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The weather in Chiba turned cooler in mid-September. Inhaling fresh air on the morning of the day after the sudden change in weather brought back many memories of the past. Lost in a wave of nostalgia, I hardly noticed September slip away. However, looking back, I’m grateful for the musical adventures September brought.
In the early days of the month, I was listening to a lot of Joe Henderson and Miles. Henderson’s rhythms are wonderful, and Miles’ sound choices are deliberate and informative. I was also painting to sort out the relationship between sound and color, testing my newly purchased Phil Jones amp in the park.
The second half of the day was spent practicing licks that I had transcribed but hadn’t digested; it’s hard to know how many licks to practice at the same time. Some new words are easily learned and can be used in daily conversation, while others are not. I don’t know how difficult it will be to master them until I practice them. Because I don’t know how new word connects to my stock language, sometimes I have to rearrange the context just to use the word, which takes time. This is how I ended up practicing multiple licks in parallel in the second half of September.
I was visiting songs: Joe (isotope), Traine’s Soprano, Brecker’s album: Wide Angles, and the album: Crescent which Brecker himself recommended in an interview. About Wide Angles, all 14 members are masters of their respective instruments, and despite the large size of the band, the interaction with the soloists is deep and quite different from that of existing big bands. The album required concentrated listening due to the amount of information it contained. My favorite points were the transition from Cool Day in Hell to Angle of Repose, Brecker’s explosive energy solos on Scylla and Timbuktu, and the beauty of Never Alone. While I was listening to Never Alone, I tweeted the following because of the sharpness of Brecker’s solo in Never Alone, but I later found out that this was a big mistake.
Watching the video of Wide Angles recorded live at Blue Note Tokyo, I realized that Brecker’s energy intensity has increased with age. It is close to insanity.
When I watched this concert, the energy intensity was so high that I couldn’t listen to any sound until 17:00 the next day. My ears got tired. It was more like a theatrical performance than a musical or a Kabuki performance. And I never thought they would use rubber ducks as instruments.
I also like to watch legendary interviewees’ videos these days, and what they talk about is as interesting on the same level as the music they play. The way they arrange words and construct sentences is extremely deliberate and open to various interpretations. Of the many interviews I have watched on YouTube, two videos stand out in my memory. The first is Brecker’s 1996 interview in which he talks about Coltrane. Some of the things Brecker said about Coltrane seemed to pinpoint and verbalize what I thought of Coltrane(and Brecker). For example, when Brecker talks about Trane, “He did not play fast because He wanted to play fast, He plays fast to get the colorful sound by putting notes together” (12:07), or when he says, “I didn’t think there was a spiritual level to music. I didn’t think there was a spiritual level to music, but listening to Coltrane I realized that I have a spiritual connection with music” (1:23).
Another is the part of the Elvin Jones interview where he talks about color imagery (starting around 14:00), and he ties colors to sounds, such as Low D is purple, C is red, F is yellow, and so on. It was also interesting to see a part of Elvin’s mind when he describes the snare as a diamond-like object that changes its color instantly.
On 9/28, I bought a Yamaha SLB300 at the Kurosawa Music double bass store in Tokyo. I have never played such a fine instrument in my life. It is made of high-quality materials and has an excellent design that is far beyond my imagination. I will post my impressions of the instrument in the future, so stay tuned.
