Go ahead, call your music “experimental.” The hapless run for their lives, the publicists melt into “The Scream,” and your audience is reduced to a group of middle-aged guys in sports sandals who can discuss MIDI without blushing.
That’s because of a curious human habit I’ve been puzzling over a great deal since interviewing Jason Robinson for Behind the Beat (“Here, There and Everywhere,” p. 33 in this issue). There’s something lurking there inside all our primate brains that demands that we wander upon the earth and discover. But we never stop there. Discover something, and, like the siren call of a distant filing cabinet drawer rolling out with its metallic bump, the urge to categorize that something becomes impossible to ignore.
I’m sure there’s good reason for it, probably to do with quickly telling a shrub from a Sasquatch so that we, in our Stone Age incarnation, could avoid being munched. But now that we’re safe from most predators (except, perhaps, for the unscrupulous financial variety), the hard-wired urge to classify and name everything often has stultifying effects.
I think it’s that very notion that Jason Robinson addressed when he told me, discussing the term “experimental”: “I do a lot of different kind of things… . There’s always a similar ethos of searching and discovery, and that’s why I like the term. It doesn’t mean ‘weird’ or ‘strange.'”
Of course, Robinson is right. But the unfortunate truth is that “experimental,” thanks to our human filing system, kind of does mean weird or strange, even though it shouldn’t.
The term conjures, I guess, failed experiments more often than mere experiments. When I hear it, I can’t help but recall a performance I once witnessed in which a lone trombonist honked his way through an excruciatingly long set, accompanied only by a manic drummer. It was indeed “experimental,” though I doubt anyone will be reading about the wild ecstasies evoked by a trombone duo in peer-reviewed journals any time soon. And I often like music that gets called experimental—what must it mean to someone who only likes music “with a beat”?
If experimenting musically merely means trying something outside the usual norms, it’s too broad a term to prove useful. Perhaps seeking to make it more specific has meant its connotations have come to include negatives like “weird.” These things are slippery—is it experimental to play reggae on a harpsichord? Is it more or less experimental than using microtones and dissonance?
But all that meta-wrangling aside, how does a musician who’s experimental in the best sense, a musician who develops the sounds that go together in his or her own head without regard for genre, describe the music that results?
In a perfect world, no one would have to. But in a world in which musicians sprout like kudzu, something has to lend a hand in making sense of it all. Reviewers, publicists and musicians alike therefore undertake the game, triangulating by combining what exists to describe something that aspires to singularity.
I keep hoping a term will arrive that jibes with the idea of music of unique proclivities, but it never does. Maybe it can’t—the best music from the most inventive musicians very often defies rigorous pre-existing categorizations while sounding completely un-alike. Is Tom Waits really just a singer/songwriter, or Jimi Hendrix a mere rocker?
Jason Robinson told me he usually calls himself a jazz saxophonist, in part because jazz is often the most welcoming genre for someone who attempts to employ the full range of an instrument, even though it too has a full roster of sonic expectations its listeners bring.
The best attempt I ever heard at pinning down a term for music of heartfelt originality came from Bono. In an interview long ago, that most earnest of rockers said he thought of the music that spoke to him most, from John Coltrane to Prince and beyond, as “soul music,” though he didn’t mean soul in the usual way. He meant music from the soul, genuine outpourings of musical passion. That’s the best anyone’s done, as near as I can tell.
It’s probably good that no such all-encompassing word has found its way into usage, though—the pleasure of discovering originality in unexpected places is half the fun of listening.