Let's Talk Jazz

Everybody has their own hypothetical example of music. If you have heard a kind of music enough you can imagine clearly in your own mind a section of that music. If I say "polka" most people are thinking that umpa lumpa sounding 1-2 time beat in fast forward. . .

So imagine some jazz. Not big band or swing. Nobody is dancing to this. This is a music that changes where you are and who you are. Sure, you walk into the club that night with a set identity. There are rules in the universe that are followed and expected. With those rules, you can make predictions whether you know it or not. Sometimes those predictions are expectations.

Like you can expect to walk into the jazz club and hear people softly talking. No exact words exchanged but a cloud of language hangs in the room as subtle as the smoke. It blends into the dark ceiling and molds against the fabric on the walls almost enough to see it and even though you can't, you get the impression that every word is trapped in this room eternally. This sanctuary is lit mostly by candles and table lights. On the walls are 20 watt bulbs, just bright enough to give everyone a soft silhouette and show the folds and creases of the cloth.

You find yourself seated and concentrated on the subtle notion of an expectation. While the mist of language has not left this place, the air becomes crisp and clear as the musicians ready themselves for this journey. It is a quartet. You can't seem to find where they started. Certainly you only now hear this music but it feels more like they are just amplifying or perhaps intensifying what was already there. You let go of everything but the frequencies streaming into you ear.

The bass player's hands climb up and down the strings with ease. He appears almost robotic, though his fingers move with such grace you would think they were swaying in the wind. The sound of the bass smoothly reverberates within the room. You can feel it in your stomach and you can feel it in your soul. It vibrates everything it touches.

On his right, sits the drums and behind the drums, the drummer. He's playing his snare with brushes. He's painting his sound better than Vincent Van Gogh and he's blending into the rest of the sound where the ocean meets the sky. When you listen closely enough you can hear each metal hair of the brush strike the skin of the drum; a pebble falling into water.

Further off to the right, but further forward sits a piano. Its flipped lid reflects the entire room back on itself. The piano player's arms swing like a pendulum back and forth across the piano in a rhythm just constant enough to keep up with his fingers, who jump to and from the keys like a frog on a lily pad. Each finger that lands magically blankets its impact and somehow stays afloat long enough to jump to the next. The result is intentionally constructed chords that captain the mood without any orders at all.

Across from the piano stands the trumpet. He stands tall and still like a statue until the trumpet reaches his lips. Suddenly a sound emerges from his horn. Accelerating out of an almost endless slow motion that was as controlled and intentional as a horse and jockey leaving the gate; entirely distinct entities becoming unified. The trumpeter's sounds bond the four instruments together. None of them are leading or trailing, but threading and intertwining like rope.

This very rope that started as an infinitely small bind, grows endless in your presence. It slowly wraps and warps. But it is just a single thread of rope that is the infinite exponential or infinity itself. It has no center and no edge. These ropes crest into never-ending peaks and trough into limitless valleys. This is the landscape of the universe; waves, rhythms, patterns. Jazz taps into a microcosm of that vastness and tugs and pulls at a few of those tiny fibers that twist into the threads that wind into the strings that wrap into the ropes that hold the fabric and declare order out of this epically unbound chaos.