I Think I'll Dye My Hair Blue

1982, Age 10.  "Words," by Missing Persons, from their eponymous debut EP.  

If you talk to people my age, you might believe that upward of 90% of Gen X-ers were watching on August 1, 1981, when MTV went live.  Everyone remembers seeing "Video Killed the Radio Star," by The Buggles in those first moments.  All of us knew how important this new medium was.

Except that we didn't really see it.  I guess it comes from some inherent desire to be a witness to history.  But according to I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Video Music Revolution, the fledgling channel was only carried by a few cable providers in northern New Jersey.  We got MTV sometime in 1982.

Nevertheless, for those of us who remember those early days, Music Television was a significant cultural event.  Those commercials were everywhere with Sting and Pete Townsend and whoever shouting "I want my MTV!"   Even their trademark top-of-the-hour commercial featured moon-landing footage and replaced the American flag with one that flashed the MTV logo, as if insisting on instant iconic status.  Everyone you went to school with watched it.  Well, unless their parents thought rock and roll was satanic.  With VH-1 and a dozen specialized cable off-shoots, digital music channels,  iTunes, YouTube, Pandora, Sirius/XM, Turntable.fm, Grooveshark, and the rest, it's hard to remember what it was like when you couldn't hear any music you wanted any time you wanted.  

I do remember the first video I saw on MTV.  It was "Words," by Missing Persons.  Missing Persons were keyboardist Chuck Wild, with former Frank Zappa bandmates Patrick O'Hearn on bass, Warren Cuccurullo on guitar, Terry Bozio on drums, and Terry's wife Dale on vocals.  The song was from their very first album, a self-titled four-song EP that came out that year.

So, there I was, ten years old, on the verge of puberty, a couple of years into the new decade, at my parents' southern West Virginia home and we turn it to the new channel.  It was a revelation.

The men are clad all in tight-fitting black sleeveless tees and black pegged jeans, their hair teased and spiky, wearing eyeliner and blush.  In retrospect, they could have been understudies for Tim Curry in Rocky Horror Picture Show.  The bass and guitar are playing those sleek, black Steinbergers that had just come out.  The keyboardist is surrounded by a bank of mysterious components and instruments that must have cost several thousand dollars back then.

Then there is Dale.

Dale, a former Playboy bunny, is wearing clear stripper heels, a black plastic bra that reveals more than it covers, and some sort of flat plastic piece held together with chains for a bikini.  Her hair is mostly platinum blonde, with a pink and blue streak.

The bass plays clean, pulsating eighth notes on the roots of chords, while the drums provide a straight rock back beat.  The Oberheim and Jupiter 8 synthesizers join the pulsing, and add a kind of sci-fi descant.  And the guitar is more "electronic" than "electric."  Dale's singing is kind of a hiccupy alto that seems a cross between a female Elvis Presley and Betty Boop.

The words of the song, all about how Dale feels alone and unnoticed by others, are clever, too:

     

     You look at me as if you're in a daze,

     It's like the feeling at the end of a page when you realize

     You don't know what you just read.

Ironically, she also sings that the constant intense media (we had over twenty channels!) is causing us to ignore each other:

     Media overload bombarding you with action,

     It's near impossible to cause a distraction,

     Someone answer me, before I pull the plug.

It seemed clear to me that Ms. Bozio was unlikely to be ignored when she walked into a room, no matter how many hours of The Movie Channel her onlookers may have watched that week.

Watching the video again now for the first time in years, it strikes me that Lady Gaga must have seen this in her youth.

It was all too much for me.  Like the fabled first hit of crack cocaine, I was addicted within three minutes. It was modern, it was sex, it was rock and roll, and I could watch it on television 24 hours a day.  I must have seen thousands of music videos that first year.

I remember my older brother Dusty setting our top-loading VCR to "extended play" so that he could record six hours of videos per tape.  His library included 70s FM rockers that made arena videos with long guitar solos, British new wave bands with colored hair and Roland synthesizers, and a pre-Private Dancer Tina Turner.  

Ten years later, while I was in college, MTV premiered the first major "reality" TV series - The Real World.  Within a couple of years, the channel rarely played videos at all.  That's ok: we were on the verge of a new revolution in listening habits, as more of us used computers as music devices.

Those first few years though - they changed the way I heard, and saw, music.  Here are just a few selections from the 80s video jukebox that loom large in my memory.

 "Words," by Missing Persons.  

 "1999," by Prince.  It was Prince, not Michael Jackson, as it is widely believed, who was the first black artist to appear on MTV, and this was the first video.  This was also the first song I heard from the Minneapolis wonder, and I was enthralled: doubled keyboards, electronic drums, apocalyptic lyrics, Japanese headbands, medical scrubs, purple lame trench coats, fire poles . . . and what's going on with keyboardist Lisa Coleman and back-up singer Jill Jones?

"Bette Davis Eyes," by Kim Carnes.  I had no idea what "Greta Garbo stand-up thighs" were, but I was really fascinated by the punk slap-fest that was happening over the drum machine.

 "Everyday I Write the Book," by Elvis Costello.  Still decades away from his godfather status among the geekerati, most of us just thought Elvis Costello was Britain's dorkiest punk.  Hints of reggae and a really smart lyric.  Plus, the video featured Lady Diana before her apotheosis.  

 "Tempted," by Squeeze.  British gents in ties and how about those classy ladies dancing in their knit sweaters and pleated skirts?  Everyone my age loved this song, which is the only reason any of us watched Reality Bites.

 "Safety Dance," by Men Without Hats.  The 80s were surely the high-water mark for midgets employed in the entertainment industry.

"Once in a Lifetime," by Talking Heads.  Who knows why a song about male mid-life crisis should have appealed to junior high students in the first half of the 1980s, but there you have it.

"Do You Wanna Hold Me?" by Bow Wow Wow.  If I couldn't have Dale Bozio, British-Burmese singer Annabella Lwin could let me run my hands through her mohawk.  Gently mocking of American culture while reveling in it sonically, these former Adam Ant bandmates sound like 60s surf music to me.

"Goody Two-Shoes," by Adam Ant.  Speaking of which, this little romp is one of the most fun dance tunes of the era, with silly lyrics provided by Jack Sparrow's spiritual predecessor.  

"Stray Cat Strut," by The Stray Cats.  The Fonz was still on TV, so it's no surprise this one took off.

"Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?" by Culture Club.  Close your eyes and it's easy to imagine these guys in Stax-era matching suits.  Well, unless you've seen Boy George before.  This video almost made my dad kick a hole the television.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

2010, Age 38.  "Little Drummer Boy," by Kenny Burrell, from the album Have Yourself a Soulful Little Christmas. 


I blogged a couple of weeks back about how crazy I used to get about Christmas and how that's changed over the years.  Of course, Christmas music played a big part in that, but I must confess that year after year of preparing Christmas concerts soured me to a lot of it.  Over time I've compiled a lot of Christmas records, largely in an attempt to find something new.  I have Christmas records with bagpipes and dulcimers, lounge records for sipping peppermint vodka, and obscure choral performances of medieval hymns.  I honestly don't listen to much of it anymore, but here are seven holiday gems that I still dig.  Most are a little less saccharine than typical yuletide fare, which is probably why I keep coming back.


1.  "Little Drummer Boy," by Kenny Burrell.  This is the opening track on a great record called Have Yourself a Soulful Little Christmas from 1967.  It does a kind of Bolero build with the drummer, but starting with a combo and then gradually adding brass to the fade.  It's all very understated and groovy, I think.  I heard this for the first time last year, and it's quickly become a favorite.


2.  "Another Lonely Christmas," by Prince.  I'm glad His Funky Majesty was able to get this one recorded before becoming a Jehovah's Witness.  This is the b-side to "I Would Die 4 U" from Purple Rain, and one of the most unique holiday lyrics out there.  Who but Prince would commemorate the Savior's birth with, "U use 2 get so horny, U'd make me leave the lights on"?  This one is a double-whammy because it also falls in the tradition of dead girlfriend songs, with the lover having passed from either stress or pneumonia on Christmas, leaving Mr. Nelson to pound banana daiquiris every December 25 for the past seven years.  Hey - it was the 80's.


3.  "This Christmas," by Donny Hathaway.  My absolute favorite Christmas song, I first heard this one covered by Harry Connick, Jr., and Branford Marsalis.  I still like this version better, but I'm not sure why.  The lyrics are cliche, the horn players don't swing, and there is a really annoying bass drum in the mix.  Still, Hathaway's vocal delivery is smooth and the electric piano is perfect.


4.  "The Be-Bop Santa Claus," by Babs Gonzalez.  This one is cheating a little, since it's really just an alternate rendering of "'A Visit from St. Nicholas" over musical accompaniment.  Recorded at the height of the beat poetry craze, this is wonderfully tongue-in-cheek without being corny (or so I think).  Mom and pop have been "goofing" on sherry and beer when Santa shows up in a Cadillac wearing a red-on-red shirt, a white mink tie, a red beaver hat, a red cashmere "benny," and horn-rimmed shades that cover just one eye.  He raps with them for a while with a king-sized cigarette hanging from his lips before laying a few records and some Chanel No. 5 under the tree.  Solid.


5.  "Ain't No Chimneys in the Projects," by Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings.  I've written about her elsewhere, so I won't labor the point, but Sharon Jones is bad.  Great song that tugs a little at the heartstrings without being maudlin.  Sharon's delivery is perfect and the production is classic soul, with strings swirling chromatically underneath.  


6.  "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus," by The Ronettes.  Let me say first: I hate this song.    Or, at least, I hate every other version of this song I have ever heard.  This record, however, is on perhaps the greatest Christmas album of all time, A Christmas Gift for You from Philles Records.  Ronnie Spector delivers a classic girl-group vocal over a wall of sound, set to a quasi-Latin groove.  It's enough to make me forgive the insipid lyric for three minutes.


7.  "Merry Christmas Baby," by Charles Brown.  I've often wondered how my favorite holiday TV special would have turned out if the musical duties were turned over to the other Charles Brown, instead of Vince Guaraldi.  I can actually imagine Charlie and Linus bringing the sad little tree back to play practice over the strains of this song.  In any event, there are too few straight blues records about Christmas, which seems strange given my own experience with family dysfunction and holiday depression.  This is a different type of blues record though, with a happy lyric and strangely melancholy tune.


Honorable mention: I've just discovered "Christmas Bop" from T. Rex, which I will probably have forgotten this time next year.  Nevertheless, I will be grooving to this glam rock (bordering on disco, really) jam that tells you to put on your silk jeans and your space shoes.  Also notable for the coinage of the term "T. Rexmas."

New Orleans

1991, age 19.  "West End Blues," by Louis Armstrong. 

I'm writing this entry from the greatest musical city on earth: New Orleans, Louisiana. I've visited a lot of places that can justly claim to be musical meccas - Austin, Chicago, New York, Nashville, Memphis - but New Orleans has them all beat. She has the most unique musical history of any city on earth and has nurtured multiple styles. Of course, everyone associates NOLA with jazz, which is true enough. The style's earliest progenitors came exclusively from the Big Easy, so much so that jazz (or 'jass') was regarded as almost a folk style. Names like Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Kid Ory, Sidney Bechet, and King Oliver are still revered here. And then there's Louis Armstrong. Pops is still regarded as more of a demi-god in the city than an historical figure, a musical Hercules and Prometheus rolled into one. Even the first white people to steal the style and record it as their own came from New Orleans. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band recorded a somewhat cornier version of the music and carried it north and east to usher in the Jazz Age.

Jazz looms so large in the city's history that outsiders sometimes forget that the city could boast enormous musical importance even without it:

• The first opera house in the Western hemisphere was located in the French colony. Native composer Louis Gottschalk was one of the first classical musicians to use "world music" influences in his writing, incorporating the Caribbean rhythms he heard brought through the city's port.
• Congo Square, now located in Louis Armstrong park, is the spiritual home of West African drumming in the United States, the only place in the American South where slaves could play the music of their ancestors.
• Brass bands proliferated in the years following the Civil War, spurred on by Patrick Gilmore's "Peace Jubilee" staged here in 1865. Bands can be found at funerals, in clubs, and marching in the ubiquitous parades.
• Ragtime, an essential ingredient in jazz, was enormously popular at the turn of the 20th century, and much of what we know about how that style was improvised comes from recordings of New Orleans' musicians.
• The city's churches have always rung with powerful singing, and the Queen of Gospel, Mahalia Jackson, was born in the Carrollton neighborhood.
• Just downriver from the Mississippi Delta, blues has always thrived in New Orleans. From early pioneers like Lonnie Johnson to Snooks Eaglin to Little Freddie King, the city is on par with Memphis, Clarksdale, and Chicago.
• The Crescent City was the home to some of the most influential pioneers in rhythm and blues and later rock and roll: Professor Longhair, Fats Domino, and Huey "Piano" Smith. And although Little Richard hailed from Georgia, his playing bears the city's influence, most of it recorded here in Cosimo Matassa's studio with band members from New Orleans.
• From such a stanky atmosphere, it is no surprise that New Orleans can claim so many funk pioneers, like Dr. John and the Meters, along with legendary producer, Allen Toussaint. The word "funk" may even originate in New Orleans. The sole remaining evidence of legendary ragtime/jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden is a song called "Funky Butt Blues," dating from the turn of the last century.
• Rappers like Lil Wayne and Juvenile call New Orleans home and there is even a unique style of local hip-hop called bounce.
• Although Cajun and Zydeco both hail from the countryside around the city, it's easy enough to find live musicians playing both any night of the week.

Throw in healthy (though smaller) doses of country and bluegrass, and one need not travel outside the city to see the full range of American musical expression.

I remember learning about New Orleans from a college music history professor. He told us about Congo Square and "Creoles of Color." We learned how the geography of the city, along with its unique political history, helped fashion the musical landscape. I discovered why the Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson may have directly influenced the birth of jazz. I especially remember listening to Jelly Roll Morton talking about "ragging the rhythm" of Sousa marches, and hearing Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues" for the first time. Armstrong knew the West End well. Canal Street separated the English-speaking black neighborhoods of the West End from the French-speaking Creole neighborhoods of the French Quarter. The opening cadenza of "West End Blues" has 200 years of history in it. It's brilliant and vibrant and 90 years after it was recorded, it still sounds fresh.

As much as I travel, I had never been to New Orleans until just a few years ago. My wife and I decided that we would make our first trip over Thanksgiving 2005. Then Katrina hit and our plans were canceled.

In spring of 2008 I decided to do a school concert themed around the music of New Orleans. We included as many styles as we could to give a cross-section of the city's musical heritage: African drumming, gospel, blues, opera, Cajun, rock and roll, funk, etc. My friend Steve even arranged Professor Longhair's "Mardi Gras in New Orleans" for my band and choir. It was pretty solid. To this day, I think it's my favorite concert I've done with students.

I decided that if I were going to teach about the music of New Orleans, I needed to experience it myself, and so we planned a trip down during spring break.

The place exceeded my wildest expectations.

There is music everywhere. Where I am staying right now, on Frenchmen Street, it is impossible to not hear live music in the evening. That's not hyperbole. This one tiny lane has over a dozen live music venues in a two-block radius, some of them with multiple stages. And that's not counting the "biker bard" who sings Sam Cooke songs, or the ragged white kids playing old-time music or gypsy jazz on the sidewalk.

The city acknowledges and celebrates its musical heritage. The airport is Louis Armstrong International. There are dozens of festivals - Jazz Fest, French Quarter Festival, Voodoo Festival, etc. - all with live music around the clock. And although the city is passionate about the home team, one senses that the Saints are named after the song, rather than their birth on All Saints' Day, as the official story goes.

That first trip led to some pretty wonderful personal discoveries. I heard the Rebirth Brass Band and the Soul Rebels, and learned that the New Orleans tradition was really alive, still incorporating new influences like hip-hop and reggae. This wasn't Wynton Marsalis. This was music that people wanted to dance to. I heard Walter "Wolfman" Washington and Washboard Chaz and swing bands where all the members were tattooed Gen Y-ers.

I also made my first visit to the Louisiana Music Factory, one of the few remaining great independent record stores. There I was introduced to Galactic and Dumpstafunk and the Zion Harmonizers. And then I found out about WWOZ, 90.7, a local radio station where DJs still spin records they want to hear instead of those that marketing reports tell them to.

I was hooked. That one trip in April of 2008 led to another in July. Then another and another and another. I'd have to get out some old calendars to figure it out, but this trip is our 8th or 9th in those few years.

To me, New Orleans represents everything that is great about America. It's a city with a dirty, complex history, where slave-traders and voodoo queens and cross-dressers and pimps and musicians all rubbed elbows. It's a place where people can reinvent themselves, where at least once a year, at Carnival, you get to dress any way you like and "do watcha wanna." It's a place where the grandson of a slave can leave reform school with a cornet and become the most famous American icon of the 20th century.

With all of this incredible music history, the school system obviously places a high value on music education, right? And of course this history is taught by music teachers to every student in the state. Well, not exactly.

In both my regular day job and as president of our state's music educators association, I get the chance to meet arts educators and leaders from around the country. Every time I meet a music teacher from Louisiana, I get excited. I tell them about my love for the music of New Orleans and who I saw on my last trip and how I can't wait to get back there. And almost every time I have had this conversation, I get a blank stare. They seem essentially unaware of the culture I am describing. They've heard of Louis Armstrong and Wynton Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr. But they don't know the Rebirth Brass Band or the Soul Rebels. They don't know Glen David Andrews or Corey Henry or Trombone Shorty. They don't know Irma Thomas or Lloyd Price or Lee Dorsey. And they don't listen to bounce.

What's going on here?

What they talk about, what they do know, is all the same school music that everyone else is wallowing in. They are familiar with the new publication from Paul Lavender or Jay Bocook. They can tell you what they thought of the new Kirby Shaw or Roger Emerson arrangements. They can discuss what David Holsinger selections were most popular at festival this year.

If you don't know those names, there is a simple reason: you aren't a music teacher. These are the "superstars" of school music, but they are virtually unknown outside of that world. Yet Louisiana students probably learn more music of a staff arranger for Hal Leonard than the music in their own back yard.

At a meeting in Atlanta a couple of years ago, I was talking to a music educator from Baton Rouge and told him that I had opened a concert with a quasi-jazz funeral, my kids improvising with "Just a Closer Walk" and "Saints." They learned it by listening to recordings of groups like the Magnificent Seventh's Brass Band and played it by ear. He told me his band had played the Jared Spears arrangement, "At a Dixieland Jazz Funeral." Dr. Spears lives in Arkansas. He complained that his students wanted to play hip-hop and sound like Grambling State, rather than the drum corps he obviously loved.

This is not quite a case of a prophet having no honor in his own country. New Orleans musicians are widely revered. Just not by music educators. And not in school.

School music programs vary widely across the state, but the public schools in New Orleans, many would agree, are among the worst in the nation. Newspaper articles often report the renaissance of school music programs, but the truth is that most are surviving largely through charitable work done by foundations like Tipitina's and Mr. Holland's Opus. One charity, MusicianCorps, places music teachers in New Orleans schools at no cost to the school system. At the Monday show at d.b.a. this week, Glen David Andrews announced his goal of providing 500 musical instruments this year to New Orleans youth through his foundation, Trumpets Not Guns. While these are certainly laudable efforts, one wonders why the school system doesn't hire music teachers and purchase instruments for its students. Catholic schools in the city fare somewhat better, and many families who love music send their children to these. The famous "Marching 100" at St. Augustine still parades at Mardi Gras, though even they are down to about 90.

In case you haven't picked up on it, the elephant in the band room is race. The poorest (read: "blackest") schools in urban (read: "black") neighborhoods have almost no support for their music programs, in spite of the fact that music is historically one of the city's most important industries. And many music educators place a higher value on traditional (read: "white") musical styles than popular (read: "black") styles.

In this way, New Orleans simply reflects our culture at large. Our music history in this country is largely the product of our attitudes about race. Styles that are most associated with the African-American community (and these are almost all of them in their earliest phases) are initially viewed by the dominant white culture as vulgar, barbaric, and even non-musical. This was true of minstrelsy, blues, jazz, R&B, and rock & roll. It's still true of hip-hop. Elaborate explanations are offered about the supposed quality of the music and its effect on "youth" (read: "white kids"). I have an aunt who used to refer to rock as "jungle music," revealing more latent racism than she probably intended. The truth is that if "jungle" refers to "Africa" (as it did in Duke Ellington's music), then all American music is "jungle music" to some extent. The musical materials of West Africa run deep in our culture.

Over time, those attitudes toward a musical style soften and become part of the mainstream culture. A genre is legitimized in our culture when it is accepted by white people. There are white brass bands in New Orleans, but they are playing music that sounds 100 years old.

For better or worse, music educators largely reflect these dominant cultural attitudes. Most music teachers are not overtly racist, but they do not generally question the assumptions they have inherited. My friend in Louisiana complained about the "poor tone quality" of marching bands like Southern University. The truth is, white music teachers were making the same complaints about jazz musicians in the 1920s. I heard a prominent national music educator tell a crowd that he had taught his own children to dislike the sound of the drum machine. While most musicians probably prefer a live drummer, the prominent sound of the "808" in rap is probably what he had in mind. And it is common to hear vocal teachers decry the "incorrect" and "damaging" technique of blues, gospel and soul singers, in spite of the lengthy career of Aretha Franklin and others. (Before anyone begins using Adele as an example, I would like to point out that she is a smoker, which is far more likely to damage the vocal apparatus than singing. I have heard so many claims on this particular issue that just sound like nonsense to me. While I certainly believe that the voice can be damaged, very few vocal injuries are permanent and most come from simple overuse - a danger any professional singer faces, regardless of the style.)

I believe it's time for music educators to move forward on this issue. School should be a place where all styles of music are studied, especially those that are prominent in the culture at large. While it is certainly laudable to extend our students' musical experiences, I would question whether over-exposure to a small handful of composers who solely serve an educational market accomplishes that. While the conversation is often framed in terms of "Mozart versus Jay-Z," the truth is that most school music teachers are pitting James Swearingen against Jay-Z. I'd pick Hova in that fight.

In the end, it's just a question of how relevant we are as a profession. Professor Peter Davis, the music teacher at the New Orleans Home for Colored Waifs, can be celebrated mainly for allowing young Louis Armstrong to discover his own creative potential. That should be the goal of any educator.

New Music

2011, Age 39. "Between Two Lungs," by Florence + The Machine, from Lungs.

For a couple of years I got to teach a class on the history of American popular music to high school students. It was a lot of fun because I was able to design a curriculum (while still addressing standards, lest you education folk be concerned) around something I am passionate about. I also had that wonderful experience as a teacher of feeling as if I were learning almost as much as my students. I certainly wasn't ignorant of the topic when I began, but my understanding is much deeper now.

There were several "big ideas" in the course, threads that ran through virtually every topic. One was that American music is unique because it is largely the product of two very strongly musical cultures - from West Africa and the British Isles - intersecting on unequal terms and in sometimes violent ways. The blues becomes the archetype for this convergence, and the basis for everything that follows. Another big idea relates to the way new musical ideas become a part of the culture. The script goes something like this:

A younger generation of musicians grows up in the musical tradition of their predecessors, learning the basic materials of the genre. Then something in the culture at large - technology, market forces, political realities - intersects the lives of these young artists, and the music is transformed. The new style is not entirely original, but it is perceived as such. The older generation rejects the new music, believes it to be inferior or perhaps even threatening to conventional values. Over time, the new style is accepted and the younger generation grows up. A new generation begins to learn the music of the generation that preceded it and the whole process starts all over.

Now this is true to a degree of virtually all art at all times all over the world, but it seems to be more true of American music, beginning perhaps in the 20th century. John Philip Sousa said that the new jazz music "makes you want to bite your grandmother." Cab Calloway pejoratively referred to bebop as "Chinese music." Sinatra said that Elvis' music "fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people." Nina Simone thought that rap wasn't even music. And so on. These reactions have become so predictable, in fact, that when you look at the history of popular music as a whole, it begins to get a little dull.

It is not lost on me that this second big idea is closely related to the first one. Speaking in generalizations, you can almost divide American music into music black folks listen to, and music black folks used to listen to. As the dominant white music establishment begins to accept styles that have their roots (for the most part) in African-American culture, that culture moves on to something else. A topic for another day, perhaps.

Music education tends to mirror these historical trends and behaviors. Time was, you couldn't even study jazz at colleges in the United States. Now we have entire schools dedicated to jazz and rock music. To a point. Those styles that are in the ascendancy of youth culture are largely ignored. As Lady Gaga asked rhetorically, when questioned about dropping out of school, "What could they have taught me about 'Disco Stick' in college?"

If you speak to music teachers, you will notice that their attitudes tend to reflect these generational biases. Many seem to believe that the last truly legitimate musical expression happened in their youth, usually when they were in high school or college. Some continue following the new releases of the idols of their adolescence, but it is rare to meet a music teacher who is actively listening to the music his students favor. A few even express bewilderment that 14-year-olds don't share their tastes. I remember one middle-aged music teacher bemoaning the fact that none of her high school students had heard of Kansas. (I should point out that this was in the pre-Guitar Hero era.) I'm not sure why Kansas should represent the acme of musical expression in this teacher's mind, but whatever.

For me, this gets to the heart of why there is so much passionless music teaching going on in our schools. I would guess that many have forgotten what it is like to really love music. Do you remember what it was like, that first time, or maybe the first dozen times, when it felt like a song you were listening to, or singing, or playing was the best thing you could ever feel? For those of us who chose this as a career, this was followed by several years of music school, then a few more years of the daily grind, trying to get 12-year-olds to remember the fingering for A-natural concert. If we aren't careful, we forget why we decided to do this in the first place. The truth is, it's rare to find music teachers who are still players. To many of them, the sheer joy of music-making and music-listening is something that belongs to their youth.

This certainly isn't true of everyone. The best music teachers I know still play music regularly and when you see them, they ask, "Have you heard . . . ?" I love talking to these people. My friend Rachel is one of the best music teachers I know. She also lives in the small town of New Haven, West Virginia, so she's the de facto maestra of Mason County. She directs the church musical. She accompanies singers on piano. She plays bluegrass bass. She occasionally sits in with a local jazz group on trombone. Et cetera. She also loves listening to music. She's the one who hipped me to Florence + The Machine. We were working together on a project and she kept saying, "You gotta check out this song."

I like this whole album. Florence Welch is one of those big-voiced rock anthem singers like Bono or Steve Perry, which is not to say she can't use her voice in other ways (check out the smarmy "Girl with One Eye"). Yet she seems most at home at forte or louder, belting it out like she's alone in her car going fast down an open highway. In fact, most of these songs make me want to get in my car and drive - anywhere - but fast, and singing at the top of my lungs.

"Between Two Lungs" is the perfect song for doing this. The instruments are boomy and full of echo, Florence is belting in full chest voice at the upper end of her alto range. It might be a love song, I'm not sure, but it's the song I'm falling in love with at the moment. Whatever it's about, it's bursting Flo's lungs to sing about it:

Gone are all the days of begging, the days of theft,

No more gasping for a breath.
The air filled me head to toe
And I can see the ground far below.
I have this breath and I hold it tight
And I keep it in my chest with all my might.
I pray to God this breath will last
As it pushes past my lips as I . . . dance!
This record probably won't change my life. It doesn't matter. Being able to wake up every day and hear something new makes getting out of bed worthwhile.

I've written several times about the transcendent power that music has, that it can transport you to another time or place, or make you feel like a different person. New music is almost a fountain of youth. This is so true, in fact, that when the apostle John wants to describe heaven, he says that it is a place where new songs are sung, a place where tears will be wiped away forever, where there is no more dying. I don't know what I think about that anymore, but I do know that when I feel like wiping my tears away and living forever, I can think of nothing better to do than ask someone, "Have you heard anything good lately?"

Soul

2011, Age 39. "Fuck You," by Cee-Lo Green, from The Ladykiller.

I probably see more live music than the average person. I tried to make a list one day, but that was an almost impossible task. I came back to the list the next day because I had forgotten to put Sonny Rollins on it. When you start forgetting that you've seen Newk live, you know you've seen a few shows.

My summer has been bookended by a couple of concerts that will stay with me, but for different reasons. The first was Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings at the Clay Center here in Charleston. The second was Cee-Lo Green, a show I've just returned from, in Huntington. The two shows are noteworthy for how incredibly different they were.

I should say that I'm writing just this moment because I'm a little angry. Or maybe I'm trying to cope. I don't know. Actually, I think I'm confused more than anything else.

Let me preface by saying that I'm a big Cee-Lo fan. I thought that St. Elsewhere was the best pop album of 2006. "Crazy" is one of my favorite songs and I've referred to it elsewhere. And "Fuck You" is undoubtedly one of the catchiest tunes out this past year, one I find myself singing full-voiced at entirely inappropriate times. Did you catch him on the Grammys? The dude played the song with the muppets. How cool is that?

I've had a really busy day and I've got a packed work schedule all weekend, so I was a little worried about coming home late. But it didn't matter because I was excited. Live music, baby!

Here's the short version:

We arrive about 15 minutes before show time, grab a couple of beers and have a seat. The concert was part of the Marshall (University) Artist Series, so they had a bunch of announcements about the series, the underwriters and all that jazz. The show starts about 7:12. Cee-Lo comes out with a chick band, all wearing Marshall University gear, skating shorts and pig tails. All except the drummer were faking. Or at least, they weren't playing the music that was coming from the speakers. Cee-Lo sings - "Bright Lights and the Big City," "Fuck You," "Crazy," a couple of new ones, covers of "Rock the Casbah" and "Don't You Wish Your Boyfriend Was Hot Like Me" - then calls it a night. "Thank you, you've been a great audience." The clock said 7:42.

It was still daylight when we left the arena and I just couldn't stop thinking about the contrast between these two concerts.

When I saw Sharon Jones, she was following Percy Sledge. Most of the audience came to see Percy and several left before she even took the stage. Almost no one in the audience knew who she was. Cee-Lo had no opening act and everyone was there to see him, a celebrity. Cee-Lo, nominated for four Grammys, brought backing tracks and a fake rhythm section. Sharon is probably not rolling in cash, but brought a 12-piece band with horns and back-up singers. Cee-Lo phoned it in and quit after about 30 minutes. Sharon quit after about three hours and the energy never dropped.

What accounts for the difference? I'm not sure, except that I can tell you Sharon Jones has soul. That's why we go hear music. Yeah, we care about chops and celebrity may get you through the door, but at the end of the day, it's all about soul. We go into a concert wanting to see something special. We want to leave knowing that the performer has left herself on that stage. We want the blood, sweat and tears. We want to know that they need us as bad as we need them.

I remember being worried at the beginning of the Dap Kings concert. The audience was slow to catch on. They'd just sat through 90 minutes of an R&B legend on a Thursday night and didn't know who this short little 55-year-old woman was when she took the stage. But she brought it from the first downbeat. They played medleys of dances from the 60s and she demonstrated every one: the watusi, the mashed potato, the funky broadway, the funky chicken, the boogaloo and the rest. She courted the audience. She seduced and teased and told those funny stories soul singers do about their no-good men and their trifling ways. And she sang. Dear God, did she sing.

It was her first time in West Virginia. Who knows what she thought when she got started. What she probably thought was, "I'm gonna have to work this crowd." She did work us. We were out of our chairs, clapping, singing, shaking a tail-feather. We danced until we had to sit down for a minute, but Sharon just kept going. She worked the band like James Brown. Actually, she seemed like no one so much as the Godfather himself and I remember thinking, "She's the hardest working woman in show business."

She had something to say and she knew that we would want to hear it. She knew her songs would mean something to us because they meant something to her. She believed in them, and knew we could relate to the fundamental humanity in her music. When she finally walked off the stage after the final encore, you knew you had seen everything she was, laid bare. That's soul.

Cee-Lo knew the crowd was there to see someone famous. He wore a Marshall track suit and told the audience they had a lot of "energy." He was even clever enough to play on the recent disappointments of the Herd faithful by dedicating "Fuck You" to West Virginia University. But honestly, he could just as easily have dedicated it to all us suckers dumb enough to shell out the paper for his show.

I've seen some good shows in my life, sometimes in unexpected places. I've seen Glenn David Andrews play to a room of 25 like it's the Superdome. I've seen Beyonce play the Superdome like she needed the cash. (She brought an all-chick band, too, but you better believe none of them were faking it.) I've seen Glenn David's cousin, Trombone Shorty, playing the auditorium at West Virginia State like it was Treme on St. Joseph's Day. I've seen Tower of Power playing a run-down casino that smelled like ash trays and bring the whole place down. I've seen 68-year-old Fred Wesley passing the peas at an Irish bar in Chicago and 95-year-old Pinetop Perkins doing his boogie at Antone's in Austin. I've heard Ginny Hawker, seated alone on stage at Glenville State College, singing the most bone-chilling Primitive Baptist hymns you can imagine. And I've heard The Del McCoury Band at Carnegie Hall (the little one) in Lewisburg, and they were so high and lonesome it could make an Episcopalian handle snakes.

They all had soul. They all had that thing . . . that thing about music that makes us come back again and again and again.

Let me tell you some other places I've heard it.

I've heard it listening to a group of teenagers on a football field on a Friday night. I've heard it at a 7:30 AM choir practice. I've heard it in the middle of a rehearsal when eight or nine high school students decide they own a tune they've heard Cannonball or Miles play, and suddenly realize they have something to say that's worth hearing.

They all had soul, too.

The concert tonight has me confused, but it also has me angry. There were several hundred 18 and 19-year-olds there, some probably seeing a rock concert for the first time. They were probably excited, probably thought about what they should wear, wondered about seeing their first big superstar. Now they've left the arena not knowing the pure, electric joy that live music can bring.

Maybe Cee-Lo just didn't think a bunch of West Virginia college kids deserved that type of soul. You know what I say to that? "Fuck you."

My Tears Dry on Their Own

2011, Age 39. "Back to Black," by Amy Winehouse, from the album of the same name.

It would probably be difficult to overstate my love for Amy Winehouse.

I first heard her thanks to a free download on iTunes. The song was "You Know I'm No Good." I was so taken aback by the record. I couldn't believe something this soulful, this melodic, this groovy was coming out in 2007. The production was good. There were horns. The sound was so warm, it sounded like vinyl. And then there was her voice.

She sounded to me like Ronnie Spector with a British accent, and I hadn't seen her picture yet. I bought the CD as soon as it was available. Then I went looking for her back catalog only to find that this was just her second record and that her first, Frank, wasn't available in the U.S. Ebay searches revealed that people were paying $35 or more for a copy. I lucked out and got a copy at a record store in Austin while visiting my friends, Steve and Michelle. I also bought the B-sides of both of those records. And downloaded her cover of "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" from iTunes. And several acoustic/alternate versions of songs.

I read cover stories about her in Rolling Stone and Mojo. I watched a Biography special about her. I played her records in my class. I played her for others, like my friend Kenya, until they were hooked, too. I accompanied one of my students singing "Love is a Losing Game" at our jazz cafe at school. I was a fan. I have even blogged about her previously.

Like all of her fans, I followed her tumultuous personal life through the media. It saddened me, but somehow I knew that this was part-and-parcel of her art, too.

I know there are those who reject this sort of thinking and are even angered by it. I will also add that I don't wish to romanticize her addictions and depression, nor suggest that these should be imitated by those hoping to achieve greatness. But you can hear it in her voice. There is very real pain coming through every note of that album. When people talk about soul, I think that is what they are hearing. It may not be necessary to be going through emotional turmoil while singing, but having that deep psychic well to draw from is an unquestionable artistic advantage.

This seems self-evident to me, however politically incorrect it is. Charlie Parker's genius, while perhaps not reliant on his turbulent inner life, was undoubtedly facilitated by it. I've heard countless musicians say, "Imagine what Bird might have done if he weren't on heroin," but the truth is, we don't know. While there have been many notable exceptions, one cannot look at music history without being struck by the many instances of depression and substance abuse.

I'm reading a good book right now called Touched by Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison. It's about instances of manic depression among artists and why bi-polar disorder seems to be such a frequent occurrence among that group. Jamison speculates that the emotional sensitivity that accompanies depression in its various forms is of real value to the artist. If there is also an attendant mania, the artist is able to tap into both the dark and light sides of her nature and work feverishly at times to produce works of exceptional beauty and power. To return to Bird as an example, it seems unthinkable that his legendary 16-hour practice days might have happened apart from a real mania.

Jamison also discusses the tendency of those who live with manic-depression to violate social mores and live on the edge of the culture. We love rock stars for this. When Cee-Lo sings, "My heroes had the heart to live their lives out on the limb," he is echoing something many of us feel. They take risks that many of us can't or won't. We secretly envy so much of their outrageous behavior and wonder if meeting Old Nick down by the crossroads might really be worth it after all. Drunken nights of debauchery and lost years are the stuff of rock legend. Winehouse certainly had that going for her and a great rock image to boot, covered in tattoos, beehive hairdo, cat-eye make-up and playing guitar.

I've speculated for some time about the issue of substance abuse among artists and I think that it is an under-discussed topic. Suggesting that it's only a physiological issue ignores what many of us know first hand. Creating art, especially performing, requires the artist to bring something deeply personal to the surface for everyone to see. This doesn't seem so hard when you are 17 and full of piss. But as you get older, your internal dialog begins to disrupt you, first saying things like, "Don't forget to use the forked F-sharp fingering in this passage." Then he grows more malevolent: "Everyone is embarrassed for you. They feel sorry for you. You should stop playing." Drinking makes that inner man shut up and lets you connect to your performance the way you used to, back when you were cocksure and the world was your oyster.

Apart from that, it's probably the way a lot of artists deal with depression. Amy Winehouse was famous for her alcoholism, but as she said, “I’m manic depressive. I’m not an alcoholic, which sounds like an alcoholic in denial.” You can hear this in her songwriting. "I don't ever wanna drink again, ooh, I just need a friend," she moans in "Rehab," the most notorious song from the album. But the album is thick with this insight into a very painful existence.

Her knowing self-deprecation in "You Know I'm No Good," is alluring as it is distressing to hear, the cheater rather than the cheated begging for a lover to stay, without asking or expecting forgiveness. "Love is a Losing Game" is at turns crass ("Five-story fire as you came") and grandiose ("Over futile odds and laughed at by the gods"). (This one has been my favorite for the last couple of years. Go look for the version with just Amy singing to Fender Rhodes accompaniment. As delightful as Mark Ronson's production is, with its Spectorish wall of sound throughout, this version is perfect and stripped to essentials.) "Tears Dry on Their Own" begins with arguably the best lyric on the album: "All I can ever be to you is the darkness that we knew, and this regret I got accustomed to."

It would be difficult to explain why I identify so closely with these songs. There are certainly elements in the songs that speak to my experience, though not many (although I always smile when she sings to her would-be rehabilitators, "There is nothing you can teach me that I can't learn from Mr. Hathaway.") When I'm going through my own "black" times, I listen to her album a lot.

It just so happens that I've been listening to it a lot this summer, for reasons that I won't go into here. I was eating lunch in Morgantown when I heard she was dead.

I almost wrote, "when I heard that she died," but that makes it sound like something that happened to her. Her death was certainly at her own hand, in one fashion or another. It struck me very hard, but of course, I was not surprised.

My grief at her death is two-fold. I'll go ahead and confess that it was, at first, a selfish grief. I was so upset that we would be hearing no more from this voice. I had been waiting anxiously for her next record and now it wasn't coming. The disease that gave her to us turned and killed her, just as it had other members of the "27 Club," along with Bird and Donny Hathaway, too.

Then I just grieved for her and what her life must have been. I know a bit about depression and have close friends who deal with it daily. Being a musician, it seems I know more than a handful, including many who have spent days and weeks crippled in a hospital, wrestling with their demons. And I've known a few, musicians and otherwise, who ended life at their own hands, whether intentionally or not. I felt like I understood something about what she went through and that type of emotional pain. I listened to her songs over and over again. And I cried. More than once.

Certainly there are more tragic deaths than Amy Winehouse's. I hope no one would infer than I find the death of a celebrity more heart-breaking than that of a soldier or any one of the thousands of children who die senselessly in our world every day due to war or hunger. But her death resonated with me particularly because it seemed itself representative of the pain of this life. I cried for her because she was able to express that for so many of us. As she sang in the title song from Back to Black, "I died a hundred times." Maybe this last time will be enough.

Drink Your Big Black Cow and Get Out of Here

1990, Age 18. "Deacon Blues," from Aja, by Steely Dan.

My friend Noelle hates Steely Dan. I just learned this yesterday.

"The Dan" are one of those acts I have been waiting to hear in concert for years. They have never played West Virginia and I found out last May that they were playing at the Clay Center - literally within walking distance from my house. Exciting stuff.

I've been a fan since I was 18. This was some years after they were popular, of course, as kings of the FM dial. I knew a few of their songs, maybe, but had never really paid attention to them until my freshman year of college.

I was a saxophone major in a studio that was incredibly talented and pretty tight. Our freshman class was good, but we were in awe of the upper classmen. They had serious chops. Scott Gumina. Bob Maxon. Scott Brockmeyer. Marty Ojeda. These dudes were serious bad-asses in our opinion.

We practiced all the time. If you went into the bowels of the CAC anytime, day or night, you could hear saxophones. Scales. Patterns. Ferling etudes. Bach suites. French recital pieces. Mouthpiece exercises. The Omnibook. Transcriptions of Coltrane, Dexter, Sonny Rollins. New music. Lots of new music, some of it too weird for other studios, but we played it all.

And these dudes had ears. Ears like you wouldn't believe. You could play drop the needle and they'd tell you in three seconds if were Bird or Sonny Stitt. Hell, they could tell you if it were Marcel Mule or Sigurd Rascher. They were some obscure motherfuckers. Bob Maxon had perfect pitch, the first person I ever met who did, but they could all hear. They taught me how to listen.

They taught me a lot actually. I once asked Scott Brockmeyer what his practice routine was and he said, "First, I get a case of beer. Then I go up in my room and get out my horn. Then I practice and drink and when I can't feel my fingers, I stop." Good ol' Brock.

Listening was a big deal. You were expected to listen twice as much as you practiced and you were expected to practice a lot. Thursday night was masterclass with David Hastings and Curtis Johnson, our professors, and still two of the most incredible teachers and musicians I have ever met. Unlike other masterclasses, ours weren't always about critiquing other players. Some nights, Hastings would come in with some book he was reading about art or education or something and just read passages to us and ask us what we thought. Some nights, we'd just listen to music. Those nights were the best.

After masterclass, some players would stay and practice. Sometimes there'd be a recital to attend or maybe someone had a gig downtown. Or, we'd just head to someone's apartment and put on records and listen for hours. I was introduced to some great music on those nights. Coltrane's My Favorite Things. Tenor Madness. The Brecker Brothers' Heavy Metal Bebop. Anthony Braxton playing all kinds of out shit. Ornette's Free Jazz. Wayne Shorter's JuJu.

They were some esoteric cats, too. They would do some out kind of things on occasion. At least, it seemed out to me at the time. In retrospect, I think they were just having fun.

One day in my first spring in Morgantown, I was down in a practice room playing tenor. I didn't have an alto yet. I was probably working on some Ferling etude at something like 1/4 speed, because I had crap technique compared to everyone else in studio. Then I hear someone banging on my door. It was Marty Ojeda.

Marty was a cool dude. He was also from Logan County, which I have to admit did not jive with my idea of a cool dude. In my mind, Logan County residents were hillbillies. The problem with my idea was that it didn't hold water when I met Marty. He had serious chops. And serious ears. He was first chair in the Wind Symphony and lead tenor in Jazz Ensemble I (I think. This was all some years ago.) He was a great player. He sounded like Lenny Pickett. I just learned who Lenny Pickett was that year. So, Marty was banging on my practice room door. I opened it.

"You wanna go fly a kite?"

" . . . what?"

"You wanna go fly a kite?"

"Uh. Sure. Let me put up my horn."

Now, this was not the type of invitation I was accustomed to getting. I don't think I had flown a kite since I was ten. But when a senior saxophone major asks you, a freshman saxophone major, if you want to go fly a kite, you accept. I thought it might be some sort of "Zen and the Art of Kite Flying"-type of exercise which might have applicability to my playing.

So, I put up my horn and got in Marty's car. We drove across the street to the Coliseum parking lot to fly our kites. I can't remember what kind of car he had, but I remember being duly unimpressed. He did have a cassette player. Steely Dan was playing.

"You like the Dan, man?"

"Who?"

"Steely Dan! You like Steely Dan?"

"I don't know who that is?"

"What?! You've never heard of Steely Dan? They did 'Reeling in the Years.'" He sang a few bars. I remembered that one. "They are musicians' musicians. All good musicians like Steely Dan."

That was enough for me. I took him at his word. I started buying Steely Dan records, which in 1990 was easy enough. It seemed that everyone was getting rid of their vinyl that year and everyone was getting rid of their Steely Dan. The first record I bought was Aja at the Princeton Record Exchange in New Jersey. I paid $1.00. Wayne Shorter plays on the record. Wayne Shorter, who played with Miles and co-founded Weather Report. I bought them all eventually. I own the entire SD discography and I can honestly say that I think every single record is great, even The Royal Scam.

I've learned over the years that not everyone likes Mssrs. Becker and Fagan. I remember some lame George Carlin bit about how he hated people who had "Baby on Board" stickers on their cars. "Are these the same people who listen to Steely Dan?" he asked. I never thought that asshole was funny.

They've been blamed for a lot, including inspiring young rock and rollers to invent punk music in protest to the slick production and complex harmonies evident on most SD records. No doubt about it: it's music for people who like to listen. I don't mean that as a criticism of anyone. I certainly don't mean that if you like to listen you must like Steely Dan. I just mean that they require some attention to really appreciate.

The music itself is the main thing. They riff on standard forms of course - Fagan and Becker had fantasies of being Brille Building tunesmiths. But they play with them. "Bodhisattva" sounds like it's going to be a 12-bar blues shuffle, but has this fun extended turn-around. Nothing too crazy. And a lot of the tunes push radio time limits. This was definitely a band for album-oriented rock, or rather album-oriented jazz-rock. The harmonies are fun for anyone who plays jazz. A little modal, some typical substitutions, the infamous "Mu major chord" (essentially an add 9 major triad voiced in a particular way).

The lyrics keep me coming back, too. I was probably listening for years before I even knew all the lyrics to one song. I once got into an argument with a friend who insisted that the refrain on "Hey Nineteen" went, "Look where they go, the fine tooth numbing-uh . . . " Honestly, with Steely Dan, I wouldn't be surprised if those were the lyrics. Songs about incest, pedophiles, porn, prostitutes, California drug kingpins, upper Manhattan cougars (before they were called that), alcoholics, Moonies and Charlie Parker. They favored the American underbelly for song topics, but what could you expect from a band named for a fictional dildo imagined by William Burroughs? You will not find, "I'm down on my knees, I'm beggin' you please," in the SD oeuvre.

I dig a lot of the songs. Some of them speak to me a lot more now that I'm older. Sometimes I like music that makes me feel young, but sometimes I like music that acknowledges that I have been around a bit. I've seen some things and not all of them are good. I'm even responsible for some of them. These are songs for losers and I can really dig that some days. "Deacon Blues" is easily my favorite:

They got a name for the winners in the world, I wanna name when I lose.

They call Alabama the Crimson tide . . . call me 'Deacon Blues.'

I connect a lot more to that music at 39 than I did at 18. Things are different. I'm more broken and more familiar with that dark side of life. Everyone I knew when I was 18 is different, too. David Hastings and Curtis Johnson have left WVU, just like all of us. Brock is dead. Marty Ojeda is back in Logan County, after spending years gigging in Nashville. He's a band director down there. He missed the concert last night, partly because he had band camp. And I'm . . . whatever I am.

I feel like that a lot these days. I did yesterday, thinking about going to the concert. I spent the day posting lyrics to my Facebook. Those lyrics bring out Dan-haters, and I know a lot of them. Noelle told me that Donald Fagen has no sense of humor and that having good players on your record does not make a band good. That's okay. Noelle is good people and a good musician, too. My friend John's wife tolerates all of his musical forerays (this is a man who is as likely to put on Burt Bacharach, the Louvin Brothers or Coltrane's Ascension), but will leave the room if he puts Steely Dan on the turntable.

Those lyrics bring out the SD fans, too. My friend Mark may be as big of a fan as I am. We've traded thoughts about the music and favorite lyrics. We even talked about getting together and writing some music a la Fagan and Becker one of these days. Maybe we will, if I ever learn to work the saxophone . . . play just what I feel . . .