Art & Creativity Quote by Joseph Jarman

Jarman’s line has the casual looseness of a musician talking process, but it’s also a quiet manifesto: the music isn’t “about” the dharma so much as it’s routed through it. He doesn’t claim mastery or preach a system. He says “I’ve come in contact with,” a phrase that frames spirituality as encounter and practice, not identity. That matters for an artist whose work (with the Art Ensemble of Chicago and beyond) treated sound as ritual, costume, and collective ceremony as much as composition. The dharma here reads less like branding and more like an organizing principle for attention.

The subtext is a defense of abstraction. Free jazz and avant-garde music often get dismissed as chaotic or willfully obscure; Jarman signals that the apparent looseness is disciplined by an ethical-aesthetic spine. “Reference” suggests lineage: these sounds aren’t random, they’re in conversation with teachings about impermanence, suffering, breath, and the cultivation of mind. “Inspired by” adds humility and elasticity, leaving room for misreading, improvisation, even failure. He’s not turning the bandstand into a pulpit; he’s describing how contact with dharma changes what feels worth playing, how long a note can be held, when silence counts as action.

Contextually, this lands in a late-20th-century Black avant-garde where spiritual inquiry wasn’t a side hobby but a survival technology and a language of liberation. Jarman’s phrasing refuses the Western demand for clean categories: sacred versus secular, art versus practice. For him, the music doesn’t illustrate enlightenment; it rehearses it.