The Life and Death of Classical Music

MANY – perhaps most – of the people who follow the state of culture get tired of stories about the graying of the arts audience, the decline of arts education, the falling off of record sales, etc. I used to be among them, until it became clear to me a few years ago that the problems were real and that ignoring them did us (and the arts) absolutely no good.

So I’m well aware that many of us – who love music, reading, and visual art, and don’t quite understand why other people don’t share our ardor – will reject or ignore this Slate story about the “death” of classical music. (The headline, I’ll admit, is a bit cartoonish – go to see my local group, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, most nights and classical music will seem quite alive and its audience quite robust. There are also a great number of substantial musicians these days, young and old.)

But there’s much of value in this piece by Mark Vanhoenacker, which looks at the pitiful state of classical record sales (2.8 percent of a fairly small pie), the fading out of classical radio, the fact that donations have since 2005 exceeded orchestra ticket revenues, and the way the audience is not renewing itself. The story employs some valuable data by music critic and ArtsJournal blogger Greg Sandow:

Sandow notes that back in 1937, the median age at orchestra concerts in Los Angeles was 28. Think of that! That was the year, by the way, that Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony’s summer festival, was founded. I grew up near Tanglewood and had various summer jobs there in the 1990s. When I worked at the beer and wine stand, I almost never carded anyone.

Sandow and NEA data largely back up what I saw on Tanglewood’s fabled lawns two decades ago. Between 1982 and 2002, the portion of concertgoers under 30 fell from 27 percent to 9 percent; the share over age 60 rose from 16 percent to 30 percent. In 1982 the median age of a classical concertgoer was 40; by 2008 it was 49.

… Younger fans are not converting to classical music as they age. The last generation to broadly love classical music may simply be aging, like World War I veterans, out of existence.

Some of my view on this whole thing comes from the fact that I find most of my generational peers – I am 44 – fairly indifferent to classical music. I’ve also watched as the press – newspapers, magazines, alt weeklies – cuts back on its coverage, which has a centrifugal effect.

It doesn’t surprise me that the Slate piece has already drawn angry denunciations. Former Naxos and iTunes executive Andy Doe clearly loves classical music, and makes some good points in his retort. But I find the shoot-the-messenger tone here a bit odd. I guess part of me thinks that those of us who care about non-corporate culture and want to see it survive are on the same (shrinking) team and should work together as best we can. That requires admitting that we're in a crisis -- and plenty of people aren't ready to admit that yet. 

Of course, I welcome comments on this fraught complicated issue.

UPDATE: A very intelligent and less defensive refutation to the Slate piece went up here, by the Washington Post's estimable Anne Midgette.

The Sorrows of Gene Clark

HERE at The Misread City, we're huge Byrds fans, and Gene Clark is, some days, our favorite member of that great L.A. band. With the Byrds he wrote and sang songs like "I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better" and "Set You Free This Time"; his country-tinged solo career was rich and varied, and included Tried So Hard" (covered by Fairport Convention and Yo La Tengo), "Why Not Your Baby" (covered by Velvet Crush) and some soulful collaborations with Byrd Chris Hillman.

But there's always been a sense that the Missouri-born Clark, who left the Byrds during their heyday, in 1966, because of his refusal to fly, never quite arrived. (This is the guy, of course, who co-wrote "Eight Miles High.") There is a strong Clark cult among musicians and fans of country rock, but it's not nearly as large as that commanded by Gram Parsons. Much of the poignant work of his solo career remains largely unheard.

Clark was reticent, often anxious, sometimes self-destructive and did not love the attention the group's fame brought. And he felt deep disappointment that his 1974 record, No Other, which he recorded in Mendocino and was intended comeback, never hit. It was a lasting sorrow for a musician whose best work is about loss and missed connections.

So it gives us great pleasure to see a number of indie musicians -- Beach House (pictured), the Walkmen, Grizzly Bear -- performing a handful of tribute concerts to Clark and this oft-overlooked album. They're at the 9:30 Club in D.C. (a club important to me as a teenager, for what it's worth) and in Brooklyn this weekend.

Here's the New York Times' Jon Pareles:

A British Invasion beat carried Clark’s early songs with the Byrds, like “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” — which, in a typical Clark touch, brings uncertainty to its chorus, “I’ll probably feel a whole lot better when you’re gone.”

But rock often gave way, during his solo career, to something closer to the country music he had grown up on, transformed by his lyrics. His songs have been recognized as a foundation for what would later be called alt-country or Americana. Clark wrote story songs as stark as traditional ballads, and deeply haunted mood songs like the two chosen by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss — “Polly Come Home” and “Through the Morning, Through the Night” — for their 2007 album “Raising Sand.”

Yet “No Other” is no one’s idea of down-home roots-rock. Mr. Clark and its producer, Thomas Jefferson Kaye, gave it a far more lavish palette, and even the songs that start out countryish end up in realms of their own. There are gospelly female choruses, horns, synthesizers, Latin percussion, wah-wah violin and, in “No Other,” a bruising fuzz-toned bass line played by a phalanx of overdubbed basses. The head of Elektra/Asylum Records, David Geffen, was furious that a $100,000 studio budget had yielded only eight finished songs, and the label barely promoted the album. In a notorious Hollywood incident, Clark and Mr. Geffen nearly came to blowsat a restaurant.

Now, let's have a Gene Clark tribute in the state he called home for much of his career. Let's start with the city in which his old band was formed -- Los Angeles.

Catching Up with Stephen Malkmus

THE other day I spoke to the former leader of what may've been the greatest band of the '90s -- Stephen Malkmus of Pavement. Their mix of melody and noise electrified me during my misspent youth, and it was gratifying to see the band reunite a few years ago and actually play like they meant it.

Malkmus, who recently returned to Portland after a couple years in Berlin, has a fine new record out on Matador. He'll be touring soon. Here's my interview. Just don't expect straight answers from him. I've spoken to him several times over the years -- on each occasion he gets a bit friendlier and a bit more cryptic.

The Life and Death of the Alternative Press

IF it weren't for the '80s Village Voice, I probably would not be a journalist. (The world, I expect, would be a better place.)

This weekend I have a story in Al Jazeera America about good times and bad for alternative weeklies. I talk about the crystalline sense of mission these publications had during conservative times, and the troubles they've had more recently. And I try to shine a light on the good and important work they still do.

In the piece I get into my youthful infatuation with the alt-press -- I interned at the Voice, freelanced for the now-defunct Boston Phoenix soon after leaving college, later worked for New Times Los Angeles. As nasty as that company could be, we had a blast there, some of the time, and I'm still proud of the work my colleagues and I did there. (Even if New Times responded by killing the paper and destroying its online archive.) Where is the alt press now?

And I try to sketch out what various weeklies have meant to the city of Los Angeles, which remains the Misread City.

Happy holidays to all my readers.

Returning to Charlie Haden, Jazz and Transcendence

TODAY I have been trying to move on to other things, but can’t get the memory of last night’s Charlie Haden/ Liberation Music Orchestra concert out of my mind. There are too many things to contemplate here, but let me offer a few stray thoughts.

Overall: While this night was by no means perfect – there were minor technical problems early on, the musician most of us had come to see was in such poor health he only played one song, there was a point or two where I was not sure ANYONE was going to play anything – it was also as powerful a jazz show as I’ve seen in almost 25 years of eagerly attending them.

The concert, which included only a few pieces, including a long “America” medley accidentally chopped into two pieces, offered great songs, great solos, and perhaps the finest arrangements I have ever seen at a jazz show. (These, with a full range of horns, were by Carla Bley, who sadly did not attend.) It was a show in which almost every note was played by someone you’d never heard of – the group was made up of students and alums from the jazz program Haden founded at CalArts – but nearly all of his was moving and persuasive. Some of it truly kicked ass.

Soon after I moved to Los Angeles in 1997, I attended a show at the old Jazz Bakery. I’m not sure who the artist was, maybe Brad Mehldau. In any case, I saw Haden casually standing around the audience that night and thought, Wow, I have really arrived at a major cultural center. (I was too cowed to introduce myself.) My friend the jazz critic Ted Gioia had a similar experience a few decades before. “I still recall the first time I heard him, when I was a college freshman,” Ted told me. “He was playing with Keith Jarrett at Oakland's Paramount Theater.  I thought then (and still believe it): Haden has the most beautiful bass tone in the history of jazz.”

It’s impossible, of course, to separate musical performances from the circumstances around them, and that goes double for last night’s gig. Live shows are always “you had to be there” events; this sense of the fleeting moment is amplified when you have a major artist who we may never see perform again, as may be the case with Haden. When I said as much yesterday, he tweeted back, Thanks 4 the nod Scott,but  I'm gonna make sure it's not my last hurrah but another hurrah in a long life! Hope u'll b there. Of course, this is a prediction about which I will very happily be proven wrong. But Haden’s health problems – a return of his childhood polio – are serious. (He has neither performed live nor eaten solid food in two years, I think.)

Haden came out at the beginning of the show, along with his young group. There was a bit of fussing with mic placement and other things. His cherubic smile is still there, and his storytelling is undiminished. (I meant this both to his anecdotes and his ability to “tell my story,” as he described it, on his double bass.) He walks with a cane, conducted the pieces rather than played them, and seemed to lose his place while speaking a few times. Nonetheless, we got a sense of a very strong personality, and someone whose love of music burns as strong as ever. He spoke about his friendship with Scott LaFaro, the Bill Evans Trio bassist who died very young in a car accident (one of very few bassists whose solos could be as lyrical as Haden’s) and Jim Hall, the graceful and understated guitarist who had died earlier in the day, and the difficulty of making sense of death. He also described his condition a bit, offering “Fuck polio!”

Chris Barton of the LA Times wrote in his review that it was "a night so fraught with the shadow of that unwelcome guest artist who can sit in at any moment: Time."

There is another aspect to the legacy of Charlie Haden: When he moved out to Los Angeles in the 1950s to seek out the jazz pianist Hampton Hawes, he made a permanent difference in the musical life of this city. CalArts jazz program is part of it. But the whole Haden clan adds up to about as substantial a musical family as we’ve ever seen. Haden’s kids – Rachel, Tanya, Petra and Josh – have, between them been part of That Dog, The Decemberists, the Rentals, Spain, and a good number of solo projects. (There are probably only a handful of us who listen with equal ardor to Haden’s playing with Ornette Coleman, Petra’s all-vocal reimagining of the early Who, Josh’s “slowcore” band Spain, and so on, but I am glad to have them all part of Southland musical life. Let me add: Spain, which recently reformed, shows how the aesthetics of jazz and a certain kind of nuanced, VU-ish rock can be combined in a way far richer than most over-emphatic, jive-ass fusion: They remain gripping and majorly underrated.)

The night, in short, left me feeling that jazz has a future, a subject I go back and forth on. The Liberation Music Orchestra organized for the show should stay together and, if possible, tour. Any kind of big band, perhaps especially an unconventional one, is hard to sustain economically. The show also reminded me how conducive a space to acoustic jazz REDCAT can be – with great acoustics and 230 or so seats, it’s the perfect size. The numbers are hard when you have a dozen or so people onstage and only a few hundred in the audience. But musically it was pure heaven.

The concert opened with the anthem of the African National Congress (in honor of Mandela), included the Bowie/Metheny “This is Not America” (which has never sounded so good), Coleman’s “Skies of America,” “Amazing Grace,” and closed with an encore of the Miles/Evans tune “Blue in Green.” For the final tune, Haden picked up his bass – we’d been told not to expect this – and played as deep and soulful a bass part as I can imagine. Despite being physically rickety, the music is still coursing through him and seemed to give him new strength.

Despite having listened to many Haden performances from the last half-century, and having seen him play a bunch of times, I don’t think I’ve ever heard him speak. Given my genial image of him, it was startling to hear his political rants – he’s a longtime lefty and anti-racist -- onstage anecdotes and thoughts on nature and music: He came across like a ‘50s Beat crossed with an ornery mountain man, appropriately enough for a guy from the Ozarks. His vocal chords are paralyzed, so at times it was hard to make out what he was saying, but I hope Haden has been taking notes on his life and music. There is clearly much fight left in this country boy.

Let me close with a rant of my own, or rather, by an art critic I admire. Jed Perl’s recent piece in The New Republic describes a process that is reshaping the world of visual art, or at least, its meaning during the market boom. It is not the neglect of the art, but rather the wrong kind of attention. As he writes:

Among the most revolting sports favored by the super-rich is the devaluation of any reasonable sense of value. At Christie’s and Sotheby’s some of the wealthiest members of society, the people who can’t believe in anything until it’s been monetized, are trashing one of our last hopes for transcendence. They don’t know the difference between avidity and avarice. Why drink an excellent $30 or $50 bottle of wine when you can pour a $500 or $1000 bottle down your throat? Why buy a magnificent $20,000 or $1 million painting when you can spend $50 or $100 million and really impress friends and enemies alike?

I think Perl is right, by the way, and my book, Creative Destruction, which comes out next year, concerns itself with some of these matters. And it’s not just the plutocracy: The cultural left, which is where I usually find myself, has run down the possibility of the arts as a holy space at least as far back as Warhol and Derrida. The irrelevance or “complicity” of culture has become an unexpected spot where right and left often meet.

But I must also add: Whether this is the last time any of us see Charlie Haden pick up the bass, or if he plays for another decade, and whatever the concert’s little rough spots, last night was quite clearly -- for many of us assembled -- a night of transcendence achieved.

(Photo credits: First by Steve Hochman, others by Steve Gunther, all REDCAT 10 December 2013)

Celebrating Charlie Haden

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TUESDAY night in Los Angeles will see both a celebratory and a sad occasion: The jazz titan Charlie Haden – the lyrical bass player, free-jazz pioneer, crucial collaborator to Ornette Coleman and others, father to a four Los Angeles indie rockers, founder of CalArts jazz program – will lead his Liberation Music Orchestra at REDCAT. It has special music since this group – which Haden began in 1969 – was dedicated to music of the Spanish Civil War, Latin American independence and South Africa’s fight for justice. The REDCAT show’s arrangements were made by the jazz composer Carla Bley, who played a major role in the original group.

The bad news is that this may be the last-ever public appearance by Haden, whohas been very sick. He will pay with the group if he is physically able, but he may simply appear for a last hurrah from the Southland’s jazz community.

I’ve been listening to Haden – first, I think, on Coleman’s Change of the Century, then on dates he led, like his Quartet West LPs and his Montreal dates – since I got into jazz two decades ago. He’s collaborated with more of my favorite artists – Keith Jarrett, Brad Mehldau, Paul Motian, Lee Konitz, Hank Jones, Kenny Barron, many others – than just about anyone I can think of. He’s taught a number of young musicians I know and admire, and the Haden triplets and Josh Haden (leader of the ethereal band Spain) are among the cream of LA’s rock subculture.

Haden, who grew up in a country-music family in the Ozark Mountains, and whose basslines still offer songlike lines and a country twang, contracted polio as a teenager, and he is now suffering, in his 70s, from post-polio syndrome.

At this point, it’s hard for me to contemplate the Southland jazzworld without Charlie Haden. So I won’t. I urge everyone who loves Haden’s music, and the numerous traditions that intersect in his work and life, to come out to REDCAT tomorrow and blow the roof off the place.

Digging the New Dean Wareham

DESPITE our well-documented bias for things West Coast, the Misread City gang has a deep and abiding love for the work of Dean Wareham going back to the Galaxie 500 and Luna eras. The day after seeing Luna on its first US tour (opening for the Sundays, if memory serves, and before the first LP), we walked to the local record store in Chapel Hill to pick up the band's Slide EP. (It was what we imagine kids in the '50s used to do.)

Dean -- whose roots are in Australia and New Zealand and whose early bands were based in Boston and New York -- has recently moved to Los Angeles. He's also just released his first solo record, an EP called Emancipated Hearts. (Check out the track called Air.) We spoke to Dean about his new work, the state of the music business, and his feelings for California.

Dean Wareham plays Thursday night at Largo at the Coronet, one of LA's best clubs. We'll be there. Here's our Q & A with him.

You’ve been in a number of semi-famous indie bands – Galaxie 500, Luna, Dean & Britta – and are now releasing what I take to be your first solo recording. How is it different from leading a band, and is it strange feeling to be on your own?

 To tell you the truth it still feels like a band effort, these are musicians I have been playing with for some years now: Britta Phillips on bass and Anthony LaMarca on drums, and augmented on this mini-LP by producer Jason Quever, who played keyboards and electric guitar. So anyway, technically yes it’s a “solo” release because it says so on the front of the record. I’m doing all the singing, and I write all the lyrics and melodies, but I depend on those around me to help figure out the arrangements.

That’s not so different from how I’ve been recording my whole career. Perhaps the difference was at the mixing stage, Jason Quever mixed it, and I was there too, but we didn’t have a whole band sitting behind him making comments. Last night the four of us had a rehearsal at Jason's studio in San Francisco and the band sounds really good, both on the new songs we recorded together but also on the Galaxie 500 and Luna songs we are doing.

You’re known for songwriting, but you’ve always had a great knack for covers – Wire’s Outdoor Miner, Jonathan Richman, Sweet Child of Mine, and so on. What makes a song right for you to play, besides, you know, liking it?

Picking covers is hit and miss. Just because I love a particular song does not mean I can pull it off vocally. I covered "Distractions" by Bobby Darin, a sly anti-war song from his folk period. But my rendition was not quite successful. Nor was Luna's rendition of "Dancing Days" by Led Zeppelin, though at least there is a bit of comedy in my singing that. Anyway I do look for songs that are under-appreciated, lost even. 

One of my favorite tracks on here is the digital-only number, Living Too Close to the Ground, an Every Bros song significantly less well-known that, say, Cathy’s Clown. How did you stumble upon this one and what made it seem right for you?

The Everly Brothers are amazing, first for their rhythm guitar playing (and this is more evident in the ‘50s songs), but there is also this ‘60s period where they recorded a number of great albums for Warner Brothers, albums that didn’t do well at radio (at least in the States, they were more popular in England). They were probably out of fashion, but they kept making records. “Living Too Close to the Ground” I think was written by their bassist (though I’m not positive about that, I’ve read a couple different things); anyway it is a great lyric and their recording is haunting and weird. I’m happy with how mine turned out too — there’s a delicious slide guitar solo in there — played by Jason.

You’ve written in your memoir Black Postcards one of the best assessments of the shift from the label era of the ‘80s and ‘90s to our current post-Napster musical universe. Lots of raging debate right now on Pandora, piracy, the joys of going it alone with Kickstarter, etc. Be brief if you like, but how are you enjoying our brave new world?

I didn’t quite realize as I was writing my book, that it was about something that was disappearing, a world of compact discs and tour support and even indie labels giving healthy advances to bands. The book ends in 2005, since then of course many more changes. Back then it was the early days of piracy (or filesharing), now people are just as concerned about streaming.

As you say, there have been some interesting discussions online lately, David Lowery arguing that the internet revolution has been terrible for musicians, and others writing about the dangers of Spotify — and on the other side Dave Allen, formerly of the Gang of Four, arguing that “the internet doesn’t care” and that we are simply in a transitional phase between technologies, with new markets being formed. Maybe that's true; certainly the old marketplaces are disappearing and we can see that with our eyes. Dave Allen also points to artists like Amanda Palmer and Trent Reznor and says they’ve got it figured out -- so what’s wrong with the rest of us? Which sounds like an updated bootstrap argument to me, something Dickens would make fun of. We hear similar thoughts from Thomas Friedman, that if we can continually reinvent ourselves and learn new technologies, we’ll be fine. 

At any rate there have always been challenges, being a recording artist or musician has never been a very reliable job. I know the 1990s were good times for the music business as a whole, it was a golden age where they convinced everyone to replace their vinyl collection with compact discs, how great was that? And if your band had a hit at radio, then maybe you did well. 

It is an interesting time to be in a band; there are certain advantages — it’s cheaper than ever to make recordings and distribute them all over the world, via the miracle of Internet and social media. It's easier than ever to reach your audience. The problem now is it’s more difficult to sell music. We hear a lot that music should be free. Sure, it should be free, and so should health care and education, and recording studios, and my rent should be controlled too. But unfortunately we don't live in that world.

You moved to Los Angeles earlier this year. What’s it like for a longtime New Yorker, originally from down under, to land in California? What do you like here and what do you miss about the East?

I lived in Sydney, Australia, from age 7 to 14. I only know Sydney from a child’s perspective, but Los Angeles reminds me of that city — the sprawl, the perfect weather, the Eucalpytus and Jacaranda trees. I have only been here six months but Los Angeles certainly has its charms, its rich history, good food, plenty of culture. But I miss some of the freedom of New York, where it is much easier to go out at night, easier to wander the streets or ride a bicycle. Life in Los Angeles, as John Cassavetes said, is life by appointment. But the truth is I spend most of my time at home, avoiding traffic, playing guitar, running my record label, making sure the social media is updated — pulling myself up by my bootstraps.