My wife Stephie just turned 42. For her birthday we went swimming at Zurich Lake. We were in up to our waists when she asked me to write a story about live music. Stephie, this is for you.
………….
Live music.
What makes live music wonderful?
Because it isn’t perfect.
It is certainly not glamor. Nor is it the starstruck stimulation of a Taylor Swift sized persona. It is not the light show. Nor a huge stadium crowd. The essence of live music won’t be found in pre-packaged Vegas style pre-form-ance.
So what makes live music alive?
Live music is live, because it is ALIVE.
And what is alive is vulnerable.
What is alive doesn’t quite know what is going to happen next.
What is alive is beyond any plan conceived by the logical mind. You can make your plans, and it is even good to plan, but God dispenses reality. In this way live music is a Godly affair.
Live music is an infusion of the stuff that lights up the here and now. It’s true currency is vibrancy.
You know live music when you feel it, because live music includes you, the audience; in fact, it doesn’t exist without the audience.
It is a co-creation. You, me and eternity.
You know you’ve tasted live music when the show is over, and, as you leave the concert hall, you pass a stranger and exchange a singular look with that person.
It is a conspiratorial look. A look that says, yes, what we just witnessed was pure magic, and somehow we witnessed it together! It changed me forever, and by the look on your face, I know that you know what I’m talking about. After this meeting of the eyes, you will never see that person again, and it doesn’t matter.
What was shared was shared.
In this respect, live music is not about consumption. It is not merely a pleasure trip. It is direct communication.
At it’s best, live music is communion.
Oneness.
Oneness in diversity.
Oneness in a creative act.
It is you letting the sound hit you how it hits you, your eyes closed, attending the pure flow of thoughts and feelings.
It never stops be amazing. That moment when your thoughts come clear in startling realization.
An unasked question answered.
An epiphany realized exactly in time with the flow of the music.
Then you know that you are not alone.
Or rather, you and the music are alone together. This is the essence of live music.
Live music is unapologetically impermanent. Like a Tibetan sand painting, it is gone when the show is over and it will not be coming back.
Live music as embodied by one man: Allow me to introduce you to Sonny Rollins.
Sonny Rollins, the only jazz man who ever squeezed tears out of these eyes.
Joy tears. Transformation, transcendent, beyond the moment and into the ever loving now…that was what I got when I received the sax sounds of Sonny Rollins. Sonny Rollins, bowing down again and again as he sends torrent after torrent of beautiful sax sounds into the receptive ether; his head bobbing up and down like a Hasidic rabbi at the western wall, incanting sacred prayers to the almighty.
There is nothing like Sonny Rollins, but Sonny Rollins. There will never be another like him.
I saw Sonny 3 times.
Once was the New Orleans Jazz Fest 1993 with my girl friend Raha. Another show was a show in San Francisco with my friend Jazzmin, but it was the free concert at Lincoln Center one July evening 25 years ago that stands out as the most vivid in my memory.
I am sorry, but you will have to trust me when I tell you that on that occasion I had my all illusions shattered, like broken wood carried away by a flood of electrified water, no conceptually constructed psycho-barrier could hold back the power of Sonny’s overflowing sound….all that with the full moon at his back, bigger than it ought to be, but not bigger than Sonny….Sonny turned that moon into a co-star, a prop even…Sonny was that big!
People ask me how it is that gong baths defy gravity and send people into outer/inner space, how they can lose their sense of time, how they find themselves beyond the boundaries of 3 dimensions, how they experience a timeless bliss.
People want to know just how the gong music can bring them through habitual distracted thought, through all emotions, through terror, down the grandest canyon of all have nots, will nots, know nots, and never nots.
How we travel beyond our individuality into a truer identity.
I’ll tell you how it happens.
I’ll let you in on the secret.
It is because I am a faithful student of live music.
The classroom where I have learned what I have learned is where live music happened for me.
My teachers were the music men and women and they set the standard for me.
It was at a concert one night, sitting next to my friends Jim and Rozann, at Carnegie Hall in 1998. Ali Akbar Khan taught me that time was an illusion.
It was a concert the same year at Cooper Union that Vilayat Khan showed me that when sound is fused with loving awareness, it can create pure auric color. I learned that synesthesia is not a special condition, but a closer relative to reality than so called normal reality. That synchronicity of sound and thought can mold material to spiritual purposes.
It was at a show at a place called the Knitting Factory in a room not much bigger than a living room that sax playing shaman David S. Ware, whose uncompromising straight ahead sax intensity drilled a hole through my separate self sense, leaving me no choice but to surrender the silliness of my artificial borders; thus, opening me up and delivering me first class to a beautiful no man’s land of pure love.
It was Eddie Harris, who showed me that dry humor doesn’t have to be a put on. It can simply be that life, when we look at it a certain way, is pretty darn funny.
But the essence of what I have learned so far about the mystical power of live music was embodied and taught to me by Sonny Rollins, who showed me that a human can play a sound with their whole self, from the bottoms of their feet to the top of their head, the whole body, the origin of sound and its destination a place before and beyond the body.
The result of being in the presence of Sonny Rollins was to be in the presence of a relentless gift of overflowing beauty, until your cup not only runs over, but shatters…shatters to sounds so shatteringly beautiful, that there is nothing to do but to cry and to sigh….Hallelujah….!
This is for you, Sonny Rollins, Happy 94th Birthday. I love you, as I know you, completely. I thank you for showing me through the electric liquid of your transmission, that it is good to be who I am. I receive it.
To the very best of my ability, I pass it on to others in every gong bath.
Even though, this is not live Sonny Rollins, I wanted to give you a small taste of his brilliance, so here it is…with apologies for those without Spotify.
As a post script, I wish to say, that I find it hard to find such teachers these days. Maybe it is because I am of a certain age and like to be in bed early. Likely, the reason is that I no longer need live music, as concieved inside the music halls. Today, I find my live music everywhere.
Today, I listen to the sounds of the environment. I listen to the trams, the trains, the cars, the wind, birds, all of it and I don’t make a distinction, good or bad.
It is all live music.
It is not perfect.
It is ALIVE!