Bird – in Context

August 29, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

Charlie Parker was born 93 years ago today.

The conventional story is that in the 1940s, Parker and a handful of other musicians revolutionized jazz, with bebop taking precedence over swing.  The kernel of truth in that version is that Bird, Dizzy Gillespie, and others really were playing different notes and with a different sound.  “Go up to Minton’s and listen to how this kid plays Cherokee,” musicians would tell one another. And swing bandleader Cab Calloway told Dizzy to “Stop playing that Chinese music in my band.” 

But the Great Man version of history – great musicians getting together to create a new music – leaves out the economic, social, and technological context. For example, the 1942 musicians’ union strike primarily against the major record companies (RCA, Capital, Decca, and a few others) allowed smaller labels into the game.  Those labels recorded small groups, not the big bands. So we get Bird’s legendary quintet and sextet sessions for Dial. 

Even the idea of the jazz-musician-as-artist (or even genius) owes much to the decline of big bands.  Big bands are the medium of the leader (also of the composers and the arrangers, but they remain largely anonymous). The musicians are more or less interchangeable. But in small groups, it’s all about the soloists. The melody is merely something the horns play in unison at the beginning and end, just to let listeners know what the tune is. Far more important are the many choruses of solos in between. Most people who listened to Duke Ellington didn’t know or care who the trumpeters were. But if you’re listening to Charlie Parker, you really want to know whether the trumpeter is Dizzy or Miles.* 

Also, what seems like revolutionary change often incorporates conventional ideas. Here’s Parker’s 1953 recording of “Confirmation,” probably his best (and best-known) composition.**

The chord changes for first four bars are the substitute changes Parker often used for his solos on the blues – they’re sometimes known as “Bird changes.”  But they are just a logical way to get from F in the first measure of the blues to Bb in the measure five. 

F  | E-7 A7 | D-7 G7 | C-7 F7 | Bb . . .                   

Even this chord sequence is not completely new with Parker.  Tin Pan Alley composer Harry Warren used the same changes a few years earlier in  “There Will Never Be Another You.”

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 * I think that Marc Myers covers this territory and more in his recent book Why Jazz Happened, but I have not yet read it


**To see Bird’s solo go by in real time note by note, see this animation, which for some reason is written in the key of G, not F – which is fine if you’re playing along on trumpet or tenor sax.

Unpack Your Discourses

August 22, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

In her “Ten Commandments of Graduate School,” published recently at The Chronicle, Tenured Radical* commands

Thou shalt use the word discourse sparingly; likewise neoliberalism, and other theoretical catchphrases designed to obscure that thou hast not fully thought through thine ideas.

At the ASA meetings earlier this month, I didn’t hear much discourse.  But there were other trendy words.  Narrative, for example, has achieved widespread use even outside of academia, though most of the time the word story would do just as well.  (My post on this word  five years ago had the title “That’s My Narrative and I’m Sticking to It.”)  Both these terms had fallen into relative disuse until post-modernist, structuralist, post-structuralist writing pumped them with new life. 

(Click on an image for a larger, clearer view.)

From the 16th to the 19th centuries, learned people wrote discourses – Rousseau on Inequality, Dryden on Satire, etc.  Nowadays, anyone who speaks has a discourse just waiting to be analyzed.  And of course we all have narratives for just about everything we think about. 

A couple of words I heard several times at the ASA were newbies. They just did not exist back in the day.  These were the “ize” words.

Incentivize probably comes to us from the economists.  With contextualize and problematize, it’s harder to guess who’s responsible. 

Maybe it’s because academics travel to these conferences, but at the ASA, and apparently elsewhere, there was much talk of unpacking.  I even think I may have heard someone unpacking a narrative (or was it a discourse?)  Unpack, too, begins is rise in the 1970s.**

Finally, the ASA seemed a good place to look for your lenses. Speakers urged us look at something “through the lens of” this or that theory, or noted that a theory was “a lens through which” we might view some data.  The graph below shows these two phrases as a proportion of all uses of lens references (to avoid the possible effect of an increase in lens caused by “contact lenses”). 

I’m sure there are other trendy terms I’ve missed.  Maybe you have your own favorites.  It’s hard to predict which will sink in popularity as quickly as they have soared, and which will be with us for a while.                     
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* Tenured Radical is the nom de blog of  historian Claire B. Potter, who looks like she might have an even more noted relative. Claire is the one on the left.

** “Unpack Your Adjectives” first appeared on Schoolhouse Rock in 1973, but although I love to hear Blossom Dearie, I doubt that she was responsible or all the unpacking going on at academic conferences in the following decades.

Cedar Walton, 1934 - 2013

August 20, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the 1980s, I used to go hear Cedar Walton at Bradley’s or the Knickerbocker in duos with bassists like Ron Carter and Buster Williams.  He was a musician’s musician.  Few jazz musicians become famous, but even among jazz pianists he was probably less well known than many of his peers.  Still, he played with most of the greats – Coltrane, Rollins, Hubbard, Gillespie. 

In the early 1960s as part of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, with Freddie Hubbard and Wayne Shorter, he contributed several lasting compositions to the group’s book.  His tunes too are less well known, probably because many of them depart from the standard forms.  “Firm Roots,” “Mode for Joe,” and “Clockwise” are part of the jazz repertoire, but they’re not necessarily the tunes that you would call at a jam session.  His best-known tune is “Bolivia,”  with its simple but unmistakable opening bass line.

(Cedar's solo starts at about the 3:40 mark.)

(One detail of his biography that may not make it into the obits: When he first came to NYC from Texas in the 1950s, one of his day jobs was at the Automat. It was a different New York back then.)

Lead and Crime

August 18, 2013
by Jay Livingston

In the late 1990s, I turned down my publisher’s offer to do a third edition of my criminology textbook.  It wasn’t just that editions one and two had failed to make me a man of wealth and fame.  But it was clear that crime had changed greatly.  Rates of murder and robbery had fallen by nearly 50%; property crimes like car theft and burglary were also much lower.  Anybody writing an honest and relevant book about crime would have a lot of explaining to do.  And that would be a lot of work.

I politely declined the publisher’s offer.  They didn’t seem too upset.

If I had undertaken the project, I probably would have relied heavily on the research articles in The Crime Drop in America, edited by Al Blumstein and Joel Wallman.* They rounded up the usual suspects – the solid economy, new police strategies, the incarceration boom, the stabilization of drug markets, anti-gun policies.  But we all missed something important – lead.  Children exposed to high levels of lead in early childhood are more likely to have lower IQs, higher levels of aggression, and lower impulse-control.  All those factors point to crime when children reach their teens if not earlier

Lead had long been suspected as a toxin, and even before World War I many countries acted to ban or reduce lead in paint and gasoline.  But the US, thanks to the anti-regulatory efforts of the industries and support from anti-regulation, pro-business politicians,** did not undertake serious lead reduction until the 1970s. 

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones has been writing about lead and crime. Because race differences on both variables are so great, it’s useful to look at Blacks and Whites separately.  In the late 1970s, 15% of Black children under age three had dangerously high rates of lead in their blood (30 mcg/dl or higher). Among Whites, that rate was only 2.5%.  By 1990, even with a lower criterion level of 25 mcg/dl, those rates had fallen to 1.4% and 0.4%, respectively. 

The huge reduction in lead was matched – years later when those children were old enough to commit crimes – with a reduction in crime.  (The graphs show rates of arrest, which may somewhat exaggerate Black rates of offending.)

(Click on an image for a larger, clearer view.)

(“Violent crime” arrest rates are the sum of arrest rates of four crimes:
Murder, Rape, Robbery, and Aggravated Assault.)

Much of the research pointing to lead as an important cause of crime looks at geographical areas rather than individuals.  A study might compare cities, measuring changes in lead emissions and changes in violent crime 20 years later.  But studies that follow individuals have found the same thing.  Kids with higher blood levels of lead have higher rates of crime.  The lead-crime hypothesis is fairly recent, and the evidence is not conclusive.  But my best guess is that further research will confirm the idea that getting the lead out was, and will remain, an important crime-reduction policy. 

Kevin Drum also emphasises race differences.  And here the evidence is less solid. 

 arrest rates for violent crime have fallen much faster among black juveniles than among white juveniles . . . .  black juvenile crime rates fell further than white juvenile crime rates because they had been artificially elevated by lead exposure at a much higher rate.

But that  depends on how you interpret the data.*** As the graphs of arrests show, the percentage reductions are roughly similar across races.  Among Black youths, the arrest rates for all violent crime fell from 1600 per 100,000 to less than 700 – a 57% reduction.  For Whites the reduction was from 307 to 140 or 54%. But in absolute numbers, because Black rates of criminality were so much higher, the reduction seems all the more impressive. In that sense, those rates “fell further.”

Arrest rates for Blacks are still double those of Whites for property crimes, five times higher for homicide, and nine times higher for robbery.  Lead may be a factor in those differences.  Remember the lag time between childhood lead exposure and later crime. Twenty years ago, high blood levels of lead among children 1-5 years were three times as high for Blacks as for Whites. 
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*I even had insider copies of those chapters well before the book went to press. Joel’s daughter and my son were in the same primary school class, and I knew him from parents’ night and other functions.

** See Markowitz and Rosner’s Deceit and Denial (2002). A review is here.

*** Drum basis his article on a paper by Rick Nevins (here).  The source of arrest date is this OJDDP report.