Live at Emmet's Place, and the community of music-making.

This week the long running YouTube gig has come to an end - live at Emmett's place is finished in its current format.

In our house, we have had some great evenings/nights watching Live at Emmet's Place on YouTube. This is a gig hosted by the jazz pianist in his Harlem apartment. He features singers and instrumentalists as guests with his trio, and for some time ran a different gig each week - more recently, monthly. We've loved watching the gigs and there was always a great vibe because it came to being during lockdown and it was very clear that it grew organically and was conceived in quite an unaffected way.

Some time back, we sat down to watch an episode and it was clear from the thumbnails that Cohen was getting gigs and concerts all over the world now that lockdown had finished. And yet, we didn't really watch them, we saw a couple of tunes but pretty quickly we realised we'd rather watch the ones in his flat! Even if we'd seen them before!! This led me to really think about why that was, and I reckon the answer is in the importance of community in improvised music making.

You see, the reason we enjoy those gigs in the apartment, I think, is because there is such a small audience. They can react and interact with the musicians in a much more immediate way, allowing the musicians to feel and play in a more relaxed and approachable fashion - which is what we pick up on when we see it. We feel included in that vibe, as though through a televisual portal, from his house to ours!

Music like Cohen's music - jazz, has always benefited from a smaller audience, yet nowadays, jazz is often performed in concert settings or large spaces, sometimes to its detriment I believe. Many of the great recordings were from small venues where people can be heard drinking, eating, talking and socialising; music is a social thing. It ought to be. Other musical forms such as traditional Irish music face a similar dilemma; trad has become very popular, mainstream, and in doing so it is moving in to similar serious or over-large spaces. Classical music has long since shooed away any notion of audience interaction, and now, if it can be amped up it can be taken outdoors and broadcast to a large audience. Although, I guess Andre Rieux is the exception that proves the rule as he always seems to achieve an intimacy that belies the grandeur of the concert. Here, I would argue that this is slightly different because this is not improvised in any way. And there is the key, in my opinion, to what communal music making is about.

Classical music can be big, it can be concerty, so too can rock/pop - neither feature improvisation very heavily and in many ways both rely on the same paradigm of having an audience sit (or stand) and experience a predeteremined artistic presentation. Rock/pop music has been birthed in a different technological era and so even the rock music that is flexible and allows audiences to be freer in their enjoyment can do so because it is so bloody loud.

Whatever, improvised music needs to be communal, which in essence needs a smaller space. I'll go further; improvised music in extremis really only needs the members making the music to come alive. I imagine football having a similar genesis - people play play football because they enjoy it, and then subsequently people come to watch, because they enjoy being a part of that vibe and because they like to watch the footballers play. This engenders a sense of community which creates a unique feedback loop which is really special in art (and yeah, I would say football is an art).

This realisation has given such a new understanding to me of my own music. I often play gigs that are to a small audience and they may often not listen closely or engage - I am there as background music. But I know that between us, in the group, we can create a bubble of community in our music which we can enjoy. And, who knew, by playing with the intention of creating a community within the group, people begin to sense this, so that ironically the very thing that you turn inwards to create becomes something perceived outwardly. It can reach out to the 'audience' - it can create an audience where there hadn't been and suddenly the bubble of communal music making has been enlarged. In my background-music-gig, that might still only mean a handful of people but, that's all you need.