Jon Rappoport Music

ENCOUNTER
JON RAPPOPORT, piano - PUTTER SMITH, bass

Encounter CD $15.00

THE LINER NOTES FOR ENCOUNTER

When it comes to my work, I don't really care what's SUPPOSED TO happen. I'm not interested in that premise at all. I'm interested in improvisation over an extended period of time, and in this session I was very fortunate to work with bassist Putter Smith. To say he is one of the giants on his instrument, although true, doesn't begin to pay homage to his talent.

The more we played, the more synchronous the whole session became. For me, it was far more than "unexpected." The collaborative aspect goes a lot farther than a shared musical tradition. It gets into places where both of you are working from imagination, first and foremost, and in that space the "arrivals and departures" are dreamlike.

When I was 11 years old, I was on a baseball team playing in the finals of a state tournament up in Niagara Falls. After it was over, we had to take a ten-hour bus trip back to New York. I grabbed a book of short stories out of a candy store and jumped on the bus, and read the whole thing on the way home. It convinced me that imagination can go anywhere and do anything. In the ensuing 60 years, I haven't changed my mind.

Doing this session with Putter Smith confirmed everything I believe about creating. You can take two people with vastly different backgrounds and approaches and experience, and both people will, as they play, arrive at something they could NEVER have conceived of or predicted.

Generally speaking, chaos and order are only very rough approximations of what really happens in the moment.

The universe is waiting for imagination to revolutionize it down to its core. Everything else is open to debate.

In 1954, when I was sixteen, a kid from my high school turned me on to Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, Horace Silver, Clifford Brown. At first, I had no idea what these guys were doing. I couldn't get into it. But this kid kept telling me Bird and Bud and Diz were the greatest musicians on the planet, and there was a little bit of hypnotism in that, and I took the bait and kept trying. After a year or so, I made the leap. I knew what he was talking about.

After that, there were a lot of turning points. One was realizing the bebop classic, Tadd Dameron's Hot House, was based on the changes of What Is This Thing Called Love, a song I'd heard sung on the radio when I was ten or 11. What an amazing transformation Tadd invented.

Three thousand miles away and 45 years later, I walked into a very whitebread church a few blocks from my house in San Diego, on a quiet Sunday afternoon. The large chapel was empty, except for a woman of about 60 who was sitting up on the stage playing something soft on the piano. As I got closer, I realized it was What Is This Thing Called Love. Why I said what I said then, I don't know. I said, "Have you ever heard another version of that called Hot House? I mean, who would say that? What possible reason would I have had for saying it in that place? So she reaches into her large purse, and pulls out a PIECE OF SHEET MUSIC: Hot House. The odds of that happening were a hundred zillion to one.

I've done some experiments with "improvisational choirs." I'd get a small group in a room and have them sing and make sounds. Any sounds. I'd cajole them to get into a process of making sounds, all at once, for half an hour. And the wildest things would happen. I would hear (I was singing too) moments when the most disparate outpourings would suddenly catapult into the Fantastical. NOT HARMONY. Something else. A dream Charles Ives or early Stravinsky might have had. You couldn't simply call it dissonance or chaos. It was beyond any label. It was the kind of music I would give a million bucks for. And there it was, for a few moments, in a room, where these people were just making "random" sounds. Extremely complex clusters, simultaneously. They were blowing open the space of any universe I knew about. Well, that wasn't exactly true. It was like being let into a dream you always hoped you'd have but couldn't put your finger on. You couldn't say what the dream was---and then all of sudden, it was there, in that room.

Most of the time, we have no idea how astonishing music can be. Yes, great, great things can happen within a framework. But outside that? We're only beginning to grasp it, even after all the water of modern music has gone under the bridge. We're only starting to find what's really possible. It turns out we're just on the cusp. There are fabulous complexities (and simple things too) that are still in the ruminating stage.

In the dream, so to speak, all bets are off. We're beyond this culture or any culture anywhere. ANYWHERE IN ANY UNIVERSE. Just as, at one time, the idea of "the music of the spheres" was a temporarily interesting notion but quite provincial, now just about all modern music, including microtonal, is only entering the unlimited space of what's possible.

50 years from now, people will still be figuring out what Cecil Taylor is doing. Not in their heads, not through analysis, but from listening.

Conventional space and time are broken. They're breaking down. What's moving in is a billion Xs. They're not moving in from somewhere. We're inventing them.

Here is an article I wrote a couple of years ago. I've added a few paragraphs to the beginning---

Maybe you've heard the old story about Charlie Parker driving past Igor Stravinsky's house in Hollywood one night. Bird was about to go up and knock on the door, but he decided not to.

Bird would have understood Igor's music a lot better than Igor would have understood Bird's. I'm sure of it. Igor was interested in the harmonics of Shorty Rogers' arrangements, but I doubt he really knew what heights a solo could reach.

Igor was a genius when he was 28. I don't know about after that. My personal opinion is he liked his own fame and status a little too much.

On May 29, 1913, in the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris, a riot broke out.

After the curtain went up on the premiere of The Rite of Spring, it took only a few minutes for the tumult to begin.

Boos, hisses, catcalls, people throwing objects at the stage... The roar of the crowd quickly became so loud the dancers lost their cues.

The music was a whisper, pounding screams, brass sheets. Cliffs were gorgeously smashing into each other in mid air.

The police arrived and shut the program down.

Stravinsky, at 28, had arrived on the world scene.

Forget that never again would he compose music so challenging, or that later in his life, after he had taken up a position as a champion of new classicism, he would conduct a recording of Rite that was modulated to a bare shadow of its former self.

The revolution had happened.

Much has been written about the premiere and Rite. A great deal of programmatic explanation has been offered to "make sense" out of the piece of music: after all, it was a ballet with a plot, and the themes had to do with primitive ritual sacrifices in a fanciful pagan world.

This is called watering down the effect. It's done by linking the music to a tale/myth. The tale, when told is, of course, much more sober and distant.

You can also find scholarly work on the structure of the Rite, indicating a possible borrowed background of several Eastern European folk melodies.

I bring this up because such music is diluted by referring the audience to "other examples" and periods of time and influences---to explain the incomprehensible.

But the fact is, to absorb a work of imagination, you have to use your own imagination.

Since this is considered unlikely, pundits earnestly help us with step-down contexts, so we can understand the music in pedestrian terms. In other words, so we can reduce it to nothing.

However, the music itself resists such translations. It immediately and finally presents itself as a universe apart from easy references and tie-ins and links.

So when you listen to Rite, you are, gratefully, alone with it. (In this regard, I recommend one recording. The 1958 Leonard Bernstein-New York Philharmonic, available as Sony SMK 47629. It's the 1992 Bernstein Royal Edition. Le Sacre Du Printemps.)

In 1912 and 1913, Stravinsky had composed Rite in a reckless frame of mind. This didn't mean he abandoned all he knew; it meant he wanted to show everyone how dim the perception of music had become. "To hell with all of them."

He took the large orchestra and made it an ocean in a storm. He crossed all lines.

He made something new, something no one could have predicted.

There are artists like Stravinsky, like the Spanish architect Gaudi, like Edgar Varese, like the often-reviled American writer Henry Miller, like Walt Whitman (grotesquely co-opted into a Norman Rockwell-like prefect), like the several great Mexican muralists---Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros---all of whom transmit an oceanic quality.

As in, The Flood.

There is a fear that, if such artists were unleashed to produce their work on a grand scale---they would take over the world.

This is the real reason there was a riot at the Theatre des Champs Elysees on May 29, 1913. Even though Stravinsky was presenting a universe of his own making, people instinctively felt the music could spill over into the streets of Paris...and after that, where would it go? What would stop it?

Their fear was justified.

When the artist creates a separate and new space, a crossover occurs.

A most natural crossover.

Our world, contrary to all consensus, is meant to be revolutionized by art, by imagination, right down to its core.

That this has not happened for the best is no sign that the process is irrelevant. It is only a testament to the collective resistance.

Who knows how many such revolutions have been shunted aside and rejected, in favor of the shapes and symmetries we now think of as central and eternal?

We are living in a default structure, the one that has been left over after all the prior revolutions have been put to sleep.

We peek between classical columns to see what the future might hold. We speculate, for example, that information itself might be alive and might flow in from our own DNA to bring about a new cyber-brain step in evolution. Information? What further evidence do we need that our society is heading down a slope to the swamp?

If Rite Rite of Spring and other works of that magnitude are information, a wooden duck on a doily is Shakespeare.

From the point of view of art, mere information is the wood scrapings and the stone chips Brancusi swept up in his studio and put out in the alley. Information is the dried flattened tubes of paint Matisse disposed of with the old newspapers. Information is the heap of wires Tesla tossed in the garbage.

Information is the neutral boil-down left over after the artist has made his mark.

Creation is not neutral.

It flows out into the atmosphere with all its subjective force.

That is what happened on May 29, 1913.

And that is what evoked the mass fear.

Improvisation. A surprising number of people look at it as the last toothpaste finally squeezed out of the tube after all other options have been exhausted.

Even some of the Zen ink-brush teachers stressed "the years of necessary and harsh preparation" before the "student" could put a truly spontaneous line on the paper. Baloney.

Jackson Pollock laid that one to rest. Despite what De Kooning wrote about his work, he put it to rest, too. So did Franz Kline, and Arshile Gorky, and Rauschenberg and Klee and Kandinsky. Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Gregory Corso---they left the academy groveling in the sand. So did Walt Whitman and Scott Fitzgerald. Of course, critics later wrote about these "two towering figures" as if they were classicists at heart. Complete tripe.

People who are obsessed by systems and structures never realize that improvisation is the lifeblood of art in all times and places. You can't get away from it, except in retrospect, when you want to revise and lie.

Miles Davis once said something like, "You listen to all my solos, my lines, my phrases. You like this one and you don't like that one. But I know when I play a great phrase. I'm the only one who really knows."

There is no art without rebellion. If a person isn't willing to go against the grain, he has nothing to do. There's no spark that can set him off.

Over-control and over-system will make themselves plain; you'll just sit there and twiddle your twaddle. You won't make art. That's when you need to force it. Twist that square peg into that round hole. Punch it in with a hammer. Burn the peg.

The whole idea is to get out into the deep, and invent a hundred thousand new things. That's where we all want to be.

Paul Klee was one of those great spirits who transmuted everything he came in contact with---effortlessly. He didn't have to think about doing it. It was in his bones, his blood, his heart, his mind, his psyche: the act of transformation.

The poet e.e. cummings once wrote (I'm paraphrasing), there's a great universe next door; let's go. Klee went, every day of his life. He wasn't committed to one particular alternative. He invented them by the truckload. (This, as opposed to organized religion, which invents ONE cosmic mural and tries to back everybody into a corner with it.)

Klee never focused on developing a trademark style. He saw that as a limiter, a defection from the real joy of painting. He was a man who had many desires, recognized the fact, and painted all of them---including desires he never knew he had until he got pigment on to the canvas.

I know of no other artist who brings off such a diverse body of work with his degree of aplomb and ease. Klee exudes the sense of: "give me a small room, a pad of paper, a few colors, and close the door behind you."

That he was one of the giants who achieved a 20th-century revolution in art is not in dispute. He appeared to accomplish this from a position of already having arrived before he started. Yet, everything he did was by way of improvisation.

Critics downplay this last fact, because for them it amounts to cheating. Spontaneity is only permitted when there are many signs and stories of prior struggle. Klee avoided becoming enmeshed in struggle by working on a number of paintings at once. When he was finished for the moment with one, he moved to another, and so on, and he kept revisiting the incomplete works and adding to them until he was satisfied.

He also committed the sin of being savagely happy. His state of mind is clear from turning the pages in any book of his reproductions. You'll also come across paintings that are very dark and strange, and once you are sucked into his basic domain of invented archetypes and (un)balancing acts, you'll find yourself holding your breath now and then, wanting to move away from ominous turnings of the screw.

Klee was what I would call a sane man. He knew how to begin, he knew how to end. He knew the next painting was more important than the last one. He didn't need self-pity, and he didn't care for outlandish praise.

He wasn't trying to be recognized for certain traits. He had found gold, and he kept mining. He realized that imagination is an infinitely forked river, and he needed no propulsive agenda to drive him forward. One, two, three strokes on a blank canvas and he was able to invent what could come next. It was all open, his spaces.

One of the great creative lives.

He wasn't trying to solve a problem. Neither, as some have said, was he asking questions in his paintings.

He didn't title a painting until it was finished. Then he looked at it and thought up a name, which was sometimes laid on as a description, and sometimes given as a statement about what the picture was not.

Even Picasso, who reserved most praise for his own fabulous self as a matter of principle, once visited Klee in his studio and acknowledged the genius of another man. Through clenched teeth, no doubt.

Kandinsky and Klee mark a point of demarcation for painting. It was not enough to alter the so-called real world. You could create a new world in every picture. There were as many as you wanted to dream up.

Klee didn't give credence to having a finished idea in his mind before starting a work. He wasn't transferring a picture in his mind to the canvas. He was inventing/discovering as he went along. This made him satisfied. Sometimes, ecstatic.

He wasn't trying to compete with engineering. He wasn't running a factory where the plans for a highly complex object had to be laid out meticulously before construction got off the ground.

Some say his work was too easy. It was too celebrative. It didn't present a final vision. It lacked maturity. The emotions were too simple.

All these judgments are off the mark. They represent estimates of what Klee wasn't. What he was was marvelously direct. Is Mars too dry? Is Mercury too hot?

Do androids dream, as Phil Dick asked, of electric sheep? Do ants dream of balloons? Why not? And if so, why not paint that?

Paul Klee. 1879-1940. There is a little (out-of-print) book titled Klee, with a long, fascinating essay by Marcel Marnat. Publisher: Leon Amiel (1974). Many plates.

Several paintings I recommend: The Red Fish (1925); Head with Blue Tones (1933); 17IRR (1923).

I believe Klee was saying this: Here are several thousand worlds I just made. Approach them with a free mind and heart. Glance at them from several different angles. Jump into the liquids, stand on the flat surfaces, lean out away from the precarious platforms. Serve them to yourself as appetizers or main courses. Let them pass through your digestive tract. Make faces to match their faces. Remove their masks; then you may find deeper shades or you may find nothing. Go away with a spark of self-recognition. Our whole planet is a mask, and we can take great delight in dreaming up new times and places.

IMAGINATION is what you use and swim in, to lead you through into new territory.

This is no lab study.

No numbered system that has 2 or 56 or 87 possibilities.

This is no set ritual that can only be carried out in a certain way.

This is no product of the culture.

This is the individual coming awake in an enormous fashion.

When Walt Whitman wrote, "I sing the body electric," and when he wrote his long poems, he was doing a kind of art that also sustained his own physical form and made it more alive. He saw healing everywhere and he created it and he broadcast it. He projected, into the American dream, a lightning bolt of improvisation that carried energy right down into the cells of the body.

If you were to open his book of grace and read out loud, boldly, and with energy, Song of Myself, you would experience a piece of this great unknown territory. It would enter your blood and brain and taste buds and carry a new spring.

There are some people who hear the word CREATE and wake up, as if a new flashing music has begun.

This lone word makes them see something untamed and astonishing.

They feel the sound of a Niagara approaching.

They suddenly know why they are alive.

What people call The Spiritual is actually all wrapped up in the meaning of that word CREATE.

People try to avoid this fact like crazy. Instead, they accept landscapes painted by a priesthood and call those landscapes Spiritual, and hope these puerile inventions will somehow take them to bliss and final enlightenment and heaven.

They want to exist inside a phony masterpiece designed by a class of authoritarians.

In a nutshell, that's the story of this planet, and it always was.

When people strip away all the hogwash that has been passed off as spiritual enlightenment for centuries, fire IS what they are left with. The creative fire IS the IT they've been after. IS the real thing. Finally.

99% of the world has been trained like rats to adore systems. Give them a system and they're ready to cuddle up and take it all in. If they have questions, or if they want to argue, it's about how to tweak the system to make it a little better. And with every move they make, they put another blanket over the Fire Within.

You can't make THE CREATIVE into a debating society, because people will turn that into another system. You have to go for actual experience, and osmosis, and contagion.

Imagine you're suddenly a singer in the middle of a choir. That's your whole life. This choir has no sheet music and no plan. The choir just sings, all at once. There is no together and there is no leader and there is no imposed harmony. There is just the choir. Everyone sings. It makes no sense. But you do it anyway. It's chaos. It's titanic and bizarre. But eventually, out of the chaos and in the chaos you find a wild beauty no one has ever heard before. It happens. And it makes the whole body and the whole mind and the whole consciousness go into a state of ecstasy.

That would be a creative experience. No one would be able to walk away from it and analyze it or label it. No one would be able to devalue it by comparing it to something else. No one would be able to debate the fine points, because there were no fine points.

Have you ever wondered why the people who are most embedded in the holiest of holy scriptures---the ones who have had those lessons shoved down their throats---go out and kill as many people as possible?

It's simple. What they've been taught is this: everything is created from above already; there is no more room; the individual invents nothing. Armed with that pungent piece of cultural brainwashing, raised in that kind of family, they are cornered rats, and they kill anything in sight.

Or if they can't kill, they go to sleep. They sleepwalk through life and say yes to everything. They promise everything and give nothing.

I'm always amused when people discuss art as if it's some sort of perfumed and expensive turned-out fruitcake. As if art exists in a room where the initiated are permitted to make a few deft comments in a vacuum. As if art is a few dollars more for something that hangs on a wall.

Art is a word that should be oceanic. It should shake and blow apart the pillars of the foul smug boredom of the soul.

Art is about what the individual invents when he is on fire and doesn't care about concealing it. It's about what the individual invents when he has thrown off the false front that is slowly strangling him.

Art is about the end of mindless postponement. It's about what happens when you burn up the pretty and petty little obsessions. It's about emerging from the empty suit and empty machine of society that goes around and around and sucks away the vital bloodstream.

Art is about destroying the old order and the new order and the present order, with a glance.

It's about spearing the old apple on the point of a glittering sword and opening up the whole rotting crust that has attached itself to the tree of life.

It's about shrugging off the widely praised harmonies of the living dead.

It's about walking away from the varnished cathedrals of miserable worship.

If you admit the possibility of an individual life force that exceeds every description of it, then the "method of art" could be compared to the work one would need to do to invent a garden.

I don't mean a cute little garden where every flower balances off every other flower and the stones look like polished fingernails. I mean a garden where the author digs into fallow ground and follows his nose, unearths stones and lays on topsoil and drops in seeds for many different flowers spontaneously---where eventually his own growing hunger overtakes the process and makes it unique.

The garden grows like a hurricane. It fills the heart many times. It marches out to the trees at the edge of the forest and into the canopy. It brings out cactus and rose and iris and magnolia. It erupts and subsides. It explodes after the rain. Like the famous Simon Rhodia, who made serpentine towers in Watts, California, from glass and metal and ceramic castoffs, the author takes his garden into unknown territory.

Like Johnny Appleseed, he goes wherever he can, as far as he can, until whole hillsides and roadsides and riverbanks are absorbed. Re-making the world.

At night he dreams of new countries where he can lead the garden. Where chard and tomatoes and tulips and lilies and turnips and oak and maple and aspen and palm and plum and spinach and gardenias and goldenseal and lilacs and hydrangea and rhododendron and corn and flax and pine can sprint to the horizon.

He is the general of this army and the foot soldier and the drummer and the hero. Stroller in the wind. Engraver, muralist. Titan. A dozer in the desert flower, the sailor along banks of green saplings. The driving rain and the drying sun. A black leopard in miles of forest.

A maker of music who has simultaneously set a hundred orchestras in miles of red reflecting canyons playing a symphony that has no beginning and no end but only an endless middle.

I know musicians who are bored out of their minds. They move through the same changes, over and over, year after year, trying to squeeze out one more blob of satisfaction.

Boredom has pretty much the same effect as concrete does in the landscape: it covers more and more territory, and once you lay it down it doesn't usually come up. It stays there.

If you look closely, you can see people walking around with big signs on their necks: I'M BORED.

They pretend they're not. They'd rather say, "I have a cold." "I'm worried about Aunt Sally." "An asteroid could hit Earth in the next three thousand years."

But they're bored silly. They're driving themselves nuts.

Real artists, real creative people of any kind, may be dissatisfied, but they're not bored. In a pinch, when they can't think of anything else to do, they can always apply a hammer and chisel to one of the many mountains of bullshit out there. It's a warm-up exercise: getting rid of fake perfection.

Some marriages work out this way. Both people were grabbing on tight to an image. It was impossible. It was a bad joke. So somehow, after wrestling and wrestling, they gave that up---and then something new and completely unexpected came to pass. Something beyond what they could have predicted. A massive and shattering beauty.

A new vital recklessness comes to fruition. A person can throw a world like dice. He can break the sky open like a walnut and let the pieces fall out. He can force the night to crash into the day and watch a new river pouring through.

He can think in any way he wants to. He can be an artist of anything he wants to be an artist of.

A dancer dances out all the moves he knows, and then suddenly leaves those familiar moves behind. He spontaneously does something new. He feels that. He feels his whole bloodstream oxygenating. He's free for eight seconds, and those eight seconds of eternity are better than anything…

This is the kind of experience the world is dying to have.

We can break the hypnotic supposition that some system of harmony is our eternal guide. We can break out of the idea that all we are supposed to do is contribute another piece to the system that has already been laid down.

The guy who gets up on the bandstand and plays All the Things You Are for the forty-thousandth time---what do you think he's feeling?

Putter Smith and I had never met in person before we went into Studio West in San Diego in June 2008. I had written him a letter, in which I said: no charts, no prep, no tunes, no after-editing; we play for two hours; that's it; we walk out with a master file of the session. He said, "What the hell. Let's try it."

I thought, for once let's just play. I knew he was a great musician. I'd heard him play with Alan Broadbent. One night, when he moved into his solo, I heard a hundred different things at once exploding. That's all I needed to know.

In conventional terms…forget conventional terms. While we were playing, there were stretches where he was breaking into a deep scarlet dream other people wish they could have.

As for what I did, it's no use trying to put it into words and wrapping it up.

Perhaps, in the session, you'll find something you want.


Jon Rappoport
San Diego
October 17, 2008

A STATEMENT ABOUT MY MUSIC

If you want solitude as a child, you lie under a piano and later you tell lies you dreamed up in that place.

Growing up, at about the same time I was learning to struggle off the floor and walk, I was listening to Debussy and Ravel and Stravinsky. They were a carving a new language in the space around my body; something I could refer to in confirming what every child believes: the air is saturated with magic.

Later on, when I was figuring out how to swing a bat and throw a ball, it was the songs of Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer and Cole Porter, sung by Frank Sinatra and Mel Torme. Finally, I was introduced to Fats Navarro and Bud Powell and Clifford Brown, and Bill Russo's arrangements for the Stan Kenton Orchestra.

The English language made me into an early cynic, because to my ears it was clearly a substitute, a public compromise made with the preferred article, music. Well, this was the world, and you had to learn to live in it.

For the first 20 years of my life, it never occurred to me to make the distinction between rehearsed and spontaneous performances. It was all one thing. How could Cole Porter investigate the way to write Night and Day? It was all one flow of imagination and desire: Charlie Parker playing Star Eyes, June Christy singing Midnight Sun, Stravinsky's Firebird, Schoenberg's Verklarte Nacht. A winter day in July, a May morning in December. Reversal. Surprise.

Scientists who are interested in acoustic properties will never get to the end of a piano. You can tune the instrument to a standard, but it will immediately begin to deviate. That is because the strings and the hammer and the wood already are acquainted, and they have made an arrangement among themselves. They've agreed to a particular infinity of potential vectors. In the same way, if you're standing in the middle of the sidewalk and confirm infinity, you're not quite standing in the same way anymore. You now have a preference which can't be tuned out of you.

My compositions are all after the fact. That way I've already left the hall or the studio before reflections occur. It's like having a conversation with someone before you meet. Everything is settled in advance.

A piano is a certain kind of friend. 1. We are friends who are strangers. 2. We've already spoken for years before I sit down at the bench. 3. We've never met, and don't need to. 4. We have always played together before. 4. We have no predictions. In other words, time is not a factor.

De Kooning once said, if the necessity of painting the human figure has finally been destroyed, then why not go back and paint the figure? It's the same with the piano. If tonal centers and scales and themes and modes and melody and time notations have all been burned in a great fire, then who cares if someone picks through the rubble and resurrects pieces of this and that? If the extreme democratization of sound has decreed that any tone is equal to any other tone, and we have all assented to that, then why not assert new differences?

I started playing the piano in 1962. I would go into a practice room and tape an hour or so of improvisation and then listen to it several times. I did this every day. Forty-five years later, I work in a similar fashion. When I go into the studio to record, I have no plan. I only improvise. Then I listen to what I've done. There is no learning in the usual sense. But by listening, I form certain tentative opinions, and then I change what I'm doing in the future. It's all based on emerging preferences. I invent, then I listen to what I've invented and I discover what I think of it. Well, that discovery process is also inventive, because there is no such thing as absolute neutrality. Even if you make a composition in a completely random fashion, the question is: do you listen to it afterwards? If you do, then you find out what you think of it, and that process places you, in relation to the composition, in a different position. Suppose the composition is an hour of silence. Then you listen to the silence for an hour. Then you decide what to compose next. More silence? Sounds? Somewhere in that process, there is a leak. That's what I'm saying. You could call that leak desire or even anti-desire, but it's there. It informs your future. It doesn't impose a heavy or complete rule over it, but it plays a part.

In art, you can say you are creating with passion, or you can say you are at a contemplative distance from the work. In my opinion, those who opt for distance are merely indicating a different kind of passion. When I was 16, I wrote a story about a man who was looking at a tree and fell asleep. When he woke up, the tree was no longer separate from the sky. For me, this meant he was closer to the tree, but for some people the change would indicate distance. Cultural and generational reactions tend to dictate a serial and alternating fashion of being close or being far away. In either case, there is still an immediacy that is inescapable. In my work, which is only improvisation, I demand immediacy.

Civilizations aren't sure what to do with this quality. When organizations grow to a certain point of sophistication, they opt for a systems approach that will function as a kind of dream that removes them from direct connections. Based on that fiction, they then unconsciously undertake a transformation, through which they will now view so-called reality as a series of problems that need to be solved. Although this platform is very useful, it allows populations to become audiences who are waiting for payoffs: the enactment of solutions. Then, later, audiences demand to be the solution. Meanwhile, those who seek immediacy are faced with the opportunity of a different kind of infinity.

Just as history has become the retrospective piling up of layers on a great cake, the future can be composed as music that has no boundaries. It is not constructed to arrive at a final destination. Simultaneously, the train can always be leaving the station, it can always be in mid-journey, and it can always be arriving. In that sense, the viewpoint of the observer, which is the basis for Relativity, becomes defunct. At the piano, time isn't simply a straight line that will later be pecked at by the birds of different angles of vision. Time is fractured and is being copiously invented.

Immediacy makes this happen without trying at all.

Jon Rappoport
December 1, 2008.
San Diego

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