Essays

A morning or two ago, I woke awoke to find an email from YouTube. Despite my anemic viewership, my channel had been selected for monetization. “Congratulations” read the subject line. Inside: “You can now earn money from your YouTube videos!” Clearly The YouTube team can spot quality!

Some quick back of the envelope arithmetic revealed the sort of dough I could expect to be rolling in. At about $1 CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) My account could have made $20 to date! That could pay for all my coffee for an entire week.

My account, at this point accrues about 100 views per day. If I only redouble my efforts, focusing on video, I could quickly be achieving 10x that! That’s a dollar a day – nearly 1/30th the cost of my health insurance.

But wait a minute here. I’ve been posting videos with the idea of promoting my band and getting our music out there. If only I pivoted, focusing on viral content, I could leap exponentially! The total jazz views of even a towering luminary like John Coltrane can’t keep pace with the deluge of eyeballs attracted by one Dramatic Chipmunk.

Yes, yes - this is all taking shape magnificently. A few well-edited fart videos, some novelty songs played on funny instruments – after all my most viewed video to date is a 2 minute rendition of “Happy Birthday” played in the hot jazz style while wearing a black hoodie and sunglasses at 3am in the conference room of a French hotel. Pretty soon I’ll be rolling in it.

To be candid for a moment, YouTube’s generosity in extending partnership to an account that clearly meets none of the benchmarks laid out anywhere for what generally warrants partnership is notable and appreciated. And I’d like to imagine that it is part of an effort to encourage the creation of original content and to build YouTube as a home for far more than clips of people falling and farting.

But if only now I had that one viral fart video…

http://youtube.com/user/zacharylipton

The Problem

Jazz has a central, existential problem. It's increasingly economically unsustainable. As record sales have disappeared entirely and live audiences have dwindled, jazz appears to have its very being threatened by the inability of the free market to sustain it. This places jazz musicians in the precarious spot of having to justify their own existence. Lady Gaga would never have to engage in this exercise. Millions of people demonstrate every day that they value what she produces, and she will never need to apply for a grant from anyone.

People, versed on the matter, have responded to this conundrum in different ways:

Some, albeit not jazz musicians, simply assert that jazz is dead. Jazz, in the traditional sense, they argue, ceased to be relevant when new instrumental acoustic jazz records failed to penetrate past the insular bubble of amateur and want-to-be jazz musicians. My cousin, often to my chagrin, belittles jazz as "that thing you do at night in the dark rooms with the instruments." But there is some truth in his derision.

Still, the opposite point could also be made - that there isn't a problem! One might argue that the market is growing, it's just moving. After all, there are plenty of gigs for working jazz musicians throughout Asia and in other emerging markets that didn't quite exist only a decade ago. Perhaps we are too narrowly focused on a small geographical region.

Others accept the idea that jazz has fallen out of the mainstream and embrace it, suggesting instead that jazz is a music to be housed at institutions of higher learning and supported by non-profit organizations. They argue that it's importance is academic and intellectual, and confers some public good, warranting the support of society's institutions.

Perhaps others yet could argue that our definition of jazz has simply grown too narrow despite our changing world. Elements of 'jazz' penetrate all forms of modern music, both directly and indirectly. Clinging to the idea that jazz must remain a relatively isolated, instrumental, and acoustic in a world that is unprecedentedly interconnected, digital, and whose dominant art is the 'mash-up' is naive. After all, there might not be any less jazz than there is rock and roll in many indie rock bands.

Perspectives

While there is clearly some truth to each of these perspectives, for those making instrumental jazz in the Western world, the problem of marginalization and dwindling audiences remains. In a recent interview with Seattle Weekly, Branford Marsalis addressed the issue of jazz's relevance. I don't agree with all of his conclusions but I think he paints a very clear picture of the underlying problem.

"I have a lot of normal friends. 'Cause it's important. [When] you have a bunch of musicians talking about music and they talk about what's good and what's not good, they don't consider the larger context of it."

This I know. Coming from broad academic background and not a music conservatory, I'm consistently shocked by how removed jazz has become from the people who might consume it. For supposedly intellectual music, modern jazz's progenitors are rarely versed on anything besides jazz, shockingly unaware of technology, the economy, other artistic movements, even other contemporary music.

In jazz we spend a lot of time talking about harmony. Harmonic music tends to be very insular. It tends to be [like] you're in the private club with a secret handshake.

Branford goes on to assert that one of the primary failures of modern jazz is the primacy of harmony over melody. This too I agree with to some extent. But I also think the problem is more general. The problem is not the failure to consider melody, but generally the failure to at all consider what things might be important to a non-musician. Much of modern jazz doesn't just lack melody; it also lacks dynamics, narrative, shape, and even harmony that appeals to the sensibilities and intuition of the audience.

Most jazz musicians ignore the question of who their prospective audience is, how to capture them, what content the music has to offer them. The exclusivity of jazz is thought mistakenly by it's practitioners to elevate it to lofty artistic territory. But this is a juvenile idea and a grave mistake.

However, this applies equally to melody and harmony. The game of "did you hear me quote a 70 year old standard no one under 50 listens to anymore?" is no more relevant than "did you hear me play the backdoor ii-V on the turnaround?"

And today's popular music isn't even particularly melodic. In contrast to the era that produced jazz, today's popular music is driven by texture, production and repetitive, nearly hypnotic beats. How many different Lady Gaga songs can you remember the melodies to? How many Beatles songs?

At the same time, of course Branford is right, and there exists an audience of laypeople moved by and receptive of music with strong melodic content. But there are also many other audiences out there.

Solutions

The answers, necessarily, are many and varied. But I think they all start in the same place - asking certain questions:

What are my artistic ambitions?
What are my ideas concerning the aesthetic?
Who might listen to what I have to offer?
What are they listening to now?
What else do they do in their lives?
How can I use my knowledge of the audience to engage them with a product that is perhaps different from what they currently listen to, but appeals to them somehow, be it via familiar repertoire and harmony, via showmanship, via lyric content?

For some reason these questions, even the premise of considering an audience strikes many in jazz, including a younger, and smarter, but also more naive version of myself, as distasteful, 'selling out' even.

But this has always been a part of what art is, and in fact is central to elevating it beyond craft. The difference between Jackson Pollack and some fool spray-painting macaroni in his basement is that Jackson Pollack found a way to make people pay attention and affect them.

The great works of classical music were often contextualized in the world outside of music. Operas, even those musically experimental, were usually set to well-known stories. Even symphonies often set to relatable themes. Jazz's delusion is that insular music is 'abstract'. IN that context, however, the word 'abstract' is butchered, meaning something more like 'unintelligible' or, more kindly, non-representational. The feat of abstraction in music is the metaphorical manifestation in sound of nonmusical ideas.

[Follow-up pending - Exemplars- Artists who have addressed these questions and produced a product that is both fresh and artistically compelling and conscious of its audience]

A few years ago, during my first period of remission from Autoimmune Encephalopathy, I wrote about what I perceived as a failure by musicians and artists to recognize the importance of the internet and to adapt accordingly. The internet, I argued, fundamentally changed music distribution, and should force intelligent musicians to reconsider how music is made, how often it is made, who it is made for, and everything else in the pipeline between instrument and audience.

Several years later, many musicians, notably indie rockers have adapted somewhat, albeit unimpressively to the new landscape. Sadly, while Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber have seen the potential of YouTube, most jazz musicians remain unrealistically tied to the idea that they can censor their image and tightly control their releases, popping out polished nuggets of final product while hiding the ugly innards of the artistic process from the public.

For a long time, I have felt strongly that I've seen an alternative - a symbiosis between online content distribution and live performance - that could enable musicians, but specifically jazz musicians to reach a wider audience more effectively than ever in the era controlled by record labels. However, while spending huge chunks of the last few years more concerned with reacquiring the ability to know what day it is, and to have feeling in my hands, I've been unable to produce the sort of torrent of artistic output that is necessary to fuel the sort of content volcano I imagine.

Now, with greater stability than at any other point in the last several years, I'm facing the challenge of backing up my assertions by providing the sort of internet-centric experience that I've envisioned.

For starters, my newest work, "Hurricane Suite," composed during evacuation in the suburbs from Hurricane Irene - I've already posted a couple bootlegged clips on the website from our first public performance of the work a quintet. Tomorrow I'll be performing the same work (originally imagined as a duo for bass and saxophone) as a saxophone duet with Lucas Pino at Lasers in the Jungle. I plan to post video from this engagement as well.

Personally, growing up, I couldn't care less about the polished turds of jazz recording. Hank Mobley records never inspired me. However, investigating the work of someone like Charlie Parker or John Coltrane - collecting bootlegs and getting deep into their artistic process, hearing them work out the material day after day, that's what inspired me to become a jazz musician.

I hope to provide the sort of experience that never could exist before this technology - capturing high fidelity bootlegs of concerts and on-the-fly recordings and posting them with regularity - providing a path so that anyone mad enough to follow my narrative can easily jump on.

Dear Yamaha,

I have spent most of my life as a saxophonist blowing into Selmer saxophones. From a young age, I was told that they were the best and, despite my otherwise contrarian nature, it seemed plausible enough that I never spent much time considering newer horns, especially not any manufactured outside Paris.

Over the ensuing 10 years since I bought my first professional model saxophone, I have changed mouthpieces, switched reed companies. I graduated from high school, went to college. I fell in love for the first time and had my heart broken for the first time. I graduated from Columbia with a degree in Mathematics and Economics, and kept a music career going too.

Along the way, I lost my sense of smell, suffered a catastrophic presumed autoimmune attack on my brain, decimating my memory and higher cognitive function, endured 2 spinal taps, plasmapheresis (incompetently performed, blowing out a vein, begetting what promises to be a lifelong fear of needles), five trillion different cytotoxic chemotherapeutic therapies, and high dose steroids.

Yet throughout the entire decade, despite the constant doubt cast into every corner of my life, I never stopped to consider that amidst all the chaos and uncertainty in the world, perhaps my deeply ingrained faith in the quality of Selmer's saxophones warranted reconsideration.

Finally, this past weekend, escaping from a little too much family time in Smithtown, Long Island, I stumbled into Cornet Music. Looking to try out horns, I asked a friendly staffer if they had any professional Yamaha sopranos I might be able to try.
He came back with what I believe was a YSS-62, presumably not even the top of the line.

Not sure what to expect, but glad to be holding a saxophone in an air conditioned practice room and not losing years of my life to the heat wave while sitting around a pool, I gave it a try, using a stock mouthpiece.

It blew my Selmer Series III away. Your horn was so much better than my soprano that I was embarrassed to have bought mine in the first place. The intonation was superior, the tone more robust, the feel heavier, and the key-work equally nimble. I am afraid to consider how much better than my horn your top-of-the line soprano is.

Alas, I am a 25 yr old trying to play art music in New York City while paying hefty medical bills in an attempt to remain alive and lucid. So my saxophone purchasing power is minimal and - left to my own devices - I might never (and certainly not soon) be able to afford one of your real deal sopranos.

So here is my audacious and perhaps laughable request. I would like to endorse your product! With my joints gimpy, I might not be quite as dextrous as a young Michael Brecker (but neither is anyone else on your artist roster). And my website is surprisingly well trafficked for a relatively unknown kid playing saxophone in New York City.

If you can be so generous as to gift me one of your brilliantly crafted sopranos, I will happily do any or all of the following.

1) Place a notice of endorsement with a link to your products somewhere on my website such that it will appear on every page. While I might be unknown, my site does get some eyeballs.

2) Write the best commendation of your horns of any endorsee you'll ever have. A literate jazz musician is a rare commodity.

3) Stick Yamaha stickers on everything I own.

4) Anything else you can think of, short of tattooing your logo onto my forehead.

So, what do you say?

Yours truly,

Zachary Lipton

I love music. I have loved music for as long as I have played it, and even before then. As a child learning to fundamentals of the saxophone and encountering jazz, this love manifested as a single-minded devotion. Music was not simply a passion, a fascination, and an avenue to self-expression. My love for music was religious; music was sacred. If someone quoted John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” over a corny funk tune, it was not simply heavy-handed and distasteful; it was sacrilegious. Music was not just an art; it was a spiritual experience, and it demanded not only serious study, but reverence.

As a high schooler, I subscribed earnestly to this notion of jazz musician as hero. John Coltrane was this master samurai who honed his talent to honorably push forward the musical zeitgeist into a new realm of consciousness. He was a messiah who would bring about change on earth through the comprehension of his improvisations, the study of his harmonic theories, the inspiration of his dedication. Jazz music was serious business, and had to be treated as such. The Bad Plus, at the time a newly formed jazz trio with a penchant for interpreting pop anthems, was heretical. They dishonored jazz - I thought then.

It's midnight. I sit in the beautiful lobby of Hotel St. Nicolas in the heart of La Rochelle. Next to me is a new friend, D'Arcy, a warmhearted and sharp-witted Canadian expatriate, who I met between sets at a May 6th concert. This trip has been a story of chance encounters, new friends. It has been characterized by adventures both exhilarating and exhausting but also by the warmth and tranquility of home-cooked meals.

I normally find it easy to write about recent experiences, but I find myself struggling to process the last two weeks, and to contextualize it in the wild adventure that has consumed the last three years of my life.

Most people entertain a deluded concept of the practice of medicine. In the fantasized version, nearly all common diseases are well-understood and their treatment algorithms are well-tuned according to the latest research and adjusted as newer treatments are developed and clinical trials performed. In contrast, a large number of idiots, quackadoos and conspiracy theorists imagine that most of medicine is a sham, that doctors know nothing, that more harm than good is done by western medicine. While these purveyors of homeopathy (treatments that tend to be at best ineffectual and at worst dangerous) are far from the truth, so are those who imagine medicine to be steadfastly scientific.

Self-promotion is the part of professional music I'm least comfortable with. It's always been an awkward process for me. The most offensive component has always been the bio. Musicians, artists, and everyone else trying to compete for the limited leisure-time attention of America's distractible public all find themselves, willingly or reluctantly, having to write self-congratulatory bios lauding their own prodigious talent, notable associations and historic achievements. To make it palatable, the standard form is for bios to be written in the third person. Here, I will try to account for who I am in a way for which I'm not ashamed to take credit.

Recently, a friend pointed me towards an edition of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick in which the preface contained a number of critical reviews contemporary to the book’s writing. Not surprisingly the critical response was overwhelmingly negative. Naturally, my first inclination was to pooh-pooh the critics and lament their failure to recognize something great in its time. But another, more important idea struck me.

For hundreds of years, the increased specialization of labor drove greater productive capacity and increased efficiency across all sectors of the world economy. Philosophers like Karl Marx noted the potential damage of such a division of duties to man’s soul. But few could have predicted then that the over-specialization of labor could spell financial catastrophe on a massive scale for those married to very specific skill sets.

Twenty-one months ago, my brain stopped working. Something might have been amiss for some time before then, but in January, 2008, I first knew beyond any doubt that I was broken. Before the month was out, I had seen a neurologist to rule out the possibility of multiple sclerosis or a brain tumor. Nearly two years later, I am not yet sure what I am fighting, and, at times, why I am fighting.

After two years of cycling between ten percent and fifty percent of my former cognitive and physical capacity, I have progressed little but learned much. I have acquired more knowledge than I can currently process about my own health, the myriad families of medical conditions that can cause neurological complications, and the problems that plague the healthcare industry itself. In this article, I will elaborate on some of the horrifying discoveries that I have made on my medical odyssey.

As my twitter feed has already suggested, my confidence in the Obama administration has been shaken, perhaps beyond repair. Given the wide range of reasons, more often illegitimate than justifiable for shaky faith in Barack Obama, I feel compelled to elaborate on my specific sources of concern.

At risk of sounding curmudgeonly, and perhaps being hypocritical, I feel obliged to join the shrinking chorus of individuals who protest the demolition of standards in written language. When I was a child, teachers ineffectively forbade the use of spell-check on school assignments. Spell-check – we were told – would foster a dependence that would leave us unable to spell in the absence of a computer.

Often, when systems are automated, adapted to great scale, one necessary trade-off for the efficiency gained is a gross oversimplification of the information being captured. Email is archivable, searchable, easily stored in less than 10kb of memory and easily transmitted to any number of recipients. The downside of this miraculously efficient representation of a human letter is that it lacks all of the nuance that can't be represented with ASCII symbols. Handwriting, sketches, personal stylistic choices of layout that once characterized the written exchange are lost. Similarly, the healthcare industry has oversimplified human health in way that leaves unacceptable gaps.