He’s a world class musician, a stand up fellow, and one of my mentors. Marcus Printup, has graciously offered to do a bit with Just the Facts, on the spiritual and unconscious side of music. We’ll be apprehending the ‘inner life’ through music just as Dr. Jurjevic and I will discuss the reading and writing of poetry and it’s relation to the eternal ‘inner life’. The term, as I have learned it, comes from Carl Jung– and it signifies an experience that’s common to all humans and our ancestors. Without going into too much detail, I’d like to have discussions that stem from this basic assumption: that all humans experience, in addition to their transient, material reality, a deeply meaningful reality, separate and distinct from the former. Poets and Artists, as Plato said, mistakenly mediate divine insight with their mediums of expression– Maybe, by approaching the issue directly, we’ll be able to understand the flash of inspiration Socrates so reveres and also become a part of the process that helps instantiate those experiences.
Without further ado: Jazz Trumpet, Marcus Printup.
Marcus is a trumpet player with the “Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra” (JLCO). He is a native Georgian, and I met him for the first time through Lovett, my high school alma mater.
When a band is selected as a finalist in a high school jazz band competition, the sponsors for the competition send a clinician to that band, to teach a class on Jazz. Typically, these classes include section practice, full-band practice and sessions on things like improvisation, and tone improvement. Marcus Printup was one such clinician that visited Lovett and the various competitions that we attended in Savannah, GA and New York.
Having enjoyed all the lessons he taught us—like playing our instruments with correct technique, improvising convincing solos and the importance of practice—I found my interest more in the lifestyle of a musician, and my love for other great jazz musicians. Marcus is and was a real-life, flesh and blood jazzer. Passion, presence, and rich understanding resulted in an unanticipated effect: Marcus and his colleagues at the JLCO impacted my life so compellingly, that I would go on to study music at the post-secondary level. The soul yearns for adventure—and mine was swept away on Marcus’ music.
In our upcoming discussions, I aim to talk with him more about the indelible impression he made on me. I want to know his side of that experience—how he feels, himself being an inspiration. Perhaps even more of interest to me are the myriad similar experiences he has surely had himself—how music has impacted his life, the artists and performers who have made impressions on his soul. Learning more about his own secret inner life will not only enrich my own experience, but be a relatable analog to all of our listeners, who have in their own ways been impacted, shaped, and guided by mentors, friends, and family alike.
Carl Jung’s Inner Life
Carl Jung wrote that he believed autobiographies are “impossible,” because a writer cannot stop himself from lying to his audience. Despite his reservations, Jung went on to dictate his autobiography with a significant focus on the eternal condition of reality. What he has to say I found highly insightful.
More so than the passages that explain how he miraculously cured someone of a mental trauma, the simple memories of his inner life from childhood are deeply profound. He tells of keeping secrets, practicing meditation-like exercises, discovering something he called his “second personality,” and then observing it in others. He talks about being ostracized as a school-boy and being desperate to fit in. In any case, the beginning of Carl Jung’s life suggests, through his reflectiveness and introspection, that he was deeply connected to his inner world.
The preface might give away a significant clue as to why these memories are important; it talks about how Jung believed that his money and fame were the least important facets in the story of his life. His inner-most experiences, on the other hand– experiences with struggling with God and Religion, experiences with being ostracized and feeling truly different from his peers, experiences with realizing the miracle of his own life– were the more important observations to make about humanity.
I’d like to understand Marcus Printup’s inner world and the how music fits into it. I wonder if it’s similar to how Carl Jung acquired psychiatry. I also want to talk about his views on the spiritual nature of the inner world. What is the model for engaging more closely with the inner world? What exactly can that do, to and for you?
We’ll be touching on these questions, and many more: Be on the lookout to a much anticipated recording with Marcus, this coming January!