Author: Roberta

In a previous post, I started thinking about what makes music “accessible”. This is a dirty word in some quarters, but I think it’s the highest compliment. If we could take the billions of promotional dollars spent pushing garbage out of the equation, I suggest we would see that accessibility in music has nothing to do with harmonic simplicity, tune length or “dumbing down” the music.

A few years ago, I played a concert of completely improvised (“free”) music at a venue in Red Hook, Brooklyn. I had thought the drummer Klaus Kugel was going to be in town so I asked a couple of his colleagues to play – the bassist Hilliard Greene and the tenor saxophonist Louie Belogenis. (It turned out Klaus couldn’t make the gig due to visa issues but I’m so glad we did the gig anyway, with Billy Mintz on drums, because it was the first time, but not the last, that I got to play with Louie. I had played with Hill several times in the distant past, but always in a straight-ahead situation, mostly backing up a very good standards singer named Francina Connors. This Brooklyn gig was the first time we played free together and I suspect it had something to do with Hill asking me to play in his free-playing-on-standards In and Out trio which is always a complete blast.)

But I digresss. I wanted to talk about accessibility. So for reasons I can’t recall now, my brother and my mother came to this gig of “avant garde” music with no pre-ordained structures. They both loved it. Now, my brother is himself a very good musician with amazing ears, albeit with more of a taste for straight-ahead jazz. so you might have expected that he would at least have some appreciation for the abilities of these musicians. But it was deeper than that. Talking to him right after the concert, I could see that his mind had actually been a bit blown, in a good way.

If you’re reading this you probably don’t know my 87-year-old mother, at least not well. So you will have to take my word for it that she is not that kind of mother who thinks everything her kids do is wonderful, the kind who freely heaps praise; quite the opposite in fact. And, while as a young woman she was an amateur singer of the American Popular Songbook, she had no idea that completely improvised music was a “thing” until I explained it to her immediately before the concert. And yet my mother, too, loved this concert. Not in her typical “that was very nice” sort of way of tolerating the fact that her only daughter (who “would have made a good lawyer”) had spent most of her adult life up to that point doing an excellent imitation of a starving artist, but in a delighted, even transformed, way.

So I have seen first-hand that accessibility has nothing to do with genre, structure, level of complexity or anything else but the sincerity, focus and depth of the musicians themselves.

By the way, I will be performing standards (played freely, but accessibly) with Hill Greene and drummer Newman Taylor Baker at the Paterson Public Library in New Jersey on November 2nd, soon after which I embark on a European tour with the amazing saxophonist Roby Glod and his quartet featuring Christian Raymond on bass and the afore-mentioned Klaus Kugel on drums.

… In Santa Barbara. Four shows in a row and it just keeps getting better and better. Another standing ovation after a 90-minute set. Thanks to Joe Woodard’s feature in the local paper we had a very good crowd. So grateful to be playing with these transcendent musicians: Putter Smith, john Gross, Billy Mintz. Tomorrow is our last night – Alva’s showroom in San Pedro.

Doug Ramsey has written a wonderful review of Mintz Quartet in his exemplary Rifftides blog. Interestingly, he uses the word “accessible” to describe the CD, which features only Billy’s originals. The recording has a few free pieces and one thirteen-minute power-vamp in 7 + 5; and at least one tune starts with a quiet drum solo. In theory, according to all the criteria of industry “experts”, this should not be an accessible recording, at least not in the way the word is traditionally used. However, Doug’s description rings completely true for me. “Accessible” is a great word to describe this album.

Billy’s writing and playing has a rare straight-forwardness about it; it’s completely lacking in artifice. The same goes for the playing of John Gross and Putter Smith. Such focus and clarity of thought. (It takes a long time to attain that kind of mastery and it is why I feel privileged to be on the CD and to be playing all this week in southern California with them.)

At first it seems counter-intuitive that in order to be accessible, one needs to reach the highest level of accomplishment and expression but it actually makes sense. Musicians often discuss how jazz was more popular “back in the day” and of course this has a lot to do with the music having been more danceable (as well as the general decline and corporatization of American culture). However, not being danceable didn’t stop sensitive laypeople from listening to Bird or Miles.

I wonder if the decline of jazz’s popularity is more about the fact that jazz has become glutted with incredibly competent players who have memorized all the rules and can regurgitate with ease, but do not have that quality of directness that Billy, John and Putter have. It used to be called “telling a story”. Some people associate that term with pre-bebop jazz but I personally don’t think it has anything to do with genres. However, that’s for another post.

Just saying.