State of the World (January) - Thoughts from Niels

Niels Lan Doky in New York 1987 with Bob Berg, Klaus Suonsaari, Ray Drummond and Tom Harrell

It’s the first Sunday of the month and I am home taking it easy and reflecting on the state of the world. Two topics have crossed my attention that seemingly are unrelated but somehow I still feel there is a connection between them. So I will now take a closer look at them, and while doing so I will simultaneously explore whether my hunch has any validity. 

According to an article in the New York Times yesterday, there is a continuous loss of Black Americans in New York City - a city I once called home. That is the first topic. I will get back to that in a moment. I have a feeling that my note here today (improvised as always) will be about consumerism and inequality, but let's see. I will start with the second topic: 

Here in Denmark, the closure of the country’s 137 year old supermarket chain, Irma, is causing massive controversy and national debate.  By today’s standards, Irma is considered an upscale supermarket and the debate seems to be morphing into another battleground, the topic of inequality and whether or not some citizens have the right to cry over the loss of luxuries that some others cannot afford. I am not interested in getting into that discussion, and would rather examine the situation from a broader perspective:

When I was a kid growing up in Denmark, I don’t recall ever hearing the term “upscale” or similar terms to differentiate supermarkets. But of course that was before the emergence of discount supermarkets that market themselves as such. But one day, all of a sudden we had to choose between what we perceived as trusted quality at normal prices, and questionable quality at lower prices. The latter gradually gained more and more terrain as we have based our society on capitalist values that encourage the pursuit of bottom line surplus while simultaneously encouraging increased consumption. The sum total of those two factors and our acquired values and model of society has rendered perpetual economic growth a necessity and has become an unsustainable addiction that we now have to learn how to tackle. Aside from the commonly debated numerous effects and consequences, such as depletion of natural resources and much more, the causes seem much less debated. I think that the causes of our actions are at least as interesting and important to debate as their effects. I am not a professional economist but it seems to me that our continuous need for more and more, that must cost less and less, so that we can keep buying more and more - is a vicious circle that turns us into slaves of an unsustainable system we have created ourselves. 

The closure of the Irma chain is an inevitable consequence of this system that is accelerating at an ever increasing speed. Numerous parallels exist in other industries, including the music industry: For the price of half of what a CD used to cost, consumers now expect to get - and do get -  a streaming platform subscription that gives them access to literally millions of songs for a whole month. The dramatically reduced margins here of course makes it infeasible to invest the kind of resources in music that we saw in the latter decades of the last millennium, before the emergence of the ultra-discounted digital music distribution technologies. The results are felt throughout the food chain resulting in ever increasing pressure to deliver more for less. Sooner or later it affects the availability of quality. Like Irma, Denmark’s highest quality supermarket chain, who now leaves the arena,  leaving us with only discount chains - and expensive boutique and artisan shops accessible only to the more affluent citizens. 

Growing inequality is a hot topic these days, but it is just yet another effect in the chain of consequences caused by our values as described above. Millennials and Gen Zs can no longer afford to enter the real estate market. In America, the cost of education has increased by more than 1000% since the 1980s when I went to college there. The cost of healthcare has exploded too. So unless you live in a country like I do, where there is universal health care and education, you only have access to education if you come from a rich family, and this further enhances and accelerates the growth of inequality. 

Historically, growing inequality has proven to be dangerous and not in anyone’s long term interest. Reduced quality in the broader sense of the word is one of many consequences. In music we see new generations of audiences with significantly less resources at their disposal, compared to previous generations, and the only music they are able to get exposed to is music that is cheap to produce and/or distribute. This is saddening to think about because when I was in grade school and high school in the mid to late 1970s my peers and I were exposed to an abundance of amazing music, that now - in retrospect - I realize was very costly to produce and distribute by today’s standards. It would be completely impossible to expose such “expensive” music to the same age groups now, given the economic parameters of today. This is why I have chosen to devote 2-3 weeks a year since 2020 to do 15-20 school concerts each year for kids in mainly 7th, 8th and 9th grade and I bring some great musicians with me. It's always a great success.  When exposed to it, kids today recognize and love music with substance, just like we did when I was their age. So that is reassuring. 

Getting back to my first topic, yesterday’s article in the New York times by By Troy Closson and Nicole Hong, “The Continuing Loss of Black New Yorkers”, is essentially all about the same thing, the growing inequality. The article depicts how it is becoming increasingly difficult for Black American families to live in New York City.  When I lived there in the 1980s, gentrification was already making it increasingly difficult for artists to live there. I was lucky enough to live in Manhattan but I saw most of my colleagues moving further and further out into neighboring Brooklyn or New Jersey. Today Manhattan is mainly inhabited by investment bankers and others who can afford it. In the 1980s and 1990s my colleagues and I often talked about the irony in the fact that the people, not least artists, who made Manhattan famous and attracted money and people from all over the world, could no longer afford to live there, turning Manhattan into more of a museum than a creative melting pot as it once was. 

The new analysis published in the New York Times article yesterday is no surprise. Historically, the Black community in America has sadly always been unjustly suppressed, so of course they are among the first victims to fall on the front lines of gentrification. The extra sad aspect here is that the Black American community, across the USA but not least in New York, has produced a staggering array of some of the most influential musicians of all time. It is impossible to imagine a world without music that is either created by, or directly or indirectly influenced by all the great Black American artists of the past century or more. New York City was once the creative hotspot that produced some of the most exciting, enriching, invigorating, life-changing and innovative music. Such as for example be-bop, invented by the giants and geniuses of modern jazz of the 1940s. This creative output continued for many decades. But after the New York hip hop of the 1990s I can’t think of any new musical movement of similar global impact that has come out of New York. This coincides with the gentrification that drives artists in general - not least Black American families that raise Black American artists of the future - out of New York city. When I visited New York in 2006 I coincidentally found out that the last apartment that I lived in there had become available again. So I tried to rent it, but the rent had gone up 740% since I first rented it in 1989. So I passed. No wonder jazz artists can’t afford to live in Manhattan any longer. It’s crazy. 

I don’t see this as America’s fault. Deep down I think we are all like that in the Western world, more or less. Just look at the world’s fascination with and influence by the US since World War II. We all want to be like that, but we are just too well-behaved, modest and restrained to go all in. America became the playground where some Europeans could act out - and did act out - their wildest fantasies. For better or worse. But aside from numerous blunders and errors of monumental proportions over the centuries since the United States of America was founded, the country has also yielded an astronomical amount of some of the greatest and most significant accomplishments of mankind. 

That brings me back to Denmark and the Irma chain. The closure of the latter is only one of many effects created by the values we adhere to. I guess we need some kind of major paradigm shift. In jazz we have the saying "less is more”, in zen philosophy they say “it is not the notes that make the music but the space between the notes”. Let me explore that for a bit:

For a long time I have lived by the rule of buying less but buying good. Once you exit the spell of endless consumption, you quickly realize that you don’t need much to be happy and content. I have heard many others say the same. It's all in your mind. It’s how you feel about what you have. I would not be considered monetarily rich in the context of successful business entrepreneurs, stock market dealers or the likes. But I still feel extremely rich because of other factors. I have an abundance of amazing people in my life - both family, friends and colleagues. I love my work so much that I could never imagine retiring. These factors alone represent real wealth to me and take up so much of my attention that I don’t have time for nor the interest in being a normal consumer. I buy very few things but I usually buy good and durable ones when I do. When I see other people who are consumption addicts, I really feel relieved to have become independent of material gadgets and luxury goods as a source of happiness. A component of this process is to also become independent of the good opinion of others. That happened to me years ago and was a great milestone in my life. My first priority is to feel good about myself, not how others perceive me. But ironically, the better I manage to feel about myself through what I say, think and do - the better others tend to like me. 

I have never owned a car. For years people thought I was crazy.  I was never interested in cars (with all due respect to everyone with a passion for cars) and I don’t have a driver’s license. I met Quincy Jones in Los Angeles in the late 1990s and he told me he did not have a driver’s license either. So I thought if Q could live in Los Angeles of all places without a car, I could do the same anywhere. So I never got a license. I never missed having a car. My accountant says that my accumulated train, car service and taxi bills (for distances too far for biking) are far less than the cost of owning a car. I love riding my bike, a Danish made bike which I have had since 1996 in both Paris, Copenhagen and now Elsinore. I ride it every day when I am home, to do all errands, etc. and will continue to do so until it stops working - which might never happen. If I had a car, I would not enjoy it and I would miss out on the joy of riding my bike. This is a case of less is more. 

Wishing everyone a great Sunday. Thank you for reading. 

Niels Lan Doky

Elsinore 02.05.23