I am of the age where young people in their late teens and twenties, and especially my students at Temple, ask me for general advice about life. I can give plenty of advice, but most of it would take a long time to explain and I save it for articles and books I write. Here is the one piece of advice I can give quickly: choose the music you listen to when you are young—that is, when you are falling in the love for the first time—wisely because that is going to be the music that rocks you for the rest of your life.
These days, the music I listen to is mostly jazz. I love the classics-Duke, Parker, Monk, Trane, Sonny, Ornette and, most of all, Miles. But I also spend time exploring new avant garde jazz made by people whose names are not widely known and who, in a great year, probably sell 3000 albums. (If you want to get into this music start with my contemporaries David Murray, Steve Coleman and Dave Holland and then explore a slightly younger generation. A good place to do that is with the recent work of Philadelphian Orrin Evans.) This is incredible music that builds on the wonderful tradition of jazz—of great black American music–while also expanding the jazz vocabularly, not least by incorporating other musical traditions.
But when it comes to parties—I just got back from a Bat Mitzvah party—the music I want to hear to is by and large the music of my early twenties. And the music that gets me doing one of the things I most enjoy in life—dancing—is the music that got me going thirty years ago—P-Funk, James Brown, the Stones, and Earth, Wind and Fire. (Was it Clausewitz who said that dancing is the continuation of sex by other means?) I don’t think I have ever heard songs that touch my feet and soul more than Martha Reeves’ “Heat Wave ” or “Dancing in the Streets” or Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” or Van Morrisons’ “Domino” or Arethra’s “Respect” or Ray Charles’ “Mary Ann” or the Stone’s “Gimme Shelter.”
So the most important advice I can gave young people is to pick the music you listen to now carefully because you are going to be stuck with it for the rest of your life.