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Opinion: Let Obama be Obama - POLITICO.com Print View

(author unknown) — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 15:16:52 PDT

POLITICO covers political news with a focus on national politics, Congress, Capitol Hill, the 2008 presidential race, lobbying, advocacy, and more. POLITICO's in-depth coverage includes video features, regular blogs, photo galleries, cartoons, and political forums.

waving

(author unknown) — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 15:41:29 PDT

Shared by Bill
cnn: "did the chicken cross the road to go to the bank or avoid being fried? you decide!"

Meat stylus for the iPhone

(author unknown) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:24:27 PST

Shared by Bill
now this is funny!

Sales of CJ Corporation's snack sausages are on the increase in South Korea because of the cold weather; they are useful as a meat stylus for those who don't want to take off their gloves to use their iPhones.

It seems that the sausages, electrostatically speaking, are close approximations of the human finger. Here's the not-entirely-useful English translation of a Korean news article about the soaring sausage sales. (via clusterflock)

Tags: food iPhone South Korea

Bandwagon Voters and the Dysfunction on the Left

(author unknown) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:23:34 PST

Shared by Bill
simply brilliant!

By Al Giordano

Somewhere in America – actually, on every street – there is an Independent voter, or a family of them.

Let's call them Mr. and Mrs. Independent. Contrary to the hype, they are less likely to be small-i independent in the sense of open-mindedness and careful vetting of issues and policy positions than they are prone to looking, election after election, for which bandwagon to jump onto.

And that explains how, on Tuesday, so many of the same Massachusetts Independent voters that cast ballots 14 months ago for Democrat Barack Obama went and did so for Republican Scott Brown.

The harsh reality is that so many of these “Independents” can more properly be called “Bandwagon Voters.”

Imagine Mr. and Mrs. Independent living on one of those streets. In the house to the right of them is one family, devout evangelical Christian, pro military interventions, and desiring of lower taxes.

Mr. and Mrs. Independent consider the family to the right a little bit scary and weird. In the privacy of their home they might even make fun of the family on the right, which reminds them of that of the cartoon Flanders family on The Simpsons TV show. And the Independents don’t generally agree with the Flanders' obsessions against abortion and gays. Still, they share some of the same fear of people of different races (most of the Independents are white), they also resent taxes, respect the military, and they also have to contend with the family in the house to the left.

In the house to the left is a more liberal family. Really, it more resembles the Simpsons themselves. Often, if given the choice between attending a party at either neighbor’s home, Mr. and Mrs. Independent will choose the party in house on the left, as they did in 2008. The Simpsons are generally more fun than the Flanders.

But if throughout 2009 the dysfunction inside the house on the left – the screaming matches, yelling, pouting, expressions of outrage and feigned outrage – spilled out onto the street, it is kind of understandable that this month they chose to accept the invitation of the Flanders instead of that of the Simpsons.

The house in the middle contains the Bandwagon Voters. They will reliably, year in, year out, follow the neighbor that seems like it is having more fun. They’re Good Time Charlies, essentially.

This dynamic – more than any public policy explanation – describes what happened in Massachusetts this week and why it happened.

And this is why we see so many preemptive screeds by the same “progressive” bloggers that have been doing the screaming out in the street all year long. They are now furiously typing to mock the idea that they have any responsibility for the Democrats’ defeat on Tuesday, pointing fingers at everyone else, because somewhere inside their little pea brains they understand perfectly well their role in the dysfunction that scared Mr. and Mr. Independent away this round, and they fear - as well they should - that Tuesday's defeat will fall harder upon them even if their behavior helped create it.

Worse, they’re using Tuesday’s results as permission to scream even louder, disturb the neighborhood even more, yell “I told you so” and make petulant demands that things must be done their way, or else.

And this only makes Mr. and Mrs. Independent more smugly satisfied that they attended the Flanders’ tea party this year instead.

And the continuing efforts at imposed buzzkill by The Poutrage Club of the house on the left only emboldens the Flanders, too. It gives them morale. It makes them more content, in turn, more confident, and therefore more attractive come November.

In that sense, they very much share in the blame that they so desperately attempt to assign to everybody else but them.

That's not "blaming the left." (I'm many paces to the left of most of those people, and many of you who share in this view are, too.)

It is, rather, identifying the dysfunction.

Roger Ebert reviews "The Book of Eli"

(author unknown) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 11:31:35 PST

Shared by Bill
magnificent writing!

I'm at a loss for words, so let me say these right away: "The Book of Eli" is very watchable. You won't be sorry you went. It grips your attention, and then at the end throws in several WTF! Moments, which are a bonus. They make everything in the entire movie impossible and incomprehensible -- but, hey, WTF.

Now to the words I am at a loss for. The story involves a lone wanderer (Denzel Washington) who wears a name tag saying "Hi! My name is Eli." It may not actually be his name tag, but let's call him Eli, anyway. Eli has been walking west across the devastated landscape of America for 30 years, on his way to the sea. I haven't walked it myself, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't take that long.

On the other hand, maybe Eli only thought he was walking west. On his final trek, he walks from right to left across the screen, which in movie shorthand is walking east. "How do you know you're walking the right way?" he's asked. "Faith," he says, a reply that takes on added resonance later in the film.

Eli is a quick hand with knives, pistols, rifles, shotguns and karate. He needs to be. After a catastrophe has wiped out most of the Earth's population and left ruin and desolation behind, the remaining humans are victimized by roaming motorcycle gangs of hijackers and thieves. Each of these gangs is issued a requisite tall bald man, a short hairy scruffy one and their go-fers.

The Hughes brothers, Albert and Allen, film this story in sunburned browns and pale blues, creating a dry and dusty world under a merciless sky. Water is treasure. This wasteland Eli treks at an implacable pace. Set upon in an ambush, he kills all his attackers. He's got one of those knives that makes a snicker-snack noise all by itself, and is a one-man army. Why don't the bad guys just shoot at him? Later in the film, they try that.

Washington and the Hughes brothers do a good job of establishing this man and his world, and at first, "The Book of Eli" seems destined to be solemn. But then Eli arrives at a Western town ruled by Carnegie (Gary Oldman), who, like all the local overloads in Westerns and gangster movies, sits behind a big desk flanked by a tall bald guy and, of course, a short scruffy one. How are these guys recruited? Wanted: Tall bald guy to stand behind town boss and be willing to sacrifice life. All the water you can drink.

In this town, desperate and starving people live in rusty cars and in the streets. We meet Carnegie's abused wife Claudia (Jennifer Beals) and her daughter Solara (Mila Kunis), named, for some reason, after the cause of all the destruction. She's a prostitute in Carnegie's bar, having made the mistake of coming in on Take Your Child to Work Day. Carnegie hurts Claudia to control Solara. How he controls the fearsome bald guy is hard to say.

The third act is recycled, but done well, out of many Westerns in which the hero and the girl hole up and are surrounded. So many other movies are referenced that we almost miss it when their hideout house is perforated by bullets in "L.A. Confidential" style. That allows countless beams of sunlight to shine in and function as a metaphor.

Carnegie needs Eli because Eli has maybe the last remaining copy of a book that Eli believes will allow him to expand and rule many more towns. I am forbidden by the Critic's Little Rule Book from naming the volume, but if you've made a guess after seeing numerous billboards stating RELIGION IS POWER, you may have guessed right.

The Hughes brothers have a vivid way with imagery here, as in their earlier films such as "Menace II Society" and the underrated "From Hell." The film looks and feels good, and Washington's performance is the more uncanny the more we think back over it. The ending is "flawed," as we critics like to say, but it's so magnificently, shamelessly, implausibly flawed that (a) it breaks apart from the movie and has a life of its own, or (b) at least it avoids being predictable.

Now do yourself a favor and don't talk to anybody about the film if you plan to see it.

What the media could learn from the NFL

Ezra Klein — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 12:31:00 PST

In football, you have one set of players that runs offense and another that runs defense. That makes sense: Your linebacker should be learning how to be an excellent linebacker, not a mediocre running back. Specialization! Adam Smith! The pin factory! This is what made America great, and Europe terrible, or something.

Sadly, the political media isn't as well organized as your average football team. There are two big things that go on in this town: Politics and policy. It would make a lot of sense to have people who focus mainly on one or the other, and news outlets do. But because lots of people read about politics and very few people read about policy, the political reporters end up prospering, and they're left with the megaphones when the election ends and policy begins. David Gregory, for instance, was a campaign reporter who now anchors a show that is, in theory, substantially about policy. And that's not an accident: He was hired because of what a good political reporter he was, as that skill is considered pretty much identical to policy reporting.

The idea that knowledge of politics is the same, or even particularly related, to knowledge of policy is really poisonous, and utterly pervasive. Take Peggy Noonan's column arguing that "the public in 2009 would have been happy to see a simple bill that mandated insurance companies offer coverage without respect to previous medical conditions" but, instead, the White House got "greedy for glory." You don't need to know a lot about health-care policy to know why the administration didn't do this, and the answer isn't "glory."

Crudely speaking, insurance premiums are the average of the expected risk of that particular pool of customers, plus a bit for profit, administration and so forth. If insurers don't discriminate against sick people and there's no mandate or subsidies bringing healthier people into the pool, then the average premium price begins to reflect the price of the average sick person. That's intuitive enough: Sick people need insurance more, so they sign up for it in greater numbers. That means costs rise to reflect the average of sick people rather than sick and healthy people, and those high costs drive more healthy people out of the pool, and that makes coverage unaffordable for everyone. The name for this is an "insurance death spiral."

But assume, for a moment, that there was no such thing as an insurance death spiral. Reread under that light, Noonan's take is, if anything, worse. She doesn't even entertain the idea that the administration sought to cover 30+ million Americans because doing so is important. Instead, it was all about political, uh, "glory." When all you know is politics, everything looks like politics. And when the media is dominated by that perspective, the public comes to believe it, and from there, it's only a short jump to the corrosive cynicism that's eating away at our civic culture.

And I don't even really mean to pick on Noonan. I think she's a pretty good political columnist, actually. And she's certainly not alone. Check out Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a GOP 2012 hopeful, writing that balancing the budget will require Congress to "reduce discretionary spending in real terms, with exceptions for key programs such as military, veterans, and public safety." As Stan Collender points out, discretionary spending with these exceptions is about $400 billion a year. The government spent about $4 trillion in 2009. You could cut 20 percent from Pawlenty's category and have done fairly little for the short-term budget deficit and virtually nothing for the long-term budget deficit, which is driven by the growth rate in health-care costs.

If political editors knew policy a bit better, they might have challenged Pawlenty on that point. But they don't. And why should they? They've probably heard the same stuff from their writers for years now. And the American people have been hearing this stuff from everybody, so it all sounds like truth to them.

Photo credit: By Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press

Conan O’Brien Says He Won’t Do ‘Tonight Show’ Following Leno

(author unknown) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:09:35 PST

Shared by Bill
on twitter, conan is god. everyone loves this statement. everyone except, that is, me. conan seems high-minded, resolute, principled. except he's sticking the shiv into leno. twisting it. drawing blood. hitting bone.

simply publishing this ("people of the world") is a power play. he steals the ground from leno, casting him as the villain. casts his team against leno's. blames leno more than nbc.

leno is in an untenable position. he can't win the p.r. game against conan at this point. or if he can, i'm not sure how he does it. nbc if frakked. otoh this is all their doing. they had choices to make and they tried to avoid them. choices have consequences. by not choosing, they've damaged leno, conan, fallon, and the tonight show franchise. which, was, of course, a choice, albeit a demonstrably bad one.

Funny and eloquent statement, addressed to “People of Earth”. Don’t miss the dig he slips in at Leno’s abysmal 10pm ratings:

It was my mistaken belief that, like my predecessor, I would have the benefit of some time and, just as important, some degree of ratings support from the prime-time schedule.

★

The Health Care System Should Give People Good Advice About Health

(author unknown) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 08:53:27 PST

Shared by Bill
after watching half of food, inc., it's clear frum doesn't go far enough. and as a committed conservative, it's pretty clear he wouldn't want to go far enough. feed that guy some high fructose corn syrup, will ya?

David Frum observes that there’s more to health outcomes than treating illness:

So if the U.S. health system does such a good job saving its middle-aged and elderly sick, why do Americans die comparatively young?

Answer: because Americans are much more likely to get sick in the first place.

And that likelihood owes very little to the health care system and a great deal to the bad choices American individuals make. If you eat too much, exercise too little, drink too much, smoke, take drugs, fail to wear a seat belt or ignore gun safety, there is only so much a doctor or hospital can do for you. And Americans do all those things, more than other people.

This is all more-or-less true, but I think the erection of a false dichotomy between “bad choices American individuals make” and “the health care system” obscures more than it reveals. Most Americans make choices in life that lead them to have jobs in which they get health insurance from their employers or else they’re retired and they receive health insurance on a socialist basis. Then they make choices to put this employer-provided or government-provided insurance to use by visiting doctors. Then they make choices to put those doctors visits to use by getting certains kinds of treatments. These are “choices”—for those old enough or prosperous enough to have them—but they’re also what the health care system consists of.

And the system does a good, though seemingly not cost-effective, job of treating serious medical problems once they develop. But the system does not do a very good job of persuading people to seriously consider the health implications of some of their actions. There’s evidence from the UK than when doctors are compensated in a way that rewards them for persuading patients to quit smoking, their effectiveness at getting people to quit smoking goes way up. Parents rely on doctors for advice about their kids in many ways. And pediatricians could, but generally don’t, say to the parents of school age children “I know many parents feel it’s safer to drive their kids to school than to have them walk with friends, but the evidence suggests that the risks of car accidents and physical inactivity are greater than the risk of crime.”

Last, the resources consumed by the health care system are one of the reasons people make the choices they do. You might walk a few blocks to the metro, then ride it most of the way to work, then walk a few blocks more to the office. But whether or not you make this choice has a lot to do with whether or not someone built a metro line. If we build more, people will make different choices. But that would be expensive. And Medicare is also expensive. Blueberries are healthy and easy to prepare. But they’re also a lot more expensive than, say, potatoes. Every dollar spent on insurance premiums or doctors visits is a dollar that could be spent on berries.

The point is that a well-functioning health care system should be conducive to public health. Ours isn’t. It’s true that our medical interventions are fairly effective, but that just tends to illustrate that our priorities are somewhat off base.

Bunker Mentality: Barack Obama's dangerous obsession with golf.

(author unknown) — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 22:50:57 PST

Shared by Bill
So golf has no redeeming social value. Except the same that playing music has for me. When I'm playing either I'm not thinking about anything else. Instant vacation!

It’s been a tough first year for President Obama, as critics throughout the body politic bemoan that Mr. Change-We-Can-Believe-In is looking more and more like Mr. Politics-As-Usual. With the coming new year, however, POTUS has a prime opportunity to regroup, reload, and revamp his image. He could start by ditching golf.

Seriously. Its venerable White House history notwithstanding, golf is a dubious pastime for any decent, sane person, much less for this particular president. Why would a leader vowing to shake up Washington--to alter the very nature of politics--sell his soul to a leisure activity that screams stodgy, hyperconventional Old Guard?

There are signs that Obama has been nursing a creeping golf addiction for some time now. He took up the game a little more than a decade ago as a newbie state senator hoping to bond with more rural, conservative colleagues. Next thing you know, he was hooked--playing for cash, fretting over his form, and goading staffers to cut out of work early for a quick round.

During the 2008 race, Obama’s golf outings drew less notice than his battles on the hard court. But, now that he’s firmly ensconced in the Oval Office, the sticks have come out of the closet as Obama constantly looks to squeeze in a few holes: on Father’s Day, during the family’s summer holiday on the Vineyard, immediately upon touching down from his June trip to Europe. It is often noted that this president hit the links more frequently in his first nine months than the reared-on-golf George W. did in his first two years (after which W. conspicuously swore off the game out of respect for the troops). Currently ranked eighth on Golf Digest’s list of presidential golfers (sandwiched between Clinton and Reagan), Obama seems intent on moving up the ladder--despite reports that he’s something of a duffer.

Various explanations have been floated for Obama’s embrace of golf: (1) Professional advancement. Ostensibly why Obama started playing, golf is indeed a time-honored way for ambitious political and business types to schmooze. In First Off the Tee, Don Van Natta Jr.’s book about presidential golfers, we learn that, as vice president, Richard Nixon went so far as to take lessons in hopes of impressing his golf-crazed boss, President Eisenhower. (2) Escape. All those hours of intense focus on getting the wee ball in the wee hole provide relief from the pressures of the office. (3) Testosterone. With all of the competition but none of the bruising of real sports, golf is what hard-charging alpha males turn to when they start getting too old to bang around in the paint. (4) Image control. Obama’s enthusiastic adoption of this most corporate of pastimes reassures middle-Americans that their history-making black president isn’t too urban, edgy, or cool. (As a bonus, golf is popular among retirees, who were stubbornly unwowed by Obama’s trail talk of hope and change.) (5) Tradition. With only three of the past 18 presidents not playing the game, golf is just something Americans expect our leader to do.

But just because other presidents have done it doesn’t mean there aren’t political risks involved. In the popular imagination, golf is the stuff of corporate deal-cutting, congressional junkets, and country club exclusivity. And, unless a president is very careful, a golf habit can easily be spun as evidence of unseemly character traits ranging from laziness to callousness to out-of-touch elitism. As a senator, John F. Kennedy scored political points on Eisenhower by mocking Ike’s golf obsession--while taking pains to keep his own golfing gifts under wraps. (As Van Natta recounts, JFK forbade the media from photographing him at play.) Bushes 41 and 43 were both slammed for golfing during wartime. It has been posited that W. quit the game in part because of the stinging coverage of comments he made on the golf course in August 2002, following a suicide bombing in Israel. “There are a few killers who want to stop the peace process that we have started, and we must not let them,” Bush told the assembled journalists. “I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now watch this drive.” The tone-deaf clip eventually made its way into Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. It was not one of golf’s finer moments.

More broadly, for all the blather about how golf is soooo much less elitist than it used to be--a line being aggressively peddled these days by the head of Scotland’s Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews in an effort to return the game to the Olympic lineup for the first time in over a century--it remains largely the province of reasonably affluent white guys. (Memo to the R&A: That whole golf-is-egalitarian pitch might be more persuasive if your club weren’t still boys-only.) There are fewer black faces on the PGA Tour now than there were three decades ago, and Augusta National’s 2003 fight to keep women out of its clubhouse did nothing to improve the game’s sexist rep.

And if we really want to get harsh about it: Golf is a dying game--on the skids for nearly a decade, according to a 2008 report by the National Golf Foundation. The number of Americans who golf has fallen by some four million, while the number who golf frequently (25-plus rounds a year) has plummeted by a third. One observed problem: evolving family dynamics. Men once free to spend all weekend on the links are now expected to help shuttle the kids to soccer, walk the dog, and generally pull their weight on the home front. The first lady may be understanding about her man’s special recreational needs. But does President Obama really want to be associated with a game so antithetical to modern life?

Michelle Cottle is a senior editor of The New Republic.

A Gutsy Risotto

(author unknown) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:18:03 PST

Shared by Bill
braised pork butt seems so, well, to hell with vegetarianism. i want me some!

Making a risotto to go with some kind of stew provides an unexpected delight -- and a good way to use leftover.

Paris / London: Testament by Keith Jarrett

(author unknown) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 01:05:09 PDT

Shared by Bill
Keith's comments are pretty interesting…

From the Artist
Since Heidelberg, Germany in the early 70's I have done improvised piano solo concerts. It all started, however, back when I was a six or seven-year-old so-called "child prodigy," studying and playing classical recitals for the Allentown Pa. Women's Club, etc. The programs would usually include masters such as Mozart or Schubert, Chopin or Debussy, but would also include something I "wrote." But this "writing" wasn't executed at all the same each time. Almost nothing was written down on paper. There were motifs and melodies that remained the same, but then around these were "takeoffs" in the same mood. The pieces were almost always "program" music. There was "Jungle Suite," for example. When I would be practicing at home, I would often change the notes of some composer, and my mother would catch this at times. I told her not to worry: I would play it as written at the concert. Heidelberg was a university town and had a jazz festival. I started my part of the evening by playing a tune, but somehow did not stop. Instead, I connected the tune to the next one by continuing on some sort of journey or transition to it. So, by the end of the set, I hadn't stopped playing. I was then married to my first wife, Margot. Over the years since then, solo piano concerts became more "abstract" and somehow they would grow from small seeds planted spontaneously at the beginning. But they still lasted the entire 45 minutes or so, then a break, then another 45 minutes. They were kind of epic journeys into the unknown. The architecture, however, over many years, became too predictable to me, and I stopped doing so many of these and concentrated on my quartets and writing. After my divorce from Margot, I lived for 30 years with my second wife, Rose Anne. I attempted several times to re-invent the solo concerts, but among other things was laid low for about two years with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The amount of energy these concerts took was always amazing to me. It was like the Olympics each time. So there was a certain off-and-on quality to my scheduling them. While many incredibly good concerts came about, some were not recorded. In the early part of this decade, I tried to bring the format back: starting from nothing and building a universe. But somehow, while practicing in my studio, I realized that much of what I was playing was stuff I had liked before, but actively did not like now. Whenever I would play something that was from the past and sounded mechanical, I would stop. This led me to try to include this starting and stopping in solo concerts in Japan. The music from this particular first attempt was to become "Radiance." I continued to find a wealth of music inside this open format, stopping whenever the music told me to, and eventually released "The Carnegie Hall Concert" in 2006. Although I seemed to others to be some kind of freak of nature, the amount of preparation work, mental, physical, and emotional is probably beyond anybody's imagination (including my own). It is NOT natural to sit at a piano, bring no material, clear your mind completely of musical ideas, and play something that is of lasting value and brand new (not to mention that these are live concerts, and the audience's role was of utmost chemical importance: they could change the potential and shape of the music easier than the difference of pianos or hall sound). I then did a series of solo concerts in Japan in the spring of 2008 that seemed to hit a technical high-note in the history of my solo events. I wasn't sure what could possibly happen next after these concerts. Then my wife left me (this was the third time in four years). I quickly scrambled to stay alive (music had been my life for 60 years) by setting up a Carnegie Hall Concert (a leaflet inserted into the program for my 25th Anniversary trio concert there in October 2008 advertised a solo concert in late January 2009), but before I did that concert, Steve Cloud managed to quickly come up with two solo concerts in Europe: Paris and London. I had not played solo in London for, I believe, 18 years. These were the first solo events since my wife had left. I was in an incredibly vulnerable emotional state, but I admit to wondering whether this might not be a "good" thing for the music. It truly didn't matter; I had to do them. Everything was put together in a dizzyingly short time. I had to find help for packing and touring (I had lots of physical ailments that prevented me from being pro-active on the physical fronts, plus stress, plus an emptiness that was overwhelming, etc.). I decided that if I backed down now, I would back down forever. I used to tell my piano students, "If you're going to play, play like it's the last time." It was not theoretical advice anymore; this was real. This was either going to achieve my survival or hasten my demise. I had no idea how much energy I would have, though I prepared well (but all along I never remembered just how much it took to do these concerts). Startlingly, Paris was an achievement I never expected. Manfred Eicher and the rest of my touring ensemble (minus one) were backstage eating dinner. It started then to be clear to me that I had a new chance at something, that nothing would stop me if only I stayed awake to the possibilities, both musical and personal. Many of the people I knew seemed to feel they were just meeting me. I was in tears going on and offstage for bows. On the way into London, I had as close a brush with a nervous breakdown as I've had. Christmas shoppers were all out holding hands; the place was way too colorful for my mood. I was exhausted from Paris (only two days had gone by) and stuck in an unmoving traffic jam in the middle of London in a car without my wife, looking out the window at couples, Christmas lights, and seemingly-normal unbounded joy. I couldn't handle it. When we finally got to the room I closed all the curtains (they also looked out at lit-up Christmas trees) and tried breathing normally. Two days later we drove to the hall (the limo driver was on my side, he perked up my spirits), I checked the piano, went backstage to see what we had for dinner, was introduced to the catering lady, who was as sharp as anyone around and had just lost her lover after some time together. I said I couldn't help thinking about my wife, and she quietly (but firmly) pointed to a blank, white wall. We shot short, pointed one-liners back and forth during dinner, and I realized all these people, unwittingly, were helping me get myself together. The concert went on and, though the beginning was a dark, searching, multi-tonal melodic triumph, by the end it somehow became a throbbing, never-to-be-repeated, pulsing rock band of a concert (unless it was a church service, in which case, Hallelujah!). I needed heat therapy on my arms afterwards (first time ever). Even the people backstage as I came off in tears again were giving off the exactly right thing. Communication is all. Being is all. People are deep, serious creatures with little to hang on to. So, loss may be a big thing, but what remains becomes even more important than ever. Just never let go of the thread. And be honest with yourself. A writer I greatly admire and with whom I was just recently in touch, echoed some of my words to her when she wrote back to me: "How fragile and serendipitous things are indeed, unbearably so."

Keith Jarrett

Interview with Keith Jarrett

(author unknown) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 01:02:25 PDT

Shared by Bill
Ethan Iverson, pianist with The Bad Plus, always does excellent, thoughtful interviews. This one's no exception.

There’s a big board that has the list of the greatest pianists in history. One of the interesting things about the big board is that these musicians are also the most controversial: Franz Liszt, Art Tatum, Glenn Gould, Thelonious Monk, Josef Hofmann, Vladimir Horowitz, and Bud Powell are all on my big board, but none of them would be on everyone's. (Oscar Peterson, for example, cattily goes out of his way to put down Powell in his autobiography.)

Keith Jarrett belongs on the big board. Amusingly, near the end of this interview when I’m asking him about other jazz pianists, the only name Jarrett is truly dismissive of is Art Tatum. The members of the big board are seldom very generous to fellow members! It’s nice what Jarrett has to say about Powell and Monk.

Thanks to Peggy Sutton of the BBC for initiating this memorable afternoon. Steve Weiss was the engineer and Bradley Farberman handled much of the transcription.

---

EI: Do you play the piano every day?

KJ: Now I do, yeah. There was a long time in my life (when I was ill) when I didn’t practice at really at all regularly, but now, yes, I do It really depends on what I am working towards or away from or both. Sometimes I have to slowly erase one thing and move towards another.

I was just working on Bach over the last few months and now I have to shelve that and pretend that I know how to do a solo concert and while I’m pretending that: that’s practicing. But! I thought I was going to shelve the Bach but now I’m playing the Bach and for the last twenty fine minutes I do the other thing and it works very well. Because by the time I do the finger-work that Bach requires, and the control thing, my fingers are ready to be completely out-of-control and in-control at the same time. I didn’t realize that it was helping me improvise until Gary Peacock looked at me between sets and said, “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.”

EI: So, at one point going between jazz and classical felt like more than an embouchure change than it does now? Is it beginning to even out?

KJ: It really depends. When I was getting ready to record Mozart I couldn’t have mixed both. And in general that’s the case. I generally don’t mix things. But I’ve seen how it seems to work this time, and I’m just taking advantage of it. Probably I’m in better shape than I was before, due to some of the patterns Bach forces upon you. The jazz player doesn’t ever play these patterns: they don’t come up; certainly not in the left hand. And working on the fingering puts you in a hypnotic state, playing the same phrase down one half step at a time or down a scale but and you’re doing the same fingering but it isn’t the same fingering. depending on how many black keys are involved. And Bach has this crazy ability to change key in the middle of a scale. So you’ve changed harmonic center in the process in of playing what you thought was a simple scale so you can’t take your eyes off the music. And even with the bass line if you stop looking for you think you know what it is but he always thought it out so well that it’s not always not predictable, but his note is always better than yours.

EI: Do you work out your fingerings early on, or keep experimenting?

KJ: I’ve had all kinds of experiences. With the Shostakovich I just played it and played it and played it. When I realized I was going to record it, I had to say to myself, wait: I’ve got to find to find an edited version of this with fingerings! Because what I normally do is find different fingerings every time I play, probably. I just improvise that part of it. It works sometimes but it doesn’t work work in the studio, when you don’t want to do a second take. So I went through three different editions of the Shostakovich and ended up absolutely no fingering : the Urtext, with no fingerings at all, and that’s always what I prefer in the end. With the Bach I’ve been able to stick with that. I don’t even like making a mark on the page...

EI: What about the ornamentation? Do you play that differently every time?

KJ: I sort of feel my way through that. Bach was said to have said that everything he wrote in is what he meant, and that it’s not supposed to have needed anything added. But I hear things occasionally depending on what’s going on; I let things happen. But I also know traditional performance practice for those those trills and ornaments. It’s surprising much that has become part of me since my harpsichord learning years in the 80’s. However, when you apply the same ornaments to piano you can end up in trouble because the resistance is so massive.

EI: I think Franz Liszt said somewhere that the heart of piano virtuosity was the trill - that if you could play those, you could play anything.

KJ: Um-hmm. Yeah. You know, harpsichordists don’t learn the 2-3-1-3-2-3-1-3 fingering, they don’t learn the “alternating second finger so you give the other one a break,” they only learn the two finger trills. Even on piano I’m finding that the two-finger trill is better if you can do it because it’s more even.

If your background is from a certain country like Sweden, there might be a tendency to play drier. If you watch old Bergman movies, when they eating it’s almost obscene: everything is drily close-miked and you hear the forks sound going into the corn or whatever But if your from lets say, a Slavic country there’s going to be gusto in the playing and maybe even a kind of unrefinement that is not bad, but just different. Then some German types think they know exactly who Bach is. But, actually, if these guys were alive...

Once I was playing Mozart on a boat with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Askenazy. I played some little extra notes inside one or or two places. After the rehearsal he said to me, in total disbelief, “Conversations with Mozart?”

And I said, “Why not? Hey, if he was on this ship, what do you think he would say? I mean, would he say no, no, no, no?” I don’t have that impression about who Mozart was. I think he would say, “That’s interesting...” I’m not saying he would think it was necessary but I don’t think he would be upset. I’ve have that experience as a composer. When I finished the only piano piece I’ve written out, Ritual, I thought, I‘m the last person who should play this. In addition to being a conductor, Dennis Russell Davies is a very good pianist, so I said, “Here! Dennis! Take this music...see what you think.” I heard him rehearsing it: I sat in the hall in Cabrillo, California while he was practicing, and afterwards he said, “Keith: What do think?”

I said: “Cool. It’s good.”

“Is there anything you want me to do that...”

“No.”

Once you die you become an icon: a dead icon. Like Mozart. But what would he actually say to you if you could play his music for him?

EI: Mozart and Bach composed and performed on such different instruments than we can imagine now. We’ll never know what that music sounded like at the time. There’s definitely room for maneuvering in terms of a contemporary interpretation. They both improvised all the time, anyway. I disagree with Ashkenazy saying, “Conversations with Mozart?”

KJ: I do too, although I see both sides. People often ask me, whose cadenzas are you playing? Or: Why aren’t you improvising your cadenzas? And the answer is simply that I can’t mix both sides, the improvising with the classical performance. And I don’t want to write a cadenza, there are so many really good cadenzas available already. I don’t want to get in to the part of me that isn’t interpreter.

EI: But you did improvise a cadenza in the Lou Harrison Concerto.

KJ: That’s true, but that’s a modern piece. I’m talking about the old guys who gave the player a chance to be themselves, but in the language of the day. Gideon Kremer does the Alfred Schnittke cadenza for the Beethoven Violin Concerto, and the audience goes, “Oh my, that’s so weird!” That emotion is not something I’m looking for: If there’s a Mozart cadenza, I play that, and if there’s not, there’s very good cadenzas by people who were there and that language was their thing.

EI: I was just listening to the Harrison Concerto this morning: It’s a beautiful work.

KJ: It is! That was actually supposed to be a documentary recording, but it became an official New World release because Naoto Otomo and the New Japan Philharmonic knew what to do with the drum part. Everybody else that played this piece was informed by the way classical percussionists always worry that they shouldn’t protrude from the texture. And there’s the koto drummer tradition over there. At first I couldn’t figure out why the hell this music had finally come to life, and it occurred to me that they have a drum tradition we don’t have. Over there, if a classical percussionist sees forte or whatever Lou might have written on their part, they go for it. Over here, they would diminish the attack. The first time I played it was with Dennis Russell Davies and the American Composer’s Orchestra, and I expected it to be really good. But I almost didn’t even notice the drums in the “Stampede,” and that’s the biggest thing in that movement!

EI: This is changing even as we speak, but it’s certainly true that classical percussionists are traditionally pretty worthless in terms of generating groove or rhythmic excitement.

KJ: Yeah, it’s a boring job.

EI: Especially when you think of drummers everywhere else.

KJ: Why would you want to be conducted, anyway, if you’re a drummer?

EI: A real pet peeve of mine are conductors who stand waving their arms frantically in front of jazz big bands playing obvious 4/4 swing. Can you imagine Count Basie doing this?

KJ: I saw the Count Basie band several times when I was a kid. In the 50’s...Man, they were swinging so hard - no one in that band needed a conductor!

EI: Was Sonny Payne on drums?

KJ: Yes...Around New Hope there was a music tent, and I saw Basie and Dave Brubeck there. I heard the Brubeck quartet a lot. I lived in Allentown, and there wasn’t much else that played in the area.

EI: Was that the classic quartet with Paul Desmond and Joe Morello?

KJ: Yeah!

EI: I love Paul Desmond so much. And you recorded his ballad, “Late Lament.”

KJ: “Late Lament” is a beautiful song. Paul Desmond came up to me once and said, “Keep it up, Keith.” When I heard the Brubeck quartet as I kid, though, I remember having the thought -- probably about Dave more than anybody else -- that more could be done. It was good that that group existed. There was no other group that came out to Allentown. Nobody else did!

EI: I think that most professional jazz players don’t list Brubeck as one of their top ten pianists, but on those early 50’s live records with Desmond playing standards like “My Foolish Things,” he’s really going for it: starting with a simple idea and trying to build a vast edifice out of it. I don’t anybody really did that before him.

KJ: I don’t think people did solo work that much, either. There was a solo album that Brubeck released that was important. Probably besides Brubeck and Lennie Tristano, there wasn’t much else for modern playing in a solo context.

EI: There was a Monk album or two...

KJ: Yeah, OK, true. About Brubeck, though, I remember also that there was an exact transcription, some sheet music, of those pieces. And I learned a lot from that! I wasn’t going to transcribe it myself, but now I could play through and see why I liked what I liked. Of course, I was young enough that I needed all the listening and playing experience I could get.

EI: How old were you?

KJ: I didn’t get interested in jazz until my early teens. Maybe 14 or something.

EI: How did go about trying to get the records?

KJ: That was hard. That was almost impossible. They had just invented the mall: really, it wasn’t malls quite yet, but big stores with various shops all on the same floor that had record departments. There was one in Bethlehem that I thought had the best selection. There was a record store in Allentown, too. But in both places you had to go through every record to maybe kind of come across something that the buyer had made a mistake purchasing...and the one, most important mistake they made there, if they wanted me to stay in Allentown and stay white, was having the white Ahmad Jamal album.

EI: The double LP, right? [I've seen this: it's a collection of Pershing material including "Poinciana" and other familiar Jamal with Israel Crosby and Vernel Fournier.]

KJ: Yes. I said to myself, “Who’s this? I know the other guys: I’m always seeing Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, Errol Garner, Andre Previn,..” (I was forced to think of Previn as a jazz player for quite some time.) “But who’s this Ahmad Jamal?”

I always wanted to find out what was happening, so I bought it. It changed everything about what I thought could happen up to then it was a virtuosity thing: playing fast, or swinging. (At least swinging was there) But then there was a spacial thing, and not a nee for constant playing, I used to practice drums to that album all the time: not to get rid of Vernel Fournier, but because Vernel was so wonderful. He didn’t even have to pick up the sticks but did just incredible stuff with brushes.

As it turns out, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette and I all had that same white album.

EI: Aha! The secret DNA of the Standards Trio.

KJ: Jack is very close with Ahmad, and apparently has told Jack that he recommends that people listen to us, so it all comes back.

EI: When you mention Oscar, Erroll, and Brubeck I think of some great music but music that has drummer that are merely present, not distinctive.

KJ: It’s just an express train, moving along.

EI: But with Ahmad I immediately think of the drums -- not just Vernel but Frank Gant and Idris Muhammad, too.

KJ: And the accents!...and the way that they dealt with space: That’s why Miles was so taken with them.

EI: Did you get the Miles records in Allentown?

KJ: No.

I didn’t hear too many important players until I got out of there. I went to the Stan Kenton band camps a couple times and did my my first record, really young. I took a bus to Chicago for that. Don Jacobi heard me play at the camps and wanted me to be part of the this All-Star College Band even though I wasn’t close to college age. I had never had stayed in hotel before this trip, never been in the studio...and the piano parts were just a few block chords and some ornamental scales and arpeggios on the ballads.

EI: I’ve heard that record: you don’t get a solo!

KJ: That was the result of the band camps, at which I also met some great big band players from North Texas State that Kenton hired. Then I would to Atlantic City and Pottsville PA, these are the two places that had big bands when the big band era was still cooking - when Kenton played and the guys in the band would tell Stan to let me sit in. Stan would rather not play the piano, and most people would rather not hear him play, either, so he let me.

When I went to Berklee, my first actual experience playing with first-string players in a small band context was with Herb Pomeroy, who was a very good player. When there wasn’t any big-name coming through he used to bring a quartet with John Nevs, who was black and a really good player, and Ray Santisi, my so-called piano teacher at Berklee although all we did in the lessons was listen: He’d always say, “What should we listen to today?” He knew that’s what I needed, that he wasn’t going to teach me otherwise. And that’s what I would have told my students if I were him. Anyway, Herb would bring this group into the Jazz Workshop in Boston, which was the single most important place in my life.

When I was 15 or so, going through town with Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians, I heard Bill Evans play there with Paul Motian and Gary Peacock. At 15 I’m hearing Paul and Gary for the first time! And I hadn’t really heard much of Bill yet, even though people said I sounded like him.

EI: Did you enjoy that performance?

KJ: Oh yeah, It was beautiful. Bill might have been too high enjoy it himself, he was speeding up or slowing down or both, I don’t know what. (Gary would know.)

While I was still at Berklee, I was working upstairs at the Jazz Workshop at the bar, accompanying singers, which I liked. We had a break, and I went downstairs and didn’t hear any music, and I thought what’s going on? Herb knew me from Berklee big band class and John said, so you want to play? I said, “Yeah!” John said, “Ray’s late - we want to get started. Pete La Roca’s on drums.” I said, “OK!” meaning, hey, OK, of all the drummers I had heard up until then, Pete was one of the guys I considered as one the best examples of how you could play without sounding like anybody else. And his time concept was unusual and I realized this is not amateur night anymore! That was a wonderful few tunes.

EI: Charlie Haden told me recently how much he loved Pete La Roca’s playing.

I wonder if people told you you sounded like Bill Evans because Bill, Ahmad, and yourself are all dedicated to voice-leading. There’s a common thread of avoiding stock harmony.

KJ: Voice-leading is melody-writing in center of the harmony. If you can do it, you’re lucky enough to get to a moment where you can actually find more than one thing happening and trace those things at the same time to a logical next place...or illogical place--really it doesn’t matter sometimes!

It’s so different that what people think when they look at a lead sheet and build those blocks they way you learn harmony. They can’t get away from this structure of vertical playing with your left hand and then if you’re lucky, maybe a good idea in your right.

But the thing is, partly because I was trained as a classical player, I believe your hands aren’t supposed to have one be dead and one be alive. The longer I’m around, the more I realize that, especially when I have a great bio-feedback mechanism happening with the audience playing solo: There’s no way I can avoid hearing what I’m not doing with my left hand. I’m not doing what could be done. So most of the time, recently, I’m asking my left hand to tell me what it wants to do. Because usually it’s right, and my brain is just locked into some sound that I like, or worse, that I used to like.

One day a few months before that trip to Japan to record Radiance, I had a strong experience of playing something and thinking, “I liked that sound, and I don’t like it anymore but I’m still playing it as if I like it, so what’s going on?” So the only way to answer the question was: stop playing it. If I find myself doing that I just stop. And I just sat there for a minute and then started again if kind of thing happened again I’d stop again. That’s what created the change in the solo things from long 45-minute pieces to short pieces. Except now that it isn’t for the reasons that it first happened. It’s now because I realize: as hard as it is to do the beginning of anything, it’s also no productive to play something longer than its alive. If it’s starts to sound like it wants to be over, you shouldn’t have to keep playing.

EI: The first time I listened to Radiance I was astounded: at the virtuosity, but especially the left-hand virtuosity. Because, despite the work done by you and some others, the final frontier of piano improvising remains the left hand.

KJ: True! It is. The final frontier! “Hello? I have a left hand.” It’s usually curled into these chordal things or vamping -- but what else can it do? Again, that’s where my classical training helps.

EI: I imagine you practiced a lot when young?

KJ: I got out to play basketball too. My grandmother was a help: she set a timer for when I could stop playing. But sometimes I would cheat when she wasn’t looking and move the knob on the timer so I could quit sooner.

EI: Besides the repertoire, were there any special technical exercises you worked on?

KJ: No, not really.

---

EI: When you were up in Boston, Jaki Byard was up there, too, right? You play that Byard blues...

KJ: I didn’t know him very well. I had respect for him; I knew his album with Sam Rivers, Ron Carter and Tony Williams, which was very tasty semi-avant garde stuff, sometimes out, sometimes in. I really liked that record.

I think I met Jaki, actually, not in Boston but at the Dom in New York when I still didn’t have any work and was waiting to sit in anywhere. Tony Scott was running the Dom: I played with Paul Motian for the first time there, and he remembers that too. (Someone had played me an amazing tape of Lowell Davidson playing free with Motian and I couldn’t believe it was Paul on drums: I had only heard Paul with Bill and said, “Who the hell is that drummer?” When they told me it was Paul I put that information away in my mental file.) I heard Jaki at the Dom quite a few times, and sometimes he would just be there. One time, after I played some standard, Jaki came up to me and said, “You’re not playing the right changes: those are the Miles Davis changes.” Later on he told Roland Kirk I was playing in jeans with the trio and Roland Kirk told me off in the kitchen of the Vanguard: “You have to create respect for this music: don’t play in jeans!” Ah, the jazz world.

EI: Jaki is famous for playing the history of jazz; stride piano, etc - but I actually appreciate his more avant-garde moves on the records with Rivers, Eric Dolphy, and Mingus. He can be quite exploratory.

KJ: Exploratory but also tasty. Andrew Hill also had that quality. But most of the guys that went out didn’t always have that kind of alignment with grace. [Name omitted] had incredible potential and played tunes great, but when he went out, it sounded like clumps of shrapnel.

EI: What about Herbie Hancock? You must have checked him out but you don’t sound influenced by him.

KJ: That’s a good observation. In his playing with Miles, Herbie’s harmonic intelligence is really worth hearing. But it isn’t my way, although Herbie is good at voice-leading, too. I’m disappointed at the way Herbie went so electric for so long.

It seems like mastery is being lost in the world and in art right now. The only way you can actually master something -- or hope to master it -- is if it sticks around, and doesn’t change, technologically. When I think of the pianists who went electronic, or “electric,” long enough, and then thought, “Hey, I can go back to that.” They call it “back.” I would call it “forward!” Now it’s called “acoustic piano.” That’s the mistake. Like “standup bass.” The chance for mastery only happens if you’re instrument does not change. And if you change along with technological changes that occur... I haven’t seen anybody successfully go “back.” I haven’t seen them go to the piano, after a certain amount of time away, or after their consciousness is not with piano, and work on it again, and start from where they stopped. They’re actually starting from some other alien place, they don’t know what touch is anymore, if they ever did, but all those things are going to disappear fast if they don’t consider them utmost in their mind. And when people master things, like let’s say the Murano glass people, outside of Venice. Those are generations of people who… five generations? They’re still working on their glass. Luckily the glass didn’t morph, and you didn’t have electronic glass.

EI: What about touch, and touching the piano?

KJ: What about it?

EI: You’re someone that gets a certain sound out of the piano. That’s your sound. No one else gets that sound, and I know it’s not the piano. It’s not like you have one special piano. You get that sound, it’s on your earliest records, on whatever instrument, I think even some uprights in some cases.

KJ: Forgetting the musical content for a moment, if a musician is working on his or her voice, he or she is trying to match what he hears in his head with what he hears when he plays. The only explanation for that difference in sound coming out of the piano is that. Otherwise it couldn’t be consistent. It just couldn’t be consistent. Not with all the different kinds of touch I’ve been using, especially recently.

But I had a tremendously important revelation in Europe in the 60s when I was playing with Aldo Romano and J. F. Jenny-Clark. And we took a break, we were playing in Belgium. Up to that moment, I thought first you learn to play your instrument and get technically proficient. And from what everyone else said, and at this point you were supposed to play what you liked and don’t play what you don’t like. You’ve gone through the whole thing, let’s hope you know how to play the piano, let’s hope that you can play whatever you think of playing. You also eliminate what you don’t like in your playing, you automatically do that. At one point you say to yourself, “Well, I kind of have a voice, I guess.” Or someone tells you that.

Dewey once called me and said, ‘Do I have a voice?’ This is when he was sick, and he was really not doing well, and his son was a big deal. He was right to ask that question in a way, because he was depressed, and he needed some support. I said, “Dewey, don’t think about that ever again. That is what you have. It’s yours!”

Anyway, back to this story: When we took that break in Belguim, and I walked back on stage, I realized it’s as simple as this, this was the phrase that entered my mind: “Now I can just play the piano.” What happens is, your voice isn’t going to go anywhere. But if you try to possess it, by playing only the things you like, forever, you will then sound like all these other guys who became stylists, and everybody knows how good they are, and you don’t expect any surprises, certainly no big surprises. You don’t expect to be confronted with a new reality. Because you think you know who these guys are. So voice is like personality. And then after you have this personality, what you wanna do is get it out of there, in the sense of it being a conscious thing. Because you’re never gonna lose what you gained, but if you don’t take it further, you will just stagnate and you’ll be one of those guys that’s, well… “Remember how he sounded?” “Yeah, yeah, it was cool, it was good.”

For me, if I don’t play something that doesn’t challenge my concept of what I liked before that second, something’s wrong. So what you do is you create a “cell,” let’s call it. And that cell is your voice. And then you want that cell to replicate in whatever direction it wants to per microsecond. And that’s when you expand it, and it becomes not a personality anymore, it becomes a biofeedback mechanism. Otherwise, what feedback do you get from playing what you like? “Okay, hey, I really like that chord, I’m gonna use that chord again.”

But you have to live through certain experiences before you can actually put into play certain things. For example, I used to say to my students, “Play like you think it’s going be the last time. That’s the only way to play.” And when I told them that, I hadn’t had that experience. I just knew that was basically correct. Okay, so certain things happen to you in your life. Let’s say you get a divorce. Your house burns down. You have big experiences. And you get chronic fatigue syndrome. Or you get some kind of problem with your physical health, your hands. If you can still play, you have to play as though it’s going be the last time. When you get more and more towards that, it’s more and more true. So you can actually do better work, because it’s real. It’s not theoretical.

EI: On the last two available solo concerts, there’s a a remarkable infusion of (I hope this term won’t bother you) atonality.

KJ: Yeah. Doesn’t bother me.

EI: Historically, you’re probably the first person that is as comfortable playing in a completely atonal context as well as on just a D Major triad for twenty minutes. I think it’s wonderful that the atonal side is so forthright on these last records.

KJ: I would call it “multi-tonal.” I mean, in a very strange way, there’s no such thing as “atonal.” It’s like when you’re listening to a bad speaker system, your ear makes up for what you’re missing. If you know the recording, you know what’s on it. Even if you don’t know the recording, and you live with this little speaker system, you gotta get something from it. At Berklee, I had this lunchbox-sized record player. The record was bigger than the box. But I wasn’t missing anything!

I started to realize the universe actually requires all sounds, in a way. And so if you want to be anthropomorphic or whatever that is, there is no such thing as atonality. You’re either putting more colors together, or you are putting less. Or you’re choosing. So tonality is a choice. But even in the concerts you haven’t heard, there’s more and more of this.

When I did the Carnegie Hall concert, somebody came up to me, who I knew, who I hadn’t seen for a while, and they said, “Oh, I love those little atonal interludes between the things.” And I said, “You know, thank you for saying that!” There’s two things: One is, I wish they could go on forever. No one will ever hear this in concert, because I would be asking so much from the audience. But in my studio, that happens for thirty minutes at a time, and maybe it could go on forever. The other thing is she had said she liked the “interludes,” so she was focusing on the other things as the real content. It made me realize that I had some more work to do. To let those things come out even more. To let them play out.

EI: To talk about voice leading again: everything is controlled in those improvisations. It’s very easy when you’re shoveling around so many thousands of notes to have some of the pitches become a little careless, especially when it’s a less obviously tonal content. But what’s extraordinary is that you’re still voice leading all the little melodies even at a really rapid velocity and in a very free harmonic situation.

KJ: Yeah. And I have to say, the releases up to now don’t even touch the Paris and London recordings that should come out in the fall, encapsulate this more, even. And then the more recent things continue to do that.

For example, at the London concert, I had had this stupid Db Major… somehow or other Db was in my head. And I knew I was going to not play in Db. I’ve said before that I don’t want to have any thoughts in my head, but this one was just not going away. And it wasn’t enough of a musical thought to call it musical. It was just that, somehow or other, I felt that I better just get it out, whatever it was. And so, in the London concerts, there was a unique beginning to a concert. It’s not gradual like the old solo concerts were, where it starts in a harmonically okay place and it sort of builds slowly into melodies and motifs. Now, recently, it’s been more like, “Go!” But this was none of those things, this was something mysterious, it was slow, and it was, again, like cellular construction. You couldn’t expect where the next thing would pop up. And somebody came backstage, a musician, probably a very good one because he had this comment, he said, “During the first piece of the first set,” -- the one I’m talking about -- he said, “I couldn’t handle it. I mean, I couldn’t handle it. I had to go out and get a glass of water. You were putting so much into this.” And I said, “I’m glad I didn’t get thirsty!”

But I think, let’s call it the color gamut, they use that phrase in photography, is infinite. And it’s certainly not infinite on piano, but it can seem infinite if you know how. And to be perfectly honest, theoretically, a piece of music like that could go on for the rest of my life. It’s so absorbing, I could live in there. And that’s what I was trying to talk about with the getting your voice thing. You have to sort of drop it so you can see how beautiful all the other things are now that you can do on the same keyboard, not worrying anymore about your voice. Forget about it. And it’ll stay there, because I’m sure you were aware that it was me playing, and yet I wasn’t playing the same way.

Somebody asked Gary, you must’ve heard this or seen this, on some video about touch, and what was it like to play with Bill versus Keith. It was kind of a dangerous question to ask. And Gary was really good, he said something like, “Well, Bill didn’t have a touch, he had a sound. It was always the same sound. Keith modulates the touch depending on what the needs of the music are.” Touch, in jazz, is pretty rare, in the sense that you can choose from a vast array of things.

EI: Although, I think the minute you put a ride cymbal on stage, you’ve eliminated sixty percent of what the piano can do.

KJ: That’s partly true. Yeah.

EI: But I actually think that’s something important to jazz piano in a way. The sound has that thing that fights against a ride cymbal.

KJ: Yeah, it isn’t that players don’t have that sound, and it isn’t that they don’t want that sound. It’s just that I think there’s been a very much lower consciousness of that element. You know, in the classical world, some of those people are coming because of my touch. Whereas, probably that’s true with the jazz people, too, but it might not be the first thing they think of. They’re thinking of ideas. Or, pulse.

EI: My impression is that most jazz pianists would have trouble playing below a certain dynamic consistently.

KJ: Classical players never pound, but they also never actually get soft, soft, soft, soft, to the point of risking that the note won’t play. Benedetti Michelangeli is an exception.

EI: He’s so marvelous.

KJ: Yeah. He could do that in the middle of a Ravel concerto. “He almost didn’t get that one!”

EI: I read somewhere that Miles Davis and Bill Evans were listening to Benedetti Michelangeli’s Ravel concerto in advance of Kind of Blue.

KJ: That makes sense.

EI: That record coupled with Rachmaninoff fourth concerto.

KJ: Yeah, that’s the one I’m talking about.

EI: That’s beautiful. Is there anyone else that you admire in the classical world like that?

KJ: Well, not for the same reasons, no. But there’s great players everywhere.

I’ve had my pianos worked on so many times to try to tweak them to a place either for practicing or for recording. And you just can’t get everything out of anything. That’s why I like meeting new instruments. They all have something to offer. Until you get to ones that you see through the soundboard to the floor. Then they don’t usually have much! But touch does come. Pianists are a strange group of people because they don’t have to know about their instrument. The piano tuners come, work on it, do things and say, “By the way, you need this.” And you say, “Oh, okay,” if you’re casual about it. You don’t have to know about the piano. But if you’re carrying your flute around, or you’re carrying a horn, bass, guitar or anything else, probably you do know your instrument. It could help the pianists if they just learned more about their instrument. Instead of going to the club owner and saying, “Man, I don’t like your piano. It’s just, it’s really bad. I don’t like it.” and hearing the response: “Well, Erroll Garner played on it last week, and no complaint,” they could be more specific.

When I brought my quartet to the Jazz Workshop in Boston for the first time, I went up to the club owner and said, “You know, your piano needs some…” and I told him what it needed. And he never heard these things before. It needed some voicing, I can’t remember what else. And I said, “I’m asking for this to be done so that people don’t complain about it. And I’ll come down when he’s here and I’ll make sure he’s doing what needs to be done.” And he said okay. Up to that point, people just said, “Uh, you know, it’s a shitty piano.” And he thought, “Oh, that’s just a musician. He’s in a bad mood.”

EI: Was that the quartet with Dewey and Charlie and Paul?

KJ: Yeah.

EI: I’d love to talk about your musical relationships. Because I think it’s very striking and under-recognized how extraordinarily faithful you’ve been to a certain group of musicians. As a leader, you’ve only recorded with three bass players, three drummers, and two saxophonists, in what... forty years or something? It’s not usually what’s done. For some musicians, there’d be forty different bands in forty years. It’s clear that you believe in chemistry.

KJ: I’m not sure what your question is…

EI: Well, tell me about Charlie Haden, for example.

KJ: It’s his ears. And his sound is so specifically grounded and his intonation is so good… He doesn’t play above his limits as a technician. Charlie’s unique. In the American group, they had to be listeners, and they had to be uniquely themselves. and they had to be masterful players.

But, if you’re asking about personality… I was like the road manager, and I was driving these guys around, and Charlie was high all the time, and Dewey was drunk all the time, and Paul was sober enough...If I hadn’t had Paul as an ally, I’d probably be in a mental institution. Ornette was backstage once, and he came up to me and he said, “First of all, Keith, you gotta be black. I don’t care what you say. You’re playing church music, man.” And then he said, “How do you keep Charlie and Dewey in your band this long?” Because he had them. He obviously knew everywhere we landed Charlie was gonna look for a hospital. And Dewey was gonna look for a bar.

But basically, the quartet was this absolutely raw commodity. I don’t think anybody else would have thought of putting that together. For the first trio I was thinking of Steve Swallow in the beginning. I hadn’t heard Charlie that much, I wasn’t that aware of his playing. But Steve was busy with Gary Burton, and he had a lot of gigs, and he couldn’t be available. (And I guess I was lucky I didn’t do that, because he started playing electric bass.) So the next guy that I tried out was Charlie, and I thought “Whoa. Okay. This is what I need. Why didn’t I think of this before?” Because Ornette obviously needed these qualities in his band, he wasn’t gonna be playing on anything chordal.

I have anecdotal stuff to say about the quartet, but it was a wild and crazy thing to try to do, to write for these guys, who all had their own… I would say Paul would be willing to play anything. I mean, for God’s sake, he worked with Arlo Guthrie and Mose Allison. (Mose was cool.) But Paul would play with anybody. He’d play anything. So I had this Armenian drummer who tuned his drums like Armenia would tune them, and Charlie, who was basically so out of it that he was fooling with his bass cover while he was supposed to be playing in time, and Dewey who was not coming in for his entry into the melody, and then I’d ask him why, and he’d say “Well, I was just having a glass of wine backstage, man.”

And I remember gathering them together and saying, “Look, it’s been great, and we’ve done this for a long time, but this is it.” But what it was was just the individualism crept in to the point of everybody’s obsessions taking them over. And I just had more to do.

I don’t believe I got to know Charlie until he was straight. When he was straight, he came up to me, he suddenly had to take care of Old and New Dreams, because Don Cherry was in trouble. And I guess he saw me in a coffee shop in New York or wherever we were and he sat down opposite me and he said, “I’m sorry man. I’m so sorry. I don’t know how you did it, Keith. Now I know what you were dealing with.” And I said, “Well, maybe!”

But we’ve gotten to know each other really well since then in the last couple of years. I did an interview for the documentary Ramblin’ Boy. Charlie said, “Would you be willing to talk?”

“Yeah, but I don’t want to play.”

So he brought his bass, put it in this control room, and we went in and talked. And after we were finished talking I said, “You wanna play?” So, that was the beginning of thinking about thirty three or four years, or whatever it was, going by and we sort of bonded in those two tunes or three tunes in a way that we didn’t know. And then when we were doing more playing after that, which was just for me, for my own purposes (whether it comes out is another question), he looked at me and he said, “Man, I didn’t know you had such good time.” I said, “That’s because we had a drummer. How would you know that?” I said the same thing back: “Charlie… why did we think we needed Paul?”

EI: Of course, Paul played so differently with you than with Bill Evans. Jazz history hasn’t really caught up with Paul Motian yet. People are very aware of Paul’s being a part of the iconic Bill Evans trio, where he played some great brush work and that’s about it. But there were more years and more records with you, and certainly a greater variety of music... and also extremely aggressive drumming.

KJ: Yeah. It was like Mozart. The piano is not supposed to be up front when when you’re playing a Mozart concerto. You’re almost too soft. And with Paul, I didn’t have to try to be almost too soft. I loved it though, because I was also a drummer, so I knew what Paul was doing was so brilliantly correct for this situation that I was never gonna say a word about it. I couldn’t have ever imagined saying to Paul, “Paul, you’re playing too loud.” Here was a guy who was probably waiting for this, through the whole brushes thing with Bill. Bill didn’t want him to use sticks.

And that’s where the writing became of utmost importance. There had to be a way to have Dewey not play on changes, to have Charlie not play vamps forever. (Although, when he wanted to play a vamp, there was nobody that plays them better than Charlie.) But Charlie always wanted to challenge the tonic, and challenge the chord he’s playing. He’s not always going to play the root. “I’m sorry, I’m not gonna play that damn root. I don’t care what you think.” And then every now and then, he’d play the root so beautifully that you’d just say, well, these are choices he’s making, I’m not gonna screw with this. This is an ensemble that’s supposed to be spontaneous and I think the way I’ve handled being a leader is one of the keys to why those, even the Norwegian quartet, why those things worked the way they did. Because there was no drill. I wasn’t a drill sergeant.

Just to give you an example: Dewey was always late for things, forever and ever, Amen. I had driven into New York, we were rehearsing at Paul’s apartment, and Dewey was a couple of hours late. You know, we’re twiddling our thumbs... I don’t know what song this is...Dewey shows up, and he’s a very poor reader. (Charlie was a great reader.) Dewey was a very poor reader. He needed to “play this slow first.” And I didn’t have time for that. So I thought, okay. Alright. Paul: just play as though we’re playing fast, but it’s not a pulse. And Charlie: you know the piece, you can tell where we are. And Dewey: you just play whatever tempo you can read it. And that’s how it ended up being recorded, the same way. I never took Dewey aside and said, “Now you have to go to what my original concept was.” The concept had to be so flexible with that band, that even though I had music for it, I didn’t have to determine what was done with that music.

Sometimes a melody has chords, then Dewey’s solo doesn’t, then you forget what the chords actually were by then, then maybe something happens after Dewey, and then I’m playing on the chords. Or it’s a now a ballad. And it was great. But it was very hard. Very, very hard. First of all, if the guys are only semi-conscious, you know you’re still trying to generate the energy.

EI: Well, you showed serious humility. You’re a young virtuoso. Everyone knows it. You’re clearly the next step in a certain kind of advanced jazz piano idiom. And instead of showcasing your virtuosity, you allowed the music to just happen surrounded by a pack of wild dogs. What I especially love is that you had a trio - which is most virtuosic pianists’ ideal, to have a piano trio - but you’re still not satisfied with enough ragged edges, so you get Dewey Redman as well.

KJ: That’s true. We walked past each other. I heard Ornette with Dewey, in the mud, in a festival in Belgium, I think. It was just like walking in quicksand, and then I had to go to the dressing room and play after them. And I came offstage after I played, and this was with a couple of guys from the Poconos, because Paul and Charlie couldn’t do these gigs, they couldn’t afford it. They didn’t want to wait around in Europe in case we had work. So I came offstage and I had heard Dewey play for the first time, and he had heard me play for the first time. We walked past each other in the dressing room and we both said, “Hey man, I wanna work with you sometime.” And so, I just called him first. Or something. And then the first time Dewey played with us was at Slug’s Saloon.

EI: There’s something about the way each phrase goes next to each other in Dewey’s playing that only a few people have.

KJ: And when it’s intense… When he was on, he was definitely on. He was afraid that he was incompetent to play on chords. And one night, we’re playing one of my pieces, on which he never plays on the chords. And all of a sudden I’m noticing, wait, he’s playing on these chords, and not only is he playing on them, it’s like he’s done this for his whole life. It’s the only time it ever happened. And we came off the stage, and I said to Dewey, “What the hell… what was that, man!” He said, “Well, Don Byas died today. I just felt Don’s spirit.” Yeah. He played the shit out of the chords. He just played like he never had a problem with chords in his life.

EI: I don’t know how it was received at the time, but my generation of musicians regard it as one of the greatest bands in history.

KJ: I broke up the band, right? Then somebody said to me, “How could you break up one of the most important bands in the history of modern jazz?” And I said, “Why didn’t you say that before? Why now?” But I guess it was a seeping process. You have to hear a lot of it, and it starts to dawn on you what exactly what is going on. I don’t think you can choose a track and throw it at somebody and say, “What do you think of that?”

EI: I love the musicians who are so provocative that some people will never understand it. To this day people think, like, whatever, Paul Motian can’t swing, or they think the most outrageous things that aren’t true...Who swings more than Paul Motian, anyway? But the real thing in that band was Paul and Charlie; playing free, playing tempo, playing vamps -- that’s one of the greatest hookups ever.

KJ: And it started with me, because I don’t know if they even knew each other before that. But then when they left, I saw all these groups who were put together for a gig, or something, and there’d be Charlie and Paul and Dewey. With Pat Metheny, or Mick Goodrick, whatever. Well, I guess I started an idea that had longer life than I had.

EI: Oh, for sure. Paul and Charlie recorded on many of each others records and also with Geri Allen...lots of people.

You bring out the best of collaborators. And I was just talking to a drummer in Australia, and I asked him who his favorite drummer was, and he said “Jack DeJohnette.” And I said, “Well, what Jack records do you like?” Surprised, he responded, “The Keith records, of course,” as if there were no other records. My suspicion is that Jack and Gary play just how they want to play with you.

KJ: Yeah, yeah. That’s the whole idea. In the beginning, I sat down at dinner with them and scared the shit out of Gary by saying, “Well, we’ll do the things like “All the Things You Are.”

"What? What? What? Why would we do that?”

But I explained that we all had experience as leaders, and I said, “You both know what a privilege it is to be a sideman. What if we were all sidemen? In the music itself?” We don’t have to rehearse. I don’t want any of that. So that’s how it’s forever been with the trio: We show up, we do the soundcheck, we have dinner backstage, we chat. Sometimes about… whatever. It could be about the universe, it could be about garage doors not working. And then we go. And we play. But I haven’t been in a group before where I’ve known the people I was working with and trusted them to show up at whatever their best is at the moment. They know that’s the job. The job is to just be there. Not think that they know what’s gonna happen.

EI: At this point, of course, the Standards Trio has a very extensive discography, it’s added up to a lot of tunes. Some of them you must have learned recently. How do you learn tunes these days?

KJ: One of us knows most of them, you know? It’s like, “What’s the bridge to that?” (The famous “I don’t know what the bridge is” joke.)

EI: Even something like “Shaw ‘Nuff”? You’ve always known that?

KJ: That probably came out of one of the fake books. Maybe I heard the Gerry Mulligan version? Most of the ballads, for example, I know all the words to. I spent a lot of my early years hearing vocalists sing almost everything that I play as a ballad.

But here’s something I never realized my entire life until recently. Years ago, I decided I wanted to do something about lost love. But only recently did I feel that emotion so... graphically. I thought, “I gotta open the piano. And I have to turn on the recorder.” I don’t feel like it, but I’m gonna do it. And, of course, all these songs are songs I heard sung. I have the records from which I heard them. I know where they are. I know the vocalists. And I thought, “I’m not even getting close to what you can do when you sing.” I took one of the takes, that I thought was really good, listened to it, and then immediately followed it up with the vocalist reference. Well, hey, the problem is vocalists have to sing words. So, if the word “the” is in a line of singing, they can’t say anything but “the.” But if you’re an instrumentalist, you can bring something to it that a vocalist cannot. And when I was talking to one of my brothers, he said, ‘Well I can give you a good example. In “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” if you’re a vocalist, how do you sing birrrds?” But on piano, or on any instrument, you can make that full of something other than that phonetic sound that sounds ridiculous.

EI: I do think something that’s deepened over the years with the trio are the ballads. They’ve always been very good, of course...

KJ: Well, we all play each other’s instruments. Slightly. I mean, my bass playing is terrible, my hands are too small. So Jack and I, when we do soundchecks, Jack goes to the piano, I go to the drums, and that’s how we start the soundcheck. That way I hear what my piano sounds like in his monitor, and he knows what he thinks the piano’s like so he can gear himself to the surroundings. It’s a magical trio because we’ve played in rooms that I am absolutely sure no other jazz group could’ve managed to play in. We played in the Musikverein in Vienna, and if you ever talk to Jack, ask him about this. We couldn’t use any monitors, we couldn’t use any sound system. The place is so… it’s like 2,000 people, but it’s so alive that I had to play soft. On purpose. And Jack couldn’t use sticks. And we’re just going from our usual selves to this room, doing a soundcheck and saying “Holy shit! Ok, alright, well, we’ll figure this out.” And so Jack, of all the things he does well, the many things I could say about him, his sensitivity to that kind of thing is absolute… his integrity is intact.

EI: It’s so important that everybody in your group plays free music, as well as on changes.

KJ: Yeah, but so-called the avant-garde purist wouldn’t call it free playing. They’d say, “Hey, momentarily you’re playing on the same scale for a minute.” Or, “You’re playing a beat? No.” I need it to go places.

EI: In addition to the free aspect, there’s been more and more jazzy jazz, too: More bebop tunes recently.

KJ: When I got sick, after I was trying to recover from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome -- which shouldn’t be what it’s called, it should be called Death While You’re Alive -- everything had to get lighter for a minute. And I couldn’t dig in much, but learned how much there was there, at that dynamic level. And some of those things were bebop things, because they have a lightness. They might be fast, but they’re, you know, a little lighter.

EI: I couldn’t be there for Carnegie Hall this year, but someone told me you encored with “Carolina Shout.” Is that true?

KJ: Yeah. It’s been in my head for a long time. Every now and then, you know how that happens, it just pops back in, and I thought, “Wait, now this time I want to see what happens.” So I made sure I knew how to do that, because I have a ski accident that prevents me from stretching even as much as I would stretch, and I’ve developed ways of playing stride that are illegal in some states. But Gary loves it. He said it gives him more room. Again, it’s voice leading, sometimes it’s the upper parts of the sound, and I don’t need to stay with the bottom. And it’s never, “bluh blah bluh blah,” blocky like that. But yeah, I did that as an encore.

EI: It’s a great piece. James P., of course. One of my favorites. Well I think we’re probably about where you, uh…

KJ: Where I don’t know what to say next?

EI: Is there anything else you want to just mention? I’m not a professional interviewer myself, so…

KJ: Well, I’m not a professional answerer. Um, actually I tell people, and I always will, that this is the hardest thing I do. I hate reading other people’s interviews, because I don’t want them to be boring, but they’re never filled with much at all. And I figure if I’m gonna spend the time, I should figure out how to speak about whatever it is. One thing I could say: I found myself wishing a couple of days ago that the entire catalogue of all the things I’ve ever done could be seen in an overview. Because it’s all come from the same place. And most people are unaware of large clumps of it. I mean, people don’t know about the organ thing. They don’t like organs...?

EI: I was listening to your brass quintet last night, actually, and thinking, “This is really, really good,” and that piece is certainly not what people think of when the think of you. Charlie Haden told me how much he loved the way you wrote for strings, like on Arbour Zena. Can I throw a couple of other names your way?

KJ: Yeah.

EI: Bud Powell. Go.

KJ: Fantastically important, and great. And I knew who he was before I heard him. I wrote his name on a piece of paper on my way to a blindfold test. I was with my wife at the time, and I said, “I’m gonna write a list of the people they’re gonna play for me.” Just for a game, you know? So his name was there, but I hadn’t heard him play yet. Knowing it was him. But when I heard it, I knew it had to be him. It couldn’t be another person, because if the legend was correct, or if the rep was true, it couldn’t be anybody else. Yeah, Bud was amazing. Still is.

EI: Thelonious Monk.

KJ: Thelonious isn’t amazing in the same way, but he’s… what would I say about that? I dunno. I dunno what to say about him. I like his stuff. I just don’t know what I’d say. It’s sideways to the flow. It’s like he’s over at the side of the road, flashing at you, saying “Hello! I’ve got this for you.” It’s important, but it’s only him. And it’s sort of singular. So I don’t know what I would say.

EI: Fair enough. That’s beautiful, what you just said.

KJ: I guess. I’m just at a loss for words. Although, his quote, according to Thomas Pynchon, a Thelonious Monk quote, I think, made him much more important than not knowing this quote: “It’s always night or we wouldn’t need light.” Anyway, go ahead.

EI: Paul Bley.

KJ: Paul. Paul took the piano and made it impossible to disregard as a horn. And that made me feel good, because I was feeling… I always liked piano-less groups, you know? I didn’t actually like the piano, for a long, long time. (I’m making up with it now.) But Paul was in my apartment in Boston, playing his Footloose! album before it was released, and we met in the club. An important force. Yeah, important.

EI: That solo on “All the Things You Are,” on the Sonny Rollins record.

KJ: Yeah. Well, that whole record, anyway. That’s crazy. My youngest son asked me, “Can you record all the things you think I should hear?” One of the first things that popped into my mind about what he had to hear was that album. Pete and Paul, and Steve and Pete together, made Footloose! extremely important for me. Sort of like Ahmad with certain kinds of drugs.

EI: Also on that record he plays a solo piano version of “How Long Has This Been Going On?” that was light years ahead of where everybody else was thinking about at that moment.

KJ: Yeah, one thing I’m sorry about is that he doesn’t still play on his cheap, broken down piano in his living room. Because that’s the best I ever heard him. And when he’s playing the Bosendorfers, or whatever he plays, I think, “No, no, Paul, don’t do that! It’s not gonna work. Where’s your sound? It’s not in that piano.” So, try another name.

EI: Andrew Hill.

KJ: Glass Bead Game. I dunno. Something like that.

EI: Cecil Taylor.

KJ: Again, he brought the piano into the realm of other instruments that were able to play free. I mean, you can’t really play free on piano, I’m sorry. It’s a lever system. But Cecil did everything he could. And it was an energy thing.

EI: Hank Jones.

KJ: Tasty. Beyond just tasty. No, it’s stimulating. Tasty and stimulating.

EI: Erroll Garner.

KJ: I used to do a really good imitation of Erroll that Jack always cracked up about, because he knew I got it right. He’s more important than most people give him credit for. Much more important.

EI: Also, his crazy introductions. Those long fantasies.

KJ: Just the ability to play the way he played and have the physique he had: even that, by itself. The octave thing. The clusters.

EI: It’s quite thick, how many notes he’s moving around. Art Tatum?

KJ: Too many notes.

EI: Really? Too many notes?

KJ: Yeah. Too many notes too often.

EI: Great time, though.

KJ: Good time, yeah. But that’s my response.

EI: Lennie Tristano.

KJ: Very, very important. As a thinker; the way he could think on his feet. Very, very important. Very important.

EI: Anybody else?

KJ: John Lewis you didn’t mention.

EI: Oh, tell me about John Lewis.

KJ: More important than most people think. As a matter of fact, I would say if you’re gonna take a bunch of the… not the Bud Powells of the world, not Monks, not the very visible people, but the less visible, John is one of the most important. John’s taste was so impeccable at times that his improvising touched the realm of written music. It was just so simple but true to the subject matter. Some of his solos are little gems of a certain kind of minimalism. And talking about touch, there’s certainly something there.

EI: I just recently was listening to, it’s not that good a record, from the early 70s, an all-star date with Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Stitt and Max Roach. And they play,“All the Things You Are,” and the John Lewis piano solo is the best thing on the record. I think it’s one chorus, two at most.

KJ: Yeah, some of the early things with Miles are great. I find myself occasionally listening to The Golden Striker, just so I can hear how they get into the beat. Gary looked at me once after we played a Pete LaRoca blues,“One for Majid.” And that was the last thing in the set, and we went backstage, Gary looked at me, made the sign of the cross, backed away, and said “Get away from me!”

And I said, “What’s happening?”

He said, “I thought I was gonna swing as hard as I’d ever swung before when I played with Miles. This is not fair. This has blown the whole theory. I’m going to my room.” So he went to his room, and later he said, and there was a review in the paper and nobody mentioned swinging, and Gary said, “You know, no one mentions swinging anymore. When it’s happening like that. They didn’t mention it? Tell me if it’s on the tape.”

And I said, “Gary, that’s a dangerous thing to expect from a board mix, because if the mix is wrong, they’re not gonna hear what we heard. And you won’t either, if you hear the tape.” And I called him and said, “Gary, I’m sorry, it’s not on the tape. We’ll just have to live with our experience.” But, uh, that’s the story of jazz. Where do those notes go? Or come from? Whatever. Too late. So, it’s good that we have recordings.

EI: And The Golden Striker, you were saying they get into the swing...?

KJ: Because it’s not the quartet, and because it’s three of the four of them... it’s just the way he plays his little dance. It’s this little, prancing way he had about it, how he did this. We play “Django” occasionally with the trio. And then when we play “Poinciana,” I’m thinking of Ahmad. When we play “Django” I’m thinking of John. And Jack will look over and smile when we’ve hit that little realm where it’s either an idea John might have played or it’s the feel that John liked, because you can tell what he likes by how well he’s playing. Same thing with “Poinciana,” if I get to this thing, especially in the upper treble of the piano, where there’s a little repeated phrase, and it’s done with impeccable concern for the propulsion of that little phrase into the beat, Jack will look over and smile.

As a sidebar to this, then there are times when we’re playing things like “God Bless the Child” and he looks over at me because he knows that he’s just found the groove. Jack and I have this thing about Levon Helm’s playing in The Band and whenever that’s happening, we both know it.

EI: Another of your innovations was putting rock music into jazz in a more sincere way then had been done before.

KJ: Last December, I found myself in London, I don’t think I played there for 18 years. and I had never had a good experience being in London, I had something close to a nervous breakdown as we drove in. Because we’re on Christmas time, there were these ornamented decorations everywhere...I said, “I don’t wanna see this shit. Get this taxi to the hotel!” And I got to my room, pulled the curtains. Then I went walking in the rain, having just gone through a major loss...

Somehow, miraculously, two days later when I did the concert, I met person after person who just had the right vibrations. The limo driver, the person doing the catering, some people backstage, the promoter. And then, finally I’m out there, realizing I haven’t done this for a long time, and I’m in London, and I start. Eventually, because of the richness of the bass of this instrument, and some other elements I couldn’t quite place, it almost turned into, at the very end, it’s like a church… like a major… not a church service, but I mean there’s a… the churchiness that Ornette might’ve meant.

Combined with the rock music that seems to have sprung from London in a great way.

I realized just before I got to that part of the concert, that this is part of what I do: I channel the situation in some ways, and I never know what the result’s gonna be. So there were these vamps that started, and then other things happened in between, and then this last piece which… I’ve never played anything like it. It was almost impossible to play. Because I had to play clusters of, you know, triadic things, and by then I was like wiped out, basically. I was playing louder than I… banging on the piano like, as though a band were going to come in, but there was no band. And I had to be the band. I had to actually be the next thing that happened, even though I was like preparing something to happen. Where was the drummer? It was an amazing experience. It was so cathartic. You know, I walked offstage and I was in tears. I did an encore, I walk offstage, I was in tears again. And that’s what I was gonna say: there was something in the air in London. I never would say that rock was playing a role in something unless I had reason to. But it did then. That evening it did. So that’s the very end of the two CDs. The very last thing is this crazy G Major thing that I hit many wrong notes in and it sounds like it doesn’t make a bit of difference because this is like so emotionally-charged. It’s not going happen like that again. As I was saying a minute ago, I’m glad sometimes that things are recorded.

EI: Yeah, for sure.

KJ: But if you’re not there… Carnegie Hall this last time was something, but if you weren’t there, you’ll never know what it was. It was like a sociological event and a musical event combined. All incredibly positive! I was having an interplay with the audience that I’ve never seen before.

EI: How so?

KJ: I dunno. I can’t explain it. I mean, we were talking to each other… Everybody was so up, you know it was like, “We have to make a sound.” So they were making these sounds. And also they were making these sounds when they were applauding that… they were like choral music. From some future Kubrick film which won’t happen. They were doing these amazing things that weren’t applause. And they weren’t grunts, but they were everything. Like shrieking, moaning.

EI: Wow.

KJ: And then I would, like, maybe come out, and they couldn’t calm down, and somebody would say something. And I’d say, “What?” And I’d turn, sit facing the audience, I’d say, “Okay, let’s hear it. What are we all talking about?” So somebody had asked for something, and I said, “No, I can’t do that right now.” Somebody said, “Play something long.” And I started to play these concerti. Like the Grieg, “Dah, da da dah, da da dah,” and then said, “No, no, no, that’s too long.” So it was like almost a comedy routine that they created. And then someone asked for Rachmaninoff’s 2nd, and I said, “That’s a good idea, but I usually have to play the 1st first.” So it was like they lost their inhibitions, and I did too, and you can’t hear that on the tape. But that’s what I like audiences to do.

---

Afterword: ECM has let me preview the Paris and London release Keith discusses above: Testament comes out on October 6. It is state of the art piano playing. Jarrett, who turned 64 the day after I interviewed him this past spring, clearly shows that his search is far from over.

Francis Wolff and the Empire of Cool (Vol. 1)

(author unknown) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:23:53 PDT

Shared by Bill
cool jazz photos by francis wolff.

In his years as an executive at Blue Note records, Francis Wolff repeatedly called upon his earlier training as a Photographer to document a veritable pantheon of American musical wizardry. Here, in the first of three installments, is a sampling of that fearsome chronicle:

Grant Green

Freddie Hubbard

Milt Jackson

Wild Bill Davison

Larry Young

Horace Silver

Don Cherry

Jackie McLean

Kid Howard and George Lewis

Herbie Hancock

Max Roach

Wardell Gray

Shirley Scott

Art Blakey

Gigi Gryce

Cecil Taylor

Philly Joe Jones

Clifford Brown

Ray Conniff and Max Kaminsky

Elvin Jones

Wayne Shorter

Sonny Clark

Shafi Hadi

Tad Dameron

Sonny Rollins

VA Goes Green

(author unknown) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:45:18 PDT

Shared by Bill
see, it ain't easy being green, but it is possible with a little effort.

"Wow. These are some fancy handouts."

We were in a meeting and VA Assistant Secretary Tammy Duckworth was flipping through a full-color PowerPoint presentation that had been neatly packaged in a professionally prepared folder. The one in her hands had probably cost five or six dollars to create. Content aside, I could tell it bothered her.

"You know, you guys didn’t need to go to all this trouble to put these together," she said to the presenters. "I'm okay with simple black and white handouts next time." Then she added: "And by the way, everything around here needs to be printed on both sides of the paper. None of this one-sided stuff. It’s just a waste."

And that was my introduction to VA's culture—what eventually became the department's "Green Routine" Initiative this month. At the Department of Veterans Affairs, it’s not that we're neurotic, or that we value such attention to detail at the expense of more important, core issues for the department—like healthcare for veterans, the GI Bill, or remaining on the cutting edge of research. The fact is that during a transformative process—like the one now occurring at VA—you have to pay attention to every last detail. That's how effective organizations run—from the military, to private companies, to federal agencies. Whether it's in how you treat student-Veterans when their GI Bill checks are late, how you distinguish between PTSD and a personality disorder, or how you run a top-tier organization that doesn't waste—it's all about being conscientious to what’s going on around us. And at VA, the leadership is committed to that level of detail in everything we do.

So to kick off Energy Awareness Month at the Department of Veterans Affairs this week, Secretary Shinseki announced the "Green Routine" campaign. The premise is simple enough: It's a campaign designed to increase awareness among VA employees of their environmental impact as individuals and as members of the federal government.

To make that happen, we’ve got a new web site devoted to environmental tips at www.va.gov/greenroutine. Along with a video from VA's Chief of Staff, the site includes tips on how employees can "green" their workplaces. It also contains a reference tool for managers and employees entitled the Greening Action Guide and Toolkit which recommends actions such as selecting a "green champion" in each office to help promote environmentally friendly steps like holding electronic meetings without paper handouts, turning off cubicle lights when not in use, unplugging cell phone chargers, recycling printer cartridges, and, of course, printing on both sides of the paper.

I'll be the first to admit, when I watched Assistant Secretary Duckworth's blooming irritation at the unnatural celebration of corporatism in the form of a lavish PowerPoint handout, I found it interesting. But at the time, that was about as far as it went for me. Being my first week on the job, I didn't realize that that's just the way we were going to do things from now on at VA. But now I know.

Reducing our carbon footprint and providing the highest quality care and services to our Veterans and their families are not mutually exclusive tasks. In fact, the thing they have in common is what will ultimately set this department apart: And that's an attention to detail in every single aspect of how we do our jobs here—from the office to the operating room.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is clearly not an organization without its faults. But with the leadership we now have in place, the department is on a path toward efficiency in everything we do. And that ultimately means the best possible care for our Veterans and their families.

Brandon Friedman is the Director of New Media at the Department of Veterans Affairs. He is a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Facebook Acquires FriendFeed

(author unknown) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:16:48 PDT

Shared by Bb
my favorite smart-aleck strikes again!

Facebook is a good match for FriendFeed, insofar as I’ve never understood why I’d want to use either of them.

★

Can Do

(author unknown) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 20:59:58 PDT

Shared by Bb
i look forward to smiling when i peruse each new post.

How Benjamin Franklin turned America into the land of invention.

Listening, Party For Two: 'Cubano Be' + 'Cubano Bop'

(author unknown) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 19:31:51 PDT

Shared by Bb
this is really, really cool!

by Patrick Jarenwattananon

My boss readily admits that she doesn't know a whole lot about jazz. But she lets me write all this nonsense on the Internet, so I'm not complaining. And at least she's willing to learn. So every week -- or at least as often as possible -- she and I get together to listen to and Instant Message about a different great jazz song.

"Cubano Be" and "Cubano Bop" are undoubtedly landmarks of Latin jazz history. The symphonic collaboration between Chano Pozo and Dizzy Gillespie helped to validate Afro-Cuban rhythms in the arena of serious music. And it's especially appropriate to have a listen to it today, because lurking behind the scenes was the late George Russell.

"Cubano Be / Cubano Bop," recorded by the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band. Dizzy Gillespie, trumpet; with Dave Burns, Elmon Wright, Lamar Wright Jr., Benny Bailey, trumpets; William Shepherd, Ted Kelly, trombones; John Brown, Howard Johnson, alto saxophones; Joe Gayles, Big Nick Nicholas, tenor saxophones, Cecil Payne, baritone saxophone; John Lewis, piano; Al McKibbon, bass; Kenny Clarke, drums; Luciano "Chano" Pozo, congas/bongos. Arr. George Russell. New York, N.Y.: Dec. 22, 1947.

Purchase: Amazon.com / Amazon MP3 / iTunes ('Be'/'Bop')

-----
Boss Lady: I'm picturing rapscallions in a getaway scene, pushing through the busy, dirty, exotic streets of Cuba. It's a movie from the 1950s.

me: You got the Cuba right
Although I suppose you could have figured that out from the title

Boss Lady: Yes, you are correct!

me: Anything that specifically makes you think Cuba? (In the music, I mean.)

Boss Lady: The drumming? The rhythm?

me: Uhh, yea
Chano Pozo: name to remember

Boss Lady: Why?

me: This fellow, the hand drummer (congas/bongos)

Boss Lady: By the way, it kinda also reminded me of West Side Story. It's not tuneful like Bernstein, but it's got that grit and brashness

me: You wouldn't be totally off on that point either -- more on that in a minute
This Chano Pozo character, though

Boss Lady: Yes? He's obviously capable of creating the fabric for the whole piece with those drums

me: He's a noted Cuban entertainer: dancer, percussionist, eccentric
And in 1947, Dizzy Gillespie was getting into Afro-Cuban music
It was already this exotic, cool sort of thing among music/dancing audiences, right? And especially in New York, where there's this big Caribbean Latino population

Boss Lady: That's right around the time of West Side Story, so I guess it was in the air.

me: Ding Ding Ding
(To be precise, I think WSS was in the mid-'50s, but the idea holds)
So Gillespie asks his friend, the Cuban emigre and trumpeter Mario Bauza, to find him a conguero

Boss Lady: Do you roll the 'R' in conguero?

me: Only if you're an NPR host -- nobody hears a tree fall on the Internet
(Even then I don't think you're supposed to, to get technical about it)
Besides the point ...
By 1947, there's this virtuoso who has come to New York, and not as a jazz guy, mind you

Boss Lady: Is Chano Pozo the one singing?

me: Yes'm
This was truly a cross-cultural thing, not the Nuyorican sort of melange we're accustomed to thinking about today (not that there's anything wrong with that either)

Boss Lady: OK, so instead of approximating Afro-Latin culture, Dizzy Gillespie went right to the source?

me: You could say that. Although ...
I have no idea what he's chanting.
Neither did the band of Americans either, apparently -- but they shouted it back!

Boss Lady: Ha! Hopefully, they didn't regret it later.

me: Wouldn't imagine so
Apparently it's a sort of Santeria chant, say the historians -- but I highly doubt that the vast majority of the audience picked up on that
It's like watching "World" music today, right? You may not understand specifically what's going on, but you get the flavor

Boss Lady: I like the raucous feel of this, but it does feel kind of dated, too. I wonder why?

me: The Dizzy Gillespie Big Band performed this piece at Carnegie Hall in Sept. 1947
Recorded it in the studio Dec. 1947
And that was like 61+ years ago, so of course it's somewhat dated.

Boss Lady: I guess I'm asking why it sounds so much like it was from that period, or like it's from an old movie.

me: Good question. Recording quality is one thing, of course ... but it does have that cinematic bombast to it, right?
And that's deliberate

Boss Lady: What makes you say that?

me: Well, the bebop revolution, which Gillespie was a big part of, broke around 1945. Not long afterward, he started pursuing this Afro-Cuban thing heavily, AND put together a big band
So here's Gillespie wanting to put together some really next-level, groundbreaking, artful bebop meets Latin meets large ensemble stuff
He hires this young, talented composer to write an extended work for him
(Cubano Be, Cubano Bop is in two parts, I surmise, largely because standard 78 rpm singles came only in 3 minute lengths)
Listen closely: it's not just a fun melody based on a song form, right?

Boss Lady: It's interesting how he's using the horns. They're providing a lot of the punch and energy of the music, but they're not necessarily melodic. While a melodic line is sometimes at the forefront, they're often like a wild chorus

me: Yup. It is, as a music professor might say, through-composed. The form doesn't repeat -- it's scripted all the way through. There's that melodic theme, but that only surfaces occasionally.
There isn't even a whole lot of improvising (other than from Chano Pozo) -- just that little tag from Gillespie at the end of "Cubano Be"

Boss Lady: Maybe that's one of the reasons it sounds like a soundtrack, because it keeps moving forward into different "scenes" rather than circling back all of the time?

me: A very plausible explanation
But also, this has aspirations to Art with a capital A, with the polyphonic, overlapping complexity that the term might entail
It's more than just your typical jazz gig fare
And you know who wrote this piece? (Gillespie is credited as a co-composer, but that was standard practice for the leader of a recording date -- royalty purposes)

Boss Lady: How would I know that, Patrick?
If I knew that, maybe I'd be guiding you through great moments in jazz, instead of the other way around

me: A fellow named George Russell

Boss Lady: Wow, I can't believe you saved that 'til the end!
That must've been painful

me: He was 24 years old when that premiered
Before George Russell was George Russell

Boss Lady: I'm proud to be participating (unknowingly) in a tribute to George Russell

me: Isn't that crazy?

Boss Lady: That's truly humbling. I think you'd better get back to work and try to match his ingenuity and productivity

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What Has Happened to Bipartisanship?

(author unknown) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 12:24:50 PDT

Shared by Bb
first mention of public power in connection with health care: "Nebraska Republican George Norris, who for decades called for establishing public power companies to compete with price-gouging private companies, was the father of the Tennessee Valley Authority." ok, bipartisanship, not health care. but i wonder how nebraskans feel about public health care given they get all their electricity from public power providers...

Harold Meyerson has a nice piece today arguing that "bipartisanship" describes something very different than it used to: Rather than liberal Republicans coming together with liberal Democrats, or conservative Democrats coming together with conservative Republicans, the nearly total decimation of the moderates in both parties has meant that a bipartisan deal means a very different sort of bill than it once did: It's not a compromise between people who share principles but potentially disagree on means. It's a compromise between people who don't share principles, which requires a bill that's vague on key areas and weak on others. Quoth Harold:

Problem is, bipartisanship ain't what it used to be, and for one fundamental reason: Republicans ain't what they used to be. It's true that there was considerable Republican congressional support, back in the day, for Social Security and Medicare. But in the '30s, there were progressive Republicans who stood to the left of the Democrats. Nebraska Republican George Norris, who for decades called for establishing public power companies to compete with price-gouging private companies, was the father of the Tennessee Valley Authority. In the '60s, Rockefeller Republicans supported civil rights legislation and Medicare.
Today, no such Republicans exist. In New England and New York, historically the home of GOP moderates, Republicans occupy just two of 51 House seats. Nationally, the party is dominated by Southern neo-Dixiecrats. In their book "Off Center," political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson compared congressional Republicans of different eras and concluded that a Republican House member in 2003 with a voting record that placed him at the median of his party was 73 percent more conservative than the median GOP member of the early '70s.

Max Baucus, then, isn't negotiating universal coverage with the party of Everett Dirksen, in which many members supported Medicare. He's negotiating it with the party of Barry Goldwater, who was dead set against Medicare.

The parties have changed. The archetypal example of bipartisanship -- the reason everyone brings up the name Everett Dirksen -- is the Civil Rights Act. But the reason that Northern Republicans joined with liberal Democrats on that bill was that they, like the Democrats, believed in civil rights. Conservative Democrats didn't.

But the parties have changed. They've realigned. The members tend to share each other's views. A Northern Republican is no longer more like a Democrat than a Southern Democrat is. The modern version of bipartisanship would be a compromise between Democrats who did believe in civil rights and Republicans who did not. The bill's strongest provisions would thus be gutted, and we'd have a Civil Rights Act in name only, but at least it would be bipartisan.

Professor in chief - Paul Krugman Blog

(author unknown) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 01:49:01 PDT

Shared by Bb
uh ehr. agreeing with krugman??

I found Obama’s health care presentation so impressive — so much command of the issues — that it had me worried. If I really like a politicians’ speech, isn’t that an indication that he lacks the popular touch? (A couple of points off for “incentivize” — what ever happened to “encourage”? — but never mind.)

Seriously, it’s really good to see how much he gets it.

Nancy Pelosi on Health-Care Reform

(author unknown) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:29:38 PDT

Shared by Bb
in case you were doubting nancy...

Earlier today, in an interview with three reporters, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said health-care reform would pass the House and that it would include a public plan. She also said the Blue Dogs were basically resigned to this prospect, and that the Republicans "will do everything they can to stop it, not only because they disagree philosophically, but because they know politically that this is so very powerful" politically. The discussion was a bit disjointed for a straight transcript, but selected excerpts follow.

On the need for a public plan.

We have been very clear about the fundamentals. We do not see real, systemic change in the health-care system if there is not a robust public option. We see that as the way to quality, affordability, accessibility, and universality in health care. If someone has another way, show us, but until that time comes, this is the way we see it.

On the co-op compromise.

I think it might be something additional. I don't see it as an alternative to the public option.

On the Blue Dogs.

Some of the concerns the Blues have raised are concerns others have raised as well. The public option is going to happen. They recognize that. They may want to put it on their list of concerns about how it will work. But part of what this is is removing misconceptions. One of the misconceptions was that the public option would be funded by the federal government, wouldn't have to pay back its start-up costs. And that has never been the case. To be a competitor, it will have to be able to compete, be fiscally sound, and be responsible for its administrative costs. It will have advantages, but it has to compete.

On the Congressional Budget Office.

We do have to be fiscally responsible. We will live by the rules of the CBO. But it's also true that the CBO doesn't count things that we know will save money, like prevention, wellness and end-of-life issues. You don't need to be a congressional accountant to know those will save money. We are very confident that this bill will have savings, and many of them will not be counted by the CBO. But they will save money. Outside groups can document them. We will live by the rules so we are fiscally sound and all the rest. But that doesn't mean we won't have other provisions that save money, but won't be scored.

On the Republicans.

We have to assume that the Republicans share our value that all Americans should have health-care coverage. But the Republicans know that passing real health-care reform that is meaningful to the American people is politically powerful. And they must stop it. It's the most noticeable initiative Congress can take to improve the lives of the American people, and they must stop it.

Can they stop it?

They can't stop it. It's going to pass. It's like, can you stop the night from coming after day? But they will do everything they can to stop it, not only because they disagree philosophically, but because they know politically that this is so very powerful. They know this is the most noticeable initiative Congress can take to improve the lives of the American people, and they must stop it. I would imagine there were some Republicans who felt some discomfort at [Jim DeMint's comments that this could defeating health-care reform could "break" Obama], because he blew their cover.

Do you need Republicans on the bill for Democrats to vote for this in significant numbers?

No.

On legislative strategy.

I call Washington "the city of the perishable." You get the votes and you take the vote because you never know what can happen.

On 1994.

That was like a 100 years ago. Everyone here is focused on tomorrow. This is a funny place. You pass a bill and it's the biggest thing in the world and then it's like, "What's next?"

On deals with the industry.

We know we can squeeze more from the system. The minute the drug companies settled for $80 billion, we knew it was $160 billion. Right? If they're giving away 80? But in any event, they're supporting the bill and everybody likes that. But there could be more money. But when you want to squeeze more, you have to be careful about what you're squeezing. You have to make sure it's waste, fraud, and abuse. We don't have the capability of squeezing from the private sector. All we can squeeze is out of the public sector. And the president made the agreements he made. And maybe we'll be limited by that. But maybe not!

On the MedPAC/IMAC ideas.

MedPAC has been an idea out there for awhile. There have been some concerns about it among many of us because it's a big transfer of authority to the executive branch. I myself could have argued the issue both ways. Do I want my members figuring out how much oxygen people need or do we want to pass it on? But how we pass it on was important. Does Congress participate in appointing membership? Do we establish criteria to make sure we bend the curve in a way that protects people?

Steny [Hoyer] and Mr. Waxman and Mr. Dingell and, I think, Mr. Rangel were among those who did not fondly receive this proposal at first. It became more of an issue when we were seeing what CBO was going to score. When we found out they could score that, we thought okay, with the proper criteria, this is something we could probably live with.

They mention the Defense Base Closure and Reauthorization Commission. But leadership has appointments to BRAC. We want to see representation, not some ex officio group we have no say over.

On the Senate's timetable.

I'd be more concerned if this were next Wednesday and they didn't have anything. But they have another week. They're here a week longer than we are.

Her hardest vote this year

Health care is not the hardest vote I've had this year. Not by far. That was the [war] supplemental. That was the worst. Energy was a heavy lift. But you're talking substance. You're discussing issues with people. But we had never thought we'd have to do another supplemental. Not that we would have to vote for. But then the president brought home the IMF and Republicans all took a hike. Then we were stuck with it. Oh brother! That was the hardest. Budget, stimulus, those were all heavy lifts. None of it is easy. But you get ready for things like energy, health, education, and budget. But the supplemental? That's where we have to do a heavy lift? We all said we were never ever voting for this again. But in any event, I think the administration knows that that was it.

Do you need more time?

You don't need more time. The time is now. People have been waiting so long for this. I had a friend who was getting married, I said "You're getting married, I didn't know about all this!" She said, "I need health benefits."

Photo credit: Nelson Ching -- Bloomberg News Photo .