Jazz and the butterfly effect

I must confess that I've never understood jazz music. It's beautiful, sure, and I'm never someone who refuses to appreciate something just because I don't peronsally understand it. What we consider legitimate art today, for example, poses more and more questions about its accessibility and therefore relevancy. Contemporary "legitimate" art has increasingly trended towards the high brow and obscurely intellectual. Ever since Marcel Du Champ stuck a urinal on a pedistal and called it a fountain, the artistic establishment has been pushing us (the common class), often uncomfortably so, beyond the boundaries of our aesthetic sense and what art ought to be. I, for one, would stand up for contemporary art precisely because of its power to question. But when I stand before something especially puzzling or personally meaningless, even I find myself questioning its right to exist. But even then, even then, I'm usually able to leave behind my questions of purpose and fall back on an innate curiosity that makes the experience of the piece more about possibility rather than certainty.

But there was always something about my lack of a structured understanding of jazz that bothered me. I felt like it wasn't enough to just appreciate and experience jazz. I needed to know how this kind of music was made, the purpose for which it was made, two crucial components to reaching a higher appreciation of jazz that remained frustratingly inaccessible to me.

These were the thoughts that were in my mind when I first sat down at Yoshi's in San Francisco tonight. And as is the case whenever I listen to jazz, I also thought about two jazz pianists I knew in college. When they played, especially during those 3am nights in the dorm where I was their only audience, I would feel simultaneously haunted and captivated. These two people came from very different paths. One is a Japanese-Italian who was born and raised in Texas, and had such thorough training that it spoke for itself when he set his fingers down to play the first few chords. The other is an Arabian (some sort of royal, I suspect) with an untamed head of tight curls who stumbled upon the piano and had almost no training whatsoever. But they had something in common - when they played, there was a rawness about the sounds they produced that made you feel like you were somehow directly interacting with them without needing contact or words. I also remember being drawn to their almost mystical energy, a deep sense of wonder that they always seemed to exude, and a tolerance for uncertainty that was refreshing in our elite institution where we were constantly pushed to pursue clarity. Somehow, I thought, if I understood their music better, I would be able to tap into that energy that was so irresistable about them. But the more I continued to search for that answer, the more frustrated I got with not finding it.

I was thinking about them as I sat at Yoshi's tonight and pondered their vastly different paths (one had gone on to pursue her music in ways some would consider eccentric, others odd, and the other one killed himself in a tragic railway incident). Meanwhile, on stage, the pianist had switched the trio from a frantic tune to something more mellow, more resounding of the natural sounds of rain and animal steps and owls in a dark forest. But even in this peace, there was still constant movement. I felt the familiar frustration of still not being able to anticipate where his chord progressions were going; I could only desperately hold on to the underlying rhythm, itself shifting and barely audiable beneath the erratic notes, by lightly bobbing my head to it. Normally, I would attribute this to my lack of understanding of jazz and music theory, and my ignorance would infuriate me. But tonight, together with the memory of my two friends, it all made sense.

The butterfly effect has recently become a popular concept (partly thanks to, or in spite of, a movie of this title starring Ashton Kutcher). It has been employed to explain everything from weather patterns to complex phenomena in math and physics. The theory states, very simply, that one small change (a butterfly flapping its wings in, say, the rainforests of Brazil) can initiate a chain of events that leads to a devastating hurricane on the Gulf coast. This means that in our quest to perfectly know and predict our environment, unless we can account for every last atom, completely comprehend its pattern of movement infinitely into the future, and understand how it will be impacted by every other atom that surrounds it, we will become very wrong, very fast. It's why weather predictions are never very accurate beyond a few days, and stock markets rise and fall contrary to our best estimates (too soon?). There are simply too many factors and relationships to take into account. But in spite of the erratic appearance of these events, some have proposed that in the long run, meta-patterns do emerge; we're just too microscopic to observe them clearly. For example, while we've never been able to predict the exact dates of major recessions, they have occurred in roughly 20-year cycles since the beginning of the last century. Ultimately, things return themselves towards an equilibrium, even exhibit a general pattern in doing so, but we just fail miserably at predicting the minute-to-minute specifics of these patterns.

So we're left stuck between the possibility for prediction, and thus control, and a deep resignation that we'll never be able to get it perfectly right. Somewhere along the way, someone must have figured out that not only do the physical components of our environment reflect the butterfly effect at play, but indeed, our own lives reflect the same. A professor of mine, who received a MacArthur "genius" award for his work with baboons and stress, argues that stress, to higher-order animals with self-awareness like baboons and humans, is the struggle they have against factors in their external environment in order to gain the control that is crucial to their well-being. In the field of psychology, stress is defined as our physical and emotional response to "stressors" (I've always loved this circular definition), or things that throw us off balance. Even in my own life, when I think about it carefully enough, stress most often manifests itself as a feeling of losing control, whereas I've felt the best when I sensed everything was in its rightful place.

How do we achieve this sense of well-being? We think, analyze, reason, justify, and plan. The process of logical analysis, when it's boiled down, is really to take into account as many factors as we can, understand their interactions, and arrive at an end state that we think has the highest likelihood of occurring. We do this (essentially predicting the future) in order to influence the future to the outcome we desire. Being able to do so gives us a sense of control; failing to do so makes us feel like we're losing control and stressed out. Our lives, in one sense, is a constant pursuit of perfect knowledge and a feeling of being in the driver's seat. We love it when we're "on top of our game," when we've "got it covered," and when things are "falling into place."

In fact, we love it so much that we perhaps forget how, according to the butterfly effect, we can never truly be on top of it. No matter how much we analyze our lives and make our decisions based on logical thought, we can't turn out right all the time. Thus enter the uncertainties, the ups and downs, the grey areas, the tough decisions that stress us out and drive us in hordes to Hawaiian vacations and therapists' chairs. We're being blind to the fact that beyond a certain equilibrium point, the more things we try to tame, the more they go out of wack; the more we try to retain control, the more we're likely to lose it.

How Zen of you, you must be thinking at this point. No, I'm not talking about becoming a Zen master or a buddhist monk to restore your sense of equilibrium and achieve balance. I'm talking about jazz. As a form of music that evolved from both classical and African folk music, jazz was in a way a reaction against the rules and theories that governed tradition (much like postmodern and contemporary art - see earlier in this entry). As such, it rejected a world view that things can be neatly categorized and explained by definable principles. The musicians on stage, and my two friends, get this. Listening to the erratic ebbs and flows of the music (which probably had some components of improv that the musicians themselves didn't even understand), all the while searching for that underlying steadiness, I realized I was listening to a world view being communicated in music. In this act of listening, I was also enacting a microscopic version of living, struggling to search for some consistent pattern in a confusing blur of random events, all the while trying to make peace with the fact that I can never get it exactly right. Suddenly, it didn't matter that I didn't know the makeup of the jazz chord, or why he was playing two notes that jarred against each other in classical theory. All that mattered was that it was...there, and it spoke a kind of truth.