You say that you want to find where ecstasy lies in music, and I tell you at once: don't try to describe it, just listen.   Play, get lost, forget logic or the need to explain the pleasure that comes when you're carried away.  Ah, but you tell me that you're a philosopher, and you love wisdom not because it makes you crazy but because you have been trained to ask the right questions, those best questions that can never have adequate answers.  One question leads to another, and after just a few you are lost.  That's the moment to start singing, I tell you--let out a piercing wail like the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan might have done, pushing your hands against the air as if to clear the sky for the ultimate lament, the total song where joy and sadness are conflated into one.  For the best music is neither giddy nor portentous, major or minor, pathetic or glib.  It inhabits pure pleasure, and forces oneness from those opposites that attract this world into being out of empty, deflecting forces.

These are my two personalities, tossing and turning upon each other: the musician and philosopher, one wailing, the other analyzing.  Neither one is ever able to satisfy the other; they quarrel and resist each other's insights.  But the ecstasy inside the art of sound is not so much pure pleasure as an escape from these divisions into an essential oneness with the unspeakable meaning of the world.  This celebration may seem like a language, but it is not.  Why?  Because you can love it and participate in it even if you have no idea what is going on.

The real musician must exude love and passion with every single note.  The tones must appear inevitable, such that no other sound could possibly do at that moment, in that place and at that time.   Because music is the art that leaves as soon as it arrives, it always comes to us suddenly, and it departs the same way.  It stays with us only if its power is so pure and strong that it binds artist and audience with a message deeper than any language.   Pure music speaks of nothing beyond itself, standing for no emotion, no story outside its ways of rhythm and timbre.  It cannot be doubted, and it can't be explained.  Its passion can only be talked around, never represented or recounted...and yet it concerns itself with everything as much as nothing.

You don't need to understand in order to know it or to love it.  When music works it speaks to people of many worlds, as well as to animals, plants, the gods, and even the earth.  The best of all musics have this emphatic and spiritual side.  The music must seem indispensable, impossible not to play or to hear.  Seeking it brings you comfort as much as adventure.

Gently turning dervishes lifting feet softly above the ground, quivering Balinese monkey chanters shaking their hands toward the circle's pulsing center, Hasidic nigunim whose melodies can never resolve--ecstasy is not only found in spiritual musics but, it's there in all those that gather our usually diffuse energy and draw it toward a single point.  From that point bursts forth the shout or the song, the concentrated melody, the tune that seems not merely pleasant but necessary, so present that it is impossible to refute.

Sometimes there are elaborate reasons for the existence of such music, and stories that explain why what we hear or perform can matter so much.  Take this one of Reb Nachman's original Hasidic tales:

At one end of the world there is a mountain; on the top of the mountain, there is a fountain from which water springs forth without ceasing.  At the other end of the world lies the heart of the world, and although all things have a heart, the heart of the world is more worthy than any human heart.  So at one end of the world is the fountain that gushes from the summit crags, and at the other end is the heart of the earth.

Now the heart is stuck at its end, and the fountain is way at the other.  But the heart is in love with the mountain spring: it is filled with an unutterable, endless longing for that distant geyser of water spraying straight from the faraway peak.  The heart cannot move, it lies scorched by the sun, but it stares at the mountain so far away, and, barely visible, it sees the gushing water.  Since the waters roar only at the summit, they can always be seen, even from thousands of miles away.  If the heart were to lose sight of the spring for even one instant, it would cease to live, and if the heart would die, then all the world would die, for the life of the world is contained within the life of its heart.

Once the heart tried to get closer to the fountain, but when it moved just a bit nearer the water fell out of view, so it could not proceed, as it needs to be able to see the water to remain alive.

So what happens at night, you ask?  The heart becomes dark with grief, for as the sun falls the water stops glistening in the distance.  The earth's heart knows that it will die of longing, and when the heart is dead all the earth and all creatures on this earth will die.  As the day draws to a close, therefore, the heart begins to sing farewell to the mountain waters, singing its grief in a wild, astonishing melody, while the mountain spring sings farewell to the heart.  Their songs are filled with endless love and longing.

Why does everything continue?   Why isn't the world long dead and gone if even one night brings with it such impossible sadness?  That's why we are here.  The true and attentive human being keeps watch over the situation.  In that last moment before the day is done, and the spring is gone, and the heart dead, and the world over, a good person comes and gives a new day to the heart, and the heart gives the new day to the spring, and so they live again.

When the day returns, it too returns with melody, and with strange and beautiful words that contain all wisdom.   Each day comes with its own song, a song that no one has ever seen or heard before.   And for as long as there are good people, true musicians, on this earth, each new day will not be the last.

Love is about the search, the longing, the striving for the pure sound you will never quite find.  Yet ecstasy is not the same as love.  It is the deep pleasure that actually arrives, that is there for the taking.  For example, I find it is impossible to doubt music while actually playing it.  Even as the rest of my life seems overpopulated with questions and uncertainties about why one thing should be done instead of another, in the midst of the playing, dancing around silence and space with the presence of notes, the music always seems to matter.

Mattering in itself is not enough, though.  I still want to reach for those notes that must be played, that are right because they are essential melodies, unavoidable tones, songs that cannot be defied.  This music is silent even when it sings because it does not speak--it cannot be reduced by explanation.  Musical mystics are often smiling, laughing, crying with joy into the world with songs that spread the human spirit not above the world but out into it, mingling with the arena of colors, species, and winds.  You must make these notes matter almost too much, such that you can't imagine the sound ever stopping and an instant of it lasts an eternity of pleasure.

The best music is both certain and ambiguous at once.  You don't know why it matters so; you don't know what it's for.  It falls between cracks of genre and purpose, being neither popular nor ascetic, earthy or mannered, raw or refined, but in between all categories and rules, transcending all boundaries critics wish to place it in.  You need not know anything about it to love it; you will feel it grab hold of you and not want to turn it off or down, yet not know that it is manipulating you or stealing away your soul.  For perfection may be a dream, but ecstasy is never beyond our reach.  It's right there in the accessible realm of rough delight.

I write music not for instruments but for people.  It doesn't matter what horns they play, but who they are and how they can fill in a situation with as little advance knowledge as possible.   This is not to encourage a free-for-all but to enjoy the possibilities that chance may suggest.  Improvisation may lead to ecstasy when it catches you off guard, when you are surprised into instant pleasure by forces you never knew were there.  This is not to deny the reality of the long predictable pursuit, but to remind us that there is always something accidental about happiness as well.

I think of the time I lived above the Ear Inn, a remote Manhattan hangout way downtown, nearly at the edge of the Hudson River.  Legendary clarinet master Perry Robinson had a band that would start playing at midnight on a Monday night.  Always one of my heroes, the only friend who would ever call me "Maestro!," he sometimes let me join in.  One night, the man on the squeezebox leans near the microphone and starts crooning the tale of the mysterious Buddy Bolden, the first jazz musician, who went ga-ga holding out an ultimate high note on the cornet and then lived thirty more years unnoticed at the Alabama State Mental Institution.  What happened to him, I wonder...what was he thinking about all those years?  What did that one note do to him?  He needed to play it; he needed to get lost.  There was no other way.

Perry turns to me and calls me up--"Now do it, your turn, play like Buddy, like this is the last note you will ever let loose"--and then I know just where the history of jazz began and where it went wrong: how that first note let loose the madness of our century's sudden music.   I'm up there--it's 2 A.M.--and I'm privileged to stand by the master as he leads me into a Russian folk tune he first recorded in the sixties.  These impossible memories are the ultimate refrain.  The sound and the stories, the memory and the moment, the master and the student--all sounds are Buddha's voice: all one, all none.  Our cries are longing for a goal that will never be attained, although it is always right here.   For an instant, question no more.  Far away from this city lie the fountain and the heart, the mountain and the desert of the world.  I taste the wet song with my dry, parched tongue.

Copyright @2000 David Rothenberg