Some Thoughts on Lateness

In the natural cycle of plant life, the middle of summer could be considered the moment of fulfillingness, the zenith of an arc that begins its ascent with the buds of early spring. In New York City, this zenith comes at about the middle of August. The days are not as long as they were in July, and they seem overripe. On a recent afternoon, the August sunlight made the red bricks of buildings especially deep. The green of leaves on trees, now no longer the sprightly, lush green of late May, looked more burnished. The sun, humidity, and lack of wind conspired to produce a stillness of atmosphere. Owing to concerns which had produced in me a certain mood, it only took a slight shift in my perception, a minute adjustment of my interpretation of the information conveyed through my senses, to feel in this August afternoon not the muggy but pleasant laze of summer in full swing, but a certain fatigue in the atmosphere. It was as if the balminess of mid-summer was revealed to be a facade with a depth of torpor lying underneath.

* * *

The news of Rashied Ali's passing on August 12th hit me with eerie force. Death had already been on my mind, as at that point I had been attempting to mentally and emotionally prepare myself for my grandmother's passing. The news of Ali's death felt like metaphysical print-through, a pre-echo of another death that my family knew was imminent.

* * *

The common link I could find between the deaths of Rashied Ali and Jean Somoroff was that each inspired in me feelings of regret. As Ali had been a close friend of one of my research informants (whom I consider a friend), I immediately thought of the encounters and conversations that might have been. I would never get a chance to tell him, in as composed and graceful a way as I could muster, that Interstellar Space, his album of duets with John Coltrane, was a reference point in my life, an example of what I love about and why I can believe in "free" jazz. I would only be telling half the truth if I didn't admit that I also thought about how it wouldn't be possible now for him to add his own memories, knowledge, and wisdom to my dissertation research - a selfish kind of regret.

Some of my first thoughts after learning of my grandmother's death could be seen as regrets about my selfishness. Jean Somoroff had a life-long (as far as I knew) love of dogs. Since my wife and I got our dog in early 2007, she had heard about him. Once she moved into a nursing home in March of 2007, I began promising her that we would bring Bobo with us during one of our visits. I told her we would bring him when the weather was warm, so that she could sit with him outside the home for a while. Since we were living in North Carolina, there admittedly were not many chances for us to bring Bobo along for a nursing home visit, as we usually left him in NC when traveling north to see family. When I moved back to New York City in late 2008, I assured her that now, when the weather was a bit better, we'd bring Bobo so she could finally see him. But I never got around to it.

* * *

Jean Somoroff was, in general, not a woman who felt a need to sugarcoat her views. When my parents brought her down to North Carolina to celebrate her ninetieth birthday in the fall of 2006, she said with a smile, "Now I'm old, too old." It was the first time she had seen my apartment (before it became the home I shared with my then-girlfriend/now-wife). The number "90" brought home the idea that my grandmother was born in a different world, and I teased her about that, knowing she could take it. I seem to remember her admitting that she didn't quite understand the world any longer, that it had more or less passed her by. Perhaps this is only an apocryphal memory.

Whether or not she voiced the opinion, I'm pretty sure she did feel a bit like a stranger in the early 21st century. She remained, until her last two years in the nursing home, a fairly avid follower of current events. She never took much to technology, and I think I might have briefly tried to explain the Internet to her. I wouldn't have asked or expected her to understand what I was doing in graduate school (it only makes sense to me half the time), though coming of age as a Jewish American in South Philadelphia (back when South Philly was an Italian and Jewish ghetto) during the Great Depression, she had an inherent respect for higher education for its own sake.

I realize how different our worlds were when I think about how baffled she would be had she ever listened to Interstellar Space. Even if she would have been able to hear or understand my words during her last week, it would have meant very little to my grandmother to know that a great jazz musician from her neck of the woods who was some eighteen years her junior had passed away.

* * *

On days I spent with my grandmother during the summer, we would often walk over to 108th Street, the commercial thoroughfare that was one long block from her apartment building. From the age of about five to nine or ten, these walks would combine a number of activities: she would run errands at the supermarket, the cleaners'; we would stop off for me to get lunch at a pizzeria; sometimes we might stop in the toy store where she would spoil me and buy me a Matchbox car or action figure of my choosing.

Looking back, I feel fortunate to have grown up near two pizzerias that both served great New York pizza. I associated Joe's, the one on 108th Street, so strongly with my grandmother that the few times during my childhood when I might stop in for a slice with my father the whole situation felt a bit odd - not bad or disconcerting, but just notably different than usual. During one of my visits with my grandmother, when I was perhaps six years old, she told me, "You're getting old enough to order the pizza and pay for it yourself. Go ahead, you can do it! You know what to say." And, sure enough, I did. I asked for "one slice to stay, please" and handed $1.10 across the counter to the cook whose face I knew so well. It was my first monetary transaction.

* * *

If I reach very far into the recesses of my mind, I can touch one of my earliest memories of being with my grandmother. I must handle it carefully, lest it flit away like a frightened bird. I cannot force it to the surface of my consciousness, but if I reach slowly and gently and then wait patiently, the memory fades in. Typical of early-life memories, it is not so much of an event as it is merely an image. But this is a memory-image whose visual contours are invested with other sensory information and with the weight of emotion, which itself seems outside the boundaries of sense. I'm lying on her bed with a bag of ice held up to my lip. I see the dresser in her bedroom, the quilt on the bed, the plain white of the walls. I'd been running around in the playground just across the street from her building and had fallen on my face, bruising my lip. I was perhaps three years old at the time - the tears came freely, and my fall seemed like a catastrophe, the injury to my lip a major setback. The context, the story, is bolstered by only the faintest of images. It is the image of myself on her bed that remains more vivid. The pink of her bed and the blond wood of her dresser feel safe in my mind's eye. I cannot recall her words of comfort that afternoon, but their feeling, their resonance, is somehow contained in these colors in a kind of mnemonic synesthesia.

* * *

It's been eight days since my grandmother passed. It was two days after her death before I could really cry for her. I cried for the minuscule geography to which her life was limited at its end, confined first to a building, then to one floor, and finally to one small room; I cried for the loss of verbal ability in a woman who knew nothing if not how to talk; I cried because the woman who had an almost never-ending supply of food and snacks whenever family visited her (and this well into her eighties) lived with barely any appetite during her last two years. It was two days after her death. Earlier the same day I had noticed the exhaustion at the edges of a mid-summer afternoon.

Rashied Ali, requiescat in pace

"Venus" - duet with John Coltrane (1967)

Interview with Rashied Ali one week before his passing

New York Times obituary

NY Ain't So Bad, Is It?

So I recently got this CD reissue of a 1975 Rashied Ali album entitled N.Y. Ain't So Bad in which Ali & co. play the blues. Yes, free-jazz stalwart and once-drummer for John Coltrane Rashied Ali, playing the blues. The straight-up, down-home blues. Kind of.

What is so arresting about this album is the way avant-garde cracks give texture to the mostly smooth, polished surface of this set of blues. This really is a blues album--heavy on groove, finely-burnished melodic and harmonic turns of phrase (i.e. great stock licks), and that elusive but crucial ingredient--"feeling." Nestled between and tucked behind singer Royal Blue's straight-ahead (and soulful) shouts, "free" elements turn up erratically: one of the saxophonists (Jimmy Vass on alto and Marvin Blackman on tenor) might play a background phrase whose harmony intersects perpendicularly with the harmony articulated by Charles Eubanks on piano and Benny Wilson on bass; Ali might expose his free-jazz roots, playing a fill that is a bit too busy, clattery, and all-out rowdy to belong in a Chicago-style blues band.

[I'm sorry I can't provide sound files here, but you check out the album on iTunes. Listen to "Everyday," the band's cover of the B.B. King standard. Towards the end of the 30-second sample you'll hear Ali taking things "out" on the drums. Also check out Ali's hip polyrhythms on "Moontipping."]

Listening to N.Y. Ain't So Bad reminded me that the album was recorded around the end of a period in US jazz when African American musicians from the "progressive" end of the (jazz) musical spectrum articulated a strong sense of a black music continuum--both in their words and their music. This pan-African musical sensibility of course arose along with (I don't really think it's accurate to say "out of") the Black Nationalist and Black Arts movements. Musicians such as Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, and Albert Ayler, who had pushed very hard against musical-aesthetic boundaries during the mid-60s to create high-energy music that confronted the listener with extremes of timbre, pitch, and rhythmic density, began to change direction by the late-60s and into the early 1970s. I wouldn't characterize this change (evidenced by albums such as Ayler's New Grass, Sanders' Thembi and Shepp's Attica Blues) as a "reigning in" of musical vanguardism so much as a spreading-out of its impetus. As in numerous prior moments in jazz, these musicians sought ways to connect what they were doing to a deeply-felt experience of an inclusive black musical tradition: one linking gospel, blues, R&B, soul, funk, jazz, etc.

While I've often thought of the notion of a "black music continuum" as a distinctly post-Civil rights African-American construct that casts an essentialist light on the musical practices of African Americans, the music created by Ayler, Shepp, Sanders, McCoy Tyner, Frank Lowe, Clifford Thornton, Rashied Ali, et al. was nothing if not eclectic. These musicians used elements of jazz (from various sub-styles and periods in that idiom), blues, funk, West African, and Caribbean music, freely borrowing and mixing together bits and pieces as they saw fit (Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp strike me as especially voracious in their eclecticism). If they were guided by essentialist notions of blackness, then it was an essentialism that seems to have undermined itself, allowing for a diversity of musical expressions that challenges the very notion of a common, underlying essence. If essentialist understandings of black expressive culture usually reduce the multi-faceted, myriad forms, styles, and aims of African-American art to a monolithic body of work with a single, driving force of "blackness," the essentialism of Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, and, on the basis of N.Y. Ain't So Bad, Rashied Ali, was perhaps something of an oxymoron: a reductionism that resulted in variety, a narrow-minded investment in race as the basis of culture and consciousness that allowed for an expansive musical vision.

I venture to guess that it was Rashied Ali's investment in such a notion of a black music continuum that allowed him to record N.Y. Ain't So Bad without any qualms. His other recorded work from the mid-70s belongs more clearly to the post-Coltrane avant garde bag. Arguably, it took courage for Ali to record a relatively straight-ahead blues album (vis a vis his standing in the avant garde community). I would say it also took musical courage for his band to inject these blues with piquant touches of free music--and to let the two musical poles, down-home blues and heady free jazz, coexist in a delicate tension in sonic space without attempting to reconcile them with one another.