Newport 2070: The Last Jazz Show

By Michael Scully

NEWPORT, RI,
Oct. 28, 2070
__
When the U.S. Supreme Court decision
came down, the jazz world wept.
It seemed like a simple idea: Can a corporation own a musical chord?
For the longest time, the idea seemed opaque to the music community.
Afterall, an
E
was an
E
was an
E
and the prospect that one person or,

for that matter, a corporate entity could possess something like that seemed
entirely alien.
Owning the air? Owning the sky? Owning the sun? mused the editors
at
Chops & Changes Magazine,
the iconic jazz trade publication. Arent these
our god-given gifts? Arent we all, as human animals, entitled to the oxygen
in our lungs, the gulps of air we breathe and to the desperate organic need
to expel outwardly the song in each of our hearts?
And so it played out in the artistic news community as the case
moved through the system.
As I recall, it started this way: Cognitive Progressions LLC., a media
company based in the shadows of a stripmall in Lancaster, Delaware, filed a
patent claim suggesting it held title to the copyright of all things for the
musical harmonic progression forming the frequency 311.127 Hz, better
known as the
E
. Not knowing what to do with the request, the U.S.
government looked at the data and determined that while a claim of this
nature had never been filed before, it was indeed possible for a corporate
entity to possess the intellectual capital of an assigned radio frequency and
thus, a copyright was granted to Cognitive Progressions LLC. It didnt hurt
that a legion of corporate lobbyists saturated the Capitol sprinkling money in
all the right places.
That was 2060.

By 2068 the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled on

Cognitive Progressions
LLC. v. the Estate of Paul Desmond.1
E

was now the exclusive property of

Cognitive Progressions LLC.
I was here in Newport when I saw the news flash over the wires; I
was doing my pirate jazz radio show over the matrix Id thrown over the
whole of Aquidneck Island: Hell, I can even remember the song I was
playing at the time: Kinda Blue by Miles Davis. Of course, at the time, I
didnt know what it meant.
For those of you who dont know: Newport was once a wonderful jazz
town. Dating back to the 1950s, this city hosted the New England Jazz
Festival and for one week out of every summer season the city came
alive with the fluid and melancholy mastery of jazz music.
The music made for an interesting dichotomy, splashing against the
backdrop of a resort town polluted with pear-shaped Bostonians seeking to
salvage a bit of their fading youth. For most of the summer, the bars and
pubs along Thames Street are filled with the lingering and repressed anger
of the newly-divorced, freshly expelled from the New England civil court
systems. Trapped in their late 40ish physiques, they wander the Newport
strip looking for other members of the lonely-hearts community.
And then the jazz festival would arrive and the city became reborn.

Thisisjustaliterarydevice.WhilethemusicianPaulDesmonddoeshaveanestate,thislegalcaseand
theplaintiffhereareentirelyfictional.

Ah jazz. Like the patter of an old friend, the melodic construction of

analog jazz music communicates with us on an intimate level. There are
chords, there are phrases, there are moments both high and low, but the
beauty is borne from the completeness of it all. Jazz comes to us through
our ears but it lives inside of us, striking some great primal tuning fork,
chilling us with its brave harmonic rapsody.
My love of jazz came to me on a lonely street on a dark morning after
a night of heavy drinking. I awoke, haggard and lost somewhere in the
eastern suburbs of Providence; I rose from a strangers couch, found my
clothing and escaped to the street before my drinking buddy could make
more of the morning. Out on the street, I reached into a pocket to retrieve
my sonic music device and pressed it to my ears seeking to blot out the
urban noise already polluting the day.
I was 25, alone and melancholy. A friend had shipped me a faded
recording from the late middle-half of the 20th Century: It was John Mayalls
Turning Point, a live jazz record he recorded with The Bluesbreakers in the
late 1960s. Within moments, I was hypnotized by the sound Mayalls tenor
voice shaking slightly between riffs on a harmonica and then the band
reached the bridge and a flute took over filling my ears, chilling my
imagination with a stark and fluid beauty.

Looking back, it may have been the combination of things: the lack of
sleep, the aimlessness, the hangover and the melancholy, but I do
remember gently weeping as I moved through the city on my way home.
That was 2040 before the music machines completely replaced
everything.
A few years later, the scientists at New England Science Academy
emerged from their Media Lab and, during a news conference, declared that
theyd solved the analog music problem as they revealed a new generation
of self-playing musical instruments. Turns out, analog was code for human
being.
Sure, we already had self-tuning instruments; and technicians
created a microphone that would make any voice pitch perfect. What was
different here was the fact that these instruments alone or in
orchestration would be self-tuning, self-playing and self-constructing. Just
like the jazz musicians of old, these instruments would seize upon a chord, a
tempo and a melody and self-orchestrate. Songs became digital algorithms
that grew in complexity and form and function. Suddenly, brass instruments
with serial numbers for names began dominating the publics musical diet.
Lord knows where the inspiration came from but, within a few
years, a digital coolness had taken over, chilling the electric passion of jazz.
It took just a couple of years for the analog jazz musician to become a
thing of the past.

Not knowing what to do about the problem, the directors of the New
England Jazz Festival shifted to meet the changes in the climate and for
half a decade or so actually hosted its jazz festival sans the analog
component. In other words, no humans, only machines. The event became a
priceless disaster.
I mean, where is the performance when all one can see is a collection
of nearly motionless machines mounted on a platform and amplified for
public consumption? By 2055, the festival was history.
The timing of its demise couldnt have been worse, because, as you
can imagine, an analog revival was emerging. Young people were combing
garage sales and antique dealers across the country searching for old analog
instruments and recording devices; little caucuses of analog-only jam
sessions began forming. Yielding to the old ways, a series of old music towns
saw their cultures reborn: Woodstock and Nashville and New Orleans and
Seattle and Cincinnati and Chicago saw little jazz occasions swell and collide
building a national movement.
Missing, of course, was a venue. The jazz clubs and bars were gone.
Corporations dominated terrestrial, satellite and Internet radio and
because it was possible for one company to manufacture and broadcast
music they excised the analog music movement from any access to the
digital public.
The government only made things worse.

Congress passed The Anti-Analog Publishing & Broadcasting Act of

2062, which forbade any company from recording or transmitting analog
information. The Congressional testimony then was that it was impossible for
search engines to protect copyrighted information that wasnt digitized. So,
analog recordings were summarily purged from the global data matrix.
From there, the police began gathering all the old analog recording
devices. The so-called Tape-deck Harvest started in Nevada and Arizona
but within a few years, it was against the law to own an analog recording
device anywhere in the United States.
Thats when the final blow came.
In 2068, with the Supreme Court ruling on
Cognitive Progressions
LLC. v. the Estate of Paul Desmond2 , the decision amounted to this.
Cognitive Progressions argued that the David Brubeck Quartets jazz staple
Take Five violated its
E
copyright. If you dont know the jazz classic, Take
Five which was written by saxophone player Paul Desmond, was published
in 1959 and features both drum and saxophone solos. The song also
happens to be in the key of
E
.
Making matters worse was the fact that most jazz standards
dip or
transition through the 311.127 Hz
frequency. As such, Cognitive
Progressions laid claim not only to the music royalties generated by Take
Five, it went after the entire Paul Desmonds estate and got it. Basically,
2

Thisisjustaliterarydevice.WhilethemusicianPaulDesmonddoeshaveanestate,thislegalcaseand
theplaintiffhereareentirelyfictional.

the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the entire U.S. media market belonged,
in some form, to the corporate community and that anyone who dared
trespass through over that turf must beware.
Suddenly, and with chilling effect, the entire analog jazz movement
was forced underground.
Of course, what did I know? As the corporations cleared away the
analog institutions, I was blithely playing digital music here in Newport until
a machine finally replaced me. Having nowhere else to go, I began plotting
my own startup and the idea for my pirate station was born.
Pirate radio is the last gasp of the analog music movement. In the
latter half of the 20th century, a series of pirate radio stations sprung up
across the globe in positions that made it possible to pump illegal music into
forbidden media markets. All one needed was a hiding place, a power
source, a radio tower capable of generating a signal that could reach out a
dozen kilometers or so and a catalog of music.
As it happens, one of the tallest structures in Newport was hosting an
abandoned radio tower, which I reactivated and recalibrated for my own
purposes. I mean, the beauty of old analog radio is this: absent the power
draw, who would know whats emanating from an old dormant radio tower?
And so, using old analog equipment and antiquated coaxial cable, I
plumbed a signal system from the tower, down the side of the building and
along a twisted path leading to my little two-bedroom apartment which is

today teeming with old vinyl records. My pirate radio station became
reality.
So, Im taking this moment now to say thank you to everyone out
there listening. Im still uncertain who is out there but Ive been seeing signs
that my signal is getting out there and that an audience has formed. I also
know that the law enforcement community is out there looking for me! But
so far, so good!
So, thank you everyone! Ive been at this three years now! Ours is a
shared relationship and jazz is the catalyst building or should I say
re-
building this community. So thank you one and all.
And, in celebration, Id like to play for you Take Five by the David
Brubeck Quartet. Thank you Paul Desmond and David Brubeck and
everyone enjoy!
But as the song played out over the bootleg network, instead of
playing through its entire 5-minutes and 28-seconds, the song ended
abruptly, giving way to silence absent explanation, absent apparent
human encounter , the soundlessness became dead air.