Kirch Quotes

Within any educational curriculum, there are going to be certain teachers that one remembers - for good or bad reasons. One may cause students (and less overtly, colleagues) to question how he or she ever got appointed to a teaching position in the first place, while another may delve so deeply into a subject that students are taken on an in-depth journey, forgetting they are in a classroom and riveted as though hearing a well-played solo amidst an orchestra of academia.

From my own experiences, most teachers tend to be better than the first type (thankfully) while the second type is not seen often enough; he or she is usually the exception rather than the rule. Rarer still is the one who stands out among this second group, imparting sage-like wisdom, throwing conventional thinking to the wind and knowing his or her stuff not just from years of referential study but hands on “real world” experience. Bill Kirchner (nicknamed "Kirch"), with whom I studied arranging for big bands and small ensembles as well as jazz history at New School University in Manhattan from around 1998-2001, is just such a teacher.

Kirch’s jazz history course opened my ears to a lot of great music, covering the gamut of improvisation from the early twentieth century to then current sounds. Although the New School at this time harbored an unspoken atmosphere of musical conservatism, his class was one place where I felt it was ok to be diverse, even if you were a (yikes) metal guitarist who loved jazz. His talks and listening sessions not only made the era of Louis Armstrong feel fresh again, they granted similar respect to an era whose music had drawn me to jazz in the first place: the 60s and 70s - a time period which, crazy as it seems, was (and probably still is) viewed in more conventional circles as the equivalent of the Dark Ages (despite the emergence of Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnnette and so many preeminent titans of today).


His arranging classes were equally enlightening. Not only were we turned on to more great music, much of it no longer in print, but the scores were there to follow along, enabling a deeper connection and lasting appreciation (see last year's blog post Big Band Blog). Arranging was a subject I'd chosen purely for the sake of appreciation and experience (and possibly an elective fulfillment); there was little expectation of ever putting it to practical use in the real world. That changed a year or so later when I got a call from a musical acquaintance who'd been asked to score a “Count Basie Style” big band swing piece for television. Though a prolific composer of instrumental rock and pop, he had little experience in jazz and was spread thin schedule-wise. Thanks to Kirch’s course, I was able to take this project off my friend’s hands, composing and recording a big-band track - intro music for the the 2001 Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, broadcast by the USA Network, who did a great synchronization of dogs taking over New York in time to the music (Note: unfortunately, my old VHS cassette of that broadcast is shot; I’ve been waiting and hoping for it to appear on YouTube. If anyone has a copy of the 2001 Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show recorded - with intro music, please contact me!).

Not every student respected Bill's classes the way I did. Some acted as though his lectures would be of little use to their soon-to-be-burgeoning careers as professional musicians (many of which would turn out to be steeped in delusion). These students, particularly the ones fresh out of high school, seemed to not want to be in school period (and probably shouldn't have been). Whenever I'd see one of them looking bored, otherwise preoccupied, simply not paying attention or leaving class early, I'd think of Frank Zappa's description of a concert he'd attended by the great modern classical music conductor Pierre Boulez: after barely paying attention to the first few pieces, concertgoers reacted to Boulez's own composition by walking out in droves: "I would have enjoyed the opportunity to grab a microphone and scream "Sit down, assholes - this is one of the 'real guys!'" (The Real Frank Zappa Book, 1990).

Late last year, Bill did an interview with pianist Ethan Iverson, of the piano trio The Bad Plus. While I admit occasionally grumbling about my own trio feeling overshadowed by this jazz “supergroup” who emerged around the same time with a huge record deal and a similar concept of doing jazz arrangements of rock songs (overlapping with us on Rush' "Tom Sawyer"), it’s never diminished the massive respect I have for these guys as musicians. Iverson, the pianist, also runs a fine blog, where his interview with Bill Kirchner is posted. Here Bill tells his story and engages in a dialogue with Iverson that covers a seemingly inexhaustible amount of ground.

I recommend reading this interview in its entirety with two minor disclaimers:

1. Set aside time, as it's long (but worth it).

2. It is very jazz-specific, with many in-depth details of music theory, criticism, journalism, history and obscure names that may lose a few less jazz oriented readers.

Jazz fan or otherwise, Kirch's story can be appreciated by anyone, if you just read through patiently. If you start to lose interest, simply skim over that part and move on to another section, as there are some really great moments to take in. His passion for music is contagious - it is rare to find someone this committed to music purely for the art's sake, with zero concern for what's popular and/or profitable. Particularly inspiring is how Kirchner dealt with his own daunting, debilitating health challenges on the heels of launching his music career, shifting into new specialties such as education, journalism, radio (including a jazz series for NPR), Grammy-winning liner notes (back when the Grammys still meant something) and more without ever giving up music making.

One more disclaimer: though it's humbling to be mentioned in the interview, that’s not why it’s posted here; there are many reasons, as you'll soon see.

Start with the “Kirch quotes” placed below. Then, check out the entire interview, which can be found here:
"Do The Math."


”At this point I’ve had over a thousand students. I’ve had, just kind of by dumb luck, most of the major jazz musicians of the last twenty years as students. Brad Mehldau, Andrew Bemkey, Marcus and E.J. Strickland, John Ellis, Manuel Valera, Alex Skolnick, Tatum Greenblatt, Nathan Eklund, Becca Stevens, José James, Robert Glasper, Mike Rodriguez, Ambrose Akinmusire…..dot-dot-dot-dot-dot. Some I’ve had just for one class, some I’ve had for a multitude of classes. But I’ve seen them all as striplings – which has been an interesting experience.”

“I tell students: ‘You’re being trained as an improviser, and one of the things you have to do is learn how to improvise a career.’”

“There are a lot of people going around putting down jazz schools and saying that they’re rigid and turning out clones and blah blah blah, which is totally uninformed...I was the New School Jazz Program commencement speaker last year, along with [pianist] Aaron Goldberg, and I told them, ‘Whether or not you make a living as a jazz musician, the biggest value of a jazz education is that you get trained to think as an improviser and you’re trained to think outside the box.’”

“Did you ever read the Alvin Toffler book called The Third Wave? It’s terrific. It was written thirty years ago, and a lot of what he prophesied in that book has come to pass. He loved jazz musicians because he said jazz musicians were just trained to change direction [snaps fingers] suddenly and without warning and quickly. And they were much more able to do that than people who are just trained to be robots. He talked about the traditional curriculum in schools that still exists – what he called the ‘overt curriculum,’ which is reading, writing, arithmetic, and what he called the ‘covert curriculum,’ which he described as punctuality, blind obedience, and being willing to perform boring, repetitious tasks without complaint...But if you’re a jazz musician, that’s not what you do. You’re being trained to interact and improvise and change direction suddenly and do whatever else we do. And he felt that for what major changes are coming in our society, that jazz musicians had a special edge. So that’s what I tell students and what I talked about at the commencement last year, and all these parents came up to me afterwards saying ‘Thank you,” because they felt like ‘Even if my kid doesn’t become a jazz musician, I haven’t wasted all this money.’”

“There’s a bass player I worked with thirty years ago named Jared Bernstein, who graduated from Manhattan School of Music, and who was a good jazz bass player. We did some gigs together and a couple of recording sessions, then I lost touch with him. A few years ago I was watching Channel 13, the News Hour, and here’s this guy named Jared Bernstein on there being a talking head as an economics expert, and I said, “I know this guy,” and it was the same Jared Bernstein. He had gone and had gotten his advanced degrees, and he was now an economist and ended up being (Joe) Biden’s principal economic adviser. And he’s still playing; he did a concert or something a few months ago in New York. I’m sure he’s not playing much, but here’s somebody for whom I’m sure a lot of what he learned as a jazz musician comes to a lot more use than people might expect at first glance. If you think creatively, that’s really money in the bank. Nobody thinks of being a jazz musician as a lucrative career, but the thought processes sure are. But you’ve got to use them creatively, whether it’s in music or anything else.”

“Find Third Wave, if you can. The other book I always recommend to musicians is a book that was a bestseller in the seventies called Winning Through Intimidation by Robert Ringer. It was written by a guy who was a real estate broker who got tired of being screwed by both buyers and sellers, and so he decided that the way to get around that was to improve his position – to make people respect him more. The whole book is written like that. Politically he’s a Libertarian, so there’s a certain amount of right-wing stuff that you have to take with grains of salt, but essentially, it’s a primer for the music business. He has a lot of these kind of tongue-in-cheek theories, one of which is called ‘The theory of sustenance of a positive attitude through assumption of a negative result.’ Another is ‘The Theory of Posture,’ which says ‘It doesn’t matter what you do or say, it’s how people view you when you do or say it’ – which in the music business is paramount, of course. What’s the difference, for example, if I call some festival promoter and want to get a gig, what’s the difference between me making the phone call and an agent calling on behalf of Wynton Marsalis – who are they gonna take seriously? For obvious reasons, right? And it has nothing to do with the quality of the music - my music is first-rate – but it’s the posture, it’s how people view you.”

“So if I might for a moment be self-analytical to the point of being perceived as immodest – what the hell – the thing I do best is that I can get talented people to play over their heads – whether it’s a band full of great players or a bunch of students in a classroom or 59 writers writing for a book or musicians recording in a studio or whatever – I can get people to do stuff that they didn’t know they could do. It’s just what I do. I don’t know how I do it, but if I had to sum up my own career in all its different aspects, I guess that’s what I do. And the reason I can do that is in part that I’m a world-class musician and know what the hell is going on. I guess that’s the sum total of it all. It hasn’t made me rich or famous, but I think I’ve left some stuff that I can be proud of. There are a lot worse things than that.”