Experimentation

So I woke up on Saturday, with the house covered in 18 inches of snow and flakes still raining down, to two noises. In the guest bedroom, Cleo's shrieks of delight, while playing with L., who's generously been doing the early shift (c. 5:30-6:30 a.m.) of late. And, on the clock radio next to me, a recorded saxophone squealing a series of seemingly unmoored notes and reedy squeaks in a sequence that was too unconventional to be called a melody, and yet too delicious to be simply dismissed. It was James Carter, the dj helpfully announced after an atonal climax, winding up a 2009 live performance of Street of Dreams.

Even while wrapped in a groggy, snowbound haze I felt that I was hearing something special in Carter's performance. When I looked up reviews, later, I found an All Music Guide review of the album that referred to "Carter's idiosyncratic penchant for mixing old-school bop blowing and avant-garde skronk with a bit more greasy funk." Well, okay. But what it really felt like to me was pure experimentation and exploration. What can this saxophone do, Carter seemed to ask?

And that, of course, seems to be a question that Cleo asks about her body virtually every hour of the day. If I blow out of my mouth, with my lips closed, what will happen? If I suddenly, without warning anybody in the room, release my grip on the support that's holding me up, what might transpire? How do my toes taste? And so on: a baby's body is a world that awaits discovery.

It's tempting, then, to say that experimentation is a pure and simple good. It can yield rich and unprecedented music, and it leads, over the course of months, to a greater sense of self: to full coordination, and to new abilities. But before we go too far, it's probably worth keeping in mind that experimentation can lead to some odd results. For instance, have a look at this undeniably innovative product from China:

Hmmm. So it's probably too simple to place experimentation in the proud list of unmitigatedly good things (with, say, pumpkin pie and Romanesque capitals). Nevertheless, in the soft grey of a winter's morning, there are worse things than wakening to the sounds of experimenting.