Last night I snuck off to the Jazz Standard to hear Marty Ehrlich and Ray Anderson, two players who I've been listening to for eight years or so. The two have been musical partners forever. They start playing and just slide right into one another's sound like they shared one mind and one body.
One of the guys I used to play with told me once that finding a musical partner, a musical collaborator, is the key to it all. You can't be who you are musically until you find the right people to play with. Like finding a lover. And once you find those players, the relationships are tight, complex, emotional. Like a marriage, really.
I remember playing with him and the music feeling like it didn't come from either of us, like it was being pulled from us as we made it, chord changes leading us along, melody lines wandering from home and back, harmonies picked up and lined out. I remember feeling as if my consciousness could retreat to a quieter place in me, and my body would make the music.
It's a sacred thing, to be able to climb into that space with someone. I miss the act of it: the motions of putting my instrument together, the ritual of warming up slowly, the laughter and small talk that came before we played. And then the improvisation itself: twining the sounds we made together into something that moved with complexity and beauty. The music pulled us shockingly close to one another. It was an intimacy we had no need to speak of or acknowledge. After we played, the silence was thick and powerful, and no one said anything for a long time.
I miss putting my horn together, both assembling all the joints of the bassoon and putting my slide into my bell, setting the angle, spinning the little thing to lock my trombone together.
Posted by: Joseph Mathews | 03/26/2010 at 05:57 PM
Oh yeah, that little spinny thing! I used spin that thing around as a nervous habit. Forgot all about it.
Posted by: Emily Scott | 03/26/2010 at 09:36 PM