There’s so much more I’d need to know.
It’s hard to say why they went. Admiration for a musician, fear of missing out, love of jazz inherited from a grandmother, desire to please a new girlfriend?
How many walked too far in a cold, wet wind so that entering a warm, dry theater enhanced their receptivity to the music?
I’d need to know if seat N17’s boots pinched his toes. I really ought to take into account how deeply L6 breathes. It matters if her tongue tip rests lightly on the inside of her upper teeth, creating open space in her mind for the music.
For E6, is the singer’s sharp attack at a phrase’s start like a wine that’s all tannin at first taste? And if that phrase mellows into rounded tones, does the finish make sense of the initial harshness for E6?
There’s no telling what made C11 cry that night. Did he have one too many beers with his sushi dinner? Did the quartet’s discovery of an updraft in its density of notes give rise to C11’s insight that he was going to be fired? To be married?
I wonder if the music student heard anything beyond the pianist’s choice to flatten the melody and smooth the rhythm of the Monk tune.
What magical combination of sensibility and circumstance made the smiling lady in the balcony lose herself in the trumpet solo so completely she dropped her festival program on the audience below?
If a city is an elegant and genial host for a jazz festival, that’s something.
If musicians give competent or exceptional performances at the festival, that’s something else.
But the mystery of how and why people put their hearts into music? I can’t tell you that, and it’s everything.
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