What are they saying?

I've been listening to music that has extended solos as a key component to their music. As a rule I enjoy that type of music when I select it. But today I listened to a concert of all very competent, if not virtuosic musicians, and as each took a solo in every song, I began to wonder if they all had that much to say.

As a listener of music, I understand that often the meaning of the lyric is of utmost importance and in other cases the sound of the singer's voice is just another instrument layered onto the canvas of sound; the words chosen for their sound and not their meaning.

I've been taught that all art has some meaning. Whether that meaning is just the expression of frustration during a moment or of a lifelong struggle against societal norms or a documentation of an event, period or place. There is some meaning to art.

The two greatest road novels to have been written in America are The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and On the Road. In each the protagonists take a journey into the unknown, but to very different ends. Huck Finn realizes that the road is the same as at home, in that his struggle with his relationship with Jim moves along the river with him. The road moves, but he remains in place. Still struggling with the notion that he is making a moral decision that is at once unethical and very illegal. Twain rectifies these dilemmas by freeing Jim at the conclusion of the novel and it serves as an exoneration of his sins, allowing Jim to feel no guilt about corrupting Huck and Huck being able to reintegrate with his white society without repercussion.

In On the Road, Sal Paradise learns to see the world differently, through his journeys. But in that he is finding what he is seeking (a bohemian America, where jazz musicians are prophets and hobos are saints). In theory, the road is not just a metaphor, but a character. Kerouac succeeds in making his book bounce with the excitement he himself is experiencing. The prose has a momentum that matches Dean's driving. OTR is probably the book for which Kerouac will be best remembered, but The Subterranians better captured the raw energy and spontaneity of being on the road. It is at once confusing, disorienting, enthralling and over all too soon. He says so much in such a short period of time, that it feels like hearing John Coltrane playing alongside Miles Davis; you're left wanting more.

Kerouac and Davis both worked in similar ways. They would have an idea, sit down and play with it until it could be released. But capturing the idea as closely to the source was at the heart. Revise little and improvise much.

Now they are dead. And every year or so, new versions of their material is released. Often with out-takes or earlier revisions that are marketed as the authors “original vision”. I guess that in some ways they are the most raw expression of the initial idea and in some cases are close to the original vision. But they are not what was released for public consumption. Or to put it another way, how the artist felt their vision was best expressed to the public.

And that brings me back to the music that got me thinking about this. When I hear a guitar solo (or piano or drums, for that matter) I wonder if the musician has more to say in the song or just has space to fill. Are they saying " hey look what I can do," or are they saying, " listen to me this is important"

Sometimes you don't know the answer to that until you vomit out the idea and see what it looks like on the floor. Then you can take it and make a cohesive work out of it, but it leaves me wondering if it is fair to artists to dig through the raw vomit, from which great art was made. Or is it perhaps essential to understanding how great art was made in those instances.