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Live Birds

I get now why they called him Bird.

That this wisdom should be granted to me at the end of my forty-second year, while watching the thirtysomething Nuyorican alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón tear a hole in the world at Smalls a couple of Tuesdays ago, is perhaps not surprising. Except that he wasn’t trying to incarnate the spirit of Bird. Nor was he trying to imitate birdsongs, like Dolphy, or Messiaen. I didn’t hear Bird, or birds, but bird, the Platonic ideal of bird-ness. I saw it, too: he was hopping from foot to foot—then his body started to jut up and down in irregular pulses, bending at the knees and waist—then he went up on his toes, his back arched, face cinched up, eyebrows raised—wings thrown out—the moment’s levitation a few inches off the basement floor … It was only after that my brain leapt to the feathered vertebrates now believed to have descended from dinosaurs, and then made the association to Charlie Parker, and I thought, This is why they called him Bird.

As the titles of his albums suggest (Jibaro, Esta Plena, Alma Adentro), Zenón has built his career as a composer and bandleader drawing on and refiguring the music of his native Puerto Rico. Even the less emphatically Puerto Rican Awake (2008) features a cover photo of Zenón on a New York City rooftop, echoing the photos early Puerto Rican immigrants would send back to their families. These are the sorts of echoes one hears throughout Zenón’s music—not Latin jazz as it has traditionally been conceived, but a Latin-inflected contemporary jazz: Caribbean folk spoken through a tightly-honed, harmonically bold post-bop idiom.

At Smalls, Zenón took advantage of the intimate atmosphere fostered by family and friends (and aficionados, and tourists) to present a series of new compositions, which, he announced, reflect on the specifically Nuyorican experience.* It is some of the most exciting music the young composer has produced to date—a music which aggressively asserts its Puerto Rican-ness, while at the same time gracefully negotiating the pitfalls confronting the consciously “ethnic” jazz composer: on the one hand, of trying to be, as the Spanish say, “more Catholic than the Pope” about one’s identity; on the other, of the folk element becoming jazz’s window dressing rather than the music’s interior life, its beating heart. The liner notes to Esta Plena (2009), which Zenón penned himself, give a clear indication how consciously he approaches the composing and improvising process, a process at once rigorous and arbitrary—rigorous perhaps because it is arbitrary—that informs every aspect of the music: rhythm, melody, harmony, form, and instrumentation. At its best, the music’s Caribbean undergirding harmonizes with its jazz expression in a way that invigorates both traditions, while stopping short of fusing them into a single entity—that beautiful photo of the dancing couple on the cover of Alma Adentro.

Probably the first thing that strikes a listener new to Zenón’s music is its nimbleness about time. It is a music where odd meters (fives, sevens and nines) are played as freely as any Viennese waltz—or conversely, where an arrangement can dramatically call attention to a meter’s oddness: in the rhythmic Grand Guignol of the set-ender “First Language,” for example, drummer Henry Cole whacking out dry sevens on his snare while the bass and piano held fast to a stolid four against it, and Zenón weaved melodic lines around the three of them. Much of the rhythmic brilliance of these compositions derives from such well-placed counterweights, from the opening tune’s pecking single note on the piano to the violent schisms of “First Language.” Nor is it just odd time signatures that create these effects, but the rapid changes between them, and between the instruments that play in them. Just as quickly as we think we’ve grasped a Zenón melody, the time changes: the same phrase might be tested against two or three different meters, sometimes all at once, in a technique Zenón calls (according to Bob Blumenthal’s liner notes to Awake) “rhythmic dimensions.” A melody, it seems, isn’t there just to be played, but tinkered with, each tinkering revealing something new about the phrase and the notes that constitute it.

Zenón does the same as a soloist: one phrase, many rhythms, accenting different notes, giving the band time to tinker, too, until he’s played it out—then a sudden sprint, or a soaring high note, or a party-favor trill. I don’t mean to suggest a hesitancy about his soloing; there isn’t that sense of seeking one hears in later Coltrane (sorry, probably an overused signifier about Coltrane), or the sort of overdeliberate thoughtfulness of John Scofield’s guitar. A lot of players will stop, listen, regroup, try a phrase a few times in different directions before finding a new groove. It’s part of the grammar of improvisation. But there’s none of that in Zenón’s playing. The style is forthright, the ideas pour out of him. And if an alto can never have quite the muscle a tenor does, Zenón’s comes close, pushed along by the sheer volume of his ideas. There is real strength in his playing, the surprisingly firm grip of a small-boned hand.

That edge to his sound, coupled with the mercurial energy of his rhythms and the harmonic intricacies of his compositions (and, need it be said, his flabbergasting technique), comes in handy when it comes times for a ballad. One wrong turn in a ballad, and an alto player can wind up in the proverbial elevator with Kenny G. But Zenón’s ballads always have these crosscurrents that cut the saccharin. “Progreso,” from Esta Plena, is a good example. It begins with an über-nostalgic, almost Beatlesy melody, arranged as a sort of processional for the piano. Later, the melody is picked up and played solo by the horn. Then the whole rhythm section comes in behind him—playing not the processional, but a slow, teasing funk, giving a swagger to the sweetness, leaving nostalgia behind. At the Smalls set, the second tune worked in a similar way: a lovely melody, but played against chromatic-sounding changes. The melody alone would have been too sweet, the changes too directionless and abstract. They shouldn’t have worked together, but somewhat miraculously they did, the melody giving the changes needed direction, the changes reining in the melody’s excesses.

As usual I find myself speaking about the leader at the expense of the band, Zenón’s working quartet for his last three albums; each is an impressive player in his own right. Luis Perdomo’s piano solos were as extensive as any taken by Zenón, who sat at the end of the bar to dig them together with the rest of the crowd. They nicely complemented the bandleader’s style, alternating between the percussive and the fluid, uncanny echoes of McCoy Tyner and Maurice Ravel. As for Cole, I’ve never heard a drummer sound more like a timbale player, at least at the outset of his big solo … but then he built outwards to the rest of the kit, inviting the other drums in like dancers on the edge of a circle, as if to suggest the evolution of jazz from that mythical northward migration, beginning not in New Orleans, but all the way down in the Caribbean, the first African presence in the New World: a direct line joining Puerto Rico to New York.

When Cole was finished, Zenón stepped back into that pleasantly punishing seven-on-four. The club was already an hour late for the open mic, though I can’t imagine anyone was complaining, least of all the other musicians, huddled in the back like spies with their mysteriously-shaped attachés.

I left Smalls on a madrugada high, marveling at the sheer amount of energy of the human species. I had a whole cartoon looping in my head: sun heating the planet green, energy absorbed by these creative ambulatory plants, plants exploding into flower on a bandstand, in a club, in New York, on any given night.

But then maybe it was just that sort of night. At West 4^th a couple of vagrants got on the train, pushing their bikes through the relentlessly closing doors. One of them announced to the other passengers that he was a serial killer, he had cut off his stepfather’s arms so he (his stepfather) would never hit him again, bragged that mental institutions were only ever able to lock him up for a few days at a time, and then started beating the poles with a chain. A mass exodus at 14^th Street to the adjacent car, where three teens put on a breakdancing show starring an old, laceless tennis shoe. They threw it like a football, shot it like an arrow, caught it behind their heads and in their armpits, put it on and kicked it off, fêted it like it was Cinderella’s glass slipper. And all this while they danced and flipped and swung around the poles.

See? That’s what I’m talking about: energy. Now, I’m not silly enough to think they’d do it for free; but the dollar I gave them—that little bit of my own transmuted energy—hardly plumbs the miracle of their intent. On some nights the whole city seems to glow like a crack pipe, the very buildings sweat light; and we, the poor folks who live here, are just vectors for all this helplessly accumulated energy, gnats inside a concrete matchbox, looking desperately for release.

* I’m guessing the Smalls sets were one more live working-through of the music Zenón would present with a 12-piece big band at Montclair State University a couple of weeks later, under the title “Puerto Rico Nacio en Mi: Tales from the Diaspora.” Regardless, it will be interesting to see what final form these compositions assume when they are recorded.

Land of the Midnight Stumble

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So you climb out of the vanguard and find there’s somehow still money in your pocket, or you stagger out of one of those latenight westvillage cafes after a grading binge, all blearyeyed & braincalloused, a coat of cold espresso on your tongue. it’s midnight. the shitstinking evercoming nevercoming subway stands like a wall between you & your bed. so you do that 7^th ave shuffle down to 10^th street, hang a right & stumble downstairs, hand the man with the cashbox your last twenty & tip your hat to the big zonked grey bombshelter cat in the corner. & lo & behold who should be on the non-bandstand but Wynton Marsalis, like THE Wynton Marsalis, here just because you didn’t know he would be, & he & the other cats are tearing through a “cherokee” the likes of which you haven’t heard since that zootsoot nineteenfiftytwo life you dream about now & then. not that the cats wouldn’t play beautifully without him, but you just know he’s taking them to another level, what with his jazzatlincolncenter halo & suit he looks like he was born in & kenburns PBS/BGO cachet. & then “you don’t know what love is,” nosir, you most certainly did NOT know what love is, not until you heard those long, breathy notes drippp from his horn like the spit you’ve watched bead & fall from another trumpet’s bell. leaky faucets. nights up. feels like every lonely man & woman in the city just turned over in their beds all at once. all you can think is thank GOD this cat still believes in slumming, because you just don’t imagine you forget he can still play like this & there’s a reason the powersthatbe picked him to wear that suit. & what better reminder than to watch him trade 2s with the rest of the cats on that closing blues, & then 1s, & then halves quarters eighths bang bang jockeying around each other while the crowd hooplas & jesus who knows probably the grey cat himself rolls over & yawns. & by the time the waitress with the impossibly red lipstick has worked her way through the people standing in the back with your drink & you’ve tipped her a dollar & she’s thanked you like you just rescued her from the Kraken you know it’s going to be a much longer night than you’d planned. because the set’s over & the night’s young & you’ve fallen in love all over again with this city of midnight fairylands that tramples on your plans & tears up your maps & throws all reason into the sea. & yet somehow manages to put everything just where it belongs. & you in it.

Best Music Writing 2011

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Last month I picked up a copy of the 2011 Da Capo Best Music Writing anthology, partly because I wanted a smorg of top-notch contemporary writing about music to read, partly because I thought I might want to use it as a text in my Writing About Music class this spring. I was particularly enthused because this year’s guest editor is Alex Ross, whose The Rest Is Noise I have praised elsewhere on this site (as if it needed more praise). The blurb on the cover, from the New York Journal of Books, also tempted me. “These essays make the reader want to explore the music of these artists if they have not been fans before,” the Journal claims. “That is what good music writing should do—it should pull the reader into the music.”

The same might be said about the relationship between a good blurb and the book it advertises. This one makes two separate claims. Both of them are valid. I’m just not sure they should be equated.

The first claim—music writing as a path to exploring artists outside a reader’s listening habits—is certainly borne out by Best Music Writing 2011. In his introduction, Ross argues persuasively for the atomization of musical culture in the digital age, a point which he shrinkwraps, “All music is subcultural; no music is everywhere beloved.” Hence the ethos of the anthology: diversity. I’m still rooting around on YouTube for stuff by Georg Friedrich Haas, Moshen Namjoo, and Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, to name but a few. Then there are those gaping holes in my knowledge of music history which an anthology like this one begins to fill. I never knew (forgive me) that Joan Jett and Lita Ford had played together, or that a band called The Runaways had existed. Of course, one point of Evelyn McDonnell’s torch song to Runaways drummer Sandy West is that the band has been overlooked by rock history—age and gender having everything to do with it.

But McDonnell can only furnish me a partial excuse. In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois writes (apropos of Booker T. Washington): “It is as though Nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force.” As a listener, I fit this description (or gloved criticism) pretty well; my habits tend to be narrow, so when I find something that grabs me, I dig. I mean, I bought every Eric Dolphy album I could get my hands on before I owned a single record by Charlie Parker. I’d rather listen to an album that intrigues me for the dozenth time than spend an hour on the internet sifting the virtual silt in the hope of finding a nugget of gold. Which is why the annual Best Music Writing, an occasional Sunday Times, and radio resources like WKCR and WSOU are invaluable: they act as sluice gates, keeping me in a happy place between desiccation and drowning. I understand that many music-writing professionals and DJs, who are expected to keep abreast or even ahead of the trends, don’t have the luxury of such restraint. I also know that recursive listening means that I miss nine-tenths of the music out there. But the only other option seems to be the Facebook equivalent of listening.*

The second, normative part of the blurb (“what good music writing should do”) is connected to the first by an unspecified “that,” which is then defined as “pull[ing] the reader into the music.” But is “pulling the reader into the music” the same as what I just described: the nudge you get from the radio, newspaper, or a friend (Facebook or otherwise) to give something new a spin? YouTube does as much when it pulls up a string of videos related to the one I searched. So does Amazon: “Customers who bought this item also bought …”

What about music writing that, rather than just pulling me into the orbit of a genre or artist, enables me to hear music, even music I thought I knew well, in a new way, in different contexts, according to different parameters? And if we expand the definition of “good music writing” to include the above, how well do the selections in Best Music Writing 2011 showcase the sort of writing that tweaks or wet-willies or even boxes my ears?

With about a third of the anthology devoted to pop music, BMW 2011 shouldn’t feel pop-heavy. And yet, it does. This may be my fault; pop rarely worms its way into my ear, let alone up to that dozenth listening, and I confess I have little patience for the nuances of celebrity-making and market synergies. Before I’m accused of a naivete I would elsewhere happily embrace: yes, I am aware that it is impossible to write about music today—popular or fringe—without addressing the music industry. I also understand that examinations of celebrity are a necessary part of the analysis of contemporary culture. But there’s a difference between addressing industry/celebrity self-fashioning, and making this the heart and soul of the writing … or the anthology. It’s not as though there was nothing else to talk about with pop; Jessica Hopper’s pitch-perfect review of M.I.A.’s /\ /\ /\ Y /\ (yes, that’s the title of the album) proves that in spades. Even Chris Norris’s well-salted take on the commerce of the Black Eyed Peas (“Will.i.am and the Science of Global Pop Domination”—it might have been called “All Logo”) has a couple of depressing-yet-fascinating Pea insights to share about the music. (My favorite: “The whole song should be a chorus.”) Maybe it all goes back to Andy Warhol. I never got Warhol, or just never cared to; Warhol is Lady Gaga’s avatar, according to “Growing Up Gaga”; and Lady Gaga seems to be the quintessence of celebrity packaging. That’s the closest I’ll get to a syllogism today.

Focus on celebrity has an unfortunate corollary, which is a preponderance of biography. This sort of surprises me, since The Rest Is Noise does such an admirable job balancing biography, history, and theory, never losing sight of the music along the way. I don’t mind a good profile; in fact, one of the pieces included in this year’s anthology is “Giant Steps,” David Hajdu’s wonderful profile of Fred Hersch, originally published in the New York Times. But as with Ross’s writing, Hajdu uses biography to forward our understanding Hersch’s music. How do stereotypes about gays affect the way we listen to the lush, lyrical music of an out gay pianist? In what ways have Hersch’s battle with AIDS affected his personality as a composer and an improviser? But in this anthology, such connections are few and far between; for all the pontificating about one or another star’s sexual orientation, the discussion rarely moves beyond packaging.** Even a masterly article like “The Thriller Diaries,” which makes some really brilliant points about Michael Jackson, is so larded with Jacksonalia that much of it reads like a savvy, well-written gossip column. Maybe that’s what Vanity Fair readers want: gourmet cotton candy. But when Nancy Griffin can pen something like “[Jackson] radiate[d] an epicene glamour that was at once innocent and intensely erotic,” it makes me pine for the article that wasn’t.

The above points to a second issue with the anthology: some of the pieces feel too slight to merit inclusion. In his introduction, Ross puts in a word for the more expansive articles: “The long read remains, in my experience, the most potent means of musical persuasion.” His point is certainly substantiated by many of the essays here: Hajdu’s profile of Hersch, James Wood’s dissection of Keith Moon, Franklin Bruno on the Bryant duo, Lauren Wilcox Puchowski on wedding music, Kelefa Sanneh on the canonization of hip hop lyrics, Geoffrey O’Brien’s review of a new Duke Ellington bio. True, not all the “long reads” are equally persuasive, and a few of the shorter pieces, such as Jace Clayton’s “Curiosity Slowdown” and the aforementioned M.I.A. album review (“Making Pop For Capitalist Pigs”), pack a real punch. The problem is that it’s not easy to make a review last much past the sell-by date. Even a concert review by a seasoned practitioner like Wendy Lesser (“Darkness Invisible”) can’t hold up beside many of the longer, more nuanced pieces that precede it. Her conclusion—“total darkness began to seem like the ideal environment for listening to just about everything”—seems like a no-brainer. And that’s just the point: months after the generating event, without anything larger to hitch their wagons to, reviews can come across sounding pretty stale. “Searching for the Heart of Country” is another good example: it begins with a marvelously detailed rundown of where the heart of country might be (“Is it … in Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge on Lower Broad in Nashville where the pickers will eternally play for the tip jar?”), but quickly devolves into a discussion of Taylor Swift’s record sales before arriving at another ho-hum conclusion: “the listeners” decide where the heart and soul of country is. Funny, the discussion of album sales started with the unrebutted assertion “But it’s also in marketing departments’ hands.” The diversification of country’s audience is indeed an important phenomenon; I only wish there had been a “long read” to provide a more persuasive analysis.

Maybe most varying in quality are (I dread to say it, but) the blogs. Like some of the shorter news-y pieces, much of the blog writing here feels too off-the-cuff, at least rubbing shoulders with the print articles. Jonathan Bogart writes with a lot of gusto about Ke$ha; but after the zillionth parenthetical interruption, some paragraph-length, I came to wish Ross or series editor Daphne Carr had invited him to edit, or had taken it upon themselves to do so. The single metal entry, also taken from a blog, has some great riffs (“One quick taste of the brick wall was enough for me. I retreated to safer ground, but there’s not much in the way of secure real estate at The Acheron”), but is less a stand-out than a paint-by-numbers example of how to write a metal show review (“‘Extinction’ started things off full throttle, instantly giving my neck a workout”; “Mutant Supremacy kill”; etc.). And Amy Klein’s tour diary “Rock and Roll Is Dead” is heartfelt and beautifully written … but adds nothing, so far as I can tell, to the discussion of the way rock music and rock journalism objectify women. I know this is her point: “It’s become such an old story that people frequently forget how vital it still is.” But where is the spiritual daughter of Joan Didion to wonder aloud about whether rock and roll wasn’t strangled in its cradle … or stillborn?

Of the blogs, pianist Jeremy Denk’s snarky, lyrical demolition of the program notes genre stands out. Here he is on Stravinsky’s Piano Concerto: “The main thematic material is good crusty Baroque fare: full of jagged, pointed intervals, evoking an academic abstruse fugue, food for angular counterpoint … to allow this to become roaring ‘20s jazz is a punning leap from the cloister to the cabaret.” He follows with the comment, “Perhaps you feel my description goes too far”—and then immediately contrasts his language—itself crusty, baroque, and punning—with generic program fare.

Now, I’m not asking for 300 pages of this. A paragraph of such language is exhausting. But I did want more like it: more precise attention to the music; more treating words like taffy. Nor am I saying no business, no celebrity, no biography. All these have their place, and can be done well—there are numerous examples here. But I shouldn’t get to James Wood’s “The Fun Stuff,” the fourth to last selection out of 32, wondering why a slightly less hyperactive version of Denk’s counter-manifesto was the exception rather than the rule.

It’s not like Wood eschews biography. We get the full Moon here: his practical jokes, his addictions, his whole restless personality. In fact, we get more than a little about Wood himself. But these elements are here to help us understand Moon the drummer. We hear Moon next to Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham, consider his life next to Glenn Gould’s. The words of Bataille and Gogol and Wallace Stevens shed light on aspects of Moon’s playing. We hear about how Wood’s own conservative musical background intersects (or fails to) with his appreciation for Moon. We get analyses of rock drumming and of The Who in performance. And we get all this bundled up in Wood’s precise, beautiful, always illuminating language: “[Moon’s] joyous, semaphoring lunacy suggested a man possessed by the antic spirit of drumming”; “[Moon’s drumming] is a revolt against consistency”; “He needed not to run out of drums as he ran around them.” By the time Wood compares Moon’s drumming to “an ideal sentence, a sentence I have always wanted to write and never quite had the confidence to do”—the familiar trope of the writer admiring the ineffable that music “effs,” albeit tweaked—it is difficult not to be mad with jealousy over Wood’s own sentences.

This isn’t a matter of wanting to read about rock more and, say, pop less. There’s no reason someone couldn’t write a similarly music-driven article about Macy Gray, or Calle 13. Anyway, I’m hardly biased toward The Who. They were always my sister’s band, not mine; she, not I, went to see the first of several “final” tours in 1982; I admired them from a distance, rather like you admire your older sibling’s coolest friends. But that doesn’t matter: Wood’s piece pulled me into the music. It didn’t just make me want to pull up some Keith Moon videos. It changed the way I listen to Moon, and the way I will hear him from now on.

So … I came to this anthology looking for a book to read and maybe teach, and wound up facing some of my own preconceptions and expectations about music writing, becoming conscious of them in a way I had not been before. This is no small gift, and makes me look forward to Best Music Writing 2012.

* In fact, I just had an interesting conversation with a record store clerk in New Paltz, who was busy going through a box of 3” discs someone had dropped on the store’s front step. “I like the Foo Fighters and Bob Marley,” he said, “but do I ever really need to listen to them again?” He frowned and shook his head. I admire his energy, and his curiosity. I realize I spend my listening career parasitizing the labor of people like him. But I couldn’t do it myself. Besides, the argument seems to be that repeated listening is an act of nostalgia, rather than discovery. You can burn out on anything. But every time I hear “Redemption Song,” it’s another first time.

** Ironically, I’m in the midst of writing a profile of one my own favorite out gay musicians … so as I write these words I can already feel them swimming up to bite me on the ass!

The Interrupted Nocturne

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If Roberto Benigni’s name has become synonymous with the Holocaust comedy, perhaps Roman Polanski should get credit for making the first real Holocaust musical—Springtime for Hitler notwithstanding.

But if The Pianist (2002) is indeed a musical—and let us imagine for the sake of argument that it is—then it is a queer sort of musical: a musical of suspended performances, of music displaced and deferred; a musical where the absence of music is as significant as its presence.

The Pianist opens with a partial rendition of Chopin’s C# minor Nocturne (opus posthumous). We hear it over grainy images of Warsaw in 1939, the eve of the Nazi invasion. The music soon reveals itself to be a radio performance by renowned Chopin interpreter and Polish State Radio house pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, on whose memoir the film is based. As the bombing begins, Szpilman, though a little shaken, refuses to stop playing. But after the frightened sound engineers flee, an explosion blows out the windows of the studio, and he is forced to follow them. We will wait more than two hours—six years of narrative time—for that nocturne to resume.

The interrupted nocturne forms one template for the way diegetic music is used in the film. After the Jews are herded into the ghetto, Szpilman turns to playing piano in the ghetto café. At one point, a well-dressed man at a nearby table asks him to pause in order to better hear the coins he tosses onto the tabletop, listening for which are counterfeit. The request is graciously made, but Szpilman is clearly exasperated. In a later scene, street musicians are forced to perform for Nazi soldiers, and the bystanders, many of them famished and exhausted, are forced to dance—until the traffic they have been waiting on finishes passing, the gates open, and the grotesque carnival is abruptly halted.

By the time Szpilman escapes the ghetto, his family has been sent to the camps, and the only remaining piano—the one in the café—stands silent, abandoned. Playing it is out of the question; instead, he will hide beneath the riser on which it stands until the immediate threat of Nazi violence has passed.

Once Szpilman’s Warsaw city odyssey begins, the trope of interrupted music is replaced by a slightly different one, of music displaced, deferred in space rather than in time. Wherever Szpilman is, music isn’t—or, if music is, it is imaginary. The Bach cello prelude, performed by Dorota, the woman Wladyslaw still loves but who is now married, unattainable, overheard from another room, and then glimpsed through a half-open door. The piano he hears tinkling away in the apartment next door to his first safehouse. The music he hears in his head, that ideal space where the Nazis can’t go, when he opens the lid of the piano in the second safehouse, positions his hands over the keyboard … and then the sweeping Grand Polonaise swells on the soundtrack, audible only to Szpilman and to us as he moves his fingers above the keys, his face beaming. After this second apartment is destroyed in the Warsaw uprising, Szpilman hides in the bombed-out hospital across the street. Starving, freezing, he plays an imaginary keyboard, humming his music quietly to himself. No more Grand Polonaise, and no more soundtrack. The man is almost defeated; the music is almost gone.

As for nondiegetic music, its infrequency—the occasional, restrained use of orchestral music; the lonely clarinet melody that punctuates some of the most tragic moments in the film (such as when Szpilman escapes the trains to the camps to find the ghetto deserted and pillaged)—makes it that much more poignant when it does appear, and the silences between that much more significant. (In the documentary included on the DVD, the set designer describes the filmmakers’ efforts to wash out the color as the story gets bleaker. This “visual silence” is analogous to the disappearance of music, as well as suggesting the moral silence of the Holocaust.)

So what happens to music deferred? It explodes, of course—in this case, in the climactic (if abridged) performance of Chopin’s G minor Ballade for Hosenfeld, the German officer who discovers Szpilman scrounging for food in a ruined home after the Nazis have leveled the city.* It’s a moment of catharsis hardly equaled in cinema, a spiritual homecoming that signals the film’s approaching resolution more clearly than either the German defeat or Szpilman’s rescue by Soviet troops. At that moment, we know the nocturne will resume, closing the six-year wound of the Holocaust, ending the long night suspended between broken night-songs.

It is difficult to imagine a Chopin composition more suited to the moment than the G minor Ballade. It has just the right mix of searching angst and triumphant answer, of defiance and melancholy, and the sort of bold, emphatic finale that Chopin only matched in a couple of his scherzos. The C# minor Nocturne, the piece Szpilman actually played for Hosenfeld, would have been far too ruminative for such a moment—the music of a man reminiscing about loss, not one holding on desperately to his humanity. Of course, as long as he was going to deviate from the memoir, Polanski could have chosen the “Revolutionary” etude—that grandiose, martial volley of notes about an older attack on Warsaw, and about the heroic Polish resistance. It would be hard to think of a worse choice. This is not a moment of patriotic resistance and nationalism, but of individual human resilience. (How Polanski to use a cracked version of the etude instead, in The Tenant!) Even the appearance of the “Moonlight” sonata late in the film—played, one supposes, by German officers—sounds weirdly lugubrious measured against the incessant cruelty of the previous two hours. In contrast, the Ballade chafes at the margins of the narrative and the cinematic frame, threatening to spill out of the diegetic world.

I will be chided for calling The Pianist a musical at the beginning of this post, and I admit this was an exaggeration meant to catch your attention—you know, the sorts of shoddy tricks we teach our writing students. But I think there is an element of truth in this assertion, one that, even if we don’t put The Pianist in the same genre as, say, Singin’ in the Rain, does allow us to think about the film differently. When it begins, with the staticky Nocturne, what should be (non-diegetic) title music reveals itself to be a radio transmission of Szpilman’s soon-to-be-interrupted performance. (There are no titles, anyway. They appear at the end, during a live performance of the Grand Polonaise: here, the “walk out of the theater” music is actually the end of the story.) Other times, we are unsure whether the music is “on” or “off” stage—the “Moonlight” sonata, for example—or we hear music on the soundtrack which only Szpilman hears. The displaced music is another example: it is happening in the story, but outside the frame. I think it is partly this blurring of diegetic and non-diegetic music that energizes the Ballade. As in a musical, the performance is at once inside and outside the diegesis: it draws its power from both deferred narrative resolution (the horizontal), and from its status as a musical event independent of the surrounding narrative (the vertical). In fact, these two sources seem to feed each other: the performance is energized by its function as catharsis, while the narrative is energized by the ekphrastic brilliance of the performance.

In this light, the questions, “Could Szpilman really have played that Ballade after all he had endured, and after so long without touching a keyboard?” and “Wouldn’t it make sense for the piano to be out of tune?” are moot. Here we have this hobbling, hollow-eyed tramp licking out dirty pots, a sliver of a human being, a ragdoll, Molloy lost in bombed-out Warsaw. But the moment he sits down at the piano bench and claws out the first climbing octaves of the Ballade, all of this ceases to matter. As in Dreyer’s Ordet, reality is superseded by cinema; the violation of the possible only confirms a new order of (cinematic) reality which does not cancel the reality before it, but rather transforms it, raising it to a higher level.

Maybe it’s that, since by this point in the film there is nothing so terrible we can’t believe it—a child beaten to death trying to crawl under the wall back into the ghetto, an old man thrown from a window in his wheelchair, a young woman shot in the forehead for asking a question—so there is no act of heroism that can seem out of place. In such circumstances, everything about humanity is magnified, the potential for generosity and heroism as much as cruelty.

The Pianist’s use of music and silence should be considered not only in terms of genre, but in terms of Polanski’s oeuvre. About halfway through, the film shifts radically away from the standard visual rhetoric of German cruelty and Jewish suffering (albeit taken to new heights by Polanski’s visceral style), and toward an apartment horror story very much in the vein of Polanski’s trio of great horror films from the ‘60s and ‘70s: Repulsion (1965), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and The Tenant (1976). In each case, the overarching atmosphere of dread is underscored through the sounds (and occasionally sights) of other lives impinging on the central character’s: through walls thin enough to see shadows behind, old doors hidden behind bureaus, and the grotesquely-distorting glass of peepholes. Piano music haunts the buildings where each of these three films is set: “Für Elyse” in Rosemary’s Baby; the descending major scale with one dreadfully wrong note played over and over in Repulsion; and the similarly repeated failure to play the opening figure of Chopin’s “Revolutionary” etude in The Tenant. (N.B.: I was tempted to call this post “Other Pianos, Other Rooms.”) In two of these films, the piano contributes not just to the ambience, but to our appreciation of the protagonists’ increasingly disturbed minds: in Repulsion, the cracked mirror of tonality reflects the oppressive monotony of life for Carole (Catherine Deneuve), a catatonically-repressed hairdresser; in The Tenant, a mangled Chopin etude suggests the Polish emigree’s inability to find place and identity, and his subsequent morbid fascination with the identity of his apartment’s previous tenant. And Rosemary’s Baby? Heard through a wall, even a lullaby can sound sinister … just as a phone conversation, glimpsed through a doorway, the half-seen body the visual analog of a conversation only half-heard, half-understood, becomes, in Polanski’s universe, suspicious.

Unlike its horror-film progenitors, the music in The Pianist is neither the reflection of a fractured consciousness nor the sign of an actual, threatening Other (even, I would argue, when the music is played by a likely enemy). It is rather the only solace the protagonist knows in the suffocating terror of occupied Warsaw. The trajectory of the film is not the slow dissolution of the walls of consciousness which keep the threatening Other (real or imagined) at bay, but the struggle to survive in silence—the physical, emotional, even moral silence which one internalizes as a survival mechanism—until those walls can be broken down, and Szpilman can be reunited with his beloved Chopin. Watching The Pianist reminds us just how sparing Polanski’s use of music often is. Many of his films seem to prefer silence; some positively crave it. In Repulsion, for instance, noise, musical or other, is always a violation: buzzers, incessantly ticking clocks, crashing cymbals, and the frenetic jazz that follows Carole around London.

With The Pianist, it’s as though Polanski had finally revealed his childhood experience as a Holocaust survivor to be the trauma underlying so much of his cinema. For forty years it had been displaced onto the apartment buildings of New York, London and Paris … as well as onto the fatalistic narratives set in Los Angeles and Cornwall. In this regard, perhaps the chief irony of the film is that, while the phantom pianist of Polanski’s horror movies has finally stepped out from behind the wall, he finds that he has not brought his music with him.

The Pianist is not the only one of Polanski’s films framed by performances. Death and the Maiden begins with a snippet of the Amadeus Quartet performing the title piece, and closes with a complete performance of the quartet’s first movement. Like The Pianist, the rest of the film is almost entirely music-less. Death and the Maiden and The Pianist are narratives about silence—the ethical silence of sanctioned atrocity; the historical silence of active forgetting; the silence of the victim in the face of state terror. But if Death and the Maiden is a manual for the misappropriation of art in the service of evil, The Pianist never allows music to be so sullied. (But then it’s not a movie about Wagner.)

Who would have thought Polanski would return to Warsaw, the site of the trauma, for a rare “happy” ending, the mighty resolution of the Grand Polonaise, complete with pornographic close-ups of the pianist’s hands? How different from the irresolution of the concluding performance in Death and the Maiden: the power relationships in the positions and the play of glances between torturer, victim, and attorney; the sense that nothing has changed except knowledge, and that knowledge changes nothing. “I want my Schubert back,” says Paulina Escobar (Sigourney Weaver) in Death and the Maiden. “My favorite composer.” Does she get him back? More broadly, can art ever be reclaimed from its appropriation by and for terror? I’m not sure. Most of Polanski’s great films end this way: without real cadences. But the The Pianist most certainly restores to Szpilman his Chopin. And ours.

* The Nocturne Szpilman actually played for Hosenfeld is a far less technically demanding piece than the Ballade. Szpilman’s memoir also reveals that the piano was indeed out of tune. (My argument notwithstanding, I sincerely doubt Sony would release a soundtrack with either the Ballade or the Nocturne played on an out-of-tune piano.) The question of the historical accuracy of the film’s beginning is less clear, at least to me, sinceI haven’t read the memoir. According to the synopses I looked at (on szpilman.net and, of course, Wikipedia), the C# minor Nocturne was part of the program Szpilman played for the last Polish State Radio broadcast in 1939. However, it is not indicated that the performance was interrupted, or that the station itself was damaged. Rather, it was the power station on which the broadcast depended that was destroyed. Interestingly, in the Wikipedia entry on Szpilman, the film’s dramatization of the event—the station bombed, the performance abandoned in medias res—and Szpilman’s memoir seem to have been conflated.

Reign in Blood at 25

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Twenty-five years ago this month, Slayer unleashed Reign in Blood, and the world became a slightly more evil place. The earth has spun a little differently on its axis ever since, as geologists can measure whenever a mega-dam is built: an infinitesimally-increased tilt toward the dark side.

On the night of October 7, 1986—the night Reign in Blood appeared—the sky was the color of tar. Holy men all over the world were racked by lascivious dreams. On October 8, on playgrounds everywhere, little girls’ heads spun around with a watch-winding sound, to the amazement of their little friends, and there was an epidemic of pea soup spit up on school lunch tables, though it was not on the menu of the day. Dead things of unknown species washed up on Pacific shores from Japan to Chile, and in California, flaming birds fell out of the sky like flapping meteors.

Twenty-five years ago Slayer unleashed Reign in Blood upon the world, and the moon had never seemed quite so large, or so yellow, or so beautiful; you felt its tug the way the tide does, as if it were your estranged home. You heard the laughter of bats, the songs of wolves, and felt an almost irresistible impulse to run.

Twenty-five years ago, the first time you heard Reign in Blood, that nasty little wish you’d been harboring for weeks, for months, for years, suddenly muscled its way up to the front of your brain, like some forgotten passenger sleeping in the shadows by the restroom at the back of an otherwise-empty bus, who awakes with an inexplicable, murderous thirst for vengeance. He clambers his way forward by the cushioned headrests; you watch him coming in the big rearview mirror, and think: Well, yes; why not? There are knives in the kitchen, in the drawer beside the sink; there are matches in the cupboard in the hall.

When you play Reign in Blood this evening, as you must in celebration of Samhain—if, that is, you wish to curry favor with the man downstairs—make sure the needle is sharp. Prick your finger with it if you’re unsure. Have a towel ready to mop the blood off the platter and stylus when the album is over. And lean close to the turntable while the record is spinning—not to the speakers, but to the actual puckered grooves in the vinyl. You just might hear the cries of lost souls rising from those freshly-opened wounds.

Happy Hallowe’en.

Bartok, Salt Lake, Emerson & Me

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The jazz guitar instructors at the University of Utah liked to tell us, their Intro Jazz Guitar students, that we were much maligned by the rest of the music department. It’s true that we were a motley-looking bunch. Many of us weren’t even music majors. We were drawn from all corners of the university: architecture, engineering, and in my case, English. This was the fall of 1992, and I had just entered the “U of U” as a graduate student. I was supposed to take two classes a quarter, for a total of eight credits. Full-time status, however, required nine, without which I wouldn’t be able to defer my loans. Eventually I found out that I could take one credit of “independent study,” to be used toward my dissertation. But in my happy ignorance I went looking for an undergraduate class to make full time. Music Theory wouldn’t have me—the class was packed with majors—so I opted for Jazz Guitar.

The guitar class turned out to be a great way to refresh between teaching freshman writing in the morning and taking graduate classes in the afternoon. Three days a week I’d lug my guitar halfway across the U of U’s sprawling campus, down from the Medical Plaza apartments at the base of the Wasatch foothills, to Orson Spencer Hall, where the English department was housed. I’d leave the guitar in my cubicle while I went to teach. Then I’d carry it across the rest of campus, down the hill and one leg of the horseshoe of President’s Circle, to David Gardner Hall. Sometimes I thought it wasn’t even the class that helped; just going into the music building, another world within the balkanized world of academia, was purging.

Across the hall from the guitar class, Ardean Watts, then-director of the University Symphony Orchestra, was holding his own “class.” It was called “Music for Pure Enjoyment.” Coming up the stairs, I’d run smack into a bulletin board, the sign tacked there promising “No analysis!” Underneath would be the program for the week. He did the entire cycle of Mozart piano concertos that fall, and if memory serves, selections by Schoenberg, Vaughan-Williams, and Beethoven. Although he always chose the program, Watts invited students to bring in their favorite recordings of the programmed pieces.

But the day I walked out of guitar class and, rather than going down the stairs, timidly crossed the hall and sat down, Watts and a few others were immersed in Béla Bartók’s string quartets. As the narrator of a Ken Burns documentary would say: It was like nothing he had ever heard before. Except Ken Burns says that so many times it ends up sounding like bullshit. To me, it really was like no music I had ever heard before. I didn’t even think a violin could sound like that. It was as if I had walked in on the middle of Hendrix’s “Machine Gun,” and listened for a minute before someone deigned to tell me that, by the way, I was listening to a guitar.

I didn’t tell Watts that, of course. He was a charming old man with a long white goat’s beard and a tremor. He would sit among the students who had happened to wander in that day, sometimes just listening, sometimes engaging his fellow listeners in conversation. He was too enthusiastic ever to sound pedantic. Like everything he had to tell you about music was the most wonderful secret in the world. I didn’t answer him when he told me that Bartók’s compositions were “so logical,” because my first thought was, So was Manson. He must have assumed I was more musically literate than I was—he mustn’t have noticed the guitar. Because for me, there was (and still is) something in the quartets’ apparent lack of logic, their unpredictability, their constant shifting between ideas, as if they were being made up on the spot, that excited me.

Watts also told me that Bartók was the greatest innovator of the string quartet after Beethoven. He brought out the score, which I perused, though I was unable to follow it to the music. Before I left, he showed me the compact disc case: four young men in tuxes, holding up their instruments like proud fisherman showing off their catches of the day. I scribbled down the name.

One day after walking in on “Music for Pure Enjoyment,” I drove over to Discriminator Records (an all-classical music store in Salt Lake, sadly many years gone) and bought the Emerson Quartet’s recording of the six string quartets by Béla Bartók. For a while I listened to a quartet a day. Then I listened to them in pairs, evens and odds, by period, by movement. I quickly learned that I had walked in on the third and fourth quartets, the most dissonant of the bunch, although it’s likely any of them would have affected me in the same way.

Before “Music for Pure Enjoyment,” my understanding of Bartók’s music had been based solely on a few of his orchestral works: The Miraculous Mandarin suite, which had terrified me as a child, and the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. Listening to the quartets, however, re-introduced these familiar pieces to me, forcing me to hear them in a new way. Ironically, though Bartók was himself a pianist, and piano was the instrument most familiar to me, his concertos and works for solo piano have taken much longer to grow on me. This may be a broader problem of the percussiveness of the piano in modern music … except that in other modern composers, like Prokofiev and Stravinsky, that very percussiveness often thrills me. Maybe Bartók was just too much the gypsy; I always imagine him carting his wax cylinders between villages in the Carpathians, recording folk music, a task he believed was more important than composing original works. In my favorite photo, he sits at a desk stacked with books, transcribing with his left hand, the horn of a phonograph beside his right ear.

I am sure I’m not the only one who came to know the Emerson Quartet through Bartók, or vice-versa. As the program for their fall 1995 performance of the entire cycle of Bartók’s quartets at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall noted, Bartók has been “something of a cause” for them. They certainly play him as if he were a cause: honed to a near-military rigor, plaintive, demanding. The grueling three-and-a-half hours (with two intermissions) that are required to play all six quartets can only be explained as a cause. I don’t know that they’ve repeated the feat since. Not that they’ve ignored Bartók or anything. They may not play him all the time, or even as often as I’d like; but the quartets are still pretty regularly included in their programs (last August it was the sixth, at the new Alice Tully Hall).

I think discovering the Emerson Quartet represented something else for me, too, something in which Bartók played a role. So many of the classical performers I had listened to were of my parents’ generation or older, because it was my parents’ music, my parents’ records. It was an inherited taste. In my young adulthood, that taste was just beginning to be reshaped under the pressures of new musical discoveries. And now here was a quartet not much older than I, playing a “classical” music that sounded utterly fresh to my ears. So my taste in “classical” music needn’t be preserved in amber, carried around as a sentimental object shaped like home. It was much more dynamic than that. By extension, “classical” music itself needn’t be treated—as its very name damns it to be—like a museum exhibit, endowed with a transcendent authority that simultaneously robs individual pieces of their language. It, too, was something vital, changeable, and renewable.

In the two chances I had to see the Emerson Quartet in Salt Lake, as part of the Chamber Music Society’s series, they followed the standard concert-program formula of two classical or romantic pieces to one modern or contemporary.* At the time, the decision to include any modern or contemporary music on the program seemed daring—the “cause” mentioned in the Avery Fisher Hall program, and the reason performers who play contemporary music are invariably described as its “champions.” But to really explain why I thought this was daring requires a bit more context.

Salt Lake City is much more diverse today (religiously, ethnically, and politically) than when I first moved there. The geography of this diversity, however, is probably about the same as when I left a decade ago: a mostly Hispanic working-class west side; a liberal/radical population ensconced in “the avenues” on the foothills around the university and a few other pockets in or near downtown, mostly transplanted from other places (like California); and a conservative, mostly Mormon and native (or, when not native, Californian or Pacific islander) population living pretty much everywhere else. As an out-of-towner, an east-coaster, and an ersatz New Yorker when I wanted to put on airs, I saw the Emersons as the envoys of a dissonance that the staid harmonies of the Beehive State could not tolerate.

Never mind that I had been introduced to this music in Utah, among music students and teachers who were likely much more conservative than I. Never mind that, relatively speaking, Bartók was a pretty conservative composer—I still didn’t know what “postwar” meant in musical terms, and my fusiony conception of jazz was only just beginning to be unsettled by Monk and Coltrane. Never mind, for that matter, Big Bill Haywood, or Joe Hill. No, never mind any of that: I went not just to hear the Emerson Quartet, but to champion a modern music I was sure many in the audience would find intolerable. I got what I asked for, both times: Bartók’s Quartet No. 4 the first time around, and the second, a 1994 piece by the American composer Ned Rorem, which the quartet had commissioned. Some members of the audience tittered, some crossed their arms like the music was arguing with them, some shook their heads and tugged on their wives’ complacent blouse-sleeves. I left feeling clearly superior, lamenting my extended sojourn among the philistines. Back home—not Jersey, but the avenues—I listened to Bartók while my Deadhead roommate chain-smoked Camels and the snow came down hard outside. He was a communications doctoral student from Michigan who liked to drop acid and listen to two different things on the stereo simultaneously. He thought the Bartók sounded cool. And so together we waved the flag of Difference, waved our freak-flag high, standing in the foothills above the city, and watching the storms roll in over the valley.

Today, I look back at what I had there—not just the exposure to a culture of ideas that came from being a grad student in a school full of brilliant people, but those tightly-knit arts and activist communities, driven together by opposition to a dominant culture that was itself less monolithic than I had presumed it to be—and wonder what I was so anxious about. (I’m sure I was already wondering this the second time I moved away, at the end of 2001; it’s always harder leaving mountains the second time.) In a sense, the Bartók quartets were of a piece with everything I was doing in my classes—Derrida and Beckett, Genet and Baldwin, Bataille and Melville. My standard line about hearing the quartets for the first time was that they rewired my brain. But that was just a particularly dramatic instance of something that, in a more subtle way, was going on the whole time I was in grad school. And I think it is the cumulative impact of a thousand such revelations, from the most mundane to the most mind-shattering, that bonds us to the humanities, to the arts and culture, and makes us as eager as Watts was to try to share that in the classroom. Like the sign said: “Music for Pure Enjoyment.”

* The first half of this post (and a few sentences in the second) is a revision of something I wrote in 1996 or thereabouts, shortly after a performance by the Emerson Quartet in Salt Lake. Although I couldn’t find a place for the descriptive passage that follows in the new version, I enjoyed rediscovering it, and so include it as an addendum: Phillip Setzer, violinist, is petite, curly-haired, and dreamy-eyed, a miniature Tony Curtis. He displays a gravity that sets the tone for the quartet as a whole. From the first moment, at least during the more rhythmic passages, he sways madly. Next to him, Eugene Drucker, the other violinist, is heavier-set and less animated than Mr. Setzer; he keeps one eyebrow raised like Leonard Nimoy, the eye zeroed slantways on the music before him, a cowlick plastered to the eyebrow-side of his forehead, his bow-tie a little crooked. Lawrence Dutton, the violist, is tall and gangly, sized for the viola the way Setzer is for the violin. His hair is streaked with grey, and he doesn’t so much hug his instrument, as the violinists inevitably do, as try to surround it. Rather than swaying, he rocks the instrument on its axis, fingers walking the neck like spiders. I’ve never managed to see Dutton as well as I’d like, because I always choose a seat in the auditorium where he his half-turned from me. But maybe this is only so I can better observe the cellist, David Finckel, who is my favorite. Leaning back with the instrument poised against him, so that it seems like a giant belly, his feet turned out, he is as much the visual as the sonic anchor of the quartet. The posture gives him a deceivingly sated appearance; he is actually the most active member. Because unlike the others, who hardly glance away from their music, Mr. Finckel’s eyes are as mobile as Charlie Chaplin’s. [N.B.: I’m indebted to Gerald Mast for this observation, in Film/Cinema/Movie.] They dart from Dutton to Setzer, Setzer to Drucker, expressing variously the enormity of his undertaking, to a kind of embarrassment at some inaudible mistake, to satisfaction at a well-rendered phrase. Somehow, these four very distinct human beings create a marvelously coherent sound, as if forged from a single consciousness.

A Fugue

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I am pursued by music.

Snatches of trombone, flute and accordion, the window-rattling thud of the bass on a car stereo, the Moebius loop of an ice cream truck. Bits of melodies and rhythms floating through the air like ticker tape, tumbling down the streets like yesterday’s newspapers and plastic shopping bags. No matter which direction I run, I can never get away.

Yet run I do: down a deserted avenue on a summer night, the echoing footfall of music just paces behind me. For all these sounds coalesce into a figure in my mind, flesh, though not visible.

A subway entrance nearby. I don’t know which line it is—I can’t even tell the color—but all the same I descend the double flight of stairs, and push through the turnstiles just as a wave of music washes by and dopplers off down the avenue above. For the moment I am safe.

Or so I think. I hear music again—the subway platform is not silent—no! The Chinese man with the two-string fiddle perched on his lap like a ventriloquist’s dummy bows away at the mournful tunes of his homeland. He does not see me, but no matter: the music does. The notes fly at me like howling furies.

I shrink against the turnstiles, wondering if I should take my chances on the streets again. Just as I am about to turn, a train roars into the station, pushing back the note-furies with a great gust of noise. I squeeze on between exiting passengers, find a seat just as the doors ding shut, and watch the Chinese fiddler disappear, bowing silently behind thick glass. I don’t know which way the train is going, and for the moment I don’t care—away from the music, that is all that matters.

And then I hear it: Showtime ladies and gentlemen, showtime! What time is it? Showtime! What time is it? SHOWTIME! and the boombox starts playing “White Lines,” or “Billie Jean,” or some other song that was big before these breakdancers were born. I can’t even look—I’m stumbling toward the door at the opposite end of the car, the music pushing me from behind like some beat cop holding me by my collar. They have already started clapping in time; I hear the stamp of feet—the landings of those acrobatic somersaults—just as I plunge out into the tunnel. The door bounces once, latches. And though I know I am not supposed to ride between cars while the train is in motion, I cannot help but stay a time in that warm darkness where all is noise, blissfully random noise.

But soon I begin to notice the rhythm of the wheels against the tracks, the monotonous beat of the city, and my heart starts racing. I step forward into the next car, let the door close behind me. That is when I see the mariachis, approaching me like a school of barracuda: three musicians in black cowboys hats and boots, festooned with spangles, one lugging a bass much larger than he. It is too late; the car is nearly empty; I am their chosen victim. They set up their instruments in a half-circle around me and begin to play, metal nails raking across guitar strings, out-of-tune nasal harmonizing and occasional clipped yodels, all while the bass um-pahs away behind. I am writhing against the door, but they do not see me, staring as they are at a spot directly above my head, like actors in a school play, or tourists looking at a subway map you have inadvertently sat under.

They finish their number just as the train begins grinding to a new halt, say their gracias to no one in particular. When the lead guitarist breaks away to make his rounds, hat in hand, I seize the opportunity to squeak by the other two. The bass player grabs me, but I manage to twist out of his firm grip. If I stay any longer, the breakdancers will block my exit, and I can’t understand why the mariachis themselves aren’t yet heading for the door—surely they can’t all squeeze out of the car together, and I do not want to imagine the war between mariachis and breakdancers which would no doubt ensue if both camps tried to squeeze through the same door at the same time, particularly with that bass in tow.

I am holding myself up by the cruddy wall of the station, gasping for breath, when the doors close and the train lurches off again. And what do I see in each successive car? Musicians. It is an infestation; the whole train is teeming with them. The mariachis, the breakdancers; in the next car, the blind accordionist, a sandwich in a baggie sticking half out of his left coat pocket, who says in his thick Russian accent that our “contributions are greatly appreciated”; the slide guitarist with Ozark beard and lazy eye, the Motown singer who uses his change-cup as a maraca, the trio of teenage conga players—singers and drummers, fiddlers and singers, until the train is going so quickly that they become a blur, and I imagine that there are no actual passengers on the train, only performers.

I am never as safe as I suppose; in this city there is no rest from music, only an eternal fugue. Looking left down the platform, following the red rear lights of the train, what do I see but a smiling kora player straddling his gourd, thumbing absently at the strings, and singing his lilting melodies, cascades of words over a hopalong rhythm? When he sees me, I feel like I’ve been spotted by a sewer-bred alligator. But it is not him, poor man; it is the notes, the notes, flying at me like swarms of poison-tipped darts.

Up the stairs and out into the evening again, I narrowly avoid a troop of Peruvian pan-flutists, decked out in their mantas and humming a Celine Dion tune, heading en masse for the platform. It is a lucky break; I would never have survived their concerted piping. The avenue is still deserted, rainwashed-looking; in the distance I hear steel drums playing a Jewish wedding song. Other tunes rumble by like the muted roar of passing jets. I have somehow ended up across the street from a park—the park? I don’t know; I can no longer tell which borough I am in. But I cross the street anyway, climb over the low stone wall, and then roll down a short hill. The landing is grass, though it is too dark to see where I am. I just know that the music seems slightly more distant than before.

But the park is no safer than the train was, or the streets. After a few minutes walking I no longer know in which direction the avenue lay; the music is once again all around me. I start running in no particular direction, hoping to surprise my pursuer into dumbfounded silence. In time I reach a procession of streetlamps, a hub of footpaths, and soon recognize the mall. It is a veritable gauntlet of music, one which I have no choice but to run: couples making out to Hot 97, petite jazz bands with drum kits that make Ringo Starr look like Tommy Lee, men passing guitars around like joints, a pianist who pushes his upright around on a giant scooter like Jesus with his cross, a lone saxophonist holding his horn so tightly I imagine his whole body would come to pieces were he to let it go, like an old stone wall. As I run each music impinges on the next, as though the mall were a giant radio, and I was running along the length of the dial.

There is a square at the north end of the mall, and in the square a bandshell, where an orchestra plays a symphony by Beethoven to silent auditors gathered along benches like birds on telephone wires, while unrepentant rollerbladers slalom rows of orange cones, their legs moving like cooked spaghetti, to beat-heavy music I can just hear on their headphones over the slow movement of the symphony. To the north is the valley of the lake and fountain, and beyond them a field of Puerto Rican men circled with their drums. I drop onto my belly and hug the ridge, crawling along like a soldier, lifting my head now and again to try to ascertain my direction and whereabouts—only to have the slaps on the quinto ping off my helmetless head.

The ridge ends at a road; beyond is a wooded hill. The music recedes in the thicket. I crawl until I reach another paved footpath, follow that until I happen upon something that feels like a bed of tile, and there roll over onto my back, gasping for air. Later—I don’t know how much; I may have slept—the sound of an approaching marching band stirs me to waking. I lift my head to see the benches around me crowded with figures that appear cut from stone, like the acolytes of some weird night-park cult. That is when I realize I have gone and died in Strawberry Fields; my bier is the “Imagine” circle! The sound of the marching band comes closer, until I can clearly hear their strutting arrangement of “Hey Jude,” snare rolling, a phalanx of horns Dixielanding the melody—a happy Jude, hopping along in one-and-a-half time, a sad song made better, indeed … for everyone but me!

Before reaching me, they have transitioned seamlessly into “Penny Lane.” I grip the tiles like a climber, resolved not to move.

It is something like being passed over by a speeding train, I the proverbial penny on the rail. But I have dug myself in between the crossbeams, lie deathly still as the twirling batons of the axles roar by just inches from the tip of my nose. Only when the band is almost entirely out of earshot do I dare roll back onto my belly and crawl out of the park.

The avenue again, empty. I rise shivering to my feet; the music senses my weakness, closes in, blaring from every open window, every passing automobile, every subway grate and sidewalk crack …

And so the fugue continues. What else can I do? I run as blindly as when I entered the park, legs spent, brain reeling. Now the sonic landscape of the city begins to morph around me. I pass the most fantastic musics, all in a blur. A man plays three clarinets at once, another holds a trombone to either nostril, and a third plays his trumpet with his ass. If individually they achieve sounds awful and brilliant and obscene, there are no words to describe them collectively. I pass drummers who make the city their instrument as much as skateboarders and graffiti-artists do, their bodies covered in wood blocks and zills, abandoning themselves to convulsive orgies in the streets, or running about in clogs heeled with castanets, up and down lightposts and buildings, somersaulting between taxis and pedestrians. I pass mazes of saxophones snaking between colonies of circular breathers, serpents of brass crafting vast networks of sonority that envelop me like the air from subway grates. I pass bagpipes as big as church organs, children jumping up and down on the bellows, while tightrope-walkers high over my head leap from one wire to another, leaving them to hum together in hives of chords, until the whole the city vibrates like the sympathetic strings of a sitar. And not just the humming wires, but all the sounds coalesce into patterns, into irrational rhythms and specious melodies and bottomless harmonies, multiplying, saturating the air, an ever-growing cosmic-orchestral monster.

I am headed toward the water—run in any direction in Manhattan and you are headed toward water. Somehow I do not have to cross any highways or barriers or run out onto any piers: I reach the shore unimpeded, wade out into the river, walking until it is deep enough to swim. I drift out with the current. I know from the width of the river than I am in the Hudson, that the lights across are the lights of New Jersey, a quieter place, a place without music, maybe. I turn over on my back and, ears underwater, stroke calmly toward the middle of the river. I can still hear the muted strains of the strange music, convinced it is only the echo in my ears. Until I raise my head. They are all there: breakdancers and mariachis, orchestra and drummers, accordion and guitar, kora and erhu, Lennonite baton-twirlers, asshornplayers and tightrope-strummers and bellowjumpers and Holy Roller streetdrummers, all assembled on the shore, waving their notes at me like hostile natives do their spears. I put my head back and stroke more vigorously. Some time later, when I lift my head again, I can see only a vague outline on the shore, and more importantly, I can no longer hear them at all.

I look up at the silence of the night, the stars, the only sound my own paddling, a drip if I raise my hand above the surface to stroke or my toe breaks it with a kick. I can see the bridge far away to my left, though the traffic is silent, dots of moving light against the stationary ones threading the cables. I paddle on, wondering what a world without music would sound like.

And then all of a sudden a horn louder than any I have heard in my life; and just as the word hits me—tugboat—I feel the keel against my side, and am swept under.

That’s when I wake up—to the radio!

Double Time

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There were a lot of good excuses to go hear the Fred Hersch trio twice during their recent residency at the Village Vanguard. Here’s mine: I went to the late set on Wednesday, had one glass of wine, and after three tunes pretty much passed out. Even imagining Connie Crothers (whom I spotted sitting up in the VIP section) shrunk to the size of a garden gnome, straddling my neck and boxing my ears, shouting, “Wake up! Wake up!” did me no good.

I rationalized the whole thing beautifully: the oppressive heat, the early-morning workout, the late-afternoon gardening. The wine. I was a victim of circumstance; I deserved to go see Fred Hersch again. In fact, I owed it to Hersch to go again. My conduct at the Vanguard that night had been nothing short of despicable. I had disrespected the man. I mean, it’s not like I started snoring or anything (at least I don’t think so). But you don’t go hear an artist of Hersch’s caliber and spend half the set fighting to stay awake. When it was over, I had the odd feeling that I should go up to him and confess.

On Sunday, devout opportunist that I am, I made sure to do everything right. Light dinner. Early set. And unlike Wednesday, I didn’t make a reservation. In fact, until I walked out of the restaurant, and felt the weather starting to break, the light breeze, and looked up at the trestle of the red train at 125^th Street, I wasn’t convinced that I was actually going to go.

It was the trio’s last night, though not their last set—it was the nine instead of the eleven, and only fifteen minutes before the hour by the time I arrived. I was surprised to find the place almost packed; Wednesday the reservation had been unnecessary, but tonight they were putting chairs where there were no tables, seating people in the spaces you usually use to cross your legs.

You’ll say it was just a self-deluded attempt at spontaneity, or the catharsis following expiation, or the sheer fact that I was alert, that made the Sunday-night set not only better than Wednesday’s, but one of those rare birds you only catch a few times a year, and that if you’re lucky.

You would be wrong.

Not to say that all of the above weren’t factors. We have a tendency to undervalue the role of the listener, and automatically attribute a great musical experience solely to the artist, rather than to the confluence of circumstances that drove the two together, musician and listener, down fog-dense alleys of memory and imagination, experience and culture, and into each other’s arms. (Writes the critic, “Rollins was uninspired that night.” Indeed, Mr Critic? Perhaps you were uninspired, and Rollins was just Rollins.)

It’s just that there were so many other indicators. Time, for example. Hersch played barely an hour on Wednesday, twenty minutes longer on Sunday. And when the lights came up, the trio received a standing ovation. I can’t remember the last time I saw a standing ovation at a jazz club. It was the best kind, too, where the crowd rises in a bunch to its feet, like released balloons. A sudden updraft of joy. Even Hersch seemed taken aback, and stayed to play an encore—another rarity at the big clubs, even at the Vanguard, which is still far and away the best of them.

And then I could see it on the faces of the musicians that night, particularly John Hebert on bass. Not that I needed to—like the applause, it was just a confirmation of what I was hearing. They nodded and smiled at each other across the bandstand, and we listened to a good marriage turn into a honeymoon, under the fickle tap of some fairy godmother’s wand.

Maybe it was because they’d been playing together all week, and we were hearing the fruits of this, a miraculous collusion of wills.

Maybe the song list was just better, though both sets started with a Cole Porter tune, and both ended with Hersch’s arrangement of Irving Berlin’s “Change Partners.” The Sunday set followed the Porter with “Sad Poet,” a Hersch composition dedicated to Antonio Carlos Jobim; two brand-new originals; two ‘60s tunes by Wayne Shorter; and another ballad, before the Berlin. The encore was “Valentine,” another original, which Hersch played solo.

Maybe it was the weather. Before beginning, Hersch thanked the club for the AC, but we could tell the heat was lifting, and were giddy about going home to sleep with the windows open. The music was just a foretaste of that liberation.

Maybe they drew the energy from the full house. Maybe their stars were aligned.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

There are actually all sorts of good excuses to go see Fred Hersch twice that have nothing to do with me, or with the fact that he’s a genius. Here’s one: a few years ago, Hersch, who has been living with HIV since the mid-‘80s, suffered a particularly bad bout with the illness, became delusional as the virus migrated to his brain, and was in a coma for two months (see the excellent New York Times profile of January 28, 2010). It’s something of a miracle that he lived, and that he could learn to eat again, let alone play the piano. In fact, when I emailed a friend to tell him I was going to see Hersch, he cited health issues as a reason not to miss the opportunity.

Not that Hersch looks unhealthy per se. More toughened. He comes to a point, like a Giacometti sculpture. You can see the knotted wires of the muscles in his arms and the bones in his cheeks. One senses the same about his music: there is no waste. Not that the music is austere. It’s just not flashy. Play has an economy of its own, which isn’t (necessarily) one of excess.

It’s an eclectic and beautiful music, one filled with the echoes of a wide range of inspirations. I hear Debussy and Schumann (on Sunday, the last movement of the Opus 17 fantasy), Monk, Tommy Flanagan. Of course, the differences are just as important. Take Monk: an easiness with time about both pianists. But Monk flaunts it, dances around the beat, teases it, syncopates the syncopation—which is not at all the same thing as landing back on the beat. If Monk keeps his own time, keeps Monk-time, keeps winding that broken watch, there is something about Hersch’s playing that is without time, in both senses of that word. He’s careless about time, as if in his absorption with a particular phrase or trill he could forget it, at least momentarily. He says, “You go on ahead; I’ll catch up.”

It’s not just escaping time; it’s controlling it, although these are certainly related ideas. After Wednesday’s first ballad, a standard, Hersch chided other pianists for not playing it slowly enough. That is: they should take their time. Play it slowly, and soon the second-hand moves like the minute, the hour. And then not at all. And then all the emotion seeps into the piece between the notes, like water through cracks in wood.

Time isn’t the half of it. A left hand that is colorful but never solicitous, as Hersch’s ex-student Brad Mehldau’s can sometimes be (often, I admit, to my delight). The occasional use of octaves in his phrasing, the quirky trills. The density of his harmonic imagination, and the range of his compositional one—“Jackalope,” my favorite of the new tunes, features a funky 7:8 melody that somehow manages to settle, without changing the meter, into an incredible swing. The passing quote from “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise,” so much a part of the improvisation that it refused to call attention to itself, stalked off almost before I realized I’d heard it. The beginning of the Berlin arrangement, spidery phrases at the top of the keyboard I had to wrinkle my nose at. The sheer number of beautifully-pruned fingerpaths between two notes, all of them redolent and surprising.

But I don’t want to give the impression that the band is only a platform for Hersch. Hebert took some gorgeous, lengthy solos; I particularly appreciated his feeling for ornament, the fretless slides between notes sometimes recalling an electric bass, while his generous use of intervals reminded me that the instrument is, like the piano, rich with polyphonic possibilities. And Eric McPherson is a softspoken miracle at the drums. Even his outbursts are measured. His first solo, over the Jobim outro, was executed on brushes; it’s the sort of thing a lot of drummers would have beat the crap out of their kits to play. His sense of color, the variety of sounds he gets out of his kit, is also striking: from brushes to sticks to mallets, to letting his hi-hat ring like a Chinese gong … and after all that color, a big solo that eschewed the demolition derby (crashes and rolls) for a single, off-kilter beat that grew increasingly more frenetic and complex.

Maybe it was because this was the penultimate set, and this is a trio that burns brighter when it senses the end is near. For Hersch, of course, this is particularly apropos, and much has been made of the way the illness changed his attitude and approach toward his music, his turn toward heightened lyricism, and his fear that each new record might be his last.

But then before starting Sunday’s set, Hersch remarked that he couldn’t believe how quickly the time had gone. He asked the club for two weeks next time.

Two weeks! So maybe the opposite is true: not that every album might be his last, but rather that, like Scheherazade, as long as he keeps playing, the end will keep receding. Same thing, except the power balance is shifted. And maybe that’s the reason they never got the endings quite right, the ta-da chord always a little staggered from the cymbal crash. The story’s not over; there’s too much left to say. There’s a next time, a second chance, a second week, a second set.

If we didn’t believe him, all we had to do was listen to him play.

You go on ahead. I’ll catch up.

I didn’t stay for the eleven o’clock set. I guess I, too, refuse to believe in endings. And I fully expect to see him here next year, for two weeks—four sets, why not? I know I’m not the only one. I like to think that’s our little contribution to the equal parts grace and determination that have kept him going so far: a house full of faith.

Burned-over

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The year is 1986. James Hetfield of Metallica is passed out in the band’s tour bus, head lolling, an empty bottle of Heineken in his left hand. Enter a roadie. He peels one scraggly blond hair from around the bottle, carries it to the man in the trenchcoat waiting in the shadows outside. “You’re sure it’s his?” The roadie nods, takes his cut, stalks away. The man puts the hair in a baggie. Cut to: a plane landing at Heathrow airport. Cut to: a lab, as echoes of the plane’s turbines fade on the soundtrack. A dozen petri dishes growing new Hetfields. Each embryo is implanted in a different womb, in a different family, in a different town in northern England: Manchester. Liverpool. Nottingham. And while the Hetfield we all know grows into the “monster” of the ‘90s, the new Hetfields grow up in obscurity—at least, to everyone but him. Their upbringings are closely monitored, carefully molded. A steady diet of old metal is piped into their cribs. Black Sabbath. Motörhead. Diamond Head. And of course, early Metallica. Their mothers taunt them with devil’s-horns-shaped rattles, spike their milk with Newcastle, goad them to scream until their vocal cords grow as calloused as their foster fathers’ hands. Flash forward to: 2004. Three of the Hetfields decide to form their own bands; the one planted in Huddersfield, under the name Drake, is perhaps the most promising. His band is a Metallica tribute called Metal Militia; the foster brother plays guitar—a perk from nurture—and is already quite the virtuoso. He encourages them from a distance, secretly exulting. For, as you have probably guessed, the hair-culprit has spent the better part of two decades consumed with bitterness about the sun setting on Britain’s metal empire, ever since the thrash and glam tsunamis crested over the British New Wave; and the Plan is nothing short of recapturing Britain’s World Domination of Heavy Metal. It isn’t long before Metal Militia begin writing their own material, and change their name to … Evile.

In case you haven’t heard, we’re in the middle—or maybe toward the end—of a thrash metal revival. Open your windows one night this summer—that’s right, turn off the AC—and you might hear strains of Slayer’s “At Dawn They Sleep” wafting across your city. You might be walking down the street when some kid drives by cranking, not Kanye West, not even Avenged Sevenfold, but old Exodus … or something that sounds like old Exodus, but is not a track you can remember ever hearing. And then one day you walk into your local record store, and the incredibly hip clerk, pierced everywhere but his elbows and young enough to be your son, is playing Death Angel’s The Ultraviolence (1987). That’s when you finally put two and two together, ask yourself: What the hell is going on?

In 2007 the Village Voice did an interesting piece about a surge of unabashedly backwards-looking metal bands with names like Fueled by Fire, Violator, and Death Hunter. The Voice was less interested in the surge per se than in the idea that the majority of these bands were either Latino (Fueled by Fire) or from Latin America (Violator is from Brazil, Death Hunter from Colombia). Lest you think this is an isolated Latin American phenomenon, though, “thrash is back” (to quote Fueled by Fire) not just in the so-called periphery, but in the core as well. The website Rateyourmusic.com lists 150 neo-thrash bands worldwide—probably a fraction of the total—and the net seems to have exploded with fans’ lists of their top ten.

Nor is this metallic Great Awakening confined to the young and spry. Several bands that had been inactive since the mid-nineties, like Death Angel and Forbidden, have taken the opportunity to regroup with as many founding members as they could muster, record new albums, and pull the spiked leather bracelets down off the wall over the mantle to head out on tour. (Think of them as the old cowboys in The Wild Bunch, about to get mowed down.) And then the “big four” (Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax and Megadeth) are in the middle of a worldwide stadium-to-stadium tour, promoted by (gasp) Rolling Stone. (They’ll be at Yankee Stadium on the 14^th of September, by the way—in case any of you Bronxites run into traffic and think you’re seeing an odd number of long-haired baseball fans.) As the term “big four” is not one I can remember hearing until last year, I’m guessing that this little marketing miracle is also attributable to the revival.

While the Voice article provides a nice rundown of the new Latin/o thrash scene, they are at a loss to explain why. Nor are the bands they interview much help. Defuse anger over the generally rotten state of Latin American society? Latin America has been rife with problems for a lot longer than five years; and although I’m perfectly happy to credit the continental spike against neoliberalism for the rise of neo-thrash—or conversely, to blame neo-thrash on the continental spike in evangelical Christianity—it doesn’t much help explain similar movements in the US and Europe. The recession? Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Price of cigarettes? Voice notwithstanding, Municipal Waste (US) and Gama Bomb (Ireland) seem to precede Fueled by Fire and Violator by a couple of years, and Evile (UK) released their first full-length LP the same year the Voice was touting neo-thrash as a largely Latin American phenomenon. (As long as we’re here, why are we always so anxious to pin the genesis of any form of loud, angry music on social dis-ease? Mightn’t it make more sense to talk about the thrash revival in terms of a cultural moment when the most successful popular music is composed of the cut-up and re-wedded samples of other people’s music?)

If there’s something ideologically satisfying about the idea of a Latin American neo-thrash movement, I guess it would be that the global “periphery” had come back to influence the “core.” And yet, whoever happened to come first, I don’t hear much in the way of influence going on here. Flamenco has a great name for its musical forms that were forged through colonization: “canciónes de ida y vuelta,” or round-trip songs. But the guajira and rumba grew from the cultural crossovers of the New World, and then were grafted back onto the music of the Old. In metal, the only analogy that comes to mind is Sepultura, who made a clear move in the ‘90s to think about the genre in terms of indigenous music and the legacies of colonization; one can already hear the berimbau in the main riff of “Refuse/Resist,” the first track on Chaos A.D. (1993), this two years before the band released their consciously-indigenous Roots. Whether this had any influence on later Latin American metal, or on metal in the US and Europe, I don’t know. But as far as the thrash revival goes, it sounds just like the name says. The master’s tools …

The alternating gales and tradewinds between the US and UK are another story, and probably strain even the most liberal application of the core-periphery metaphor to breaking. It was pretty much Kiss and some of the other heavy stadium rock acts, and maybe Alice Cooper, carrying the standard on this side of the Atlantic through the ‘70s. But we seem to have needed the Saxon invasion of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal and its consolidating effect on the genre to spur a real native American metal movement. When Metallica parodied “Run to the Hills” on the fadeout of their “Last Caress/Green Hell” Misfits cover on Garage Days Re-revisited (1987), it was more than an inside joke: they were striking at the heart of the beast, asserting the primacy of this punky new American style of metal. This is pretty ironic, given that the rest of that album and the previous Garage Days EP are largely dedicated to covering the unsung heroes of the British New Wave—covering them so well, in fact, that they rival Metallica’s best material; there is still probably a large contingent of the fan community who believe “Am I Evil?” and “Helpless” and “The Prince” are originals. Okay, maybe it was just a good-natured poke at Maiden’s popularity, as against the relative obscurity of bands like Diamond Head, Blitzkrieg and Budgie. Anyway, it’s worth remembering that the Garage Days Re-revisited EP appeared one year after Ozzy passed the torch, likening Metallica’s energy during their opening sets on the Ultimate Sin tour to the early days of Black Sabbath.

Rather than causes, maybe it’s more useful to talk about motives: why this desire to resuscitate a music that spiked and died a generation ago? According to the vocalist for Colombia’s Death Hunter, interviewed by the Voice, it is “to make the scene revive to the old days, to try and maintain the scene and strengthen it so that it doesn’t die with time.” Ah, nostalgia for a lost Eden, before the splinterings of the genre over the last two decades, when sound, scene and identity formed a coherent whole. (These bands even make fun of “net metal” fans who listen to the music online but don’t go to shows; the word “poseur” seems to be making a comeback, Fueled by Fire leading the charge.) It begs the question of whether such a scene ever existed, except in hindsight. But then revivals are always characterized by their emotional intensity about the thing revived, anger at the trespasses of the generation immediately prior, and a desire to “restore” something perceived as fallen: a religion, a society, a genre of music. Their zeal is only exacerbated by the sense of having missed the heyday, the time before the City on the Hill became a den of iniquity. That the thrash revival has been somewhat contentious among older fans is case in point: a certain distrust about those meddling kids raiding the tombs of their fathers’ fathers. Who knows to what sorts of travesties their misguided zeal might lead them?

In this light, the thrash revival appears not as an anomaly, but a necessity: a labor of reverence, a drama of devotion. At its core metal is still tribal, deeply beholden to begats, and as genealogically obsessed as the Mormon church. There are multiple ironies here—for one, that a genre that prizes itself so much on rebellion is so deeply bound by its own tradition—bound, in fact, by its very own tight-knit allegiance to a certain, specific rebellion. But it’s just these sorts of weirdnesses that led me to want to write something, however incomplete and overwrought, about this curious phenomenon called the thrash revival; and to focus on Evile for the very particular role they seem to be playing in it. How long can a genre revival last before it spirals into pure self-parody (assuming it neither started nor has already ended there) or bores itself to a dead end, even in a genre so enamored of its own past? How does a younger generation playing an older music both appease older fans and attract younger ones? And how much can a band pay tribute before they become just a tribute band?

Last fall a Jerseyite friend of mine suggested we go see Overkill at the Starland Ballroom in Sayreville (or “Slayerville,” as he calls it), New Jersey. Overkill are one of those genre stalwarts that have been going like a rabid Energizer bunny since the early ‘80s, as consistent and loyal to the scene as Slayer, if nowhere near as well-known or influential. Overkill are metal as blue-collar punk. Their early material managed to walk the crooked line between hardcore and classic sword-and-sorcery metal; there was even a bit of hair-metal hedonism thrown in for good measure. They capture everything that is lowbrow and in-your-face about working class N.J., epitomized in their 1987 re-casting of the punk anthem “We Don’t Care What You Say (Fuck You).” Not surprisingly, they played it for an encore, the crowd turning their devil’s horns into middle fingers to deliver the “New Jersey salute” (as wizened frontman Bobby Blitz termed it), a visual echo of the larger-than-life middle finger on the cover of the “Fuck You” EP. (Larger than life on vinyl, at least. What happened to the “actual size” head on the cover of Devo’s Are We Not Men? when it was shrunken for CD, and then became the “album artwork” on your phone?)

The “Slayerville” show was the last stop on the band’s silver anniversary tour. You could actually buy a T-shirt with a fluorescent green “Overkill bat” (a skull with bat wings, the band’s mascot, like Iron Maiden’s “Eddie”) hovering over a similarly day-glo outline of the great state of New Jersey. Seldom have music and cultural geography been more perfectly matched.

My Overkill roots go pretty deep. If you’re from North Jersey and listened to metal in the ‘80s, Overkill are at least your second cousins, like Jews and Italians. Original drummer “Rat Skates” and founding and continuing bassist D.D. Verni are from the town next to the one where I grew up. Friends of friends took lessons with Skates. Overkill were the first club show I ever saw, in 1987, on a double bill with Testament, at the now-defunct Satellite Lounge. That said, I was actually more eager to see the second band on the bill that night, Forbidden, one of several great acts that percolated up out of San Francisco Bay toward the end of the watershed, just long enough to put out a couple of records before going back to mowing lawns in Berkeley. They were maybe the most successful band of that era in uniting an operatic prog-metal with thrash’s speed and aggression. Anyway, I hadn’t seen either band since the mid ‘90s, so this show was as much a homecoming for me as for Overkill.

The third band on the bill that night (of five) was Evile. I hadn’t heard of them, and what with doors opening at 6 and first band going on at 7, I didn’t expect I’d get a chance to hear them. But then my friend insisted—and since this is the same friend who routinely ensconses himself at some nearby bar and drinks his way through half the headliner, never mind the opening acts, I eagerly consented. After all, I didn’t want to miss Forbidden; who knew but that it was my last opportunity—who knew how long thrash’s Indian summer would last?

I couldn’t have known at the time that this was the perfect context in which to see Evile: warming up for the sorts of bands they had built their career paying tribute to. Truth be told, I hadn’t been paying much attention to the whole thrash revival. I had read the Voice article when it came out, bookmarked the relevant MySpace pages; I was thrilled to see some of the old bands working again; I had watched and enjoyed YouTube clips my friends had sent me of Gama Bomb and Municipal Waste. But I walked into the Starland Ballroom not knowing that Evile was even a participant, let alone the revival’s “flagship.”

The 6 p.m. doors made sense. This was almost a matinee performance; the only thing missing were the picnic blankets. There were several guys my age there with their young sons. There were actually quite a few fans in the 16-to-24 age bracket, too, including one who works at the Mailboxes store my friend manages, and who has a band of his own. Here it was, metal as a rite of passage, as much in the audience as on-stage. It was as if, by incantation, by repetition, Evile could resurrect the past, “revive the scene,” as Death Hunter put it. Sabbracadrabra … and out of the smoke stumbles Forbidden, asking what the fuck year it is, and why their heads hurt so bad.

There were the obligatory expressions of excitement and homage of a young band getting to play with some of their heroes. But then they were so down to earth, and so gracious to be there, saying “cheers” in their very British way to a bunch of Jersey metalheads. I have to admit, I preferred that “cheers” to the New Jersey salute; but then I grew up on a different side of Jersey. And maybe just hearing that accent, in that context, pushed my Maiden-Priest nostalgia and blind allegiance buttons. Here were these young Brits, playing old American thrash metal with a “new” accent … as if metal had clicked its heels three times and found its way back to Oz, away from Kansas, and from Caracas. I enjoyed them so much that I forgot to ask why they weren’t doing to Metallica what Metallica had done to Maiden back in 1987.

Infected Nations (2009), Evile’s second album, maybe best illuminates some of the big questions facing the thrash revival as the subgenre crests its first half-decade. With 2007’s Enter the Grave, the band was credited with “carrying the genre’s whole ‘revival’ on their shoulders.” (That they were credited thus by British rock mag Kerrang! seems significant; perhaps my fictitious hair-culprit has a shade of truth about him.) Singer Matt Drake was likened (more than he deserved to be) to Slayer’s Tom Araya, and the music to early Metallica—surely helped along by the fact that Grave was produced by Metallica’s old engineer Flemming Rasmussen. But there were some notable differences between Grave and many of the revival’s other burnt offerings. The band logo and album cover art didn’t have that cartoonish, DIY style. Nor did the music have the same self-conscious over-the-topness of, say, Fueled by Fire, which screams pastiche. For many neo-thrashers, having a band seemed like an excuse to play dress-up Exodus, like some sort of postmodern glam-rockers. Could it be that these young Brits were taking themselves and the whole revival thing seriously?

It’s common wisdom that second albums are difficult, particularly after a much-lauded first one, and the “revival” thing adds a whole other degree of difficulty. Most reviews of Infected Nations suggest the band chose to move beyond Enter the Grave and begin to establish their own sound. This narrative of maturation is echoed in the bio on the band’s website—or probably the reverse is true—which, tellingly, does not mention that Evile began as a Metallica tribute. Fan reviews take pains to either praise or damn the changes; there seems to be no middle ground. Some go so far as to suggest that it would have been better for this great quasi-tribute band to keep tribute-ing than to evolve toward original mediocrity.

I think this misses the point. Evile is certainly changing; whether they are coming into their own sound is another story. And here is where the ironies come on fast and thick. The fact that the band has produced a more ambitious, progressive, slower second album is hailed as a step forward in their self-making. Until, that is, you consider that Metallica did just that, expanding their song lengths, and varying times, tempo, and dynamics through And Justice for All (1988). And not just Metallica; many thrash acts moved toward a proggier style as the ‘80s drew on, increasing song lengths, playing with time signatures, writing multi-movement suites, and slowing down that raging tempo. More than one fan review points to Justice as a viable analogy for Nations; others compare the change to Slayer’s between Reign in Blood and South of Heaven. Evile, then, seems to be recapitulating Metallica’s career, and the trajectory of the genre as a whole (as befits the look backwards: life is lived at the pace of time, but flashbacks can condense mercilessly). The price of being part of a genre revival appears to be that every attempt to “move forward” only binds one more closely to the genre revived. What’s maybe even more interesting to consider is whether the fan community, too, is recapitulating the reception of Metallica’s music, from exaltation to contention and feelings of betrayal.

It’s hard to get past playing riffspotting with Infected Nations. “Oh, that sounds like new Metallica/ middle-period Metallica/ old Metallica/ Slayer/ Testament/ Sepultura/ Queensryche/ etc.” Which is a bit of a shame, really, because it’s more fun to listen to than pick apart. Not that there aren’t weaknesses. The choruses in particular can be pretty drab, built around the title word/phrase groaned with either a half-step drop (Demoli-tion; Infected … Na-tions) or, in moments of near-inspiration, a full step up followed by a half-step drop (Devoid of … devoid of), buttressed by riot vocals (“Na-tions!”; “Now!”; “Thought!”; etc.) that sound like a packed football stadium. (I like a little less riot in my riot vocals; four or five guys shouting together is enough.) The funny thing is, it doesn’t take much to save a chorus—I know, I sound like one of those penny-for-the-homeless hawkers, but it’s true. “Plague to End All Plagues” is catchy because it monkey-wrenches the de rigueur half-step (Plague … to end) with a flat-fifth jump up (“ALL”), reinforcing the theme (for a regular plague, the regulation half-step in the chorus would be enough; but, goddammit, this is the plague to end ALL plagues). “Genocide” does it one better: again built on half-steps, the third line of the chorus kicks the half-step up a major third (“Visions of a future denied”), putting it squarely in the much-abused and -exalted Freygish scale. I’m actually being a little unfair with “Now Demolition,” which features a funky little key change and arpeggiated chords in the pre-chorus. In fact, were this not thrash metal, it would be totally unfair to suggest the vocalist need do anything but fart for the duration of the record.*

Where Nations excels, though, is in its sheer quantity of interesting riffage—derivative or no—and tight playing … and in the lead guitar work of Ol Drake, who turns out some of the most inspired, flamboyant and technically-sophisticated guitar solos since Dimebag went down in a hail of bullets. It makes me positively nostalgic for the days when a certain amount of self-indulgence was perceived as a virtue (he says, at word three thousand eight hundred of this post). For this reason—and contrary to what even some positive reviews of Nations suggest—the more interesting tracks here are the ones where the band give themselves space to stretch out and riff around: the aforementioned “Genocide”; “Metamorphosis”; and the 11-minute instrumental “Hundred Wrathful Deities.” Granted, “Deities” is not the masterpiece its length cries out for, and maybe because it sets the bar highest in terms of the ostensible move toward a new, more complex sound, it is the song most disparaged in reviews. But for the purpose of considering Nations in terms of the thrash revival, it’s the most remarkable track on the record: a sort of serial homage to Metallica’s three big instrumentals: “The Call of Ktulu” (1984), “Orion” (1986), and “To Live Is To Die” (1988) … with bits of Testament, Seasons-era Slayer, and even early Judas Priest thrown into the mix (see: riffspotting). A “Ktulu” opening gives way to two slow, heavy, “To Live”-like movements; the song then breaks into an “Orion”-like mid/up-tempo solo section, and then cycles back through variations on the three-movement introduction before concluding with an even stronger echo of “Ktulu”—not surprising, as this is the instrumental that closed Metallica’s own second album. And yet, I don’t want to give the impression that “Deities” is just a medley, or suffers from the rather typical metal-instrumental problem of sounding like a patchwork of unused riffs, even unused Metallica riffs. It actually has a structural integrity that many instrumentals lack. In fact, it’s more tightly welded together than “To Live Is To Die,” the Metallica instrumental to which it is probably closest in spirit, right down to the dull spots and the transcendent, full-on dirge in the middle, complete with harmonies that sound like they were laid on with a palette knife.

When it’s all over—”Deities” ends the album—the question nags: how can it be the masterpiece it wants to be when it’s still so indebted to the master? How can Evile restore the phallus and the purity of British metal when they’re as prone as Latin America to kowtowing to the US?

Maybe the better question is, Can it be a masterpiece of the revival without being indebted to the master? And maybe that’s what makes Infected Nations enjoyable, and sometimes downright good. It’s not that Evile sound most like themselves when they sound most like Metallica. It’s not even the earlier point, that by trying to grow out of being a tribute band they more firmly grow into one. It’s that the line between pastiche and inspiration is a fine one; and though Evile fall more than once, they also manage to perform some pretty amazing feats of balance. By flattering an older listener’s knowledge of the genre while managing, through sympathetic magic, to turn the stuff of rote tribute into something vital; and by refusing the security blanket of irony, and shooting so big as to try to gobble up the whole history of the subgenre, pace Metallica, in their sound. And why shouldn’t they? The City on the Hill was supposed to start the purifying fire, to be seen across the Atlantic. Even thrash metal was about restoring something, burning away the icons and brambles to find that mutable, fleeting essence underneath, maybe just called rock-n-roll.

A word about lyrics before concluding: In a genre that expends so much energy making monsters, and capitalizing on the monsters created by the more reactionary elements in our culture, it’s refreshing to hear a band that reminds us that the “demons” who commit monstrous evils “are only men”—that “they” are no different from “us” (“Genocide”). It’s particularly nice to hear this in a post-9/11 era, where a band like Testament, not unknown for occasionally spouting progressive-tilting lyrics back in the day (as was in fact intermittently true of many thrash bands), returned to the scene in 2008 with an apocalyptic “holy war” album. I don’t know what Evile’s politics are—where metal is concerned, most bands’ politics don’t bear much looking into; I’d as soon ask the Hell’s Angels to sign petitions for marriage equality. But is it too much to ask British neo-thrashers to re-import a bit of political sanity into the lyrics of post-9/11 metal? As long as they’re riffing on ‘80s thrash metal, they might as well channel that punk-inspired anger, or at minimum, apathy.

Evile’s third album is slated for release at the end of September. In interviews the band has suggested that they are seeking a middle ground between their first and second efforts—seeking, it seems, a compromise between “early” and “late” revival, between a much-lauded straight-ahead sound and a more contentious “progressive” one. I’m not sure how to take this. They’re a talented young band with, one hopes, a bright future. They weathered the sudden, tragic death of their bass player, Mike Alexander, in 2009. (Talk about recapitulating Metallica’s career, Jesus. At least Cliff Burton lasted three albums. Couldn’t Alexander tell his days were numbered?) It would be a shame if the very exuberance about an older style of metal that brought them into the spotlight were to become their Achilles’ heel. I’d really like to see at least a few of these neo-thrash bands chart their own course, wherever they might go, before their vessels are dashed to pieces on the rocks of a revival set to expire—history repeating or rhyming or whatever it does—before the next big evangelical apocalypse.

This all might be asking too much; the dead hand of the past may simply weigh too heavy, and the balancing acts of inspired tribute might be the best I can expect. In the meantime, I’ll keep listening, and raising my glass to them, as they did to me in Jersey.

* Matt Drake’s voice has been a focus of ire for several reviewers, who argue that he was a good Araya impersonator, but now that the band is writing slower, more nuanced material, he’s trying to “do something” with his voice … and it’s about as effective as a comb-over. Drake belts in the gruff midrange of thrash metal, a mix of Puppets-era Hetfield—even to the vocal harmonies—and Sepultura’s Max Cavalera, though without the dopey punch of the latter at his best. But I’ll take Drake any day over the “scream the verse, croon the chorus” (probably the best 6 words of music criticism the Voice ever wrote) emo-death crap that dominates the genre today.

Gentlemen’s Club

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The Iridium is the sort of place that makes you feel like a tourist in your own city. It’s the Caesars Palace of jazz clubs, a place where you resign yourself to shelling out fifty bucks to hear the legends of yesteryear, talk to out-of-towners in third-grade English, and sip overpriced drinks. I have a vague recollection it wasn’t always like this, that it was less mercenary before moving from its Dali-inspired digs across from Lincoln Center to the basement of the Stardust Diner at the north end of Times Square. Today, if you’re not careful, you’ll wander right past the club entrance and into the diner, among the bright lights and singing waitstaff and people from Iowa. You’ll vainly look for the door at the back of the diner that says “Iridium” instead of “Restrooms,” until some busboy takes pity on you, spins you around, and gives you a shove; and then, skirting the waitress belting out something from Show Boat, and to frivolous applause, you’ll find yourself back at the front door, where, if you’re extraordinarily lucky, some other good samaritan might just point you to the staircase leading down.

The basement is all murmur and dim rather than loud and bright, club versus diner, but don’t be fooled: the Iridium and the Stardust are very much of a piece. Times Square hammers everything into the same matrix, ensures consistency as much as any brand. Last year I came here to see Alan Holdsworth, that rumpled gentleman of the electric guitar, and the events calendar on my table big-named an upcoming performance by David Coverdale. Of Whitesnake! it said, in case the name of that justly-forgotten supergroup had escaped you. I just can’t imagine Birdland or even the Blue Note doing the same.

For the Holdsworth gig—and probably for the Coverdale gig, too—the club filled up with men my age, come to watch their elderly hero or mentor with the same rapt attention that the patrons of the gentlemen’s club a block up Broadway watch women take off their clothes. I confess that I learn more about myself at such shows than about, say, playing the guitar. For one, Holdsworth wasn’t revealing any secrets, and so made his achievements on that instrument seem all the more astonishing—in fact, I got the impression that he was flabbergasted by his own technique. And then I see other versions of myself in the audience, and wonder, for example, why my beard doesn’t look that way, or why I’m not taking pictures of Holdsworth’s effects rack, or whether I’ve become too curmudgeonly in my early forties—I generally don’t think to bring earplugs to jazz clubs, but a lot of other people obviously had, and that Holdsworth guy, Jesus, he was too loud.

But then David Coverdale was playing here next week. What was I thinking?

I was eighteen the first time I heard Alex Skolnick, and so was he. This was 1987, and Testament had just put out their first album, The Legacy, one of a handful of truly great metal albums to come out of the exploding Bay Area scene in the late ‘80s. Even in a genre that defines itself partly by guitar virtuosity—and sometimes, alas, by little else—Alex was a bright bright star. That he was “our” age made him that much more a hero.

Five years and as many albums later, Alex quit Testament, and a few years after that entered the New School to study jazz. There, he put together a trio with the idea of treating classic metal tunes as jazz standards. Instead of Cole Porter and George Gershwin, it would be Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest and the Scorpions—the so-called “new standard” taken to its logical extreme. So far as I know, he’s been working on and off with that trio since the early ‘00s, dividing his time between them and other projects … including a 2008 reunion album and tour with Testament (huzzah!).

I had tried to see the Skolnick trio when they were gigging semi-regularly at the Knitting Factory some years ago, but stuff had always gotten in the way. When I saw him scheduled to play the Iridium—on Memorial Day, no less—something clicked. Here was Alex, old friend, blood brother, who had followed the same musical trajectory as I had, albeit as a performer instead of listener. We were finally going to get the chance to catch up.

The show was listed as “Les Paul Mondays with the Alex Skolnick Trio,” so I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Nor did the guy on the other end of the reservations line have a clue. As it turned out, the Les Paul Trio (sans Paul, since his death a couple of years ago) played for about a half hour; then they invited Alex out to jam with them on “Caravan” and “How High the Moon”; then the Les Paul players fled the stage, and Alex brought his guys out to play their renditions of Metallica’s “Fade to Black” and Judas Priest’s “Electric Eye,” together with three or four originals.

He seemed nervous jamming with the Les Paul players, and a little sketchy, too. And he looked … old. I mean, older than me. I couldn’t help but think of “Sonny’s Blues”: I was the safe brother, the narrator, the one who became a teacher (math in Baldwin’s story, English in mine), and Alex was Sonny, the “searching” brother who had given himself to music, the one with whom I had just been reunited, and who now looked like he’d aged past his years, past mine. But then he had always looked older, even when we were both eighteen. He was a rock star, larger than life; he was in pictures on my wall.

And yet … he acted like such a kid. The nerves, like he’d been called up to solo in high school band. He gave a shout out to his dad, who was sitting at the bar, and who had brought him here, he said, to see Les Paul. He showed off his signed box set of Les Paul CDs to the audience. He said the Les Paul trio was the epitome of something called “class,” and asked, “What the hell are we [the Skolnick trio] doing here?” (He might have asked the same about David Coverdale.) He seemed unable to catch up with himself, always a step behind his own excitement. He had seen Les Paul at the Iridium! And John Scofield, too! And tonight he had brought along his own Les Paul, to play part of the gig on!

So there you are, brother Alex, all grown up and ever-older than me, still a big kid. It was heavy metal fan culture transposed onto jazz, yes; but I also wondered if I was glimpsing something larger, about the nature of celebrity, or at least rock-n-roll celebrity: all these aging children, warped that way, like Carlos Fuentes’s “Doll Queen” (I won’t give the ending away, in case you haven’t read it), not in this case by the unnatural desire of parents, but by the similarly unnatural desires of mass culture.

I don’t know about class, but combining the Skolnick and Les Paul trios was definitely an exercise in incongruity. The latter played to the theater crowd: nothing over three minutes, everything standard as standard could be, and most of it with vocal accompaniment. I hadn’t seen the trio since the late ‘90s, when Paul was still the leader: the original Johnny Carson of the guitar, though a bit randier in his humor, all looking up girls’ skirts and tricking his bandmates into sitting on whoopee cushions. It was nice to see Lou Pallo still holding down the fort on rhythm guitar, comping with the relaxed aplomb of a gondolier pushing down a Venetian canal. He can’t solo or play a melody to save his life, but that had been Les’s job, after all … and one gets the impression that this dour soul was happier being Ed McMahon. As for the rest of the band—Nicki Parrott on bass, John Colianni on piano—they have more talent than I can possibly do justice to in a few sentences. But let me try with Ms Parrott, who so embodies the essence of performance that she transcends the Times Square aesthetic, perhaps by most fully embracing it. Beautiful, blessed with a sultry voice and a great feel for her instrument. There was a point in the set that I was about to start beating my glass on the table and chanting Skol-nick, Skol-nick; but I swear, if all I had heard that night was her rendition of “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby,” I would have gone home content. They said the tune had been one of Les’s favorites, but she very much made it her own.

Surely the most memorable moment of the evening, though, happened a tune or so later, when Pallo invited Alex out to play. “We’re going to bring out now a very talented young man” (don’t you love it? Goddamn, I am YOUNG!) “… he’s some sort of heavy … rock … heavy rocker … what is that? Heavy metal, that’s it!” (laughter from the band; applause from the audience at the back tables) “… but now he decided that he wanted to play jazz” (uproarious laughter from the rest of the band, I mean, baby, this is just a GAS, a HEAVY ROCKER who wants to play JAZZ? baby, can you dig it?) “and he’s an absolutely fabulous player … please welcome to the stage Mr Alex Slotnick!” (close enough … maybe cue cards next time?)

Out loped Alex in that tight-jeans metal way, as hobbled as if he’d worked those five years on a chain gang, head bobbing, long foofy hair with a skunky streak in it. He cut a pose with the trio for the paparazzi, playing along with them, face all metal-serious, the devil horns in his left hand.

I couldn’t make this shit up, but somebody’s got to write it down.

As for the “Slotnick” trio and their music: some of it was austere, some of it bluesy, and some of it enjoyably kitsch, and consciously so. You can’t write a tune called “Bollywood Jam” without a pretty deep appreciation of the traditions you’re pulling together. Once the “Jam” got going, it reminded me of nothing so much as early Al DiMeola. This makes sense: I imagine that Alex and I both discovered Land of the Midnight Sun and Elegant Gypsy right around the same impressionable time in our lives, probably through our respective guitar teachers (though I can’t claim to have studied with Joe Satriani). Probably we had both sat with our ears close to our stereo speakers, trying to pick up those badass riffs from “Race with the Devil on a Spanish Highway” and working on our right hand speed picking patterns, heads nodding … yes, of course, metal and jazz, it makes sense, as much sense as anything, and there we all were, the guys at the front tables, all these superannuated headbangers bobbing our heads in unison.

But it’s not like the New School would have let him get away with just DiMeola, likely among the baggage he brought along with him. Alex had obviously had the Wes Montgomery on heavy rotation, as he shaped those solos from notes to octaves. And there was at least one other classic bop influence whose name was on the tip of my tongue … and will likely remain there until I have a chance to pick up one of the trio’s records and myself put it on heavy rotation.

In terms of the metal tunes, “Fade to Black” was the more interesting of the two, smartly arranged, from the use of effects loops to record and carry on the opening chord progression under Kirk Hammett’s original solo, to an extended jam on the “Stairway”/ “Watchtower”/ etc. finale. Maybe “Fade to Black” is just a more interesting tune to re-imagine than “Electric Eye,” which came across sort of flat. Or, since the Metallica is a more recent “cover” than the Priest, maybe it’s the case that Skolnick is seeing the music with enough distance now that he can really play with it. Or maybe it was the Paulite influence—those inventive loops. (As Alex put it, “He [Paul] was doing loops before there were loops.”)

The question, it seems to me, is not “Can metal be played as jazz?”—anything can be played as jazz—but rather, “Should metal be played as jazz?” On this I think the jury’s still out. Not that I don’t admire Alex for trying. But then I’ve always admired him—his prodigious technique, his verve and imagination as a soloist, his contribution to those heavy harmonies that defined Testament’s sound, and his thirst to keep expanding himself as a musician.

As for whether one should play metal as jazz, I will end with this, an observation-cum-aphorism: Holdsworth was louder.

Helldriver's Pit Stop

Because your foot shall slide in due time.

Author Archives: helldriver

Live Birds

Land of the Midnight Stumble

Best Music Writing 2011

The Interrupted Nocturne

Reign in Blood at 25

Bartok, Salt Lake, Emerson & Me

A Fugue

Double Time

Burned-over

Gentlemen’s Club

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