"Nice Jazz Music"

 

-----

When I was in my early 20's, I was in a band -- a trio, mostly, guitar/bass/drums, later adding keyboards and occasional second guitar, which rounded us out as a quartet -- and we were trying to "do something within music". One meaning of this phrase is that we were moving through music towards something -- I guess you could say we were "exploring the landscape" of music, or "seeking out the distant horizon" of sound, or any similar esoteric phrase of poetic effort. "Doing something" meant, to us, "not doing what had been done". An idiot's dream of a new world, a beautiful dream of shining things in the aging light of a new dawn, but also the willingness to try to see the world anew through sounding out the undone. We know you can't really do anything that hasn't been done, but it's the bravado of trying to do something that makes something happen (to someone). So, we played music, however we could play it. We'd stretch tempos, drop bars, go from loud to soft or vice versa, use effects and echoes and wrap our sounds in pillows of deep galaxies, we'd immediately play something almost pop long enough to stab it to death with steak knives of steely cloud sounds. We'd open the space between verses so that you'd forget there once was a verse. We didn't sing much, or if we did, voices would fall in and out of the time of the music in order to reveal to anyone listening that what we were saying were the words of ghosts hovering just behind everything, just to the side of what might be there in front of us....It was a time of strangeness, of playing things that filled the air with the mystery of their unknowing.

One day, in a quite moment, or between saturnic journeys, we heard a knock at the door. Our rehearsal space was in a pretty "hard to find" spot, on the mezzanine floor of a building that had a Jillian's pool hall above it, down an accidental open door-ed corridor you'd have to either be drunk to enter or unconcerned as to the danger you might find down there. No one besides us ever "meant" to walk down it. The knock rang out like a shotgun -- Who was it? Were we doomed? Had we paid the rent? (We were young and poor and notoriously irresponsible...) Was this the end of love as we had known it? We all shrank back from the sound of the knuckles rapping against the wood as if it were the sound of something that were to seal our fate were we to acquiesce to it. Our freedom, at that silent moment, was expressed in our refusal to respond with anything but our own silence.

But this was a fist aimed at breaking us apart, and it knocked again, and again. The bass player, a smiling guy for whom even going to the moon in music was a reason to smile even more at the glory of space, moved towards the door, then deftly flipped the lock and pulled the door open towards him, moving back lightly and quickly. A tall man stood there, quite crisp, a grey wool overcoat on his shokders, beige cashmere scarf across his collar, matching beige cap, matching smooth grey slacks, dark business shoes. We wondered if he was lost. Or, in fact, if we were even more lost, even though we thought we knew where we were on what we still call "planet earth."

He looked soberly into the sad disheveled room of our rehearsal space, the walls covered with incomprehensible hidden agendas. Then, he smiled wider than the horizon and exclaimed, "You all are playing some nice jazz music in here!" We wondered, just then, what "lost" could mean, what it was for us to be so. We were playing some nice music -- we were trying to make something in music that was the likeness of something that invited the listener in to listen -- but "jazz"?

-----

-----

I generally listen to instrumental music -- not as a rule, but then, kind of as a rule. Partly it is because I prefer not to spend my listening time concerning myself with the words that someone may be singing and attempting to make meaning of those words amongst the forest of sounds swaying everything around me - as if I were looking at a row of blended green trees and, instead of losing myself in the true contemplation of nature for a moment, were called upon to attend to the bird call that isn't meant for my response. And what I like to hear in instrumental music is the sound of the instruments interacting in time in a manner that could be thought of as freedom -- that is, the open space to move amongst everything that there is to move within. So, there would be improvisation within what I like to hear, since part of this listening is hearing what is to come that is not to be known to come, even by the musicians who are there leading me on towards what is to come. But I also would like to hear a thematic element to the music, perhaps a repetitive phrase, a melody, perhaps some instant where the music unscatters itself, is gathered for a moment into something distinct, defined, co-committed. And then the sounds can go scurrying merrily along a harmonic footpath, fast or slow, mean or sweet. I want to be near this inconsistency, this constant change from one thing to another thing and then back. I want what ends up being within jazz. But I don't want jazz. I don't want a genre; I want what the genre might contain, might hide, might exhibit despite itself and despite the marketplace that craves the simple fact of its finite existence.

-----

-----

There are a lot of "I wants" in the above paragraph -- perhaps too many for a reader, perhaps not enough for the writer declaring themselves aloud in a silent room. But that's part of it, too -- for me, music is what fills the silent room with an additional silence through which I complete a contemplation. Of what? Well, the music itself, which is to say everything that the music evokes - images of the world in which I have lived, times, places, images of images, shades of shades of suggested feelings. There's an Eberhard Weber piece called "Visible Thoughts" -- I think of the music I most want to hear being what lies behind the thoughts that emerge in my mind, the thoughts I think I see by thinking them. Sometimes there are fields of grass, greenish-blue, so vast I disappear in simply thinking of them; these fields are the vastness of everything I could think, ambiguous and open to the world, closed to everything that has vanished from the earth, open to everything that could appear right after this.

-----

Jazz, of course, has an important and essential history, and it cannot be referred to without evoking the space and time and cultural context (in?/out of?) which it arose. I pause to formally evoke history here, partly because, when I listen to recorded music, I both exist in the historical moment of the music I am hearing, as well as the past through which this music shines to alight itself upon me, or the space I am in. And then there is the historical moment in which I coexist with the sounds in the room or air around me, and the historical moment that makes the moment of all these coexistences possible, too -- while rooted in the purest chronology, I am also suspended in the impossible time of hearing something that can always repeat if I play it again. Jazz, by definition, as it is linked through identity (what is it?) to improvisation, has always resisted the recouperation of recording. It has always existed only in the moment it is being played, and it cannot repeat except by not repeating itself. So, perhaps we were playing Jazz Music that day in our shoebox, with an unknown stranger outside in the brightly lit hall, because the music disappeared upon his hearing it. Perhaps everything I listen to that has been pre-recorded only attempts to reconstruct the possibility of the music's disappearance, and it is all a wonderously lost hope. If so, then there is no style at all, no genre that can even be declared. We can all sleep gently in the noise of the thoughts we would like the genre to make of us, that it hasn't known how to make.

-----

-----

There are also practical reasons for my "disowning" of jazz. Ever just like the sound of an instrument? You know, just hear it and not want to stop hearing it? (I feel that way, for example, about the sound of my wife's voice. I just want to hear it and not stop hearing it.) That's the guitar for me. The guitar, while "allowed" in jazz, is actually an instrument that enters jazz to tear it open a bit, to push it against and then through the wall into the sea, beyond the sea, into the sky, beyond the sky. The guitar soars into the sun and melts a firey path downward, and the whales jump up to greet it as it hurtles past them into the center of the earth. "Nice Jazz Music" is exactly what the guitar needs, exactly what history has given us, finally, the finality of things as they once were ending.

Can the Ocean Be Described?

First, start by hearing this, broken into 3 sections by You Tube User "bebodrummer".

The three sections are of Miles Davis' 28-minute-and-change "Great Expectations", from 1970's-and-change Big Fun. Meaning, I don't know how long the track is, and I don't know when the album came out. I'll even say that it doesn't seem possible to "know" when "it" (the track, the record, the sound?) was made. Miles' music in the late 60's through mid 70's, when he vanished post 1975 into a silent bedroom of white cocaine magic is all vague cosmetics, blurry rainbowed edges, smudged makeup -- all which show the weird similarity of skin and bones and costume between it -- is music of complete indefiniteness, undefinable as praxis. There's a lot of documentation on "what actually happened" at this time -- and a good article here by Electric Miles Scholar Paul Tingen. I'll leave the detective work to you, whoever you are. Let me know what you find and if we learn anything that defines this weird washout period of Miles' music -- from 1967 to 1975 -- that helps us to know any more about HOW to listen to what happened there. To me, all of Miles' music in this time period appears to be about something that hasn't yet happened, but which is always threatening to split the sky in half. It reminds me of a moment in Andrei Tarkovsky's "Mirror" where a little boy may have seen a ghost. How do we know? Because the camera fixes on the evaporating condensation from the cup of hot tea upon the wooden table, the vanished cup of tea that the ghost may have been drinking, but the boy who saw the ghost is now, of course, alone in the room.

I recently restumbled upon this track in making a mix through 8tracks, which allows you to upload tracks from your iTunes collections to make web-based mixes that you can share with other users. Pretty cool. My innovation is to narcissistically make mixes for myself so that I can listen to tracks not uploaded to my iPhone's iPod on our iPod dock while taking a shower (say that 10 times fast, then silence yourself, which is what I did). Pretty silly, and also pretty wonderous. The best part of doing this isn't "making mixes", which I personally dislike -- I'm an album listener, a staunch traditionalist, and a pain in the ass all at once, making pleasing me impossible, so I stick with myself sometimes -- the best part is rediscovering music that, in iTunes, becomes no more than a list of names and titles, so voluminous that one's categorization of music is the shorthand mechanism for the possibility of listening to it. Great Expectations, indeed. (We all hope that iTunes will mean we never have to LOOK at a record cover ever again. But the thing about looking at a record cover is that, through it, we actually associate image and sound, color and depth, timelessness and time passing.....)

But, enough technology aggression for now, since the point is the music and what it SOUNDS like. Because of this weird double technical of iTunes and 8tracks, I found myself looking at my music as if it were an email inbox with messages whose value I suddenly needed to prioritize -- or at least refamiliarize myself with, since the messages were mine, yet I had forgotten them, or what they might mean or say or do or be. And so, I saw "Great Expectations 28:25" and uploaded it to my mix, curious what I might hear later, in the shower, after I had forgotten what I hadn't read or heard but wanted to remember....

Ever since I was a kid, I've always thought the long songs on a record were the best songs. Exactly what a kid ought to think... I mean, more doesn't mean better, does it? Except for the Big Gulp is better than a 12 oz can of soda, and what makes it better is that it is a better value, penny for penny, sip for sip. I think from the start, part of me was a total capitalist consumer of music -- I figured that the song was longer and had more music in it, and because it was more, and the others were less (shorter is less music) -- then it had to be better....I know, that is some deeply circular logic, tautological and impenetrable. A=B because A and B are equal, so if A>C, then A>C. Yet, even now, I can't quite dispute this immature thinking. Perhaps because what I want to do, when listening to music, is be occupied by something, to be taken by something, to have something be there for me to attend to, in time, through time, with everything that I am that listens. If there is MORE TIME in the music, there is more for me to attend to, and more listening for me to do across time (diachronic). Music happens in time, and its happening through time is part of what it engages us within -- time passing, things moving or repeating, things starting and stopping, things vanishing, things appearing, things thinging through something that is a space we can't see, that we know is moving because it gets later when we are hearing it.

I thought Great Expectations, being 28-minutes-and-change, would make good sense to have on a "mix" because it would kill the mix, since a mix gets its power from the movement from track to track, from sound to sound, from artist to artist or style to style or time period to time period or all of these. A mix needs to "move". But I wanted to confuse that for myself, I wanted my mix to get stuck in the mud of the horizon, which stretches out to infinite blindness. I wanted to hear "Great Expectations" again with no expectations of anything -- I've been listening to it for 20 years now, but what have I really heard?

It's hard to describe music -- I've said it elsewhere, and I will say it even more so now -- in fact, one can't describe music, and yet, there are words to know it with. On Miles Davis' Live Evil, there's a really freaky track called "Inamorata and Narration by Conrad Roberts". Basically, it's a spaced firefreeze where, at some unknowable point, the music receding into an echo chamber, a deep, dark voice narrates a poem of the impossibility of speaking of, of knowing through speech, what music is. He chants "Can the Ocean Be Described?" He kinda takes the fun out of everything there. But the fun is gone, because we fall mute at the center of it. Yet Conrad knows Miles' game -- he ends his poem game with the bext next move: "I love.....tomorrrow". Great Expectations! (You can hear Roberts below, at 6:12 of the 9:33 below. Volcanic Ash Wowzer. Relistening to it, I want to run and hide and have his voice blanket the earth so that I can come out from below and lie down on top of it and forever sleep....)

So, in the center of the mix, anonymously, it came on. How to begin with it? Great Expectations has a riff in 7/4 time. What does that mean? Well, generally, most figures in much western music -- rock, pop, jazz, blues -- have lengths that fall into some category of beats, and that category is "even". Meaning, it usually is 4 or 8 or 16 bars of "pulse". If you tap your foot, every 4 taps, something ends and starts over, or every 8 taps, or every 16, or 16 is made of of 4 somethings that start over once again after 16. There's more to say about this, but for my point, most western music uses phrases that are EVEN, for every yin a yang, for every odd an even. Yet, Great Expectations is built on a phrase (really a guitar riff, but, then, everyone is playing a "riff" here, meaning a series of single notes that repeat in some foundationally rhythmically spaced way) that is 7 beats. Tap your foot and count -- when you get to seven, start back at one. And go on, from 1 to 7 each time. The thing is lopsided, asymmetrical, oblong, jutting out into space, contained yet in the rollicking of its repetition. Because your hips move. There's a drum riff, a percussion riff, a bass riff, a tamboura wave, trumpet soaring echoed over it like a discontinuous seagull. In the depth of the night behind it, a rhodes is plucking away, a bird pecking at the heart of the sky. But "Great Expectations" keeps shutting down after a few phrases, the riff resisted, resetting, releasing. It's very weird. You keep thinking the song will push again out into something else, but the expectation, the loved tomorrow, is the same uneven keeled thing that crashes into the edge of the sea and reemerges careening.

At 13:30, though, the song totally resets. Whatever restarting happened once and many times before does not restart. The day is now awaking, the sky placid, plastic, performed. They bide their time, and you wait. For something. Else.

I've only actively sat and watched the sun rise a few times in my life -- on one hand, enough to know what it looks like, on the other, not enough to be fair to myself and the world around me. One thing about the sun rising is that even while you are watching the sky and you see it change, you also see nothing. Because changing is like something and nothing all at once, it is the fact that things become different and express difference through the repetition of and reiteration of their sameness. Perhaps something is drastic -- as in "Great Expectations", every time the rhythm escapes and there is only floating sky sound of horn, rhodes, tamboura, percussion -- but even what is drastic only expresses everything that came upon it, everything that preceded it.

As you wait out the sky in "Great Expectations", you wonder if everything has always been this way, if things will ever change, if difference is only in your perception, if perception is only in what you have had to unknow.

Eventually, as in everything we come to know, a rhythm settles in, the drums are the end result of it, and everything reiterates into a blend of earth and sky, all of which makes the world return, reappear, remain.

I guess what we can expect, then, always, only, is the world unfurled, unfolded, recapitulated. That is, we can expect only what is always great. This is the essence of Miles' silence, the ocean undescribed in, as music.