Sloppy Luck, Part 1

I’ve had “sloppy luck” for most of my life. I’ve never won a lottery, but I’ve won some stuff at company parties. My “career plan” was squashed in infancy, but my emergency “plan” (to grossly abuse that concept) turned out surprisingly well. There is nothing special about my genetics, but I have often “been able to take a punch” of all sorts and make some kind of comeback and keep going. Best of all, I have had a life full of wonderful, reliable, loving, brilliant friends. That is plain good luck.

One of my first sloppy luck moments was when I was 11 or 12-years-old. On a whim, I signed up for the Columbia Record Club’s “special offer.” I remember it being 10 for $1, but that was a long, long time ago. First, I had to pick a music genre and I didn’t know squat about music except for my parents’ 78-rpm collection that I’d listened to in the basement of our home when I was supposed to be baby-sitting my 8-year-old brother. All of the records in our basement were from the 1940s or earlier and that big wooden console record player/radio had a tone arm that probably weighed a couple of pounds. My mother had died just a couple of years earlier and the records might have been hers. I never really saw any evidence that my father cared about music, other than singing in the choir or pep bands leading cheers for his basketball teams. The records I’d experienced were “classics” by Spike Jones, Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, etc. On a whim, I picked Jazz and from among the jazz record category options I picked:

• An Electrifying Evening with The Dizzy Gillespie Quintet (still my all time favorite record)
• Birth of the Cool, Miles Davis
• Sophisticated Swing, Cannonball Adderley
• After Hours, Sarah Vaughan
• Silver Vibes, Lionel Hampton
• Cool Velvet, Stan Getz

Over the next year, every month the “pick of the month” card would show up in the mail and I’d procrastinate sending it back to reject the selection because I didn’t even know how to buy stamps. (The card with the original offer was postage paid.) After most of a year, I had a pretty decent collection of jazz albums and owed Columbia Record Club more than $100 before they stopped sending me the “pick of the month” selections. I listened to every one of those records practically until I could see light through the grooves. With those monthly picks and the Columbia catalog I discovered Davis’ “Kind of Blue,” “Brazil, Bossa Nova & Blues” by Herbie Mann, “Time Out” by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, Wes Montgomery’s “Movin’” and ”Bumpin’” and special members-only records by Charles Mingus, and Thelonious Monk.

After receiving a half-dozen unpaid-for-records , Columbia Record Club became less friendly. In fact, their letters became downright threatening. Their pick of the month was “only” $7.95, but after shipping-and-handling it was closer to $10. It’s only fair to mention that 1961’s $100 is the equivalent of more than $1,000 today. My father’s high school teaching annual salary was about $5,000 that year. For quite a while, I managed to intercept the mail before Dad got home from school, but eventually he spotted on of the “final notice” envelopes and opened it up. By then, I was getting the occasional bill collector telephone call, too. After chewing my ass into bite-sized bits, Dad got one of the bill collector calls and the conversation went something like this:

“Hello, who is this””

“My name is ____ and I’m calling for Columbia Record Club. Is this Mr. Thomas Day?”

“No. This is his father, Fred Day. What can I do for you?”

“Thomas has received almost a dozen records from our company and he owes Columbia Record Club $__. How do you plan to pay for the records?”

”I don’t and if you know how to put a lien on an 11-year-old boy I suggest you proceed with that action. However, I am not responsible for his bills and you should be ashamed of yourselves for being foolish enough to give credit to an 11-year-old kid. Tell you what, though. I’ll put all the records in a box and leave them on the front porch and you can come pick them up at your convenience.”

We didn’t hear from Columbia Record Club again and Dad, eventually, let me take the box of 33rpm records back to the basement where I totally wore out all of them. Listening to Gillespie and Davis inspired me to want to play trumpet. Being always short on cash, I eventually inherited an awful Conn cornet from my step-mother’s brother and discovered that I had no talent for teaching myself trumpet, let alone jazz trumpet. A few years after taking up the trumpet, I managed to score an awful Sears Airline acoustic guitar. After struggling with that instrument for a while, I used my paper route money to buy a $35 Airline electric guitar from my local Western Auto store. Thanks to my Columbia Record Club jazz exposure, no part of early 60’s vocal music appealed to me, but I could get my teeth into The Ventures, Dick Dale, The Surfaris, and, thanks to the local music magician, Howard Roberts.

By the time the Beatles and the British Invasion straggled into the Midwest and KOMA radio, I had no interest in either British muppet music or vocals in general. Somewhere in that period, I found WLS out of Chicago and soul music. Imagine hearing Wilson Picket, James Brown, Otis Redding, the Staples, the Bar-Kays, or anything from Motown before you hear the Beatle’s chipmunk voices and the Stone’s limp R&B imitations and you’ll have a clue where I was coming from as a wannabe musician. It wasn’t until I heard “The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan” before I developed any kind of appreciation for lyrics.

I consider all of that sloppy luck. Every bit of it, from mailing in that Columbia Record Club enrollment card to picking “jazz” as my musical preference to that  music leading me to R&B instead of R&R pop to the trumpet-to-guitar progression to becoming who I am as a person and a still-tryin’-to-be-a-musician 76-year-old. It was all good luck.

Overwhelmed by Talent

 I recently read The Road Home, by Jim Harrison and, during a pause in reading this book, I watched an interview with Pat Metheny. Every once in awhile, everyone is overwhelmed by someone else's Talent. Jim Harrison was the kind of writer that wannabe writers probably should avoid. He was so supremely talented that reading anyone else for attempting to write seems like a pointless exercise.

Pat Metheny, in this interview, described the first time he was around "a real jazz guitarist," (Something that happened to him long after he had recorded albums with Gary Burton and his own groups and had established Pat as a jazz guitarist. To the rest of us, Pat has always been "a real jazz guitarist," but his standards are obviously higher.) At that moment, Pat realized how far he had yet to travel before he considered himself to be the real thing.

I've owned guitars for more than 60 years and even played them off-and-on for that long, but I haven't described myself as "a musician" since the late 60s. I have been around real musicians for much more than 3/4 of my life and I know what they look, sound, and act like. I'm not like them. I'm a music hobbyist, at best. My knowledge of music theory is shallow, my physical abilities and skill are remedial, my willingness to study and practice music is limited, and my natural talent is nearly non-existent. After 2/3 of a century, I have nothing that resembles "a voice" as a musician. I sound like everybody else, at best, and like the worst too often.

Several years ago, I invited a friend, Scott Jarrett, to a local jam session when he was visiting us. Scott is a monster on every instrument I've heard him play and he borrowed a mandolin for that jam session. The group was mostly old guys who either picked up music after retirement or restarted playing at that time and the range of "talent" was pretty narrow. And there was Scott. When we left to find lunch, he commented, "There are three things you need to be a musician: a sense of rhythm, some kind of grip on melody and harmony, and an ability to listen. At the least you need one of those. Those guys don't have any of them." To be honest, most of the time the musical output from our little group could best be called "cacophony." You would have to stretch your imagination to find an artistically redeeming moment in an our of our playing. None of us, except Scott and Brian, would be called "musicians" by any real musician.

Lots of no-talent writers are beating up the "10,000 hours" theory of how you become an expert, but it's pretty clear from reading their "analysis" that becoming an expert writer/author is a long ways out of their grasp. More likely, they aren't even inspired enough to do the work to become expert writers (like me). They just got where they are the old fashioned way: they inherited enough money to work for free or incredibly cheap. Becoming a "musician" is, as Pat described in his interview, a hard road. Most of us just want to be guitar collectors, not musicians.

Jeff Was My Beatles

90% of the British Invasion went over or under my head. I was not a Beatles fan, but I liked the Who a lot and Stones fairly well. The rest of that lot was just elevator noise. But Jeff Beck changed my world. And now he’s gone. Since I heard the news, last night, I’ve had my office stereo system on an endless Jeff Beck loop. I own eight of his eighteen albums, plus two Yardbirds records, which amounts to about seven hours of non-stop Jeff Beck. Not nearly enough.

Geoffrey (Jeff) Arnold Beck (24 June 1944 - 10 January 2023) was four years older than me and light years beyond me musically from the moment I first noticed his guitar playing in “Jeff’s Boogie” on the 1966 Yardbird’s record (on Epic Records at the time, in “Simulated Stereo”). A friend and I travelled from Dodge City, Kansas to Denver, Colorado in ‘66 to see the Yardbirds. Specifically, to see the guy who played “Jeff’s Boogie.” Sadly, I don’t remember a lot about that show. It was in a fairly small venue, there were a pile of those weird looking Jordan amps on the stage, we weren’t able to get particularly close to the state, and I didn’t learn a thing from watching Jeff play. He was at least that far over my head when he was 21 and I was 17. I stupidly thought his guitar was fretless, based on his fluid technique and went home to rip the frets out of my Airline electric, rendering it useless.

The second time I saw Jeff in concert was in 1976 at the Music Hall in Omaha’s old Civic Auditorium. He was touring to promote the “Wired” album with the Jan Hammer band; Believe it or not, Billy Joel’s band was the intro act; talk about an odd couple. Mrs. Day and I had front row seats, stage right smack between Hammer’s keyboards and where Jeff stood. There was nothing between me and Jeff except a few feet and I still learned . . . nothing from watching him play. The band I was in at the time covered “Freeway Jam” and often ended our practices with “Scatterbrain.” “Scatterbrain” was slightly past my level of competence, which is why that song did not make it into our setlist, ever. There was a moment when Jeff appeared to be concentrating and I briefly imagined that if I could just get to the point where I could play the song at that speed, I’d have finally caught up to Jeff after a decade of floundering in his wake. Then, he noticed that Hammer was waving a scarf over his head while he played the song’s Lydian scale riff. Jeff walked over to Hammer, had a short conversation, and he laughed and they began to double-time the song (roughly the tempo of this 1976 live recording). At the new impossible pace, he didn’t look even slightly pressured.

Around that time, poor, sad little no-solo-hit-wonder John Lennon was whining about the credit George Martin received for turning their pitiful little bar band into a massive success, “"When people ask me questions about 'What did George Martin really do for you?,' I have only one answer, 'What does he do now?'” What George was doing about that time was Jeff’s “Blow by Blow” and “Wired.” Can anyone remember anything other than “Give Peace a Chance” or “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” from post-Beatles-Johnny? One more reason I do my best to avoid Beatlemania.

This is a quirk, I know, but vocal music rarely connects to me emotionally. Blow by Blow's "Diamond Dust" is one of the songs that practically reduces me to putty, especially when I'm listening to it on headphones. Pat Metheny's "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" is another song that effects me that strongly. This Rolling Stone interview has Jeff talking about the clarity of sound, purpose, and musicality George Martin brought to the studio and Jeff's music: "Jeff Beck Remembers George Martin: ‘He Gave Me a Career’." This one of my favorite stories from that interview, "Beck has particularly vivid memories of the album’s last track, the gorgeously orchestrated 'Diamond Dust.' When they first cut the song, Beck thought his band’s version 'sounded a bit lame.' But Martin suggested adding a string section to emphasize the drama in the melody. 'When he finished it, he came wafting in and said, 'This reminds me of a French love movie!'' Beck laughs. 'I said, ‘You’ve just spoiled the whole effect! I might not put it on the album!’ He didn’t realize it was the worst thing he could have said to me. But I thought it was beautiful. George lit a fire under it.”

In 2011, my daughter Holly (through a connection from her Guitar One column of the time), got a couple of amazing seats at the Minneapolis State Theater for Jeff’s group of the moment. I swear my wife was the only non-guitarist in the audience. Every time I looked away from the stage at the audience everyone around me was fumbling air guitar, totally baffled at every note Jeff played. Me too, of course. Finally, I learned something from watching Jeff play, “There are no picks in his fingers!!” said my hillbilly-self probably out loud to nobody in particular. Holly, of course, had figured that out either before or after the interview and we had a conversation about my big breakthrough. I watched some YouTube and learned even more. Jeff’s biography documentary, Still on the run: the Jeff Beck story, gave me more insight than I needed or wanted to know about his genius. As Jan Hammer said, “Jeff is the guy who took the instrument of guitar into the furthest reaches of guitar universe and nobody ever - nobody even comes close.“

 I think I’m going miss his smile the most. Not just that he was having a great time on stage, but that “Did you see what I just did?” look that every guitar player within earshot heard, saw, loved, and desperately wished they could do. Even at 78, he was pulling off stuff nobody else in the world could do. Nobody. We’ll never hear anything like Jeff Beck again.

This is one of the few moments I wish I could believe in a life-after-death. The world would be far less empty if I could imagine Jeff is still playing guitar somewhere, anywhere. Today, his live version of “Elegy for Dunkirk” seems particularly sad and relevant. When I saw him perform this song live at the State Theater in Minneapolis in 2011 (not listed on the setlist, but he did play it), it was heart-stopping then. Today, a part of me wishes my heart had stopped with his.

Shot Down Before He Started

The Jamkazam group I’ve been playing with for the past year and a half is half about playing music and half about hanging out. Two of the guys in this group came from places where real music is and was played well and often. Two came from Minnesota where music has always been a fairly big thing. And I came from western Kansas where music is more often a chorus of beer cans clinking, farts, and shouting around a street fight. Seriously, it was and is that bad. This week’s conversation began when one of the guys mentioned that an old friend was going to be visiting and that friend was “the guy” in his neighborhood (Chicago, so it was a big neighborhood) on bass back in their growing-spurt days. That started a round of everybody describing who “the guy” was when they were kids.

For starters, there was no “the guy” on bass in western Kansas. I loved playing bass and when I first went into college in 1966, I wanted to be a music major and I wanted to focus on bass. Guys like Bob Cunningham, Paul Chambers, Charlie Haden, Dave Holland, Ray Brown, and Ray Carter were my personal heroes (only slightly behind Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Sandy Colfax, and Bob Gibson before I was 15). However, in Kansas pop bands the bass player was always the band’s weakest member; ALWAYS. In every band I knew of between 1961 and 1967, the bass player invariable either owned the band’s PA system, had a car big enough to carry the band and equipment, or had a much bigger bankroll and payed for everything anyone wanted as long as he got to be in a band. I started out as a bass player in my first money-making band and I was, hands-down, the worst player in the band by miles (I was also the youngest by at least 4 years). Oddly, I didn’t bring anything else to the band other than a willingness to be positioned in the back of the stage by the drummer and learn my parts. At the time, many of the better-known bands had a hard time recruiting bass players because nobody wanted to be easily identified as the band’s least competent member. As usual, I was too clueless to get the insult and was totally absorbed in my instrument. After that group, I always ended up playing lead guitar because that was a bigger hole to be filled than bass, but I always missed the responsibility of being part of the rhythm section, the anonymity of being “upstage with the drummer,” and the sound of that instrument coming from my hands and mind.

“The guy” in my hometown and probably in a 100 mile circle was Skip Cave. From my perspective, Skip played “everything” better than everyone else. He was, as I remember, mostly known as a drummer, but he played saxophone, keys, guitar, and most everything else that could be induced into making a musical sound. The last time I saw Skip was when I was 15 or 16 and he was about to leave Dodge for L.A., so there are likely many holes, glitches, and fractured fairy tale aspects to my telling of this story. The biggest will become apparent soon, since one of the last gifts I received from Skip was time spent in his room listening to  Howard Robert’s “H.R. Is A Dirty Guitar Player.” A record I later bought and kept until it vanished sometime between my many moves from Dallas, Texas to Colorado. I probably loaned it to someone and it didn’t come back. Sometime later, an on-line friend ripped a copy from his own LP to CD for me, so I still get to listen to Howard the way he was intended to be heard, hiss, pops and clicks and all.

But I, as usual, digress.

Many years later,in 2000, just before I started working for Musictech Skip ran into an article about “cheap mics” that I had written for Recording Magazine. Skip reappeared in my life via an email linked to me by the Recording Magazine editor. Totally by luck, I saved that email and I really wish I’d have been smart enough to record the telephone conversation that followed. The following is a segment of that email conversation where Skip tells the story better (and more accurately) than I could possibly remember:

“[After high school] I had a hard time deciding whether I would major in music or engineering, but after visiting my cousin Howard Roberts in L.A. one summer, I realized that if I wanted a music career, I would have to either get much better at drums, or lower my living standards significantly. I went on to get a BSEE from KU and worked on a masters in EE at SMU after I got to Dallas.

“The Howard Roberts episode makes an interesting story, however.

“Howard was at that time (1964) married to Jill Swartz , my dad's sister's eldest daughter [Who moved from Dodge City to L.A. to become a professional drummer in 1955.]. Nancy (Swartz) Myrick was the younger daughter. Howard was the top session guitarist in L.A. at that time and was playing several studio sessions a day, as well as making lots of great albums. My mother suggested that I go visit my cousins to see what a musician's life was like. I went to L.A. and stayed in H.R's swanky Hollywood home. I was really impressed with the lifestyle, until I went to a jazz club one Sunday night where Howard was playing an improvisational jazz gig with an all-star cast. The gig was AWESOME!

“I then realized that virtually all of the clientele were musicians, all of them were much better than me, and all of them were starving. THAT's when I decided to be an engineer.

“By the way, a recording of that gig (at Donte's Jazz Club) was made, and was recently released as a CD (The Magic Band, Live At Donte's [LIVE]).”

Funny. I just got through telling my remembrance of that story and it was . . . different. Partially, because my memory of the story is filtered through two or three fairly long, story-filled telephone conversations that came later and, mostly, because my memory is so flawed everything gets quickly converted to a compilation story that I can manage to remember.

But that is a tiny glimpse of “the guy” in my hometown. If you followed the link to what Skip is doing now, it’s probably true that getting scared out of a music career into engineering by members of the Wreaking Crew--Howard Roberts (guitar), Steve Bohannon (organ), Tom Scott (saxophone and 18 years old!), Chuck Berghofer (bass) & John Guerin (drums)—might have been the best thing that could have happened to a brilliant young man in 1966.

Serious Music

Back in the late 70s, I signed up for a recording seminar at the University of Iowa. Believe it or not, Iowa City, IA had a very small recording program and decent studios (primarily for classical music and the college jazz band) in the 70s. The presenter was Stephen Temmer, who must have been in his early 50's when I met him but who seemed "ancient" to me at the time (I was in my late 20's.) Temmer died in 1992 at 64, which I would probably consider "young" today. 

Mr. Temmer later became an adjunct professor at the University of Iowa, but at the time we met he was still President and owner of Gotham Audio Corporation, the only North American distributor for AKG, Neumann, Studer, EMT (plate reverbs), Lexicon, and many other things European. At the time of the course I took, Temmer was just beginning to market a collection of audio cables that he claimed were significant improvements over "ordinary wires" and we had some spirited discussions about that subject, too. 

I was at least as big an asshole then as I am now. During Temmer's introduction to the two-week-long, 8-10 hour/day course, he said something like, "We won't be discussing popular music recording in this class. Our topics will all be regarding the recording of 'serious music.'" 

I couldn't let that pass. Up my hand went and I said, "I didn't think music was a 'serious' thing. If it's not fun, it doesn't have much point does it?" I got a scowl and no reply. That was on Wednesday, the first day of class. For the next two days, Mr. Temmer pretty much ignored me. 

Luckily, the school's studio maintenance tech, Stephen Julstrom and I had hit it off pretty well, mostly talking about tape deck and console maintenance and design. The "in" with Mr. Julstrom, who was about my age (and who later became a design engineer with Shure Brothers in Chicago about the time I went to work for QSC Audio Products), provided me with some amazing opportunities including recording student classical performances and the college jazz orchestra (I still have a copy of that last one.). Unfortunately, one of the nights I'd volunteered to help Stephen record a student jazz group at a local coffee shop was the night the rest of the class went to see one of my lifelong heroes, Dizzy Gillespie, direct the UofI's big band. I've always regretted that and didn't get to see Gillespie until the early 90s in Long Beach with a small, mostly electric band. However, I got to play with some very expensive microphones that I'd only read about up to that moment and work in the college's great performance spaces using the school's very expensive equipment; although some of it was expensive, but not particularly high fidelity.

When the first weekend came, Steve Julstrom had invited Mr. Temmer and me out to his lakeside place for an afternoon barbecue. Because we were a one-vehicle family at the time, I'd taken the bus from Nebraska to Iowa City and Mr. Temmer offered to give me a ride to the lake. The school had rented a Cadillac for Mr. Temmer and I hadn't been in a new Caddy for several years. At the least, it would be a comfortable drive, even if we didn't talk much. I'd mentioned this experience in another Wirebender essay a couple of years ago, "That’s Not Serious, It’s Art." Who knows why, maybe to irritate me, maybe because it's how he always traveled by car, maybe he thought he was going to educate me, but Stephen fired up the stereo as we took off and found a classical station. When the orchestra started playing something I wish I could remember, Temmer began to wave his arms while he drove and sing along with a pretty decent voice. I watched him for a bit and about the time I started to smile at his performance, he looked at me and started laughing. We laughed together for a bit and had a great conversation about music being about "fun" and entertainment and a distraction from serious stuff and by the time we arrived at Julstrom's home we were more than acquaintances. 

The next day, Sunday, the Stephen's invited me to help record a piano-violin Bartok record with two of the school's faculty musicians and a collection of Temmer's Neumann microphones; new and historical (Including a Neumann omni that Temmer said was either "Hitler's microphone" or one like that used to record Hitler's speeches. It looked a lot like the one in this picture, as I remember. Temmer was an Austrian immigrant.) I also included several of the Audio Technica and Tascam microphones from my own collection in the recording and, later, we did a single-blind comparison of all the microphones used in this recording with the rest of the class. To Temmer's mild disappointment, the class overwhelmingly selected my Teac ME-120 condensers as their favorite in that test. The "Hitler mic" was pretty obviously lacking in high end response as the violin would often slide above the mic's capabilities far enough that it vanished in the mix. If nothing else, that proved that there are some limits to the vintage cache. 

For the next several years, any time I came upon a low-to-moderate cost microphone that I thought was either interesting or exceptional, I would write Stephen Temmer about it and, often, he'd ask to borrow it for a bit. I fell out of that habit a little before I moved to California in 1983, after my 2nd studio closed and I was convinced my life in music was all but finished. At the time, I was managing a manufacturing company building everything from high voltage inductance test equipment to the Arrakis Systems broadcast equipment. That might seem like I was still working in audio, but it didn't feel much like it. In my last few months in Omaha, massive personal turmoil pretty much squashed everything in my life but work and home. I'd been working with a friend, Mark Hartman, on jingles and pitches for commercial music, but that sort of withered away in those last months before I accepted the QSC job. 

Once in California, I was a regular member and occasional officer with the Orange County Audio Engineering Society (which no longer exists) and I bumped into Stephen at least once at the LA AES Show before he retired from and sold Gotham Audio in '85. A year or two later, I ran into him at Wes Dooley's AEA Micophones facility in Pasadena, when I was buying a couple Audio Precision test fixtures for the QSC assembly line. It still would be a few years before I started collecting and messing with microphones again, but I always clung to the idea that music wasn't a serious thing. If it's not fun for someone it's not music. I didn't see or hear from Stephen again and didn't know he'd died in 1992 until recently.

Note: Heidevolk and their one and only flash-in-the-pan semi-hit, Vulgaris Magistralis, are the poster children for my music is "fun" point. It's hard to tell from their other songs, but I can only hope these characters are posing as Viking assholes. Regardless, I love this song and it never fails to make me laugh when i hear it. I would just as soon not know anything more about the band or their opinions on "life, the universe, and everything." They might be "serous," but I think they are hilarious.

Great Interview with A Great Guitarist

"Great" doesn't even come close to describing Larry's talent.


One of the amazing moments in my life was getting to talk, briefly, with Larry after a performance at the Costa Mesa WAVE smooth jazz concert sometime between '89 and '91.

I was doing some testing, backstage, on new QSC products and subb'ing for the Sound Image monitor tech (Dave Shadoan, the owner of the company at the time).  During David Benoit's set, there was an FOH problem and Dave asked me to watch the monitor board while he went to the FOH desk. There wasn't much to do, since Benoit's set was about over, so I just re-familiarized myself with the board and flipped through the stage mixes to see what Dave had setup for each player. Benoit's set ended and Dave still wasn't back and one of his guys and I started setting up for the next set, with me on the board, mostly, and the other guy positioning equipment and telling me what each aux needed for the next band. I was pretty overwhelmed with the complexity of it all, since I was used to a 36-channel, 8-aux version of the board and this was a lot more of everything than I'd ever used. We got it done barely before the band hit the stage and I didn't even look up to see who it was. I had my hand poised over the aux bus solo buttons, waiting to ratchet though the stage mixes correcting whatever the musicians wanted fixed during the first song. I heard someone say something like, "This is my first time on a stage since I got shot . . . "and I looked up to see Larry Carlton talking into a mic I had a little control over. The song, "Smiles and Smiles to Go" was the opening tune and I was back to work getting nods and directions from the band until Dave came back and took over about 3/4 of the way through the first song. I went back to work monitoring our amplifiers' performance.

When Larry's set finished, we all went into another frenzy of setup berserk-ness and about the time the next band started its set, I saw Larry exiting the dressing room trailer and head down the backstage area toward the parking lot. I sort of hate most things about being a fan and all things fanatical, but it struck me that I would only get one chance in this life to tell Mr. Carlton how much his music had meant to me. I usually become totally tongue-tied and lose about 100 IQ points in those situations, but I managed to run up behind him and say something like, "Mr. Carlton, I have loved your playing on the Crusaders records since #1 and especially Southern Comfort and Those Southern Nights." He turned around, looking slightly fearful, saw a dumbass yokel wearing a QSC jacket with tools, test equipment, and cables dangling from his belt, a tool bag, and wrapped around his (my) neck and relaxed. We had a really nice 5-10 minute conversation about that music and his love for jazz and I managed not to be a bigger Kansas hick than usual through most of it.

I have been lucky to meet and talk to a few of the people who kept me coming back to music for almost 60 years and meeting Larry Carlton is close to the top of those experiences.

Serving Music?

In my manufacturing career as a quality and manufacturing engineering manager, I was always asking my employees and managers, “Who does this serve?” whenever they wanted to implement a procedure, change a process, or add paperwork to our workload. One of the late-great Quality Management concepts was that everyone in an organization "serves" someone. From the CEO to the shipping clerk, all of those jobs exist to provide service to someone in the customer or organizational chain. When that system fails, we end up with a society like the one the 1% have created today and, historically, that never lasts long.

Last week, I took some friends to the local jazz club, the Artist Quarter, to listen to a well-known local jazz saxophonist and that question popped into my head for the first time in a few years. In my opinion, the best music is created by musicians who are “serving” the assembly of sounds the whole group creates and that the rest of us call “Music.” In the classical world, I think this goal is commonly accepted principle. In an orchestra, everyone, including the featured soloists, is focused on the whole they are creating. They all obey the conductor who is the conduit to the audience for the musical environment being created. There is no shortage of oversized egos, varying talents, or personality conflicts in classical performances, but they are mostly sublimated in the service of the music printed on the page in front of every player. Even solo classical performances are still directed by the directions on that page that describe how to best service the composer’s aural vision. On average, I would argue that classical music performed in groups is more closely directed toward the service of the music.

In the pop world, this ideal is rarely reached because the service goal for popular music is profit, not music. The engineer, producer, and record label drones all serve as focus groups who analyze the gross aspects of a recorded performance for the possible financial return. “Will it sell?” is infinitely more important than “is it beautiful?” There are obviously violations of this generalization, but those only occur when the “music industry” is in disarray and the financial interests have lost control of where the music is going. That may never happen again in our constantly-connected, followed, friended, and information-manipulated world. Pop music is so thoroughly commercialized that musicians call it that, “commercial music.” That’s a term that used to apply to music made as background for advertisements. Today, a prime goal of popular musicians is to have a song end up in a commercial or as background in a television series. The service of music as an ideal entity is becoming a vanishing cause in the pop world.

Jazz pretends to be a different animal than either pop or classical music. Since jazz presents practically no possibility for financial reward, jazz musicians can imagine themselves to be in a similar boat as classical musicians. Since improvisation is valued over sheet music regurgitation, jazz musicians tell themselves they are more purely serving music, following the muse, as it pops into their heads.

In application, jazz often fails to live up to the best goals of either pop or classical music. The performance I took my friends to was a case-in-point. As if there were some rule that stated each of the four musicians would be allowed a moment in every song to show off, every tune followed the same sax-melody-sax-solo-piano-solo-bass-solo-drum-solo, rinse, and repeat routine.

To be upfront, I have to say that 99.9% of every bass and drum solo I have ever heard has been a miserable exercise in gymnastics. Bass players insist on showing off how fast they can play “pittoon-pitoon-thump-thump-pitow.” Drummers piddily-piddle, paradiddle, and whack the crap out of their percussion paraphernalia until the audience is looking for any excuse to drink more or take up smoking outside in the rain. There is nothing musical about listening to the rhythm section be non-rhythmic. On a commercial basis, selling a drum solo (outside of the Safari’s 1963 fluke hit Wipeout or the few seconds of Steve Gadd’s work in Steely Dan’s Aja) or a bass solo (I have no examples of that.) is ludicrous. Can’t happen. Outside of nihilistic minimalist modern weirdness, classical music is without any examples of extended bass or drum solos. Only jazz musicians imagine that an audience wants to listen to that silliness.

Music is not what is being served in traditional combo jazz, at least in the live performance venue. Musicians’ egos are the one and only focus. Everyone gets a place to show off and disrupt the music for a moment of self-proclaimed glory.
I believe, that’s why modern jazz musicians like Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays, Stanley Clarke, Keith Jarrett, Gary Burton, Larry Carlton, Chick Corea, Larry Coryell, Al Di Meola, Mark Egan, Béla Fleck, Jeff Lorber, and hundreds of other pop-influenced, jazz oriented musicians have found an audience. They waste minimal time stroking their egos and maximum time serving their vision of Music. Sometimes, that veers toward commercial music, for the same reason pop music was perverted by hard cash, but just as often modern jazz musicians reflect the attitudes and dedication of the players who created jazz. While many of the players in Duke Ellington’s bands received solo opportunities, they didn’t expect ten minutes of attention in every tune. Most of the acknowledged classic jazz albums featured incredibly brief moments of rhythm section solo time, if any at all; Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, Dizzy Gillespie’s An Electrifying Evening, and Charles Mingus Mingus Ah Um, Dave Brubeck Time Out, and an almost infinitely long list of great performances that created a genre and audience.

Live jazz, however, still appears to be working at repelling all but the most tolerant audience more interested in X-games performance and less absorbed in Music.