On Turning 60 1-b, side note - Tom Waits (76! this month). What do Beethoven, Petrucciani and Jeff Lynne have in common?
(note the lack of meter, the whole imitating a kerchief being blown along by a wind)
...(2017/2025): December. Birthday month. Music. Fiddling around with music posts a few years ago I noticed...an odd thing.
Like everyone else, I've listened to an enormous amount of music since, well, my birth almost 51 (now 59) years ago. And a bit like everyone else I have a few favorites.
Despite the huge numbers of people listened to, only 3 - all of them men - consistently 'get' and got to me through their music. All 3 preferences, as usual, being established in my teens or late childhood. (The notion of both the ages - my age when a composer or musician was first heard and music as a 'talking' meta-language - would each be for a different note.) Basically they, those 3 ...talk. I hear them in fairly -you could call them deep and consistent - places. Every time I hear their music.
The first was Jeff Lynne (first of ELO, then solo.)
Pop with strings orchestrally arranged, likely one of the few pop album LP's I would listen to entirely with relish. That my ELO love began fairly early... at maybe 9 or 10. years old. Jim Carter was US president.
Of course there would plenty of other Pop musicians I'd listen to a good bit, years later: Mark Knopfler, Tom Waits, Annie Lennox come to mind. But Jeff Lynne's music always, to repeat, talks to me. (I've always used 'talk' when describing most music and musicians, jazz - as a genre - nearly all of.) Lots of sweetness and sadness in Lynne's music. Blue-purple its color and for me a bit 'sweet', literally (..that, to, the not-quite synesthetic index of bitterness that has, well, actually almost always since at least adolescence, accompanied more than only the sensation of things...the modeling of things. After more than a few bits of information have been placed together, accompanied by that index of sweetness to bitterness. Stuff in that way for me has a sort of taste. Along with SP2 receptors both above and suppositionally further downstream, synchrony with CNS networks and varying development both pre and post birth, the connection with expression... will also be for a different note.)
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The next musical 'hit' to me happened at about 13 years of age, Beethoven.
(Digression. Carl Sagan introduced me. Cosmos. 7th symphony, 1st movement - which remains still my 'favorite', if I have one, singular piece of music if conducted... as I like it. Ie, a la Kleiber - near perfect. But really any way, from von Dohnayni's 'clean to the point' to Szell's 'let the music linger like a sweet wine after a rich dinner'.)
Then by chance, in my parents suddenly very quiet household, (it had been a war theatre for some years, filled with rage-filled yells and hits, scratches, slaps, broken furniture and heavy tear-laden drama. Until my elder brother, the primary instigator, went off to university,) a patient gave some music to my father in lieu of payment. A lovely treasure trove of notes: Bach, Chet (Baker,) Sibelious, Sara Vaughn - and LvB. Sometimes you get lucky. (...long before youtube. Reagan was still in his first term as Pres. Music still meant using needles, analog, tubes and that fullness of sound that digital largely removes.) In that, to, it helps if whomever is playing either allows LvB expressive power through, or 'talks'. Ie, not that I don't like a Glenn Gould - type playing of LvB but ... lets say that Pollini is 'there' every time. That my personal 'sweet-to-bitter' index is always about, or just, right. Or someone like Barenboim, who often transmits a jazz-like articulation when he plays, (at least over the past 20 years or so. Don't know how he played before.)
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For awhile Chet Baker was played a lot then - devastating. Still, after high school, at age 17, Michel Petrucciani. Rather satisfying the introduction to his paying, marvellous really. In 1984, less than a month after graduation (Solon High) and after 8 years basically without having left the east side of Cleveland.... to NYC.
Which then was still New York, filled with energy and contrast and violence and possibility. 'I'm home,' I thought as soon as I hit the street. The first eve there, Petrucciani was opening for Sara Vaughn at Carnegie. 7th row center. First jazz venue for me of any kind. Not a bad place and way to begin.
Since then I've listened to...lord, maybe everything of Petrucciani available even without looking for it, including a couple of bootleg albums. Still, and a bit surprisingly... not once, not one tune... listened to was or is at all lamentable. His playing always talks straight, flavorful, slightly bitter usually but always so stratified. To this day even though sometimes a few seasons can pass without listening - likely because of this too much earphone youtube crap over recent years. (A lot of stuff tied here also to be dealt with later: what is music, what is tonic, why do we form them - the expectations, ecc.)
Anyway. Those 3 have dominated, by compare, the music I've listened to over time.
So... like everyone else....on social virtual networks like Facebook, you pass through, early, the 'share music' phase without much order at first eventually within some habitual system - mine was posting to share on musician and composers birthdays. One December I noted that the three composers/musicians above were all born on the same month as I, December, and all within a couple weeks of my birthday (the 17th). LvB the 16th I knew but didn't know that Lynne was born the 30th while Petrucciani the 28th. So I wondered - from a listener's, not formally musical, perspective: what if anything do these three have in common (Chet, to, the 23rd,)? They do.
For me, a non-musician (learning piano up to Joplin's Entertainer doesn't count,) the only way to describe it: they all play or compose below the music. Something below is transmitted which I call the 'talking' in music.
link- overlapping networks language-music overview: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4321131/
So... I wondered if those three have that in common - without going as yet into possible why's, those three talk to me so consistently... might others have something similar?
The first thing was to quiz myself on other musicians and composers, particularly in the atonic (jazz), mostly all liked as in musicians I enjoy but that don't have that 'below' component, bottom-up coming through, vs those who do. That sort of talk-talking to me. So I did. Quiz myself blind that is.
To my astonishment, out of the almost 20 people, musicians, I quizzed myself regarding birthdays... all those who play 'below' the music were identifiable to my ears (I didn't know when they were born but could guess if they were born in the same part of the year, within 2 weeks of me.) I only made one mistake, Ron Carter, the jazz bassist who I guessed would be but instead isn't. (That, to, the mistake of falling into narrative description or way of describing the understanding to self vs letting information speak itself - I like him a good bit, his elegance, and met him - is for still another note.)
So I guessed before knowing their birth dates: that Miroslav Vitous (born today - the 7th of December, same as Waits) would be close to mine; that Ella wouldn't; that Brad Mehldau wouldn't - even though I like him a lot; but Chet would and is. That Jim Hall would be; but Pat Methany (whom I actually can't bring myself to appreciate much) wouldn't be, and so on. It was a bit like ...identifying people with excessive SP2 receptors - 'buon gustai' or 'gourmet' or natural foodies (you can tell not only if someone else is into certain flavors and food fairly quickly - those who are, at least to this point, usually also have the oddness of being, er, sensitive downstream in their digestive systems. Just add water and flush, your body tells you if something bitter arrives down there and you have a relative excess of that kind of receptor. It's not distinguishing flavors per se - that's a step beyond and requires training, short-term or more a directly functional and aware memory usage and is less consistent. Relative physiology instead is more bottom-up, from deeper, as it were. And more consistent since it relies less directly on any created narrative meaning.) Anyway.
link: what makes a tasty plate, person to person: https://phys.org/news/2010-03-meal-tasty.html
So... I began modeling (guessing) at possible causes. But that...requires a lot of a lot of things, not least of which is strata - what music is or might be (a meta language), distinguishing language from communication (which seems counterintuitive but isn't really. The two are quite different, language and communication.) And the plurality of systemic expression, including us, much more than merely one consciousness. Anyway.
None of that takes away from the joy music brings. Like this piece below, also in the above Petrucciani link, over the past decade or so my second 'favorite' piece of music, this version. Jim Hall is another who plays below the music and he, to, passed his 2nd trimester in his mother's womb during summer's end, that is was born within a couple weeks of Dec. 17th, while W. Shorter, playing the horn, wasn't. (I guessed right on both. Why and how? That's for...something soon.)