Corea and Hancock – Overview

I went to see on Sunday the 19th, the concert of C. Corea and H. Hancock at EDP Cool Jazz in Oeiras. Good night, beautiful landscape, peaceful public, taking into account the usual hysteria that do everything to show.

The musicians arrived well-prepared and then made sure to explain who had no idea they were going to play. For more lie it was, I was immediately grounded, less experimentalism of all kinds.

And so it happened. During the first 45 minutes they were doing dinner digestion and having fun. They ask me what they were playing, that is, what topics? I have no idea. They did not. Suggest me the hand, with irony, are still fine-tuning the pianos? Hancock seemed to me more composed, but Corea just laughed, hovering above the clouds, however, they arrived. I was to go away.

At some point, I do not know which of them began to fathom, but I felt that music was beginning to exist. Maybe they responded to an audience that was not very happy – half-hearted cheers – except those who insist on shaking their heads to show that they understand the depth of the matter. But somewhere, Corea joined the dance and the Hancock after a “Cantaloupe Island” little achieved, there tried to go down paths in a more refined slow (more in line with the entries “Court and Spark” and “Both Sides now “from the album of” Joni letters “).

It was then that the Corea decided espanholar, fetching their “Spain”, which pays tribute to the Aranjuez Concert, resuming albums Return to Forever (such as “No mystery”) and most other things I did not recognize (I think part of their “Spanish fantasies”). No matter, it was very good.

The concert (almost) ended with an encore, which involved the public to produce sounds to accompany, or to reproduce the sounds they touched. It was very fun and enjoyable. But the music had finished. And much of the public came out with encores still ongoing, which is at least strange.

Rather than trying to assess the concert in my head, what impressed me was the consciousness of so thin line that, at least in music, between the mediocre and the wonder. We were facing very high caliber musicians in a concert of “discipline”, the jazz, that has everything to shine the uniqueness of a live concert, and yet, the danger is always lurking. And this danger is, in my opinion, adherence to a philosophy of contemporary art based on innovation, some jazz musicians promoted and eventually install. When it says “after Coltrane nothing was like before”, regardless of the opinion that we have on the work of this musician, we value originality, and it alone. Contemporary music has, like the painting of the same “time”, works that are worth only by its originality. What is little. It was with this philosophy that was born the “free jazz” and it is for this reason that a sheaf of papers wrapped in a string can be worth, as I saw personally in NY, several thousand euros.

I remembered the distinction that Popper (who was not a musician, but surely one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century) made between subjective and objective art art, the first being the one where the work is the result of emotions (author, it is presumed), and the second one in which emotion (the receiver is assumed) are the result of the work. So he argued that a work of art should not only possess originality, but also integrity. It is an interesting reflection that is worth considering.

Returning to the concert: worth it? Of course I do. A sublime fifteen minutes worth several hours of indifference.