The Evolutionary Music of Our Transitional Time- a music review by Dr. Maggie Rizzi
Few would argue that this is a turbulent time. The climate crisis, the pandemic and its fall out, the intensity of politics and more all demand our attention. The amount of information available and the technological tools growing exponentially are overwhelming our psyches, our emotional capacities, and our ability to process. As tough as things can look, the arts, particularly music can instantly give us perspective and remind us that there is always reason for pure optimism.
As 2021 drew to a close with all of these factors in play, three albums emerged with new, startling, daring and provocative approaches to music very much rooted in our time, and at the same time transcending it. These are Esmeralda Spalding’s Songwritersapothacarylab, Pharoah Sanders’ Floating Points, and Steve Thomas’ Audnoyz, Project Vol. 4. While in some ways these recordings could not be more different, they share some interesting and adventurous things in common. Three musicians of three different generations all breaking new ground, but in a way to which it is very easy for anyone to connect.
Ms. Spalding’s airy recording features both her bass and her voice used in ways that depart from what is typical. The bass is more punctuation than driving line. While the music is in time, time is not allowed to dictate the course of it. Patience and openness prevail. The lyrics are abstract poetry, somewhat reminiscent of Beat Poetry of another era, and yet unmistakably contemporary. The acoustic sounds are harmoniously melded and unaffected. There are drone tones in some places, but often in the voice and higher ranges where you don’t usually find them. There are love songs, but they refer, infer, and examine snippets and aspects of relationships, less obvious than we are used to. The music is tonal and yet the intervals and harmonies are unexpected and far beyond the choices of most singers and song writers. The sound world is rich and just plain beautiful with no contemporary technology anywhere to be heard. The tracks are arranged in formwelas, rather than songs or movements. All of this is bold and avante garde, yet you don’t need to know anything about music to instantly get it.
Pharoah Sanders is one of the most distinctive and enduring of a long list of distinguished Jazz tenor saxophonists. More avante garde than many of his contemporaries, he demonstrates with Floating Points that late career artists can do some of their deepest, most stunning, and impactful work during a time in their life when many people choose to withdraw into retirement. It’s a good thing for the world that Mr. Sanders chose a different path. The wisdom here, the peace, the absolute bliss that emanate from every note of this recording show us a sound scape, almost a dream scape that is full of great hope and happiness. In some ways like Songwritersapothacarylab, the music is abstract, and free from traditional time. Mr. Sanders shows that atonal music can be truly harmonious. The use of the voice here is beyond words, drawn from a consciousness beyond language. The collaboration with the London Symphony points toward a true third way between jazz and classical styles that enhances both. Putting to bed, if it was still needed the argument that never the twain shall meet.
Now for another dimension. In the 21st century it is clear to all of us that technology is here to stay, and provides us with a source of great power that we didn’t have before. But, perhaps startlingly, it can provide us with great beauty as well. In Audnoyz Project Vol 4, Steve Thomas further evolves work he has been doing for some time- blending the tools of technology with acoustic instruments and voice in a mature and seamless way that puts to rest the question of which is more genuine and legitimate as a means of musical expression. In earlier days, and even now to some extent, music made with machines has sounded mechanical and sometimes sterile and stiff. It takes real surehandedness to blend in the newer tools with the old to make a really perfect union. There are many examples of the different ways you might do that in this album, all of them fluently elegant and musical. As in the other two recordings, the vocals of Patty Barkas in these pieces are abstract, poetic and at times entirely beyond the realm of words. None of the songs is limited by traditional form. And while some of the elements of popular, dance and electronic music are represented here, they are used in ways that have not been heard before, and which are entirely integrated into tracks that anyone can relate to.
Here are three distinct and very new bodies of work with startling and unusual elements, that are still entirely accessible and harmonious, lifting us to a place where we can see better the tumult of our world, and the beautiful possibilities within it.
The End of the Romantic Era, the time of the Neo-Renaissance Human
Abstract: Its time to jettison the Romantic approach to life and art for a Neo-Renaissance approach exemplified by at least one multifaceted practitioner of music, technology and business, Steve Thomas.
Occasionally, there is a major paradigm shift that changes the set of ground rules we share and perceptions of the nature of who we are and our world view. During such times, the group assumptions upon which much thinking is based are themselves changed, and the “givens” in some very important conversations are shifted. Perhaps the most common example of such a shift is the change to the view that the earth was round not flat. Everyone in a conversation about trade, expansion, the nature of sea travel, a host of pursuits was suddenly grounded in a very different set of assumptions than they had been previously. This is a drastic and very concrete example, but I would like to draw a parallel to a shift that has started, and that I suggest will soon take hold across the culture. Those schools, colleges, artists and businesses that see it first, will help themselves to a considerable advantage in positioning competitively for the next leap forward in many endeavors. Further, there are examples of those whose lives are constructed to show the way, and I will recognize one of them.
Since the early 19th Century, the Western World has been deeply influenced by the paradigm of thoughts, beliefs and world view perpetuated by the thinkers of what we have come to call the Romantic Era. Some of the artists most associated with the Romantic Era include Jean Jacques Rousseau, Hector Berlioz, and Lord Byron, among many others. This body of beliefs replaced what is commonly called, the Age of Enlightenment, and in the view of some was most certainly not an improvement or advancement in human thinking. Why?
The Age of Enlightenment was typified by rational thinking, logic, and the growth of democracy and self-determination in Europe and America. The figures associated with the time are many, but include Newton, Kant, and Thomas Jefferson. During this period it was expected that scholars of science and medicine were also philosophers, writers, and potentially artists or musicians as well. There was not the specialization in one discipline to the exclusions of all others that has become prevalent in the 20th Century, and that I will argue is, to some extent, a byproduct of the Romantic Era.
During the age of enlightenment, there was an admiration of the Classical Greek tradition, and predecessors such as Aristotle had never considered limiting themselves to one area of study to the exclusion of others. Musical artists of the time include Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven. Bach was a most prolific writer, and the composer of arguably some of the world’s greatest music, but he also taught, ran a church choir, and a coffee house. Handel ran an opera company in London, and worked for a number of wealthy patrons, writing to order for certain events. Few would argue that these occupations made them poor musicians. I mention this to set up a contrast with the self-concept and work approach adopted very widely by the artists of the Romantic Era, and to a large extent, still in fashion today.
According to Grout’s History of Western Music, on page 539, “Romantic art aspires to transcend immediate times and occasions, to seize eternity, to reach back into the past and forward into the future, to range over the expanse of the world and outward through the cosmos… and just because its goal can never be attained, Romantic art is haunted by a spirit of longing, of yearning after the impossible fulfillment.” Grout further states a few pages later (542) that, “It is just this period more than any other that offers us the phenomenon of the unsociable artist, one who feels himself to be separate from his fellow men and who is driven by isolation to seek inspirations within himself.” The Romantic artist is a loner, who believes that one hears the creative muse when alone, and preferably close to nature. The narratives of Romantic music and literature, frankly, are often self-destructive, and include themes such committing suicide as a result of unrequited love. Sometimes the object of the hapless artist’s affection doesn’t even know he exists. The Romantic artist is often tortured and suffers for his or her art. He or she (most often he, although Mary Shelly and the Brontes were exceptions) is often poor, outside the mainstream of society, single minded, often highly emotional, and beyond engaging in the concerns of ordinary people who do not have the artistic temperament.
It is true that having time and space to receive inspiration in peace, not bothered by the issues of day to day life, does contribute to creativity. The rebellion of these artists against what some viewed as the hyper rationality of the Enlightenment is understandable, and necessary to tap an entirely different, and less verbal side of human nature.
But anything can be taken too far. As we look back on the late 20th Century, we see the world filled with starving, struggling artists, many barely making a living. It is almost a given that you will hear an artist assuming a complete lack of competence, or interest in the affairs of the world such as business. The general population makes this assumption about the artist as well. According to the stereotype it is derigeur for artists to be very poor practitioners of anything that is not within the narrow band of their artistic pursuit. We take for granted that the artist will be unfamiliar with, uninterested and unskilled at other forms of human endeavor. Vincent Van Gogh is a stereotypical example of the Romantic Era artist. He was tortured, lived in poverty much of his life, was poor at managing his business affairs, displayed what was probably a significant mental illness, and ended his own life. The Don McLean song about him says that he was too sensitive for this world. While his is an extreme example, most artists exhibit some of the same characteristics. Because artists are notoriously unskilled at handling matters of money connected to their work, entire parasitic industries have sprung up and thrived to interface between the artist and the world. The members of these professions book artist performances, negotiate their recording and distribution deals, manage their “images” and the ways in which the world finds out about them and their work. Why? Because the artist is supposedly incapable of doing these things for a variety of reasons. These functions take away from creative time. Perhaps that is so. They are indicative of a skill set that is assumed to be incompatible with the creative mind, brain, personality. If you are an artist, these things are below you, or alien to you, incomprehensible. We have inherited a very narrow view of the Romantic artist, and few artists even question that construct themselves. If it was ever useful in some cultures and economies to embrace that view, I suggest that those days are most definitely behind us, and in fact, for artists they need to be. The paradigm just described has become so ingrained as to have become an entirely self-fulfilling prophesy.
Now here we are in the 21st century, carrying with us some paradigms from the Romantic era that are not particularly helpful to us, or reflective of the multiple types of intelligences and interests that people have, not to mention the skill set needed to find success in the 21st century work environment. It is time that we cultivate a Neo-Renaissance approach to life and work that honors the capacity of all people to be more than one thing. It has been said that the performing musical groups from MIT rival those of Boston’s music schools. Is this because there is a strong cross over between musical thinking and mathematical thinking? When I interviewed 16 female jazz musicians for my dissertation, a large number of them indicated that a talent for drawing and painting had also been noticed in their youth. Some musical artists like Jay Z, Madonna and Quincy Jones have shown tremendous acumen in managing their careers as well as their artistic lives.
In a time when people have multiple careers over the course of a lifetime, and when there are many fields of study at play in most careers at once, the idea of specializing in just one thing is anachronistic. Let me use music as an example. The concert violinist needs to be the consummate performer, but what such artist would not be well served by understanding the production side of their recordings, the development of their salable image, the coding behind the remixing of their lines in a multimedia presentation, the distribution of music in the age of Streaming?
Young artists will find it helpful to have role models while building a creative life that is successful in the contemporary world. I can suggest one. 
Steve Thomas of Atwood Media is just such a person. Steve has consistently ignored the boundaries that are assumed to exist for a person of his creative bent. What does that look like? Young Steve started as a conspicuously talented guitar player. He could play Jazz, and all other styles of music unusually well for a teenager, raising eyebrows among his father’s circle of professional musician friends. Then he found he had an aptitude for composition, not inconsistent with his performing acumen, and generally accepted within the musician stereotype. Then he showed a high level of skill and interest in the production end of music: recording, mixing, and mastering, much more technical pursuits grounded in math, science and engineering. Steve then demonstrated an ability to see from the rooftops the ways to position music, products, thinking in the world and demonstrated an ability to market and position a variety of products related to the music industry, and interfacing worlds of technology, both hardware, software, and all types of connectivity. None of these things has interfered with Steve’s ability to produce amazing music, or play at a high level. In fact, there is a good argument that they have enhanced and enriched those talents.
The moral of the story? If you are an artist, don’t allow yourself to accept limits. Listen to the many things that may call you, or be necessary for your higher level of survival in this world. Don’t assume that you can’t manage your money or understand the trends of the economy, or that these skills will somehow damage your ability to create art.
It is time for schools and colleges that charge considerable tuitions to broaden their concept of the artist, or even the liberal thinker, to embrace some of the skill sets that can enhance effective participation in the 21st century world. I do not suggest that as a culture we stop producing artists, or liberal arts majors. Indeed, these people are absolutely necessary in a world that any of us want to live in. Rather, relinquish the associations that have led to an “if this, then not that,” thinking that has led people to work and think in silos for generations. Ironic, that Romantic Era thinking, so grounded in freedom, and passion could get caught up in what is really just a hyper logical limitation.
The Last Ship
Ever since our Newcastle friends, Mike and Joanne, told us about The Last Ship, and showed us the British telecast of the concert reading of the album by Sting and some of his musical friends when we were in Newcastle in July, we had been looking forward to seeing it. When we found out that it was headed to Broadway, we ordered tickets from there, even before we got on the plane to come home. I insisted on preview tickets, because it wasn’t at all clear to me that the show that would resonate with the New York audience, and many a show has closed in the first few days. Sting’s comments in the album liner notes indicated that he was prepared for the possibility that the piece would not be a commercial success. His album, Soul Cages, written after his parents’ deaths was not as popular as some of his other work. It is nice not to have to worry about all of one’s work making huge money. The freedom to do exactly what you want is wonderful. That is the reason I am looking forward to retirement: no work need yield money, the two things become completely independent of each other.
Not that the music wasn’t good. Sting is a reliable and creative songwriter, after all, but we weren’t sure that the demise of the ship building industry in Newcastle would capture the imagination of the well heeled New Yorker. I figured it could easily go either way. As the “merch” guy said when we entered the theatre, it’s all about the universal themes.
The show is highly ambitious. It is no small feat to capture the death of an entire industry and the effect that has on the community so deeply dependent and intertwined with it. This is not the first work to deal with the loss of industry in the UK. Kinky Boots, and The Full Monty are a couple of others. There will be some similarities among all of these of course. In The Last Ship, the shipyard men decide to build one more ship as a legacy before the work goes to Korea, and wherever else. There are so many aspects of this story that could be treated, no one work could contain them all and treat them well. The political story, the Tory decisions to destroy the industries of the British working class, the breaking of the unions by Margaret Thatcher, those are not specifically addressed in this play. Sting chooses not to delve into the reasons for this destruction. He leaves alone the politics of the decision, on a national political level, to destroy a series of industries, and the Northern economies that depended on them. Fair enough, one can only do so much at once. That is a different type of story.
The focus, rather, is on the impact on a community. There is the interesting additional layer of the sometimes negative impact that the culture of that community can have on people living it. The lead character, Gideon, left his family, his community, his love, willing to relinquish whatever necessary to have a different life. Gideon left in anger, as did Sting, determined to get out, and his eventual need to circle back around to incorporate the parts of himself that his decision had severed. Interestingly, the woman he left behind has taken up with one of the few who is figuring out how to rebuild from the ashes of the industry, make a life after its end, which of course the entire region was eventually going to have to do.
The hard parenting, the limited choices, the physical danger and perpetually low wages with no chance of advancement, the embittering lack of support for any ambition, make for a very ambivalent picture. Gideon comes back in time to observe the demise of a life he hated and desperately wished to escape. A lifetime of work on the slipway would never better a family, the opportunities for women were few, parents were hard on their children, and talent in so many areas atrophied and died due to lack of nurturing. If that had not been so, Sting, and people who shared his need for something better, something more, would not have struggled so hard to leave that life behind, no matter the cost of doing so. This story has particular resonance for us because my partner of 24 years did the same thing, leaving Newcastle with 2 suitcases to escape the limits of her working class community. A good decision on her part, without which her professional and personal accomplishments, and even a normal lifespan, would have been impossible. And yet, this can never happen without a cost. Sting also cut ties and moved on, leaving his old life and the community that raised him far behind. There is nothing black and white about these questions.
The music, though very Sting-like, translated beautifully to the Broadway style stage. There are catchy hooks, rousing anthems, romantic songs, nice pieces for supporting characters. For someone who hadn’t written in that genre before, the requisite high points were all hit. One must suspend disbelief when really thinking about the possibility of making a last ship. What would it be for? Who owns it? What will its purpose be? Who will take care of it? But the longing for continued purpose and closure is metaphorical, and many shows before have asked for this kind of indulgence. After all, most musicals feature people bursting into spontaneous song, and that in itself demands the suspension of disbelief. This is a wonderful work, and if there is some difficulty integrating all of the components into a single piece, well life is never a simple convenient story with a beginning, middle and end, in which one storyline at a time plays out. And through this work, the world gets to hear the story of a proud people with a proud history, a community that doesn’t get a great deal of attention, even in the southern parts of its own nation.
Audnoyz Project Vol 3 -the next big thing
It is generally a given that music, and other arts, reflect the life and cultural context from which they spring. Some art and artists speak to something more universal than a particular temporal context only, and those are the works that last for generations and become classics. We cherish such classics from as long ago as 5 centuries before the golden age of ancient Greece, the epic poems of Homer, for example. The plays of Shakespeare and the compositions of Beethoven are other such transcendent masterpieces, and the work of Duke Ellington and films of Coppola are more contemporary examples.
The relationship between message and medium, that is, the tools and materials used, is perhaps the element that has changed the most profoundly and with evolutionary implications of unusual proportions in the last decade. The implications are so profound, and as yet unprocessed, that that in itself can be subject for artistic exploration. Recording technology was developed to preserve performances for audiences removed spacially and temporally from the musicians who played them. This invention was in itself world changing. Even though the sound quality was inferior to most live performances, it allowed the music to live beyond its initial playing. This has allowed us to get a glimpse of early 20th century music aurally, a glimpse we will forever lack in older music, where we are left with only the ability to reproduce it from the written sheet. The current world shifting revolution has made the current recording technology an instrument in itself. One no longer needs acoustic instruments to record. One can digitally create them, as well as entirely new sounds that acoustic instruments were never intended to make, but which add to the palette of instruments that the composer has available.
In Audnoyz Project Vol 3 we see all of this going on and more, while at the same time receiving a deeply satisfying musical experience with no pretentions. This is an album of pieces that takes us to the leading edge, while grounded in everything we know and understand. That is the essence of great art, and in a wrapping that could only have come out of the 21st century, and a truly talented musical mind.
All artists are limited by the tools at their disposal. Beethoven wrote for the instruments he had at hand, all of them, and yet only these were available. He struggled with this, as it is safe to assume that his genius mind could envision music beyond the capacity of those instruments, but in that time frame, could not express it. He tried to go beyond those instrument capacities. We know at least one violinist of his day complained about the difficulty of executing the written lines. His reply, “do you think I consider your miserable fiddle while talking to my god?” hints at the frustrations that Beethoven felt in this regard. What would he have done if all the instruments we have ever known were at his disposal, along with the electronic capability to mix them in any and all ways, including all sounds from all sources in the world, with any sonic treatments available? Well, enter Audnoyz Project Vol 3, and you might begin to get a picture.
The evolution/revolution occasioned by the emergence and universal accessibility of digital media and internet communication is effecting all human lives, not just those of artists. Teachers, until very recently, taught from the bound paper books available to them. That is what there was. History of hundreds of years was distilled down to a text with a couple of pages of summary narrative written by one or a small group of writers. A few primary sources might have been brought into play when available, but that was about it. Now teachers have internet linked interactive white boards and computers in the classroom which literally bring the entire world and all of its libraries into the room, and the curriculum: staggering exponentially more vast amounts of information, which in all fairness, few havje yet been able to exploit fully. The musician, whether using a traditional instrument, orchestra of instruments, a mixing board, a sampler, a synthesizer or all of these, is in a similar position. In the current context, Everyman/woman has these tools. What can be done with them by the truly musical mind? For the answer in all its rich, mind blowing possibilities, one must listen to Audnoyz 3.
This music is both easy and difficult to categorize. Interesting that people always want to know what genre music is, what style. Perhaps because there is a preconceived notion that they will like music in some styles but not others. But just as it is possible to bring all musical instruments and sounds into a composition now, it is equally possible to bring all styles into a piece, from whatever era they hail. The music is techno, dance, electronica, performance art, but both more and less than that. Each of the tunes will make you want to move, until you come to the parts where you stop dead in your tracks to listen. In some of the songs we are reminded of Charles Ives, who brought musical themes and street sounds into his post classical works as references.
Epic Tale uses an operatic style of singing for its emotive quality, bypassing words. In this way the limitations drawn by languages, and whether or not you understand a particular language are neatly side stepped. The power comes across, without the barrier, and clothed in the technique and sound palette of our contemporary world. In a gesture that brings us squarely into contact with the wonderful possibilities of our 21st century global community, we are swept into the enticing world of Bollywood before coming to rest in a lush new age style resting place. The entire piece is a grand gesture. What makes a tale epic? When we think of the Homeric tales, or the great plays, it is the scope, the universal, the life lessons that transcend time that make an epic. All of that is referenced in this piece, without a word ever being spoken.
Random Intersection deftly paints a contemplative sound scape with a guitar solo that reminiscent of Jeff Beck, but with no pretenses of imitation. A clear voice articulates a short statement of wisdom, over the heartbeat of peaceful world.
In a different approach to the world’s great composers and previous styles, Bach’s Prelude #6 is treated to a jazz arrangement and then recomposed using Euro DJ techniques with a level of sophistication that while unique, is utterly accessible to any listener in Get Off my Bach.
Paris channels some of the same techniques, Euro techno, impressionistic beckoning connected beautifully with jazz style saxophone improvisation, so appropriate, given that the French have always loved Jazz, perhaps more than the Americans whose culture gave rise to it.
Grain Jazz brings us right to the heart of jazz, with a featured piano solo that is all jazz, blended seamlessly with a dance rhythm both Native American and contemporary, while Damaged Goods reminds us that there are difficult human experiences in this world. There are classical orchestrations in this tune, completely faithful to conventions of that style, and yet enhanced by their attachment to digital percussion techniques from a completely different context.
M Vision is a haunting reverie that is both a validation and a cautionary tale, depending on who you are and where you are in your life’s journey. When you get to the last tune, Techno Talk, and are told that “You are about to witness history in the making,” you know that this is literally true, even before you hear the Thai rap, not often experienced on the larger world stage. The speech rhythms in Thai are very different than those of Romance languages, and yet again we are reminded that we have a collection of conventions in our mind that lead us naturally to expect certain things. Our paradigms are suddenly opening up exponentially.
Don’t miss this music. We have just begun to fathom what the tools of the new era can bring. Our minds have yet to grow into the expanded possibilities of the information age, but this is an album that will surely and clearly point the way,