It has occurred to me that I used to have friends who listened to music . We all liked the "Waltz for Debby" live album from the Vanguard by Bill Evans when it came out . We were crazy about Coltrane and "Favorite Things" was nearly a pop tune to us but "Africa Brass " was just terrific . We didn't get high to listen to them or drink , we just liked it , we all liked it . Most of my friends in high school were older musicians but I did have some friends my own age and they also liked jazz . I do think that back then I clung to the first statement of the melody and the arrangement before I got deeper into the improvisation. As I became more involved with my own playing I appreciated the individual solos more as well as the way the individual player approached their solos . Eventually I had opened my ears to electronic music , music concrete , modern classical , and free jazz which seemed to come together around 1959 . Listening to music became like watching athletics in my mind . A fine player was indeed to be compared to an athlete except ,in my opinion , the ability to play and listen is more intellectually stimulating.
Working as sideman wasn't exactly the dream I had in mind yet I always improvised even on the straight gigs . Surprisingly enough , it was a jazz job that turned me off the stringed bass in the mid-sixties . While on the road I entertained myself town to town with a guitar I bought. I guess I was playing bossa nova songs and even performing them with the band I was traveling with occasionally in our shows. In Louis and Clarkston ,on the border of Idaho and Washington , we played a Moose Lodge for a month ,December to New Years Eve and during one afternoon I went to see "Hard Days Night" at a movie house and things started changing fast . In Dallas I had a month lay over after the gig at the hotel and I stayed with a girl I met , a waitress in the hotel who had all of Bob Dylan's recordings till 1965 or so.I wasn't really receptive to the Beatles or Dylan but after listening I began to think that I could sing and started writing lyrics ,still to entertain myself as I worked on the road . This departure from jazz was an important event and I wasn't the only person caught up in it . After leaving the group , totally drugged out in Louisville Kentucky , I stopped in Washington DC and , after a few months , headed for Austin . The jazz work I was expecting didn't materialize right away and again I was entertaining myself with my guitar between gigs .It was at this time that I met Jerry and Pete and we formed the basic vocal group that continued till 1968 . It was also at that time that I played the Austin Jazz Festival and one of the people I had to perform with was Fathead Newman. Fathead saw where music was going and was ahead of his time incorporating rock beats in his jazz vehicles much as Stanley Turrentine would be doing a few years later .This was fine for Fathead but I wasn't personally happy to play the stringed bass behind him in this style. I left Austin and dedicated myself to the folk rock scene adapting myself to the lead guitar position with the other rhythm guitar ,folk players , Jerry and Pete . Leaving jazz yet still improvising around the folk music with my guitar , the rock beat prevailing , I was happier playing the guitar than the stringed bass in the era.
While rock grew and became more and more complicated in production , the bass lines stayed a dance beat , sometimes simply the tonic rhythmically. Pop music had ups and downs with currently interesting venues that came and went . Jazz seemed to be going backward on the bottom , the bass line , which became a work horse not the creative independent line that came forth with Scott LaFaro with Bill Evans . Ron Carter had to hold down the changes for the illusive nature of Wayne Shorter's music with Miles Davis in the sixties and the walking bass was about all he could do with it . When Miles switched horses and went to a rock beat and found a greater popularity , jazz was advancing as rock but also staying the same like pop music .
Sometimes I hear music , guitar music , "head bangers" that seem to move through the changes like elephants just taking enormous steps without contrary motion . The power alone of the instruments carry the vehicle like a tank over the audience raising their arms and hands as if at a Hitler rally . Pop becomes something like a cult to join or be run over and excommunicated from society . Jazz was going a similar path in "Fusion" with the melodies so complicated as to make it impossible to improvise . The melody became the only thing to cling to and the individual solo was going by the way side .
There are still great players but they have to work inside the character that is recognizable by a culture that has taken the easy route much like water going down stream .There are many songs that seem to call to people from the venue of the simplest or lowest common denominator.The advent of "Rap" music using primarily rhythmical undertones could be seen as another step backward toward the primitive entertainment of basic drums without melody at all but featuring poetry and sensationalism .
Many of my friends are gone , dead , or maybe I just lost touch with them . I don't know where they are at with it all any more . I do know that I still crave the improvisation, the independent line , the counterpoint of jazz. Unfortunately I don't think that this is supported by our current culture or where it is headed.I question intrinsically the idea of capitalism as a driving force to art , if there is art .I thought that there was art in Coltrane yet I still saw him as an entertainer grasping upon the ideas that he saw his audience responding to like "Favorite Things". Once I had an argument with Dizzy Gillespie about his choice of an electric bass player as opposed to a stringed bass player in his band . Diz had the patience to explain to me that he was merely trying to reach the greater audience . I admired Dizzy and I wanted him to remain in the crest of the wave as he had been in the late forties with Be Bop . Diz knew better and continued till he died ,surviving in his field , while not in the fore front , at least in the game . My characterization of Gillespie is now recognizable to me as people characterize me as someone recognizable to them ,though I may not be that person.Wasn't Miles striving to entertain and make a living in our system when he went to rock? The capitalist way has brought about an influx of singers and dancers who merely want to get their share of this market.
As music has grown to such a big business and even a contest we lose sight of the idea of art in favor of mob popularity. The idea of having a contest between Rembrandt and Van Gogh would seem funny yet we have come to the conclusion that we can have contest between songs ,singers ,dancers,players, musicians, and composers. I think that capitalism has corrupted art to the point of no return . If singers are judged by how good they sing the cliches of forty years ago , where is the art ? Popular phrasing is similar to what Ray Charles was doing in 1956 . So the masquerade is the art ? It would be different if we were recognizing interpretation but still it would only be comparing one painting to another . Is beauty in the eye of the beholder or not ? Is beauty in the ear of the beholder ?
Somewhere back there I was inspired by players , musicians , and composers who seemed different ,individually different . This difference is what is missing in our current format of capitalist art directing our culture . What we are witnessing is the effect of capitalism creating the same mold over and over again . The same movies are redone ,the same tunes are re-sung , and the same phrasing is overdone in the rush to success and the big pay off .
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