Sticks and Stones and Christmas Jeer

Meet our newest contributor to Jazz (Jazzers Jazzing), Jeff Fitzgerald, photographed here at the Virginia Craft Brewers Fest, tasting--what else--a craft beer brewed somewhere in Virginia. You could reasonably ask if there isn't a more appropriate photo for introducing Jeff. The answer is, nothing is more appropriate.

Jeff Fitzgerald has talent that can inspire jealousy in other writers—not all writers, just the good ones—and he’s one of the few who can make me actually laugh out loud (not simply LOL). He lives in Roanoke, Virginia, where he writes about music as well as topics like Southern (as in Dixie) cooking, in a way that makes me want to grab a tenor saxophone in one hand and plate of barbecue and coleslaw in the other, and commence to shouting. Here in his debut piece for Jazz (Jazzers Jazzing), he renders his pithy take on the serious topic of Christmas jeers, the newly fashionable trend among hipster killjoys and thin-skinned libertines. – CLH

Sticks and Stones and Christmas Jeer

By Jeff Fitzgerald

We live in contentious times, here in the land of purple mountains majesty and fruited plains (whatever the hell that means). People who wish to divide us into querulous, perpetually offended microgroups that can be easily manipulated, have been chipping away at us for decades. And they've used our primary form of communication, language, to do so.

They've weaponized speech for their own ends, turning almost every word into a “microaggression” or a “trigger event.” They've played upon most everyone's desire not to deliberately hurt someone's feelings, and used it to create subgroups upon subgroups of victims. It’s a microaggression towards me, as a lefthander, when someone uses the word “right” instead of “correct?” Of course not, don't be silly.

Which is the whole point. Let us all take a step back for a moment and get over ourselves. Remember that playground rhyme, which our parents and our teachers (those of us who are of a certain age, of course) taught us? Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Call me whatever you want. Call me a fat, crippled, crazy bastard. Call me a bubba, redneck, hillbilly, or a grit. Doesn't bother me. I'm a grown man, after all. If I let stuff like that bother me, then I give someone else power over me. It's that simple.

So let's fight back at these divisive, censorial, would-be martinets. But let's do so with a smile, to let them know they can't get to us no matter how they try. This time of the year, if you should wish someone a Merry Christmas and they get all huffy and indignant and accuse you of forcing your religion* on them, just smile and say:

"Please, I didn't mean to offend you. If I had meant to offend you, I would have told you to go ____ yourself. Know the difference." Then, go on about your day with a song in your heart.

---

* In my experience with the Jews, Muslims, and Hindus I've met, they do not take offense at being wished a Merry Christmas, and take it in the spirit in which it is offered. And I don't mind being wished a Happy Hanukkah or Eid Mubarak in return. I just smile genuinely and say "Thank you," glad to have made a human connection.

A Few Thoughts on Christmas--the Agony and the Ecstasy

Central Park, Manhattan, NYC. Photo courtesy of centralpark.com

You may have noticed that I introduced a new contributor to Jazz (Jazzers Jazzing) a few weeks ago, Jon Hendrickson. There are a few other writers I will be publishing here as well, so from now on you will see a byline accompanying each story—including my own, since it will now be necessary to distinguish one writer from the next. Anything you see with no byline is mine, prior to the arrival of these new writers and dating back to the beginning in 2008. The bylines will also help you to search the website for articles by each contributor by simply entering the writer’s name in the search field in the upper left-hand corner of the webpage—it’s the little box with the magnifying glass icon, which has apparently become the universal symbol for searching, though I must tell you that the last time I went shopping for a real magnifying glass (CD liner notes are often printed in a microscopic 4- or 5-pt. typeface) it took some detective work to find one. Said search box sits immediately to the right of Google Blogger’s little orange logo.

Okay, so now you know that there are going to be bylines on future articles, other people’s and my own.

The other thing to know is that we’re going to spread our wings a little bit. All the writers who contribute here have actual lives they are leading, which means they do other interesting things each day in addition to avidly listening to music. This is something jazz fans understand better than, say, beat box fans. Not that there’s anything wrong with beat box. If you see an article on wine tasting, or an interview with an eminent expert on the differences between South Carolina barbecue and North Carolina barbecue, don’t pass it up. Be assured, at some point in the article the writer will tie the barbecue in with some killer saxophone arpeggios he/she was listening to whilst sipping a glass of merlot or chewing the last bite of a barbecued rib. -- CLH

A Few Thoughts on Christmas

By Carl L. Hager

Christmastime is one of my favorite times of year. I’m like a lot of people that way. But like a lot of those people, if I am called upon to explain why, despite the pagan gluttony and the greedy commercialism that feeds it, my answer gets a little complicated. It’s similar to my answer in explanation of why I think George Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue, a thoroughly composed piece of music written by a Jew from New York with only a single clarinet glissando that offers any semblance of an opportunity to improvise, is one of the great jazz compositions of all time. But both are true.

Yes, Christmas is one of my favorite celebrations. I’m a fairly liberated and liberal person, in the sense that I am open to many views and beliefs, and enjoy the company of the people who hold them. That’s not a political statement, except in the broadest sense—fixated political partisanship is the precise opposite of liberalism (conservatism, too), and while “libertarianism” comes close to the original concept, even it is an ideology often used as a shield for a kind of dimwitted moralistic autism.

Christmas is a favorite time for me for the simple reason that it can be, and is, celebrated with equal enjoyment by all the above, without any sense of obligation to do anything else.

Christmas is undeniably a religious holiday. But it is unlike any other religious holiday in the world in its ecumenism. Christmas’s unpopularity among militant atheists is due to this fact only—the more people enjoy the holiday, the more miserable life becomes for the grinches. Even a religious agnostic or a person with a mild case of philosophical atheism can be witnessed laughing it up at a company Christmas party. Christmas is so ubiquitous and so widely celebrated around the world that it has become synonymous with everyday expressions of kindness and consideration, like brotherly love or charity. It is so powerful a force that it has brought about spontaneous truces between warring armies and navies, and even gets credit for much that it has really only inspired. That’s the nature of its simple doctrine of peace on earth and goodwill to men.

The true meaning of Christmas—a hotly debated topic every year in the Western world—produces thousands upon thousands of conclusions, but ultimately ends in a toast and a glass of eggnog liberally seasoned with brandy and good wishes, wherever the debate has occurred and regardless of the religious faiths of the debaters. It happens every year, from Boston to London to Cairo. Even in New York. Christians themselves come in many colors and guises, and very few agree completely on the actual significance of the holiday that originally began as a pagan celebration of the winter solstice, a festival so popular that the various factions of the Catholic church appropriated it as the logical time to celebrate the birth of Jesus. But just like any other birthday party, EVERYBODY was and is invited, anyone who promises to behave. God bless us, everyone, as the wise young Tiny Tim advised.

When I was growing up, my two best friends in the neighborhood were Jews. Both attended Friday night services at the synagogue, and I often went with one or the other of them. Both also attended Hebrew school in preparation for their bar mitzvahs. I didn’t attend these classes, feeling quite unprepared to be preparing for an exclusively Jewish manhood, even though the rabbi was a heroic example. My parents were the most religiously tolerant people I’ve ever known, and their response to all this was to get me a sports coat and tie so that I could dress right for these occasions. Both had been raised as standard-issue North American Protestants, but both also thought religious persecution was what the original Plymouth colonists had braved the icy Atlantic waters in tiny boats to escape, and that religious freedom is what they had come this far expecting to find. My parents didn’t talk it, they believed it. So when I was 12 years old, I was a Protestant-Jew. But the point salient to this discussion is that both of my Jewish neighborhood friends celebrated Christmas each year. Not in the same way I did—with a houseful of Swedish Lutherans in south Minneapolis, where my father’s parents and all the extended family gathered each Christmas Eve beneath three feet of snow—but in their own individual manners. Because as anyone paying attention knows by now, Christmas means something different to whoever is celebrating it. Like jazz is to music (the worn-out question, “What is Jazz?” is best answered with “What isn’t Jazz?”), in addition to being a religious holiday, Christmas is the most all-inclusive, all-welcoming, I-came-to-play holiday of the year.

Nearly every Jew I’ve known since I was young celebrates Christmas. They celebrate Chanukah, of course, but on Christmas they celebrate forgiveness for the same sins they are lamenting—as does every Mormon, every Scientologist, every Baptist and every Pentacostalist. Contrary to the iconic Red Ryder-obsessed writer’s rendition of the holiday in A Christmas Story, even many American Buddhists celebrate Christmas. Why do you think they keep their wonton soup ready for the diasporic Christmas revelers? But the important point is that participation in the celebration isn’t mandatory. You are not fined or shot or beheaded for not celebrating it. Christmas is a day off from the madness of the world. It’s a day to love one another despite all the reasons not to.

One of my dearest friends is, at once, the least religious and most spiritual person I know. For years he did nothing out of the ordinary on Christmas, aside from enjoying a long weekend and a winter’s nap. Then one day, one of his daughters had a child. Next thing you know, his other daughter had a child. Christmas became a holiday for him. It was about other people all along.

What makes me think of him is that I go through the same emotional curve myself, every year. The agony and the ecstasy. The personal evolution from non-believer to believer, non-celebrator to celebrator. Just about this time each December, some asshole in Washington, D.C., decides to makes his or her ego more important than letting every congressman and White House official go home and cool off for a few days. Or some psychopath in Pakistan gives a few of his psychopath friends some pills and convinces them that killing schoolchildren will bring them closer to… (fill in the blank). Every year, I know I need to celebrate Christmas more than I need anything else on earth. And every year I go through the same brutalizing experience of convincing myself that I need it, deserve it, can afford it, etc.

Well, I made it all the way through again this year. To those of you who need a reason to enjoy Christmas, let me suggest an approach illustrated by Woody Allen, a jazz clarinetist and jazz fan, in his film Manhattan:   

Discovery

Photo of Matt Schofield courtesy of theiridium.com

A couple things about this article make it a good introduction to new Jazz (Jazzers Jazzing) contributor, Jon Hendrickson, and his writing. First is that he describes the intensity of connecting with a musician’s live performance in the intimacy of a small club, an experience that was utterly new for him. Though this experience is something many of us are familiar with, very few have ever written about it. Second, the artist he saw was the very talented British blues guitarist/singer/composer, Matt Schofield, who is doing something that I haven’t witnessed in years—he plays a blues guitar so inventive and fresh that he blows right past comparisons to Eric Clapton or Stevie Ray Vaughan, or anyone else. – CLH    

DISCOVERY

By Jon Hendrickson

I live in a backwater of civilization in the southeast corner of El Dorado County, California, known as Fair Play.  The origin of the name is a matter of local debate, but is no doubt rooted in the gold rush which began about 30 miles from here and made California rich and famous.  A burgeoning wine industry has found a toehold here amid the oak- and pine-forested Sierra Nevada foothills, but those who have discovered the delights of Fair Play have done so only as the result of deliberate exploratory intention. 

Fair Play is not on the way to anywhere else, and it is about as far from anywhere as you can get and still be somewhere.  Most of the relatively few people who live here came from somewhere else and brought with them a vast array of backgrounds, skills and interests.  They like living here, I suspect, for a lot of the same reasons I do.  Life here is more unhurried and less crowded.  And the circle of acquaintance is not so large as to dilute the sense of wonder when confronted with yet another revelation you get by paying attention to something or someone you might otherwise overlook, except for the fact that there are fewer of them to pay attention to.

There are discoveries that are more momentous than others, but you get used to them coming regularly enough, to the point that they’re no longer remarkable.  For example, I distinctly remember becoming aware of air entering and exiting my mouth and nose, and the day or so I spent exploring the limits of my ability to breathe faster, slower or not at all.  Such are the discoveries of earliest childhood.  Later discoveries, like figuring out you can balance on two wheels or float on water, come less frequently and less remarkably until, after several decades, it seems that you even forget what discovery is all about.

I have a very good, long-term friend, Carl Hager, who I have known as “Cully” for the last 47 years or so because his father was also a “Carl.”  We wrote a satire column for our high school newspaper during our senior year under the byline, “The Dipertni Bros.”  In more recent years, he has been doing his best to get me to appreciate his favorite music, jazz.  And he’s not one with merely a casual appreciation of the genre.  He can wax eloquent for hours on the finest minutiae of the evolution of jazz before Miles Davis and from Miles Davis forward.  And this knowledge is a tool he puts to good use plying the trade of writer, commentator, critic.  He has dedicated years of focused study of the music, its practitioners, their roots and inspirations and relationships with other musicians and their peculiar styles of music.  He has cultivated acquaintances and friendships among jazz musicians and other enthusiasts and was asked by a very critically acclaimed artist to write the liner notes for one of her new albums.  He has set a very high bar for comparison.  So high, in fact, that long ago I decided a bar is just a hurdle and I’m more of a lawn darts kind of guy.  So, while Carl has inspired me to take up the pen again, I am no more a music critic than Helen Keller.  However, Carl has also reminded me not to be deterred by fear of my ignorance.  Besides, Carl lives a hard five-hour drive away and the opportunities to absorb his passion firsthand are few and far between.  And this essay is actually about an influence almost as strong, but much closer at hand.

My friend Ian Schofield, the prodigious proprietor of the Pub at Fair Play, is an even more prodigious aficionado of THE BLUES.  It seems that he holds THE BLUES in such biblical reverence that he could be expected to capitalize the personal pronouns referring to Stevie Ray Vaughan, B. B. King and Albert Collins.  Ian is very much like my friend Carl, not only in his enthusiasm for his favorite musical genre, but also in the extent to which the arcana of his favorite musical genre is a complete mystery to me.       

My musical aptitude is the same as my aptitude at math, which is virtually nil.  That’s why I relate to and describe my world with words and pictures, not numbers.  In other words, I’m the kind of guy who causes people like Ian and Carl to roll their eyes when I attempt to join their conversations with their other, more attuned, acquaintances.  Fortunately for me, I’m not sure there are that many people in Fair Play who are as attuned to THE BLUES as Ian is and, because he’s my friend and takes pity on me, he allows me to hang around—occasionally some glimmer of understanding breaks through and I get a little closer to “getting it.”  “A little closer” would be about an inch further along Fairplay Road where “getting it” would be a half hour up the road.

This story is really about how my acquaintance with Ian led me to one of those discoveries that may not be as revelatory as discovering your breath, but it’s close.  Ian’s son, Matt, lives in his native Manchester, England, and he plays the guitar and sings.  But he doesn’t just play and sing.  He can REALLY play and sing.  He is very well known among aficionados of THE BLUES in England and Europe and is acquiring a following in this country—he toured various venues and festivals in the east part of the country and Canada earlier this year, including a pass through the west coast, and is currently touring the UK.  Ian had previously turned me on to Matt’s playing by showing me a couple DVDs and I had whetted my enthusiasm for Matt’s music by watching some of his performances on YouTube.  When Ian told me Matt was coming to Harlow’s in Sacramento for a single show on Friday, July 18, I jumped on the opportunity to score a couple tickets as soon as they were available and made reservations for a table.

Listening to CDs or watching DVDs is not anything like live music.  This is especially true when you’re seated ten feet from the stage, and Harlow’s is a tremendous venue for this kind of performance.  If I had been paying attention, as I have now started to do, to B. B. King or Stevie Ray Vaughan, I would have seen the inspiration for what I was hearing, but I don’t think it would have really prepared me for the depth and intensity of what I was experiencing.  As he was warming up, I became more and more keenly aware of how much of himself Matt was putting into his playing, how his guitar was really an extension not just of his arms and fingers, but of his psyche, all of his emotional and mental energy permeating the entire room.  And the communion of guitar, keyboard (longtime collaborator Jonny Henderson) and drums (a remarkable performance by San Francisco’s Ronnie Smith in his first performance with the band) transformed my experience of this music into something not too far short of euphoric, pervading every sense of my being, although my senses of smell and taste are still a little confused.  If pressed, I would have to say THE BLUES smells and tastes pretty much like beer.

Shortly after the intermission, Matt brought Mick Martin onto the stage.  Mick is a local legend of THE BLUES.  He has had his own band for something like 40 years or more, laying down some of the most incredible blues harmonica anywhere on local audiences.  He also hosts a local public radio program on Saturday mornings featuring THE BLUES and was the first person to play Matt Schofield’s music on the radio anywhere on the planet.  So, Matt not only is very grateful to Mick for what he’s done for his career, he genuinely enjoys playing with the man when he can.

When the two-hour concert ended, I felt like I had run a marathon, or at least what I imagine I would have felt like if I ever had run a marathon.  I had been wrapped in a kind of sound I had never heard before, especially live and so close that it felt like I was right next to the band, because I was.  On further reflection, I think what I thought would be a good introduction to THE BLUES was much more a perfect performance of perfect music that transcended cubby-hole labels.  The lyrics were bluesy (I think THE BLUES has a rule that the first line of every stanza has to end with “baby”), but I had also heard some of the best rock guitar I have ever heard in my life, and the jazziness was pleasantly energetic, making much more sense to me than anything I’ve heard of Miles Davis.

I managed to find my way to the front of the club to purchase a CD of Matt’s latest album and get him to sign it for me.  I think he would have signed it for me even if I didn’t know his dad; he seems like that nice a kid.  But I have always stood in awe of the kind of talent that I had seen and felt and heard that night, so it was hard for me to just make light conversation. 

On the way home that night a few thoughts occurred to me.  First, percussion of the rhythm and intensity sustained as it was for about two hours does, in fact, act as something of a laxative. 

Second, while there were a few other people there whom I know from the Pub at Fair Play and the local south county area, the room was mostly filled with enthusiasts of THE BLUES from all over the Sacramento area, and probably some who had come from even further away than we had. 

And finally, yet again I was struck with the richness of experience I have encountered because of what the people I’ve met have chosen to share with me, in and near the place I call home.