A funny thing about jazz, at least lately, is that its great practitioners often get more notice when they die than when they lived. That’s certainly true about Charles Mingus who passed in 1979 and whose 100th birthday was celebrated last year to much acclaim.
Wayne Shorter, another jazz great, died last Thursday at age 89. His large recorded output survives him, of course, and now the critics (like me) grab the opportunity to speak out about his greatness, uniqueness, and transformative powers.
Shorter was one of jazz’s strong composers besides being a reed player who could shape the conventional forms of the music into something truly new. So I don’t want to hear encomiums about him; I want to know how he did this. The praise will soon fade; the music won’t.
The typical obits gave the facts, as they should. But some writers went beyond that. As jazz critics will do, they offered up spiritual, even flamboyant versions of what they heard in Shorter’s music. Richard Brody of The New Yorker knows his jazz but spoke a different language in trying to express what for him was the essence of Wayne’s music:
Unlike such spiritual seekers of the avant-garde as Coltrane and Albert Ayler, Shorter, even during his most vehement solos, wasn’t heaven-storming but heaven-gazing and heaven-longing, looking rapturously upward—again, in effect, in two places at once.
Jazz people don’t talk like this. Neither should their critics. The people who really understood how to write about Shorter were other musicians, like Ethan Iverson who wrote five years ago about Shorter’s seminal recordings in the 1960s:
The compositions on “Speak No Evil” occupy a rarified plane. They aren’t quite hard bop, they aren’t quite modal. Elements of everything are just there, hanging out in a new and inspired way. The musicians at large loved it, then and now. Every song on “Speak No Evil” has been learned by each new generation of jazz students. Every solo by Shorter, Hubbard, and Hancock has been transcribed and assimilated.
Jazz lovers want to understand how the music they love was created, appreciated (or not), and produced. Let the jazz audience, not the critics, be the spiritual and rhetorical interpreters of what they are hearing. My feelings about a piece of music may or may not be yours.
And, one hopes, the critic can positively influence the public reception and understanding of a music—and do this in a timely way. My book, Mingus Speaks, finally got published almost 40 years after I had finished the interviews with Charles. The unconscionable delay was owing to some troubling and difficult times for me. You know, “life happens when you’re making other plans.”
Anyhow, the last time I saw Mingus was after a set at the Village Vanguard in 1973, I think. He fixed me with the Mingus glare and said, “I guess you’ll finally do the book after I’m dead.” And that’s what happened.
Wayne said it best: “I never make the same mistake twice. I make it five or six times, just to be sure.”
The folks who make their living off jazz and love it and write about it should speak up when it counts. What you have to say about the music can make all the difference to the people who play it. Wayne Shorter’s music was just too singular and important to be treated with fawning praise.
The worst sort of ageism has been stalking Joe Biden. The biggest count against him is that if he runs he’ll be 86 at the end of his term in 2024, and polls show his negatives are mostly about his age. As someone who has eight years on him (he is 80, I’m 88), I rise to his defense.
Getting to this age involves some familiar tradeoffs with your body. I’ve been lucky on that score, and for the most part Joe has too. I’ve seen so many recent hip fractures and replacements among friends, digestive disorders, deaths, disablements and debilitations. One survives by having good genes, following (mostly) the dictates of good health, and being lucky.
Biden’s brain seems to be working pretty well. He sometimes has a short fuse when responding to dumb questions. And yes, he can ramble on. People are quick to focus on his stumbles boarding a plane, his flubs on delivering a speech, the stuttering, his gait when walking, and so on. Only a few recognize the severe disabilities that Presidents FDR and JFK had to overcome—and their success in doing so. Biden’s problems pale in comparison.
I still don’t quite understand why his approval numbers are so bad. Some 62% say he hasn’t accomplished much, despite a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, $369 billion in climate initiatives, and tremendous growth in job numbers. His policy positions should appeal broadly but don’t, though they reflect large-scale approval of their aims. “A third of registered voters have heard ‘nothing at all’ about the climate law, while another 24 percent heard ‘a little’ and 29 percent heard ‘some.’” So says Politico.
Despite a shaky start, his State of the Union speech was strong. It demonstrated that he could quickly and effectively respond to provocations from the Other Side. Who could ask “for a better foil than Marjorie Taylor Greene”? His performance showed that he could effectively think on his feet. The expected catalog of Biden accomplishments was presented so as to be understandable (if not appealing) to everyone. Few presidents have been able to do this as well.
The major problem for Biden seems to be (1) that his administration hasn’t put his achievements in terms to appeal to a mass audience, and (2) made sufficient efforts to get that message out. Young people in particular aren’t tuning in, and “Americans broadly distrust Biden, McCarthy and both parties in Congress.” Some 60% see no progress in job creation even though “Biden has overseen the fastest pace of job growth in U.S. history, with unemployment reaching lows not seen in decades.”
Hurrah, but perhaps the problem is more than messaging. People need to see action and results, some kind of evidence that the Biden policies and legislation are working. The administration has less than two years to show us more tangible progress. Shooting down spy balloons gets a lot of press; opening new chip plants does not.
Joe’s folks need to rebuild their communications efforts. Show us the benefits in real time and tell us stories with real people that we can believe in.
These days, you often can’t give them away, and many fine pianos actually end up in the trash. The market doesn’t care about family or sentimental values or the fact that music may have kept the family together or at least brought home the joy of making music.
In 1931 at the height of the Depression my parents bought a new Steinway grand for their new Chicago apartment. I was born three years later, and the piano (along with 78-rpm records) became my introduction to music—a lifelong passion. My mother played Christmas carols and simple classical pieces on it, dad would hammer out old show tunes, and some notable jazz musicians like Barbara Carroll entertained us at parties.
Other musicians recognized what a great instrument this piano was. When the family moved on from Chicago, so did the piano, to a new home in Highland Park. In 1950 my parents hosted an affair with the Louis Armstrong All-Stars, and Earl Fatha Hines played it and loved it. In the mid-1960s it came to rest in my New York apartment where in 1971 Sir Roland Hanna, the noted jazz musician, came to a party I had and played it. For its later years it took up space at my ex-wife’s house in New Hope, PA.
When Sally and I split up, we had a fight about who would get the piano. At that time she had a house and I was moving around, starting a new life in Rhode Island and doing a lot of itinerant communications work. So she got the piano, and I got the divorce. I think she did play it, a little. But mostly it sat for ten or more years, tuned but unplayed.
When she died the house had to be sold, and I undertook to sell the piano. I wrote to local music schools and got a lot of nice responses and no-thank-yous. I lowered the price and finally got a bite from NYU’s Music Department. They sent two people out from New York to audition the piano. They found it “a very fine instrument” and so we had a deal. Since I used to teach at NYU years ago, I thought it was a perfect home for a pedigreed old Steinway.
Grand pianos are big clunky objects, very heavy. Many people today are perfectly happy with mobile electronic keyboards that offer cheesy programmed accompaniments and sound enhancements. They are light and convenient for band musicians and those content with digital music. As readers of this blog know, I’m never content with digital music even though I do have a Yamaha electric piano to (sometimes) practice on.
Our old family piano in a way held the family together emotionally when we were all younger, analog people. It was more than a fixture; it was a memento of good times and the power of music to create a joyful connection.
The NY Times recently published a piece in which a 41-year-old doctor in Boston muses about advances in the science of anti-aging. She is pregnant with her first child and wonders whether aging is really inevitable. Her dad does pull-ups at age 70 and pursues studies on “how he might slow the ticking clock.” Aging for folks like this is clearly something to be conquered, not accommodated.
“Longevity researchers,” she says, “would tell you that aging itself is a disease that we can understand and treat, cancer and heart disease and dementia only its symptoms.” Hmm, if aging is a disease, I must be pretty sick at 88. I do have age spots but no cancer or heart disease—yet—and no crippling ailments or obvious mental disorders, though some might contest that. So I got lucky in the old age sweepstakes.
I’ve been blessed with good health (with some minor problems) in the last few years, and I look at getting older as something perfectly normal. If I can get another year or so, that would be fine. I don’t fear death, though I might if things change. For now, I look and feel younger than my chronology would predict. Except in the morning.
Getting older, I’ve been drawn to feel that so much of what we do as a society works against nature. We humans can’t even manage ourselves, and all our false notions of progress are usually at the expense of the natural world and those less fortunate. How we respond to climate change will be the ultimate test.
So I find that anti-aging and extending human life are like so many other new tools for fighting off or plundering nature and advancing bogus notions of progress. Work proceeds apace on gene modification, CRISPR, AI, and other high-minded efforts to alter our humanity and improve on what nature gives us. I never thought I’d say this, but why is science always the answer?
A good friend in her mid-70s recently had major surgery for an intestinal blockage. She was quite healthy, and this came as a big shock. So did the resulting colostomy. She’s been depressed, won’t eat, and talks about wanting to just give up. The vicissitudes of our health can change everything.
If good health is everything, why are we so cavalier about it? Could someone in poor health rely on an anti-aging program? Will these programs be just for the rich? Of course they will.
To her credit, Dr. Lamas, the writer, is not wholly convinced that anti-aging science will provide a better life: “it is not entirely clear that having a younger genetic than chronological age confers a longer or better life.” If I continue to be blessed with good genetics and health, old age remains something to treasured—until it’s not.
The other night it was a mixed group, oldsters and mid-oldsters and a few younger people. I was probably the most senior of about thirty people there to exchange silly Christmas gifts and watch the sun go down over the Pacific. I knew only about four of these folks and thus looked forward to another evening of isolation, boredom, and social constipation.
This is what happens to many of us, old or not, as parties find us standing alone, drink in hand, listening to the noisy chitchat, resenting the loud music, deciding whether to approach a group and break into their conversation.
Perhaps you’ve experienced this. I used to be a jovial party-goer and party-thrower in my youth, big drinker, life of the party. (See “Nothing Succeeds like Excess.”) Aging often produces a slow process of withdrawal from all that, which is no bad thing. After all, how much small talk can you generate? Who wants to hear more stale political opinions, gossip about the neighbors, indulgent talk about oneself, with never a question about you?
At the party in question I came in with my partner, felt awkward and out of place, said a few hellos, and sat solo for a while to watch the sunset and plot my next (if any) moves. I made up my mind to tough it out so I went to sit with a younger couple eating dubious hors d’oeuvres and had a nice exchange with them.
The rum punch was good and I found people approachable. The gift exchange turned out to be fun, and the atmosphere changed from small pods of talkers to participants in an engaging group activity. I almost felt glad I’d come.
The small group I hang out with in Oaxaca was nothing like this mixed bag. Beach people are different. One older tanned guy in Hawaiian shorts looked like my old college roommate and never stopped talking. Other oldsters simply sat and said little. Women, as usual, carried the day and brought things to life. One looked like Kyrsten Sinema even to wearing a brassy Sinema-style dress. I kept ascribing personalities to these characters.
The point of all this is that aging produces in some of us the urge to withdraw (see “Retreat of the Elders”), which occasionally can come on strong. I’m not a recluse and I do like people, but in small groups or one-on-one. Most parties I can do without; this one—good for observations—wasn’t too bad.
Forced intimacy in any circumstance may work for the young. For most oldsters it just pushes old buttons.
On Friday my friend and I drove from Oaxaca to Puerto Escondido, a distance of 160 miles, which usually takes a minimum 6-1/2 hours on high mountain roads, through truck traffic, potholes and endless switchbacks. That works out to about 23 miles per hour. It’s a tough drive and took us a bit over 7 hours including a stop for lunch.
I drove the whole way, and in the last 10 miles or so hit two topes (speed bumps) pretty hard—feeling really stupid because I’ve done this road scores of times. On arriving I was so tired and wrung out that I couldn’t meet friends for dinner. It finally came to me that fatigue had made me lose my concentration. And you cannot do that in Mexico.
So no more long-distance solo driving for me. Like many oldsters, usually male, I’ve been proud of my driving. I drove sports cars in my salad days and for a long time thought my capabilities generally persisted. In a short book, I spoke about
avoiding the kind of hubris or testing of fate that old codgers manifest on the roads. Giving up the keys for most of us would relinquish a final vestige of independence. Like coasting downhill on an empty tank. . . . If I had to quit driving I’d be giving up one of the remaining joys in my sedentary life. It’s a matter of maintaining, as we all do, the fiction of one’s life.
So much for that. Hubris is what happens when you’re making other plans. A good local friend of mine drives so badly that I refused a few years ago to ride with him unless he let me drive. He once fell asleep on that same mountain road and nearly killed himself and a companion.
With the arrogance of youth I said to my father Jerome years ago when he was driving too fast in big glitzy Lincolns: “How about letting me drive for a change?” No way that was going to happen because I had told him his new car looked like a Baroque church. So he kept on driving big cars until he once roared through a stop sign, hit another car, and then argued about fault with the insurance company.
Oldsters are naturally jealous about keeping their driving privileges, and they can get very testy about it. Younger relatives may force the issue, but many states have no age restrictions. Make ‘em all take a test, I say. Yet the politics of aging may not let that happen. The AARP opposes this, calling it age discrimination.
And as the public approves of more electronic junk and digital screens in cars, the distractions for seniors and all of us will get worse. Drive safely to your Christmas destinations.
I’ve written before about the joys of getting older: first, about some of the social aspects of withdrawal; then about declining brainpower. I’m not quite sure why these pieces drew the attention of my readers. Maybe it’s the aging process itself that binds us old farts together.
To discuss the more physical aspects of aging is a little more risky. Yet we must face up to our own mortality by confronting the commonplace ways our bodies degenerate—or at least have difficulty performing their accustomed functions. Who wants to hear about another’s constipation? Still, a few personal stories may connect with you.
About three years ago I realized that I wasn’t getting enough exercise. I didn’t want to walk much anymore. The sidewalks in Oaxaca are cracked and broken; I was fearful of taking another fall. And how many times can you enjoy hiking around the very same blocks? I used to like going to the gym, so I bought an elliptical trainer.
This is a great machine for exercising a bunch of muscles, plus some low-impact cardio. You know what’s coming, right? I used it faithfully for a while, then progressively abandoned it. Monotony and apathy will overcome all your good intentions. Well, lately I’ve gotten back on it, and it feels good. Let’s see how long this lasts.
It’s very common that as one ages one’s gums recede and gaps appear between the teeth. This is why you see so many old people using toothpicks after eating. You finish a nice dinner and your companion starts poking away at his/her mouth. Now you’ve begun to do it too. My dentist said, “get a Waterpik,” and he was right. The detritus removed after brushing will simply amaze you.
Years ago, my father had a pretentious gold toothpick in a thin leather case. He would produce this and use it at home or after a fine restaurant meal. We observed this many times. Finally my sister said, “Pop, do you have any idea what’s growing in that case? It’s pretty disgusting.” Naturally, this had no effect.
Older people finally don’t care what others think about such habits. That too is part of the aging process.
I find it harder and harder to cut my toenails. Bending over to get a purchase on the nail clipper gets more difficult as one’s arthritis progresses. And the longer the nails grow, the harder it is to cut them neatly. A male friend of mine, now deceased, gave up on the whole thing and regularly went to a podiatrist for, God bless him, a pedicure. I’m not quite there yet.
It may not be in the best of taste to talk publicly about such commonplace things. Older folks are still rather sanitized and Victorian in talking and dealing with bodily needs and functions. The fact that such behaviors are rarely discussed can only mean that we’re less equipped to deal with them as we inevitably age.
Some of you know I had a partial career as a music critic years ago. (Most everything is now “years ago,” it seems.) I wrote about jazz, the record business, ‘70s rock and, later, classical. My writings were all ephemeral; but the music is not. Most all of it is on record in one form or another, the wine and the dregs.
When I was growing up, a lot of Beethoven echoed in my house. Music was an intrinsic part of our lives, and Beethoven was at the heart of it. I’ve talked about that here and in a book I wrote but not much about Beethoven. Well, the Eroica symphony was a revelation to me as a teenager because it completely broke new musical ground. When I began to really listen to the string quartets in college, they became touchstones of my musical life. Jazz was my daily fare, Beethoven the haute cuisine.
Last night, over leftover noodle casserole, I listened again to all three Rasumovsky Quartets, from Beethoven’s middle and troubled years. There is no music in the world like this. Here is Opus 59, no. 2 of these masterpieces.
I won’t give you a critique here, rather some thoughts that the music evoked. First, the surprising turns this music takes: I remembered that critic Whitney Balliett once called jazz “the sound of surprise.” The three quartets embody surprise in abundance. Second was the stark contrast between the world this music projected and our own disjointed times—the ways in which Beethoven could render his disjointed life and times in the coherence and power of his musical speech.
Later I was to think about how the Eroica Symphony and later the Rasumovsky quartets revolutionized the music of Haydn and Mozart. Here’s how Joseph Kerman put it in his classic work on The Beethoven Quartets:
A new world was being explored, and if the string quartet was going to find a place in it at all, it had to smash the fragile, decorous boundaries set by the classic image of chamber music, . . . a new “symphonized” quartet necessarily had to come into being (p. 151).
Haydn and Mozart provided the building blocks, but the decorous age was clearly over, another instance of the surprising ways the 18th century changed thought and art.
There is no analogue today. The crudeness of our pop music and the irrelevance of much contemporary classical offer no relief from the social and political chaos around us. When I’m hungry I go back to Beethoven.
The recording I listened to is a two-SACD set by the Tokyo String Quartet. The sound is extraordinary, their interpretations exemplary. I have other different but interesting renditions on vinyl by the Guarneri, Budapest, and Juilliard ensembles.
Beethoven would go on to even greater heights of expression in the Late Quartets, one of which (the C-Sharp Minor, Opus 131) would change the way I thought about music forever. More on that later, perhaps.
Some fans have urged me to write more about aging. It is a rich topic, especially for one at my age (88). I offered my general thoughts on the matter a couple of weeks ago, but that was the tip of the iceberg, so to say.
Every aspect of aging seems to have three components—physical, psychological and social—and they’re all interlinked. There’s a very thorough and intimidating treatment of this on Wikipedia. Read it while you have your late afternoon cocktail. (Why do all discussions of aging always recommend easing off the booze? They totally ignore the psychological and social benefits.)
So today I want to talk not about dementia but about mental deficiency as it creeps up on you. This is normal yet disturbing. Myself and many friends have experienced loss of short-term memory. You know, forgetting your keys, the last name of a friend, where you put something. This is so common that it’s unremarkable. Yet it upsets a lot of us.
Often when you’re trying to recover a forgotten name it will come back to you a few moments later while you are thinking of something else. So your memory is still functional; it’s just taking its time to sift through all those long-unused cells in the mental library.
And sometimes the name or the word doesn’t come back. Well, calm down and search out related aspects of the word on Google. This will often trigger an association that can make the connection and turn your light bulb on. The usual fear and distrust of technology in elders is well-placed. But you have to learn to make tech work for you. I talked about some of the problems here in “Computer-Assisted Headaches.” We elders have to stop being intimidated by technology and learn simply to ignore what we can’t understand.
Keeping your mental alertness is key to solving many problems of aging. I have IBS, a too-common bowel disorder. So I complain again to my doc, who says that after all these years “you know more about this than I do.” I’m skeptical but as I experiment with treatments, nostrums, remedies natural and unnatural, I find some success in dealing with it. And I use the internet a lot.
Bottom line: your apparent loss of mental (even physical) control can often be compensated by using what’s left of your brain.
What we all worry about is keeping our mental acuity. Well, you’re never going to keep the edge you had at age 20 or 30. After 70, we all decline, so what can help? The usual advice is to exercise more, learn a new skill, play games and solve puzzles, dance, meditate, eat a good diet, and so on.
I think the most important way to keep sharp is to involve yourself regularly in a mentally challenging activity you love. For me it’s writing; for someone else it’s hiking or volunteer work or cooking. When you feel depressed, anxious, irritated with someone, or too isolated, don’t give way to it. Get back to something you really treasure doing.
That’s not just a bromide, folks. Example: when the blues take over, I turn to the music I love and I can regain an equilibrium from that. We need to remember to engage with the things we love.
