We get mentioned on YouTube sort of

Hey, it looks like one of my posts was a catalyst for a video by a semi well-known opaquely-named YouTuber. He has been the victim of some kind of smear campaign to make his videos seem negative, competition-oriented, and status-obsessed. Which they are, but he wants them not to be thought of that way. 

At least the few I've seen. I tried to “research” this further by watching a couple more videos, but I couldn't hang with it. Clearly I am not the intended audience. Looking at the list of his videos en masse I'm getting a very similar vibe as some YouTube nitwits I've written about previously. Not good. I know he he's had an education, but I'm not seeing any evidence of any depth at all. If it's there I wish he would put it in his videos. But he doesn't. I'm starting to feel cheated for the 15 minutes it costs to watch them.  

Sidebar: If you want to know what substantive, positively-focused content looks like, take a snoop through the archives of fellow bloggers Jon McCaslin and Ted Warren.  

So, this new video is partly a reaction to my post Authenticity, which he quotes and screencaps, but doesn't mention this site by name, or link to the post. Normal etiquette would be to at least identify the subject of your quote, but YouTubing is not really about that. 

My post was partly about my own experiences with the concept of authenticity, as a young white jazz student and musician from the Pacific Northwest; and it was partly about my reaction to his video “DOES AUTHENTICITY MATTER?”, in which goes at great length about authenticity in jazz as being about achieving supreme status, and surviving punishing combat, and people being mean to you— a lot of sturm und drang.   

Anyway, here, because I link to things I talk about, is the new video: 

Noted that it wraps up with a pitch for his method of learning jazz by learning hiphop instead, which I also reviewed in a previous post. 

So, I feel I'm seeing a strange act of deflection; he argues against himself being perceived as a kind of mean, gatekeeping “music school jazz nerd” drummer, while putting that same criticism onto others, who presumably are guilty of it. 

The opening is pure fear and adversary— the frame is that people are trying embarrass you for being interested in what they're interested in... jazz drumming... to which the natural response is to be scared and aggrieved and run away and give up. 

Marketing adolescent fear is very popular on the internet. People love the idea that there are disapproving, purely ego-motivated jazz snobs who will correct your errors unapologetically, and to punish them by quitting and not listening to them is awesome. Hop over there and look at the comments. It's one big celebration of quitting jazz for the hatred of mythical jazz snobs.      

He claims to be encouraging to newcomers, but saying I am encouraging is not the same thing as being encouraging. Especially when, in the very next sentence, he helplessly reverts to the old crucible of high performance competition business. 

Arguing with that framing is like turning on Fox News and saying “well, at least they put their bias up front.” But it's influencing you in ways you don't even understand. You think “well, I know this is bullshit, so the truth must be the opposite of that.” But you're still living on their terms, while the real truth is in another country and time zone, speaking a language you've never heard of. Like, I'm talking about making wine and you're talking about clawing your way to the top writing an android app. Bringing the mentality of the latter into the former is a recipe for some fucked-up wine. 

I'll close by saying I don't care about the superficial conflict aspect of this— beyond being a little bit irked at not being credited for my quote— none of this is personal, it is about the content of a line of video product, which happens to reflect some very common negative attitudes promoted on the internet. I only comment on it because we can learn something about being musicians, teachers, and media consumers from it. Today the lesson is beware of living in other people's narratives, doing so may mess you up in ways you don't expect or understand. And maybe don't sell fear and ego. 

[h/t to Anthony Amodeo, an excellent drummer and teacher living in New York, for alerting me to this video]

Authenticity

“I grew up happy and rich and I can play blues.” 

— Miles Davis 

“You're not Art Blakey, you're a white kid from Eugene.”  

— some guy

I worried about “authenticity” for maybe a couple of years in the late 80s. How could I be a real jazz musician being a white kid from Oregon? To be for real you had to be from New York, or some other city that sounds like a place. You had to move naturally, and have a cool sounding name, and be from “the streets”... somehow. Whatever that means. You had to have a pedigree, and at that time the Pacific Northwest really felt like no place, even though there was actually a lot of music happening. A couple of years later grunge happened, Bill Frisell moved to Seattle, the movie Drugstore Cowboy came out, and suddenly I felt like the region had an aesthetic. That's all authenticity meant to me— finding a feeling that I had some kind of cultural basis to be a creative musician.

And that was completely dumb. Most artists do not come from New York or wherever, and do not have any cultural pedigree. They come from mediocre places, and had bad teachers or no teachers, and no support, and most of them own it. Many of them appear to be quite ordinary humans like you and me.

In this video, Nathaniel Smith, better known as 80/20 drummer, is talking about something else entirely. Apparently being a jazz musician is a rigorous, savagely competitive enterprise of deep seriousness, not unlike undertaking advanced study of the works of Montesquieu at the Sorbonne. Like, how dare you. Also it's about pain and nausea, and people beating the crap out of you for not being good:





I left a flippant comment to the effect of lol it's not that hard, just learn some tunes and try to sound like you've heard a jazz record. I'm not real excited about the focus on the hostility and misery, the crucible of combat, and all the people eagerly waiting to destroy you for not knowing a tune. This thing is like watching Whiplash all over again. Like, “paying dues” doesn't mean you have been punished a lot so now you're a cat. It just means you've worked— played a lot of gigs, maybe very crappy ones.

We never get a really satisfactory answer to either of his opening questions: What is a real jazz drummer? and Does authenticity matter? Maybe it's a youtube thing, teasing questions you never answer. The upshot is that being a real jazz drummer means you are Nasheet Waits, and people have been really mean to you, and you are a world class scholar. I don't know. This shit wears me out.

“...it all just laid on you like a slab of cement, and you wanted to get out and away, they were like heavy stupid parents insisting upon regulations and ways that would make even the dead cringe.” 

— Charles Bukowski

“Here, as you know, whatever a person may do, he is always under the sway of Monsieur Descartes’ intelligence. Everything instantly withers and grows dusty. What France really needs is a good kick in the ass from America.”  

— Salvador Dali 

I mean, the one thing this country had going for it was its unseriousness. The freedom to play around, figure out what you're interested in, and find your own voice. Make some mistakes. There is already a place where the ghosts of great men watch over your every move, like hawks with horsewhips in their talons, and pull down your pants and shame you for your feeble attempts at creativity, and it's called Europe.

Arguably Dali's kick in the ass has already happened— my point is that fetishizing genius, and competition, is not real helpful when you're just some guy exercising your basic human right to have a voice and make some art. Living up to your own idea of what you should be doing musically is hard enough, and motivating enough.

“...I mean, try to sound like you've heard a jazz record...” 

— A very accomplished jazz pianist, to himself, at a jam session, in a very dark mood at the bar after playing with a drummer who did not fulfill that modest standard. 

So yeah: learn some tunes and try to sound like you've heard a jazz record. It's also a community and professional thing, so connect with other musicians and play some gigs. Nobody starts out knowing everything. Some players are serious, eloquent scholars, but what is required is only that you commit and listen a lot and play a lot. Love the music.

How to really play jazz drums

I received this question by email:

I wondered if I might trouble you with a small query about a video I recently watched: It's called 'How To (Really) Play Jazz Drums' and it's presented by a guy who does a channel on more advanced playing (you know, Guilliana, Nate Smith and others). It struck me as an odd way to develop a jazz vocabulary, and I wondered what you take is on this? Is learning how to 'really' play Jazz is through the filter of hip hop?! 

He's not a massive fan of the syncopation method (it seems), and his videos are pretty popular. Is this a worrying trend, or a valid gateway?

I think I've watched one of this drummer's videos before (can't find his name, just many repetitions of the 80/20 Drummer trademark)— the only biographical info I found states that he was a student of John Riley's, and that he lives in New York. I'll watch the video and state any observations as they come up. The presentation is pretty meta, so you have to have been playing the music for several years to know what he's talking about. I like that for myself, because I hate sitting through a lot of re-explanation of basic things, but novices might be lost or misled.

Learning to play swing
Good: He says swing is a way of playing 8th notes. As you know, it makes me angry when people say “it's triplets” and move on. Not angry, but I don't like it as an explanation of swing.
OK/questionable: He says the way to learn to play swing rhythm is to play along with hip hop. It's not a bad exercise, but usually the first suggestion would be that you play and listen to jazz music.

“Bottom up”
He suggests that jazz is usually thought of as “top down” playing, by which I assume he means that it is ride cymbal-driven, or hands-driven. So when  he says bottom up, he apparently means playing in a bass drum-driven way, like in backbeat-oriented styles. It's a good exercise, not so good as your primary concept. It takes some musicianship to pull it off in a way that doesn't sound like a funk or rock drummer trying to play jazz, and that doesn't draw some pointed questions from the more experienced musicians you play with.

The hihat conversation
The presentation about the hihat doesn't cut it for me— I need a little more to work with by way of explanation. I can see what he's doing, but his job is to explain it. He says conversation the way other people use interaction, or coordination, or independence, which is a good idea. The words you choose matter, and conversation suggests a more musical way of thinking than independence does.

How he plays the drums
With all of this talk about jazz drumming, but no talk about jazz music, you want to check if you're ending up in the right place. He has a nice touch, has a command over the instrument, plays things that are stylistically “correct”, and probably sounds great playing with a band. In his demonstrations I'm not hearing what I consider a jazz musician's phrasing, which is going to be oriented around four measure or longer phrases. Basically, if I'm not able to hear Bye Bye Blackbird— a blues, something— as a backdrop to what you play, it sounds wrong to me.

Not a great title
At the 8 1/2 minute mark, it occurs to me we're not really talking about jazz here— he's more sketching out some ways of doing creative independence, with, it happens, a swing feel. “Jazzy” hip hop, maybe.

The feel
Hmm, all we get here is “practice with the metronome on the swing & of 2/4.” Not a bad suggestion, but I'd think that subject would merit a fuller treatment.

Conclusion
Objectively what he's done is sketch out some ways of practicing hip hop with a jazz-like feel; so the title's no good. You can't have a jazz video without some kind of reference to jazz music, and the common practice of it. He's clearly educated, and able to play, but what I'm hearing feels curiously detached from the tradition. Normally jazz musicians make references to that stuff without even thinking about it, so it makes me wonder to what extent it's part of his background in a serious way at all, or what's going on here. Overall not a bad sketchpad for alternative ways of practicing a jazz feel, and coordination, not good as a primary concept. B-