alias Bruce.

Speaking of art and resistance,

Tao Seeger (center), Pete Seeger (right)

here is a piece on American musician Tao Seeger, who, to quote the lead-in, "speaks to Ahram Online on music and its important role in revolutions over the course of history, following his performance on the night of the Egyptian Revolution's first anniversary last month."

Tao, grandson of musical fighter Pete Seeger, says plenty in the interview that we need to hear right now, including detailing the ways (and the eras) in which art has always been a mainstay of dissent when the respectable classes go silent. Take a look.

The other night, at a jazz gig I played

as a drummer in a hot trio at a tony club, the club owner got very drunk -- something I gather he often does.

In the middle of a set in which we three musicians played our asses off for a packed and appreciative house, the bar owner walked up to the stage and, while everyone watched in shock, he launched into a long, loud, drunken rant about how the band was playing way too loudly and it was screwing up his business and it was all my fault. Me. The drummer. He stood squarely in front of me and my drum set. He shouted in my face that all of the volume problems started with me, and his patrons upstairs needed to make conversation, and the band sounded like a train running through the building, and he was the boss and I had better do something about it.

In a room where the audience had been giddy with our performance, you could suddenly hear a pin drop.

The rest of the details don't matter. Suffice it to say that I was both cool and blindly furious, and the crowd sided with the band, and the drunken club owner ended up making a meaningless apology, and I'll be damned if I'll ever set foot in his cursed little club again.

This is part of the turf that a jazz musician walks: Having the most intense art form that America itself has ever produced relegated to gin mills where people yak and drink too much; having this country's most creative musical intellectuals (and I'm not talking about myself, but about jazz musicians at the very top of the art, who as a threat to white superiority still face a certain stubborn denial and disrespect of their role in the culture) treated as mere entertainers.

Sure, I, or we as a band, may have been playing too loudly for the conversational upstairs crowd who felt our playing through the floor. But what is John Coltrane's music -- we played the seminal "Giant Steps" that night -- doing in a bar where a sloppily wasted white tavern keeper feels entitled to publicly lecture hard-practiced black jazz musicians? Why was the club owner trying to humiliate me when he could easily have avoided the spectacle with a private conversation? And who the hell was he to even play cultural critic in the first place? What is such compositionally and improvisationally brilliant music doing in a speakeasy, anyway? What was I doing there?

That's the problem with being jazz musicians in the United States. We have our hands on something that the dominant culture feels it can't afford to fully recognize: black creativity that is part Beethoven and part shaman. Over the decades, we have cleanly played our hand with our former slavemasters, seen them and raised them, upped the cultural ante on what they feel is their very best, and their response at the table has been a sullen silence, eyes averted, with the occasional self-comforting and inherently racist outburst about our being too primal for their company.

Talk about dysfunction and ingratitude.

This is precisely why Europe and Japan -- having less of a vested interest than America in undervaluing the breakthrough Afri-Euro aesthetic of the Louis Armstrongs and Josephine Bakers and Aimé Cesaires -- remain magnets for black American artists who want to be seen for who we actually are and for what we actually do.

Meanwhile, here on the 2012 American plantation of cultural production, it's still too often pearls before swine. But there is also this: the mere fact that this awful nightclub story isn't my typical experience as a jazz musician, and that the crowd stood with we musicians against the drunken owner, and that jazz and its audiences manage to thrive from corner bars to Lincoln Center, says a lot about the loving indestructibility of music and of humanness in the face of even the most wickedly pervasive machinery.

[2/8/2012 12:30pm EST: I re-edited the final paragraph to better express all that I see and feel here.]

A fellow musician mentioned the other night

that it's a bad idea for musicians to "listen with their eyes."

What he meant was that when we decide how creative or talented or worthy of respect a musician is on the basis of their received recognition by an audience or their image among connoisseurs, we make bad decisions. The only true way to know what you hear in the music is to listen to the music.

I like the way he put this. It's true for musicians, but it is also true for poets, readers of novels, sports fans, theater folks, painters, voters -- anybody who needs to have the clearest take they can manage on someone's contribution.

This isn't always easy. Sometimes huge popularity is -- wrongly -- a signal to us that someone is a hack. And sometimes obscurity is damn well deserved. It's all subjective, of course, but it's still complicated.

Take the hugely successful 1960s/70s rock band Grand Funk Railroad. They were a spectacular sensation among teenagers who wanted their music loud, brash, self-righteous, and infused with pot smoke. (I know. I was there.) Writers who "knew" music (a timelessly common condition among critics who know how to listen but not how to play) trashed GFR in print with bloody fury. And they were often right. Frontman Mark Farner did suck as a guitarist and was largely full of shit as a writhing, shirtless, pseudo-philosophical rock poet. The band did play to counterculture teenybopper clichés. Producer Terry Knight was in fact a slickster whose GFR album cover concepts and band marketing rivaled the product packaging of Alka Seltzer and Shake & Bake.

But Grand Funk Railroad rocked its ass off -- mostly because monster bassist Mel Schacher and drummer Don Brewer were among the first big-time white rhythm section players to understand a basic foundation of black R&B: when you synchronize the bass line with the bass drum, you get the funk. You create the gut thump. Go back and listen to vintage GFR, and you'll hear a white band that picked up on part of the seismic essence of James Brown and other funk pioneers. These white boys heard the underlying real shit, and they rendered it well enough in coliseums to drive thousands of bodies into a frenzy. Sure, like a lot of groups, they had help from ganja, acid, and Madison Avenue. But Grand Funk Railroad was and always will be a classic ass-kicking band, no matter how many armchair virtuosos cursed them in reviews of their albums and concerts.

That is why, when I listen to musicians who I believe thoroughly suck, I try -- sometimes successfully, sometimes not -- to listen beneath that for something I need to hear. And it's why some musicians, far more accomplished than I, try to do the same thing when they listen to me.

Did you catch Wyclef Jean's NPR interview tonight?

Not impressive, I'd say. Actually, worse than not impressive.

I'm not saying a hip-hop star couldn't make a great president. But Jean, in this interview at least, came off as being slightly more informed and qualified than an average turnip. His basic pitch -- to the extent that he was able to express it -- seemed to be, "I'm Haitian, and I'll surround myself with real smarties, and my tax and fiscal scandals are all being taken care of by my people."

But then, his fame and sincerity may be enough -- it often proves sufficient in American politics -- and his well-intentioned distance from the entrenched and corrupt Haitian elite can't hurt, either. So let's stay tuned.

As you know, "The Star-Spangled Banner" is based on a drinking song,

so, in the spirit of the holiday, I have posted those original lyrics, and their story, here on my "A Poem for Tuesday" blog at The Agonist. Nice to read (and sing, if you like) the six verses of raucous tribute to wine and lust from which our national anthem derives its melody.

I hope you had a fun Fourth of July.

Cats: the Music.

Did you know there is music for cats?

I don't mean plain old human music repackaged for cats, with our familiar homo sapiens assortment of scales and tonal ranges and ambient sounds given cute new feline names at $15 a pop. I mean a new type of music that is acoustically designed, melodically pitched, harmonically constructed, rhythmically paced, and otherwise aurally crafted for the physiology of cats' hearing and the psychology of what sounds they find pleasing.

Cat lovers, be intrigued. Non- cat lovers, laugh your heads off.

I've got a thing for cats. Always have. I think it's about their independence while still being good pals, their silken moves, their Bagheera-like grace in following the pure pouncing compulsion of one of nature's less pretty imperatives, their talk, their weirdness, all of it. Their car sickness and their litter-box needs? Not so enjoyable. But you can't have everything.

For years I took in stray cats and found them homes. In between, I had a number of cats of my own, the most recent of whom, Buddy, came off the street with feline leukemia and lived for three blessed years with a three-week death warrant hanging over his head. He was the best pal I could have asked for, and his presence taught me that the length of the time span before we die matters less than what we do with it. Someday I'll tell you more about him.

But today I'm suggesting you go here, if only out of curiosity. The site is MusicForCats.com. It's got (alleged) acoustical and behavioral science. It's got explanations of how all of this works. Best of all, it's got free cat music samples you can listen to. (They are at the very bottom of the home page.) You won't believe this stuff.

I swore that my cat Buddy's favorite was Mozart, which I played for him whenever I left the house for more than an hour or so. He always seemed more chilled out with Wolfie than without him. But maybe that was just me. From what I can tell, the animal music scientists, including a Wisconsin psychologist who does music research with monkeys, say that non-human critters are pretty much oblivious to human music.

Hence cat music, for cat ears and cat brains and cat memories of the joys of kittenhood -- such as suckling. (Funny that there apparently isn't human music about that. Although there seem to be plenty of films.)

Anyway, give a listen. And see if you feel a sudden urge to knead the couch with your fingernails or to run frenzied laps from room to room.

Bad.

Say whatever you want about Michael Jackson. He was one bad MF, and his dying at 50 after having apparently drifted out of the solar system long before then is one of the greatest losses pop music will ever know. Since there are, at the moment, approximately 17,448,293 reverent online tributes to the late King of Pop, I will keep this short.

Like so many, I remember when I Want You Back hit the street and was blaring from every loudspeaker in existence in 1969. We were all jabbering to one another about this superhuman 11-year-old boy who sang as if he had already lived a hundred lives of heartbreak. Maybe he had. And of course there was the song's body-melting orchestration with strings and every other instrument known to man, and that gorgeous Phil-Spector-on-steroids intro that practically had you weeping before the singing even started. And the so-called B side? Who's Lovin' You, one of the great shattered-heart songs of all time. I challenge you to make it through the extended vocal coda, with Michael finally breaking upward a full octave at the end, and keep your composure.

But we know all of this, and all that came after. And we all have our perplexity about What-The-Hell-Happened-To-Michael, with the nose and the skin and the whispery perpetually pre-pubescent voice and the chimp and the Lisa Marie marriage and the baby on the balcony and the allegations about little boys at Neverland and the rest of the awful circus. A beautiful genius of a black man literally sliced into a creature we couldn't recognize. It's a story partly about race, partly about family, partly about Hollywood, partly about outer space. That's the story, mind you, the narrative we thread together. The truth, though, is something we will never know. Even the most definitive autopsy and toxicology report will never give us, really, the cause of Michael Jackson's death. If you know what I mean.

So, as with every death, we are left with what he left us.

In the documentary film Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger delivers the best summation of the meaning of Hendrix's death -- and, almost presciently, of Michael Jackson's death -- I have ever heard. Jagger basically says, and I'm paraphrasing from memory here: I don't know anything about Jimi's private business or whether he was a casualty or any of that. All I know is he was the best rock act, the most original, and I miss him, and I wish he was still here. And that's it.

Yeah. That's it.

My Maryland.

There is a poem, written by one James Ryder Randall in 1861, that calls for Maryland, a slave state, to secede from the Union and to join the Confederacy. The poem refers to President Abraham Lincoln as "the despot" and "the tyrant." It pleads for Marylanders to take up arms on behalf of the Confederacy against "the northern scum."

The poem, set to music, is today the official state song of Maryland, and it has been since 1939.

I don't know how many adult Marylanders and singing schoolchildren know that "Maryland! My Maryland!" (sung to the tune of "O Tannenbaum") is basically a cursing fit aimed at Lincoln (isn't there a monument to him somewhere near Maryland?), at the Union, and at the northern threat to the slaveowning South. I myself didn't know this until just a few days ago, when the local paper carried news of the latest try at squaring the state anthem with a century and a half of human rights progress. And I've lived in Maryland for 25 years (which, in fairness, is 1.7 seconds in Maryland time). I mean, who reads all nine stanzas of a bad histrionic rhyming poem? Who actually listens to and thinks about the words to such parochial martial jingles?

But I'm making excuses. Maryland is below the Mason-Dixon Line, and it was (and still is in many places) Confederate-friendly turf in which there were bloody riots when the Union Army marched through Baltimore on its way south (pictured above). One of the men killed in the riots was a friend of the poet Randall. Hence the weepy, vengeful poem. And hence its continuing regional audience. No getting around it: When the Mid-Atlantic state in which one resides figures it's okay in the 20th and 21st centuries to pin its official pride on the glory of the Confederacy, this is a fact that a citizen (say, a blogger) pretty much has a civic duty to know.

And now the cheeky efforts to end the reign of a name-calling Confederate battle cry as the Maryland state song have resurfaced in 2009, with the State Senate boldly discussing the prospect of naming a commission to study the possibility of changing the lyrics. This move has come up against charges of "political correctness" and "historical revisionism," the former of which is standard screw-social-progress rhetoric but the latter of which has some merit. I personally think altering a long-existing poem to make it palatable to the civilized world, as some in the State Senate seem to want to do, is a coward's way out. As a poet myself, I feel the hair stand up on my neck at the thought of trying to play off an altered work as the real thing.

I say ditch the ridiculous poem altogether. It may have inflated the chests of bitter Marylanders in the years of backlash against Union triumph, and its lyrics may have sat just fine with the official Maryland mood in 1939 amid brutal white supremacy and legal segregation. But in 2009 this song is an anachronism, an offense, and an embarrassment. It is way past time for a new Maryland state tune, preferably one more or less in synch with the broadly-accepted moral imperatives of, say, the past 50 years. I'd say that's not a radical expectation.

What is radical, though, is the fact that this issue is even controversial.

Come to think of it, do you know all of the lyrics to your own state song?

Playing for Change.

Imagine dozens of musicians playing outdoors -- some known and some not, street players and studio players alike -- all playing the same song together at the same time even though they are scattered in countries throughout the world, and all connected electronically so they can hear one another in real time, with cameras filming each of them simultaneously so that you can watch it all at once. And remember, all of this is happening not in wired studios but outside: on streets, in fields, on balconies.

Maybe you knew about this. I've just learned about it. It's called Playing for Change. It is an organization that, in its own words, is "dedicated to connecting the world through music by providing resources (including but not limited to facilities, supplies and educational programs) to musicians and their communities around the world."

What the Playing for Change musicians do publicly is perform. Globally. Simultaneously. On location. I have no idea how they technologically pull this off. All I know is that you need to stop reading this and watch their rendition of "Stand By Me" right now.

Thanks to Mushim for the tip.

Quote of the Day.

"Some of the guys would try to get me to hate white people... and for a while I tried real hard. But every time I got to hating them, some white guy would come along and mess the whole thing up."

-Pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, as quoted by his manager Harry Colomby

For more, see this 1958 Down Beat Monk profile and this Monk bio by Robin D.G. Kelley. (Scroll down on that page for Kelley's piece.)

Thanks to Phil C.