Encounter

When it comes to my work, I don't really care what's SUPPOSED TO happen. I'm not interested in that premise at all. I'm interested in improvisation over an extended period of time, and in this session I was very fortunate to work with bassist Putter Smith. To say he is one of the giants on his instrument, although true, doesn't begin to pay homage to his talent.

The more we played, the more synchronous the whole session became. For me, it was far more than "unexpected." The collaborative aspect goes a lot farther than a shared musical tradition. It gets into places where both of you are working from imagination, first and foremost, and in that space the "arrivals and departures" are dreamlike.

When I was 11 years old, I was on a baseball team playing in the finals of a state tournament up in Niagara Falls. After it was over, we had to take a ten-hour bus trip back to New York. I grabbed a book of short stories out of a candy store and jumped on the bus, and read the whole thing on the way home. It convinced me that imagination can go anywhere and do anything. In the ensuing 60 years, I haven't changed my mind.

Doing this session with Putter Smith confirmed everything I believe about creating. You can take two people with vastly different backgrounds and approaches and experience, and both people will, as they play, arrive at something they could NEVER have conceived of or predicted.

Generally speaking, chaos and order are only very rough approximations of what really happens in the moment.

The universe is waiting for imagination to revolutionize it down to its core. Everything else is open to debate.