Life: An Improvisation

The other night I went out to listen to jazz at a local restaurant.  I went solo as my husband was out of town.  I sat with a fellow jazz lover we have gotten to know over the years since we have been so often in the same place at the same time and we clearly all enjoy jazz.  He's slightly older than me and has never been married.

As we sat and listened to the quartet play what I will call contemporary jazz, we managed to carry on something of a conversation.  He shared the joys and tribuations of searching for companionship via the internet.  That, the music, and the book I'm currently reading, THE ART OF CHOOSING by Sheena Iyengar, got me to thinking about patterns, both in music and in life and why some of us follow one pattern and some another.    Why some marry once, others multiple times and still others not at all.  Why some live far from where they were raised and some never leave their hometown, the place of their birth.  Why some take a job and stay in it a lifetime while others either move up the hierarchy or switch professions.   Why some women work and others choose to stay at home.  We are not given a guidebook upon birth, and when we finally set out on our own, we certainly have no hard copy set of directions telling us what to do.  Our parents, family, community, and culture provide, kind of by osmosis, a point of view, a perspective, a set of criteria for making choices that most of us either don't recognize as such or acknowledge exists.    We think we are in charge, we make the decisions, we choose.

So where does music come in, jazz in particular?  Improvisation.  Music is, if nothing else, a set of patterns of notes and rhythm.  There is an endless variety possible.  In jazz, there are standards and those standards are recognizable but the musician can then improvise, impose origniality on a known tune.  A good example is "Somewhere Over the Rainbow".  We have numerous recordings of this song by various artists and each takes this lovely tune and makes it their own by improvising.  In some cases the tune is still recognizable because the set pattern is still present in some form or another.  Yet in a few cases, improvisation becomes something apart from its origins.  And then there are the artists who explore their own limits, compose their own songs.  Some will have a recognizable pattern within the new tune and others, frarnkly, I question whether there is any pattern at all, which perhaps becomes a pattern by default.

It occurred to me as I listeneed to the contemporary jazz quartet whose music was all new to me and as I lintened to my acquaintance recount his life story, that living is something like jazz.  There is a pattern for us to flollow set for us by tradition and culture as practiced by our parents and our community.  Some of us are very comfortable with things just the way they are prescribed and thus our lives reflect clearly the pattern we inherited.  Others of us deviate from the pattern.  We improvise.  Each of us improvises to the extent we are comfortable.  Some of us improvise to the point that our origins are not recognizable.  So guidebook or no, set of directions or no, each of us finds a way of living, chooses a way of life that fits us.  Some of us marry, make a home, have children, and establish a career.  Others of us do variations on that theme.  The question I still have, however, is what determines who will and who won't improvise and what determines to what extent.  That I'll have to give more consideration.