Being in relationship

In the opening bars of La Mer the other night at the San Francisco Symphony my mind pushed the alarm button. Uh-oh, it said, someone lagged in an entrance. I heard a stutter where my mind sought a bang. My memory pulled up a recent disastrous performance by another orchestra that was marked by poorly shared entrances that stranded the sound in a murky swamp. But it turned out that the flaw at the beginning of the Debussy was a gift. The fear mechanism in my mind was now sharply attuned to the SFS's entrances and attacks. And I was rewarded with a visceral appreciation for conductor Michael Tilson Thomas's genius.

For me, it all goes back to rock and roll drumming. Most rock drummers lag the beat. It's a horrible thing. The stick or pedal hits the skin an instant too late. It's the plodding downfall of many bands. I wish it would stop. Having grown up mostly on rock and roll, my mind tunes to it. I was talking about it last night to a 100-year-old friend of mine who spent her working life as a concert cellist. She found it curious and even amusing that I focused so much on the precision of attack that it could quickly ruin a concert for me. It surely has reached the point of exaggerated importance to me, distorting my view as profoundly as the survival stories I invented as a kid continue to distort my relationships with people fifty years later.

But focusing on a distortion, letting it come to full consciousness and mind, can be a beautiful portal to things of truth, joy, bliss, consciousness and real presence. It's in knowing the suffering that we can come into contact with grace. And that's not just true in the ego conflicts of relationship. It can be true in watching live music.

Sitting above and behind the orchestra, looking down at the musicians as they went through the human motions of their job, watching Tilson Thomas emote and communicate with them, they became to me individuals in relationship to each other. Suddenly I heard myself marveling at how the percussionists pounded in absolute unison with the strings and brass and harps and woodwinds, and the beauty of that precision became a thing in itself. It was transformed into absolute beauty itself. There was nothing mechanical about the precision. These were individual human beings, with hearts and histories, and they weren't leaving those behind as they joined together. I divide the way of music sometimes into the Ellington band and the Basie band. The Ellington band is a bunch of individual geniuses who mainly solo and then meet up every once in a while to exuberantly expand on the solo. The Basie band is a swinging machine, the parts relatively unimportant to the overall groove, the feeling of unison. Tilson Thomas's orchestra was Ellington and Basie, joined.

La Mer is a standard for the SFS, and to a lesser orchestra could be called a warhorse. But the other night, the musicians' vast experience with the notes paid off. I couldn't find a video of the SFS playing it. The best I could find is a Berlin Philharmonic performance, which doesn't exhibit the precision I saw the other night. Still, you can get the picture of what it might be like for the musicians to reach the climax of the last movement and find themselves in a single loving embrace.

Why do drummers so often lag the beat? Strings don't. Woodwinds don't. Brass do sometimes, especially trumpets. I started to think it has to do with the kinetics of percussion and brass. It's worst in bombastic passages where for percussionists the attack doesn't start in the wrist but in the forearm. Pretend you're hitting a bass drum. The forearm tenses and releases before the wrist. The mind might feel it has finished the job with the release of tension in the forearm. Likewise with brass. Maybe the mind is finished when the tongue hits the palate, before the air carrying the note has made its way through the tubes and out the bell. I don't know. Just a guess.

My favorite drummers, many of them in jazz, seem to anticipate the beat all the time, and yet the band doesn't speed up. Jazz soloists notoriously listen to the bass to keep time rather than the drums. Maybe that's how they get around the fact that the drummer is playing just a little ahead of them. Here's a clip of four terrific jazz drummers accompanying a tap solo. Notice how they're always a little ahead of her, and yet she keeps perfect time. She knows drumming. They're playing Cute by Neal Hefti, which was one of my mom's favorite songs.

And here's my favorite drum piece of all time. At the end of the Bangladesh concert in 1971, everyone got on stage for the encore. Usually an all-star encore is a musical wasteland, muddy, meandering, and devoid of authentic energy and meaning. But Jim Keltner singlehandedly drives a momentous groove that stays ahead of the band and forces the music into ecstasy. Ringo's helping out. The video doesn't do it justice. On the soundtrack it's a juggernaut.

For the beauty of the earth

The divine can express itself by implication. Not reacting, not being triggered into judgment: these are ways to be present, too. They're oddly noticed in retrospect; they don't shout out "presence" while they're happening. When listening to music, this is the feeling I get when everything is played seamlessly and at the same time with little need for emotion. The notes themselves are enough, like when the sun on my face and sand in my toes are good enough, or a ham on rye, or walking past my neighbors' houses.

Andras Schiff has the attitude to find the divine in the everyday and ordinary. As a conductor he is courtly and pulls seamlessness out of the orchestra. As a pianist he is inside the geometry and plain sense of Bach. I didn't lose myself in emotion last night at the San Francisco Symphony. I lost myself in an appreciation of the orderliness of life.

Sometimes I think that since Blood on the Tracks, Dylan's love songs have been dissecting a single past love over and over, more delicately and narrowly as he descends deeper into it. Bach is like that for me. It's as if he found a single leaf, and started looking at the perfect geometry in its structure and near-infinite variability in that geometry as it fractaled under a microscope, and he transcribed the ways of the leaf in one composition after another.

Here's part of one of the pieces Schiff played last night, in a recording with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra:

Music is my primary companion now. I'm uneasy about that, but getting used to it. Orchestral music allows me to feel the humanity of dozens of players finding agreement on what is true, what is now, what is present. Sitting in the cheap seats overlooking the orchestra from behind, I have a beautiful window into the players' intense work. The Rolling Stones wrote a simple tune of gratitude called We Love You. I feel that love from the orchestra. I saw Furthur play it once; here's a recording of another time they played it:

Slow-cooked soul food

If time is a human invention, which I think (and feel) is true, then why does slower or faster matter in terms of feeling the divine? Sure, some musicians like Coltrane felt faster and faster might get them there. But sacred music tends to be slower and simpler. Think hymns.

Witnessing Bartok's 3rd Piano Concerto today, I fell into an expansive series of moments at the outset of the second movement, which is not-coincidentally tempo-marked adagio religioso. In the clip below it starts around the eighth minute. The part I'm talking about starts there and lasts two minutes or so. It seemed like much more during the concert.

No matter where you are in music, if you're truly in it, as a player or listener, you are nowhere other than that moment. In hymns like this, the moment is allowed to persist long enough to be explored. And there's no concern about the dissonance or consonance of the next moment. That's the oddest part. Yes, slow movements have melodies that are built like song melodies. But at times, like in the Bartok selection, I have the experience of total surprise with each change. I've settled in, explored, maybe discovered something, maybe joined with something, and then it changes and the feeling starts all over again, only different.

Slow can approximate timelessness, I guess, in a way that fast doesn't. I can be transported by fast, and I can be swallowed by it, and I can feel joy and divinity. With slow, in addition I have no purpose or direction.

The performance was by the San Francisco Symphony under guest director Vasily Petrenko. The first piece, also deeply spiritual, didn't work so well, and I think that's because Petrenko is too human and driven to grok Arvo Part. He conducted Fratres, a famously simple composition, with a lot of fierce emotion, as if its subtle tensions were a personal manifesto. I just don't think that's what's going on in the piece. It's about an orchestra holding moments and moods, and that was what I didn't hear. I heard it in the Bartok in spades, so much so that the virtuosity of the fast, technically demanding last movement was completely lost on me. I was still stuck in the slow moments of the second movement.

Boy I love live music. The second half of the show was Respighi's Fountains of Rome and Pines of Rome. Not the deepest stuff, but exuberant and beautifully delivered by Petrenko and the symphony. Petrenko's a young guy, and that means he can be in full command of breathless, fast, brassy, complex charts. All he has to do is project himself! And then, in the midst of this Disney stuff, principal clarinet Carey Bell delivered repeated egoless, sensitive, textured and exquisite solos, one after another. It was like I had never heard a clarinet before.

I can't find any video of Carey Bell, so here's a nice recording of Fratres: