HT Ethan Iverson on a new biography that has been published about James Price Johnson., a few thoughts for a Saturday afternoon

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/S/Speakeasies-to-Symphonies

https://www.amazon.com/Speakeasies-Symphonies-Genius-Johnson-American-ebook/dp/B0GCNYWJVS/

 

Of note, Iverson points out that Scott Brown seems to be the first to bring to light that James P Johnson and Thelonious Monk had a piano teacher in common:

 

https://iverson.substack.com/p/james-p-johnson-1

… Alberta Simmons also taught Thelonious Monk. According to Monk’s biographer Robin D.G. Kelley, Simmons frequently played Eubie Blake’s “Memories of You,” and this may be why Monk played “Memories of You” so often in later years. At any rate, the fact that James P. Johnson and Thelonious Monk actually shared a piano teacher is a wonderful detail. I believe Scott E. Brown is the first to bring this detail to light: one of many revelations from Speakeasies to Symphonies.

Parts 2 and 3 of Iverson’s little series of posts are …

https://iverson.substack.com/p/james-p-johnson-2

https://iverson.substack.com/p/james-p-johnson-3

Ethan Hein on "How to learn to jam", a brief thought as a classical guitarist on how inimical much classical music education has become to the idea of jamming

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2026/how-to-learn-to-jam/

…

The best scaffolding is a participatory music community. For a present-day American, this can be difficult to find. Some subcultures are richly supportive of participatory improvisational music: the Black church, hip-hop cyphers, Latin percussionists, jazz jams, blues jams, bluegrass jams, the old-time music scene, the video game music scene. For other styles of music, though, you are probably on your own …

 

Paul Hindemith would propose, obviously enough, that a family interested in making music together would be a good option … if you have that.

 

I am reminded once again of Robert O. Gjerdingen's  Child Composers in the Old Conservatories: How Orphans Became Elite Musicians and Dana Gooley's Fantasies of Improvisation: Free Playing in Nineteenth-Century Music.  One of many reasons I dissent from Ted Gioia’s “we need a new Romanticism” is the history of Romanticism being against improvisation and jamming in “serious music”.  If anything Ted Gioia the jazz historian should be aghast at the prospect of a new Romantic era when Germanophile Art Religion and the cult of Beethoven played such outsized roles in purging classical music concerts of improvisation.

 

But I have often thought over the last ten to twenty years about how if you look at the isolated elements of avant garde movements in classical music it can seem as though each avant garde movement sought to transform one ingredient into a whole loaf of bread.  Let me extend the metaphor a bit. Let’s take microtonality.  Composers like Wyschnegradsky, Haba and others on through Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, Easley Blackwood and Ben Johnston and Kyle Gann have experimented with the microtonal path.  Stochastic processes?  Xenakis.  Free improvisation?  Eh …

 

Anyway, my idea I float for mere consideration is that a European avant garde movement would crop up pinning everything on some one element.  Conversely, in American popular music any and all of those constituent ingredients would already be all over the place in pop music.  You can hear microtonal inflections, flexible approaches to tonality, modal mixture and modal mutation.  I read Herbert Pauls’ Two Centuries in One book that was mentioned by John Borstlap over the years.  Pauls mentioned that the musical language of Romanticism and late Romanticism survived and thrived in popular music and jazz after post World War II avant gardists declared that those antiquated chords and scales were yesterday’s news.

 

So when I  try to sit through some guitar duet by Brian Ferneyhough I can’t help but think that it’s more fun to listen to Robert Johnson, Tampa Red, Charley Patton and Blind Willie Johnson than to listen to some guitar duo use slides to screech all over the strings of classical guitars.

 

A feat worth trying to accomplish, if only a tiny bit, would be to develop ways of writing music that could encourage classical musicians to feel like they actually can jam.

 

In reality classical musicians have been jamming but not necessarily in “classical” settings.  Brass players can switch from Hindemith to Monk and guitarists might switch from Sor and Britten to whatever strikes their fancy.

UPDATE

6-26-2026

I have been thinking over how the score has been so sacralized in classical music that there must be some way to steer between Cagey aleatory or Xenakis stuff and cult of Beethoven specificity.  Suppose a composer wrote a sonata form in which there were, say, two different recapitulations?  Performers with little to no experience jamming could pick one recapitulation or the other and a path toward being able to jam could lay in learning both recapitulations and simply toggling between them, taking some elements from Recap 1 and other elements from Recap 2 but getting to the end and playing what is, technically, fleshed out in the score.  After centuries of Romantic and post-Romantic fealty to notes on the page asking people to just "jam here" is likely a bit much.  Yet throwing a chart of globs of music a la some Stockhausen scores where you pick fragments 4, 5, 2, 7, 8 and 11 of 12, for instance, most certainly won't teach a performer how to jam.

But writing out a score and setting aside 20 to 25 percent of it with instructions to jam if you want?  That might work. 

these look like fun ...

It doesn't get more niche than something like this ... 

Freddie deBoer on how recovered memories aren't real and yet belief in them remains popular

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/recovered-memories-arent-real

Freddie deBoer has published a long-form case against recovered memory therapies and cultivation techniques.  Longtime readers of Wenatchee The Hatchet may not need a reminder that the salience of the decades-long arguments against recovered memories in counseling of any kind, secular or religious, is that it featured prominently if briefly in a 2008 presentation on spiritual warfare given by Mark “I see things” Driscoll back when he was in charge of what used to be called Mars Hill Church.

 

Back in 2014 I transcribed the majority of that 2008 presentation for the record and provided some analysis and discussion.  I asked whether any of the visions of discernment Driscoll claimed to have had ever had any, ahem, forensic outcome.  Of course, I also asked why Mark “I see things” Driscoll didn’t anything amiss about his friend and wise counsel Robert Morris.  For that matter, why would Mark Driscoll have ever felt any need, as was reported about him by Vince Manuele and relatives, to have people tail and surveil a fifteen-year old male if he had those super-powers of spiritual discernment? 

 

Mark Driscoll may have claimed to have witnessed molestations in real time but for practical purposes that was between him and his counselee.  There’s no record any arrests were made, not even in the case where, allegedly, Driscoll claimed he told someone that a  grandparent molested said person at age two and the grandparent, even more incredibly within the account, just admitted to the deed. 

 

deBoer gave a brief tour of cases with actual trials where people were found guilty on the basis of recovered memories that were never able to be forensically backed up.

 

deBoer’s tour is a fairly thorough debunking of the credibility and viability of recovered memory in light of research into the malleable and constructed nature of human memory, on the one hand, and the discovery that for victims of trauma the problem is never that they repress traumatic memories but that they can’t not remember them.

I had to familiarize myself with the whole multi-hour presentation Driscoll gave as a volunteer on the Mars Hill Theology Response Team  After slogging through roughly four hours of that content I discovered another nail in the coffin of my membership.  

The irony with a figure like Driscoll is that if mainstream and pop psychology had not made the concept of the repressed memory so easy to believe the man wouldn't have deployed it in his "pastoral counseling".  That may be a bitter irony indeed, kind of like how Driscoll has been wielding concepts from Murray Bowen's therapeutic work on family systems in newer self-help books.

It might be a sign of how pervasive the idea of the repressed memory is that even someone who could be regarded as a quasi-fundamentalist Christian nationalist like Mark Driscoll touted his capacity to help church members unlock recovered memories in pastoral counseling.  For actual mental health professionals, however, that idea has been set aside.