Books &Music Entropy | 21 Sep 2009
How Jazz Can Change Your Life
Wish to share a profound & beautiful excerpt form a Book -
- Moving to Higher Ground – How Jazz Can Change Your Life -
by Pulitzer Prize—winning musician and composer Wynton Marsalis, which draws upon lessons he’s learned from a lifetime in jazz–lessons that can help us all move to a higher ground, with wit and candor he demystifies the Jazz..
Discovering the Joy of Swinging
The best way I can describe it is through the feeling between two people. Before any words are spoken, before one makes any gesture toward the other, there is a feeling. And that feeling loses intensity and purity when translated into words or gestures. When someone reaches up to kiss you or says “I love you,” those acts are reductions of that bigger feeling. But if someone figures out how to communicate that big feeling—how to master a moment of soul—they just look at you with directness and honesty and love. Eyes alone can warm your entire body. We most often experience this unencumbered feeling from children. But some adults give it, too. Because jazz musicians improvise under the pressure of time, what’s inside comes out pure. It’s like being pressed to answer a question before you have a chance to get your lie straight. The first thought is usually the truth.
At twelve, I began listening to John Coltrane, Clifford Brown, Miles Davis, and Freddie Hubbard. Just by paying serious attention to these musicians every day, I came to realize that each musician opens a chamber into the very center of their being and expresses that center in the uniqueness of their sound. The sound of a master musician is as personalized and distinct as the sound of a person’s voice. has. After that basic realization, I focused on what they were communicating through music—pure truth, delivered with the intimacy of friends revealing some secret, sensitive detail about themselves. It takes courage and trust to share things. Many times the act of revelation brings someone closer to you. In learning about a person, you learn something about the world and about yourself, and if you can handle what you learn, you can get closer, much closer to them.
That’s why, I came to understand, the scuffling jazzmen around my father were so self-assured. They didn’t mind you knowing who they were. With Coltrane, of course, I was impressed with his virtuosity, his ability to run up and down his horn. Everyone who heard him was. But I noticed that the most meaningful phrases were almost never technically challenging. They were succinct phrases that would run right through you, the way we remember profound nuggets from Shakespeare’s plays that can both cut through you and linger; all those words in Hamlet but you remember “To be or not to be” or “to sleep perchance to dream.” Something in those type of phrases reveals universal truth.
That purity of feeling is what I heard in Coltranes’s sound. His sound was his feeling. You also heard Tommy Flanagan’s feeling when he improvised at his piano; then you had Paul Chambers’s feeling on the bass and Art Taylor’s on the drums. A single performance was an improvised symphony of their combined feeling, made more honest by the pressure of time.
It’s not easy to find words for the kind of emotions that jazz musicians convey. You don’t have a name for the feeling of light peeking through the drapes in your childhood bedroom. Or how the teasing of classmates hurt. You don’t have a name for the feeling of late-night silence on a car ride with your father or how you love your wife’s smile when you tease her. But those feelings are real, even more real because you can’t express them in words. Jazz allows the musician to instantly communicate exactly how he or she experiences life as it is felt, and the instant honesty of that revelation shocks listeners into sharing and experiencing that feeling, too.
Some popular music evokes nostalgia. Your memory of your own emotions fills the songs with meaning: “You remember this one, baby? This was when I had that old beat-up Oldsmobile and used to pick you up in it and this was our prom song.” But jazz music is about the power of now. There is no script. It’s conversation. The emotion is given to you by musicians as they make split-second decisions to fulfill what they feel the moment requires. The explanation can be complicated, but the music is very direct and basic. And because Coltrane felt so strongly about things, his sound remains potent and present. We can still feel him and Louis Armstrong and Thelonious Monk and all of the great ones. And we can feel and empathize with many other musicians, too, if we allow their sounds to reach and fill some space inside of us.
Jazz makes it possible for individuals to shape a language out of their feeling and use that very personal language to communicate exactly how the world feels to them. Recordings froze the sounds of these musicians, affording us the pleasure of entering their world whenever we wish. The world according to Lester Young. Mmmm. That’s where I want to be. Then, to be there over and over again….
By Wynton Marsalis © Random House
Moving to Higher Ground – How Jazz Can Change Your Life
on 23 Sep 2009 at 7:22 pm 1.Nimesh said …
What a wonderful article… La vie en jazzz.. Wynton is a prophet with a heart of a child, has an innocence of dew drops on a lily, a simplicity of a blade of grass, sincerity of a connoisseur and his essay has a voice like a prophet spreading a gospel truth and a smile that instantly caresses your heart…
This phrase is an aphorism of Jazz
“” But jazz music is about the power of now. There is no script. It’s conversation”
Nimesh Dadia
on 25 Sep 2009 at 12:04 am 2.Max Babi said …
Dearest Ajay and Nimesh,
Though this is a delicacy for us jazz lovers, it would mean little to non-jazz folks, if you are interested I will ask some of my literature lover friends to comment… they’d as lost as a rabbit talking to a bird and trying to establish a connection. Someone rightly said the greatest challenge is to describe colour to a blind man.
The spinal chord of my life’s kaleidoscopic experiences has been a unique ability to paraphrase the world, since my interests are many and it gives me a guilty feeling when I find my best friends unable to appreciate an art form. Also, paraphrasing dry subjects like plasma processing or vacuum technology to a non-specialist can be a deadly challenge, much as Jazz can be for a non-jazz listener.
Aparna Panshikar, who learnt vocal from pandita Kishori Amonkar, is a good friend who has never been exposed to jazz and she always tries hard to get into it but ends up saying it is all so complex !
The only ray of sunshine in this darkness is the fact an anecdote that really posed me the greatest challenge of my life. You see when I was at Gandhingar, as a technical director of Indian Plasma Systems Ltd, I used to visit the Institute for Plasma Research at Bhat village nearly every day. The same sentry at the gate would salute me, and without checking my car, let me pass. After months, he stopped me and shyly asked me, if I could explain what on earth was ‘plasma’ and what these 1200 scientists were doing inside the labs?
How can you explain the Tokamak reactor, the plasma generation, the possible use in ultimate thermonucelar fusion for power generation? I gave him a simple lecture for 20 minutes, after which he grinned and said : ‘ Saab jo kuchh bhi hai, yeh sab bahut bhaari maalum hota hai…’
My interpretation of his remark was, he grasped the huge importance of the research, as it promised a possibly cheaper power generation technology for future.
So -it would interest me greatly if someone could write a similar article without the jargon and without the prop of Coltrane, Flanagan, Chambers, Davis,Armstrong or Monk. Some day I will do it myself as I have already drawn up a syllabus for ‘Inside Jazz’ -series of jazz appreciation workshops, shortly to be endorsed by JJA, USA.
Cheerz!
Max
on 10 Oct 2009 at 6:18 am 3.Max Babi said …
P.S. : I met Aparna recently, and was thrilled to know her online Indian vocal teaching classes keep adding surprises to her repertoire of students. Some from Chile, and Germany… some who showed up at Pune to meet her too.
She jammed with an electric bassist last week at her place who had come all the way from Cochin, and this sounds both eclectic and intriguing -she without any depth of knowledge of how jazz works ( she has asked me to do a workshop at her place, just play some unforgettable jazz melodies and show improvisation works there, for the benefit of 15-20 others who have a similar predicament), and he with an original flair for jazz improvisation. It worked.
Am waiting to see more happen in such a unique collaboration.
Warmth
Max