I had always wondered how ECM Records funded itself. Its catalog is vast, its production values are extremely high, but the commercial appeal of its artists, even in Europe, is, in the grand scheme of things, limited. Now I think I know - whenever the label needs money, they release another recording by Keith Jarrett, then sit back and watch his rabid fans gobble it up, lining the label's coffers.
I'm really starting to think that Jarrett has managed to attain that enviable position where critics and listeners alike stopped trying at anything resembling objectivity. It doesn't matter what he plays. He achieves instant holiness just by touching the keyboard.
His latest recording is Yesterdays, with his usual trio of Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette. Though released a couple of weeks ago, it was recorded back in 2001, so clearly it is from the vaults. I was initially drawn to it because it was purported to be available on LP - the first new recording ECM has issued on vinyl in fifteen years. Turned out the LP was not officially available in the US, and to get it from Europe would have cost me €30 plus trans-Atlantic shipping. But by the time I found this out, I was convinced, on no basis whatsoever, that I had to hear it. So I got a copy of the CD.
While Yesterdays is not bad per se, it is definitely not essential. Turns out Jarrett's trio has released several other trio records since my last acquisition --1999's Whisper Not. Yesterdays is just another link in a seemingly endless chain. Everything they play here they have played before. The songs are all standards - their stock in trade these days - and while everyone plays competently, and I normally love standards, it is just not that interesting. The band grooves, Peacock plays some tasteful solos, and DeJohnette tosses off some pretty wild stuff now and then without ever losing the beat, but as a whole package it doesn't make me go "wow." I suspect one of the major problems is Jarrett's infamous humming and moaning. I realize that anyone who is going to listen to him in any quantity is going to have to live with it and learn to listen through it. But on Yesterdays it seems louder and far more distracting than on any other record I've heard. I've played the disc all the way through a few times now, both through the speakers and on headphones, and it still grates in a major way.
To give credit where it is due, the last two tracks come a ways towards redeeming the record. "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" is lovingly played, with one of those floating, harmonically ambiguous extended intros that used to be Jarrett's trademark but have not been heard much since he recovered from a major illness in the 1990s. "Stella By Starlight," recorded during a sound check (the rest of the record is live), is more uptempo, but Jarrett is still a bit restrained, not only articulating extremely well (he usually does), but holding back from gratuitously long and fast passages. Download those two from a music source of your choice and forget the rest, I say.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Monday, February 16, 2009
Theodore Dalrymple
Finished Life at the Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple a few days ago. Enjoyed it, if that’s the right word. I read quickly, without taking notes, so I can’t get into too much detail, but here are a few reactions.
Dalrymple is a psychiatrist in Birmingham, where he practices in an inner-city hospital and, part-time, in a prison. The book is a collection of essays originally published in magazines, primarily City Journal, that describe his interactions with his patients and proceed to infer from these interactions certain generalizations about these people’s lives. The subtitle of the book is “The Worldview that Makes the Underclass,” and while the term “underclass” is easier on an English ear than an American one, it does capture Dalrymple’s intent better than any American equivalent could. These people are poor, but only in government’s definition (specifically, England’s essentially socialist government). As measured against history and, more importantly, against current economic conditions in much of the rest of the world, these people’s level of economic comfort, in many cases provided government programs, is far above basic. They are not, in a vast majority of cases, homeless. There is no official policy of discrimination against them the way there was in, say, the Jim Crow American South (often quite the opposite, Dalrymple argues). So perhaps “underclass” is an apt term to capture the general cultural and moral decrepitude he describes.
The book is not prescriptive. It is neither a scientific report nor a policy paper. Dalrymple merely describes his experiences, sometimes citing individual cases, other times describing his observations in the community (to his great credit, he lives among those he studies). His argument is essentially this. The vast majority of the underclass finds itself in the position it is in not through any sort of misfortune, unfairness, or circumstances beyond its control. On the contrary, its predicament is a direct result of specific moral choices. It is enabled – nay, encouraged – to believe that it is acceptable, and even desirable, to make such choices by pervasive government policy that deemphasizes individual responsibility in favor of being provided for by society as a whole in the name of fairness. This policy was, for decades, promulgated by liberal intellectuals, both in academia and politics. The net result is a moral and intellectual collapse that goes far beyond the loss of “traditional values” and permeates one’s very notion of right and wrong.
Some of Dalrymple’s claims and examples do come across as faintly ridiculous. In a chapter dedicated to tattoos, he claims that in his experience, there is a universal correlation between tattoos and criminality. He seems to recognize the silliness of his suggestion – the tone of the essay seems to say, “look, I know it sounds crazy, but I can’t help it – this is what I see in front of me every day” – but a reality check would have still been useful. I personally have an acquaintance who, while tattooed, is a hard worker, a dedicated mother and a loving wife, and another who, while far less tattooed than the first, is a promising scientist and a dedicated researcher. My sample size is smaller than Dalrymple’s, I realize, but it still shows that it pays to slow down now and then when making generalizations.
On balance, however, Dalrymple’s observations are sharp, informative, and successful precisely because while he does, to a point, blames (correctly, I believe) the members of the underclass for making the choices they make, the bulk of his blame is reserved, also correctly in my opinion, for the rotten intellectual climate among the social elite that made these choices possible in the first place.
Dalrymple is a psychiatrist in Birmingham, where he practices in an inner-city hospital and, part-time, in a prison. The book is a collection of essays originally published in magazines, primarily City Journal, that describe his interactions with his patients and proceed to infer from these interactions certain generalizations about these people’s lives. The subtitle of the book is “The Worldview that Makes the Underclass,” and while the term “underclass” is easier on an English ear than an American one, it does capture Dalrymple’s intent better than any American equivalent could. These people are poor, but only in government’s definition (specifically, England’s essentially socialist government). As measured against history and, more importantly, against current economic conditions in much of the rest of the world, these people’s level of economic comfort, in many cases provided government programs, is far above basic. They are not, in a vast majority of cases, homeless. There is no official policy of discrimination against them the way there was in, say, the Jim Crow American South (often quite the opposite, Dalrymple argues). So perhaps “underclass” is an apt term to capture the general cultural and moral decrepitude he describes.
The book is not prescriptive. It is neither a scientific report nor a policy paper. Dalrymple merely describes his experiences, sometimes citing individual cases, other times describing his observations in the community (to his great credit, he lives among those he studies). His argument is essentially this. The vast majority of the underclass finds itself in the position it is in not through any sort of misfortune, unfairness, or circumstances beyond its control. On the contrary, its predicament is a direct result of specific moral choices. It is enabled – nay, encouraged – to believe that it is acceptable, and even desirable, to make such choices by pervasive government policy that deemphasizes individual responsibility in favor of being provided for by society as a whole in the name of fairness. This policy was, for decades, promulgated by liberal intellectuals, both in academia and politics. The net result is a moral and intellectual collapse that goes far beyond the loss of “traditional values” and permeates one’s very notion of right and wrong.
Some of Dalrymple’s claims and examples do come across as faintly ridiculous. In a chapter dedicated to tattoos, he claims that in his experience, there is a universal correlation between tattoos and criminality. He seems to recognize the silliness of his suggestion – the tone of the essay seems to say, “look, I know it sounds crazy, but I can’t help it – this is what I see in front of me every day” – but a reality check would have still been useful. I personally have an acquaintance who, while tattooed, is a hard worker, a dedicated mother and a loving wife, and another who, while far less tattooed than the first, is a promising scientist and a dedicated researcher. My sample size is smaller than Dalrymple’s, I realize, but it still shows that it pays to slow down now and then when making generalizations.
On balance, however, Dalrymple’s observations are sharp, informative, and successful precisely because while he does, to a point, blames (correctly, I believe) the members of the underclass for making the choices they make, the bulk of his blame is reserved, also correctly in my opinion, for the rotten intellectual climate among the social elite that made these choices possible in the first place.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
NSO
I seem to be in permanent catch-up mode these days.
Went to hear the NSO a couple of weeks ago. Interesting program – Stravinsky's Jeu de Cartes, Crumb's A Haunted Landscape and Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto. Stravinsky was fun – great wind parts, especially bassoon, a good horn solo, and an amusing quote from Rossini's Barber of Seville towards the end. It was the Crumb that made the concert worthwhile, though. I have mostly avoided his music, largely on the basis of his reputation for an almost complete lack of structure. Landscape, though, was worth hearing, and it absolutely had to be heard live. The work is a percussionist's wet dream. Every percussion instrument was dragged out for the occasion, including ethnic instruments not normally seen in an orchestra. The structure was predictably lacking, the orchestration sparse in the extreme, and the melodic content equally minimal. The basic pattern was a sequence of short pairwise solos, with one conventional and one percussion instrument in each. It was all about sound in its pure form, and as long as you approached the work with that in mind, it was fascinating. What made hearing it live essential was the fact that we could see the percussionists reach for their next instrument. The stage was partially obscured from our usual perch in the chorister, but we saw enough to build anticipation. Had we been listening on record, the sounds would have seemed random. I don't know that I need to hear the work again – it is too fragmented to serve as ambient music, and too abrasive for repeated active listening, but experiencing it once was definitely worth it.
The second half of the concert was Lief Ove Andsnes playing Rachmaninoff. He played well, at least as far as we could tell. The main distinguishing feature of the work, to me, is the fact that the soloist and the orchestra are almost always playing together, the way they might in a Baroque concerto, as opposed to alternating solo and tutti sections common to Romantic concertos. This is interesting. Unique at the time it was written, in fact. The problem was that from where we were sitting, we could barely hear the piano most of the time, so much of the solo part was lost to us. Still, I had to give it to Rachmaninoff for some gorgeous string parts, which sounded fresh since I haven't heard the concerto in years, even though I have an LP of Horowitz playing it. I wish I had pulled it out – had I been reminded of the mass of sound that it is most of the time, I might have splurged for orchestra seats.
Went to hear the NSO a couple of weeks ago. Interesting program – Stravinsky's Jeu de Cartes, Crumb's A Haunted Landscape and Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto. Stravinsky was fun – great wind parts, especially bassoon, a good horn solo, and an amusing quote from Rossini's Barber of Seville towards the end. It was the Crumb that made the concert worthwhile, though. I have mostly avoided his music, largely on the basis of his reputation for an almost complete lack of structure. Landscape, though, was worth hearing, and it absolutely had to be heard live. The work is a percussionist's wet dream. Every percussion instrument was dragged out for the occasion, including ethnic instruments not normally seen in an orchestra. The structure was predictably lacking, the orchestration sparse in the extreme, and the melodic content equally minimal. The basic pattern was a sequence of short pairwise solos, with one conventional and one percussion instrument in each. It was all about sound in its pure form, and as long as you approached the work with that in mind, it was fascinating. What made hearing it live essential was the fact that we could see the percussionists reach for their next instrument. The stage was partially obscured from our usual perch in the chorister, but we saw enough to build anticipation. Had we been listening on record, the sounds would have seemed random. I don't know that I need to hear the work again – it is too fragmented to serve as ambient music, and too abrasive for repeated active listening, but experiencing it once was definitely worth it.
The second half of the concert was Lief Ove Andsnes playing Rachmaninoff. He played well, at least as far as we could tell. The main distinguishing feature of the work, to me, is the fact that the soloist and the orchestra are almost always playing together, the way they might in a Baroque concerto, as opposed to alternating solo and tutti sections common to Romantic concertos. This is interesting. Unique at the time it was written, in fact. The problem was that from where we were sitting, we could barely hear the piano most of the time, so much of the solo part was lost to us. Still, I had to give it to Rachmaninoff for some gorgeous string parts, which sounded fresh since I haven't heard the concerto in years, even though I have an LP of Horowitz playing it. I wish I had pulled it out – had I been reminded of the mass of sound that it is most of the time, I might have splurged for orchestra seats.
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