The Arts Salon

This is a special conversation to me, as Marco has been an important influence, and mentor for me throughout the last decade. Marco embodies all of the rarest qualities in the trumpet community, and like anything this rare, it makes Marco a huge asset to us all.

Marco taught me how to listen more deeply, to enjoy sound to its fullest, and to be grateful for the moments spent making music. He has also been an important influence to me in having the courage to be outspoken and fierce in defending the arts. In our time together he has always been generous and pulled no punches, often going for the jugular. In enduring his nudging, I have discovered more about myself than I could ever have imagined.

My guest today is Thomas Gansch. This has been so far one of my favorite conversations on The Arts Salon. Thomas is an incredibly generous man, and I was humbled by his openness. This conversation was a joy to listen back to and edit, it helped me bring to words, sentiments I have for years been espousing. We touch on many topics, but I want to briefly highlight the one that is most important to me.

In talking about the classical musical industry, Thomas correctly diagnosed many of its most salient issues. The stagnation art music, like all high arts, has been experiencing since the late 70s is largely the product of an over technification of its creative class. We’ve relinquished the role of the artist to the technocrats whose competence rarely opens the possibilities of human expression. We’ve designed curricula and value systems which doesn’t encourage creative decision making. In a community where everyone talks more about mistakes than achievements, the result is the breeding of self-deprecating performers, and audiences with no emotional investment.

I remember starting my sophomore year at McGill University, and meeting with Ed Carroll who told me there was a killer bass trombonist joining the class. “No Nico, this guy is something else,” said Ed.  By way of coincidence, we were paired up in a dreadful brass quartet, and from the atrociousness, was born one of my most cherished friendships. I look back often, but seldom wish to vividly relive the past; my weekly conversations with Felix, powered by our mutual love for music, coffee, literature, and philosophy, are one of those exceptions. I cherished them so, that I wish I could relive them all.

My guest today is Dave Bilger. Our conversations examines many subjects that are dear to my heart: revolution vs. evolution, the role of the educator, living a cultural life, cancel culture, and many more topics which I’m sure you will enjoy as much as I did. If you’re new to the Arts Salon, this might not be the conversation with Dave Bilger you expect, but probably the one you need to hear.

But before beginning I would like to talk about the events of last week, live in the US Capital, and the subsequent responses I am seeing. If you wish to skip the politics, feel free to do so by moving ahead into the conversation.

The 20th and 21st centuries have been a period of extreme progress in matters of human development. Technologically, we have advanced more in a century than in the previous millennia. Over the last 40 years the distances between nations have become negligible, and democratically rooted systems have taken hold of a majority of the world, where even until the 1950s, only a minority of nations had successfully implemented them for extended periods of time. Superstitions were receding at a commendable rate until the first decade of the 2000s, but the last 10 years have seen a strange regression in the perception of people regarding said progresses. The data clearly tells us one story, one of progress and improvement in nearly every facet of global wellbeing, and yet, the public intuition fueled by unhinged news sources and social media’s reactionary bias, feeds a more tragic outlook. The disparity between perceived reality, and a factual progressive world has led to many moments of unbearable stupidity, which are often shrugged off as “mere overcorrections.” One should not be so blasé about this, as any good doctor will tell you, overcorrections have dire results, and are no mere detail. When an immune system overcorrects it can often have calamitous consequences for a person. An over-zealous response can lead to death, and when not to death to something often more dire than the disease itself. It has been a strange decade leading up to the moment we’re in, and It seems nobody is safe from the tribunals of public opinion. One by one, we have seen important advances brought into question, civil liberties and freedoms decline, as these overcorrections move unopposed. Most people find these easy to ignore, and applaud them as signs of progress they claim to not understand themselves, until the inquisitors arrive at their doorsteps to threaten things they hold dear.

Today’s guest is Steph Richards. Editing this episode in the wake of the New York Philharmonic’s news, seemed serendipitous. During this pandemic we have all been scrambling to find a way forward, and most artists have been lost in this effort, because they have not been accustomed to swimming in the waters of change and hunger for far too long. This is obviously not the case with artists like Stephanie Richards, whose latest project, Supersense, is awe inspiring. Steph is NOT going to be caught in the wave of extinction facing many artists in the coming years.

Conversations like the one you are about to hear matter, it’s time to understand that the people we are propping up in this fetishistic madness, are those stuck in the structures that led to a catastrophe which Covid has only accelerated: boring programming, poor audience relations, unsound financial practices, and exorbitant salaries for administrators, music directors, and concertmasters. For those out there listening who are starting their careers, or who still have ambition, it’s time to think more deeply about what it means to be an artist, and take your destiny into your own hands…the institutions won’t be here for you. But for now, if Mark Swed’s list constitutes the heroes of the industry…count me out, and sign me up a ticket to the first Steph Richards or Dan Rosenboom show at the earliest convenience.

Today’s Guest is Dave Taylor, the extraordinary Bass Trombonist, who for decades has disproven that a muted personality will land you in a lucrative career. Dave is a great hero of mine, and I feel like I’ve known him for years through my dear friend Felix  DelTredici. Meeting him for this podcast was a real joy, and he proved to live up to my expectations.

Dave and I talk at great length about many subjects including bravery, and going all out. I value this perspective enormously, as I do not believe history ever rewards the cowardly in the pantheon of artistic remembrance. In these uncertain times, I wish more people would stop listening to those who built their lives in institutional comfort, in favor of people like Dave, who has dared to live his own life, with tremendous results.

Welcome to another episode of the arts salon. Today’s guest is CJ Camerieri. I Met CJ when we did a concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the great American composer LaMonte Young. CJ can be heard with the innovative new music ensemble YMusic, as well as with legendary musician Paul Simon.

Nobody on that gig was average, half of them will appear on this show if they haven’t already (Stephen Burns, Steph Richards, Ben Neill), but CJ is the exceptional within the exceptional. He is an interesting individual, a fierce thinker, and a brave proponent of ideas that many would cower from. I hope he will become a staple guest of this podcast as it evolves, and that as our friendship grows many will tune in to hear his important and prescient insights.

John is one of the Trumpet’s leading scholars, and one of its main practitioners. His work with composers throughout the 20th Century has left a rich legacy of pieces that are truly spectacular. In this, his work with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies is particularly salient. As a thinker he is unparalleled, and I wanted to have him on, because he is one of the Trumpet’s most educated and interesting advocates, and a gentleman through and through. As my friend Jonah Levy said to me once: “I would tune in to hear John speak about anything, even if he was only reading a phone book.”

John is a rare breed in the trumpet world: a true academic. Despite not having a Ph.D. or a D.M.A. he has arguably produced more useful research than anyone in the field, including his seminal book: The Trumpet. It is astounding to me that with the amount of people in America pursuing DMA’s, it takes someone like John to investigate thoroughly. This makes me question what all these people who now get to call themselves Doctor, indeed they often insist on it, are doing to advance the research in our field. The bar is laughably low in brass to achieve the highest academic degree, and it shows.

This bonus episode deals primarily with the erosion of Reason first world countries have been experiencing, primarily through the exploration of what I believe to be one of the most useless additions to the English language, the word Latinx.

Earlier this month, I received a sleuth of emails in a single day from prominent academic and artistic institutions inviting me, a Latino, to seminars, festivals, and several assorted events for the “Latinx” community. On Facebook I wrote a very short version of an argument against the use of the term Latinx, which I had been building over the last couple of years. This is the full case. It will focus on both explaining the roots of the adoption of the term Latinx, its unviability, but also seeing it as a symptom of a larger problem brewing in America, largely the result of the hold Postmodernism and now Critical Theory have had over academic and cultural institutions (particularly in the Humanities) since the 70s, and which is now manifesting at full steam as it spews over into other realms of society.