In high school I was always the kid walking around the halls with my headphones on, rocking out in my own little world. People unfamiliar with the concept of a “one-person dance party” stared at me like I was psychotic. I never minded; I just had a good time. The music that bled through my headphones into the surrounding hallway was not the Top 40 or Dirty South that was popular at my school at the time; it was loud, typically anthemic, and reasonably impassioned. Now, three years after having strayed from the aforementioned angsty genre in which I once found interest, Against Me! remains a personal outlet.

The four piece from Gainesville, Fla., is laden with acoustic guitar, syncopated drums, and harsh, semi-yelling vocals. They are considered “folk-punk,” a genre which I initially labeled as being too abrasive. I didn’t truly understand or appreciate the genre until I saw Against Me! live. The show was unlike any which I had experienced; it seemed as though everyone knew every lyric to every song. It was like a huge pub: Hundreds of people sang the same semi-political choruses in a pleasantly dissonant roar. The band broke a collective sweat from dancing and exerting more energy than I could have ever expected. There were no mosh pits or girls wearing Ugg boots. The show wasn’t treated as a place where individuals prove their devotion to a specific genre through their clothing choices or attitudes. That night was just a bunch of people together in a room sharing music, dance and an obtuse feeling of camaraderie; I was with a group of friends to whom I had never actually been introduced. I haven’t been to a concert like that since.

Every so often I walk along the Cut at night and hear a bunch of guys with acoustic guitars singing random Against Me! songs. They sit in a circle strumming and singing at the top of their lungs, not caring about who is trying to study around them or who actually likes the band. I hear:

Everyone would leave with the memory that there was no place else in the world/ And this was where they always belonged/ We would dance like no one was watching… /Just gimme a scene where the music is free/ And the beer is not the life of the party/ There’s no need to shit talk or impress/ ‘Cause honesty and emotion are not looked down upon,

and it reminds me of that night at the show. I crack a smile, knowing that there are still people who love music for how it makes them feel, not for the scene or a prescriptive image. They appreciate how music should bring people together and make them happy, not self-conscious. Consider this a “thanks” to those guys, from the kid with the headphones.

We are all part of a global community!

You hear that all the time now. Well, the fact is, a global community might as well be *no* community. What we call the global community is really just a term for the gray uniformity of the globalized media. When the same story runs in Topeka and Miami, in Bangor and Burbank and Bangkok, it must speak to the common denominator of all those audiences. It cannot express a human perspective, being forced instead to synthesize its human elements into a sort of bland universalism, and it has no capability to provide much in the way of “local color.”

But the greatest problem of the globalized media is trust. As media outlets become more far-flung, as stories have to be turned around in shorter and shorter periods to meet the demand of an ever-more-ravenous 24-hour audience, a certain expediency must be adopted regarding traditionally important principles like accountability. If editors no longer have time to check apostrophes, who, then, is checking facts? In days past, different publishing or broadcast organizations could rely on their reputations and those of their personnel to reassure the readers of the integrity of their copy. But institutional integrity has proved short-lived: Now a segment on a cable news network is increasingly indistinguishable from the ads that paid for it, and the onscreen anchors who deliver it are indistinguishable from actors.

How is the discriminating reader to deal with such an affront? As the mainstream media are increasingly defined by their dual nature as global and commercial enterprises, broadcast media that are both locally produced and noncommercial in character are becoming increasingly important anchors for citizens searching for transparency and probity. Local print media (like The Tartan) find that being grounded in a community is as much an asset to their readers as USA Today’s breadth of distribution is to its shareholders. Similarly, local broadcast media (like Carnegie Mellon’s own radio station, WRCT) offer a dual benefit: They provide a candid, locally-grounded perspective to their listeners, and also act as the voice of their community.

As the globalized media fill more and more of the airwaves with emptiness, more of the audience is changing the channel. We may be part of a global village, but it turns out the locals have a few things to say.

Free musical improvisation involves playing an instrument without the restraints of traditional imposed rhythm or tonality. Free improvisation, at least in the context discussed here, developed from jazz-oriented thinking in the early 1960s. Musicians well versed in be-bop jazz such as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman began to disassociate their music from jazz structure, tonality, and time signature, creating a completely new genre of music.

Since that time, many musicians have used “free improv” as a vehicle for exploring a boundless array of sonic realms. Most still make use of the group setting in which members of an ensemble play together and thus inform each other’s playing. There are those who play alone, however, and therefore produce music that is informed solely by the mind of an individual. Much of the work that employs this method of playing can be viewed as a sort of musical free-association upon which the individual can decide how much, or how little, restraint to impose. Playing solo in this fashion is clearly a very personal endeavor, and extends musicians the opportunity of creating a very powerful final product. Solo free improvisation that employs the saxophone as a medium has an especially powerful body of work attached to it, due partly to the saxophone’s wide sonic range as well as its historical significance in the setting of jazz improvisation (e.g. the work of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Coleman Hawkins, etc.).

The first-ever freely improvised solo saxophone album was Anthony Braxton’s For Alto. Recorded in 1969, less than a decade after the term “free jazz” was coined (by Ornette Coleman, with the 1960 release of Free Jazz), For Alto was remarkably ahead of its time. Though free improvisation was well-established by the time of its recording, the jazz aesthetic still weighed heavily in the hearts of most free musicians. For Alto adheres far less to jazz influence, and is therefore a more pure free association.

European saxophone players Peter Brtözmann and Evan Parker experimented with solo improvisation a few years later and yielded some of the most challenging and incredible albums of all time Solo and Saxophone Solos, respectively. More removed from the jazz setting, both musicians bring the saxophone to its sonic limits and further expose the enrichment that lies at the intersection of free association’s great power and the astounding expressive quality of the saxophone.