More on Jarrett

I want to go back to yesterday’s quote from Keith Jarrett and focus on one specific part of it:

“I once had a conversation with Vladimir Ashkenazy. We were on a cruise with the English Chamber Orchestra and I gave him a tape with some recent improvisations. When he had listened to it he said, ‘How do you play all the right notes?’ I said, ‘No, you see they just become the right notes by virtue of their environment.'”

Now, I can just see my more conservative friends thinking that there is a problem with Jarrett’s thinking and asking these kinds of questions: What does he mean that a note becomes right as a virtue of its environment? Doesn’t that smack of postmodernism? Doesn’t a note either belong in a chord or not belong in the chord? Why would the environment change that? Aren’t there rules about music that make all this black and white?

Well, here are some thoughts about this from a Christian perspective.

First of all, Jarrett is probably best categorized as a jazz pianist and jazz is all about improvisation. It is also about taking control from the writers of music and giving it to the performers of the music.

As this happens, the concept of right or wrong becomes blurred because there is no standard for how a song has to sound. If you listen to ten great pianists play a Bach Fugue, they will all sound fairly similar with only subtle differences. This is because the classical community all agrees that a Bach Fugue should sound a certain (right) way. But if you listen to ten great jazz pianists play a song like “Moon River”, every performace will be profoundly different even to the most untrained musical ear.

This democratic approach to music contributed to immense musical development during the 20th Century especially in harmony and rhythm. But the byproduct of complex harmony is dissonance, at least by some standards. What is a gorgeous chord to one person sounds like wrong notes to another.

There are rules that are generally followed by writers that use this complex harmony but they are not set in stone. For example, you will not see many natural 11ths in a major 7th chord but #11ths are common. But no one is going to complain if you use a natural 11th in that chord if it sounds good and I sure that has been accomplished by someone.

The point is that music is very complex. And there is no rulebook on earth that handles every complexity. I do not know if Jarrett believes that God created music and the laws that govern it. But I would guess that he knows there are laws that govern when a note “works” that cannot really be explained by us yet. Music is still in the process of being discovered. We are still making advances in music just like we are making advances in medicine and technology. Contrary to what any naive person tells you, musical development did not stop with Beethoven.

Great musicians sometimes stumble on things that just work but cannot be explained. We can look at musicians from the last century who broke the rules as we still know them and yet created great music. What does this really mean? It simply means that we do not really know all the rules yet.

So, Jarrett’s genius is just more advanced than our musical understanding. That is nothing for Christians to be scared of.  His quote does not hint at a dangerous philosophy. It instead represents a normal result of healthy innovation.