I am starting a blog.

There are a few reasons why I’m doing this. First, I’ve always enjoyed writing and it’s never a bad thing to add another creative outlet to your life. And there would be nothing wrong with stopping the list of reasons here! But I also think I have some ideas about jazz, composition, and art that are insightful and are not completely common knowledge (at least in the circles I run in). I’ve been encouraged to write a couple articles by a few friends in the past, but have been daunted by the uncertainty and unfamiliarity of the publishing process. I’m hoping that writing these posts functions as a gateway drug for me to get serious about putting out academic articles. They will be a good way to start since I won’t have to worry about making them perfect before I put them up, and I won’t have to worry about making it into some obscure music journal. They’ll be more accessible, giving them a slightly higher chance of actually helping musicians out in some small way.

They’ll give me an excuse to take some ideas about art that I’ve been rolling around in my head for quite some time and try to bring them to some kind of conclusion, to develop them further and then wrap them up into a presentable package, hopefully keeping me from getting stuck on them for the rest of my career, endlessly feeling like I’ve almost figured them out but never actually seeing them through.

This is a phenomenon that I’ve seen in several older musical mentors in the past (I’m thinking of two specific teachers will remain nameless here). Clearly, to have achieved what they did during their careers, they must have been exceptionally open minded at one point. I know from their resumes that they did spend time on the cutting edge, and they made legitimate discoveries and innovations in improvised music. Yet, 40 years after this, when I found myself studying with these individuals, I found their concept had cemented into something inflexible, into a set of aesthetic values that they developed 40 years prior and apparently at some point stopped updating. I find this to be in stark contrast with figures like Miles, Coltrane, and Wayne Shorter, who never stop pushing, who have to totally scrap their aesthetic concepts every few years, and whose hunger for artistic development never stops. To be clear, I still had a great experience studying with both of these teachers, but when I’m thinking about who my musical heroes are, and which of their qualities I hope to emulate, the choice is obvious.

How and why musicians end up in either of these two camps is a mystery to me. Maybe it’s an innate quality that some people become rigid in their personal criteria for art, while others are always searching and striving. But I believe that a part of the question comes down to the fact that the artists who become inflexible in their ideals are the ones who wrongly believe that their ideas are still new. They get this feeling that they’ve just discovered a technique or musical philosophy, despite the fact that they might have been working with it for decades. They keep this sense of “if only the music scene valued these aesthetics that I feel are missing from it,” without bothering to look around and see if the ideas actually have been adopted, and more.

I’m hoping this blog does a small part in keeping me from being like that. I hope it keeps me hungry and gives me landmarks that say “you can move on from that topic now, you’ve already hashed it out and it’s time for a fresh creative direction.”