EVERY October, half the world, I would guess, awaits the announcement of the Nobel Prize Laureates; in my world, the keenest among them is the Nobel Laureate for Literature. This year the highest accolade went to the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, the only other poet since Pablo Neruda “to have an international presence in his lifetime,” whose work has been translated into 50 languages.

I am not an avid buyer of poetry and rely on hand-me-down books or gifts to read them.  This is so because superlatives have been heaped upon the art of poetry that when a poet fails in the attempt, the disappointment is close to grieving. Fiction is a different matter. No matter how badly written, or how grossly commercial a novel is, there is still the story, if given the chance, or gems of phrases or ideas that can be inspiring. But one wrong word in a poem, and the artist is doomed.

The few extraordinary ones that reach my ears do transport me to another place, or another emotion that has yet to be articulated.  Tranströmer’s “meeting places,” as he calls his poems, are muted elegant footfalls of a life that rein you in as a welcome voyeur. And most of all, they are always a revelation.

But this year, it was the Nobel Laureate for Physics that caught my attention. Two “teams” of astrophysicists, that of the Saul Perlmutter of Berkley, and Brian Schmidt with Adam Riess of Harvard, were awarded for their discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe back in 1998. This is especially rewarding for me because decades before that, scientists were steadfast on the theory that the expansion of the universe was decelerating, and that the end of the world would result in fire. With this “new” discovery, the dark energy-—called dark because you can’t see it, and energy because it is a density that fills the vacuum of space—which comprises 73 percent of the universe, seems to guarantee that the universe will expand forever.

More significant is Einstein’s cosmological constant, a concept he apologized for, calling it his “biggest blunder,” when Alexander Friedmann of the Big Bang model proved Einstein wrong. As it is, this discovery of the expanding universe as accelerating would not have been possible without Einstein’s blunder, a fact that made Riess exclaim that perhaps Einstein should be getting another Nobel prize. Perlmutter called it the longest “Aha!” in scientific history.

This is the layman’s account of the most important scientific discovery since the 1970s but its importance to me is the eureka moments of mankind that are a result of his thirst to question, to prove, or disprove, tenets, human or scientific, that have been held dear for years. I feel extremely fortunate to be living in a time when discoveries and breaking down walls are not near to exhaustion. And even as I am confident that more powerful technology will allow more discoveries in space, it is still “good ideas,” as Schmidt stated, that drives the excitement. “You need to go through and look up into the heavens, and sort of figure out what the cosmos has given you, and make an experiment out of that.”

Which brings me to the Big Band, which is not a typo error in the title.

Decades ago, my humanities professor in the UP, Jun de Leon, startled us eager freshmen by saying it would be difficult to create new exciting music based on the Western scale given that all the permutations possible have been exhausted after hundreds of years of experimentation. It would take a near genius to give us something “new” in Western music, thus 20th century compositions have added other environmental sounds to give the form a new twist.

I have held on to that theory for many years, and, in fact, still do. But every now and then you hear a sound that prickles your ears and makes you say, “Now, that’s new.” The Beatles, CSNY, Michael Jackson, Sting, in my musical opinion, were some of them. But with music, even the old can be new. Every second Monday of the month, in an unassuming watering hole called Skarlet’s Jazz Kitchen, a group of musicians led by Mel Villena, occupy one-fourth of the establishment and treat jazz animals to the sound of the Big Band. This is the music of my mother, more of my grandmother I would say, that echoes the sound of the “swing” era of the 1930s to the 1940s. My earliest memory of the sound is the music Nida Blanca and Nestor de Villa would dance to in their blockbuster, black and white movies that had reruns on pre-martial law TV stations. Perhaps the most famous, and the only one I can recall, is Nida’s rendition of “Waray-Waray,” composed by Juan Silos Jr. with lyrics by Levi Celerio, later on covered by the inimitable Eartha Kitt.

For some reason, the sound of a big-throated brass band weaves a kind of magic that goes beyond the standard, the swing, the rock or the funk that it sings. The AMP (Asosasyon ng Musikong Pilipino—although I still have to hear “Waray-Waray” and other OPMs from them) Band’s version of “Scrapple from the Apple” by Charlie Parker can send you to the African jungle dancing to the blare of elephants’ trumpets; “You Make Me Feel So Young” and “Our Love Is Here to Stay” is not so much a celebration of love but a steamy exchange of taunting gratitude that makes you want try your heel taps on the tabletop, on the bar, in the rain or anywhere else.

The permutations of the Western scale may have been exhausted, but the discovered variations can be breathtaking, like looking up at the heavens and figuring out what is stirring in you and giving it a go.

http://www.nobelprize.org/

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2011/10/12/nobel-prize-in-physics-2011/