Prodigious

Every couple of years I recall this essay and go reread it. Even if you're not into jazz I think it holds interest as a piece about personalities. The nutshell is that the author, when he was in his mid-twenties, held down the lead tenor sax chair in a big band from Detroit, when all of a sudden a 16 year old kid is invited into the band on second chair. The kid happens to be James Carter, who is now a big time sax phenomenon. It's interesting as an essay just in an exercise in seeing how one guy dealt with meeting someone two thirds his age who was, still in his youth, just flat out superior at their chosen vocation. Music isn't a contest and all that, but there are still tiers - I might enjoy a guy from the third tier more than a guy from the first tier, and for whatever reason, but there are levels of accomplishment and artistry and sheer technical capacity. (I actually do this a lot; Mozart and Charlie Parker are in my opinion among the greatest geniuses of Western music, but I'm not especially fond of either one from an enjoyment-listening perspective.)

The other interesting thing to me this time was noting that according to the author, at sixteen James Carter was essentially the James Carter of 1999 (when the article was written Carter would've been about 30). He's undoubtedly grown as a musician, but the maturity and identity was largely there. I found this interesting because the greatest child prodigy in the history of Western classical music, Felix Mendelssohn, was also essentially done maturing at sixteen. He evolved the way any adult mature artist will, but the formative years were over and mature work was being produced.

Then, of course, comes the observation that Mendelssohn, at 16 or 30, is a great composer, but he's not quite Beethoven or Mozart or (for my money, at least) Schubert. Similarly, Carter, while fantastic and a gas to listen to (I'm not huge on Felix, but every time I've heard Carter on a record I'm knocked out smiling), probably isn't going to go down as one of the absolute greatest or most important players in the history of his instrument. Of course he was many years left to write a legacy and keep growing, but I wonder if it's largely a given that the level of artistic maturity in a teenager I'm talking about here often leads to that kind of..."dead end" is so not the phrase I'm looking for. If you're that good at sixteen, is it possible to really get better?

[INSTANT UPDATE]

Then there's the corollary which just occurred to me: in my opinion the two greatest jazz artists of all are Miles Davis and John Coltrane (I know, I'm going way out on a limb). Other than the fact the Coltrane played in Davis' band during the '50s, the obvious link was that by the standards of their profession, and of people who achieved anything like that level of artistry, they were abnormally late bloomers. Davis didn't really start getting it together until his mid-twenties (and didn't start gathering the accolades indicative of true greatness until he was about thirty), and Coltrane didn't really emerge until he was thirty (and did his most widely acclaimed work between about thirty-four and thirty-seven; at thirty-seven Herbie Hancock was already a few years removed from 95% of his most creative work). And in addition to being late bloomers, they both never stopped moving; Davis' style on trumpet crystallized somewhat by the mid '60s, but he kept finding new situations to put himself in. Coltrane, more radically, kept actually reinventing his approach to how he used the saxophone. So if you have it in you to be a world-historical genius, does blooming late indicate a propensity to continual evolution?