Music is presence itself. Playing or listening, each note exists in its own bit of time, and until a note is appreciated and felt, it can't go on to the next note. But link the notes together, and presence may or may not survive the transitions.
I learned a little more about that from Joe Lovano's sheets of sound the other night at SFJazz, where Lovano played tenor with Jack DeJohnette's Spring Quartet. "Sheets of sound" was journalist Ira Gitler's term for John Coltrane's cascading eruptions of hundreds of blistery notes. Coltrane's wails started as harmonic inventions -- overlaying three different chord progressions in a single, dense arpeggio flurry -- and were reinforced by his belief that speed would enhance his quest for God.
For many years I didn't get it. Coltrane sounded cold to me, analytic and cerebral. Where was the heart and soul? Virtuosity for the sake of human accomplishment? I dropped him down the same hole I dug for Pink Floyd. Engineered music. Music for me was an escape from super-rationality, the hell I lived in. Music was a place to feel overt emotion, right?
But I noticed something as Lovano reprised Coltrane's effects. I imagined for once that I was inside the soloist, playing fast and using the heavily rehearsed structures of chords, harmonics, scales, and arpeggios as vehicles for freedom. By playing so much so fast, I felt, Lovano was forced to surrender to the moment completely. He never had breathing space to take control himself. He had to trust that God would fill his horn with breath and move his fingers with music. Surrender.
I can't find any video of the Spring Quartet. Too bad, because the soul resonance that emerged from Lovano and DeJohnette was palpable all night. I'm sure DeJohnette was playing figures at times, but I didn't once notice them. It was as if he was in every note with curiosity and energetic creativity that seemed to float above his drum kit. The two kids in the group, Esperanza Spalding on bass and Leo Genovese on piano, comped and supported the older men as they soared. It was a kick to see Spalding in awe of the music; the one time I saw her fronting her own group it seemed like so much ego and not much else.
Once in a blue moon a band appears to me as something so completely new that everything I heard before seems pale. The mid-career Beatles. The Tony Williams/Wayne Shorter Miles Davis sextet. As the world's body of music progresses through time, it synthesizes and either adds a new form or recombines old forms in newly revealing ways. If a brand new form shows up, it's a revelatory addition -- the halving of the eighth note's speed to form bebop, Miles Davis' modal form, or his fusion form, Buddy Holly's unadulterated rock beat, Cuban beat, the acceptance of chaos in free jazz. Those are exciting shifts, but they're additive and I feel no impulse to diminish what came before. They exist side by side with past forms: swing, blues, gospel, whatever.
So what is it when I hear something that sounds like it is not just adding, but reorganizing things so profoundly that for a moment at least other bands that I've appreciated suddenly seem pale?
Last night at SFJazz singer/pianist Patricia Barber introduced me to the erotic as a fundamental source of creativity, like tantra, more completely than I would have thought possible. At times it was as if she was fucking the piano. Her relationship with her harem of young male accompanists was gobbling up eros and trapping it in an intensely physical music.
This was big eros, encompassing creativity as a singular delight, opening one unexpected universe after another. I'm used to loving small eros -- sexuality -- in music. It's no surprise that she had a Nat Adderley composition in her repertoire. Cannonball and Nat's group was a funky, sexual enterprise. Get up and swing your hips.
Here's Cannonball Adderley's quintet playing Sack O' Woe:
And Hendrix. In last night's encore, guitarist John Kregor was hearing the raw sexual explosion of Hendrix. Sex and music. So what could be pale about Cannonball Adderly or Jimi Hendrix? How did Barber impale them?
While powerful, I think there's a one-dimensionality in Cannonball's or Jimi's sexuality. Cannonball's is the sexuality of dancing, and he knows it, and he's intent on getting that response from the audience. Come on guys and gals! Let's dance. Jimi's is the sexuality of raw, meaty copulation, and he's showing off his manliness. (I get the feeling that Hendrix never said "Let's just cuddle tonight.")
What Barber was doing was far more complex and personal, and hardly needed an audience. S he wasn't showing sex. She was being eros. Big eros. Creativity and bursting universes. The original Greek Eros wasn't a cherubic cupid, but the formidable God who created order out of what had always been chaos. He created. Last night there was sexuality, no doubt. It was so strong that her harem couldn't return her constant, amazed gaze at them while they played. Each of them gave her what she wanted, in spades, but eyes downcast or sideways it was as if they were hanging on for dear life in fear of being overwhelmed. What she was advancing -- her mouth was wide open at times -- was too much for them to grok. She squawked and snorted, and lost herself in her intellect, and emerged in glee and surprise. It was like she was letting go into a stream of creative moments ordering a new universe one after another, uncontrolled by ego.
How did she do it? Her own talents weren't the point. Her voice and piano playing were well-tuned and certainly capable of virtuosity, but it was clear that she had let go of much sense of being in service to virtuosity. What she seemed to care about was using musical forms to embody all music, as a form of creativity, as a way to open her soul spontaneously, moment by moment.
I think it's a generational thing. From at least the Forties, leaders in the jazz idiom have been intently aware of music as a path to enlightenment. They mean to open space to bigger consciousness. But they were held down, I think, by the demands of virtuosity. Coltrane famously thought that virtuosity was the central key to unlock pure creativity. Being brilliant at an instrument required analytic, mind-based study. A jazz musician's first entry into professionalism typically came through virtuosity. They found heart and body only after they had first thoroughly explored mind. Ear training. Scales. Double-tonguing. There's an empty-soul feeling to an immature virtuoso, probably because he or she doesn't have much access yet to heart or body as a source for playing. Some virtuosos never get past the technical. But the point is that mind is overwhelmingly the entry point for virtuosic music.
Barber has a different memory of the beginnings of her fascination with music. Her father was a sax player for Glenn Miller. She remembers touching the horn as he practiced, to feel the vibration move through her. So body might have already been there. And she grew up in a generation when all women of a certain income practice yoga and Oprah promotes Eckhart Tolle. The integration of body, heart and mind as a practice toward enlightenment is everyday, not esoteric.
Isn't that what Barber was engaged in last night?
Here with different accompanists she does a Beatle tune:
So what felt new was her personalization of the body, heart and mind in music. This is the opposite of new age music, which while steeped in the rhetoric of enlightenment often feels like it's holding a mistaken belief that the transcendent is a place that primarily soothes the soul. I like being soothed, but not so much by music. Her band took me to a place that felt her body, heart and mind impress my soul with creative energy, delight, glee, spontaneity, and individual, human consciousness. There was nothing nondual about it, nothing transcendent about it. It was like being with the root of the creative fire.
One kind of sad thing was that the audience last night wasn't the generation that most might welcome it. It was nearly all a bunch of greyhairs like me. But the experience was much closer to jamband music than post-Miles jazz. With a tweak here or there, this band would blow away all the other bands at High Sierra. This is music to dance to.
In fiction writing, a scene typically lasts a half page to a page and a half -- in reading time, 30 to 90 seconds. Even if the setting remains for longer than that, it's broken into sub-scenes -- each a complete figure of conflict, action, and resolution -- that fit the 30-to-90 boundary.
The bugaboo that arises if the scene extends too long most often is defined as the sagging middle. The action isn't active enough. It sags into redundancies or loiters aimlessly.
Music's the same. A pop song might have a verse, a bridge, a chorus, a verse, a middle eight, a verse and a chorus. Six or seven movements in two to four minutes. Each has to stand on its own, within the rise-and-fall arc of the overall song.
So how do jam bands or jazz combos pull off 12-minute excursions that prolong each verse, chorus, or bridge? Not well usually. Often, story-telling sags into vague noodling. But over the weekend, I saw two examples of tight groups adhering to the rules even while expanding well past the four-minute mark.
On Sunday night at SFJazz, bassist Dave Holland led his Prism fusion quartet through six compositions that averaged 12 minutes. I don't know, but I would guess they followed typical 32-bar segmenting, or in some cases doubled 12-bar blues breaks. Think one second per bar, so the idea is to chop things into 32-second or 24-second segments, which fits the low end of the fiction-scene scheme. The first complication that arises in extended pieces is that a 32-bar verse might be repeated twice or three times in a row. Now you're at the high end of a fiction scene, where the sagging middle starts to be prevalent. And there's a further complication in the rules of fusion established forty-plus years ago by Miles Davis: chord changes don't push the story every one to four bars, but can be delayed for eight bars, or 16, or the chord can remain for all 32.
So how did these long, minimalist compositions hold my interest like a 3-minute pop song? They did. I think a key was guitarist Kevin Eubanks' 15-year apprenticeship as the house band leader for the Tonight Show. From 1995 to 2010 Eubanks interrupted a jazz career that had established him as a master of serious jazz with lightning chops and deep composition credits. Twelve-minute songs. But for five nights a week, he zinged out four- or eight- or at most 16-bar flurries of recognizable melodies and flashy pyrotechnics. His improvisational work with Prism was the melodic centerpiece last night, and much of his storytelling urgency seemed to be supported by his capacity for finding rock-star riffs to punctuate his extended stories with mini-stories -- which part was the counterpoint? -- that boosted the tension and helped it rise and fall.
Prism's encore was a relatively brisk seven minutes, but to my mind it might have been two minutes, it felt so economical and simply resolved.
In the clip below, notice at the beginning how Eubanks duets with Holland as if his guitar is a bass, glissing and letting plucked strings extend. Then in the last third, Eubanks adds the world of Jimmy Page and riff blues. Prism was in a fiery, celebratory mood last night, and the piece sounded less abstract than this version. But maybe that was just the intensity of being there live.
The night before, I danced at Brick and Mortar to the rock jam band New Monsoon. Like Eubanks, lead guitarist Jeff Miller can be pyrotechnical and dazzling. Like Eubanks, he keeps his ear to great riff rock that grounds and accentuates his storytelling. And like Eubanks, he finds himself telling a new story every 30 to 90 seconds.
New Monsoon surfaced 15 years ago as eclectics who added tablas, raga harmonics, a didgeridoo, timbales, and Cuban rhythms to the Grateful Dead ancestry that all jam bands descend from. Saturday night, they kept it stripped down to the rock and roll that they were steeped in growing up. They closed their first set with a nearly note-by-note reconstruction of Hendrix's Fire.
Hearing Eubanks hearken Led Zeppelin, it made me think that it was no accident that Hendrix exploded onto the scene in London. The simple, thudding, hormonal riffs in British Blues -- Yardbirds, Bluesbreakers, Stones, Who, Cream, and Hendrix, too -- were their own thing. Charlie Parker reached into his youth and curved himself around I Got Rhythm. When Dave Holland was a kid in England, British Blues was on the radio. No wonder it returns to ground his new music. And it wasn't hard to find the Neil Young and Led Zeppelin and Allman Brothers of their youth in New Monsoon's driving, riff-loving soliloquies.
Here's New Monsoon a few years back, when raga themes served the same grounding purpose.
When a soloist steps forward, the threat machine in my head starts up. I may have a sense of anticipatory thrill, but it shares space in my body with my ever-present platform of dread. More than anything, I dread the repeater -- the solo that settles into what isn't a groove or an exploration, but a repetition of the one thing the soloist is thinking about. Three out of four blues solos get stuck in a repetition. It has something to do with the acceptance of showboating in the blues; when you're playing for the audience, I think, your mind is at work, not your soul.
There is a place for repetition. Jobim's one-note samba, Neil Young's one-note guitar wails, rising choruses in songs like Steven Stills' Love the One You're With. But mostly, repetition indicates a failure of imagination, which means a failure to let go and let something or someone else take charge of the instrument. Whether the performer calls it a muse, or God, or a fugue state, or inspiration, it's a release of thought and it's an ability to perform without effort.
Last night the aged bebop pianist Barry Harris told how his friend and roommate Thelonious Monk taught him his tune My Ideal by playing it all the way through, then having Harris play it all the way through, then Monk, then Harris. "I wish I had recorded it," Harris told the Herbst Theater audience. "We must have played it fifty times." He paused, in the presence of the divine. "It's too bad there's no recording of that day."
What to say about Monk? By stripping chords to their smallest necessary elements and then collapsing those elements into narrow intervals, Monk found a way to trap the silence of God within the gratitude of music. And once he had done that, it became playtime for him. He was a highly repetitive pianist, making tiny subtle changes, and sometimes big abrupt ones, while over and over finding the core, the place where nothingness could emerge, again and again. That's an important kind of repetition, one that rarely involves an audience.
Last night the young Cuban pianist Alfredo Rodriguez showed the same kind of appreciation of silence and repetition. He had been asked to intentionally honor Monk in a three-generation piano show that SFJazz put on for its annual celebration of Monk's birthday. (Jacky Terrasson was the middle generation.) For his centerpiece improvisation, Rodriguez played a simple, tight and dissonant, figure in the middle of the keyboard, hinted at a stride bassline like Monk would, and then explored the central figure over and over. It was intense, sweet, and strong and sent shivers through me. Here's Rodriguez playing a Monk-inspired tune of his own called Cu-bop. It doesn't have the simple repetitive strain, but it's a powerful evocation of Monk:
When I was 15 I saw Monk. He was the warm-up act for Blood, Sweat and Tears at the old D.C. Coliseum, pretty much an airplane hangar. It's hard to know what I actually remember of Monk. I was there for BS&T; I played in a BS&T cover band at school, and presumably I carried a sense of privilege and tribute more than a desire to open my ears to something new. But I have an inkling, a tiny sense of memory, that Monk seemed a marvel, and that his pling-pling attack -- unlike anyone else's (except Chico Marx) in its childlike acceptance of the brightness of hammer on string -- got into me.
In 1978 living in New York City for the first time, I sat on my bed thumbing through the giant telephone book, and something stopped me on a page. I looked, and then I looked twice. There, listed in the phone book, was Thelonious Sphere Monk. He had two telephone numbers and a Harlem address. I guess he was actually living in Jersey at the time, but still, it was so cool to think that Monk had a listed number and that I could just pick up the phone and talk to him.
Here's a video of Monk with Dizzy the same year I saw him at the Coliseum:
I was a freshman in college in Santa Fe in 1972. On a lark we rumbled up to Albuquerque to catch Sha Na Na. An astonishing opening act called Steely Dan limped off the stage, scorned alike by the greasers and ironic hippies. My new college friend Anji grabbed my hand and pulled me under the stage risers. In a minute we were backstage in a circle sharing a bottle of -- catch this -- Jose Cuervo with the glum Fagen and Becker et.al. Skunk Baxter, I think, too. Pretty cool. Until I spoke up and said to Fagen, "Man, you guys are great. You must listen to Traffic." He looked at me like I had just vomited on his foot, or like I was a Sha Na Na fan. We gathered it had been a pretty dispiriting tour. "Traffic?" he sneered. "You kidding? We listen to Sonny Rollins."
I bought Saxophone Colossus. Oh my.
By 1978, Sonny Rollins was my favorite jazz guy. I was then a grad student living in New York City. One night I went to the Beacon Theater to see something called the Milestone Jazzstars, one of those odd things record labels used to do -- putting together a group of their signed musicians who normally didn't play together. It was Sonny Rollins, McCoy Tyner, Ron Carter and Al Foster. Oh my. At the close of In A Sentimental Mood, I felt something wet on my face. I was coated in tears that I hadn't even known I was shedding.
There's a recording of the same program I saw, taped I think at the last concert on the tour, that goes in and out of print. Here's a link: Milestone Jazzstars. It's a masterpiece.
So now it's forty years since Donald Fagen turned Sonny Rollins on to me, and thirty-four since I first saw him live. At 82, he still produces some of the deepest explorations of the soul. I've read that he calls it a search for perfection that never gets there, like a frustrating itch, except one that lasts a lifetime.
Three of the more revelatory concerts I've experienced in the last few years were by octogenarians: Sonny Rollins (I try to see him whenever he's in town, like tonight; it's always worth it), Ornette Coleman (likewise), and Ravi Shankar (likewise). Four if you include Joao Gilberto, who is now 81, but was in his late 70s when I saw him. Quietest concert ever. His voice was a whisper, his guitar a breath. A very ornate breath. They all had the air that performing is something spiritual, and fun, and not a pursuit of more glory. They have plenty of that. Shankar was 89. I swear that his hands and mind moved at the peak of his powers. Usually there's something different, slightly diminished as musicians near the end. By the first time I saw Dizzy he was in his 60s and his timbre was less bright. (Ha! About as important as a few specks of dust on a Leonardo.) But I have no doubt that had I seen Shankar in his 40s, it would have been no more or less spectacular than what I heard from him at 89.
I wonder whether we would have had Miles Davis' genius if it weren't for Dizzy Gillespie? I don't mean in terms of influence. Exactly the opposite. Sometimes I imagine that it was Dizzy's extraordinary chops -- speed, intonation, sense of time, exuberance -- that forced Miles down a different path. Why compete with the virtuoso on his own terms?
Randy Brecker got me started on this with his Brecker Brothers Reunion Band on Friday night. The marks of Dizzy were all over him, from the exuberant joy that spilled out of brassy runs to the self-mocking elegance of his comments between songs. I had seen Brecker last year as a sideman for the great pianist Kenny Werner, and was beyond disappointed by him. He just didn't seem to be there. Always give a master musician a second chance!
Great band, especially ex-Miles Davis sideman Mike Stern on guitar, and control king Dave Weckl on drums. Stern plays with John McLaughlin's speed, but sentimentally. Weckl seems to channel tiny amounts of energy into huge, crashing elaborations, like it just takes concentration and not muscle. And because Sonny Rollins was in town, Brecker got his conga player Sammy Figueroa on stage, which gave the band a Dizzy-like Afro-Cuban edge.
Enough of the review. Great band, beautiful funk-drenched jazz, everyone cooking and the hall filling with joy.
I hope that with its new building, SFJazz won't have much need for Herbst Theatre anymore. It and 142 Throckmorton are the Bay Area's two high-school-gym echo chambers that masquerade as music venues.
The next night, a band that couldn't have been more similar and more different came on stage. This was a reunion band of Miles Davis sidemen from the '80s and '90s, called Miles Smiles. Same lineup -- trumpet, sax, keyboard, guitar, bass, drums -- and same era and genre -- fast, funk-based fusion.
And there the similarities ended. Where the Brecker band's sound is built on soloists, Miles Smiles is built on the mysteries of collective improvisation. Isn't that what's different about what Miles brought to music? That he discovered a path to the transcendent that was based on the musicians having just enough structure, and not so much that it would close the door on finding their way, together, to truth. Miles' music is head music, as if it was cerebral, but it moves right past thought and emotion, leaving them behind to find something more primal. Truth is complex and paradoxical. This kind of band is willing to look at everything that's there at once. Wallace Roney can be glissing along as if his truth on the trumpet is slick with honey, and at the same time, deeply appreciating what Roney is seeing, there's Ford comping with a squawk or some other rude utterance, while Omar Hakim joyfully fills the room with Usain Bolt's heartbeat, all of it at once and all of it part of something big.
Robben Ford isn't a McLaughlin type, and his blues-based soloing took getting used to. Where did it fit into the dissonant mystery that was being explored? It made me wonder whether Davis brought McLaughlin in as a memory of the fast trumpet voice of Dizzy. Mike Stern blended his guitar the night before with Randy Brecker's trumpet as if they both were playing the same lines on the same instrument at different times.
Joey DeFrancesco on B-3 with Miles Smiles was a trip. He's such a purist, so used to bifurcating his mind so that his left hand plays the bassline that, in a band with a bass player, he let his left hand go limp and produced his lush, complex, rising-gospel breakouts with just his right hand.
Two nights, two magnificent post-Tony Williams drummers. Why is rock and roll filled with such lame drumming? It wasn't always the case. Ringo, Charlie Watts, Keith Moon, Mitch Mitchell, Jim Keltner, Jim Gordon ... and then? Most of them seem to learn only so much, and then stop and play that little bit over and over and over. Why? More can be learned, and mixing up time and rhythm is part of the reality we live in, so why do we let in drummers who have stopped exploring and drag down most of the bands worth listening to?
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.
