Focal Points: Sam Newsome
patrick brennan
February 2020
Creativity, Learning and the Business of Music
Sam Newsome’s new book Be Inspired, Stay Focused, a collection of short essays, is a generous contribution to our knowledge and understanding of a self reflective life within musical practice as well as a window toward conditions of creative activity in general. Newsome’s writing style synthesizes journalistically terse, direct simplicity with a disarmingly personal, conversational presence that he’s also, since 2010, cultivated in his blog Soprano Sax Talk.
As an ever evolving creative musician, self criticism is a constant, sometimes even overly haunting, companion. But it doesn’t stop there because of an even more consistent dedication to growth oriented problem solving, and that, under the circumstances, engages an active process of compassion for oneself in service of imagination, which here, in his sharing of questions and adventures, transfers a solidarity with the many others who likewise contend with similar challenges and circumstances. This understated display of vulnerability in tandem with searching curiosity is what also contributes to the writing’s charisma.
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Newsome’s credibility as a writer anchors, for me, in the persuasiveness of his music. Some may have acquaintance with that experience of hearing a musician one’s never heard of for the first time and being lifted into that jaw dropped exclamation of “Who is that?” My own introduction to Newsome’s music was when a fellow musician popped on a YouTube segment of him playing Monk unaccompanied, which was a head turner. I could immediately hear an understanding of Monk’s soniverse from a real someone who could hear on his own terms. I’ve never forgotten it.
This has to also be put in a context where it’s now far easier to tune into a jazz radio broadcast where I might find myself trying to guess just what early 60’s Blue Note recording I’m listening to, and while stumbling in my guesswork as to who the cats are, I learn that these players hadn’t even been born yet, and who, in a way, have therefore been reinventing the role that “moldy fig” dixielanders once played back during that same decade as those far more organically original Blue Note sessions, although it is important that at least part of that music’s skill set is being maintained, even if, as Ornette Coleman might have put it, “not for the same reason.”
I’ve since heard Newsome in a really extraordinary collaboration with Fay Victor, flying through Coltrane’s labyrinthine obstacle course Giant Steps, inventively exploring the outer sonic regions of the altered soprano saxophone, and digging into multiphonics with a musicality that’s influenced my own musical investigations.
This un-boxed-in musical inclusivity likewise suffuses his thinking about music,
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Be Inspired, Stay Focused divides into four areas of inquiry. The first addresses keeping one’s creative engagement fresh, which he follows with a look at cognitive biases and illusions that can complicate, even choke, any creative person’s development. He then turns to learning and education and closes with some thoughts about music in relation with business.
Newsome makes his own perspective clear right up front. “It’s more important to create work that makes a difference than trying to figure out how to make everyone but yourself happy.” Talent might make other people happy, but genius, as he describes it, can open that path to distinctiveness.
The ancient Roman and Greek conceptions of genius (daemon in Greek), by the way, were of a source beyond oneself, something of an accompanying guardian spirit rather than a personal attribute, in some ways like the Igbo conception of one’s own personal chi. Newsome likewise recognizes that every person has access to some unique well of possibility, peculiarities that might at times seem so deceptively easy as to be instead even thought of as weaknesses.
There are reasons that one might be tempted to think so. As Newsome puts it, one may often find oneself in unfamiliar territory with no solid understanding of where the ideas one’s pursuing are even coming from. And one’s music might not have much in common with what one’s peers are doing. It may even sound comparatively strange and outright defy theoretical conventions. These, Newsome suggests, are indications that an artist may be on to something. And he reminds us that the precarious openness that goes with this also depends on well developed (and sometimes completely new) skill sets to cultivate that.
He additionally recommends the disciplined focus of simplicity of presentation, freedoms conferred by self imposed limitations, outside the box sources of inspiration, non-linear imagination, an embrace of ignorance (as in negative capability), and a commitment to possibilities beyond the status quo.
One of the more interesting framings of creative process Newsome introduces draws on the writings of David Galeson, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, an institution most readily associated with its influential global diffusion of starve the poor feed the rich economic ideology over the past half century. Galeson presents a refreshing departure from that dubious legacy as his areas of interest have instead gravitated variously toward relations between markets and servitude in the early Anglo American colonies, painters, art markets and patterns of creativity.
From this, Newsome cites two distinctive modes of artistic innovation. Conceptual breakthroughs often emerge from flash insights that reorganize everything through revised perspective. Examples might be Charlie Parker’s harmonic expansionism discovered while playing Cherokee or Picasso’s sudden leap into something unforeseen while painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Alternatively, Cezanne and Coltrane might be recognized as models for what Galeson refers to as experimental innovators, those who, through cumulative trial and error, gradually build paradigmatic shifts. These two poles help us recognize these potentials among the varying spectra in between.
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Newsome is clearly aware of the uneasy paradox of music—which is, in actuality, neither commodity nor service—as business (whose sole raison d’être, in contrast, is the generation or extraction of monetary surplus). At the same time, music needs audience to thrive, and the challenges of developing audience are not really so different from other kinds of marketing, which, in this case, means getting the word out and acquiring a reputation magnetic enough to draw audience (one could even argue that musicians don’t actually “sell” their music per se to venues but instead rent out their audiences to them). Newsome, in this regard, views marketing itself as creative activity, albeit of a different, but necessary, order.
When considering business, one might expect topics here on the order of “how to become a billionaire in 30 days” or something like that, or, “how to best maximize your hustle,” but Newsome instead swings counter to fast buck fundamentalism by first emphasizing “investment” in one’s artistic “capital” (or identity) over financial capital, which is to say, if one’s not concentrating on the quality of one’s art first of all, then just forget the whole thing and go do something else. Or, to put it differently, in an intensely oversaturated musical arena, if one’s sounding like everybody else, no one’s going to notice anyway. But, on the other hand, playing a role as simulacra of Paul Chambers, for example, might make one more employable as a sideperson in a good number of contexts, but then this doesn’t promise much if one wants to go anywhere beyond that. Newsome continues to introduce perspectives from here that are likewise not just about the Benjamins.
I’ve had the experience often enough of reading a description of a particular music only to find that what I was imagining turned out to be more interesting than the actual sounds. Such experiences can nevertheless be directed toward one’s own possible further invention, so they’re well worth the stimulation. An obliquely related essay in Newsome’s business section concerns what’s called “interview music.” Interview music is apparently a term of derision applied by musicians of a more neoclassical commitment to dismiss more heteroodox musics that some journalists might opt to write about (that is, instead of about them). Someone like Anthony Braxton, for example, frequently offers a favorite target. Newsome, whose experience has already traversed a range of perspectives, questions the blanket allegation that non-standard musics are necessarily symptomatic of the incompetence of charlatan pretenders.
One of the most painfully familiar essays, Sometimes a Gig is Just a Gig, tells of landing a series of four weekly performances at the once upon a time Knitting Factory Tap Room, which could elicit hopes, as it might for quite a few, of getting some traction in terms of greater visibility and better performance conditions up the way. In actual practice, however, the pay was too low to ensure that everyone in the band would show up for each date. The crowds would holler enthusiastically among themselves over the music throughout. Musicians bellyached about the venue’s exploitation, and some cancelled if they found something else more attractive to do. By the fourth date, Newsome even sent in a sub for himself. It’s enough to drive a person to performing solo. Boy, do I understand.
Newsome closes with some guiding principles for success, among which he includes thinking like an artist while acting like an entrepreneur as well as embracing risk and failure. He sees great opportunities in the, in some respects democratic, DIY possibilities offered by the internet versus old school corporate label control. Some perspective might nevertheless apply here. While the Art Ensemble of Chicago, through similar principles, managed to succeed on purely business terms to the extent that they could even cover each musician’s health insurance costs, many contemporary creative musicians still have to think more than twice before even considering giving up that day job that they still keep as backup, but none of this at all precludes the possibility of artistic success.
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The music we identify as jazz (and many of its related offspring) has been edging further and further toward the margins of public attention, especially in the United States, since the 1950s, but that doesn’t mean that the music itself has necessarily atrophied or become any less alive. On one level, it can be a good thing that a degree of institutionalization has since set in—if only because some musicians can now look forward to getting a steady paycheck for sharing with students what they learn. On the other hand, the shift from more decentralized community learning toward formal educational settings is not without consequences, if not implications, as the “hows” of learning may well exert greater generative impacts than any specific“whats.”
A parallel can be noticed in the visual arts, where, before the 60s or 70s, artists learned more from each other than otherwise. People might, of course, take some classes at the Art Students League, the Studio School, or perhaps with an artist like Hans Hoffman or David Alfaro Siqueiros, but this was nevertheless supplementary to one’s own studio work, to hanging out with other artists and to a general bohemian autodidacticism across the board. This has been since been replaced, for the most part, by the permitted, or “licensed and certified” artist, whose market pedigree is best confirmed by a degree from a plum art school such as Yale. The contrasts can be as evident as those between the nutritional content and flavor of a wild and a cultivated strawberry for reasons not quite so dissimilar as one might at first suspect.
It’s unavoidable that most formal educational settings nest whatever’s learned within very different metamessages regarding value and meaning than, say, stumbling from a sense of the whole amid a diversity of engagements and gradually coming to understand finer points. University contexts, for example, tend to frame learning within quantifiers such as sequential curricula, tuition, grades and credits, thereby placing students in competition with a program’s requirements, and, by extension, with each other as to who’s right, wrong, better, worse and so forth, which might apply well enough to engineering qualifications or to baseball statistics, but not particularly well to the openendedness of any art, where the attainment of one’s individual uniqueness is, by definition, incomparable. Enclosing knowledge within limits that can be replicated and measured hints that one may “master” or “dominate” a subject, that one could become, for example, “smarter” than the music.
One could then ask if the horserace mentality suggested by those complaining about “interview music”—as if all musical questions have already been answered (and already answered correctly, by the way)—has been stoked to some extent by significant experience with the compliance models encouraged in standard educational settings (although, in this case, market motives, such as battling over limited turf, may also come into play). And besides that, the current preponderance of excellently schooled musicians, impressive as that truly is, doesn’t necessarily guarantee that they’ll have more to say than their far less perfect, but often more clearly identifiable, predecessors.
Artists teaching in such institutions often understand these contradictions and enlist their creative acumen as much as possible to turn what goes on in a classroom into an art in and of itself, that is, if they can. And while the shadow of the classroom may also loom like an imposing skyscraper over many of these essays, Newsome (who also doubles as a professor of music at Long Island University) admirably swims upstream to remind us to imagine beyond any walls that might close us in.
For more information on Sam Newsome’s book →
For Sam Newsome’s site, Some New Music →
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patrick brennan coordinates ensembles, composes & plays the alto saxophone, pursuing a contrarian and independent musical path toward evolving a distinct musical language in relation with the Blues Continuum that explores multidirectional thinking, organization, time, sound, line & rhythm. Recordings include terraphonia (Creative Sources), muhheankuntuk (Clean Feed), which way what, and Sudani (deep dish). He leads the ensembles s0nic 0penings & transparency kestra and performs solo as rōnin phasing. His book Ways & Sounds (2021→), which explores some of the formal implications of music’s internal social interactions for composing & listening, is available from Arteidolia (→) Press .
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