Jazz Shaman

[Joseph K]

This appeared on Paul Dunmall's facebook page today, and looks interesting, though I haven't yet watched it:

'An exploration of intuition, shamanism and drugs in improvised jazz with Tony Bianco, Paul Dunmall, Dave Liebman and Alex von Schlippenbach.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8hIEGkp-NQ

[Serial_Apologist]

Guitarist Phil Gibbs - overlooked associate of Paul Dunmall and Keith Tippett:

http://www.google.com/search?client-firefox-b-d&q=Philip+Gibbs+Infinite+I+Am+on*youtube#pstate=ive&vld=cid:d7f6d3e6.vid:hGDe4uBTkaU

I thought this deserved posting here for our more discriminating attendees!

[Joseph K]

Guitarist Phil Gibbs - overlooked associate of Paul Dunmall and Keith Tippett:

http://www.google.com/search?client-firefox-b-d&q=Philip+Gibbs+Infinite+I+Am+on*youtube#pstate=ive&vld=cid:d7f6d3e6.vid:hGDe4uBTkaU

I thought this deserved posting here for our more discriminating attendees!

I just watched the first twenty minutes of Jazz Shaman. Seems worth watching (though not much more than what I already knew so far).

[Ian Thumwood]

I just watched the first twenty minutes of Jazz Shaman. Seems worth watching (though not much more than what I already knew so far).

I have been watching this documentary. It is interesting to see Dave Leibman being interviewed as I went on a masterclass over twenty years ago that he held with the pianist Kenny Werner. The saxophonist is a musician I really admire but he is quite intense and serious on a personal level. The horn players were split out to have tuition with him and the impression I got was that he was quite demanding. It is intriguing to listen to him because there seemed to be a difference of opinion between him and Werner on certain topics centring around improvisation. From recollection Liebman was quite sceptical of some of Werner's more Zen-like approach to jazz. Prior to the masterclass, a musician with an American big band that was touring who has experience with the likes of Woody and Mel Lewis was saying that Kenny Werner had an exceptional way of explaining the concept of improvising. There is a book that Werner published nearly 30 years ago which offers this approach called Effortless mastery" which many musician swear by. I was really looking forward to this masterclass but the reality was a rather uncomfortable eye-opener.

The reason I want to bring this up is because Leibman struck me as being the more "practical" of the two whereas it was Werner who seemed to be the one searching for spiritual inspiration. In fact, I have to say that I found Werner to be quite disturbing, not only as he was growning whilst playing the music but also because of the really bad language and imagery used in front of some quite young kids. I did not feel that his approach really helped and his behaviour effectively alienated everyone in the room to the extent that the jazz festival never asked him back. At one point he was talking about focusing on the suspended ceiling tiles in the room so that you totally forgot your surroundings and totally focused on improvising. Far enough but not really helpful if you want to learn the basic mechanics. He also used another comparison which was less polite and subsequently got him banned from the jazz festival ! Ultimately, I was put off my Werner's methodology . I can understand that the whole trance thing can work for some people yet it was not really analytical enough to resonate for me. Maybe I think you have to have an exceptional technique before you have the tools to teel with the kind of stuff Werner was talking about. Unfortunately, I think his behaviour was unacceptable (worst by an jazz musician i have encountered) and because of this i felt the message he was trying to put across was lost on his audience. By constrast, the horn players who went in to a different room with DL seemed to gain a lot out of it and that he applied different methods.

[Serial_Apologist]

I have been watching this documentary. It is interesting to see Dave Leibman being interviewed as I went on a masterclass over twenty years ago that he held with the pianist Kenny Werner. The saxophonist is a musician I really admire but he is quite intense and serious on a personal level. The horn players were split out to have tuition with him and the impression I got was that he was quite demanding. It is intriguing to listen to him because there seemed to be a difference of opinion between him and Werner on certain topics centring around improvisation. From recollection Liebman was quite sceptical of some of Werner's more Zen-like approach to jazz. Prior to the masterclass, a musician with an American big band that was touring who has experience with the likes of Woody and Mel Lewis was saying that Kenny Werner had an exceptional way of explaining the concept of improvising. There is a book that Werner published nearly 30 years ago which offers this approach called Effortless mastery" which many musician swear by. I was really looking forward to this masterclass but the reality was a rather uncomfortable eye-opener.

The reason I want to bring this up is because Leibman struck me as being the more "practical" of the two whereas it was Werner who seemed to be the one searching for spiritual inspiration. In fact, I have to say that I found Werner to be quite disturbing, not only as he was growning whilst playing the music but also because of the really bad language and imagery used in front of some quite young kids. I did not feel that his approach really helped and his behaviour effectively alienated everyone in the room to the extent that the jazz festival never asked him back. At one point he was talking about focusing on the suspended ceiling tiles in the room so that you totally forgot your surroundings and totally focused on improvising. Far enough but not really helpful if you want to learn the basic mechanics. He also used another comparison which was less polite and subsequently got him banned from the jazz festival ! Ultimately, I was put off my Werner's methodology . I can understand that the whole trance thing can work for some people yet it was not really analytical enough to resonate for me. Maybe I think you have to have an exceptional technique before you have the tools to teel with the kind of stuff Werner was talking about. Unfortunately, I think his behaviour was unacceptable (worst by an jazz musician i have encountered) and because of this i felt the message he was trying to put across was lost on his audience. By constrast, the horn players who went in to a different room with DL seemed to gain a lot out of it and that he applied different methods.

The difficulty surrounding what particularly to the Western mind appears to be a dichotomy between discipline and spontaneity has particular pertinence with regards to jazz, the musical art par excellence exemplifying spontaneity in ability to think and improvise on the spot, though it applies also to other disciplines besides jazz. An unfortunate misinterpretation arose in the 1960s counterculture, one that originated in the initial phase of the Surrealist movement, with its emphasis on spontaneous writing, supposedly to uncover unconscious motives and thereby free the individual of them in a sort of inner exorcism, as I understand it - the ideas of free association having originated in Freud. Zen monasteries in fact would place great emphasis on disciplining the mind through strict meditation practices, an extreme application of original Hinayana doctrines which advocated strict asceticism to discipline wayward human impulsiveness. From many discussions Alan Watts, widely regarded as one of the foremost authorities in the West on Zen Buddhism, argues that such disciplines would imply an actual dualistic character embedded in human nature, (contrary in fact to Buddhist teaching non-dualism), in which the subject is obligated to conquer these wayward tendencies through life in noble quest for supreme control over the ego. Instead, he was assured, such disciplines amount to an upaya, a Hindu word for a tricky means of leading to a realisation of the ultimate futility of such exercises in self-control. Their object is instead for the appellant to come to a realisation that controller and controlled are in fact one, and that such attempts are tantamount to the eye trying to see itself (without the aid of a mirror) or breath to breathe itself - tautologies. This is in line with Zen's teaching that the body, of which the mind is a part, operates best when left to its own spontaneous workings: it is the Western psyche, raised on beliefs in its own untrustworthiness, that is particularly hung up on this problem, although clearly it is not solely a Western problem: one only has to observe the strict ritualised social codes of interpersonal relating to appreciate just how controlled Japanese people are!

The way Watts puts it is that the mind can and ideally should operate in the same way the heart and breathing operate: without need for conscious overseeing control. This is well demonstrated by the phenomenon of "blocking", when an artist who has practised and practised handwriting or a piece of classical piano playing to the point where the music "plays itself" - in the same way a child experiences that moment of illumination (satori in Zen) when he or she is able to stay afloat swimming or maintaining balance cycle riding, that "it" rather than the conscious controlling "ego", is doing the action, and of its own volition. This relates to the question of whether practice in any activity is actually counterproductive at best and inimical to spontaneity at worst. The teacher may demonstrate to the student the effectiveness of spontaneity by getting him or her to casually fire a dart or arrow at a target, showing how often the target gets an accurate hit on first go - so-called beginner's luck. Ask them to repeat the action, and the subject cannot achieve the same result, because he or she is concentrated on concentrating, creating a false controlling self to police the self that acts perfectly well on its own, to counterproductive ends. This generates further blocking as the student is sure he or she can overcome the block by forced mental application, which can continue for a long time until he or she gives up in despair. The guru then needs to be on hand to reassure that the subject and the object that the subject thinks of as the self that needs keeping under control are one and the same. When this is realised the reaction is sometimes to fall about laughing - the punchline has been understood - spontaneously. In the final analysis, the individual has no alternative but to trust in their own better inner nature, since to mistrust is to place trust in the very instrument of judgement, the putative "self"! Perhaps this is what Jesus really meant when he spoke of God's saving grace; but one has to subsume the notion of "God" within some wider definition of Nature, or simply "the natural", as something to be trusted - which goes against every notion of human agency fostered by the ruling orders!

[Joseph K]

The difficulty surrounding what particularly to the Western mind appears to be a dichotomy between discipline and spontaneity has particular pertinence with regards to jazz, the musical art par excellence exemplifying spontaneity in ability to think and improvise on the spot, though it applies also to other disciplines besides jazz. An unfortunate misinterpretation arose in the 1960s counterculture, one that originated in the initial phase of the Surrealist movement, with its emphasis on spontaneous writing, supposedly to uncover unconscious motives and thereby free the individual of them in a sort of inner exorcism, as I understand it - the ideas of free association having originated in Freud. Zen monasteries in fact would place great emphasis on disciplining the mind through strict meditation practices, an extreme application of original Hinayana doctrines which advocated strict asceticism to discipline wayward human impulsiveness. From many discussions Alan Watts, widely regarded as one of the foremost authorities in the West on Zen Buddhism, argues that such disciplines would imply an actual dualistic character embedded in human nature, (contrary in fact to Buddhist teaching non-dualism), in which the subject is obligated to conquer these wayward tendencies through life in noble quest for supreme control over the ego. Instead, he was assured, such disciplines amount to an upaya, a Hindu word for a tricky means of leading to a realisation of the ultimate futility of such exercises in self-control. Their object is instead for the appellant to come to a realisation that controller and controlled are in fact one, and that such attempts are tantamount to the eye trying to see itself (without the aid of a mirror) or breath to breathe itself - tautologies. This is in line with Zen's teaching that the body, of which the mind is a part, operates best when left to its own spontaneous workings: it is the Western psyche, raised on beliefs in its own untrustworthiness, that is particularly hung up on this problem, although clearly it is not solely a Western problem: one only has to observe the strict ritualised social codes of interpersonal relating to appreciate just how controlled Japanese people are!

The way Watts puts it is that the mind can and ideally should operate in the same way the heart and breathing operate: without need for conscious overseeing control. This is well demonstrated by the phenomenon of "blocking", when an artist who has practised and practised handwriting or a piece of classical piano playing to the point where the music "plays itself" - in the same way a child experiences that moment of illumination (satori in Zen) when he or she is able to stay afloat swimming or maintaining balance cycle riding, that "it" rather than the conscious controlling "ego", is doing the action, and of its own volition. This relates to the question of whether practice in any activity is actually counterproductive at best and inimical to spontaneity at worst. The teacher may demonstrate to the student the effectiveness of spontaneity by getting him or her to casually fire a dart or arrow at a target, showing how often the target gets an accurate hit on first go - so-called beginner's luck. Ask them to repeat the action, and the subject cannot achieve the same result, because he or she is concentrated on concentrating, creating a false controlling self to police the self that acts perfectly well on its own, to counterproductive ends. This generates further blocking as the student is sure he or she can overcome the block by forced mental application, which can continue for a long time until he or she gives up in despair. The guru then needs to be on hand to reassure that the subject and the object that the subject thinks of as the self that needs keeping under control are one and the same. When this is realised the reaction is sometimes to fall about laughing - the punchline has been understood - spontaneously. In the final analysis, the individual has no alternative but to trust in their own better inner nature, since to mistrust is to place trust in the very instrument of judgement, the putative "self"! Perhaps this is what Jesus really meant when he spoke of God's saving grace; but one has to subsume the notion of "God" within some wider definition of Nature, or simply "the natural", as something to be trusted - which goes against every notion of human agency fostered by the ruling orders!

Thanks for this interesting post, S_A.

[Serial_Apologist]

Thanks for this interesting post, S_A.

Thanks very much JK - over-wordy I now think - the downside of editing at the end of a long day! The main point I possibly under-emphasised is that there need be no contradiction between discipline and spontaneity; that spontaneity, just like brutality (!!!) can be cultivated in the individual. The perceived problem is in thinking the controlling agency as separate from the part of the brain tasked to operate automatically, though one can understand the mistake involved in assuming some element of suppression to be involved. The key lies in putting in one's "all" (literally), summed up in the Zen saying, "In sitting, just sit; in standing, stand - above all, don't wobble" - meaning do not confuse when acting between different sorts or levels of action. Some are excellent at multitasking - not me, probably because I lack practice and self-confidence. One lifestyle change I introduced after time-management was brought up on a course was to sideline essential tasks or decisions by listing them on a jotting pad kept just inside the kitchen whenever they came up, thereby not having constantly to be thinking, is there anything else I should be concerning myself with right now? There are some within jazz who attain inspirational states of consciousness within proscribed routines, others who seem, to judge by their playing, to be limited by straitjacketing and to have found the openness and expansion of possibilities offered by free jazz or free improv to be optimal. Keith Tippett would speak of dependency on learned techniques and associated mannerisms or clichés as fall-backs to be relied on solely for inimical circumstances (a poor instrument, a non-reciprocating audience, in one case an exhibition of paintings illustrating torture), but he would describe these dependencies in terms of "nervous habits", implying (I think what he meant) unsureness as to subconscious inspiration matching up to occasion. Some unintentional disingenuousness may be understandably at play here - people like Keith have arguably expanded "the permissible within the empire of sound" - Debussy's description of Stravinsky's Rite - as far as idiomatic expansion allowed in his time. Someone has to be at the forefront of a continuum of expressive means that has others wedded to traditional means at the other end of the pole, and most of us, artists and consumers, at various points somewhere along the presumed line!

[Joseph K]

I just finished watching it. Very enjoyable I thought.

[Serial_Apologist]

Interesting article I just came across, germane to the discussion about spontaneity vs discipline:

http://thewalrus.ca/why-do-kids-hate-music-lessons/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB

[Joseph K]

Interesting article I just came across, germane to the discussion about spontaneity vs discipline:

http://thewalrus.ca/why-do-kids-hate...b-global-en-GB

Cheers for this, S_A.