Entomological Jazz

By Peter Lloyd

What would you call someone who plays a saxophone with insects? I’m not talking about a wooden saxophone infested with termites or anything like that. I mean a saxophonist who accompanies bugs. Someone who plays what you might call a concerto for sax and swarm.

The painfully polite NPR radio host Diane Rehm almost called just such a man, philosopher jazz musician David Rothenberg, crazy. Not in a pejorative sense. Diane simply asked David, “Some people listening to you talk about covering your body with cicadas might begin to wonder whether your behavior is other than rational.”

Novel Combinations
When creative people combine things in new-to-the-world ways, the result always provides opportunity for generating original insights, if not breakthroughs, whether the novel combinations end up as innovation or absolute lunacy.

Listen to Riddim Bugz by Rothenberg and decide for yourself. Innovation or lunacy? Or something in between?

I doubt that the cicadas will put a legendary drummer such as Roy Haynes out to pasture, especially since the rhythm of bugs in Riddim Bugz has been “quantized into regularity,” but hearing the regularity of insect rhythm in nature has always reminded me of the human connection to other life all the way down, if you will, to our insect relatives. Did we get our sense of rhythm from hearing bugs or is it built into us in the same way it seems to built into insects?

I’m also reminded of the most simple definition of music—organized sound. Is it organized sound if they players have no intention of making what we call music?

An Ancient Idea
The ancient Greeks thought of music as derived from the idea of the Muses, who inspired all kinds of artistic and scientific effort. The sixth-century philosopher Boëthius named four kinds of music—musica divina, musica universalis, musica humana, and musica instrumentalis. Respectively music of the gods, order in the universe, proportions of the human body, and what we think of today as music.

So if the ancients allowed for a relationship between music and nature, well then, I’m certainly comfortable with the Rothenberg’s jazz-bug collaborations. Not so novel after all.

To hear novel, you’ll have to take in a performance of 4’33” by John Cage. Renown for his non-standard, to say the least, use of musical instruments, Cage staged a 1952 performance in which musicians of no particular kind took the stage and remained silent. The performance consisted of the audience reaction. I haven’t heard it. I hear they’re still working out the bugs.

See also:

Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Rhythm and Noise by David Rothenberg
Why Birds Sing: A Journey Into the Mystery of Birdsong by David Rothenberg

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.

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