Thinking Together: An E-Mail Exchange and All That Jazz

By Howard S. Becker, Robert R. Faulkner and Franck Leibovici

Faulkner and Becker, sociologists and experienced musicians, wrote a book about their musical experiences—Do You Know? The Jazz Repertoire in Action—describing how musicians who didn’t know each other could perform competently and interestingly without rehearsing, or playing from written music. When they wrote it, they lived at opposite ends of the country: Faulkner in Massachusetts, Becker in San Francisco. Instead of sitting around talking about their ideas, they wrote e-mails. So every step of their thinking, false steps as well as ideas that worked, existed in written form.When conceptual artist and poet Franck Leibovici asked them to contribute something that showed the “form of life” that supported their work, they collaborated with Dianne Hagaman to put the correspondence in order, which Liebovici exhibited and now appears as an e-book (which allows linking to available performances of the tunes they discussed).It’s one of the most revealing records of a scientific collaboration ever made public, and an intimate picture of the creative process.Collective creativity—making sparks of originality produce something more than a glint in someone’s eye—intrigues sociologists, people who study communication and theorists of business organization. The collective part of that process, turning an idea into a finished product, is even more complicated, and Thinking Together readers can watch the authors go through all the complications of working together to make the final result happen.Becker played piano in Chicago and Kansas City and taught sociology at Northwestern University. Among his books are Art Worlds and Writing for Social Scientists.Faulkner played trumpet in Los Angeles, got a PhD in sociology from UCLA, then taught at the University of Rochester and the University of Massachusetts (playing professionally in those places too). He is author of two books about the movie business, Hollywood Studio Musicians and Music on Demand: Composers and Careers in the Hollywood Film Industry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: USC Annenberg Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781625172037

Howard S. Becker

Howard S. Becker was born in Chicago in 1928, got three degrees from the University of Chicago (Ph.D. 1951), and taught for many years at Northwestern University and then, more briefly, at the University of Washington. He has written extensively on deviance, art , and social science methods and played the piano professionally for many years. Some of his most popular books are Outsiders, Writing for Social Scientists, and Do You Know? The Jazz Repertoire in Action (with Robert R. Faulkner). He lives in San Francisco and Paris with his wife, photographer Dianne Hagaman.Robert R. Faulkner is author of numerous books and articles on the work and careers of musicians in Hollywood; the social organization of political and economic conspiracies; the breakdown of relationships between large corporations and their advertising agencies; the art of accusation and economic wrongdoing in America; and the culture of jazz. With Wayne Baker he won the American Sociological Association's Max Weber award. He is Emeritus Professor at The University of Massachusetts and the recipient of the university's Outstanding Teaching Award. He lives in New England.

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Titles

Preface

an ecology of inquiry—or a form of life

one fine day in may 2011, i received by e-mail a word document of 250 pages, titled thinking together. it was howard becker’s and robert faulkner’s contribution to an inquiry begun a year earlier, titled (forms of life)—an ecology of artistic practices¹. this inquiry, carried on not by a sociologist but by an artist and poet, began with a simply summarized hypothesis: a work of art is more than the artifact exhibited; for it to function in the widest possible way, it’s necessary to take into account the practices which have brought it into being, the forms of collective action which have carried it that far, the kinds of maintenance it needs, the marks of asceticism it displays, the public consequences it will generate—the ensemble that we will describe with the word ecosystem, in order to distinguish it as much as possible from the idea of context: while context always preexists the work, the ecosystem of the work is, in contrast, produced starting out from it. thus two works which may be formally and physically identical (two monochromatic paintings, for example, by a russian artist from the beginning of the 20th century and an american from the ’60s) will not function in the same way because of their radically different ecosystems. that these art works were not only linked by, but are also carriers of forms of life, that’s what we wanted to explore.

but this immediately poses several problems for us.

first, we didn’t know how to represent the forms of life and their ecosystems. we didn’t even know what should be understood by artistic practices. because, even though i am an actor in this world, i quickly realized that the practices of my comrades in contemporary art were so hybrid, so labile, distributed, collective, that a simple ethnographically intended visit to their studio wouldn’t be enough to give me access to their practices. i would have to question them, assemble the pieces of the puzzle, try to reconstruct a much larger image. at the same time, i above all didn’t want to content myself with their own commentaries on their work, because between what an artist does and what he says he does… in fact, i wasn’t interested in artists, what interested me were the art works. not the link between an artist and his practice, but the one between the art work and the practices it involves. not a sociology of professions which sometimes runs the risk of crushing the works by reducing them to side effects, to the status of a simple reflection of interactions taking place in a world, but an attempt to bring the works back to the center of our attention in order to evaluate their results—without, for all that isolating them, glorious, from the rest of the world, in an idealized autonomy. following these practices, these instruments, these collectives let me avoid traditional dangers and simplistic binary oppositions: the artist versus his work, production versus reception, individual versus society, etc. starting from practices, you are immediately at a level that is simultaneously intra- and trans-individual, taking you through all the strata until you find yourself at the heart of the institution in the blink of an eye… and maybe back again. the institution was no longer this goliath crushing david, the artist, the institution was itself, like the practices, distributed, and could be found mixed into the very core of the practices and interactions.

in short, faced with these first two problems, we decided to let the artists themselves serve as our guides. after all, who knew better than them how to delimit the territory of their practices and point out their action.

so when, one fine spring day, i received the contribution of howard becker and robert faulkner, i came down to earth.

it wasn’t as sociologists, taking a look, distant and learned, from outside, on this question that we had invited them to participate in our project, but as practitioners—practitioners of music, one plays the piano, the other the trumpet—and practitioners of research. they sent me an electronic epistolary correspondence they had carried on for several years, dealing with the question of improvisation in jazz (how do people who don’t know each other nevertheless play together for hours, in a bar, without having ever rehearsed?). but beyond the thematic contribution of their study, which developed a dynamic conception of the idea of repertoire, their text posed (in the framework of my inquiry) the question of the form of life of a research: what was the form of life of a research project? i had never asked myself that question before. that a research, just like a work of art, produced its own ecosystem, through an ensemble of practices, of collectives, of kinds of maintenance, forms of asceticism, public consequences—that’s what their contribution let me see.

in the worlds i work and live in—contemporary art and poetry—people usually think, naively, that being scientific rhymes with following a strict research protocol, symbolized by an algorithm applied mechanically. this correspondence showed, in the expression scientific writing, the importance of the word writing, which we too often ignore, considering that doing science can exist perfectly well without writing science. we have today, however, a well-established history of the writing of science. this petty sin is found moreover, this time, among scientists themselves, who too often think of writing as a neutral and transparent medium which lets you put the results of your research on paper. in this view, writing serves simply to express data already gathered in proper form, independent of specific system of inscription. what this correspondence becker and faulkner sent me exemplified, on the contrary, was that the technologies of writing informed, in the course of the research, the very nature of the data.

the quality of a scientific study is often strongly linked to the quality of the data it has produced. but how are these data produced? by techniques of notation, by systems of representation. the pertinence of the descriptions produced cannot be dissociated from the resources, the instruments and techniques, of writing they were made with. by which i do not mean stylistic qualities (well written, badly written) nor the literary genre used (to describe, for instance, an idea in the form of a theatrical dialogue.) the resources of writing do not come into play only at the moment of editing, when the writing has been done, but also in the very production of the data; you get the data you get as a result of the technology of writing you have chosen. from this point of view, there is no such thing as raw data,, since the materials have already been mediated, already formatted, by the writing instruments, writers and setting chosen to produce them. in a certain sense, the resources of writing co-produce the raw material.

if we follow, now, our two correspondents, you will not only, for example, see some theoretical references that they mobilize but also how, why, and at what moments they mobilize them. how, for example, becker summarizes selby’s research on witches in oaxaca, in mexico, and immediately indicates the tremendous adaptability of the protocol selby improvised: we could do that, not go to see our mexican neighbors but musicians playing in bars and ask them what tunes they know… (a sociology of tricks, antoine hennion might say); how faulkner then mobilizes magazines which litter his apartment in order to find things he can use, like a mountain climber, as toeholds, to go further with this idea; or how at a certain point he tells himself that, having restated their question enough times, he can now use the fourfold tables he so loves (briefly, he will make it possible to do that without upsetting becker too much!). the dates at the head of each message show very simply how an idea is born, grows, changes, lays down successive layers of meaning over time (a genetics and a genealogy of the idea, in action).

it’s just because they have a longtime member’s competence in the world of both jazz and sociology that our two friends can deploy this agility, this ease, rapidity, and offhandedness with respect to the most serious matters of their two disciplines. it’s also, on the other hand, the technology of e-mail that lets them imitate an oral conversation when they respond to the last point of the preceding message, even returning later to earlier questions left not yet dealt with—e-mail lets them play in both the oral and the written formats. but it’s a practice which, in itself, leads to the inquiry in the form of an electronic exchange of letters, a practice reduced neither to the acquisition of members’ competences, nor to technological developments. this suggests a metaphor from sports, the idea that you have to immediately grasp what the other player has seen and the tacit understandings he has mobilized in order to act, and then use that understanding to produce a new move and advance a square. each response in the game has to be thought of as an action, knowing that many games might be being played at the same time. the atmosphere is simultaneously friendly and professional. it’s a private conversation, but our micro-reflexes are always on the alert.

the editorial format for scholarly articles is nowadays dominated by the important journals in a field. this format permits the commensurability necessary to compare and evaluate articles as they compete to be published. imagine how much time this would take if each article was written in a unique style and format. the editor would have to construct, case by case, new criteria, then construct ways of comparing articles produced by different criteria in order to arrive at editorial decisions. this would produce a successful case of slow science. but, in order to retain a general similarity of appearance, the link between the research reported and the writing resources it has used and the form of life that has supported it has to be cut. said another way, the editorial format imposed by the important journals has a cost: cutting the link between science in the making and science as the presentation of results.

if following a resource of writing is what lets us get nearer to the form of life of a research, there is no reason to think that the academic format imposed by the journals has anything at all to do with writing resources which have given the research its look.

this was proved to me by our two authors. i had read, in 2009, do you know? published by the university of chicago press, a text which organized and presented the materials of this correspondence. now i could measure concretely the difference between the official publication of a research, and the original form it had been written in, and found an abyss… almost everything, for me, had been lost… because it was the very form of the correspondence, its format, which showed, in action, what it was to have an idea in sociology, or how to create a research project: it is not a collection of rational micro-segments deducible one from the other. it’s instead a heterogeneous ensemble of anecdotes, ideas, plays on words, leading to another anecdote, a new idea, going back to the first idea, and so on. to take account of this production, this operation of writing-by-four-hands, mixing improvisations, rhythms linked to the format and the time dimension of electronic correspondence, the agility required to synthesize things coming from ordinary life, to adapt and adjust past work and work done by others to the case being dealt with here: that’s what must, on the evidence presented here, be considered as an operation relevant to the domain of art.

this epistolary object thus has a major virtue: to show that scientific writing is a question of poetics.

why is it so important to make this response public first in the framework of art? because it is perhaps one of the responsibilities of art, today, to make visible the forms of life necessary to what is still not thought of as art (making the goldfish aware of the water). it’s perhaps up to art to take charge, at least in part, of the relations that can exist between the production of knowledge and the making of art. to not leave this responsibility to others—to everything that isn’t art. to pose the question of writing in science is to create an indestructible link between the production of science and the questions of poetics.

the response of becker and faulkner nevertheless goes beyond the framework of the forms of life project.

the epistolary form was, for a long time, the dominant form of communication between savants (we can think here of the great correspondences of the 17th and 18th centuries). this correspondence thus finds its place in a great tradition rather than in the marginal fringe of a counterculture. but, in the present context of the production of knowledge, it stands as a radical statement about the relations between the arts and sciences (human and social). it’s thus time now to let this text produce similar effects in its own ecosystem of origin, that of the social sciences, so that it can, as it has done for art, make the question of the practices and tools of writing inseparable from that of inquiry itself and above all that of the forms of life.

franck leibovici

(translation by howard s. becker)

____________________________

1 franck leibovici, (forms of life) - an ecology of artistic practices, les laboratoires d’aubervilliers / questions théoriques, paris, 2012.

Prologue:

How This Book Happened

Sometime before June 2003, Robert R. Faulkner (Rob) and Howard S. Becker (Howie), sometimes addressed by Faulkner as Count, started thinking seriously about a project to study jazz improvisation and the repertoire of jazz players. Since Faulkner lived in Massachusetts, on the East Coast of the North American continent and Becker lived on the West Coast, they did almost all their work together by e-mail, except for a few meetings face-to-face.

The correspondence continued for several years, and their book, Do You Know? The Jazz Repertoire in Action was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2009. A French translation, Qu’est-ce qu’on joue, maintenant? (La Découverte: Paris, 2011) followed.

In the fall of 2010, Becker and his wife, the photographer and writer Dianne Hagaman, spent three months, as they customarily do, in Paris. One day, Becker received an e-mail from a conceptual artist and poet named Franck Leibovici, who had read Becker’s earlier book Telling About Society and thought they had some interests in common. They did, and Dianne and Howie got to know Franck, who soon invited them both to contribute to a large project he had underway at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, called des formes de vie. He explains the details of this in his preface to this book.

It’s enough here to say that Becker initially thought that he couldn’t contribute to the project for what seemed to him the good and sufficient reason that he wasn’t an artist and so had no idea what form a contribution could take. Hagaman, who had lived through the entire Faulkner/Becker project, from first thoughts to published book, had another, and better, idea. She remembered the hundreds of e-mails the two had exchanged and was convinced that they documented the story of the events that culminated in Do You Know? in a way that ordinarily never happens for any kind of sociological project. The accident of geography meant that the minutiae of communication, ordinarily condensed into a summary term like story or development had been written down in permanent form, and so were available for inspection. She and Becker read through the entire archive and came away convinced that the story of the project really was there in the electronic correspondence. (Her own contribution to Leibovici’s larger project, 32 Cutaways, was a video piece.)

Becker wrote to Faulkner about this possibility, who was immediately enthusiastic. Becker pasted all the e-mails together and sent the result to Leibovici, who was equally enthusiastic. The piece was one of a hundred that formed the corpus of the work that became the finished project (if a project like this can ever be said to be finished). Fragments appeared on two pages of the book documenting the project, (forms of life)—an ecology of artistic practices (Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers / Questions Théoriques: Paris 2012). And Becker and Leibovici performed a part of the correspondence that had been translated into French, Leibovici reading the part of Becker and Becker reading the part of Faulkner.

Leibovici and Grégory Castera, co-director of the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, decided that the appropriate way to display the correspondence would be in a book, but no obvious publication outlet came to light. Until Larry Gross, Director of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California proposed that the Annenberg Press, one of the school’s activities, publish it as an electronic book. Everyone involved was enthusiastic.

Even after they discovered that meant more work to do. The e-mails were not in what you could call tip-top condition. Many were missing dates and other identifying information, and the whole corpus needed to be gone over to make sure that it would be reasonably clear to readers other than the people who wrote them. Hagaman undertook this job and scoured the couple’s computers to find the most accurate set of originals from which to constitute an accurate account of the events that inspired and produced the major ideas of the book. Her meticulous work made sure that the materials were in the best shape they could attain.

Becker and Faulkner read the complete version and made some minor editorial changes, occasionally changing names and taking other measures to protect the anonymity of people who had not known that they were participating in a research project (in fact, of course, for part of the time neither Becker nor Faulkner were completely clear that they were doing a research project). Leibovici proposed that the document include a sort of soundscape, made up of the tunes the two correspondents constantly referred to as they went about collecting the interviews, observations, and reminiscences that made up the bulk of the material they worked with. Electronic publication makes it possible to insert electronic references to such material and so, when a tune is mentioned for the first time in the correspondence, the title is clickable and the click takes you to a performance of that tune found on YouTube (which means that you may encounter a short ad before the music begins). Otherwise, the e-mails are presented as they were written, including all sorts of informalities, jokes, personal references, etc. which we have not tried to annotate or explain. The semi-private language, we think, becomes understandable in a very short time.

Along the way, Larry Gross and Arlene Luck, the managing editor of the Annenberg Press, kept the project manageable, letting us know when some idea would not be economically or technically practical.

All this proving that the old maxim is right: it takes a heap of people to make a book.

Becker and Faulkner, San Francisco, 1998.

Becker used to play the piano for a living, in taverns, for dances, weddings, bar mitzvas, Safeway employees Christmas parties, and so on. Here is a picture of the Bobby Laine Trio, circa 1950 (Bobby Laine, tenor; Dominic Jaconetti, drums; Howie Becker, piano), performing at the 504 Club, at 504 W. 63rd St. in Chicago.

Dave Santoro, bass; Rob Faulkner, trumpet; Jay Messer, guitar. The Egremont Inn, South Egremont, Massachusetts, 2012. Photo by Olivia V. Faulkner.

A concert at the American Sociological Association (ASA) meetings in San Francisco, 2009. Doug Mitchell on drums, Don Bennett on bass, Faulkner on flugelhorn and Becker on piano.

Becker at his desk at home in San Francisco, 2011.

Becker and Faulkner in Becker’s kitchen, 2003.

I. Part I: 2003

Most of the song titles are linked (in purple) to YouTube videos from yesteryear. From time to time, songs are removed from YouTube. We have no control over that. So be prepared, if a link produces a message saying that the clip requested is no longer available, please use YouTube’s search function to find another version of the same tune. There will almost surely be one.

Navigating tip for iPad users: After viewing a video link, simply double-click on your home button ( ) to return to your original reading place.

Navigating tip for Kindle and Nook users: After viewing a video link, simply click on your home button ( or respectively) to return to your original reading place.

Count. I do not know "I Can Dream Can’t I?" but will learn it because if I don’t it will just mean that you know yet another tune that I don’t know and I hate that…hate that. I mean like hate like not knowing like tunes that you like know more tunes than like I do.

Do you have the music to the tune in question, not "There will Never Be Another You," the other one? I can’t find it in my fake books.

Rob Faulkner playing Smoke Gets in Your Eyes at Castle Street Cafe, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, 2013.

I Can Dream Can’t I? I think I play in E flat, but could be G too. what’s the difference? Well, E flat might be better for the trumpet due to the range. My best memory of this tune now is (you won’t believe this) the Andrews Sisters recording, with Patti Andrews showing that she really could sing if they let her do it. (I know this because Paul Taylor made a fantastic dance called Company B to a collection of Andrews Sisters recordings and that’s one of the tunes—the dance is about WWII and soldiers and all that, very somber.)

You might as well give up trying to know all the tunes I know, this is my big claim to fame and I was working on it when you were a toddler and besides I accompanied a lot of singers off and on and that will do it for you and then it just got to be a thing with me. It’s only people like Mike Greensill, the British pianist we caught at Moose’s, who are as crazy as me in this area, and I’ve got a bunch he never heard of.

It was funny when I did the gig in Denmark, the bass player asked about tunes we would play (by e-mail) and I gave him a list of possibilities and he wrote back and said that he thought he knew a lot of tunes but I had managed to hit on seven he had never heard of before.

And I’m not counting the ones that I sort of know, but not all the way through, I’m missing some bridges here and there and they are hard to track down. Such as "We Go Well Together, or Humpty-Dumpty Heart" (the one Glenn Miller used to play, not the hillbilly tune), like that.

OK Mr. like Smartipants. I found Dick Hyman’s two classic articles titled Keyboard Journal in the journal, ah, Keyboard. Jesus I am losing my mind here, as you can easily detect. Anyway, Dick Hyman has some terrific things to say about how Bob James and Phil Woods, in Keyboard Jan. ’82 and Phil in Down Beat noted that the new crop of players tend to be deficient in repertoire. Too often, younger musicians don’t know the tunes that are still the common currency of players in all styles of jazz. Holy cow, exploitation as common currency. The article is in, again to be redundant, Keyboard April and then in May 1982 pp. 56-57. Title? 150 Standard Tunes Everyone Ought to Know. Love it? Then in May 150 More Tunes Everyone Ought to Know, continued on page 64 which, like a dumbbell, I didn’t get copied properly—Mr. scholastic scholarship. For this they cut off your head, or balls, or both, in Venice in 1300-1330. I will mail you the abbreviated listings and we will sit around the campfire and tell stories when I get my self to thy venue, like.

Why is this important, you ask? Well I have been tearing the fucking condo apart looking for this Dick Hyman Keyboard stuff for two months thinking that it would be a perfect example of the issue of repertoire, and if Phil and James are complaining that the kids don’t know any tunes, or know how to play on the Dorian mode and other revenge riffs of the ostinato people, then this is a nice fit with the learning the repertoire theme (like duh).

I plan on interviewing, ahem, if that’s too dignified a word, about practicing and learning tunes. Or, better, you can insert your two cents, make that two paragraphs into Shedding Culture.

Sooner or later, Hyman says, Someone is going to ask you to play ‘Stardust.’ The sentence before that is the gem, here goes:

Although I agree that not only jazz but popular music in general has been fleeing from the discipline of chord changes, I believe that a musician, and in particular a pianist, is gravely under-prepared if he or she embarks on a career based primarily on the Dorian mode. Funny-ha-ha. Not funny- strange. no? I looked at the list. I don’t know "Yours Is My Heart Alone. I don’t know I Surrender, Dear either. I don’t know Can’t We Talk It Over. I do not know Japanese Sandman. Oh well, I know Stardust."

Well, I don’t really know Yours Is My Heart Alone, but I think it’s in my ancient fake book. I Surrender Dear was really a standard when I began and it was one of the eight tunes that Lennie T. played (along with "Don’t Blame Me, Ghost of a Chance, What Is This Thing Called Love, etc.). Can’t We Talk It Over is another one that I sort of know but not really, we never played it (as opposed to Can’t We Be Friends) and Japanese Sandman isn’t anything you’d want to play, it’s too simple, sort of like Tiger Rag or something like that. But he’s right in that the Dorian mode will not get you through the night, especially if there are any requests. Does he have favorites of mine, like Do It Again"?

OK, here’s the result of my research. Can’t We Talk It Over? is from the 30s, I think, written by Victor Young and Ned Washington, recorded by lots of people. Yours Is My Heart Alone is from an operetta by Franz Lehar (give me a break, Mr. Hyman, enough is enough) and Sinatra recorded it with Tommy Dorsey and elsewhere. I don’t have the music for either one in my fabulous ancient fake book. Tough shit.

Where Hyman is wrong, I think, is that he doesn’t take into account that the common currency changes. Tunes that used to be cc aren’t any more, new ones are. Still, for a long time there was a core, you might say, that everyone knew. In my day, it went back to the Dixieland tunes so that, even though no one played like that any more, we all knew, say, "Muskat Ramble or Riverboat Shuffle or certainly knew Basin Street Blues. Things were added: How High The Moon, Laura, etc., as these came into being and people liked their changes and someone made recordings of them. Some of them became cc strictly because of recordings by jazz people, even when those were made for the wrong reasons. So everyone knows things like Mean To Me (I remember your recorded solo with the fake octave jump) or What A Little Moonlight Can Do" just because Holiday and Wilson had that contract to record a bunch of new tunes every month.

Anyway, that’s how the canon of standards gets constituted. There were core things that everyone seemed to think everyone would know. There were marginal tunes that nuts like me knew and taught to other people. There were tunes that hardly anyone knew (like the Alec Wilder tunes I like) because they were never popular or played much, and tunes that were popular on the Hit Parade and then disappeared but that some people liked to play (like me) and so kept slightly alive. There were show tunes that some nuts (like me) liked, like "Little Tin Box," and played whether anyone else did or not. Etc.

There was a lot of stability in the core of this thing because of classic recordings that kept things alive that otherwise would have disappeared. If I remember correctly, Hawkins or Chu Berry or somebody made a classic recording of I Surrender Dear that all the saxophone players knew and wanted you to accompany them on their version of.

But then maybe ten years ago I began to run into young people who had never heard of, say, "Sunny Side of the Street or You Can Depend On Me, but did know Joy Spring or Godchild and other tunes of that kind which had become part of what their everyone" knew. I learned some of those tunes but not all of them, because by then I wasn’t playing that much and my repertoire became increasingly eccentric as I had less and less to do with other players.

We could work on this together if you want. I think it’s an interesting aspect of jazz playing that no one has thought much about until you started nosing about in it.

Count. Just as I suspected, Hyman is swinging his Dick, as in who knows the most obscure tunes. This reminds me of the stat jocks who pride themselves on knowing all the fancy, and very obscure, new techniques, and make sure that you know that you don’t know them. It’s a shark tank, as one of my respondents (or is it informants) said: swim or die. Bullshit. Anything by Victor Young has to be paid attention to.

If you change voice and treat yourself as an informant and pretend like I asked you the following question—do you think the canon of tunes has changed?—then you have now added an enormously insightful ditty to the domain of, ahem, exploitation. The core changes and you just depicted it. Just like these days, I hear, the standard jam session tune is "Giant Steps, like Giant fucking Steps. I can’t even play it. In effect, this is good and you should write this up, oops you already have, so can I use it, as in treat it" as a document of changing canon, or what? I have no idea what I am talking about here, so this is definitely a Moose discussion (if you know what I mean). Do you know Mooch the Moose? It is very hard at the bridge is it not, check it out. Milt Hinton, by the way, in Bass Line, has a great photo of your hero Alec Wilder with Red (Norvo, not Mitchell).

The repertoire that one has to learn changes or, in our lingo, the standard repertoire and common currency changes, as you say, which means that repertoire is a construction (underlined), so that exploitation is constantly moving as a target to be learned, absorbed, played on and with, and so forth.

Musicians are not passively studying and learning the record—which brings to mind Eliot’s [Freidson] superb ethnography of professional practice (together) in Doctoring Together (1975), although practice is used differently in several important ways. Riverboat Shuffle? Huh? Things were added… is a big idea. In appendix B Eliot asked about techniques that had to be learned when the physician came into the medical group. Same question I’m asking of some of the musicians when it seems appropriate, i.e., when it doesn’t end up making the interviewer sound like a real cultural dope. What the fuck are you talking about Rob? Why are you asking me that? You know it. I know it. What is this, some kind of ‘INTERVIEW’?

Howie Becker playing in a bar on 63rd Street in Chicago, owned by a man named Frank Fish, circa 1950.

Rob, this is fabulous. We just keep writing back and forth, we’ll have a whole Thing, if you know what I mean.

I can imagine a very easy piece of research here, which would be to make a list of tunes from these various varieties we’ve been outlining and then ask a lot of different players if they know them, if and when they play them, where they learned them, etc. I’m a great fan of this kind of simple stuff. Like an old buddy of mine, anthropologist Henry Selby, did a study of witchcraft in a village in Oaxaca. he moved into a little house at one end of town with his family, then told the people next door he wanted to study witches and where could he find some. They said, Oh, too bad, there aren’t any here but at the other end of town there’s a lot of them, and they named names. He goes to the other end of town, asks the same question, and they say, Funny you should ask, there aren’t any here, but at the other end of town, where you live, there’s a lot of them. and they named names. So he concluded that witches always live at the other end of town. Then he did a witch census: asked everyone in town to name all the witches they knew of. And his hunch was right: everyone could name some witches but they never named neighbors or close relatives. Because, Selby explains, you know those people too well to believe that they are flying around on brooms and causing people to die, but you have to have witches, because they are the cause of all diseases. So there have to be witches but they can’t be people whose naming would be too disruptive. QED.

The reason I went into all that is that his procedure was so simple: take a census of witches and see who names who. Which would be a sort of model for us asking what tunes you know and who else knows them and where did you learn them, etc.

And one reason this interests me is that in a couple of weeks I’m going to an NSF thing that my old buddy Charles Ragin is running in DC, about, ahem, qualitative research and how can NSF stop discriminating against it, etc. All the usual suspects will be there. And one thing I might do is to describe our research on the