The Music Tells You - There’s No Freedom In Freedom

I went to Bennington College my freshman year. I had a great year but I was ready to get Heiruspecs going so I left after that first year. Dorm advisor at Fells Hall freshman year was named Bryn Mooser. From Maine. He’s turned out to live kind of a Hollywood life but back in the year 2000 he was a very attractive alto sax player who had the misfortune of knowing he was very attractive. He was an incredibly fun dude to be around as an eighteen year old. I played in his junior concert which was called. . .wait for it. . .get ready. . .you can’t make this shit up. . .America. I think there was maybe five chords in the whole show. Plenty of headbands and wardrobe discussions. Lots of drummers. A lot of TVs playing art school shit. It was ambitious, and frankly more enthralling than seeing a more talented musician play it safe over eight songs from the Real Book. I was an impressionable sponge and Bryn was full of ideas, advice, album recommendations, and more. I’m grateful for that year I got to be around him. He turned me on to a movie from 1992 from Branford Marsalis called “The Music Tells You”. Watching that video I was so fascinated with Branford Marsalis. Honest to a fault, arrogant to a T, and seemed earnestly excited about making music and disillusioned with the things surrounding making music.

We watched the movie together and I was stuck on the scene, clipped above, where he says “the music tells you” when explaining the stricture of improvising, the stricture of writing and of collaborating. Artistic expression to me is about limiting potential choices and then finding remarkable opportunities within those choices. Practice in the largest sense of the word is cultivating a vast arsenal of skills to deploy when a potential choice that requires one of those skills is available. ProTools, the most advanced multitrack recording software in the world, is a creative godsend but it clouds some into thinking that limiting potential choices isn’t part of artistic expression. Spotify’s business practices and the major labels’ complicity in obscuring them is a cancer on the music industry, but it also clouds people into believing that any song can go after another song. That every song looks the same. That every song is best measured by the amount of people who have listened to it since the dawning of streaming.

I prefer thinking of music like a war of inches in trench warfare with groundbreaking artists forging yards ahead and permitting others to benefit from those gains and fill in the missing pieces. The music told Ornette Coleman and Charlie Haden that something else was available when improvising after a melody. There was more that could be up for grabs in real-time. But I do believe the music told them that. I believe that the music called for a larger canvas and they painted on it. In breaking old rules they made new rules. Same year that Bryn Mooser from paragraph one showed me the Branford Marsalis documentary I took counterpoint from a composer named Stephen Siegel. The king of counterpoint was a writer named Palestrina from the Renaissance. What’s counterpoint? Take a melody and with a set of pretty demanding rules navigate an additional three independently moving voices to supplement the melody. I hemmed and hawed my way to what would’ve been a C if I hadn’t gone to Bennington where they didn’t have grades but I gained a lot. I do believe the music told Palestrina something. He formalized these rules and I do believe in the hands of many teachers the rules are taught like unmoving policies bound for eternal truth. I don’t believe that’s what music tells you. Music is not black and white, but it’s not a free for all. Even “free” music is not a free-for-all. Free-for-alls are terrible. Terrible. The music tells me that your free-for-all is just a jerk fest for your three favorite scales. Or it tells me that it has become too demanding or rote to listen to the rules inside of music; it has become more expedient to pretend that there are no rules even though you know it to not be true. And if someone is following Palestrina’s rules from a cool half a millennium ago with no innovation then I have doubts that you are letting the music tell you anything, you are just painting within the lines. There is a merit to learning counterpoint that I barely appreciated as a freshman in college. There is a merit to transcribing solos and melodies that I am finally embracing, far too late for it to have an appreciable impact on my career, but blissfully early for it to have an impact on my musicality and my soul.

The music tells you on the radio too. I believe a good radio person should be in the business of stretching and breaking those rules only if they are also a student of those rules. I believe that the path to creating great radio involves listening to great radio. In fact, I believe it involves listening to the radio period. Different shows, different formats. Different hosts. Different cities. There are plenty of Palestrinas in the radio industry clinging unexplainably to a set of rules that don’t make sense or that fortify and codify things that are best left in the past. I’ve been in radio just over ten years and I’ve heard of program directors talking about not playing two black artists in a row, not playing more than three songs from women fronted projects in an hour. These ideas are immediately reprehensible but they are also outdated. It is a disrespect to your current audience and your potential audience. It is enshrining a hierarchy that throttles the digestible output of talented artists who aren’t white men. The music didn’t tell those programmers that. I don’t even think their gut told them that. It’s a play-it-safe strategy that perpetuates our worsts. Our AI, our legacy media and our habits enshrine the long-established hierarchies in our world. Through practice, through listening, through imagination I aspire to cultivate an arsenal of skills that will make decisions from what is available. And I know great radio is available that adheres to none of the stupid rules. And the more I practice, the more is available.

My brother Steve, fellow musician and writer, has been firing on all cylinders in Big Trouble, the band we play in together. He’s been writing, practicing, videotaping, designing and doing it with an enthusiasm I am amazed he has mustered this deep into his years. The big record isn’t coming. The honeymoon is over. But he’s reaching out to schedule a rehearsal and sending around the flyer. He added a keyboard/sampler/synthesizer into his rig in the past handful of practices and gigs and it’s been a mixed bag by his own accounting. I have a distrust of gadgets that is LOUDLY amplified in my feelings about Steve having gadgets. Steve has been a gadget guy since he was born and I’ve been a “fuck it, I’ll make it work with your hand-me-downs let me try it” guy since just as long. So I look at these new technologies under a different light than if another bandmate might do it. But after the gig we talked about the need to try, to expand, to push. It doesn’t have to be gadgetry, but without a push from somewhere we’d miss out on so much musical expression. Years ago Steve bought a pitch shifter pedal and I will still jokingly point to that pedal and say “that’s the pedal that broke up Big Trouble”. We’d be playing restaurant gigs with tentative support at best from the booking person that a two guitar quartet could cater to the dinner and cocktail crowd that might be coming in. Steve soundchecking the pitch shifter through the VOX AC30 at above full volume forty minutes before downbeat wasn’t making my booking job any easier. But, we do need these new technologies to push us to see what we can do with the music. We need to be pushed into finding out what of this new technology can be used while always letting the music tell us.

No one person gets to be the arbiter of what it means to let the music tell you. I think with the new sampler/syth/keyboard doo-dad Steve is listening to the music, sorting out how to work it into the web of Palestrina-like rules that Big Trouble has concocted throughout the years. Where is their room to expand? What is available? What expands and what diminishes? In these musical pursuits I am on the conservative side and I need to be surrounded by a spectrum of perspectives on innovation. What could a more-mature-me do enthusiastically with the potential of Steve having a pitch shifter? I’m not certain, but I think I could’ve done a lot better than bellyaching about the volume during soundcheck.

In radio I don’t know where I land on the conservative/liberal continuum. I believe radio stations have a unique responsibility and freedom that comes from pursuing experiences 24 hours a day. A peer in radio talks about “the promise”. What is “the promise” when you turn on that station? Is the promise genre specific? Is the promise an ethos towards music that floats above genre? Is the promise an ethos towards presentation? Is the promise no promise at all? Is the promise that it’s a dice toss every ten minutes? I’m writing this four days before Halloween and “the promise” is such a strange combination of strong and weak around Halloween. I can accept the Monster Mash being played on almost every radio station on planet earth this week. But what is “the promise” surrounding Monster Mash? Is it the promise of being seasonally appropriate? Is it the promise of what sits next to the Monster Mash on the playlist?

I’d like to answer a question I can see a reader asking at this point:

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Dear Blowhard Bennington Sean,

Is it really all this complicated? Just play the music! So Steve got a pedal! Figure out what songs it sounds good on. Share your opinion and keep it moving. Stop acting like there are massive rule books lining the walls of every practice room and radio studio in the world. It’s music and you’re ruining it.

A Concerned Blog Reader

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Thanks for writing ACBR. It is this complicated. It ends up being simple. At the best it sounds simple, but the people I respect think that under the hood can’t be pure simplicity. There is history, there are precedents. There are rules to break and rules to honor and a beautiful life with beautiful offerings for the world in caring a ton about this stuff and working it over in your head. There’ is a difference between someone who plays a D chord because it’s the only thing in their arsenal and a person who picked a D chord out of fifteen different options because it was ultimately the best option.
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What does a radio station promise on Halloween? Does it promise a detour? Does it promise a sincere seasonality that Spotify’s “Ghoulish Grooves” with an AI ghost and a turntable graphic simply can’t? What does a bluetooth speaker offer at a Halloween party? At the neighbor’s Halloween party on Saturday I had already clocked in a beautiful discussion about creative responsibilities with my brother post-gig and futilely fumed in the car at a radio station for not satisfying “the Halloween promise” as I wanted them to. I was tasked with bringing over a bluetooth speaker after the other one had run out of juice. I tried to dial in what might work for the group of assembled neighbors on Halloween. Queens of the Stone Age, Soundgarden, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Monster Mash, Whodini, Blue Öyster Cult (but I did Burnin’ for You for a little flex). I was ready to get some suggestions from others and to pepper in some more. I was letting the music tell me. I was following the spirit and trying to let the music help the great time. I HAD TO TAKE THE DOG AROUND ONE SINGLE CITY BLOCK BECAUSE HE WAS BEING AN ASSHOLE AND I RETURNED TO A LOSS OF CONTROL OF THE SPEAKER. My neighbor Blake ceded it to a man who listens to a Wall Street Journal podcast in the shower every morning. It was atrocious. He was starting podcast episodes. He was picking songs to purposely pick fights with certain people who he knew hated certain songs. He’s drunk, leaning back, an evil wizard who was both picking shit songs and then getting lost in emails/texts/facebook and not even tracking what is coming out of his cranked JBL. And when other attendees would discreetly turn down the speaker he’d indiscreetly turn that bad boy back up. The music tells you Andy! You aren’t listening but the music is telling you. It’s sacred. It’s sacred to share music. It’s sacred in a bluetooth speaker, it’s sacred on a stage, it’s sacred in your own playlist, it’s sacred in a booth at a radio station. It is not reserved for professionals; it greatly benefits from youthful indiscretion. It greatly benefits from seasoned veterans who have been making these choices for years. It greatly benefits from a drunk guy having a fun time in his garage, but you got to try and have fun. But if you don’t think it matters, if you don’t think it’s a gift, if you don’t think it’s a miracle you don’t belong to it, you aren’t Palestrina, you aren’t Ornette Coleman, you aren’t bending or breaking rules, you are out of the mix. I don’t think you’re listening to yourself. The music tells you. Listen. Even if the music tells you to play some wild off the wall shit that Bennington Sean McPherson turns his nose up at. . .listen to the music and I’ll believe you. I’m bringing a bigger speaker next year.