The unexplored country

In just about every realm of human existence, there are three primary ways of approaching the future -- innovation, maintenance, and destruction. This plays out in innumerable expressions, but the area that has my attention right now is in music, and to a lesser degree, art. Maintaining in jazz means a mastery of traditional harmony, structure, repetoire and technique. When I say maintaining, I do not in any way imply that it is a lesser state than being an innovator. Jazz maintenance is a high art, and requires a level of detail and commitment that is absolutely staggering! It's akin to the level of musicianship required to be first violin in a major symphony. In these positions, the vocabulary is well established, as are the expectations of the audience and your peers. Jazz has an immense repertoire that is expanded upon literally every day -- not only with original tunes, but highly original adaptations of existing songs. Added to this are the unique inflections and accents of exceptional performers. Individual solos over chord changes may sound very unique to the person playing them, but there is always a baseline expectation of what will happen within the constructs of the tune. I repeat that this requires a staggering level of commitment and persistence. Even the notion of practice -- learning new things included -- reinforces the notion that you must work on maintaining technique or you will assuredly lose it. Another hallmark of jazz maintenance is that it can be documented, repeated and communicated to others through tutelage. At the highest levels, the instruction requires an immense foundation of knowledge, much like a science, where you must understand all of the underlying laws, theorems and hypotheses. Jazz at its highest level of maintenance is dizzying.

As I have thought about this, I came to realize that the ultimate demarcation of an art in maintenance mode is its appellation by an audience -- either the music-consuming public, or the artists themselves. Quantifying an art form means putting it in a box that can be maintained. On the fringe of this box is always a group of individuals pushing it out further, exploring what possibilities still remain. But eventually, this meets a point of infinitely diminishing returns. Almost all sciences have met this point. As quantum physics delved further and further into the atomic world, smaller and smaller particles emerged, and eventually the only thing left was an unintelligible mystery that seemed to fly in the face of the macro-realities of the physical world. There are still innumerable major mysteries, but most quantum research is focused on elaborating upon earlier theories and postulates. Eventually, scientists hope to find the Unified Theory that ties the macro and micro worlds of physics together. Other sciences have met even more solid boundaries. For example, geographical exploration has reached a defined terminus. With mapping and tracking satellites circling the globe, high-resolution spectrometry and a host of other technologies, there are no more continents to be discovered. We know to a very high level of certainty where all dry land on planet Earth resides. There is not really a place for explorers circumnavigating the globe in wooden sailing ships anymore. With the exception of correlative sciences such as oceanography, climatology and vulcanology, geographers have become unified maintainers of the science. Again, this maintenance requires an extreme level of expertise to comprehend. Anyone who has ever studied the erosive patterns of oxbow-forming rivers, or subtleties of continental drift knows that geology is a big subject. Jazz is a big subject. So much so that it has created hundreds of splinter disciplines just like in geography. There's bebop, big band, fusion, and funk -- all with even smaller avenues of expression . But, as one looks at the big picture, Jazz has reached a terminus. The majority of jazz players out there are elaborating on what has already been explored -- albeit at a much higher level of precision and refinement. As Dexter Gordon's character said in the clasic jazz movie 'Round Midnight "A cat came up to me one time in Brooklyn, and stared at me while I was playing, you know, the way a lot of dudes do; and then he says, I'm a jazzman too, and I play you better than you play you."

For me, I want to find the unexplored country... if it exists.