"Well, shall we/ think or listen? Is there a sound addressed/ not wholly to the ear?"
–Williams Carlos Williams, "The Orchestra"
The above is my favorite bit of poetry about music. Williams was
thinking about classical music in "The Orchestra," but the same
thinking applies to "America's classical music," jazz. The answer, of
course, to Williams' question, is we should think and listen.
I say this by way of explanation for why all my yammering about jazz
this week on this blog. Obviously, I'm writing about it because I like
it a lot and my directive as BAP guest blogger was to post "about
anything you like." But then, of course, jazz seems to me to have
several intimate connections and overlaps with poetry, some of which I
thought I might elucidate today.
Listening to jazz, as anyone who does it a lot knows, is an active
process, an act of will. You must actually listen, concentrate,
think. Jazz is music not address wholly to the ear, but also
to the mind (the imagination, the short and long-term memory) and to
the body. At its root, jazz is based on the idea of variations on a
theme the listener knows, either because it's a popular song that
everyone knows (or knew, in the case of many standards), or simply
because the theme was just played for the listener at the beginning of
the tune.
But then, it gets weirder and more interesting than that, and this is
where it seems to me we get into a realm that jazz and poetry share.
Not only is a jazz listener meant to suspend the basic melody and
rhythm of the song being heard in memory, but also all the solos that
unfold in that song, the unfolding of the solo from one moment to the
next, and, further, every other rendition of that song, every
song like it, and, in a way, every other song, period, from the past,
present, and future. While a jazz listener is experiencing the music
he or she is hearing, he or she is also comparing it to other
music, hearing how decision these jazz musicians have made in terms of
melody, rhythm and a number of other factors comment on other
musicians' decisions about other music, how other musicians make
meaning and feeling with their instruments.
Poetry, I would argue, works the same way. When reading a poem, we're
not meant to simply interpret the words the way we would a sentence
spoken aloud in a conversation. We're meant to compare the
words in the poem–taken together and apart–to all other uses of those
words, to the echos those words carry from other speakers. The poem is
a collection of associations pinned together, disguised as a kind of
coherent piece of writing. It's actually much more dynamic than that,
in motion like a jazz tune, changing its meaning and feeling not only
as it unfolds in the poem, but as its words are used in the world
outside the poem. It's big stuff. It's what makes poetry, and music,
come off the page or out of the speaker, as it were.
–
As for an album, may I recommend Paul Motian Trio 2000 + One by
the band of the same name, led by the extraordinary septuagenarian
drummer (and Bill Evans trio alum) Paul Motian, who is one of the
strangest and most original drummers every, thinking of the drums more
as textural, rather than rhythmic, instruments. This is music that's
alternately melodic and lovely and strange and abrasive. I'd say more
but I can't so I won't. Talk to you tomorrow.