Listening to Jazz Guitar

Jazz is good for me. There is something going on around the business of imprecision that makes music human.

I spent enough time around synthesizers and MIDI several years ago to know the inhumanity that is so easy to produce. Right now I feel like it is human imprecision that gives the music the real interest. This jazz is brain candy. What my mind is doing as I listen is predicting where, when,how and why the next note is going to be.

I have no doubt that what I am writing about is old, old stuff for people in music. But I am not there. I am a consumer. Maybe I am a maker, too, but not for the sake of the music.

Wow. I am getting somewhere tonight. I have struggled with music forever. Maybe this is why. Maybe music for me is not about music, but about the mind.

Just now stopped by piano of Maurice Vander on Blue Eyes set with Birelli Lagrene. Just stopped cold. What piano lacks in pitch imprecision seems to be made up for in the shear number of variables per minute available in timing and dynamics.

Father God, thank you so much for how you made us for music and music for us. I know you like music, because I like music and you made me like you.

Songs in my head.

I have never talked about songs stuck in your head that somebody has not understood and agreed. It does not happen with speeches, poems, movie lines. It happens with songs. I have Seals & Crofts "Hummingbird" in my head right now. And I am enjoying it as much as the first time I ever heard it. And I am seeing images from 1975.

Songs must be so powerful.

Dad made songs and put them in our heads. He made us compatible with them and made us to make songs.

Dean Robert Evans talked about all of the years he had spent around the college age group and how the one thing they had always had was being surrounded constantly with music. Craig and I said, "Well, of course." The Dean said, "No, not of course. It goes away." How sad that was at the time. To think that days would come when we would turn off the music.

And it is not instrumentals. It is songs. Lieder. Mit WORDS. The music expresses, but not like words. It is the words and music together in our heads that sticks. It is a wonder and a delight to me. I want to know more about how and why that works. I wonder if it is my spirit singing, and my soul hears it and repeats it into my consciousness. But what does that mean then, when the song is "not entirely edifying?" Does my spirit sing bar room ditties to the Holy Spirit? I want to conclude that having any song in my heart is better than being dry, dead and songless. I have been there. I am not there now, by the very grace of God.

Father, thank You that you sing over us. Songs are vital to you, and so they are life to us. This is very good.

Godfrey

I want to find out more about the anointing on music. I have had some music come in new that has had listeners on the floor, and two years later it is still wonderful, but the power is gone. Maybe the power is not gone, but that particular anointing has done it's work here. Maybe it would still bowl over someone else.

Then there is my friend Godfrey Birtill. I will hold him a long time in Heaven. I have been listening to the same GB songs for nearly eight years, and they still take me right there.

Point being, there is a difference. I do not know if the difference is important, or the idea that there is a difference is important.

Anyway, if you do not have it, go out on iTunes and buy everything that Godfrey has to offer. Sit down with people you love, and listen to it. All of a sudden you will realize you are on your feet, with your hands to Heaven and big hot tears streaming down your face. The next time you come to, you will wonder what all the noise is...and you will realize that it is your dancing feet madly thumping the floor.

About five years ago I met Glynnis Robbins, now Farmwald. She was part of the music at a church that was new to me. She sang a song about going out into the wilderness and meeting God. I have not been the same since.

Glynnis is finally recording a bunch of songs. I was going to call them her songs, but I can not. Even though the Spirit gave them to her, they still belong to God.

I have made a contribution to her project. If you see this in time, you can, too. Otherwise, just get your hands on the output.

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