Everyone complains on rainy days, and I'm not really sure why. For me, they're some of the best days ever. Rain is a very sensory experience. Sound, smell, feel, sight... and even taste, if you want. Everything about the rain, I love. Yes, even when I have to walk in it.
Today, I'm going to reference time. Music lives. Especially in improv. You know how I know? Because in one moment it exists, it expresses, it breathes, it makes mistakes, it falls apart, it builds up, it speaks, it evolves and unfolds. And then, it's over. And what happened in that moment of living never happened before, and will never happen again. It's a translation of the soul, and is as unique in its moment as any of us, or any other thing in nature. Even a recording is just a photograph of what happened in that moment, and what we have in that photograph is just a memory.
What happens in a moment of music will never happen again the same way, just as you and I will never happen again once we pass. Yet somehow, during the course of a piece of music (and even throughout the evolution of music as a whole), what happened then is essential to what happens now, and to what will happen in the future. And what happens in the future depends entirely on what is happening now, which depends on what happened already. It is predetermined, and its not. Once a choice has been made, it's very difficult to go back and try to reroute onto a different path. It's not impossible, but getting back there entails yet another path. One of the scary things, and honest things, about music is that you can't take back anything. There are always consequences. And since this is the truth about how the world/universe/evolution/humanity works, you can see why I would say that music lives. Fwew. I'm rereading this, and it's just a conundrum of wordplay. Let's leave it to the experts.
An excerpt from a poem by T.S. Eliot. I won't put the entire thing here, because no one wants to read an entire poem in a blog. I'll just write the title so that you can look it up if you want to.
An excerpt from Four Quartets: Burnt Norton:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Here we go, Day 4: https://ia902701.us.archive.org/35/items/Improv81811/Memo-5.mp3
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