Friday, July 20, 2012

Jazz, Chaos & Who Do We Think We Are...




Last night my husband & I attended a performance of the David Liebman Group at the Center for the Arts, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Ct. My husband is the musical aficionado as he's been a natural guitarist since his boyhood days. I'm pretty much a listener & appreciator of all music, though jazz does take a bit of an open mind sometimes to delve into for me. We certainly enjoyed this quartet immensely, though some numbers of course resonated more soothing than others. When experiencing jazz know that you will often times be kept on the edge of your seat, as the energy is palpable & often raw. It was an excellent concert, & one the things I so enjoyed doing was watching the faces of the performers, especially the quartet's leader David Liebman who had a deep look of concentration & satisfaction of what he was doing for his life work.

The concert last night got me to thinking, jazz does do that make one think, & then awakening this morning to a lead in news story, thus more thoughts~

Who are we, & what the h^#* are we doing anyway?

There's no true way to even begin to answer this one, as we're all evolving, a work in progress.
Human beings are complex creatures, & I certainly have no hesitation in acknowledging that. I do think our only moments of pure perfection were at the time of our births, & then due to the hand of humankind, a lot truly was pretty much out of the hands of that baby who grew up decades ago to be molded upon by the others, & the human being like any organism knew instinctively only to survive & function as best as they could. For better & for worse...

We see this all the time on the news, in our neighborhoods, in our own families & the world. No one really wants to sit down & hear the long heavy details of what has become of that sweet baby in the nursery decades ago, by the hands that did the molding, unless of course it's become a news item, or one is a specialist in these matters. What often times happens quite serendipitously is when that baby in the nursery grew up & made it out of the controlling realm of the kingdom of who's perhaps toxic hands did the molding, but had enough protection for survival then much of those ancient toxic experiences can be directed & channeled into something positive. Thus the arts.

One of the very first thoughts I have when learning of a rather horrific incident that has been wrought on the innocent by the hands of another, I often wonder what molding & toxic exposure was done to the perpetrator. The bio of course of the individual who chose to be a Corella Develle, or a Darth Vader type. Gardens, gardens, gardens of life! Some are most beautiful, as the garbage & debris are recycled in a most positive & useful way to compost down to essential valuable nutrients. I do believe the pained & tortured souls of many of the artistic types we so love, have whittled, & refined themselves down. They have created an exercise of having surviving their exposures in the kingdoms of the Corellas or Darths in their lives & are doing what it is they need to do in order to survive. It is plain & simple an enduring need to live, endure, & produce when they can. We are all in this together, & can't change or control the past, but we can control the grip it has on us, to not let it drown or disable. To make art not war, is what motivates the artistic soul, for not only is it personal, but a matter of our mutual survival as a specie & a citizen of our world, our pure blue marble the third planet from our sun.

The David Liebman Group closed their performance with two numbers, one was Lonely Woman & the other Turn Around. After listening to Turn Around the prenounced thought of it all being controlled chaos came to mind. Below is a link to the Dave Liebman Group with one of their performances in Paris. I couldn't find his version of Turn Around to share, but I'm sure it's out there, as I think it's a Miles Davis composition of whom he played with so many decades ago.

Feel free to give this link a try last click it did work, enjoy*~












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