“You’re going to listen to your own music at work, that’s understood. But make your own music at work. And master your craft so well that you can craft a music they can’t play…”
Instrumental music is good at work, of course, since you can play it fairly quietly, and since there are no words (except “Salt Peanuts!”) to interfere with your thinking.
I would argue that complex compositions – like Classical or Modern, Progressive or Cool Jazz – will tend to improve the quality of your thoughts, through time, since your mind has to work so much harder to process the music. Constant exercise for the muscle of the mind should make you a stronger thinker. It seems reasonable to me that a familiarity with musical cadences will make you a better writer, as well.
Lately we’ve been tuned into the Bebop station on Pandora. Like all streaming-radio stations, the playlist could be a lot longer, but it’s a pretty nice representation of the Bebop idea in Jazz: Bird, Monk, Dizzy, Dex, Mingus, Trane, Miles. A little bit of Art Tatum, which I love, and a little Hard Bop, which I loathe. Bud Powell and Cannonball Adderley to show the world how a sound this demanding can still be fun. If you really want to listen, you have to go to your own record collection. But for the office, it’s the best solution we’ve found so far.
That’s all beside the point, though. You either like Jazz or you don’t, and many people don’t. But the quote from Monk in the headline
“We wanted a music that they couldn’t play.”
is practically a mission statement for hard-working Realtors and lenders.
Bebop was born during a musician’s union strike in 1942-43. Players who had been working as sidemen in Big Band and Swing orchestras would spend their idle days together in two Harlem nightclubs, jamming for each other. Over a very short span of time they created a brand new form of music, with a brand new music theory all its own.
The “they” in Monk’s quotation refers to the white band leaders who had co-opted Jazz and made it palatable to white audiences. The Bebop pioneers created a style of music that only virtuoso players could master, leaving their former bosses in an ever-more-obvious state of irrelevance and obsolescence. Bebop was four-, five- and six-player Jazz for very cool cats, and the Big Band leaders were instantly dinosaurs.
Sound familiar?
If you gotta pay for leads to keep the kids fed, do it. But every spare minute of your day should be devoted to Bebop real estate, working toward the day when you don’t have to pay some broker or boss or lead vendor for the thrill of making money for them. Not everybody who wants a bite out of your pay-check is a bad guy, but if you’re taking shit from morons – if there is someone telling you how you must work and then taking 20% or 35% or 50% of your earnings – I think you’re going about this wrong.
You’re going to listen to your own music at work, that’s understood. But make your own music at work. And master your craft so well that you can craft a music they can’t play…
