Chick Corea and the music of the twentieth century.

Music is introspection. Album titles that stay most in my mind suggest some kind of aural image: ‘The Hissing of Summer Lawns’; ‘In Search of the Lost Chord'; or meditative state: ‘A Strange Fantastic Dream’; ‘Time Out of Mind’.

That introspection resonates heavily with jazz, with which I’ve had a lifelong love hate relationship, once describing (on this blog) a certain type of jazz as an airhose going off underwater with notes bubbling up and down the scale like an insane snake accompanied by random bangs and toots. It’s like music by Schoenberg or Bartók: you either get it or you don’t. Sometimes I do get it, and sometimes I don’t. It’s a mood thing. Jazz can sound like one of those cartoons in which a builder turbo-builds a house in ten seconds, yet corralled inside a well-written tune it can add immeasurably to its appeal; hence the brilliance of jazz-influenced rock, pop and soul tracks over many decades.

I will never bag jazz or any atonal music again. If something by Berg or Bartók comes on and someone says, 'That's not music!', I'll say, 'You're right. It's not. But I like it.'

I also like John Cage's 4'33", in particular the gripping start, on the YouTube video (5'26" version), where you just don't know whether the pianist, Kyle Shaw, is going to hover his hands over the keyboard or put them somewhere else. Personally, I thought resting them on his knees was a cop-out.