The fact that I was grooving on Andrew Hill, coupled with the fact that I decided to check out his Andrew!!! (literally, I got the cd at the library) because I saw that John Gilmore, longtime collaborator of Sun Ra, played on it, makes me a “jazzhole.”
Likewise, the fact that I would say, “Everyone knows Point of Departure cuz Dolphy was on it, but I prefer the stuff Hill did with Sam Rivers,” makes me a “jazzhole.”
Nevertheless, if digging the esoteric masters of the art is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
Image Courtesy of Max Sparber.
Went to see a jazz trio called “Fly” last night: Mark Turner (saxophone), Larry Grenadier (bass), Jeff Ballard ) drums. Their performance reminded me how much I love improvised music played by intuitive and gifted people who know how to spontaneously combine harmonic complexity and dynamic subtlety with a searching and startling lyricism.
Just as we’re taught that a line contains an infinite series of points; music, for it’s part, shows us the infinite divisibility of time. The limits of this division are set, on the one hand, by the frequency of tonal or rhythmic variation attainable by the musicians and, on the other, by the patience, attentiveness, and perceptual acuity of the audience.
Events apparently never exhaust the between of instants, which always allows for ever more vanishingly brief happenings. By contrast, a moment is not a measure of time, but a state of consciousness. Music, like the music I heard that night, ebbs and crashes around this moment of awareness causing us to ask not how soon is now, but how long?
Image Courtesy of overdrive_cz.
