IntellectualMusician.com

Listening to music calms me right down, especially if my mind is troubled. Music provides a means for aligning the mind with a language that it knows inherently much less needs to learn about technically in order to appreciate it. No matter the effect that music exerts, no matter the type of music, its purpose lies in its power to communicate.

My major focus in writing is creative improvised music. Spontaneity steers this music. Its improvisers know all there is to know about their instruments and can tap their vocabulary for creation as easily as they can say “Hello.” Writing about this kind of music has meant that I incorporate all of what I know into understanding the evolution of what I hear. This happens automatically. What I know is not technical. What I know is what I can see and feel through the expression of the musician. The senses that operate coalesce into a particular kind of consciousness that is probably not unique to me but which supplies the avenue for great satisfaction. Intellectualizing the sum total of the sensual experience and fitting the result into a comprehensive picture which includes consideration of a history of culture within my own view becomes the writing.

Approaching the music means allowing it to confront me. What initially washes over me on a recording or at a concert instigates meeting a series of extraordinary sound pictures. Many would say that these sound pictures are too abstract to plug into and enjoy, that the music is “un-listenable.” The enjoyment is a process that combines gut reaction to witnessing how the musician plays whatever instrument. The listener has a responsibility to accept how the musician has chosen to present his/her art. Emotion and spirit can easily be identified. Improvisers speak (sometimes literally) through their instruments. They are elucidating the intangible energies that make up their performance in a continual striving for enlightenment. They may have rebellious attitudes and embody a culture of non-conformity but their music does not renounce all musical form. It creates the form and the substance simultaneously.

Having heard a great deal over the past dozen years has allowed me to cultivate an idea of how improvised music can unravel. Because form and substance integrate before my very ears, recognition of what will become thematic is a challenge, for sometimes no thematic material appears at all. An entire piece can become the theme. This means that every sound I hear is important towards shaping the whole and I won’t know until the piece is over what has happened. The being-on-your-toes factor weighs in heavily. What catches my attention three-quarters of the way through a performance is usually the apotheosis of the improviser’s or improvising group’s intention. And when that happens, it is thrilling. The fact that my recognition of the climax out of what can seem to be a morass of disjointed sounds implies that I have actually listened, that I have actually been on board with the musicians, that I have sympathized with their groove.

Driving the musicians is the significance of the heart and the intensity of spiritual connection. All of the analysis and interpretation in the world can never dilute the seminal motivations for the music. In the liner notes of alto sax player Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz To Come (one of the landmark recordings for improvised music), he is quoted as saying: “Music is for our feelings. I think jazz should try to express more kinds of feeling than it has up to now (1959)…. I don’t know how (the music) is going to sound before I play it any more than anybody else does, so how can we talk about it before I play it?” His thinking is innocently crystalline and irrefutable. It does not refer specifically to the technical aspects of making the music.

Furthermore, Albert Ayler, a radical musician of the same era, based every note he played on his saxophone (alto and/or tenor) on the incidence of sound. Although Ayler was influenced by many artists from Lester Young to Sidney Bechet to Coleman and Coltrane, God was his Muse. Ayler’s music loosed restraints and transcended all that had preceded it. The influence he had on the musicians who worked with and followed him was immeasurable. In an interview in 1966 with Downbeat about his group, Ayler described the backbone of his music: “…we are the music we play. And our commitment is to peace and the understanding of life. And we are trying to purify the music, to purify ourselves so that we can move ourselves… to higher levels of peace and understanding.” Later on in the interview, in response to a question seeking answers as to how to listen to the group’s music, Albert’s brother, trumpeter Donald Ayler said: “One way not to (listen)… is to focus on the notes…Instead, try to move your imagination towards the sound. It’s a matter of following the sound.”

As a writer, I have to have been so well-acquainted with the creative process that most of how I hear can be described in verbal terms that are familiar to me. Bridging the gap from music to words often requires the use of metaphor stemming from the visual. And then to approximate how emotionally moved I am? That is close to impossible, but I try to do it anyway. I have chosen to step outside of the boundaries imposed sometimes by music criticism because the music warrants and deserves it. Unearthing and exposing the poetry that the creative improvised music burgeons can offer a gift not only to the unseasoned listener but also to the musicians.

© 2007 Lyn Horton

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• Thinking About Recorded Music