I've always enjoyed jazz from a safe distance. It was free, but it was too free, for my pop-meddled mind. I'd forget the bars seconds ago but too static to embrace the next ones. I had always thought of enjoying the freedom of jazz like a wave function. Something that has a mind of it's own within a certain confinement but something that I can trust to quantize into an understandable state upon careful observation. Perhaps this is a profile of an amateur mind, but did boy did i love this song.
The song builds on mellow tones, a palette, a stage being set by Yorke's voice. A pressure builds, a stoic but dynamic presence of lights and the set via the deeper bellows of the trombone and trumpets. Melody, the lady of tonight, walks onto the stage in adamant steps as the jazz tries to direct her in a brownian motion. The clarinet is quick to grab her and create a perfect 2 step monotony that is soothing amidst the jazz. There is entropy within the music, in the scientific sense of the word, not as a substitution for "chaos". There are many unfathomable random final states for Melody as the clarinet leads her to more impolite stances with flitty steps. The once-antagonist of the rest of the improvisatory jazz band now leads it, up, up, up. So quick, so high, that the trombone tries to pull it down, pad the fall, reduce the entropy. The lead voice parts the stage curtains frantically to give this airy, heady contraption more space, more entropy: energy meant to be ripped apart and wasted, energy used to wet the floor, energy used to reduce drag and friction and sobriety and virtue. Melody dances, grinning, the gaps between her teeth filled with vice, as she is snatched from one instrument to another and her heels slip, feet praying to scrape across the floor once. Clarinet sucks her dry, thinning into lacy curtains and eventually, into evaporated ethanol. She falls onto mother bear's bed, drowned in smothering softness of the ending bars of the trombone. The audience ("someone's listening in") finally closes the curtains with a exasperated breathy sigh, weary of the mess to be cleaned.
