Henry Threadgill has been called one of the most important living jazz composers. Here he is in 2015 at a Washington performance. Perfect for this rainy Saturday morning.
I'm listening in stages, skipping ahead a bit every once in awhile. For most of it, it sounds like they're deliberately not hearing each other, like they're all just aimlessly noodling on their own instrument... Oh, here's a place where two of them and the drummer are playing together but the last two aren't, but soon each one's on his own different planet again... And here it sounds like they're tentatively, jerkily tuning their own instrument and desultorily limbering up before the real performance starts, which never comes. Then when they go quiet for no apparent reason --I guess that's the end of a song-- there's applause, and, at the very end, enthusiastic applause. What is the studio audience hearing that I'm not? Is there something happening that you have to be there in the room to experience properly because the recording can't capture it? Pheromones, or dust cooking of the amplifiers' vacuum tubes? Or is this music (and so much else like it that I've heard on jazz channels and in school movies*) some kind of advanced math that aficionados are clued into, that I'm too ignorant of music to understand? I hope this doesn't sound mean; it's really what I think and wonder. I'd like to enjoy it but I don't know how.
I tried again, another pass through. Same feeling, same impressions, except this time I heard a couple places of random funny squawks and honks and squeals that I missed the first time... it it supposed to be funny there? /The call of the SWAMP. Do-DAAA, do-DAAAA./
*It's like the background of movies they showed in the gym in high school in the 1970s on a rainy day, to teach you to wear your seatbelt, or never take drugs, or to avoid venereal disease, or to learn about a famous painter who threw buckets of paint around and called it art, and there'd be quick cuts to traffic, street signs, buildings on their side... It's also in the episode of Star Trek Enterprise where T'Pol is mind-meld-raped by a Vulcan creep who seems to think he's doing her a favor. "Stop. Stop," she whimpers. He eventually lets go of her head and saunters away, leaving her practically dying with her brain damaged. So, bad associations for me there. Maybe that's the problem.
I'm listening in stages, skipping ahead a bit every once in awhile. For most of it, it sounds like they're deliberately not hearing each other, like they're all just aimlessly noodling on their own instrument... Oh, here's a place where two of them and the drummer are playing together but the last two aren't, but soon each one's on his own different planet again... And here it sounds like they're tentatively, jerkily tuning their own instrument and desultorily limbering up before the real performance starts, which never comes. Then when they go quiet for no apparent reason --I guess that's the end of a song-- there's applause, and, at the very end, enthusiastic applause. What is the studio audience hearing that I'm not? Is there something happening that you have to be there in the room to experience properly because the recording can't capture it? Pheromones, or dust cooking of the amplifiers' vacuum tubes? Or is this music (and so much else like it that I've heard on jazz channels and in school movies*) some kind of advanced math that aficionados are clued into, that I'm too ignorant of music to understand? I hope this doesn't sound mean; it's really what I think and wonder. I'd like to enjoy it but I don't know how.
ReplyDeleteI tried again, another pass through. Same feeling, same impressions, except this time I heard a couple places of random funny squawks and honks and squeals that I missed the first time... it it supposed to be funny there? /The call of the SWAMP. Do-DAAA, do-DAAAA./
*It's like the background of movies they showed in the gym in high school in the 1970s on a rainy day, to teach you to wear your seatbelt, or never take drugs, or to avoid venereal disease, or to learn about a famous painter who threw buckets of paint around and called it art, and there'd be quick cuts to traffic, street signs, buildings on their side... It's also in the episode of Star Trek Enterprise where T'Pol is mind-meld-raped by a Vulcan creep who seems to think he's doing her a favor. "Stop. Stop," she whimpers. He eventually lets go of her head and saunters away, leaving her practically dying with her brain damaged. So, bad associations for me there. Maybe that's the problem.