Jazz Improvisationx

With Kenny Barron and Ray Drummond, in the context of Jazz Improvisation, I was able to experience the power of silence in music. My encounter with these two great jazzmen was a real shock. They teach through their presence : it is as though a tranquil force emanates from them, allowing what they think to be felt without recourse to expression through words. My first emotional response was to feel not only the group’s way of being, but also its ethic. This superb reality, the musicians’interdependence, enables them to confront the unforeseen and to tackle unknown territories instinctively, whence the focus, the sublime concentrated attention of this group that is feeling its way into life. The jazz band thus appears as a body in motion, attempting to grasp the poetry of the real. Each of its members works on receptivity by actively listening to the others. Each sustains and supportsthe fragility of the one who is searching for interiority in a vibrating meandering. From there, the unrestrained solo turns into a group frenzy. Once he attains this “state,” the jazz musician becomes unequivocally a free man, to the degree that he succeeds in capturing the sound vision that emerges. All the members of the ensemble are immersed in the flow of an abstract thought, a flow whose jubilant rhythms are those of a meandering journey. The space explodes with all these energies. The body begins to listen for all these vibrations. Spontaneously, I felt I wanted to recover the sensations procured by the language of crayons, of color, thus returning to the naïve joys of childhood. Under the aegis of Kenny Barron, I was invited to join the group in its improvisation process. Here, once again, my style was set free. I tried to give a form
to the musical exploration of interiority. Curiously, in the crazy dynamics of the drawn line, I recovered some of the principles that the Chinese masters had taught me more than twenty-five years previously, primarily concerning the form of writing they refer to as “mad cursive.” But, for the first time, I untethered myself from the intellectual diktat of the ideogram. Jazz revealed itself as an almost contemplative listening experience, each instrumentalist being invited to let his interiority speak freely. This, perhaps, is what Paul Claudel is evoking in The Eye Listens,
“Musicians invite us, more effectively than any treatise on asceticism or meditation, to investigate our own depths, and to inventory the hidden recesses of our being ; to become aware of our inner selves.”