Jazz Gallery 4/7

It was a quintet. The first few minutes of the set were disorienting as the cellist/French-horn player, fiddled with a laptop, from which screamed perfect pregnant bubles of sound, harmonic and blaring. The band sat, listening, the crowd, less relaxed, restively trying to decide how ot react. It was a strange juxtopositon but I was reminded myself, this is music, it's for listening not looking and once I did that I realized how powerful the midi-derived sounds really were. Once I settled into thatthe band picked up. I'm not oging to comment on the particularities of this slightly avant, definitely contemporary Jazz quintet, but I will discuss the themes that ran through my mind as I inadvertently twitched my head, loosened my shoulders and madly thrummed out the rhythms, at once in sympathy with the fervor of the drums, or the plucking madness of the strings, or the stoic backbeta of the tuba, or the funky syncopated looseness of the classical guitar... First I thought about tension, and I thought of how good jazz is all about it, taughtness, pulled to the breaking point. Any good illustrtaion of a dialectic is extremely tense. The edges of polar opposites pulling infinitely apart, growing tighter until each side snaps back into harmony. That is how I htink of jazz and so what are the polar sides of the Jazz dialectic? For one, it is the endless struggle between part and whole, individuality and cohesion. That is apparent in nearly all jazz which incorporates improvisation, even the standards. This particular group really played with that concept expertly. I could practically draw a line of touch-points in the composition, near brushes with harmony and synchrony, points of collision, then diversion and sudden fleeing to the furthest bounds of total isolation. And of course embodied within this metaphor is all of the struggles of individuality within society and all the points of connection and discordance, and also of course of the layers of harmony wrapped within extreme dissonance...Dissonance yes, there was plenty of that, the entire performance was played in flat keys, I can't tell the exact key, but possibly F flat. Here is another theme running through, the extent to which rhythm rather than melody was the dominant mode of the pieces. Classical guitar, cello, flute, saxophone, horn and tuba all highlighted the range of their instruments rhythmic capabilities, rather than traditional melody, their dance with eachother was similarly a dance of syncopation rather than harmony, of beat meeting beat, twirling then departing into it's own stream. I could even say that it was the drums with their tapered out hissing and sudden up-beat that seemed the most melodic, the solo certainly was. And so again we have the theme of inversion, what is rhythmic becomes melodic and vice versa...Finally the the theme of space and territory and mapping out of terrain. This was a very visual sound, at the best of times the group was tight and one could imagine an exact formation across a desert a city, the relaitonships between players stretching out in various forms, triangles, bursting circles, balloons with the edges pushing in and pulling out. And finally of course, the sexual metaphor...The cresendos building for long long, the taughtness, the coming together and climbing upwards, the holding off of release, the orgasm had never been more awaited, more deserved... And also, that desperation, that pleading for communion, that bout of hopelessness when one is standing far afield with a purple tune swinging heavily melancholy from their lips...and suddenly a long, gently tripping bubble of red reach out and draws them in, and dances and expands and fills wantonly and lustily....The excitement of chaos and control, unlimited boundaries...it is the drama of reality of emoiton of human society of sex...Jazz, the drama of human existence played out by sound....:)