Saturday 3 March 2018

Listening to cassette, wondering about timing

Sometimes it seems quite arbitrary what I choose to carry with me when going through and saving some things from my parents household, but for some reasonI have saved the cassette of ‘Jazz on a Summers Day 15 Jazz classics’ which has, track 2 side 1, Sarah Vaughan singing 'Summertime.' 
Listening to it on an old beatbox while I potter about the kitchen and thinking of how most music is quantised and regularised and then I think of the precision and freedom combined of jazz musicians, and Sarah Vaughan and the bands ragged and precise timing and how weird it is. You could get all analytical and decode what is happening in there, but it’s all felt and I bet all players involved would laugh if you asked them to analyse exactly what is happening. 
‘That is the way she sang and we went with it’ I  can imagine them saying, downplaying their probably unconscious sensitive musicianship
Pre digital playing  is so different- there is always compromise and sensitivity there. Hard to keep that sensitivity in a digital world. 
(I say this knowing how bad my timing can be, but knowing the importance of being in tune and time whether digitally achieved or achieved sensitively).
Maybe that in the digital binary world there is less room for mistakes or happy accidents to be assimliated.
 In the digital binary world something is either 'wrong' or 'right'. The real world is a bit looser- good or bad?

Thursday 1 March 2018

AGE


When I were a mere yoot of 45
I still felt 25
but now I am 55
(I lie about my age, I'm actually 59)
I am, under no illusions
and dreams are in the past and I imagine
Being 65, 75, 85