My feature centered on the recording session for 4D in May of 2009. The experience was unique for me; I went because I never thought that I would have another opportunity to share in this process. I did not take notes at the session. I absorbed as much as I could with my eyes and ears. When the challenge to write the article for AAJ arose, I had to do everything I could to integrate the information necessary to produce a full-bodied article. Months of listening to Shipp’s solo records and the promo CD, interviewing Shipp on the phone and exchanging emails, when gaps needed to be filled, were critical to the writing.

Shipp’s solo music from 1995 on to the present clearly spoke of its evolution. It was obvious to me how experiential influx moved him to render his sound. From album to album, the music shifted in delivery even in the smallest of increments. Out of the six solo records, the most noticeable change occurred between Songs of 2001, and One of 2006. Granted several years passed between the two records, nonetheless, a rebirth had taken place.

Shipp’s essence entered the grooves of One. It was if he had gritted his teeth and leaned into a full force wind. It was the first record for which he seriously composed both lead sheets and heads. The music was written down. It was embedded in stone, in perpetuity; it was repeatable. He had reached one of those moments in his musical life when he had taken an extra step, similar to the step a visual artist takes when he knows that he has to buy a better brush to paint with or a better grade pencil with which to draw.

It is at those times in the creative process when the artist is seizing onto shaping the quality of his work. A cycle has completed itself. A cycle of discovering has concluded and has broken through a wall in order to continue. It is not easy to face these moments because they are filled with questions and inherently uncertain. Yet, with the answers to these questions comes a sense of relief that passes quickly and morphs into a kind of truth. The truth is the artist is irrevocably wedded to this “thing” he has made. Its future is infinite. And the artist assumes the responsibility for taking his creation as far as he can.

Un Piano, from RogueArt in 2007, became a tangible stepping stone from One to 4D, both from Thirsty Ear. In Un Piano, he crystallized his musical language so that he could see it again with a sharper focus. Shipp continued to examine his language so closely that he knew how he had to prepare to record 4D. Traditional methods of practicing led him to the place he wanted to go: a place where details became the most important aspect of fulfilling his goals for the kind of sound he wanted to create. He had established a new plane from which he could spring. That plane was seamless, a sheet of glass. He could break away from it, but he knew he could reincorporate himself with the main road. His landscape was dimensional, full of breadth, height and depth and the nooks and crannies that were invisible until he came upon them in improvisation or in the choices he made from one track to another.

Seven months lapsed between the recording session for 4D and the CD release concert, both held at Roulette. The room for the concert on January 28th was filled. The concert started fifteen minutes later than its scheduled time.

Thirsty Ear’s founder, Peter Gordon, introduced Shipp. He mentioned that the audience was in “the place where all the magic had happened…” He was right. Magic had happened on that day in May of 2009. But more was to come.

Shipp came out of nowhere and took a signature deep bow before he sat down on the bench in front of favorite piano in New York City. Two seconds passed before he touched the piano. He had no reason to be concerned with stopping and starting, constrained by track length. Rather he had an entire blank sonic canvas in the eighty-eight keys before him.

In the time that followed, Shipp travelled through familiar territory stylistically, but he stepped into zones that were outside of 4D.The transitions from abstract to lyrical happened in varying tempos. The shape of the continuity changed constantly; he let the breaks in the sound release him from the direction he was in the midst of taking. He was using rhythm and melody to transform a metaphorical space.

From the beginning to midway in the set, it was as if Shipp had brought the audience through galaxies of stars, the darkness of the bass chords as effectual as the lightness of the twinkling treble notes. The prevailing idea of being nowhere and everywhere at the same time translated through the power of the sound’s flow as it fell into every extreme from high pitch to low, from fluid to dissonant and disparate, from intense to lullabye-like, from syncopated to separated, from heavily chordal to accented with cutting single notes, from being filled with clusters to settling into articulated phrases.

The head from “Gamma Ray,” from One, signaled that Shipp had reached another soundscape, where he was earthbound. The tonality became less ethereal. He reached into the piano and plucked a midrange string hard; he returned to the keyboard to play a lyrical interlude, stopped, and went back inside the piano. His fingers returned to the keyboard. He had arrived at a lyrical oasis. But the conversation between harmony and abstraction ensued. His hands alternated chords. He modeled ostinatos. He bounced on the piano bench anxiously. His face had passed though grimaces; he had mouthed his musical thoughts as he played. Then the densely packed music suddenly spread out. He was in ‘a state of grace;’ the description Jackie McLean had once assigned to Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk upon seeing the two in Paris.

Shipp played the theme of “Equilibrium,” from the album of the same name. He stopped a whole note’s worth and played the theme again. He did this several times quietly, peacefully. And then he simply came to rest. The set was over. It had lasted exactly sixty minutes.

The cycle he had completed with the recording of 4D was moving forward. Shipp was recharged. This concert marked the onset of yet another dimension of exploration.

In art making and music making, agony and decisiveness go hand in hand rather than contradict each other. If it were not for the dynamic between the two, the art and music produced would be boring and flat. In the real world, Shipp has too much on his mind. In his emotional world, he has become so much a part of the spiritual and epistemological universe that the state of his music can reflect nothing but transformation, out of how it already exists, one cycle at a time.

I hear the horns, the bass and the drums from the next room; the sound weaving its way around the corners of the walls that become the dividing lines between here and there.

This is poetry… a diary entry more than a report, requiring referential footnotes. Poetry sometimes skips the grammar and the punctuation, formalized in text books. Those saucy steps also happen in improvised music… music that lunges out of bounds passing through the wall that constantly presents itself at the point when no one can leap to the chance of the unknowable future, which, when speculated upon, has already become false and another story, rather than some indescribable set of circumstances.

Words and music will always be intertwined because the essence of the language is similar. Only the form changes. Words and music transcend the ages; transcend the decades, the years, the days, the moments. They both convey how time erodes itself into other passages and channels to forests of growth.

And as I listen to the music, it wraps around my body and keeps me safer than the heat from the wood stove or the roof over my head. The music is the bastion of a sovereign sacredness. The music is a tool with which the bishops should bless and the priests should offer communion. Music is bereft of limitations once it leaves the lips, the fingers, the appendages of the musicians who make it.

I take the experience, the knowledge of the numerous records I have heard and, proportionately, the handful of live performances I have attended, to another level. To the level floating above the troubles I share with the entire world. Can only a few comprehend the purity and the holiness of musical or artistic experience? The experience that cleanses, like the taking of the wine and the bread?

Is it a good thing to sully improvised music with the derogatory description of “noise” and denigrate those who create it? How many people would be out of a job if the chance to do so were taken away? Who is to say where the music comes from except the persons who are closest to it? Is listening subjective? To a degree, it is. But the subject of my continual interests can be objectified and heard as it goes, flows, expands, contracts, gets louder, softer and constructs irretrievable events. Its message comes later, after its digestion. Oh, some would say, that after digestion, comes the crap. But, the process of digestion is the uptake of ingredients that supply energy to the body as steered by the mind. What comes after digestion is also a renewed perceptual confidence to do something else in a life that has nothing to do with music. That is maybe about cooking or painting, or mowing the lawn or sweeping the stairs, or folding the laundry. There are no dividing lines between the ingestion of the music and the aftermath of its experience.

As 2010 slams itself down at midnight, I will feel different. I will be closer to the eternal light. The light will shine brighter because the music, like a one-thousand voice choir, is ushering me to sanctity. I have to let go of the trappings that critical eyes cast upon me and the music and simply move ahead in a dance that I have never before known. A dance where no suffering or pain inhibits its flourish. As for the words, the question will always remain: could have I said this better? The answer is: yes, in a different context, in a different time.

Journalism, by definition, requires that certain rules of reportage be heeded. Right. OK. That holds true if a story were being written that necessitated arranging facts in order to build a story. I have done that before; there was absolutely no room for poetry. But as far as jazz “criticism” goes, “criticism” does not fit well within the category of journalism.

“Criticism” itself needs to be defined in order for the word to make any sense in its application. In the online dictionary source I use, the first ranked definition of criticism is: “the act of passing judgment as to the merits of anything.” This is a broadly based, but perhaps a good way to begin to deal with the idea of criticism in general.

Rep. Joe Wilson’s verbal attack on President Obama during his Congressional Address on September 9, 2009, is an outright passing of judgment on how the President is doing. “You Lie” is Wilson’s subjectively drawn conclusion, criticizing the President’s shaping of Health Reform. Wilson’s accusation is an act of Freedom of Speech, but it is also an act for which there is an editor, blatantly ignored by Wilson, that takes the form of public decorum within Congress. Wilson could say the same words in another socio-political context; for instance, in his office or quite possibly on the Congressional floor in a speech about Health Reform. The practice of Freedom of Speech means accepting the responsibility for that freedom. There is no freedom without responsibility, which means complying with rules and with laws and one’s own common sense of human dignity and morality; otherwise, anarchy would prevail.

My mother, who was born into the arms of decorum, was extremely critical. Nothing was right in her eyes. Everything had to be perfect and conform to the acceptable, which was defined by her peers and her elders. This attitude placed a terrible onus on her children, including me. Her critical nature spawned my fear of punishment for everything I did within her ken. It was not until I left home that I became aware of my own capabilities and strengthened my language for making art. When I left home, I walked away from the stranglehold of conformity, but I chose not to become a protester. My commitment to developing my own spirit and work was a means to supplant conformity and foster my individuality…my own voice.

It has not been until I began “writing” about music that I have witnessed that voice rising from within in a different guise. Were it not for a particular editor with whom I work, I would have lost that voice: he allowed it to blossom and helped me to shape it. That voice is concerned with how I approach music: not from the standpoint of measuring all music against that which has come before it; or whether or not I have a personal dislike or like for it, necessarily; or whether or not I regurgitate the PR that accompanies the music I listen to, live or recorded. My view is not the right or the only view. It is simply my view. It is an expression of my voice.

I have been chastised for writing a negative review, which, for me, was a freak occurrence. Ironically, that review was printed in one place and not in another. That situation was supposedly a lesson to me not to write about music with which I could not identify. I had no motive for writing negatively. The music for me was ill-conceived, poorly designed. Within the article, I commented on how technically adroit the musicians were; certainly, no criticism there. The negative remarks, I directed towards the lead artist’s interpretation of his subject matter. Previous to this incident, more times than I can count, upon receiving recordings I cannot relate to, I have been in touch with the senders, telling them that I would not do service to the music and it would be best to select another reviewer. Did I learn my lesson? I don’t know; it depends on the music.

When writing, nearly always, I take steps to tell the reader how the music sounded. After all, I am writing because of the music. Certainly, facts germane to the article I will without doubt research, but the number of words allotted me to observe “objectively” are few. If I were to pack the article with biographical facts on the musician/group or quotations from the musician(s), or proclamations of my opinions, no room would be left to describe as accurately as possible the sounds I have heard or create verbal metaphors for readers to imagine the music.

My approach to writing about music is one of validation. This is what I hear. This is how I hear it. I have honed my methods. I try desperately to separate myself from the pressure of competition to stay on top of the music as if I were tweeting. I am a thinker. I connect intensely metaphysical dots with dissonant string notes, or high-pitched sax squeals, or the agglomeration of piano note clusters, or the cascades of instrumental arpeggios, or incessant cymbal sibilance, or stick to snare drum clatter. I listen to music as if it were a first-time exposure to it…fresh, alive and filled with feeling.

The music is telling a story and it is my place as writer to translate that story as best I can. I do this through a process called jazz “writing” that excludes describing how horrible or even how great it is. Because who, outside of the musicians who make the music, really knows how to make that decision. The music just is.

I thank Chris Kelsey for inspiring me to compose yet another statement about how I write about music. The statement expresses an opinion; it is not law. The statement just is.

copyright © 2009 Lyn Horton

Response to the Vision Festival, held in NYC for the past fourteen years, resists prosaic declarations and superlatives. Rather the Festival inspires poetry because the senses are stimulated beyond simple sentences; it is a cultural event that includes visual art, dance and music. In the words of William Parker: “There is nothing not to enjoy.”

The 2009 Festival was held in two venues: the Abrons Art Center on Grand Street and the Angel Orensanz Foundation on Norfolk.

The Abrons Center provides more of a space for dance and theater than a place for music performance. But, the raked floor packed with padded seats and the proscenium arch that frames the stage set up a point of view and an acoustic range that focused the sound more than satisfactorily. The ambiance remembered from past festivals did change somehow; yet the appreciation of the music and the socialization did not, especially when everyone migrated to the Orensanz Foundation on the last night.

At the Abrons Center, audience members packed the house and at break times wandered through the halls and foyers where cds and DVDs and books were being sold. In a room further away, home-cooked food was being served and on a patio through a door even further down the hall, hamburgers were being grilled and eaten, feeding the ravenous appetites of musicians, merchants and listeners who sacrificed meals for the sake of the music.

I cannot summarize the total experience of the Festival. I missed Wednesday night when tribute was paid to altoist Marshall Allen, longtime member of the Sun Ra Arkestra and the musician responsible for keeping the Arkestra alive. I missed the invocation on Tuesday. I missed Billy Bang’s group and McPhee’s Ayler project. I missed Bill Cole, Butch Morris, Ernest Dawkins, Sunny Murray, Ras Moshe and Charles Gayle. I missed many dance performances and several poetry readings. But the three nights I did attend at the close of the week had to have been as intense and fulfilling as the previous five days and nights.

There were many trios: Rob Brown’s, Steve Swell’s, Eri Yamamoto’s, Fred Anderson’s, Lisa Sokolov’s, Peter Brotzmann’s and Joe McPhee’s. Larger groups included Milford Graves’ quartet, Michelle Rosewoman’s Quintessence, Joe Morris’ ten-piece GoGo Mambo, William Parker’s Quartet and Jason Kao Hwang’s string orchestra. The blending of tonalities, the instrumental singing of songs, and the push to discover dimensions beyond our own impressed me as being the prevailing destinations for the journeys the musicians took.

Tonality

The members of trombonist Steve Swell’s trio, Planet Dream, with Daniel Levin on cello and Rob Brown on alto, interacted as if the improvisational plan was based on the probabilities that the three would converge in harmonic unisons. Their separations were both active and silent, each taking a turn to exercise their fervor to enhance time and transfer that energized time to the next player. Swell’s scattered yet sensible abstractions often consumed the space, muted and not. Levin bowed the cello with no less seriousness, rarely succumbing to the pizzicato. Brown’s twinkling discrete notes on his alto expressed more than enough the disguised distance among the instruments so as to make their synchronicity all the more satisfying and beautiful.

In contrast, Spontaneous River, the string orchestra enlisted to play a composition by violinist Jason Kao Hwang, opened with a single violin overture. Hwang conducted the orchestra, signaling multiple basses, violins, violas, cellos and guitars when to come in and when to stop, building the improvisation as each section’s playing overlapped and coincided. The guitars offset the waves of motion with playful undercurrents, which tended to allow the piece to breathe. The drums constructed the bridge from one wave to the next in an unobvious, nonetheless staccato fashion, giving impetus for the continuation of the flow. An abrupt stop of all the instruments yielded to Hwang as he turned from the orchestra to the audience and played an utterly poignant, high-pitched, gripping line. He had isolated his instrument at the beginning and at the end to bracket a tightly woven fabric of similar colors and threads.

Song

It is common knowledge that Fred Anderson has extended the ethic of Charlie Parker, one in which melody and improvisation are finely balanced. The influence of William Parker and Hamid Drake, who brought exotic instruments to Anderson’s field, altered his approach to the tenor ever so slightly, as was evidenced in his trio’s performance when Drake played frame-drum and Parker, doson gouni. The influence was measurable in how Anderson shaped the notes and runs on his horn, which were not necessarily as broad and deep as when he played in a more conventional format with Drake on the kit and Parker on bass. Then, the music pulsated and the focus was the continuity of the tenor’s song. Anderson occasionally dipped into his sax’s low register, but bounced back into clearly articulated arpeggios and carefully timed breaths between phrasings. Anyone who has seen Anderson perform knows how he stands: bent over to coalesce his senses for one purpose. When the set was over, and the applause mounted, he stood straight up, smiled gingerly and offered his horn to the audience in appreciation.

Celebrating its eleventh year in existence and returning to the Vision Festival stage at the Orensanz Foundation, Trio X, with Joe McPhee on tenor and pocket trumpet, Jay Rosen on drums and Dominic Duval on bass, honored, paid tribute and offered heartfelt thanks to those musicians “on whose shoulders we stand,” as McPhee aptly put it. McPhee wrote “Old Eyes” for Ornette Coleman years ago, but its tuneful resurgence was as fresh as the day it was born. Rosen’s restrained and precise drum solo opened “Taking It to the Max,” an improvisation that musically stretched and bent the memory of how Max Roach formed his music. When McPhee put his pocket trumpet to his lips, a love song sprang forth, wrapping itself around the melody of Freddie Hubbard’s “Little Sunflower.” The trio ended its set with “Remembering ‘The Call’,” a gift to bassist Henry Grimes, who was sitting right in front of the stage and whose first session as a trio leader was recorded on ESP in 1965 as “The Call.” Though the members of Trio X all wore dark glasses, it was not to prevent light from penetrating their eyes, but rather for the purpose of looking inward and, through their instruments, shining light on history and its immutable bearing on the present.

Other Dimensions

Peter Brotzmann’s trio, FULL BLAST, including Michael Wertmuller on drums and Marino Pliakas on electric bass, forged a tonal chasm into which the audience could do nothing less than plunge. The music started as if an electric switch had been thrown, not the kind that turns on some sort of appliance, but one that completes the circuit activating an entire electrical grid system at a power plant. The sound was huge, pumped through amplifiers that sat in the corners of the floor of the Abrons Center stage. The group gradually mollified the initial thrust enough to allow the improvisation’s basis in continuous-ness infiltrate the arena. When the envelope is pushed like FULL BLAST pushed this one, nothing short of believing in this musical art form takes hold. It takes bravura, drive and a deep desire to keep moving in one direction to break barriers, invisible barriers, in order to reach metaphysical zones. The volume did not matter; the skilled process of the convergence of constant fingering on the guitar, expressionistic pounding on the drums and trancelike arpeggiation on the tenor and alto, did.

In the same vein, in a solo piano performance, Matthew Shipp sat at the keyboard to map his way to the stars and the intergalactic dust whose constituent particles are the same material as our own. If ever an alteration of time-space took form, it was during his performance. Shipp hit every piano key as if it were the last one that would ever sound. Not one note was missed, nor muffled. The fire in his fingers was tractable; the disposition of his fingers could be matched with the way in which they touched the keys. The flow of the music was physical as much as it was aural. Shipp strove to discover what it feels like to burst through to a simultaneous state of everything and nothing. Shipp has displaced the detail of ostinatos for expanding within larger parameters. His conception of the keyboard is as a whole unit, not white and black keys, not bass, mid-range and treble notes, but as one keyboard. The eighty-eight keys expose the possibilities for endless texture, particular designs, placed next to each other, erecting a stairway out of mind, through the heart and soul to another stratum of existence.

To Close

Only one performance made no sense in the context of the Festival. Michelle Rosewoman’s group played in the shadows of the past somewhere between Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea with Pat Metheny and John McLaughlin thrown in. It was sad, really, that such a large ensemble had no more to say than what has already been said many times previously.

Concluding the Festival, the William Parker Quartet (Hamid Drake on drums, Rob Brown on alto, Lewis Barnes on trumpet) was joined by James Spaulding on tenor and Bobby Bradford on trumpet. Only at the Vision Festival is this kind of camaraderie possible. These two veteran players fit into Parker’s ensemble with ease, as if they were meant to participate. The Quartet became a band, a swinging band. The rhythm took over and rocked the house. Applause followed each band member’s solo. The concision of the playing was not hidden. Finally, the music defined a place to stop, but only for a while.

The Vision Festival brings to mind that the music which experienced improvisers deliver, moving spontaneously from one anchoring conceptual or thematic phrase to another, is not arcane. It is so alive that it can bite and surprise, but never cause harm. The music can reach into the caverns of the unknown fearlessly, where there is no resolution… only the next swish of a cymbal, the next buzz on a mouthpiece, the next key stroke on a piano, the next vibration of a reed and the next pluck of a string.

In the presence of an audience, if musicians do reach the other side, the non-physical dimension that is pure energy and beyond description, does the listener go as well? Let’s hope so, because divisiveness, derision, war, hatred and ignorance severely disconnect culture from the individual and the resurrection of the collective human spirit, which dwells in the magnificence of pure energy, must always be beginning.

Photo credit: Lyn Horton

During one of the most tempestuous winters in memory, the twentieth season of the Magic Triangle Series at UMass Amherst began with the highly energetic performance of the Kidd Jordan Trio: Kidd Jordan on tenor, William Parker on upright bass and flute, Hamid Drake on drums, percussion and frame drum.

The producer of the series, Glenn Siegel, announced the players and prepared the audience to expect one set. After rousing applause, the players came to the stage from behind the back wall. A hush blanketed the hall. With his left arm hugging the neck of the bass to steady it, Parker meanwhile applied resin to his bow. Drake settled on his stool in back of his drumset and adjusted his array of drumsticks. Moistening the reed in his mouthpiece by inserting it in his mouth several times, Jordan readied himself to play his glistening silver tenor saxophone.

Soon, Parker was bowing in a slow back and forth motion; Drake used his mallets to expand the timbre of the bass. As Parker deepened the bass tone, Jordan repeated the same mid-range note sharply. The improvisation was beginning. The music was in the hands of three inimitable musicians whose group alliance demonstrated and substantiated the notion of spontaneous improvisation for anyone who might question its occurrence and effect.

As Jordan pressed through, fingering up and down the register of his horn, Drake fell easily into his fluid address of his drumset. Parker dropped his bow into its carryall on the outside of the bass and plowed into pizzicatos. Drake flipped his mallets to their handles and used them to snap the snare and strike upwards on the hi-hats. The dance-like motion of his arms simulated the image of sound waves that resonated from his actions. He moved from snare to tom to snare to cymbal to hi-hat to form a continuous circle. Parker’s endless energetic plucking did nothing but ground the three. All of Jordan’s fingers wiggled their way up and down the sax, modifying the notes without imposing any indeterminate fluidity.

Jordan repeatedly reset the pitches in the central register of the horn and jousted with stop-and-go blurts to plug into any spaces in the sound that surrounded him. Then as the bass was plucked more rapidly and the drum sticks flew, Jordan charged through to the highest register of the tenor and, just as quickly, dropped immediately down. That deep tone catapulted him to a register leading to a piercing of the air, extremely high pitches alternating with low tones, before he adopted a slower tempo. Throughout the entire climb, Drake played the drums with a constant insistence, his sticks the extensions of the lithe arabesques outlined by the dancer-like movement of his arms. Parker was no less assiduous as he plucked the bass strings.

The sound each musician produced was tightly interconnected with that of the other two. In no better way could this extemporaneous groove, incapable of being represented by conventional notation, have been measured than at the point at which Jordan stepped out of the mix because he had split his reed. Drake and Parker found themselves in a duet. The tide shifted. The pair suddenly was in a more demanding situation; they had lost the third string in their musical fiber.

After Jordan regained sound capability with his horn, the music turned the corner, finding a bluesy minor key. But the incessant tenor progressions continued. The drums and the bass translated the tenor’s musical line, and the tenor seized the nature of the drum or bass sounds. At one point the trio found a synchronized pulse. And way down the line, deep into the set, Jordan broke his own rules of staying away from melody by embracing “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child,” along with a little bit of Ray Charles.

But it was within the multiplicity of different sounds that the character of the trio was forged. It was if a gift from an unknown source had been opened, and out of that package radiated a myriad of sounds that were meant for each other’s company, an occasion during which an unanticipated blend was born—a mixture of dissonance, squealing, thematic riffing, tremolos, fluttering vibratos and arpeggios on the horn, all methods to approach the highest of pitches; of snaps, sharpness, sibilance, muted rattling, softness and faultless polyrhythms from the drums; of the depth of finger-plucked tones, drawn-out two-bow scraping, and split- string bent pitches from the bass.

The set sprouted and developed out of the changes: changes in the dynamics, in keys, in the textures, in the phrasings. At one juncture, Jordan was stretching his high pitches and altered the way he played them upon the entrance of discrete bowed strokes from the bass; then with two slurred notes, lower in pitch, Jordan echoed Parker’s unique articulations until the two sounds were synchronized. From this mating, Jordan slid through hundreds of successive notes and Parker, still using the bow, fingered one glissando after another, echoing Jordan.

Finally, as Drake started to tap the frame drum, the tempo decreased and the pitches from the horn descended with Parker responding to the changes by stroking his low-register strings with two bows. Soon, whistling sounds came from the tenor; Parker began to play a wooden flute first, then switched to a double-reeded Oriental horn to match the tenor’s coloration; Drake’s left-hand fingers tapped one rhythm while his right hand supplied another on the frame drum, the entire texture of the music evolving spontaneously and organically into a creation unlike anything that had preceded it.

The changes were suggestive of the different chapters in a continuous and unified story—a musical one, the preparation of which, more than any rehearsal, was the lives and experience of the three musicians. For artists of this stature, the “rehearsal” is life experience that has occurred in countless concerts in numerous venues and which is documented in as many recordings, both on location and in studio. Rather than a practice room, the preparation for this trio originates in three different habitats: New York for Parker, Chicago for Drake, and New Orleans for Jordan. The commonality of years of practice, performance and teaching is the rehearsal.

Yet, linked to the life experiences of each musician is a form of “internal preparation,” a quality of mind capable of shaping spirits and souls, as the musicians so aptly pointed out during an interview broadcast before the performance. The statements of each implied that what turns lives around, changing them the most, is also what has been internalized the most. Jordan met Charlie Parker on the same day that he met his future wife, with whom he has seven children. Birds singing, dogs barking, children playing in the streets of the Bronx and the sound of only one note resonating through the universe become the seeds for Parker’s musical imagination. And for Drake, even harmony, rather than being spawned from theory, rises out of how he is actually feeling.

Without diversity and its melding, cultural richness such as that embodied by this trio would not be possible. The sensitivity among Jordan, Parker and Drake allows the three to build and share their art—as a kind of “hybrid” life form in which the historical and the transcendent are never at odds. The common habit is to experience life as though all were determined by rigid and relentless cause-effect logic. But these three seem to be saying that it is possible to create and experience unpremeditated bliss even as we exist as historical beings in time.

Sitting at the piano before playing it is somewhat like sitting at a drawing table in front of a blank piece of paper before drawing on it. The keyboard is like the piece of paper. Until a pianist touches the keyboard (or not, i.e. John Cage, 4’33,”1952) or the artist makes a mark (or seems to not, i.e. Robert Rauschenberg, ”White Paintings,” 1951), nothing happens: the emptiness is brimming with potential (which implies “substance” to Cage because Cage was exploring the meaning of silence as itself and Rauschenberg was reacting to the overdone-ness of Abstract Expressionist Painting).

The pianist, like the visual artist, is an individual interpreter of the piano. Through this interpretation, how the pianist plays the instrument and subsequently develops a language using it evolves. The instrument becomes the medium of expression, or communication, as well as a participant in the conversation between instrument and musician. The material with which to communicate through piano is, in turn, drawn from the musician’s life-experience.

For the first three weeks in February, a consortium of contributors brings the Series “A World of Piano” to the Northampton (MA) Center for the Arts. This year, three pianists, each of whom might be said to travel under a popular audience radar, performed: Curtis Clark, Connie Cruthers and Joe Bonner.

Curtis Clark

Curtis Clark is mild-mannered, diffident and carries a small frame. He seemed unaccustomed to performing solo. He announced every piece on the program, reading from a list of one-word titles: simple, direct, unadorned.

His fingers carefully picked out the first notes. The tempo as yet uncharted, he paid great attention the placement of his hands. A tune arose through his fingers. He stopped. The tune resumed like a pageant march. It was time to break open: his right hand zoomed up the keyboard. His left hand pointedly struck chords in the bass and alternated in sets of two. These chords broke the continuity of the arpeggios he rolled out in the treble notes. Recollecting himself in the central section of the keyboard, the entire cycle started anew. Anew in the sense that his gestures constantly changed, but the auditory patterns bore similarity. The resulting textures prevailed in the balance of the program, thick with improvisational dynamic and teeming with signature moves.

Throughout each piece, Clark processed an even mix of chord and fingering progressions. He attended to discrete packages of sonic (and “sound”) ideas, each piece comprising a composite of many unique ideas. The positioning of his hands just to the left of middle C provided the founding of a center.

He would unleash the beginning of a musical line with his left hand and continue it with his right, his hand placements steered by the rhythmic groove, which also prepared the groundwork for the accents. He alternated being poised and deliberate with allowing his fingers to fly into relentless expressions during which a singular phrase disappeared into a plethora of phrasings, the closeness of the intervals the key to the precision of an arpeggio. In every instance when he started a fingering process that brightened the pace, he counterbalanced that gesture with chord plants, clusters and other slow and deliberate finger manipulations that would, in effect, deconstruct the tempo, laying bare its constituents. Not all the ideas were abstract; in fact, they were simple, melodic, concrete and direct, exemplifying articulation in the plainest sense of the word.

Thoroughly open to the keyboard’s promise, he adjusted himself on the bench before he played one note, as if that decision of physical positioning would lead the musical idea to follow. And it was not only one note that he aimed for: it was tens upon tens–chords and phrases, ostinatos, synchronizations, or syncopations– jettisoning him forward in an endless sonic stream that traveled over rocks and through valleys to finally settle in the nearly flawless surface of a pool of glistening water.

Clark exhibited no roughness, no severity, no explosiveness–only repeated straightforward emphasis. If the music slipped into perceptible familiarity, he always pushed himself out of that territory. One could see the music taking shape in his mind as he looked at the keyboard and then picked up his head to look straight ahead. The ending of each piece came without flourish, not unlike the characterization that might fit this unique artist, who described himself as once just a “wee lad,” an autodidact nurtured in Chicago and further educated in California where he adopted classical underpinnings, eventually moving to Europe and then returning to the US, a fully-grown improvising composer who plays genuinely from the heart.

Connie Crothers

Of the three pianists, Connie Crothers was the only performer to not bring a written plan to the piano. Her plan unfolded as she played. Nothing about Crothers, though, was uncertain. She took hold of the environment, the audience, the location, the local history, and shaped her program in response to it. She decided that the first piece would be a tribute to Max Roach, who had lived nearby in Amherst when he taught at UMass, and with whom she had toured many years earlier.

Her playing did not imitate Max Roach’s rapid-fire snare and dry hi-hatted approach towards the drums. Rather her tribute reflected a map of how he inspired her. Without melody, her flat-handed splats on the keys from the treble to the bass drew the starting line for the wide-angled action to come. The notes and chords to follow became the tools with which she built an unpredictably strong foundation of persistent resonance. The tempo established itself and then changed as the notes multiplied. Her right hand traveled more than her left, which stayed on the bass keys to keep the rhythm. Occasionally her left hand tore itself out of the bass pocket to follow the right into a fingering flurry up the keyboard. But it was not long before, as if magnetized, her left hand made a beeline to the bass keys, leaving the high register at the mercy of diligent, purposeful fluttering. At no point was she playing in the center of the keyboard. The expressive adamancy of her wide embrace of the keyboard lifted her body off the piano bench, her hands dropping from the keys, which still seemed to resonate from the force of her insistent two-handed chords. Not content, merely, with the instrument’s response to her movements, her pianistic methods caused her own body to respond in kind with physical manifestations of the instrument’s effect on her.

Crothers moved on to play the Robin-Rainger standard associated with Billie Holiday, “If I Should Lose You,” and Jerome Kern’s “All The Things You Are,” performed with no less intensity, no less unpredictability of intentions than any of the spontaneously improvised pieces that came before or after. Both tunes were assembled with chords harmonizing the melody, yet intricate fingering fostered a connective tissue while exerting a sparkling flare between familiar melody signposts. Soon, arpeggios and runs spiraled down the keys to dissemble the themes. If she occasionally ignored the rumble of the bass, it always returned–in the same way that the constant sonic vibrancy overrode discrete rushes of trills and tremolos. Her creations lay bare the extremes of the keyboard, which were available to her to the degree she searched them out, starting in a different place every time, taking a different approach every time. The parameters she established with one finger or her elbow paradoxically marked the boundlessness of her improvisations.

As she continued, delicate sonic notions altered the music in a piece she dedicated to Emily Dickinson. The ideas were the unconventional romantic ones that tell arresting stories, where the intervals between the notes are both wide and tight simultaneously. She wanted to dwell, to linger, in the blues, in a deceptively dream state of mind, but she strove for ecstasy. She erected a border between abstraction and melody the better to probe the question: how does one fabricate melody out of not necessarily a series of single notes and discrete pitches but rather a series of “meaningful” gestures as they combine within the context of the melody?

Her tribute to her mentor, Lennie Tristano, ended the concert. As she introduced the piece she chose to call “Lennie’s Dream,” she transmitted nothing but admiration. In the piano, this emotion translated to thematic concerns, simultaneously locked into the bass and launched in the treble. Blissfully integrated energetic hand and finger motions traveled from mid-keyboard out and then back in again. With a resurgence of two-handed bass ostinatos that progressed to mid-tones and then to repetitions of a melody, she constructed a melody of repetitions. All tuneful coherence that had amassed broke down. Then, as in the beginning, the sounds re- collected. And with her eyes closed and her head held high, notes sprang from the bass to the highest register. And she was done.

In the same manner after each piece, Crothers rose from the bench and turned to the audience, one hand resting on the piano. She looked a bit drained from her intense involvement with her work, but in a way that illuminated her face. She glowed from the satisfaction that her creative instincts had produced in her, to be kept secure until another day, another performance, another application of her unparalleled talent.

Joe Bonner

The character of Joe Bonner is built on the sizable influence of some big guns, since he was at one time picked as a band member by both Pharoah Sanders and Roy Haynes. Out of the tradition of accomplished instrumentalists and composers, he has risen like a musical engine that runs in perpetual overdrive. Dressed in a black tux, a ruffled shirt topped off with an oversized velvet bow tie, Bonner came to this concert to display his dynamic wares. He wove his repertoire of piano moves skillfully into standards, both familiar and not.

Teasing the keys in front of him with two hands, starting a bass ostinato before he propelled himself into fluid treble runs that conjured up falling tear drops, Bonner fingered phrases reaching over one hand to land bass chords with the other. The tempo was slow, but quickly changed as the melody of “How Long Has This Been Going On” shone through. Bonner began to improvise on the theme in a non-abstract, formalist way, attending to a multitude of means to intermix ornamenting and phrasing with primary theme. He displayed a veritable lexicon of piano stylizations in an outright defiance of monotony.

Yet everything was about the Gershwin melody: how well could he paint the thematic lyricism and how many times he could change the substance with which he was working as he spread his wings to fly or as he stayed in one place. Sometimes the piano sounded like a harp evoking the image of everything gossamer. At other times, the changes in key told his story, a narrative of the blues.

In general, Bonner’s penchant for exaggeration demonstrated his versatility at the keyboard. Heavy bass chords gave birth to sparkling tremolos. Elegance and precision accompanied a huge range of hand motion that unified melody with improvisation. His physical movement rendered a seamless succession of notes from one end of the keyboard to the other, rapidly or gradually, singly or in repetitions or clusters. The melodies flowered in accordance with the directions in which they pointed. Swells of sound came out of nowhere in bass tremolos which were upended by rips up the keyboard from the center to the treble end. He leaned back to prepare for crashing into the keys, which he did several times to create an unrelenting resonance. Never once, did he sacrifice the tune he was working with: from the aforementioned Gershwin song to the pop period piece “Stranger In Paradise,” from the Broadway musical “Kismet,” to the theme from Peanuts to Barney Kessel’s “Love Is For the Very Young.” Yet he also comfortably incorporated other familiar melodies within the greater ones–to the point where he wound up playing medleys. The rhythmic elements were irrefutable amid the flurry.

Bonner could have played all night. The first two sets were separated by an intermission that lasted about five minutes. After bowing once, he returned, sat at the piano in the dark and just let loose. And then after many bows, and assorted manifestations of appreciation, he briefly disappeared into the dressing room–but came out once again for a third set! What the audience could have expected to be an hour or so of music became two hours–all filled with Bonner’s personality and straightforward exhibition of love of the music.

Conclusion

This solo piano series gives its ever-growing audience a player-by-player glimpse into the realm of possibilities that lie in the playing of the instrument. Every player without doubt has the same tools in hand, devices learned through formal training or self-discovery. The difference among players, though, is stark, for each shapes what he or she knows at the very instant of concert time. How the pianist feels, what the pianist wants to say at that moment, sets the framework for sound which has never before been heard.

The way in which information is disbursed signals the onset of a process. Put into a larger context, with the downturn of the economy and layoffs at technology industries as a backdrop, hardware is moving out and the development of software is rising. How that little ol’ Blackberry or iPhone is used and the number of apps it carries could be one key to the transition to a new economic world. Using information. Applying information.

Nat Hentoff was quoted in a NYTimes article documenting his being “let go” from the Village Voice. He said, in effect, that writers are inundated with information to the point of being so overwhelmed that proper research is avoided and what turns up being printed is downright wrong. Information in this case can be understood in terms of its application: how relevant and valuable it is to the context being developed for it. This leads to a possible conclusion: how information integrates into context that lives outside of the home of the information is a creative act.

So what does this all mean? It means that a slow down is necessary so that the assimilation of information can be complete enough in research in order to avoid mistaking the wrong information for the right information. Too much misinformation is attributable to a lack of experience with subject matter and lack of attention given to thinking. The quality of Reading and Listening is more important than the amount of information compacted into conversation, books, or articles that can mean nothing. It is that simple. Reading and Listening take time, applying what is learned takes thought.

Reading and Listening transcend the information highways and allow for time to park. Reading and Listening can define experience, which can be associated with some kind of emotion. Reading and Listening are experiences themselves. How clearly they are experienced is a matter of the participants’ purpose and state of mind.

Is music information?
When it is packaged in a recording, it becomes information. But making and playing music changes its informational characteristics. In its most basic form, music begins from the outside with sets of information, like the notes on a page or the instructions for playing instruments. But then, that information is taken in and learned and assimilated and then applied. Life enters in. The people who make music are communicating. The music is the language they have chosen, to say what cannot be said in any other way. The people behind the music have individual experiences, perceptions, beliefs, sentiments. The tools that are used are chosen because they can convey the most appropriate sound and translate possibly the most musicality as designated by the composer or realized by an instrumentalist.

Music is not concerned with correctness. Music becomes itself through discovery. It is subject however to structure. The source of Structure imposed on music is defined by the composer/instrumentalist, no matter how the music is formed initially, either in a traditionally disposed composition or through improvisation and indeterminacy, or a combination of both processes. The capacity to structure music takes years to refine and perhaps begins with music theory. The muscles for creating structure have to be strong. Structure has to do with cumulative knowledge and practice, instinct and intuition.

Music is also imbued with expression. The source for expression lies in the emotion and spirit of the composer or musician. How the dynamic, timbre and whatever has to do with choice originates in sensitivity and commitment, in personal struggle, sorrow, longing, loving and forgiveness. Expression also is the product of the absorption of the environment. Noisy or silent. Music can also reflect the environment in its poignancy and elegance.

Music can be anything which the musical artist crafts it to be. The artist filters the surrounding information. And out of that process comes what is created. Nothing more, nothing less. Music and art live on the edge of their perception. Writing and talking about music and art pushes them over the edge and makes them a part of a world which reactive words inhabit. These words can often be mistaken for the art itself and relied upon too heavily.

Information is light bulb. Music and art are chandeliers.

Just as one cannot begin the universe with one molecule of hydrogen, so can one not analyze, philosophize, criticize and proselytize on the music when viewing from any one position. Because the music loses something. It loses the impact with which and for which it was and is created from the beginning. The music itself is the result of assimilated experience for the musicians. Why does it need to be explained? And why does it need to be compared to anything else?

This music of the black experience, the music of the slaves, is only itself. Because it does not exist in a vacuum, the shape of the music has changed. It is no less pure than it ever was, simply different. What ruins its shape… of how it really changes, how it truly evolves, how it continues to speak, how it might influence …is the result often of the interpretation assigned to it. Interpretation leaves behind wreckage, instead of elucidation. Assuming that the music is a certain way, because someone who is not the musician says so, gives off bad vibrations. The question becomes, in response to music that has been called jazz, and which became simply improvised/world and endlessly revolutionary music, what else can we say?

Nothing. We need to listen to the musicians who make the music. We need to hear what they have to say. We need to listen to the music.

For the writer about music, it is challenging to transcend the story-telling guise which this music carries. Because it is in human nature to step forward to be curious and try to understand what is going on outside of the self.

Perhaps, an approach to the music is to witness it. To pretend that it is from outer space and has never been heard before in any context. And then put it in context. To see the music for itself, recognize that it is already a summation, product of history, and simply a temporal conclusion that will change, allows that it rise to its purpose which is to express the feelings of the musicians. Countless times has it been said by musicians who perform in types of music, originating from Africa and penetrating many cultures, that they are communicating their feelings.

The debate about purity of the source of the improvisatory ethic could not be more clearly explained and substantiated than in A Power Stronger Than Itself by George E. Lewis.

This book, within its comprehensive self, reveals the essentials of how music can be formally promoted to enrich culture, bearing a message beneficial to all, but which surprisingly was looked down upon or disregarded by many, even those people of the same ethnic origins. The detailed and in depth descriptions of the migration of the members of the AACM from Chicago to Europe to New York only and necessarily to return to Chicago is evidence that walls are built where they have nothing but ideational foundations and that artistic expression in its richest form can become an object of tolerance as opposed to a jewel of expression and spirituality. The “power” of the AACM was invested in not only the music but in the way in which it leveled the cultural playing field literally. It is not a wonder that its members re-inhabited Chicago as a safe zone.

Despite the Pulitzer Prize winning attributes that Lewis’s information-filled, gloriously unfolding book possesses, Lewis, himself, knocks his open declarative viewpoint for a loop. In the epilog, his accreditation of those music “groups” which had grown coincidentally with the AACM is paltry and narrow and undereducated. It would have been better for his conclusions to have been left unspoken. As if compared to a piece of music, this epilog was an ill-conceived coda.

Lewis’s conclusion is similar to the emptiness of the phrase assigned to a record review of “recommended highly” when no basis of recommendation has been provided, except that the sound is similar to the sound of that comes from another musician. Who needs to read that a trumpeter who has issued his debut album is playing in the tradition of Miles? Even if the musician is showing no sign of inventiveness, it is ultimately up to the listener to determine that. But it is up to a writer to give a response in terms of something other than vacuous ungrammatical prose. There has to be as much poetry and guts in the writing in the writing as in the music.

Equally as upending is an academic analysis of the art of improvisation. Paul Berliner dedicated a tome on the subject. To introduce Chapter Six, “The More Ways You Have For Thinking,” pianist Barry Harris is quoted: “The more ways you have of thinking about the music, the more things you have to play in your solos.” How well-put is this? Does this sentence point to how to fill in the blanks? Just listen. Find the musical ideas. But Berliner goes on in this chapter, as happens also in the remainder of the book, to pile layer upon layer of “to do” on the reader. Granted this book is probably meant for musicians alone. They are the only people who could understand it. But I read it and I am not a musician. I want to understand the music, but not from the standpoint of theory.

Then there is the more recent publication by Paul Rinzler. How is it useful to begin a book called The Contradictions of Jazz with a chapter utilizing pseudo-set theory to explain the concept of opposites within the structure of improvisation? His assignations of the fundamentals for this structure are stunning in terms of their outlandishness. Not that the concepts (Individualism, Assertion, Interconnectedness, Creativity, etc.) cannot be used to describe the music, but to be concretized to the point of becoming monuments of principle and axiom boggles the mind, at least, mine.

To reinforce the thread of this article, that is, to listen to the music and the musicians and respond directly to both, is an excerpt from an interview of Joe McPhee by Michael Anton Parker from 2002. In the following, reed and brass player McPhee tells the story of working with children in Switzerland in the early 80’s.

“So I went in this school, and I took my pocket trumpet and my tenor saxophone, and an orange- painted conch shell, some bells and whistles and so on like that, and I put them in the middle of the floor – it was in a gymnasium. And then the first class was unleashed upon me and in came all these kids. First they were startled because I didn’t look like any of them; they saw all of these instruments in the middle of the floor, and so that’s when they all came in making a lot of noise, and then they came to a screeching halt, and like ‘what is this about?’ They didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Swiss German, but there were teachers there who were translators.

“So the first thing I did was a few rhythmic exercises, pounding the floor, clapping hands and so on like that, and trying to get their attention, and then I sent them all to the far corners of the room and asked them to listen, and they giggled and so forth, and they came back, and then I asked them what they heard, through these translators, of course. And they would say they heard the person next to them laughing or shuffling feet or making rude noises and so on like that. So we did some more exercises and what I was trying to do was get them to follow directions, and so on like that, in a real organized kind of way. And then I sent them away again, and I asked them to listen very carefully and come back and tell me what they heard. Now the first time they not only heard the people next to them, but they heard trucks passing outside, an airplane, a guy on a bicycle – I remember a bell and so on, but the second time they came back, and they had listened very carefully, they began to hear the breathing of the person next to them; they could hear their own heartbeat, and a high-pitched sound in their ear – it was kind of like from their own nervous systems, and they were really beginning to listen very carefully, and they were interested.

“So then I asked them if they wanted to try and play my instruments – of course they didn’t really want to … So they were all in a circle, and they tried to play the pocket trumpet and couldn’t, and they’d puff out their cheeks and so on like that. And there was one little boy who was like the class clown, I guess, and they were always making fun of him and saying ‘Let him do it.’ So he did it, of course, and he really eventually could play the trumpet – not play it, but I mean he’d make sounds on it, and then he became kind of like a hero because he was adventurous enough to try it, and then he was able to make a sound, you know. And then there was one little girl who – she was very shy, and I said ‘you try it,’ and she tried it, and I said ‘Do any of you play any other instruments?’ and she said she played the piano, so she played some little things she had learned on the piano, and no one knew she played piano – she was very shy, and all of a sudden she became sort of like, you know, very interesting, and people wanted to know her…

“And then we made some more rhythm things … we sat around and asked what they thought about it, if they knew anything about jazz – of course they didn’t really have any experience with that, except I think they heard of Louis Armstrong at one point, and they all said that they were gonna write me because they had, you know, such a good time… And then, that class was finished, and the second class came in. But between the first and second class I found out that there was a closet full of instruments there in that school that the teachers never let the children play with because they thought they would break them. I said, ‘Oh really? [said not with the common rising intonation that indicates surprise, but with the special intonation that indicates he is about to set them straight]. Take every instrument out of the closet and bring it here. They just played my saxophone and my trumpet and I wasn’t worrying about them breaking them, cause I didn’t think they were gonna do that. Take them all out and put them in the middle of the floor.’

“So the next class comes out, similar to the first one – they ran into the room, screaming and yelling, and they screeched to a halt when they saw me, and all of that pile of wonderful devices all over the place, you know. Same thing – we repeated the same thing, and the same result happened: they listened more intently. And then I gave them instruments and I created sections – music sections – and I had them play following my direction. Within 10 to 15 minutes I had an orchestra, organized, following directions and the teachers were sitting there with their mouths hanging open: ‘How can you do that? They never listen to anything. They never do what we tell them to do.’ So they played and so on; I let them play my instruments, and the same thing: I spoke to them and… we had a wonderful time. And that happened three times in a row. And in the end we had a little meeting, and they said ‘What did you do? How could you do that to them?’ and I said ‘I didn’t do anything. I just let them, you know, free, to do what they wanted to do, and they were not going to break the instruments,’ and I said, ‘You know, it’s ridiculous that they’re all there in the closet.’ They said, ‘Oh, we’ll have to try that.’ So maybe something changed at that school.”

Something certainly changed at that school because McPhee lifted all the boundaries that were imposed on creation. He listened to the students who in turn listened to themselves. He imparted his own early experiences with sound to the kids. There was no great academic enforcement of rules or imposition of analysis or the physical separation of groups. The process was open, direct and about communication.

Emotions have nowhere to go without some channel for shaping them. Music is a channel, visual art is a channel and words are channels. Prior to the coalescence of music, art and writing comes clarity of purpose within the creator. The simplicity derived from clarity comes with a certain state of mind. In this state of mind, there is nothing to prove. There is only the sobering rawness and unparalleled beauty of emotion and the free will to honestly share it.

Therefore, writing about the music, whatever its origin and identity, records perceptions of the instinctual drive behind the music. The writing completes the communication the musician initiated through the music to the listener. All the more reason for whoever writes about it to respond in kind… in the form of words rather that of sound.

Since no day in my life passes without the consideration of music, the range of my exposure is wide. The direction I could go in, from the most conservative to the most edgy that is available, denotes a steady non-exclusionary absorption.

Writing about any kind of music requires compatible listening ears. Just this morning on the radio, Bill Frisell’s Unspeakable was playing. I never wrote about this recording — only listened — and I put it on my top ten a couple of years ago. At present, I am thinking about a new release from Chico Hamilton. The drummer is as smart as they come. He has been around the block several times. And his concept for this record overrides the concepts that even the most “sophisticated” of traditional and vanguard musicians working today try to encapsulate in their recordings. Another record in my stack exudes a contemporary modus operandi: to mix electronics and acoustics up the wazoo. Yet, another record is from vanguard pianist, Eri Yamamoto, whose improvisations open up and break through networks of bar lines. Right now, I am listening to Glenn Branca’s “Symphony No.1.”

It is not easy for some people to break a pattern of listening or even take the time to do it. Perhaps breaking that pattern resembles changing a means of traveling from one place to another, as in taking a detour. Ofttimes, taking detours means going over bumpy roads and through tough neighborhoods and this creates anxiety. Because the way is unknown and unknowable. And moving along requires trust and faith that point B will eventually come into view. The route may no doubt have been chosen by some one else or a wrong turn may have been taken. The only consistency between the customary route and the new one is the person taking the trip.

So, putting that analogy aside and directing the argument towards the music. The first “free” improvisation experience I had was in 1998, hearing the quintet, Other Dimensions in Music. Roy Campbell, trumpet; Daniel Carter, sax; William Parker, bass; Rashid Bakr, drums; and Matthew Shipp, piano. The venue for the gig was small but acoustically alive. I was aware of the penchants of the performance organizer. He is a believer in the freedom of expression and song. In no way did I carry any preconceptions to the concert.

The music simply started. Daniel Carter wailed on his sax. Matt Shipp pounded voluminous chords on the piano. William pizzed deep reverberant tones on his bass. Bakr darted his drumsticks on the skins and Roy’s fingers flew on the valves of his trumpet like there was no tomorrow. The group was telling a story, not unlike the stories that any good storyteller would tell… the kind of storyteller who passes on legends to grandchildren, to neighborhoods, to children in school. Legends of innocence and wonder and life.

The band mapped out no real thematic destination from the very beginning. The instruments conversed with each other tonally, contrapuntally, diametrically, harmonically; they merged, they diverged; they argued; they agreed. Each of the musicians contributed their own details to the story. Each musician used his own instrument to color the language, give inflections to the notes, create sentences, paragraphs; instrumentally punctuate, emphasize, embolden, temper and test the rhythm inherent in maintaining a direction. The music never fell apart; space and time held it together. The music’s development depended on the mutual trust of the musicians to, as a group, determine their common sense, their common goal, their common instinct. The music simply ended as it had begun. There was no Beethovenian conclusion.

The way in which Other Dimensions in Music operated is exactly the same as the way in which Bill Frisell organizes his 2004 Unspeakable orchestra. The instruments are no less exercised to their capacity. Certainly, each musical group is eccentric in its own way. The electronics and strangeness in Unspeakable accentuates the musical essences of the people who make the music. Their musical origins may be completely different from those of the band members of Other Dimensions in Music, but they strive for a similar camaraderie for the purpose of communicating. The Unspeakable band rolls out abundant rhythmic elements. The bass guitar and drums lock into the ground from which the density of the lead guitar, violin, and electronics can grow; a trampoline of vibrancy allows experimentation to start and become huge with jubilance.

Music continues to come to a mergence of what seems to be incongruous. Somehow, cultural worlds are uniting. It is through this kind of union that the most is done for the political world. In John Szwed’s book Crossovers, he cites a comment made by big band leader Stan Kenton about a Downbeat critic’s poll in 1956 when most of the recipients of honors were African-American. Kenton was disgusted with the results. He exclaimed that whites were the new minority. Thank goodness, it seems that that frame of mind has changed. Or has it? Look at the way that the 1960′s gave birth to a bulk of new music societies which subsequently dissolved for lack of sustenance. These groups cultivated cross-culturalization; their members were African-American, Caucasian and European. The sixties for music was like the beginning of the 20th century for science and art: a great period of invention, most of which is still being studied, analyzed and thought to be “new.”

So many people have no room for adventure. But it is the adventure that is necessary. The adventure stimulates the senses and inspires human interconnection. A mid eastern frame drum keeping a diversified pulse behind the complex and bright tunefulness of a flute which union blends into a seeming directionless cacophonous barrage of three saxophones collected with hard driven yet often suppely applied strokes on a trap set tom and snare recorded on an album that has a title originating in Yogic practice perfectly exemplifies the borderlessness of music’s future. Is this eclectic? No, it is global. Does this music address a wide population? No. What does this music do? It transcends formula. It achieves openness. It addresses the soul. It is nearly parochial. But not really. The music partakes of the shift, a paradigmatic shift. What may seem to create more separation is really creating more unity.

Free improvisation employs broadly accepted ensembles of instruments, speaking a language that is sometimes foreign to the instruments; but also within this music is used, among countless others, the doson gouni, the kora, the shenai, the cello, the violin, the oud, the djembe, accordion, synthesizers, amplifiers, samples, vocals, spoons, mouth-harps. Box drums. Table tops. Stages. And instruments still to be invented.

There is no drawing the line between one kind of music and another. The lines have disappeared. The lines have transformed through time, silence, will, and heart. Instruments and musicians symbolize the way the world can work. All it takes is an atypically congealed awareness. And consciousness that leads itself.

In every culture, there is a burrito.