Speak, Brother, Speak!

I've been doing a lot of listening lately, having rediscovered my voracious appetite for jazz and exploring the internal logics, stylistic markings, and musical personalities the rich history and tradition of American music supplies.

I'm consistently amazed when I follow the trajectory of an individual musician's career, how a unique musical voice can be identified in its nascent state and retain its character through stylistic evolution. Even geniuses who sometimes appear to arrive fully formed undergo subtle changes and refinements over the course of years and decades. For some musicians, these changes take the form of refinements, the shedding of excess, perhaps the exuberance of youth whittled down to its essence; for others it seems more akin to climbing a mountain, or stewing a pot of gumbo that somehow never ends up overcooked.

There's so much to explore that I get overwhelmed trying to process the various branches and historical trajectories while also keeping apace of what's going on now. I think my wallet feels the same way.

I approach it as a very serious endeavor that also brings me great joy. I try not to get too obsessive but it rarely wanes for long. I have always felt that music was important in a way that is difficult to explain in the same way that other generally accepted matters of importance are.

Needful things.

Recent listening has centered around the late, great, brilliant Max Roach in all his settings as a leader and sideman,and  the development and brilliance of both Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman. I'm hoping to develop the latter exercise into a meaningful piece of writing at some point.

I've also been playing a lot and doing a bit of recording. It's interesting that listening to jazz doesn't necessarily lead me to creating jazz. I do a lot of improvising but music doesn't tend to come out as stylistically resembling jazz.
In addition, I'm currently reading a very interesting book entitled Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity by the musician and scholar Paul Austerlitz. Mr. Austerlitz is an alumni of Bennington College, where he had the pleasure of studying with both Bill Dixon and Milford Graves, devoting an entire chapter to the latter musician. Interestingly, it's not a chapter about Graves per se, as much as it's a chapter by Graves; Austerlitz prefaces Mr. Graves' writings with the following qualification:

"Rather than writing a chapter about Graves, I opted to present Graves's openions in his own prose voice: he has his own vocabulary that is supremely suited to conveying his ideas. Moreover, my own academic stance requires a detachedness that does not do justice to Graves's thinking."

I found this to be a fascinating way to introduce the chapter which I had assumed would be about Milford Graves rather than by Milford Graves. It was actually one of the primary reasons I had purchased the book, knowing that there was a whole chapter devoted to Milford Graves, a sorely under-documented figure in my opinion.

When I found that there was a whole chapter by Milford Graves, I was ecstatic. I love primary sources, and hearing it straight from Milford Graves' mouth was an exciting premise, even if it was a bit daunting as well. The other recent prose of Milford Graves' that I had read was in John Zorn's Arcana II volume that was recently released. That was a rather dense chapter about his medico-musical theories.

Mr. Graves makes an interesting distinction at one point, stratifying musical practices into three ways of approaching music. To paraphrase, he says that the first mode is to play for the "regular people," and play music that will touch them. The second way is to play for other musicians, what he calls "the in-group, the clique." The third way he mentions is when musicians cultivate themselves, by playing for their own furthering as well as for a "higher force." At this point, Graves says, "Once you have this, you can go into a state where you do not operate according to earthly laws any more. Then you can really stretch out" (p 172).

I'm not quite sure which earthly laws he's referring to, but it's an interesting point. I've done some writing on the general subject previously, improvising musicians' spiritual beliefs and how they may or may not interface with their musical beliefs. One issue I've always grappled with is transcendence, and why this plane of musical experience is often posited as transcendent and above rather than an expanding of the immanent human experience.

Until next time...