Ntuple Indemnity

What mean I by unrecognitis? I believe it’s a Stu Goldman coinage, and it describes a curious but common phenomenon that afflicted me tonight, when Bill Payne bingoed out with RESTATES in an improbable location I had neglected to block. “Restate?” I thought, “What’s a restate? Sounds like some kind of residual chemical compound… it looks familiar, so I think it’s good, unless I’m thinking of TESTATE.” But hey – the game was over, so I challenged the darned thing anyway (which is always a good idea on the last turn, since you have nothing to lose).

Naturally, it was acceptable, and Bill scraped so many points from the play that I ended up winning by a narrow margin (423-406) in spite of dominating the game until the last few turns. To keep things in perspective, that’s one whopper of an aggregate score between the two of us. One doesn’t often lose with a score over 400.

Ten minutes later: “Oh! Re-state!”

I haven’t posted here lately, but if I had, it would have been about sport. However, I’ve been reading about it instead (hockey and footy, anyhow), and that’s my alibi.

Enough excuses and distractions, though. Here’s a treat for your patience: a live jazz trio playing the Super Mario Bros. theme. That’s the wine-bearing Darryl Meyer on drums, the lovely Aleks Argals on bass, and yours truly on the crazy eighty-eights. Share and enjoy.

Han shot first. Unfortunately, so did the Ducks.

That was disappointing. I was really hoping the Flames would meet the Oilers in battle this year, if only to counteract my vague and hazy childhood memories of Esa Tikkanen getting in the way of things. After losing my collection of photographs from the 2004 playoff run with the collapse of my last hard drive – and let me tell you, I captured some fine shots of the most victorious deportment – I was hoping for a replacement. And now, to put up with rowdy Oilerfolk all by their lonely selves; just as I was about to wish them well, too, after such an entertaining drama of rise, fall and redemption on the rink Monday night. Uh, go Sens, or something.

Speaking of senators, I went to see Tommy Banks perform at the Yardbird Suite with a veritable who’s-who of Edmonton jazz. I didn’t actually see him, though, since they sold out just as I arrived, and I listened by the door for the full hour of the first set until it was clear nobody was leaving. There, I could at least discern that Senator Banks still handles Duke Ellington with care, though half the fun of live jazz is the realization that it’s actually live theatre. On the other hand, this meant I witnessed the arrival of the Governor-General and her band of merry men from the RCMP as she had a photo-op with Stephen Mandel a few feet away. Both of them had very nice cars.

To quote Chris Jones (upon witnessing Kevin Taft jump the line and waltz right on in ahead of us): “If it’s not okay for Medicare, why is it okay for Musicare?”

I’ve been thinking about words.

I’m unabashedly a word-lover. One of the consequent afflictions of word-loving, though, is a passion for cute little alphabetic clumps that extends so far beyond their utility as meaning-carrying units that this utility becomes fully detachable. And as soon as one accepts that language can be beautiful in and of itself without having to communicate anything, one begins to see all kinds of instances where language in its meaningful state is intrusive and wholly unnecessary.

This is going to turn into a post where I make fun of hip-hop; but first, a few words about Tolkien.

I have, on one occasion or another, heard someone dismiss The Lord of the Rings on the grounds that Tolkien merely intended the mythology of Middle-Earth to serve as a playground for his invented languages. While not strictly untrue, this is an oversimplification and a misunderstanding. The way I read it, what Tolkien had claimed from the beginning is that the sound-patterns of a language – which would naturally include invented ones, since the meanings of individual lexical units are to some extent arbitrary – are able to contain and reflect the cultural history of a people, even a hypothetical people.

And so you have the Elves, whose unvoiced consonants slip and slide off the labiodental oh-so-gently, whereas the Orcs speak in abrasive, glottal coughs and hacks. In both the physical world and the speech-world, the Elves dance lightly, the Dwarves weigh themselves down; and the language and nomenclature of Rohan are lifted straight from Old English, so there’s no question about where that places them in Tolkien’s cosmos. (Allegorical conclusion: the French are beautiful and the Germans are ugly.) But the important thing is this: the mimetic position of each culture is discernible before meaning is introduced in the form of definitions.

This observation, and the illusion of authenticity that it permits when it comes to an invented tongue, separate Tolkien from all the cheap imitators who think dropping unpronounceable apostrophes everywhere is sufficient. For one thing, it makes no sense for an English-language narrator to anglicize everything except for the funny names, especially in a quasi-medieval setting reflecting an order of society organized around appropriation and homogeneity. I like to think of this as a case of contradictory suspensions of disbelief: how is it that English narrators speaking of a world in which English does not exist are somehow incapable of transliteration? Did they never have Peking Duck at the Turin Olympics?

But enough about bad fantasy. After all, this isn’t my area of special expertise. Talk to Wolf Wikeley, or better yet, watch My Fair Lady. Me, I just play keys.

At this juncture, I want to talk about what inspired this post in the first place. About three weeks ago, I comped a chart featuring my old schoolmate Ian Keteku, who now frolics on the Edmonton rap scene and goes by “Emcee E”. It was a surreal experience, and while in rehearsal, the pair of vocalists coordinating the shindig had to remind me on several occasions to keep the harmonies simple and not swing the time. It’s a struggle to let go of the upper structures and blue notes once you’ve internalized them, and I have no idea how Herbie Hancock ever managed to not only do it, but go on to record a hit single with Christina Aguilera. Then again, he’s Herbie Hancock.

Curiously, the last time Ian and I shared a stage was when he passed the microphone to me at my high school graduation banquet – a legendary evening that, roughly an hour later, went down in history (or down in flames). But the really bizarre thing about this whole scenario is somewhat more transparent.

Jazz guy. Rap guy. We’re not supposed to get along. Think of the Capulets and Montagues; now think of one of them as illiterate, and you’ve got it.

Two days earlier, Kenny Drew (not the one who played with Bird, but his son, who is also a pianist) wrote an article on All About Jazz entitled “What the F**k Happened to Black Popular Music?” – which, predictably, led to an explosive messageboard discussion about the decadence of American youth.

The animosity towards rap is uniquely strong in jazz circles for two reasons. First, rap has taken the place of jazz as the inspirational voice of black America, and there’s a certain cultural jealousy at work – jealousy in its second-most justified form (the first being an armed response to the Universal Constant of the Treachery of Women).

For my part, it is my learned opinion that jazz was, and is, a discovery, not an invention; it does not belong to black America, or America on the whole, any more than the moons of Jupiter belong to Italy. At the same time, I am not going to disrespect the forefathers of the great musical artform of the twentieth century by ignoring the hard fact that the syntax of jazz improvisation developed out of a specific ethnic milieu motivated by the desire to express a positive racial identity. The very problem is that once jazz was properly recognized as a universal construct, it lost its importance to African-American youth.

The second peeve, and the more fundamental one, is that jazz is an extension of the accepted musical dimensions of melody, harmony and rhythm, whereas rap thrives on the absence of the first two and the minimalistic reduction of the third.

I’m not going to get into the discussion of whether or not rap is music. Hip-hop production is no small task, even if it constricts itself to a limited subset of possible syncopations in 4/4 time – which, at face value, isn’t too different from the rhythmic complexity of early swing. It’s just that one requires a MIDI keyboard and a handful of plagiarized samples, whereas the other requires an instrument and practice. But as with any artform, the EffortMeter is merely the first line of aesthetic defence, and leans heavily towards exclusion (or, in the case of aurora borealis at 28,000ft, religion).

The repetition of vowel sounds produces a series of resonances that could be characterized as a harmonic system of its own, though it’s no more sophisticated than Eliza Doolittle reciting nursery rhymes about the rain in Spain falling mainly in the plain or Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor tapping to “Moses supposes his toeses are roses” over half a century ago. And melodically speaking, there does exist a “correct” diction that distinguishes “good” rap from cheap imitation President’s Choice rap, though in either case, it still deserves a bad rap.

So the genre passes all three tests. I accept that rap is musical, in the same way that the ziplocked excrement of an underfed chihuahua decorated with parsley (the excrement, not the chihuahua) is edible. Technically, yeah… it’s just that I prefer the filet mignon, especially when it’s offered for the same market price.

And I will state, for clarity, that it’s not like all rap is intolerable simply because its musicality is relegated to technical excuses. I will concede that the most outstanding track on Bound Together, a tribute to the music of the Super Nintendo game Earthbound, is the rap remix “Da Black Market”. I will concede that for some reason, French rap is actually not bad; if it’s as full of crass proletarian gutterspeak as the English variant, I don’t know it. I will even concede that the sight of a shrimpy Japanese-Norwegian rugby player channelling the Wu-Tang Clan is hilarious.

However, I am going to identify a general cause behind all of this semantic infighting.

Contemporary popular music has a problem. It happens to be the same problem as the one in mainstream computer animation: there are too many goddamned words.

Rap is the extreme case: the distillation of music for the consumption of the lowest common denominator of the tone-deaf breakbeat bobblehead. Somehow, it always manages to stumble its way back to the but-it’s-poetry tagline excuse. But in almost every genre, there is this depressing tendency for kids with mad guitar chops to obscure their playing with vapid half-sung lyrics about love or death or whatever else is fashionable this afternoon on the bipolar planetoid of Kazaa, when the music is perfectly comfortable speaking for itself.

The meaning of the words is at most a supplement to the music, or a part of some larger dramatic mixed-media construction. The words do not equal the music in any respect apart from acting as signals in the soundspace. Remove the words, and you still have music. Remove the triumvirate of melody, harmony and rhythm, and the music is gone; lyrics are not information-preserving. There’s a reason we file operas by composer, not librettist.

Louis Armstrong recognized the self-sufficiency of melodic expression and invented scat. Annie Ross turned it into a joke and pioneered vocalese. And when jazz vocalists still anchor onto the old standards, the melodies suggest a template for creative interpretation, a crucible for the formation of a personal musical identity. The notes on the page by your Gershwin or Rodgers or Porter, and the words that fit them, are norms. What you listen for are the erratic deviations.

I don’t say this to exclude. I have a lot of respect for the burgeoning poetic tradition of the singer-songwriter, be it those who can sing (Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell) or those who can’t (Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen). But in most cases, the words do not equal the music. They are separable, as lyricophiles consistently demonstrate; and that also implies, quite correctly, that the musical dimensions can be isolated. Unless, of course, the music is absent. Just as bad music can get in the way of well-meaning lyrics, bad poetry – or poor enunciation thereof – often obscures the music. And there’s way too much of both going around. Curiously, market forces are driven by the verbally empowered and musically illiterate, a subdivision that is disturbingly representative of consumer society at large where everybody hears and nobody listens.

That’s one possibility, anyhow. The other one is the ego of the musician who feels the need to disrespect the audience by spelling out how it should feel and what everything means. That’s not poetry, it’s narcissism. And when the words are superficial blotches of noise designed to obscure an underlying monotony of composition, the practice is especially reprehensible.

I don’t deny that words can serve a very direct musical function, and in fact, that is what works in rap. That is what works in opera when you ignore the supertitles and listen to the enunciation of a foreign language, which is itself emotionally indicative of something. That is what works in John Coltrane when he chants along to Jimmy Garrison’s bass line in his spiritual “Acknowledgment”: a love supreme, a love supreme. Which is the dominant function, and which is the supplementary one? Here’s a clue: most of what you hear today has it the wrong way around.

March is usually a busy month for me, and correspondingly, a quiet one. Spring, as the song goes, can really hang you up the most.

So, what news from the secret lab?

One thing I have not been doing is playing Scrabble. Having missed the Calgary Spring Tournament on a last-minute cancellation, I won’t be formally tested against the new word list until the Sherwood Park tournament on the weekend of 22-23 April. Casual bystanders new to (and curious about) competitive Scrabble should note that this is a very good choice of a first tournament, since the expected pool of players is fairly low-rated, and the divisional cutoffs reflect that. Know all your two-letter words and be comfortable with a good chunk of the threes, and you should coast.

I wouldn’t hesitate to say that the choir I play with had a great performance at Choralfest, but it was a unique and unreliable aural experience. On a stage like that, everything is a little out of balance where the piano guy sits, especially if you put him right in front of the kit. But the gig was still a blast.

In fact, it was such a blast that my pages flew off the piano and onto my hands while I was playing, and I had to shake them off. As I would have it, my solo was henceforth wicked as the Witch of the West. There’s nothing like being spontaneously forced to listen; jazz, after all, is a social activity. I’d liken it to the uncoupling braces of the young Forrest Gump breaking into his first exhilarating run, but even I have my analogical limits.

Our next performance is at Convocation Hall on Saturday, 8 April. 8pm, I think, but I’ve been wrong before. In addition to the typical standard-bearing, there will be Paul Simon aplenty – and maybe, just maybe, a smidgen of Koji Kondo.

In the tail end of my lukewarm review of Inside Man, I take a parting sideswipe at acclaimed trumpeter Terence Blanchard for the mishmash that is his score to the film. I nearly forgot to mention it, but it’s an important point. It’s quite literally all over the place. Figuratively, too, in terms of style. While I admire genre-bending versatility, it needs to have some kind of rhyme or reason, and it needs to fit the film. Here, it just distracts.

I didn’t see Letters (Thursday, 23 March 2006) reprinted in the online edition of The Gateway, so I’ll reproduce another response to the Scrabble article I was moaning about last week. It comes from Tony Leah, who unlike me, is one of the best players in Canada, and unlike me, is polite and eloquent about it. I don’t know how he came across our campus paper all the way out in Ontario, but I’m glad he did:

New words doing nothing but improving Scrabble, Fedio

I play Scrabble competitively, and I think you should know that the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary is not an arbitrary collection of words and non-words (Re: “New words ruining game of Scrabble,” 21 March). It was compiled by referencing four major North American Collegiate Dictionaries. Only words that are listed in one of these dictionaries are included in the OSPD. Even so, the OSPD, with about 83 000 entries, is a tiny fraction of the complete Oxford English Dictionary, which lists some 616 500 words.

I am also not sure how you can so confidently set yourself up as arbiter of what is, and what is not, a “real word.” Anyone who has been to Hawaii will have likely seen aa and pahoehoe (different types of lava), and will find the words familiar, not strange. Even my Canadian Oxford lists aa. (By the way, aa is not a new addition to the OSPD. It has been included for years.) My Canadian Oxford also lists qi, and most well-read people will be familiar with this spelling of the word.

Serious Scrabble players would strongly disagree with your contention that the recent update, which added about 3000 words, diminishes the skill involved in playing at a high level. And, to draw comparisons with steroid use is ridiculous. Everyone has access to the new words, if they possess the skill and determination to learn them. In fact, the very best players have the ability to master different lexica for different tournaments – one for play in North America, and a much larger dictionary for the World Scrabble Championship.

I’ve been spending a great deal of time following the discussion on the All About Jazz forums about why jazz is so unpopular, and you should too. It reduces to a crowd of jazz evangelists strategizing about how best to save the heathens, but that’s a cause worth fighting for.

I buy that it comes down to a fundamental gulf in musical cognition between those who know how to listen to the stuff and those who don’t. The running conjecture is that most people who think they are listening to music aren’t actually listening to music.

More on this later. Suffice to say, if you are one of those people who reduces a listening experience to lyrics and “the beat” – and there must be a lot of you out there, because apparently you’re driving the recording industry – I don’t understand you.

Allow me to reflect.

I’m not a prolific writer by any means, on the web or in print. Part of it, by my intention or not, is that I’d rather read than write – a preference that I think should be a property of all writers irrespective of their level of seriousness or the prestige of the medium they call home.

Lately, I’ve neither read nor written to any nontrivial degree. I’ve been playing Scrabble. But there’s a common principle at work that applies to both activities: you can’t do something well if you don’t know what it means to do it well.

Writing without reading is bad writing, and to a discerning observer the deficit is as discordant as a karaoke regular who has never heard a real singer in his life. Then again, real singers are hard to come by for the modern layperson when record labels are actively engaged in marketing superstars on the basis of their being tone-deaf. It’s become a house style. And a world where Kenneth Gorelick making like a prehistoric glowworm and flopping his way around an ill-selected blues scale is enough to outsell every real jazz artist on the globe is a mad, mad, mad, mad world indeed.

The funniest thing I’ve read in the last little while comes from a controversy I thankfully slept through a few years ago, and have only discovered now. It seems that Mr. Kenny G decided to overdub a few of his trademark saxopharts over Louis Armstrong’s “What A Wonderful World”. This prompted a reaction, I would call it, from none other than Pat Metheny himself (only the man who defined the sound of contemporary jazz guitar, if you don’t know who he is), who called the endeavour “musical necrophilia” and then some. Metheny’s talent for obloquy is as lyrical as his proficiency for the Ibanez electric. It even spawned a song.

(Permit me to make a brief and self-congratulatory pause as I admire, in the above paragraph, the best word I’ve coined in at least a fortnight. Google returns no hits for the word or a variant of it spelt with an F. This one’s mine, baby.)

Anyway, to return to the topic at hand: every time I think of writers who don’t read nearly enough, the one that comes to mind is Robert Jordan. When I was fetching the new Snicket at Chapters last week, I passed by another freshly-delivered penultimate volume of a more thickset build – Jordan’s Knife of Dreams, the eleventh of a projected twelve books in his popular series of sword-and-sorcery paperweights, The Wheel of Time. I quit the series after seven out of having better things to read, though I no longer sleep as well as I once did; Jordan’s prose was a panacea for all forty-two flavours of insomnia, and I recall missing at least one bus stop on its account.

Now that I’ve discovered a really schlocky bestselling writer, who is as terse as Jordan is grandiloquent, he doesn’t seem so bad. I still can’t justify resuming where I left off, of course, because I simply have better things on my shelf, and his common penchant for pluralizing gerunds could have a detrimental effect on my word study.

But I digress. (Almost as much as he does. Oh, snap!) I meant to bring up Robert Jordan in conjunction with the topic of how reading and writing interact, because I remember one particular interview with him where he comments on the same. I’ve dug up the relevant excerpt:

I had always said, “One day I will write.” Then when I was 30 I was walking back from a dry dock to my office, and I had a fall and tore up my knee very severely. There were complications in the surgery, I nearly died, I spent a month in the hospital, and I spent three and a half months recuperating before I could walk well enough to go back to the office. During that time I reached burnout in reading. I remember picking up a book by an author I knew I liked, reading a few paragraphs and tossing it across the room and saying, “Oh God, I could do better than that.” Then I thought, “All right son, it’s time to put up or shut up.”

And so I wrote my first novel. It has never been published although it’s been bought by two publishers, and a lot of good came out of it, including meeting my wife.

And you know, I respect that. It’s true that the extremity of consuming words in hopes of fueling the production of them is a life of consumption that produces very little. I think a lot of writerus blockitis comes from ambition and perfectionism. Robert Jordan has the good fortune of suffering neither.

He’s an odd example in the sense that he is, in a manner of speaking, a writer who reads. (We’ll ignore for now that according to Amazon’s “Significant Seven” interview, he names as his desert island book his own work-in-progress.) But judging from his own writing, if he thinks he can do better than the authors in which he was once so engrossed, either he’s not there yet, or his influences clearly weren’t very good.

It’s easy to tell when a writer is an overly selective reader – one who only reads in genre, or one who refuses to read in genre; one who only hits the pulps, or never hits the pulps. I find that writers who read develop a writer’s identity, or voice as some would call it, through a balance of controlled mimicry and improvisational distortion; and just as the most revered figures of the great improvisational art form, jazz, draw on influences from gospel to swing to stride to bebop to post-Romantic to chain-gang country blues, writers can only benefit from reading diversely.

Then you have the likes of Umberto Eco, who is so well-read that it makes his fiction impenetrable because of all its a priori dependencies. Predictably, his non-fiction critical discourse fares much better, but even in fiction he conceals a treasure trove of content, not fluff, behind a tattered verbal curtain. In Robert Jordan’s case, after some early books that are pleasurable for their escapist manoeuvres if not their style, the content is wholly subsumed by a textual torrent that begs for a stopper. One wishes the author spent more time reading the works of others instead of treading water in Narcissus’ swimming pool.

I hear that Knife of Dreams cleans up some of the muck, but considering how much of it must have accumulated in the interim (in addition to how much was floating about already), it sounds like a book for fans’ eyes only. I’ll not make judgments by covers, of course.

There is more to say about literacy that needs to be said, but I have midterms to swat.