Living in The Pocket: The Music of Life

Keep it in the pocket. I hear these words at some point every time I play with Cole, my good friend and bass player whom I got to know through only the most serendipitously synchronous channels. Until recently I was never quite sure what he meant by this. I always knew that when he said ‘keep it in the pocket’ he was talking about ‘being in the groove’, but I guess I didn’t fully understand the nature, comfort, and freedom of the Groove. What makes things interesting here is that he and I have what on the surface appears to be divergent approaches to making music, though like all things they actually converge in an intricately profound way. Cole understands his Theory, to say the least. He combines this knowledge in his mind with the feelings in his soul and spontaneously pumps out very chill, tight bass lines that make angels above and corpses below pop their hips and swing their shoulders with attitude and joy. I don’t have this knowledge. I don’t think with my head. I think almost exclusively with my ears and with my fingers, in effect downloading saxophone lines from the cosmos. If I start a jam, Cole has learned to not even ask me what key I’m playing in. He knows that I won’t be able to answer him, at least not without a long pause and a bit of brain-racking. What is a little strange to me is that my approach to music seems that it would be more conducive to finding the Groove. Ha, but it isn’t so! Least not for me. How quirky the realm of music! (And other realms indeed). Fortunately he has enough groove to go around and when the two of us get going, either alone or with other musician’s in the mix, we often reach a point (sometimes after much foreplay, sometimes immediately) where we are in a state of musical ecstasy, the Tantra of Sound. It is always apparent when we reach this state because suddenly no effort is required. The music flows freely out of pure creative bliss. For me, these magic moments seemed to appear spontaneously, randomly, and fleetingly. Little did I know that with minimal effort, this transcendent musical connection can be intentionally invoked. And this is the nature of keeping it in the pocket.
It all became clear to me the other day when Cole was telling me how he gets into the Groove. He will play a progression (it can be the simplest progression one can think of, complexity matters not!) and he will keep playing it over and over until his whole being is resonating with the Groove. Freedom! At this point the real magic begins. Once in the Groove you play off it without thinking. The ecstatic funk commences and you begin to play things you never knew, or even dreamed, you could. The connection sparked somewhere between my brain and my soul as these words, music in their own right, leapt from his mouth to my ears. This is the nature of meditation! For the last year minus months I have been using basic methods of meditation to bring myself back to full presence in the eternal moment of Now, but I was missing something (perhaps many things). I knew that meditation was not just about sitting on a pillow in silence. I knew that it was a way of life. But I knew this in the head and not in the heart, and what a vast difference this is! It is like the following scene: the young man has always known that ‘home is where the heart is’, but it is not until he is out in the world, living in four different places in three months that he KNOWS that ‘home is where the heart is’. I now know (not fully, but more wholly) what it means to be fully present. It is the art of finding the Groove of the moment, getting in the pocket, and staying there.
And the beauty is the simplicity! Just find the tempo whether it be the beat of your heart, the rhythm of your breath (as it is for me), or the flow of the energy around you. Focus on the simple Groove, feel it, be it. Everything else plays off of it, effortlessly. And amazingly! Whatever the realm, from life in general to music, reading, eating or any other particular, keep it in the pocket and watch the beauty unfold. Effortlessly. Ecstatically.