Recently someone asked me about the form of dance I practice — the form I aspire to, really; and like all good forms it is small enough for me to wrap my arms around, large enough to contain my curiosity, lean enough that an evening costs a few dollars and yields a fortune, full enough that I think I will never find the end of it.

I talked about the improvisational “jam”, the coalescence of a couple of dozen movement artists, with no talking, no music, only the sound of sliding or shuffling, running or slowing feet, deep breath… sometimes spontaneous laughter, sometimes spontaneous stillness, deeper because it is shared. My friend tried to imagine that space for a moment, as much as one can really imagine it, foreign as it is, and asked “How can you dance without music?”

“I mean, when I dance I give myself to that melody so it will take me, maybe it’s the beat of latin drums, maybe it’s the power of electric guitar or the singer’s emotion… but that’s what inspires me. That’s what moves me…”

photo: ascend-dance.com

I love to dance to music. I play music. I write music. It’s water that fills you, rain that enters the mouth and the ears, fills you from the top down, and when it reaches your feet, you begin to move. You have to move. Sometimes, when you recognize a piece of music, or a style, your feet already know the wave is coming, and they begin to shake and jump before the river reaches earth. When the music is right, I lay back upon it, watch the sky begin to move, my body begin to flow toward the sea: I love how it supports me with its muscular fluidity, how it lifts a roomful of people and tosses them together, lovingly, passionately, shows them how to find themselves, splashes them in its small stormy sea, crashes them together and together until they forget they are separate people, forget, for a little while, that they are alone.

There is another music, though, and it is subtler. In fact, I would say that its voice can’t be heard, or can’t be heard clearly, when that thundering waterfall-current of sound has taken the room for a ride. That other music is almost ethereal, like angelsong (remembering that there are destroying angels and angels of fire), whose unique melody can only be heard in stillness. If you don’t find stillness, you don’t find your song.

Your song is what begins to swell with silent dancing. It is quite remarkable, really: one is unable to stay immobile: we are filled to the brim with bouncing atoms and surging waves, if you live you can’t help but begin to move. So without effort, you will find your movement, or your movement will find you; you’ll find that water, that river is within you, the rhythmic passage, the harmony, the rest, the coda, all within you.

As you begin to puzzle out that subtle song, you begin to make out the sound of subtle singers all around you. What delight! And as these singers tune into their own making, with unexpected skill yours suddenly merges and thrills with their’s, or theirs’, and a new current is born, heading who knows where! But certainly, toward the sea…

After two hours of following your thread of sound in this greater flow of sounds, as it spins and tangles with those other threads, you finish the night in a circle, looking at the faces of fellow dancers, and you will swear there has been music all night long… even if you couldn’t for the life of you sing it back when asked.

That’s what our jazz greats always knew. Sure, there is form, there are notes on a page; but like a great Indian raga, the container is slight, it moves with the breeze, the breeze rides a current of feeling, the feeling surges from a seed of being, from a night, from a fight, from a memory, from a tragedy, from a slap, from an embrace.

With all that humming and drumming inside of me, all the kaleidoscopic spinning and light-flickering, all the deep droning and high crooning, all the harmonic dancing one thread of music toward and around and into another, all that pulsing that was (and wasn’t) the beat of my blood, the tap of the heel or turn of the toe, with the pull of a partner’s weight or soft draping of her limbs or his arms around me, with the ensemble tuned and riffing, with the orchestra shouting out my fingertips and pouring pearl-edged from my open, smiling teeth… I found all these words but spoke none of them, they were so loud they shouted down my voice, the brass was too brassy, the bass too deep, so all I could do was turn to her and say:

Love: it’s jazz.

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