What an aimlessly self-indulgent load. We'll try again tomorrow.
As we near 4,000 footnotes on our implicit theory of everything, perhaps it’s an appropriate time to reassess and determine if we’ve gotten any closer to it.
I suppose this is like asking a musician at the end of his career, How did it go? Did you get any closer to Music? "Yeah, there was this one time in Vancouver when the band almost touched it, but then we fell back down to the bandstand."
A reminder of Theolonious Monk’s 25 tips for musicians, for example, #10 Let’s lift the band stand!!, #15 What you don’t play can be more important than what you do, #17 A note can be small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination, and #24 A genius is the one most like himself.
But the real answer is that the reaching is the playing (and vice versa), at least for a genuine artist who is most like himself, as opposed to the mere entertainer who is like most anyone else.
That may sound trite, but it’s weirder than you might think, because a musician will know when he’s reached the goal, but how? It’s not a matter of mere execution or avoiding mistakes. Rather, some sort of meeting takes place in the vertical space where music is created and perceived.
It reminds me of something Schuon says, that beauty is an adequation. Obviously, this is antithetical to the postmodern view that it is solely a matter of subjectivity, opinion, and taste. In fact, there can be no such thing as good or bad taste, in case you were wondering about our culture’s unending celebration of tastelessness.
I’m also reminded of Keith Jarrett, who can be a bit pretentious, but then again, he’s earned it. He says the master musician
goes onto the stage hoping to have a rendezvous with music. He knows the music is there (it always is), but this meeting depends not only on knowledge but openness.
There's no doubt that it's a spiritual practice, but you can't find what you're not looking for:
It [music] must be let in, recognized, and revealed to the listener, the first of whom is the musician himself.
The structure -- the basic form of the composition -- only
provides a layer of substance above or beyond which the player intends to go. It's also possible to do this by going deeper into the material.
While looking for that quote I also found this from an old post on the African Orthodox Church of St. John Coltrane:
Our primary mission at the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church is to bring souls to Christ; to know sound as the preexisting wisdom of God, and to understand the divine nature of our patron saint in terms of his ascension as a high soul into one-ness with God through sound. In our praises we too seek such a relationship with God. We have come to understand John Coltrane in terms of his sound and as sound in meditative union with God.
No doubt wacky, but it sure beats the Church of Ghostface Killah.
Everything is in reality like a play of alternations between what is determined in advance -- starting from principles -- and what is incalculable and in some way unforeseeable (syncopation mine).
For "principles" substitute chordal structure, and for "incalculable and unforeseeable" say improvisation, AKA spontaneous composition, and here we are: jazz blogging. Except I'm not a credentialed philosopher, a trained theologian, or a certified writer. Well what is this then? Punk metaphysics?
Hmm. Not bad. At least in the early stage of punk, when it was all about heart and simplicity, not rebellion and fashion. Which only lasted about six months.
However, that combination of love and simplicity is always at work somewhere in the musical world. It motivates the whole genre of garage rock, the ranks of which are filled with basically untalented groups that could nevertheless record one perfect tune, but never expand it into a whole career.
These primitive peoples played with a naive enthusiasm. But as Schuon says,
If to be naïve is to be direct and spontaneous, to know nothing of dissimulation and subterfuge and also no doubt nothing of certain experiences, then unmodernized peoples certainly possess -- or possessed -- that kind of naïvety...
Moreover,
there is naïvety everywhere and there always has been, and man cannot escape from it, unless he can surpass his humanity….
[What matters is] the fact that the sage or the saint has an inward access to concrete Truth; the most unpretentious formulation -- doubtless the most “childish” in some people’s eyes -- can be the threshold of a Knowledge as complete and profound as knowledge can be.
If the Bible is naïve, it is an honor to be naïve. If the philosophies that deny the Spirit are intelligent, there is no such thing as intelligence. A humble belief in a Paradise situated among the clouds has at least a background of inalienable Truth, but it has also and above all the background of a merciful reality in which is no deceit, and that is something beyond price.
I'll take three chords and the truth over mere virtuosity in 17/14 time.
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