In Pursuit of Excellence: Keeping the world safe from mediocrity

In this morning’s New York Times article on Michael Moore, Chris Lehmann, editor-in-chief of The Baffler, is quoted as saying, “the problem with being an outsider is you can sometime confuse truth-telling with self-indulgence.”  Being a life-long outsider, I’ve got to think about this.

I used to read explanations of why Jews and Blacks have contributed so much to the arts in America—especially music.  Being excluded from many other fields of endeavor (which explains the numbers but not the quality of the contributions), being an outsider gives us a different perspective and an intense desire to belong.  Growing up Jewish in the 1950s, I noticed that the Lone Ranger, Father Knows Best and every other show I watched on TV had no Jewish or Black characters.  This clearly was not my world. 

Later, I identified with jazz and was consumed by it.  This was the ’60s and jazz was counterculture.  Hardly anyone I knew listened to jazz.  So I went through junior and senior high school feeling like an outsider.  Even as a lifelong professional jazz musician, I’ve felt like an outsider.  Although I have had some success (for me, success means being able to do the work I love), I never became famous like some of my friends.  Not that I ever desired fame, but a certain amount of fame brings acceptance and the ability to put asses in seats—which is what you need to be able to do to perform.

I’ve been just enough of an insider to work with a lot of great musicians and show biz stars, so no complaints there.  And maybe feeling like an outsider has given me the need to create and the perspective to understand what it is that I am creating.  It could be that success breeds complacency, and extreme success corrupts our relationship with other people and reality itself.  How many rich and powerful people surround themselves with sycophants?  I’m not pointing any fingers, but were you disgusted with all the ass kissing at Trump’s first cabinet meeting?  Had I known that was going to happen, I would have bought stock in Chapstick and kneepads.  

Being averse to that sort of behavior, both as a giver and receiver, I may have been trading upward mobility for self-respect and artistic integrity.  I’m sure that my friends would say that I could exercise more restraint with my opinions.  Point well taken.  Is my desire for truth and excellence self-indulgence or is it my desire to make the world a better place starting with my immediate surroundings?  In the moment, it always seems like the latter, but given the benefit of hindsight, I will admit that there were times when I might have held my ego in check and waited to fight a battle that I could have won. 

In the creative pursuits, there is a thin line between fine art and self-indulgence (or as we jazz musicians call it “masturbation”).  When I was young, I created music to please myself and other musicians.  As I matured, I came to understand the connection between the performer (and composer/arranger) and the audience and the need for artists to communicate.  At 20 I thought that only musicians would understand what I was doing, so there was not much point in trying to reach pedestrians.  How could they know what I was doing if they didn’t know the chord changes, tritone subs and all the manipulations that my young mind was imposing on the music?  Even the critics didn’t really get it.  Well, very few did. 

40 years ago I took a couple of courses at the New School on the films of Alfred Hitchcock with author Donald Spoto.  I learned a pile of stuff in those classes and from Spoto’s books that he was writing at the time, but the big thing that I learned was that Hitchcock appealed to all kinds of audiences.  Simultaneously, there was a spy story, a love story and all kinds of inside jokes, techniques and symbolism for the more artistically inclined viewer.  His movies worked on all levels.  They were beautifully shot and contained witty dialogue.  Best of all, he never dumbed down his concept.  He raised the audience’s consciousness and challenged them. 

The same is true of the great composers in the classical world, except that their music has little appeal on face value to the common man of today.  This is most unfortunate.  Great art uplifts us all, but it takes effort to appreciate it.  My sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Moylan, used to say that the medium of live theater was superior to movies and TV for the simple reason that when you go to the theater, you must decide where to look on the stage.  In movies and TV, the director makes those choices for you, thereby creating a passive experience. 

I learned a long time ago that modern audiences have difficulty appreciating jazz.  Two of the big obstacles are the complexity and volume.  We musicians expect our audience to be able to follow the ball, just like at a football game.  Who are the receivers and who are the blockers?  In pop music, the volume is so loud, that the audience is assaulted by it.  In jazz, we must make an effort to hear each part.  Many people who say that they don’t like jazz, haven’t made the effort to overcome these two major obstacles.

Another stumbling block for non-jazz fans is that if they don’t know the blues and American Songbook, they can’t fully understand how we are transforming our traditional music into something new and personal.  This would be like taking advanced calculus without knowing algebra, geometry and trigonometry.  You might be intelligent, but…

For me, the challenge in performing is to draw the audience in, so that they can appreciate the best music I can create.  I never want to pander to them and demean my music and the musicians who are performing with me.  Even when our band plays for dances or weddings, making it necessary for us to play In The Mood to get the beginners on the dance floor, we play my arrangement, in which I made subtle changes to hopefully correct the elements of Eddie Durham’s original arrangement for Glenn Miller that have seemed obvious and trite to me.  This wasn’t an easy feat, and we could have just played the original stock arrangement.  The dancers would have been happy, but the musicians, hipper listeners, and I would need to suffer for three and a half minutes rather than try to slay the dragon.  In The Mood may not be my greatest artistic achievement, but it serves its purpose and makes everyone happy.  And maybe, just maybe, it makes us all want to strive for and accept something better. 

For me, an OK life would be a waste.  I may not hit a home run every time I come up to the plate, but even when I strike out, I’m 100% invested in getting a hit.  I know that about me, and hopefully that is how I am perceived by others. 

When my kids were little, I used to read them a book about leaving the world a more beautiful place than when you found it.  It doesn’t have to be much, but it sure would be great if it’s something.