Jesus, Jazz, and Buddhism

"Music and Buddhism.  They're not interested in the answer. 
It's the moment; it's how you live and how you practice." 

Jerry Granelli in Part VI of In the Moment


by George Hermanson and Jay McDaniel

Some people live on the edge, pulled by the lure of adventure.  Their lives are not easy, but they are filled with intensity.  Witness the life of the jazz drummer, Jerry Granelli.  In some ways he is like a Titan storming heaven, never settling for predictable forms of order because always on the way toward novelty.  He and others like him perform a very important service to the whole of society, reminding us that the universe itself is a creative advance into novelty.  They are drumming their way into the future, improvising along the way, and we are doing the same, albeit with the rhythms we create out of our own lives.

And yet they, like the rest of us, are never apart from the present moment of their lives.  All of us -- drummers included -- are akin to crests of a wave.  We are always here-and-now wherever "here" and "now" happen to be.  Even if we are remembering the past or anticipating the future, we are doing so from "here" and "now."  This is how Whitehead and Buddhists see things, and any good jazz drummer knows this.  The drummer is here in this moment, remembering the past and anticipating the next here.  The jazz drummer is in the moment, on the edge. 

Allow us a little theology.  The Bible says that in the beginning, there was a spirit within God: a Word that sought to become flesh.  What was this Word?  Was it OM?  Was it Love?  Was a yearning for novelty?  Evidence suggests that, at the every least, it was a yearning for novelty.  Witness the thirteen billion year pilgrimage of the universe itself, always on its way toward an open future like a jazz drummer, and creating new sounds along the way.  

Is the universe creating these new sounds?  Or is God creating them?  The answer, so we believe, is both.  We process thinkers believe that the universe is a journey, and that it contains creativity which can unfold in ways beautiful and horrible.  The universe, too, is in the moment, on the edge.  We ourselves, along with the atoms and molecules and microbes and kindred creatures, are continuous instantiations of this creativity.  God is becoming, too.  Becoming with us, albeit from an inclusively polyrhythmic perspective.   The polyrhythms of the divine reality yearn for novelty conjoined with love, and inwardly we feel these divine rhythms as a heartbeat in our own life, a rhythmic lure to survive and then to live with wisdom, compassion, and creativity.  But even as divine drumming beckons us, we choose the sound we make.  When we choose to drum this way rather than that way, our very drumming becomes a new sound in the heart of God.  Yes, the God in whom process thinkers believe is a God of drums: a God whose rhythms are closer to us than our own breathing, but whose invitations we often ignore.  We can drum with, or against, the syncopated rhythms of love.  In the beginning is the Rhythm, and always we are in the beginning.  Each moment is a beginning.

Jerry Granelli is in the beginning, too.  As you will see in the documentary of his life below, he is profoundly influenced by Tibetan Buddhism with its emphasis on being in the moment.  He has had his breakdowns, his crises.  Who hasn't?  His daughter describes him as "a very cool dad."  His family matters to him.  His practice of meditation matters to him.  They matter as much...and maybe even more...than the drumming.  

Granelli's art and his life invite us to consider drumming as a metaphor for life, and thus to find our rhythm.  We who, in our own ways, are also in the moment and on the edge.  Can we learn to play with the rest of creation rather than against it, all the while adding our own forms of novelty?  Granelli's art and life are, in their own way, catalysts for this question. 

  

We write this piece in December, 2011.  We close with some reflections on the more relational side of Jerry Granelli.  You see from the interview in Part VI that his family is very important to him.  His daughter describes him as a "cool dad."  You can tell that we think he's kind of cool, too.  We close with another interview and with a few more reflections on how he, like the rest of us, is an outlier.

Recently he was in Ottawa, Canada, with his trio.  He also was part of an event on creativity in which he gathered with Ottawa non-musicians in some rhythmic play to spur their creativity.  In this context he reflected on his career and the importance of Buddhism to restart his career. He talked of his journey. 

He tells us that grew up in a musical family.  His father loved drums and his uncle had drums. Both loved music.  In that culture -- in the Italian culture -- music emerged at a drop of a hat.  Somebody had an accordion and people were dancing and playing. He started playing very, very young.  Indeed, he started playing violin when he was four and switched to the drums.

 “My uncle, he took me to hear Charlie Parker, man, in the late 1940s. I was eight or nine years old, you know, in San Francisco.  I was fascinated. I didn’t understand it, but it touched me way inside. Then one night, I guess a little later, he took me to the Blackhawk to hear Clifford Brown and Max Roach. I had listened to Gene Krupa, I got to meet Gene Krupa when I was eight years old,….So when I heard Max Roach that was like a real epiphany, just hearing a drum solo where I understood the point. I didn’t know how to do it. I understood that he understood the melodies and harmonies, and his solo was an improvisation on the form;  but I had no idea how it worked. But something went click, and I knew that’s what I had to learn. That’s what I wanted to play like.

But all this time, I played classical music.  I played any kind of music there was to play on the drums. At a pretty high level for an eight-year-old, a 10-year-old, a 12-year-old. All the time listening, listening to Charlie Parker, listening to great blues artists…. Playing some of that, playing a lot of Italian weddings, playing in swing bands. It was a fantastic musical education.”

Granelli’s story is an illustration of Malcolms Gladwell’s book the Outlier: The Story of Success (Little, Brown, and Company, 2008).  "Outlier" is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience.  Gladwell observes that we vastly underestimate the extent to which success occurs by means of events which lie completely outside a person’s control.  And he points out that, for those who get to the top of their game, getting to the top is preceded by 10,000 hours of practice and doing.   He also uses the term “outlier” to describe people who seem outside the range of ordinary expectations in their success and recognition: people like Paul McCartney or,. For that matter, Jerry Granelli.   Gladwell’s point is that these people, too, are not self-made.  They are made by circumstances beyond their control.

In saying this Gladwell points out the truth of relationally.   Noone is self-made.   We may have freedom in how we respond to events, but the events themselves are given to us.  Granelli knows this:

He says: “When I was about 13, I started sneaking out of the house on Sundays going down to the Fillmore which was the African-American section, to a club called the Cuckoo Club. I would try to sit in and it was always a disaster, they would throw me off the drums and stuff…That was really the music that I really felt at home with, I wanted to be a part of. My teen years were spent pursuing that and listening to that. And listening mostly to black music… rhythm and blues and all of that,.Sneaking off to those churches to see what they were doing. It drove my parents crazy.”

He goes on to illustrate the truth of being an outlier:  “But looking back at it, I just refused to be discouraged. I felt I could do it.  I was getting enough positive feedback… There was a lot of encouragement and a lot of help. I was lucky enough to meet Joe Morello. I was about 17…. I heard this record, Sounds of the Loop, and I heard Morello, man, and he was doing stuff with one hand that people were doing with two hands, you know? My mind was blown.”

Over the years he played with some of the giants of the jazz world.  Then came a shift to more free form.  He had become bored and he moved into the world of psychedelic rock. 

 “Fred (bassist Fred Marshal) invented this incredible instrument called the Megatar. So I started getting into electronics, and getting rid of the drum set as I knew it, creating a bigger drum set, four tympani and all that stuff, more of a percussion section. I look back at it now and it was an incredible time. Man, I had four tympani, 12 tom-toms, couple of bass drums, racks of gongs! Then we started playing with Light Sound Dimension which was two light painters and us. That band was pretty cutting edge, it’s in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, for inventing psychedelic music, Isn’t that amazing?”

At 30 he stopped and dropped out.  His jazz dreams had much reached fruition.  Then a transformation.   He felt he needed to be in touch with his life, to find deeper meaning. He grew up a Christian and he loved the Catholic church but it stopped making sense to him socially in a lot of ways. He found a deeper sense when he met his  teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche, and discovered meditation and Buddhism, and did that pretty much for four years.

He began to play again with Mose Allison, and that was he way back.  He moved more into free form playing with people like  Bill Frisell and Robben Ford and Kenny Garrett on Song I heard Buddy Sing. He moved to Halifax in 1987 because his teacher Trungpa Rinpoche had moved to Nova Scotia with several hundred Buddhists.  He did so because he had a young daughter, and  was getting tired of living in the United States. 

His reflections remind me of the point of process thought, the importance of risk and reflection.  The importance of seeking the edge and those who will journey with us.  This is spirituality as religious living, ideas and work that go together. 

In his own words: “You know, at my age at this point, I got 60 something years into doing this music, it’s kind of trying to stay relevant and evolve. Jazz isn’t a sacred cow to me. I don’t care to play standards unless I play them with my peers, you know? I’m much more interested in music that I haven’t heard, much more interested in being turned on to music haven’t heard, so doing a solo record….

I enjoy the company of young people, and I’ve been lucky enough to teach enough of them, and to have my oldest son, who’s turned me on to a lot of music. Maybe part of a constant search as an artist, you don’t want to stop. To me, the meaning of jazz is to keep looking for the edge. Where’s the edge, where’s the next edge? Where would be Charlie Parker have been today? We don’t get to know that. Maybe he’d be playing in some indie band somewhere, you know what I mean? Certainly Miles didn’t stop; he just kept right on going out there… I think that’s what I enjoy doing.

This trio is another kind of evolution for me. (Bassist/cellist) Simon Fisk lives in Calgary, but he’s originally from here, I knew him when he was a kid, and I knew (saxophonist) Danny (Oore) when he was a kid. They both kind of studied with me or were around my sphere of influence.

When I was looking around, and saying what do I do next, what do I hear next? — The trio. I knew I loved with playing with both of them. And then I thought I wonder if we could make a trio. I was fascinated with the fact that Danny plays all the horns it didn’t have to be a stock saxophone trio. And Simon plays cello, so there’s other movement out of just the regular trio form. I started to get interested in the band. It’s been evolving. This is our first tour.”

My spiritual life was based in music. I grew up a Christian, I always loved the church but It stopped making sense to me socially in a lot of ways.

I’d been around the Zen Centre, I toyed with Zen. I toyed with Hinduism. None of them felt comfortable to me, then I heard Trungpa Rinpoche talk and it made sense.  You know I described that moment of hearing Max Roach?  It was the same thing, only it was a guy talking about life.

So I heard him and I was trying to figure out how to be a human being. I didn’t know how to do anything but be a musician.  He started talking about meditation as a way to practice that simplifies you.  You can be related directly to your mind and your emotions without acting on everything. That just made sense to me, and then I had the opportunity to be around the greatest teacher in the West at that point.  It’s just… music is too complicated. You have to get it down to a simplest thing, your body your breath and your mind, you know.  I wasn’t looking to be a better musician. I wanted to find out how to be like this guy, like I wanted to be like Max Roach — that simple. I wanted to be as good as that, I wanted to understand life at that level.

Music is a spiritual practice, but you have to redefine spiritual. For me, meditation is the foundation practice of my life. Music is what I do. So anything that helps me work with my mind then shows up in my music. But you can ‘t think that just because you’re going to be a meditator you’re going to be a great musician. It doesn’t work that way. They both involve discipline and training.”

Grinelli goes on to say that his aim in music and in meditating is to become a good human being.  Those of us in the world of process thought likewise have this aim.  We believe that it can be realized with help from meditation, with help from discipline, with help from risks we take.  And we know that these factors alone will not make us “successful” in the monetary sense.  We cannot all receive the acclaim of Granelli.  But we can follow his lead and find rhythm for our own lives, our own ways of drumming, sometimes syncopated with, and sometimes at odds with, the surrounding society.  After all, seeking justice is a form of drumming, too.  And getting a good night’s sleep after a long day is also drumming.  In the house of drumming there are many rooms. 

The quotes are from the Ottawa Citizen Oct 10, 2011.
For more information on Jerry Granelli, see: http://www.jerrygranelli.com/site/.