(Originally posted on My Left Wing in response to the sudden questioning of “community” that seems to be arising on ALL of the lefty blogs recently. It seems to apply here as well.)
There is an ongoing balancing act being performed on the various left wing blog “communities”, and the large and passionate reaction to today’s reprinted diary Community – And Our Lack Of It by eugene shows me that this is perhaps the most important issue we have to face at the moment.
Certainly one that gets people’s attention.
Below…my take on it.
From an artist who deals in a necessarily “communal” art.
Read on.
“Community” needs simplicity.
By that I mean that when the central set of rules…whatever they are…becomes fragmented or too complex, the community breaks down.
But…there is a counterforce. When the rules become TOO simple…too rigid…the community again fails.
The balancing act continues.
I am…or was, at least, when the idiom actually existed…a mainstream jazz musician. I have been so since what can only be termed a revelation experience at about 13 years of age which had to do with a live Charlie Parker/Dizzy Gillespie performance that I heard on a record in the late ’50s. I grew up in that idiom, and it is the basis of what I do and understand, both as a performer and as a composer/music director/teacher. Even in other, related idioms.
As a social theorist, I use the microcosm of that idiom to understand the macrocosm of society in general.
“As above, so below” say the Sufis.
Yup.
“Jazz” was the artistic expression of a fairly concentrated culture….the black culture of America post-Civil War to the late ’60s, which had been formed in a particularly concentrated manner due to the huge pressures of segregation. The musical idiom went through enormous changes, but essentially its center held. Musicians like Duke Ellington and Coleman Hawkins…products of the ’20s…could sit down and play with a revolutionary like John Coltrane in the mid-60s with no trouble whatsoever. When that culture was essentially destroyed by a combination of the civil rights movement and what I consider to have been the application of a purposeful influx of drugs on a massive scale into the urban communities by the Permanent Government in an effort to weaken the one group of people who posed a real threat to the PermaGov’s hegemony, the social support system of the “jazz” idiom disappeared.
I came up INSIDE of that system, that functioning idiom, before it was so thoroughly shattered. And within it, the rules were quite clear. Especially the rhythmic rules. But as the idiom’s social center broke, so did its rhythmic center.
And now, some 40 years later, young players cannot find the beat.
Literally.
They cannot agree on where the eighth note lies.
Too many options.
Nothing is reflexive or natural.
Too many choices.
Thus in “community” settings…larger ensembles, in the case of this music…the players do not cohere. Which means that they no longer trust the system, and cannot blend timbrally either. They do not trust the leader…the music director or the lead players in the ensemble…and go off on tangents that cripple the real power of the music as a result.
Now this is not a complaint about what has happened…merely an observation about an ongoing process. The opposite could just as easily have occurred, as it has in Western European styles where there are NOTHING but rules and obedience. The passion and intensity is long gone in most of the performances and large ensembles of that idiom, but they surely can blend.
Clomp clomp clomp.
“YASSUH, boss!!!”
So it goes.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
“The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
Real prophecy, as far as it goes.
Will it go further?
Or will we find a center that CAN hold?
We shall see.
And by that I mean that WE shall see.
The people who are involved in blogs like these are literally the best and brightest of this culture, in my estimation. We are now in a process of trying to find a balanced center.
Will we tip too far into lockstep, as I believe has happened over at dKos and has SURELY happened in the mainstream Democratic Party?
Will we tip the other way, into anarchy and ignorance? “Fuck you, I’ll put the beat where I fucking want, and fuck Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Abraham Lincoln and yo’ MAMA, too!!!”
Stay tuned.
And may you SURVIVE interesting times.
Strive for balance.
In BOTH directions.
Later…
AG