Author Archives: helldriver

T-shirts and Wittgenstein

Packing for the 2013 Heavy Metal and Popular Culture conference in Bowling Green, Ohio, the first to be held on U.S. soil, I paused, a button-down shirt in one hand, a Meshuggah shirt in the other, looking back and forth between them, as though I were trying to match socks.

The question of what to wear had never loomed quite so large.

The morning of the first day, my mind was made up for me: I had gone directly from school to Penn Station, to catch the 4 o’clock Lake Shore Limited to Toledo. I was in Bowling Green by 7 a.m. My hotel room wouldn’t be ready for a few hours, so I stowed my bag at the front desk and walked to campus still wearing the clothes I’d taught in the day before: dockers, collared shirt, black dress shoes. It was a chilly morning, the sun just peeking over the rim of the western Ohio plains, wind blustering down the wide flat treeless main thoroughfare. The student union, the hub of conference activities, was at the far end of campus, a mile away.

BGSU is a flagship institution in popular culture studies. It’s still the only place in the U.S. where you can earn a graduate degree in the field, and is home to a renowned library (named after the pop culture department’s founder, Ray Browne) to support research. From the late ‘70s until just last year, the department had resided in a 1932 Sears-designed kit house, the ex-living quarters of four former BGSU presidents. Despite a joint faculty-student effort to save it, the house was bulldozed to make way for a new student health center.

My first impression of the BGSU campus made me nostalgic for the pop culture house, this though I’d only seen it in grainy internet photos. Past the Stroh Center, BGSU’s sports arena, I hooked right into a wasteland of squat brick student barracks; the academic buildings, into whose midst I entered a few minutes later, were hardly more charming. The student union was pretty much what you’d expect: glass and carpet, a cafeteria, chairs fit for dozing …

So I did, and came to a little after eight. A couple of women had appeared, one working at her laptop, dressed like anyone would for an academic conference—suit, spiffy glasses—and another, probably a student, with a purple streak in her hair, peddling logoed totes and guitar picks along with programs and name tags.

Then a third figure appeared, male, wiry and sunchapped, with a long, thin beard and a black cap pulled tightly over his skull, the words VERY METAL written across it. He was the first drop in a deluge: full beards, long hair, earrings, black sweatshirts and trenchcoats, ratty jeans and old sneakers, denim and leather and jean jackets covered with patches … and, of course, black T-shirts with the names of bands on them.

And me? Here I’d had the opportunity to dress for a conference like I would on any other weekend, and I was still in my teaching duds. In my bag at the hotel, one measly Meshuggah shirt. I might at least have pulled it on with the dockers and dress shoes, and made of myself an exquisite corpse.

If you think I’m dwelling on something petty or unrelated to this conference, think again. The blurb on the back of the anthology Metal Rules the Globe (Duke UP, 2011), co-edited by conference co-organizer and BGSU professor Jeremy Wallach, calls metal studies “a burgeoning field”; and when fields burgeon, questions of “Who am I? And what do I study?” necessarily raise themselves. What does it mean to be a metal scholar, with each word emphasized in turn? What are the musical and other signifiers around which the four-decade old genre on which we lavish our attention can be said to cohere? To what extent is metal present sheerly in the clothes, images and iconography of the subculture (or scene, or tribe, or taste public, or whatever) built up around the music? Is it possible to imagine the culture without the music—“metal beyond metal,” as someone cleverly put it? How has the subculture changed in its growing diversity over the last two decades, as global cultures transform local ones, and vice-versa, and more women and minorities distinguish themselves and participate at a variety of levels? It is not without meaning (to quote Melville, ever and anon) that the first two people I saw the morning of the first day were women, or that the first male participant I met had traveled all the way from New Zealand. With questions of identity so much at the center of inquiry, a paper examining modes of dress at a metal conference would have fit right in.

Lest you still think I’m making mountains from molehills: Matt Donahue, a local artist and musician who teaches in the pop culture department, has an ongoing “heavy metal T-shirt project.” He’s traveled around the world, stopping at shows and record stores and other hang-out spots, interviewing fans about what their metal shirts mean to them. There was even a room set up at the conference, next to the exhibit on metal masks and facepaint, for attendees to participate. On Friday night he took an hour so to scroll through a few hundred photos and show a couple of vids. In one, a burly bald guy in a tight black T ranted at the camera, boxing: “What, people think I should grow up or somethin’, that I’m some kind of fuckin’ dork ‘cause I wear this shit? This is who I am.”

This is who I am. I am, frankly, less sure about who I am. I identify strongly with the metal community, whatever that is, but can pass as a rumpled academic on weekdays, when my inability to tie a tie and keep my shirts pressed is interpreted as membership in the absent-minded professoriate rather than as metal-bred sartorial disdain. My beard is closely cropped, my hair mostly gone, though long in the back—a mixture of defiance, nostalgia, and disinterest. I have no tattoos (whatever that means anymore), only the superannuated desire to get one. I even took out my earrings for an MRI a few years back and never bothered to put them back in. But on Fridays, look out: I duck into the nearest phonebooth and come out wearing a Mastodon shirt. What on earth can it mean?

And what can it mean for my colleagues at the conference? Many noted they had alternate lives and fields of study: the sociologist who works with the Jewish community in London, the anthropologist who moonlights as a pianist for weddings, the classical musician who just started teaching a course in heavy metal—a one-time fan who, for reasons at once personal, pedagogical, and scholarly, was looking to re-connect. Style of dress hardly revealed one’s field of scholarly expertise—there was an enormous diversity of disciplines and professions represented, as well as nationalities—but it did say worlds about one’s identity, about the force cutting across and uniting all these creeds and approaches, and about what had drawn so many of us to this flat, dusty college town in western Ohio, to burgeon together over bagels and coffee, and to participate in the ongoing, collective fashioning not so much of yet another identity, as a sort of ur-identity: one that would help us find harmony among at least some those we already possessed, and enable us to navigate more confidently between them.

If this “we” has a father, it is Robert Walser, author of the 1993 study Running With the Devil. Word has it that he is a reluctant father—“the bastard father to the thousands of the ugly, criticized, the unwanted,” as Pantera once said—and his no-show for the opening keynote seemed to confirm this. Poor Professor Wallach was left up there doing a softshoe, waiting for Walser to walk down the aisle. Whispers that this was not the first time it had happened. Whispers that he is embarrassed about his status as metal guru.

In hindsight, I think Walser did us a favor. Running With the Devil may indeed be seminal, but the field, like the music, has moved on. God absent, he can be that much more easily reviled, his shrine toppled, even as his absence makes him that much more unassailable. At the conference, Walser was at once the most consistently cited and consistently challenged scholar. The hole he left at the beginning—of the conference, of the field itself—becomes a vacuum which younger scholars rush to fill. His absence forces us to look into that hole, rather than to him, for our identity; to look to the work of a community of scholars, newer stars around whom intellectual work can be organized. Keith Kahn-Harris, Steve Waksman, Kevin Fellezs: all attended, and all spoke; it was like a children’s story where the books in my office had come to life. And how could it possibly be more symbolic than for Niall Scott, a leading figure in the new sub-subfield called Black Metal Theory, to step in and fill Walser’s shoes? Wallach called it an example of heavy metal community, but it could be more appropriately read as a Beowulfian challenge: Who would dare step into Walser’s shoes? Who would dare take his mantle on this first morning? Scott went on to read a draft of a paper he would be presenting in a couple of weeks at another conference. Called “The Blackening of the Green,” it was a dark, poetic, playful, pro-putrefaction manifesto-critique of deep ecology. It made me feel like I was listening to a resurrected George Bataille read “The Solar Anus.” Scott himself exudes a sort of cheerful nihilism, a warm blackness; one of Slayer’s better titles, “Serenity in Murder,” jumps to mind. I don’t think I saw a band logo break the blackness of his attire the whole weekend. He is a sort of essential darkness, the personification of that “abyss-topia” (his term) he invited us to stare into—that void Walser had left us. No surprise that, later in the weekend, he would be elected president of a brand-new International Society for Metal Music Studies.

Dad may be deadbeat, but mother Deena (Weinstein, Heavy Metal, 1990) was there in force, all spunk and needles, looking never more the bruja, in leather and the darkest of shades, like a blind biker. During one panel I found myself sitting behind a woman who was wearing black fingernail polish, knitting. It wasn’t Weinstein, but for whatever reason I now connect this image with her.

In Running With the Devil, Walser criticized Weinstein for trying to wear the mask of an objective scholar even though she is clearly a fan. It’s not a bad starting point for thinking more heavily about the role of the metal T-shirt at the conference. What were we, really: fans or scholars? Was this an academic conference or a convention, or some hybrid of the two? (N.B.: This is the only academic conference I have been to where people in the audience who were not fans of the subject felt compelled to identify themselves as such.) Is it only much-disparaged metal, always under the boot of the intelligensia, that suffers from this identity crisis, where “metal scholar” sounds like an oxymoron? Or is it the expertise in one pop-culture artifact—Buffy, metal, etc.—that draws the titters, knowing smiles, and expectations of shoddy work by “scholars” overly invested in their subject of inquiry, clouding the serene waters of academic investigation? The metal T-shirt on the academic body seems to me a cipher for these issues.

Interestingly, what became evident over the course of the weekend at Bowling Green was the extent to which fandom and scholarship can be mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive. Keith Kahn-Harris brought this out most forcefully in his keynote, when he suggested that there are kinds of “embodied knowledge,” ways of knowing through the body, that privilege the thoughtful, self-reflexive participant over the detached observer. This is not to idealize the participant-as-scholar in the place of the observer, but rather to problematize both the observer, who comes with a baggage all his own, and the binary that constructs the two as opposites. I am aware that this is not particularly new; feminists have been muddling the investigation-participation binary for a generation, and anthropology has been enriched by the practice of auto-ethnography, of which there were several interesting examples at the conference (a woman who studied underground metal venues in Leeds in part by recording her experiences as a gendered participant; a fellow traveler with female extreme metal fans in North Carolina (“Blasting Britney on the way to Goatwhore”); a self-described “bogan,” or working-class thrash metal fan from New Zealand, studying his own community). Yet, as fans and scholars, we are still haunted by the question of what it means to be both.

In his work on extreme metal scenes, Kahn-Harris builds on the work of Sarah Thornton to define two different forms of subcultural capital:* mundane and transgressive. The former consists of the “everyday activities that [constitute a] scene …—rehearsing, corresponding, trading, buying CDs”; it is “produced through a sustained investment in the myriad mundane practices through which the scene is produced as collective practice,” and is demonstrated “by knowing the complex histories of the scene and by having heard the music of its vast number of bands” (“‘You Are From Israel,’” MRTG 211-12). Transgressive subcultural capital, on the other hand, “is claimed through a radical individualism … It involves an attempt to be different, to challenge and transgress accepted norms within and beyond the scene …. ‘[G]reat art’ produces forms of capital that can be transferable into and out of other scenes; it is … a particular version of a form of capital that exists wherever artists and other individuals seek to attack taboos and ‘the mainstream.’” (214-15). Working in equilibrium with each other, the two forms of capital help to create a scene that is at once stable and innovative (215-16).

Unlike metal, academia is closely associated with what Pierre Bourdieu calls the “field of power”: the cultural capital it bequeaths is (still supposedly) convertible into economic and other forms of power. A discipline like popular culture studies, however, creates an interesting wrinkle, since it grants symbolic power to a kind of “savoir-faire”—Bourdieu’s term for the display of cultural capital—not convertible into other forms of capital. (E.g., at your college’s fundraising cocktail party, no one is going to give a shit that you know Dennis Stratton was Iron Maiden’s original second guitarist. In fact, it may be a deficit.) Like gender and ethnic studies, pop culture was a one-time academic coup; that it still sits uneasily in the academy is suggested by the aforementioned demolition of the pop culture house, which can be read as an act of disciplinary punishment, a reactionary swing of the wrecking ball back toward a more narrow conception of scholarship. At the same time, pop culture studies—Cultural Studies as a whole, really—has a well-recognized tendency to behave like a music subculture, with its own rock-star profs, theory groupies, hip brands, and so on. (Capital may be accumulated and displayed differently in different fields, but the rule that it must be displayed is field-neutral.)

In this light, rather than imagining academia imports a sanctified objectivity into the degraded fan discourse of a music subculture like heavy metal, it may be more productive to examine what sort of a symbolic economy is constituted when the two come into contact under the aegis of pop culture studies. Among metal scholars, knowledge of genre esoterica may be even more highly valued than in metal subculture per se. In this sense, we are distinguished by the degree of mundane subcultural capital we possess and, in Veblenesque fashion, conspicuously display—although its academic currency is limited to the tiny (but burgeoning!) market represented by the conference.** On the other hand, the many bona fide academic fields represented at the conference, the academic subculture called pop culture studies among them, aligns metal studies with the field of power; imported into metal subculture, the (mundane) capital of academia is transgressive. Knowledge of a variety of theoretical languages, partly field-specific, partly cross-disciplinary; the ability to toss around names of philosophers and critics as easily as those of bands and albums; an openness to diversity in gender and sexual orientation; and a political orientation that puts us rather to the left of the more populist mainstream metalhead—all of these things designate us as interlopers, “part of the scene but not of the scene” (Kahn-Harris 215), bearers of transgressive capital which we flaunt (in the scene proper) to our peril, but which, like good narcissists, we imagine is necessary to its progressive evolution. There was thus a tendency at the conference to see those engaged in metal studies as a sort of scene avant-garde, movers and shakers who, through minority-collective action, could spearhead generic innovation. This is the proper answer to the occasionally-expressed fantasy that the community of scholars gathered in the room was congruent or even identical with heavy metal subculture—a fantasy Weinstein was quick to deflate. The bearers of transgressive subcultural capital are never congruent with the scene; they aspire to make the scene congruent with them, aware of the risks this entails, indeed, thriving on these risks. (Then again, there may be no genre of music better poised for transgressive transformation.)

It might be asked who were the outsiders in Bowling Green, who the insiders: the producers, journalists and musicians, some of whom adopted the conventions of academic discourse for their presentations? or the scholars, some of whom wore metal T-shirts to announce their dual citizenship and difference from the “pure” academics, i.e., the musicologists, literary scholars, and others with only a passing interest in the subculture? Actually, everyone with a stake in the conference was a potential insider, engaged in forging, and being forged into, a new alloy. Between the various disciplines represented and the subculture of heavy metal, itself a heterogenous mix, we were participating in the evolution of a subfield, the construction of a new “insider” identity and discourse—one where the language of the fan subculture does not so much puncture the academic as give it a new (off-) color;§ where Pig Destroyer and Pierre Bourdieu rub shoulders in the same clause; where the grain of our voices whittles them into a new coherence. We were building an altar on which to sacrifice a binary that won’t stay dead.

One more thought: the problem of prestige has as much to do with the newness of the subfield as with its much-disparaged object of study. Rick Wallach, who I believe is still president of the Cormac McCarthy Society, once noted (a little more than a decade ago, I think) that he was writing at a moment when the study of McCarthy’s work was moving from having to legitimize McCarthy’s place in the canon to a time when that position was assumed, and the critic could turn to more purely scholarly investigation. What I find particularly fascinating is that those with a passionate investment in McCarthy’s writing—in other words, fans who also happened to be academics—opened up a door for a wider group of scholars to appropriate and write about his work. Exuberant fandom, then, can be the foundation on which a subfield is constructed. Perhaps all passions are scholarly passions in embryo, and vice-versa.

And in all this, the heavy metal T-shirt? It signified the need to perform the mundane rites of metal subculture in order to assert a particular scholarly identity distinct from the academic mainstream. The black T-shirt hugging the scholar’s body becomes a metaphor for both the embodied-ness of the participant and that body’s sublimation into academic language: the logo at the center, the obligatory blackness surrounding it.

For Saturday night the conference organizers put together a show with six Toledo metal bands at a Bowling Green dive bar. I’d already been sneaking downtown during the brief lunch and dinner breaks—the local hippie hangout The Happy Badger and Grounds for Thought café/used bookstore. As it turned out, the campus straddled the wasteland of highway and chain stores on the one side, and the much more charming old part of town on the other, full of colorful houses and a suitably gothic city hall.

At the bar I fell into conversation with a couple of conference folk. It turned out I wasn’t the only one with T-shirts on the brain, and, through feints to a panel on metal and community, we ended up doing quite a bit of wondering aloud about the rites and practices associated with “membership,” and how the T-shirt negotiates status. For example: Is it proper to wear a T-shirt of the band you’re seeing to their show? What limits exist as to what one can wear to a show and still blend in? (This has changed, by the way, as the crowd and bands have aged; you see a lot of pinstripe buttondowns nowadays, as grownup suburban kids go straight from their white-collar jobs to a venue.) Who can actually wear the shirt of the band nobody’s heard of? Who can wear the shirt nobody’s seen of the band everybody’s heard of? And what happens if you think you’re wearing the coolest, oldest, most obscure shirt by band X—call it shirt A—only to find that someone else is wearing a yet older and more obscure shirt of the same band—the dreaded shirt B? What can you do but hang your head, or slink around in the corners, or cross your arms over your chest and try to look natural, or run back to the hotel for another shirt, or something to cover up this one—maybe a dress shirt with the top button undone, so that the black T underneath appears as a sort of inverted priest’s collar? How ostentatious we are! How ruthless! No wonder the brightest among us just arrayed themselves in the purest black, a black into which all logos dissolve(s) and any can be imagined, expressing the essence of metal without recourse to the gladiator-pit of savoir-faire. There is something seductive about this black metal theory stuff indeed.

The point is, no matter how much we stand back and chuckle about it, no matter how much smarter we think we are, we do care about this stuff. We were in Bowling Green because we liked to think about this stuff, too, to be at once inside and out, to toggle between body and mind, to sully each in the other.

The subcultural capital had been flying all weekend, as the BGSU student union was turned into the floor of a metal stock market, scholars’ reputations were ruined in a matter of moments as T-shirt trumped T-shirt, participants were asked whether they had heard of obscure metal bands in far-flung locales, and one keynote speaker, Laina Dawes, confessed to be a “snob” because she was only interested in people who were out regularly supporting their local scenes—no “fair-weather fans” allowed in her pool. She actually had a good reason: as a black woman and a metalhead, her life had been one long battle to defend her identity against, on the one hand, a family and community who wondered why she didn’t listen to “black music,” and on the other a subculture that asked the question posed in the title of her memoir: What Are You Doing Here? (Dawes, as someone cattily noted in the Q&A, had decidedly not dressed metal.) Dawes is just a particularly stark example of what the genre as a whole has faced, and the reason metalheads have worked to carve out an identity against the elite and pop mainstreams. Reaction or no, irony or no, it is sad to think that the only way such an identity can be achieved is by aggressive policing of generic and subcultural boundaries. Are you authentic enough to join our church? Beware of poseurs, of outsiders, of coloreds, of injuns, of girls, of those who would ruin it, of those who aren’t sincere, of those whose love is not true. (The recent phenomenon of pop starlets enamored with Iron Maiden T-shirts almost makes me want to eat my sarcasm.) We’ve begun moving beyond a metal scene that is white, male, and heteronormative; if so, rather than allowing other forms of cultural capital to fill the vacuum—forms which, because they reflect the purported meritocracy of broader capitalist society, are presumed to be natural—perhaps it’s time to start imagining community beyond capital, cultural or otherwise, created by beings who are not inherently “capital-maximizing,” just as we have begun to imagine metal beyond metal.

Not to sound too much the missionary, but what if we envisaged community as an opportunity for inclusion rather than exclusion? A friend of mine, a writer, would always say he “envied me” when I told him I had not read this or that great work of literature. What he envied was my yet-to-come first encounter with a masterpiece. It was a little patronizing, maybe—he is five or six years my senior—but genial. A little more of this attitude in metal might go a long way. Imagine a sixteen-year-old kid surfing the internet, discovering Ride the Lightning for the first time. How can I not envy him (or her)? It is an envy particularly strong because it is mixed with nostalgia.

The easy availability of so much music through the internet—what Kahn-Harris referred to provocatively (and, I think, correctly) as a “crisis of abundance”—and the explosion of subgenres in metal has increased the number of fan positions and identities available. When items were scarce and required effort to obtain, Kahn-Harris noted, the boundaries of scenes were clearer. Today, with minimal interest and leisure time, one can occupy any number of positions along the continuum between a fractured, multiple center and their many peripheries, making the boundary lines much less clear. Simply put, to call oneself a metalhead today is a much more complex proposition than it was twenty-five years ago; and to kvetch about “weekenders” seems out of touch with the myriad other cultures and identities that coalesce around and impinge upon metal in our historical moment. I would guess there is an element of nostalgia here, for a time when scene boundaries were clear and “poseurs,” a word with such a quaint ring, more easily identifiable. Yet, we continue to operate according to this desire to appear insiders, to be in the good graces of our dearly-authentic peers—to have them authenticate us; there is no other way to be sure—to hysterically affirm our insider-ness, our identity, in the face of threats to our egos. All of us float around some mystical generic center, carrying the baggage of a hundred other identities, and of a highly individual archaeology of taste, each of us wearing a mask in the form of a T-shirt that we have spent the better part of our lives and the best part of our selves fashioning.

Anyway, by Saturday night everybody knew everybody, and everybody was dressing down, so to speak. The MLA woman I had seen on the first morning had put on a black leather jacket. The French rock critic, whose plaid shirt had made him look like an indie rocker snuck into the conference to sneer, came in wearing an old grey denim, tattered and faded as a well-loved paperback. Some looked like they had slept in their clothes for the past three days. For others it was the plaids and chamois that had sloughed off, revealing the black metallic skin beneath, at once soft underbelly and magic armor.

After the T-shirt discussion I listened to one of the bands for a while, and then approached another group: two who had presented on gender in extreme metal, and one Canadian musicologist who had analyzed death metal vocals with a computer. The latter pointed to my Meshuggah shirt. Was I into polyrhythms? I told him I was. Did I play drums? Indeed I did; at least, I had used to practice West African patterns with a drummer friend. We brought our beers to the nearest table. He wanted to play polyrhythms with cross-accents. We started with a simple 2 against 3, but entering on opposite beats, in something like the rhythmic corollary to the harmonic concept of imitative polyphony. Then the boyfriend of one of the two women came over. It turned out he was a drummer. She had wanted to go home. Too late, too late. I recommend a shorter leash next time, my dear. Now we were three, and the number of permutations exploded. We did the same exercise, but accenting the different beats on 3, listening to the “center” travel around the table. Then we got more ambitious: 3 against 4, 3 against 5, 7 against 2 and against 4; we started using our glasses, pens, any other objects within our reach to make the cross-accents clearer. We would all get it for a while, but it was hard not to start laughing, particularly when the death-metal analyzer would shout, “Oh my God, this sounds just like fucking Sepultura!” (the Brazilian extreme metal band known for incorporating polyrhythms and other elements of indigenous and Afrodiasporic percussion into their music; see Idelber Avelar, “Otherwise National,” in MRTG for an illuminating discussion). We would fall apart, like overzealous jugglers hurling pins at each other. Then we would decide drinking more might help. We did this until they closed the bar.

Ah, heavy metal community. And it all started with a Meshuggah T-shirt.

I’ve only written one properly scholarly article on metal, which started as a talk at the December 2006 MLA convention and was eventually published under the title “Heavy Melville” in Leviathan in 2009 (link at right). When I started researching the paper, I remember being struck by the fact that almost all the articles on heavy metal were at the John Jay library. John Jay is the criminal justice college in CUNY, and almost all the articles were about whether and how heavy metal contributes to social deviance. (Yes, this is partly what prompted me to write “Vermis Odium,” 02.11.13.) There was very little in the databases analyzing heavy metal and culture, or (God forbid) heavy metal as music. The only books I found were Walser’s and Weinstein’s. I somehow missed Harris Berger’s Metal, Rock and Jazz—it would have been enormously helpful in organizing my discussion of heavy metal fan communities—while Glenn Pillsbury’s and Kevin Kahn-Harris’s studies were just on the cusp of publication.

Focused on questions of prestige and aesthetics, “Heavy Melville” represents only about a third of my original argument; the rest, about form and gender, I had to cut for length. Someday, perhaps, they will form part of a book chapter. If they do, I’ll consider myself lucky to be working at a time when there is such a thing as ISMMS, with its on-line scholarly bibliography, a journal in which to publish scholarship (planned for 2014, fingers crossed), and a community of scholars to read and listen to and bounce ideas off of. I’m already happy to know that I’m not the only one who has taken on Walser’s idea that the guitar solo represents “freedom,” or who has been fascinated by the hand gesture I tried to describe in my now three-year-old review of Immortal at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple. (There is a high-profile metal blog called Invisible Oranges, the name drawn from that very gesture.) As for my T-shirt fetishism and missed opportunity to both present and re-present: apparently I’m to get another chance, in Helsinki, in 2015.

I’m already thinking about what to pack.

* Thornton herself builds on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, that is, capital symbolically understood as a “resource that can be convertible into forms of power in particular settings” (Kahn-Harris 204). The difference between subcultural and cultural capital is that the former does not mirror the dominant position in what Bourdieu calls the field of power, which “represents those forms of capital (economic, educational, and so forth) that have the most currency in society as a whole” (204). Instead, subcultures set up alternative hierarchies where capital is not so easily “convertible into economic capital and to positions within the field of power.” See Kahn-Harris, “ ‘You Are From Israel, and That Is Enough to Hate You Forever’: Racism, Globalization and Play Within the Global Extreme Metal Scene,” Metal Rules the Globe (Duke UP, 2011), ps. 200-226 (particularly 204-218).

** While it would be stretching or even inverting Kahn-Harris’s terms, it is fruitful to imagine the opposite: that the mundane subcultural capital of something like metal is transgressive, and potentially transformative, of academia, and of the contours of the field of power. This is somewhat to put the cart before the horse, since it is the attention of those fields congruent with the field of power that converts once-subcultural capital into cultural and other forms of capital proper. But there is, there must be, a force exerted from below that drives such shifts, when mainstream and high culture fields absorb the creative energy of subcultures, coverting once red-lined cultural property into something that has currency in the field of power, and changing what gets to count as culture. (This is the moment when the college president smiles at you and says, “Dennis Stratton was fine, but he was no Adrian Smith.”)

§ An example: By the time the scholar at the first Friday morning panel on race and gender apologized “for the [mostly racist, homophobic] language” in YouTube comments, the F-bomb had already been dropped a few times the day before. Forty-five minutes later, the last presenter prefaced his paper with the words, “This is the best fuckin’ panel I’ve ever been on.” Laughter and applause from the audience. Truly, it was one of the best fuckin’ panels I’ve had the pleasure of attending.

Three Years in the Pit

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Time again to wander through the well-stuffed graveyard of my literary ambitions, whistling as I go, bending now and again to re-read inscriptions, I, patriarch of this obscure family of stones, one such yard among many thousands, some long-ago abandoned, some barely able to keep up with their parade of dead, some of a rare gothic beauty, so that, like the Recoleta in Buenos Aires, they draw millions of visitors annually to leave flowers and pinwheels and scrawled messages for the departed. In these graveyards the stones never weather, even the most ancient engravings are still legible, and even the oldest flowers smell as though they had been picked this morning. The pinwheels never fade, though neither do they turn. And the stones cannot be overturned, and the ground neither heaves nor settles, and the graves will not be robbed. If a stone disappears, it takes the whole graveyard with it, and leaves not a trace—for what stone can claim the memory of the vanished yard itself, of a lineage, a house, a clan?

I am patriarch, but also gravedigger and stonecutter. I make memorials; this is my chief occupation. Custody may be shared with Mother Experience, but the stones are all mine. This arrangement pleases me. The children pass away so quickly, you see. But the stones, the stones remain. I find them very companionable. And if the graves are never robbed, there is good reason: there is nothing to steal. These stones are as much cenotaphs as the marble tablets in Whaleman’s Chapel. Says Ishmael to the reader, about the bereaved: “Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say—here, HERE lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave.”

The bodies—the music of experience behind each of these stones—are similarly lost at sea, in depthless Time; they survive only in the inscriptions, in the fantasy the latter create that a body is buried somewhere beneath. Dig as much as you like, your shovel-blade will never strike a coffin’s hull. If indeed Ishmael’s body was “but the lees of [his] better being,” then what price resurrection? Resurrection be d—-d! As for Faith, I’ll put mine in those marble tablets, or rather in the words cut in them. Aye, Helldriver, Ishmael’s happy fate is thine, as it is all of ours: “a stove boat,” says he, “will make me an immortal by brevet … [through] a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity.” Faith may be a jackal, but the poor creature starves here—the mere idea of death is not enough to sustain him. It is the inscriptions, only the inscriptions that sustain me; I hope and fear that they are my true substance; my eternity, dear Ishmael—like yours—is anything but speechless!

Wandering among the year’s stones, I suppose the first thing to note is that the Pit has diversified—not in theme or purpose, of course, but in style and form. Scott Burnham, in the marvelous final chapter of his 1995 book on Beethoven, calls for rethinking the way academics in particular talk about music.* While I can’t really blame Burnham for my own evolving approach to writing about music, his words do remain a touchstone and an inspiration. (Perhaps professors of music should be more careful what they wish for?) Overall, there is more in the way of creative dialogues with music—more fiction, pastiche, parody—more play—than in the previous two years, though these remain scattered among the more traditional reviews, cultural analyses, personal reflections, and thoughts on pedagogy.

I also wanted to take a moment to clarify one aspect of my process. I’ve noted that I sometimes revise and post older pieces. Now, if an event is involved—usually a concert—there is always a lag between experience and text, usually a few weeks, sometimes more. Sometimes, I work the lag into the piece, as in the year between the show and the post that became “Animistic” (5.18.12). Sometimes, a concert review becomes part of a longer reflection on a genre or band, or I’ll wait a few months and bundle some shorter reviews in a single post. Some pieces, like my by-now-mythical post about Scarlatti, have been in draft form for going on two years; I keep turning back to do more reading and listening; I dread the monstrosity it threatens to become. The point is that I only call attention to something as a revision if it was actually finished and drawer’d before this blog was launched back in 2010.

“Year of the Oh” (3.6.13): In an earlier draft of this post there was more about gender and ethnicity in jazz. A very interesting discussion a couple of weeks back about women in heavy metal prompted me to reflect. If one calls too much attention to an individual musician’s gender (or ethnicity, or whatever), it smacks of tokenism. If one overlooks it, one ignores the very real disparities that still exist, in jazz as much as in other genres. How then to balance drawing gee-whiz attention to (say) gender, and ignoring it entirely? Perhaps I was thinking about this catch-22 when I decided to cut (more likely I was just concerned about length). What makes Oh’s situation particularly interesting is that she is a threefold anomly: in terms of gender, ethnicity, and choice of instrument. I hardly had to face such a dilemma writing about Kazzrie Jaxen (“All That Is Solid,” 12.19.12): disparities notwithstanding, women have been a deep presence in jazz piano since the ‘30s, and Jaxen, bright and wandering star though she is, stands on the shoulders of that tradition, as well as the traditions of classical and avant-garde piano. Anyway, later at the same venue, though not during the same discussion, someone commented that in indie rock, the (electric) bass was one instrument it was “okay for girls to play.” Given Oh’s obvious and deep debt to rock, do we have this obscure rule of music/genre/culture to credit for her evolution into bass-playing bipedalism—and perhaps for the presence of other female bass players in jazz as well?

Reviewing some previous jottings, I actually came across a page of notes I had missed about the Soundscapes Vanguard show. The details are useless now, but the thoughts they prompt about the role of the bass in jazz and other musics might be worth mentioning. Because of its pitch and usual place among the rhythm instruments, the bass is always present, but not always heard—something I alluded to about William Parker’s playing in “Two Free Jazz Epitaphs” (12.7.12). It reminds me of something Tobin, the priest, says to the unnamed “kid” in Blood Meridian: that he’ll know the voice of God has always been present when he stops hearing it.** This is the bass: the Voice that keeps the stars aligned and the planets on their respective axes and orbits, though we only really notice it’s there when things go to hell. It’s the reason Hendrix played so much cleaner with Billy Cox than with Noel Redding: Cox, the Voice, keeps Jimi on the straight and narrow. Redding was but a slovenly demiurge. This is also why a great bass solo is such a show-stopper: if you’re actually going to hear the Voice, you need the quiet of the church; the rest of the music has to stop, or nearly stop, and this creates a space that doesn’t exist for the other soloists—even for a soloist who plays an unaccompanied set. A great bass player knows how to exploit that silence, to frame him or herself in the contours of the sound that precedes and follows.

From reading Charles Rosen’s companion to the Beethoven sonatas, I learned that the beginning of the Opus 2 No. 3, which I noted gave one of the young pianists at the Cincinnati World Piano Competition difficulties (“Closer Than They Appear,” 8.4.12), is “famously awkward to play”—which tells me a little something about the presumed hierarchy of virtuosities. And then just the other day I had the chance to see the marvelous 1998 film about Svatoslav Richter, The Engima, at the Walter Reade. There, Glenn Gould calls Richter “one of the age’s great musical communicators.” Unlike a Paganini or Liszt, who made the act of performing apparent to the listener, Richter used his “enormous personality … as a conduit” between the music and the audience, allowing them to focus on the music itself rather than the performance. This is fairly close to what I was trying to say about the Hungarian pianist Bogdan Dulu in the same post, using Emerson to do so. Emerson or not, I could hardly have said it with anything approaching Gould’s authority … or with that smarmy erudition, in what sounds suspiciously like a ‘30s Hollywood “British” accent.§

Finally, about an old, old post: I was listening to the Eric Dolphy/Booker Little Memorial Album the other day—this is the third installment in the Five Spot recordings, the quintet also featuring Mal Waldron and Eddie Blackwell. Listening to “Booker’s Waltz,” I realized something that had been a bit of a mystery for me when writing about Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints” (7.26.10). There, I commented on the enjoyable effect produced when the accent from the drums comes a fraction of a beat before the bass. What I realized from “Booker’s Waltz”—and the same holds true for many if not all jazz waltzes—is that it’s a 2-against-3 rhythm with the two swung.§§ I guess this is what I meant when I said that some of the things that are fascinating and mysterious to a listener may be common practice to the musician.

It’s always fun to make such discoveries oneself, though I confess that, when I started this blog, I had rather hoped its place on the CUNY Commons would mean the occasional itinerant music scholar might wander by, sniff, squat, defecate, and pass on. (“A flatted fifth? Are you sure you don’t mean a flattened fifth? A squashed fifth—like a cockroach?”) Perhaps my good humor constipates them.

As long as we’re talking about graveyards, I should take this opportunity to chisel a line about two Commons yards abandoned or vanished: Footenotes and Librarianship in Lower Manhattan. The latter tossed the occasional asphodel into my Pit; many thanks for the recommendation of Chris McDonald’s book on Rush—it now occupies a happy place on my shelf between Will Hermes’ Love Goes to Buildings on Fire and Steve Waksman’s This Ain’t the Summer of Love. I hope the bibliographizing project goes well. As for Footenotes, obviously an enormous hole has opened in the Commons, like those gluttonous sinkholes swallowing homes all over Florida. I hope that with our collective hard work and goodwill we can manage to fill it. I promise to do my part, in the same manner I have always filled such holes: with prayers, slurs, cries, expletives, screams …

* “Rethinking music through the notion of presence and consciousness allows us to disturb the processual, cumulative standpoint to which we have grown so accustomed. If we can thus attenuate the valuation of process, we will be less inclined to read a composer like Schubert as the negative half of a binary opposition, as “process-minus,” or Beethoven simply as “process-plus.” Instead, we will ask why we value the presence of any given music and how we are present in the experience of that music. This is more difficult to do than it may seem, for the attempt to thwart current academic discourse is not to be construed as a refusal to think, in favor of some “be here now” haziness, a “dumbing down” in order to encourage emotional groping—it is rather the challenging business of talking about why music matters to us as something more than the occasion for a specialized branch of academic study. Indeed, this is the most difficult thing to do: although we all understand that music is vitally important to us, we do not yet possess a discourse equal to that understanding.” (Burnham, Scott. Beethoven Hero. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995.) Perhaps “discourse” could be pluralized?

** “When it stops,” said Tobin, “you’ll know you’ve heard it all your life. At night, when the horses are grazing and the company is asleep, who hears the grazing?” “Don’t nobody hear them if they’re asleep,” said the kid. “Aye. And if they cease their grazing who is it that wakes?” “Every man,” said the kid. “Aye,” replied Tobin. “Every man.” (Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian)

§ Or, as I have learned, a “cultivated Canadian accent of half a century ago.” See Mark Kingwell’s wonderful description of Gould’s voice in Extraordinary Canadians (the Gould chapter is currently available on line).

§§ If you tap out a 2-3 polyrhythm and then let your two-hand lag a little, you will hear this. You can work up to this by counting triplets for each three, and then, instead of tapping the two-hand directly between the second and third beats of the three-hand, tap two-thirds of the way through (on beat 3). In other words: ONE two three one two THREE one two three in the left hand, ONE two three ONE two three ONE two three in the right.

The Apotheosis of Blitz

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How did little Blitz grow so tall?

I’d been busy watching the slow striptease of that black satin shirt, a button here, a button there—normally he’d be as topless as a go go girl by the set’s end, this small, gamey man with the boxer’s nose smashed onto his face and the glowering blue eyes. Tonight, though, he only has forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes! “We’re runnin’ out of motherfuckin’ time here,” he cries, in a voice that distills twenty-five years of Turnpike grit and Jersey mockery, the voice of an old boardwalk barker or casino whore: wheezy, grating, peppered with expletives, and pierced now and again by hoarse, squealing laughter. He’s trying to get himself off, you see, and he hasn’t yet, and he’s runnin’ out of motherfuckin’ time. When he stands hunched in front of the mic, his head stutters more than bangs, somebody pull the clutch out, Bobby’s stuck. And those big entrances: sprinting for the edge of the stage, catching the mic stand along the way, tilting it over one knee; he has to time them just right to pick up the first words of the verse post-bridge. But with all the head-stuttering and sprinting, with “Rotten to the Core” and “Electric Rattlesnake” and “Wrecking Crew,” with the shirt that comes off in dribs and drabs, he’s still not convinced. And so neither are we. And though we try to give him the energy with our own violent movement and adoring expletives, we know Blitz isn’t there.

And then, during “Elimination,” it happens: Suddenly he is atop the monitors, balancing on one foot, splayed, enormous, chest heaving, driven there by the fury of the music, by the jackhammer in his voice, by the cut-tin edges of his breath driving through that scream, eliminate eliminate eliminate ELIMINATE!—newly tall, this electric man with the boxer’s nose and eyes that dare you to be tall, too. Now the whole band is ready for “Fuck you,” they needed “Elimination” to get them to the brashness of “Fuck you.” And here again, as the song nears its end, Blitz climbs atop the monitors—but slowly this time, squeezes his legs together, holds out his arms, middle fingers raised. A self-crucifixion in blasphemy, or at least vulgarity; the stiffly-raised fingers are the nails from which he hangs. Fully unbuttoned, the shirt clings to either shoulder; the belted pants ride low on his hips, exposing the join of thigh and belly, just shy of decent; his body is a braid of muscle, and entirely hairless, jerked, it seems, by sun, tar and rage. A mirror-Christ. In that moment I am sure he will ascend, hover a few feet over the drum riser in a halo of noise and power, the thin raiment of his shirt still clinging to him, and then disappear up through the lights, his body but the husk and the echo of that voice, its flesh totem.

Somewhere between the becalmed pose of inverted worship and the fragging on the grenade of his own rage—somewhere in that cross of sky-daring rebellion and sneering martyrdom, the soul of metal.

Four Quartets

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The Takacs Quartet in 2012, photographed by Peter Smith

Quartets seem to be in the cultural crosshairs of late, at least judging from two recent middlebrow movie releases, The Last Quartet and Quartet (both 2012). If the latter, a geriatric Brit comedy set in a home for retired musicians, isn’t about a string quartet per se, it’s perhaps that much more an indication that quartet-ness has come to be regarded as a figure for community, a ready-made dramatic framework for exploring the dialectic between individual and group, the converse perils and joys of intimacy and isolation, and the struggles and strains behind finding a coherent, collective voice.

Watching the Takács Quartet in action during their master class at Weill Recital Hall last week was an engrossing reminder of these dramas of collaboration. The subjects were two of Beethoven’s late quartets, the Opus 131 and 132; the participants, three young quartets, the Spruce, Linden, and Attacca. It also made for an interesting contrast with my own previous experiences of master classes, all of which had been piano. When the pianist’s clear, single voice of authority is split in four, the dynamic changes, revealing to what extent a quartet’s unified voice is the product of consent, compromise, negotiation, and argument. The tightly-braided rope that is the quartet in its final, public form unravels into its individual strands, exposing an amiable babel of semi-private voices.

It was in this spirit that Takács violist Geraldine Walther called out, “Don’t worry, Ji Hee, he’s been telling me that for years!” just as the younger violist (of the Spruce Quartet) was about to make a third attempt to appease Takács violinist Edward Dusinberre. Dusinberre was on stage, circling the Spruce, score open in one hand, asking them to pick up the Allegro at different measures, stopping them to comment, ordering them to repeat. Walther sat in the audience; her voice could have been any of ours. Her comment actually provoked a good deal of laughter, as she would several times over the course of the evening, a testimony to the easy atmosphere the class maintained despite the intensity of the undertaking and the grave beauty of the music, as the veterans prodded their younger counterparts to approach certain passages differently and experiment with new sound combinations.

As the exchange between Dusinberre and Walther suggests, the personalities of the Takács players fit neatly into their roles in the quartet, at least as they appear in performance. Dusinberre played first fiddle for much of the evening. The most outspoken and demanding, he also seemed to have the clearest sense of what he wanted, of the dramatic trajectory of the piece as a whole, and the language with which to express it. Cellist András Fejér was the second on stage, though he spent most of his time leaning against its left or right flanks, like Dusinberre’s goon. When he had something to say, he would approach all full of righteous fire, make his point, and then slink away, setting the tempo by snapping his fingers. Violinist Károly Schranz was less present, though he did lead part of the discussion of the first movement of the Opus 132, while Walther sat either in the audience or at the base of one of the columns along the rear of the stage, interjecting something to lighten the mood if the musicians seemed flustered, or taking their side if Dusinberre pushed a little too hard. (As Dusinberre was trying to get more lilt out of a phrase made up of rapid tradeoffs between cello and viola, she said, brightly, “It’s my fault, I told him [Linden violist Eric Wong] to play it that way.”) The prowling dominance of the first violin; the thoughtful if less prominent contributions of the second; the stabilizing role played by the viola; and the pantoum of the cello, who spent much of his time on the margins, but who would thrust himself into the foreground when he had something to say, and then retreat, holding down the tempo. Dialogues have just such a rhythm: characters who speak more, characters who speak less, and characters who hardly speak at all, but whose presence and occasional contributions are all the more necessary for pacing and rhythm, and without whom the drama, which only the others seem to be moving forward, would collapse of its own weight.

From the standpoint of music writing, the most fascinating thing about a master class is the opportunity to watch and listen as music is transformed into something else. It’s a setting where all the nuances of oral and gestural communication are called into play. The swinging conductor’s arm, demonstrating not just tempo, but rhythm, mood and line, often accompanying the singing of melodies. The proximity or distance of the teacher’s body, sometimes leaning in over the players, sometimes touching them—and sometimes far away, the disembodied voice in the room that eventually worms its way into the musicians’ heads, and then into their muscles and sinew. As for the words themselves, they can be brilliantly concrete (as when Fejér asked for a particular passage to display greater yearning, and then affectionate yearning, when he realized that an aspect of the personal was missing), or tumble and bleed into gesture and song; they are tugged this way and that, collected like pebbles to create greater emotional nuance, marshalled together into narrative arcs (sickness and convalescence, despair and hope), or appear as murky tickers along the measures in the score.

At one point, Dusinberre asked violinist Sarah McElravy of the Linden Quartet how she interpreted a particular phrase. When she replied, he answered, “I agree with you; but that’s not what I’m hearing.” He asked her to match her playing to the concept he had just pushed her to wrestle into language. And she did. Even Dusinberre commented on this: the incredible facility these players had for transforming opaque, knotty instructions cobbled together from a clumsy mass of words, gestures, half-sung melodies and snapped fingers into concrete musical expression. It may have been partly the effect of hearing the phrases again, set off from the rest of the movement, and thus framed anew, or even just hearing them more than once; but there was no question about the differences, sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic, these changes created for the listener. It is something magical for the non-musician; one comes to appreciate the remarkable plasticity of the musical text that much more.

Another example was the debate about how to approach the different parts of the theme (the droning introduction and the chorale) of the Opus 132 Molto adagio: with or without vibrato? The Attacca Quartet was asked to try both, if only to hear the difference. The first thing one notices is that the lack of vibrato is part of what gives those big, perfect intervals and slowly-accreting harmonies of the introduction their sacred quality; too much voice, too much of the human, ruins the effect—the equivalent of inserting a figure into a Rothko painting. With the parallel introduction of the Opus 132, the Assai sostenuto, the Linden was asked to resist the temptation to play it crescendo. The addition of each instrument successively in the opening phrase did not necessarily mean the volume should increase. And then, for the third essay, another correction: that the sound was not growing did not mean the music should be played tentatively. So we listened to that introduction transform over three or four readings, into something yet more beautiful and more moving; the absence of crescendo had, somehow, an emotional payoff. The same thing happened with the droning of the Adagio: a side of the spirit of the piece hitherto hidden suddenly manifested itself, perhaps not only because we heard a difference, but because we were being taught how to listen.

I’ve noted elsewhere that younger quartets can play the romantic repertoire with an almost histrionic intensity, which can be sometimes exciting, sometimes alienating. The Linden Quartet brought just such an intensity to the Allegro of the Opus 132, stretching it almost to the point of snapping. Here Dusinberre provided a welcome counterweight, reminding the players that there is a limit to dynamic range: if you play all your fortes as fortissimos, there will simply be noplace else to go. (As a writer friend of mine likes to say, “The lights can’t always be on.”)

But Dusinberre and the Takács as a whole played an even more important role in this regard. “You need to lean into each other more,” he said at one point to the violin and cello; and they did, actually physically leaned into each other—producing, once again, audible results. It was a reminder that music making is deeply and essentially bodily, that there is no music without movement. This was clear enough from the nearness of the music-making bodies in the room—sweating, stamping, swaying bodies whose movement, sometimes slow, sometimes vigorous, was responsible for everything we heard. It’s the intimacy of the chamber in chamber music that Weill comes closest to reproducing: the chamber that is the body, its walls erected around that pious organ, itself a mass of chambers, a throne of meat busy flushing blood around the body’s plumbing; and the chamber-pot, the chamber as the place of voiding and excreting. Music has its share of this, is about this, much as we try to spiritualize it, sequester it in big, impersonal cultural temples with ceilings that mimic the heavens.

Of course, nobody knew this better than Beethoven, and nowhere is that struggle with physicality more fully expressed than in the Opus 132. It was, after all, his digestion that struck him down, as it had plagued him his whole life. He wrote the quartet as he recovered from a long illness he had presumed to be mortal, as a “sacred song of thanksgiving from the convalescent to the divinity”—a letter, so to speak, from the body to the spirit. But what does the young musician, the young man or woman, know about these things? This wasn’t just about playing or not playing your fortes as fortissimos. During the jauntier Andante interludes of that haunting slow movement, Dusinberre noted that the musicians were responding too forcefully to the “Neue kraft” instruction in the score. This was hardly the energy of an old man just recovering from a long illness; one could not play these passages with the almost harsh physicality due, say, a symphony or sonata of the composer’s heroic period. This was a late quartet, in the fullest sense of that word. Not to say that a younger artist can’t empathize with and imaginatively understand the aged, ill Beethoven, but rather that a younger artist would be unlikely to come to the piece with this knowledge, and even less with the emotional maturity necessary to embody it.

The last time I heard the Opus 132 played live was last fall at Fashion High School by the Pacifica Quartet. The whole concert was one of the finest quartet performances in recent memory, even, or perhaps especially, in its incompleteness. In the middle of the Molto adagio, the stage lights—true story—went off; a few minutes later the musicians, unable to see their scores, were forced to abandon the performance. (So much for Neue kraft.) Now, it’s hard to think of a piece of music where a sudden plunge into darkness is more appropriate … though a slow fade might have been preferable. I remember thinking, If only we could find a way for them to finish. I’m sure everybody else had the same wish, and the Pacifica, too. And Beethoven? He had such plans: a tenth symphony, another great choral work. That great mournful darkness of the spirit, the animating force of the music: maybe this, above all, was what the Takács Quartet was there to teach.

Year of the Oh

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I came out to hear somebody else, I can’t remember who. This was November of 2011, at Smalls. There were two bands on deck, two sets apiece. Somebody must’ve called in sick, or maybe the second band just asked the bassist to stick around, because she ended up playing all four sets. The old jazzhead sitting next to me wondered aloud if she was the house bass player. That’s all I remember—that, and the last-set bass solo. When it was over, and we got done clapping, we looked at each other as if to say, OK, and where the hell did she come from?

Where indeed? Born in Malaysia to parents of Chinese descent, raised in Perth, but that’s hardly an answer. In a global era, for a global music, Perth may just be the new Kansas City, Kuala Lumpur the West Coast. Still and all, rivers always reach New York. And so did she.

I think the pianist Vijay Iyer put it best: “I love the way she just blew into town and took over.” A year and a half ago I’d never heard of her; now, Linda Oh is hard to miss.

As so often happens, I lost touch with Oh for a few months after the Smalls show. She became just that amazing female Asian bass player, not to be confused with the other great female Asian bass player who gigs at Pisticci on Sunday nights (really, how many can there be?). And then, twice in March of ‘12, two very different trios: Fabian Almazan’s at the Vanguard, and Oh’s own at the Rubin museum. Almazan is easily my favorite of the four young pianists spotlighted by Ben Ratliff in his Times article last year. Here, though, I wanted to focus on the Rubin set, and Oh’s first record, Entry, both of which feature Ambrose Akinmusare on trumpet.

From the opening bass strums and trumpet mewls of “Morning Sunset” to the Red Hot Chili Peppers cover for a closer, it’s hard not to hear echoes of the bass-led power trios I whetted my young ears on before coming to jazz. Today, it’s as easy to hear Roy Campbell’s Pyramid Trio, or the early electric Miles. Entry is a raw, heavy, tough, spare record, riff-based and rhythmically-driven, with a feel of bleak avenues and endless rooftops: music for a traveling cityscape, mournful but not without humor, homeless but never rootless, graspingly beautiful. Oh plays with a calculated heaviness, bellyflopping on low notes, slapping those fat strings, letting them hum and buzz. She doesn’t do much walking; when she finally does, at the end of “201,” just a track shy of the end, it’s more swagger than swing. There’s a gangly quality about the playing, too, a rough-and-tumbleness, as if we were waiting for the musicians all to collapse together in a heap.

The songs offer a pretty open terrain to improvise on, and at the Rubin set, as on the record, Akinmusire took full advantage, playing against the grain of the bass, missing high-note climbs by a note before careening back down, skittering into a solo and then backing off with a whine. He liked to fiddle with dynamics—bright, sharp cries and bugle calls followed by long, breathy interludes—his horn less an extension than a purer embodiment of his voice. As for Oh, it’s hard to know where to begin. Watching her play is half the fun; she’s so physically in tune with the music she’s creating that the instrument transforms her. Such a wealth of ideas, such a mastery of the bass’s rich vocabulary of harmonics, taps, strums and slides, and such a happy gift for melody and phrasing—each is rare enough in itself; to find them all together, and in a player so young, seems almost unjust.

Like the album, the set ended with “Soul to Squeeze,” the Chili Peppers ballad, actually a B-side from Blood Sugar Sex Magic. A friend of mine, a great writer, once said that the most affecting moments in fiction are the sort that take the reader by surprise—and very often, the writer as well. Something like this happened at the Rubin set with the Chili Peppers song. I’m not accustomed to being moved in this way by jazz. Exalted, excited, intellectually stimulated, sure. Once, though, I saw George Benson sit in as a vocalist during a Ron Affif set at the Zinc bar, this back in the ‘90s when the Zinc was on Houston and those Monday night jams had become a magnet for New York’s jazz Illuminati. He sang just one song, “All of Me,” and before I knew it there were tears in my eyes. It had nothing to do with the words, or the melody, or emotion per se, as it would with, say, a pop ballad, or a folk song, or a Chopin nocturne. It was rather a sense of presence, of contact, or the momentary revelation of the ideal in the guise of the real, like an avatar. True, “Soul to Squeeze” is a pop ballad; but I think the feeling on this night arose from something closer to the Benson experience. Oh started out with a pensive solo, really embellished statements of the melody, although this only became clear as the solo drew to a close. Then the horn, gently rising. It was like Oh’s bass had opened a door, and Akinmusire’s horn stepped through. An ease of walking, a lightness of step, as if answering some unheard call in the opening couple of bars of bass. They could have stopped there; nothing else needed to be said. You hear this, and the title of Akinmusire’s Blue Note debut, When the Heart Emerges Glistening, seems anything but corny. You want every band to do what they did.

When the set ended, someone from the museum came up and hung white stoles around each of the musicians’ necks, which was itself weirdly moving, and so fitting after the last song, blessing them for the blessing they’d brought us.

While I was waiting to pick up a copy of Oh’s new album Initial Here, a couple of music students, probably high school age, were noting to each other (in tones of disapproval) that all the tunes were modal, with none of those tricky bop changes to keep the musicians on their toes, and dissuade amateurs from the bandstand. They were wondering aloud whether she could really play changes—dare I say “keep up with the boys”? I wanted to turn to them and say they should have heard her at Smalls. (In Miles Davis’s gruff whisper: “She can play those changes like a motherfucker.”) A decade from now, after she’s won a Grammy and has a dozen albums under her belt, they’ll be talking about how they saw her when they were eighteen, when they used to have that Friday night music series at the Rubin, before anyone really knew who she was, and with Akinmusire, too, no, dude, I’m not shitting you, really, they used to play together, I’ll burn you her first album. And the younger musicians will regard them with awe and reverence.

It turned out she was hawking her own records. I had to ask her three times what the title of that ending song was; I’d only listened to Entry once at that point, and would only make the connection between the tune and the record later on. Either I couldn’t hear her, or it was the Perth accent; but the third time I asked, she signed it for me: “Soul,” she said, and made some sort of gesture I can’t remember—maybe put her hand on her heart?—“to squeeze”—and she hugged herself, briefly. Now, I have spoken to a fair number of musicians, and the majority have warm personalities, and seem like the sort of people you’d have over for dinner, open a bottle of wine with, maybe even let the conversation wander into politics. They might squeeze your shoulder, as Bob Stewart did mine the other day, big hands of a tuba player, if not your soul. But this exchange was special. She could have said it louder the third time, with that edge of annoyance that greets the tourist who doesn’t know when to stop asking and just smile. Instead, she treated me with the cheerful patience due an elderly ward. I’m not sure what this says, but I know it’s the opposite of bad.

By the time I caught Oh again, with her quartet at the Jazz Standard in June, I’d had a few chances to listen to Entry, a few less to Initial Here, the record she was supporting this night. They are as different as the show at the Standard would prove to be from the Rubin, and as both were from Smalls. If Entry is a fledgling, fusiony romp, weighty and starkly beautiful, Initial Here is remarkable at once for the deftness with which it captures the contemporary jazz idiom—Dave Douglas’s quintet comes to mind, as does Dafnis Prieto’s—and for the breadth of styles, rhythms and cadences it exhibits—from the bluesy Ellington spiritual “Come Sunday” to the Sturm-und-Drang drama of “Deeper Than Sad,” the jaunty Caribbeanisms of “Desert Island Dream” and the seemingly cadenceless and deeply moving “Thicker Than Water,” featuring the preternatural vocals of Jen Shyu. In fact, Shyu serves to remind us how much this record, as much as Entry, bears the mark of all the players in the band—and the collective musicianship here is pretty phenomenal. Each track is a surprise; the riches stretch end to end, like pearls on a string.*

What was most remarkable about the Standard set, though, was not just the opportunity to hear Oh in yet another creative format, but to hear the growth of one tune in particular. Called “Ten Minutes to Closing,” the title reflects the commission that comes as part of the invitation to perform at the Rubin: the musician composes one tune about a piece of art at the museum. As Oh told it at the Rubin, she only found one at the eleventh hour, so to speak—necessity being the mother of invention; and so the tune is less about the piece itself than about the artist’s struggle to create on demand. Perhaps the tune was trying capture that feeling of contingency and indecision. If so, it tried too hard; the changes felt forced, the structure ungainly. It was the only tune in the Rubin set that fell flat, leaving me wondering if it was still under construction, an inspiration arrived at too late.

At the Standard set, “Ten Minutes” came second, right after the hoppy opener “No. 1 Hit.” It had obviously been worked over since the Rubin: very recognizably the same tune, with the same flippant tone and quirky changes … but in every other way, different. Somehow, the arrangement for quartet had welded it into a whole. I’m looking forward to hearing how it sounds recorded.

It was nice to see the electric bass come out for an extended cooker, certainly the jam of the evening, a side of Oh that appears on Initial Here, but which I had not had a chance to witness live: that elixir of Riot Grrrl, Jaco and Flea that couldn’t but push the already-bursting energy of the night another notch higher. And yet, “10 Minutes” was the tune I remember best, because it presented the opportunity to watch the music grow, and the musicians with it. I’ve somehow gotten to the age—it’s definitely snuck up on me, like those tears—where a lot of the musicians I go hear are younger than I am. They’ve become like the kids in some fantastic musical neighborhood, all moved out and making good, and my seat at the club, or maybe the virtual one in the Pit, the porch swing from which I watch history go by. Remember Linda from down the street? Yeah, she’s all grown up and playing music in New York. Making quite a name for herself, too. And Ambrose! Remember Ambrose? Well …

I guess I’ve been writing a jazz Horatio Alger story of sorts, or maybe a David Levinsky (remember, he’s the one who wanted to be Irving Berlin), tracing this young immigrant musician’s rise from the good company of her similarly-emerging peers to Soundprints, the supergroup featuring Dave Douglas and Joe Lovano and Joey Baron, at the Vanguard almost exactly a year from that night I first caught Oh at Smalls. By now I was a certified Oh junkie, waiting out in the cold an hour for my fix, for the proverbial man. I stood in front of that red door so long people started thinking I worked there, and I even came to enjoy playing the part, holding the door, answering questions—why I wasn’t taking money is anyone’s guess. About twenty minutes into the queue, a couple of music students from NYU joined me—they always seem to come in pairs, like missionaries—good people to shoot the breeze with while the wind cut through our coats and all those who’d thought far enough ahead to make reservations glided past. At 9 o’clock, the VV staff grudgingly found us seats, me at the absolute and utter rear of the club, back against the wall, band visible over a sea of heads, waiters milling in and out of my vision, assholes at the table next to me unable to shut up, even after being asked politely, and then asked again. But the music: the music that night could have cut through an acre of lead, like neutrinos from a star gone nova, so what could a few assholes, waiters and extra feet of space do? Afterwards I ran into the music students again, their faces all alight, and they asked me if I was staying for the second set, all I had to do was buy a drink, how could I think of leaving? Ah, I had to go upstate tonight, there was no hope for me; but wasn’t it nice to see their faces, hear their voices again. It confirmed to me what I was feeling.

It’s always great to hear Douglas and Lovano together—it had been too long—and Douglas and Baron, of course, half of Masada in a club where Masada maybe never played. (You can cut Masada six ways and you’re always left with the better half, how’s that for a paradox?) The pianist, one Lawrence Fields, was the find of the evening; in a year he’ll be the hub of yet another wheel, just like Oh, just like Douglas and Lovano and Baron before her. And Oh? What does it say that, on a bandstand with Dave Douglas and Joe Lovano and Joey Baron and yet some other genius in the making, you proceed to play a bass solo that puts in the phone call to God, throws everyone else in shadow, and becomes, like at that gig a year ago at Smalls, the thing I remember best? And what does it matter if the words I might have used to describe it to you have long since disappeared, if they were ever there at all? I can still hear the gasp and sigh that came up from the audience when the rest of the band started back in—how could I not, sitting where I was, with all that audience between us. It was a register of the collective emotion, there on the cusp of the sound, sound made a moment of exalted flesh, which is always easier to describe. I can tell you about that gasp and sigh, and I can swear to what I remember; the solo itself goads me with its unspeakability, an unspeakability that fills me with the urgency of words.

Initial Here made one of the three top ten lists in the New York City Jazz Record for 2012—not bad for a sophomore album. It’s on Greenleaf, Douglas’s label; he just tapped Oh for his last album, Be Still. Douglas is like a trampoline for fresh talent—look at Chris Potter and Donny McCaslin. Meanwhile, Fabian Almazan’s trio is back at the Vanguard this month, Oh still on bass. I’ll be there, on my porch swing. Have I told you about Fabian? Well, I will say, with a bit of old Miss Havisham and a bit of John Jarndyce, let me tell you about Fabian …

* While it’s true they’re very different records, I’m loathe to construct them as absolute opposites, which language and logic sometimes compel me to do. Entry has its fair share of rhythmic and other playfulness, its Jaco inflections even without the electric bass (check out “Fourth Hand”), its moments of textured harmony (the intro to “Numero Uno”), and the full range of the bass’s vocabulary on display. Still, Initial Here is nimbler, works with a broader palette, and is consistently richer and more surprising in its arrangements and compositions.

Vermis Odium

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The structural formula of metal consists of a classic rock ring in its most basic 1-5 manifestation and an extreme state of dynamic compression, and is generally distinguished by the presence of one or more tritones (TT). A progressive rock (PR) chain of varying lengths may also be present (Figure 1.1). Like those molecules to whose structure it is closely related, metal and its derivatives mimic and potentiate the synaptic action of norepinephrine (NE) in the central nervous system, particularly in the cerebellum’s vermis, while inhibiting frontal lobe activity. A second, sedative-hypnotic “rebound,” thought to be associated with increased serotonin levels, has also been identified, and has become the subject of some clinical attention.

Metal was first synthesized at the end of the 1960s by O. Osbourne and his legendary team of occult doctors. Working secretly in laboratories around Birmingham, England, it is said that Dr. Osbourne did not immediately recognize the combination of dissonance, distortion, blues riffs and pounding rhythms as a distinctly new molecule, and that it was only upon mistakenly ingesting a small quantity that he cried out, “What is this that stands before me? / Figure in black which points at me!”

Usage of metal increased steadily during the 1970s, although abuse did not become widespread until the early ‘80s, when derivatives like glam and speed began to be synthesized for use in a wide variety of recreational settings. The latter represents the beginning of a disturbing trend in the history of metal abuse, as the speed derivative greatly increased the potency of the original molecule by adding one or more hardcore (HC) groups, and by turning up the volume of ingestion. Indeed, perhaps no other aurally-ingested drug has been so widely abused as metal, leading to concerns about its impact on public health. Over the last two decades, despite brief dips in popularity, metal has remained a drug of choice among the young, with new, even more potent derivatives appearing every few years, such as death, doom, goth, and black, as well as “designer” compounds, like nu and groove. Chemically, these derivatives can be distinguished by the addition of a rap group (HH) or EMO ion, and by the multiplication and permutation of PR, HC and HH molecules.

The increasingly potent strains of metal that continue to be synthesized are a logical response to tolerance, which develops quickly (5-10 albums) in many users, as is the increasing use of metal in combination with other drugs, either to intensify its euphoric effect or mitigate its toxicity. Research into clinical varieties that exploit the sedative-hypnotic “rebound” effect in the treatment of Obnoxiously Violent Disorder (OVD), ADD, and other anxiety and mood disorders continues despite concerns about the drug’s highly addictive qualities.

Characteristically, metal produces a state of euphoria. Psychomotor performance may be improved, although this is quite erratic and improbable. Users also experience augmented alertness and the fight/fright/flight response, increased wakefulness, and feelings of power, invincibility, and the urge to dominate. In its post-stimulant, sedative-hypnotic phase, metal acts like a low dose of barbiturates, inducing a mild euphoria almost indistinguishable from that experienced at low-dose ingestion, as well as an increased sense of well-being, relaxation, and relief from anxiety. In its everyday use, metal is often combined with amphetamines, marijuana, alcohol, and, less frequently, with hallucinogens.

Despite the number of derivatives available, the effects are quite similar to that of its generic parent, mostly varying in the quantity that needs to be consumed; therefore, so-called “classic” metal will be discussed at length, and its derivatives compared as differences present themselves.

Pharmacological Effects

Effects vary markedly with the dose of the drug. In general, though, they may be categorized as those observed at low-to-moderate doses (5 to 50 minutes at medium to high volume) and those observed at high doses (above 100 minutes, often administered via headphones or at concerts). Again, these dose ranges are calculated for classic metal. Low-to-moderate doses of speed metal range from 2 to 20 minutes, while the effects associated with high doses can occur at 30 minutes or even less. Death metal and grindcore derivatives such as Napalm Death, which contain several HC groups and few or no PR chains, are even more potent, and doses have to be lowered even further. According to one recent study (Benton, 2006), a single minute of Deicide was enough to kill white bunny rabbits and other animals associated with childlike innocence and goodness (hence the unfortunate moniker “Bunnycide” which the band has carried ever since). “Designer” compounds are qualitatively less predictable, as the synergies between HH, HC and PR groups on the compressed rock ring are still poorly understood, and the mildly inhibitory effect of PR on HC groups requires further investigation. Generally speaking, however, “softer” designer derivatives mitigate the more deleterious effects of “meth metal” by inhibiting the function of the HC group, whether by frontal-lobe reactivitation or by promoting reuptake of NE from the synaptic cleft (DeGarmo, 1989; Keenan, 1996).

At normal aural doses, metal induces an increase in blood pressure, and a variety of other responses that are predictable from drugs that mobilize NE and thus induce the fight/fright/flight response (increased blood sugar, increased blood flow to musculature, decreased blood flow to internal organs, dilation of pupils, increased rate of respiration, and so on). In the CNS, metal is a potent stimulant, producing both EEG and behavioral signs of increased alertness and excitement. Characteristically, wakefulness, a reduced sense of fatigue, mood elevation, increased motor and speech activity, euphoria, and feelings of power and task-worthiness occur. Task performance may improve, although dexterity may not, as evidenced by increased errors that can result from the irritability and nervousness that occur. When short-duration, high-intensity energy output is desired, such as in athletic competition, performance may be enhanced despite the fact that fine motor skills may be reduced.

These responses continue for up to 30 minutes after ingestion has ceased, with predictably cumulative effects for longer ingestion durations. At this point, most users will experience a rebound feeling of lethargy, satiety, and well-being, as after successful copulation, sometimes lasting up to 12 hours. Prolonged use of low doses of metal or single use of a high dose is characteristically followed by this relaxed, soporific, careless state, customarily referred to as metal-induced satiety (MIS).

At moderate doses (5 to 50 minutes), effects include stimulation of respiration, production of a slight tremor, restlessness, increased motor activity, insomnia, and agitation. Blurred vision and cardiac palpitations may also occur. In addition, metal prevents fatigue, suppresses appetite, and promotes wakefulness.

During chronic uses of metal at high doses (100 minutes or more), a different pattern of physiological effects is observed, in part because such high doses are usually administered through headphones or at outdoor rock festivals, at volumes intended to saturate the auditory system and maximize the rates of neuronal activity—all of which abet the suppression of impulse control and activate the subject’s “lizard brain,” with particular, unrelenting excitation of the vermis, the locus of feelings of hatred and aggression in the brain (hence the epithet vermis odium, or “hate worm,” for metal among the drug’s more literate addicts). Doses in the range of a few hundred minutes to several days have been reported. During prolonged, high-dose “sprees,” an individual experiences a manic megalomania—the so-called “berserker state”—induced by radical changes in brain chemistry, chronic lack of sleep, and high levels of distortion. Users are put at risk of injury and even death from the irrational, violent behavior that follows the ingestion of high doses. High-level earphone delivery provides a “rush,” described by users as being extremely pleasurable and very similar to a violent sexual orgasm. In addition, MIS is at once more intense and more extended than at lower doses. These pleasurable effects, however, are offset by the more toxic ones. After the sedative-hypnotic period wears off, the subject will still appear lethargic, but also anxious and intensely hungry. Food, counseling, and Neil Diamond may be helpful in this withdrawal period. Otherwise the user may turn to more injections of metal, thus initiating a new spree. In the words of Araya et al. (1994), the “chemical rush” of metal may “leave [behind] a suicidal hole.”

Psychological Effects

The psychological effects of metal differ widely, depending upon the dose administered. At low-to-moderate doses, an individual typically experiences increased alertness, wakefulness, elevation of mood, mild euphoria, possible freedom from boredom, and increased energy. Occasionally, aggression, hallucinations, and psychosis may occur, but usually only at higher doses.

High-dose “berserker” use induces a pattern of psychosis characterized by confused, disorganized behavior, compulsive repetition of meaningless acts (maniacal laughter, headbanging, violent bodily contact with others, making the “evil eye”), violent thoughts and urges (to dismember, eviscerate, defenestrate, etc.), sadistic megalomania, impatience with the weak and helpless, delusions of imperviousness to pain and bodily immortality, gross paranoia, apocalyptic hallucinations, a Manichean worldview, and mild irritability. Individuals who inject high-potency death, black, and grindcore derivatives on a regular basis often attempt to antagonize high-dose toxic symptoms by adding an analgesic or other CNS depressant (e.g., Pink Floyd; Led Zeppelin III, side 2). Such a concoction is called a “speedball.” Chronic metal users also usually consume large amounts of these CNS depressants.

Interestingly, MIS may be accentuated by the use of these depressants, and the euphoria produced by sedative-hypnotic rebound may be more intense, with users falling toward the hypnotic-anaesthetic range of the sedative continuum. Post-berserker “deep MIS” is characterized by a marked decrease in anxiety and aggression, feelings of peace on earth and goodwill toward men, renewed ability to deal with annoying people, and repetition of stock phrases like “it’s all good” and “no worries.” An increased ability to concentrate on minor tasks is only hampered by lethargy and overall feeling of a need to sleep. This is sometimes accompanied by a giddy feeling of having survived mortal danger, similar to that survivors of natural catastrophes or terrorist attacks feel, but without concominant feelings of guilt.

Reinitiation of metal use generally follows the end of deep MIS, initiating a new cycle.

Side Effects and Toxicity

The side effects induced by low doses of metal are usually extensions of the drug’s behavioral actions. These side effects are usually tolerable and decrease within a few days as tolerance develops. Metal can cause heart palpitations. Sweating, dry mouth, nausea and vomiting may also occur.

The side effects of prolonged use of high doses are more serious. Psychosis and abnormal mental conditions, general mental dimness, muscular fatigue, a negative outlook on life, infections resulting from neglected hygiene and a variety of other consequences occur because of the drug itself and because of poor eating habits, lack of sleep, and the use of unsterile listening equipment.

Most high-dose users show progressive social, personal, and occupational deterioration, and their course is often characterized by intermittent periods of hospitalization for episodes of toxic psychosis, often directly after attending a “show” or similar event where high-potency, prolonged use is collectively reinforced.

Fatalities directly attributable to metal are rare, but humorous. Individuals with no tolerance have survived three-day black metal festivals—in Norway, of all places—and even larger doses are tolerated by chronic users. The slogan “metal kills” does not refer to a direct result of a single dose but, rather, to the deteriorating mental and physical condition and the destructive behavior induced by prolonged high-dose metal sprees. Only rarely does a high-dose use of metal result in the lethal rupture of blood vessels or twiglike snapping of the brain stem as a result of prolonged, excessively forceful headbanging, or a “breaking wheel” or self-eviscerating accident in the mosh pit.

Dependence

Metal dependence is twofold: psychological and physiological. Psychological dependence is described as a compulsion to listen to the music repeatedly for its enjoyable effects. The “berserker” state that sometimes follows even moderate doses of metal, and the “rush” that may be induced by high-volume use, can lead to a compulsion for misuse. MIS may be itself habit-forming, although it cannot be regarded in isolation from the drug’s other effects.

Withdrawal from metal produces a period of rebound passivity and exhaustion, prolonged inactivity, and EEG changes characteristic of sleep. This may be followed by severe emotional depression, often brought on by feelings of abandonment, sometimes expressed verbally by the addict as having been forsaken by metal. Once MIS has worn off, the patient generally returns to his previous level of anxiety, leading to an ever-deepening cycle of anxiety, metal aggression, and rebound satiety.

Tolerance

Tolerance to the many effects of metal develops at different rates and to different degrees. The habitual user is able to increase the dose considerably and/or resort to more potent derivatives in order to attain a desired effect as his or her tolerance to the central effect builds.

Medical uses

Since the discovery in the late 1980s that MIS can moderate mood and anxiety disorders, particularly OVD, research has been directed toward developing a safe, non-toxic treatment derivative. Challenges are myriad, and include: the extremely addictive nature of metal; the drug’s widespread availability outside a clinical setting; the relatively short duration of MIS; and the rapid development of tolerance, necessitating new ingestions of metal at ever-higher doses and more frequent intervals.

Artificial forms of metal, such as mixing amphetamine derivatives like Benzedrine or Dexedrine with grunge, or combining Bad Company with selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs), as well as low-potency dilutions of true metal, such as injecting grindcore with L-tryptophan, or adding a POP group or boy band (BB) subgroup to the metal molecule (e.g., My Chemical Romance), have thus far failed to produce either a weakened berserker state followed by extended MIS, or—grail of grails—to isolate the MIS period itself for subjects suffering from OVD. It is thus widely believed that the intensity and duration of the MIS period is directly proportional to the intensity of the CNS effects of metal and the duration of the ingestion period (Figure 1.2). Except in rare instances, low-volume exposure has proven ineffective (Halford, 1993).

Some evidence exists that, when low-potency, low-toxicity derivatives were administered to children with a genetic propensity for developing OVD, they acted as a gateway to true metal addiction, and that said addiction developed earlier than in untreated subjects (Portnoy et al., 2011). This seems likely given the rapid development of tolerance, especially among younger listeners. Regrettably, these compounds have become wildly popular among pre-adolescents, and are so cheaply and easily produced (and hence so profitable) that they are now available over the counter in most shopping malls and suburban convenience stores.

Results from short-term, high-dose “metal blasts” have shown more promise. Occulta and Apollyon (2002) showed that periods of MIS double the normal duration could be induced in patients suffering from OVD after a series of 30-second exposures to Amon Amarth.

If POP and BB have failed utterly to treat anxiety and mood disorders like OVD in adults, this is likely due to the fact that children have as-yet underdeveloped senses of hatred, vengeance, betrayal, anger, and bitterness needed to appreciate true metal. In sum, while it may be true that music therapy has helped people to overcome a broad range of psychological problems, we are a long way from understanding how to use metal for this purpose. One must continue to strive for non-chemical alternatives to curb the propensity for violent behavior.

Metal and Public Safety

Given the pharmacological profile of metal that has been presented, what conclusions can be drawn about its social impact and continuing legal status?

While metal clearly has public health consequences, whether its production and consumption needs to be regulated, curtailed, or even criminalized, as some have argued, remains an open question. Certainly, metal culture has been demonized to the point that all recreational users are stereotyped as devil-worshipping baby-killers, and the music itself as a weapon of mass destruction against America’s youth. Consider, for example, the story of one young man, who, after 67 straight hours of listening to Pig Destroyer, was reported to have spontaneously combusted. In another, a Cannibal Corpse fan on a two-day grindcore binge began (according to his similarly inebriated girlfriend) bleeding from his eyes before collapsing; a brain autopsy later showed the cerebrum had been cooked into a hard paste which had to be chiseled off the inside of the skull. Stories of spontaneously aborted fetuses, massive cerebral hemorrhages, and literally exploding cardiac tissue have also made their way into the tabloid press. While they might be intended to warn users away from the drug, these sensationalized portraits of hardcore abuse at once attract new users (by the aura of glamorized danger) and serve as fodder for those groups lobbying for all metal’s criminalization.

On the other side is the phenomenal rise of metal rights groups in most major cities around the world, which advocate for the use of metal in its unadulterated, natural, “homegrown” form. These groups tend to paint a utopian picture, with metal in a role similar to that played by LSD for the “flower children.” Unlike acid, however, metal is understood as a conduit for channeling and dissipating “negative energy.” (“The releasing of anger,” remarks Phil Anselmo, a sort of tattooed Timothy Leary, “can better any medicine under the sun.”) The original sin, according to these groups, was the turning over of metal to vast record conglomerates, who make false metal for profit. The metal lobby has worked to have metal protected under the same laws that allow some Native American tribes to use drugs such as peyote in religious rituals, and “medical metal” has become something of a buzzword in the Bible Belt states, where religious fanatics are pursuing an aggressive ballot-initiative strategy to criminalize metal.

Of course, metal is neither a panacea nor a doomsday device. It is, rather, a faithful reflection of our aggressive, anxious times, where young people and adults alike consume drugs like metal to escape day-to-day problems, deal with assholes, and generally get by.

Correlations between metal and violent crime have generally been overstated. Even in a concert context, the controlled environment and relatively short duration of berserker effects post-ingestion, combined with the rapid onset of MIS, prevent violence from going beyond overturning and burning a few automobiles in the parking lot, a couple of fistfights, and a beer bottle broken over somebody’s head. Users are generally too stupified by the high-dose effects of the drug to plan antisocial behavior—as is to be expected, given the total inhibition of frontal lobe activity (the so-called “metal lobotomy,” the lack of EEG activity suggesting a cerebral “dead zone”). Rather, aggression is largely expended in the aforementioned behaviors, and the most dangerous effects seem to be confined to crowds in the grip of metal frenzy, and to the contusions, lacerations, head trauma, and acute spine and joint pain the high-dose user experiences as MIS begins to wear off, colloquially referred to as a bangover.

It is moreover unclear to what extent the other drugs often consumed simultaneously with metal are responsible for other violent acts for which metal bears the brunt of the blame. In short, neither informed current professional opinion nor empirical research has produced systematic evidence to support the thesis that metal, by itself, either invariably or generally leads to or causes violent crime. Instead, the evidence suggests that social and cultural variables account for the apparent statistical correlation between metal use and crime or delinquency.

The greatest danger to public safety today probably involves driving a car while in a state of acute metal intoxication. Feelings of invincibility, together with impacts on motor coordination and the visual impairment that results from headbanging, even with both hands on the wheel, can lead to excessive speed, erratic driving, extra miles, and poor choices.

While the public continues to debate the criminalization or regulation of metal, various harm-reduction approaches could be tried and evaluated. Safer modes of dispensing metal would go a long way toward curbing the more deleterious effects of the drug, as would federally-enforced volume limits. Albums could be made shorter, and listening equipment programmed with dissonance and dynamic compression sensors to filter total metal output. Perhaps the most conservative course of action would be for society to oppose widespread listening to metal, while at the same time refraining from punishing or demonizing those who choose this genre of music to listen to. Youth should be counseled, to borrow the words of Headlock, to “Tak[e their] hate and spend it wisely.”

Many passages in this post are embellished plagiarisms of passages from A Primer of Drug Action, by Robert M. Julien, M.D. (New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1988). Thanks to Dr. Julien for writing such an engaging textbook, filled with so many fabulous words.

Goodbye, Music Library!

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Among my handful of sacred places in New York—those cafés, gardens, and institutional spaces where I can best study, write, meditate, mosey, and otherwise get in tune with the Am and Is—I would include the music library of City College.

The library is housed at the southwest end of that beautiful neo-gothic monument Shepard Hall, a block away from my old Convent Avenue apartment. Shepard is shaped like an anchor, or a flexing cross, with the tall tower at the crown, the Great Hall for a shank, and the library in the half-rotunda where the shackle would be. (In cathedral terms, the hall would be the nave, and the library located under the apse.) The library has two floors, with listening carrels on the second, entry level, and the stacks and reading room on the first, accessed by way of a narrow staircase that turns twice, to the left on the way down, to the right on the way up. The stairs are wood, as is much of the work around the doors and upstairs windows. What with the woodwork, the two floors, and the cathedral environs, it reminds me, fittingly, of an organ. Unlike an organ, however, the library tolerates a charming amount of illogic—the improbably narrow staircase, for example. I don’t think you could get a cello down those stairs, let alone a bass.

I love this library for how small and self-contained it is. I loved the Marriott Library at the University of Utah (where I went to grad school) for the latter reason, and for the same reason feel little connection with the New York Public Library: none of the individual branches are adequate to themselves. The Performing Arts library at Lincoln Center is better in this regard, but still too diffuse … and, perhaps, too well-traveled. The music library at City can get a little busy during exam time, probably spillover from the Cohen, City’s main library. During the regular semester, though, there are rarely more than ten people there at any one time. This space filled with recordings, with notes, and with words about music basks in a near-monastical silence.

The Marriott had the kinds of stacks that rewarded careful, curious, passionate browsing. I would always go in looking for one or a few books, and walk out with a pile. I never wrote down call numbers very clearly—I couldn’t, not with those nubbins of pencils, on those business-card-size bits of scrap paper. So I could only ever get into the general vicinity of a book. And then I would have to browse, not by call number, but by title. Digging around, I would find a dozen other titles, some better than the ones I believed I’d come for. (It’s always more pleasant to ballpark, isn’t it, to have to ask, to get turned around, to play Marco Polo with wisdom. Every good book has a measure of serendipity about it.)

The music library multiplies the rewards for such browsing because it is organized around a single subject, and its collections are the cumulative reflection of the taste, wisdom, and judgment of the librarians and the faculty of the music department at City College, of a century (more or less) of thoughtful scholarship and librarianship.* And so, unlike at the University of Utah, where I used to set off with a half-legible call number for a compass and a walking-stick, a trip downstairs in the music library requires no call number at all—just a good bit of time, a bunch of questions you haven’t quite been able to formulate, and a lot of tunes that never leave your head.

Some days I would pick a stack at random and go through title after title, pulling books off the shelves, opening to the table of contents, or to a random page, in an odd, secular gesture at bibliomancy. After I had gone through a few shelves this way—sometimes all the way down to the floor—I might bring a few books over to one of the carrels under the arched, barred windows looking out onto the quad. For a sort-of basement, it gets nice light, particularly in the spring and early fall, when the sun has begun to go down behind the clock tower, and the light splashes across the tables, sometimes too warm and bright to work in. On those days, at that hour, from the steps of the North Academic Center, Shepard Hall looks like the Cathedral of Ys risen from the waves.

I have sat on the floor amid the stacks, too, my books piled in the space past the metal bookends, stumbling upon bits of musical esoterica—connections between Renaissance music and bird songs; the story behind the naming of Damrosch Park—scribbling down titles for future reference, occasionally taking books out, racking up enormous, humiliating, bankrupting fines, to be paid only after much arguing and whining and weaseling.

At least, at the Cohen. Never here. One must stay on good terms with one’s sacred spaces.

I return my books with pencil marks in them, after I have reached the limit of possible renewals, or have been threatened with losing borrowing privileges, knowing that in a few months, or years, or a decade, when I need that book again, I can go back to the same place in the stacks, find my old copy, and my marks again, and perhaps, finally, take notes, and erase the marks, at least some of them, and so return a clean(er) copy, and begin to set my accounts right with the universe.

I have spent afternoons there, too, my unsanctioned coffee thermos hidden in one of the nearby carrels, diligently plugging away at counterpoint homework, or parsing examples from Aldwell and Schachter, or writing out the first draft of some piece bound for the Pit Stop, or copying articles I am thinking of using for my Writing About Music class … or, of course, grading papers, while students paced up and down Convent Avenue and the shadows of the bars started to creep across the carrels.

And then before I knew it, it would be almost five o’clock: the closing announcement is made, and the blind man—the one I used to see walking to school, arm locked with a friend’s or good samaritan’s—emerges from one of the labs and rings the elevator. At Johns Hopkins, where I did my undergraduate work, the main library would close at midnight; and, if you happened to be there at that hour, you could participate in the pilgrimage across the quad to the “Hut,” the all-night library on the bottom floor of Gilman Hall. Gilman is the only academic building I know that held a candle to Shepard—held, because it was renovated a few years ago, and many of its most fantastic quirks removed. Leaving the music library at five, I could have relived (as farce) this memory by turning left, heading over to the Cohen; the flukes of the anchor may be buried in St. Nicholas Park, but the shackle points toward the Cohen, as though the newer structure were a vessel tethered to the older one by an invisible rope. Instead, I always went right. This much hasn’t changed. The difference is that I don’t live a block north anymore, but a thousand. I can’t see Shepard Hall out my window. But I can still imagine it, tiny and far below me, I tethered not by rope, but by a string, as the kite I cling to dips and flaps.

I suppose part of what made the music library sacred was that it allowed me to try on another identity. If I always crossed the upper floor quickly, making a bee-line for the stairs, maybe it’s because I felt a little like a charlatan, and was trying not to be noticed. Once, when I borrowed the score for the “Waldstein” sonata (for “Of Liszt and Other Ghosts”), the librarian, who directed me to the right area in the stacks, counseled me that these were mini-scores—fine to read, but not to play from. I assured her that I was in no way capable of playing the “Waldstein,” that I merely intended to read it. But even that was a bit of a ruse. I was like a man with a third-grade education walking around with a copy of Ulysses, just so he could run his finger along the lines and mouth the strange words to himself, marveling at the incantatory nature of the language.

For a writer, that edge—between two identities, two modes of representation, two disciplines—at once inside and outside—is the most natural of places. The erotic gaps between, as Barthes might have put it; the places where knowledge gapes. The music library is the space where, for me, those gaps appear, in the fantasy that always accompanies the word.

* And, of course, the realities of public school budgets. Still, I remember the first time I realized that I, as a faculty member, could request that the library order books. It was a dizzying confluence of responsibility and irresponsibility. I was helping to direct the purchases on which the future of an institution depended. I was standing with a shopping cart at the entrance of a fantasically large bookstore, watching the man with the starter’s pistol.

All That Is Solid

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It’s a Sunday afternoon in August, and I’m at the Howland Cultural Center in Beacon, New York, to hear the Kazzrie Jaxen quartet. I’m here because Kazzrie is here, and because my neighbor, a pianist and friend of Kazzrie’s, invited me. In a broader sense, I’m here because I am new to the peaceable kingdoms of the Hudson Valley, and I am still trying to find my moorings amid the upstate exiles. In the City you get used to the weight of people, smog, and noise. It settles on you, over time. Here, I’m like a man walking on the moon: every step threatens to catapult me into space, and I look around in vain for someone or something to hold me down.

The Howland Center is a tall, airy space with a churchy feel. It used to be the town library, until 1976, when the collection outgrew its confines, the books were (re)moved, and the building joined the National Historical Registry. The shelves have been taken down, but the cabinets remain, the numbers still stenciled on them, and black and white pictures of the town-as-it-was hang above the spaces where the books used to be. Instead of rectangular reading tables and card catalogs, there are round folding four-tops covered with plastic. There is fruit, cheese, wine, brownies, kids. A metal balcony encircles the room ten feet above, with more empty numbered cabinets along the walls and four lights suspended from the grillwork. A big grandfather clock, its brass, lute-shaped pendulum stilled, fails to measure the time.

The musicians put their things on top of the cabinets: instrument cases, a red fabric cooler, a few bottles of water. Jaxen, who plays piano, stops by our table to say a brief, warm hello. She is blond, nimble, radiant. Sinewy, though there is something wispy about her, too. Charlie Krachy, standing a few feet behind her with his tenor already hanging from his neck, is grey, plodding, down to earth—her complement in every way. Together with the rest of the band—Don Messina on bass, Bill Chattin on drums—Charlie will spend the next hour holding on to the sleeves of Kazzrie’s blouse and the hem of Kazzrie’s skirt, as she refuses to let that great ballast of the instrument world hold her down, and threatens to float up and away, like one of those newlyweds in a Chagall painting.

I had the chance to hear Kazzrie only once before, in an apartment in Morningside, on a Sunday afternoon not so different from this one. The musicians who played that day, and the vast majority of those in the audience, were part of a musical collective that seems to have grown up around the pianist and educator Connie Crothers. It was a trio of violin, piano and clarinet, playing freely improvised music. In such a setting, there is no agreement about structure or melody beforehand, and there are no standards, at least in the jazz sense of that term. Somebody starts to blow, or strum, or pluck, or whatever, and the musicians go wherever the spirit of the moment takes them, and the jam lasts as long as that spirit inhabits them. Then they pause, and start again. It is remarkably beautiful to watch as well as to listen to.

When the “set” was over, there was a break to eat and drink and chat. Then the real jam began, real because it was yet more free. Different people got up to play as the mood struck them, like Quakers moved to speak. Maybe what was most beautiful was the humility with which playing was approached. There was not that sense you sometimes gets at late-night jams, where one player after another wants to muscle in, take the limelight for a few bars, be heard. Here, everybody knew everybody else, or almost, and pretty much everybody had played together at one time or another. There was much hesitation and politeness; a smile and nod across the room, like you might ask a stranger to dance; the sudden leaping out of a chair, because nobody else had; the desire to share something. Of course, almost everybody there was a musician, they had all brought their instruments with them, or just themselves. It was even a little eerie to find that everyone else in the room was touched with the capacity to create ex nihilo, as much as it would be to find that they could bend spoons without touching them, or read each other’s minds. And there was the feeling that they all know each other on a level more intimate than I could ever know them, or perhaps anyone; and this produced a combination of admiration, envy, and unease. If this were a Polanski movie, I thought, they would be a coven. I even began to suspect that the reason each of them could improvise in this way must have something to do with the rest of them being present; that they create a sort of magic circle in which such things can happen. That they were all holding the edge of an invisible net, which they cast collectively into the air, to catch the bits of melodies floating around like pollen. As for the music, it is as ephemeral as the dappled bit of sunlight I noticed falling on the carpet when I glanced toward the window late that afternoon; it is music of that Sunday, and no other. One is not leaving a legacy, but living a moment. And so it is all the more necessary just to play. Maybe the feeling of humility comes partly from this.

Kazzrie was not part of the original trio that day. She flitted up to the piano during the jam two or three times, once dragging my neighbor along with her for a duet at the same keyboard. I remember the immense sound she got out of that piano, for such a wisp of person. But then there was a special radiance about her, an energy far greater than her size. Walking home with my neighbor after the gig, I was reluctant to single out any one performance, the whole afternoon had been so enjoyable, the collective musicianship so impressive. We have a running joke between us, my neighbor and I. Both of us have had the experience of sharing music we love with friends, only to be disappointed by a lukewarm or patronizing response. So now, when we talk about music, no matter how much we like something, all we will ever commit to saying is that it is interesting. “Was it interesting?” “Oh, yes. Definitely interesting. I have something you might find interesting as well.” “Great, I’d love to hear it. I like interesting music.” In this sort of exchange, you depend on the off smile or wrinkle of an eye to say more than words.

But when we talked about Kazzrie that afternoon, it was in tones of reverent, gushing appreciation. We were suddenly comfortable dropping our masks; something about the music demanded it. It only lasted a few moments. Then we returned to our more generally laconic, dispassionate discussion of music, and then we moved on to other subjects.

In a way, the Beacon set was the antithesis of that intimate gathering in Morningside. Before the quartet began, Kazzrie told the audience they were going to evoke the days of Young and Holiday, as well as play some more free improvisation. The set that afternoon was definitely tilted toward the former. The nine or ten songs were all standards, with the free excursions relegated to digressions at the ends of tunes. With the exception of two ballads, and to a lesser extent the songs Kazzrie sang in her pleasant, Holiday-inflected voice (“All of Me” and “I Ain’t Foolin’”), the selections were identically imagined and approached: the same forward momentum, hippity-hop bounce, arrangement, and order of solos. “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise,” which appeared early in the set, is such a delicate, haunting tune; I’ve always thought it carried faint suggestions of conspiracy, of betrayal. But the band played it with the same foot-tapping energy as they did everything else. This wasn’t so much sunup as high noon; the melody lost all shadow.

Was it the audience? I wondered. From the Q&A after the set, it was clear that at least a few people there were new to jazz. Maybe the quartet was afraid of alienating them.

I don’t think so.* While Charlie and the rest of the band did indeed evoke the days of Holiday and Young—and Young is not a bad touchstone for Charlie’s warm, sumptuous tone and wonderful sense of melody, both of which really shone on the ballads, and which the Howland space served to amplify—Kazzrie, singing excepted, did not. Something I learned from one of my jazz guitar teachers many years ago: you can swing your way through just about anything. (He demonstrated this by playing an uptempo solo with as many “wrong” notes as he could squeeze in.) In the middle of a heavy swing, an excursion into dissonance or even sheer noise is passed over almost unnoticed by many listeners—even by educated listeners who have not had much exposure to jazz. A steady rhythm allows us to box in and measure such transgressions; it reinforces the sense that they are temporary, regulated. A good beat can square even the most crooked line. The early free jazz players knew this—compare early Dolphy records to Out to Lunch, or Cecil Taylor’s Love for Sale and Conquistador!, or Coleman’s Free Jazz to AACM records from the mid ‘60s. For the average listener, there is something much more transgressive about the bassist and drummer dismounting and tramping off into the meadows to screw around than in even the most outlandish melodies or harmonies. It is the difference between walking into a room and frowning at the décor, and having the rug pulled out from under you.

It wasn’t just Holiday and Young, then, but early Cecil Taylor, that was evoked in me: that time in Taylor’s career when the piano worked like so many IEDs, blasting the rest of the band, and the whole musical experience, off kilter—“Excursion on a Wobbly Rail,” indeed. Like my jazz guitar teacher, Kazzrie could swing when she wanted to, but delighted in getting the notes all wrong; and, like Taylor, comping or soloing, she delighted in throwing rhythmic and harmonic curve balls while the rest of the band swung away, balls that (I have the feeling) whizzed right by many of the foot-tappers in the audience.

If Charlie’s big, huggable sound was all about pleasure, Kazzrie’s was bliss. There was something almost haughty about her, sitting sidesaddle at the piano, her shoulders hunching and relaxing, her mouth occasionally moving. She is almost too big a presence; she is swept away from the moment she sits down. And the way she smiled at that keyboard! Yet, I never got the sense, as is sometimes the case when such different musicians sit in together, that she was off in her own world. Her desire to float did not mean she was leaving the band, but rather that she was finding her own ways to approach them, and the music (cf. her bizarre substitutions on “All the Things You Are”). Comping, she was always listening, prompting, teasing the other players—particularly Charlie, whom she spent the hour scampering after while he soloed, chasing up and down scales and throwing pie-in-the-face chords at. And didn’t Charlie take it all not only in good humor, but with more than a little love and respect? For he never knew, when she went to the top of the keyboard, whether she was going to splash around in the shallow pool of those high keys, or turn them into harp-strings, purling around his tenor. And if she went to the bottom, he didn’t know if those octave runs up from the rumbling depths of the keyboard were going to sound like a Chopin etude or a boogie-woogie … with a dash of Richard Strauss’s bass strings thrown in. She might start a chorus with a single note, and slowly build outwards into a thicket of chord, modifying the rhythm as she went, until Charlie’s tenor, caught up in that beautiful dream, had to hack its way out of the morass of harmony. And then she might climb the keyboard with that same idea, maybe using it to thread her way into a solo, holding onto the tatters of the original idea to create seams. For there was always continuity, the remarkable sense that the concepts on this wide, weird palette come to her fully-formed. There is little, I imagine, she can’t do with a piano, little to which she can’t make it bend, like those spoons, back in that apartment in Morningside.

Did Kazzrie lie to us? Maybe a little. Maybe unintentionally. Maybe just not the whole truth. There was that bit of Holiday in her voice, and Young in Charlie’s horn. And she did say they were going to go a bit … out. Only she was never in. And so there was a subversive air to the whole performance, as if she wanted to plant bad seeds in this green audience by smuggling all that fabulous chaos and dissonance into a straight, sincere, swinging jazz set, smiling the whole way through, as if to say, “Who, me? I didn’t do it!” My guitar teacher warned me about people like you, lady. She was, finally, impossible to resist: she is so sunny and untroubled, so goddamn sure of herself, so certain that whatever she plays is going to win you over, so poised, and so clearly transported by the joy of making music, that if you were to tell her that her playing was, well, a little unorthodox, she would look at you like you were crazy.

It’s the same story as everywhere else. They used to make things here. Things you could touch. Hats, apparently. Lots of hats. The factories closed down in the ‘70s, right when they were moving all those books. Now they’re lofts, and the library is a façade. It’s all widgets and MacGuffins. When this sort of thing happened in SoHo, and Williamsburg, at least there was the rest of the City to ground them, like stones around a hot-air balloon. I mean, some neighborhoods still have metal trash cans, and people live in the buildings where they were born and raised. Or they come from faraway lands to squat, old new people without a pot to piss in, as they say. But here? They’re building a hotel and conference center on the river. Same as everywhere. Beacon just did it better, stronger, faster. Dia. Noche.

In the bathroom of this library without books, there is a picture of a chicken. Music, echoing in the spaces where books used to be. Presence, filling the space left behind by representation, twice removed. This is what I am thinking, staring at that picture of the chicken hanging over the toilet.

Maybe it was the rest of the band who were living a dream: the quaint beauty of the old country, the last century, jazz as it used to be, when the men worked on the waterfront or in the factories, and many of the women, too, and they met on dancefloors or smoky pubs, when the boom was taking off and the bomb was so real it made every moment precious. Maybe it was Kazzrie, with her big piano and her big sound, and her sound, and her sound that was nothing like theirs, nothing like anything but itself, no matter how much I try to find musical stones to pin it, who was holding the rest of them down; Kazzrie they depended on to stop them from floating away into some dream of a former time that wasn’t coming back. Kazzrie who kept the whole thing anchored in the present, who said, simply, You are here, like those maps in malls and museums. I didn’t have to worry about pictures of chickens or libraries without books, or even the fact that I’d moved so far out that the City was a faint glimmer and tug in space, a picture from Voyager, because I was a satellite of other, nearer bodies, and Kazzrie was here with her big piano to ground me in the living present.

* Another reason I don’t think so: I’ve attended other concerts by musicians in the same collective (perhaps not the right word; “New Artists” will do, I guess, because many of them have recorded for the small, independent label of this name) just as standards-driven as this one, and others made up entirely of originals, and yet others tending toward the free improv of that afternoon in Morningside. They are an impressively ecumenical bunch; I never got the impression anyone would get called a fascist for playing the tonic triad. For these musicians, “free improv” does not necessarily mean painting on an exploding canvas. From what I have witnessed, they often seem more interested in finding consonances and erecting structures, however temporary or strange, with dissonance reserved for shade and ornament, like vines over a trestle, than in creating the esctatic maelstroms associated (a little too facilely) with free jazz.

Two Free Jazz Epitaphs

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Fall is generally the time of year when I depend on finding some older piece to revise in order to keep the Pit Stop going. These two “epitaphs” are from 2003 or 2004. The evocation of the City in the first of the two is very much of that time. The second has been somewhat more updated. HD

1. CBGB’s 313 Gallery

Free jazz! Creative music! Avant-garde music! Liberation music! Et cetera!

In New York, once upon a time, it was called downtown music.

Downtown at CBGB’s 313 Gallery, they called it “freestyle,” and their Sunday night free jazz concerts “freestyle events.”

That word—freestyle—had a special resonance for me. I used to be a competitive swimmer. Everyone who swam knows what freestyle means. It means you wouldn’t get disqualified for doing something different. And that would have been fine, except the point was to win.

The 313 Gallery was not the place you would drag your out-of-town guests to, unless they shared your perversity—though I seemed to have a perverse predilection for trying to pervert the straight ones, once they’d tired of the museums, parks, and tall buildings. The next thing you knew, there we were, at CBGB’s, or Tonic, or Roulette, and they were enduring, like Bush’s freedom, squirming or angry or just plain bored.

There’s a reason these freestyle events were stuck into the cellar of CBGB’s, already music’s cellar, in the Lower East Side, one-time cellar of the City of New York. Like the Weather, the musical revolution, too, went underground. That club smelled like a cellar, goddammit. Must and damp, and behind that, and behind that …

The skid mark in Dali’s underwear. Stop your ears, Wynton. We’re 20,000 leagues under Lincoln Center.

Otherwise, the basement of the 313 Gallery shared the found-object aesthetic of many contemporary art spaces, trying hard to appear as discovered and unreconstructed as the music. The ads in the Voice called the seating comfortable, though many of the chairs were of the plastic lawn variety, and the sofas were past exhaustion. Pillars stood fickly between the audience and the space for the band, like at the old Iridium, though here they were so obviously functional that they stopped being in the way. On each, a plain white sheet of paper listed bands, members, set times.

What drew my attention most, though, was a red curtain hung carelessly behind the space where the band played, sagging at its middle, exposing the broken brick behind it, a strip of tin foil, maybe the space for the boiler.

I said found-object; I could have said ascetic. It was a space of denial, as if we were gathered inside a hair shirt. Maybe the club used to be a mission, and its spirit lived on in us. Self-abnegation had driven us into each others’ arms. In a city of this size, there is a kind of immediate intimacy formed in groups this small, as if the pressure of all the millions outside were brought to bear upon us. Strangers, we were suddenly of one blood, revolutions plotted in our ears.

In a city this size, any gathering this small must be transgressive.

Early one Sunday evening, March of 2003. The band of the moment was called Test. A fourpiece: two multireedists, bass and drums. Daniel Carter, that downtown workhorse, was blowing long and dizzy into his tenor; tonsured, reed-thin, he swept and looped in figure-eights from squat to tiptoe. Sabir Mateen, on alto, also had his eyes closed, though his face was less placid than Carter’s, his body rigid; with each burst of sound his waist-length dreads swung. I got stuck on the bassist, Matt Heyner: the expression on his face, the reiterated thrust of his right hand across the strings. I’d seen that face, that hand, maybe, in a porn movie. Yet, in this context, it remained chaste. And it’s remarkable that this should be so. They were playing a sort of music you might have been burned for, once upon a time.

On that red curtain, the shadows of musicians leapt like the shadows of flames, the shadows of devils dancing around a fire.

Test of endurance. Test of faith. Weapons tests, and tests of emergency response systems. Experiment, rehearsal, trial-run for something yet to come, something on the verge of coming, the moment before the moment, always delayed—test-imony to the ultimate goal of free jazz, which is, which must be, presence. Writers envy music for being a language that can say “now” and mean it. Free jazz shouts it through a megaphone. Free jazz throws a tantrum over it. Free jazz wants it NOW.

If jazz is (as we’re so often told) a music hewn from the living present, then why is so much of it mesmerized by tradition to the point of turning itself to stone? Free jazz lets us imagine, if only for a moment, what it would be like to get out from under that stone, to float unmoored. The moment is a fiction, of course—not least because the avant-garde has its own well-developed tradition, “the shape of jazz to come,” long since come. But the moment is only artificial in retrospect. Experience has no memory; its faith is raw, primitive, total. What better way to understand that moment of exhilaration, of connection free jazz affords us, than that moment when doubt escapes us?

Test ended their set with a coda and yielded the stage to an all-brown band called Chocolate Nemesis, anchored by the bass of William Parker. In whatever context Parker’s bass appears, it creates an undertow, is more felt than heard, and so helps close the gap between listening and experiencing. This night was no exception. Parker likes to flirt with rhythm: as soon as he’s settled into a groove, one we can dig our toes into, he undercuts it; the groove fractures into a prolonged stumble. But there is no pratfall, no cymbal crash, no punch line. That moment before the comic’s butt hits the boards and the audience bursts out laughing is prolonged—not repeated, like in slapstick, but prolonged. Because once the comic falls, all he can do is do it over again. But in Parker, in freestyle, the music stays on the cusp of an endlessly-deferred, ever-arriving climax, until any sense of structure—verse, chorus, bridge, coda, A, B, climax, origin, end—is lost. Land hasn’t just disappeared from sight; land has just disappeared. And since there is no place to return to, there is no time we can imagine ourselves saved.

Collectively, intimately, chastely, band and audience participate in this voyage whose destination is loss. With a music that promises so much, perhaps it can’t be otherwise.

That sagging red curtain, drawing our attention to what it’s supposed to hide!

A couple of months later I was walking through the Lower East Side with a friend of a friend. He was lamenting the disappearance of the “dark underbelly” of New York. Maybe he had never experienced desperate poverty, as I had not. Maybe, like other people of our class and age (middle, thirtysomething), he’d fed off the spectacle of poverty to remind himself of his own reality in the fantastic surroundings of “new economy,” or doctrinally free market, New York—ever more fantastic as the economy thumped back to reality. Suffering built this city’s character, but not my suffering. So we lamented the death of a tragedy that had used to be performed nightly on these dark stoops, on Stanton or Rivington or Ludlow.

Could we be consoled? Hadn’t we attended these freestyle events, in these cellars, in this last ungentrified outpost on the Bowery?

And yet, could I really believe that these freestyle events didn’t depend on the Bowery’s gentrification? Now through January first, at the Museum of Urban Grit’s new I-MAX theater, I, too, could experience The Dark Underbelly. (In 3D, of course.) Skid row, skid mark—we have to believe it exists, that we can reach over the rope and touch it. And if that’s what the music was really about, then maybe the mystical evocation of the present was just what I wanted from it: a hold against my own slipping reality: my own freestyle, the way my body used to feel hitting the freezing cold water on summer mornings. Maybe the music was really a torch song for the Lower East Side, an invocation of past suffering, the ghosts of the penniless immigrants, homeless people, junkies, freaks. An injunction to remember.

2. Tonic

Among the many criticisms leveled at free jazz, one of the most common is that it forgets its audience. It wears its esoterism as a badge; its adherents believe themselves the elect.

The assumption seems to be that, before we can expect an audience to decode “difficult” music, they require a palliative. After all, the people must be given what they want, music must delight first, instruct second. Free jazz, perennially unsweetened, bitter at the root, and real hard to understand, is thus relegated to music’s cellar—at least until some apparently ever-deferred revolution of consciousness overtakes the general populace.

If John Zorn is the best-known avant-garde musician to have emerged from New York’s “downtown” scene, maybe it’s because he believes neither that a music’s “avant” status exempts it from seeking an audience, nor that finding an audience requires sweetening the music. As a label mogul and club entrepreneur—not to mention working musician—to believe the former would be suicide. Zorn has gone out of his way to promote what he calls “creative music.” It’s a silly label, and particularly bizarre coming from somebody whose contempt for generic boundaries has been his music’s best promotion. Then again, given that Tonic, his first venture, buckled under New York’s tectonic real estate shifts back in 2007 (cf. the Himalayan condo that rose up just across its Norfolk Street home), it does make you wonder whether the branding of the avant-garde presents the only hope of a mitigated salvation.

The latter idea, though—sweetening—would be suicide of a different sort. “Sweet” is not the first word that comes to mind when thinking about Zorn’s music. Take, for example, the first time I saw him, at 1999’s Vision Festival. He still wore his hair long then, and had on baggy pants, and he put one foot up on the monitor like Steve Harris (the bass player for Iron Maiden), and, head buried, horn braced against one thigh, and held at an angle less reminiscent of Pres than of the way those Tarantino gangsters fire their pistols, he proceeded to sonically violate me in a way that, once upon a very long time, believing my suburban white heavy metal the most transgressive music imaginable, I couldn’t have begun to fathom. And wasn’t I pleased to find out later that Zorn had recorded with Slayer’s original and only true drummer, that cocaine-infused dynamo Dave Lombardo? Didn’t I say then, “See, I told you he was a metalhead”?

Of course, Zorn’s no metalhead. Still, I like to imagine hundreds of such recognition scenes: “See, I told you he was a punk!” “See, I told he you he listened to [Stockhausen, Messiaen … fill in the blank]!” Suffice it to say Zorn’s musical universe is too elemental and too chaotic to adhere to the boundaries of any one genre for very long.

Were he to stop there, though, Zorn would fit neatly into the genre-bending that has characterized jazz for the last half-century. Nor is it enough to simply say that Zorn is at once an uncompromising musician and highly conscious of himself as a performer and promoter, or even that he knows how to market his uncompromising artistry. It’s rather how he handles—explodes, really—the “contradiction” between artist and performer that sets him apart. He wallows in it. He recognizes that only by actively invoking and manipulating the artist-entertainer binary can its conventionality be exposed, and the construct held up to ridicule.

After the ’99 Vision Festival, I didn’t see Zorn again for almost four years. This was partly because I left the City half a year later to finish my doctorate, and didn’t return until the summer of 2002. In hindsight, though, I wonder if it wasn’t also to keep that Vision night’s cosmic mindfuck enshrined in my memory. There had been something so right about the church basement setting, the metal folding chairs in lieu of pews. Zorn’s partner that night was the percussion guru Milford Graves, a man for whom the word “grandstand” might have been invented. Between that set and the Anderson-Parker-Drake one that ended the night, I left feeling like some newly-minted evangelist, all ready to rush out into the wilderness and found a religion.

I guess four years was long enough, because when I saw Zorn billed with Brazilian singer-guitarist Vinicius Cantuaria for a set at Tonic, I decided the time was right measure, as Melville reckoned it, the size of god.

I got there late, but Zorn was later. The Goth-Tinkerbells who worked the door said he was having dinner, that he’d had a busy day and was running behind schedule.

The club was almost silent. Inside that halo of red Christmas lights, on the crotch-high altar Tonic called a stage, for the early-birds in the few chairs and the hipsters sitting crosslegged on the floor and the dozens shifting from one foot to the other behind them, Cantuaria thumbed bossas on his plump hollowbody, half-whispering in Portuguese. Erik Friedlander accompanied him on cello, filling the sonic near-vacuum with a restrained lyricism. After a few songs, a drummer sat in. He treated his kit like it was made of glass. Maybe it was the sound of bottles at the bar behind me.

Forty-five minutes later, Zorn trucked in, sat down on stage, and said, “That was the candy, this is the medicine.” There was no slow build into the cacophony, no time for the musicians or audience to adjust. It was like an evil clown had wandered onto a movie set right when the glamorous couple, lying on the beach in Rio, were about to kiss.

John Zorn: musical freedom-fighter or musical terrorist?

Wasn’t it just possible, I wondered later, that he’d planned the whole thing? It was of course so very very Zorn, just the kind of jump-cuts out of which albums like Naked City are built. And then the first piece Zorn drove into was longer, more dissonant and more wildly malevolent than anything that followed. When he finally let up (and Friedlander, too, and the drummer, both of whom had caught the wave without blinking), Cantuaria was still thumbing his bossas and whispering in Portuguese, a subdued act of resistance … or a state of shock. And Zorn lay his horn across his lap and looked wryly at the crowd, as if this Brazilian singer-guitarist had shipwrecked on a free-jazz set, and was playing the unwitting straight man in a musical comedy.

If music often finds its most nuanced accents in a blend of sweet and sour, Zorn, like some demented chemist, had separated the two—let Cantuaria give us the sugar until we choked on it, and then himself gave us the medicine until we choked on it. But far from demonstrating that each element couldn’t exist on its own, whether serendipity or plotted coup, the partitioning worked. It worked maybe because free jazz is finally not interested in musical instruction, but destruction—another kind of sugar, the kind that monkey-wrenches the culture industry, rotting the teeth of its gears, dissolving binaries—sweet-sour, instruct-delight, artist-entertainer. The show didn’t “work” in the sense of musicians playing together like good little boys and girls; according to that definition, it was a trainwreck. Later on, sure, sort of. But the minutes following Zorn’s entry were the performance’s jagged peak. There, in the unexpected moment where the performance “fails,” it finds its center as live experience. And how could that peak, or that abyss, when every expectation about the performance is torn away from us, appear, unless we had been fattened, sweetened, and kissed goodnight by Cantuaria?

It’s one thing to bend generic boundaries by bringing the free reeds of avant jazz to metal and punk—other musicians have done this, and clubs like Tonic and CBGB’s used to be around to capitalize on it. It’s quite another to descend like a roaring lion upon well-intentioned Brazilian singer-guitarists. The former marks a daring openness that has done much to expand the language of contemporary music, and to turn younger music fans onto new styles and sounds. The latter is a calculated effort to break down the perceived barrier between two conceptions of music’s role in culture—to mess with our heads at the very root of thought. It’s in the latter that Zorn really distinguishes himself. A serious and thoughtful musician, always ready with the blue note, the honk and squeal, this joker, macaw, one hand behind his back, always smiling at himself and at us. Shaman and showman, circus clown and medicine man, he is as much at home playing the ringmaster as with his head in the lion’s mouth, or swinging a hundred feet above the startled crowd without a net.

Master/Class

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The first thing I heard was laughter.

At The Stone, John Zorn’s Dieter-jazz follow-up to defunct Tonic, this is no mean feat. If Tonic had all the earnest scruffiness of a mid-90s Williamsburg squat—the garage with bedsheets for walls and a dirty skylight for a window—The Stone’s aim seems the opposite: to create a high-cult, gallery-like ambience for “creative” music. Even the name strains under the weight of its own symbolism: cornerstone of a new downtown, laid at the southeasternmost corner of the East Village/Alphabet City. Heavy stuff, this.

But laughter has a way of transfiguring spaces, making windows out of walls, turning stones into feathers. A child laughing in a museum always sounds insouciant. Laughter in a church turns the pulpit into a sandbox and the censer into a swing.

It was Steve Coleman doing the laughing. I might have guessed; I don’t think I’ve ever gone to see Coleman and not heard him laugh. This was at last year’s Pi Recordings festival, and Coleman, the resident heavyweight, was busy lightening the mood. He was sitting in an empty row of chairs at the far corner of our Spartan little auditorium, joined by the other musicians in that night’s trio, the trumpeter John Finlayson and pianist David Bryant. They all seemed to be enjoying themselves. But it was Coleman whose laughter rang out for The Stone to hear.

A well-known educator as well as composer and improviser, Coleman clearly enjoys working with younger musicians, and one can easily see why younger musicians like working with him—and why artists like Finlayson, a ten-year veteran of Coleman’s Five Elements band, would stick around. In his backwards baseball cap, chamois shirt and loose-fitting jeans, Coleman looked hardly older than his mentees, many of whom were appearing in other Pi festival sets, on other nights, in combinations and permutations that seemed to mirror the music’s complex logic of chord substitutions.

As a 2010 piece in the Wall Street Journal noted about his ongoing workshops at the Jazz Gallery, for Coleman “performance and instruction are often indistinguishable.”* The bandstand is a classroom, and vice-versa; a workshop is a set by another name. This was certainly borne out at The Stone, where Coleman spent the hour leading Finlayson and Bryant around the wormhole alleys of his harmonic imagination, restating lines, breaking them into bits, cycling through the bits until the other two musicians could patch the whole together. More than once he stopped playing and sang a melody, accenting the rhythm by clapping his hands. And just when they thought they had it, he would find some unexpected way out—the trapdoor, the corkscrew ladder, the skeleton key. No surprise that Coleman has compared his role to that of a Griot … or that he counts among his influences a visit to the Dagbon people of Ghana, who have—according to his rich, recondite website M-Base—“a tradition of speaking through their music, using a drum language that still survives today.”

Now, every good teacher knows that teaching is part performance. It’s not so much that Coleman exploits this crossover as that he seems most at home as a performer when he is teaching. At the same time, it’s possible to overstate Coleman’s role as leader. Some of the most enjoyable moments in the set had him laughing at, and then musically responding to, Bryant’s noodling diversions and interventions. The laughing teacher is the one who enjoys what his students have to contribute, who expects to learn as well as teach, to inspire and be inspired. Coleman, that is, never stepped back to play teacher—he was as fully present, as fully integrated in the music-making as the other two. It’s a difficult line to walk, between self-indulgence and self-effacement. Coleman made it look easy. Then again, if you like to teach, the classroom is often just a more structured, measured extension of whatever else you do.

Of course, teaching and learning are still work. Coleman may not be a harsh taskmaster, but his is a labor-intensive music, with a certain agony of force behind it. Finlayson had beads of sweat shining in his cropped afro, and not just because it was August. For a while, a moth circled around and around in the light above him, like some errant melody he couldn’t quite catch, hovering just out of reach of his spiraling drones.

Here is a thought: perhaps the set must be a lesson, because the lesson so conceived, and the teacher-student relationship so understood, embodies an ideal that allows egos to fuse, and the collaborative product of music-making to rise above the artificial strictures of clubs, sets, times, fees, and all the other elements of our culture that work to divide music from life, experience, spirit.

For this, finally, is Coleman’s project. In his wildly abstract musical imagination, jazz is code, a complex series of algorithms, but employed for the purpose of rising above mere intellectual play. Listening to a jam build over the course of eight or ten minutes (as one can do on Coleman’s most recent albums, like The Mancy of Sound) is like watching crystals grow in solution. Those clumped crystals, you may remember from your high school chemistry lab, always looked eerily organic, as if the submerged metal rods had grown hair. And this is precisely what happens in a Coleman jam: the austere, unforgiving beauty of pattern and code slowly takes on a palpable life. Math grows hair.

When the house lights came up, maybe because they’d played overtime, Finlayson and Coleman kept blowing as they exited (which, at The Stone, means either walking back over to the folding chairs, where everyone pretends they can’t see you anymore, or down to the basement). Had I stuck around a few more minutes, I have a feeling the conversation would have picked up right where the music left off.

* Unfortunately, Coleman has never been present the few times I attended these Monday night workshops. What I saw was a venue for up-and-coming musicians (the sort the Jazz Gallery exists to support and promote) to test out new compositions with each other, and with an audience. Apparently, Coleman’s absence from many of these “Steve Coleman Presents” events resulted in complaints—or so the guy working the door himself complained, on one of those nights when I was there and Coleman wasn’t. True, curator and organizer does not mean bandleader … but it is a little questionable to put the words “Steve Coleman Presents” in big letters on the ad, and then wonder why people—particularly visitors to Gotham—might be a teensy-weensy bit disappointed. Anyway, for a good idea what Mondays look like when Coleman is present, see the aforementioned Wall Street Journal article.

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