Responses To A Troll & A Heckler

Who's "qualified" to be a critic? Anybody.

Something to listen to: Burning Ambulance has recently begun partnering with Rihards Endriksons, journalist and artistic director of Latvia’s Skaņu Mežs festival, on the monthly Resonance.fm show Such Music, which is devoted to new works of free improvised music, either previously unheard or created specifically for the show. The latest episode features a Zoom interview with master bass player Mark Dresser about his teaching, his upcoming book and his new solo record Tines of Change, published by Pyroclastic Records last month. It also features two recent and previously unpublished live recordings by the trio of saxophonist Chris Biscoe, guitarist and saxophonist Kazuhisa Uchihashi, and drummer Roger Turner. The shorter of the two pieces features “classic Turner” — another instance of the charismatic musician talking to the other players onstage and making jokes. The three musicians will be touring Europe this fall. The show ends with a preview of Repetition Disguises, a new duo record by electric guitarists James O’Sullivan and N.O. Moore, out this month on Liam Stefani’s Scatter Archive. Here’s the link to listen.

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Responding to a troll: So last week, I saw the tweet above (which has since been deleted). First of all, yes, I know it’s dumb, and when confronted with a display of such pure ignorance and dumbassery online, one can always — indeed, one should always — do the equivalent of averting one’s eyes and shuffling past, like you do when you see someone taking a shit on a subway platform. But this time I decided to think about it.

On Twitter itself, I responded, “Is it better to not even know what you don’t know? Is it a kind of bliss?” I mean, the phrase “legal free options to listen to any song whenever” reveals such a fundamental misunderstanding of the streaming universe, it’s liable to turn me into Ted Gioia just thinking about it.

The sheer volume of music that is not available on any streaming service is mind-boggling. I would be willing to bet that there’s more music not streaming than music that is streaming. Here’s just one example. The other week, someone asked me to create a 4th of July-themed playlist. One of the songs I wanted to include was the Blasters’ “American Music,” from their self-titled 1981 album. It wasn’t on Spotify, but the 1991 compilation The Blasters Collection was. By the time I went back to finish editing the playlist a week and a half later, The Blasters Collection was no longer available on streaming services.

Here’s another example. This past week, the CD in the photo above arrived in my PO box. It’s actually a 2CD set — a 1999 expanded reissue of a 1979 double live LP by the Milestone Jazzstars, a supergroup consisting of Sonny Rollins on tenor and soprano sax, McCoy Tyner on piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Al Foster on drums. This set, which contains five extra tracks adding up to nearly an hour of music (the whole thing is 14 tracks long and runs 2 hours 20 minutes), was only released in Japan, and even the abridged US version’s not on Spotify or Tidal (my streaming service of choice) or Apple Music or Amazon Music.

(I’m not gonna tell you how much I paid for it, because my wife reads this newsletter. But suffice it to say that if you remember buying Japanese import CDs in the 1990s, you can probably make a pretty accurate guess.)

The music is great. They play pieces from their current catalogs — Rollins’ “The Cutting Edge,” Tyner’s “Nubia,” Carter’s “N.O. Blues” — and frequently break the quartet up into subdivisions. Tyner and Carter duet on “Alone Together”; Rollins plays “Continuum” solo; Carter plays “Willow Weep for Me” solo; Rollins and Tyner duet on “In a Sentimental Mood”; and there’s a pianoless trio version of “Don’t Stop the Carnival”. Milestone was one of the labels really flying the flag for high-level acoustic jazz in the late ’70s, and this album should absolutely still be in print and far better known than it is.

But if you get your knowledge of music from streaming services, you wouldn’t know that album ever existed at all. And that’s why music torrenting still exists. And why there are still MP3 blogs. And why some of us spend so much of our time and money on eBay and Discogs. If you know, you know (and as one similarly afflicted, you have my sympathy).

Responding to a heckler: So three years ago, on the week of Charlie Parker’s centennial (he was born August 29, 1920), I posted on Facebook, “Feel like this might be the wrong week for an essay on my ambivalence re: the music of Charlie Parker and bebop in general...”

It got a few likes and a few amused comments, and life went on. But somehow, nearly three years later (yay, algorithms!), it came to the attention of a musician and writer I will not name, who commented last week, “you have just disqualified yourself as a jazz critic.” (I’m retaining his capitalization.)

Assuming he was being as lighthearted as my initial post had been, I responded, “That happened decades ago and I feel much better off for it.”

To which he said, “if it was based on a rational and nuanced rejection of jazz I would accept that. Not sure that I have ever seen that in your writing. You have to understand something before you reject it. I am not being glib, and I know this sounds like a nasty crack, but if you want to write about it you have to know what it is and where it comes from. No critic would be able to write an acceptable rejection of Joyce unless he understood the lineage and the references. So no critic can reject Bird intelligently unless he knows the music that came before and after. In detail.”

At that point I realized we weren’t just joking around, we were having an Actual Discussion About The Role Of Criticism. So I responded, “I’m not teaching a for-credit course on anything, in any of my writing, ever. I’m pointing people toward records they might want to listen to for pleasure. ‘You have to understand something before you reject it’ is simply false. If I hear a piece of music and I don’t like it, it is my right as a listener to say ‘Nope, Not For Me’ and move on with my life. And that’s all I am — a listener who shares his observations with other (sometimes potential) listeners.”

He didn’t take it well: “Written like a true confession. If you consider yourself a serious critic of the music, of any music, you have to understand what you’re criticizing. You pretty much just confessed to being unqualified to do any of it. This is about taking seriously something which people have devoted and giving their lives to. You make it sound like asking a girl to the prom. yes, you can stop listening to something if you don’t understand it, but you should never be writing about it because as a writer, you have an obligation to the art and the culture. If you don’t think that, we really have nothing to talk about.”

My final response (for reasons that will become immediately clear) was, “Not only do I not consider myself ‘a serious critic of the music’, I reject the very idea of ‘qualifications.’ To quote Varèse, music is organized sound. There’s nothing more to understand, and the only thing required to have an opinion is a pair of ears. And I didn’t say I stop listening to things because I don’t *understand* them — I said I stop listening to things because I don’t *like* them. They’re boring, or they’re an exercise in ‘look what I can do’-ism, or something else. I have no obligation to *anyone* or anything. And just so we’re clear, *neither do artists*.”

He ended the discussion (from my perspective) with this: “spoken like a Trumpie. ‘We don’t need to know anything, we just have opinions.’ This is really incredible, to hear a known critic admit all of this. ‘I am an art critic — I have a pair of eyes.’ ‘I am an atomic physicist — I have a brain.’”

I hope you understand why I stopped responding after that. But the points he was trying to raise are ones I’ve wrestled with many times. As I mentioned above, this guy is both a musician and a writer-about-music, having authored multiple books about early jazz history and recorded several albums of his own compositions, with bands that include players I know and like. I’ve never listened to any of his music, or read any of his books, but I have no doubt that he has put in the work. If we were both competing for a job as a musicology professor or something, the institution would choose him over me in a heartbeat.

But that’s not what I do. That’s not how I see my role in the world of music journalism, or music criticism (I hope you agree with me that they’re two different things). I believe that scholars like the late Phil Schaap, or the still living Ben Young and Rick Lopez, do an extraordinary service by researching and archiving and keeping track of the details. But the mere accrual of facts — dates, session personnel, authorship of tunes — is not enough. You have to be able to decide which facts are important, marking stages in an artistic journey, and which are mere happenstance.

Side note: I am generally opposed to critics claiming that one album in an artist’s catalog is a stepping stone to the next, or anything like that. What I know about artists is that almost without exception (say, Matana Roberts, who will be releasing the fifth in a planned 12-album cycle in the fall) they think of each record they make as a thing in itself. And generally speaking, when you’re asking them about their “latest” record, they’re forced to think back and retroactively apply meaning to it, because they’re already on to the next thing in their mind and heart.

Anyway, what I do is a lot more… subjective than what this cranky writer wants me to do. I listen to records. Sometimes, I see artists play live. Sometimes, I interview them, and try to get them to tell me about their creative process. But I filter their art through my own perceptions, which is what allows me to make connections that others might not make, like when I say that Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s music reminds me of Sunn O))) or Einstürzende Neubauten.

A more literal-minded critic like this guy who decided to come at me about Charlie Parker would surely say that I had no business opining about Thorvaldsdottir’s work at all, since I can’t read music and have almost no knowledge of the orchestral/symphonic tradition. But, see, to me it’s all just sounds. If the sounds are arranged in a compelling way, I will listen (repeatedly, carefully) and eventually share my thoughts. If I have questions, I will ask the artist, and share what I learn. But knowing “the lineage and the references,” to quote the crank, is a fool’s errand, because musical evolution is never a purely chronological journey from A to B to Z. People are always into unexpected shit that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the “genre” they operate in. For example, what does Charlie Parker’s love of Igor Stravinsky have to do with bebop? There’s no direct connection between them. So you can like Parker’s records, or not, without knowing that information. It’s reasonable to infer that he liked lots of innocuous pop tunes from his youth, too; should critics theorize about how those influenced his work, too?

More importantly, individual works of art exist on their own and deserve to be appreciated for themselves. To the greatest extent possible, you should listen to a record in order to figure out what makes it different and special, not to draw connections between what your archival research has convinced you are the creator’s artistic forebears, or to pinpoint what makes it most like the work of the creator’s contemporaries, the better to create the illusion of a “movement.”

And just so we’re clear, critics don’t owe artists anything, artists don’t owe critics anything, and the only qualification to be a music critic or a musician is the desire to be one. If you can only blow one note on a trumpet, but you can blow it at regular intervals, congratulations — you’re a musician. Find someone to accompany you and do it to your heart’s content. If listening to a particular record makes you feel things, things you want to write down and share with other people, congratulations — you’re a music critic. Are there degrees to this shit? Are there ways to get better? Absolutely. But there are no “qualifications,” and there are no barriers to entry. Anyone who tells you otherwise is an asshole.

One last thing, before I go: I reviewed 10 Tom Waits albums (Closing Time, Nighthawks at the Diner, Swordfishtrombones, Franks Wild Years, Bone Machine, Mule Variations, Alice, Blood Money, Real Gone and Bad As Me) for Shfl last week. Here’s the link.

That’s it for now. See you next week!