Ink Tea Stone Leaf

Jazz music is a misunderstood music, one of the load-bearing pillars of a culture that makes a habit of misunderstanding itself. Of all the kinds of music one commonly hears in America, it stands apart as the most human kind of expression—its cardinal virtue is improvisation, and it delights in the recreation of what was old as something new, without forgetting its history and falling into the trap of thinking it is being original when it is only reinventing the wheel.

Why am I bringing this up? I just heard the loveliest version of “Autumn in New York” by Makaya McRaven, and I wanted to say a little something about the horns. Honestly, when I listen to any jazz, I often find myself wanting to say something about the horns. But my musical vocabulary is so limited, I am often reduced to saying little more than, “man, listen to that horn; do you hear that horn?”

Putting aside the human voice, I have long felt that brass and wind instruments most embody the spirit of jazz. My main reason for believing this is that, like the human voice, the sound originates in the breath. It literally comes from a person’s interior, brought forth with the core muscles and channeled into elegant instruments that augment the melodic possibilities of the lungs. Keyboard players and string players can dazzle with the works of their fingers, but what comes of the breath is so much more intimately expressive.

Just now I heard Charles Tolliver and Stanley Cowell play “Abscretions,” and I just have to say again, “listen to that horn.”

Am I dissing other kinds of instrumentalists? Absolutely not! The myriad ways that people have devised to create euphonious sound are a collective marvel of the global culture. But humankind never did it better than when they figured out how to blow.

And what about the human voice? There is, obviously, nothing more human than that. But jazz singing has always been the slightest bit elusive to me, not because jazz singers are not incredible, but because it sounds so unusual for a person to sing with the same kind of range and phrasing as some jazz players perform on the horn. Jazz singing, I feel, is more suitable to the kind of cool, melodic phrasing of a slower, relaxed kind of jazz, while the horns have more credibility in fast, hard-driving, bebop-like styles.

But you can’t reduce these things to universals—a dedicated jazz musician, singer or otherwise, can accomplish incredible things when they embrace the underlying jazzy-ness of their setting. The essence of the music is surprise.