The first step in saving the planet is appreciating it, and the step before that is seeing, hearing, and feeling it. This Earth Day weekend one very picky musician reminds us how.
The sound of not-quite-silence
Keith Jarrett has conquered the worlds of jazz, contemporary and classical music in a thoroughly convincing way, and he's done it while consistently throwing concert decorum right out the window. He has stopped, mid-performance, and lectured his audience for excessive coughing. He has walked off the stage because the piano wasn't tuned to his liking. He has walked off the stage and not returned without any explanation, at all.
He also truly believes in the power of the moment, and trusts in that power enough to give recitals in which nobody, including him, knows what he's going to do until he sits down at the piano in front of thousands of people. The most famous of those was recorded in 1975 in Cologne, Germany, and went on to become, at 3.5 million sales, the greatest-selling solo jazz piano recording yet.
When Keith Jarrett plays, people listen
Apparently, though, some of Keith Jarrett's biggest fans don't trust themselves. Even though they've ponied up mighty lucre for his concerts, and even though he's right there in front of them they still can't stop themselves from pulling out their phones and relying on a tinny condenser mic and a crappy video screen to try and capture his magic for them.
And that's what really makes him mad.
Last week at a Carnegie Hall recital he left the stage three times. When that didn't work, he sent out an assistant to explain that unless people put away their phones he wasn't coming back.
He did come back, but before he sat down to play he said "It's not that I don't like my picture taken. It's a process here. It's not something photographable. When people take whatever they take home with them, it's meaningless. BUT IT SCREWS WITH US."
So, what's this got to do with Earth Day?
Good question. It's about experiencing what happens when it happens, and being present enough to take it in. Don't get me wrong, I love technology but I agree with Jarrett: art has no place on the smartphones of the nation. That thing about going to the Musée d'Orsay and taking a picture of yourself beside a Degas? What is that? Instead of actually looking at the picture and maybe soaking in one millionth of its beauty, you get a low quality snapshot that is half you. If Degas had wanted you in the painting he'd have put you in it. It's like rubbing stains onto the elbows of your white shirt so you can recall the vividness of the green, instead of just lying in the grass and enjoying it.
And when the field has been paved into a highway, or a strip mall, that shirt is going to look even worse.
The Earth needs us to see it
This Earth Day, or any day, for that matter, just for a moment try really seeing, feeling and hearing the world around you. It isn't easy and it takes practice, but it's worth it. You don't have to be in a country paradise plucked from an RSP commercial. No matter where you are, you're bound to see something. Just for a moment, be like Keith Jarrett: get picky - see light, see line, see decay, see the miraculous and graceful beauty that is always there and that all of us all the time walk right by.
And don't try to take a picture. Your memory will do a better job, and it will make our brazen destruction of the place we've borrowed from our grandchildren all the more outrageous. That's how change begins.