As is clear by now, this blog has been dormant since its inception. When I started the blog, my life began to change in many ways – I took time to pursue work, internships, and even transferred colleges. I kept seeing shows, listening to records, and writing, but was too caught up with these other aspects of life to produce finished pieces. But it always remained an aspiration of mine to make this blog into something; to turn this project into a reality. Now I am finally ready to embark on this goal.
In the past few days it occurred to me that the time to kick this project off (once again) is now. After seeing Brad Mehldau, The Bad Plus, Kurt Rosenwinkel (in many different settings and contexts), and meeting with fellow bloggers and hanging briefly with the New York jazz scene (I go to school in Worcester, MA, so I'm only occasionally in the city), I have been bitten by the bug again.
Secondly, and more importantly, I have now figured out exactly what I want to explore with this blog. The intent was always to hear good music - analyze it, communicate it, and to “entrench new pathways of sonic satisfaction through which we can experience each passing musical moment” in the process - but I always wanted a clear, specific question to tie together my work. That fundamental question, I realized, was implicit in my earlier, abortive introduction, as well as my earlier work — that is, how do we listen to music? How can we listen to music? In what ways can passive listeners actively involve themselves in the music they hear? This has been my curiosity, and this question is what motivates this blog. I am not yet sure what makes music significant to myself as a listener beyond the pleasure of listening – and maybe that’s all there is to it – but the fact that critics exist suggests there’s more to music than understanding its components on the one hand, and enjoying it on the other.
Being a listener has always required some kind of performance aspect; in all musical contexts, it incorporates some form of reciprocal performance, of response. Dancing, for example, is the listener performing through movement the experience of listening to music. At jazz clubs, avid listeners bob their heads, make faces, and call out during exciting moments of the music. Painters - most famously, Kandinsky - tried to depict music visually.
In jazz this question of how the listener experiences that music and in turn expresses that experience is particularly vexing. If you play jazz, as many modern jazz fans do, everything you experience is inspiration for your own musical pursuits; and thus one way the listener/player experiences music is by using it to inform his own. Theoretical experience of music is indeed very significant when you can use that theory to create your own music. But if you don't play, how can you appreciate a theory that you might never apply yourself?
Then comes blogging – an interesting way to perform with music (so to speak) because you can transmute the otherwise silent feelings and experience how music stimulates, and point to what elements the music uses to create that experience. You are describing the music as it is in itself, while at the same time discovering how you experience that music in your mind. So, blogging may be similar to dancing, except for one crucial aspect - instead of understanding your experience of music through turning it into some other outlet, this reaction is focused on that inward relationship – understanding your experience through understanding your experience.
Jazz is a music that lends itself perfectly to this pure element of musical experience. On one level, soloists dig for and create a language out of the desire that it will sound good on its own merit. It is melody for melody’s sake, harmony for harmony’s sake, rhythm for rhythm’s sake. What context the new players have is the language that surrounds them, other players, the tradition, and so forth, but all these contextual elements are essentially focused on the same quest to find good sounds - they come up with new sounds to establish themselves and push the boundaries of the art, to find newness once again; but all this leads back to the simple notion that what sounds good is good. The music begins to carry the meaning of the context that created these sounds; for the ears of the individual, night after night, striving to sing their musical experience over and over, connects to the lived experience it came from.
That is why this blog is titled “On The Listen.” The phrase was one I came up with on my own, when I would tweet the music I was listening to at the moment. I started using the term strictly because I heard it in my head one day -- it was more fresh and more fitting than “now playing” and I liked the way it sounded -- not because the phrase makes much sense grammatically or otherwise. I kept using the phrase, on my own, because it became a unique stamp of my musical experience; and like music itself, the sounds being used over and over began to develop their own meaning. Hence “On The Listen” has now come to mean, to me, more than just listening, but a kind of deep listening, where you meditate specifically on the dialogue between music and your experience of it; in the moment, after the moment -- perhaps even before the moment -- it hits you. My objective in this blog is therefore to put music "On The Listen" – to hear how you listen, and reconstruct why the music makes you hear that way, then find its broader significance. It’s meta-listening but the spotlight is fixed back on the music itself; first you construct, in words, the music as it exists independent on its own, and then you determine how those nonconceptual sounds dictate meaning to us, and where that meaning comes from. It may seem a basic, perhaps trite question -- or on the flip side it may seem a frivolously specific question -- but I feel it is crucial to use this one fundamental relationship as the cornerstone for my musical exploration and jazz criticism.
I know from my friend and fellow blogger Jon Wertheim that Thelonious Monk compared talking (and writing) about music to dancing about architecture. One cannot dance to something that has no time. Indeed, writing about music involves freezing music inside the mind, responding to music that is not there but fixed in the mind’s ear. Yet I think this process of converting an art form into a different format in order to respond to it may actually help one understand it better. Architecture is, in many ways, "frozen music," as Goethe called it. Perhaps we could learn more about what architecture means to us if we unfroze it, conceptualized in time and danced to it (but I can’t dance, so I’ll leave that to another blogger to attempt). Similarly, I believe I can understand more about what music means through freezing it, and processing it through words.
