Divergence
Though daily life is full of choices that carry the potential to reroute the direction of our futures, we don’t often know it. At least if cultural portrayals of the butterfly effect have any bearing in reality, small choices (should I go out for coffee or make it at home?) have the potential to influence future events to a degree belied by the easy, accidental nature of their happening. Precisely because such decisions are folded into the fabric of the quotidian, it’s hard to locate them, to pinpoint: There! That’s the moment when everything changed.
But then there are the Big Choices, which stand out clearly against such a backdrop, the handful of decisions in one lifetime that determine a whole trajectory—and you know that they will before you make them. Because these are so clearly discernible as inflection points, whatever choice you make will set a path for your future, where the choice you don’t make will continue to haunt you one way or the other. If you’re considering a stark choice about where to college or whether to have kids—the kind of choice that represents not just a different version of the same fate but a completely different life—the choice you don’t make (but could have!) takes on a particular, ghostly form. The lost possibilities of that other way of living continue to haunt you, even when you know you made the right decision.
This haunting isn’t about regret so much as it is the certainty that everything would have been different, the fantasy you project onto who you might have been, the existential grief at not being able to try both just to see what would have happened, to live more than one life. When you have to make that kind of total choice, one from which there’s no going back and which entails radically different outcomes one way or the other—and when you could see yourself reasonably making either choice—it’s difficult to let go of what you let go of.
California Avant-Garde
While it’s impossible to accurately generalize whole musical scenes, it’s long seemed to me that the west coast has cultivated an approach to improvised music that’s quite distinct from both the east coast version (overdetermined by whatever seems to be happening in New York) and the midwest (which, with the exception of the beautiful anomaly that is Chicago, feels all but oriented around standards). Things get weirder when trying to parse jazz from improvised/avant-garde music, categories that at least in the most exciting scenes blur easily and often. All of which is to say, I don’t actually know if what I’m trying to point to can be considered indicative of a west coast approach, or whether it’s something shared more widely in our distributed, disconnected soundscape.
Whatever it might be and wherever located, I came to know this sound through Los Angeles, on my mind more than usual these days. It’s a particular approach to experimentalism that involves less frenetic energy than repetition, more space and time for the unfurling of what is gorgeous in simple harmony, a single chord. It’s an approach that plumbs one idea rather than juxtaposing twelve, music with what to my ear seems a kind of patient radiance, displacing what’s experimental onto factors like rhythmic interplay and timbre. It stands in such stark contrast with the flashy virtuosity of a band like Snarky Puppy, for example (whose music, to be charitable, I couldn’t give less of a shit about).1 What’s long interested me, by contrast, is whatever you call this and this and this.
In my imagination, this kind of music has something to do with LA’s cartography, the fact that it’s both expensive to live there (so musicians need to work widely) and also that there’s ample opportunity to rub shoulders with musicians in other genres—perhaps particularly the robust indie scenes that have long been there, that have recently contributed to the indie revival I’m writing about.
I think about musicians like Anna Butterss, who’s played with with “jazz” contexts like SML and Jeff Parker, but also indie bands like boygenius and SASAMI. I think about my friend Greg, who’s done straight jazz records like this one but also plays with Perfume Genius; or my friend Lauren, who conducts her own big band when not on tour with Iron and Wine or Japanese Breakfast. Is there something about living in LA that makes indistinctions between improvising and indie musicians? Is that why you can hear so many chords and grooves that would be appealing to any indie listener showing up in the masterful improvisations of a band just working things out for the first time at a jazz club?
A kind of bargain: To live in a paradise on the edge of an apocalypse, to have every possibility before you, for however long it lasts.
Whatever the reasons, this sound—real or imaginary, a concerted project or a projection of my own fantasies—is the reason I moved to LA in 2010. I heard it on these compilations and was so transfixed that I uprooted my whole life to pursue it. In Columbus, Ohio, I put a tune on my senior recital that was written by a fellow student on the other side of the country, hoping to catch some of its magic. When I was waitlisted at CalArts, I simply organized my life around re-applying the next year.
Then, once I had finally gone there, had met some of the musicians I had revered from afar, after I had started to hear what it was like in LA with my own ears, I quickly resolved to leave it behind.
ETA IVtet
When I actually lived in LA (rather than Valencia), it was in Highland Park, though by the time I moved there I had already plunged into the existential crisis that would cause me to stop playing music entirely—at least for a time. Three years after I left, a club called ETA opened up in that very neighborhood, helping to consolidate a scene that I’d only learn about after it was all over, thanks to this record. From the first moment of my listening, I’ve found it, unsurprisingly, gorgeous. Jeff Parker’s IVtet (with Butterss on bass) is indicative of the dynamics I’ve been trying to outline here, in part because Parker himself has long been a singular bridge between improvised and popular genres. And here, finally, is the occasion for all this reflection: in November, the band released another, heavy record. Recorded just under a year before the club’s last service, this will be the final dispatch from the room that cultivated their sound.
By the time this one was cut, the IVtet had been playing Mondays for some seven years. At that point, this music had become its own language, a vernacular of patience. And it’s in part for this reason that I believe it conveys, more than anything, an investment in space, in holding onto something special for as long as you can when the incentives to move on are omnipresent. I can hear the same kinds of interactions on this record that I recognize in much improvised music (including my own playing), the kinds of gestures that signal movement to others, soliciting reaction and response from one’s bandmates; the difference here is the timescale over which they occur, so that even as the music continues spiraling, the rate at which change happens feels slowed down, stretched out.
What happens when every gesture, every switch in timbre or harmony, solo or background figure, every adjustment one might hear and the execute becomes elongated—spread over minutes—before it can even feel possible to move on? On this record in particular, it’s as if the band is reluctant to let go, aware that once they do, they can’t go back to where they had just been, that it wouldn’t be the same if they did.
Ghost Music
When I was a senior in college, one of my teachers put me in touch with the head of the jazz program at a major Midwestern university, suggesting that I might go to grad school there. I declined without even considering it. I knew already that I wanted to go to CalArts, and I knew why; I was not to be dissuaded. The next year, a friend of mine, a drummer just a year behind me in school, said yes where I had said no: He went to that Midwestern grad program along with, as it turns out, my at the time girlfriend. As that relationship collapsed (on account of the long distance and, in fairness, a good degree of my own idiocy), I looked at my friend and imagined him as a living embodiment of my alternative timeline, a doppelganger who chose B instead of A, a choice I had every chance to make but didn’t.
This is a fiction—it is an imaginary relationship to my friend, a fantasy born out of my anxiety over having made the wrong choice. But it’s rare to have someone walking the path from which you had previously decided to turn away, constantly there for your own comparison. “How’s life been?” in this context means also “How could my life have been?” I wondered: If I had followed my teacher’s advice, would I have stayed in my relationship? Would I have been happy instead of depressed, on the other side of the country, where I knew no one?
It was the right choice for me to go to LA, and three years later, it was the right choice for me to leave. As sure as I’d been that I needed to go there, I was convinced then I then needed to go home. And yet, listening to Parker’s IVtet raises these musical ghosts for me, this sound that was honed down the street from where I used to live, with friends of my friends in the band or at the bar. Listening to their wisened commitment to their own making, I wonder what would have happened to me if I had stayed. Who would I have become?
In the end, my decision to leave LA was also my decision to give up being a full-time musician. If I had decided to keep pursuing a musical career, would I have stayed, and would I be looking back today on that decision as the right one, as convinced about A as I am today of B? Or in reverse: If I had stayed, would I have decided to keep pursuing a musical career? Would I have stuck it out long enough to finally meet the people who could help connect me with enough work to get by?
These are questions only interesting to me and even then only when I’m left alone in the house with my malaise. But there is a broader point here, I think, about how the things we decide not to do never really leave us; instead we have to hold onto them in order to shore up the rightness of our decision, have to internalize what we rejected so thoroughly that we’re able to justify to ourselves why we did what we did. Ghosts—of people or places, things or times—are in this way dialectical: What we reject or simply move beyond plays as much a role in shaping our personalities as what we embrace, though not always in ways that we can know. To me, The Way Out of Easy sounds like the part of Los Angeles that’s still in my spirit, not despite but because of the fact that I left.
Cry hard.
No offense if it’s your thing—it’s obviously great; I just need to be really clear about the fact that it’s not interesting to me.
As you know, I faced a similar decision and made a similar choice. I do still sometimes wonder what might have happened, had I stayed in LA. But I'm also confident that the choice I made at that time was the right one for me. For instance, I probably would never had met you had I stayed.