While I try to swing between the maturità and my conservatory diploma, I'm reading a book about Charlie Parker that I can't put down.

What stands out most in my notes is the thread that runs from Parker's music to Coltrane's, and then to Shorter's. Three saxophonists, one lineage, all bound together by what I can only call a cosmic sense of music and of life. For them, playing is not entertainment. It is a way to step outside this reality and reach toward something larger, to let sound carry you past the walls of the ordinary and out into the cosmos.

Charlie Parker was called Bird, and maybe that nickname says more than it seems. People who knew him said he was forever looking up, watching the birds and the planes crossing the sky. I think he was after the same thing his playing was reaching for: more space, more air, more freedom. Coltrane chased it through the long, searching prayers of his final years. Shorter chased it by turning every phrase into a question with no obvious answer, music built out of the unknown.

That is where the title of this post comes from. Even a violin is a synthesizer. We tend to picture a synthesizer as a machine that builds sound out of nothing, but an acoustic instrument does the same thing: breath, reed, wood, string and the body of the player all combine to synthesize a sound that did not exist a moment before. The instrument is only the interface. The real work is shaping raw vibration into meaning, and that is exactly what these three did. They treated their horns not as objects but as ways of generating a new world out of air.

They wanted more freedom. So do I. That is the whole point of all this practice, all this studying, the maturità and the diploma and the rest: not to play correctly, but to earn the freedom to say something of my own.

I'd push you to read Gianfranco Salvatore's interview with Wayne Shorter.

Where are your tears?