Rhythm Of Life

If talking about music is like dancing about architecture, talking about jazz is like cooking up a three-legged improvisation about the Taj Mahal.

As a language, its sort of a mash-up of all the others, including some made-up ones that everyone pronounces differently. Which is partly why artists from eight countries will feel equally at home at this years Melbourne International Jazz Festival.

Michael Dwyer attempts to translate the inspirations and destinations of four of them.

Bullets are flying, sirens screaming, buildings smoking and people running for their lives down the street. Its another day in Cape Town and local pianist Dollar Brand is sitting out the mayhem with some fellow musos in a parked car.

Naturally, someone turns on the radio and the air is suddenly sweetened by the warm, round tone of New York tenor sax colossus Sonny Rollins. His late 50s recording of Blue 7 plays an impossibly bright and breezy counterpoint to the chaos.

"Phew!" says the South African jazz man now known as Dr Abdullah Ibrahim. "Can you imagine the sound of Sonny Rollins crackling through the static among this gunfire? It was a moment of truth! It was an affirmation of unity!

"We understood now that we were living in two separate worlds. We understood that apartheid could not be correct because if you follow logic, you have to come to the conclusion of the unity of everything, the unity of the universe. We understood that our quest is to deal with beauty and deal with the truth."

Its no small quest for any musician, especially one living under a brutally ugly regime that kept truth on a distant backburner. Even after the apparent liberation of South Africa, and dozens of albums exploring the unity of African music, gospel, jazz and countless other musical dialects, Ibrahims quest is far from over, he says.

"People in their own communities are living in exile today, all over the world. The syndrome of the planet now is that people live behind secured walls. Living in exile! Music is the symbol of the concept of the unity within all things."

Conversation with Dr Ibrahim can be as maddening or rewarding as an audience with any spiritual master. The subject of jazz is repeatedly dismissed as a microcosm of something much larger and more mysterious.

His embrace of Islam in the late 60s was a logical manifestation of his philosophy of unity as a musician, he says. "Islam means submission to the divine will. To me, that is the natural rhythm of the universe."

Asked to describe his first channelling of said rhythm as a child, he chortles like the Dalai Lama watching Benny Hill and paraphrases the Persian poet, Rumi: "There is only one sound, all the rest is echo." Recollections of his 50s benefactor Duke Ellington arrive in similarly mystical garb.

"Ellington is also misunderstood," he says. "In some places he is still considered as a jazz man. We spent many hours talking. I remember one. We spoke about water. Water. And he said Maybe I will write a ballet about water: the stillness and serenity of the lake, the meander of the river, the endless ocean. Hm?"

When he puts it that way, its music already.

"Exactly," he whispers, like weve nailed the jazz vocation in a nutshell. "We look at all these signs and information and lessons that God gives us and puts in the universe, then we try to decipher them."

Lenny Kravitz doesnt surrender centre stage lightly. But there he was, on his first Australian arena tour of 94, backing out of the spotlight and tugging a frizzy forelock as he introduced his outrageous new drummer, Cindy Blackman.

The unleashing of her truly monstrous afro would have been the highlight of the show if it werent for a thunderous, quadruple-limbed solo that neatly subverted Kravitzs predilection for the rock n roll minimalism of his favourite drummer, Ringo Starr.

In every respect imaginable, the tall, glamorous, flamboyant black American woman thrashing in strictly weird time was the Antiringo herself, a title she accepts with a slightly wicked chuckle.

"What I realised when I joined that band was I had to settle into what was needed and what Lenny wanted," she says. "I heard a long time ago from one of my heroes, (ubiquitous jazz bassist) Ron Carter, that every situation needs a different thing to be satisfied. Ive never forgotten that."

Blackmans current situation is far removed from the foursquare backbeats of retro rock. Her first album after leaving Kravitzs band in 2004, Music For the New Millennium, is a double-disc exploratory opus with drums front, centre and everywhere else.

"All my heroes, theyre drummers who loved to play," she says. "Elvin Jones and Art Blakey, Philly Joe (Jones) and Tony Williams, Max Roach, Roy Haynes, they love to play the drums and Im that way, too. So when I get the opportunity to play the drums I go for it with all the gusto I can muster up at that moment."

Blackman talks in heroes a lot. She had her first epiphany at a drum clinic by Tony Williams, who honed his chops as a teenage prodigy with Miles Davis in the 60s. Davis was among the legends she studied at close range after moving to New York in the early 80s, where she made a point of regularly imbibing the same smoky air as a veritable rollcall of other sadly deceased giants.

But her greatest stalking story is the night she met Williams. She was sneaking in the back door of a Dizzy Gillespie gig in Washington, her drumstick bag still over her shoulder, when she got sprung by someone who turned out to be Williams drum tech.

"He said, Oh man, do you have any brushes in there? Dizzy wants Tony to play brushes, can he use em? I said Tony Williams can HAVE these brushes, can I come with em? It was like a movie script, for sure."

The ensuing friendship was a fountain of inspiration that kept flowing even after Williams death in 97, Blackman says. So it is with all of her departed heroes.

"Certainly when those energies departed this world there was a big hole, but I think that the scene is really bouncing back with some people who really are here to create. And I plan on being one of those people. As long as Im breathing, I plan on working towards pushing the envelope."

During his lifetime, Belgian-born gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt was one of the few non-American musicians to make a substantial and unique contribution to jazz. When he was 50 years gone, Rolling Stone critics listed him second to Jimi Hendrix among the greatest guitarists of all time.

The fact that he created this astounding legacy with two fingers of his left hand paralysed after a caravan fire is a classic illustration of genius transcending physical limitations.

"Django Reinhardt was the master. He was like Beethoven," says Samson Schmitt of France-based gypsy ensemble, Les Enfants de Django. "He was the first musician to be able to play with such a disability. He was also a composer and in terms of jazz improvisation, he was the best."

Its fair to note that this assessment contains elements of family and cultural pride as well as musicianly respect. "We, too, are gypsies, like Django," says Schmitt. He can only guess that Les Enfants second guitar player, Mike Reinhardt, has some familial connection to the master, who died in 1953.

Whats certain is that Schmitts grandfather was a contemporary of Django. He passed his gift on to Dorado Schmitt, Samsons father, who may be the most celebrated violinist in the "manouche" (gypsy jazz) tradition since the late Stephane Grappelli, Reinhardts collaborator in Le Quintette du Hot Club de France in the 1930s.

"This style of manouche has been passed on through many generations," says Samson. "It was my father, Dorado, who first put me onto the guitar to play renditions of (Reinhardts most famous composition) Nuages, when I was six years old.

"Dorado is the most important gypsy composer and many people have interpreted his compositions through the years. We have toured everywhere including the United States, Japan and China and its been an absolute pleasure playing with my father."

Its a safe bet that each of those countries harbours a clique of elite adherents to the cult of Django. Some purists even tape up two fingers of their left hands while practising to simulate the masters handicap.

Samson Schmitt laughs at this suggestion, but he acknowledges a certain sacredness to Les Enfants approach, from their distinctively shaped and large-bodied acoustic guitars to specific aspects of technique.

"Its the kind of music that needs to be interpreted with feeling, with heart, improvisation and sentimentality, but its also the kind of music that needs lots of energy because its an acoustic guitar, not electric," he says.

"We endeavour to maintain the purity of his work. There are times when we put in our own manner and our own style, but still with absolute respect for Django."

It aint broken, is Samson Schmitts suggestion, but it may well be endangered.

"There is no future for this style of music, because it was Django who created it. From here, its up to groups like ours and composers like my father to adapt this style of music into new things. Its up to us to keep it alive."

Music is all about sex. Its about tension and release, eagerness and restraint, gratification and generosity, control and surrender, and other delicately opposed forces in a more or less graceful fumble towards ecstasy.

This is a cliche that Norwegian pianist Tord Gustavsen found himself endorsing in some detail in his academic thesis of 1999, The Dialectical Eroticism of Improvisation.

"When I went deeper into that cliche using the psychological theories that I have found very fruitful, the parallels just grew stronger and also more nuanced," he says.

"You need to enter into it without hesitation, without boundaries, for eroticism to really work. At the same time you need to have perspective and be able to deal with frustrations, and to see the other person as something other than just an aspect of your own desires. That really has its parallels in the way a musician has to relate to the music and the instrument."

For a global audience, the thing that makes this so much more compelling than your average University of Oslo abstract is the undeniable allure of the Tord Gustavsen Trios music. Their hormones may be racing with the infinite reasons and impulses that determine when, how and exactly what to tickle, but the result on their latest album, Being There, is a striking melodicism thats rare when hard-core jazz musos get down to business.

"We take seriously our own passion for melody and for beauty at the same time as taking seriously our own passion for freedom," Gustavsen says. "That makes it both a romantic lyric ensemble and a contemporary jazz ensemble, and I guess that combination is probably not so common."

Gustavsen, double bassist Harald Johnsen and drummer Jarle Vespestad "all come to music with a basic imperative of playing music that feels as honest and intense as possible, there and then," the pianist says. But part of that honesty is acknowledging their own biases, as determined by the musical diets of their childhood and upbringing.

"Whenever I get in touch with a basic core musicality and a basic, almost childlike, singing way of playing the piano, thats when my explorations and my creativity are really satisfying to me," Gustavsen says.

"To me, that has a lot to do with daring to use actively the songs that were sung in my home when I was little, the hymns from the Lutheran tradition of church in Norway, and spirituals and lullabies of the Scandinavian folk tradition.

"While were not trying to play those things. Its a matter of getting in touch with the vibe, so to speak, and allowing structures and forms and melodic key elements to sink into the improvisation. Then we build from there."

Given this kind of regional palette and aforementioned melodic accessibility, it seems reasonable to ask Tord Gustaven exactly what he means by jazz.

"In the globalised, post-modern age," he replies, "you can neither expect nor should you try to find one answer to that. You can just collect different stories, different biographies, different perspectives, and then the truth will be the totality of that."

The Melbourne International Jazz Festival runs from next Tuesday, April 29 until Sunday May 4.

For program and tickets: www.melbournejazz.com

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