Week 10, 3/11

Just about ready to put my first interview up, with Mei Han (transcription almost done). Min Xiao-Fen got my questions and rescheduled a couple of weeks up to a less busy time.

I wasn’t looking forward to transcribing my own interviews—thought I might hire someone to do it—but they’re probably going to trickle in once every 2-3 weeks, which is a manageable load...and I’m finding I’m actually enjoying what has been in such projects past the most tedious part of the job.

I notice another difference, in my own interview style: it’s more Socratic. I didn’t intend that, but it suits and intrigues me that it is so, as I listen and write what I ask and am answered.

I might contrast my previous style to it as Aristotelian: I girded my mind with everything written about and by, and everything recorded by, Anthony Braxton before I started talking to him for my book on him. I tried to be more scrupulously aware of his history and body of work than he himself (or anyone) was likely to be, as a point of both professionalism and genuine interest. Similarly, before interviewing the European musicians of my second book, I read copious amounts of German- and French-, as well as English-language accounts of their lives and music, and listened to all of their recordings, before we ever met.

I prepared for my interview with Mei Han as well as a good music journalist (as opposed to a scholar) might: listened to her CDs, presented her with a typical list of questions. But I didn’t take a year or so to immerse myself like a scholar in Chinese music history and culture. When we did sit down to talk, it was more conversational than penetratingly erudite (as, for example, I’d say my long online Third Millennial interview with Braxton was).

As I listen and transcribe, a part of me feels I’ve exposed myself, like in a dream about standing in my underwear before a class I’m teaching. The larger part, however, is benevolently bemused, telling me why it’s okay: (1) I have nothing to prove, everything to enjoy—and what I’m enjoying is embarking on new terrain, smelling the roses, letting depth and breadth fall into place on their own as I go. (I am, in fact, immersing myself in Chinese music, first through my chosen musicians, then through background research that slowly but surely, organically, takes me into their music universe and the literature on it—just the way I gradually schooled myself in jazz, as a teenager); and (2) I am not trying to write the kind of journalism and academic music studies I’ve written in the past. I’ve conceived and am gestating with a certain kind of hybrid book—main part literature and philosophy, sub-parts music journalism and scholarship. This infuses my awareness and approach as interviewer with a different tone, voice, silence, thought...I can’t know how my interviewees are picking up on this, if at all—but I can see what’s different about my own experience, and why. Again, it suits and pleases me, because it’s a new adventure, albeit in the old, well-trod pathways.

It’s what pleasures me in the transcription work, too. Before, that was a tedious means to a clearer end, a rather unsavory processing and distillation of overloads of information. Now it’s a bodily act that savors every bit, like an embodied act of thought, or intellectual-imaginative rumination. It’s the author in me, mulling over his characters in the real world, not just his mind.

For that matter, the same payoff lies in this semi-public project site and blog. As I said before, I can do what I plan to do even if no one joins in in the way I envision as ideal—but I keep feeling that this silence and isolation, after that initial collegial response from many, is fecund rather than barren.

When I put Mei’s interview up, I’ll notify a few other musicians and colleagues whose interests and work hers would most naturally interest, and I’ll do so from within the site—which will put them on a thread with her and me, where they can interact via email if they want. At the same time, I’ll notify everyone else from outside the site, which they can respond to, and jump into the thread too, if they wish, without drawing them into a list they may or may not want to hear more from. (One reason I chose the Basecamp forum over other easiers, slicker-looking such sites is the control it gives me over how much to share, and with whom; it doesn’t just shotgun posts out like a typical listserv.)

My hope is that this first thread will indeed be of enough interest to spark some interaction—and that it will be the first of, I don’t know, several dozen more or so over the course of this year. (I also would like to see comments here, in this blog, from people who want to observe the process of the project as it develops, and to talk about the process itself, rather than the content of the project.)

My interview with Randy Raine-Reusch was a little more than twice as long as Mei’s, and somewhat more sophisticated (on my part), perhaps, because he and I are closer in age and cultural history—which brings me back to the Socratic affect I noticed in my interview with Vijay Iyer, seemingly for two other reasons new to me: generational remove, and detachment from his scene.

If I were using the old Aristotelian approach with him (and many others his age in this particular project’s list, in the same or comparable scenes), I would either (or both) compensate for the generational difference and/or ignore it. I would immerse myself, as much as possible, in what he’s immersed himself in—the carnatic music, the hip-hop influences, as well as keeping more current with the New York-cum-world jazz milieu common to us both, in deep ways.

In fact, however, I’ve intentionally withdrawn from most of my former engagements with such things, people, and places, with scenes I’ve known well...and have intentionally not further engaged with new such universes (of those other, newer times/ages and genres/traditions). I say intentionally...but also because I never managed to land a teaching position, and feel beyond trying to now...and have no more interest in being an au courant journalist, or a public musician...so I’ve withdrawn into this novelist cocoon, where my interest in these people and their music and intellectual work is no less keen, but has different motives.

As with the Chinese world, I expect I will meander my way into selective new engagements with the Indian-music cosmos Vijay’s been dealing with, along with his own scholarship on such matters (for example, his dissertation, and Michael Dessen’s, on order)—but the budding experimental novelist in me senses it would be a mistake to try and cover his world and work in the way I did previous subjects.

What will be the one result out of all the unpredictables that I can say at this point will measure the success or failure of this project? One word: exposure. These musicians and their work will be seen and then visioned by many more people than the conventional forums of specialty journalism (Signal to Noise, AllAboutJazz, etc.) and academic literature afford. In any case, that’s my aspiration—a best-selling, cinematic novel, an innovative breaking of new ground that will draw much attention, as well as a conventional work of journalism-cum-scholarship.

We’ll see...