Jazz for Brain Scientists

courtesy of Naxos of America

When I first learned about the album Yuko Mabuchi Plays Miles Davis, my curiosity was immediately piqued. Having spent almost a decade of my life at an “outpost” research laboratory in Palo Alto funded by a Japanese company, I quickly found more enthusiasm for jazz among my Japanese colleagues than I had encountered among Americans. Yarlung Records has provided an impressive platform for pianist Mabuchi and her trio, and it was hard to resist seeing what they would make of compositions that had been indelibly stamped with Davis’ unique approaches to creativity.

I quickly discovered that there was more to this album than I had anticipated. It turned out to be a concert recording taken from a performance in Cammilleri Hall on the campus of the University of Southern California on April 25, 2018. Cammilleri Hall, in turn, is in the building of the Brain and Creativity Institute (BCI); and Mabuchi’s gig turned out to be the last in a two-year series of concerts inspired by Davis in response to the hanging of his 1988/89 painting in the Cammilleri lobby. (The painting is reproduced in the booklet that accompanies Mabuchi’s album.) For the record, this is one of two USC research laboratories concerned with what pioneering researcher Warren Sturgis McCulloch liked to call “embodiments of mind.” The other is the Center for Neural Engineering, directed by Michael A. Arbib. BCI is led by Antonio and Helen Damasio, the former having written several perceptive books for lay readers on the relationship between brain and mind.

With all that as context, I found it hard to silence Davis’ own gravelly voice in the back of my head saying, “Jazz ain’t brain science, man!” Indeed, between the history of cognitive psychology and the various “wet brain” specialties, there is a long history behind trying to study “the mind behind the musical ear,” a phrase which happens to be the title of an excellent book by Jeanne Bamberger that was first published by Harvard University Press in 1991. During my tenure with Examiner.com, I wrote about a book entitled Music, Language, and the Brain by Aniruddh D. Patel, a Senior Fellow at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego; and reading that book was not a particularly satisfying experience.

By way of a sidebar, I would like to observe that, when that San Diego campus first opened, its Director, Gerald Edelman, arranged a “launch seminar,” which included, as “entertainment,” a recital by the Juilliard String Quartet. It was on that occasion that I first met Antonio Damasio; and I have to wonder whether “jazz at USC” was his response to “chamber music in San Diego!” If nothing else, the Cammilleri concerts are a sign that brain scientists are still as occupied with music as they were two decades ago.

Where the music itself is concerned, the other members of Mabuchi’s trio on this new album are Del Atkins on bass and Bobby Breton on drums. They are joined by trumpeter JJ Kirkpatrick. I am afraid that Kirkpatrick was the weak link in this chain. I can appreciate that he was determined not to “channel” Davis through his own solo work; but he never seemed to find a distinctive voice of his own to add to the trio players. I was more interested in listening to Mabuchi and what she could do with not only Davis’ thematic inventiveness but also the impact of those themes on the pianist Bill Evans. Indeed, Mabuchi’s creative skills advanced beyond Davis’ legacy to take on three original tracks on the album, culminating in a concluding track entitled “Missing Miles.”

Ultimately, what I most appreciated was that Mabuchi provided me with a new context for listening to the five Davis “classics” included in her recital: “All Blues,” “Blue in Green,” “Milestones,” “So What,” and “Nardis.” For the record (so to speak), “So What” is the longest track on the album; and other Davis motifs creep in during its performance. The most recognizable of those motifs comes from “Four;” and it is introduced at the end of Kirkpatrick’s opening solo. A healthier share of that kind of free-association inventiveness would have been appreciated.