Finding your art

Nov. 5, 2009

Dear Julie,

When the writer Annie Dillard asked a painter she knew how he came to be a painter, he answered, "I liked the smell of the paint."

Maybe it's as simple as that, what we become. We are drawn to it, like salmon to their river, like clouds to a mountain pass. Other ways offer resistance. Going our own way feels more like rowing a boat gently down a stream, maybe even for salmon.

My old friend Randy was a singer and songwriter who had his own sound, a keening voice clearer than any bell and stubby-fingered guitar riffs only he could play. What you play and the songs you write and sing are defined by your limitations, he told me once. I thought of fast, dexterous guitarists who hadn't comprehended, as Debussy did, that "Music is the space between the notes." Limitations have many faces.

Last week the university jazz bands played at the River Campus. Each had moments unbridled by limitations. The younger musicians in the Jazz Lab band began leaning into the music in their final number, Count Basie's "One O'Clock Jump." These are musicians for whom standing up and taking a lead is a new experience that can transplant the heart to the throat.

Not so for the Sultans of Swing, a band composed mostly of college professors. Most have been taking leads half their lives. Only five musicians on a stage set up for 20, they played well individually, but I wished they were squished together more, breathing the same air.

The Studio Jazz Band composed of older students simply astonished. A powerful, heroic sound emanated from the trumpet of Nate Nall, though he is only a freshman. Tenor sax man Spencer Day matched Nall's power with fluidity. Buddy Rich, a drummer who knew only one speed -- flat out -- made "Channel One Suite" famous. This band's drummer, Brandon Harvey, plays fast and hard but seems to know other gears as well.

All the musicians in this band played up to their limitations.

Dillard's point is that whatever you create comes from your relationship with the raw materials, with clay if you're a potter or with words if you write. If you write your vocabulary is your box of paints. You like the way words look on the page or the way they sound. Musicians are enthralled with sounds.

Dillard's book "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" limned the wonder and terror in a little corner of her world, making the wonder and terror of the larger world somehow more comprehensible or more part of the natural order. In a different book she writes of encountering a sphinx moth that was sitting on a ship's rail, panting as it supercharged its muscles with oxygen before it could take flight, a tiny jet preparing for takeoff. She left to get drawing paper and returned to find the moth "still revving up." She watched the moth leave the rail and gain and lose altitude again and again until more was lost than gained and the moth drowned. She knew that moth.

Whatever moves you and stirs you, be beset by it, Dillard advises anyone who would commit a creative act. "You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment," she says.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.