Piano Genius and NEA Jazz Master Keith Jarrett Asks, What is Music?

[kris]

[Maxxx]

"Music is not something you can describe with words".

That just about kills this entire forum.

Or as Wes used to say: There are people that play.. and there are people that just talk about playing.

[strumcat]

Yeh!! Now that my feet are back on the ground after listening to that (whoo-EEE!) maybe he meant that theory is an attempt to explain in ideas, words, and symbols something that can't quite be explained in ideas, words, and symbols. But theory turns out to be incredibly useful for musicians trying to communicate and cooperate with one another and write down what they've created. And maybe jazz is an approach to all music with the same freedom of expression and creative abandon of blues, without being limited to pentatonic scale. Whatever, IMO that recording had the real spirit of jazz straight from its New Orleans beginnings. My head is still spinning. Please excuse my exuberance...

[SOLR]

"Music is not something you can describe with words".

That just about kills this entire forum.

Of course it helps that Keith Jarrett was a child prodigy, had a formal musical education starting at 3 years old , played Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and wrote his own compositions in "concert" at 7 . ..... I like this quote from this film (more or less accurate) :"If you're about to play a chord you've learned, from the past and you forget it , that's perfect 'cause it becomes improvisation" ...Let's not "kill" the forum prematurely, we, mere mortals still have a use for it.....

S

[Cunamara]

I don't know if it was intentional, but he demonstrated the impossibility of communicating music through words quite elegantly.

[strumcat]

This reminds me of D.T. Suzuki's books on zen. That enlightenment can't be expressed or achieved through words, ideas, or logic was a recurring theme in them, yet he kept writing them. A paradox. I love the proverb about zen being only a sign pointing in the direction of enlightenment, nothing more. "When a wise man points to the moon, a fool considers only the finger." Sometimes I think of music theory as the wise man's finger, while music is the moon itself.