“Stern Winter loves like a dirge-like sound.” – William Wordsworth, On the Power of Sound
In Seattle, Washington, winter is a chilling and soul-sucking experience. Gray trees droop above an either soaking wet or a frosted dry pavement. Sporadic sounds of cars and nature burst and reverberate in your ears. There’s simultaneously nothing quite like it and nothing worse. What could prop up my mental health for the time being? The question lingers.
The season of winter in the Pacific Northwest can be desolate, a cacophony of sharp winds and chillingly cloudless days. Yet we approach this period by soundtracking it with baseline depressive music. Sure, slap on that Bon Iver record, hit shuffle on your “Calm Taylor” playlist, listen to “Punisher” ten times in one sitting; it’s perfectly fine to do so. There’s nothing wrong with embracing your seasonal affective disorder and plummeting into a Mariana trench of sad vocals and acoustic guitar.
There’s more out there, though. There is something better living in the Spotify worldwide library awaiting your ears, meant for the uniquely awful Seattle winter. I want something that enlightens and supports me in a chaotic and ghastly bareboned PNW winter.
I recently became an avid listener of something everynoise.com and rateyourmusic.com calls “free jazz.” Think… Ornette Coleman, Pharaoh Sanders, etc.
This style of jazz utilizes free improvisation and irregular time signatures, as Archie Marshall puts it, “spastic gyrations.” Free jazz is in the name. It’s free. Jazz evoking freedom. Which is exactly what we Seattleites need in the winter.
As I’ve grown older each year, I have begun to notice a pattern in human behavior in the Pacific Northwest from November through December. We feel the need to curl up and hide away in our shells for three months, feeling unwilling to step outdoors, and we’re resistant to seeing the sunlight through the white and gray skies.
I want to bring up two specific albums. One is obviously beautiful, easy to digest, and a great way to access free jazz. “Karma” by Pharaoh Sanders, recorded in 5 days in February 1969 and released 2 months later, is a spiritual awakening of earth and color, an embrace of two natural beauties that one desperately needs in a daunting Seattle winter.
The first track, “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” has a divine optimistic outlook, convincing the listener of Sander’s positive Nihilism. The second song, “Colors,” is the most joyous song I know. “Mother Nature seems to love us so / When She smiles there is a subtle glow.” Overall, it is a beautiful album to beautify our bone-chilling season.
The second album I urge you to check out is “New York, Fall 1974” by Anthony Braxton. While still relatively tame on the scale of what free jazz can be, it is a bit more sporadic and improvised than “Karma.” Braxton embraces the improvisational side of free jazz, stepping into the genre’s main focus of freedom. His squeaks and unprompted tonal journeys explored through his saxophone are like no other and strangely match the desolate feeling we Seattleites tend to experience this time of year.
With December’s skeletal body embracing us, it’s important we don’t forget that everything is going to be OK, and there can beauty in the depressive era we find ourselves in. Sending love and free jazz to you and your loved ones– this winter will be over soon.
