april 2005
Boris Gamer and Martin Heidegger
By Gilad AtzmonŠ
“The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than learning”- Martin Heidegger – What Is Called Thinking
Unlike many contemporary professional jazz musicians, I am far from being formally educated in music, not to mention in jazz. Back in the 1980s while on a tour of America, I had a clear plan to stay in Berklee School of Music for some years, I then visited the famous shrine of jazz education, I saw the masses of students, the cold corridors with the endless rehearsal cubicles, I also visited a few ensembles. Altogether, the industrial atmosphere put me off, I ran away and never came back. I realised even then that the jazz that I love is far from being an academic adventure. It is soulful, it is angry - sometimes even furious, but always poetic. I had probably already grasped that, while fury, anger and poeticism can be analysed, they can never be taught. And yet, it took me a few more years before I realised that jazz is a form of spirit rather than merely knowledge. If anything, jazz is closer to religion than to physics, maths or art-history. It is about practicing; and no matter how much you practice, you always get very little in return. It is about total submission. It isn’t about logical or rational investigation. In fact, it is an assault against rationality and a complete surrender to beauty. It didn’t take long before I grasped that, since jazz is love to music in its making, I would be better off sleeping with my horn rather than taking it with me to college.
And yet, I must admit that a serious amount of knowledge is involved with playing jazz: some extensive theoretical, harmonic and rhythmic ideas must be thoroughly reviewed and internalised before one manages to produce one’s first simplistic ‘jazzy’ phrase. Saying that, I would still maintain that it is the internalisation rather than scholarship that is so crucial for the musiK to come out. Internalisation is achieved when consciousness is put to sleep. Internalisation is completed when one becomes a mere channel, while musiK sings itself.
But then, how to incorporate such a demand for internalisation into an academic world, is it possible at all? If anything, an academic jazz education, like any other academic activity, is aiming at the opposite direction, it is engaged with the enlargement of ones intellectual capacity.
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When it comes to my own musical or jazz knowledge, it’s not only that it isn’t formal, I can’t even point out what it even is exactly, where it is stored or how it is implemented. Quite often I find myself slightly puzzled before playing, I am afraid that back on stage I will get lost, I may forget it all, the changes, the swing, my runs, my licks and my chops. Somehow, I always manage to be rescued by a glimpse of inspiration. But the fear is always there and it hopefully remains there as long as I am strong enough to hold the sax in my mouth. Seemingly, this fear and especially its resolution is the core of excitement of my jazz career.
I assume that throughout the years I have managed to internalise a few basic musical principles. I have managed to utilise some of the sonic, harmonic and rhythmic characteristics of jazz and a few other musical styles, but it is important to mention that I learnt most of them just from ‘being in the trade’. Over the years I had the chance to play with some great musicians. In general I always try to associate myself with people who are far more gifted than myself. Years ago I made myself a rule, I always try to join forces with musicians that are far ahead of me. In a retrospective overview, I can say that this was my way of learning the art form. Thinking about it in practical terms, it would lead me to the conclusion that as long as I keep in the mode of catching-up, I will always remain a student. I would argue as well that being an ‘eternal student’ is exactly what the jazz experience is all about. It is about being willing to find and redefine new worlds and new expressions. Jazz is the real notion of flux, and rejection of fixation. It is grounded on the will to learn, and the tendency to become bored far too easily.
Occasionally I am asked to take part in a jazz educational
programme: to lead a workshop, to run a jazz course or a master class. To be honest, I love it. I always try to fit educational programmes into my schedule. Not because I have something concrete to say but rather the opposite, in fact, I have very little to say. And yet, I do believe that it is important to stand out there and to say very little. Silence is inspiration: rather than providing my students with some technical and instrumental knowledge, I would rather try to locate them in the very centre of their own musical endeavour. I would try to teach them how and where to search for inspiration. Thus, the lesson itself should be realised as a joint search initiated by both teacher and student. From a teacher’s point of view, to teach means first to revise one’s understanding; to revisit or even to question one’s visions and preconceptions.
But then, as bizarre or even outrageous as it may sound to some, I really believe that musical fundaments can be summarised into eight to ten intensive lessons. I would argue that being a musician is pretty achievable and the fact that I made it means that everyone can. But then what does it mean to be a musician? What does it mean to ‘make it’? I assume that in contemporary America the answer is pretty obvious: being a musician means making a living being a musician. I would be far less demanding. For me, to be a musician means to be able to express oneself musically. This is what jazz was in its days of glory (1950s-60s). It was a unique personal voice explored by black Americans. Seemingly, being a musician would mean being oneself. On the surface it may sound very simple, but in fact this is the most complicated task to achieve. It is far easier to be someone else (a clone) rather than being oneself. I would then argue that jazz
education should concentrate on two main fields:
1. It should train the future jazz performer to search for a personal sound,
2. It should coach the young musician to listen to others. In order to find who you are, you should first make sure you know who you aren’t.
I was very lucky to confront those very issues early on because I had an astonishing teacher, a teacher who was brave enough to make it clear to me that music is simple. Altogether, I had no more than ten intensive music lessons. This happened twenty three years ago back in Jerusalem. As it appears, since these days I still practice the same very basic principles that I learned from him so many years ago. When the time came for me to find my own way, as we parted, he warned me not to come back before I am ready for a lesson. I must admit: I am not there yet. By now I acknowledged that I will never be ready, and this is probably the most important lesson: to admit that musiK is always beyond the horizon, it is a Sisyphean struggle. You will never get there, you may never get anywhere. It is only when you don’t expect anything to happen that it takes you by surprise.
First I saw him on TV, the day he landed in Israel, he had migrated that very day from the USSR. Not that I knew anything about jazz at the time but I was clever enough to realise that the short man with the big sax played like nothing I had ever heard before. At the time I was seventeen years old. Although owning a French clarinet, I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about music, like my buddies I listened to
the Beatles, Queen and some wild British punk bands. Somehow, I knew that I loved jazz without really knowing what jazz was all about. I assume that, at the time, it was ‘in’ to love jazz and I was ordinary enough to be part of the flock. I was slightly familiar with Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, I found them in my old man’s vinyl collection. And yet, modern jazz was completely foreign to my ears. But then, that very night, in front of the TV, just around midnight, Boris Gamer, an anarchist musician, a new Soviet immigrant, blew my mind away. I was hooked forever.
Twenty five minutes later, already in bed, I was utterly convinced that I am going to become a jazz musician. In the morning, rather than wasting another day in school, I found my way to the biggest music shop in downtown Jerusalem. I spent all my pocket money on Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. I bought every album Bird and Dizzy ever recorded. I rushed home, I put it on. It was fast, angry and glorious. I wanted to be a bird. I wanted to fly like Bird. This wild music had an evidently magical effect on me. A few days later, on Friday, I took my clarinet and went to Pargod, the one and only jazz club in Jerusalem. It was an ancient Turkish bath that was converted into a jazz club. I heard that every Friday afternoon they had a jam session that started around 2pm, and terminated by the entrance of the Sabbath. At five minutes to two, I was there, and to my astonishment, as soon as I crossed the entrance door I saw him, the new Russian immigrant, the one I saw on the TV, he was already there in the middle of stage flying over the chords taking no prisoners. I sat just under the bell of his tenor trying to absorb anything he had to say. When the session was over, I wasted no time, I approached him as soon as he went off stage and asked him to be my teacher.
Boris was living with his wife and two very young kids in a tiny one bedroom flat in a complex built by the Israeli government for recent Soviet immigrants. I would travel two hours to meet him. Then he would roast me alive. He was extremely demanding and abusive, needless to say that we had no lingual continuum between us. Boris didn’t speak any
language except Russian and I was still deeply involved within my Hebraic phase. And yet he managed to teach me, because teaching is rooted within the will to learn, both teacher and student.
Boris made it very clear that education was all about the making of learning practices accessible. Rather than processing knowledge, he would aim to present some different method of acquiring knowledge. He probably grasped that to educate is to teach how learn. Accordingly, to be educated is to know how to learn. I learned from Boris that sound is the mother of any future musical expression. I learned as well that if you want to play fast you better know how to play slow, I learned from Boris that progress is all about genuine process of mirroring. One must be able to identify one’s weakest spots. Once you identify your difficulties you should spend all your energy tackling them. This was very unusual concept for me. Being born in Israel, a
Jewish chauvinist and supremacist society, I was always trained to develop strategies to hide my weakest spots. Now for the first time in my life, I was asked to confront myself. I was asked to acknowledge the fact that I am far from being great. I realised that I will never be perfect. Only lately, did I realise that this was a major turning point in my life. It was the Latvian anarchist saxophonist who taught me black American musiK, who made me realise that there is a lot out there to be encompassed.
I am occasionally asked by left wing media how is it that I manage to come out and express radical and distinct ideas about the Israeli-Arab conflict, ideas that make a lot of sense within Western discourse and yet are hardly expressed by any of my expatriates. I think that the unique experience I had with Boris Gamer just when I was about to become an intellectually stagnated Israeli, had a tremendous effect on me. It shook my confidence, it opened my mind and liberated my heart.
Soon after I picked up the saxophone I found myself supporting my Palestinian neighbours. It didn’t take long before I realised that my people are actually my enemies. I realise now that it wasn’t a coincidence. Jazz is an open question and it was Boris who opened my mind to the possibility of questioning.
For many years I didn’t think of Boris in philosophical terms, I regarded him as a great saxophonist, as a core of inspiration and a great teacher. In the end of the day he had an instrumental role in my life. He made me into a saxophonist and this was enough to make me grateful forever. But then, years later, while being engaged in postgraduate studies in the UK, I came across another great teacher. His is name was Martin Heidegger. It was through him that I realised the major impact Boris had on my life. According to Heidegger, “Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching is call for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than - learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by ‘learning’, we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information. The teacher is ahead of his apprentices in this alone,
that he has still far more to learn than they, he has to learn to let them learn …the teacher is far less assured of his ground than those who learn are of theirs.” (M. Heidegger, What is Thinking Pg’ 15). Heidegger was as articulate about it as one can be. Teaching is not about the delivery of information. It is the delivery of the affinity to process information, to teach is to impart to someone else the skill of thinking. Both Heidegger and Gamer realised that to teach is to make your student an independent researcher, to teach is to make your
student a free being (as much as being can be free). To teach jazz is to transform your student into an expressive being. Rather than passing on technique, teaching musiK is the method of developing personal sound and a personal technique. To teach jazz is to lay out the road to beauty. But then, it is down to the student to show what beauty is all about.
