[Tango-L] Jazz and Tango

[Robin Tara]

I was listening to NPR "This I Believe" essay and heard the following.

I thought it pretty much sums up why tango is so seductive.

"Sometimes when you are listening to a great jazz musician performing a long
solo, you are experiencing his mind, moment by moment, as it shifts and
decides, as it adds and reminds. This happens whether the player is a
saxophone player or a bass player or a pianist. You are in there, where that
other mind is. His mind is coming through your ears and inside your mind.

The first time I heard Charlie Parker playing "Ornithology," I was
delighted. I was about 11 years old. You are so much alone with your mind as
a kid, so when you hear someone else's mind improvising, you feel an
excitement you will never get from some music that just wants to keep a
steady beat.

I got that delight again when I first heard great improvisatory poetry. When
I read "The Desert Music" by William Carlos Williams, the book fell out of
my hands and made a loud splat on the library's concrete floor. Later I
would hear the poet Philip Whalen call this kind of poetry "a graph of the
mind moving." Yes, it is.

It can happen with prose, too ‹ sentences you hear in your head and know how
they felt inside another's. I believe that if there is a god, this is what
he wanted us to do. It is the holy life of the intellect.

If we can experience another's mind in our own, we know that love is
possible. We understand why the great poet Shelley wrote a poem to what he
called "Intellectual Beauty," and called it an invisible power that moves
among the things and people of this Earth.


The essay continues at:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12821079