Late To The Party - Organ Damage/Wild Things/Bird Notes

End of the year roundups are a great way to find out what you've missed from the previous year.  To cite just one example of something I'm sure I wouldn't have found any other way, my favorite discovery from the year-end conversation at Nate Chinen's The Gig is the (get ready for it) badass Norwegian organ trio Elephant9.  I realize that the phrase "badass Norwegian organ trio" sounds like it contains multiple oxymorons, but check 'em out and see for yourself.

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I don't remember where I found the link to this Awl piece from 2009, but I just came across it this weekend.  The Awl was one of my most-read sites of 2010, but I guess I wasn't checking it regularly before that.  In any case, Tom Scocca articulates the problem I had with the Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are with much more clarity and force than I'm capable of.  Reading it was cathartic.

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Another thing from 2009 that I only recently got around to reading was Steve Coleman's Charlie Parker "Dozens" at Jazz.com, an epic piece worthy of its subject.  As the writings on his M-Base website demonstrate, Coleman is almost frighteningly knowledgeable and insightful on just about every aspect of the art of spontaneous composition (his preferred term), and this Charlie Parker piece is like 12 excerpts from the best textbook on the subject never published.  There's the basis of an education here, an implied course of study.  It takes some close listening to grasp some of Coleman's points, but if you follow his example and really dig into this music, he will teach you some things.  And lest you think he's just blowing conceptual smoke, he provides plenty of transcriptions to illustrate his points.  With one complete reading, I feel like I've only started with this piece, but Coleman has already made me listen more closely to the music he discusses, which is perhaps his most important lesson.  As Phil Schaap's long-running radio show has amply proven, this is inexhaustible music which just sounds better as you pick up on more of its nuances (most of which are guaranteed to elude on a first or even third or fourth listen).

Coleman is particularly strong in trying to understand (without pretending to be certain) how Parker and his associates thought about the music they were playing from a technical standpoint (which may have been quite different from the way the music has been analyzed after the fact).  Though it may sound like a ridiculously esoteric piece of musicology, Coleman's elaboration (supported by quotes from Parker and Gillespie) of the distinction between minor sixth (with a sixth in the bass) and half-diminished chords is a valuable bit of analysis insofar as it illuminates something about the thinking behind the improvisation.  Coleman isn't just describing what Parker played, but how he (along with Gillespie, Monk and others) might have developed the approach that led him to play it. 

Reading David Foster Wallace's "The Empty Plenum", a review of David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress, just after reading some posts on Coleman's blog, I noticed that the concept of time and its relationship to language comes up in both places.  Language is particularly important to Coleman's understanding of Charlie Parker's music.  He conceives of Bird's solos as hip, streetwise conversations, with the natural but extremely intricate rhythms of speech (Coleman takes the idea of musical "phrases" quite literally).  Jason Moran did some experiments in this area, "transcribing" recorded conversations into music ("Ringing My Phone" was one recorded result).  Coleman suggests listening to a Parker solo and focusing only on the rhythms while ignoring the pitches.  Both Moran's transcriptions and Coleman's listening exercise serve to reveal underlying structures that may be obscured by "content" (words or pitches).  [Update: some interesting speculations about the connection between language and improvised music in this video.]

One last note re: Steve Coleman and his appreciation of the masters - his 1991 album Rhythm In Mind, which I recently downloaded from his website, is a beaut.  It's an all-star lineup, including Von Freeman, Kenny Wheeler, Dave Holland and Ed Blackwell, but to me, Tommy Flanagan shines brightest of all.  Flanagan is one of those widely-acknowledged piano greats that I've never taken the time to really get to know, but his work on this album has made me resolve to dig into the Flanagan discography in the new year.

Learn English The Malkmus Way

I never really got into Pavement, so I've been pretty immune to the excitement generated by their reunion, but it does give me an excuse to share my one and only Pavement-related anecdote, which takes place in Beijing a few years ago.  My Chinese friend, who was driving me to the airport, had the radio tuned to a station that played English language lessons.  The lesson that was playing as I arrived at the terminal, and that made me wish I didn't have to get out of the car, was using as its text the lyrics to Pavement's "Cut Your Hair".  So, Pavement fans can take pride in the fact that potentially millions of people in China have been learning English via Steve Malkmus lyrics.

On Around, or The Selected Ballads' Most Boring Post Yet

I'm on board with the idea that a language needs to evolve.  Usage is fluid.  That doesn't mean there shouldn't be rules or guidelines (see this David Foster Wallace piece for a heroically thorough discussion of this topic), but I'm no fan of language pedantry.

All that being said, I'm a little puzzled by the way the word "around" is being used these days as a weirdly vague substitute for "about", "on", or "concerning", often from guest "experts" on TV news shows.  It's almost as if the new usage was rolled out a few years ago at some kind of academic or corporate-speak seminar.  I'm not sure why this bothers me, but when I hear "around" used in this way, it sounds like a clanging, out-of-tune note in an otherwise innocuous sentence.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I couldn't find anything on the web about this, with the exception of these two posts on a New Zealand-based professional writing/editing site.  The examples they give ("new legislation around", etc) are exactly the kind of thing I'm thinking of, so if you're trying to figure out what in God's name I'm talking about, just follow the links.

DFW on Split Infinitives and Wedgies

Thanks to Amy McDaniel over at HTMLGiant for linking to this new-to-me David Foster Wallace essay on English usage (originally published in Harper's in 2001 and later collected in Consider the Lobster). It's much more entertaining than I would've thought possible given the subject, even at 37 printed pages (at least on my printer). Wallace being Wallace, almost a third of that length is taken up with end notes, through which he weaves, Pale Fire-like, strands of autobiography. Strange as it sounds, this essay, in large part a review of Bryan A. Garner's Modern American Usage, would be a must-read for any biographer researching Wallace's childhood (in which he apparently received countless wedgies for being an insufferable language nerd, or "SNOOT", his family's self-description of the type) or his experiences as a teacher.

Many of the positions and arguments Wallace describes in re: "the Usage Wars" are reiterated by McDaniel's commenters (here are the related posts, 1, 2 & 3, that began with a Wallace-inspired "Grammar Challenge"). If the comments don't quite prove that DFW is capable of directing blog comment threads from beyond the grave, then they certainly show that he Put His Finger On the Hot-Button Issues (or Had His Finger On The Pulse - just the sort of language Wallace highlights/mocks in the found-language poem/assemblage that begins his essay) in the field of English usage.

When will we see a nice, fat Collected (or Selected) Non-Fiction of David Foster Wallace? I realize that many of the uncollected pieces are available online and the existing collections are still in print, but this is a body of work that deserves the tome treatment.

[DFW-inspired Confession: I spent far more time writing this post than previous ones of roughly equivalent length. The reason for this, the influence of Wallace's essay, is obvious. This note is intended both as a warning of the contagious obsessiveness of Wallace on Usage and as an expression of my fear that the extra time spent has not resulted in a better, more readable post. Not at all.]