Where does Modal-Fusion Music Composition take us? Does it move us towards Jeff Rice's provocative question, "How can the student writer learn from the DJ?"? (http://enculturation.gmu.edu/4_2/rice) Is there anything to be gained from moving from Weird Al's surgical re-mix of medical "insider language" to the "Weird/Norm et al" of the Russell-rustling of all the names in history? (Cf. Nietzsche in Vitanza, 1997)
In answering these questions, I should note that there's something of a performative contradiction in this effort. The many jazz examples that I use to move from Jarrett's Jazz Model to what I am calling Modal-Fusion that tries to get beyond just jazz threatens the overall purpose of this project. Again, one of the key difficulties of this project is setting aside one's own tastes and trivia(l) knowledge in music to allow Something Else to emerge.
This "Something Else," for instructors, often comes temptingly close to connections one could make with one's own interests. (For example, in simply saying "something else," I am reminded of two of my all-time favorite 1958 jazz recordings--Ornette Coleman's first recording, "Something Else" and Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis's "Somethin' Else"--and how they were both recorded in the year of Art Kane's "Great Day in Harlem" portrait that I call upon in my introduction! Oh, how continously adding folks like Adderley re-mixes any Canon!)
And yet, for an instructor to perform his or her own connections continously would be to miss the who's of our students that can also be something else. Thus, to return to Basie lines from which this piece began, I can only say that I often spend a great deal of time in class playing with my potential to not-play (Cf. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community; Vitanza, 2003).
The who's of our students can tell us much about who students are and aspire to be. Far from a simple representation, music gets at an encounter that Jenny Edbauer describes as the "big time sensuality" of "affective literacies" that extend beyond mere ideological interpretations or analysis of music (29-30). It taps into what Sarah Arroyo calls, in her essay "Playing the Tune of Electracy," the "new 'rules'" that we will have to "at least partially legitimate" if we are to "set aside print-only values (such as linear thinking and providing one definition for things)" (703). The who's of music, not simply one band or one tone, involve all these million tiny becomings that is the sharing and exposure of classes, professions and relations to come.
The idea of the Sound(Career)Track, after all, is to permit student Modal-Fusion access to their music and their careers, rather than merely using jazz as a model. For me, again, the temptation of jazz is no doubt evident. Throughout this section, for example, I have riffed Russell’s Chromatic Conceptions Chora-matically. I do so, however, to show how Modal-Fusion chora-matic riffs plays alongside Ulmer’s work (and others), which Jarrett notes, in his own exploration of heuretic chorography, goes back to Plato’s creation myth in the Timaeus that involves the chora (183). As Jarrett also explains, the term “heuretics” carries the connotations of the words “eureka, heuristics, heretics, hieratic, heretics and, yes, diuretics” (x). Thus, in m.y.our Music/Compositions, t.here will have been many such eureka experiences. In my work, for example, I was stunned to find how Jarrett’s nod to the connection between heuretics and heresy takes up precisely the sense of conductively allowing the dissonance of the tritone, which may paradoxically be expressed in well-timed silences.
In giving a hearing to heresy—through a "Russelling of Who’s"—what I am suggesting is that, yes, it is likely that Jarrett’s fondness for Jazz, as it is expressed in Davis’s Kind of Blue, may well give rise to student taste in music that tends to run the gamut of Kind of Country, Kind of Rap, Kind of Rock, and Kind of Soul. And yet, it will also allow, as evident in Davis’s late fusion work, in albums such as Dark Magus, Pangaea, You’re Under Arrest, and Live-Evil, a sensibility of alternatives that can only be expressed through an Alter Ego or reversed signature like “Savid Selim." This is the challenge of bearing witness to and allowing musical idioms that might otherwise appear as mere Noise (cf. Lyotard The Differend; Serres The Parasite). For in the twin S’s of Savid Selim—as with the musical lightning bolt Z’s in Dizzy, Ozzy and RuZZell or career philosophers as DeleuZe, NietZsche, and VitanZa—academic encounters with ACZDC.demics has to be prepared for what will have been potentially revolutionary and shocking Music/Compositions.
Modal-Fusion Music/Composition is, as Jarrett says while conductively stretching Ulmer’s efforts to his jazz model, the idea is not so much “writing about jazz,” but finding the “tools for invention or writing with jazz” (x, emphasis Jarrett’s). Ulmer himself exemplifies this prospect neatly in textbook, Internet Invention, when he notes that guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer says, “Jazz is the Teacher, and Funk is the Preacher” (316). Modal-Fusion Music/Composition is all about allowing a course to start the coursing Funky Blood.
Such coursings are but the signature/insider-language expressed by the mason jars found in Jarrett’s grandmother’s pantry. In casuistically stretching the language of this Pantry, from the earliest days of jazz along Tin Pan Alley to Miles Davis’s last (re-beginning) Fusion collection Panthalassa (1969-1974), one allows whatever insider-language and various networks of whoever to emerge. When the full span of variation is allowed—including of course “music geek” language—Modal-Fusion Music/Composition becomes a site/cite for further Sound(Career)Tracks that may become the zigzagging tracks of lightning bolts to come.