Notes from Bizarroland 4a: Music Is the Healing Force

As I sit and begin to write this latest installment of literary effluvium, the unbridled soul and humanity of Dr. John Plays Mac Rebennack, vol. 1 vibrate around me. Since Dad’s expiration, even minutes after we all returned home from his deathbed at the hospital, I sought something from music. I sought comfort, consolation, escape, indulgence. Music has been a fix, a drug. “I’ll take a shot of James Booker followed by a chaser of Howlin’ Wolf.” Or, “Can’t do that right now, I’m about to sit down and gorge myself on Schubert’s most misery-soaked slow movements – a few of them back to back should do the trick.”

            On the Tuesday of his death, I wanted to hear music of celebration, music that Dad loved. During the last six months of his life, he whittled down his listening habits to the music that most sustained him during his sixty-eight years on the planet – the blues. Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, John Lee Hooker – the aces of the Chess catalogue, these were Marc’s aural bread and butter. His admiration for James Booker also peaked during the summer and autumn of 2010. I am glad to say that I played a part in this: during my stay in April, I purchased Booker’s The Lost Paramount Tapes, a sickeningly good collection of “previously-unreleased” recordings the Bayou Maharajah made in the early ‘70s. Seeing how much my dad enjoyed it, I left it in AZ while I returned to New York so we could pack up the Eastern homestead and head West.

Anyhow, on Tuesday afternoon and into Tuesday night, I blasted Muddy, Booker, Dr. John, Wolf, Clapton’s all-blues album From the Cradle. Somehow the good vibes flowed, probably aided by the bottles of Black Bush Irish whiskey and wine my uncle had brought home as sweet spirited salve. My uncle and I had a joke that we were going to honor Dad by making up for all those years (26 of them) that he didn’t drink – he put the bottle down in 1984 and never picked it up again. Well, we didn’t quite reach the goal that night.

Dipping into the wellspring of the black music of the Delta was my attempt to somehow keep my father’s spirit going. Since the vibrations of energy that make up “life” had escaped from his body, I guess I tried to conjure them up using my parents’ stereo – and all our ears – as surrogate flesh. I had brought in a small kitchen stereo and played him some blues, Miles, and Bach Cello Suites during his last days in the hospital. I’m pretty sure now and then he heard it and possibly enjoyed. I know that on the afternoon of 21 November it thankfully calmed him and even lulled him into a brief nap. I put on some blues and New Orleans R&B in the few hours on Tuesday before he unexpectedly checked out at 1:25pm.

We all knew that music would continue to sound in the house over the coming days. I knew because it had to, for my own sanity. I gradually began searching for music that would help me realize my own grief; these I would listen to privately, with headphones. I sought recordings that could provide me with a sonic mirror, reflecting back to me the feelings of melancholy, pain, loneliness and plain stupefaction I was experiencing. Reflect those back, and in the process help define the situation, help me trace out the landscape of myriad and at times conflicting emotions that had been continually forming itself in my mind. I knew that Bill Evans would provide a sure shot of melancholy, and his recordings did not disappoint. Especially effective were the albums Since We Met (1974) and You Must Believe in Spring (recorded in 1977 but not released until after Evans’ death in 1980). I have held the former in special admiration since I bought it in college…some ten years ago. It’s not one of Evans’ widely-lauded recordings, but there just seems to be a spark in his playing, a sonic twinge that speaks to me of the cold, hard streets of lower Manhattan in January, when Since We Met was recorded. I have no idea of what the lyrics of the title song of You Must Believe in Spring are, but listening to that tune, and hearing the aggregate mood of the whole album, I imagine the lyric going something like, “You must believe in spring, because the winter of this world sucks.”  

So at night I would wrap myself in Bill Evans’ melancholy. I would imbibe of it. I would glut myself on the sweet stinging pain of his piano. Isn’t there at times an exhilarating edge to an oncoming wave of misery? As good as I was doing with Bill, defining my own sorrow, erecting an imaginary monument to my pain, my feeling of loss (me me me), I knew there was someone else I was forgetting. I would shuffle through my CD collection at random times of day and night, trying to remember who else’s music I should be listening to the way a person searches for the proper word which has of course escaped her at just the wrong moment in discourse. Who…? Not Tchaikovsky, well not quite – too many fast movements interfering with the slow agonized pathos I need. Not Chet Baker, too pathetic himself…Not Schumann, too thick, too German, too…something…Some of Kenny Wheeler’s recordings worked very well, but there was still an unexplored territory in my mind’s ear.

Then two nights ago it dawned on me. Chopin. Like a starving dog shown scraps of meat, I greedily pulled out CDs containing Chopin’s Mazurkas and Nocturnes, for me the most wistful and stately of his music – the furthest from the exuberant, virtuosic mode. Yes, the Nocturnes especially fed my ears and soul well. Yes, soak in the misery of these sounds, the regret. The excruciating nostalgia of some of the middle sections that is then crushed, ground into dust by the return to the opening material…I’m really thinking specifically of the C-minor Nocturne, op. 48/1. Years ago during my Master’s program, I performed a Schenkerian analysis of this piece. I spent hours studying the music note by note – hours consuming the wealth of feeling, which was never depleted by my scrutiny. So I know the piece well. The loose, little narrative about the piece I’d constructed for myself years ago fit the current situation magnificently. The “A” section, with its stately march-like texture and minor mode, is funereal. In the “B” section, Chopin switches to the major mode. From C major, the Nocturne moves into brighter the brighter keys of D and then E major. The music grows increasingly fervent; pounding octave figures become manic, hallucinatory – a hallucination of a beloved past, of a lost love, of a dead father, whatever. It was always clear to me what the return of the opening material in the A¹ section did to this hallucination-reminiscence-whathaveyou: it smashed it. It brought the nostalgic reverie to a crunching halt, and brutally reminded the subject (= Chopin? Me? You?) of the current reality.

It then occurred to me that by hanging out in the aural headspace of Chopin and Bill Evans, I was getting in touch with my Slavic soul. (Half of Evans’ ancestry was Rusyn. I am of all Eastern-European stock, at least half of it Slavic.) And I started to think, What I really need is for the Chopin interpreters and Evans to take it to the next level. More. More sorrow. More pianistic pain.

I imagined a recording of the C-minor Nocturne wherein the pianist doesn’t just play those B-section octave figures in a robust forte, but hammers them out. I imagined an überpianist with hands of titanium attached to arms of granite pulverizing the piano keys, SMASHING them in that B section. In my mind’s ear I heard a recording of almost farcical pathos – an overdubbing of bombs exploding to coincide with the punctuations of the octaves. As the bionic pianist-hulk smashes the piano keys, eventually pulverizing the wood, metal, and ivory, the piano simultaneously crumbles under his weight, explodes, and then, like a video-game character flickers back into view as a “new life” is used. Huge crashing of bombs, dynamite – no, bigger – nuclear blasts – accompany the decimation of the piano – One can listen to the overlapping sounds of wood splintering, metal strings cracking and bending, and massive explosions of air molecules caused by gargantuan bombs.

I imagined an analogously grotesque Bill Evans recording, one in which the listener can hear Evans’ keel over from the suffering and misery of his own music - No, better yet, make a video of it – A DVD that shows him in the studio performing the achingly beautiful tune “The Peacocks” and imploding at the end of the take – shriveling up on the piano bench – and to the shock of Eddie Gomez and Eliot Zigmund, crumpling like a deflated balloon on the studio floor.

If we’re gonna do grief, let’s do it right - Let’s REALLY get into it – On one side, I want Chopin’s music making pianos explode – I want the piano to be the detonator for a collection of hydrogen bombs – setting off a chain of pulverizing impacts that feed back into the musical groundswell of the Nocturne – On the other side, I want Bill Evans to play himself and all of us into a musical-metaphysical blackhole – his sound creating a central vacuum that sucks us all into ourselves and out of existence.

MORE POUNDING OCTAVES – MORE NULLIFYING CHORDS.

To me it’s only the flip side of an aesthetic of excess that has been so brilliantly cultivated in African-American music for decades. James Baldwin, Fred Moten, Amiri Baraka, and others have celebrated this aesthetic of excess. It’s in the music my father and I love so much – the good-times thump of Muddy Waters and Hooker, the screeching excess of James Brown, the all-out musical, sartorial, and performative excess of James Booker – a willingness to let it all hang out, a celebration of the rough edges of life. Of course an aesthetic of excess isn’t only the province of African Americans. Among many other folks, cultivated excess is no stranger to my father's side of the family. (If you had spent a few hours listening to the cackling and absurdly raucous humor that took place when my father, my uncle and I got together, you’d know.) Excess – more is more. More, in some cases, is better. Listen to the music louder. Pound those drums harder. Make those guitar slides wilder.

Dad was a practitioner of excess. If one ibuprofen pill helps that headache, maybe six will help it a lot more, and faster. He did stuff like that. I don’t know if he truly believed on an intellectual level that more ibuprofen would work that much better, but it was his practice. 

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....]

Coming Soon to NYC: Clean Feed Festival!

For my money, Clean Feed Records is one of the very best jazz labels in existence today (and, believe it or not, there are A LOT of jazz labels out there). When you buy a CD from them, you get the total package: great music from great musicians (be they veterans of a jazz scene in the US, Europe or Japan, or "up-and-comers" who might be getting a first chance at making a record, Clean Feed seems to have a sixth sense about picking out the music most deserving of documentation), beautifully-recorded sound, AND beautiful cover art & packaging (for a devotee of the album like myself, this last part matters too). The Clean Feed catalogue is large (especially considering that this independent jazz label began in 2001) and extremely diverse stylistically.


Of my own accord, I want to plug the label's upcoming showcase in New York City. You can find all the info here:

http://www.cleanfeed-records.com/festivalpdf/

Folks who live in the NYC area and care about jazz: you WILL NOT be disappointed if you attend this. (I stand by this guarantee.)

When Griff Was Great

I received Johnny Griffin's first Blue Note album, Introducing Johnny Griffin, in the mail today. It was recorded way back in 1956, with a great rhythm section: Wynton Kelly, Curly Russell, and Max Roach. Listening to this album has washed out a sonic bad taste that has been lingering for going on two years now. I heard Griffin live at Duke University in the fall of 2007, as part of Duke's "Following Monk" series dedicated to Thelonious Monk. Griffin was featured as a soloist with the Duke University Jazz Ensemble, and the program was heavy on Monk tunes.

Though I knew Griffin was 79 at the time, I did not know what to expect from him. His articulation was sloppy, he was dragging way behind the beat (which was never his style), his lines were short, his musical vocabulary limited. I withheld judgment, thinking that perhaps what I was hearing actually evidenced a reconception of style: a distillation, a paring-down that often occurs with elder jazz musicians. But after a few tunes, I had to admit it to myself: the Little Giant sounded finished. To be sure, on a slow blues (I think it may have been "Misterioso", but I can't be sure) he pulled out a few burly, bluesy lines befitting his beginnings in R&B - perhaps the soul was willing, but the body just not able. The audience at large reacted vociferously to these few, precious, beautiful lines of saxophone: large roars filled the hall. With them the crowd seemed to be saying, "Yes - we knew you still had it in you! That's Johnny Griffin! We remember you."

And that night, and the next day, I thought about what happens when musicians get old, when they lose their stuff. And how often this happens in the jazz world, and often fans get to hear it. Should one wish, one could put on the recordings Lester Young made in the last year of his life: the sound of a man barely able to blow enough air through the saxophone to produce a tone. One could also hear a strung-out, withered Chet Baker in the last years of his tumultous life, blowing ragged, weak trumpet. And such events become embedded in jazz lore in an unfortunately perverse way. The frailty of players and the diminution of their abilities are regarded sometimes with deluded romanticism, sometimes with morbid fascination, but rarely with the understanding that decrepitude can take hold, that these unsightly endings to the lives of such "legends" neither negate the pinnacles of what they've accomplished nor amplify whatever greatness they may possess. It also occurred to me that I have never read, at least within jazz scholarship, a serious discussion of the cultural dynamics around the passing and mourning of musicians.

I had this bad taste, as I call it, from that Johnny Griffin concert. While I'm glad that Introducing has helped wash out the taste, it wasn't that I wanted to forget the concert. It's just that I want to remember the Little Giant all over the changes, hyperactively edging ahead of the beat. Like others in Duke's Baldwin Auditorium, I applauded those few great blues lines Griffin mustered up to pay tribute, to tell him, "I know who you are, what you have accomplished." It was a very poignant moment, and one that made me glad I had attended the concert. Though not an especially satisfying moment musically, it was an eminently human one. For musical and aesthetic satisfaction, and to hear Griffin joyously ripping into a tune, I heartily recommend Introducing Johnny Griffin.