[Dixielandjazz] The Case For A New Kind of Popular Music

[Stephen Barbone]

While this article is not OKOM, the parallels are striking. Sometimes we
think that only OKOM is in trouble, when in fact, the entire world of
music is in trouble. Below is an interesting read that can easily be
modified to help those of us who play the music, and record it, do it
better.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

January 2, 2004 - NEW YORK TIMES

REVERBERATIONS - By JOHN ROCKWELL

Beyond Singles and Concept Albums, Pop Yearns for a Long Form

A gift under our Christmas tree was a two-DVD album of David Bowie's
collected videos. Mr. Bowie has been a composer of songs and their video
visualization for 32 years, since his earliest efforts for the BBC, and
video vignette after video vignette was both musically appealing and
visually engaging.

Yet after a dozen of them my interest waned. Too many discrete songs,
one after the other, is like reading a joke book or eating candies. They
don't make an album, or a novel, or a meal.

Which got me to thinking about popular music and its decades-long,
stumbling quest for a successful extended form. When I retired myself as
chief rock critic of this newspaper in 1980, one reason was the tiresome
predictability of the same short song structures, the same idioms, the
same mannerisms. The bedrock of tradition is one thing; the deep rut of
routine quite another.

Not that pop composers haven't tried to stretch out. We've had rock
operas, like the Who's "Tommy" or Neil Young's recent "Greendale," which
were really successions of songs, even if they told a story.

In that sense they were like the concept albums, first LP's and later
CD's, in which musicians tried to set a mood (Frank Sinatra's premiere
collection of lost-love ballads, "Only the Lonely"), create a world (the
Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band") or make a statement
(Pink Floyd's "Wall").

But there seems now to be a widespread fear, in this era of the
downloading of singles on the Internet, that the album as a marketable
package and artistic statement is slipping away. The whole music
business is in trouble, but album sales declined 20 percent over the
last three years, reports Nielsen SoundScan. People want to grab the
songs they particularly like, free or for 99 cents, burn them onto their
own CD's in their own order and ignore the rest. "I see the demise as
inevitable," David Bowie himself said, as quoted in The Dallas Morning
News.

For some rock 'n' roll purists this is merely a restoration of the true
and natural order of the universe. Rock was originally about singles,
and a lot of albums consisted, or consist, of padding around a couple of
hits. The padding became all the more patent when albums expanded from
the LP's 40-minute length to the CD's 70 minutes. If the album goes
away, so, some might hope, will pop padding, pretension and pomposity.

Take that, all you hopeless English art-rock bands of the 70's, like
Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and all the way up to Paul McCartney's
clueless "Requiem." When technically limited pop artists try to emulate
orchestral classics — as David Byrne did in his music to Robert Wilson's
"Forest" or as Stewart Copeland did in his dreadful opera "Holy Blood
and Crescent Moon" — they either turn their skeletal song inspirations
over to hack classical arrangers or they ape the surface characteristics
of classical music with none of its muscle and heart.

Yet artists and the public have shown a perennial need for music that
transcends a three- or four-minute limit. In instrumental music, that's
not so hard, as any number of jazz or disco and techno numbers or
bleary-eared jams (the Grateful Dead) attest through sheer, dogged
repetition of their basic elements. On a more artistically elevated
level, the folk guitarist John Fahey showed and the jazz pianist Keith
Jarrett shows a wonderful skill in knitting together fragments
of music into album-length improvisations (Mr. Jarrett's "Köln
Concert").

But songs with lyrics are harder to expand, unless instrumentally
fleshed out (Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven"). Songs knit together
sequentially are a revue, or a musical. Songs more seamlessly knit
become modern-day opera.

That was why I found Jeanine Tesori's score for her collaboration with
Tony Kushner, "Caroline, or Change," so promising. This has been billed
as a musical, and may well move as such to Broadway from the Public
Theater. But lovers of older-fashioned musicals remain puzzled by it.
They lament the score's lack of hummable tunes, even if they profess
respect for Ms. Tesori's work. They fret that it's chilly and
emotionally distant, even confusing, as pop idioms are juggled from
(embedded) song to fragment to snippet.

What Ms. Tesori has done is to create a successful pop long-form
composition: an opera if you will. There are plenty of moments when her
singers can rear back and belt, even if not all the singers at the
Public have the vocal chops to do so. But what's ingenious is the
continuity of the text and music, the way everything flows together at
no cost (to my ears) to the vitality of the moment. It's exciting to
read that Ms. Tesori and Mr. Kushner have planned more projects
together.

On one hand this kind of work — I'm also thinking of fellow new-musicals
composers like Michael John LaChiusa, Stephen Flaherty, Jason Robert
Brown, Adam Guettel and most recently Stephin Merritt, although some of
these are so far sticking with linked songs — represents a new fusion of
the musical and opera. This is a subject already much written about,
going all the way back to Virgil Thomson and George Gershwin to Kurt
Weill and Gian Carlo Menotti
in the 50's through Leonard Bernstein and on to Stephen Sondheim.

But maybe the lines of influence can flow the other way, whereby
composers of musicals can help invigorate pop music. There would be a
certain symmetry in this. Rock 'n' roll arose in the 50's as a challenge
to pop standards, which were (in often debased form) the songs from the
golden age of the American musical.

If composers like Ms. Tesori can circle around and inspire a pop
composer like, say, Alicia Keys to stretch herself beyond the singles
format, everyone might profit. These new long-form composers will need
to keep themselves communicative, connected to some kind of real and
viable audience. Sheer performing or composing virtuosity can please
musicians but alienate audiences.

A pop composer of extended forms needs to know not just the vast range
of musical idioms now suitable for transformation, but also the harmonic
and theoretical underpinnings needed to effect such transformations. Yet
all that knowledge can't usurp the need to thrill people or move them or
fascinate them; learning must be worn lightly.

In this time of crisis for pop music and the pop-music business, it's
time for a rethinking of basic assumptions, even at the price of a
little pomposity. The album as a set of loosely linked songs may be
moribund. But long live the album, or the stage, as a home for a new
kind of popular music, one that appeals equally to head and heart.