Jasmine

The more I hear about Keith Jarrett's soon-to-be-released new album Jasmine, a collaboration with bassist Charlie Haden, the more I look forward to it. From the liner notes (you can read the full text as well as the track listings here at Amazon):

An ecstatic moment in music is worth the lifetime of mastery that goes into it, because it can be shared.

Privilege

When I checked Tomasz Stanko's official website the other day and saw that he was due to play in San Francisco and New York next month as part of a U.S. tour to promote his new CD, Dark Eyes, I recalled a comment I made back in November last year about timing my proposed epic rail journey across North America to coincide with a concert by either the Polish trumpeter or my other musical hero, pianist Keith Jarrett, and ever so briefly considered flying over to see Stanko in San Francisco and then traveling by rail to New York to see him again at Birdland (and to eat grilled stuff with Erik).

I then remembered that I'm visiting Tokyo later this month and couldn't possibly afford to make another overseas trip so soon after that one. Also, the Keith Jarrett Trio is performing in Tokyo in September-October, and I've promised to take Mrs Fool to see them to celebrate our wedding anniversary. And while I'd dearly love to see Stanko perform live again, the prospect of seeing him with his new quintet doesn't excite me as much as that of seeing him with his old quartet (with Marcin Wasilewski on piano), which I had the pleasure of doing back in March 2009. It seems that that quartet is a thing of the past. It produced just three CDs, including the sublime Lontano, which took me a while to get into but is now one of my all time favourite albums. I consider it a privilege to have seen that quartet perform live.

As Jarrett himself confirmed to an Italian audience in 2007 during one of his infamous outbursts, seeing Keith Jarret perform is also a privilege. Unlike Stanko, however, Jarrett doesn't believe in changing the personnel in his groups much. In fact his current trio (with Gary Peacock on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums) has been playing together for more than 25 years. And while I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the trio in Japan, if I had a time machine one of the first things I'd do, probably even before going back to Wellington on the night of 7 March 2009, would be to go back to the Village Vanguard in New York on the night in May 1979 when Jarrett's "European Quartet" (with Jan Garbarek on saxophone, Palle Danielsson on Bass, and Jon Christenson on drums) recorded the album Nude Ants. According to Ian Carr's Keith Jarrett: The Man and His Music, Garbarek was having an "off-night," but even that couldn't spoil the magic.

Beyond Keith Jarrett

A part of someone's Keith Jarrett collection

I finally got my hands on a printed programme for the Wellington Jazz Festival while in town yesterday. Looking through it, I came across the name of Marcin Wasilewski, a Polish jazz pianist who features on both of the albums I have by French drummer Manu Katché. The first of these albums, Neighbourhood, also features Tomasz Stanko and one-time Keith Jarrett collaborator Jan Garbarek, which is what got me interested in Katché in the first place. Anyway, Wasilewski is appearing with Tunisian vocalist and oudist Dhafer Youssef on Saturday before the Tomasz Stanko concert. I decided I had to go to this as well, so I went into Ticketek and handed over another $55. That's three concerts I'm going to in Wellington this weekend, all at the same venue. If I'd booked them together I would have qualified for a 10% discount, plus I would have saved $12 in booking fees. Never mind. Incidentally, Wasilewski has played with Stanko a lot over the years, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he shows up in the latter's quartet on the night.

Manu Katché is one of the artists I started listening to a few years ago after I decided that my fascination with Keith Jarrett was bordering on the unhealthy and that I should try to broaden my musical horizons. Having said that, I'd found a genre I really liked (understated, melodic, romantic piano jazz, for want of a better description), and I didn’t want to stray too far from that. So I started by checking out other musicians in this genre, as well as some of the pianists who'd influenced Keith Jarrett.

My first port of call was Bill Evans. Evans played piano and cowrote some of the music on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, considered by many to be both the best-selling jazz album of all time and the greatest jazz album of all time. He later went on to revolutionize the piano trio concept. He did this by giving the bassist and drummer more active roles, resulting in more interplay among the musicians. Keiko had a copy of The Bill Evans Album, featuring Eddie Gomez on bass and Marty Morell on drums, so I started listening to this and grew to like it a lot. On some of the tracks Evans plays a Rhodes electric piano, then a relatively new instrument. For this reason some critics have dismissed the album as "gimmicky", but the music is great and it's still one of my favourite Bill Evans trio albums.

Among the collection of CDs my brother Mark left behind when he went overseas was a compilation of Bill Evans tracks called Quiet Now, which served as my introduction to Evans's non-trio recordings, including his solo work (including Conversations With Myself and Further Conversations With Myself, in which he used overdubbing to layer up to three tracks of piano on each song), and his duo work with guitarist Jim Hall. My own collection of Bill Evans CDs now numbers around ten. Last Christmas Mark gave me The Legendary Sessions CD, which includes Evans's two collaborative efforts with Tony Bennett, The Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album and Together Again, listening to which has helped me overcome my aversion to jazz vocalists.

Other pianists who've been described as having influenced Keith Jarrett and whose music I listen to fairly regularly include Ahmad Jamal and McCoy Tyner. I never really got into Oscar Peterson. I've liked some of what I've heard of Bud Powell, and am interested in hearing more. The same goes for Thelonious Monk.

Some of the pianists I've enjoyed listening to over the years who've undoubtedly been influenced by Keith Jarrett are Tord Gustavsen, John Taylor, Bobo Stenson, and Eliane Elias, although I've pretty much lost interest in Gustavsen, whose playing sounds a bit monotonous to my ears, and the only work of Elias I've heard to date that I really like is on Shades of Jade, an album credited to bassist (and Elias's husband) Marc Johnson. Johnson, by the way, was once a member of the Bills Evans Trio. (Don’t you just love those connections?) Elias recently released an album of Bill Evans tunes, although I'm too scared to listen to it because she sings on some of the tracks. New Zealand pianists in my collection include Mike Nock and Alan Broadbent.

Since I'm going to a concert of his on Sunday evening, I should also mention Brad Mehldau. Mehldau is often compared to Keith Jarrett, although according to some Jarrett fans the similarities are overstated. I must admit I've heard very little of Mehldau. I have listened to a CD he made with guitarist Pat Metheny, but I've only heard snippets of his solo and trio work.

Last year I branched out further and started listening to quite a bit of jazz ensemble music, mostly of the genre known as hard bop. The catalyst for this was seeing a performance by a sextet led by saxophonist Oyama Hideo at Someday, a jazz club in Tokyo. The highlight of the evening was a performance of "This is for Albert" from the Art Blakey album Caravan. Back in New Zealand, I got hold of Caravan and also checked out some of Art Blakey's other work. I gradually built up a small collection of Jazz Messengers albums, mostly from the period in the 1960s when the group featured Freddie Hubbard on trumpet and Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone.

Blakey had a close affinity with Japan. He gave several of his sons Japanese first names. He was one of the first overseas jazz musicians to tour that country, an experience he later described as follows:

"When we hit Japan in 1960 or 61, I never saw anything like it. There were 7,000 heads going up and down at the same time and humming every note of everything we played… When we first went to Japan, they had Lee Morgan shirts, Wayne Shorter overcoats, all that kind of stuff in the department stores. The same kind of publicity the Beatles got in the U.S., we got in Japan, and plus. I think we're the only American artists that had an audience with the emperor. But this country never said a word about it, never a word."

Another classic hard-bop album I listen to a lot is Oliver Nelson's The Blues and the Abstract Truth.

I've always had a soft spot for John Coltrane, and have four or five of his albums, including the magnificent A Love Supreme. Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come is another jazz saxophone favourite. The title is a bit of a misnomer. Although he's regarded as a pioneer of free jazz, Coleman's playing on The Shape of Jazz to Come is very melodic and the music quite orthodox, especially compared to something like Coltrane's Olatunji Concert. I hope to add to my Ornette Coleman collection in the future.

Distance walked today: 3km
Total distance walked since Tokaido training began: 73.9km
Days left until departure: 75

We live alone

What could be more devastating than the realization that we die alone? Well, try this for size: WE LIVE ALONE!

A year or two ago I came to the conclusion not only that I don't really understand other people, but that such an understanding is impossible. Sure, people have a lot in common. We share many of the same experiences (of love, heartbreak, illness, loss, and so on). But how we deal with these experiences and how they affect our lives and our relationships with others varies greatly from individual to individual. Of course life would be boring if this weren't the case and we were all the same. But the fact that we're all so different can be alienating. But it doesn't have to be.

Near the end of a 1986 interview recorded at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater in San Francisco, Keith Jarrett was asked by a member of the audience, "Do you ever get lonely?"

"No," he replied, "because you see when you accept being alone, loneliness doesn’t exist. Loneliness is not knowing you're alone…and every once in a while wondering…if you are or not…and then thinking it's bad."

The interview is long, and it sheds a lot of light on Keith Jarrett the person. Be warned, though, that the music he plays from time to time during the interview (tapes of overdubbed improvised pieces that would eventually be released on the double album Spirits 1 & 2), while beautiful, isn't typical Keith Jarrett music (if there is such a thing). For a start, there's very little piano playing. Instead he plays a selection of other instruments - a total of 18, in fact, including flutes, recorders, and drums of various kinds.

Also, at times during the interview he comes across as rather "difficult", although I wouldn't go as far as one member of the Keith Jarrett Yahoo Group who, after listening to it, commented, "When he speaks, he's a halfwit and a windbag." After all, as I mentioned when I wrote about the Charles Bukowski documentary, Born Into This, personality flaws in artists don't concern me as long as the art they produce moves me. And that's something Keith Jarrett's music does in spades.

Distance walked today: 9.7km
Total distance walked since Tokaido training began: 39km
Days left until departure: 84

Speaking of connections...

I'm not very good with names. It's only just dawned on me that Tom Stanley of Walk Japan Ltd., who co-created the previously clunky but now beautiful Nakasendo Way website, parts of which I printed off and used as a guide when we walked the Nakasendo in 2007, is Dr. Thomas A. Stanley, author of Osugi Sakae, Anarchist in Taisho Japan: The Creativity of the Ego.

I should explain that when I went to Tokyo in 1996 it was to do research on Osugi Sakae for a possible M.A. (Things didn't quite go to plan. I blogged about that year here and here.) Japanese anarchism in the Taisho period is a very specialized field, and although my efforts to contribute to it have been pathetic compared to those of Dr. Stanley, it seems remarkable that we're both interested in Osugi Sakae and the Nakasendo. I wonder if he likes Keith Jarrett?

A spiritual (?) journey (Part 5)

Today, some 60 years after his death, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff remains a controversial figure. While many people claim to have benefited greatly from his teachings, others maintain that he was a charlatan who preyed on his followers' weaknesses. It's easy enough to dismiss the wackier critics who argue that Gurdjieff was the devil incarnate, but not as easy to ignore analyses such as this one, which describes Gurdjieff as advocating "an almost fascistic conservatism". Some of Gurdjieff's ideas, including his contempt for Western medicine and his belief in strictly separate roles for men and women, certainly don't seem particularly progressive. But I tend to agree with Webb that Gurdjieff was sincere, that it's conceivable that he was both a spy and a seeker of the truth. This is not to say that he always did what he said he was doing. What he actually did may simply have been an elaborate form of psychotherapy. It's interesting to note that on a number of occasions he supported himself by working as a hypnotherapist.

To me one of the most fascinating aspects of his story is that it highlights the fact that there are esoteric schools within all the major religions that teach that it's possible to achieve higher levels of consciousness and that the true role of religion is not to gain and convert as many followers as possible but to preserve these ideas and pass them on in their original form. This explains one of the defining characteristics of esoteric religions, which is that the transmission of ideas must take place directly from teacher to student and cannot be learned from a book. The secrecy of the ideas itself is not important, as this is just a side effect of the reality that they cannot be passed on other than in the context of the teacher-student relationship.

And so we return to my original post in this series, in which I referred to my fascination with Kukai, the Japanese founder of Shingon Buddhism. Shingon is one of the two main sub-schools of esoteric Vajrayana Buddhism, the other being Tibetan Buddhism. The esoteric Buddhism practiced at the Qinglong monastery in Chang'an where Kukai was initiated was introduced from India in the eighth century. Later, the same teachings were introduced into Tibet. If Webb's account of events is accurate, then Gurdjieff had close contact with Tibetan Buddhism, even serving as a Tibetan Buddhist monk for a time. Webb goes as far as describing Gurdjieff's indebtedness to Tibetan Buddhism as "the greatest single debt Gurdjieff owed to any existing system". The teachings Gurdjieff developed based on this knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism in turn had a profound influence on Keith Jarrett. (There's also speculation that Vajrayana Buddhism influenced the construction of Borobudur, a place that's long been a source of fascination for me, but whose story will have to wait for another time.)

There's something very satisfying about finding connections like these. But do these connections really mean anything, or are they illusions that we cling to because they reassure us that there's a semblance of structure in the chaotic world around us? One evening in the French city of Avignon, Keiko and I stopped outside an Indian restaurant to look at the menu. The Indian proprietor came out and starting chatting to us. On hearing that I was from New Zealand and Keiko from Japan, he said, "Ah, Japan, India and New Zealand form a triangle!" I laughed. "Yes, but any three countries would form a triangle." Then we went into the restaurant.

A tale of two festivals

I was just starting to get mildly enthusiastic about April's New Zealand International Jazz and Blues Festival (which despite the grandiose title is very much a local Christchurch event), mainly due to the participation of Mike Nock, a much-underrated New Zealand jazz pianist whose illustrious career stretches back to the 1960s, when he took over from a young Keith Jarrett as the pianist in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, and who also led a seminal fusion group called The Fourth Way (is that a Gurdjieff connection?). But I've just seen the programme for March's Wellington Jazz Festival, which despite its far more modest title boasts a lineup that puts the Christchurch event to shame.

How's this for a weekend of fine jazz? Friday night: Mingus Big Band. Saturday night: Tomasz Stańko Quartet. Sunday night: Brad Mehldau Trio. And they've got Mike Nock too, playing in a concert with classical pianist Michael Houstoun. The only slightly disappointing thing about the programme is the description of Stańko as "the Polish Miles Davis". That's about as meaningless as describing Beethoven as "the German Mozart". Still, it's not as bad as the description of Keith Jarrett as "a classical Billy Joel" in this unenlightened review of Jarrett's latest triumph at Carnegie Hall. That's just wrong! The guy doesn't deserve to be at a Keith Jarrett concert. He should have given the ticket to me. And paid for my airfare to New York.

A spiritual (?) journey (Part 4)

Published in 1980 shortly before the death by suicide of its troubled author, James Webb, The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G. I. Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, and Their Followers is regarded by many as the definitive history of Gurdjieff and his disciples. It's an attempt to piece together a portrait of a figure whose early life in particular is cloaked in mystery and to explain the unusual method of self-development he promoted. It's long, sometimes rambling, often gripping, and always thought-provoking.

The cloak of mystery is nowhere thicker than at the point of Gurdjieff's birth. We know where he was born (Armenia), but the date is uncertain. It could have been as early as 1866 or as late as 1877. In 1912 he appeared in Moscow and began working as a spiritual teacher. The only written account of the years in between is Gurdjieff's own Meetings with Remarkable Men, which purports to be the true story of the author's travels in Asia, the Middle East and Africa in search of various esoteric teachings but which contains episodes that are clearly allegorical.

Webb's version of events prior to Gurdjieff's appearance in Moscow caused a stir due partly to his suggestion that Gurdjieff may have been working as a spy for the Tsarist government, a role that enabled him to travel widely, even as far as Tibet, where, Webb claims, he acted as an advisor to the Dalai Lama and helped to thwart the Younghusband expedition of 1903-04, an attempt by the British to gain a foothold in what was then considered an important buffer state on the border of India.

Whatever the actual destinations and reasons for his travels, it's clear that by the time he turned up in Moscow Gurdjieff had amassed a wealth of knowledge on a range of esoteric subjects. He began teaching what he called the Fourth Way, so named because in contrast to the three Eastern teachings (the way of the fakir, the way of the monk, and the way of the yogi), which focus on developing the body, mind and emotions separately, Gurdjieff's methods, which included music, dance, lectures and group work, were designed to work on all three at the same time. Also, unlike the Eastern teachings, Gurdjieff's methods enabled his followers to continue going about their normal lives while studying.


At the heart of Gurdjieff's teachings is the idea that most people spend their lives in a state closer to sleep than wakefulness. We live like automatons, reacting mechanically to external stimuli. He taught that it was possible through hard work to reach higher levels of consciousness, and that he had knowledge of the best methods for achieving this, knowledge which he'd gained through his contact with various esoteric traditions during his travels. According to Webb, these traditions included esoteric Christianity, Sufism, Cabala, and Tibetan Buddhism.

Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Gurdjieff found it impracticable to continue teaching in Moscow, so he devised and executed an elaborate plan to escape to the West. After being refused a British visa (it's been suggested that this was because the British authorities knew of his spying activities against them in Tibet), he set up a new school, the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, in Fontainebleau, France. Among his students was the writer Katherine Mansfield, who died at Fontainebleau in 1923. This caused quite a stir at the time, but as she was already dying of tuberculosis before she arrived, it seems unfair to apportion any blame to Gurdjieff. On the contrary, it seems she found happiness in the final months of her life in his company.

Gurdjieff continued to teach and write up until his death in 1949. Today his work is carried on by the Gurdjieff Foundation, which has branches in New York, London and Paris. In 1979, Meetings with Remarkable Men was made into a movie starring Terence Stamp. It's notable for the inclusion of several scenes showing the "movements", devised by Gurdjieff based on dances he'd observed among the "whirling" Dervishes and other Sufi orders during his travels in Asia and the Middle East (here's a short clip on YouTube showing a couple of them). In 1980, Keith Jarrett recorded Sacred Hymns, an album of music penned by Gurdjieff and Thomas de Hartmann based on folk and religious music Gurdjieff had heard during the same travels.

(To be continued...)

A spiritual (?) journey (Part 3)

Earlier I noted how Keith Jarrett's music moves me, how at times it fills me with a sense of wonder. This is something I rarely experience listening to other music. Other music may provoke an emotional response in me (it may make me feel sad or happy, for example) or leave me feeling contented, but these are responses on a different level.

Also, I find it difficult to relax while listening to Jarrett's music, not because it's discordant (on the contrary, most of it is extremely harmonious), but because it commands my attention. In other words, I often feel I have to stop what I'm doing and listen intently.

Keen to find out why Jarrett's music has this effect on me, I tracked down a copy of Inner Views, a book not widely available outside of Japan based on a lengthy interview with the pianist conducted in November 1988 by Japanese music journalist Kunihiko Yamashita.

In the interview, Jarrett describes how he realized quite early on in his career that he approached music differently from most of the other musicians around him. To him music was not just a form of entertainment; it was something far more serious.

Towards the end of the interview he says of his piano playing, "There are no emotions involved. So many people think it's an emotional thing in the way that emotions have colors like…happiness and anger and joy, but really as soon as an emotion is involved in a concert, I also lose the music."

He also recounts the following episode:

"One time someone came backstage and said, 'It was a nice concert, but the chairs were uncomfortable.' They were very uncomfortable, just little chairs. And I said, 'Oh, gee, I'm sorry. Should I do it again in a comfortable room for you?' But then I said, 'Did you ever learn anything when you were comfortable?' Who learns anything when they're comfortable?"

Throughout the book Jarrett speaks about his own music with a fervor that suggests he's on a mission. But if the point of the music is not to entertain or provoke an emotional response, and if he's not concerned with the comfort of his audience, then what is this mission?

The answer is hinted at in the following statement at the very beginning of the interview:

"I don't think of myself as a musician. When I hear myself play I realize it is not about music. It is about staying awake and continuing to perceive. Perception, awakeness and awareness."

Jarrett's ideas on the importance of what he describes as "perception, awakeness and awareness" owe much to the teachings of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, a Greek-Armenian mystic who influenced many artists and writers in the early- to mid-20th century. Gurdjieff had some unusual ideas about music, and reading them reassured Jarrett that he was not alone in regarding music as something utterly serious.

"I knew my calling was music. But as to why that calling - why such a serious calling was in a world where the other people doing this didn’t feel serious…there was some discrepancy there. But this seriousness that surrounds music is what Gurdjieff explained. Not serious like the opposite of happy, but a profound, reasonable quality that emanated from music. Something that moved, truly could be a moving force."

I was convinced that if I wanted to know more about the effect Jarrett's music had on me, I needed to learn something about this Gurdjieff fellow. I went to the library and found a tatty old hardback entitled The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G. I. Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, and Their Followers, by James Webb. It turned out to be one of the most interesting books I've ever read.

(To be continued...)

A spiritual (?) journey (Part 2)

As I was saying, I'm a fan of the music of Keith Jarrett. Listening to his playing now, I find it difficult to imagine that I didn't fall in love with it straight away. Such is the sense of wonder it inspires in me. Such is the extent to which it moves me. Yes, I know some musicians grow on you. You're either not ready for them the first time you hear them, or you just need to allow time for them to grow on you. But it's different with Keith Jarrett. Today he moves me like no other musician I've heard before or since. Yet the first time I heard him I didn’t get it at all.

A few years ago when my brother Mark went to live overseas, he left me his extensive collection of Miles Davis CDs for safekeeping. He also left me a handful of CDs by other artists, among them Keith Jarrett's La Scala. I gave it a listen but it left no real impression on me.

I while later - I think it was Christmas time - we were up in Nelson where my father was living and someone put on The Melody at Night, With You. I thought it was beautiful. I still enjoy listening to it, although it's quite unlike most of Keith Jarrett's other recordings. It's very restrained (it was his first recording after a long period of enforced inactivity due to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and he used a specially adjusted piano as he had insufficient strength in his hands to play a normal piano). Some people rather disparagingly refer to it as "Jarrett lite". But it's a good CD for introducing people to the world of Keith Jarrett without fear of scaring them off with some of his "heavier" material. It certainly did the trick for me. Back in Christchurch, I bought my own copy of The Melody at Night, With You. I also gave La Scala another listen, and before long I was hooked.

What really sealed my fate was seeing Keith Jarrett perform with his trio on the Standards DVD. The performance is shocking in a way. All his eccentricities (the facial contortions, the vocalizing, the dancing while playing) are laid bare, but at the same time his passion, joy, and ecstasy are so plain to see. I knew that I was witnessing something special. It wasn't just great music; there was something more to it.

On just about every Keith Jarrett recording I own, whether it be solo, trio, or quartet, there are certain passages that are so beautiful they almost bring me to tears. My reaction is more or less the same every time I listen to them. There are also moments of ecstasy, of rapture. I'd never experienced this while listening to music before, and I remember telling someone once that listening to Keith Jarrett changed the way I listen to all music, changed the way the sound enters my ears. How can someone's piano playing have such an effect? In an effort to answer this question, I started reading about Keith Jarrett and his approach to music.

(To be continued...)

A spiritual (?) journey (Part 1)

While browsing some Kyoto-related websites the other day in preparation for my brief stay there in a few weeks, I discovered that the day I arrive in the ancient Japanese capital is the one day in October when To-ji temple holds its famous flea market, dubbed Kobo-san in honour of the priest Kukai (known posthumously as Kobo Daishi), the founder of the Shingon sect, with which the temple is closely associated. I actually paid a visit to To-ji temple with my brother Mark on the same market day in October two years ago, and much as I try to resist the urge to revisit places I've already seen on my travels throughout Japan, I'm tempted to go back to To-ji again this year. One reason is that I was making a video last time, and so I want to experience the place again not through the lens of a camera, but with my own eyes and ears. But another reason is that I've developed a bit of a fascination with Kukai and the esoteric Buddhist sect he founded.

Kukai (774-835) was a gifted scholar, calligrapher, poet, and artist. He was undoubtedly a genius, although claims that he invented the Japanese kana syllabary have always struck me as rather dubious. In 804, despite his reputation as a maverick, Kukai managed to secure a place on a government-sponsored expedition to China. It was an extremely arduous journey. Two of the ships in the fleet of four were lost at sea in a storm, and the vessel Kukai was on drifted for some 34 days before making landfall. The survivors then journeyed by land to the Tang capital of Chang'an, where, after completing in several months a course of study that normally took 20 years, Kukai received his final initiation into the esoteric Buddhist tradition. He returned to Japan in 806 and established the Shingon sect, whose headquarters on Mount Koya Mark and I also visited in October 2005.

I think I was interested in Buddhism long before I started studying Japanese, while I first heard of Kukai during my university days, when his name cropped up from time to time in Japanese language classes. But there's another, less obvious factor fueling my fascination with Kukai, particularly as a practitioner of esoteric Buddhism, and that's my interest in the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett.

(To be continued…)

Distance walked since Saturday: 12km
Total distance walked since blog began: 639.8km
Days left until launch of Kisokaido Project: 33

Return to the Treatise on the Function of Art

Among the torrent of replies to the Treatise on the Function of Art I posted back in May was an email from my brother in Bhutan. He took exception not to the main thrust of my argument, which was about art representing the fulfillment of a desire to connect with others by expressing common feelings or ideas, but to something that I'd taken completely for granted; that is, the idea that we make art to satisfy a creative urge. (Perhaps I should have heeded the warning of Theodor Adorno, who in 1970 said, "It is now taken for granted that nothing which concerns art can be taken for granted any more.")

My brother called mine a Western perspective, and rightly pointed out that in earlier years in the West, and still now in Bhutan, religious painting is anonymous and that the ego doesn't come into it. While there is some creativity, he said, the emphasis is on draftsmanship. I guess the purpose of art in this context is to transmit what is believed to be some universal and eternal religious truth, so of course the less the individual tampers with the content the better.

It's a valid point, and one that I should have acknowledged in my treatise, but as a committed materialist living in 21st century New Zealand, I couldn't say I was prepared to give it much further thought in the run up to producing whatever art it is I do as part of the Kisokaido Project. For me personally, art is all about individual expression. But is it really?

The reason I'm bringing this up now is that the other day I read this interview with jazz bassist Gary Peacock, and ever since I've been thinking that just maybe I've got it all wrong. Talking about his trio playing with pianist Keith Jarrett and drummer Jack DeJohnette, Peacock stressed the need to not have an agenda or feel you need to prove something.

It's just the music. What does the music want? Almost all of the music I play with Keith and Jack are like flowers. There's this beautiful bouquet of flowers, so the idea is to really nourish them. You wouldn't trample them, you wouldn't give them too much water or you'd drown them. How do I nourish these flowers so they can really express themselves? You approach the music from that standpoint, rather than as a vehicle for your technique or your self-expression. Creativity is not the point. It's just about the music.

So here we have a musician I respect playing a very modern form of non-religious music in which individual creativity has traditionally been heralded denying that creativity is the point. Now some of the music these three people make together, and especially the solo piano playing of Keith Jarrett (another person who describes his music in spiritual terms), moves me like no other art I've ever come across. And at the risk of being caught out again, isn't emotional impact one of the qualities we all look for in art? So perhaps it's not surprising that when I read statements like the above my commitment to materialism starts to waver ever so slightly.

Distance walked today: 3km
Total distance walked since blog began: 288.3km
Days left until launch of Kisokaido Project: 92