ABSTRACT
Introduction The great jazz guitarist John McLaughlin speaks of witnessing a performance by The Bill Evans Trio one night in San Francisco in which the trio came onstage and, within a few notes, seemed to enter a special state of being – as he nicely puts it (and he says he does not know how else to put it), the trio entered a ‘state of grace’. This transcendent state lasted unbroken for the set, and it was not the kind of thing one can assume one will see on anything like a regular or predictable basis throughout the world of musical performance. This was a performance in a sense above time, or in a distinct if descriptively elusive sense, somehow not in, or of, ordinary time. We all know such performances exist, and we use words and phrases such as McLaughlin’s apt ‘state of grace’, or ‘transcendent’, ‘magical’, ‘special’, ‘unforgettable’ (and they are), ‘hypnotic’, ‘spellbinding’, and indeed ‘timeless’, to name them, and we have come to use the phrase ‘being in the zone’ (bitz) to name the heightened states of the performers who produce them. I will investigate in some detail a few such exemplary jazz performances, particularly looking into: (i) the phenomenon just mentioned of players who seem to be able to create a sense of timelessness and who seem to stand in a distinct or special relation to time within their performance; (ii) the extraordinarily skilled ability to discern, and then creatively develop improvised musical material within, what I call here the range of implication of the initial composition in a way that both preserves and strongly develops musical sense (and a fundamental analogy between jazz improvisation and spoken language emerges here); and (iii) the unmistakable sense of the inimitable uniqueness and non-arbitrariness of a performance in the zone, and the sense that all elements in play, however complex or rapid-fire, fit together to create a coherent whole. By exploring these three elements, interweaving them with a close listening of some of the music made in this special state, I hope to help shed light on what it is to be in the zone – a state that has remained, despite its undeniable importance and special value in musical performance, interestingly easier to recognize than to fully understand and describe.
