Cross-posted from OccultCorpus forums for the enjoyment of regular blog readers – way too much jazz playing here lately, and it makes me happy 🙂 Turns my thoughts to a new angle, one I had not considered in my metal heaviness xD Here goes…kindly either excuse the beatnik posturing, or nod and smile from behind your beret and shades 😛
Miles Davis – the jazz shaman. The red-lacquered horn was his fetish, Cool was his aura of power, and his sidemen were his spirit helpers. He was known for picking the best sidemen to make his music more than it would have been alone, and he was actually influenced by them as well. If not for Tony Williams and the younger players in the Second Great Quintet during the early 60s, and if not for his “spirit wife” Betty Mabry, he wouldn’t have met Jimi Hendrix and gotten into jazz-rock fusion. His album titles are even magical – Bitches Brew, Sorcerer, Dark Magus, there was a suite he did with a big band in the 80s based on colors that the composer saw in his Aura – the title of the album.
Jazz instruments – elemental attributions – microcosmic correspondences:
Sax/Trumpet/Lead – Fire – Will/Spirit/Soul (the lead instrument in both melody and improvisation, the key to the piece. Without Will, there is no magic. Without melody and improvisation, no Jazz.)
Piano – Air – Mind (thoughts running along like tinkling keys even under the sax’s stronger solo)
Bass – Water – Emotion (Deep, prone to solos at times, with its own characteristic of deep vibration)
Drums – Earth – Body (What is music without time, without measurement, without rhythm? What is the moment without the illusion of previous and future moments? And why be locked in when you can solo at times – dance on a snare and cymbals?)
An LBRP can be constructed for any jazz quartet using these attributions – for Miles, with the trumpet as Spirit and the sax as Fire, and the magus as Miles, the Sorcerer, the effects are fiery, electric. Thrilling, unlike traditional LBRP effects. Album titles for the Qabalistic Cross, a Middle Pillar with the five subgenres or Aeons of jazz that Miles created or influenced? Epicness.
And lastly, the crux. The nature of improvisational music in magic. Melody – ritual. Structure. The bedrock of an operation. Then, influenced by music theory and knowledge of one’s chosen instrument, or symbol set…improvisation. Kia. A Love Supreme, fire music of Impulse! Records, the chaos of 60s and 70s free jazz. One disconnects from positive, measured, planned space, and – to break the jazz idiom for a moment – connects with the principles described by Seether’s album title Finding Beauty In Negative Spaces. (That came to me in an exploration on chaos and jazz…it’s a recurring theme in my mental keywords. Deal with it 
) Space is not empty at all. Once one gets down far enough into an empty cosmic void, Nuit is revealed to be at union with Hadit – Kia emerges. Negative spaces Seethe with beauty.
It is in this negative space that CHAOS – KIA – IMPROVISATION can occur. Break free from ritual, play a passionate solo.
Second consideration – swing, the nature of being in the pocket. When a jazz band gets up to speed, hits the right rhythm, they are said to be “swinging”. This is no idiom of hep cats from bygone days – this is a technical term. The rhythm section drives swing – they are “in the pocket” when they fire on all cylinders, instinctively, yet with finger-snapping drive. In the pocket, music occurs. In gnosis, Will becomes manifest amongst the Spheres. Swing is key for jazz…or for jazz magic.
That’s all I have on this topic per se – except that a sense of experimentation is key. Don’t be Wynton Marsalis, tying yourself and your brothers down to a 50-year-old idiom, or to a 500-year-old grimoire. Be John Zorn, Bill Laswell, Peter Brötzmann – the heroes of jazz in the 21st century, melding old principles that have worked since 1917 with musical forms and extremity unknown to even the “underground” kids buying Slayer shirts at Hot Topic. They are the heirs of Miles, the Black Man Of The Sabbath, the Man With The Horn, the Dark Magus. Perhaps with proper skill and creativity, you can be too. Even if you previously thought jazz was old people music
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