Ellery Eskelin with Andrea Parkins and Jim Black
Arcanum Moderne

On tour, March 2002. Four weeks of one nighters. We'll soon be entering our ninth year of performing and recording and I've now lost track of exactly how many tours and concerts we've done since 1994. A lot of issues have come and gone over the years but one has stuck in my mind. Namely, what the hell are we doing out here?

Globally it's been a tough year and sometimes the idea of playing a rarified and arcane music in light of such upheaval seems pretty much irrelevant. But each time we tour more and more people come out and encourage us to keep doing what we do. And then I ask myself, what is it that people are applauding when we play? It's certainly not about me and trying to impress the crowd with how well I play, at least I hope they don't take it that way. But then I realize why I'm attracted to music in the first place. It makes me feel like a human being. Hopefully it has the same effect on them.

So now I'm trying to figure out what it is about this phrase "music is the universal language" that bugs me. The phrase gets a lot of play but I'm not a hundred percent sure how that actually works out in practice. Obviously our music is not immediately embraced by the entire world let alone the entire universe. Nor is anyone else's. Why is that? I've given some thought to the idea of language and music and while I would never want to tell someone how to listen I have made a few observations.

"It's sounds like they're just blurting out anything" was what my wife said when she first heard the music of Ornette Coleman. And so I realized that many people are not used to thinking of the sounds they hear in more freely improvised music as being specific, intentional sounds, distinguishable from one another. But just like any other music all it takes is repeated listening. Just ask my wife, she still loves the music she grew up with but once she "got" the music of Ornette Coleman she's become one of the most adventurous and open minded listeners I know.

So what is it about this band that may or may not speak to people? Well, one of the things I like best about this group is that we strive to play a real "band" music. We've got a certain point of view and we try to express that as an ensemble. One way we manage that is to keep focused on the idea of what I think of as a functional improvisation. Even as we've gone from more mapped out tunes to increasingly longer more open pieces the improvisation still has a compositional function, a job to do, even in the most open pieces. Trying night after night to figure out how we're going to get from "point A to "point B" keeps us constantly fixed in the moment, no aimless meandering.

But let's face it, there's a lot of ways to improvise and my way is no better or worse than anyone else's. So I read a lot of musician interviews because I'm interested in how musicians talk about what they do. More and more I sense that the barriers are breaking down in aesthetic attitudes concerning what method is best. It used to be that in jazz it was almost a matter of taking a stand in your music that tacitly assumed that yours was the best approach and that all the others were pretty much just BS. Thankfully that attitude is changing, slowly. These days one can espouse a definite and specific musical point of view without it coming at the expense of or to the detriment of other approaches.

And so in music I'm interested in finding as many distinctions and possibilities as exist, and of course that's endless. Any difference between one sound or musical gesture and another can have it's own corresponding emotional resonance. At least potentially since perhaps there's not been a resonance attached to it yet. The problems begin to creep in when value judgments get attached. Value judgments are fine for one's personal use but imposing them on others constitutes cultural warfare. For example, one might criticize a work for not being emotional, for being too cerebral. Or one might criticize some other endeavor as not being "art" or that it doesn't offer enough substance to be worthwhile. Well who's to say that one can’t get an emotional response from intellectual stimulation? Or that more popular works can't address important human concerns? Why the dichotomy? I say it's all worthwhile. That's not to say it's all the same. It's not, it's all different.

By the way, is there any extreme music anymore? Need there be? Didn't the musical revolution of the last century have the purpose of liberating us? Are we liberated yet? Are we having fun yet? It's hard to imagine an unusual, shocking or revolutionary sound today. Maybe now we can move on. And so I'm not too hung up about style. This music is not conceived of as being in opposition to anything else. We've embraced a lot of what has been considered good and bad about music. I'm not into cultural snobbery or exclusivity. Excellence is fine but elitism is a drag. I want to be able to find joy in listening to a great symphony orchestra or a terrible junior high school stage band. And if I think about it, I've never played in a great symphony orchestra, but I have played in a terrible junior high school stage band. So I never want to get to the point where I destroy my love of music. I see it happen all the time.

And what about audiences? A friend of mine hit the nail right on the head by calling attention to the fact that today's music fans are very eclectic. More than being jazz fans they are music fans, and jazz and improvisation are just another set of musical choices available to them. This makes sense as I try to figure out how and why our audience is changing and why in nearly nine years of steady concertizing we've rarely played in an actual jazz club. We play in quite a variety of venues these days, from concert halls, cultural and community centers to art galleries, theaters, bars and rock clubs. Our most recent tour is another case study in how this music has filtered out into a number of cultural tributaries nourishing itself in the process as well as those who seek it out and occasionally even those who stumble upon it by accident.

So I don't know if all this explanation and commentary will help or hinder. If it's a hindrance hopefully you've passed it over and are already listening to the music. I realize that what we do may not have universal appeal, at least on the surface, but I think we do have a job to do and I'm always hopeful that while we may not have universal appeal we might have an impact on those who do listen.

Ellery Eskelin
New York City, October 2002


Ellery Eskelin with Andrea Parkins and Jim Black
Arcanum Moderne

1. it's a samba 13:36
2. 43 RPM 6:20
3. five walls 12:43
4. for no good reason 9:46
5. half a chance 10:51
6. arcanum moderne 14:19

Total Time 67:35

Ellery Eskelin - tenor saxophone
Andrea Parkins - accordion, piano, sampler
Jim Black - drums and percussion

All compositions by Ellery Eskelin, Tuhtah Publishing/Suisa. Recorded on May 31st, 2002 at The Studio in New York City. Engineered by Jon Rosenberg. Mix and CD master by Peter Pfister. Thanks to Gunnar Pfabe, all of the promoters on our 2002 European tour, Jessica Constable, WXU, Peter, Jon, Walt Davis, jazzcorner.com and, of course, to all of our listeners.