Linguist, Author & Jazz Musician David Moser Chats About The Intersection Of Music And Language

How much overlap is there between music and language? Sinologist, Linguist, Jazz Pianist & returning Geopat Podcast Guest, David Moser, joins us again for a dive into this question. 

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Transcript

Steph: 

We're going to dive into your musical life in this conversation. And that is quite an extensive life, from what I understand.

David:

It is a big part of my life. So, yeah, I try to take as much opportunity as I can to play music, for sure.

Steph: 

What, what are you involved with musically now?

David:

Right now I'm playing several times a week or at least once a week with a. With a jazz group here in Beijing called the Ah Q Jazz Orchestra. The Ah Q being a reference to the famous short story or novella, I guess, by Lu Xun, the True Story of Ah Q or AKU Zhengzhuan.

Steph: 

So what is the Ak Yu story?

David:

It's a character in a Lushun story who sort of. It's a character that sort of exemplifies what he saw as some of the negative sides of the Chinese character at that time. Sort of cowardly, having no moral center or any spine or any sort of moral compass, you might say. Someone who was willing to appease others, to sort of grovel at the feet of authority figures and so on, so forth. So it was sort of Lu Xun's critique of what modern, the modern Chinese citizen had become. And so that's why we sort of chose that name as a sort of mocking anti. You know, we're anything but heroes and we're anything but exemplars. And so we chose that name.

Steph: 

Sort of like bad boys kind of thing.

David:

Yeah, right. We. We are a group composed of both Chinese and American musicians. We play everything from straightforward traditional bebop and standards to more post bop and even avant garde, or even sometimes free jazz occasionally, but even fusion and things like that. So we have a great deal of fun. We love the cross cultural aspect of it. We have Chinese and foreign musicians, and the Chinese musicians are professionals. But me, the trombone player, the drummer, we just do it for the love of it. We both have day jobs. We all have day jobs.

Steph: 

How far back does your music life go?

David:

Yeah, so I was actually a music major. I studied in undergraduate and graduate degrees at Indiana University and was studied music composition and trumpet was my instrument that I played. So. And then I worked for many years in Boston as a teacher, as a composer, and I was on a path for music the rest of my life. There was just no doubt about it. Classical music, modern music, jazz. And I sort of did lots of things, but it was a big struggle. It was hard to be a musician. It was hard to make money. Even the most successful composer never makes much money off the compositions. And teaching was nice, but really not a way to Make a living. I had always been interested in music and languages. I saw a connection between the two of those. And I had studied French on my own and also a little bit of German in high school. In junior high there were some Taiwanese people who lived in, in our house with, with my mother and father. They had, we had an extra bedroom. And so some exchange students lived with us for a while. So I had some exposure to Chinese culture, although I hadn't really studied the language. And then by sheer coincidence, I got a chance to come to Beijing to help translate a book. I began to study Chinese on my own and just for fun and had actually learned to read quite a few characters and speak a little bit. And one of my best friends who was an author at Indiana University named Douglas Hofstadter, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book called Girdle Escher Bach An Eternal Golden Braid, which was I think the first big major work on about artificial intelligence. And it, it caused quite a splash in the United States. And, and he found out that there were some people at Peking University translating it into Chinese. And so he knew that I was working on Chinese and very interested in learning that, learning more about it and learning it. And he said, look, why don't you just go to Peking University and help them with the translation. You may have to struggle to read it, but you can work with them on the on to make sure they get the meanings right, to make sure they get the, the text correct. Because there were huge amount of wordplay, some complex concepts that probably didn't exist in Chinese. And he didn't have to ask me twice. I thought this is a fantastic opportunity. And to make a long story short, I spent the next two or three years at Peking University working on a book and frantically learning Chinese and learning to read Chinese. And by the end of the experience, I said, you know, I don't think I'm going to go back to music as a profession. I think this is my profession. But I always wanted to continue music as an amateur. And when I arrived it was the before when opening up period. And so China was now open to rock and roll, Western music and also jazz. And so I came at the right time and so I was able to sort of, sort of jump ship and pursue a completely different academic career in Chinese studies while at the same time keeping up my music and my jazz.

Steph: 

During that two year period, were you still doing something with music on the side or did you kind of put it aside for a while?

David:

When I came to China in 1986, yeah. I just put it aside because at that point there really wasn't much of a music scene yet, and certainly not jazz. There was some rock and roll. Sejan was the big rock star here. So people were aware of it. But no, I just put it aside and I thought, I can always play by myself or maybe find some groups or maybe when I go back to the States, play some music. But I just consigned myself to playing jazz at home or listening to it or just being a fan of it. Not just jazz. I love all kinds of music. But so no, for the. From 1986 to 1989, when I had to leave and then come back, yeah, I wasn't really doing much jazz in China. I didn't really start that until the 1990s, the early 1990s, when jazz actually became a thing here in the Beijing environment.

Steph: 

Yeah, there was a video of yours I was watching at Google. Was it Google in Shanghai? Yeah. Where you were talking about. You were like, oh, jazz is finally coming to China. And you're like, oh, wait, it was here before.

David:

Right, Exactly.

Steph: 

That was a great moment. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about jazz's history in China?

David:

I first heard Chinese jazz In the early 1990s, 19 1, 1992, there just began to be some jazz in China. And so for them, it seemed a very new thing. It was something that just didn't exist and they were bringing it in seemingly for the first time. But of course, what a lot of people forget is that jazz was, was in China and in the Chinese media and arts environment in the 1920s and 1920s and 30s, when Shanghai was. Was one of the world's most cosmopolitan cities, this interesting convention called the Phonograph. It was now a reality and was everywhere and the Chinese middle class had access to it and there was some jazz fanatics in China. It. It was. Keep in mind, jazz was the popular music in the United States. There was not yet rock and roll or rap or, or soul or anything. Jazz was it. And it was also primarily dance music. It was just like music of today, you know, DJ type music. It was mainly to get everyone on the floor and dance. And the Chinese really took to that. It was a ballroom dancing culture in Shanghai that was as. That was as vibrant as anything in New York City. And they had access to Phonograph records and they had heard some of the jazz music that was being produced in the United States and, and for them it was novel and interesting and exciting, but they didn't know much about it. But they liked It. So there were a few jazz musicians from the 20s, American jazz musicians from the 20s and 30s, who actually came to China and. And lived and worked and played in Shanghai for. For many years. To give you an idea of how mainstream it was in some sense, Song Meiling, who was the wife of Shanghai Shek, was a big jazz freak. She loved it. She would. She would show up at the Canadian ballroom where Buck Clayton and his Harlem gentlemen were playing, and she was there dancing with everyone else. So she actually invited Whitey Smith, who. Who was an American jazz musician playing in China with his big band. She invited him to play at her wedding, the big wedding when she married Chiang Kai Shek. The. The. The music. The background music at the performance was, at the wedding was Whitey Smith and his jazz orchestra. So that shows you how much jazz was a part of the, you know, the Chinese popular music world at that time. So, yes, so I. So when I got into jazz in the early 1990s, that was the. That was, in a sense, the second coming. It was the. The return of jazz to China. And so it was a very interesting period. They. They had completely lost touch with it. There were no surviving musician. Musicians who, who could play that music, so they were really learning it all from scratch. And so I am very proud to say, in fact, that although my level of jazz musicianship is not that high at all, if I had to make a living doing this in New York City, there'd be no way I would never get a call, just be sitting at home alone. But here in China, there's a need for people at my level. And I even switched from trumpet. I quit playing trumpet and just went over to piano, which I also never studied. So. But I feel proud to say I was part of that movement and actually was able to sort of teach a lot of the musicians what it was like to play jazz and what the basic principles were. And especially going back to America and bringing back tapes and CDs to give to them so they could actually hear the music. Because at that time, the big problem was they hardly had any access at all to any of the music. They hardly heard any of it, even though they liked it.

Steph: 

Oh, my gosh, that's amazing. Have you ever read the book Night in Shanghai?

David:

Night in Shanghai, I think, is that. That's all about. That's also about the history of jazz, right?

Steph: 

It is. Well, it's. It's a fictional account of a few African American musicians who went from the US To Shanghai and kind of their, you know, dramatic trajectory and Everything that happened to them. And I'm sure there's some factual, historically correct stuff in there, too, but it's, you know, laced with fiction and all that kind of stuff.

David:

No, I should read that. That sounds very interesting.

Steph: 

Yeah, it's very, very cool. One of my book clubs that focuses on books connected to Shanghai did that the first year I came back to China. And I knew kind of a little bit of the jazz history, but I didn't know how intricate and how international the scene was. And so it was a really. It was a very cool intro to that.

David:

The first time I met you was at my talk on Chinese. Jazz is shy, as I recall.

Steph: 

Yes, it was. It was. So let's connect this to language, because we've been dancing around the language bit a little bit, and I have a feeling there's a lot of. Of comparisons and a lot of really interesting stuff in that Venn diagram of language and jazz, so.

David:

Good way of putting it. A Venn diagram. Yes.

Steph: 

Well, that's where the. The genius stops, because my language ability is not high enough to know what that connection is. So what would you say is probably the most poignant connection between jazz and Mandarin Chinese?

David:

I mean, there are a couple of things. One. One is just that it's all about sounds. It's all about, you know, sounds and, you know, how the ear perceives sound. But it's also, you know, both in some sense. The thing, I guess the big connection is that music is, in a very real sense, a language, a kind of language in. In that it has certain rules of grammar. It certainly has what you could call accents in the sense that there are different styles and people approach the basic melodic material different. Different ways. And it's certainly different cultures. There are different ways of playing scales, and they're even different scales. So in that sense, it's a very compelling kind of enticing metaphor that music is a kind of language. And so that the process of learning a language and learning a language as your native language is very similar to the process of learning the language of jazz or any sort of musical language, and that you can learn it at your mother's knee so that you. You absorb it very perfectly, have a perfect ear for it, or you can learn it, you know, as an adult, in which case you may be able to play it, but you may never play it, you know, with the perfect kind of feeling and sense for the language that a native speaker would have. So there are lots and lots of parallels like that there's an episode on a podcast with John Pasden that says you can learn Chinese, right where he, where he and I have a dialogue about this very topic about music and jazz. And so it's a very good podcast. You could put a link to it. People could like get a more in depth discussion on this because Pasn himself also is a musician.

Steph: 

Let's go back just one second. It looks like it's number eight tones, music and confidence. That's the one that you're in. So I just wanted to get that for the listeners.

David:

So, yeah, there are a lot of parallels and I guess for most people, they do know that Chinese is a tonal language, which means that the intonation, the sounds, the four tones contribute to the semantics. And there's been this question, I think, for a long time of whether someone who has musical ability also would have an ability that would transfer to the ability to hear and produce the tones correctly. And also whether native Chinese speakers somehow have ears that are more finely attuned to tonal aspects of speech. And there, I guess there is an answer to that now because some research has been done at UC San Diego and maybe some other places where there actually is a correlation between Chinese language speaking ability and perfect pitch, which if some people don't know what that is, it's like some, some children seem to be born with or some, or they can develop what's called perfect pitch, which is to say that when they hear a note at the piano or a note played, they can instantly recognize which note it is. They can tell you it's a B flat or an A flat or a C or something. Whereas most adults and most people never develop this skill. Even the best musicians only develop something called relative pitch. If you tell them this is a certain note, then they can tell you what the next note is based upon its distance from that note. But these children can just, you can play a whole chord, six notes, and they'll pick out every single note. They could hear exactly what it is. So it turns out that there is a correlation between this mysterious perfect pitch ability and Chinese as a native language. In other words, Chinese native speakers children have a much higher ratio of this ability. And also there is some indication that studying Chinese can actually, as a child, even, even as a non native speaker, can actually increase your, your perception of the tonal subtleties. And actually, people who are, have good music ability will tend to also be able to produce the four tones much more correctly and much more accurately. So there is a link. So surprisingly, not not surprisingly, I suppose there is a link. It appears that the musical hearing ability actually does transfer over to the language ability and vice versa.

Steph: 

Let's go back to your own experience with jazz and language. When you first started playing with the international mix of locals and foreigners in China via jazz, did you feel like you were the, quote unquote, native speaker of jazz and people were looking to you to be the sound expert?

David:

Yeah, that's a very good analogy. It falls apart a little bit in the sense that I'd say I had it more like a native ear. I was a native listener because I certainly couldn't produce the jazz that is speak it as, as well as some of the best jazz players, obviously. So I was able to hear what they were doing wrong. I was able to explain to them what they were doing wrong and how and who they should listen to and what they should pay attention to when they listen in order to produce more idiomatic jazz. So it's funny because at the time I was also teaching English a lot. So as I was teaching like two, two native languages to these Chinese learners who were very, very interested in learning both jazz and English. An easy example is for the native listener of jazz, there's this rhythmic aspect to the root music that we call swing, the swing feel. And everyone knows it when they hear it. They've heard the music from the 30s, 40s, the big bands, and the word. Everyone knows the word swing. Duke Ellington said, it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. It's that rhythmic feeling. And what it is simply is that instead of the. If you have a page of eighth notes, I'm getting a little musical here. People will need to know at least the basics of music to understand what I'm saying. But if you have a page of just straight 8th notes and you're in a classical music, you would play them in the way they're written, which is equally spaced eighth notes. So like four eighth notes would be performed as 1, 2, 3, 4, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da da. But the same sequence of eighth notes in jazz are played actually not like evenly spaced, but actually like triplets. So it's like each beat is divided into three. So instead of da da da da, the beat is divided into 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1st, 2, 3, 1, two, three, 1, two, three. And the first note is the first two parts of that triplet. So the 1, 2 is the first eighth note, and the second eighth note is actually the third of the triplet. So 1, 2, 3, the two eighth notes are not represented equally spaced, but. But in this sort of a swing feel. So the result comes out, as we all know, the swing feels. Da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da. That's the basic kind of swing feel. So what you're hearing is actually 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3, 1- 2, di da da da da da da da da da da da. So that's basically it. You know, I think people can kind of understand what I'm saying. It's very, very easy to explain, but it's extremely hard to get people to play that effectively and naturally and with the same kind of feeling. It's like. And I. I can explain the rules of grammar to you. I can ex. You know, I can explain the rules of. Of Chinese grammar and how to use le and how to use D and how to construct a sentence and everything. And you. And you may understand it, you say, oh, yeah, I see. I get the principle. But then when I put you in a conversation, you make. Yeah. You trip all over your tongue. You can't say anything at all, and you screw it up every time. You know, so, so, so explaining is pretty easy. And you can get people to get the idea. So jazz is like that, too. I mean, explain this to them. They get it. But then when they put the horn to their lips and try to play a phrase, then it's extremely hard to make it. To make it sound natural. And especially. It's especially hard because it's. It's one thing to learn it and know it and be able to say it, play it at the tempo that I was just using, which is da da da da da da. But usually. But very often, jazz is at much, much faster tempos. And so when you have a tempo like then, then it's like you cannot be thinking, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, one. You have to just. Absolutely. You have to feel it in your gut, and that's very, very hard.

Steph: 

Then it's almost like an argument. Like, you have to be able to be fluent enough to. To not think about the language, just use it to keep going and argument.

David:

Exactly. Exactly.

Steph: 

Oh, there's a huge parallel between these two. Oh, my goodness.

David:

And even with the tones, you may know how to use, but until you can use them, like in your gut, they will never sound natural and normal. You know, things. Things like need some huishi, you know, as opposed to eat some way.

Steph: 

Sure.

David:

That it gets this feel of the way the tones come out. It takes years and years to get it so that. So, yes, you said exactly right. So you don't have to think about it. You just perform it. You just perform it.

Steph: 

You're just using it to get communication through. Oh, this analogy is awesome. So far, I've got language and music and then sound and tones, grammar and swing. So what is accents, then?

David:

So we all have different accents. You know, you and I have a similar accent, but there's British accent. You know, there's even foreign accents. Even though people speak fluently, they may have an accent. So the accent would be something like the difference between listening to the way Count Basie plays the piano versus the way Art Tatum plays the piano or the way that Lester Young plays the saxophone as the way. As opposed to the way John Coltrane plays the saxophone. So it's the same grammar, it's the same notes, it's the same rhythms and stuff, but the way they play it, the way they move into a note, the way they put little finishes on the tone, and also their choice of vocabulary, what kind of things they like to use. Those are like the accents. Those are the things that make the actual person recognizable, not just as a native speaker of jazz, but as that particular person.

Steph: 

So the style of it. It sounds like that might be the last layer to get into a musician's.

David:

Yeah, yeah, that's right. And we even call it in China, in jazz parlance, in the jazz world is, you know, you have to find your voice. We use the word voice, which means you have to speak the instrument as you would your personal voice. I mean, actors and performers and singers or whatever, we get to hear their voices. Sometimes just one phrase or one word even. Sometimes you can hear who it is. You can hear, oh, that's Winston Churchill. That's, you know, Richard Burton or who. Some. I don't know, some famous actors, maybe you say, oh, that's them. You know, Christopher Walken, for example, has a very distinctive.

Steph: 

Morgan Freeman. Freeman. Morgan Freeman, you know. You know, that's who it is. Yeah.

David:

Samuel L. Jackson, you know, all these people and comedians, they have their voice, you know, so jazz players is the same way. It's. They're playing the same notes that we all play, and they're playing the same chords, but they play one phrase and you say, oh, that's John Colt's. That's beautiful. You know, you hear it and so that's. That would be the equivalent of the accent. Still the same language, still the same grammar, but you have a choice of what you. You choose with it. And it can all be very Idiosyncratic. Like some of us, including me, we have little phrases that we use in the sentence to just kind of keep track and to sort of, you know, for some people, it's, you know, you know, this, you know. Well, you know, you know, for me, it's, it's like, it's like, I mean, it's like. And you know, players have these same little quirks that they, they put these little fillers in. Musically, you can do that little things you like to do or you like to say, and those become part of that person's, that player's voice. Just, just as with you learn any language, you have little things that you prefer to say or that you tend to say catchphrases. So I think the. There you go. The analogy is pretty, it maps on pretty well. It's perfect.

Steph: 

It does. It maps on really, really well. As someone who's going from learning Mandarin Chinese to learning German in a few weeks, the size of the words, the size of the words I'm about to encounter is intimidating compared to like, what is it? 74% of, of Chinese is, is two syllables. And that is not true in German.

David:

No, it's not.

Steph: 

It's more like, I think six or seven might be the average. I don't know. I haven't, I haven't researched it. But it, it's long. When I hear a German word now, I, I breathe and I'm like, I can do this, I can do this. I'm wondering if the length, the average short, two syllable length of a word in Chinese, if we're doing the, the language music or language jazz comparison, if that affects how Chinese players of jazz play somehow. I know this is a really far stretch, but I'm, I'm curious.

David:

Huh?

Steph: 

Do you know what I mean?

David:

Yeah, I know, I know what you mean.

Steph: 

Yeah, it's kind of a stretch. Like, if they're used to communicating in words in rather short, short bits, does that short bit comfort zone bleed over into their music playing?

David:

Well, the short answer is I don't know. But the longer answer is that probably when you get into things like length of words or word formations or, or really, really specific access of aspects of the language, like whether it's a subject, verb, object kind of language or subject object, verb type of. I think when you get to those kind of very, very specific linguistic features, I think the analogy probably kind of begins to break down a little bit since then, since the, the kinds of thing you're talking about don't have an obvious analogy in jazz. I Mean, it is true that you can vary the length of the phrases that you play in music or that we speak in can vary a lot, and it can vary from context to context. So, for example, if you and I are just having a discussion over coffee, we'll tend to use short, very communicative phrases like. How come you say that? What do you mean by that? Well, I think that's just my opinion anyway. Whereas if I'm standing up in front of an audience, I'm giving a lecture, then I'm going to use much, much longer sentences from more complex structures. And I may use bigger words and more Latin words, but that doesn't mean that if I. That that transfers exactly to jazz, although it's. It is, it is intriguing you raised. The question you raised is kind of interesting because, you know, it's not a matter just of the actual grammar of the language. It's like, I suppose if you come with a. From a language where very short expressions or just a language context where short expressions are more preferable and people use them more, maybe when you play, you would also sort of subconsciously prefer these little short lines that. I mean, I can sing an example. I mean, if I'm going to sing an improvised line, I have a choice of playing something like. Or I can just go. So I have a choice. I can break it up into little short phrases or something, or I can spin out a very long thing. And I think that it could be that if you kind of your language habits are, you know, long expressions or long things put together, linked together, as opposed to short choppy ones or monosyllabic ones, then maybe you could be right. Maybe. Maybe players would kind of think I like to play these short forms, phrases, and they mean more to me than trying to play long ones. I don't know. That's a good question.

Steph: 

Me neither. And you're right, it is. It is more than just the. The two syllables for the word. It is more of the whole exchange. If you. There. You know, there's some languages where, where saying something very simple can be a very long exchange versus some languages where it's a very quick one.

David:

Right.

Steph: 

So it's. It could be that. I don't know. Stab in the dark. I was just curious.

David:

I think it's a good stab. I don't think we know enough yet. There are probably not enough people sort of engaging in these things cross culturally to even make a. To make a distinction yet. But someday, someday, maybe it'll be. You will be getting a tape recorder and playing Recording jazz performers in different countries and you say, aha. See, there we go.

Steph: 

My stab was correct.

David:

Yes.

Steph: 

From someone who hasn't listened to that much jazz, me, I think of jazz as more of the instruments than words, than like lyrics. Is there a strong vocal component to jazz?

David:

Well, there's two aspects there. One is whether or not jazz is predominantly or based upon songs like singing songs with lyrics. That's one issue. But then there's this other issue. I think we should separate them because it's easier to talk about. It'll make it more clear what the analogy is. So one thing that's very much written about just common knowledge by now is that one of the, I guess you could say the innovations of the jazz style is that the players actually are playing the music, playing the instruments, and very much in a sense imitating the human voice in a way that compresses musical instrumentation. Look at violins and trumpets. Although there is a kind of an analogy between the playing of the notes and the human voice, the jazz players are actually making that explicit in the fact that they play between the notes. They play in the cracks between the notes so that. So that the music, the playing, when they're playing a clarinet, playing a trumpet, it sounds like a voice singing. And so you could. It sounds like it's crying or it sounds like it's laughing. So you could play three notes, da da da da da. Those are three separate notes. It'd go da da da da da. You can play it that way. And that. Now that sounds more like a human voice singing. And so when. When guitar players play the blues or when pianists or saxophoners play the blues, they're very often playing in the cracks between notes because the human voice doesn't obey those notes, those crack, those scales. We talk all the way up and down, we emphasize things and we turn sometimes and we get mad and we go. So we're singing and producing sounds that are. They don't have anything to do with notes, they're just intonations. So that's one. So that's one thing when you listen to jazz and especially, well, all jazz, but you're hearing sounds that are very much human voice sound that do the same kind of glissandos and sort of just. Just perturbations of up and down that cross note boundaries. And that's one feature of jazz that people have noted. So that's one of the things that people like about it. The other thing though is that there are a bunch of standard jazz songs that have been written through the years, some classic ones in the 1930s that everyone knows. George Gershwin, Tin Pan Alley songs, things like Body and Soul, Embraceable You. All these sorts of songs that people know are part of the standard jazz repertoire that jazz players play on and use in their music. And those are very often played without the singing. They're just the melodies and the chord structures, because jazz players love them, because they sort of give rise to more creativity. They're structured in a way that you can always improvise very well on top of them. But then there's also a long tradition of jazz song with jazz singers, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and all these different singers who would sing these jazz songs. So I think that is one aspect that most of the jazz musicians in China have not yet quite understood, because it's in the language of English. And the kinds of things they're doing with the lyrics and the words are hard to appreciate fully unless you really speak English as a native language. So I think they love the singers, but I don't think they can get quite into the language as much, because the subtlety of a Billie Holiday or an Ella Fitzgerald is in what they're doing with the notes and how they're pulling them out or shortening them to fit the lyrics, or vice versa.

Steph: 

Are there jazz lyrics being written in Chinese?

David:

A little bit. One sort of experiment that people have tried is just taking a jazz standard and putting Chinese lyrics to it. That's very hard to do, and it usually fails, because when you have a really high standard for the original lyrics, that it's very constraining to try to translate that into Chinese without losing a lot of the meaning. Same is true of opera translation. But there have been lots of jazz singers, Chinese jazz singers, who just write their own songs and then just write them in Chinese. Not a lot, but there have been. And the person I used to work with in their blue, in his blues band, his name is Zhang Ling. He's a bass player, used to play bass for Cuijian. He actually has done a great service in writing, writing blues songs in Chinese so that Chinese audiences can understand it. And he's been a pioneer in that. And lo and behold, it works better when the Chinese can actually understand the lyrics. They understand what he's talking about.

Steph: 

Funny that.

David:

Yeah, it's funny how you like it more when you can actually understand it. He wrote a. He wrote a great song, just called. I think it's called Drinking Blues or something. When he go. He goes on about how his lover left him and. And it's Basically a litany of all the booze he drank the night before. And at one point in the middle, he has a break session where he sort of starts listing all the drinks, you know, how much tequila, three bottles of arguato, six bottles of beer, blah, blah, blah. And at the end, he concludes it with, I can still drink more, you know. And the Chinese audiences really respond to that because the idea is that I'm just so miserable that my girlfriend left me. I just want to drink myself into oblivion. And the Chinese audience, they suddenly understand the meaning of the blues. It's all about. It's all about pain and trying to find some meaning and joy in the pain somehow. And so, yeah, so, yeah, you're right. But that's an example of things that people are trying to do, but with greater or lesser success.

Steph: 

If we stick to vocabulary for a minute, are there any terms that are used by musicians while they're playing or learning how to play jazz or anything that's really, really different in Mandarin Chinese versus in English?

David:

You mean when Chinese musicians are learning jazz, any different, different ways of talking about it?

Steph: 

Yeah, well, different. Like the language that's used in Mandarin Chinese to talk about jazz versus in English, is that very different?

David:

I would say yes and no. No, because if there's a word that's kind of hard to explain or translate, they just use. They just borrow the word. So I'll give you an example. We have this word that musicians use in English, which is the groove. I guess it comes from groovy, which back in the 60s or something, the hippies said something was groovy. I'm not sure. But anyway, this notion of the groove is very hard to translate because it's not the tempo, it's not the beat, it's not the dynamics of the beat, it's not even the precise instruments you use. It's. What. What is it exactly? And just to say the feeling, it's the feel that doesn't really tell you too much. You're not. Don't have the right feel. The groove is more specific, and it has to do with how the instruments interact and what kinds of things they do to. To produce this rhythmic underpinning. So everyone knows it because if you. You take your favorite song that you like, and just from the beginning, few measures, it establishes this kind of a feeling. A groove, a beat. And you can instantly recognize it as that song because the way the bass is playing, the way the piano is playing, the way, the speed of it and everything. And you'll know what I'm talking about most people have a favorite song and then they hear the first three bars of it, they know exactly which song it is. So in a certain sense, that's the groove. And it has to do with what's the bass doing, you know, is it playing a lot or is it just playing boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, like that, or, you know, what kind of thing is over it. Right. So since. Since it's very. It's so hard to explain that to a Chinese musician. When we first started doing that, and they would hear us use this word groove. So they just use the word groove in China, in Chinese and just say groove. So the. The usual thing, you know, is they just. It's just like any. Like any technical field or any area when you don't know the word. When you don't have that word, you just borrow it, just like they borrowed the word email and, you know, things like that. So wi Fi, stuff like that. So if you hear jazz musicians at a rehearsal, you'll hear that sort of thing, you know, like we have a thing called trading fours where the musicians just trade four bars. They dialogue back and forth. So you hear them saying, say, like you'd say ho and woman shall trade fours. Ba. Groove. That's the way they talk. Just throw in these English terms.

Steph: 

Code switching. At its best.

David:

It'S just code switching. Exactly.

Steph: 

I know that, David, you've talked about jazz and China and language so much, but there must be something that people rarely ask you about, this intersection of jazz and language to put you completely on the spot. Sorry, not. Sorry, what is that? What is the thing that people never ask you about that you find really fascinating about this intersection?

David:

I suppose it's not what people don't ask me, it's the things they ask me that show. They don't quite have it figured out. They don't quite know what they're asking. I think this notion that tones are somehow just music is not quite the right way of. Of looking at it. They usually say something like, oh, well, you have a good musical ear, so your tones must be very good. Yeah, not necessarily. We talk about. That's the way this works. There's these tones. Because the tones. There isn't like a set pitch that we're talking about. That's the people think, you know, the four tones are like, you know, do, re, mi, fa, so, or something like that. It's these specific tones that you have to hit, which they aren't. They're different for everyone. It more has to do with where they are in the range of your voice. And so they sometimes say, oh, well, so when you hear someone speaking Chinese, you could hear the tones they're saying. And so you're able to imitate those pitches as if tones were actually just pitches, which is not right. That's not right at all. And especially for the popular articles on this thing, because people don't understand what tones are in Chinese, but they do kind of know what musical tones are. So when they. When they hear, oh, children who study Chinese gain perfect pitch, or children with perfect pitch can speak better Chinese, oh, it means that they can just, like, hear. They can hear a note on the piano. They also hear first tone. And they go, yeah, ma. Oh, there. I think they know that pitch and they remember it. They can say it wrong. That's totally not. Totally not the way it works. But I can understand why they think that, because they're thinking it's a tonal language, so these must be tones, and therefore it must be like do, re, mi. So it's always hard for me to. To explain this to people when they ask this question. I mean, I understand it. It's a very naive question, but I understand why they ask it. You just have to give them examples of why that's not the. Not the case. And also, I think also, people don't understand that the tones are just part of the language. But that doesn't mean that the tones take the place of expression. You have to always put the actual emotion on top of the tone tones. The tones don't automatically just express emotion or, you know, that's a sort of a separate thing. They don't. They don't seem to understand that people say, well, how can you express anger or anything when you're. When every word has to have a certain tone? Because they. They sort of think it's like if every word in English had to be, you know, like, do, re, mi, fa, I could only use those four tones. And all I could say is, hi, Stephanie. How are you today? I am fine. What shall we do after lunch? And that's all you can say? That's your tone. You can only say that. Those sort of tones. So how could you express emotion? No, that's not. That's not how it works. That's not how expression it's on. Is on top of the tones, not in it. In the tones. Yeah.

Steph: 

And I think part of that is how it's taught, especially to adults is they spend so much time just on the tones, just on individual words. And it's like yeah, but then they check when you put them in a sentence and then you have the added layer of, like you said, like, our emotions and the contextual sounds that are. That your voice is doing when things are happening. It's not just the tone.

David:

Precisely.

Steph: 

Yeah. Like, it's not just the note, it's the personality and the style and the moment and the energy in the room and all of that kind of stuff. It's not just the tone. I think I found our title for this episode. Not just the tone. Yeah, it's not just the tone.

David:

It's the emotion. It's the emotion. Yeah, right.

Steph: 

Yeah, it's a language. And languages are based on voices, and voices change depending on what you're doing.

David:

Exactly, exactly. And just in the same way, you know, Charlie Parker, the great jazz player, saxophone player, said someone asked him, how do you get such a. At such a high level of expertise on this? And he said, well, first you learn all the scales and all the keys, and then you learn all the chords, how to play them, and then just forget all that shit and just play. And so I think that's another parallel between, you know, the language and the musical language, which is you first, you first learn the tones you're in, the grammar, you this, and then you just internalize it and you get all. You just start speaking. And then the same thing in jazz, when a jazz saxophone player or piano plays something, they're not thinking, oh, now let's see, I go to a D minor seventh chord and then a G7 and then maybe do an altered chord and I next I'll play, I think I'll bend this note upward so it goes between a B flat and a C. They're not thinking anything like that. They're just. They're just thinking, oh, I want to express the pain of longing here. And they just play. They just play. Yeah, exactly.

Steph: 

I love this analogy. I love this analogy because, like, language, music is meant to express something. And it's the expression, not the accuracy and not the. Just the skill. There's. There's the emotion and the, the. The groove, dammit, of it. It's in there.

David:

Exactly, exactly.

Steph: 

That. That is what is the forceful part and the powerful part that, that people pay attention to. So. Yeah, exactly, exactly. There's so many layers to expression in both language and music.