Rule # 62.4.4

I was asked to write about my resentments of clarinets.

In music that concert bands perform there are no violins, violas, cellos or contrabasses. These instruments typically carry the lion’s share of melody of symphonic music that listeners are familiar with.

An arranger is paid to transcribe these orchestral works into something usable for high school players.

To make it sound close to the original, the arranger uses clarinets to carry the violin parts, as many high school players play that instrument.

I came from a very small rural high school with 600 people from 6th to 12th grade in one building. The Band Director was a notorious alcoholic.

There was no private instruction available and the rehearsals that the Band Director initiated were scattered, confused and disorganized.

Being the adult child of two alcoholics, I was familiar with that modus operandi of slovenly sloppiness. So, the clarinets who were designated to carry the melody…sucked.

A clarinet, played extremely poorly, squeaks like a goose that’s been stabbed in the throat. During the band’s rehearsals, this would happen about every other bar (or every four or five seconds).

I love music. It matters to me. I hated those clarinets, and endured them from the 7th through the 11th grade…like a good non-recovering Adult Child.

It’s time to forgive them, the Band Director and myself for being so musically needy, yet not announcing limits and leaving on the first day of seventh grade.

God, have mercy on me, the Band Director and those silly, squeaky, country girls.

By the way, I’ll be listening to Richard Stoltzman and Benny Goodman…as a 9th step living amends for all that hate I carried around in my heart for over half a century.

Squeak, squeak…

Rule # 62.4.5

From The Kelso Depot in the Mohave Desert.

A train yard out of the 1940’s when men were lean…and in olive drab Eagle visors.

Building America in steel…

Before the alcohol
Before the rape
Before the fat

Rule # 62.4.6

Step #2 in Chastity: “I sing, discipline my body, pray and meditate every day”.

Music has meant a number of changing things to me over 57 years.

First it just meant sensuality, the sonority of the trumpet, and wanting to be like my next door neighbor who played…so my getting my unrecognized need for “love and belonging” and “esteem of others” was alloyed in, right from the start.

My fifth grade music teacher was the first presiding adult I had close contact with, who did not try to sexually molest me, so my need for safety was met.

That might have some bearing on my being a professional music teacher since I was 13.

But, then I heard a 4 string tenor guitar that my Uncle Charles had made and let me play, when I was 11. I instantly fell in love. The old Jewish Psalm #31 says “The music of the strings makes your heart glad”. Again, Charles and his brother were safe people.

At 13, I heard Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced album” and, like millions of other guitar players, I became a musical acolyte…and still am.

Until I was 27, when I first went to AA, the most spiritual thing I would know was the bends and vibrato of Hendrix’s soloing.

In that sense I knew “God”, because it was “Greater than myself”.

“God as Beauty” works for many atheists or agnostics, as I was at the time. It’ll do in a pinch. So, there is my need for spirituality being met.

Around 15 I was making more money than any of the country boys on the neighboring farms and I bought a used 1967 Ford Mustang and I began to see music as freedom from my alcoholic parents. My need for financial safety was now met.

A 17, I had explored all the commercial music that was available to me in my bucolic hometown and I became an “Artist”…through getting drunk on two beers and discovering the interval of a major seventh. Music now became a way to meet my need for creativity.

At no point along the way did I find music a good way to “Hunt chicks”. The four worst musician’s I have ever played with had that motive and I found them and their music, repugnant.

I went to the University of Virginia, studied hard for a year and a half, and was told by the Chairman of the Music Department that I should not be there, that I should study with John Cage, who I had never even heard of.

But Hendrix was my role model at the time and I went on the road for four years, 19-23, as he had done, and music became solely my means to meet my financial needs…I was thoroughly miserable, and drunk a lot.

But, I also then started my relationship with John Cage, arguably the most intelligent musician since Wagner, and Beethoven before that.

I heard and saw things that I had never dared even dream of musically and the die was cast.

I decided at 25 to devote myself to teaching because I was good at it, it paid well, I made my own hours and I didn’t have a boss…an all important feature to an alcoholic whose main personalty trait is “Nobody’s going to tell me what to do”!. And the need for creativity soared. I wrote “beautiful music” according to Cage and I was broke as a snake and drunk as a goat…just like him.

Finally, I joined AA, at 27, hung around three times a week, didn’t get a sponsor, didn’t share, didn’t fellowship, but I worked the steps.

Spirituality was wrestled our of Hendrix’s hands and another power greater than myself, that I could choose myself, began to slowly seep in.

I was selfish, dishonest, extreme, obsessive, fearful and full of hate (which AA called resentment)…but I wasn’t drinking.

Music was a business and I started the very first Rock’n’Roll school in America in 1982…did I mention I was grandiose?

Five years in, I lost my sobriety for about six months, over a woman who broke my heart (My wife was not very pleased with that) and I started over.

My first AA sponsor was an old bear of a man, beat-up carpenter called “Crazy Harry” because he lived in his 1963 Chevy Impala in the AA parking lot, but after hearing my fifth step said only one thing ” You are obsessed with music”. 

I was shocked, so I asked my wife, who confirmed this. I sought a second opinion…and my girlfriend said the same thing. So, now music was not meeting my needs. It was controlling my life. It was disease…the way I was using it.

I went back to teaching music as a my primary business…which has given me a humane financial life the balance of my life.

The truth is that I, gradually, gave my whole life to recovery for the last 40 years. It was a good deal. I found life, God and people…through honesty alone.

14 months ago I furloughed myself from 12 step, for five minutes, and I looked back at my life to see if there was anything of value that I was good at, musically, and I discovered, to my surprise, that I had a knack for the avant-garde and have been practicing that 3.75 hours a day, for well over a year.

Now, I have finally achieved something I have never known in all my life, my highest spiritual need: “Peace of mind”…and I found it through music.

Everyone hates the music, except my 2 year old son (Stravinsky said once, ”My music appeals to children and animals”) but, I just adore it.

As for the Second Step in Chastity “I sing every day”: I sing often with my wife in two part harmony. I suck and my wife, who can’t count to four if her life depended on it, just let it rip with greatest of passions.

Singing helps restores me to sanity, one day, three hours at a time.

Steve D.

Rule # 62.4.7

I have been asked to write about my resentments with the Major Seventh Chord.

For lucky non-musicians this is a sad, pretty chord used in jazz but not in blues, rhythm and blues or funk.

Since the 1940’s it has been the dominant chord played in jazz.

As it is two of the primary chords in any key, you hear it played, hegemoniously, in all it’s prettiness, like Southern Steel Magnolias, the iron fist in the velvet glove, or

Blanche Dubois in “A Street Car Named Desire, drawling I always depend upon the kindness of strangers”.

It is a pretty women in 3/4 length white cotton gloves, an Hermes scarf and Prada evening loafers…at her teenager’s baseball game. Wildly overdressed, but so hot that no one ever questions whether this is simply unbalanced taste…or borderline personalty disorder.

It is a “livery collar” chord, educated beyond its intelligence, that lobotomizes any genuine expression of honest feeling with the smell of nickel lilac perfume from Woolworth’s Black Friday Bargain Bin.

But how do you really feel about it, Steve?

This was not true of jazz in the Dixieland Era, The Reign of Louis Armstrong or The Swing Era.

It was used upon occasion, as the Seven #9 is currently used, but with respect for its force and restraint in its use.

During the Second World War Jazz entered its “Romantic period” as Classical music had done more than 100 years before.

In both styles of music heavy chromaticism and absurd changes of key, pointlessly going nowhere and having absolutely no musical value, except in saying “Oh, look at me and my chromatic jewelry, aren’t we fine some fine babes, here?”

I don’t like Bop for the same reason I don’t like Wagner, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, Holst, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Dvorak, Smetana, Sibelius, Rachmaninoff, Liszt, Bruckner and that insufferably self-pitying Gustave Mahler…excess.

As John Cage would say “ There is too much there, there”.

Am I opposed to sad and pretty? 

Of course not, the “Inner child” in me is sad, and the “Inner egomaniac” certainly sings Bernstein’s ” I’m so pretty!” with great assiduity.

The only use of that most potent and pretty chord, the major seventh, that I find agreeable is in Eric Satie’s Trois Gymnopedie No. 1.

It is elegant, simple, straightforward and used for purposes worthy of its grace and charm.

When you are that pretty, that much of a “genetic celebrity”, it is important that you know your affect on people…and to act in ways appropriate to your listeners.

This is not exclusively true of the major seventh chord…

Rampant, indiscriminate use of augmented, fully diminished, half diminished, minor-major sevenths, augmented sevenths and a bevy of chromatically altered chords more resemble the commercial trashing of the Amazon rainforests than the intelligent expression of artistic experience, judgement and intuition…but don’t get me started.

Thank God that Stravinsky would come along in 1910 and put and end to this madness in Classical music and in 1959 Miles Davis would stop the mayhem with the album “Kind of Blue” and bring purity and simplicity back to jazz.

The first tune on that album “So What” is where you, as students, will start…with the birth of “Cool Jazz”.

Let’s turn to our studies…

In America there have been essentially two schools of thought in music:

1)Literate Tradition

2)Oral Tradition

These two traditions have, in the main, fallen on racial lines.

The reason is that, in America, from 1619 until 1865, slavery was legal.

Wikipedia quotes: “The comprehensive “Negro Act of 1740” was passed in the Province of South Carolina, during colonial Governor William Bull's time in office, in response to the Stono Rebellion in 1739. The act made it illegal for enslaved Africans to move abroad, assemble in groups, raise food, earn money, and learn to write.

As appalling, morally, and as sad, emotionally, as that is, it would also have long reaching effects, musically, on American music.

Since African Americans were forbidden from learning to write letters, they were also, collaterally, denied access to writing notes.

That being the situation, as all people have a need to express their creativity, the African Americans, who were drawn to music as a form of creativity, had to learn to play by ear…not sight.

This divided music into two camps:

1) Those who took pride in their ability to execute flawlessly the notes they saw written on the page

2) Those who took pride in their ability to create melody…on the spot

As we are studying Improvisation we will be exploring the second group.

Steve D.