I saw the life inside your eyes
from Diamonds by Rihanna
Music wouldn’t exist without us. It’s kind of a strange thought - because our brains are so amazing, we can hear songs in our heads without artists performing them for us. We can listen to recordings, which are… disembodied. It makes music have this “beyond us” kind of experience, but this art form only comes from within us and has been passed down for tens of thousands of years. I had this experience where I felt the connectedness of it all back in May, and even before that, as I worked with amazing Rochester musicians.
Working with a team of musicians is life-giving. You give your time and attention in ways unlike anything else. You listen and contribute to the conversation all at once. You experience a beyond-ness that is the mystery and power of music. The boundaries and breaks, in music, feel as if they bend the laws of physics, as if a performance is some form of spacetime travel.
You can make music alone, of course, but there’s something noteworthy about the group experience. It’s where the mess, the structure, the challenges, the wins, the drama, the release, the fear, the excitement, the chaos, and the chemistry combine to make something we call a song. When you get that power in the form of musical sections and arrangements, the beyond-ness presents itself. Music is the sound of life and death and beyond-ness, all coming from within us.
The band members who worked on A Night of R&B with Damaris Rivera are not just musicians. They’re musical family. I don’t have enough time or space to write about why Dan Cooper (guitar), Eric Heveron-Smith (bass), Denis Johnson (keys), Charlie Carr (trumpet), and Damaris Rivera (vocals) have had such a profound effect on my life, but I can tell you that music is what brought us together, and because of life’s demands that we all face, it is the thing that keeps us together.
When we got to perform the hour-long set we prepared, we stepped into the beyond. I know this from sitting behind the drum kit at The Penthouse at One East Ave and seeing the light inside the eyes of the audience members. I had a sense of what some of the audience had been dealing with, and the heaviness of it all. I also had a feeling of who was celebrating a huge win or another trip around the sun. The light was stronger that evening than I had seen it in years. And it was contagious.
From my point of view, there isn’t artist and audience. There is one thing happening—music. The production part, though I greatly love it, is merely a reflection point of what we all share as a species. The music is with us from generation to generation, and the fact that a shared experience like A Night of R&B is possible in our shared world; well, that’s the miracle of humanity.
