Macho Meal Breakfast of Champions

I’d chosen to avoid checking out Damien Chazelle’s film Whiplash not just because of its almost sinister title, but because “jazz” and conservatoire in combination still feel so oxymoronic to me (must be a generational thing or something, as the combination now seems to play so de rigueur in many people’s conception of the music). I tend to wax suspicious at conflations of bottom-up, vernacularly generated high cultivation with top-down, received prescription especially because of the huge disparities in their contextual metacommunications. I once visited Berklee School of Music when I was 16 and talked to some students there. One dwelled particularly on the theme of “No matter how good you are, there’s always someone better.” Hmm. The tension of that concern seemed to me to be reeking all over that place. I didn’t go back.

I don’t mean to say that Whiplash isn’t an effectively organized cinematic work, or that the writing or the acting are especially flawed (it’s not); but I do feel some qualms about the story it tells about what it seems to call “jazz.” That said, even with the extremities of some of the characters’ behavior, it feels humanly plausible and likely not all that far from some actual jazz conservatory experience, not to mention mentality.

I also think especially about viewers attracted to the film’s drama who may also conceive of “jazz” as a distant category, style or product, likely a bit archaic, of a bygone day (something not quite so fresh on the I-Pod), but one that still connotes a contemporary aura of luxury or prestige. I wonder about the kinds of stories this movie builds around the sounds of the music.

Just a few weeks previously, I’d gotten to see both Jazz 34 and Kansas City by Robert Altman at the MoMA retrospective series of his films. Altman (this was in the 90s) assembled some of the real cats (Geri Allen, James Carter, Olu Dara, Don Byron, Joshua Redman, Ron Carter, James Zollar, David Murray, Craig Handy, Nicholas Payton, etc. etc. etc.) to play Bennie Moten Count Basie Kansas City style complete in 1934 dress. Altman hit a sweet spot in asking musicians to work as actors portraying musicians with the playing itself as their script. Jazz 34 displays over an hour and a half of this unapologetically without comment. Kansas City wraps around excerpts of these performances a fanciful and fictitious narrative saturated with personal memories (Altman was born there in 1925) that unravels the tragedy of small-timer Blondie O’Hara’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh) heroic but fatally doomed love story amid the complications and contradictions of class, love, greed, fear, cruelty, interdependent corruption, power politics and the administration of race.

Especially in Kansas City, a certain fiction generated “truth” about how that music happened comes across to those of us who couldn’t possibly have been there. There’s the way the cats went at playing (which is still contemporary) and the way the folks there were genuinely digging it, dancing, drinking, partying, but really with (and a contributing part of) the music as it happened. The music wasn’t being treated as some kind of aural carpeting or disposable status item.

Then, what surrounds this (for the most part) congenial, mutually supportive, creative competition is the paradoxical envelope of a fatally dangerous gangsterism that made that musical context possible, most lucidly personified through Harry Belafonte’s ice knifed rendering of the complex, astutely intelligent and logically ruthless Seldom Seen (the name of an actual figure from those days), who also loved the music to death doth he part: a Missouri River Medici.

Whiplash (actually the title of a somewhat tricky big band composition that’s revisited throughout the film) locates its story in a very different universe among very different “truths.” The Whiplash world is decidedly linear and career oriented. The destination of all the intense ambition displayed throughout seems well assigned, clear and already known. This story could just as easily be played out about an aspiring MBA, politician or athlete. The emotionally sadistic band instructor, Terence Fletcher, more than convincingly played by J. K. Simmons, could just as well be a USMC boot camp sergeant out to break a person to remake him: homophobic, in it to win it — with winning win win win win win being the primary goal. The students are likely going into near irreparable debt to develop the best honed technical skills they can develop as they train to score big along the 4H circuit of juried competitions. The main character, Andrew Neiman, played by Miles Teller, wants to be Buddy Rich.

As drummers go, Buddy Rich (unlike Max Roach or Philly Joe Jones) was far from a poet, but indeed a grand virtuoso of macho jazz, that daredevil art of exceptional technique that makes damned sure that listeners can notice it (and there are “out” versions of this too). This is a highly skilled enterprise where the standards are clear and the margin for error is slim, a measurable sport within which one can actually become “the best” within the rigorously standardized norms of a “big band music” light years away from the far more nuanced dreamscapes of Ellington, Basie, Lunceford, Henderson, George Russell, Gil Evans, Sun Ra or Thad Jones. Still, you can’t actually say that it’s not “good.” Everything is unimpeachably correct, and that by itself really is a pretty hard thing to do.

Realistically, however, it’s impossible to be “the best” unless measuring conditions are identical in absolutely every respect. Maybe that might work with baseball; maybe, that is, if we completely, completely ignore style. The genuine quirkiness of being truly individual, of being topologically unique, cancels this whole horse race.  Can one person actually be “better” at being oneself than someone else?  Does that even matter? The beauty of high intensity environments such as New York, where have gathered so many who each vie for one’s max, is that there really is no such place as “top” — only, at most, some incomparable individuals.

Seriously, is Sonny Rollins a “better” tenor player than John Coltrane (aka who “won” Tenor Madness?) or Coleman Hawkins (or who “won” Sonny Meets Hawk?) or Charles Gayle or Ben Webster or Archie Shepp or Lester Young or David S. Ware or John Gilmore or Sonny Stitt or George Adams or Warne Marsh or Sam Rivers or Booker Ervin or Arnett Cobb or Johnny Griffin or Dewey Redman or Lucky Thompson or Yusef Lateef or Don Byas or Wayne Shorter or Albert Ayler or Dexter Gordon?  This gets ludicrous pretty quick.  Identity is achieved through difference, no less by lacks, deficiencies, wounds, exaggerations and imbalances than by any accumulation of strengths and “superiorities.”  Identity is an aikido.  It can be as much about what one doesn’t do as otherwise; and it’s a lot more complex and interesting than simple victory.

Fletcher’s somewhat skewed worldview is perhaps most lucidly telescoped where he misappropriates the legendary tale of fledgling Charles Christopher Parker being dismissed from a Kansas City performance via a flying cymbal that had been launched his way by Jo Jones. In Fletcher’s telling, Jones aimed right at the adolescent saxophonist’s head, although other, more reliable versions have instead recounted that very same cymbal, as it delivered its message, more amiably meeting the floor nearby, presenting a distinct contrast between Fletcher’s cut close to malice and Jones’ dismissive cutting humor (airborne cymbal as haunting specter looms also in sniper lover Clint Eastwood’s psychodrama that imagines the saxophonist as an idiot savant). The consensus remains that Parker did indeed withdraw afterwards into a year or so of highly intensive study and practice, after which his playing had already matured into a quality that we’re still listening to.

Defeat, embarrassment, humiliation and its long afterburn imprint upon the journeys of all sorts of aspirants. Parker’s virtuosic accuracy (and velocity of thought) still retains a capacity to terrify, but it’s also important to keep in mind that his virtuosity was an agent of spirit in service of an imagination that heard unforeseen nuances of feeling and experience. It’s not just trophy display — and the same can be said of Coltrane, Rahsaan, Cecil Taylor, Tony Williams, Milford Graves, James Newton, John Carter or Peter Evans. Their techniques co-evolved with what those musicians needed to say, unlike what we’re able to see of the digicelluloid Andrew Neiman, who simply, at this stage, however admirable his intense determination, only aspires to be “great.”

Now, Terence Fletcher does to some extent play the role of trickster in this movie, of bad cop in order to scare the very best out of his conceivably internally complacent students, (that is, if we’re willing to bypass his more pathological flourishes); and young Andrew Neiman does accomplish a kind of transcendence at the end of the narrative, where, after being set up yet once again by Fletcher, he surges back to take leadership of the performance (and the band) in playing like a lot more than just a student, thus budding a sort of peer to peer quality respect with his mentor while just beginning to come into himself on his own terms.

My reservations aren’t to diminish the value of what Albert Murray calls antagonistic cooperation, the ecstasy of resistance described by sculptor M. Scott Johnson or the many constructive ways that gratuitous difficulty, imposed or freely adopted, can yield resilience, confusion and resourcefulness, nor is this to question artist determined high standards and the expressive and conceptual freedom that well cultivated technical flexibility might support.

Both Neiman and Fletcher each in his own way seem to relate to music as something that’s achieved purely through the power of will: if enough force is applied, one may succeed. ¡Los conquistadores! That’s all there seems to be to it. Only the strong, only the monomaniacally dedicated may merit survival. No room for meandering, wondering, reciprocity, dreaming, dissidence, trial and error, awe, falling in love, mistakes, mystery, serendipity, weaknesses, deliriousness, humor, disorientation, contrariness or critical disposition in their particular version of the world. No time to find one’s mind, much less discover how one might even begin to make it up. Parker, in contrast to this, has been recalled as a spontaneous and ever curious polymath, alert to literature and visual art and a wide ranging conversationalist. Someone like Bill Dixon, who constructively incorporated absence into his playing, would be absolutely inconceivable, much less permissible, within the neck snapper mindset.

Perception as a matter of course projects preconceptions, guesses, fantasy, dreams and memory onto experience in initiating dialogues within which one continually readjusts and poses anew. But, how closely, and just how far, does Whiplash actually care to listen?  The influence of colonialist mentality in this culturally revisionist storytelling can’t be completely exempted.  As Manifest Destiny types so often tend to prosper proportionately to the degree that they desacralize and dehumanize what and whom they defeat or subjugate, it’s not so surprising that they might regard those whom they step over as blank slates about whom they can invent any story (usually self serving) they please, since these people don’t “really” exist.  The artistic license that stretches truth to construct fiction, a make-believe spectrum of lies that might even avail some truths even more vividly, differs from this film’s glib  (or could this only be symptomatic of mere privileged ignorance?) disregard for more concretely lived, actual worlds.

So, why not go ahead and change the entire ethic and story around “jazz,” the practice of which would not have come into being without the imagination and invention of African-Americans, each of whom were identified by the original United States constitution as 3/5 of a person?  Chazelle and company seem to feel easy license to distort the music’s (and especially Parker’s) example to invent their own excellently crafted “white” drama about Gordon Gekko and Bud Fox with some purported “chocolate dandy aesthetics” added for an extra backdrop to resemble “reality,” along the way joining the Adorno crowd, Rockers and Poppers, the “arts business,” media mainstreams, the coded boundaries of “new music” and the New Yorker in diminishing something they want neither to recognize nor contend with.

But let’s not stop there. Just forget about “jazz.” What is this film contending about music period — or about any art practice for that matter?  While in no way so severe and deadly a contradiction as D.W. Griffith’s Klan recruitment “masterpiece,” the paradox of this independent (a position toward which I’m predispositionally sympathetic) filmmaker’s first major feature is how solidly it weighs in for a mediocre status quo.

In contrast, a recent documentary by Allan Hicks and Adam Hart, Keep on Keepin’ on, shows Clark Terry’s no less demanding transmissions of musical experience generously spiced with straight up love, enthusiasm and encouragement, whether or not times and performance may be up or down. The circular, nearly eternal, musical world portrayed in Altman’s Kansas City films, almost 24/7/365 enter and exit as you will aren’t that far from the kind of osmosis environments I’ve seen among my Gnawa friends in Morocco, where the kids start picking the music up just by being there (Parker likewise haunted KC spots as a kid), not to mention all the jam, house, loft and apartment, even street sessions I’ve witnessed right here. Altman’s Kansas City films recognize something that’s long been happening all over the country, a certain culture and worldview, a mix of sharing and mutual challenge that’s nurtured a particular quality of musical intelligence. The music has emerged out of meanings and concerns far more complex than the right note obsessions of the conservatory. The Yardbird can take the last word here too: “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”

That kind of love that lifts a community without surrendering aspirations doesn’t seem to compute among the zero sum racing of Whiplash. What’s too bad is that some viewers, especially those of the younger generations, might get the impression that the music itself is really that simpleminded. Furthermore, just look at the relations portrayed among musicians: barely a hint of friendship or playfulness — and no humor at all. Just what planet is that? In this respect, Whiplash affirms Ayn Rand solitary great man achievement scenarios, when in actuality what impresses us as “great” in any person’s achievement or presence, is, in addition to that individual’s necessary efforts and imagination, a widely collaborative process that involves a lot of people.

Afterwards, I went home and put on one of those European live recordings from ’64 of Charles Mingus with Danny Richmond, Jackie Byard, Eric Dolphy, Clifford Jordan and Johnny Coles of Meditations, where Mingus plays this unbelievably delicate arco unison way up on the bass along with Dolphy’s flute: a music very challenging to play, strongly fragile, emotionally polysemous, changing its mind and its moods from within, reconsidering itself over and over. Mingus’ own reputed personal madnesses aside, this sounds a very different image of a high aspiring “maleness” than we could ever hope for from the one dimensional macho demonstrations of Terence Fletcher (while still holding out some eventual hopes for his protege); and there are a lot of other complex blends of possible and actual “maleness” to consider and imagine — or whatever’s different that “womaness” (mostly absent from this film) also brings.