Prodigious

Every couple of years I recall this essay and go reread it. Even if you're not into jazz I think it holds interest as a piece about personalities. The nutshell is that the author, when he was in his mid-twenties, held down the lead tenor sax chair in a big band from Detroit, when all of a sudden a 16 year old kid is invited into the band on second chair. The kid happens to be James Carter, who is now a big time sax phenomenon. It's interesting as an essay just in an exercise in seeing how one guy dealt with meeting someone two thirds his age who was, still in his youth, just flat out superior at their chosen vocation. Music isn't a contest and all that, but there are still tiers - I might enjoy a guy from the third tier more than a guy from the first tier, and for whatever reason, but there are levels of accomplishment and artistry and sheer technical capacity. (I actually do this a lot; Mozart and Charlie Parker are in my opinion among the greatest geniuses of Western music, but I'm not especially fond of either one from an enjoyment-listening perspective.)

The other interesting thing to me this time was noting that according to the author, at sixteen James Carter was essentially the James Carter of 1999 (when the article was written Carter would've been about 30). He's undoubtedly grown as a musician, but the maturity and identity was largely there. I found this interesting because the greatest child prodigy in the history of Western classical music, Felix Mendelssohn, was also essentially done maturing at sixteen. He evolved the way any adult mature artist will, but the formative years were over and mature work was being produced.

Then, of course, comes the observation that Mendelssohn, at 16 or 30, is a great composer, but he's not quite Beethoven or Mozart or (for my money, at least) Schubert. Similarly, Carter, while fantastic and a gas to listen to (I'm not huge on Felix, but every time I've heard Carter on a record I'm knocked out smiling), probably isn't going to go down as one of the absolute greatest or most important players in the history of his instrument. Of course he was many years left to write a legacy and keep growing, but I wonder if it's largely a given that the level of artistic maturity in a teenager I'm talking about here often leads to that kind of..."dead end" is so not the phrase I'm looking for. If you're that good at sixteen, is it possible to really get better?

[INSTANT UPDATE]

Then there's the corollary which just occurred to me: in my opinion the two greatest jazz artists of all are Miles Davis and John Coltrane (I know, I'm going way out on a limb). Other than the fact the Coltrane played in Davis' band during the '50s, the obvious link was that by the standards of their profession, and of people who achieved anything like that level of artistry, they were abnormally late bloomers. Davis didn't really start getting it together until his mid-twenties (and didn't start gathering the accolades indicative of true greatness until he was about thirty), and Coltrane didn't really emerge until he was thirty (and did his most widely acclaimed work between about thirty-four and thirty-seven; at thirty-seven Herbie Hancock was already a few years removed from 95% of his most creative work). And in addition to being late bloomers, they both never stopped moving; Davis' style on trumpet crystallized somewhat by the mid '60s, but he kept finding new situations to put himself in. Coltrane, more radically, kept actually reinventing his approach to how he used the saxophone. So if you have it in you to be a world-historical genius, does blooming late indicate a propensity to continual evolution?

Update Bullets

(1) My father agreed with me that it was, for us at least, unusual to attend a funeral where part of the ceremony involved watching a video of the deceased oiled up and posing onstage in a skimpy swimsuit. I suppose it's the sort of thing that might happen when the deceased happened to be a successful local figure competitor prior to her first bout with cancer, but it was still strange for me. That aside, it was the first non-Catholic (or nominally Catholic) funeral I've attended, and it was simultaneously nice but well outside my realm of experience and, sometimes, comfort.

(2) Ongoing and interlocking frustrations at work of the sort that I imagine must be insufferably dull to talk about, even by the standards of what I put up on this so-infrequent blog. I will note that working for five months in a government agency has pretty much solidified and etched in stone my nascent convictions that we live in a society where systems seem to operate independently of the individuals who compose them, and work against them. A surprising proportion of my frustration and anger is impotent and directionless because there's no one identifiable at whom to aim it; everyone would appear to agree, whether explicitly or tacitly, that most of the stuff I think is crazy shit is in fact crazy shit. I'm utterly confident that if I had a sit down with the organization's CEO, he'd agree with me. Things calcify and seem to be the way they *are* and the system grinds on. Everyone watching out for their own wheelhouse unknowingly conspires to create the machine they decry.

(3) There was a movie starring Fred Ward (and Kate Mulgrew and Wilford Brimley and Joel Grey in what I'm going to call "yellow-face", somewhere between David Carradine in Kung Fu and Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's on the offensive scale, though I suspect that might've been the point), based on a long-running series of men's pulp novels. The movie was entitled, optimistically, Remo Williams: The Adventure Beings. There were clearly supposed to be multiple sequels. There clearly were none. I don't post here as often as I'd like, but note to a fellow blogger: when your post titles indicate a multi-part series, it's only polite to provide the second installment within a month's time of the first. Just saying. :-P

(4) I just put an emoticon on my blog.

(5) I don't write about direct politics in the horse-race sense, because for the sake of my mental health I like to maintain a heavily mediated distance from the immediacy of all that, but I'd like to be the umpteenth voice noting the absurdity that Katie Fucking Couric was too tough an interview for Sarah Palin. That literally dozens of bloggers on the left can come up with answers that would be 1000% preferable for her own interests than what she can come up with is astonishing. "What newspapers do I read? The Anchorage [Whatever] and/or the Juneau [Whatever-Picayune], and I make sure to read through at least a couple of sections of the Wall Street Journal, plus, of course, whatever press clippings my staff feels it necessary to bring to my attention." Christ, namecheck USA Today. How fucking hard is this? I wouldn't want to vote for someone who claimed their worldview was influenced by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but I'm not a fucking Republican, am I? - that'd be a perfectly respectable answer for someone coming from her perspective. The early buzz amongst frightened liberals was that Palin was an astonishingly good liar because she didn't flinch while telling you her piss was actually rain, but at least piss is a fucking liquid. Some of her responses are the kind of idiot panic / smug conceit you get from Homer Simpson. Where have you been all day, Governor Palin? Think of something clever, think of something clever! I was at the bar getting drunk at two in the afternoon! Brilliant! What newspapers do you read? All of them! What are your personal accomplishments? I invented the Cobb Salad!

(6) In the month of September I lost twenty pounds (thanks, Dr. Agatstin!). Unfortunately, between May and August I gained twenty pounds, so I'm still c.30 pounds overweight, same as I have been since applying for grad school back in 2006. Sometimes for giggles I measure my weight against basketball players, though, and it's nice that I no longer weigh as much as some NBA power forwards (i.e., muscular guys who are nine inches taller than me).