Pat Metheny * Zero Tolerance for Silence

Pat Metheny, guitars * December 16, 1992


Some people don't want to eat their musical vegetables. They consider music only a dessert on the buffet table of the arts, and because Zero Tolerance is no twinkie they reject it. Because of this, the album has slipped out of print, condemned by critics and fans alike.

But for those who have the courage to listen to music which pushes back; music which provides a type of psychological and spiritual resistance to our fast-food culture, this album is essential.

This music was born in a time of reductionist destruction. Grinding guitars and grunge appropriations of '60s pop music was dominating the charts, and a generally cynical and sinister take on our society was exploding on the alt-rock scene. Disturbing as the music and poetic of Kurt Cobain (and those of his milieu) was, it was important for at least one indispensable reason: it warned us as a society that we weren't as clean, guiltless, and virtuous as we might like to pretend we are.

In the face of this, what was a great musician like Pat Metheny to do? Ignore it all? Deny the obvious sonic criticism that was shaking our musical culture? A true artist can't ignore what he hears around him. I believe Pat Metheny's answer was Zero Tolerance for Silence.


Zero Tolerance can seem like an aural endurance test, and in a way it is. The haunting, institutional light that dangles on it's cover seems to fritz away at us, in a holding pen or interrogation chamber. And the music will indeed try to get a confession out of us. But this is music with profound shape and direction--and that direction, which seems to take us through a type of destructive experience, is ultimately positive. Zero Tolerance is ultimately a massive, hopeful piece, and a valuable precursor to Metheny's later magnum opus, The Way Up. Its message suggests that even if we get hit by a tremendous, seemingly relentless blow, we can still stagger back out into the daylight, put one foot slowly in front of the other, and rebuild.

There will always be listeners who like the "London" Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams, but who find his F minor Symphony "too disturbing." There are those who prefer Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, but "can't handle" Mozart's Requiem. Some people love the Firebird and wish Stravinsky had never written Rite of Spring.

Zero Tolerance for Silence is America's F minor symphony, and just as revolutionary. In 1934, Ralph Vaughan Williams shocked his listening audience, who expected more pastoral grace and expressions of musical peace, by producing a symphony of violence and warning--ending with a shocking buildup of tension and the orchestra slamming the argument closed like a door. Zero Tolerance is as shocking as RVW's symphony, and with as unexpected an end result--a staggering, hopeful (if injured) working forward. We should be grateful for it. Get a copy while you still can--they aren't going to be around much longer.

Pat Metheny/Ornette Coleman * Song X * 1985/2005

Pat Metheny Guitar, Guitar Synth
Ornette Coleman Alto Saxophone, Violin
Charlie Haden Bass
Jack DeJohnette Percussion
Denardo Coleman Drums, Percussion

Recorded "Live" at The Power Station, NYC * December 12-14, 1985

Police People  (*)
All of Us  (*)
The Good Life (*)
Word from Bird (*)
Compute (*)
The Veil (*)
Song X
Mob Job
Endangered Species
Video Games
Kathelin Gray
Trigonometry
Song X Duo
Long Time No See

(*) additional tracks released on the 20th Anniversary edition only 

In the event that Civilization as we know it wakes up with a hangover one morning, yawns with boredom, takes a vote, and decides to crumble beneath the weight of its own pretensions, contradictions, and selfishness; and in the equally likely event that there is some profoundly learned and well meaning monk scouring the internet, hoping to find examples of culture worth preserving and smuggling through a new dark ages, I propose that he seriously listen to one of the very best results from the musical laboratory of the Pax Americana--

                                  Song X by Pat Metheny and Ornette Coleman.

There is nothing out there quite like Song X. Precursors, yes--Metheny's own output hinted strongly at a desire for this sort of project in his landmark 80/81, and as all of the tracks on this album were written primarily by Ornette, one hears a strong continuity with the rest of his output. But even with this in mind, something about Song X is always fresh, unprecedented, and unrepeatable. Pat was candid in his liner notes to the 20th anniversary edition, stating that their goal had been "to make a record that was unlike anything that had been done before." Bold words, usually reserved for youngsters attempting their first album--not seasoned veterans who should know better. But they did know better--and more importantly they accomplished what they set out to.

This review is concerned with the 20th Anniversary edition, as it offers the most complete view of the sessions from December 1985, which in turn enables us to better approach even that music which was originally released. I say this to make an important point: much of how we are able to comprehend difficult music like this lies in presentation, and specifically how we are 'taught', by the music itself, to approach it.  I've heard this album described as 'avant-guarde', 'straight ahead', 'post-bop', 'experimental', and many other terms, but none of the labels really capture what is going on in this music. It's doubtful that the term 'avant garde' meant much of anything by 1985, certainly this doesn't count. 'Straight ahead' conjures up a soundscape of polished bop, replete with chord changes and driving swing, and this album can't be easily jammed into that category. 'Post-bop', well...yeah...so is plenty of stuff, but the label is unhelpful (it's like calling our era the "Post Revolutionary War Era".  Kind of, but why drag Lafayette into it?)

Critics need to be forgiven, though: this is difficult, culturally packed music, as enigmatic as its name implies. We must let the music itself teach us what it is. And that's why the 20th anniversary edition is invaluable.

The six "new" tracks are more emphatically bright and open-air in quality than the denser materials of "Song X" and "Endangered Species"--the most dominant tracks of the album. This helps frame the emotional discussion, as it were. Whereas the original release opened with a the surging storm that is Song X itself, throwing listeners into a full-fledged aural challenge, the 20th anniversary edition presents us with "Police People" as a starter. At first it seems tongue in cheek, then, upon repeated listening, satirical. It is only after becoming thoroughly familiar with it, perhaps, that we realize the most extraordinary quality which permeates "Police People"--a quality like sunlight itself, often unnoticed but essential for vision. How Coleman, Metheny and crew manage it is a mystery, but the new lead-off is brilliant.

Also, the careful listener will hear thematic material in the first six tunes which weaves throughout the album. Pat's solo in Song X, for instance, incorporates a transformation of the main theme from Police People. Ornette's solo in The Veil utilizes what might be called the B theme from Endangered Species. Denardo Coleman's humorous use of sampled noises in "Compute" come back in a darker sense in Endangered Species. The original album released in 1986 lacked all of these foreshadowings, and as a result seemed much less intertwined and unified an expression than it actually was. Listening to the expanded version is therefore like finally getting to hear the first two movements of symphony that had been lost.

Two dominant sensations run through this "completed" version of the album. First, the sheer range and complexity of emotional material is impressive. From the wit of Ornette's violin solo on "Mob Job", to the dark regions identified in "Endangered Species" (where the listener might justifiably come to the conclusion that the title refers to homo sapiens), to the lyrical landscape achieved in "Song X Duo", the scope is rare in its breadth. But it is the intertwining and the thematic unity of the album that places it in a category beyond most other classic works of art. Song X  is more than a collection of songs, it is both a discovery and a question posed. It confronts us, warns us, instructs us, and helps us lighten up a bit about it all at the same time.

If either Ornette or Pat (or anyone who knows them) happens to come across this little review, I have only one request. The 30th anniversary is not far off: would you please release the complete sessions of Song X? 

 

Franklin Cohen plays Golijov

Sometimes words fail, and music must take their place when we shout for joy or cry out in agony. The clarinet is an instrument singularly capable of expressing certain profound emotions, and composers have often used it at moments of intense personal reflection. The Concerti of Mozart and Nielsen, the sonatas of Brahms, Poulenc, and Saint-Saens were all written close to the deaths of their respective composers. Combining the lyricism of the violin with human breath, the clarinet gives utterance to the soul unlike any other instrument; by turns joyous, melancholy, and probing.

Many composers, when writing pieces of real spiritual import, have chosen the clarinet as a primary vehicle. One such example can be found in Olivier Messiaen's monumental Quartet for the End of Time. Another has been written by Osvaldo Golijov, entitled The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind. Each of the last three centuries has produced an masterpiece for clarinet and string quartet. The late 18th gave us Mozart's, the late19th Brahms'; the late 20th century gave us Golijov's.

There are a growing number of excellent recordings of this piece. I remain deeply moved and impressed by David Krakauer's reading with the Kronos Quartet, but realize now that, as with any other masterpiece, Dreams and Prayers will never be exhausted by a multitude of great interpretations. Here is an important live performance excerpt by Franklin Cohen, who has also released a full recording.

 

  

Featured Recording: Sidney Bechet * Blue Horizon * December 20, 1944

Sidney Bechet * Blue Horizon

Sidney Bechet, clarinet
Sidney de Paris, trumpet
Vic Dickenson, trombone
Art Hodes, piano
George 'Pops' Foster, bass
Manzie Johnson, drums

December 20, 1944, NYC

Here is a recording every clarinetist should know and understand--even if at first the approach to the instrument is different from anything they've heard.

Sidney Bechet was called the greatest jazz musician of all by none other than Duke Ellington, and he has been credited with a fully formed jazz solo concept predating even Louis Armstrong. Because of his enigmatic career, and his sometimes intense personality (he once got deported from France for a gunfight at rush hour in the Paris metro) he is certainly less well known to the general public. Despite this, his music is of such profound value that I consider him a kind of American Muhlfeld. Rich, deep, intense, bursting with joy or sorrow, Bechet poured his soul through the horn, and the crackle he got from the wood was inimitable.

Bechet grew up in New Orleans, that garden of exotic clarinet sounds which quickly spread over the rest of the country, but never gained institutional acceptance in music schools. It was (and is) a "talking style" of playing, reminiscent of the way some historians have suggested early clarinetists in Europe played as well. Clinical and sterilized sounds are not considered a virtue in this style of playing, and every timbre from the sweet to the rough, the sublime to the piercing, is expected, exploited, and extended.

Part of the mission of The Jazz Clarinet is to reacquaint or introduce clarinetists to a variety of approaches, sound concepts, and styles which are often frowned upon or banned from the American conservatory establishment. Several of the recordings I've already shared fall into this category, the present being no exception.

"Blue Horizon" is one of the finest blues played on any instrument. I encourage every clarinetist, regardless of background or aspirations, to transcribe this solo--it will only make you a better, more flexible, and more emotional player.



Artie Shaw and the Altissimo

Best known for his intense rivalry with Benny Goodman, his succession of marriages to beautiful Hollywood starlets, his temper towards fans, his disdain of the music business, his enigmatic retirements and ultimate disappearance from the world of music in his artistic prime, what is often lost about Artie Shaw is perhaps the most remarkable thing about him: his revolutionary approach and accomplishments on the clarinet.

As early as 1938, when Artie recorded what might be considered the definitive version of his theme song "Nightmare", we can hear a clarinet like none heard before on record. Nearly the entire natural range of the clarinet is represented, without changes in timbre between registers--one long, flexible line from the bottom of the instrument to the top, without strain for high notes. Lightening clarity of fingers, always shaping phrases musically rather than mechanically pounding out patterns, this is virtuoso playing that has seldom, if ever, been equalled by clarinetists:


A contemporary of Shaw, the composer Arnold Schoenberg opined in 'The Future of Orchestral Instruments' (1924):

"Among the winds only the clarinet and horn can be given a favourable prognosis on the basis of their present state. The clarinet is almost as perfect as the violin, if not so versatile."[cited in Hoeprich, p. 206) 

Artie Shaw's recordings, especially dating from 1938 on, are perhaps the best justifications of Schoenberg's statement, for here we witness a clarinet with the flexibility and nearly the range of fine string playing. Indeed, had the Viennese composer written those lines in 1950, he might even have conceded versatility to match (in 1924, it would have taken a remarkable imagination to predict the heights clarinet performance would be pushed to over the next thirty years, by the likes of Benjamin David Goodman and Arthur "Artie Shaw" Arshawsky. Perhaps only the era of Bernhard Crusell and Heinrich Baermann in the early 19th century pushed the potential of the instrument so hard).

Artie Shaw was an enigmatic man, and any discussion of his playing tends to get sidetracked very quickly. The major distraction that never seems to lose interest is his personal life. But there is also the difficulty of parsing the better known quotes from Shaw himself. Like Goodman, he was always conscious of their rivalry, and he was not always complimentary towards the great Chicagoan. The intellectual Shaw would make a habit in his career of suggesting that while Benny was interested in playing the clarinet, he was interested in musical ideas. The implication was that Benny was a technician, Artie a musician.

There is a sense in which this assessment is unfair to both players. Anyone listening to ballads performed by Benny Goodman such as "Body and Soul", "Moonglow", or even "You're Blase" can hear a musician of considerable depth and gifts for phrasing. And as far as his musical ideas are concerned, while he was not as harmonically advanced as Shaw, nor as creative intellectually, there can be no doubt his solo ideas on faster numbers increased the language of jazz clarinet in a melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic sense. During the important years of 1935 until 1938, Goodman frankly exploded the notion of what it was to play jazz clarinet.

Yet paradoxically, Shaw's assessment also shadows his own unique accomplishments, in a very technical sense. In his drive for musical expression unimpeded by his instrument's perceived limitations, Shaw mastered the instrument in a unique way. From the recording of "Nightmare", we hear a fully formed clarinetist with a radically different approach to playing--and one which sidesteps many perceived problems. His flexibility and versatility have already been mentioned, but these qualities, like layer upon layers of the enigma, are also overlooked because of the awe inspiring quality his playing possessed like no other: a fully expressive, flexible, and melodic altissimo register, which he maintained from High G to what will be called "Double C" in this blog.

According to Shaw himself, his altissimo register was a direct result of performance conditions. Playing clarinet in front of a Big Band, often playing with poor speaker systems in dance halls 'the size of airplane hangers', Shaw needed to project above the orchestra. By all accounts he was self taught. And his goal was to have 'real' notes, fully sounding. How he accomplished what he did remains a mystery, but we are not left without clues as to how to approach the instrument in his manner.

Shaw wrote:

"A well known clarinet player came into my dressing-room after a show I'd just played in a theatre (we did five or six shows a day in those days, seven days a week, sometimes for months on end); I used to play my 'Concerto for Clarinet' at the end of every one, and he said 'Artie, do you end every show with that piece?' I said, 'Yes. Why?' He said 'You mean you always end on that top C?' I said, 'Of course. That's how the piece ends.' 'I know,' he said. 'But aren't you ever afraid you'll miss?' I said, 'Put your hand on the table.' He did, and I said, 'Raise your index finger.' He did. I said, 'Were you afraid you'd miss?' 'Well, no,' he said, and then, 'You mean it's like that?' 'If it isn't,' I said, 'don't mess with it.'"[quoted in Nolan, p.157]

For Shaw, range was not a matter of tension--it had to do with posture and training, to make difficult seeming things easy. But how do we crack his method?

It's worth watching Shaw performing excerpts of his 'Concerto': we are fortunate that an excellent performance of it has been preserved in the Fred Astaire movie, Second Chorus (1940). When watching, despite it being slightly out of sinc between audio and video, pay special attention to Shaw physically--note the shoulders, arms, fingers, and embouchure. His upper body is relaxed, with a stillness like a boxer--not tensely, but limber; no extraneous movement, but never stiff. His embouchure is unique, but bearing a resemblance to a more typically German embouchure--the clarinet held farther out, relaxed, with an emphasis on the upper lip. His fingers never tense, but flowing, confident.


His clarinet at this time was almost certainly a large bore Selmer (if anyone can identify the exact model, please do comment), also favored by Goodman at the time. Yet Goodman never controlled the altissimo to the degree the self-taught Shaw did.

My theory, after years of working on the altissimo to try and match Shaw's mastery, lies partially in that he was a self-educated genius of the instrument. Had he been 'properly' educated, his embouchure would probably have been set much differently. As it is, Shaw came to the clarinet through the saxophone, and seems to have simply adapted his alto-embouchure accordingly, with no preconceived ideas about a 'proper' classical sound. But there is possibly more to it.

The popular Method Book for clarinet by H. Klose, in Bellison's revision (published 1946) gives a conventional wisdom that was common among American clarinetists in Shaw's day no less than our own. In the introduction we read

"Do not sacrifice tone for technique. A good tone is a performer's most valuable asset. Let your practice be mostly in the medium and lower registers; the higher register will take care of itself." [Klose, p. 8]

In much French-based American clarinet pedagogy, it is the lower register (chalumeau) that is considered the basis for good tone on the clarinet--as stated above, it is assumed the "higher register will take care of itself." The catalogue of recordings that emphatically disprove this theory need not concern us here--it is enough to note that this principle is often, if not dominantly, taught.

Karl Baermann, on the other hand, seems to offer a different path in his method for clarinet, suggesting that the clarion and upper registers are the most important to develop:

"If this register (which is the finest on the Clarinet) is beautiful, the lower tones will also be necessarily good."    

This is an idea not often presented to American clarinetists, so dominated are we by French method (though Bellison himself played German system clarinets). Fortunately for us, both Shaw and Goodman seem to have had a different foundation. It seems likely that Goodman's youthful training at the Kehelah Jacob Synagogue and later at the hands of Franz Schoepp set a more German style foundation than is common here today, and Shaw's familiarity with klezmer style (as shown by such recordings as "Dr. Livingstone I presume" and even "Nightmare") hint at a musical past not always acknowledged.

Whatever may have been the case, both Shaw's and Goodman's approach seem to have been built not from the bottom up, but from the top down--with Shaw's approach and mission seeming the more radical and extreme of the two.

A central attribute of Shaw's altissimo is his command of dynamics. From the recordings we possess of him, we can piece together a sound picture, and it shows the outline of a player who could hit any note in his altissimo at any dynamic, comfortably. His own published "Jazz Method" (two slim volumes of interesting material) does not shed any light upon what exercises he must have done to attain this, but the "short finger exercises" of Baermann's Second Division are a possibly a clue.

I believe Shaw expanded these "short finger exercises" extemporaneously to reach Double C, and did not rest until he could navigate any musical material he might want up there with ease.

The combination of embouchure, relaxed approach, and orientation towards the instrument (top-down rather than bottom-up) are keys I've used to reach towards Shaw's mastery of the clarinet.

Happy Sixth Day of Christmas, everyone!

  References:

The Clarinet. Eric Hoeprich. Yale University Press, 2008.
Artie Shaw: King of the Clarinet. Tom Nolan. Norton & Co. 2010.
Benny Goodman and the Swing Era. James Lincoln Collier. Oxford University Press, 1989.
Celebrated Method for Clarinet. Klose (revised/Bellison). Carl Fischer.
Complete Method for Clarinet. Baermann (edited Langenus). Carl Fischer, 1918.