Intimacy Calling

It's my first winter living outside a city in a long time, and I'm cold. I'm used to apartments with few windows, in which someone else controls the heat and cranks it so hot that I pad around in shorts and a t-shirt. But here in the snowy Northeast, living in a house that has windows on all sides, I feel like a tiny plastic Christmas caroler anchored in a snow globe. And just the sound of the wind rattling the double-paned glass windows makes me cold.

From years of musical training, I know that sound comes in different temperatures. Different instruments have different timbres, and I have always been attracted to instruments and instrumentalists that have a "warm sound." I guess it's no surprise that during these chilly days I've been listening over and over again to one of the warmest sounding albums I know, Intimacy Calling - Standard Time Vol 2 by Wynton Marsalis.

The first track, "When It's Sleepy Time Down South," sets the mood for the album. Vol 2 is full of what I like about Marsalis- expressive articulation, a sense of humor, amazing control of the instrument. But the really great thing about "When It's Sleepy Time Down South" is that it's like a crackling fire. "Indelible and Nocturnal" is a friend's warm hand. "Yesterdays" is a cup of hot chocolate.

Calling Intimacy Calling a "warm" album isn't just my subjective impression. One look at the album cover, snow falling outside the window, shows that Marsalis intended Intimacy Calling as music to warm you up when it's cold outside. So what exactly is this timbre stuff, and how does it get to be different temperatures?

The timbre of an instrument depends on both the instrument's construction and how it is played. What musicians call a "warm" sound actually describes the amount of overtones present when a pitch is played. Overtones are tones above and below the actual pitch, that lend richness and character to a sound. Overtones are the reason we hear a difference when a C is played on the piano, strummed on a guitar, or sung by Pavarotti.

So how does Marsalis intentionally make his sound warm? His technique- and playing any instrument- is very much like the field of behavioral medicine, using the mind to create measurable effects on the body.

Medical researchers are learning that the mind has the power to effect the body. A patient with hypertension can practice techniques such as visualizing a relaxing scene, and eventually lower his own blood pressure. After years of meditation, Tibetan monks can consciously raise or lower their body temperatures. The idea is that the body has its own wisdom, knows how to do a lot of amazing things- and that the conscious mind can access that wisdom through symbolic visualization.

We don't have to consciously control the physical and chemical interactions of our body to slow our heart rate- it can be accomplished by imagining a grassy meadow. And it's not just Tibetan monks who figured out how to access this power before the field of behavioral medicine had been invented- instrumentalists have been using this mind-body connection for millennia. A trained instrumentalist can be given any variety of seemingly abstract ideas- such as tender, grandiose, tremulous, fiery- and translate these imagined states of emotion into amazingly complex manipulations of the overtone series. Each of these manipulations is effected by subtle physical alterations of the body and its interaction with the instrument.

So, how does a musician learn to use visualization and imagination to manipulate his sound? Practice. Practice. Practice. Years and years and years of practice. He dreams, he plays, he listens. Then he does it again. And again. And again... until his thoughts come out the instrument as sound.

That's why Wynton Marsalis can warm you up like fuzzy slippers and a cup of tea. He put in the time and effort to be able to tell you any story he wants, to create any mood he can imagine. So if you're feeling kind of chilly this winter, I highly recommend Intimacy Calling.