About Ghosts of Our Former Selves - chapter 2 (disillusion with suburban jazz)
About the inspiration for the album, Ghosts of Our Former Selves
Chapter 2 - Disillusion With Suburban Jazz
Artists who pretend that no art existed before them do so at their own peril. We are enriched by our complicated histories and the difficulty of finding the right dialog with the past, whether conscious or not. In composing Ghosts of Our Former Selves, I sought to create a kaleidoscope of musical and textual historical references. Some are personal, intimate, and at times hidden, while others are obvious and speak to our difficult “apocalyptic” moment. As each song unfolds in succession, it creates its own little world, while shifting the perspective and building on those that have come before.
The challenge I always set for myself is to thoroughly internalize a broad range of influences and come out the other side somewhere new and unexpected, while at the same time respecting our “ancestors”. On the surface, these songs seem to combine popular, jazz, folk, and electroacoustic traditions. The music I have written though does not sit in any one place. I am seeking a synthesis of commentaries that strives for something deeper, and that means I need lived experience and an intimacy with my musical points of reference. Appropriation and ironic distance are not going to cut it. Years ago I started hearing many attempts at musical synthesis, and most were superficial combinations of musical clichés. I have been determined ever since not to fall into that trap.
It feels somewhat ironic to write about “lived traditions”, because growing up it felt next to impossible to find a place to belong and I mean this well beyond that feeling so common to adolescence. Wherever I found myself, I had the intense sense of being the other – different, outside and removed from. I passionately hate the “artists are angst-ridden misfits” trope, but it is true that many of us feel like outsiders and that it is this perspective that allows us to truly observe and use our art to report back.
After our year in Key West, and a couple of shorter subtropical assignments, my parents moved us for good to Whippany, New Jersey. By 1965 there were six kids – four boys and two girls, and constantly relocating to accompany my father was no longer practical. Some of my siblings got to feel anchored in that place, but I never really settled. Dad continued solo, flying off with little notice to Pearl Harbor, Bermuda, the Aleutians, Iceland, the Bahamas, and countless other, often secret, destinations. He told us he was an applied mathematician, but just as often he said, “I’m a spy”, which we sort of believed because it was so much more glamorous. Once, my mother was woken by a late night anonymous voice on the phone telling her, “Ivan is ill and we are seeing to it that he is escorted home… sorry, but we can’t say where he is… yes, he is going to be OK”. Dad’s life continued, full of mysterious adventures. To me, the New Jersey light was dim, the air felt cold, and sitting still was hard.
In spite of its eponymous nod to a long ago displaced indigenous people, Whippany was then a working-class town of cozy, insular neighborhoods, each defined by its own church – Ukrainian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Methodist, and down along the highway, Route 10 that bisected it all, Presbyterian. As the Jewish family on our side of the highway, we knew we were the “other”. Many people were welcoming, but there was also an undercurrent of antisemitism that would surface painfully when least expected. After an incident or two, I took on a sharper feeling of exclusion. I remember visiting friends, sitting in the kitchen while their mothers cooked exotic and enticing dishes, and feeling a deep sadness. There was plenty else to mark us besides religion. My parents were younger - too young for Dad to be a war veteran like other fathers. To compound matters, my mother liked to remind people that Dad was a PhD. Sure, I was proud too, but it felt distancing from my school friends whose fathers worked shifts at the paper mill. They were mostly Polish or Italian and Catholic and seemed to come from another, more meaningful era. They told World War II stories while showing off souvenirs, they smoked cigarettes and drank at the VFW. I wanted desperately to belong, but I had not yet discovered how to forge an identity out of difference. I felt weighed down and worked hard to deny, to hide, and to discard. Some years later, I discovered that my parents had first tried desperately to find a house they could afford one town east, in Livingston. That was where upwardly mobile Jews congregated. It even had a New York style delicatessen. But they ended up priced out, and besides, with Bell Labs just down one hill, across the railroad tracks, and up one more, my father could walk to work.
My experience of racial difference too became especially acute just as I was starting to compose and play jazz in high school. Other than Bill Evans and Joe Zawinul, every other jazz master I went to hear in the clubs was black. The few times that I traveled with school bandmates to workshops though, the clinicians were almost always white. One time it was Stan Kenton, though we really just sat there while he told stories. My exchange with Manny Albam, as I recall, was more meaningful. No one said anything directly about the meaning of race in jazz history, but it seemed obvious to me that jazz history was really part of black history. Eventually I started to feel unsettled and inappropriate being a white kid composing jazz. I never stopped listening and loving it – being inspired by what I heard and felt, but more and more there was that inescapable feeling once again that I just did not belong and bit by bit, I disconnected. I was deeply conflicted, feeling a loss, but the shift also opened up a space to start discovering other corners of the music world, including some where I would eventually feel authentic.
