Notes from Bizarroland 5: Nearing One Month

Ma and I descended upon the homeland yesterday. Homeland in two senses: the house and the neighborhood. The house in which I grew up, in which the vast majority of my parents’ life together played out. The neighborhood is a humdrum borderland that we always called Forest Hills but that is apparently within the bounds of Rego Park. It may have been considered part of Forest Hills decades ago. The problem is that the house in which I grew up, which before it was my parents’ belonged to my maternal grandparents – a Slavic immigrant couple who met in New York during the depression – resides right near the boundary separating Rego Park and Forest Hills, these neighborhood designations in Queens that may or may not have significance now but that linger on as reminders of the collection of towns that made up western Long Island before the consolidation of the five boroughs. So I spent the earlier part of my youth saying I was from Forest Hills, and then sometime during my adolescent years I acquiesced and admitted I grew up in Rego Park – a name that for those in the know carries considerably less cachet.

            In any case, the “homeland” – this neighborhood that contains buildings I’ve looked at since infancy, this place I still call “home” in spite of increasing feelings of alienation I feel at the changes in the local landscape. Where there is now a mall containing Sears, Marshall’s, and other stores there used to be a monolithic branch of the old NYC department store Alexander’s. Before there was a discount dollar store of some sort on Queens Blvd. there was a Nobody Beats the Wiz. Before the Wiz there was…I can’t remember now… Ben’s Best Delicatessen is still there, serving classic New York Jewish deli fare.

            Within the neighborhood there are streets I walked hundreds of times with both grandmothers, my mother, my father. Over the past few years, each time I’ve visited my parents’ house I recognized fewer and fewer of the neighbors on the block – a block like many others in Queens, made up of red-brick connected row houses, these a bit larger and admittedly nicer than similar blocks elsewhere in Rego Park, Astoria or Sunnyside. Last year the next-door neighbor Helen died at a ripe old age of…hmm, don’t know…shortly after my grandmother Jean did. Her daughter still owns the house next to ours, and I guess that makes her and my mom the longest-term current residents on that block.

            Something about Rego Park – my section of it, started to annoy the shit out of me since I moved out in 2005. The increasingly chintzy storefronts, the motley folks bumbling around, the disappearance of restaurants and stores that should have remained, if only for my sense of continuity. Yet as much as the damn place annoys me, I can’t loathe it. It’s too much about me, so when I look at it and feel disdain for it I’d be feeling disdain for myself too.

            The house itself is now a large brick-and-mortar ellipsis for me, the gradual process of my parents’ move out of it and fully into their new house in Tucson having been interrupted by the revelation of Dad’s terminal cancer. Of course walking through it yesterday there were memories. Of course. While my mom sorted through mail, I found myself looking for artifacts proving Dad’s existence. I knew where to find his notebooks from about ten years ago – artist journals, I guess you’d call them, into which he pored out all kinds of mental activity, some insightful and beautiful, some morose and tiresome. The red-and-black ink drawings still strike me as brilliant: garish caricatures of people both real and imagined. I slowly read through some of his writings, laboriously deciphering his horribly messy hand. It occurred to me that I might be eavesdropping, invading his privacy by reading these jottings, but somehow I didn’t feel any guilt of trespass.

I won’t lie; a lot of the writing conveys a keen feeling of depression, of anxiety about how to go through life. Not only did Dad mull over his own tribulations, he wrote out his sympathy, sometimes pity, for family and friends – a piece describing his observations on the neglect of his half-sister by other relatives, an entry pondering the bullshit of the W. Bush regime via worrying about my oldest friend’s being called to duty for the Iraq invasion of 2003. My friend, and my dad sat there scribbling out his worry for him. Well, sure, why not. I mean he treated the guy like a fucking nephew since sometime in high school, and the guy came out to see the old man, full well knowing it might be to say goodbye before Dad kicked it.

Then there were the photographs. I just started to look around through the many MANY photos my mom took over the years, knowing I was looking for images of Dad. I found a good deal – photos from the late 80s and early 90s, photos of trips to Vermont, Florida, pictures of my dad’s 50th-birthday celebration in 1992 with some of our Czech relatives with us in Queens. Photos of both of my grandmothers, Anna (my mom’s mother) already suffering the symptoms of Alzheimers’ in 1990, though you can’t see it in the images. Anna, looking healthy (as she physically was) at age 78; Jean with a head of almost all-brown hair at age 74. Photos of Dad looking spry at 45, 48, 50. Photos of Dad and me – he a slim man in early middle age, thick dark hair on his head; me an incredibly dorky 10-year-old, with baggy pants and a baseball cap the diameter of which fit my head but still looks outsized on me. I had read some stuff in his journals from 1999, stuff about how he realized he needed to let me live my own life, about how at age 19 I was grown up (I’m sure he later realized that I was anything but grown up, even if I thought I was), about how he still wanted to help prevent me from making the mistakes he had made. Quintessential concerns of a father, perennial hopes for the good fortune of his son. 

So I spent a couple hours being an archaeologist of my own past, of my father’s life and past, of my family’s past, of the house, the neighborhood. Whatever.

The thing is, with all the feelings of futility and fatigue brought on by this archaeology, this recollection, there is so much I want to tell you…

There’s so much I could tell all of you out there about the crazy and hilarious interactions Dad had with the neighborhood freaks and goons: Chester, the homeless guy who gradually went more crazy over the course of a few years, who started to bend the windshield wipers on peoples’ cars, whom our neighbor Abe wanted to pulverize with the help of my dad; “FBI,” the fucking maniac who walked the streets of Rego Park screaming out “I’m FBI, don’t mess with me!” or things like that, and who then actually got shot by a Central-Asian Mafioso (they started to pop up with the influx of Bukharian Jews into Rego Park during the 1990s) for yelling his bullshit, a mobster paranoiac who actually thought “FBI” was yelling it at him, warning him that he was in trouble; the bizarre conversations Dad had with The Late-night Streetwalker, a neighbor on the block who will remain nameless, who spewed vitriol about his family and about the revenge he would exact upon anyone who dared block his driveway. These people all existed.

There’s so much I could tell you, so much I want to tell you, about how I remember all those games of catch, how I too remember the time you played basketball with me and my teenage friends, when I made that one basket that won the game – that game you scribbled about years after it happened; about how much I enjoyed watching those Marx Bros. movies for the first time with you, how it opened up whole worlds of laughs and ideas when you showed me the Marx Bros., the Pink Panther movies, W.C. Fields, how even though you annoyed the shit out of me at times in Tucson this past year I still wanted to laugh with you at the Marx Bros. and Louis C.K.; about how I remember that you taught me how to understand baseball and basketball, these rituals of fathersonhood, these rituals of Americana, those hours we looked up all kinds of shit in the huge baseball encyclopedia you bought in probably 1993, the year the Mets sucked more ass than we thought possible, the year the Knicks were great but not great enough, the year the Phillies caused you agony when Mitch Williams completely blew it, “CHOKED” as you talked about at length, fucked it all up and gave up the Series to the Blue Jays…

Now, and for the past four weeks, I have so much to tell people about, so much to tell you…so much to tell…

And I wonder who it is I’m telling, and, for that matter, who’s really doing the telling.

Notes from Bizarroland 3: Letter from the HVAC Monster

During the week Dad spent in the hospital, I noticed an occasional buzzing sound coming from the ceiling intake vent just outside the bedroom my wife and I have been using since moving to Tucson. It first became audible one morning as an intermittent buzz…buzz…buzz when the thermostat prompted the system to give off warm air.

For a couple of days before and after Dad’s passing I lost track of the buzzing sound, being of course preoccupied with other matters. Yesterday evening the intake vent let out more than just that intermittent buzzing. From the grill covering the vent fell a clean white envelope containing neatly-folded letter-size sheets of paper, upon which was typed a letter. Paranoia seized me from the intestines up. Upon touching the crisp white sheets of paper I instantly had the premonition that a hideous creature, some malformed, shrunken, troll-like being had been living in the ducts of the HVAC system in my parents’ house. This goblin, this monster, had powers of clairvoyance that would boggle and frighten the human mind, and it had composed a private letter to me. The parcel looked like something that might be issued from a law office, so clean were the folds, so crisp the black ink. It is written in a stilted and somewhat pompous diction…

To the First- and Only-Born Son,

            Perhaps now you see that you are a fool. Perhaps now, after witnessing the emotional work of months and weeks, the preemptive mentations you erected to shield yourself against the eventual onslaught of the inevitable, hammered and quickly felled by the vicissitudes of an unknowing Cosmos, perhaps now you can truly perceive how foolish was your hubris, how ill-founded your sense of poise.

There are so many things I could tell you about yourself, young one. Yes, young, as you well see now, despite the recent occurrence of your thirtieth birthday, in contradiction to the feelings of weariness this milestone incited in you, you are still young.

            I can still see you standing in the hospital room after the abrupt utterance of a nurse new both to your family and your ailing father, “He’s gone.” And this said almost in haste, nearly blurted out, as if this nurse somehow knew the events of the past days and held the same expectation of at least a day or two in the relative comfort of hospice care that you had held. You notice the redness and gleaming of her eyes, creases of incomprehension upon her forehead as she tells all of you the news she ascertained not two fifths of a second before the speaking of it, “He’s gone.” I can see your mind digesting her words, then this same mind realizing that it had fallen behind just a bit, that your stomach had actually digested moments before her motions with the stethoscope over his body, the beginnings of worry in the skin and muscles of her face. And yet, in the next moment, as you relay the fact to your mother, who has already begun to weep because of the sadness of his being toted off to a hospice to perish and not because she has just seen the perishing itself, you cannot yourself understand it. And so as your mother immediately embraces the full thundering pulverizing truth in a forward swoon and instant wracking sobs, you offer the most pedestrian suggestion - “Come here, Ma” – and clumsily catch/lift her in your arms lest she fall face first onto the linoleum floor from an apparently pure grief that you cannot yet know.

            Yes, I can still see at this very moment into the cavern that looms beyond the opaque, obsidian lacquer painted by your words of a few minutes later, “I don’t understand.” I can see behind and beneath those sounds to what even they in their awkward inarticulation hide: raw fear. You feared not only the jarring closure, not only the grief and anguish to come, but you feared the dead body. You feared a foreign object in the room, a mass of protein, minerals, and water that stood in as a perverse doppelganger for what had moments before been your father. The seizure of your body and mind by fear was analogously sudden to the switch of animated being into dead matter – and, yes, I know and knew at that moment that your bloated, overanalytical mind was already spinning out myriad explications; I detected even from my lair back home the concoctions of a suffocating psyche gasping desperately for some whiff of knowing or being rather than gagging on its own production of putrid thought and theory. You feared the great mystery of this instant transformation of your father into notfather, as many others have. Your own ignorance confronted you from without – ignorance of how easily you slipped into the awe and dread about death that you knew had plagued human hearts for millennia, but which seemed to have been resurrected afresh for your own private torment. Not “death” as an abstract concept to be discussed round a table amidst vague friends and hearty drink, but death as the plain cessation of breathing, death as the sudden metaphysical flattening-out of a person with spirit and mind into a body with only volume and mass.

            I can look ahead, too, to see your bafflement at how the work of eight months seems to be erased in the passage of a day. I can peer into your embryonic questioning of Causality, Effort, Time, Memory. I can already hear the tiresome discussions you will hold about the meaning of a life, whether your father was reconciled to his death even as he perceived its coming, the stunning infinity suggested by the finality of his departure from a physical and apparently objectively-verifiable reality. I can feel my stomach turn when I listen to the pre-echoes of your pontifications about “anima” and “breath” and how “expiration” is a fitting word for death since it refers to the final irrevocable release of breath.

            I have chuckled quietly to myself over the past few days as I have listened to you repeatedly observe the habitual nature of Mind, surprised that you keep expecting to find him sitting in his usual armchair when you enter the house or to see a missed-call alert from his number on your mobile phone. And I know, perhaps more than anyone else, that each one of your verbal utterances to this effect hides countless more silent reminders whispered to yourself, that you will never see him AGAIN…

Notes from Bizarroland 2

My mom and I went to the funeral home yesterday morning to "make arrangements" for my dad's cremation. That was what my mom said the funeral director told her the appointment was for: "to make arrangements." I had wondered what it meant. Ma already told him over the phone that we wanted a basic cremation, no service, no urn. (At some point we'll decide where to scatter the ashes.) Besides paying, what "arrangements" needed to be made?

There was a bit more, but not much. A few forms to verify and sign; some minor details to confirm. Then the funeral director asked if we had any more questions. Ma and I looked at each other, she shrugged, she asked, "I don't know, Matthew, is there anything you wanted to ask?" 

I paused and began to simultaneously shrug and shake my head "no." But a number of questions demonstrating an idle curiosity about the mortician's craft had shot through my mind. 

"When you got the body from the hospital, where were they keeping it? Was it a morgue? What does the morgue look like?"

"Do you keep the body refrigerated at the funeral home until the time of cremation? Or since it's going to be burned anyhow, do you not bother? Let it begin to decompose?"

"What about all the smoke? Is there any environmental regulations?"

"If we wanted to, could we see the body now? Not that I do want to, but...if I wanted to...?"

I decided it was better to just leave than to ask these questions.

Dad and I had once had a conversation about a sleazy funeral director somewhere in New York that tried to guilt-trip him...I think it wasn't pertaining to a relative of his, but a friend and work associate - but I really can't be sure now. I think it was something about how the undertaker tried to convince my dad and the other person he was with that the deceased deserved better than a pine box, how the deceased should be honored with something more noble or elegant or dignified - and definitely a shitload more expensive - than an unadorned wooden box. My dad had related the story so that we could share a feeling of contempt about the inappropriate behavior of the undertaker, and so we could share a meditation on the grotesque humor of a hard sell taking place in an awkward moment where stale grief met tedious bureaucracy. 

I was glad that my mother and I were not subject to any hard-sell techniques, even if we inevitably had to spend a few absurd moments acquiescing to a compulsory bureaucracy.

My Hearing Belongs to ME

I recently read  a description of Miles Davis' album In a Silent Way (IASW) that gave me a start: 

It was the sound of Miles Davis and Teo Macero feeling their way down an unlit hall at three in the morning. It was the soundtrack to all the whispered conversations every creative artist has, all the time, with that doubting, taunting voice that lives in the back of your head, the one asking all the unanswerable questions.

This is from Phil Freeman's book about Miles' electric period, Running the voodoo down: the electric music of Miles Davis. I haven't really looked at much more of the book, and it hasn't been a book that has held much interest for me otherwise. I ran across the excerpt above in the Wikipedia entry on IASW; I was curious to see what Wiki had to say about the album after giving it a serious listen for the first time in over a year. I realize it's not entirely fair of me to write off Freeman's book without reading some more of it - but that's not what concerns me here and now. 


As I said, Freeman's description gave me a start. These musings about Miles and his producer Teo Macero wandering through an unlit hall, about secret interior dialogues in the heads of artists...these comments, though juxtaposed with some historical information and contextual analysis, are certainly evaluative, definitely subjective, and don't even try to be critical or historical. One might say they're also poorly-written. Freeman switches perspective in the second sentence, beginning by describing "every creative artist" in the third person, and then switching to the second person, talking about "that doubting, taunting voice that lives in the back of your head" - "your head." And isn't "creative artist" a redundant construction? Doesn't the second word, "artist," already imply the adjective "creative"? Yet the interpretive thrust of Freeman's gloss gnawed at me - maybe the way he imagines the voice in Miles' head, or any creative artist's head, gnawing at him. There was something about Freeman's notion of IASW as the sound of being lost, of contemplating the infinite, that struck a chord within me. 

I was going to continue here, to recount my personal history with IASW, probably get a bit mushy at times, etc. (See below for previously unreleased excerpts of this reminiscence.) Well, what was happening was that for a few days it felt like Freeman had stolen my hearing of IASW. Yes, stolen, taken the way I hear the album, the way I feel about it, think about it, know it away from me. But then a few days elapsed, and Freeman's slick yet for me nevertheless uncanny gloss on IASW lost it sway over me, and I started to regain my own hearing of the album. I became able to reconcile Freeman's "unlit hall" with my own dimly-lit space created by IASW. 

And then I remembered that Freeman's book belongs to the greasy, fetid, and even depraved industry of Miles Davis publications - a entire subcategory within music books - and I said to myself 

"FUCK PHIL FREEMAN

AND FUCK HIS UNLIT HALL."

The still-growing number of vapid monographs on Miles Davis - or some period of his life, or one of his albums - is another topic altogether, one which I intend to address in my very next post.

Unreleased Reminiscence Outtakes
[This is an album I've known well since the age of 16, 38 minutes of music which I've listened more than 200 times, possibly more than 500. Miles' trumpet sound immediately struck me as incredibly beautiful - as full and cushiony as on Kind of Blue, and yet with a new timbral variation, especially in the high register. It was also the album from which I really got to know Wayne Shorter's sound on soprano - still one of my favorite sounds among the recorded jazz I know. There are so many moments on IASW I could tell you about, so many aspects of the recording that have fascinated in different ways at different times. I could really talk someone into oblivion about it....


....I never really thought of IASW as "being about" being lost, if that's even what Freeman is getting at in his words. For me, IASW has often been about something unknowable, both something unknowable about life, the universe, the human condition, and its own unknowability - the music's own inscrutability. There was something evocative about Freeman's thoughts, about the idea of the album being a soundtrack to an internal dialogue of metaphysical questioning. So reading the excerpt, I had an experience of the uncanny. Freeman touched on a feeling I too had gotten from the album - a feeling of contemplating the infinite through music....


...In my late teens the things Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea were doing on the Fender Rhodes keyboards, and the things Joe Zawinul did on the electric organ, held infinite fascination for me. I imagined that as I continued to learn about music, I would someday be able to explain what made the web of keyboard sound on the album so intriguing; I'd be able to analyze it - break it down into its component parts and understand the how and why of the keyboard soundweb. When I started to really delve into music theory in college, I would sometimes return to IASW, maybe play a few phrases on my trumpet along with the record, and think to myself that I was getting closer to being able to analyze that thick, inscrutable fog of keyboards....]

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.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Music

The sophomoric nod to Raymond Carver aside, I do want to revisit this question with some degree of seriousness. It is a matter of not just academic interest for me (although that too), and it is one of the main questions behind my current fieldwork. I’ve recently read two pieces that raise the issue of listening to music and talking about that listening in complementary ways (Steven Feld’s near-classic essay “Communication, Music, and Speech About Music” and a long essay/short book by Peter Szendy titled Listen: A History of Our Ears).

Feld’s approach is very much that of an ethnomusicologist/linguistic anthropologist: he’s thinking about the social factors at play when a person listens to music, and then what's at play when this same person talks about that listening. Rather than seeing a primary meaning as being located within the sound/text of a musical work, he argues, we should understand meaning-making as a process that takes place in the mind of the listener. He discusses what’s happening when, for instance, US citizens listen to a remake of the “Star Spangled Banner” in minor, as opposed to the usual major: “A range of social and personal backgrounds, some shared, some complementary, of stratified knowledge and experience, and of attitudes (about anthems, songs in general, parodies in particular, politics in all cases) enters into the social construction of meaningful listening through interpretive moves, establishing a sense of what the sound object or event is and what one feels, grasps, or knows about it” (Feld, 89). So when people talk to each other about music, Feld claims, even when they stumble for words in these exchanges, they are making their listening experiences social.

Szendy, a philosopher and professor of aesthetics at Universite de Paris X, meditates on the idea of “sharing one’s listening.” For him, a major example of how listeners have made their listenings shareable, or even legible in the first place, is to document them in arrangements of pre-existing musical works. Now, though Szendy’s meditation focuses on the canon of Western art music (unapologetically so, I would say), I find his insights more broadly applicable. He writes about wanting to share his listening with others, because he feels that in the act of sharing his listenings really become his own: “…it is more simply as a listener that I want to sign my listening: I would like to point out, to identify, and to share such-and-such sonorous event that no one besides me, I am certain of it, has ever heard as I have” (Szendy, 3 [italics in orig.]). Please indulge me as I submit one more extended quote, since Szendy’s own prose is more poetic and efficient than any gloss I could attempt:

The listener I am is nothing, does not exist so long as you are not there. There or elsewhere, it doesn’t matter, so long as my listening is addressed to you. The listener I am [que je suis] can happen only when I follow you [je te suis], when I pursue you. I could not listen without you, without this desire to listen to you listening to me, not being able, since I am unable to listen to me listening… (Szendy,142)

Again, the sociality of listening, the desire to externalize interior thoughts and feelings – or is interior/exterior too simple-minded and dichotomous way to think about these things?

These passages from Feld and Szendy (among others in these two pieces) may well become rallying cries for me as I look and listen for evidence of why people listen to jazz and of what they listen for when they do listen. And as I then think about why they might (and often do) want to tell others what they heard, what they thought and felt about what they heard. And as I try to teach myself to hear the interplay of content (what they say) and form (how they say it) in their talk about listening, and how this talk communicates something of the stuff of their listening experiences. These passages have been swirling around in my mind, often bumping up against a concept that two of my informants have invoked, and about which they have had something to say: “the privacy of listening” or “listening as a private experience.” They both believe that deep, intense listening – the kind where you feel excited, moved, transported, stunned, the kind you remember for years afterward because you made sure to construct a narrative form of the experience that enables you to tell it to yourself (and maybe others) – is something that happens between oneself and musical sound, often sound issuing from a recording. They both mention how they’ve had these really amazing, overpowering moments of listening when they have been able to sit alone with themselves and give their attention to a recording by Cecil Taylor/Albert Ayler/Sun Ra/whoever and receive something in return, when they were able to commune if not with the minds/souls/bodies/beings who created the sounds (such a conviction implies a simplistic mysticism that would misrepresent their more complex spiritualistic and humanistic thinking) then at least with the materiality of the parts of these sounds that have been captured and preserved.

And so they’ve both told me that they think there is something deeply private, deeply interior about listening – but they’ve told me about that experience. I guess I want to place my informants’ thoughts and comments next to those of Feld and Szendy. I can’t figure out yet if my informants agree with, argue against, move in parallel or oblique motion to, or do something else to/with the ideas of Feld and Szendy. In telling me that they have had these private listening experiences, are they undermining their own statements? Are they making a claim about the sociality of privacy (e.g., “I want to see if you’ve had these same kind of feelings when listening intensely; I want to see if this ‘private’ feeling is something we all share”)? Are they merely spouting rhetorical manifestations of what amounts to a form of aesthetic false consciousness? [I’m thinking here of Jonathan Sterne’s convincing discussion of how ideas of hearing as a sense allowing for “pure interiority” have their roots in Christian theology (Sterne 2002, 14-19).] Yet how can my informants’ experiences be false? What right have I to discount, denigrate, or moreover deny these experiences? Perhaps they mean to parse the difference between the incommunicability of the experience itself and the communicable statement that “We have all had similar incommunicable listenings.” While they seem to say, “You cannot know my listening, you can never touch it and feel it the way I have,” they also seem to say, “You can touch and feel the knowing that you and I have both had these private experiences of our own.”

So, to reformulate the question implied by the title of this post, “What do we talk about when we talk about the privacy, and possibly the profound unspeakability, of deep listening?”