Author Archives: helldriver

Not An Apology

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First, a disclaimer: I’m not going to address Rand Paul’s quoting lyrics from “The Spirit of Radio” in his recent primary victory speech.

Five years ago, I don’t think I’d have stood in line for more than an hour to get into a midnight showing of Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage, the band bio-doc that premiered (and won the audience award) at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. But there I was, fingers crossed, at one with the marginally functional talking over the noise of their earphones, the jerseyed moms with their teenaged sons lamenting having missed Iron Maiden’s last tour, and the shmooish Gargantua showing off his homemade “Rutsey lives!” T-shirt. (If you don’t know who John Rutsey was, you might want to stop, toggle and Google before reading on.) I have to admit, I felt a little silly. Looking at “them,” I couldn’t quite recognize myself. I guess I’d forgotten what it feels like to be a fan.

I ended up getting an extra ticket off a guy wearing a Signals tour shirt. Of all things, my very first concert. The Garden, 1982. Can’t Fate be just a little subtle? I still have the same shirt, somewhere, faded to the same grey. The sleeves have climbed up my shoulders; the whole shirt throttles me now. As, of course, our past infatuations sometimes may.

A couple of hours later I left the theater walking on air, wondering why I’d ever questioned coming out in the first place. I had happily regressed, submitted myself to fandom; and as I crossed the Village, I carried the words and images and music wrapped about me like a blanket and a dare. I was acting like a recent convert; I wanted to stop at the nearest bar, order a beer, and share The Good News with the nearest drunk. But in reality I’d only been reminded of something: the undeniable truth that Rush is—I blush as I write the next few words—my favorite band.

I’ve always disliked the idea that one “grows out” of certain bands or kinds of music. You grow out of clothes, shoes, maybe allergies and political ideologies. But music? I don’t think so. At least, not in the same way you do shoes, etc. There are certainly some exceptions that prove the rule. (Styx, maybe.) But overall, this sort of willed obsolescence strikes me as immature as the opposite extreme: to wallow in nostalgia, to become the subject and victim of one’s youthful infatuations. Even today, when diversity and inclusiveness are supposed to define what it means to be a “cultured” person, there’s a regrettable tendency to equate taste with the sheer quantity of music one finds unpalatable. In this regard, “growing out of” something becomes the chief indicator of cultural maturity; for what more powerful way to demonstrate a ruthlessly narrow taste than to disparage what you once loved?

Most music grows with you, if you’ll let it. It’s much more rewarding, I think, to hear the old music in the contexts and perspectives of an ever-widening listening palette. That doesn’t mean you keep listening to the old stuff with the intensity or abandon you once did; you may hardly listen to it at all. But why not let your old favorites grate on your ears, and let that song you always found dull or troubling suddenly shine with a new light? In the end, all listening is an act of excavation (even if the archaelogical metaphor is complicated by the fluidity of the medium).

I suppose that after a certain time we should put away childish things, but where music is concerned I refuse to do so. Maybe music is itself a childish thing?

I digress this way with Rush in mind because, ever since I was in college, if I mentioned to someone that Rush was my favorite band, I always got a variation of the same response: I used to like them. I went through that phase, too. Which meant: You’ll get over it. Someday you’ll grow up. Or just: I’m sorry. It’s the sort of thing religious people used to say to me when I mentioned that I hadn’t found Jesus and wasn’t really looking, either. In the late ‘80s, growing out of Rush amounted almost to a rite of passage: not to do so was the cultural equivalent of ending up delivering Domino’s Pizza. In fact, the whole idea of having a “favorite band” smacks of a deranged naivete. They really go hand in hand: Rush (ugh!) is my favorite band (hurl!). Anyway, if this was the response I got when I was in my twenties, I can only imagine what most people my age would say to me today. I may as well just crawl into a hole with my “Rutsey Lives!” T-shirt, conduct mock interviews at home with life-size cut-outs of the band, like Rupert Pupkin in King of Comedy. Maybe I should have nailed a FANS ONLY sign to the head of this post.

Much of this perception has to do with Rush’s longstanding lack of acceptance by the rock critical establishment. In fact, if Beyond the Lighted Stage has a theme, it’s vindication: the sense that we, the fans, were “right all along”; at last, Rush have claimed their rightful place in rock history as one of “the greats.” Rush, it seems, was always condemned to be the band the hip don’t like, but that influenced all the bands the hip do. For the fan—that is, for me—one of the best parts of the movie was listening to testimonies by all these musicians from bands I never cared for, many of which were critically acclaimed, about how important and lasting an influence Rush’s music was for them. I left the theater on a self-righteous high.

It cuts both ways, though: Rush was listening to all those bands that were critically embraced through the late ‘70s and ‘80s, bands like The Police and The Talking Heads, and reshaping their sound according to what they heard. Once upon a time I could not understand how critics’ ears could be so tin (“oído de lata”) as to not hear that. I have a better idea today. Here is a band that in no way fit the image of rock-n-roll bad boys, and whose drummer-lyricist was (deep breath) a libertarian. In terms of the former offense, there’s none of the expected angry young Liebstod, none of the hope-I-die-before-I-get-old bullshit to milk over five or six reunion tours. Honestly, I always found this refreshing. Growing up, I was a bit too straight-and-narrow for rock-n-roll, and Rush told me that was okay. God forbid they sing about things besides smoking pot (which they do with great verve in “A Passage to Bangkok”), like honesty (ugh!) or integrity (hurl!).

From the filmmakers’ perspective, this may have proved a hard pill to swallow. How do you make a rock documentary without the de rigeur trashed hotel rooms, drug overdoses and messy breakups? How do you make a compelling story out of an uneventfully happy marriage? With the exception of Neil Peart’s tragic losses of his wife and daughter in the late ‘90s, there’s not much of a human interest angle to work with. As Lee and Lifeson say tipsily over the closing credits, the problem with the movie is that people will find out they’re actually boring. But then they’re so endearingly boring, so goofy and un-coiffed, that we tend to forget this. It may be the fan in me talking, but I can’t imagine that others wouldn’t find this refreshing, too—among other things, that being a rock musician, like any other musician, is a profession and not (necessarily) a lifestyle.

It’s the second issue, however—Peart’s libertarianism, and the way his politics are reflected in the band’s lyrics—that maybe best explains the critical cold shoulder. That I understand this today is in no way thanks to Beyond the Lighted Stage. The movie never asks why Rush was disparaged; it simply takes critical non-acceptance at face value, as an obstacle to be overcome in rock-Bildungsroman fashion. Given that this is the only real engine for the narrative, I’m surprised it wasn’t milked more heavily. I’m not saying the movie had to be “political.” I can’t think of a worse angle than, say, the “Reaganite ‘80s” explain the ascendency of Rush, or some other such reductive crap. But some measure of context—interviews with dissenting critics, say, rather than just a few blurbed reviews—would have helped to tease out the knotty relationships between music, commerce and ideology that are certainly part of the Rush story, if by no means all of it, and to balance the intimate portraits that are the movie’s strength. It’s as if the filmmakers felt they had to adopt the band’s ideology in order to portray them. (If one wants to understand why Rush can be so easily adopted by the likes of a Rand Paul, one should begin here: not with Peart’s libertarianism per se, but with the trope of the lone underdog struggling against some collective social evil (Big Government, Beltway Insiders, The Liberal Media, what have you), displaced onto aesthetics, emptied of all context, so that it takes on the crystalline purity of a myth.) According to this reading, critical dislike for Rush was always about something other than the music, and bashing the music was an excuse for bashing the politics. Then again, most of said critics would probably argue that the music and the politics are inseparable: Rush are a sort of Canadian Leni Riefenstahl, belting out anthems to the triumph of the will; if one admired them, one was ipso facto a creeping fascist as well. (For an insightful analysis of the band’s critical reception and of the fan culture of progressive rock, see Durrell Bowman’s “Let Them All Make Their Own Music” in Progressive Rock Reconsidered.) Then again, I would argue that if we have to look to popular music to validate our political philosophies, we’re in a whole heap of trouble, regardless of whether one ends up a Joplin-inspired flower child or an Objectivist convert via the gospel of Neil Peart.

I want to suggest something unorthodox for the orthdox rock critic and the orthodox Rush fan alike: do Rush without the words. I’m sure I was prejudiced by growing up listening to classical music, and it’s one reason I landed so hard on jazz in my twenties; but I’ve always preferred rock that doesn’t depend much on lyrics. True, I did know a lot of the words, particularly where Rush was concerned, and they certainly articulated and flattered the more romantic-individualist strains of my nascent political personality. But I also seemed to have had a penchant for making up my own versions of songs without bothering to check them against the record sleeves. (Apparently this is the case for rock fans all over the non-English-speaking world: they will phonetically know every “word” of a band’s songs, but have no idea what they’re singing.) And even when I did know the words, I confess I didn’t think about them all that hard. The sound of Lee’s voice, the sounds of the words themselves, the way the words were sung—all these things were more important than any meaning they were supposed to convey.

This means I didn’t run out and buy The Fountainhead after discovering 2112. At that point I was reading Stephen King and Fangoria and finding Billy Budd and Portrait of the Artist painfully dull (it probably shows). A friend of mine, the bass player in my high school band and another rabid Rush fan, read Anthem. I can’t remember what he thought of it, and I didn’t borrow it. My single exposure to Ayn Rand’s writing wouldn’t come until ten years later. I was on a packed bus in Buenos Aires, reading over someone’s shoulder. (Come to think of it, that’s how I learned about Beyond the Lighted Stage, too.) The book was in English. I read a page or two, and thought it was some of the clunkiest, most godawful prose I’d ever read. It was a big book, too, and I thought, If this is an English language learner, I should do them a favor and advise them to find a less painful primer.

That book was The Fountainhead, or Atlas Shrugged, I can’t remember which. Rand, anyway. I know it’s churlish of me to judge a writer based on a page of flabby prose. Dreiser (say) worked on a broader canvas, and it only takes a few chapters of cringing before the story sweeps me off my feet. The same is likely true of Rand. Or maybe not. I also know I’m supposed to dislike her ideas, not her prose. Regardless, that was my only direct contact with Rand; otherwise, I have only the hilarious sketch in Tobias Wolff’s Old School and a review in Harper’s of two recent bios to go on. If I had to guess, I’d say that when Peart’s lyrics are good, they’re good in spite of Rand, not because of her. Certainly I don’t need Rand to appreciate or acknowledge the power of those lyrics which still speak to me (a very partial list would include “The Fountain of Lamneth,” “Hemispheres,” “Natural Science,” and “Witch Hunt”). Anyway, who’s to say that Peart, who once described himself as a “left-wing libertarian,” hasn’t “grown out” of Rand, just as I’ve grown into Melville and Joyce? Or that she isn’t as yet a star in his universe, albeit a small, dim one? (In case you’re interested, the only scene in the movie where you can make out what the band is reading shows Lee with The Sound and the Fury, Lifeson with God Is Not Great.)

So … to post or not to post? This will throw a ghastly light over all my previous posts, I’m sure. All trust will be lost (trust is such a fragile thing, and so dearly earned!), all previous thoughts discredited, all endorsements made suspect. It’s a skeleton key for understanding my whole listening past, some vulgar Freudian plot worthy of ‘40s Hollywood, my musical primal scene disseminated throughout the web. I was supposed to get over this. Really. But I keep listening. That’s bad, isn’t it. Is it? I like dinosaurs, too. Sometimes, I watch Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. Jesus, Shark Week. That is bad. Should I have said that? Get out your little notepads, all of you. Scribble scribble scribble. Ah, see, I told you, didn’t I? I’m afraid that’s very bad. Ve-ry bad …

I promise my next rock post will not be a confession. But maybe the movie should have been called Out of the Closet instead of Beyond the Lighted Stage.

And since I promised I wouldn’t talk about it, here are the lines Rand Paul quoted: “Glittering prizes and endless compromises/ Shatter the illusion of integrity.” Ah yes, Mr Paul, but those lines are about music, not Washington. It says “music” twice before in the same verse, and the word “radio” is in the title, and words like “studio” and “concert hall” pepper the lyrics, too. In fact, the theme of the struggle between art and commerce wraps around the album; from “Natural Science”: “Art as expression, not as market campaigns/ Will still capture our imaginations.” Not that you can’t take it all metaphorically, of course; but to be honest, I can’t help but hear the “market campaigns” and “the sound of salesmen” in your rhetoric, as much as in the rhetoric of your colleagues across the aisle; and conversely, I can’t help but hear, in “The Spirit of Radio,” in tone, form and content, a partial self-indictment, a tempering of the anger of 2112 into a deliberation on what it means to be professional popular musicians, to be entertainers as much as politicians are … and yet to hold onto the possibility of retaining one’s honesty (ugh!) and integrity (hurl!) in the process—to finding a balance. It’s an idea that returns over and over in the words and music: Hemispheres, Counterparts; art-rock complexity and pop/hard-rock simplicity; their ongoing shuffle on that step between the sublime and the ridiculous.

But I’m as happy to hear you quote it as anybody. It’s a song so fine not even you can diminish it.

*

If I should apologize for anything, it’s probably the length of this post. Rest dismayed, where Rush is concerned I’m only ever just warming up. And as long as I’m being metacognitive, one other note: this blog as a whole is set up so that I have to approve comments before they appear. This may be wise, since it is open to the internet as a whole, not just CUNY; but I’m going to try to figure out how to set it so that comments appear when they are posted. In case, that is, you ever tried to leave a note and figured the site was busted. By the way, I just read that Paul got the cease & desist letter from the band’s lawyer. Copyright infringement, ya know.

Underground Man

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One dusk not so long ago I was walking around the tract housing development (or “semi-custom,” as some of the locals call it, except that there are no locals there, and no such thing, when you come right down to it, as semi-custom) north of Houston where my parents live, listening to Out to Lunch. I should begin by saying that this is the sort of neighborhood that makes marijuana pointless. The combination of curving streets, dead ends, and nearly identical houses make me want to leave a trail of breadcrumbs. Everywhere I look are the haunted traces of suburban bliss: overturned bicycles on lawns, abandoned playgrounds with empty swings slightly rocking, single-car garages awaiting their occupants. Some days it all reminds me of a façade built on a testing range in the Nevada desert.

That evening, passing house after house in the near-dark, I was struck by a counterintuitive aesthetic kinship. For my typical feelings of disorientation were heightened almost to dizziness by the wonderfully disorienting compositions and improvisations that make up Out to Lunch … so much so that, after walking for a while, I was forced to retrace my steps in order to get back to my parents’ house, even though, as I realized later, I had made almost a complete circle. I could only blame Eric Dolphy for this: for pretzling the insipid curves of the suburban beautiful; for making me believe a man in a bowler hat stood poised with a net behind every door.

I think what Dolphy’s music did was expose the neighborhood’s essential weirdness, dis-integrating it, disassociating every element—every lonely pine tree, every shutter, every glass door—from every other, and making all of them seem like the products of an alien culture. In “Aminadab,” Sartre defines the fantastic this way: you order a coffee; the waiter brings you an inkwell; you say, “But I ordered a coffee”; the waiter says, “That’s right.” In fact, Sartre’s conception of the fantastic as “the revolt of means against ends” is a not a bad formula for describing Dolphy’s music.

Unlike in the suburbs, though, there is no retracing your steps with Dolphy, no equivalent of a trail of breadcrumbs. There is only a staggering forward motion, as of a man riddled with bullets, leading only to the most unexpected places, or to nowhere.

Out to Lunch is probably the pinnacle of Dolphy’s ensemble work. As has been noted, this is because it is the only Dolphy album where the walking rhythm section gives way to free-form improvisation by all the bandmembers. And what a band it is. Bobby Hutcherson’s vibes seem to fit most perfectly into Dolphy’s idiom, forcing us to ask where the vibes were before. (Mal Waldron’s piano occasionally has that vibelike timbre on the Five Spot sets and other albums; but it makes me wish Dolphy had recorded with Earl Griffith, whom I know only from the Cecil Taylor recording Looking Ahead!) The Richard Davis-Tony Williams rhythm section acts in perfect questioning counterpoint to the rest of the band, Williams’ resounding toms and bass drum in particular. In fact, the snare is almost vestigial. Only Freddie Hubbard seems a little out of his element here, as if he occasionally realizes he’s lost his way, and by doing so makes the listener aware of it, too (rather than simply being pleasantly lost with the rest of them, and us).

One thing that needs to be stressed about Dolphy is his gift for melody. It is a paradoxical gift. His melodies are at once catchy and unsingable, groovy and jagged. The heads of “Out to Lunch,” “Gazzelloni,” and other tunes will stay stuck in my head for days after I listen to them; and yet I’m sure my memory of them is corrupted, both in terms of time (for “Out to Lunch,” for example, it’s notoriously difficult to remember where each symmetrical part of the melody ends, as well as how long are the breaks between each part) and pitch (I hear a travestied version in my head, and woe is me if I try to hum them accurately, or figure them out on my guitar). There is something magical about this combination of the seemingly-accessible but perennially-out-of-reach. They’re a long tease; the alto sax, the flute, and the bass clarinet are all laughing at me, each in its appropriate register (whoop, giggle and guffaw, respectively).

Part of what makes the tunes so catchy is their infectious rhythm, which Dolphy carries over into his soloing. I remember listening to him on the Live at the Village Vanguard recordings with Coltrane’s quartet (this while driving a rental car into San Francisco via the Bay Bridge) and realizing that he swung like crazy, yet every note—every note!—was “wrong.” The rhythmic grammar of bebop was being co-opted to speak a new language. If Scott Deveaux is correct (in his awesome Birth of Bebop) that it was the rhythmic more than the harmonic advances that made bebop bebop, then perhaps it was with Dolphy (and the other musicians forging the avant-garde at that time) that bebop rhythm began to find an appropriately crooked harmonic language.

There are other fascinating elements to his soloing, on Out to Lunch and other albums. Dolphy can play a slow, whining blues like nobody else, with a plaintiveness that borders on self-mockery. And then those trills, always too high or too low. The huge leaps across the range of the instruments. The moment on “Out to Lunch” when, after all that empty space (the whole album absolutely revels in space), the alto irrupts back into the song in a long cascade of misplaced notes. On the other hand, I also like the way Dolphy has a standard line that he plays over and over and over again, that he must have played a million times over his short life. He plays it seemingly unthinkingly as he gears up for each next musical idea, returning to it obsessively, though with slight variations. It is the musical equivalent of “ummm …” As such it is the purest expession of his musical thinking, the background radiation of his personality. I imagine it was what he was thinking from the moment he forsook the nipple for the reed.

Dostoevsky’s Underground Man raged against the tyranny of 2 + 2 = 4. Why, oh why couldn’t 2 + 2 = 5? Well, Dolphy is that happy psychotic for whom 2 + 2 is 5. He was utterly, unshakeably convinced of this. It was his great leap of faith to believe so, the law of his particular universe, to which, of course, he was perfectly well-adjusted. It’s probably why he was (reputedly) such a sweet person. And it’s no wonder so many other musicians wanted to come along.

Circus Masada

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Just this: You’re riding the Bx 19 bus up 149th Street to the Grand Concourse. On your headphones, the mad Jewish carnival that is Masada, the song is “Karaim,” on the album Gimel, these words mean nothing to you, but the music still conjures images of acrobats somersaulting between trapezes and elephants stampeding around tents. And what should you see when you look out the window but a black man furiously pedaling a unicycle up the hill beside you, keeping pace with the heaving motor of the bus? This latter-day John Henry, a circus runaway, surely, first to, then from. He’s balanced high above the pavement, his coat is slung over one arm. Such serendipities can happen anywhere. But why do they seem to happen with such greater frequency in New York?

Encore

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If I had to hazard a guess as to what was the musician, ensemble, or band I’d seen live more than any other, it would probably be Maurizio Pollini. The first time I saw him I was in my early teens, and I’ve repeated the experience maybe thirty times since. I know this is a number more commonly associated with rock bands, like The Dead and The Who, but it does make some sense: reunion tours notwithstanding, most rock bands don’t have this sort of longevity; classical and jazz musicians are more likely to age with you (plus the jazz musicians, when they’re local, are playing around town all the time). I saw Pollini play the complete Beethoven cycle in the late ‘80s, and got stage seats in the late ‘90s when the regular auditorium was sold out. There are some pieces by Beethoven, Chopin and Debussy I’ve probably seen him play a dozen times. If for whatever reason a year goes by without his coming to Carnegie Hall, I feel like I’ve skipped a season.

This year promised to be a treat: a series of three recitals, all of them all-Chopin. I bought tickets for all three, and then promptly missed the first during a blizzard of grading. It made me that much more eager for the second, which was last weekend, and the third, which, as I post this, is later today.

Among Pollini’s many gifts, perhaps the chief one—particularly for a pianist who specializes in that instrument’s romantic literature—is his ability to play commandingly at both ends of the dynamic range, from quiet passages of great expressive subtlety to tempestuous, often technically brilliant outbursts. It may just be my aesthetic, but the second seems the rarer gift. Playing the climactic moments of the great Beethoven sonatas (for example) convincingly, in such a way that the listener (at least this one, at least occasionally) is transported by the sublimity of the music, seems to me the true test of romantic pianism. It is in just such moments that many of even the greatest pianists fall short. Maybe it’s the dread of sentiment, or ridicule. (Emmanuel Ax to a student in a master’s class, regarding Brahms: “I want you to play faster and louder.” Chuckles from the audience, but hell, that’s the way I want my Brahms, too; and if you don’t give it to me that way, you might as well go play Haydn.) In fact, one of the things that has most impressed me about Leif Ove Andsnes (of the younger generation of top-notch pianists) is just this confidence at the all-guns-blazing end of the dynamic range.

One other thing about Pollini: he is as close to technically flawless as seems humanly possible. One can’t help but get used to such perfection … and to come to expect it.

Last weekend’s was a lovely program: two nocturnes, two polonaises, four mazurkas, the second ballad, the second sonata, and the opus 49 fantasy. But with the exception of the ballad and parts of the sonata, the execution fell well short of my expectations. Had it been only the fantasy (a piece I’ve always had trouble with, and hence am perfectly willing to blame Chopin for …!) and the occasional missed note, I might not have been bothered enough to write. But my disappointment was general, and seemed to arise from every facet of his playing. A nocturne, for example, should be easy to fall in love with. Just last year he played one as an encore, after a program of breathlessly-executed Beethoven, and my partner and I agreed that it was the finest thing he played that whole evening. So delicate. But on this night the nocturnes did not seduce me; the high notes in particular sounded strident. As for the sonata, the bells of the funeral march were muted—hardly bells at all—while the last movement, which on Pollini’s recording is barely audible, eerily affectless, and blisteringly fast, an undertow of notes, notes, notes, like some dark thought tormenting you, was muddled by dynamics that diminished the overall effect. The encore—the second scherzo—only sedimented my feelings about the whole recital. That technically daunting passage bridging back into the piece’s “A” section was almost painful to listen to.

Pollini, off? Surely it was a sign the end is nigh. I remembered the recent spate of earthquakes, the volcanic eruption in Iceland, the oil spill in the Gulf. Faiths would crumble, relationships end, distraught listeners leap from the balconies …

Or perhaps not. Nobody seemed to notice; the applause was general, thunderous; apparently the heavens don’t fall for such a trifle, as Conrad so aptly put it.

To be honest, by the end I wanted the audience to stop applauding. They’d never seemed so sadistic, or the pianist so much a gladiator, helpless but to engage in combat, now not with the music, but with his own body. I’d seen him play that scherzo before as an encore, obviously exhausted. But this seemed like more than mere exhaustion. And to think he could have come out and played a nocturne. I’ve seen him shrug before sitting down to play an encore, too, as if to say, What the hell. But there was no shrugging last weekend. It was as though he realized that he had no choice, that he was chained to that piano, slave to whipping-post.

*

During the concert, as my disappointment grew, my mind wandered from the music, and I started thinking about the piano’s role in our culture, and about what the public expects of its classical pianists generally, and Pollini specifically. Robert Walser traces the piano’s role as “music’s central vehicle for heroic individualism” back to Franz Lizst’s “invention” of the solo recital in 1839. Little seems to have changed since then, at least in terms of what we desire from our pianists: the incarnation of that heroic ideal, a musical athleticism that we don’t expect even from other classical performers. Not for nothing Chopin was portrayed by a barrel-chested Cornel Wilde in 1945’s A Song to Remember: the thirtysomething dandy already dying of tuberculosis must be dashing and exuberant, and built like Michael Phelps, at least for Hollywood. Today, the classical music industry seems to churn out hot young pianists as fast as supermodels, all bemedaled from this or that international competition. What happens to them as they grow old, or obese, or infirm—that is, as the body interposes itself between the music and the heroic spirit? Do they really age with us, as I said earlier, or are they turned out to pasture?

The above is not true of all pianists. Alfred Brendel, for example, crafted a very different persona for himself, a sort of living New Yorker caricature: bashful, introspective, erudite. (None of this is meant as a criticism of his playing, which I admire.) But Pollini has always seemed to be the poster-boy for romantic pianism. And he has retained this persona as his hair has grown whiter with each passing year.

I’m wondering, then, if what I witnessed last weekend was the passing on of the younger pianist, and if it is a transition that Pollini has not yet fully embraced, or does not quite yet know how to make, or, perhaps, is as yet unwilling to. I’m wondering, that is, if Pollini still wants to be the great athlete of the piano, even as his overwhelming technical facility begins to fail him. Because only an athlete could play the second scherzo for an encore. And last weekend, the athlete stumbled. Thinking back, I’m wondering if the desperate speed at which he played the Beethoven sonatas last year, his near-Puritanical distaste for rests, was a harbinger of this year’s recitals. And I can’t help but remember tubercular Tristram’s desperate, sentimental journey through France in Book VII of Tristram Shandy, fleeing Death and dancing mad circles with peasant girls; and the aging protagonist of John Cheever’s story “O Youth and Beauty!” assembling the furniture around the living room to run the hurdles one last time, about to be shot dead by his long-suffering wife.

All this is not to say that Pollini is a virtuouso without the depth of spirit to interpret these works. Nothing could be further from the truth. Pollini is a brilliant, even generous, interpreter. Today, we tend to be suspicious of virtuosity, as if any such display were necessarily emotionally bankrupt. It’s a combined product, I would guess, of the cult of authenticity and the culture of distrust. But like anything, great technique is as full or empty as the uses the artist puts it to. Virtuosity and affect aren’t so easily extricable from one another as seems to be imagined. Anyway, what was remarkable about this Pollini recital was the way in which a slight shift in the pianist’s ability to phrase and articulate and ornament pulled the curtain aside on the wizard, and all the gorgeous effects on which our emotional engagement with the music depends, and which themselves depend so much on coloring and sustain and a jumbling of musical phrases into a warm, distorted whole, suddenly vanish before our ears.

Finally, an irony to ponder. What does it mean for the music of a terminally ill thirty-five-year-old to be routinely performed by robust men and women of twice that age? Do the inverted ratios of health and age lead performers to perennially miss something in Chopin’s music?

Addendum. While I was in line for the bathroom at today’s third and final recital, I overheard an older gentleman commenting on the previous recital. He was disappointed, too, and when he saw me nodding vigorously, we fell to talking. It turns out that Pollini had been ill, though I’m not sure how he found this out. He thought they should have canceled or postponed that concert, and I agreed. Anyway, I’m just pleased that the infirmity was only temporary. The berceuse today was a gem—how can anyone’s right hand can get those sounds out of a piano? It was also great to hear him back in form for the Bm sonata, a piece which, like Pollini, grows with me. May he continue to run those hurdles for many years to come, Death nipping at his heels the whole way.

And still the nagging question: Why the second scherzo for an encore, if he was indeed sick? And so all the musings about sadism and aging romantic bodies and musical athleticism continue …

Spring, Washington Square

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I love spring in Washington Square, when the musicians come out with the crocuses and daffodils. You’ll be walking through the Square on one of the first warm days of the year and hear the strains of a trumpet or a saxophone you hadn’t heard since the previous fall, and you’ll recognize it immediately, though the notes, and by and large the musicians, are as anonymous as cathedrals.

The other day I took a train to Park Slope hungover and got my taxes done and had lunch and sat down in Ozzie’s café and finished Sweet Hearts by Melanie Rae Thon (what a writer) and then sat drooling and half-dozing watching the shops across the street re-open while the sun emerged from behind clouds and beat through the window. Then I took a train back to the City. I listened to “Perugia,” maybe the most mournful piece on Brad Meldhau’s album Places, while the B train crossed over the East River, listening to the clatter of the train over the music and watching the water and the city behind and before me for the duration of the crossing. The sun wasn’t going anywhere now, and between the satiety of the receding hangover and the slight caffeine buzz and the nostalgia of the music and the view of the city from the bridge high above, all of these things colluded to bring about one of those lingering moments when you think about old lovers and other possible lives, and you feel a secret sad joyful resignation. I felt pleasantly scummy, too, as if I’d never made it home the night before, as if I were still in my itinerant twenties, all full of wanderlust and the spirit of vagrancy.

So I wasn’t ready to go home yet. I got out at Canal and footed it up to Washington Square, on this first real spring day after half a week of torrential rain. How could the Square not look radiant? And who should be playing on this day but Lawrence Clark. Lawrence is a young tenor player I’ve spoken to a couple of times. He seems to have had a champion in the late, great Rashied Ali, whom he played with at the uptown Charlie Parker Festival in 2008. Another time I tried to go see him at The Kitano, but he didn’t show. (An image from that set sticks in my mind: a drop of spit clinging to the edge of the bell of the trumpet, falling, forming again there.) He played brilliantly at the Festival—better, I thought, than the young altoist whom the crowd obviously preferred, and who won the day’s perhaps unintended (but always implicit?) cutting contest. Her sound was more firmly grounded in R&B; Clark, following Ali, has a tendency to play farther out. The crowd that comes out for the Charlie Parker Festival is not the same crowd that goes to, say, The Stone, or Roulette—not even the crowd for the downtown sets on Sunday, so far as I can tell.

Clark’s blowing has a buttery tone reminiscent of Rollins’s. At least, that was what struck me when I sat down to listen to him play, closed my eyes in the sun like I had in Ozzie’s. Jazz sounds almost preternaturally good after a hangover. You surrender yourself to the music, you let it wash over you. And then all the pores in your body open, and the music saturates you. Of course, there’s a time and a place for intellect and processing, for standing back and comparing musical phrases, for thinking the music even as you listen. But this was not such a time or place. Not in Washington Square, at the beginning of the spring, after drinking too much. These are moments for surrender.

It was a trio, sax and bass and drums. The bass player had thick dirty fingers—Brahms had fingers like that—and a red star on his baseball cap. There was a plastic wheelbarrow set in front of them, for donations. A wheelbarrow. It seemed a bit ambitious.

Look at them: they have no right to play music like this, this well. They might have wandered here off the street. They might have just met. History has not anointed them geniuses. They have no right to play music like this, this well. Which, I guess, is one reason they do.

It was like running into an old friend—even though these musicians wouldn’t know me from Adam—because the sound, the sound was back, very much the sound of the Square. (And this remains true, mind you, even as much of the old vibe seems to have migrated north, to Union Square.) I’ve always loved this quote from Eric Dolphy: “Once the music’s over, it’s gone, in the air, you can’t get it back.” But in the Square you can get it back; the circle is inscribed in the square, the music is as cyclical as the seasons, and as transient as the passers-by. That’s the beauty of it: you leave one day in the middle of a song, which fades slowly out of hearing as you walk away; but you’ll pick it up again the next day, or the next week, or the following year. Each band may be staked in a different corner of the park, but the listener lives on the frontiers, the melodies mesh one with another. And in the meantime the other business of the Square goes on around, a Whitmanesque time immemorial of walking-meeting-parting-listening-playing. And so you’re never sad to just be passing through, because you’re never just passing through, because you know you’ll return to this very spot, and the sound will be here, an old friend, waiting, in that one long jam without beginning or end.

Immortal, Beloved

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Immortal_photoThat I am not a true fan of Immortal, the seminal Norwegian black metal band (black as in Satanic, not African-American), but went to their recent show at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple anyway, is a sin for which I am still repenting. What follows is the text of my confession.

I was lost in Clinton Hill looking for the place—I had forgotten to bring the address; all I could remember was the first letter of the street name; the subway station was without an area map—when out of the blue my guardian demon appeared. She was pale, gangly, maybe nineteen years old, with stringy blond hair, and dressed in black from boots to hoodie. I asked her if she knew where the Brooklyn Masonic Temple was; excited, she asked if I was going to the Immortal show; I confessed that I was, and so we started walking to the venue together.

About a block later I could sense that she was becoming suspicious. After all, I didn’t look like an Immortal fan. I was dressed in a blue windbreaker over a quilted chamois shirt that everyone says makes me look like a lumberjack. I had on new jeans, North Face shoes, and a New York City Parks & Recreation baseball cap. I should have been on my way to play tennis, not to a black metal show. In fact, I don’t think she believed I was going to the Immortal show at all. I was really some middle-aged creep in a blue windbreaker preying on nubile young black metal chicks in the middle of Brooklyn.

True, underneath the windbreaker and chamois I was wearing a Mastodon T-shirt: the open-mawed white shark with the legend “Megalodon” in electric red letters. But a prog-metal shirt would hardly convince her that I was anything but a poseur. (Probably better I didn’t engage in any unzipping or unbuttoning in an attempt to show her my shirt. God knows how that might have been interpreted.)

She said, “So, what’s your favorite Immortal album?”

The ultimate fan question! It was like she had peered into my soul. Everything came out then: how I didn’t really know Immortal; how a friend of mine had bought me a ticket; how, had I known the show was forty-five dollars, I probably wouldn’t have come at all; how I had listened to one of the songs from the new album on YouTube and “liked it”; how I had actually seen Immortal once before, a couple of years back, opening for Halford and Testament at B.B. King’s, and had “enjoyed them” (in reality, I hardly remembered them at all, except for their creepy corpse-paint and synchronized thrashing).

Why was I suddenly so defensive? I could justifiably have said that I’d been listening to metal since before she was born. And yet, what would I have been trying to justify? Would there be some sort of litmus test at the door? Would I have to drink the blood of a ritually-butchered goat and recite the Lord’s prayer backwards? Would they at least give me part of my forty-five dollars back if I didn’t make the cut?

She said, “Wow. I never met anybody who was indifferent about Immortal before.”

And with those words it was clear that she was done with me. I had been consigned to the dustbin of metal history, together with my heroes, who were yet older than me.

*

At the show my friend and I bought tickets for beers like we were at an amusement park and commented on the number of hipsters who were crashing the party. I was safely with someone nearer to my own age now, so I could claim old-guard status, and hence a certain degree of authority. After all, whether I loved Immortal or no, I was here because I loved metal; I wasn’t one of “those hipsters” who had come to stand in the back and sneer. I thought, “Thank God for hipsters,” and drank until I almost put that nineteen-year-old Immortal freak out of my mind.

I did end up enjoying the show, as I knew I would—the endless blast beats, the suffocating double bass, the sheer squandered volume of theatrical smoke, the generally eeeeeevil atmosphere they managed to create between the music, effects, and corpse-paint.

But there was something I enjoyed much more than Immortal, and that my non-love for Immortal allowed me to appreciate. It was watching those who did love Immortal. There were fans there as young as eighteen (and maybe younger, despite the age cutoff) and as old as fifty. They were there with their girlfriends or boyfriends or in same-sex groups. They absolutely exploded when the lights went down, and the shadow of the drummer appeared behind the kit, and then the other two members of the trio sprang from the wings in a miasma of noise and smoke. They banged their heads and made devil-horns. They knew all the words, and “sang” them, too, as surely as if the lead singer had said, “Now, boys and girls, aspirate along with me …”

There’s a gesture I’ve been thinking about a lot since that concert. Not the fist, and not the malocchio. The hand is open, palm turned three-quarters up. The fingers are slightly curled—the index finger should be the most extended, the pinky most curled—and taut, so that the hand looks like a claw (see photo). The arm is also rigid, bent slightly at the elbow, and raised over the head. Now, diaphragm tensed, spit the lyrics back at the singer-guitarist, word for word, mirroring his delivery. That was what I saw when I looked around the crowd: dozens of passionate individual performances, souls strung up and together by music, fans demonstrating their intensity to themselves and the rest of the crowd and the band. The arm really has to go up for the words to be broadcast with their full measure of vehemence (unless, that is, you’re also playing the guitar) … the metal version of that much-parodied gesture of singers worldwide, be it opera or flamenco or Irish ballad.

Ah, love for Immortal. What could possibly be Satanic about that?

Convalescing With Miles

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milesA few Fridays ago I was listening to Out to Lunch, WKCR’s weekday afternoon jazz program, as I try to do whenever I have the opportunity. Because Friday is the day I’m least likely to be listening, and because the DJs rotate from one day to the next, and some only work every other week, the voice on this Friday was unfamiliar to me. It was a female voice, a British voice; apparently, it was the voice that DJ’s every other Friday. I was at home, convalescing, or hoping I was convalescing, the process can be so slow, the body so unreliable. And this voice, it seemed better suited to a classical music program than to jazz … but of course it’s ridiculous to associate British accents with classical music, just as it would be to associate New York ones with jazz. The whole ethos of KCR would crucify me for such a prejudice—if, that is, one could be crucified by an ethos, and if it weren’t too ironic to be crucified for a prejudice.

Anyway: I want to thank this DJ, whatever her name is, for playing Miles Davis, and nothing but Miles Davis, on this day, day of hoped-for convalescence. For playing songs from Walkin’, and Seven Steps to Heaven, and Miles in the Sky. New Miles, old Miles, Miles known and un-: I could think of nothing I’d rather have listened to. In the best possible way, and as he has in the past, Miles settled on me. I remember many years ago listening to Kind of Blue and sensing that there was an effortless perfection about Miles’s playing, and a sense of inevitability about his choices. Each note spoke the next one, which looked back upon the last, and which, somehow, could have been no other. And I was convinced of this, even as I understood that, at each moment, he could have chosen any other. And so I walked along with Miles, carried by him, expecting and not expecting each next note, each next note making so much sense that I couldn’t imagine it otherwise; listening, I couldn’t help but say yes, of course, that’s right, as if Miles had just proved to me that this note necessarily follows that one, and the next the next, with all the beauty and certainty of the simplest proofs of geometry. Miles told me there was noplace else to go. And that, in its small way, was comforting.

Miles settles and rolls, never strains or trembles, hoeing that straight, simple line (for a hoe in the hands of an experienced farmer is as expressive a tool as a jazzman’s horn). Wherever he moves—and he never really stops moving—he’s always at home. Such grace and poise and confidence, even in those growled motherfuckers. The result doesn’t sound like improvisation; it has more the feeling of sculpture; even as it unfolds in time, it has a spatial, plastic quality, as if, after he were done, you could hold the entire solo in your hands, turning it; or as if, while listening, you were walking not with but around it. You appreciate it as a whole, even though you can never hear it all at once. Sonny Rollins has been credited with introducing this sort of structural unity to the jazz solo. But I can’t imagine Rollins without Miles; there is the same seeming inevitability of choice about both men’s playing.

I’ve listened to a lot of Miles since that moment many years ago when I realized the above, listening to Kind of Blue, realized but never tried to say it; but I hadn’t really felt it again until this day—felt it and remembered that feeling, remembered what Miles is (as opposed to who he was). And that made me want to go on, and go back, and keep listening. So again, Ms. DJ, with your fine British accent and good taste, and with those vast archives at your disposal, whose name, in this age of the internet, I have chosen to let remain a mystery: thank you. A lot of music is a salve when you’re ill, but some is more salve than others. And then there’s some you just can’t be healed without. Miles fits the last category.

J.S. Bach: The English Suites

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glenn-gould-canadian-pianistWhat struck me listening to the English Suites this time around (the Glenn Gould recording from 1977) is how different they are from each other. Each has its own personality. The second, for example, is expansive and refined, the first with such a long, imposing prelude, culminating in at once the most soaring and static (cathedral-like?) of gigues.* The third is the polar opposite of the second: it is hardly adorned, building patiently on its musical phrases, giving the performer time to settle them at his leisure. The fourth is expansive like the second, but of a romantic mood. The fifth sounds almost impossibly modern. I don’t know why it strikes me this way; Bach was hardly a stranger to chromaticism. As for the sixth, where to begin? At the end, maybe. The gigue is haunting. But here, I particularly appreciate the playful gavotte that directly precedes it: it sounds like children marching.

I first heard these suites, together with the French ones, on tapes a friend of my father’s made for him. I was probably 14 at the time and, an inveterate mixed-tape-maker of rock songs, I quickly copied my favorite sections from a variety of suites together on one side of a cassette; the other side had the first, fifth and sixth piano sonatas by Beethoven (performed by Wilhelm Backhaus), I think, which I had taped from my father’s records; and they, together with a couple of other cassettes of Chopin and Beethoven, and the pieces my father practiced nightly, constituted the core of my identification with classical music when I was a teenager. I made several other tapes, all from my parents’ records, but these first few pieces remain mine in a way nothing has since. The suites were thus all jumbled together and incomplete. So when I listen to them now, it is the suites themselves that seem all mixed up; and whenever I run into an old friend—the bourees of Suite #2, the gavottes of Suite #3—I ask, “What on earth is this doing here?” They still seem more natural where they appear on my old mixed tape than in their “proper” place in the middle of a suite. I like the rhythm and the tension this creates in listening to a suite as a whole, each section more or less familiar, more or less loved.

I should say something about Gould’s playing, for he is no doubt partly responsible for making each suite so distinct (and yet all of them together so distinctively Gould). I have another recording of the suites by Andras Schiff, another pianist I greatly admire, from about 10 years later. I have actually listened to the Schiff recording more, simply because I have so much Bach by Gould that I haven’t bothered to load Gould’s English suites onto my computer yet.** I was struck by the difference. Perhaps Schiff is a bit too high, a bit too serious, for Bach. (He certainly came across that way in the one master’s class I had a chance to see him teach.) Gould is so much more playful, intimate, even irreverent. He seems to dare to do with Bach what the composer might have done himself. I hope that doesn’t sound too theologically author-enamored. But no one else could play the children’s crusade of the sixth suite with those careless near-glissandos and pauses. Nor does he need to overemphasize the low trills and descending arpeggios of the gigue to make it truly haunting. I don’t think this is simply a matter of emotional memory or musical imprinting, either—that is, of the link between my discovery of classical music as a teenager (in the sense of finding a canon of pieces that spoke to me) and my association, surely a common one, of Bach with Gould.

* I can remember the first time I “heard” this gigue, really heard it, driving down old Route 24 through Chatham, New Jersey, onto an exit ramp by the Short Hills mall. Not the most propitious setting for a musical moment of being. But then I’m always unprepared for them; in fact, surprise seems to be an important factor, as a friend of mine, a fiction writer, noticed about similar moments in stories. My musical life is punctuated by listenings which, for whatever reason, transcend all previous and color all subsequent ones. I don’t imagine I’m alone in this.

** As a New Yorker, I do a lot of my listening while walking, and given the limited amount of space on my iPod, I rarely have more than a suite on there at a time, which means I rarely listen to them as a set … yet another example of the way the technology of reproduction affects how we appreciate and understand music.

What I’m Listening To

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Why blog? I’ve asked myself this question more than once. I’ve started and abandoned a couple of blogs already … if creating the space and then never even posting counts. They’re still floating around cyberspace like the corpses of astronauts. (Apparently cyberspace is littered with such corpses. Not a very encouraging factoid for the novice blogger.)

So maybe the better question is, Why NOT blog? Lack of time, lack of patience for working on the computer. But above all, because I’ve never been one for occasional writing. Blog entries give one the impression (at least the illusion) that they were composed on the spur of the moment, and then just as quickly disseminated. To beat the dead horse: gobs of information, a variety of available perspectives … but little space or time for reflection or synthesis.

So. A few months back I was strung out on some bad medication and pretty much all I could do was lay around and listen to music (boo hoo). I’d always thought that, given the amount of energy and resources I expend on music, I should make more time to write about it. God knows I go out and hear enough of it, living in New York as I do. I treat my iPod like the fetish object that it is. I take time over winter and summer breaks to do some reading, unstructured though it might be, about music. I must have something of it in my blood, too, since my father is a conservatory-trained pianist, and I grew up listening to him play, and to my parents’ robust record collection, which my own penchant for collecting mirrors. And then I did take that lovely Writing About Music course as an undergraduate, and have gone so far as to design my own … but more on this later.

Then again, why should I write about music? I’m not a musician, at least not a very good one. Nor am I a music historian or musicologist, so my ability to analyze music and put it into any sort of meaningful context is severely limited. With whom, then, beyond a small circle of friends, would I share my thoughts?

Enter the blog. The blog seems like an ideal space, to borrow Gunther Schuller’s pun, for musing. In many ways, the blog seems not so different from writing for a circle of friends, even as that circle is necessarily much wider. In a blog I don’t feel like I have the pressure to craft something finished, to speak as an academic from a fortress of authority, to contribute anything to a field. I don’t feel that I have to account for what has already been said about (say) Miles Davis, or Bela Bartok, or Tool. Hell, I don’t even have to have a goddamn thesis if I don’t want to (though I will certainly try, good little academic writer that I am). In fact, a more questioning, probing, personal, intuitive approach might be welcome in such a context, and even more likely to elicit comments and suggestions from the combination of idle browsers and occasional experts who cruise these blogs (this being the CUNY Academic Commons). It might even be that such an approach is warranted for writing about as slippery a fish as music.

All this is not to say I won’t work at crafting what I want to say. I’m a compulsive reviser; any and all worthwhile thoughts generally arise through revision; and so, true to form, I will compose all my entries on Word, and then sit on them for a while before uploading.* Among other things, this means that the title of my blog category—“What I’m Listening To”—is bullshit. A more accurate title would be “What I Was Listening To a Few Weeks Ago.” (The title does preserve the illusion of spontaneity that makes the bloggable blogworthy.)

So. My doctor told me not to make any important decisions while I was strung out on those meds, but I went ahead and decided to start a blog anyway. This means I can always blame the meds if I go ahead and abandon this one, too.

As to what sort of entries I will write: As someone whose understanding and appreciation of music is largely intuitive or emotional rather than analytical, they will quite shamelessly delve into personal narrative—that intimate relationship between music and memory—and the role of music in shaping personal and cultural identity. As such, this blog is partly an exercise in self-examination and cultural analysis (as all personal narrative is). Second, they will rely heavily on those tried-and-true crutches of music writing, image and metaphor. And finally, as someone with an evolving literacy in a variety of musical genres (rock, jazz, classical, flamenco, and Latin), and some familiarity with the persons and recordings who/that have shaped these genres—and as someone with at least the rudiments of music theory haphazardly taught to him in the distant past—I will not shy away from either historical or musicological speculation when it seems warranted. Above all, and whenever possible, I will try to be shamelessly exuberant (for, as Blake said, “exuberance is beauty”), and will occasionally make unwarranted, peurile exclamations of like or dislike for some musician, band, piece, or composer. (This is a blog, after all, no apologies are necessary.) All this to say: Don’t expect very much light from this blog … but do enjoy the heat, while it lasts.

There is a second reason for this blog, really an afterthought, but one which, I hope, will be an added incentive for me to keep it going. A couple of years ago, a colleague and I developed a sophomore-level English elective called Writing About Music. It was inspired by and partly based on a course of the same name I took as an undergraduate. That course was developed and taught by Dr. Jonathan Spitzer at Johns Hopkins; his assistant was an Australian whose full name escapes me (his first name was Greg; in some Borgesian alternate universe he would certainly discover this blog). It was probably my favorite class I took as an undergraduate, and I was happily able to get back in contact with Dr. Spitzer and model our course on an updated version of his, including his marvelously extensive bibliography. Anyway, one way I thought to get students writing about music was to have them keep a listening diary in the form of a blog (in their case, through a Blackboard site); and what better way to encourage students to keep such a diary than through example, for better or worse?