Jazz Doctor: Milford Graves

His playful eyes are framed by a bearded face. The energy comes through the roots, he says. If you cut the stems, you're truncating power. His place exhales an alchemical aura. A stairway painted in bright rainbow colors leads to the music research laboratory. Next to it, in the lavish garden citrus trees grow amidst healing herbs and exotic plants. The walls of the house are covered with a rococo of mosaic stones, pieces of reflective metal and chunks of discarded marble that stand apart from the gritty character of the 110th Avenue in Queens. The basement glares in psychedelic colors. The interior is filled with musical instruments computers, electronic stethoscopes, botanical remedies and acupuncture dummies marked with tinted pathways along the meridians. Among many other things, Milford Graves made trips to the Far East, studying with Chinese and Japanese masters of acupuncture, as part of his development as a critic of allopathic mainstream medicine in the context of western culture. Many days ago he was a police boxing champion and invented his own martial art technique, a perpetual motion form, which borrows from aikido and African dance, sort of a physical jazz that hits hard and fast. Milford Graves came from Jamaica to New York City, where he liberated percussion from its timekeeping role. In the 1950s and 1960s he emerged in America as an intrepid pioneer of avant-garde music; an innovative and different drummer who marches to his own beat beyond bebop. He altered, extended and broke down the conventions of free jazz. His music is characterized by fast tempo, improvisations of harmonic structure and of melody. His free biological music synthesizes the corporal and the mental, corroborates and celebrates the unity of the body and the mind. The human heart, he says, is a musical heart. The heartbeat is a source of rhythm, And the music made by the heart is nothing but free jazz. As a holistic therapist Milford delved deep into researching The relationship of music and health, The healing power of throb and melody. In his basement laboratory he uses electronic stethoscopes and computer monitors to analyze heartbeat rhythms and pitches. People vibrate differently, he says. Their frequencies vary And if you know how to use music it becomes a healing force. Decades ago he had a revelation: An idea struck him in a New York book store About normal and abnormal heart beats. He knew that the heart beats like a drum, And the drum beats like a heart, and he began to investigate the secret of the heart with computer programs that measure earthquake tremors. With the collaboration of other musicians he created compositions based on the collective rhythms of their hearts. Using a stethoscope and special sensors detecting the electrical impulses of the body he listens to the cardiac rhythms of volunteers. A healthy heart, he notes, produces a steady musical rhythm. Like a good jazz drummer. it beats in triplets of 1-2-3,1-2-3, rather than in the eight notes of 1-2-3-4,1-2-3-4. And if raised in a few octaves, the cardiac sounds crystallize in melodies. However, the rhythmic and tonal complexities Of the heart, its conflicting poly-rhythms or unexpected off-beat syncopations are truly uncharted, unknown territories. In some of his computer programs Milford applied Cuban and Nigerian music to analyze human heart rhythms and pitches. Sometimes the heart beats too fast, or too slow, or in an irregular rhythm. This happens when cardiac cells misfire because of some flaw in the electrical system that controls the heart. Milford points out that these arrhythmias As well as many other heart disorders, arise from stress related problems. But the good news is that by music therapy and biofeedback it is possible to redirect and retrain an ill heart. To listen to cardiac rhythms and "to hear if a melody sounds right or not, you've got to look at it as an artist, not a doctor", he says. Because, "if you're trying to listen to a musical sound with no musical ability, you're not feeling it."