A Riff on Baseball, Jazz & The Beats: Thermodynamic Improvisation and Expansion of the Soul in the Midst of American Modernity

00:01

So I want to run you square this process of the big band jazz, the beat of Coltrane... I want to give you Monk, and talk about the relationship, right? Mingus.

I mean, the list is just endless and effervescent in the sense that when we’re talking about the relationship between baseball, jazz and the beats, we’re talking about an entire paradigm of the maturation of American symbolic consciousness as it relates to energy creation… through and in the vehicle of improvisation and improvisational unity.

Mean… these are the same raw structures that build the skyscrapers and the architectural blueprints in which are filled out systematically by a team of workers, each in their own rhythm and sound. And this is the industrial. This is the factorial.

01:04

It’s the rhythm of the time and the day and the instrumental work of each individual upon the field of play.

And this is the idea of baseball and jazz as a sound and a rhythm improvisation in the field proper. And so what I’m saying in the field proper, I’m talking about the field of being as in the unified field. It’s in a waveform synthesis of each integral part performing a function.

This is the rising of ecosystemic awareness in the modern American consciousness — and has manifested self across cultural forms from Kerouac’s On the Road to Ginsburg’s Howl to Count Basie. We’re talking about the innovations that are taken from bebop and turned into deeply individual profound forms of musical knowledge and expression such as Miles Davis and Monk, Bill Evans.

02:03

And so we want to move from that into the conceptual idea of baseball as a structural framework, much as blues acts as a structural framework for jazz, which allows for expansive rhythmic improvisation upon the back-beat, which is the theme… the essential rhythm, which is iterated and reiterated upon.

This is a construct which allows for the revelation of freedom, as in the thermonuclear and metabolic and genetic conditions of the human being as an energetic structure; a nervous system… and then the conscious revelation of that energetic structure and then conscious direction of the drive, which is the thermonuclear power of the will — which is essentially and fundamentally metabolic and energetic.

This is the amount of real energy in terms of food, nutrition… the nervous system needs, the synaptic system of the mind needs — in order to process ideas and to function beyond the pure bounds of survival.

03:18

And this kind of energetic excess is typical of American civilization in its modern time. What is necessary is the profound leap in and beyond the structural bridge and formulative skeleton of blues. Human history as a template of pure survival.

Which is maintenance and sustenance of the genetic vehicle of the metabolism.

03:26

Into the aesthetic explosion of jazz or the aesthetic explosion of the poetic pyrotechnics of Ginsburg and Kerouac.

03:38

This is the art which emerges from the transcendence of survival.

03:47

And this is as in, as we’ve discussed, typically… the aesthetic act of baseball — which has nothing to do with mankind, other than the fact that it’s the ritualization and externalization as in a cultural practice and cultural history and performance in wood and leather and life of man’s greatest ideals and heroism, freedom, and the practice of the exertion of the body toward no real outcome other than the simulated victory, striving, and achievement which is laid upon the fields and the terrain of the myths and legends and history of baseball itself as a cultural form.

04:20

Just as Charlie Parker frantically lays down lines or Dexter Gordon paints a slow landscape of New York City, we’re talking about fundamentally artistic and creative acts of the use of the will and the force of the body and the being itself, the entropic thermodynamic force, the energetic force through which time and energy and nutrition pass.

04:48

The form of the genetic body to create and sculpt, to play and be at play.

04:56

And this is the grand liberation that Kerouac reaches towards in On the Road. And this is the spiritual word and penance which Coltrane pays in his Love Supreme. It’s a providence of self in the laying bare of the soul into and through time. Through sound.

Coltrane’s Love Supreme is a love to music as much as it is to love to God and spirit and the universal force which impels and moves through the musical, which is the waveform. It’s the bearing of the heat of his very form and essence unto and onto the vinyl grooves of wax — carved and etched into stone and recalled again… the immortal form of his expression of the true nature of the grand soul of being in time.

05:22

Just as it is DiMaggio’s devotion to his practice on the field — because he never knows when it’s the first or last time some young kid’s going to be watching him play. And that young kid in many ways was Johnny Logan, the Braves shortstop of World Series fame — who watches him through a knothole in the Yankee Stadium fence; is enraptured with DiMaggio and decides to become a baseball player.

05:51

So understand this. This principle is the principle which impels all life beyond survival.

It’s the principle which must be reached in the thermonuclear explosion of modern American civilization as a breach beyond the veil of history into pure aesthetic creation, which necessarily is excess and excessive, as in Basie’s Big Band. It’s Jimi Hendrix’s incendiary performance of the American National Anthem at Woodstock in ‘69.

It’s a statement of profound liberation out from under the profound darkness of the history of American civilization — just as much, the history of humanity and mankind; evolution on and upon planet Earth. It’s the call — as is in the very movement and essence of the radical politics emergent in, of, and around the cultural burst of the 1960’s — a demand for something beyond suffering, greed, and desperate metabolism. A form of incarnate, transcendental love and brotherhood… which exceeds and overcomes the love of greed and power. This is an expression necessarily born from excess; the possibility and capacity for more than enough… for one another and for all.

06:14

Or the big jazz band… or the process of iteration, improvisation upon the skeletal theme — a movement from the bare, stark bones of minimalism characteristic of the language and linguistics of Hemingway into the broad, expansive burst and expulsive burst of Kerouac’s excess and maximalism as we reach the latter half of the 20th century.

And this is all product and byproduct and parcel of the times. It’s an entropic nature and a thermonuclear nature of the expression and expulsion of energy through a civilization. Hemingway is characteristic of the sparse, bare times of early American history as industry emerges and clashes with culture and spirals into economic chaos and fragmentation. Just as Kerouac is a product of the post-war era, the sense of American striving out beyond this political victory which has availed the civilization with mass amounts of nuclear power as well as political and economic force.

07:23

These are simulations of a broader organism of historical movement and mass assembly and dispersion of energy as in force, natural gas, fossil fuels, sunlight, meat, water, metabolism… in which each man indelibly plays a part.

07:33

And this expansiveness is perhaps most manifest in the unique template of a musician like Monk or Mingus or even Coltrane — those who stretch beyond the bounds of the form and medium and genre itself and create something so thoroughly original that it transcends jazz. We ask this question too of baseball, perhaps in such a figure as Jackie Robinson.

We could ask this again… in the concept of the Beats, in particular, Kerouac… as he reaches towards the stars in his very form and method of creation and what is expressed through his form and method as a form of human striving — which itself swallows the human, expresses something ineffable through the grand poetic force and thrust which is his improvisation upon the page, the freedom of his spirit and character, the profound honesty and authenticity.

Man seeks to overcome himself and in doing so exceed his contemporary capacities. This is the force and thrust of evolution proper manifest as the force and thrust of character. The existent limit is something to be overcome; it is something to be overcome through the symphonic energy… of the interface of the human ecosystemic body of the metabolism, physiology, neurology; synapse of mind and brain…

08:30

Therein expressed, no matter how dirty, rough, crude, callous.

Childlike and simultaneously prophetic.

This is the work and art of Kerouac as a free bearing of the soul in a call to break the bonds and through the road fly; through the road, transcend… through speed, ambulatory movement — the exceeding vehicle of the modern car flying over primally impossible swathes of land at increasing accelerations of speed… toward Einstein’s light itself.

08:43

This is the reach and the striving of baseball, jazz, and the Beats — as itself an era and a microcosm and a capsule.

The rising power and force of American industry, the thrust of American civilization towards a modernity… which is an incorporation and encapsulation of that industrial drive into technicolor — into something that exceeds, produces an entirely new realm of being through technological capacity of movement and consolidation of space and time into an increasingly incorporated thermonuclear and metabolic artifact… which necessarily produces excesses and artifices as in surplus energetic forms.

Art, culture, liberation, real political movement toward transcendental values and principles of compassion, kindness, unity, love, acceptance. These are always already born from an excess of. Those who do not see or seem these things operate directly from extraction and closed lips, eyes, mouths… even beyond their seeming rhetorical language, words, ideologies. They are closed souls in fear of loss of what little remains in the parsed, sparse pantry of what has been taken — or never remained — of the creative warmth of the heart so native and endowed to the strivent perseverance of the great arts and artist. Creation itself is profound heat and warmth. It is the thermonuclear capacity of radiation itself. The sun.

09:16

Into which… this rising tide of modern Americana… the human is thrust and must grapple with the emergent tensions that come from a radically ulterior presentation of the possibility of the real transcendence of survival into aesthetic, life giving and life making at the level of soul and spirit and character and art as in practice of human values that exceed control, manipulation, bare-toothed hunger… within the scope and ocean of any given civilization’s march towards an unpending and unknown future.

It is a historical moment that neither America nor the historical evolution of mankind as a scarcity driven animal bent on survival is truly prepared for. It is the alien emergence through industry, war, and capitalistic production… of the possibilities of a life lived in excess of true survival — which is to say, a possible human life; the introduction of radical qualities of love and compassion as fundamental principles; load-bearing principles into modern human life… even out from profound death, violence, and suffering.

The human genome and nervous system… and historical, epigenetic experience — is not coded nor codified for this kind of emergence. So it necessarily shrinks away from this emergent capacity… into the ancient past of the hunting and hunted wilds of old…

09:37

This American peak, post the atom bomb; the acts of profound violence in World War II, which grant and gift the American civilization at large with profound amounts of economic wealth, power and influence on the global stage… this is America’s birth into young adulthood.

As a thermonuclear power, productive power and force, a war machine — just as much as it is a machine of the creation and production of industrial technology on the home front; the direct, causal effects of this level and height of perfection of industrial technological production in and upon the cultural, communal, and political life of America’s performance of humanity and humanism both at home and abroad.

10:12

This is the maelstrom in which everyone from Kerouac to Charlie Parker to Jackie Robinson is caught. It’s a force and a thrust of history which ebbs and flows far beyond the molecule of the individual, wandering synapse… which is caught… in the current of the wave.

And each current of the wave speaks uniquely of this predicament, which is — as Kafka says — to be between past, present, and future… and being pushed and pulled hitherto in each direction.

Being recalled to the past and thrust forward into the future — and being mediated entirely by the physical body as an entropic and thermodynamic force in the present. The body is both at once ancient, prelapsarian past; neo-industrial energetic future and futurity via consciousness of the vehicle at large; the emergent, exceeding capacities of technological industry.

10:54

So what there is to do… is to make the music in the time — which is the absolute immediate speech in the maximal speech of Kerouac, just as it is the big band improvisational force of Count Basie, the expansion of Mingus into the personal idiom — increasingly profound, consistent moving in practice towards the unity of his soul and the character of his music. To work with what is at hand, which is the energetic vessel directed towards and toward freedom and free expression of creation. Prometheus Unbound…

11:23

Just as it is the incessant practice of a figure like Lou Gehrig or Rogers Hornsby.

11:33

That upon the discipline of the diamond something profoundly authentic emerges from the base and foundation of the character — even in the midst of global turmoil and overturning which is characteristic of modernity… with increasing force, thrusts, and capacity — exponential fundamental overturning of the circumstances and condition of the human spirit.

And it is in this movement that sound and rhythm are fundamental. That sound and rhythm themselves form the grounding nervous ecosystem, the grounding nervous somatic condition of mankind as it faces unprecedented change. The rhythm and swing in the bebop consistency that marks the fast moving pace of industry, the expansion and explosion of American modernity into the bustling skyscrapers of New York City...

The changing conditions of labor and the tenement housing would shift radically in relationship to figures like Upton Sinclair and Eugene Debs… the emergence of Harlem neighborhoods populated by figures such as Langston Hughes.

12:42

Manhattan jazz scenes and clubs like the Village Vanguard and Bill Evans’ live masterpieces.

Bursting of pop art…. the Greenwich Village scene of music and literary achievement.

13:04

This is a grand swirl in the face of a maelstrom of an utterly changed time.

13:10

Which is the emergence of post-war America and the burst, the energetic burst, the influx and transfusion of industrial energy and global power into the post-war American consciousness… which is then grappled with as a further terrain, an expansive road — which ripples across the continent and the country itself as described by Kerouac. This is, in so many ways and forms, undergirded by the before and after of the creation and demonstration of Oppenheimer’s power of the atom bomb. It is a before and after of energetic profusion, force, and diffusion. And the effects phenomenologically upon the global and American psyche as in energetic consolidation practically and symbolically in the victory of the Allied forces formally and definitively in World War II post this movement.

History; this history is a symphonic demonstration of the ebb and flow of the presence of the collection and dispersion of energy.

And this expansiveness… of this moment… is also a terrain of the soul, a space of the soul articulated in Coltrane’s Love Supreme.

13:49

Which is a deeper inward witnessing characteristic of the transcendentalist tradition in early American history — that of Thoreau and Emerson as much as it is the grappling with Melville’s whale of the whole thing of it all, the being human… just as it is the maximalist amphetamine tradition of Kerouac and Ginsburg’s modernity.

A seeking the depths inward and outward of the far reaches of space and time, the cosmos and the spirit and the psyche and the soul.

14:16

This is Coltrane’s journey to God, as depicted in his Love Supreme suites.

14:29

And it is in baseball, the character of Satchel Paige’s striving… the craft and names, the creative, playful names of his pitches which baffled hitters for decades.

The persistence of his practice, the rhythm of his rocking chair delivery — the way in which he turns his practice into entire methods of living and being in the world… running from here with suitcase and his band of fanatical players — Josh Gibson among them — to the depths of Caribbean Islands… which become his legacy, his travels and his journey.