mystique
... Miles in Vienna 1973 ...
::Note:: ... heading out this evening to see daughter Ileana sing Beethoven's 9th with Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra ... yes back in the cultural wasteland ... so it goes ...
... was twenty ... two months married & having fled what I felt was the cultural wasteland of my Canadian prairie home, barely a couple of months in Vienna had seen Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention ... was now witnessing Miles Davis ... yes goodbye cultural wasteland ...
... forty-two years later I stumble on a YouTube of the whole Stadthalle concert ... the mythical memory faces the recorded image …
... didn't remember any of the visual colors ... remembered the intensity of that single, slim figure focusing the entire energy of the momentary space and time into a place at his feet ... we, the audience, were present only to provide a testimonial vortex of the magnetic center of the mysterious electric field ...
... Miles had has back to us the whole time ... trumpet pointing straight down to his foot peddle ... exploring ... no more of a reaching/searching/probing ... like one who had seen the abyss ...
... i didn't know what the hell was going on but knew it was ... well shamanic & seared somewhere invisibly within breaking barriers pushing beyond normal limits ... i could only surrender to the trust nurturance ...
... here were dialogues ... obscure, undramatic, fierce ... echoing, repetition, counterpointing ... segments resembling cuneiform signs ... remote, futuristic and ancient ... piercing fragments ... expressions of the force of a personality …
… the experience lived inarticulately …
… now i could see the whole up close … albeit edited through a film makers eyes … nothing yet everything was the same just as i am and not the same … i could reconstruct/recreate/research to find other incarnations what was described as "the greatest electric funk-rock jazz" ... learnt:
Miles was recovering from a car accident, but refused to quit playing. "Just because I was forty-seven years old in 1973 didn't mean I was supposed to sit down in some rocking chair and stop thinking about how to keep doing interesting things. I had to do what I was doing if I was going to keep thinking of myself as a creative artist", he explained in his autobiography.” - Taken from the liner notes
… his words validated the thrust of what it takes to be a creative artist or at least the type of artist i have dedicated my pedagogy towards … i recognize it takes tremendous courage and will to be that "creative artist" ... watching the filmed archive led to a recognition i had succumbed to the participation mystique … more than succumbed had turned the concept into a practice ... oh well so it goes ... oh how i wish I had seen John Coltrane ... so it goes ...
::Note:: ... heading out this evening to see daughter Ileana sing Beethoven's 9th with Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra ... yes back in the cultural wasteland ... so it goes ...