why ageism is b.s. - shout-outs to young musicians – social media challenges - nurturing curiosity - the strength of the jazz scene right now, as a progressive bellwether

How many of you are familiar with this kind of gloomy, self-righteous statement?

“When we were coming up, we would go look for such and such artist at the record store. We saved up our money, and getting one record was a big deal. We would then stay with that artist, and explore their oeuvre slowly. Now though, everything is available. Everyone has access to everything, and the result is that they don’t go deep into anything.”

This is an ageist claim, and it might come from someone of my generation (I’m 55), harping bitterly/nostalgically about our younger years. In my jazz neck of the woods, there is the further (unfounded) assertion that younger musicians consequently do not go deep into particular artists, and that this has a negative outcome on their development.

I’d like to say: in my present experience interacting with jazz musicians in their twenties – hanging out at jam sessions, or talking to them after a gig, for example – this claim does not hold up. Younger musicians are wonking out in a beautiful way as much as they always have. Pianists are going down Bud Powell wormholes. Drummers are digging way into Philly Joe Jones rudiments. Saxophonists are going deep on Ben Webster and Don Byas, and staying there for a while.

Younger musicians show up to my gigs and I’m honored and gratified that they are there. I’m checking them out as well. Last month, I had the chance to play at The Village Vanguard in New York City for a couple weeks, first in Gilad Hekselman’s group, and then in trio with the incomparable Larry Grenadier on bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums. I was able to make it over to Small’s down the street, and a couple other newer clubs like Close Up and The Five Spot, and hear them on my off nights, or in the late sets after I was done. I got to sit in a couple times as well.

A few highlights: Allison Lee, the bassist running the session at The Five Spot – great bounce in the beat, refreshing assertive kind of bass playing that I love. Guitarist Emmanuel Michael, whose set at Close Up was really exciting – an absolutely individual voice; have not heard guitar playing like this before. Pianist Brandon Goldberg, who was at Emmet’s Place with me a few weeks ago. Original ideas, searching, strong identity forming. (Emmet featured Veronica Swift as the headliner and her singing was out of this world.) Or, there is Skylar Tang, the trumpeter who I heard the last time I was in NYC, when she was sitting in at Smalls. Fire. Check her out with Joshua Redman and Emmet’s group. All these musicians are under 25. The scene is really strong now.

The ageist assertion that younger people have a shorter attention span more generally does not hold up by my lights for a simple reason: People my age and older as well have the same problem! The way to frame this is to look at the common dilemma we all face, and the common solution. The problem, I propose, is indifference. The solution is nurturing our innate curiosity.

The writer Henry James described why people are drawn to fiction, referring to our “blessed faculty of wonder”.¹ We are drawn into novels, music, and other arts, through this faculty. I’ve thought about this a lot over the years. Wonder, which is closely related to curiosity, is a “faculty” in the sense that it’s innate to humans across the board. We’re born with it. Today, however, you’re invited to continually scroll through an algorithmic feed of disparate content – stupid pet tricks, food porn, doomsday political pronouncements…Your emotions swing from laughter and joy, to righteous indignation, every 2 seconds.

Here’s where it gets complicated: Let’s say you’re a jazz musician, and you use Instagram. Interspersed in that feed, you might have some really great stuff. Old stuff: A video of drummer Billy Higgins you had never seen before, or a masterclass of pianist Barry Harris from the 1980s that someone just posted. There is a lot of amazing archival material that turns up in Instagram, of musicians who are no longer with us. Notably, a lot of the people posting these archival videos are young, so that’s more evidence, if we even need it, that young people are less focused on particular musicians. On the contrary – they are curating. In itself, this is a win for everyone: You might otherwise miss some of these archives if someone hadn’t pointed you towards them.

The problem though: your attention is pulled away from this by the other stuff in your feed, which offers you an easier, quicker hit. When you focus on the easy hit, your sense of curiosity and wonder gets compromised. Curiosity involves a willingness to search, and use your intellect. You may not “get” what you’re taking in right away. But if you stick with it, you get a lasting reward. The easy hit requires no effort. Curiosity, I would suggest, is like a muscle – we have to use it and expend some effort to keep it in shape; otherwise it withers.

We sense that an app like Instagram is positive and negative at the same time, inviting us into further curiosity and further indifference all at once. This issue with social media and tube sites has been covered a lot, and I don’t have the answer for that. My point here is only to say that I recognize that people my age are faced with the same hurdle, and we’re doing the same shit. I see them on the airplane next to me, scrolling from the time they sit down, through the whole flight, not even looking up. (As the jazz bassist George Mraz was known to wryly comment: “I’m not judging, just observing…”)

Speaking for myself, my most direct relationship with social media is here on Substack. Substack is a form of social media, but overlaps with something else: an online forum of writers and other artists presenting their work. I’m still new here, just a few months in. I have a Facebook and an Instagram, but someone oversees them for me, posting what’s going on with new releases, gigs, etc. They are a promotional tool for me as a musician, but I’ve never had the apps on my phone and only occasionally post a message on Facebook.

This is not because I feel “above” Facebook or Instagram – not one bit. The reason is self-care. It works best for my brain to not get saturated with those kinds of social media. I have a predisposition to obsessive-compulsive behavior, and I also experience hypomania – “racing thoughts” as they’re called – as part of my mental make-up. I avoid getting on those platforms because, to put it plainly, that shit would be like crack for me. (How do I know a little what’s happening on Instagram, you might ask? I lurk over my son Damien’s shoulder when we’re hanging out, and he turns me on to those archival videos, or more recent posts from people’s gigs. Damien is a jazz drummer and is now 18.)

Substack appeals to me because, while there is an algorithm mediating my feed, it steers me towards any number of subjects that interest me, and to the people who are writing on those subjects. Another way to put that is that Substack works for me because of what it doesn’t include. It doesn’t have an endless stream of other content beckoning me. Substack requires me to flex my curiosity muscle, and rewards me accordingly. I learn stuff; I hear other perspectives.

For all the incredible material on YouTube, I struggle with it. Let’s say I’m watching a great archival video of Leonard Bernstein conducting Mahler with Vienna Philharmonic. I’m just about to go full-screen. But a thumbnail link in the sidebar catches my eye. It’s one of those shark attack videos. (I’m not sure why these violent animal attack videos always come up in my feed.) The reptilian impulse kicks in, and I click on it, choosing quick thrills over sublimity. I might not even go back to the Mahler, but instead, skip around shark attack videos which lead me to even more awful, violent animal attacks. Going to bed that night, I think, man, I could have watched Mahler…what happened?

In all this, am I more adept at avoiding the impulse towards the easy thrill than a 20-year-old? Nope.

For me, with my particular mental makeup, Substack is an experiment. It could be that it gets to be too much for my brain. So far, it’s been positive and I’m grateful for people tuning in to what I write. Importantly, Substack sparks my curiosity in other writers and artists of all stripes, and people doing philosophy. That’s my tribe, so to speak.

The alternative to curiosity is indifference. The subject I’ve been exploring in the essays on AI and the artist has touched on the kind of indifference that AI fosters. Most of us are probably familiar with a new phenomenon: AI music in restaurants, coffee shops and bars. For us musicians, we hear it quickly, and we’re dismayed. The primary reason this is happening is because AI music is cheap or free, vs. the (paltry) royalty a streaming service like Spotify pays a real human musician when they stream their music.

But there are other reasons people choose for AI music. Felix Moselholm, the bass player I’ve been touring with this last couple of weeks, told me about an Uber ride he recently took. The driver was playing AI music. Felix asked him why he played that instead of music from real humans, and the driver answered: “When I play this, nobody ever complains. Before, when I played human-created music, it always caused problems. One person might like it, but then another person didn’t, and would complain about it. I want to please my customers, and I want to keep it simpler for me.”

What can you say to that?

Well, you can try to explain to this guy that real musicians are getting supplanted by AI in this situation, and losing their potential royalty from a stream. That’s a big convo for an Uber ride though, and it will be hard not to come off as lecturing. I myself in that situation ask as nicely as possible for the music to be turned off. Felix, who is a very diplomatic fellow, but confrontational when he feels he needs to be, told me that he took another tactic. After the driver explained his rationale for playing AI music, he responded: “Well, I actually like hearing music from real people, for whatever it’s worth.” The conversation didn’t continue, but he spoke his truth, and the guy received that.

Indifference has many hues. Just as there is potential indifference on the part of the audience towards an artist and their work, an artist should be on the lookout for their own indifference towards their audience. The AI music phenomenon, for all its unpleasant aspects, has given me an opportunity to reflect and reconfirm the magic and sacred exchange that takes place in a live performance. Think of it in terms of a conversation.

The musician says to the audience: “I invite you to take time out of your day, and listen and engage in my music.”

The audience responds, “Okay.”

The musician (hopefully) says, “Thank you, for giving me your time.”

The performance takes place. The audience might now say: “I didn’t like it.”

The musician can hopefully say: “Well, thanks for listening anyways.”

That’s an ideal kind of exchange, even with the fact that the audience didn’t like the music. There are a lot of less ideal ways that the conversation can go. The artist might not be very grateful at all and not acknowledge the audience. They might be a megalomaniac jerk. The audience might not take the time to listen, and ignore the artist, hopping on their phones, or talking through the performance.

Even in these imperfect kinds of exchanges, there is still human interaction. The exchange between an artist and their public is an edification of manners. That sounds snooty as I write it, but I mean that we – all of us, the artists and the public alike – are invited to be kind to each other - even if we don’t pull it off every time. The audience, at the same time, is invited to engage their critical faculty. We learn how to express that criticism in a nuanced way. That could never happen with AI, which will never challenge with this kind of hypothetical confrontation, in which we do not like the music we just heard. AI has no emotional affectivity because AI has no consciousness. We can tell it whatever the fuck we want with no consequence.

One last thing I’ll add, for whatever it’s worth, going back to the jazz scene in NYC right now, as I’m taking it in. Comparing the jam session at Smalls in NYC now to what it was in the early 90s, when I was the age of a lot of these musicians: As cool as it was then in many ways, for the most part it was a sausage-fest, and while I wouldn’t say it was outright homophobic, it was not a particularly welcoming environment for a queer person. Smalls is totally different in both respects now. The whole vibe is completely inclusive to people on the whole gender spectrum, and you see that reflected in the musicians on the stage, and the audience as well. For younger people, this is just a given – if I pointed that out to them, they’d probably be like – yeah, whatever! But that in itself is great. Gender and gender preference is not a thing.

Do I have to say that? No, but I feel like saying it, because with all the doom and gloom about the present wider society, which seems to be regressing into a shitty strain of conservatism, the jazz scene is progressive in the best sense: it’s not self-consciously so; it just is, and that’s indelibly connected to the musical ethos. Jazz is not dead; it does not even smell funny like Zappa ironically said already a while back. Jazz is the music that answers to progressivism in its expression, and inspires us forward. It is optimistic – not poptimistic.

1. I’ve searched high and low for the original source of this phrase from James’ own writing and still not found it. I’d love it if someone knew and would tell me. I found it in one of Lionel Trilling’s great essays in the collection, “The Liberal Imagination.” The essay is “The Princess Casmassima”, referring to that novel of James, and Trilling cites that phrase. I’m guessing it’s in The American Scene, or James’ collected letters, neither of which I’ve read.