Real jazz is mindless. By that I mean, real jazz is without mind. That’s when you know you’re a master, when you don’t have to think, and the notes just flow out of you naturally, and every vein and every nerve feels each note in the scale and you pick and choose based on searing guttural emotion. It’s temporal, too. The song lives and then the song dies, and if you feel something in between, consider yourself lucky. Sometimes these images flash into my head. A jazz trio with no arms, sitting there, cigarettes that they can’t light dangling from quivering lips. The pianist stares at his keys and wills them to sing and they never will. The drummer dreams of glorious fills he will never put into practice. The bassist leans against his hollow log of an instrument, praying for the strings to vibrate under calloused fingers he does not possess. I know this is real because I feel it. I feel the anguish and the foggy dreams of the dark room these three men inhabit, and I think to myself of the trinity. Mind, body, and soul.

The body is the drums. I have no doubts about that. Percussive movements. The carnal dissatisfaction forcing muscles to clench and then relax, driving the rhythm of the world. The drummer is the train moving up the mountain, slowing as it reaches the top, but still shoveling coal into that lump of machinery, belching fire and smoke. The drummer hastens the demise of the song with each blow. He is the body. I know this now.

The piano is the mind. Picking at each string indirectly by means of tiny hammers already set in place, stabbing at thoughts and ideas, a thin whine over the drone of the music. No new notes can the pianist make; they have all been played before. But he picks at them all the same, defining the ideology of the song, feeling out the chords of each number with disciplined fingers.

The bass, as we all know, is the soul. It is the chain of mountains in the misty background. It flows along with the ease and strength of a river. There are no frets on the classic stand-up bass. The finger placements define the sound on a microscopic level, and each note is just slightly different each time it is played. The bass drives the tides of emotion beneath a song. It can be fast and clever, or slow and patient, but it will always be cool, simple, contemplative.

I know their names, too. But there’s no need to talk about these things. The music is all in your head, anyway. Remember, they don’t have arms.