I believe that every living human has a personal sense of time, a signature as unique as any of the more usual means of individual authentication. What singles out musicians and dancers is our developed ability to express this sense.

If you're reading this, you're likely a musician. I am, too. As musicians, our lives are important to the species as a whole. Don't let anyone tell you that you're marginal; don't allow public indifference to prey on you, don't let commerce trivialize your calling. I repeat: Our lives are important. Don't let your daily struggles erode this certainty.

This is important, because without individual expression of time, time would become terminally confused with its measurement: the clock would rule the planet. It already does for those who don't dance or play. For the unlistening ear, music is at best a trip: a moment outside of time, blessed recreation. For us, music is our lives: We live time – a wild gift, a serious responsibility. Time is our language.

Your personal sense of time exists both prior to your experience in life and accompanies you every step of the way – it has everything to do with your choices, your destiny. When your chops are together on your instrument and you voice is truly your own, your temporal distinction can help any listener whose personality is submerged in patterns of authority, whose sense of herself depends on what others tell her. What people think they want is recreation, entertainment; but what they really both need and desire is to be themselves. We can help with that.

It might take years for you to find your voice. That can't bother you. The searching is the finding. Everybody starts out imitating someone else. The point is never to give in to the allure that surrounds imitating yourself. Forget it – that's how you sounded yesterday. That's another reason to take yourself seriously as a musician: You operate in a medium that embodies change. People need encouragement to change. We certainly can help them with that, too

. But there are additional depths to be sounded. Living as a musician is a gift; our souls know a freedom not granted to others; and the most important thing we can offer, in return, has to do with memory.

There is more to memory than information retrieval. The hardest thing to remember is the fact that your life is limited. I believe that all definition arises out of an awareness that our lives will end. Death defines us, and we learn from that. But we also pass much of the waking day hiding from this awareness. Novelist Anthony Powell once had a character title his autobiography Camel Ride to the Tomb, something he once saw as a kid on a sign outside an Egyptian airport. I played with drummer Denis Charles for 25 years; I once warned him about the temporary nature of a weekly gig we had; he answered with an open-arm gesture meant to include all creation and said, "Man, this whole scene is temporary!"

A musician focuses her memory on the present. Her memory allows her to make a moment of that present. That moment can be shared y all who hear what she plays. Life is every bit as temporary, but we are no longer on the "camel ride". The musical moment involves a tacit acceptance of death; it does not hide from death by killing time. Music needs time to breathe.

My guide here has always been Austrian musicologist Victor Zuckerandl, who described hearing the succeeding tones in a melody as a master of "freedom in prospect, necessity in retrospect." This involves memory as a dynamic process. Again, that's functionally obvious to a musician; he needn't think about it. And it's always been important.

But never more so than today, when we are inundated with information, most of it visual. At the same time, there is a consensus that our species must soon go through a change in order to survive; and our most honest critics say it is the inability to deal with death that holds us back. All the more important, then, for those gifted with music to live "melodic" lives; that is: open to the moment, if only momentarily.

Any musician knows that there's more to existence than the visual world, more to memory than data. The eye may justly be considered the window to the soul, but the ear is the portal.

We are heralds, we musicians. We can help humankind make the next big change. And just by being ourselves.

"Art for art's sake" is a nice homily more honored in the breach than in the observance. What jazz musicians do is tangled up in many constraints and competing intentions. They consider commercial popularity, as Miles did in embracing Michael Jackson's "Human Nature", or temper artistic ambitions with popular sweetenings, as Creed Taylor's productions did. And in today's capitalist top-heavy age, patronage – that economic impetus of Renaissance art - is becoming more important and more influential on jazz musicians.

This album is as much the brainchild of "biotechnology entrepreneur and new music philanthropist" Glenn Cornett (who presumably financed it) as it is of pianist Joel Forrester. In fact, the press release for it credits Cornett with not only handpicking the band but the "musical approach was suggested by [him] and is inspired by his penchant for progressive rock." It's an odd fit for a jazzman best known as co-leader of The Microscopic Septet and leader of People Like Us to tackle an often grandiose style identified with the likes of King Crimson and Yes. Forrester's ambivalence - also evident in the finished product - is revealed in his notes with the album: "I filled a few perfervid weeks in Brittany and Paris furiously writing music that didn't swing. I mistakenly imagined that the great bass player Jean Bardy was into the Chapman Stick; and when he wasn't, got him to play electric bass. I encouraged my regular drummer in France, Richard Portier, a master of subtlety and tact, to play LOUDER than his wont. Would that do?...I also suggested to Glenn that we call the band PFROG, seeking to capture in name what eluded me in deed."

The results are equivocal, neither truly a jazz take on prog rock nor a prog rock-inspired jazz album, yet the tension between the patron's wishes and leader's jazz inclinations yield some fresh and surprising music nonetheless. "Second Nature", done by the full quintet with piano-electric bass-drums joined by electric guitarist Manu Codjia (fully conversant in jazz-rock vocabulary) and baritone saxophonist Alex Hamlin (whose legato style and vibrato suggest an amped-up piccolo bass) features a patterned rhythm and stairclimbing melody redolent of King Crimson. On other tracks, Forrester employs such prog rock tropes as mixed time signatures and classical allusions like minuet ("Skirmish") and pointillism ("Who Ever Knew") and even includes a suite-like track suggesting etudes featuring a different instrument in each section ("Vortex"). Forrester sticks to acoustic piano and the tracks closest to the swing he professes to eschew are the trio tracks, or trio sections of others by the quintet. And repeated listening will reveal a whimsy and wit in the conception that might elude a first go-around – it did for me.