Some who listen to jazz say “listen to the notes they’re not playing” and I never know how to do that. It is like Pierre in Sartre’s famous café scene, where the man rushes into the café looking for Pierre but Pierre is not there. Suddenly there’s an absence in the café, but the absence doesn’t happen to Pierre, it only happens to the man looking for Pierre. Pierre experiences no absence. Pierre is where he is. I’m always looking for Pierre when I listen to jazz.
Instead of Pierre I thought of looking at jazz visually as intaglio. In intaglio part of a substrate is cut away to hold ink which then creates an image on paper. Absence allows the image. It is the opposite of sculpture where something comes out at you. Some jazz comes out at you but often jazz is like intaglio, carved out of the unmusical unity of notes, a cut-away you look into with your ears.
Then there’s free jazz. In free jazz all of the notes are permitted. How can I listen to the absent notes when all of the notes are permitted? How can I write the feeling of not being able to hear the absent notes? How to “outline” absence? One way would be to write a word by writing every other word except the word. I’m not sure anyone would publish that and I know no one would read it. Not with words, then, but letters—each word a series of letters intaglio’d out of the alphabet. So, to spell a word in “free jazz” I use every letter other than the letter that it is.
Now how does that all sound?
Jacob Braun is from Thorold, ON. He writes both experimental and traditional poetry. His debut chapbook Tryangles (Trainwreck Press, 2020) is a history of philosophy in trilingual anagrams. Other writings have appeared in The Antigonish Review, The Malahat Review, filling Station, Brittle Star and elsewhere. He is working towards his first book.
