Jacob Zimmerman grew up playing jazz in the Seattle area, which led to an international touring schedule with his high school jazz band; before moving to the Bay he attended the New England Conservatory, and then Mills College for graduate school. JZ composes and plays a variety of instruments, but is above all a purveyor of the virtues of the alto saxophone.
His is a boyish face which sits atop a tall frame, and his demeanor is marked by an easy confidence one usually expects only from a much older man. He sat down with me on a sunny Oakland morning to talk about all things music. Our conversation covered a wide swath of ground, from the (racial?) divide between experimental & jazz musics, to why Berkeley should be disappointed in Joshua Redman.
Want more information? Read on.
JZ: Not long ago I saw John Wiese open for Wolf Eyes (a band from Michigan). I was really pumped about John because he made an album with Evan Parker, and he’s done these collaborations with these legendary European free improvisation people even though he’s totally in this noise scene. I went and saw him play at this warehouse in East Oakland. I was talking to him, you know, and I was wondering what this guy was going to be like, because his music is so fucking crazy and I admire how much he’s working. I got to ask him questions, and 90 percent of his responses to me you could basically say were a plug for himself; for example he knew the next time he was going to be in Oakland. He could tell me the exact day. And he’s playing, like, 200 gigs a year. All these crazy different places.
CV: That’s saying something. Musicians famously don’t know where they’re playing tomorrow let alone next month.
JZ: Yeah, he was just obviously a very dedicated professional. It’s very seldom, but very good, that I get inspired by people that are really good with organization in the business side of what they do. I kind of go in spurts. I get inspired by something like that happening, and then I’ll be like “I need to memorize all my upcoming things.”
CV: The other day I was trying to recall a conversation we’d had about Karlheinz Stockhausen. Could you remind us what he was on about?
JZ: Stockhausen, right. When he was starting out, he was a post-Webern serial composer. He took that to new levels. He was part of the European school that also included Boulez, and really what it came down to was just the extension of a lot of European music, the idea of unifying music on very grand levels… because Stockhausen was sort of on the cusp of a lot of electronic music, that posed a lot more possibilities for different ways of realizing unification on a grand level; unity, and also coherence in a piece of music. He had original ideas about how to do that, and that’s kind of the initial reason why he was so great. Conceptually at least.
CV: Do you see any of those concepts as bleeding over into what you do? Into how you think about jazz in general?
JZ: Well, I don’t really think about jazz in terms of how it relates to my music. I just think about music and unity and coherence…
CV: Before you go on, could you say a bit more about how you define “unity” and “coherence” in this context?
JZ: Sure. There’s a lot of history, a lot of philosophy, talking about this stuff that I don’t really know about, but I do know that it was a big topic for certain schools of European artists. They use the analogy of what makes a flower a single entity; what is it that ties a flower together, on a cellular, molecular level, or whatever. There’s this unity that’s supposedly coming from some sort of similar thing in the music. That’s roughly the aesthetic of a lot of that music.
CV: So is this about an individual piece of music having unity? Or is unity about the music the composer produces more generally?
JZ: A piece. Schoenberg would say that a piece posed a single musical problem, and that the entirety of the piece should be centered around solving that one particular musical problem. The realizations and implications of that problem. And it can always be reduced down to something small, a germ. Basically it could be like, an interval, that’s the musical problem. Or like an interval relationship within a tonality. Some sort of dissonance that creates a discord, or tension, or motion, or anything. The point of that, the overall thing, is when you make a piece of music it makes you think “Ok, when I have an idea for a piece of music, do I see an idea of the whole thing? Can I come up with a picture of an entire, unified musical idea?” As opposed to, you know, just sitting down and stream of consciousness, I might move left to right. I start somewhere, and I don’t know where I’m going to end up. Not worrying about how to tie everything together.
Actually, I’d say most music is unified. Even if people don’t necessarily think about it. The question becomes, is it even possible to make a piece of art work that doesn’t express unity on some level. Or has no coherent concept whatsoever. Anyway, that was a refreshing thing to think about, because I was just beginning to compose more, and beginning to think of music on larger scales. Not just thinking of a single piece of music as being one idea, but thinking of a whole body of work as being completely unified. Not a revolutionary idea, but I like it nonetheless.
CV: Do you see your group Lawson as having one unifying concept?
JZ: The concept that ties Lawson together on a technical level is that there’s this pitch network system, which I won’t go into in detail because it’s difficult to explain in words, but it’s this very complex sounding, very rich system of pitches that ISN’T like a serial system, not a scale or intervalic system, it’s just its own thing; and all of the music for that group is written using that system. The idea of the project, what I wanted, was for it to have this theme of sustained notes and very slowly moving melodies. The focus is finding and exploring shapes and thinking of melody as a linear thing. As in like a line. One note after another. Exploring different speeds at which you can move from one note to another. For instance, if there’s 8 people playing randomly generated notes, (This would be at like, the slowest level possible) if one person wants to change their note, they have to be aware of what their note is, and what everybody else’s note is. And they make that decision based on knowing what effect that’s going to have on the sound the group is producing.
So it’s a very slow, slow level of moving through these melodies. So slow that it wouldn’t be what anyone would call a melody, it’s much more static. That’s one end of the continuum. Then there’s the other end of the continuum, where we play these other parts of the network so fast that the individual notes are blurred and it becomes more about the shape of the thing. The gesture of the thing [waves hands about]. To sum it up, the concept of Lawson is just the exploration of creating melodies, different types of linear shapes, across the continuum of slow to very very fast. I’m thinking of it very visually.
CV: It’s interesting to hear you say this, because when I listen to your music, the Lawson group in particular, I often explain the experience to people in terms of shapes. As in, they’ll be this static auditory space that you’ve constructed for the listener to just exist in for a while, and then something will be bubbling out of the static, and glisten and shine there for a moment before receding back into the static again. It’s a kind of amoebic sonic ooze you’ve developed. That’s meant to be a compliment by the way.
JZ: Yeah, that’s cool.
CV: Speaking of slowing down melodies, we’ve talked about Lennie Tristano before; not only his music, but also his teaching methods. I’m thinking in particular of his lessons that required slowing down the solos of his heroes and learning them note for note that way. Presumably to absorb them into your own body and craft more effectively. I was wondering if that was the sort of thing that inspired your treatment of melody in Lawson?
JZ: That was definitely what inspired it. The thing about Tristano’s music is that he really emphasized the importance of the melodic line. That was what he did, basically. And, you know, also a lot of what Charlie Parker did. The major advancements of jazz were, I think, in the realm of melodic linearity; taking jazz and music in general to a very new level of complexity within that parameter. A part of that was also just rhythm and phrasing, which is another new development as well. The thing about Lennie is that he really emphasized improvising and being spontaneous, and a way to do that was to just concentrate on each note following the other. As opposed to having a more pre-thought out idea of like a certain phrase or gesture or lick that might be comprised of 10 notes or something.
CV: As you describe the Tristano influence, it occurs to me that the inspiration you’ve taken from Stockhausen could be viewed as in tension with it.
JZ: How so?
CV: In that, the idea of unity and coherence, preordained within an auditory system, seems to be one that takes a fairly wide view on the piece as a whole; meanwhile the method of thinking only of the note you’re playing in the moment, and then the one you’re about to play, is just about the most narrowly focused way of viewing the piece.
I can see ways of getting around this tension, but it could use explaining nonetheless.
JZ: Yeah, it’s true. I mean within that parameter, definitely.
CV: In any case, go on.
JZ: So I was basically thinking, you know, I play the saxophone. Some people have taken the saxophone and made it more of like a sound-generating type of thing…
CV: Well, it IS a sound-generating type of thing.
JZ: Well, let me be more specific. The saxophone is designed with all these keys, and they’re made to be able to play the 12 notes of the equal-tempered scale chromatically within a certain range. It’s designed to be able to do that with a lot of fluidity. But then there are people who have taken the saxophone and re-thought of it as like an electronic instrument; they’re thinking more about timbres and sounds and not so much about playing the 12 notes of the equal tempered scale in tune and everything. Because, if you just play the notes of the scale, then for example on the saxophone, you’re only using maybe 5 percent of the possible fingerings that you could make on that instrument. So if you open up your thinking about unusual fingerings you can take the instrument and come up with a lot of different sounds. And people have done that, and I’ve done that. But my thinking is that to just play the notes intended for the saxophone is such an inherent part of the instrument, and I’ve spent a lot of my life learning them and that I’ve enjoyed, that I wanted to come up with my own approach to dealing with playing pitches and notes.
I have a general interest in improvisation and spontaneous music, so the idea of note to note improvisation inspired me. I worked on that for a really long time. Just playing single notes. And while I was playing one note, to imagine what the next note would be. I did this in a very intuitive way. It was a very structured, strict method that I was practicing this within, but I didn’t have any sort of overarching idea of what I wanted the resulting things to be; I just wanted it to be very intuitive and that worked for me. You know, finding a way to create a structured environment that still had surprises and felt intuitive and intriguing. No one listens to Lawson and necessarily thinks “Oh, obviously he’s into Lennie Tristano.” There’s not a strong sonic resemblance, but conceptually, that note to note improvisation is a good method for me, and I learned it from Lennie.
CV: Stepping back a bit, I’m still trying to relate the “wide” focus to the “narrow” focus we discussed earlier. Wide being related to the concepts of unity and so on discussed related to Stockhausen, and narrow as understood by the note to note improvisation of Tristano.
So, could you say the note to note concept is enough of a unifying factor to be the stuff of Stockhausen?
JZ: Well, I wouldn’t say that the note to note thinking is the overarching concept of the whole project, because a lot of the music we play is written out, not improvised.
CV: I get the sense most of it is actually.
JZ: A lot of it. Most of it. All the notes are written out… But we always start with a very, very slow improvisation.
CV: And then it builds into something else and you polish it and write it up once it proves itself in this note to note improvisational process?
JZ: Yea, the way I think of music is when we’re making it and improvising, the music isn’t flowing through us, but rather, we’re flowing through music. I think of music as being like an ocean (I’m stealing this concept from Bill Frisell and Wayne Shorter, my two big heroes). And the ocean is just, well, the boundaries seem so endless. There’s no lines and the possibilities seem endless. So playing this music with Lawson is kind of like, when we’re in that zone, I could know what note I’m going to play next, but what is the timing of that note? We’re operating on such a slow scale, with long improvisations, sometimes 15 minutes in length, so there’s a lot of possibilities. There’s decision making happening, but there’s also the feeling that you’re not necessarily making rational decisions, you’re just going with it, letting the music take you. Yet it’s still very structured. It’s important to have the structure because that gives it meaning. The rules are important.
CV: Right, if the rules weren’t there you couldn’t break them.
JZ: Yes. What was the question again though?
CV: We were talking about the connection between “wide” focus and “narrow” focus. You mentioned the narrow note to note beginnings of your compositions, and now I believe you were going to explain how that fits in with the wider focus on creating a unified, coherent piece.
JZ: Right. I would say that the thing about Lawson that’s unified is not this note to note thing. Though that is part of the construction process. In terms of performance and listening to the music the unifying concept is the different rates of speed for melodies. Where melody is so slow it doesn’t seem like a melody, or when it’s so fast it seems like a shape.
CV: I think the fast parts are the one’s I described as “shiny” earlier. When you switch so quickly from slow to fast the shapes take form and bounce out of the static “melodic” space you’ve built.
JZ: It’s interesting to think about too, because there’s a lot of ways you can interpret melody as being visual. First of all, we use all these metaphors to describe melodic motion that are totally visual. Like we say “go up” or “play lower pitch” or “that’s a stepwise scale” or “that melody had a lot of leaps in it.” So one way you could make an analogy with the music is thinking of it like dance. Which I like a lot. I think of some of the Lawson stuff as being like abstract dance music. On the saxophone, if I just stick with the 12 equally tempered scale I’ve got around 30 notes. Not very many notes. If I thought of each one of those notes as a location, a place that I could go, there’s not really that many places I can go. I can take my time to get place to place, but I’m going to run out of possibilities.
So thinking of melody as always going new places is kind of an illusion, since there’s so few places to go given the notes you have. So that’s why I like to think of it as dance. It’s this motion that is not directional. If we get in a car, we’re trying to go to a specific place; but when someone’s dancing they’re basically staying in the same place. They’re moving in a much more confined area, and it’s basically about how they’re getting from one place to another, and the rhythm of when they’re going to one place and moving to another. That’s how I have to think about Lawson. The music can’t be completely directional. There is this stasis to being rooted in the same place. But I like that concept that it’s not about going anywhere, but about finding different ways of going to the same places.
CV: I like it too. It’s a beautiful idea. And well put. Another thing I’m curious about is that as we talk, you throw out names like Charlie Parker and Wayne Shorter, obviously quintessential persons in the history of jazz. A lot of people I talk to about being interviewed for this series are very excited to talk to me about jazz, and the influences of their music therein, but they’re also reluctant to call themselves a jazz musician. Even though everyone else might call them one.
Given this phenomenon, I was wondering what you think jazz is? There’s no right answer (for now). But obviously you’ve come up through these roots, and you’re talking about coming up with new ways to go to, to be in, the same place. I think that’s actually a nice way to talk about a lot of historical movements, in the arts at least, if not more generally. So using this mechanism, could we talk about what you see as jazz and why you have this desire to not see yourself as explicitly part of that tradition?
JZ: The desire is strictly personal: it doesn’t have a lot to do with how I’m viewed by others.
CV: What do other people say about you? I think of you as one of those, you know, avant-garde composer/jazz guys.
JZ: Sure. Even in a place like Mills College, where I went for grad school, which is like a bunch of people who are really into experimental music, and improvised music, I was the jazz guy. It’s just something I can’t hide. Not that I’d want to, I’m not ashamed in any way. I mean, I have a degree in Jazz Performance. So call me a jazz musician. But what I mean is that I don’t wake up in the morning and say “I am a jazz musician.” I just think about being a musician. I have a lot of strong ties to the musicians of the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) because I think they did a lot to define themselves and present themselves as complete musicians, even though it was an exclusively African-American collective. They were all jazz musicians, playing jazz gigs. But they came up with a new way to think of themselves that was very fresh. Probably the most famous group from that collective, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, started calling their music “Great Black Music” and they were also doing things that were not traditionally jazz like spirituals.
CV: Getting back to our metaphor of staying in the same place but finding new ways to be there, jazz was spawned of spiritual music was it not?
JZ: Right, sure. But I think that is an important distinction. Or at least it was for those guys. To say “don’t think of what we’re playing as jazz, just think of it as Great Black Music.” And that that could be so many things. If you really look at it, to say that they make “Great Black Music” simply means that they make music, and they’re black, and it’s great. That’s as simple as it could be. But it’s neat because that was a very evocative way of saying it. Even though it was the most generic thing they could’ve said about what they were doing, it still had a lot of meaning. It was a real statement.
For me, making a statement like that, I’m not too into it, because terminology and language is such a fluid thing. It’s not something you can control as an artist. You can try to, but you really don’t have a whole lot of control over the perception and labeling of what you do. So I’m not interested in using “jazz” as a defining label for myself. And I definitely do not think of it in terms of what I do creatively. But, I do think that in a way, calling something jazz is like saying “this is great black music.” Not that jazz necessarily equates with GBM, but that they’re comparable terms; calling my music jazz is just as fundamentally vague as them calling their music by that label.
CV: We started talking about your music using words like “experimental,” and “improvisational,” and we used those words to talk about people you went to school with as being into those things, but yet you were the “jazz guy” among them. It seems to me that of all the words we could use to describe jazz, those two would be the ones that best describe what jazz emphasizes in musical expression in a way that didn’t happen (at least not as explicitly) in the musics that came before. And so inthat respect, those are the things that jazz is. I think I’m saying the same thing that you are when you talk about “great black music” equating to jazz. It’s interesting that they felt the need to separate themselves from jazz. Perhaps people were trying to pin down what “jazz” was in a way that they hadn’t yet?
JZ: The main thing I’ve learned from those guys is that they were interested in all music, and that was so profound. Being african-americans, it was almost automatic that there were only certain types of music they could play. For example, Coleman Hawkins was a cellist, yet he became the father of the tenor saxophone and one of the greatest early jazz saxophone players. But he was first a cellist, and he loved classical music and opera his whole life. But he didn’t stick with the cello because at that time there was no way he could get into any symphony. He could never make it there because of the color of his skin. So his path was set in another direction. But in the 60s when these guys came up, they decided they had the power at that time to create their own thing. To control their own destinies. They wouldn’t have to rely on gigs from some other group, say the symphony orchestra, and having to play that game, they were going to form their own groups and perform and produce their own music. And that’s what they were interested in: Music.
I had a lesson with Muhal Richard Abrams, one of the elder founders of the AACM, and I told him that when I’m playing music, some people just automatically categorize it as jazz. I told him it frustrated me, since I considered it to be a narrow way of looking at what I’m doing. I told him I was at odds with music that can be interpreted as being “jazzy” or whatever. So much so that sometimes I try to play the saxophone in ways that aren’t associated with jazz at all to negate this association. And he told me “Look, you just have to take jazz, which is something that you studied and you learned a lot about, and say “Jazz is just an idiom, but it taught me discipline. It was a defined thing in my mind at one time, and it gave me structure, a lot of guidance, and I was able to develop a lot within it.”” So there’s no reason for me to be angry at jazz, no reason to negate it, but you have to say jazz is what it is, it’s not the whole thing. Music is the whole thing. He said what to do was to think of the fundamentals of music; what is music? Music has melody, it has rhythm, it can have harmony. Don’t think of being in the context of any other style or idiom. And it’s as simple as that. So that’s what I try to do. I wake up, and I try to make music. I’m not angry at jazz, and I can’t control how people label me.
All I can hope is that people think I make music.
CV: Ha! I guess there is a danger of people not calling the sonic structures and shapes you make music. Then again, those aren’t the people we care about right now.
JZ: If I was John Cage I might say something like “if the word ‘jazz’ or ‘music’ or whatever, makes you uncomfortable, call it something else.”
CV: Would you disagree that all these things you’re saying now, that they were the same sorts of things that jazz was trying to do at its conception? It’s just that as jazz has reached a certain age, people did try to define it and peg it as something. Maybe they’ve done that, and jazz isn’t a word that can represent the things you speak of now anymore? In my mind, for some reason, I want to believe it still can.You focus on the basics of harmony and melody and whatnot, and then from these fundamentals building, and then letting, something happen, who knows what.
This seems to me a way of describing improvisation quite well, and in turn, a way of describing jazz. This idea has given birth to so many things we’re comfortable calling part of the jazz cannon, but that sound very different. Louis Armstrong and Ornette Coleman don’t sound much alike really, yet everyone’s comfortable calling both of those things “jazz.” What’s happened today that we can’t call disparate sounds created with similar conceptual foundation by the same name? Has the cannon been closed? This might explain why the experimental musicians want to separate themselves so cleanly from the jazz guys…
JZ: Oh, I see what you mean. I don’t know. I don’t know why these things happen. My impression of the word “jazz” is, and my impression of most labels given to music, is that a lot of them happened from the perception of other people. Somehow they caught on…like a lot of other things, the titles were given by outsiders.
CV: Sure, as for the labels I agree there’s no clear telling in the end as to the how’s and why’s of such matters. But that’s not the worry. The important thing is that there was this music that acquired the label “jazz” and for some reason for decades and decades as this music evolved, the label stuck. Now we’re at a point where the only place we see the label used is for these static, even stagnant, throwbacks to the original art forms. For some reason now we feel pressure to call ourselves “avant-garde” or “experimental” rather than use the word ‘jazz,’ which arguably already had in it the descriptive power needed. Or is at least no less descriptive than these other terms.
JZ: Like I said, I don’t know why. It is interesting that the name stuck, because early on there were canonical jazz musicians that rejected the term. Duke Ellington from very early on told people he didn’t play jazz. I do like the idea that you’re expressing, that now people call things “experimental” or “avant garde,” and certain things that historically should’ve been labeled that way; I have in mind the music of Charlie Parker, which obviously ended up being considered part of jazz. There’s a lot of contention around this issue. There’s this defined school of the American Experimentalist, which includes people like John Cage, and Christian Wolf, and Harry Parch, and Henry Cowell; a bunch of white guys that came from Western European musical backgrounds but had their own version of that. They decided to introduce randomness, and indeterminacy, and in many cases improvisation, into their music.
This is all happening at the same time as jazz.
So here are these parallel movements. Then once you get to the 40s and 50s, they’re all in New York. You know, Charlie Parker is in NY, John Cage is in NY, even Stockhausen is there sometimes. Stockhausen had his own version of improvisation that he called “intuitive music.” But most of these guys, John Cage in particular, really rejected their stuff being called improvisational. I think it was important to them to delineate what they were doing from jazz. Some people even think that it was a racist thing, because most of these guys really didn’t understand jazz. John Cage couldn’t relate to it, couldn’t see what was so great about it.
CV: And who were the people that he was dealing with? Who represented jazz in that moment?
JZ: Well, I’m not sure what he knew in the 50s. In the 60s there was an interview where some guy played him John Coltrane’s “Love Supreme” and Cage doesn’t exactly bash it, but he is so naive in the way he talks about it. So ignorant. The point being that the argument about what the sonic thing is called, there are books written about music post-1945, about the music that was radical, avant garde, and important to the shape of experimental music today. And the music of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane is never mentioned. This absence points to the rejection of african-american music being in any way significant towards the development of what is innovative, experimental, and yes, improvised new music. So, one of those big historical racist mistakes.
A big misunderstanding. And it’s too bad.
There are a lot of people who would argue that Charlie Parker’s music should be considered as broadly influential as these white guys’, not just as America’s “folk music” [he says this last part with sarcasm dripping from his tongue]. Calling it folk music implies that a bunch of these people were making music like this, which implies that it was not such a serious craft. You know, just a crazy subculture of the african-american community. A vernacular music that a bunch of people were into.
But Charlie Parker was a serious intellectual. He was incredibly intelligent. So bright. Same thing with John Coltrane. But they were african-american. They both lived such short lives, and they’d both stated all kinds of goals they had for their work. Some people have taken these things to mean that they didn’t reach the level of John Cage because they didn’t have time to reach those goals. For instance, Charlie Parker wanted to study with Varèse, who was this super-important French composer that lived in NYC. Charlie hunted him down for lessons, and the classic story is that he said “I love your music, I’d like to study with you” and Varèse replied “I’m a fan of you, too. I’d love to study with you.” But the way the story gets slanted is that Charlie Parker was looking for a way to become legit. So he needed to study with a European composer so that he could eventually be on the level of those other guys. To “know what he was doing” or whatever.
Which is a joke, because in his short lifetime he did stuff that was completely amazing.
It’s still the most amazing music now. But that story gets slanted to say we could’ve considered him great if he’d written a string-quartet or whatever. And that’s too bad. There was a production at The New England Conservatory before I was there, it had a concept that was horrible in its way. Almost a back-handed tribute to Charlie Parker, a festival called “Charlie Parker and the Teachers of his Dreams.” And it was like a what if… [insert uncomfortable laughter here]
CV: What if they, the white guys, had gotten their hands on him? Almost saying, he was smart enough to know who he needed to see to be really great, but not capable of greatness on his own?
JZ: Yea. But you know, these people use one type of measuring device to evaluate another thing. They have their own aesthetic, and they try to apply it to some other kind of music and it just doesn’t work. You can’t look at all the music of the world in a vacuum. You have to understand a little bit about the social significance and cultural conditions that make these things. These big misunderstandings stem from lack of knowledge in this area I think. For instance, John Cage didn’t like Charlie Parker’s music because it had “too much emotion” since he was so obsessed with ridding his music of personal taste and emotion.
CV: Interesting. You mention communities as being relevant to understanding the musical offerings developed therein, I wanted to ask how you see the community of artists around in the Bay area? Call it the jazz community. Or not.
JZ: The community here is so great. The best thing about moving here is that there are so many musicians that I feel a deep connection with.
CV: To review, you grew up in Seattle and did your BA in Boston before moving here for grad school. So Boston and Seattle are the two strongholds of your musical upbringing. How are they different from here?
JZ: Well, I was part of a real strong community at my high school in Seattle. I was in the jazz bands there, and we got to fly around the world to perform. I went to European jazz festivals and performed there. Played in New York. We were really good. And that was super important. When I first started getting into jazz I was living outside of Seattle, and I was one of a few people who was really checking jazz out. And then when I went to high school it was like paradise. There were so many people who just couldn’t stop talking about jazz. It was great.
CV: Do you think most of those people had a set idea of what jazz was/is?
JZ: Hmmm, I don’t know. We were all very young, so I don’t think so. We were interested in the “whole thing” not necessarily…
CV: To return to your previous metaphor, you just wanted to jump in the ocean, and that was the nearest diving board available.
JZ: Yes, and we were exposed to a lot of things coming from a more traditional perspective. To me, the most conservative viewpoint on jazz comes from Wynton Marsalis, and the people surrounding him. And in high school I was very involved with that. Every year we went to the competition at Lincoln Center with Wynton. There was always a Q&A with him and everything. I was very exposed to those ideas, but never really a big fan of him, just because there was a lot of negativity and a lot of exclusiveness coming from him, and you know, who likes that?
CV: Right. Well maybe some people…
JZ: Anyway, that was high school. Then I moved to Boston which was totally different, but amazing. Different because a lot of people had a much more diverse background in music, so I got exposed to different things. Boston was a great place to live and be a student, but not so much to be an actual working musician. The school systems are great, but outside of that, Boston is a small place, not a lot of places to play. The east coast in general, you know the stereotype, but I really do think it’s true, that people have a little more cut-throat personalities, that they’re more closed off. So I moved out here. And coming out here, I didn’t know the Bay Area was such a big place. Just in general, L.A. and the Bay Area are huge metropolitan areas. Much different than Seattle and Portland. And there’s a lot more going on already, which is exciting. From Boston I had connections with people who lived out here, so they put me in touch with people like Michael Coleman.
CV: Ah yes, next week’s interviewee! As well as part of your cohort Arts & Sciences.
JZ: Yes, Michael was the first jazz musician I met when I moved out here. Which is kind of amazing, because he’s years later still one of my favorite people to play music with, and I think that’s just amazing that there was the network in place where I could find him instantly. Then through him I’ve met most of the other people I play music with as well. That’s kind of all it takes, is one person you really have a connection.
CV: Do you think that’s in general true, or something peculiar to this area?
JZ: That’s what I’ve found in my short experience of meeting people through music. And even though I see the Bay Area as a thriving, large musical community and everything, it hasn’t really taken me that long to know who everyone is.
CV: Right. Even if you haven’t played with someone yet you know who you’re likely to soon.
JZ: Not that I know everybody, but I know a lot of people that are active, and that’s nice. The one thing I would like to see that I think really helps a community, is a lot of support of each other. And a lot of positivity towards the things that are really, really good. Getting things written about artists that are positive, and really go into a lot of depth, that’s one thing that’s very good. But the first thing is that the musicians need to support themselves. They can’t expect other people to support them if they’re not helping each other out; if they’re not, in some way, working as a team. That’s very important.
CV: And by “support themselves” you mean the individual musicians should support the larger group of musicians in the community?
JZ: Yes. Exactly. Not that it needs to be automatic, or that you should feel the need to support somebody whose work you don’t like, or to kiss-up to someone just to get a gig. There’s plenty of stuff out here that’s creative at a very high level, and that deserves to be at the very least supported by the colleagues and the friends. Out here there are a lot of places to play, but at the same time, I think a negative view of the jazz community comes when people look at the venues and see that there are institutions that say they are supporting jazz; if we measure the strength of the jazz community by how well these institutions are doing, then we’re not going to get a very positive picture of what’s going on.
But the institutions are not what’s going on. What’s going on is the music, and the people that make it, and they’re going to be there regardless of whether the institutions are happening or not. So, in my book the venues don’t really matter. It’s nice to have places that support the musicians, and it’s good to have lots of places to play. But the fact is that there are so few people that will even go to these shows. There really is a surplus of performances, because there aren’t that many people who are interested in going to see these shows. I mean right now. At this moment. TONIGHT. The number of people who would go to a performance by someone they’ve never heard of, like a jazz person or anyone really, in this day and age, there aren’t that many people interested in doing that.
CV: Also I think the institutions are set up to give people something that they’ve already demonstrated that they want.
JZ: Like what?
CV: Like star acts, historical ones even, that they can bring to town and sell out for 2 or 3 nights. That’s what they’re set up to do. Not to cater to the music; not to keep the music moving forward by supporting the artists that are pushing boundaries of what’s come before. Even though they might hope both of those things will happen, I don’t see any necessary connection between the two. I guess it’s the difference between sustaining the people creating the new art, and sustaining those who’ve already created.
JZ: Yea, I’m with you on that! And I’m just so perplexed by a lot of these institutions. I mean, SF Jazz, that’s one thing that I can understand because they bring in a lot of people from New York and everything, and that’s great. I mean the superstars come and a lot of people want to go see them. That’s cool. Ok, but what about the local people? The support for them isn’t really there. I don’t understand really what goes on in someone’s mind when they open a jazz club, because first of all if you did that you would probably be like “Yea, I may not make any money on this, but I just want to support the music.” But that’s not exclusive to jazz, that’s just the reality of being a small business owner. It’s just really hard. No matter what your trade, you live a fragile existence. Hardly anything lasts forever. These things come and go, but nothing like that will ever be the next Microsoft or whatever.
But what perplexes me are the places like Yoshi’s that say it’s an issue of survival, but they just want to keep getting bigger. All I can think of when I go in to a place like that is “These guys are really trying to make some money.” They’ve got the food, the beer, the drink minimum. And it’s not about the ticket prices necessarily. I’m willing to pay a lot of money to go see some music. But when the environment is set up in such a way that it’s really clear that they’re trying to create all these extra things in addition to the music, and that’s ok, but it can be distracting. What it says to me is that they’re not just interested in presenting music and maintaining a business standard. They want to grow and spread and make a buck…
CV: The interesting thing is the way the media tends to portray musical sustainability, artistic sustainability, is by how well institutions like are doing financially. Jazz might not be alone in this, classical music seems to be in a similar place, but the viability of the art form is apparently judged by how many tickets are sold for the shows, rather than the quality of the work coming out.
JZ: The thing about classical music is that the money that comes in from ticket sales does not even come close to covering how much the musicians get paid. It’s all endowments and donations and stuff.
CV: Perhaps that’s a model the supporters of jazz should aim for?
JZ: That’s the same thing as SF JAZZ though. They’re comparable in that they get money to preserve the really big things. Like bringing in the master musicians.
CV: So then we’re still in the same, rather near-sighted spot where the evolution of the creature we call jazz is not being supported.
JZ: Yea, the local people, the younger people get lost. A lot of people get lost. New York gets a lot of precedent. You know, if you make interesting great music in Milwaukee, people might say “Cool.” But if you make that same music in New York City, then you might actually be considered legit. Considered a jazz musician worth talking about. Which is so strange. So so strange.
CV: Right. That’s interesting, because with some other art forms, or even pop music for instance, being from somewhere other than NYC or LA can almost be part of the appeal. But for jazz it seems you need to go to the mecca or you don’t exist.
JZ: Yea, it’s too bad. Actually, that’s one reason that that article in the East Bay Express was a drag too. I mean, how do we measure the strength of the jazz scene around here? One way is that a lot of Bay Area musicians go to NYC and make it there; therefore the Bay has something going for it. To me that’s kind of depressing though. It doesn’t say a whole lot about the area being great.
CV: It makes it sound like we’re a farm team.
JZ: Yea! Totally a farm team. And it’s stupid to think of us that way.
CV: It’s also sad, because there are plenty of people who probably wouldn’t want nor be able to live in New York for completely non-artistic reasons. I mean, if you wouldn’t be happy living in New York, it’s possible that your art would suffer if you lived there. I wonder if Graham Connah is a person like this. Or perhaps yourself.
JZ: Right. Probably. The other thing is that NY musicians move to other places in the country to just hide out. Basically they want to live somewhere that’s more low-key, but they still go to NY all the time and do their thing. People, like Wayne Horvitz and Cuong Vu, who moved to Seattle to sort of hide out from NY, are important figures on the local scene. They’re great community organizers and have had a huge impact. This sort of thing would be good to see around here. Joshua Redman is a huge name, a famous saxophone player, who made it in NY and then moved back here to his home town of Berkeley. I just saw him by the Cheeseboard the other day actually…
But it doesn’t seem like he does much of anything for the community around here. He’s really hiding out I guess. And that’s kind of disappointing. He did do some stuff when he first moved out here that got a lot of national attention. He started this thing called the SFJAZZ Collective, the hilarious thing about which, was that everybody in the band was flown in from NY. That was ridiculous. It’s just basically an all-star NY jazz band. Maybe it wasn’t Redman’s idea. But seriously, ridiculous.
CV: He’s the kind of guy who could step up and make a difference in the lives of musicians around here in the way that Horvitz and Vu have done in Seattle.
JZ: Exactly. I wanted to mention that I recently started a monthly concert series (every third Sunday from 5-7pm) in North Oakland called the Actual Jazz Series. It’s very exciting because it’s a very accessible all-ages venue, and we present a highly diverse cross-section of the local creative music scene. Each month is curated by a different local artist and we don’t plan to ever repeat a curator. I’m especially pumped about using this series as a way to connect to younger musicians. Trumpeter Erik Jekabson is curating the next one (Sunday July 17th) and he asked some young recent college grads that are originally from the Bay Area to play. Then in October trombonist Rob Ewing is planning to have one of his ensembles from the Jazzschool play.
Another great thing about the series is that we record and take video of every concert and post it all up on the website. So we’re slowly creating this great archive that is accessible by everyone, and the musicians take our performances more seriously than the average gig because what they play is permanently up on the internet. Attendance has been really great so far and I hope this series can continue for a long time.
CV: It seems to me that strengthening the musical communities in regions other than New York is essential to the continued production of quality music in NY itself. For instance, the birth of most of the really great musical ideas of the past century happened in places like New Orleans, Kansas City, Chicago, and so on. The progenitors of these ideas then tended to move to NY to get the manpower needed to produce and peddle their auditory ideas into what we’re familiar with today. If creativity is stifled in these places, in effect robbing the city-centers of the creative talent coming from the middle and westward, then the next century’s music is bound to suffer.
JZ: Yes. It’s just sad that the Midwest and other regional communities don’t have more support for the arts. I don’t know why NY has to be considered so great. It’s just a human thing, a cluster in these areas… but especially now with the internet, the world is getting smaller and all that, you would think that already we would’ve seen more people spreading out all over the place to do their art. I also think about jazz, even though it is a live art form, that it’s going to take some time before the whole world gets back into live performance of anything. You know, going somewhere and actually seeing something happen. I think it’s going to be a really long time, but I think it’s going to make a comeback.
CV: Right, the virtual thing is new and sexy now. Going to concerts perhaps less so. And a live performance can be very different from the recorded version thereof, sometimes we forget that as we hoard mp3s…
JZ: Yea, in the 60s there were huge stars, and I’ll bet when people went to see them, the Beatles or whoever, some people were just like “This is horrible. Thousands of people are screaming, I can’t hear the music, and yet I sit here…This isn’t fun.” They want the music not the crowd. Even for smaller stars, Tune-yards for example, you have to go to the GAMH or wherever and stand the whole time. And that sucks and I understand why some wouldn’t want to go out for that. They can buy their CDs or mp3s and stay home. There was TV and now there’s the internet and we can get all this stuff so easily wherever we happen to be. It’s just there at hand at all times.
But I think at some point the commodification is going to fade. Someone will be playing music in a room somewhere, and another person will walk in and it will be the first time they’ve ever heard music played live, and it’s going to blow their socks off. They’ll wonder “what’ve we been doing listening to our iPhone speakers all this time? This doesn’t even compare.” You know? People will always play live music, and someday there will be a comeback where people will be excited to witness it. I may not live to see it happen, but I can’t imagine that as long as people play live and in the moment, as long as people are there making sounds for that moment… Live music will return.
photo by Lindsey Hausmann
Check out Jacob’s trio Anteater (featuring upstanding bass by Kim Cass and percussive textures courtesy of Sam Ospovat) in Oakland and Sacramento this month:
7/13/11 – Anteater @ Cafe Van Kleef
9 pm, 1621 Telegraph Ave, Oakland CA
Opening for Bob Thayer/Sean Olmstead guitar duo
7/15/11 – Anteater @ Mama Buzz Cafe
8 pm, 2318 Telegraph Ave, Oakland CA
All ages variety with special magic performance by Harry Bolles
7/18/11 – Anteater @ Luna Cafe
1414 16th Street, Sacramento, CA
Playing Ross Hammond’s Nebraska Mondays series
Cost: $5-20 sliding scale
Who's What Now
who's what now 