Jazz

A friend of mine who does not like jazz--especially anything having to do with the saxaphone--was telling about a dinner she and her husband, who is a serious jazz-lover, gave for another couple, the male of which is also a serious jazz-lover and the female half of which feels similarly to my friend. This second woman defined her dislike by saying something along the lines of, "I don't need to sit and listen to a bunch of men masturbating," a reference, I have no doubt, to the emphasis in jazz on the improvised solo and to the fact that most jazz musicians seem to be men. My friend said she felt an immediate click of rightness when her dinner guest made this statement and our subsequent discussion made me think about this comparison between music and sex, between improvisation and solo sex--though, of course, jazz improvisation is not necessarily done in solitude, as masturbation usually is; there are other musicians there whose purpose is, to keeep with the conceit, to help the soloist climax--and also between the different kinds of solo improvisation there are, including in different genres of music (rock, new age) and different ways in which people masturbate--not just differences between how different people do it, but also differences with the same person's masturbatory repertoire.

I have written elsewhere--in an unpublished essay called "My Daughter'sVagina"--about the connection I made early on in my sexual awakening between the orchestrating of sexual pleasure during lovemaking, alone or with someone else, and compositional techniques of classical composers, specifically Wagner's trick of constantly moving up the chromatic scale, leading you to think the tension is going to resolve but stringing you along as long as possible before letting it do so. What my friend's story made me think about was how, say, a certain kind of jazz solo, where the musician explores subtle nuances of melody and harmony, or the various ways in which you can slice up a beat to create different rhythmic textures, corresponds to the kind of masturbation in which you use the pleasure you are giving yourself to explore yourself, either through the fantasies that arise while you masturbate or through the different kinds of awareness your solo lovemaking gives you of your own body, and if the soloist is accompanied by other musicians, well, who has not masturbated in front of or with or fantasizing about a specific person or people? And it is different to give yourself to that pleasure in someone else's presence; there is a level of trust that is there, that has to be there if the masturbation is to be truly satisfying, that you do not need to worry about when you are by yourself. And then I thought about how rock solos or blues solos or the large solo concerts that Keith Jarrett once gave all have an analog in masturbation, from the kind that is just a release of sexual tension to the kind that is an affirmation in deep sadness and joy of the fact that you are alive, which for me is what defines the sound of the blues, to the kind that is large and complexly motivated and that you may never fully understand.

Masturbation is, as all sex is, a working through of who we are and how we feel about ourselves, of what we wish for, of what we wish to avoid, of the history of our bodies--of everything that makes us human in the capacity of our bodies to experience that humanity, and there is way in which lovemaking constitutes the creation of a symbol of that humanity in the pleasures we move through on our way to orgasm, not so much because the orgasm itself is separable from our bodies, but because each orgasm, whether we are conscious of it or not, is something to which we have to give meaning and, in giving it that meaning, we make it other, something "out there" that we can comprehend. I know I can name many of the orgasms--and I include in this statement everything in the lovemaking leading up to them--that changed me. Some of them were solitary and some of them were shared, but all of them captured a truth about myself that I needed to face if I was going to grow, sexually and otherwise.

This symbolic aspect of sex--which may or may not be an accurate way of talking about these things, but which makes sense to me--reminds me as well of something I read a long time ago in Suzanne Langer's book, Feeling and Form (or was it Form and Feeling? I never remember) about how music is the symbolic representation of the process of human emotion and that it is this symbol which the composer creates when he or she composes a piece of music to be played. The performer, in other words, plays the symbol into existence, and it occurs to me that, in sex, one thing we are doing is playing into existence that part of ourselves that is always waiting to become who we are.