THE SMALL THINGS IN LIFE

From the first moment over a decade ago that I saw Jacob Collier on YouTube encircled by ten? instruments, moving from one to the other and creating music in the most extraordinary way (remember this from nine years ago?), I was captivated; this is how I remembered him. I found a video from 12 years ago with Collier looking like a 12-year old, and one directing the audience to accompany a solo singer.

Lately my cellphone algorithm has been feeding me snippets of Collier's recent large-hall concerts or solo performances. How could I have missed these? I immediately snapped to attention, then was devastated to learn I had missed him when not long ago he was performing in San Francisco!

Yesterday I came across a video clip that brought me to tears.

So I shared it with my musical friend, a comrade poetry- and art-lover. Our subsequent email exchange was yet another attempt to describe the nature of what happens to me when music or a performing musician (or artist) "hits" deeply inside.

Below I include the slightly-edited conversation, simply to spark your own thoughts about the ineffable experience I am attempting to describe, no matter who, what composition, or what performer brings the same or similar feeling and gift into your life.

I'm curious to know how you personally describe it, if you know what I mean?

But first, please watch and listen to this short clip:

 https://youtube.com/shorts/3EwMZwATpMo?si=3UYQEgyZAJcfG5C0

CONVO:

 It is exquisite (to me; realizing that for you, some other musician or entertainer may "do it"). This made me tear up when he started singing. He just touches me. I think he’s an angel down from heaven.

I think you’re in love….(not being sarcastic—just to be sure you don't misinterpret.)

I am! Every time I align with a musician or a composition (I recognize it most when I tear up), I am falling in love and most likely, already deeply there!

And you are not?

Matters not if male or female or in between - or on paper or in person.

Love is love and in music, it slays me when it comes (or I allow it).

I think you are saying that love is when someone zings right into our soul in small or large ways and in short of long interactions or time shared?

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Dang! Re-listening to this clip, he did it to me again!!!

There is also something about the lyrics of this song, about the simplicity getting to the basics of what is important in life, coupled with soft humor about how awkward we are in expressing love and our need for it, and receiving it in such gentle ways.

Joy is so simple, is it not?  Love and creating beauty. Two things I think it boils down to. Plus the grace that in seconds of life come thru total inclusion, such that everything and every person becomes just One. (is that as trite as using the clichéd word "soul" in poetry I write?)

Then, too, his magic for me is the joining everyone into music. Everyone in that concert hall becomes one with his intention. He is enacting "love" by including everyone in the magic that he somehow knows how to create, by way of his genius.

Excellence for me in pianism, or being an instrumentalist or a singer, is about how that person includes everyone in a single experience, wasting not one extraneous moment in anything other than sharing the magic and the pure joy of music.

Yes, magic moments that remain forever in one’s memory.  It’s at such times that world truly is a perfect place, perfect, but fleeting.   (Couldn’t be any other way to have deep and lasting value.) Experiencing such a thing can be the high point of existence! 

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