Master Class KEYBOARD SCHOOL Woodshed | By joel forrester Subscribe 877-904-JAZZ Embracing Change In Real Time believe that every living human has a personal I sense of time, a signature as unique as any of the more usual means of individual identification. What singles out musicians and dancers is our developed ability to express this sense. If you’re reading this, you’re likely a musician; I am, too. As musicians, our lives are important to the species as a whole. Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re marginal; don’t allow public indifference to prey on you; don’t let commerce trivialize your calling. I repeat: Our lives are important. Don’t let your daily struggles erode this certainty. This is important, because without individual expression of time, time would become terminally confused with its measurement: the clock would rule the planet. It already does for those who don’t dance or play. For the unlistening ear, music is at best a trip: a moment outside of time, blessed recreation. For us, music is our lives: We live time—a wild gift, a serious responsibility. Time is our language. Your personal sense of time exists both prior to your experience in life and accompanies you every step of the way—it has everything to do with your choices, your destiny. When your chops are together on your instrument and your voice is truly your own, your temporal distinction can help any listener whose personality is submerged in patterns of authority, whose sense of herself depends on what others tell her. What people think they want is recreation, entertainment; but what they really both need and desire is to be themselves. We can help with that. It might take years for you to find your voice. That can’t bother you. The searching is the finding. Everybody starts out imitating someone else. The point is never to give in to the allure that surrounds imitating yourself. Forget it—that’s how you sounded yesterday. That’s another reason to take yourself seriously as a musician: You operate in a medium that embodies change. People need encouragement to change. We certainly can help them with that, too. But there are additional depths to be sounded. Living as a musician is a gift; our souls know a freedom not granted to others; and the most important thing we can offer, in return, has to do with memory. There is more to memory than informationretrieval. The hardest thing to remember is the fact that your life is limited. I believe that all definition arises out of an awareness that our lives will end. Death defines us, and we learn from that. But we also pass much of the waking day hiding from this awareness. Novelist Anthony Powell once had a character title his autobiography Camel Ride to the Tomb, something he once Drummer Denis Charles (1933–’98): “Man, this whole scene is ‘temporary!’” saw as a kid on a sign outside an Egyptian airport. I played with drummer Denis Charles for 25 years; I once warned him about the temporary nature of a weekly gig we had; he answered with an open-arm gesture meant to include all creation and said, “Man, this whole scene is ‘temporary!’” A musician focuses her memory on the present. Her memory allows her to make a moment of that present. That moment can be shared by all who hear what she plays. Life is every bit as temporary, but we are no longer on the “camel ride.” The musical moment involves a tacit acceptance of death; it does not hide from death by killing time. Music needs time to breathe. My guide here has always been Austrian musicologist Victor Zuckerkandl, who described hearing the succeeding tones in a melody as a matter of “freedom in prospect, necessity in retrospect.” This involves memory as a dynamic process. Again, that’s functionally obvious to a musician; he needn’t think about it. And it’s always been important. But never more so than today, when we are inundated with information, most of it visual. At the same time, there is a consensus that our species must soon go through a change in order to survive; and our most honest critics say it is the inability to deal with death that holds us back. All the more important, then, for those gifted with music to live “melodic” lives; that is: open to the moment, if only momentarily. Any musician knows that there’s more to existence than the visual world, more to memory than data. The eye may justly be considered the window to the soul, but the ear is the portal. We are heralds, we musicians. We can help humankind make the next big change. And just by being ourselves. DB Joel Forrester is a bebop and stride pianist who lives in New York. He Has written 1,600 tunes, including the theme to NPR’s “Fresh Air.” His latest release is Down The Road on the Ride Symbol label. With Phillip Johnston, he co-leads the Microscopic Septet. Valerie Wilmer 62 DOWNBEAT SEPTEMBER 2011
76th Annual Readers Poll The Critics have spoken. Now, here’s your chance to… VOTE! Just go to DownBeat.com Make your vote count in naming the year’s best in jazz, blues and beyond! Deadline AUGUST 25
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