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.
