The Aesthetic Principle
Two nights ago, Dawn and I watched Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue, a documentary about Miles Davis’s turn from acoustic to electric music. It centers around Miles’ performance at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, where Miles and his band played to over half a million people. Other performers at the festival included Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies, Joan Baez, the Doors, the Who, Jethro Tull, and a dozen or so others: picture Woodstock occurring on an island off the coast of Britain, and you’ve got a decent picture of the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. Now, in the middle of all this rock and roll music, picture an obsidian jazz musician who recorded his first single in 1949, which is right about when most of the half a million people were being born. This man is not a peer. This man is an elder.
The music that Miles Davis and his band played that night was not the music that Miles played on ‘Round About Midnight, nor was it the kind of music that he played on Kind of Blue, both of which contain music that any classicist would gladly call jazz. At the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, just as he was about to go on-stage, someone asked Miles for the name of the piece his band was about to play. Miles said, “Call it anything.” But as the documentary makes clear, the classicists refused to call this music jazz. The classicist representing the group in the film, Stanley Crouch, describes the music as physically painful to listen to. Crouch listened to it when he was sober, and he listened to it while experiencing a significantly altered consciousness. And both times, the music upset him. “Call it anything,” indeed.
It is difficult to understand why individuals who consider themselves music aficionados would want to limit their understanding of music to only those forms with which they are already familiar. This is a question that goes beyond music; it could be addressed to any art form; furthermore, the same question could extend to life itself (there is a reason why some artists consider life to be the purest form of art). Outside of “fear” (which, though an easy answer, is ultimately an unacceptable one, if purely on moral grounds), it is difficult to understand why people choose to limit themselves to the forms they know. Is there something so terrible about expanding one’s given conception, perception, and reception?
To those who would say, “Music has form, and beyond that form is just noise,” I want to say that this is not an argument for chaos, nor is it an argument for a world without forms. Creating and discovering pre-created structures is a primitive definition of consciousness. It’s what human beings do. We are, before anything else, structure-ers, and our intelligence is a measure of our pattern recognition procecces. To argue for chaos, to argue for a world without forms, is to argue in favor of the nothing, and personally, I agree with Walter, who said, “Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”
What I am asking is that, given a form, isn’t it interesting to see where the form breaks down and how? And isn’t it exciting to experience that process for oneself? What’s more, doesn’t the process inspire you to wonder what the next form to come along may look like, particularly if it is, as it necessarily must be, formed from the scattered pieces of the now-destructed original (given the structuring consciousness and given the world, we are all, as Derrida said, bricoleurs)? Isn’t this process, as a whole, the experience of innovation? And isn’t innovation one of the very experiences we, as Americans, are taught to crave?
This is an argument for liberalism, of course, but it is also an argument for Americanism, in the sense of jazz being the first true American music (with rock and roll as one of its direct descendents — perhaps that is what pisses off the classicists: Miles’ electric fusion of rock and roll and jazz struck them as an unholy union, musical incest, whose result was some disastrous mutant, the offspring of America copulating with itself). As within the heart of America, deep within the heart of jazz there lies a commitment to innovation, a commitment to constant renewal.
In the universe of life, there are two negative side effects to a commitment to constant innovation. First, the need for constant expansion can appear as a cancerous outgrowth of innovation (push until it breaks, but what if it never breaks?!); this need is not sustainable given the universe of life’s finite resources. Second, the desire for constant renewal may engender a cult of youth, where the wisdom of the elders can go largely unheeded. Neither of these side effects, however, need concern us when the topic is music. First, in the universe of music, resources are limitless: a note can be played without diminishing the universe’s storehouse of notes. Second, the only harm that can come from not heeding the wisdom of the elders is that the music of the youth won’t be enjoyed by the elders, who, given the infinite storehouse, are free to make whatever music they wish. In the case of the fifty-some-odd-year-old Miles Davis, he was an elder who happened to make music that the youth happened to love.
In that sense, I just don’t understand why a person would allow himself to get angry — angry! — at Miles Davis for exploring new “directions of music.”
The documentary concludes by showing the full 38-minute set that Miles and his band played at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. Even if you don’t consider yourself a jazz fan, the hour or so of documentary leading up to the set provide all the context you’ll need to “get” the music, even if only on the surface of the new form. You may not like it, but that’s only if you determine that the form of the music does not fit your particular aesthetic principles; at the very least, however, Miles’ willingness to venture beyond the known limits will help you to find the limits of your own principles, and then — only then — can you decide whether it’s time to do the American thing and expand them.