What about the concert then?
Well, the band we went to see was the Norwegian jazz trio known as Tord Gustavsen Trio, comprising Tord Gustavsen on piano, Harald Johnsen on double-bass and Jarle Vespestad on drums.
I've been listening to their CD "The Ground" for the last three years but this was my first opportunity to hear them live, as part of the Glasgow Jazz Festival.
As is often the case with those you only hear on the phone or the radio or on a recording, Tord Gustavsen himself looked different from what I'd imagined - even though I'd seen his photograph in the sleeve-liner for the CD. A slight, almost fragile, and slightly crumpled-looking figure, he had a very peculiar hushed but high-pitched voice as he almost whispered into the microphone that he held tight to his lips... but that is to leap ahead a bit because before he, or anyone else spoke, he shuffled across the stage to the piano and in a strange curled-up posture leaned over the keyboard. He stretched out his left arm to press down one key in the bass, then reaching in the opposite direction with his right gently tapped out a single high note. From these two widely-separated but repeated notes, and with a lot of 'loud' silences in between, he began to bring the notes together. [It was the child Mozart who once said that all he did to write tunes was to "bring together little notes that like each other"]
It was like listening to the dawn of creation as a musical theme gradually came into being.
Eventually, he was joined by Vespestad on the drums. He virtually caressed the cymbals and snare (and even the bass drum) with various parts of his sticks and brushes. I don't think I've ever heard a drummer play so quietly, or in such an understated way. He went on during the evening to squeeze all sorts of strange noises from his drum kit, using a variety of techniques, including dragging the point of a stick along the surface of a cymbal to make a sound like a rusty gate-hinge, or a 'keening' sound like whale-song and even dolphin-clicks.... and all with immaculate timing. A bit weird, but in this context it worked...most of the time.
The trio was completed by Johnsen "playing on a hired bass thanks to British Midland."
The thing about the live performance, apart from the fresh jazz improvisations on tracks I'd heard many times before, was the musical chemistry between the three players. It was a real trio, not just a star pianist with two others filling in an accompaniment, even though in a sense Gustavsen is the 'star' being the composer.
All the best music (whatever the style) is about togetherness - even when it is a soloist, as Gustavsen demonstrated with just two notes at the very beginning of the concert.
I don't know how the trio would define their music themselves but I think of it as 'late night jazz' - the kind to just chill out to. It was also for me very spiritual music. Not in a theological sense, perhaps, just in the sense that it touched parts of me deep down that I can only call 'spiritual' - certainly beyond rationality and deeper than emotion.
One of the things that the best music and the best musicians teach us is that the silences, the spaces between the notes, are just as important as the notes themselves. (This applies even to loud, fast and energetic music, but it is much more obvious when the music is 'chilled.')
It's true of life too - getting all the different bits of our lives to work together and not be fragmented, but also making those spaces just to be rather than to do - it's not easy.
Some folk have a talent for it - most of us just struggle like beginners banging out chopsticks on the piano.
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