Jazz and the alpha male

Do jazz and the alpha male really have a mutually exclusive relationship?

The question came after a chat I had with a macho buddy, who over a whisky-laden table kept counting, on the fingers of one hand, the areas of human endeavor he insisted were nearly exclusively the domain of men.

"Chess," he started. I quickly reminded him that lady pawn pushers are pushovers no longer, e.g. the Polgar sisters, especially Judit who’s been ranked as high as eighth in the world in recent years.

"Well, yes," he allowed. "But she keeps giving birth and missing tourneys. Otherwise, she’s lean and Hungarian." I had to snicker.

"Then there’s high cuisine," he continued. "Chefs, especially grand chefs, are all men. Why is that, when housewives are better known to master kitchen chores? Is there a self-imposed glass ceiling? Or does garlic turn them off, slicing onions cause them to weep?"

The fiery chauvinism brought a smile to my single malt-brushed lips, even as I lifted my whisky glass anew to the strains of Take Five played by a trio onstage, live.

"Surgery. Open-heart, neuro-, most internal probes and explorations." Whereas he knows, he said, of a lot of male pediatricians and OB-Gyn specialists. Then...

"Jazz," he uttered reverentially, with a sweep of the hand in the trio’s direction. "The only women in jazz are lady vocalists, as interpreters of song and improvisatory riffs. No top-class lady jazz pianists, even."

Hmm, maybe he has something there. Wait, I said, there’s Alicia Keys, she composes some jazz. And she pounds the piano.

"That’s soul, or neo soul. Also R&B, but ain’t jazz for me. She can keep the keys."

Maybe he was right, I had to accede. Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, the classic chanteuses all relied on jazz creations by men. So why is that?

"You know why? Males are actually more secretive than the fairer sex. We tend to keep our hurts to ourselves. Women have their comfort zones of confidantes to share their innermost turmoil with. We men keep much of our travails to ourselves. Especially the alpha male. We stay silent, mope by our lonesome, drink whisky and listen to jazz. The alpha male musicians, they do rock, jazz, blues and hip-hop. Beta male musicians do R&B, country, pop, reggae, or go longhaired classical."

Kinda opinionated there, aren’t you? There’s such an animal as a beta male?

"Where there’s alpha, there’s beta. The alpha male is drawn to jazz creation because in all that dim smoke and confines of tortured existence, as exemplified by bonding together quietly in a men’s loo to smoke dope, all that dark and dingy character of soul and environment leads him to explore internally. Charlie Christian on guitar, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane on sax, Dizzy Gillespie on his bent trumpet, Thelonius Monk and Keith Jarrett on the piano, etc. – they were all sullen alpha males, thus their great jazz."

Ah, orations, monologues. Convinced me he was alpha male, self-pronounced, and that he knew his jazz. But to correlate the two exclusively? A stretch. Good thing I had the talent for humoring perorations.

Good thing a drummer joined our table: Richie Qurino, jazz player and chronicler. His book Pinoy Jazz Traditions (Anvil Publishing) won the 2004 National Book Award from the Manila Critics Circle.

Good thing the alpha male soapbox orator couldn’t long stand a three-way conversation, thus took his leave, off into the dark corridors of his alpha night. While Richie took it up from there, exulting on the musicians of Bremen...

Wait, wait, I asked, what’s with Bremen? You don’t mean he-men, do you?  

"No, no, I just came from Bremen," recounted the young Quirino, scion of National Artist for Historical Literature Carlos "Charlie" Quirino. Why, Christian, Parker, Quirino would sound like a jazzed-up law firm.

As Richie narrated, he had just returned from Bremen, Germany, where he attended the first-ever German jazz congress billed as Jazzahead, after which he did some R&R in Amsterdam. Hmm, I could imagine what sort of recreation he indulged in. Inggit.

Sponsored by the Goethe Institute and German Embassy, he represented the Philippines, as one of 50 international delegates from 27 countries. There he caught 28 of the best German jazz groups that ranged from avant-garde to impressionism to fusion. Evening treats came from an array of international guests that included Randy Brecker and John Scofield from the US, Bobo Stenson from Sweden, Maria Joao and Mario Laginha from Portugal, and the NDR Big Band of Hamburg that featured the music of Frank Zappa.

"I met a number of luminaries," Richie went on. "Among the must mentions would be ECM Records big boss Manfred Eicher, Berlin Jazz Festival director Peter Schulze who had me picked up and dropped off at the airport in a swanky Mercedes-Benz, Arndt Weidler and Dr. Wolfram Knauer from the Darmstadt Jazzinstitut, who are heavy on archiving and documenting jazz history.

"I gave them copies of my book and the recently released DVD, Pinoy Jazz: The Story of Jazz in the Philippines, as well as big band charts penned by Angel Peña, and Bob Aves’ CD, "Translating the Gongs."

The DVD Richie mentions actually premiered on ABS-CBN’s The Filipino Channel and Pinoy Central TV Channel last July. TFC subscribers in Saudi Arabia, Dubai London, and Australia tuned in on various dates. In North America and Canada, simultaneous broadcast was conducted by TFC and PCTV in all US and Canada time zones throughout July and August.

Pinoy Jazz is a 59-minute video documentary on the development of jazz in the Philippines, "from its infancy in 1898, when Filipinos were first exposed to black music performed by African-American soldiers, to its present-day maturity in which musicians are turning to indigenous sources for inspiration." It incorporates historical still photography, turn-of-the century film footage, maps, old recordings, present-day performances and interviews with veteran and contemporary musicians.

Quirino partnered with Collis Davis Jr., an African-American independent docu filmmaker, to complete the three-year-long production based on his book. Narrating the docu is Wayne Enage, a former jazz radio host and jazz club owner, with Prof. Ron Nethercutt as a correspondent, and Gus Lagman as a co-producer. More info on the docu can be gleaned from www.jazzsociety.ph.  

Richie says he hopes to bring in a German jazz group for the 2nd Philippine International Jazz Festival organized by the Jazz Society of the Philippines, scheduled for February of 2007.

In Manila he last performed earlier this year as part of the jazz trio PhilJazz Ensemble, together with guitarist Aya Yuson and upright bassist Dave Harder. So is he an alpha male?

Ah, revelations. He can’t be, as he’s a poet, too. He confides that several years back he was so in love with a lady who was also a poet, and that when they parted ways, he came up with half a dozen poems in mild lament. One poem is titled "The Millennium Dream," written on New Year’s Eve in Boracay. Another is "The Voice of Silence." An excerpt:

"The voice of silence beckons forth from the one that echoes whispers into my listening ear./ Speaking to me in a familiar Rabbi tongue that excites the scarlet color of my veins, she reigns./ Peeping into that worm hole where we are always whole, our love rainbowed through the universe and the black hole."

Hah! No alpha male could write those long, lyrical lines. My macho buddy might have countered, "But you see, he husbanded his melancholia and turned it into jazzy verse, and not into a confession before other, expectedly sympathetic guys."  

Oh, yeah? So why’d he let me in on it, the glories and subsequent throes of a love affair? Well, maybe because we were enjoying jazz that night, and the sight and sound of jazz chanteuses. Or because we were both omega males.