Having spent the week refreshing my .Net skills, thanks to Paul from Readify, I remembered that programming can be a very satisfying activity. So, with me sporting a head full of curly braces and semicolons, Alison and I joined some friends to see Bernie McGann play out at Poacher's Pantry, a restaurant a few Miles out of town.
When I was a 'young adult' I couldn't figure out what kind of nerd I was. I wasn't sure if I was your basic engineering/science nerd, or one of those creative artsy fartsy type nerds. At the time, it was a cause of great consternation - but in the end I ended up in software, which is probably the best of both worlds - a pretty creative endeavour that's grounded in engineering.
Jazz music reminds me of a lot of things, but listening to the band last night got me thinking about the border between creative and structured. Jazz can really screw with your engineering head - it's based on a definite mathematical structure - scales, modes and time signatures, and yet if you try to bring along your engineering discipline, your music will sound stilted and awful.
Great musicians (like Bernie) bring so much empathy and colour and warmth into the music, through a creative, emotional thing that is really hard to define, yet gives Jazz all of it's magical power.
And so we sat there, enveloped in music, and awash in the organic imagery that comes along with such a spontaneous, ephemeral musical experience. For me, it was evoking the fresh hidden tunes in rolls of thunder, the musicalness of a Fibonacci curve, inspirational highs, those long lopey summer days, where rays of light tug at your nostalgia chords with each sunset.... ah.
It can be so rewarding to really listen.
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