As the brief Texas spring slips quickly into blazing summer, I’m starting some new projects. I left Nick Curran & The Nitelifes after a year on the road. The guys are still out there, slogging from town to town, and we may reconnect further on down the road, but I decided it was time to work on some of my own projects. My new CD should be out by the fall. This project features vocals (and sax, of course!), in a blend of jazz, funk and world music.

I also recently returned from Los Angeles, where I recorded some of my more whacked out jazz tunes with my cousin Tommy Kay, who played some formidable guitar on the tracks. He’s working on a straight ahead jazz album of his own, and also had some of his material covered by none other than George Benson. L.A., baby!

This spate of creativity got me to thinking more about the relationship between art and entertainment, a subject that is usually floating somewhere in the dark recesses of my brain. Every time I get a chance to indulge in pure musical inspiration, creative expression with no commercial agenda, I get infused with energy – spiritual, libidinal, philosophical. It usually doesn’t last long, but what a rush it is, after the more earthbound routine of teaching lessons and playing cover music in bars.

Yes, like dogs digging under their backyard fences, we would all like to run free. Some of us do and it is a noble vocation. But after peeing on a few dozen trees, smelling a few hundred new smells, the question arises: Whither goest? Art is about freedom, but as any artist will tell you, it is never without structure. The question for me these days is, What kind of structure? Not a new question, but I’m examining it from some different angles.

Musical structure. When I write a song, I start from a loose template, based on all that I have learned from other songs. Will my new song be a pop melody, with verse, bridge and chorus? Will it be a cyclical vamp that grooves? Will it be a sparse theme, defined by avant garde jazz explorations? The staff paper is blank – anything is possible, as llong as the mind is open. But as soon as I start jotting down ideas, a structure begins to emerge. Each concrete idea excludes the possibilities of others, until the finished structure emerges. I keep editing, changing, until I’m satisfied (of course, I’m never totally satisfied). The arbitrariness of it, the fact that the ideas can keep changing, that there is no predetermined correct path, used to bother me, especially when my inspiration began to fizzle out. Nowadays I just step away from the horn, or keyboard, or whatever instrument is the vehicle for my ideas, and wait for my creative juices to regroup. The beautiful challenge here is that as a composer you face your own limitations and hopefully go beyond them.

Cultural structure. I call this “cultural structure” to be adequately general. Maybe there’s a better term for it, but what I’m thinking is that particular musical structures (song forms, melodies, harmonic patterns) are part of larger cultural traditions. When you start to write a song, your mind makes connections with certain styles, references the familiar. Your amorphous musical idea gets dressed in Motown trappings, or maybe cowboy clothes. I like to imagine those old Tin Pan Alley songsmiths trying out a motif, first as foxtrot, then as a waltz, then as a syncopated rag, until the style that fits it (or, if they are hacks, they just “make it fit”). The art lies in taking your new musical ideas and working them through existing cultural structures.

Commercial structure. Of course the cultural structure connects with commercial considerations. Those old Tin Pan Alley composers had to pay the bills. The bossman, wet cigar jutting from the corner of his mouth, bursts into the tiny, suffocating workroom with its battered upright piano and yells: “Hawaiian is big right now. Write me a Hawaiian song!” He slams the door, the composer scratches his bald spot for a minute, adjusts the garters on his arms, and tries to turn his new ragtime melody into a luau lullaby. The most interesting thing here, from a historical point of view, is when a composer successfully blends stylistic elements from different musical traditions, creating or reflecting a cultural exchange.

Of these three structural frameworks, the commercial structure is probably the most vexing. The first two have to do with musical craft and musical tradition. The more you learn about both, the better a musician you become. This will aid you, even if your goal is to play like Ornette Coleman. But commercial structure is more about the business of music than the sound of music. Its logic is what they call “extra-musical”, meaning its rules come from outside the sounds themselves. Examples: A song must be under four minutes, not because of compositional logic, but because that is the format that sells on radio. A song should fit within an identifiable genre so that it can be more easily marketed. And so forth.

This is not to say that commercial constraints don’t make you a better artist. They certainly can, especially if you remember that they really boil down to your interaction with an audience. A good composer/performer uses commercial constraints as a filter, without succumbing to predictable, formulaic work. This happens at least once every thousand songs (well, maybe not quite that often). In the long run, we can see that certain artists broke through commercial structures, either by ignoring them or by incrementally expanding them. Sometimes an artist makes an unorthodox connection with an audience and the music business has to play catch-up, jowls and flabby asses flapping in the wind as the corporate pigs chase the runaway trough. More often though, composers, arrangers, and performers add small innovations to existing formulas, things that don’t challenge the status quo but which over time result in noticeable shifts in cultural and musical structures. Examples: The addition of Latin percussion to American pop from the 1950s on; The use of black gospel vocal techniques by white pop singers from the 1970s on; the use of synthesized bass ostinato throb in most horror, sci fi, suspense, and action films over the last 30 years. These little things sneak in, and gradually change the status quo. If you listen to composers of film and television soundtrack music, you can hear some amazing things. I don’t like all of it, but I respect the artistry in it.

So, my theme for the summer is, like so many other summers, how to make enough money playing music to pay my air conditioning bill but also, as I sit in air conditioned comfort, tinkering away at my craft, to keep the art alive, to keep the musical creativity flowing along with the cool air. It is a dance, or a tightrope walk, between art and entertainment. As I get older I think success is not measured by questions of “selling out” or bar receipts or whether a particular cultural gatekeeper deems you “authentic” but rather by the amount of creative juices flowing through you. Are you inspired?