My latest Substack is here.
https://open.substack.com/pub/fenlandmusings/p/on-the-music-of-loneliness?r=22ev0d&utm_medium=ios
“What we do in playing a solo instrument is a little like being a long-distance runner. You’re out on your own, and you gotta come up with something. We’re in this lifestyle to find something of beauty, and it’s a lonely track in the end.”
David Liebman
~
A lonely track. A double meaning right there. Was David Liebman talking about the track of his Jazz record, or the track of his journey through life?
Dave Liebman is a prolific Jazz musician. He was born in New York, recorded around 500 records, and even toured with the likes of Miles Davis. Liebman played solo on the opening track of Davis’s experimental/funk/global record “On The Corner”, an album I must have listened to a dozen times or more, but only remembered through this venture into Liebman’s own music.
Despite being a talented multi-instrumentalist, Liebman went on to dedicate 15 years of his musical craft to just one instrument, the soprano saxophone, and it is his solo soprano record, The Loneliness of a Distance Runner, that has really captured my imagination.
Tracking back, it wasn’t until my university days that I really started listening to jazz music. There was a café cum jazz bar named Bistro Casablanca just a stone’s throw from my university digs in Sheffield’s cultural hotspot known as Devonshire Quarter. I often hung out at Bistro Casablanca on a Sunday night. It felt grown up, sophisticated, the walls adorned with black and white photos of jazz musicians, and the place offered a chance to end the week by sinking a bottle of red, all while listening to a different kind of music, live jazz.
Like life, Jazz is not always easy to navigate. At times, the notes can feel emotionally freighted, like a storm cloud ready to let go of its watery load, and they can carry the weight of a million sadnesses. But in the very next moment, without warning, a jazz record can suddenly soften into what feels like a slow, deep, gentle hug from a loved one, only for a sharp, unexpected high note to toss us back into the inner chaos. It can feel truly unpleasant on the ear, unsettling in the soul and disorienting to the body, but also there’s something sweet, nourishing and addictive about it too. Just like another classic Sheffield export, Liquorice Allsorts.
I realise in describing jazz in this way that there are parallels to some other passions here, myth and poetry among them, with these not always being straightforward to absorb, but containing important gifts if encountered with a poetic sensibility.
For me, Jazz appears as a doorway to my deeper self, and there’s an image there I want to continue to work with. It also presents as the doorway to diversity, to dissonance and harmony and to complexity, all qualities of the soul.
Jazz invites me into my shadow. It is inviting me to confront my loneliness. And, somewhere amongst it, it is reaching out a peaceful hand of acceptance.
I can’t help thinking about Liebman turning all his focus on just one instrument, one ‘track’, one way of paying the bills, one way to express his creativity; and I find myself asking:
What would that be like;
To give up all other ‘instruments’ to play just one for 15 years?
To go deep with it?
To learn that one thing so intimately?
To experiment with different amounts of sweetness, sorrow, silence?
And, to commit to the journey of the long and “lonely track”?
That might not sound like the kind of road contemporary society would be promoting, it wouldn’t feature in the advertising brochure for ‘living your best life’, but it sure does sound purposeful, it has a hint of unconventional beauty about it, it definitely speaks to the conditions of soul, and perhaps it might even turn out to be healing; after all, “Apollo was patron of music and discoverer of medicine”
A final thought.
There is a word Martin Shaw often talks about, fidelity, and I think there is fidelity in exploring these questions carefully, and I think there’s a hi-fidelity in the grooves of the lonely track