"Nice Jazz Music"

 

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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"?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.