SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Sometimes we could use more freedom than instruction to learn things. Just ask the pianist and composer Billy Childs.
BILLY CHILDS: My parents loved music, so they said, Billy should take piano lessons, when I was six, right? So I took piano lessons, and it kind of went in one ear and out the other. It wasn't fun for me.
SIMON: But when he just messed around on the keys on his own...
(SOUNDBITE OF BILLY CHILDS' "ONE FLEETING INSTANT")
CHILDS: What I discovered was that I would play a chord, and it would evoke a certain type of emotion. I now know that what I have is kind of like a synesthesia because I see shapes on the piano - a pattern that looks kind of a zigzag way, like a black key going to a white key. The shape became synonymous with the emotion that I was feeling.
(SOUNDBITE OF BILLY CHILDS' "ONE FLEETING INSTANT")
SIMON: Billy Childs' jazz career took off in 1977. He has since become a defining voice in the genre. He's won six Grammys, played at some of the world's most prestigious concert halls and released more than a dozen albums. His latest is called "Triumvirate," and he delves into the complex nature of life.
CHILDS: My song "One Fleeting Instant" is about motion, mostly. Everything in life is movement. Everything is moving. Atoms are moving. Molecules are moving. The wind is moving, although you can't see it. Motion is how we stay alive and how we remain vital.
(SOUNDBITE OF BILLY CHILDS' "ONE FLEETING INSTANT")
CHILDS: I wanted to convey that in this song - a kind of ease with movement, a kind of gracefulness. The gracefulness of the design of the universe, of how motion kind of keeps us going and keeps us ever-changing and ever-evolving.
(SOUNDBITE OF BILLY CHILDS' "ONE FLEETING INSTANT")
SIMON: There can be an awful lot of competition for your attention in Billy Childs' jazz, a lot of instruments wailing to be heard. His new song, "One Fleeting Instant," uses every voice to explore this feeling of life constantly coming at us.
CHILDS: "One Fleeting Instant" is kind of a standard in the jazz trio format - that everything is interdependent and people's motions affect the others, just like in life. So I wanted to use rhythm a lot - sudden shifts of motion, different meters and different directions that the piece goes - to describe that. And also, there's a lot of counterpoint too - one voice occurring at the same time as another voice. All of this is in service of describing what I see as fleeting time.
(SOUNDBITE OF BILLY CHILDS' "ONE FLEETING INSTANT")
CHILDS: You know, I was at the Rose Museum in New York, and I was looking at the timeline of the entire universe, right? They have this display. And it starts from, you know, the Big Bang and goes through different phases of existence and to the very last thing, which is life on Earth. It's, like, the last 100,000 years after, like, 13 billion years of all of this other stuff happening. And out of that, you know, I have 70 years to my credit right now and hopefully can make it into my hundreds. But the point is, a hundred years in the face of all of the existence of the entire universe is a fleeting instant.
(SOUNDBITE OF BILLY CHILDS' "ONE FLEETING INSTANT")
SIMON: Billy Childs talking about his new song, "One Fleeting Instant." It's on his new album, "Triumvirate."
(SOUNDBITE OF BILLY CHILDS' "CAREFREE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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