Sometimes the most meaningful work we do begins with a casual “yes.”
Inspiration comes from many places — dreams, accidents, epiphanies. But sometimes it comes from something simpler: a deadline.
When asked which comes first — the music or the lyrics — songwriter Sammy Cahn once said:
“The check.”
For him, the gig was the muse.
Last September my dad Ben and I played a concert at Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin.
Taliesin was the architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio — an 800-acre estate outside Madison and one of the purest examples of Wright’s Prairie School architecture.
We had been asked to create a special program for the event. So I improvised an idea and sent it to the organizers. “If architecture is frozen music,” I wrote, “maybe music is architecture thawed.”
It was highbrow enough to sound serious, yet vague enough to give us room to improvise. Ben organized the musical side of the show around variations on the blues.
The idea was that just as architecture can grow from simple repeating shapes, the blues grows from a simple structure that allows infinite variation.
And in between songs, we talked.
The thing is that by the time we got to that show, Ben and I had been talking about architecture and music for months. The audience had just shown up for a night out. Pretty quickly our conversation wandered into the realm of the barely relatable.
A few months later Ben got a call from the Palm Springs International Jazz Festival. They asked him to give a lecture with music about jazz and modernism during the city’s annual Modernism Week.
Ben said yes.Then he watched the video from the Taliesin show and realized what we had done might have been… slightly less clear than we remembered.
When I arrived in Palm Springs a few days before the concert, I found him surrounded by months of notes, trying to wrestle the ideas into something coherent.
At one point he tried to explain what he had been chasing.
“What we touch, what we see, what we measure is the visible surface of an invisible ocean of vibration. Solidity is a performance. Stability is rhythm. Matter is music slowed down into form.”
What he was really talking about was the idea that music, architecture — maybe even the universe itself — is built on patterns of resonance. And that jazz, in its own way, is simply another expression of that same phenomenon.
“It seems like there’s a fundamental that’s true throughout the universe based on harmonic ratios, based on vibrations, based on proportions that I guess you could say we vibrate to,” he told me.
At the center of Ben’s process is always the search for a narrative. For Ben, everything comes down to a story. After months of researching and reflections, weeks of scripting, and days of showing me the folders on his computer, the moment finally arrived to take the stage.
We walked out. We started swinging. And then he began to talk. “Jazz and modernism. Or, architecture as frozen music…”
After diving deep into the mysteries of the natural world for some kind of source code, the story Ben discovered in his search was his own.
Maybe the goal was never to solve the mystery. Maybe the point was simply to keep searching for the clues. Because as long as he’s searching, it means he’s got a gig.
Listen to my full chronicle and exploration of this experience - including interviews with Gil Goldstein, Howard Levy and Jacob Collier on The Third Story this week.
