Muse-ic

Ended up in another rant today about the "Before the Music Dies" (B4MD) documentary. I seem to rant about this alot. Had a number of good running rants with Marty over lunch on Monday about the DVD. And had a good one today talking about how we're mortgaged the soul of our nation for the sake of quarterly earnings & shareholder profits...

...but yeah, suffice it to say that today was a day to thing about music, among other things.... thinking about the power of 'voice', of how you never know if one person could be the messenger for a generation, about how essential that could make one person's words or song... and yet, how God seems to layer His 'voice' & sends multiple prophets usually... though there is still this dynamic of where if one voice fails, God'll raise up another, but the message must still be told, sung, whispered, shouted...

...maybe one voice can't change a generation, but yet there are these songs that somehow become part of our collective conscious/unconscious in society & so maybe one song, one word, one voice can impact a culture for at least a moment of time in history...

... was hunting around on the net for where to pick up more Kathleen Edwards CD's. I've fallen in love (well, in a manner of speaking) with the album 'Failer' & was looking to hear more & found that Kathleen has another album out there. While following the links from her website to the 'Rounderstore.com' music website, I came across an artist listing for the Branford Marsalis quartet - another name from the B4MD video.

I've been quoting Branford a number of times already in a number of B4MD rants. One point he makes that echoes with me is that people usually won't 'get' the new music. We're all used to listening to what we like & so the truly new, truly innovative music is usually met with a certain level of apathy or disdain. The new stuff grows on us eventually & eventually we realize it's true greatness. Artist after artist has met with this, that their initial works are completely misunderstood & eventually people somehow 'get' it - likely at around the same time the artist is thinking about giving up 'cause no one understands.

But I think this is true of everything, not just music. Christianity is plagued with this, as is the rest of society. We usually crucify the 'new' stuff & then about 5 years later, for better or worse, totally embrace it. We're just about 10 years behind in our embracing of what the rest of society has already embraced.

Anyhow, I was mesmerized by the write ups on his disks & promptly ordered his "Braggtown" disk along with Kathleen's disks. But it was the write up on his record 'Eternal' that really caught my eye:

"Branford Marsalis knew that his quartet had achieved a new level of eloquence when two listeners told him on separate occasions that a ballad by the band had made them cry. "I had rarely heard that said about jazz before," says the acclaimed saxophonist, "and the comment made me realize that the quartet and I were achieving emotional development as musicians." The revelation led to Eternal, the September 2004 collection of original and classic ballads that realizes Branford's goal of "aiming for what Billie Holiday could do, which was to get to the emotions of each song." "

This has left me pondering for the rest of the day. I have to admit that I usually don't 'get' jazz. This, I know, automatically disqualifies me from being an audiophile... I feel bad about this. Lots of musical friends that I really admire love jazz, it's a part of their lives & they seem to 'get' it (if jazz can be 'gotten')... But yeah, so much of jazz is a mystery to me. I recently picked up a Stan Getz & a Chris Botti album on the recommendations of Jim Wilson. Both are fantastic albums, but they don't grip me, they haven't moved me... Maybe it's just that I haven't been paying attention. I listened to the Getz album while painting G.I. Joes & then later at work. Both cases may have left me distracted from treating it as more than background music (tonight while painting I was sort of only half way hearing all the screeching/ yelling/ screaming of Alexisonfire, so yeah, guess I can tune out anything while painting).

But, as Branford's note says, I don't think I've ever cried at jazz.... I've listened to some of the greats: John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis - all of them I enjoyed, but no tears....

...and this sort of says something (don't know what yet) 'cause i cry at everything....

... so wandered down to the Urban Sound Exchange & walked out of there with an Alexisonfire, Danko Jones & Branford Marsalis album (try to pin that to a demographic or marketing strategy!!) . They has a number of Branford's CDs. Looks like he's been around doing his thing for quite some time now (well, at least 15 years - that's the crazy thing about jazz - it's not like you get good artist recognition in the mainstream media ('cept for maybe Norah Jones- though I'm not sure if she counts, likely does, I just don't know)

Being there got me thinking about the progression of our music tastes over time. We seem to go through phases of what we love for music as we get older. It made me wonder if maybe all of us progress to loving jazz by the end of our lives.... made me wonder if maybe jazz is this elevated state of consciousness that we arrive at after years to wandering through the blues & rock & country & hiphop...

..got to thinking of my own musical journey & the soundtrack of my life and how much following the trail of CDs in my life would mirror the trail that my heart journey has brought me on... I thought about trying to chronicle that, but realized it would take days & would make my post painfully longer than the already painfully long length that they're usually at. But yeah, musically, my life has moved from the hymns to flirting with rock& roll & 'secular' music in my teens, to finally owning my first album, Rich Mullins, in my early 20's. Then it moved into various other Contemporary Christian Music, while mostly listening to Rich's stories. Then to indie Christian music, opened up by the world of the web & sites like Grassrootsmusic & PasteMusic which introduced me to rich lyricists like Bill Mallonee and Don & Lori Chaffer. And from there, the Christian artists introduced me to the 'spiritual' secular artists. U2, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Bruce Cockburn... and it's just kept going from there. This so mirrors the story of my life from being rooted in the church & the foundations of deep theology to seeing a world with temptations & brokeness & yet beauty & something good in it,too to moving into a life of Christian service & ministry & being 'in the church', to slowly more & more being expanded to see the greater world around & recognize that The Voice, the Living Word, speaks for all to hear & whispers through even the most broken & wretched vessels... (often more so in the 'pure' & polished ones)....

And I know that for most of my generation & the generations following that we can trace our growth as people by the changes in our music. But then again, I realized that this was likely true of my parent's generation & even while they didn't listen to the 'secular' music out there, Artists like the Beatles, Elvis, Johnny Cash, the music these people created impacted even the pseudo-sheltered world of my parents living in small town christendom.

And I wonder if maybe every human in every culture has a soundtrack to their lives. In tribal cultures, it is the songs that tell the stories of the tribe. History & knowledge are stored in music & rhyme. Children are sung to sleep by lullaby. Lovers sing to each other. Songs for drunken revelry abound. Nations have anthems, sports teams have songs. Warriors sing songs to prepare for battle or to sing of victory & mourn defeat... Asaph whispers some prophetic psalm asking "how can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?"... somehow music, songs, are woven into the fabric of our everyday & it is this music in some ways which charts, or at least bears witness to, the events of our lives....Sometimes shaping, sometime reflecting how we are being changed, or how we are growing to be fully oursleves....

... so bailed on the community house people tonight (sorry) & declined the lovely offer to go for chinese food. I'd sort of planned for a quiet night at home to be able to cook & watch 24 & maybe paint & write some.... Partly just wanted a quiet night, partly wanted to cook to have leftovers for the week ahead, partly just wanted the night at home just because.... but anyhow, started my evening my making spaghetti, sipping on a glass or red wine & letting the notes of Branford's "Requiem" spill over me. Trying to absorb the music rather than try to understand it...

...Jazz is this strange kind of music (& to all the true Jazz lovers out there, please forgive me as I try to describe what Jazz 'feels' like to me. I mean no disrespect, but am just fumbling towards understanding...) In so many other types of music, the song is the key thing. There are notes to be played that follow a progression, that communicate a thought or a range of emotion. All the instruments, no matter how layered & textured the music is, they all point to that one thing & sort of speak to that one voice, the one story, or parable, that the song is communicating....

Jazz does not feel like this, or at least not the instrumental jazz that I often hear & heard tonight. Jazz somehow pulls together a collective of masters, experts at their own instrument & puts them together in this loose structure called a 'band' & the instruments/players then dynamically collaborate with each other. If there are notes to follow, some overarching direction that they are taking, it's imperceptible - the music seems to wander like my train of thought, it moves in & out, sometimes loud, sometimes soft, sometimes one instrument emerges, to become the lead or the solo, but other moments it's a cacophony of noise, instruments playing on top of each other, sometimes all in different timing & melody... It is this odd, odd place, where somehow the musicians seem to be solely individuals playing, but yet somehow they are one & singing one song, though the song breaks, defies, the rules of what a song should be. Any stories told here, must be felt, as your heart is caught by one instrument, lifted to blazing heights by one solo string of notes & then abandoned to come crashing down onto the next stream of sounds...

Sometimes I think that the solos in jazz are just people showing off who can move their fingers the fastest... like some strange competition to determine who can shove as many notes as possible into a minute of time... Tonight though, the flurry of notes sounded more like ecstatic utterances, like babbling in tongues, the person somehow caught by God & unstoppably declaring mysteries & revelations that only the heart can hear....

Maybe it is hard to cry at jazz because it is such happy music... or well, happy is the wrong term. In jazz it feels more like the musician is caught up... captured & captivated by the complete giving of themselves to the music & the moment. For the collaboration to be great, you must give yourself to the moment, listen to the other players around you & let their song inspire yours & you build off of each other until the point of where you are racing to keep up with the pace of what you are creating/what is creating you... the music comes faster than you can get the notes out & it is a struggle to keep up... This is a 'holy' (or perhaps rather 'wholly') place of where you must be fully present, fully surrendered & there is perhaps no sadness in that. Sadness may come from the exhaustion at the end of the night, but in the moment, there is only the song, only the music, only the next notes - the player becomes the instrument & breath from somewhere beyond begins to blow on the player, coaxing & caressing them to bend & move & sing to a tune greater than themselves...

...this results in an 'excellence' in jazz - a place of where people become disciples of the creative process & have to dedicate themselves to being the best they can be & this shines in the music of the great jazz masters...

At the end of the day, I was left to wonder if all we'll sing in heaven is Jazz.... Jazz is the melody sung by the slaves as they gained their freedom & in heaven there will not be a one of us who will not sing the song of the redeemed. All of us have been slaves here on planet & none of us enters heaven out of our own merit. We call come as slaves liberated by the true emancipator. In heaven, we trade in faith & hope for certainty & seeing & we hang on to love... Maybe we trade in our blues for joy, the anger of our punk for peace, maybe in seeing we are left with only music with no rules, music where we all get to play our part & while somehow it sounds like we're singing different songs we all sing that one song of the slaves that are freed, celebrating the beloved who has set them free...

..or as Brandford says, maybe the music of heaven is something we've never heard yet. & we may not even like it at first, but I'm sure we'll get used to it.....