You Don't Know What Love Is

You Don't Know What Love Is.mp3


This is the only piece of music so far that I have shared with anyone on purpose.

My reaction seemed to belie the quasi-empirical vibe that has characterized much of my work on this project thus far. I cried.

Why?

Emotion. Pure and simple.

In fact if you listen closely in the second verse, my voice gets a little shaky and then trails off prematurely at the end of phrase. Human emotion meets Musical performance; a curious event.

It was the lyrics of the tune. They caught me with my pants down. hardly surprising given how little experience i've had with words in music. Most likely won't be the last time.

Lyrics like these aren't for the faint of heart.

You don't know how hearts burn
For love that cannot live
Yet never die
Until you've faced each dawn
With sleepless eyes
You don't know what love is.



Now, I've written about this phenomenon before, where the music takes on an entirely new meaning once i start singing the lyrics.

But this time....this time was different.

Because not only did my voice go limp from the emotions when i was recording, they were reconstituted when i played it for her...this time with much greater intensity.

Why?

Of course i don't know for sure but from where i sit now, some three days later, i think that the heart-wrenching sentimentality that i felt when i recorded the tune was augmented by something else as i listened to myself playing and singing an entire day later.

I think it was in fact a response to a universal human condition. Everyone with a heart has had it broken.

You Don't know how lips hurt
Until you've loved and had to pay the cost
Until you've flipped your heart and you have lost
You don't know what love is.

I think now that the tears that welled up in me were tears shed for all of us for whom love has touched. Compassion drove them to brim over my lower lids. Compassion for every man, woman and child whose heart bears the scars of living a full life.

This tune, while not being the only one that has illicited such a response, is especially suited for strong emotion.

It's the perfect cross-over tune between blues and jazz. that is, the harmony and the melody lend themselves to a rather seamless confluence of tension notes (blues melodies: flatted fifths and thirds) and harmonic complexity (unexpected cadences and major seventh tonic chords)


Do you know how a lost heart fears
The thoughts of reminiscing
And how lips that taste of tears
Lost their taste for kissing.

The lyrics of a song...

Being an instrumentalist all these years, i've not paid too much attention to the words assigned to the melody. (just the way i phrased that gives you a hint about my nonchalance heretofore; 'assigned to the melody?' Is that all lyrics are? just words tagged for a melody line?)

Thanks to this Chet Baker Project, i now know differently.

If you'll forgive a rather banal simile, they seem to me kind of like a cooking recipe's dry ingredients.
Nothing much happening; they don't reflect the intent of the dish, their appeal to the palate--at least at this stage-- is almost negligible.

But add the wet ingredients: water, milk, oil...and everything changes. the tastes come alive, the cook's original intention for the dish is reconstituted and voila! we eat. and hopefully we understand and enjoy the chef's idea of a good gastronomical experience, be it sweet or savory.

Likewise a song's lyrics. By themselves they don't have nearly the juice as does the entire song made complete by the composer's melody line, rhythm and harmony.

This one (as my mother would say) knocked me for a loop from start to finish.

It began when i was feeling pretty low this past friday morning.

It's not unusual really, for me to have some low spots these days. being out of work for months can be like that sometimes.

But this day, i actually had a lot on my plate. For one thing i had to continue preparing music (woodshedding) for a new group with which i was making my debut the following day. i was pretty wound up about it and had been working on the music all week; actually i had two gigs the next day, with two completely different groups, for both of which i was shedding big time.

About this process of preparing for a gig.

For me, it's kind of like a scene in that Robin William's film TOYS. the one where he is in a golf cart driving up and down the hills and valleys of a narrow astro-turfed hallway inside that awesomely phantasmagorical Toy factory. (Great movie btw especially if you happen to be a fan of L.L.Cool J. or Joan Cusak)

Yeah, so this up and down psychology of mine when i'm faced with a personal challenge i see as a rollercoaster of emotion and psychology.

'Man, I got this. I'm in great shape'

Oops.....

'What the hell was I thinking, i'm friggin screwed!'

that was the theme ... up to friday morning.

I was teetering on the lower of edge of that rollercoaster when a thought shouldered itself into my crowded head, muttering something about the Chet Project. i hadn't done anything on the project all week so it seemed to come from nowhere.

'Do another Chet tune. Now. Do this one right here.
"You Don't Know What Love Is." 'Do it now.'

So i did.

And as soon as I began, i knew it was exactly the right thing to do.

Yes i had all this shedding to do on these new tunes on which i was playing trumpet and flugelhorn, with lots of exposed parts, lots of solos and TONS of unfamiliar keys, but PAY ATTENTION to this little thought that had the courage and fortitude to insinuate itself into a--'we know what he should be doing right now'-- consciousness, I DID.

I think this tune picked me this day because it knew that within it lie the strong emotional content that mirrored what i was feeling inside. I needed to play this particular song because its content and original recipe had within it the requisite feelings that would allow me to process all the stuff going on inside me.

In other words, this tune, this "You Don't Know What Love Is" would give me the raw materials out of which i could deconstruct the heaviness in my breast.

You don't know what love is
Until you've learned the meaning of the blues
Until you've loved a love you've had to lose
You don't know what love is.


Right from the start it was different. different from all the other tunes i'd done in this Chet Baker Project. for one thing, i didn't record against a clic or a drum track. in fact there's no drum track at all on the finished mix.

What this means of course is that i relied on the melody and the harmony to frame the entire piece. and although it's not a new idea, I had attempted this in previous tunes, working without a net--without a time reference, aka, a rhythm track--was an entirely new experience.

What it ended up giving me was the flexibility of phrasing; i could stretch out or lay behind the lyrics as much as i wanted. i could let the emotion of the words and sentiments linger long enough to let it breathe...to give the meaning of the words time to resonate with my memories and thus affect my delivery.

and i guess that's why my voice kept breaking. the trouble is it came at unanticipated times. trouble because i'm no enough of singer to know what the hell to do when it happens.

i'd be singing along, trying to keep each note in tune, each word understandable, each line in rhythm, then a word would snag one of those memories and one by one, the wheels would come off. my voice would melt, the pitch would sag and the consonants crumble until i'd simply have to stop.

And although this has happened many times now, it still catches me by surprise because i never know what words are going to trigger a tender spot in my heart/mind.

I think this is why i decided to share it that night; because of this strong and somewhat startling sentiment.

And how does this relate to my experience with music in my life? Where do i put this information so i can find it and use it in the future?

This is the question that lies at the heart of this whole project.

After all these years of letting my curiosity drive my musical endeavors, learning new instruments, seeing what it means to be a bass player or a drummer, or a piano player or a trumpet player or a percussionist, i think that maybe now it has come to seeing what it means to sing.

Moreover, to put vocal musical expression in situ with instrumental musical expression.

What does it feel like to be the trumpet player in the band? the pianist? the percussionist? the bass player? the drummer? the singer?

What does it mean to be a musician?

That said, i have no ambition whatsoever to sing in public. i do however plan to let this strange emotional response to the lyrics of a song lead me to another experience of this connection between human emotions and the art of music.

we'll see.

Considering the Connection between Emotion and Melody

I took a bike ride.

I was forced to on account of there was so much noise and disruption outside.

Utility crews are fixing some broken dirt. They must be using really dull tools. Either that or they're just plain having fun; little big boys playing together, with big ass equipment. Fun for the entire family. Loud fun.

Anyway i wrote the following while sitting on my favorite pedestrian bridge in Austin. It's one of several bridges spanning the Colorado River as it meanders thru the Capitol City. the bridge does a little meandering itself as its not straight; it undulates, wiggles its way across the green fast-moving water.

Trouble is, the city insists on calling it a lake. Which is puzzling because it's not. Not really.

When i first visited Austin i remember wondering why they named it Town Lake. It's clearly not a lake; it's clearly a river. Lakes are big and somewhat entire--monolithic like a pond or something, not straight and narrow like a...a river. Lakes are supposed to have an inlet and an outlet, at least that's what my Earth Science book claims.

Anyway they changed the name. It's not Town Lake anymore (although why they went with something as prosaic as Town Lake i've no idea). Now it's Lady Bird Lake (which you might find head-scratcher as well, that is,if you didn't happen to know that Lady Bird, silly sounding name as it is, happens to be the dead wife of one of our dead presidents: a Texan by the name of Lyndon Johnson. .

Yeah, so i sat down in the sunshine on this serpentine bridge that connects North with South and i wrote this: It concerns the mystery of Music.

After slugging my way through 'It Could Happen to You' this afternoon it occurs to me that perhaps the thing that eludes me--the element that remains missing--that has been missing all these years--is not so much an element at all but an attitude.

Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl Rast tells a story. He says that we have sometimes a grasping, clutching attitude towards life.

Says that we're all born with this 'monkey brain'-sort-0f-deal. I can totally see what he means. I mean it seems most of us are walking around with a fair amount of caution., some would say uncertainty, maybe even dread. And our response to this tenuous planetary life we got going here can sometimes be to hold on to what we DO have lest it too slips from our grasp.

Think about it:

What is the first thing a doctor does when we are born? He or she shakes the table or slaps the bottom of our feet, or cuffs our butt, to see if we are alive and well. And what is our response? we reach out for something to hold. like a monkey trying desperately to hold on to its mother as she swings from branch to branch.

This response to life extends past diapers, touching even the most basic of human needs: the quest of the human heart for meaning.

Br. David talks about the dilemma we so often face in life: whether to play it safe, take no risks, keep everything on an even keel so as to avoid the oftentimes troublesome unknown or do we venture past our comfort zones, test the boundaries set by inertia, and run the risk of tribulation?

until we discover that the truth is something that HOLDS US, that we give ourselves to it and then it holds US.

Not something that we hold onto, that we grasp and clutch to our breasts like the monkey clinging to its mother.

This becomes an attitude held in us, by us.

And this is what i am wondering about as i sit here on this breezy sun-drenched wavy gravy bridge.

This 'element', this 'attitude' about what it means to create music, to play 'good,' is it something i can give myself to and then let it hold me

or is it something that i must struggle to acquire then maintain and rigidly hold, wielding it like some Medieval knight crashing into battle?

Is this idle curiosity? NO.

This project, this all-inclusive resort for the high-minded that i've begun, has put me touch with all the elements of music that have baffled me since i first remembered that i wanted to play something 'good.'

Part of the project is me acting like i know how to do this shit. i know how to come up with changes, i know how to comp, i know how to engineer, i know how to improvise, i know how to operate instruments and on and on. Really?

So as i struggle to play what i hear, to sing the notes i hear in my head, to sound like a musician that has something meaningful to say, this one thought remains: what's it take to translate emotion into music?

I know this question yet its answer continues to elude me. But maybe this concept of attitude, once thoroughly adopted, is the same kind of deal: Brother David's deal.

Maybe this attitude about playing a melody--any melody--be it my own, the head of a tune, a solo line--maybe the element that is missing in me is not something that is studied and acquired and held on to and hauled out when the time is right.

Maybe it's an attitude that simply needs to be accepted and manifested.

Doubts come immediately of course.

But maybe that's part of it too. Maybe doubts are just indications of an immature attitude; one not yet fully formed and adopted. So does this mean that we can simply sidestep these doubts and continue to strive for this all-inclusive attitude?

An attitude that has at its core an unshakeable belief (trust) that there are notes to be played and i can find them.

It's a mystery.

But could it be, that i have yet to spend the requisite time in discovering the connections between these elements? Do i just need to keep going?

By sitting, by contemplating, by paying attention, is it possible to discover and make my own, this connection between an attitude about life and music that sustains me instead of drains me?

If i stumble upon one will it bend to the other?

If i'm able to discover the truth that holds me with respect to the essential life-giving elements, i.e., love, trust, courage, will the musical elements of melody, harmony and emotion follow suit?

Or vice versa. If through this project, i am able to discover precisely the connection between emotion and melody, emotion and harmony, will the truth that holds me up in times of uncertainty and despair come as well?