Lessons From A Legend

On Monday night's PBS Newshour, correspondent Jeffrey Brown put together an excellent piece on an American dance legend - Judith Jamison, who just announced that she'll step down from her post at the head of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 2011. Ailey has long been America's leading African American dance troupe, and both its namesake and Jamison have been widely celebrated for embracing a staggeringly wide variety of dance styles and traditions.

My favorite part of the interview with Jamison came when Brown asked about modern dance, and how some people often come away feeling like they don't "get it." Her response, uttered with a broad, easy smile: "That's okay! That's just fine! All we want you to do is just get in the theater, [because] there's just nothing like live performance. And you have to remember: there's no test at the end of it... There's nobody strapping you in your seat and saying, you've got to get this!"

So true, and so applicable to music as well. Because so many of our entertainment choices these days are commodities that we know well before we ever walk in the door, it's possible that we've lost some of our willingness to take a chance on the unfamiliar, and by extension, some of our patience for new works that fail to fully connect with our hearts and minds.

Jamison's dead right, though - there's nothing like live performance. Here's one of the many she's created over the decades...