Excitable Media: Real: Long Live Dave King

Why I Know Nothing About Popular Music

To retrace the whole story of how I ended up at a jazz club listening to Dave King (aka. The Best Drummer in the World) perform his abstract ballet would be to waste both of our time. Let's just say that "due to an unfortunate series of events" I started listening to jazz music as an impressionable adolescent. Quickly, I drowned myself in the genre, spending all my music-listening time with jazz albums from the 20th century's middle decades, and it got so bad that I don't believe I willingly enjoyed a single pop song between the eras of REO Speedwagon and Radiohead. And if listening to jazz music has taught me anything in all this time, apart from the fact that heroin makes you a better musician, it's honed my ability to glance furtively while whispering about jazz music with other jazz music listeners.

Happy Apple: the early days

Jazz secrecy was necessary because, sadly, I was born too late to really enjoy my enjoyment of jazz music. By the 80's lisening to jazz had become synomymous with sanctimonious beret-posing. I'm serious. Growing up, whenever people asked me what kind of music I listened to I would say "Marilyn Manson" to avoid being labeled an outsider.

But I've learned that you can't run from yourself, you can't hide who you really are, and you can't pretend to know about pop music when you really listen only to jazz. During those days I spent many a sleepless night mulling over my dilemma. I wondered about how jazz music had become so alienated and alienating. Was it because jazz music is pretentious and self-absorbed? Was it because it's aloof and incomprehensible? Or was jazz music self-consiously abstract, expensive, undanceable, arhythmic, and obnoxiously atonal? What was the reason? I looked into my heart and knew: The answer was (D) All of the above.

Of course things weren't always as bad as they are today for jazz music, popularity-wise. According to legend, jazz music was once cool, and while I try and take all the mythic descriptions of jazz music's heyday with a pinch of salt, there must be something to the glory stories. For example, in It's a Wonderful Life, when Jimmy Stewart is living his nightmare, one of the first signs that Bedford Falls has gone to seed is that Main St. has become a hangout for jazz musicians. Shudder. Gasp.

There's lots of possible reasons that jazz music went from a peak coolness level of "Jimmy Stewart's dark side" to the current trough of "Mike Meyers' hipster parody in So I Married an Axe Murderer". Possibilities include: The formal stagnation of the post-free jazz era… the Brubeck family… and/or the elitism that followed the money that followed jazz music's self-identification as an modern art form… But I think the real reason for jazz music's near-total obscurity is that somehow jazz musicians have been unable or unwilling to embrace the pop cultural consequences of television. In other words, they've been unable to adopt that posture which we sometimes call postmodernism. In other other words, they have failed to ironicalize.

What is Irony Anyway?

To understand irony, at least in the highly reductive way that I understand it, you need to know about sincere communication. According to pioneering Swiss linguist Ferdinand De Saussure, the linguistic sign is made up of two things: the thing said (the signifier) and the intended meaning (the signified). While most everyone knows that language is a slippery construct entirely based on memory and social convention, totally sincere people (yes, they still exist) seem to have made a choice to suspend their disbelief in linguistic slippage. Sincere communication thus resembles the above diagram, requiring an absolute faith in the possibility of uninterrupted communication from (A) to (B). Today, of course, sincerity is an engangered species. Sure it thrives in certain habitats, like cover letters or debate team meetings, but throughout the media landscape it's constantly hunted by philosophers, critics, comedians and TV producers throughout the land. Need proof? Look no further than those twin bastions of sincerity, Martha Stewart and Michael Jackson.

Irony, on the other hand, is consciousness of the separation between what's said and what's meant. Like it or not, nobody ever really knows what anyone else is talking about, and communication always involves a gap between its partipants, conveniently illustrated above. (A) represents the realm of thought, and (B) the realm of language, and they run like railroad tracks, paralleling into the great beyond. Not coincidentally, the ironic gap resembles a deep gorge, and for a more sophmoric description of what happens, think of Wile E. Coyote runnning off the cliff, and remember how he hovers for an instant in midair, unaffected by gravity until he looks down and plunges to his canyon doom. Sincere people never look down, but ironists always do, which is why the basic message of ironic communication-"we're just having fun while falling to our death"-seems so similar regardless of context.

This is for kids

Today irony plays a much larger cultural role than it did in jazz music's 1950's prime. As everybody's favorite ironic writer, David Foster Wallace, writes: "Irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive of those features of contemporary U.S. culture that enjoy any significant relation to the television whose weird pretty hand has my generation by the throat." Wallace's career has aptly demonstrated how irony has become an artistic necessity. It's now a required formal uniform for every media, from literature to film to music. And we, the media consumers, have become so accustomed to the ironic perspective of advertising, television, &c. that we can't tolerate anything that smacks of sincere communication, no matter what the content. It's gotten so bad that cultural theorists have started making facile distinctions between things like basic irony (Andy Warhol) ironic irony ("I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV"), and ironically sincere ironicalism (McSweeneys), &c.

The late 20th c. triumph of irony has dramatic consequences for the future of jazz music, primarly because jazz music is an instrumental art form (jazz without singing, anyway), totally devoid of semantic content. Whereas TV is an ideal ironic medium because of its ability to contrast what's said with what's seen, jazz music is a horrible medium for irony. Without irony's prime mover and shaker, language, a jazz musician is totally unable to become hip and self-referential. They're forever doomed to a lifetime of sincere unpopularity.

Happy Apple is Delicious

Arriving in the Twin Cities a few years ago, I asked a friend of mine about the local jazz scene and he mentioned a happening band called Happy Apple. Bored and lonley, I soon went to see them, and I most remember being floored by the number of young people at the show, youth being a rare occurrence given that most jazz gigs smack and smell funeral, and the appeal of Happy Apple was all the more suprising because, unlike many popular pseudo-jazz acts (e.g. Ben Folds, Medeski Martin & Wood) their music was abstract and difficult, embodying many of the more problematic aspects of jazz music.

You can buy a vintage Happy Apple on eBay

And this month, after a multi-year hiatus, I've gone on a Happy Apple listening spree, catching two different sold-out performances. What can I say? Sure Happy Apple has talented musicians, but most jazz musicians are exquisitely talented and that doesn't keep people from ignoring the hell out of them. I think the real reason for their success (relative to other jazz musicians, mind you) is that they have managed to make inroads toward that seemingly Gordian challenge of reconciling irony with abstract instrumentalism.

The lion's share of this work has been done by Dave King, the mad drummer and the heart of the group. Here, purloined from the back side of the band setlist, are Mr. King's four simple rules for jazz irony:

Dave King's Ironicalization Primer

1. Playing music isn't a metaphor, so break out the toys.

Mr. King has an unusual drum kit. A recreation of a kindergartener's playroom surrounds the usual array of cymbals and snares: he has some sort of African metal device played with a violin bow, a orange jingle-bell ball, a pair of walkie talkies, and the band's namesake, a Mattel toy from the 70's called 'The Happy Apple,' which jingles tinnily like a wind-chime when shaken. At apropriate moments Mr. King will pull out one or more of these toys and use them to break the musical ice. He also loves hitting his cymbal and drum stands with his sticks, making a rattling noise and looking mighty goofy. All of this lends the band no small degree of atmospheric irony.

2. Lot's of talking between songs, humorous, if possible.

Between each twenty-minute instrumental song, Mr. King grabs the microphone positioned to his left and says "Thank you. You're all so nice. Thanks for listening to our abstract modern jazz." Then he tells either a long joke about himself or his family, or regales the audience with a wacky road-trip story, all well laced with pop-cultural reference. Mr. King is very funny, and would make an excellent stand-up comic if he wasn't sitting on his drum stool.

3. Titles are important; think programmatically.

Along with jokes, Mr. King will often set the stage for a song by defnining some visual/symbolic context. For example, before playing the song 'The New Bison,' Mr. King suggests that each listener imagine: a 70-story bison emerging from our polar ice caps with intent to destroy pretty much everything, from tall buildings to '83 K cars. Dave King knows that setting up a predefined meaning horizon allows rudimentary irony to occur.

4. Band uniforms are a must.

Each of the band members has some sort of ironic-esque appearance. The bassist has been known to wear a trucker hat and a pair of Bill Evans glasses. Mr. King has been known to wear tasteful satan/communist T-shirts. If you can't be musically ironic, visual irony can lend your jazz band some pomo credibility.

Bill Evans, in cardigan and glasses

While I like Happy Apple, clearly I'm no cultural barometer. They haven't gotten great national press, and their albums haven't sold like wildfire. Is this a sign of the jazz music apocalypse? I think, rather, that it's a sign that the above ironicalization tactics only work for live shows. On their records, the only remnant of all this irony is the cover art, and, frankly, that isn't going to get you very far. Today's ironic demands being what they are, perhaps Happy Apple is forever doomed to kick ass in person.

Is Jazz Music Royally Screwed?

Actually, it's ironic (in the theatrical sense of the word) that jazz music has become a bastion of sincereity. When jazz emerged in the 40's, it was a playful reaction to popular music of the day. The entire art form was composed of improvisations based on covers of Broadway musical numbers (like "I Got Rhythm" or "Body and Soul"), the popular hit-songs of the time. Jazz music was hip and self-referential, and its solos were laced with quotes of popular songs, little wink-jokes between performer and audience. Damnit! I still say that jazz music laid the foundation of the irony movement and set the stage for the generation to come.

And while Happy Apple hasn't yet hit the mainstream, Dave King (really, truly The Best Drummer in the World) has a backup plan. He's in another, even more ironic, even more popular, jazz band called The Bad Plus. In fact, they're so popular that they regularly pack The Village Vanguard, NYC's jazz temple, and their new album is selling like DVD players at a Jacksonville Walmart.

The secret to The Bad Plus (is their name ironic? I think so) is that they take all of Dave King's four ironicalization tactics and add another crucial bit: They cover pop songs. They preform works by The Police, Nirvana, Ozzie, and many many more, skillfully twisting familiar melodies into neo-cubist musical expressionism. Their shows are a grab bag of original modern-jazz compositions and fun musical jokes, so that sitting and listening to them play I can easily imagine what it must have been like in the old days, when the audience's cultural knowledge was a big part of the jazz music experience. Finally, jazz music is reclaiming it's status as a meta medium.

Why is Jazz Music Important?

Was Happy Apple influenced by Keirkegaard?

Because irony's trickiness has so innundated our pop culture, I believe people are becoming somewhat (somewhat? you mean 'totally') nihilstic about art. Sure jaded self-awareness has a lot of good consequences, but it can also alienate, reinforcing indiviualistic subjectivity at the expense of publicly collective empathy. But unlike other art forms, music has a particularly powerful defense against the erosive effect of hipness. In all my many years of listening to people talk, nobody has ever (ever!) been able to convincingly explain why and how instrumental music, which is made up of nothing but meaningless sounds, is able to make anybody feel anything whatsoever. Why does listening to Beethoven give you goosebumps? How can an opera sung in another language make you cry? Apart from drugs, how does techno make its audience feel so darn good?

Music, in its simplest form, is a totally unironic phenomenon, and strikes me as a bit out of place in today's status-symbolic world. It's something that just can't be put into words, and call me a dreamer if you must, but I'd like to believe that jazz music has a inscrutable hold on its listeners. I'd like to believe that it's only the unavoidably sincere perspective that has kept my generation a ten-foot pole-length away, and while it's probably impossible to ever really reconcile inherently sincere instrumentalism with the wink-wink aloofness of Britney Affleck, somehow Dave King is singlehandedly (he uses all of his limbs, to tell the truth) making a valiant effort. As one of my hip jazz teachers used to say: "It's close enough for jazz."