Hopeless

I have a rule: There's always something worthwhile happening on stage. If I'm stuck seeing the meretricious Eagles, I can find joy in Joe Walsh's self-deconstruction. Even Michael McDonald on solo piano got me going with his upper range. (Those were both corporate events that I felt compelled to attend.) There's always something worth listening to on stage. There is nothing logical or right about the expression "the exception that proves the rule," but if there were, it would be Esperanza Spalding.

No question she is a brilliantly trained musician, and her voice can do lots of things. She can hire great backing musicians, and she has ambitious tastes. She is charming, too. And yet it was peculiarly difficult to find a heart to her show the other night. I think part of it is the Berklee background; what once was a secret school for eccentrics who wanted to live in jazz instead of rock now is a factory that produces technically brilliant, commercially available studio musicians. She puts on a formulaic show that leaves little opening for mistake, which also means little opening for risk, which also means little opening for the serendipity, the stream of consciousness, the leap of faith that can reach the divine.

The other problem with jazz like hers -- the updated Maynard Ferguson school -- is that funk drumming restricts emotional expression. It has its place, but when a band is rooted in funk it is not rooted in demanding improvisation. And what's jazz without demanding improvisation? Not pyrotechnically demanding, but emotionally demanding. Touching souls. The problem with the rock or funk beat is that it is relentless and quite orderly, and the emotions of the heart are not so much. One of the virtues of the swing beat is its ability to teach musicians how to stretch time. That isn't a dotted eighth and sixteenth note. It's two eighth notes, only one is a little longer and the other a little shorter. How much stretch is up to the band, and can vary within a single song. For Brazilian musicians, the samba works much the same way. Once musicians get used to that flexibility, they learn to stretch not just notes in the meter, but the very meter itself. Syncopation and hesitation work hand in hand. And what is hesitation but doubt -- doubt about what has just been said, about what comes next, about whether to linger or go on? The rock beat doesn't doubt. It drives.

Yes, she can sing like Flora Purim. Technically. But when Flora Purim sings to me and stretches time and hesitates and doubts, universes open.

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