T-Town = Tune-Town?

Melding of music and technology paves the way forward

Some Tulsans and a bevy of outsiders, folks who know a lot about musical history and creative ecology, claim that the mantle of “musical kingdom” was a crown that we should have assumed years ago.

They talk with passion about our history and the social and cultural diversity that characterizes so much of Tulsa’s musical landscape from the Depression years forward. We are one of several communities, Tulsa Jazz Hall chief Jeff Kos told me, for early jazz and allied forms. Jazz is arguably American’s quintessential gift to world culture: a hyperkinetic, fevered product of the African American experience, in triumph and in tragedy. Jazz is also a cultural shockwave that has rocked T-Town in spots like Cain’s Ballroom, Brady Theater (a.k.a., the Old Lady On Brady), and dozens of long-vanished gin joints, seedy speakeasies, and hideaway havens.

More recently we can look to the musician and composer J.J. Cale. Mr. Cale was an electrifying figure in American music. He was a grand master at mixing styles, genres, and our rich musical traditions. Cale’s contributions to music in America is part of what musical historians now call the Tulsa Sound.

Cale’s energetic conflations influenced artists like Eric Clapton, one of Cale’s best friends and someone who brought Cale’s tunes to the world stage on more than one occasion. Other inspirations and sometimes collaborators included Tulsa’s GAP Band, Bobby “Blue” Bland, the ever-quirky Rocky Frisco, Tulsa’s legendary Flash Terry, and, to name a contemporary example, Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey. JFJO’s music is a brave braiding of many movements. Critics sometimes say the works of the group, which turned 20 this year, are iconoclastic, eccentric, even abstract. In a 2011 breakout piece, the group recorded “The Race Riot Suite,” centered on the Tulsa race riot of 1921, at Tulsa’s famous Church Studio.

The music world is changing. It’s convulsive, happening at hyper-speed. What might a reclaiming of this past glory, a real upgrade to Tulsa’s competitive posture as a music center, look like?

Wired and Fortune magazines both carried stories recently about new-instrument development projects, including the one under way at MIT’s famed Media Lab under the Opera of the Future group, which explores concepts and techniques to help advance the future of musical composition, performance, learning, and expression. I got a taste personally of some of this work on a trip last year to Boston. There is an expanding ensemble of electronic wind instruments and digital synthesizing devices that have for years transformed almost every facet of American and World music. Tulsa jazz fan and economic development pro Court Newkirk told me recently that T-Town has long been a valued venue for instrument making. He said we have several veteran violin and guitar makers in town and reminded me that we live among people who know how to use tubing, exotic materials and sensors, mostly thanks to our heritage in fossil fuels. Why not fund a musical-instrument innovation initiative in Tulsa, one that could run under the auspices of our area universities, the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame, Barthelmes, Tulsa Symphony, and our technology companies?

One of the biggest and latest developments—one that doesn’t have to do with music origination or instrument invention but still vastly improves our live-music offerings—is the BOK Center in downtown Tulsa. This fabulous facility was designed to bring world-class performers to Tulsa and it has succeeded in doing so, beyond almost anyone’s expectations. It was a difficult undertaking, as any game-changing effort is bound to be, but the BOK Center is a riveting example of how large, public expenditures can dramatically improve Tulsa’s cultural ecology.

We need to fund facilities that can help maturing and new musicians get a foothold in the increasingly competitive space that defines the modern musical world. Blue Man Group, for example, created a school in New York City. The school is an attempt to teach music theory, composition, and performance, but it is also a novel employment opportunity for professional musicians who need steady work to add to their weekend gigs.

Here in Tulsa we have Barthelmes Conservatory, with a tight mission to provide classical music education for a very defined portion of Tulsa’s younger community, along with a bevy of the smaller, more informal tutorial and development offerings for promising kids and veteran musicians, including several Arts and Humanities incubator spaces, a range of efforts at the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame, and the Deborah Brown children’s project. A commitment to the training of children in music appreciation, music history, and instrumental music is a hallmark of a vibrant community.

At the same time, dramatically expanding music education for kids in Tulsa would create a cadre of adults who want to consume quality music, which is ever-present in our cafés and bars as well as in our performance halls and arenas.

These programs require dramatically augmented funding. We need to reanimate our music classes, band classes, and tutorial programs in Tulsa Public Schools. We need to demand the talent and agile management required to operate high-quality music offerings and allied performing-arts efforts, including an immediate rollback of the ridiculous cuts to Tulsa Performing Arts Center recently recommended by the Bartlett administration.