Phil Freeman has a lengthy piece about Matthew Shipp on the Burning Ambulance site. In the course of the article he takes a few misleading swipes at my recent JazzTimes feature [pdf], so I ought to correct the record.
Affecting a high-road posture, Freeman tells us that he’ll no longer take the bait and print Shipp’s more virulent quotes, and he takes issue with me for including in my piece such gems as “[F]uck all of them. And I mean that – fuck Herbie Hancock, fuck Wayne Shorter. On a certain level, fuck Louis Armstrong…” This quote came in the midst of what Phil himself admits is “a subtle, nuanced multipart statement from a very smart guy.” Yes, that’s why I included it, in full context.
Freeman is concerned that the average jazz fan will “stop reading or listening once somebody starts pissing on graves – or the shoes of living players. … Come out swinging […] the way Shipp does, and folks are more likely to shut their ears entirely.” Yes, that’s true, and that’s why I concluded my feature with the assertion that Shipp might be his own worst enemy.
Freeman again: “I’m more interested in talking about what Matthew Shipp does while seated at a piano, or how he sustains a professional career making music, than I am in reproducing another set of quotes about his opinions of his competitors.” Well, good for you. What I find interesting is that I devoted the bulk of my article to a fairly close reading of Shipp’s musical output. (The piece even opens with a description of what Shipp does while seated at a piano.) The controversial stuff crops up in about the final third of the piece. Yet that’s the part that draws a response from Freeman, even as he faults me for downplaying Shipp’s art.
Far from “reproducing another set of quotes,” what the controversial final third of my piece did was present Shipp’s take on the apportionment of fame and clout in jazz — precisely the stuff that affects the sustaining of professional careers. It’s not just “quotes about [Shipp’s] opinions of his competitors” — it’s a “subtle, nuanced multipart statement” (Freeman’s own words), one that Freeman, for some reason, thinks I should have omitted.
Shipp’s fiery quotes, Freeman argues, “distract the writers to whom he serves them up like pastries from asking him about (or at any rate writing about – I don’t know what other questions were asked and answered during their interviews) exactly what it is that he does.”
Well, our interview did in fact take place in a shop that sells pastries. All I can say is read the piece again — it actually sticks to the chronology of the interview very closely. Lots of straight-up musical discussion, followed by a relatively brief coda in which we touched on the bigger picture of the jazz economy, which was hardly a “distraction” but an integral part of the story.
Freeman adds parenthetically:
Adler, it should be noted, did not choose to argue with Shipp’s criticisms of other players, at least not in print. Within the Jazz Times piece, he offered secondhand dissent via citations of Ethan Iverson of the piano trio The Bad Plus and various unnamed blog commenters, but did not wade into the fray himself. This, too, was playing a role – not that of a neutral party, but more of a “let’s you and him fight” agitator.
By “various unnamed blog commenters” he means the widely read and cited Destination Out, which I named. And Iverson, one of the finest pianists and jazz bloggers of our day — geez, what possessed me to think that JazzTimes readers might be interested in his opinion?
My role here was hardly that of an “agitator” — the fight had already taken place in the blogosphere over two years before, and I was going straight to the source for additional insight. Shipp’s response to Iverson was substantive and worthy of inclusion, and Iverson responded in turn at Do the Math. Yes, I did play a role here, as a facilitator of discussion, and I’m glad I went that route.
Bemoaning a lack of in-depth musical analysis in music journalism overall, Freeman asserts that this “might be attributable to writers not actually knowing how to play an instrument or read, write or record music.” One paragraph later, Freeman states: “I don’t read or play music, though I did study audio engineering.” For the record, I know how to play an instrument and read and write music, and I’ve touched on the subject elsewhere.
6 Comments
I've honestly never understood the complaint that critics "don't play an instrument or read, write or record music." The people I'm writing for by and large don't do any of those things either.
Me, too (though I can read — fitfully. Might I add that many (undoubtedly most) of the people who buy CDs and downloads and attend concerts "don't play an instrument or read, write or record music," either. Im my role as a music journalist, I try to be a travel writer of sorts. I go places, listen to things and report back whet I heard. I'm not a musicologist, nor a peer. I'm ears by proxy. I understand this complaint, but musicians who raise it might as well just send .mp3s of their stuff around to fellow musicians. The procession of much jazz into an "inside baseball" proposition has drained a lot of life from the art form.
Just to be clear – the only reason I brought up being a musician is that Phil brought it up, and insinuated that I'm not a musician. So I can't let that stand. But I agree that it's neither here nor there.
David –
I didn't know whether you were a musician or not. Some of the stuff I said applied to your piece in specific, and was labeled as such, but a lot of it was about music journalists in general. The bit about people who don't know how to make music themselves was definitely meant as a more general statement. Since I shift back and forth between covering jazz and metal, I read critics who do one or the other more exclusively, and a lot of pop/rock critics not only don't play an instrument, they don't know anything about how records are made (which is why I brought up my own knowledge of audio engineering). To quote myself:
"Since most music discussed in the remains of the music press these days is conventionally pop/rock in its structure and has lyrics, the writer will gravitate toward discussing the lyrics and/or the performer’s personality and how it fits within or bumps up against social roles, genre parameters and (the writer’s, or society’s) expectations for someone of the performer’s race, gender or perceived social class. Pseudo-poetic descriptions of the music, with only vague ideas about how the actual sounds were shaped, will be offered too, of course, but the primary music-critical mode is almost always personality profile combined with half-assed sociological dithering."
Also, note that I mentioned (though I didn't quote from it) the Signal To Noise cover story as well as your Jazz Times piece. I wasn't citing you in an attempt to paint you as a bad writer for publishing the quotes you did. I intended it more as a critique of Shipp for insisting on doing this sort of thing, and pointing out (from my own experience) how hard it is not to take the bait, especially given the journalistic need to draw eyeballs. It's a two-sided game that'll continue until somebody walks off the field. But I'm not claiming the moral high ground.
I appreciate your point of view, Phil, and everyone is of course free to like or dislike my article. I have no problem with that. But I did need to correct the misperceptions your piece seems to encourage – that Shipp somehow wrapped me around his finger, that I didn't deal with Shipp's music, and this might be related in some way to the wider phenomenon of non-musicians writing about music. It ain't so.
wow, talk about a controversy about jazz music thats gotten legs for days….i sometimes wonder if it's because the collective itsy bitsy pie of survival playing this art form is readily dissolving and needs new ways of fattening it up a bit? I think it's important to remember that what's fat and what's not is really a matter of perspective.
And btw the way–i am in no way taking sides here. I'm all for freedom of speech in all directions. Fostering critical thinking about art no matter whose side you are on is important, as is making sure people get where you are coming from, in the age of where everything can be so misunderstood from computer to computer….