why vegan?

This post is a one-stop primer in which I explain my reasons for turning and staying vegan from December 2007 to the present.  That makes this my silver month-iversary… 25 months of animal-free living!  I get asked questions all the time, and I’m usually up for answering or discussing why I do what I do.  I am glad to go through, point by point.

1.) Compassion – though I never get to see or know the animals I would eat, I still don’t think it’s acceptable to kill an animal for any purpose when my survival is not at stake.  I also don’t believe it’s acceptable to pay someone else to do it for me.  I admit I’m very lucky to live in an urban centre like Toronto, where being animal free is very doable, and if I lived in Nunavut things might differ, but I don’t.  I once heard the ridiculous and badly considered argument that humans are morally superior beings and that gives us the right to kill animals.  This is a circular argument, since only humans are able to deem ourselves morally superior, and that’s debatable anyways.  So this only works if we believe in a higher authority which deems humans morally superior.  Even then, aren’t mercy and compassion components of moral superiority?

2.) Reality – to me this is the main theme of Jonathan Safran Foer’s recent book Eating Animals.  I bring this point up in response to the question “What if you were offered humanely raised beef or eggs laid in someone’s backyard?”  As Michael explained to Lindsay in Arrested Development, “they don’t remove it surgically.”  So called “humane” beef production still ends in death of the animal.  If that’s fine with you, imagine if you were offered the best job in the world and told that at the end of it you were to be “humanely killed.”  I wouldn’t take that job.  Even then… this sort of humane/natural farming accounts for less than 1% of all production.  Is that where you’re getting your food from?

3.) Health - on the surface, it would seem like going vegan involves removing things from your diet.  I suppose you could do that, but what ended up happening for me is that I added the following to my diet:

• kale, swiss chard, beets, mustard greens, artichokes
• tempeh
• beans which I soak and cook myself – favourites = pinto, chickpeas, black-eyed, navy
• almond milk, and most importantly, chocolate almond milk!!
• dark non-dairy chocolate: what chocolate connoisseurs would call  “the real thing.”

Soy milk and tofu I was eating already, like most informed people, and don’t worry – I eat soy in moderation and aim for non-GMO stuff.  The point is, I started eating a wider variety of things than before I made the switch.  I take an animal free multi-vitamin to cover the bases, and in the last 2 years I’ve run 2 half-marathons and keep a pretty regular (if sparse) strength training routine.  Just the other day I asked my doctor about levels of important things in my blood and it was “perfect” (her words).  So I know it’s only been 2 years, but anecdotally, this vegan is fine.

4.) The finer points - Honey? Wool?  I irk a lot of people about this topic.  I don’t know that the bees do or do not suffer, but I opt out of eating honey mostly to ignite discussion over veganism.  And to be consistent.  Same with wool and other clothing type products.  I still have some leather and wool in my closet, but I don’t see the sense in throwing it out, and I won’t be buying any new stuff.

5.) The company I keep – some famous vegans: Woody Harrleson, Erykah Badu, Thom Yorke, Georges Laraque, Margaret Cho, Kevin Nealon, Andre 3000, Weird Al Yankovic

6.) Finally: there are a few things you can get me on.  I still can’t reconcile the idea of owning pets and 100% perfect veganism.  My cats live on an animal based diet, so it follows that to really opt-out, I’d either give them a vegan diet (which I’m not comfortable doing), or not own them at all.  I don’t know what to do about this yet.  I’m sure there are other things you can catch me out on… but what are you doing?  Just because I can’t do everything, doesn’t mean I do nothing.

Some shout-outs: Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, whose podcast helped me decide to act what I believe.  Jae Steele, who continues to put out amazing practical recipes which help me to stay healthy and motivated and in the kitchen.

thelonious monk (and no, this will not be the last time)

There’s not much left to say about Thelonious Monk.  It has been pointed out to me that the man made decisions about everything he played.  He never “just played a chord.”  He sat down and figured his own version of every chord he wanted to play.  No stock voicings for this guy.  This discovery was both scary and liberating.  Scary, because all of a sudden I felt a huge responsibility to clean house and check everything I did for evidence of my personality.  It would no longer be alright to just play an acceptable functioning major chord voicing, for example.  I now had to ask myself “is that how I want a major chord to sound?”  It was also scary because putting my own sound out there might not be acceptable when playing with others.  Was I sacrificing immediate understanding and communication for the assertion of my own musical personality?

But so liberating!  I could go from playing voicings I learned in books, from teachers, and off recordings, to pretty much anything that I decided made the sound I wanted it to.  I had a lesson with Jacob Sacks in October, and one of the many projects he assigned me was to come up with 100 voicings for C major.  I pick away at this every once in a while.  Here are some of my favourites:

I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, but at one point I didn’t have the audacity to play voicings like this.  I think hearing and contemplating Monk helped push me in this direction.

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of An American Original by Robin D.G. Kelley is a book I’ve mentioned on this blog before, but I’ve finally finished reading it.  It’s the best bio I’ve ever read and essential reading for musicians.  It does much to debunk Monk’s “idiot savant” image, and gives great perspective on the different periods in his music (Blue Note then Riverside then Columbia, as one way to chart the Monk eras).  Most of all, Kelley’s balance between readability and information is great.  I’ve read exciting stories about musicians before, but it’s really important, especially in this culture of believe-what-I-wanna, to back up what you say, and Kelley’s really done his homework – he spent 14 years on this book and there are 100 pages of notes in the back.  If you want more depth on his preparation (interviews and research, etc.), check here.

Some surprising things I learned from reading this book

(a.k.a. Ali practices the bullet point feature in WordPress)

• Thelonious played Rachmaninoff as a teenager
• he had an almost career long rivalry with Dizzy Gillespie
• Monk had a pre-conceived notion of what audiences could deal with
• The intro and ending to ‘Round Midnight came from Dizzy and Monk decided to add them to the tune
• a list of albums in Monk’s personal record collection

There is only really one criticism I can level at the book, and that’s the chapter endings.  It feels like they could be read by the movie trailer voice over guys.  A sampling:

• “This small Harlem club was about to become a jazz legend.”
• “A revolution in music had been declared, and Monk was staking out a position.”
• “It turned out to be the last time these two giants played together.  In six months, John Coltrane would be dead.”

But really, that’s part of the charm.  This is a fantastic book.  Go get it.

happy new year, of course

I’ve really been enjoying Christine Bougie’s blog, which has been updating on a daily basis for the past few weeks.  Inspired by that experience, I figured maybe I could bring a mild diversion into your lives by updating more regularly.  Right here, I am committing to update this blog once a week, Monday mornings in January.

I’m also trying to switch from coffee to tea.

So how, you ask, will I be able to go from monthly or less updates to something weekly?  Well I’ll just have to draw on a larger range of topics.  Here are some ideas for myself and topics you can expect:

• jazz, of course – meta-jazz usually: looking back on the blog, it looks like I’m some sort of contradiction, taking the music more seriously than anyone should, yet at the same time wondering if it makes any sense to identify myself as a jazz musician
• vegan topics: this is really close to my heart and it’s time I shared a bit more about what’s going on in my head.  I had some great discussions with a friend over the holidays that helped to clarify where I stand and why.
• books on music: one of my favourite shopping activities is to haunt the used bookstores to see if they have any of the classic (and new classic) books on music.  Over the years I’ve picked up a few, and writing one-by-one about the books on my shelf will be a great way to stay on blog schedule, since exciting non-book things might not happen to me every week.

Stay tuned.  The first post drops Monday morning.  Here is a teaser…

hear jazz as it was meant to be heard:

Thanks to Peter Hum of www.jazzblog.ca for alerting us to this.

the triangle

With musician rights and fair employment issues in the air these days, I’d like some clarity on the idea of the “gig triangle,” which is a method for deciding whether to take a gig.  It consists of three points:

1. Good Music: In order for you to consent to this gig, you have to be excited to play the music.  I don’t think I need to elaborate on this… if you love the material, or know that average material is going to be played in a band with killer players, this qualifies.

2. Good Hang: Maybe the music is going to be cheesy, or maybe you’ll be paid your share of the tip jar and that’s it, but you are in this together with your best friends/colleagues.  You can laugh about it later, or joke about it at the time.  Either way, this point of the triangle is about camaraderie.

3. Good Money: You have a minimum rate for doing a gig and this meets it.

Now here is the most important thing: any gig has to contain two out of the three points of the triangle for you to agree to it. This is a fun yet sometimes sobering litmus test of one’s integrity.  I can personally remember many times where I’ve done gigs that only had one of the points.  I hope it goes without saying that extreme situations can make a gig worthwhile when only one of the criteria is met.  For example, maybe the gig is terrible with terrible people, but pays a ton.

I have also heard of a pentangle.  I know less about this system, but I’ll go ahead and share some explorations of this idea in the hope that someone knows about this and corrects me.  Assuming this five-point system keeps the three parameters from the triangle, here are my guesses at the remaining two points:

4. Travel and/or Practicality: Maybe everything about this gig is great, but it takes 3 hours to get there.  Maybe you don’t own a car and something that pays well doesn’t pay quite so well after you have to buy a bus ticket?  For this criteria to be met, the gig should be easy to get to (for downtown Toronto musicians, I will throw out the arbitrary but reasonable 60 minute travel time).

5. Career Advancement: I’ve been suckered into a false version of this before.  Maybe you are being asked to do a freebie by someone with a big name around town, and it could lead to other great gigs.  Be careful with this one.  I usually like to ask myself, when a decision hinges on this parameter, if this person was such a big shot then why is he doing this crappy gig?  Sometimes though, it is worth proving yourself to someone who could help you with opportunities down the road.  It’s hard to predict the future.

Questions for the inventor of the “gig pentangle:” Does one take a gig if three criteria are met or is it four?  Are these the right criteria upon which to base a decision?

Please chime in with your life-deciding shapes.

what the heck I’ve been up to…

I’ve been very busy this past month… apart from a bunch of administrative necessities which are far too boring to go into here, there has been a lot of music made. First and foremost, I’d like to announce the new disc Arkana Music: Kaleidoscope, which is just finishing baking now.  As with any freshly baked goods, you’ll want to let it rest for a few minutes before serving; we are done mastering and soon it will be Compact Disc-ified.  Here are some bloggy things about its creation:

Arkana Music: Kaleidoscope

The pieces on this record have been road tested for about 2 years now, so it was time to get them down.  Here’s some pics of the session:

This is Mark Laver – more on him later…

This is Jordan O’Connor (engineer) getting so mad with us that he punched the screen:

This next one is when I told everybody about how Phil Collins song “In the Air Tonight” was really about him witnessing a murder:

Though we never actually did any playing, I figured it’d be a good idea to get a shot of us playing for evidence, as in: “Yeah we were too playing this music!  Look, here’s a picture that proves it!”:

For more inane caption potential, please visit the Flickr slideshow page of the sessions.

For an actual taste of the music,  here is a promo video I made in Windows Movie Maker which proves that even if I had the budget, I wouldn’t need to hire someone to make a decent video because my skills are Hollywood level:

those kind of people

From Robin D.G. Kelley’s book – Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

“If Monk’s dream of a hit eluded him in 1944, he did finally land a job – a great job. His employer happened to be one of the greatest tenor saxophonists since Adolphe Sax invented the instrument. And he was one of the few jazz musicians who had a hit. His name was Coleman Hawkins, and his hit consisted of two improvised choruses of “Body and Soul.” It had been in his repertoire for years before he recorded it for RCA Victor in 1939, but to his surprise, the record sold like hotcakes – 100,000 copies in the first six months, rare for an instrumental not intended for dancing. Down Beat anointed him “best tenor saxophonist” for that year, and from that moment on he could not play anywhere without a request for “Body and Soul.”  Hawkins’s success with “Body and Soul” was always a curiosity for Monk.  “Thelonious Monk said to me,” recalled Hawkins in a  1956 interview, ” ‘You know, you never did explain to me,’ he said, ‘how did these people, these old folks and everybody, go for your record of ‘Body and Soul’? ‘Cause I’ve listened to the record, and I could understand if you played melody, ’cause that’s what they like, those kind of people, that’s what they like, they like melody…. They sure won’t listen to anything else that’s jazz!”

See?  Monk did it too.

 

a new jazz bio – yay! (and I really mean it this time)

I’ve tried very hard to work up a collection of the better books on jazz out there and some of you have no doubt heard of the new Monk bio by Robin Kelley:

I just bought it the other day (they should still have some at the World’s Biggest Bookstore, Torontonians) and so far I’m loving it.  Too many books and films perpetuate the same tropes: that the great artists are tortured geniuses whose gifts come from unique inspiration or personal tragedy.  I think it’s an attempt to “other” the artist – to deny that we can all produce great things if we study or work hard enough.  This book grounds Monk in his traditions and influences.  I never thought a genealogical study of Monk’s ancestry could be so riveting.  More when I’m further.

By the way, the winner of the caption competition is Arnold Faber with his caption:

Since I already lent him a photocopy of an article I was reading, I consider us even.

caption competition

Welcome to Arkana’s first ever caption competition. The subject is below and features our trombonist Tom Richards and our frequent collaborator Chris Roberts on saxophone.  This shot was taken in June at the Trane Studio and is by Diana Piruzevska.

Please add your speech/thought bubbles as per the following examples and I will photoshop the best ones right into the picture:

Tom: “I am on the left.”

Chris: “I am on the right.”

I will think of some kind of prize for the best caption.  C’mon people… turn on the funny!  You have until August 7th to enter.

5 questions 2: electric boogaloo

Now for the correct answers…

Of course I kid.  The whole point of this was to provoke more questions.  Thanks to all involved for an intelligent, adult discussion.  If you are just joining us, please check out http://arkanamusic.wordpress.com/2009/06/23/5-questions/ for the original series of questions.  Now to take it up a notch with a summary/my own take:

1.) Do jazz musicians have a responsibility to be culturally relevant?

Some great answers here, from Dave MacDougall’s “Cultural relevance… can only be determined in hindsight,” to Benjamin Mueller-Heaslip’s “Yes, if… you mean making a conscious effort to create music in a language that reflects the way people live and communicate.”  But I am not convinced by the idea that if you make it, it’s automatically relevant.  If I want to produce an album of note-for-note transcriptions of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, does the fact that I create it make it relevant to the culture at large?  What if I create original music completely in the style of the ODJB?  Does the originality of the work make it relevant because I made it?  In the end, it is more than fine if someone chooses to be a stamp collector, or a ren-fest enthusiast, but I feel like some people don’t examine their own work under this microscope.

2.) Do post-secondary institutions have a responsibility to highlight the supply vs. demand problem (i.e. too many players vs. too few gigs)?

Mostly agreement on this one.  Thanks to Mike Anklewicz for citing Charles Rosen’s attitude on this.  That lends some serious credibility!  Ben… what do you mean by “I don’t think music should be taught in Universities at all.”  I am fascinated.

3.) What is your idea of career success?

Again, some lovely responses here, and I never really expected anyone to cite a dollar amount on success, but you know what struck me?  In the book Three Wishes, Pannonica de Koenigswarter asked a slew of jazz musicians what their three wishes were, and many of them had money or material gains as one or more of their wishes.  If you are reading this blog on a computer, we can pretty much conclude that our demographic of musicians is better off financially than the guys in the book, which includes people like Hank Mobley, Roy Haynes (who asked for a Rolls Bentley), Horace Silver and many others.  I’m not sure what my point is.  I know that some of you who answered the thread do identify as jazz musicians in the tradition of those guys, and I certainly do as well, despite what you may have heard, and it seems like nobody says “money” anymore when asked what success means to them.  Does that mean we’re okay financially, or does it mean something else?

4.) To what extent ought musicians train to be creative artists?  To what extent ought musicians train to be tradespeople?  Does one come at the expense of the other?

I want to be clear on what I meant with this one, and here’s where I first started to consider the potential conflict between learning music as a trade vs. learning music as a creative pursuit:

“People have to realize that they’re learning to be an artist, not a tradesperson, because there’s no trade left.  Are you paying $50,000 a year so you can play $50 gigs for the rest of your life?  Now it’s really whether you have something in you that’s dying to get out that will be articulated through this craft.”

This is a quotation from an interview with Vijay Iyer from the July 2008 issue of Downbeat.  So to clarify further, the question is about one’s responsibility to learn the stock materials of a genre (e.g. tunes and licks) in order to “get” those $50 gigs, vs. the pursuit of “original” materials and compositions in order to “make one’s mark.”  I wasn’t referring to phone skills and networking.  I was considering the inward musical dilemma.  How do you spend your time?

Now… it doesn’t have to be an “either/or” situation, and as some have pointed out, it ought to be a “both/and” one.

5.) What, if any, problems are inherent in identifying as a jazz musician?

A side note: Ross Porter’s station announcements on JazzFM are growing increasingly scary.  I was doing the dishes the other day tuned into the station when he came on and said:  JJJJJJJYYYEEAAAAZZZZZZZZZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! in the most raspy low rumble I have ever heard from him.  I nearly peed my pants and dropped the plate I was drying off.  Say it, Ross.  Don’t spray it.

My answer to question 5: sometimes it hurts and sometimes it helps.  Sometimes I’m lucky enough to know who I’m describing myself to.  If I say jazz, and I know the person will think of Diana Krall, I don’t say it.  Sometimes I’m proud to call it jazz and other times I’m ashamed.

What I’m hoping for now, is for you to come up with more mind-bending questions.  What life questions do you keep coming back to as a musician (jazz or not)?  What nags at your soul?  What is the 6th question!?