Artist's Statement

I am a serious musician because I fell in love with the soundtrack of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” when I was nine. I loved the sound of that music and wanted to hear and produce more like it. Since then I have grown to love the great works of all musical genres and have dedicated much of my life to identifying and studying the commonalities between the different musics I like. What I like about my favorite music now is exactly what I loved about “A Charlie Brown Christmas;” that is, the sound. I am not interested in music’s “meaning” or “expressive power;” I am interested in music as a pleasurable and deep aesthetic experience.

But I am also a human being with diverse interests. Music is the most important of them, but I wouldn’t be content without other experience in my life. In my opinion, a night out on the town with friends can be just as valid and deep a use of my time as a night alone listening to music.

It just so happens that the musical tradition I identify with the most, jazz, originated as a synthesis of these goals. It originated in social and dance settings but is able to stand on its own, as well. And although my own music is often outside the jazz tradition in the strictly musical sense, it is very close to jazz in the cultural sense. I try to create music that, like early jazz, is dance music from its very conception. It is not functional music, because it is not compromised to fit any extramusical goals and because the sound is the primary focus of the experience. Rather, it actually achieves its highest expression in being live at a party, in making feet tap and throats shout and eyes flirt. These are not shallow aims, and music that achieves them fully will, of necessity, be just as complex, artful, and valid as the headiest works of art music.

Last Friday, March 6, I had the pleasure of attending a recital by USC student Cassie Peterson. Cassie is an excellent pop and jazz singer who is about to graduate with a BA in music from USC. I should also mention that she is a friend of mine and that I have worked with her as a musician in many different situations, so I won't pretend to be entirely objective about the experience.

Cassie came to USC as a Jazz Studies major; at that time she was very committed to being a "jazz singer." Over her time here, as many of us students do, she lost a degree of enthusiasm for that particular tradition. She has changed quite radically and now works almost exclusively in a pop/folk vein. Her recital was a reflection of this; she began with an homage to her jazz roots by singing two standards in a straight-ahead (traditional) jazz style, and the remaining selections were pop, both originals and covers.

I mention this background not to shed light on the music. In fact, the music needs no explanation. It was simply perfect. Cassie and her band were battling sound problems the entire night, but not a note was out of place. The material, the programming of the material, and the execution of the material was at as high a level as I've seen live. If you're curious about what she sounds like, you can check out her Myspace here.

So what is this post about? The recital brought up some interesting aesthetic issues to me. You see, Cassie and I have wildly differing philosophies about music. Cassie says she is only interested in music with emotional content, music that "tells a story." I, on the other hand, am only interested in making a thing of beauty - I believe that pure music exists, and even where a song has clear emotional content, I'm more interested in the sound than any emotions it carries or inspires.

It's not that I think that music can't have an emotional element or inspire emotion; I just think that good music doesn't necessarily do so. You see, most of the time when people say they're only interested in "expression," they're merely paying lip service to the idea and aren't truly committed to it. It's actually pretty radical, if you think about it: it seems to suggest that they are most interested in raw punk or the challenging music of Ornette Coleman or Schoenberg (who, possibly apocryphally, said, "I never was very capable of expressing my feelings or emotions in words. I don't know whether this is the cause why I did it in music and also why I did it in painting"). It also seems to suggest that they are uninterested in the relatively pure music of a Haydn string quartet or a Dizzy Gillespie album.

Cassie is different, however. She believes wholeheartedly in the principle and actually follows through with it. I've tried to stump her by giving examples of music she likes that is to me "pure music," but she always finds emotional content in it. At her recital, she was in full emotional connection mode; she frowned during the sad songs and smiled during the happy ones. Now in my opinion she always sounds great, even when she's emotionally disconnected. However, she sounded even better at the recital. I've noticed at other times that she sounds better when she's more connected.

This leaves me with a classic question. An aesthetic with which I generally disagree has results I love; what, then, is its place in my artistic life? At this point, the easy way out is to say that having an emotional connection to the music is a technical tool that helps the sound even if the emotion isn't the eventual goal. I guess this is like the football player who is passionate about his sport. Winning, not emotion, is the point of the game, but the passion increases his chances of winning. When I am emotionally connected to music (I indeed can be; it's a skill I've developed in order to serve bandleaders who want that from me), I also sound better, even without buying into emotion on an intellectual level.

But this all has very little to do with Cassie. Take a listen and you'll probably like it, regardless of your philosophical outlook.

The Claudia Quintet

It's a huge shame that there is basically no discussion in the blogosphere of my favorite currently-active ensemble, The Claudia Quintet. I was fortunate enough to be introduced to the group about 4 years ago through my teacher and friend Joey Sellers, who is a friend of Claudia's leader and composer, John Hollenbeck. Since then, I've noticed the curious fact that serious musicians with a passion for new music have almost all heard of them, but very few others have. The group has won awards across the nation but doesn't even have a website (Hollenbeck's personal one covers it, sort of).

The Claudia Quintet is a new music group led by composer and percussionist John Hollenbeck. You'll sometimes find it categorized as "jazz," but this is only because Hollenbeck and several other members are noted jazz players. The music itself is firmly outside any genre, so much so that "beyond category" is sort of the default buzzword to describe the group. To my ear, particularly heavy influences include West African folk music, hip-hop, drum 'n' bass, free jazz, and minimalist classical music, but there's plenty of original content, as well.

To give you an idea of what this sounds like, check out these youtube clips, the two halves of the same piece.

and the second half:

This more or less exemplifies the sound, although the variety of material they present, even within a single album, is also impressive.


The Claudia Quintet is one of the few groups active today (besides friends of mine) that really gets me excited about music. It's influenced a lot of what I know about my own musical aesthetics, particularly because I find it very accessible despite the fact that it can be pretty challenging. This I know from conversations with other musicians. Analyzing why I took to such "out" music so easily has been very instructive. Here's a few of the things I found; I'll talk about them in relation to the clips above:


An interesting harmonic and melodic vocabulary: As you can tell, harmonically and melodically it's like nothing else. It's very far from a pop tradition, a jazz tradition (whether old and functional or new and modal), or any folk tradition that I know of. Some of it comes from modern classical music, because Hollenbeck is a trained classical composer from Eastman School of Music, but it's pretty unique even within that. However, as wonderful as this is, many groups have developed unique melo-harmonic palettes, so my attraction to this music in particular must be elsewhere.


The sound or timbre of the group, which is lovely. The instrumentation choice of clarinet or tenor sax, vibes, accordion, bass, and percussion was crucial. Each of the instruments blends with the others in a wonderful and, more importantly, unique way. Hollenbeck uses this to his advantage by reorchestrating melodies and ostinatos, getting far more mileage out of them than most other composers. Listen to the initial flurry that Matt Moran, the vibes player, plays in the beginning of the song. This is reorchestrated into the accordion, then later accordion and vibes together, and later accordion, vibes, and clarinet. These guys are all top musicians, as well, so they have unique and great sounds individually.


It grooves really hard. Hollenbeck is one of the sickest drummers alive, and Drew Gress, the bassist, has one of the fullest sounds and deepest pockets ever on the acoustic bass. When they team up on a groove, watch out. This piece has several cool ones. For example, the opening one is interesting in a typically polystylistic way; it sounds like a cross between a hip-hop groove and a West African ensemble, with the tight kick and snare drums hinting at backbeats in a duple meter and the bell hinting at an African 12/8 thing.



Compositional integrity. By this, I mean the development of ideas: that nothing is written which doesn't proceed from the preceding material. This is something that is really important to me as a writer and something of which Hollenbeck is a master. This piece, for example, is largely constructed around the initial flurry or cascade of notes I mentioned above. The reorchestration of that flurry gives it its first new dimension. When that's been exhausted, he changes the notes of the figure, suggesting the figure is textural, not harmonic. Just when that's been exhausted , he changes those flurries into a series of chordal hits that the band solos over (at 2:30 in Part 2), giving the initial cascades a harmonic, not textural, function. What's crucial to me is that all of these processes are audible. Though audible development is by no means the only way to go, it's something that I enjoy hearing in music and usually strive for in my own work.



I've had the pleasure of meeting the band twice: at a clinic at a local community college where I was first introduced to them, and at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 2005. I also brought Hollenbeck to do a clinic at USC this past fall (2008) and had the chance to hang a bit then. He is a gentle and intelligent person, and his attitude towards music is inspiring to me as his writing. As a matter of fact, I know some that aren't fans of his music who are inspired by hearing him talk. He is a true musician, interested in playing and writing music he likes. He is not interested in business or marketing, not interested in how his music is categorized or not categorized, and not interested in making a lot of money from it. He is curious and educated about music, and although his music, including that of the Claudia Quintet, sometimes sounds very complex, in the end he is only about the sound and whether he likes it. If that's the sort of attitude that results in music like The Claudia Quintet's, then that's something all artists can learn from.