Whiplashed

Timing is in the brain, it is basic to how it works. Neurons prolong instantaneous stimuli, sending them down axon nerve wires, and releasing them at synapse nodes, in variable lengths requiring variable time, on to other axon network circuits.  In this way, the brain creates temporal patterns out of instant sounds, and that is music. The brain is a musical instrument. It is a time machine.

And it can synchronize.  The brain can do rhythm.  And on top of rhythm, dancing with it, like ideas that play with words, the brain can do melody.  Patterns on top of patterns create a live, unified, dynamic experience, like being alive itself.  Body and mind, thought and feeling, rhythm and melody.

Jazz lives on the edge. . . having both rhythm and melody, and having neither.  We like to go into, and out of, and back into, timing, and structure, and point/ counter point.  That is what our lives do, and that is what our neurons do, and that is what we like our art to do.  We seek order and we seek improvisation.  Rhythm paces melody, and melody challenges rhythm. They swing apart, and back together, like partners on the floor. Catharsis and synthesis.  It feels good. We play music and music plays us.

In the movie Whiplash, an elite music school teacher has a very skilled, musical ear.  He has been thru the  scores countless times, with countless students.  He knows their ranges, he is primed to hear their mistakes.  “This makes him a good teacher.”  Don’t believe it. It gives him power, and he uses it.  He uses it to humiliate them, to prey on their vulnerabilities.  He makes them feel that their failures are their fault. A bully with relish.

I HURT YOU FOR YOUR OWN GOOD, AND YOU DON”T EVEN DESERVE IT!

He enjoys it.  And he is good at it.  Kind and considerate, in just the right doses, he keeps everyone uncertain.  Good people are willing to doubt themselves.

A skilled liar, he announces that a  former student, (a former victim), one who had eventually found musical success, has died.  Misty-eyed, our teacher tells his class that it was an accident. He knows it was a suicide.

One student drummer, however, is very determined. He doesn’t just want to be good, he wants to be the best.  Go around obstacles.  If necessary, plow thru them.  He becomes a targeted victim, but he doesn’t relent, he runs the gauntlet.  He does what you have to do with the likes of this teacher, fight back.  His sympathetic father sort of wants him surrender, but he refuses.

People like this teacher are everywhere,  . . . in sports, education, business, politics.  And they often get far.  Good people will defer, they won’t  fight, they dont want to judge.  People like him somehow know that.

They have to be opposed.

Our drummer does it, in the end, with a  unrelenting, exillarating, commanding, and triumphant crescendo of rhythm and drumming. . . and justice.