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Yul Agee: I jump from Troubador/Elizabethan up to late-20th-century jazz tune- and wordsmiths because both are part of the same elegant Western art-song tradition; there is also a direct connection between the keyboard improvisations on Medieval and modern jazz material. The whole decade-and-a-half of Heffley’s recording projects (1993-2008, roughly), for all the trombone playing he still did then, was in fact his shift from that horn to the piano keyboard (on synthesizer too) as his main instrument.
This pair compares to the first of the nine here in their similar narrative concerns, and progressions from first to second double-CD. The first of each pair, Troubador/Goliard Songs and Songs of Nature and Love both sing of nature and love; both are collective (albeit simulated via overdubbing in Troubador), followed by the more personal solo expressions of similar material in Pierced Through and Double Bill Heavens. Both sets thus show in microcosm the larger arc of his musical life from group to solo art.
The contrast in the tenor and content of the lyrics is striking, too. As the arc from Medieval to Renaissance marked the courtly love tradition from youthful pining and whining to richer, rangier joys and despairs, that from Renaissance to Postmodern moved from the middle to the elder part of its life. The conventional love songs are steadier, stabler, seasoned by longsuffering; they are also supplemented in roughly equal numbers by love-of-nature songs, and love-of-childhood (the memory of one’s own, in old age, and the joy in one’s grandchildren) songs.
Heffley’s own life recapitulates that arc; he was youngest when doing the Troubador songs, older with the Elizabethan, and recorded the following two works in his 50s, living happily alone, near his grown daughter and younger friends just starting their own families.
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The Minefield
It is at this point that my exegesis of Heffley’s oeuvre encounters the licensing/permissions minefield. It extends from pairing #1, The Oily Daze and Demos (discussed at Heffley's site), through this pairing #3 to pairing #5, Fake Book Stuff and Lazy Ampliano/Music for Loners (currently unavailable, pending mechanical licenses).
Why write here about music you are not able to hear? Several reasons.
He and/or his bandmates created, recorded, and released it all, as serious statements made in good faith for serious music and lyric lovers. The naďve, amateurish part of that process was Heffley’s assumption that lyrics added to music could be easily, uncontestably legitimized, mandatorily permitted in the same way copyrighted compositions were, for a small royalty fee.
Well, on second thought, what seems naďveté and amateurism may be only the tip of an iceberg of cynicism. The culture Heffley came up in as a young jazz musician was one in which “fake books”—Xeroxed collections of hand-transcribed lead sheets of copyrighted tunes—were still underground-illegal, but widely used by players and tolerated by policers. By law, every time a musician covered a copyrighted tune in a live performance or recording, he or she had to pay royalty fees to the publisher. This no doubt happened as legislated on some levels of the business, but local freelancers simply ignored it, and were ignored for it, at least on the live gigs. Moreover, vocalists and lyricists, which Heffley often was, as well as instrumentalist, often supplied and/or added their own words and verses to, in the same way they made their own arrangements of and improvisations on, a tune.
Another thing many of them ignored—especially establishment-hating young free-jazzers coming up in the 1960s and ‘70s, contemptuous of so much of the business, academic, and media worlds then comprising the “jazz-industrial complex,” full of utopian dreams of more collectivist models, independent labels, artist co-ops, etc.—was the Musician’s Union. It always loomed like some kind of protection racket, if taken seriously at all, in Heffley’s young club-gig years on the West Coast, as did the idea of paying some publisher’s rep every time he played a standard in a jam session, or played around with lyrics. The Union oversaw mainstream gigs of little relevance to Heffley’s more radical bent, and was largely ignored even by many in the mainstream jazz scenes he also had a foot in.
This discussion could merit a book—the realities of the business clashing with the creative and survival impulses of the artists—and this artist’s lifelong avoidance of business, academic, artistic careerism, all of which he was successfully enough “in,” while seldom “of.” Boppers worked around such things in their day simply by re-naming standard tunes and altering their melody lines, by using pseudonyms on recordings, etc. The dynamic has evolved to our own time through the internet, sampling, file sharing, and all the lawyering up and careerist approach to the music that defines the culture and entertainment industry now.
To wrap it up here, short of such a book, let’s just say that the “fiercely amateur” aesthetic I first applied to this music has roots deep and strong...yet the thick trunk shot up from them has itself branched and flowered. That is to say that this body of work has always been more avocation than vocation, more calling than career, and more pleasure than business. Even when he was younger and more passionate and starry-eyed about it all, he consistently proved his disinterest in the professional musician’s life (hard-scrabbling labor of love, acceptance of the worldly realities that made it so); in commodifying his music; in the personal politics of business, academia, or of the musician community itself. His default paradigm was always more that of, let’s say, an amateur (in the original non-pejorative sense of “lover”) oral-traditional world, in which all information was communal intellectual property, there for all to freely learn, preserve, and tweak, add to, alter, not buy and sell.
He did these recordings as desire and opportunity colluded to help him do them, sheerly as musical projects; then, granted, he did take the steps to make them available as products, in the simplest, most passive and direct way. However, like his gold-standard higher education, his critically acclaimed books, his work as a scholar presenting papers around the world, and most of his journalism and live music throughout his life, these products cost him far more than they earned him.
This approach works well when applied to an artist’s original work, which he or she automatically “owns”—and to material from public domain—but it costs money to cover that of others. Heffley has been paying that cost as he can afford to, but would withdraw all such material if it were to bleed more than reward him (licenses are renewed annually). As for adding lyrics, that is often not an official option, and is even more of a bleeder when it is. (“I’m tired of doing all this million-dollar work for nothing,” he often says these days; in fact, he’s been borrowing from and paying the world to be able do it, or at least to make it available to the world.)
In the case of this 2-CD set, he either couldn’t reach anyone about getting permission, couldn’t get them to respond when he did, or was offered by lawyers terms of permission so blatantly exploitive that even he drew the line. The tracks with his lyrics that are still enabled are those that no one has demanded he remove, or expressly forbidden; he will let them run on their mechanical licenses alone unless someone does claim rights, and objects. The disabled ones fall into the permission-granted/too-much-blood-expected category, though they may be negotiated out therefrom eventually.
Like mine, Heffley’s sole interest in this is artistic. He feels loyalty to the energy and imagination he put into both music and lyrics of these covers, and as a last resort will redo them in ways that will elude such legal lines. From that perspective, there is little difference between one’s own original material and another’s. Whatever one creates is going to draw on a language and a tradition common to all, and is going to reference parts of that, however radically original one’s new spin on it. Conversely, in the hands of an original creative artist, whatever spin one puts on someone else’s work is going to have the same stamp of original genius that marks his or her own. Heffley may massage the music couching these lyrics enough to make it then “his”...and will most likely neglect to patent, copyright, register, and otherwise protect or demand sole control over such makeovers as he passes through the institutionalized individualism and ego of this biz our lovely planet’s current moment in history calls “show.”
My main purpose is to map and ponder the forest comprising all the trees, which the artist entered as one creature and emerged from as another. (The readers who followed the link above to the account of our meeting in Vienna will understand the depth of that transformation; more prosaically and music-specifically, it is of interest for its manifestation in the trombonist/bandleader/composer/improviser transforming into the solo pianist-vocalist-lyricist.)
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