expanding horizons new frontiers in music
descend from the same guy, I found very interesting.
New Books on Music Lecture Series: Ben Ratliff & Alex Ross by David R. Adler
Books are immersive, self-contained worlds, but their stories can radiate outward, in ways the authors didn’t necessarily foresee. Two recent volumes, Ben Ratliff’s Coltrane: The Story of a Sound and Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (both Farrar, Straus & Giroux), seem at first glance to address different subjects. However, each succeeds in showing how modernism—in jazz and classical music, respectively—has impacted a wider cultural sphere, changing the way we listen to this day. In late 2007, the Philadelphia Music Project hosted readings by both of these influential music critics, as part of the PMP New Books Lecture Series. Although Ratliff and Ross appeared in Philadelphia two months apart, they touched on matters of creativity and artistic production that are inescapably related. Ratliff, a critic for The New York Times, began by emphasizing what his book is not: a biography of the late saxophonist John Coltrane. Rather, he explained, it is “a book about music”—specifically, the evolution and reception of Coltrane’s sound, what it reveals about Coltrane’s time period and the way we appreciate jazz artistry in the present. Similarly, Ross, a staff writer for The New Yorker, described his book as “very much a story of classical music’s place in culture right now,” an inquiry into “the challenge of modernism and how audiences have struggled to come to terms with it.” Put another way: If Ratliff tells the story of a sound, Ross tells the story of many sounds. If Ratliff focuses laser-like on the output of one artist so as to generate PMP 38
larger questions, Ross casts an imposingly wide net so as to narrow the questions down. And while both narratives interact on an implicit meta level, sometimes they literally converge on a specific point—for instance, when they explicate the influence of Coltrane on Steve Reich. In these pages, connoisseur viewpoints are argued over in new ways; daunting bodies of work are placed in an incisive, welcoming context for the general reader. The big-picture message is that jazz and concert music aren’t niche categories after all. History buffs, rockers, ravers: All can learn from Ratliff’s and Ross’s accounts of musical innovation in the 20th century, and draw their own conclusions about the trajectory of the 21st. Ratliff’s book idea began gestating on the job in the mid ’90s, when he noticed a pervasive Coltrane influence on the players he was reviewing for the Times. “You start to think: We know Coltrane was important. We know some feel he was the last major figure in jazz. But why? How did this happen? Why is it that this one man had such a blanketing influence?” Coltrane’s sound, moreover, galvanized players on just about every point of jazz’s aesthetic spectrum: Coltrane became an ideal of the practiced musician, the perfectionist, the solitary student.… On the other hand, he’s also an ideal as a cathartic improviser… [whose playing] doesn’t reduce to bar lines and traditional structure.… These are two different ways of looking at music and the fact that both of them
Leading off with a passage from his Introduction (pp. xviii–xx), Ratliff spoke of Coltrane as an artist whose transitions, however radical, still had a compelling internal logic. “One of the general listener’s major misperceptions of jazz is that when improvisers work at their best, they pluck ideas out of the sky, channeling heaven. No.” Ratliff also challenged the notion of Coltrane as an otherworldly saint, while insisting this needn’t diminish his stature in jazz history. This is the focus of the second section of the book: not Coltrane but the rhetoric about Coltrane. Ratliff read from a chapter called “you must die”—words that Charles Moore actually wrote to fellow trumpeter Don Ellis in 1965, in response to Ellis’s negative criticism of Coltrane. Choosing a passage from pp. 171–174, Ratliff summarized a de rigueur view that took hold around Coltrane’s late-period work, as “music [that] requires new inventions of selfhood,” that “cannot be separated from the path toward racial tolerance and absolute worldwide human equality.” Without being cavalier about this view—he takes pains to contextualize and explore its genesis— Ratliff concludes: “No art can hold up under the weight of these hopes.” During the Q&A session, a mild tension surfaced between Ratliff, eager to demystify Coltrane, and audience members keen to hold onto the artist as a spiritual symbol. But common ground was easy to establish. Referring back to the “titanic claims of importance” that some lavished on Coltrane in the mid-’60s, Ratliff said: “I think if I had heard that band playing [live], I probably would’ve written something like that too.” His larger point, however, was that by evaluating Coltrane on the plane of mortals, not gods, we do him even greater justice. Ross prefaced his talk with autobiography, recalling a youthful immersion in classical music that “began with Mozart and stopped with Brahms.” By college he listened “almost exclusively to music of the postwar avant-garde era,” writing off popular music entirely. Then he made the leap to radical jazz artists such as Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, followed by experimental rock along the lines of Sonic Youth and Pere Ubu. Finally, around age 25, he came to accept the Beatles and other universally admired fare. Such was the journey that inspired The Rest Is Noise. Ross explained: “If I could discover popular music in this roundabout way, perhaps there are those who could move in the opposite direction, who have grown up with popular music, and are listening to the more adventurous, progressive end of it, who might become curious about classical music and perhaps enter through the gateway of the avant-garde or minimalism or Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and work backward from there…. I’m engaging in a project that a lot
of music and performing arts organizations are facing now, which is to find new audiences.” The Rest Is Noise falls into three chronological sections, the first addressing the sonic revolutions of 1900–1935; the second the New Deal period, World War II and the rise of totalitarianism; and the third the postwar avant-garde and the contemporary age. Ross read from each of these, beginning with a passage on Schoenberg (pp. 49–51), continuing with a look at government support of the arts under FDR (pp. 277–280) and ending with thoughts on the “purely American art” of minimalism (pp. 473–475). “I called the book The Rest Is Noise to allude to the perception of 20th-century classical music as a period of continuous dissonance … the general sense that classical music was going along wonderfully and suddenly all hell breaks loose and the music ceases to be of broad interest. I obviously don’t agree.” The Q&A session began on an apt note: What’s next? What is Ross excited about in the new century? “As a critic I have an obligation not to have any ideas about the future,” he responded. “It might cut me off from hearing the music that doesn’t fit into my expectations. I really try to let the music tell me where things might be going.” Ratliff, in his text, makes a similar case against “future-mongering” and criticizes the “hippie myth in which jazz is ‘tomorrow’s music’ forever and ever…” This is not to say that innovation is nothing. It’s to acknowledge music’s tendency to “advance by slow degrees,” as Ratliff puts it. Many jazz critics, itching to hear “the next Coltrane” and ready to fault young musicians for insufficient boldness, would do well to check their impatience. As fun as it is to imagine a dialogue between Ratliff and Ross, it’s unnecessary, for such a dialogue already exists. In early November 2007, the two participated in an open exchange at the widely read news and culture site Slate.com. The goal, in Ross’s words, was “to converse for a day or two across the walls of specialized taste.” In an eight-part epistolary format, they mused on the formation of taste among the young; the role of the critic amid the upheavals of digital media; ways of talking about music that “move past ideological dispute,” and other areas of shared concern. The discussion kept cycling back to the differences, and commonalities, between jazz and classical performance, and the problem of attracting and even defining the audience—issues that both Coltrane and The Rest Is Noise contend with in various intersecting ways. “You and I have both been talking about ritual,” wrote Ratliff, concluding philosophically. “[A]nd the thing about ritual is that by definition it goes on and on, whatever it is. That’s what we hope from our favorite music—we never want it to stop in our lives, whether it’s free improvisation or composed top to bottom.”
David R. Adler writes regularly for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Weekly, Jazz Times and Down Beat. His work on music, politics and culture has also appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic Online, Slate, Democratiya and many other publications. He blogs at lerterland.blogspot.com.
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