Artists in all fields of expression have one basic thing in common: what they are attempting to do. All artists spend their days either looking for the inspiration that will give them the vision for their next project, or desperately trying to actualize that vision so it can be appreciated by others. Where it can get especially tricky is if you're trying to realize a concept that can't just be spelled out.
Abstractions are difficult to communicate, even with a media where you use a language that an audience is familiar with. Yet the difficulties involved in writing about a subject pale in comparison to those faced by those working in the more transitory arts like music. Someone listening to a piece of music doesn't have the luxury of being able to read a sentence over and over again until they comprehend it. Instead a composer's audience is dependent on his or her abilities to communicate via their ability to make their music understood on an emotional level.
Like the abstract painter who uses shapes and colours in an attempt to stimulate a reaction in his or her audience, the composer uses sounds and their arrangement for the same purpose. Compounding their difficulties is the subjective nature of music. Unless you are willing as a composer to be blatantly obvious, most pieces of instrumental music are wide open to interpretation making it very difficult to communicate, even imprecisely, what you were trying to say.
Jazz musicians have been working together in improvisational collectives since the 1960's, and the listening public has grown used to the idea of them creating pieces based on a single phrase of music or an idea. This does not meant the ensemble is necessarily creating a piece of music anew each time them play it, because the basic structure has been developed through rehearsal, but individual solos might change from performance to performance. The same holds true whether a band is in the studio recording, or in front of a live audience.
Bass player/composer Jason Ajemian had been playing improvisational gigs with percussionist Nori Tanaka and saxophonist Tim Haldeman for some time before they decided to enter the studio. It was only when Nori's visa allowing her to stay in the United States was about to expire that they decided to create a record of the work they had been attempting. The Art Of Dying, on Delmark Records, is a distillation of the past four years of their experimentation.
Time is of vital importance in music of course, and according to his liner notes for The Art Of Dying, it's time and the way we use it as a society that Jason and his fellow musicians have been exploring. If timing is everything in comedy, what is it in music? Of course there is the basic notion of keeping time, where in you maintain a steady beat, but maybe even more importantly, there is what you do with the time at your disposal. You can fill it with numerous notes in the hopes of hitting the right one, or you can find the right one to start with and sustain it long enough for people to hear what it is you want to say.
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