to know both sides of the divide - the musician and the listener - and be able to translate so that the listener can really understand what the musicians are getting at, with all its nuance (not to short shrift the musicians' specificity of intent). One certainly does not need to be as good a musician as those playing to comment authoritatively, but one must know what to listen for and playing experience certainly helps in that department. I feel its more about how music the critic has listened to (and of course you listen a lot when you play). Listening to lots of different music teaches one to appreciate tightness of form, novelty of sound, technical mastery, and deftness of touch. The critic needs to know what makes a piece of music great or memorable, which most of the time does not have to do with the technical aspects. It's about recognizing some of the abstract blissfulness of a particular moment and describing it in a way to elicit that same sense of bliss in the reader.


You do see a lot of good critics with at least some musical experience. Nate Chinen played drums through college (apparently with my future high school band director at least once). Alex Ross was a dutiful piano student and took music theory with Peter Lieberson at Harvard (Lieberson called Ross's final sonatina project "most interesting and slightly peculiar."). Stanley Crouch is also a drummer, Randy Sandke is as much a trumpeter as a critic, and pianist Jeremy Denk even takes some time out from his busy touring schedule to give the internet some fine and funny insights into the music he plays. I don't think that this musical experience has made these critics insightful and successful (correlation doesn't always mean causation, my dear), but it's this experience that has made these people want to become writers/critics. If you're going to spend a great deal of energy writing about something, you really must love that something (which is likely why you seen so many memoirs on bookshelves). In my experience, I have found that my love for music has come from both listening and performing experiences, a love built of visual, audial, and tactile memory. Reading Alex Ross and listening to Felix Contreras may have made me want to write about art and music in a serious way, but I wouldn't have even gotten to that point if I hadn't fallen in love with music in the first place. In order to love something at that magnitude, you have to spend a lot of time with it and its easy to log a lot of hours in the school band or on the living room piano.

But while playing takes a back seat for most critics (just think of the time crunch), I still play more than I write. My perspective as a performer has affected my critical occupations in that I am wont to get at the psychology of the performer. I am sensitive to how my state of mind can affect my playing. Pulling up certain images can pull into the musical moment and make me swing harder behind the drum set. When I'm freely improvising, I try to hold one basic musical idea in my head and come back to it at different points, while my subconscious handles the movements from one drum to another. I try to get at this same insight when writing about other musicians. I can usually get a decent idea just by how the musician plays, what decisions he or she makes. For an improvisor, it's the vocabulary and use of space (the motor-mouthed Pat Metheny vs. the restrained and intuitive Bill Frisell). For a classical musician, it's the touch and character of the performance (how much of the performance is practice-room autopilot vs. in the moment risk-taking).

A good piece of criticism doesn't need to hit on this level, especially from the listener's perspective. But I feel this kind of insight is much appreciated from the musician's standpoint. It doesn't trust translate the music for a lay listener, but brings the listener inside the musician's very world. If the listener can understand the musician, they're much more likely to feel like they understand the music.

It has been duly noted that this is post is heavy on the masculinity. See Lara Pellegrinelli for many smart words on gender in jazz.