PLAYING WITH THE MIND (continued)

A conversation with Harrel is a singular experience. ONe of the common difficulties schizophrenics face is a feeling of verbal fragmentation. (In fact, Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, who invented the term schizophrenia, did not intend for it to mean "split" personality, but "shattered" personality.) A typical manifestation is loosening associations - losing track of a thought in the middle of a sentence.

Harrell occasionally trails off in the course of an idea and sometimes is unable to converse at all. What eventually comes through, however, is not at all fragmented. His thoughts and ideas, like his music, are rich with a view of jazz that reasches into the heart of the creative process.

"In a sense," he says, "a jazz improviser is like an orchestrator, because when you hear the music inside yourself, inside your soul, you choose how you express it to the world, to the universe. And it's a spontaneous choice because jazz is a medium of the moment.

You choose the instrument you want as the medium, the register you place the note in, what inflection you use, and, as you would when you're talking, you have a choice of the tone you use. But this is all something that happens in the spirit of the moment, without being preconceived, with the colors of emotion coming out as a spontaneous celebration of life."

Artists, of course, have always transformed all kinds of difficult psychological and emotional materials into art in a fashion that is both creatively productive and personally healing. For many, artistic expression has been their best friend since childhood.

Harrell is no exception. "Music," he says, "is vital. It's the thing that gives meaning to my life."

And, for Harrell, the statement is not simply rhetorical. Music - in his case, playing and composing - provides a focus that tends to reduce his symptoms. His wife, for example, says that the symptoms of tardive dyskinesia - involuntary, sometimes bizarre movements of the mouth, hips and limbs associated with extended use of neuroleptic medication - diminish when he concentrates upon his music.

If he had his way," she says, "he would probably play or compose 24 hours a day. He already has 300 compositions that haven't been recorded. But as long as he's focused on something that he wants to do, the symptoms seem to subside. Which is what explains the difference between the way he looks when he's just stnading on stage waiting to play, and the way he looks when he's actually playing."

Saxophonist Don Braden, who has worked with the trumpeter for more than two years, agrees with Harrell's wife's assessment, reporting that, on stage, Harrell only says three things: the lineup of tunes to be played, the count-offs for the tunes and the announcement of the player's names.

"I can't think of any time that he's said anything else," says Braden.

"But that quiet space that he goes into on stage," he adds, "doesn't happen when we're recording or rehearsing, because he gets very cogent and focused when he's discussing anything specific about the music."

According to Braden, Harrell's capacity to function so well as a musician and a leader evolves from the fact that he is a "creature of habit."

"And I mean that in a good sense," adds Braden. "He phrases a certain way, he writes a certain way, and you always know where his is musically."

"I've worked with a lot of trumpet players - Freddie Hubbard, Wynton, Wallace Roney - and the first thing you learn as a tenor-playing sideman is how to phrase with the trumpet player. With Rom, because of his consistency, there's never a problem. Sure, he has his own way of doing things, his own habits. But he's serious about baking music, which si what really matters to me, and you just kind of get used to the other stuff."

Harrell's ability to link his consistency with a spontaneously creative imagination is one of the most singular aspects of his musical personality.

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Pianist-psychiatrist Danny Zeitlin, who has written and lectured on the creative process in jazz, believes that the lighest levels of achievement are reached when an artist can simultaneously bring together two different aspects of the creative process.

"The first is the more obvious," says Zeitlin, "the discipline of craft, in which all the woodshedding gets brought to the focal point. The other discipline, which is less often talked about, is the ecstatic tradition, in which the goal is the loss of the positional sense of the self.

"The greatest moments of creativity - when you hear jazz players say, 'Boy, I got to a different level last night' or 'Everything clicked' - are all ways of describing this sort of fusion of one's craft and one's ecstasy. It's the amalgamation that brings about the greatest moments of creative expression, because it has all the passion as well as all the intelligence. And there's a creative integration at the highest level when one person can allow him- or herself to enter that zone."

But it is not a zone in which one ordinarily find persons afflicted with schizophrenia, a disorder that is generally viewed as an obstacle to such high-level creative pursuits. Following through on an artistic idea usually requires a conceptualization, followed by the ability to see it through with discipline and a sense of continuity - qualities not common to the schizophrenic disorder. That Harrell is not only able to consistently conceptualize music, but that also he does so at the highest level of aesthetic achievement is, by most psychological standards, amazing.

His music has blossomed particularly well in the last few years since his signing with RCA and the release of "Labyrinth." Harrell's trumpet style reveals traces of influence from Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and a less familiar source, the underappreciated Fats Navarro, as well as his first musical idol, Louis Armstrong. But his playing is too mature, too much an articulation of his own personality to fall into any individual musical tributary.

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