I spent some time today helping Lauren Hendrix prepare for her Graduate Oral exam. This is basically where you go into a room with three professors and they ask you to tell them all about jazz. They will also expect you to have a fairly extensive knowledge of your concentration. As a bass player, Lauren has been cramming her brain full of jazz bass information.

She and I talked about how strange the gaps in our knowledge can be. For instance, at this very moment in time, I could tell you more about the first Miles Davis Quintet than the second. I know (hopefully) a lot about the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, but couldn’t tell you very much about the Mingus Big Band.

My trumpet teacher from my high school years, Brad Shermock, told me not to let people try and insult me for not having heard a record or not knowing the names of all the players. It is good to know these things, but everyone’s experience is different. Last fall in Dr. Murphy’s graduate jazz history course, we talked about the difficulty in establishing a true jazz canon. There are so many levels of “importance” that one can ascribe to any given figure. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington are two artists that everyone, even people with even a cursory knowledge of jazz will deem important. Of course, if you were a stupid person that wants to argue just to argue, I suppose you could even dispute those two, but you’d be wrong. After them and a few others, it’s pretty much impossible to judge importance and relevance objectively.

I have been and will continue to slowly fill in these gaps, so that my knowledge of jazz will become more comprehensive. Specifically, I need to listen to more of the second Miles Davis Quintet and the offshoots from that group: Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams. All of these guys are too important for me to continuing not knowing that much about them.

Okay, so it hasn’t been exactly a year, but I haven’t written in a blog for a while.  The blogs I used to write were overly personal and sort of sloppy. I think I’ll try to make this one a mostly music related. That probably won’t be too difficult a transition, seeing as a good percentage of my old posts were about music anyway. I’ll just try and minimize the amount of “24 is the greatest TV show known to man” type posts and focus more on thoughts on music concepts, recordings and performances that interest me, as well as ruminations on my transition from student musician to professional musician.

My friend Q will be designing me a bitchen new website. I have no doubt that it will look awesome. A lot of my friends who are registering their own domain names are opting for the popular Dynamod Web Portals. These generally look good and do their job well, but I don’t think they are for me. That my friends are using Dynamod and not just Myspace Music, is a fact to be applauded. Sometimes you have to dress for success.

The completion of my last final exam this coming Wednesday will mark the end of my first of two years of grad school at UNT. Thursday will be my first rock music performance since the dissolution of my old band, Chestnut House. My band will now consist of me and members of The Grasshopper’s Dying Words, who will also be playing the show. The Grasshopper’s Dying Words is an amazing band led by ridiculously talented and soon-to-be-degree-holding multi-instrumentalist and composer Brian Stark. I would advertise this event, but it’s doubtful anyone will know of this blog’s existence in the next few days. For posterity’s sake, the show is at 9PM this Thursday, May 8th at Art Six Coffee House in Denton, TX.