john medeski’s key-flute unlocks the secret of musical performance.
This video offers, in some sense, what all musical performance aspires to achieve: it’s a little scary and a little joyful at the same time; it’s just goofing around and it’s transcendent; it’s instructive by not being instructional; it’s a chase and a discovery and an escape collapsed into a game, which is very real; it’s made of muscles and breath; it is more about courtyards than courts, but is still concerned, in its own way, with justice; it doesn’t change the world, but it does create a shared melody for a time by blurring the boundary between performer and spectator.
It uses an instrument to de-instrumentalize.