Announcing a New Series After Meeting in Norway with Jazz Drummer Jon Christensen

It is perhaps fitting that my first post on this new blog would be in dedication to life and rhythm. Stravinsky and Emerson are quoted to underscore the central role that music, drums, jazz have all played in my own life.  

In that spirit then I would like to continue by documenting a most unusual, and rewarding, conversation I had four years ago with one jazz drummer, Norwegian Jon Christensen.  He has been described as: "A European institution of modern drumming, a master of music, probably the most influential musician of his generation.  A constant source of inspiration...One of the few remaining jazz musicians committed to the concept of the music as the 'sound of surprise'" (from ECM Records website).

In May of 2009, I had the opportunity to sit with Jon (he asked that I call him this) for a long and leisurely afternoon meal in Oslo, Norway.  Here (and in succeeding blogs) follow a few of the gems of that lovely afternoon...

“I’ve only ever played myself: Jon Christensen.”  He spoke on about the key importance of finding one's own voice, whether in music or in life.  Reminds me just now of Thoreau's famous, parallel reflection on "hearing a different drummer."

Stravinsky on the Rhythms of Life

In one of his sketchbooks for The Rite of Spring, Russian composer Igor Stravinsky writes: "There is music wherever there is rhythm, as there is life wherever there beats a pulse."

from: http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2013/05/26/186486269/why-jazz-musicians-love-the-rite-of-spring

This quote from Stravinsky reminds me of one of my favorite poems/addresses by American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Man the Reformer

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is a man born for but to be a Reformer, a Re-maker of what man has made; a renouncer of lies; a restorer of truth and good, imitating that great Nature which embosoms us all, and which sleeps no moment on an old past, but every hour repairs herself, yielding us every morning a new day, and with every pulsation a new life? 

Let him renounce everything which is not true to him, and put all his practices back on their first thoughts, and do nothing for which he has not the whole world for his reason.

If there are inconveniences, and what is called ruin in the way, because we have so enervated and maimed ourselves, yet it would be like dying of perfumes to sink in the effort to reattach the deeds of every day to the holy and mysterious recesses of life.

(from Nature: Addresses and Lectures)