Musical Revelations

I’ve come across a couple of recent musical revelations that I wanted to speak about. Specifically, there are four bands that I’ve been focused on the last two days:

1. Shakti with John MacLaughlin
2. John Coltrane, specifically the album Ole’ Coltrane
3. Gojira
4. Miles Okazaki
   
   

I’ve also been reading a biography on Coltrane which causes me to contemplate a lot. Have you ever had a day where everything just seems to center around contemplation? Yesterday was like that for me. Two things from Coltrane really stuck with me. One was from his biography. He was talking in an interview about learning from Monk. And he said Monk would play a minor chord but leave out the third. And Coltrane would argue with him that it wasn’t a minor chord because he left out the third. But he said when Monk played it he could make it sound like a minor chord, even without the third. What is it about music that shares something with the world of magic, wherein conviction and truth can be communicated without the fundamentals of our normal ways of communicating? Monk had it, and Coltrane didn’t, at that point in his life. Was it conviction, bravado, context, feel, abandonment of all fear…?

Next, from the liner notes of Ole’ Coltrane:

“Now, sometimes we get up and play a song and I play thirty, or at least twenty, minutes. Well, at the Apollo we ended up playing three songs in twenty minutes! I played all the highlights of the solos that I had been playing in hours, in that length of time. So I think about it. What have I been doing all this time? It’s made me think, if I’m going to take an hour to say something I can say in ten minutes, maybe I’d better say it in ten minutes! And then have another horn there and get something else.”

I think that speaks volumes.

Ok, what do Shakti, Miles Okazaki and Gojira – a French death metal band- all have in common? Polyrhythms. The more I search for music that grabs my interest, the more often I find that there is a common thread with what I like - a use of polyrhythms.

Wikipedia defines a polyrhythm in this way:

Polyrhythm is the simultaneous sounding of two or more independent rhythms. Polyrhythms can be distinguished from irrational rhythms, which can occur within the context of a single part; polyrhythms require at least two rhythms to be played concurrently, one of which is typically an irrational rhythm.

In working to help define where it’s at, musically, for me, I think polyrhythms are the source. It’s like polyrhythms can trigger a trance-like state, not unlike the koans that Zen teachers use to help stop the mind from thinking to reach that split second of enlightenment where thought stops and life exists unblemished. Polyrhythms do that for me.