Music Syncing

Manhattan Transfer

Saturday my wife and I had the pleasure of attending a concert by Manhattan Transfer in Albany, NY, at a venue called The Egg. Manhattan Transfer is the quintessential jazz vocal group, and is celebrating an astounding 40 years in the music business. Their concert was superb in all regards. If you’re familiar with their music you know that their intricate vocal arrangements can only be accomplished by skilled singers who have taken the time and effort to not only memorize the arrangements and lyrics, but have learned how to blend their individual vocal tones and overall volume. We sat next to the soundman, who had very little to do, and I suspect he was told to “set it and forget it.” The vocal quartet plus the three-piece piano trio were totally in sync for the whole concert; there was nothing not to like. The set list included everything from their biggest hits (“Birdland” and “Route 66”) to jazz classics (“Killer Joe” and “Sidewinder”) Music from early in their career was featured, making it apparent that their musical memories could reach both back and forward. Perhaps the most impressive piece was not the one that drew the most enthusiastic applause. The group pulled off a vocal rendition of Miles Davis’ “Tutu,” a tribute to humanitarian and political activist Desmond Tutu. Cheryl Bentyne nailed the Miles Davis solo set to lyrics courtesy of master vocalese artist Jon Hendricks. Capturing Miles Davis vocally is no easy task. Her female counterpart, Janis Siegel, similarly impressed us with her uncanny rendition of a swing era muted trumpet solo and a spot-on performance of Ella Fitzgerald’s classic recording of “How High the Moon.” Interspersed with this vocal magic were impressive instrumental solos and audience repartee, including a few corny jokes about The Egg itself (“the yolk’s on you”).

The tech required for this stellar performance consisted of four hand-held microphones, two synthesizers, the acoustic instruments, and one spotlight. The rest was up to the performers. Their expertise explains their longevity. And after 40 years they are still road warriors, traveling in short order from coast to coast and abroad. On the way home we were speculating whether they could possibly be rich after all these years of performing. I had to remind myself that “rich jazz musician” is a classic oxymoron.

Beyonce at 2013 Inauguration

We were reflecting on the experience of witnessing a live performance and speculating about how many talented groups might have performed across the country on this particular Saturday night. I contrasted it with the news hype generated by one “performance” that lasted all of 2 minutes and 35 seconds. Of course I’m talking about the Beyonce lip-synching inauguration controversy.  In reading about the Beyonce incident I was sad to learn that Whitney Houston also lip synced her incredible “Star Spangled Banner” years ago at the Super Bowl. Even now this current controversy seems to have many variations. Beyonce sang live. She didn’t sing live. The band played but the voice was recorded. The whole thing was a recording. She sang live but with a prerecorded track. The most perplexing combination of observations was that she lip synced because there was no opportunity to rehearse with the Marine band. A widely circulated photo showed Beyonce in the recording studio with members of the band. They produced a recording without a rehearsal? My own opinion is that the rather intricate arrangement written for Beyonce was not nearly as straight ahead rhythmically as most of her pop music; that she was concerned about messing up the performance and thus her image. I am aggravated to think with all the technology in this day and age that a singer can’t stand next to the conductor by the Marine band, and have the band play and sing the song. Is this too complicated?

Jerry Lee Lewis

Most people know that lip-syncing is not a new phenomenon in the music business. It was standard practice on Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand” for years. As a fan of early rock ‘n’ roll, I note that Jerry Lee Lewis was one of the few artists who insisted on performing live during his performance on that show. Thank you Jerry, for not trying to lip sync to your own wild recordings.

Perhaps after a few more inaugurations and Super Bowls, the press will breathlessly write about a diva who had the temerity to sing live, as if she wasn’t concerned enough about the performance to have a recording created to which she could mime. Maybe what we should do is simply honor the practice. The Grammys have an endless list of award categories, a few more wouldn’t hurt. They could hand out a Grammy for “Best Lip Syncing Performance at a Political Event,” “Best Lip Syncing as a Group,” “Best Instrumental Syncing on YouTube,” and so on. Then all the nominees could prerecord their acceptance speeches, lip sync them, and prevent any image-damaging spontaneity. Beyonce could receive a Lifetime Achievement Lip Syncing Award, because one thing is apparent: she does a hell of job at it. 

Jazz Networking

The JazzEd Network organization made a good choice with their name. After the International Association of Jazz Educators (IAJE) folded a few years ago, the space was quickly filled with the JazzEd Network, an organization that successfully builds on the fact that jazz now predominantly lives in academia. Their recent annual conference in Atlanta demonstrated their embrace of networking technology with a conference app for your smart phone, a social media stream, Facebook, LinkedIn, tweets and YouTube all up and running. The 3-1/2 day conference included 84 performances, including professional musicians and students, and combinations thereof. A music industry hall offered everything from new brands of saxophones to improvisation method books to the latest ways to read fakebook tunes without paper. Seventy-seven clinics were offered, with titles ranging from the down-to-earth (“Combining Chops and Soul”) to the world of cyberspace (“Asynchronous and Synchronous e-Learning — A Case Study in Globally Networked Learning Environments”).

I was pleased that my proposed clinic had been accepted by the JazzEd evaluation team. I was able to screen the 1996 film “Joe Williams/A Portrait in Song.” This film was produced by the Jazz Archive at Hamilton College. Filmmaker Burrill Crohn captured Joe in full voice with the Count Basie Orchestra in Hamilton’s own Wellin Hall. The concert was interspersed with archival footage from Joe’s career, interviews with fellow musicians, and crafted in a manner to show Joe’s humanity as well as his vocal talents. The JazzEd audience for the film was exactly what you’d hope for. Everyone knew who Joe was, and throughout the film I heard laughter, saw some tears, and heard exclamations of appreciation when Joe or another musician offered some pearls of wisdom. I couldn’t have been happier with the outcome. The comments and questions afterwards were astute and informed. Perhaps the best moment was when a gentleman in the audience raised his hand and thanked us for showing the film, and then said, “because I played lead trumpet that night.” What a nice surprise to have Basie trumpeter Mike Williams in the audience. He was offered a nice round of applause.

In addition, bassist Rufus Reid and drummer Carl Allen joined me for fascinating interviews for the Jazz Archive.

It’s a rare jazz musician these days who does not have some kind of educational component in his offerings. Making a living as just a player is almost impossible. At the conference you see people networking constantly, exchanging information about what they do and what they can offer. I have to imagine there was some quid pro quo going on (if your school books me, my school will book you). If you’re interested in the JazzEd network, check out their website here. There’s no argument that the future of jazz lies with these kind of organizations and for the high school and middle school teacher it’s an especially useful resource to investigate.

If I attend another conference in the future I will remember to bring my wallet to the airport. I magically turned a five hour trip into a twelve hour ordeal. I don’t recommend it.

The Jazz Glass: Half Full or Half Empty?

Next week I will travel to Atlanta for the annual JazzEd Network conference. This association quickly stepped in when the International Association of Jazz Educators went bankrupt in 2008. If a journalist wanted to write an article about the healthy state of one of America’s original art forms, this would be the event to attend. Educators, performers, students, and entrepreneurs will convene for four days of concerts, clinics and commerce. The jazz glass will be overflowing.

Players and promoters know that this vibrant scene is sadly not mirrored in other areas. Rick Tessel, the publisher of JazzEd Magazine, recently authored “The Paradox of Today’s Jazz Scene.” He pointed out the inequalities, citing statistics and focusing on the fact that high schools, middle schools, and conservatories have students studying jazz more than ever before. At the same time, the jazz audience is shrinking, especially under the age of 45, according to the Jazz Audience Initiative. The record industry is suffering as well, and jazz recordings account for less than 3% of total music sales. Mr. Tessel cites possible reasons, including the proliferation of music on the internet, and the fact that “younger buyers seem to be more actively involved in the full range of music activities, especially downloading and organizing music.” My reading of this statement is that downloading and organizing have replaced purchasing and attending. I don’t think any observers of the jazz scene are surprised by this paradox.

Saxophonist/composer Jane Ira Bloom recognized the situation with recordings back in 1998 when I interviewed her for the Jazz Archive.

MR:    Yesterday I overheard you talking about recording albums and the business of finding labels, and you had mentioned that the business for records these days is not too healthy in the jazz world and that the time you’re getting to make records is getting smaller.

Jane Ira Bloom

JB:    Yeah. Well this is the middle, the jazz trenches, we’re not talking about the major jazz labels, we’re talking about all the independent jazz labels that live and operate in this kind of middle ground, on very small budgets. And the fact is it’s become so easy to make a CD now, everybody can make one, anybody can make a CD and get it out there and reproduce it and get it in the record stores. And I’m not entirely sure what that says about the quality and the content of what’s in those CD’s if they’re so easy to do, how carefully we think about what it is that we record and want to put out there. There is also a lot of other entertainment options for people who buy CD’s now, you know the computer and internet has changed all kinds of things. And entertainment options people have, not just listening to records. People can barely listen to 60 minutes of music, they don’t have that amount of time. An LP used to be 40 minutes. People could handle that. Jazz critics say today that they don’t even have time to listen to an entire CD when they’re evaluating new albums. It takes a lot of time.

MR:    Yeah. You get a stack of CD’s on your desk that you’re supposed to review and each one of them is an hour.

JB:    Yeah. It also brings up the point of, you know, how carefully are you thinking about what you are recording, how special you want to make those musical moments.

Bob Kinkel, a founding members of the TransSiberian Orchestra, and my most recent interviewee, succinctly addressed the easy accessibility of current technology:

Bob Kinkel

BK:    My view of technology and the way it’s gotten so much easier to do it in all forms — like graphic design, art, music recording — it’s really easy to get to high mediocrity. And unfortunately that is where a lot of people stay and it’s very rare that people are popping above that with any kind of design. It’s like I’m happy that a lot of the top architectural schools are making everybody do stuff by hand again before they’ll let them take whatever design they did by hand and put into CAD programs. So it’s more using it as a tool instead of the creative crutch, because it’s so easy to get to get high mediocrity.

It’s hard to imagine that the connection between slumping record sales and concert attendance is not one of the consequences of the astounding leaps in technology. Recently I related to my most accomplished saxophone student the thrill of seeing Cannonball Adderley in live shows in the late 1960’s. His reply was “oh yes, I’ve seen him on YouTube.” My saxophone teacher about that same time would recommend to me different artists to listen to and absorb. My process would be to save up money from my allowance and go to the record store to pore through the offerings, making my most informed choice possible. The prodigious liner notes on the album jackets assisted in my selections. I also listened to my transistor radio late at night where I heard the all-night jazz station in Rochester, New York. All of the above are now just a click away.

Very few young musicians would ever need or want to recreate the effort that Phil Woods talked about in our interview from 1999.

Phil Woods

PW:    Before I graduated, I was still in high school. And we’d come down, we’d take the bus to New York and we’d have to take another subway out to Long Island and then a bus to Lennie’s [Tristano] house, and I forget what it was, it was $15 a lesson or something, which seemed like a lot of bread in those days. I’d take a lesson then go back to Manhattan and go to Romeo’s and get a bowl of spaghetti, and you knew it was fresh because it’d been sitting in the window all day, and then we’d go to Mainstream Records and get the latest Bud and Bird and Diz, whatever we could afford. They were 78’s of course in those days. And if we still have a dollar left over we’d go to 52nd Street. I could get a Coca Cola for a dollar and I could sit there all night man. And that’s where I first heard Charlie Parker. I think he was sitting in with Milt Jackson I believe and Howard McGhee.

If I suggest to my saxophone students today that they would benefit from listening to a certain artist, my expectation used to be that the student would seek them out and purchase select recordings. Suppose I suggest that John Coltrane is the important artist. My Google search yielded the following on the first page offering: A live recording of John playing “Naima,” a live recording of “My Favorite Things,” the full version of “Blue Trane” with moving photo gallery, and a version of “Giant Steps” with an animated solo, the notes appearing one after the other, in real time, complete with chord changes. Most Coltrane fans would agree that these four songs belong on the short list of his notable recordings. Will the average student feel compelled to purchase this music? Why should they?

Let’s look at a current artist. Eric Alexander is an accomplished saxophonist, influenced by John Coltrane amongst others. Eric’s Google search offers a treasure trove of video and audio. One particular link has 32 different videos of Eric performing. What about live concerts? If a student desires to see an actual live performance, he/she can visit Small’s website, and for $5 a month live jazz from the club can be viewed every night. Is the experience the same as actually being in a jazz club? Of course not. However, it’s very close, and costs next to nothing. Let’s face it, the days of going to extraordinary measures for your jazz education are long gone, except for paying extraordinary tuition.

My intention here is not to sound like a “moldy fig,” the term used to describe purists who dismissed any attempts to modernize jazz in the 30’s. The discrepancy between the separate sides of jazz provide a fertile topic for music journalists and the occasional sociology paper. I believe most of the situation can be explained by the adage “what we receive too cheap, we esteem too little.”

There is little doubt that the JazzEd conference at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta will be stimulating and upbeat. If you attend, please consider my presentation on Friday, January 4, 2013, at 10 a.m. in the Learning Center. I will host a screening of the film “Joe Williams: A Portrait in Song.” Hamilton College produced this concert documentary in 1996, featuring Joe with the Count Basie Orchestra. Expect a review on the conference in our next posting.