Barry Johnson for The Oregonian

The great pianist McCoy Tyner sat erect at his piano during his Portland Jazz festival performance, and to me he looked like the great hawk of jazz — almost fierce, brow slightly furrowed, eyes darting from keyboard to his quartet, master of this universe.

At one point, drummer Eric Kamau Gravatt finished a solo in “Angelina” and began to reintegrate into the song through an exchange with Tyner. Suddenly, Gravatt laughed and shrugged at Tyner, which made Tyner chuckle. And then dig in. Because, to my eyes anyway, they had found themselves in a tricky spot, with a musical problem maybe only they understood, and Tyner was going to have to figure it out.

Tyner picked at the complex drum rhythm with a couple of chords, waited, and then inserted a couple more — strange chords, difficult chords. And then he smiled to Gravatt again, because we were back in the middle of “Angelina.” Balance was restored to the song and the concert, maybe the universe itself.

You get that feeling when Tyner plays. Great matters are at stake, and great resources are at his command. Watching him solve a musical problem creatively makes solving your own seem more likely, somehow.

That’s because jazz makes us smarter. I mean it literally: Jazz makes us smarter, more creative, more adaptable. You listen to Tyner carefully, and he suggests new avenues to try in your own life. A dead end doesn’t have to be fatal.

I have misunderstood jazz most of my life. I thought it was “magical” — something that visited certain people and turned them into jazz players. What I’ve learned lately is that it is far more pragmatic than that.

You get that from listening to Terence Blanchard, who was also in town for the jazz festival, as he explains the little creativity games that he and Spike Lee play when he’s scoring Lee’s latest film. Or how he learned that his compositions connected with his audiences at a deeper emotional level if he sang them as he wrote them.

It was revealing that he downplayed “ideas” — “It’s not having them, it’s what do with them,” he said. And then he launched into a discussion of learning how to manipulate and extend musical ideas in various ways. He concluded with a quote about composition from sax player Wayne Shorter: “You gotta go down into the basement and visit every note.”

That is a sustained, rigorous approach to creativity, not a bolt from the blue. The jazz player looks and listens and processes, clears the decks and waits for the creative moment to come, at which point, as Blanchard put it, “you have to allow it to do with you what it wants to do.”

This is another way of talking about wisdom.

For me, wisdom was available Wednesday night for five bucks and a plate of falafel at the Cave jazz club on Southwest Jackson Street.

Veteran jazz vocalist Nancy King was singing about love won and lost from various often-obscure, sometimes forlorn corners of the American songbook. And she was really smart about it — the notes she found completed interesting chords, her phrasing analysis was impeccable, she deftly drew on all her vocal and emotional resources to make each moment matter.

But it was more than smart. The smoke in her voice deepened both words and music, turning what might have been a romantic cliche into a testament to endurance. And she was left standing and singing at the end of it all, emerging from the emotional storms with her own senses of balance and humor intact, ready to create something alive and electric.

In the Nancy King school of jazz, heart and mind figure out how to reach an accommodation. Or, as Blanchard put it: “The brain says, ‘This is hip.’ The heart says, ‘Yeah, but not right now.’”

Barry Johnson: 503-221-8589; barryjohnson@news.oregonian.com

This entry was posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 1:07 pm and is filed under 2009, Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.