sardonick

I caught the Pelt Quartet down at the Jazz Bakery a while back, and–aside from the amazing music, of course–it got me thinking about the idea of artists as being filters, in addition to creators.

Me, I wish I had more time to get into Jazz. Jazz music is like red wine–compared to white wine, I find that reds go the full gamut between vile and amazing–there’s a much bigger difference between a good red and bad red than between a good white and bad white. And, aside from some extraordinary whites, I find that drinking a red takes a lot more practice to discern the subtleties. I’m beginning to catch them, but experience slowly brings out new layers.

Anyways, big digression. My main point is that I don’t know red wines as much as I like, but that I don’t know jazz nearly enough as I’d like. There’s so much subtlety to a trumpeter’s style, or the interaction/contrast between a bassist and drummer–honestly, most of the time that I’m listening I can only see the vague outlines of something deeper, that I can appreciate superficially but know I’ll appreciate more as I get more experience.

So, that’s my context, as a novice listener, not too familiar with trends in the genre. It hit me, while listening, that artists don’t only create: they also summarize for their audience. They capture the zeitgeist of their field at the moment of composing or improvising. Now, this idea isn’t mature just yet. I think it hinges on the well-worn “man is a product of his surroundings” idea. But I like how it brings out the facet of artists as performing a summarizing, information-relaying task to the listener, aside from what we normally expect of them.

It’s like tech bloggers consolidating/aggregating, acting as filters to all the news, because too much of it is happening for readers to have time to spend all day doing the information extraction for themselves. It seems like creators (as opposed to pure performers) like painters, composers, improvists, perform the same function for audience with trends in their specialty of art.

Huh.