"creativity" part II Creativity" is a mushy word today but with a simple Latin etymology, creare=to bring into existence, which could be the animal act of giving birth and not related to art or how to live one's life. It gets its fully positive valuation only from Christianity, which referred to the universe as created by God out of nothing, such that the entire world exists as vestiges left by Him for our spiritual edification. Creation was valued such that it would have been blasphemous for medieval artists to think of what they did as creative, or to think of themselves as more than anonymous craftsmen. What we today would call creative artists were closer to the classical "homo faber", a comparatively mixed bag, since man can make things for good and ill, or well and poorly. What moderns added to the Latin meaning of creare was the notion of human originality, to create then meaning to make something unique and unprecedented, so that the object now reflects back on its maker just as the world used to reflect back on God in its perfection. This self-flattering substitution didn't bring down the wrath of the deity in any obvious form, so it stuck. Hence "creativity" as a quality, which would have made no sense applied to God, or to homo faber, sitting at his bench making shoes or gargoyles. As a quality Creativity is something you either got or don't got, a valued possession, a trace of nobility for the socially valued individual in a politically flattened world. This related creativity to art and the art genius, as represented in the Romantic movement, which it seemed no democratic plebs could overthrow or bring down to its level. From the democratic perspective, it should be remembered, the (English) Romantics saw themselves as leaders, nobles reborn as leaders of mankind.

The dynamic of post-war and post-humanist society, in the name of democratization, has led it to appropriate "creativity" as a personal trait and quality no one should be denied, detached from the noble genius. It has joined the other, more material human rights and has evolved to mean simple individuality. If Everyman can't be his own autonomous self, in our highly socialized world, he can at least be his own Artist. According to this pervasive view, creativity is what best distinguishes the individual, whose freedom it represents. Just as with the iconic artists it means to have something unique that resists social conformity, mass production/consumption, the industrialized, homogenized man, etc. All this is part of the liberal and self-esteem blather we've been hearing since the late 19th century at least (the so-called anti-modernists) and is now triumphant in the cultural left. In our dichotomized society anyone who questions this is painted as a conservative-how could you criticize creativity unless you were on the other side?

I picked up this quote somewhere as an example of how this word is used today: "I'd like to see a society in which people are free to be creative, rather than having their creativity constrained or eliminated."--George Ritzer. Who would dispute this? Performative expressions like this that can't be disputed are useless as far as understanding their meaning, but can have immense ideological weight, which means convincing motivational force for many. Creativity=freedom, which everyone has by right and is only constrained by society, institutions, the need to supply material needs, so the story goes. Maybe "freedom" has been taken over by conservatives, as the threatened American way, so liberals have to ask, free for what? And supply the vacuous "creativity" as the spiritual content of freedom. What harm could it do?

If creativity is a version of freedom then it is difficult to see how a practicing artist would be willing to be constrained by disciplined training, study, and years of drudgery. Art would even have to be free of materiality, which was not even possible for Concept Art, which did its best to escape it. Musicians might be able to create any sound imaginable but can't create a sound that is not the movement of molecules. The filth on our hands from working with matter is the reason artists were at the lower end of the human species for so many centuries. Materiality is not a quality of freedom, but some relatively durable or evanescent terrestrial thing. As such it mixes with all other such movement and is separated out with difficulty-Cage of course fits in here. The artist is also not free of the historical context of every mark on a page or canvas, nor of the non-producers, without which an object will not be recognized as art at all. Those who take uniqueness as the aim of their work are wholly dependent on all that already exists, but must pretend to be at least an inch visible above the crowd. Is the vaunted creative freedom then just a feeling, a kind of happiness? Then what about the feeling of being stuck and dissatisfied, is one not creative when facing the frequent feeling of defeat either by materials or by mood, which many practicing artists consider their usual mode? So I don't think we can use this word, nor strive in any way to be creative, or think of some people or certain acts or vocations as more creative than others. I'm sounding harsh here, but I think this word, and the belief that some such quality exists will obstruct our actual messing around with sound, color, shapes, etc. In other words, the quality adds nothing and even detracts by distracting us from our focus.

In my own work I might replace it with less culturally-loaded words from my personal lexicon. I think of those rare moments in playing when I suddenly feel entranced, outside my normal thinking apparatus, my anxiety and self-consciousness, my oft-cursed habits. "Connected" is one word I spontaneously apply to it. When I am less physically involved, as when I write, and that sense of connection appears I might fall into tears, or collapse into a strength I don't wish to claim. Joyce's "epiphany" is analogous, I imagine, an event rather than a lifestyle or activity, and beyond what he can fully express. One can build a life around the notion of creativity, take reasonable steps to enable it, surround oneself with it and with similar others, but what I'm talking about here merely happens. It cannot be my life. Instead of aiming at this, it seems to have aimed at me. Alan Watts used to joke about the self-contradictory effort one makes to relax; it only yields tension. Contrary to all the effort I put into playing, what happens in these moments is closer to grace, a movement that is pure reception, an end of striving. Creativity, as I see it conceived in our culture and language, is an "it" which striving takes as its goal, but which the trickster Hermes playfully snatches away from us. On the other hand, "art" (with a slash through it, as conceptual artists do), pertains to these moments I speak of; it is not something I can say I am good at or have, nor is it readily apparent to listeners. In some obscure way it is what I am serving. If Joyce has Stephen Daedalus proclaim with adolescent vigor, "non serviam", invoking the figure of Satan, it is also to confess what he does serve, this god, we have good reason to call it, whom we do our best to turn into our servant.

As for creative vs. non-creative (day-job) work, I’ve worked as a laborer and jack-of-all-trades, but never thought of myself as doing that to support my creative work. I think of it as all one life, not divided into tiered compartments. What was painfully difficult was shifting gears from practical tasks, time and money efficiency, to the inefficiency and pointlessness (from a plumber’s point of view) of playing music. But I’m reminded often of what a relief it is to turn to practical work, where either a pipe or a roof still leaks or it doesn’t, a kind of satisfaction missing from music. On the other hand, the practical work of building a career instead of a house is to me debilitating; I collapse under the weight. Fortunately, as I now see, fortune frowned on my youthful desires to be a musician (I had scheduled myself to go to Oberlin), such that when I did finally throw in my lot I had already expanded in many contradictory directions. What is often missed in the praise of individuality is the complexity of the individual person, the crushing distortion that comes of bending ourselves to one singular desire, and ignoring the kaleidoscope that each of us is. I have always recommended that would-be musicians, painters, etc., should find money jobs whose activity in which they can imagine some real personal interest, that engage another part of their psyche than playing, and not think of the day job as support for what they “really” want to do. Otherwise life is deadening, sad, a big complaint, with idealism and false sacrifice propping you up until you find yourself heart-breakingly bitter at thirty-five or forty, just mentally pushing a broom down the hall.

For a good laugh at the proverbial waitress pawing at the ground for her chance to act, the waiter scorning the rich clientele until his book is published, I recommend Gilbert Sorrentino's novel "Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things", written in 1971, when the NY world of would-be artists was still in its infancy.

I've never thought of myself as creative, the word has not functioned for me, was never part of my motivation. As soon as I was playing I was doing what I loved, and that was enough (I was mostly pissed, in those days, that I couldn't find enough people to play with). I'm not an artist either, except sociologically; to the IRS I'm an entertainer. I'm just working with sound material guided principally by feeling, technical capability, and accident. This work is a form of play, and doesn't enter into artworld discourse because it sounds self-indulgent and undistinguished. My divergence from the artist as homo faber, and where I part company with the common conception of Artist altogether, is that for me feeling is a very bad guide for doing things well. I am not aimed at a product that has the exquisiteness and uniqueness of the art object, that embodies my genius or muse in some way and is therefore precious and valuable. I'm happy to have my product, the result of my work, be considered as worthless to others as it is to me, at best contingent, indeterminate, dependent on a momentary appreciation. Every humanistic writer today and for years past puts Art on a pedestal, and for all the challenges and modifications of this there it stubbornly remains, a pillar for the contemporary world as it was for the bourgeois. They're not talking about what I do but rather about the creation of objects, which are a step upward in our cultural value system from pure materiality. That's what the university and wider culture means when they say Art has social value: it edifies and ennobles, it's good for you, especially when it "challenges out-moded conceptions". My attachment to playing the acoustic instrument, my love for the sensuality of sound as a medium for feeling, my acceptance of "musicality"-these are certainly out-moded. This puts me on the other side of divide from Art which is intended to challenge, which has never been my intention to make, however much I have gained from experiencing it.

For Hannah Arendt art consists of objects, which puts the emphasis on visual art as the fundamental form of art, the model. An object is conceived as metaphorically outside the artist and viewer, and what we perceive through our eyes has a greater relation to our concept of the "real" world than the invisible molecules invading off our eardrums. Visual art also seems to have permanence, can be viewed by us today in the same form as it had thousands of years ago. She views musical compositions and presumably dance also as objects, but unable to equal the "objectivity" of the visual, the stone against which we stub our toe, they can never have the same preeminence. Yet such objects are the result of thought, which in the Western cultural tradition is transcendent, timeless. As embodied thought (the object pre-conceived in the artist's mind) it is separated from the world of objects for use, designated as "craft". Their very materiality is transformed into the spiritual, since thought in the Western tradition belongs to the realm of spirit, uncorrupted by time.

Arendt's humanist and modernist conception of Art as the legacy of mankind has not proved very durable however; less than ten years after she wrote "The Human Condition" this notion was history, and not only to those practicing artists, musicians, dancers, writers who scorned the masterpiece and embraced the everyday. She probably didn't know this, but the museums got on board, and Conceptual Art flourished. With all those dancers just walking across the stage, and musicians toying with scrap metal they had just found in the street, writers presenting lists of daily chores, what are we supposed to value, where's the object, the talent? But those were days of revolutionary fervor, there were many who wanted to resurrect durability back onto the pedestal. Only as objects, edifying mankind, can art be ranked, with some objects of more value than others, and some producers above others. Despite the efforts to conceptual artists to sink into anonymity, artists were sorted into icons, especially those like Duchamps and Rimbaud who renounce art, because true art, once again, was made to rise above the "mere" object, the getting and spending of the art market, etc. etc. This story has been pounded into us from the universities to the popular press, and is the grounds for ranking all of us as worthy, creative, geniuses-and this means also--mostly not. From there the ranking becomes the basis for us judging ourselves, which is the worst part of the deal, the introjection into our belabored psyches of a superior model as the only way we know how to value ourselves.

If there's something we need the word freedom for it's here: we must be free of this burden, which constrains and inhibits us and makes us second guess everything we do. If there's no one better than me at playing whatever I play it's because no one else will be able to use my particular mix of feelings and technique. Radical egalitarianism of the ear: let me hear with no strings attached. What I do is individual without referencing a quality of individualism or an object or a comparative status. I can even say I am not particularly good as a sax player, since that comparative word refers to a rank of developed technique, skills, and the ability to determine and produce what market-targeted others want to hear, including "challenging their conceptions". Perhaps what I do achieves that, but that cannot my intent or any of my business.

If creativity is an "it" that defines what we're claiming and aiming at, then it would make sense to view it as diluted by commercial concerns, and so our reasonable interest would be to keep it pure. On the contrary I seek to be neutral and objective about the marketplace, and do not wish to change it except to make it easier for me on a daily basis, a selfish concern. Commercial dealing-impressing the critics and bosses of the avant-garde establishment--is not my personal strength, nor, objectively speaking, is the market prejudiced in my direction. The market is to some extent necessary to do what I want to do musically-to play for others and attract certain partners, who need funds to travel and live. I want to be aware of how it operates and use it for my ends, but I can't imagine being thrilled if suddenly I was offered paying gigs unsolicited. I am content, even in my snarling contempt for the "music biz".

The marketplace cannot be avoided. To announce even a basement house concert is to compete on the marketplace with the other options of consumers, even if they are friends. What I recommend is to have enough awareness to know that it is p.r. and not an effort to tell the truth. An announcement is simply a sign that we want people to come. As players, our true opinion about our playing is often that it is pure shit, and it's fine not to spread that around, but we should say it to at least ourselves privately when it occurs to us. I'm not for government support of music as a solution and not against it either, I just say there is no reason not to take a handout, except for the small print. The government or NGO or private sugar daddies (who tend to run those European labels that pay for cd production) are just there to be used, another kind of market. We might suit their taste or purposes, but if we don't then we've just wasted our time. All buyers are thinking, what makes us look good, what fulfills our organizational goal? Unfortunately, we get suckered into leaning on them, flattered by the validation-will somebody please say my music is authentic and worthy?

You are perfectly right to put the accent on motivation. I played in Mostar, Bosnia a few years ago with Andrew Drury, and a woman came up to us saying she appreciated our music, "but what is your motivation?" This was something wonderful to hear, because in Brooklyn it would be understood without a thought that we were ambitious, that we had some goal to be accepted, whereas to her our music had no discernible future at all. So I think we all need to ask, constantly, what is our motivation, and in our private cogitations drop what might sound good and convincing. This is a ticklish question, because in our culture motivation is confused with goal, the carrot that turns into a stick that beats and bruises us from adolescence on. If we can't sustain our motivation then we collapse, it seems that our life has led to nothing, and it would be wasteful to even ask the question, a downer. People normally define themselves by their goals--that's supposedly better than what they like or just find themselves doing. I see musicians who are prized, valued, and it is difficult to imagine that their goal, effort and motivation has not been to achieve exactly that. Then where is the music? Along the sidelines? Part of the picture at all?  ¶ 11:47 AM 1 comments

  a critical view of improvisation [The following comes out of an exchange with an old friend and former musical partner, M., now a doctor and psychologist and no longer playing music. He heard me play recently and criticized the playing of a partner of mine from several years ago for his obsessive drone-like performance, reminding him of an autistic child. In the most recent email he was pleased that I wasn’t offended at the criticism. I reply:]

Without critical back and forth there isn't much to think about. Of course even with close friends we often don't know if they are interested in what we “really” think. For some, any differences at all are hurtful and personal, and we try not to step on their toes—which assumes we can catch their hints as to what are their sore points! I myself often take things personally, but I can usually distance myself from that as a bad habit. Of course, I don't want to assume others can do that, so I am usually cautious, apologetic. So I appreciate your boldness, based on friendship and trust. As for your criticism of the music (even though not much directed at me), I am more interested in comments of rejection, and audiences that question my music, than praise. And it’s good that I appreciate the negative, since I have gotten very little praise for my music; mostly no comment at all. If there’s one thing sorely lacking among musicians it is self-criticism and the willingness to get help from others in seeing their music critically.

M: I imagine I overstated the criticism of improvisation: I wrestle with the approaches to improvisation because I think it has the potential to be the most important music on the planet. I get frustrated because it is so potentially magical and gets as close as I would ever admit to believing in anything transpersonal. I am far more critical of popular music and masturbatory guitar solos. I'm sure [the player he criticized] was more present than he seemed, and I am making assumptions about players all the time. I am a viciously critical live music listener, and probably err in assumptions so much because I miss performing so much.

You make me aware of how much of our listening and playing assumes a cultural background, a story. In the case of improvisation this is quite inaccessible, since its history is only known as the story of its icons and not the people like ourselves. This background is largely unconsciously procured over time and shapes our taste, our patterns of acceptance and rejection. My partners have in varying degrees absorbed this history into their playing, as have I, which means that we wouldn’t now play what we would have played in the past. We “move on”, often unintentionally, which is transparent to those hearing us for the first time, or after a long interim.

A prime question for the player or artist is to what extent this evolution is individual and what is collective, as in the typical avant-garde movement. Evolution that is collective requires interpretation, an explicit meaning or message that can be communicated and shared apart from and yet shaping the experience of the art. In the sixties message art triumphed over abstract expressionism, which people complained didn’t have any single explicit (literal) meaning, or could mean a variety of things at the same time. Pop art and its sequels corrected that problem. An example of message art is Concept Art, a seventies art movement of which there are traces today (art with an aesthetic or political message). Each piece, installation, or action of Concept Art was one of a kind, individualizing the artist as well as the statement. One could not then and cannot today repeat a Concept Art piece without someone saying, "but that was done yesterday (or forty years ago)". This falls in line with the approach to art at least since the Renaissance, which declares all art as historical and each contemporary artist as standing on the shoulders of the predecessors. For the spectator, some art, such as classical music and all museum art, is still fully valid after centuries, but no composer would dare write a Bach chorale today. For art of any age to be considered “contemporary” it matters very much that the past is past—at best a storehouse from which to pick, choose, mock, re-interpret and revise for the present. Not just for the artist but for the spectator of contemporary art, if you don't have some awareness of what the contemporary artist has presumably absorbed, discarded, explored, it is often hard to appreciate what is going on. Without that cultural background you might just miss the point, for instance you might have thought that Pop Artists were just commercial artists working for an ad company and not the pretentious first wave of postmodernism.

The notion of collective progress found in art movements is shared by technological and scientific advance, whose cultural prestige they envy and would like to borrow. Progress is based on scientific experiment, whose point is to do something infinitely repeatable with the same or analogous result. Once it is done and the awards handed out there’s no point repeating it, only elaborating it and making it more widely known. It is the result that counts, results that stack up over the time of a scientific or artistic career. You don’t have to dwell on the individual’s motivation, the focus is on the advance that has been made. It turns what was previously done and considered valid into a naive past, known at least to some collectivity, which can identify itself as advanced, progressive. And to be progressive is to link oneself with all that is true, just, good, and all that blah.

I spoke above of individual evolution as the common alternative to this. As an example of this, watching a dvd of 21st. century visual artists recently I am struck that they are all expected to elaborate stories that individualize the artist in question as a “person” in the contemporary sense. They talk not of how their art challenges conventions, educates us, and advances Art, but of their family and cultural background, how their present work reflects their story of themselves. To be presentable as artists of course nothing currently disreputable can be hinted at, such as machismo or right-wing fantasies. As those advancing collective evolution might consider themselves radicals, these personalistic artists would be liberals (it would seem that anyone to the right of center is simply incapable of artistic expression). Such interviews of artists would have been unheard of in the days of the classical avant-garde (imagine Picasso asked how he expressed his love life in his paintings of women). Rather they reflect our current liberal culture in which everyone is potentially an artist, and one’s work is valid as unique self-expression of a personality. All art needs is a few more pats on the back and “good job” all around.

In relation to assessing a performance, improvisation has an evolving history, which means that some of it is “past”, and valued for that, and some of it is “contemporary”. Of course it is important to register our immediate feelings about any art we encounter, but when we are faced with the contemporary we are being asked to suspend judgment, to not have our taste determined by our feelings. That means to doubt our feelings, to distrust them temporarily in order to search out alternative possibilities behind what we experience. To put this in the language of psychology, what offends us might be the clue to some part of ourselves that we don’t want to acknowledge. By no means am I saying that resistance is either foolish or futile, but that it might be a key to something more, indeed to a path we are headed down without knowing it. My favorite personal example is hearing Ornette play in 1967, when I practically had to leave the room it was such a horrid experience. Then five years later, after much change in my personal life, I found myself enraptured by it. At that point I bought some Schoenberg records expressly because I didn’t like Schoenberg, and played them often, just to break down my resistance and open myself to something beyond my experience.

As a player myself, I have one foot in what is now considered “the past” and one in “the contemporary”. That is, I can no longer play what I did twenty years ago; even though I can listen to it with pleasure and curiosity, it is not what I would spontaneously play now. Beginning about twelve years ago I was open to those who were finding a way around conventions I myself had become bored and frustrated with. Particularly in Berlin players had been challenging the predominant “full-tilt” improvisation (roughly called free jazz today). They, and a few players in Boston and London, created a collective aesthetic called unfortunately “reductionism”, closer than improvisers had ever come to an avant-garde movement. (While reductionism has been declared dead, the pretensions of representing the avant-garde over all free improvisation is firmly in place.) At the time I borrowed the players of this reductionist movement to get me away from my personal musical cul de sac, while smiling at its pretensions, which I thought harmless and adolescent. Playing with minimal sound and much space drove many of my regular listeners away, but to shift towards playing this way was something absolutely necessary for me.

The music I tend to play for others now gradually recovered much the same energy that I used to have, but a quite different quality of time and space, utilizing sustained pitches, texture, and often no recognizable saxophone sound. To my ear, my music today has more concentration and tension in it than my “full-tilt” playing of the past. The critics and record producers apparently don’t like it, I suspect, because it is a mixture and not the kind of easy story they want to hear. I don’t fit the picture of the loyal free jazz player, yet I have too much physicality and emotion in my music to be part of the avant-garde scene. Also, though I most often play with plugged in players or percussionists, the two categories most prized by the avant music world, I myself play only the traditional, unmodified saxophone and make sounds only my breath makes in the tube and my fingers make on the keys. In other words, it might look like I have reneged on the avant-garde project, or was not capable of doing it, whatever. Such criticism comes from the point of view of what I am calling collective evolution, and is associated with “radical”, uncompromising, risk-taking—all the p.r. of the cultural left. But this is where my personal evolution has taken me, a spiraling movement rather than the straight linear, monolithic progress that sees itself always ahead in the race against the past. That’s what I mean by being both on the side of the contemporary, the progression of art shared by most of my partners, and at the same time not dismissing my personal or the collective past of free improvisation but vindicating it through the work of transformation. My particular version of this music is one of many possible, and does not easily fit the hierarchy based on an aesthetic model.  ¶ 11:27 AM 1 comments