Give priority to what you hear

The author, Pierre Capretz, argues that the writing systems of French AND English are merely attempts at capturing the actual sound of a language. As an example of the limitations of written language, he cites George Bernard Shaw’s jest that “fish” should instead be written “ghoti” – the “gh” as in “enough”, the “o” as in “women”, and “ti” as in “nation”.

Part of the point, here, is that inflection, accent, and a hundred other dimensions are simply squeezed out when we reduce living language to the printed word. In reading a novel, or even a newspaper story, we have to “rehydrate” the original intent in some fashion, lest the dry letters and typeset sentences betray the best intentions of the author as surely as a computer-generated voice would in reading Shakespeare aloud.

When you first play the melody, or “head”, to a jazz standard, such as “Stella By Starlight”, it’s tempting to think that your first reading of the music is definitive – that every subsequent performance of the melody, either in private or in public, must necessarily closely match your first rendering of the tune. It’s only as (much) time has passed that I’ve really begun to internalize the notion that the notes on the page capture at best 0.01% of the true meaning of the actual music. Just as you can stretch out words, or hurry through them; drawl or speak with a Yankee-ish accent; raise your voice, or drop your inflection, and so on, the true meaning of notes on the page seems ever more elusive.

Viewed from this perspective, it doesn’t seem interesting at all that in jazz you rarely play a melody the same way twice. It would seem amazing, given the almost infinite variations embedded in the almost-too-sparse language of musical notation, if you ever managed to truly duplicate a single rendition.

Another nice thing – for only the second time in my life, I had the bass player – Jon Blondell – ask to grab a copy of the sheet music for one of my tunes. This is quite flattering, since everyone knows that the only person on the bandstand guaranteed to know what’s going on is the bassist. Especially if it’s Jon. Jon wanted to grab a copy for his band on Tuesday at the Elephant Room, to play and maybe record. Totally cool with me. My only demand is 50% on every dime past $500K in profit that they make on that record (please note that the song in question –  ”I Don’t Know, I Don’t Care” – has actually already been recorded, and is available on the album “Who I Am”  in Napster, on iTunes, and at Amazon.com, Cheapo Discs, and Waterloo Records).

Finally, as a very nice surprise, after we finished and I dropped off our sax player, Philipe Vieux, he asked me to hang on a sec while he ran in to grab something from his apartment. It was a very cool reharmonization – in C# – of Fifteen Miles on the Erie Canal – an old work song that he was working on with Wakie in lessons. He’d promised Wakie he’d transcribe the tune so that I could try it out with my band, and here it is – a really crazy (in the good sense of the word) looking version, titled “Twenty Three Kilometers”; I guess Philipe was stopping just short of a literal transcription.

Sorry about that, I couldn’t resist.