This is the first song on the first jazz record I ever bought. I must have been about 14. I had listened to Herbie Hancocks Headhunters album at Mike Sarins house a bunch of times. I think the record actually belonged to his older sister Shelly, and at the risk of having her kick our asses wed sneak into her room and listen to it. Later at the record store I was hoping, since this one was also by Herbie Hancock, that it would be the same kind of thing. It wasnt. I was disappointed. I didnt like this album. But I didnt have many records so I kept listening to it. It had a cool picture of the drummer playing a yellow drum set on the back.Then a year or two later on one of those rainy, smoky, boring, eternally drab afternoons that provided a significant backdrop for my early years in the Puget Sound region, somehow the music creeped into my ears in a new way. It was like I could suddenly understand Chinese and in that instant the troubling mish mash of notes I had been half tolerating half annoyed by and half curious about fell into patterns and shapes that possessed more beauty and profundity than anything Id ever encountered before. It was a moment where a young person encountered something new, something almost completely foreign to the people, images, and ideas he was familiar with, and had has mind blown. Slowly it (and some others such as hearing Julian Priesters trio with Gary Peacock and Dave Coleman, and hearing Jack DeJohnette for the first time, and hanging with my recently departed creative writing teacher Bob Mcallister) made it kinda like I was seeing color for the first time, or tasting chocolate for the first time. Maybe thats a sad commentary on where I was at prior to hearing this, or on my cultural environment, but it made me feel like life could be magic and that there was hope that it wasnt all about work or money or possessions or folowing rules or being moral or ego or other things that felt spirit narrowing or like BS. This kind of possibility for unpredictable expansion is basically the core spirit for me whenever I teach and when I parent, and when I take five 8th graders camping (which is the main thing Im involved in for the next couple days). The beauty and fun I had discovering it circa 1978 still blows my mind and is pretty much the thing Im trying to do whenever I play the drums in 2014. If you have time (just to zero in on one point that Ive dug for a long time) check out how Herbie (on piano) and Tony Williams (the drummer) play on top of Ron Carters steady bass ostinato behind Wayne Shorters soprano sax solo--starting from being all calm, simple, and relaxed at first after the (amazing) trumpet solo by Freddie Hubbard, then tossing in some disruptions and kind of stirring the pot and seeding the clouds for a downpour and up-pour of climactic energy that ends at an extraordinary handoff from the soprano to the piano solo which kind of flies around in the tornado wrought by Wayne et al. Enjoy! https://youtube/watch?v=kj6yOszCEzE
Posted on: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 04:54:54 +0000
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