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If I have to explain this to you, you probably wouldn't understand anyway.  Get down with it!

On Synesthesia

Michel Paul Guy de Chabanon (1730-1792) was a French violinist, composer, and writer on music theory and literature.  His experience as both a writer and a musician gave him a unique viewpoint on the links between music and language and in developing a philosophy of music.  As explained by Claude Levi-Strauss, Chabanon claimed that although the various forms of art engage each perceptional sense separately from the others, the mind uses the artistic experience of one sense to engage the others.  At its highest level, art encourages and enables this cross-sensual perception.

Chabanon was apparently also interested in spiders and played the violin for them to see what kind of music they liked.  He noted that "the spider, sitting at the center of its web, corresponds with all its threads, living, as it were, in each of them; and (if, like our senses, the threads were animate) the spider would be able to transmit to each of the threads the perception given to it by all the others."

A similar image, Indra's net, describes the interconnectedness of all phenomena. As explained by Timothy Brook, "When Indra fashioned the world, he made it as a web, and at every knot in the web is tied a pearl. Everything that exists, or has ever existed, every idea that can be thought about, every datum that is true—every dharma, in the language of Indian philosophy—is a pearl in Indra's net. Not only is every pearl tied to every other pearl by virtue of the web on which they hang, but on the surface of every pearl is reflected every other jewel on the net. Everything that exists in Indra's web implies all else that exists."

Setting aside for now the lyrics in songs, music consists of sounds but not words, and the sounds are not explicit representations of other things.  A C-sharp note does not carry any significant meaning separate from, say, D-flat.  Each sound is more or less empty and has neither its own meaning nor character.  Musical sounds do not have a precise, agreed-upon vocabulary the way words and writing do, and thus cannot explicitly articulate an idea or describe a scene.

No other art works this way.  To Chabanon, a poem, a painting, or a piece of sculpture were all more or less depictions of other things and conveyed some level of meaning.  Chabanon lived before the age of impressionism and abstract art, so to him all painting functioned as photography does now.

Music does not faithfully reproduce the natural world the way photography or a natural sound recording does.  Chabanon wondered why the charms of music did not require it to have to imitate our sense impressions in the way that poetry, painting, or sculpture were required to provide faithful images. "If music," he asked, "is not an imitation of nature, then what is it?"

To answer his question, he reasoned that the ear found its own innate pleasures, which could be enjoyed independently of the other senses.  Music acts on a sensual level and specifically on the sense of hearing alone, but if it appears to have meaning for the listener, it must be because the mind becomes involved.  Unlike words, sounds have no intrinsic meaning, but the mind "seeks to establish relations or analogies with different objects, and with various impressions produced by nature."  The slightest analogies, the weakest relations are sufficient for the mind to find an corollary. In this way, the mind takes the spider-web thread of hearing to inform the threads of thought, memory, and the other senses.

Knowing that the mind creates analogies and corollaries, composers create multi-sensual impressions using elements of rhythm and tonal scale.  For example, waves on the sea can be evoked not by trying to produce the sound of the ocean the way a tape recorder might but by melodies that rise and fall in roughly the same rhythm as swells in the ocean, and it's the mind of the listener that associates the rise and fall of the music, that slightest analogy and weakest relation, with the rise and fall of the sea. From there, it doesn't take much imagination to feel the sun on one's skin, smell an ocean breeze, and visualize surfers bobbing up and down on their boards waiting for the next set of waves.  That formula has served Brian Wilson well.

Chabanon noted that a weak, continuous oscillation of two notes could render the murmuring of a brook; a cascade of rising or falling notes express a clap of thunder, a flash of lightning, or a gust of wind; numerous basses playing in unison and rolling the melody evoke the sea; and so on. Prokofiev's Peter And The Wolf presents a veritable catalogue of these effects, as does Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite.

Musical impressions can go far beyond mere representations of nature.  Music can capture emotional states ranging from joy to rage, from loneliness to ecstasy.  Modern musicians convey the psychedelic experience by composing music with multiple layers that each function on their own and reward individual attention, so that the listener gets "lost" among the various levels and loses sense of time and forgets which level they're "supposed" to be listening. The Miles Davis Quintet understood this well and were masters at musically evoking the sensation of marijuana use:

Animal Collective understood this as well:

 

In the spider web of our consciousness, the thread of hearing informs the threads of feeling and sight and emotional/cognitive experience.  The mind orchestrates our sensory experience and uses smell to interpret taste, sound to inform sight, and so on, and no sensation stands alone apart from all the rest of sensation, just like the pearls in Indra's net reflect every other pearl in the net.  We're all synesthetic to some degree or another, and the pleasures of music come in part from what our minds do with the sounds presented to us.   

Water Babies

Unlike Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Louie Armstrong, you don't need to smoke marijuana to fall between the spaces of the Miles Davis Quartet, to hear the different levels and layers in the music overlap and play with each other, and get lost in the dark rhythms of  the bass and drums, only to snap back to the present with the sound of the horns and the piano.

But it helps.

Here's Two Faced, a Wayne Shorter composition, recorded in 1968 with Miles on trumpet, Shorter on tenor saxophone, Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock on electric piano, Dave Holland on bass, and Tony Williams on drums

He Loved Him Madly

Miles' tribute to Duke Ellington, and perhaps one of the most mournful and emotional pieces of work in the Davis discography.  Recorded at Columbia Studios in New York on June 19 or 20, 1974, shortly after Ellington's death, the composition features Pete Cosey, Reggie Lucas, and Dominique Gaumont on electric guitars, Dave Liebman on alto flute, Michael Henderson on bass, Al Foster on drums, James Mtume on percussion, and Miles on organ and electric trumpet with wah-wah.  The trumpet doesn't start until some 16:00 minutes in, and I don't know of too many other musicians audacious enough to wait 16 minutes before performing on the first song of their own record.

Brian Eno cited He Loved Him Madly, and particularly the sense of space in Teo Macero's production, as a lasting influence on his own work.  I bought the album Get Up With It when it was first released in 1974 and loved it, but none of my New York roommates liked it, even though they were all jazz fans like myself, and when I went off to college in Boston, my university roommates flat out refused to even allow me to play it in public areas, but the album, and this song in particular, quietly accompanied a lot of my late-night study sessions.

Miles Ahead

One of my favorite actors portraying one of my favorite musicians.  If they don't blow it, this could be epic.  

Miles

If Charles Mingus was the godfather of punk, what is one to make of '70s-era Miles Davis?  In 1972, when Miles released On The Corner, he completely tossed out every convention of jazz music up to that time, including composition (all the cuts appear to be random snippets of jam sessions), melody, harmony, and technique, and, as explained by Wikipedia, "was scorned by established jazz critics . . . and was one of Davis's worst-selling recordings."

However, the album's street rep "has improved dramatically with the passage of time; it is now widely considered one of Davis's most experimental releases and a strong forerunner of the musical techniques of post-punk, industrial, hip hop, drum and bass, and electronic music."

Reviewing Black Satin in allmusic.com,  Thom Jurek notes, "Though a tabla kicks the tune off, there's a recognizable eight-note melody that runs throughout" and "the groove rides a bit easier -- except for those hand bells shimmering in the background off the beat just enough to make the squares crazy. The respite is short-lived, however. Davis and band move the music way over to the funk side of the street -- though the street funkers thought these cats were too weird with their stranded time signatures and modal fugues that begin and end nowhere and live for the way the riff breaks down into emptiness."

In other words, although Miles ostensibly recorded On The Corner to appeal to urban youth of the time,  he and the band were light years ahead of everybody else and didn't give a fuck what anybody else was thinking.  

Old School Saturday

This "proto-ambient" masterpiece emerged from one February 18, 1969 session with Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Joe Zawinul, Dave Holland, and Tony Williams.

Wadada

You may not have heard of him, but Wadada Leo Smith is probably the greatest living jazz musician today.  His interpretations of electric, Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis (1926-1991) were impeccable, and now he's taking on another hero of mine, Don Cherry (1936-1995).

I don't blog about jazz much, mostly because so much of the genre has become so moribund, and also because the few remaining innovators tend not to tour much. But this track, Don Cherry's Electric Sonic Garden, is freaking awesome.

Dave Brubeck

Innovative jazzman Dave Brubeck passed today at the age of 91, just one day short of what would have been his 92nd birthday.

During a period of the 1970s, between, say, the demise of "progressive rock" and the advent of punk, when  disco, mellow California pop, and Stevie Nicks ruled the airwaves, I very nearly stopped listening to rock music altogether and retreated into a world of jazz.  I was amazed at the richness and variety of this American art form that was largely ignored by the American public.  Coltrane, Miles, Mingus, and Monk became my new John, George, Paul, and Ringo, and as I went further down the rabbit hole of the avant garde, Shepp, Pharoah, Braxton, and Sun Ra became my new Coltrane, Miles, Mingus, and Monk. Speaking of Monk, though, there's a link to a great, nearly half-hour performance by Monk in all of his eccentric genius at the end of the Brubeck clip above.

Somewhere in the background of all this great music, though, there was always the Dave Brubeck Quartet.  They weren't my favorites, and I don't think I ever owned an album of theirs, although I had managed to accumulate a fairly prodigious collection of vinyl.  They were cool and cerebral, and my interests in jazz leaned more toward the visceral and the emotive.  No disrespect toward the departed today or the living back then, but it simply wasn't my thing.

I always did have an appreciation, though, for the playing of Brubeck's alto saxophonist, Paul Desmond.  In 1977, at the height of my jazz enthusiasm, Desmond died of lung cancer, the result of chronic chain smoking.  He was 52 when he passed, and I remember thinking that he was an old man then, even though I'm older than that now.

In any event, at some point around the rise of late 70s punk and the emergence of New Wave, rock music got interesting again.  At the same time, the number of musicians playing music that could legitimately be called jazz had already started to diminish due to sickness, old age, and death, as well as to the economics of the music industry.  I still appreciate jazz and my musical tastes today are informed and influenced by the freedom and creativity I encountered in jazz, but rather than listen and re-listen to the same old recordings over and over, I continue to explore the new and the different, just like Brubeck had during his lifetime.