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The world can be a sad and sickening place, juxtaposed with beauty and joy at every dead end you plow through, if you just keep going.

The contradictions are abundant. The only truth lies somewhere in the in-between, in the harmonies between dissonant notes.

I think that’s why music resonates so profoundly for those who let it in, without thinking too much about what they’re listening to.

Listening in Miles Davis and his Quintet blow the socks off a beautifully clad room of Italians in the 60’s, you wonder how many of them ruined the experience trying to understand what they were hearing.

You know what you’re hearing. You’re hearing the wailing and sombre tones of a trumpet, the breath of a man at the height of his powers, and the genius of an 18-year-old drummer who changed music for good, coupled by the incredible bass, and dancing keys. Music that tethers on the brink of madness, as the brass players bounce giddily off each other, subdue and lift in equal measure.

In short, you’re hearing life. The talking, the joining, the arguments, the bewilderment, and the sublime that comes with the breathes between.

In music, technical talk is just for problem solving. How does one note resonate with another? How can we get where we need to go without hitting “wrong notes”? Miles Davis says even this is a bad way of thinking. “There are no wrong notes”, you just have to work harder to resonate sometimes. Herbie Hancock, who plays the keys in the same show, reflects how Miles Davis taught him just that, after he thought he’d ruined an entire performance, smudging the keys in a particularly crude manner during Mile’s solo. Miles only winced his face, as he had to think how best to resonate with such a unique sound. There was no real trouble, no wrong playing – no such thing.

You can hit any note, anytime, and it’s never “wrong”, so long as you slide that note back somewhere in the end that the ear finds pleasing. This, we call resonating.

There’s no rhyme or reason to it. It simply fits.

Like mathematics, in music people harp on about whether the craft is created or discovered – if there’s some foreign realm where numbers and notes really reside, in some abstract form, we merely subconsciously tap into, and through osmosis call our own.

The same could be said of thought. You didn’t invent the words you think or speak, did you? Who did, then? The guttural tones your ancestors belched out when pointing out a particular fruiting tree or animal, becoming more and more sophisticated over time, until tones culminate in opera singers bringing you to tears, and written words of philosophers and poets bringing you to bear – confronting all you feel, all you wrangle with within, in pages before you, somehow betraying your innermost unspoken thoughts to the world outside.

Seems odd that a shared emotive affect could be the result of oral technology, the bi-product of made up symbolic syllables, what we call language. Stranger still, a person could mix some beetle juice together to a form a pigment, then use that for paint, and conjure up the Mona Lisa, or a cave painting, and that can somehow affect you deeply, making you see something of your own life through the painstaking craft of another – without something “real” laying behind the effect. Is all music and art akin to a magic trick? An illusion. All songs nothing but a “a trick of air” as Tom Waits calls songwriting?

How then can one word resonate with an ancestor enough to catch on, over any other? Could it be, like in music, it simply fits? Every word seems to owe a debt to the beauty of the fruit it represents. Shakespeare said “a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet”, but, if roses were called “dungbells”, I doubt they’d sell out on Valentine’s day. The word has to fit, has to represent a true nature – has to resonate with the senses – before something’s true beauty comes through completely.

Like the beauty of Wayne Shorter’s sax, when his solo in “My Funny Valentine” takes you aback, the solemn and tender tones steal you away from the young drummer’s chipper, chugging along, and you fade into the quieter rumination of a man lost in the moment, before the drums kick back to life, and bring back the mood, like someone unexpectedly refreshing your glass at a party, asking you about the weather or sports, or TV – anything to get you out of your head and back to reality, back in the room.

Whether music and math are creations of people, or discoveries in nature – the effect’s the same. Tell what you’re feeling truthfully, as accurately, as articulately as possible – no matter how harsh, or telling, or uncomfortable, and it’ll resonate with anyone’s who’s felt similarly. That’s all there is to it. You either feel the music now, or you’ll feel it later when it’s true to you, too.

In the end all art’s stolen, taken from memories of events past, the guttural tones sharpening over generations till they fit just right on the ear. But, recording music, playing it over again and again, lets those memories last a lifetime. As Ron Carter, the bass player playing alongside Miles Davis that one night in Milan says in the comment section below the video, “Great memories… Thank you so much for sharing.” What more could anyone want? To live on forever, in a moment worth sharing. Talking things through. Writing them out. Knowing nothing for certain about anything you do, or say, but, that you can’t go wrong, so long as you just keep going, ‘till something resonates, ‘till it finally rings true.

That’s the art that sticks, owing to a truth behind the notes, behind the words, behind everything else.

25/March/2024