BECOMING (via Mike Daley):

Meaning in Those Melodies: Reflections on American music. (NAT HENTOFF, April 7, 2004, Wall Street Journal)

I measured the other adults I knew against these musicians' resilience of spirit. They made their living as improvisers, taking chances in public every night. Challenging themselves was their natural way of life.

Later, I found similar directness of speech and feeling among other creators of what Alan Lomax called "the rainbow of American music"--Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Charlie Rich, and Delbert McClinton, among them. . . .

Trumpeter Clark Terry once said of Duke Ellington: "He wants life and music to be always in a state of becoming. He doesn't even like to write definitive endings to a piece. He'd often ask us to come up with ideas for closings, but when he'd settled on one of them, he'd keep fooling with it. He always likes to make the end of a song sound as if it's still going somewhere."

It's their constant state of becoming that draws me to people I write about, especially those who make music that I can hear whenever I need to connect again to the life force of these sounds of direct experience.

That's an especially appealing selection of musicians he cites.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 8, 2004 8:01 PM