From Pine View Farm

A Night at the Improv 0

David Hadju offers grudging admiration for Donald Trump’s ability to make stuff up on the fly. A snippet:

Sullivan Fortner, a gifted 29-year-old pianist I had never heard before, played a fiery, shape-shifting piece new to me as the first selection in his debut performance at the Appel Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center last Friday. Fortner was brought on as a guest of the featured artist, pianist Fred Hersch. “That wasn’t planned, and it wasn’t rehearsed,” Fortner said at the completion of the piece, sounding proudly surprised by the quality of his own spontaneous composition. “I don’t know what that was!”

The audience oohed and aahed, clearly impressed by Fortner’s creative ingenuity, and the drama of the moment got me thinking about Donald Trump. I should make clear here that I am anything but a Trump supporter. In fact, I find his wild and volatile, xenophobic, hate-fueled rhetoric loathsome and terrifying. I have never understood any aspect of his appeal—until the night at the Appel Room, when it struck me that the very wildness and volatility of Trump’s performances in campaign rallies, debates, and television interviews do not look to everyone like liabilities. They come across as strengths to his admirers. Like Sullivan Fortner and every other musician skilled in the art of extemporaneous invention, Donald Trump is, in his way, an improviser—in a perverse sense, a jazz candidate.

Share

Comments are closed.

From Pine View Farm
Privacy Policy

This website does not track you.

It contains no private information. It does not drop persistent cookies, does not collect data other than incoming ip addresses and page views (the internet is a public place), and certainly does not collect and sell your information to others.

Some sites that I link to may try to track you, but that's between you and them, not you and me.

I do collect statistics, but I use a simple stand-alone Wordpress plugin, not third-party services such as Google Analitics over which I have no control.

Finally, this is website is a hobby. It's a hobby in which I am deeply invested, about which I care deeply, and which has enabled me to learn a lot about computers and computing, but it is still ultimately an avocation, not a vocation; it is certainly not a money-making enterprise (unless you click the "Donate" button--go ahead, you can be the first!).

I appreciate your visiting this site, and I desire not to violate your trust.