Category Archives: What I’m Listening To

Two Years in the Pit

1 Reply

I came to the internet because I wished to write deliberately: to drive life into a corner, stun it with a few well-placed hammer blows, slit its throat, hang it from a hook, and gather up its blood in buckets; to slurp the marrow from its split bones, and mill its flesh into language; to prance about wearing nothing but a skin of words, without any neighbors around to point or phone the authorities. So I built my little cabin in this hollow in the CUNY woods, beside not a pond, but a tarn—a bleak, black, stygian tarn, in whose still waters I see my cabin reflected. There are days I step into the tarn, confusing the reflection for the reality. I feel a downward suck, and know the tarn could swallow me in one cold gulp.

No House of Usher mine, though. Slapped together out of old plywood and salvaged pine, my cabin is hardly taller than I, affording me nothing more than an escape from the elements, a space to store my few worldly possessions, and above all, a hiding-place from R.W.—which is to say, from the world.

R.W.! Little did I know by how long He would outlive me. And now I am in hell, and He in some other woody place He no doubt calls heaven, and we never have occasion to see each other anymore. I admit, I do sometimes miss hearing His voice, calling to me—H.D., H.D., come out and walk with me—; and some days, when the wind whistles through the chinks in my record albums, I imagine I can still hear Him. Sometimes I turn up the volume on my headphones, my version of the wax in Odysseus’s crew’s ears, until I have blotted Him out. Other times His voice is irresistible.

Maybe it’s just loneliness.

My cabin may not look like much, but you should see it from the inside: piled high with records, and cassettes, and compact discs, dirt floor to slat roof. They act as second walls, although from the inside it’s easy to believe them the walls themselves. Up, up from my humble headquarters through the stovepipe chimney my little antenna burrows, beaming my signal out to the world, just as the chimney does the smoke from the cooking flesh of my victims. For here in my cabin, I am just one more node in a noisy global conversation.

It’s why I never let R.W. inside: He always thought I lived a Spartan life, dressed in a hair shirt, knelt to pray on broken glass. Had He found out otherwise, He’d no doubt have felt betrayed. And then He never would have invited me over anymore, and I did so like Lidian, her home cooking. One does tire of beans, beans, beans. But R.W. was so easy to fool, I almost felt bad about it. I do love Him; you just need to take Him with a great big grain of salt … which is to say, a grain will not do.

And how would I survive without Him? I am poaching on His signal, His soil. It’s not even password protected. How could it be, with His ridiculous philosophy?

It’s true, I do raise beans and meaty fruits here beside my cabin, in this fetid viper’s nest rank with death, where nothing lives but as the shadow of itself. And so I have learned to content myself with shadow-beans, and shadow-fruits, until I can’t tell the difference anymore: drop the prefix, and one comes to believe Lidian and R.W. are the real shadows. They—the beans and fruits, I mean—come up early as my thoughts; I blood them generously from bucket and trough, coax them along, harvest them when they seem ready, which is about every few weeks, if I am diligent, and not too distracted by the other business of life. As with any noxious swampland, the task of clearing and draining it was difficult; but once your labor has redeemed you, the soil is that much more venemous for it.

Did I mention that the land on which I built my cabin is part of something called “The Commons”? Leave it to R.W. to come up with such an idea. As if it didn’t all belong to Him anyway!

Nor did He ever tire of reminding me that I live on His property. Then again, because I’ve chosen the coldest, darkest corner of these Commons to live, I might as well be the exclusive proprietor—be R.W. Himself! I ask no permission to build, plant, or hunt; I have all the privacy and dominion of a king in his hunting grounds. Visitors are rare—who would want to come to such a dim, dank hollow in such an otherwise beautiful country?

And who are these rare visitors? I don’t really know. They hardly ever come within easy shouting distance—probably they are afraid of breathing the pestilential air, perhaps of contracting some obscure infection, of becoming mere shadows themselves. And then there are the carcasses I leave in a ring about a mile away, as if to suggest a predator of unimaginable voraciousness that had claimed my hollow as its hunting ground. Not surprising, then, that no one has ever approached me while I’m outside … and all the moreso that the occasional few dare to sneak up and slip a note under my door. There is the footloose Mr Foote, an itinerant tinker; he occasionally still braves these cold, swampy lowlands, waves his stick at me from a distance, not menacingly. I, less often, wave back. Sometimes an old friend sneaks through, and finding me occupied—and knowing my feelings about being interrupted in my work—slips a note under my door. Others I see less often, or from a yet-greater distance, or only from behind. Their names escape me, if I ever knew them to begin with.

I myself do get out sometimes—not often enough, perhaps. I may pay a brief visit to Mr Foote, or Mr. Picciano, out tending his garden every day, a better man than I. When I do go out walking, I am always startled by the number of abandoned properties I come across, and by the number of new, as-yet unlived-in homes as well. It makes me wonder why the newcomers don’t simply squat in the existing structures. Not that there is any problem of cluttering here, mind you. These Commons are so extensive there is hardly a place they do not reach—from the brilliant hills of Appalachia, to Scotland, Italy, even China.

But then I remember days out walking with R.W., pointing to a hill in the distance and saying, There? Your property ends there? And He would smile that cryptic smile, and say, No, past that. Just a little ways past that.

There are strangers who pass through the Commons too, of course: the occasional honest traveler, some of whom are not afraid to stop and visit, have a cup of birchbark coffee with me, talk music—all other subjects leave me dumb as a stone. Droves of salesmen, too, lugging about their coffin-heavy suitcases—I chase them away, waving my machete, howling like a berserker. But there are strangers and there are strangers. It took a long time before I realized that some of them were spies, lurkers: Pinkertons of a sort, scabs by any other name. Just the other day, I surprised one peering through the window of my cabin. Unfortunately, while giving chase I stubbed my toe on a bucket of blood, and by the time I was able to recover myself he was long gone. I did, however, find a small bundle of papers that he must have dropped in his flight, which I brought into my cabin and, under the light of the single bare bulb, set to reading. It turned out to be a report of sorts, addressed to one Dick. It read, in part, as follows:

Dear Dick:

Spent another day browsing the CUNY Academic Commons, as per your request, for heretical, satanic, blasphematory, and otherwise morally turpitudinous material. Can confirm your suspicion that the site is a cesspool of sodomite-coddling communists. Social programs, drugs, organic food, bestiality—it’s all here: the whole domino tumble from secular humanism to tax-and-sex slavery, I mean, it’s horrible, Dick, just horrible. Should be a sign that says “Shower After Browsing.” Am more concerned than ever about what our Godfearing young adults are forced to “think critically” about.

Am particularly disgusted by one site, called “Helldriver’s Pit Stop.” You’d think the name would speak for itself, but it’s actually worse. A general tone of mocking the Creator. Seems like the only way author can make a point is by using foul language, or taking the Lord’s name in vain. Author claims atheism, but seems obsessed with religion—you know, the typical secular hypocrisy. And talk about worshipping false idols! […]

It went on like this for another six or so pages.

Luckily, I also found a card among the papers with said Dick’s full name and address. Rest assured I have set about amending the language of the report. Oh, not so much, really—a few corrections here and there … a little more attention to … ahem … word choice. I only wish I could be there to see what happens to my unnamed Pinkerton when the amended report arrives.

*

Ever since reading the comments from two visitors of apparently evangelical orientation on Tony Picciano’s post about Michele Bachman’s gaybashing last July, I’ve wondered to what extent the Commons is trawled for soundbites by the minions of the religious right. It probably should have occurred to me earlier—after all, CUNY is the home of the dreaded Frances Fox Piven, bitch Eve of the American fall, and her imps canker the campuses of Sodomanhattan and the Gomorrahs of the boroughs. Ah, to be an educator in a time when education itself is considered radical! And so I must admit a vague disappointment at not having become (at least to my knowledge) the target of someone’s righteous anger. Why isn’t anyone commenting on my suspect morality? Why isn’t anyone except my neighbor (my actual, physical neighbor) telling me I’m going to hell? Not that I have any interest in seeing the sainted crosshairs around my mugshot. But an outraged comment or two would really be a shot in the arm. It would be a whole lot better than the spam, spam, spam, spam, spam …

Ah, Helldriver, expurgate thyself. The virtually unlimited nature of virtual space hath made a blatherer of thee. Secretly thou cravest the editor’s bridle and crop.

Pray tell, what editor in his or her right mind would allow me to end anything with the sentence “And then I woke up”? Any of you who have not felt such an urge at one time or another, feel free to cast the first stone … but wait until you have your own blog first!

Blather aside, this is supposed to be an end-of-the-second-year roundup (and, very much in the spirit of my namesake, I will allow my two years to bleed into one). Over the last year I didn’t post quite as frequently as I’d have liked—only 15 posts, as compared to 24 the first year. But it would be incorrect to say my output has dwindled, since the average length per post has increased. Conclusion: I humiliate myself less often, but at greater length; where once I apologized for writing 2,500 words, I now gleefully plop down 5,000. To be honest, I didn’t expect to spend a month writing an article-length post about Anthrax. Summer is one thing, but during the school year? O, how I look forward to the next few short-and-sweet posts …

But to the past. Regarding what Brian Foote called the “sartorial duties” of bandleader Ron Carter (“No Tie-Picker He,” 6.20.10): when I saw Carter last fall at the Highline Ballroom, the whole band (he, Mulgrew Miller, and Russell Malone) were wearing matching rainbow ties. Since this was right around when the legislature was set to vote on marriage equality, I took it as a statement. I actually missed the beginning of the set, so for all I know Carter might have mentioned it.

I got a chance to see Fred Hersch’s trio again at the Village Vanguard this February; the last time Hersch played there, I was so moved by the Sunday night set that I was compelled to write about it (“Double Time,” 8.16.11). I must have been trying to reproduce the experience—knowing full well that such experiences are not reproducible—because I chose to go on Sunday again. He played some of the same tunes, including the same encore—yes, the encore I made such a to-do about last August. Overall, though, it was a very different set: low-key, playful without being rambunctious; a winding down of the week’s residency rather than its apotheosis.

As I continue to plow through the BFI anthology Early Cinema, and after listening to John Zorn’s comments in the documentary Put Blood in the Music (which I don’t recommend unless you’re a real big fan of Sonic Youth), I’m almost ready to start thinking about reconsidering some of my points in two separate posts, “On Bands” (8.5.10) and “Silent Movie” (3.25.11). Some of Zorn’s comments focused on the way television, cartoons in particular, have changed the way he (and his generation) think about musical structure. Since this is not a matter of correcting or rethinking a point or two, but of making a whole new argument, my comments will take the shape of a whole new post. By writing this paragraph, I’m sneakily trying to commit myself to get to it before next April.

I’m sure I’ll have things to say about “Glee Metal” (3.17.12), the second of two Tolstoy-length posts about metal, once I’m a little further away from it (besides the amusing fact that Candlebox is playing the Gramercy Theater next month). As for the first (“Burned-over,” 8.3.11), two points. (1) The July 2011 unrest in England—and similar unrest over the previous months in EU stepchildren Spain and Greece—suggest that it was a bit myopic of me to dismiss “defuse anger at the state of things” as a cultural catalyst. My broader point, though, was that rather than making a sweeping gesture at the recession and then pointing a finger at “angry” music, we need to be careful about arguing the connections between history and the evolution of aesthetic forms. In this regard, the recent popularity of ‘80s metal needs to be considered according to a wide range of determinants, many of them purely aesthetic: the dissemination of elements of heavy metal’s musical discourse into a variety of other genres; many young bands’ open admissions of debt to their ‘80s precursors, now lumped together with “classic rock”; the growth of the nostalgia industries, which seem to have moved on to the ‘80s after turning the ‘70s into a stripmined moonscape; and the propensity to read musical kinships through the lenses of irony, kitsch, and retro-. Once we’re done talking about all this, then maybe we can talk about the economy, racism, etc.—but again, specifically (e.g., Scandinavian black metal and right-wing nationalism). (2) My assertion that thrash metal evolved into a more progressive style between its inception and its demise (roughly 1983-1990) needs to be complicated. I think a closer look would reveal various strands of change, from the more progressive to retro-punk, alternative, and industrial, as metal bled into surrounding genres and vice-versa, through the convergence of audiences accommodating themselves to the new, more aggressive sound, and metal growing to accommodate a wider audience. In terms of my point in “Burned-over,” this means that, with Infected Nations, Evile is recapitulating a certain strand of the genre’s evolution, but not the genre as a whole.

Finally, ever since reviewing Best Music Writing 2011 (1.9.12) I’ve wondered whether I wrote a Trojan horse against affirmative action. Not my intention. My point was that it should not be the responsibility of a “best of” anthology to reflect all the nuances of the historical (musical) moment, but rather to showcase as diverse as possible a range of great writing. An anthology’s not a university … Enough! or Too much.

*

I sometimes wonder how the hell I ended up with a doctorate in English. I was never the Smiths-loving high schooler with the soul of a poet. Portrait of the Artist did nothing for me, except for the “horrors of hell” sermons. I don’t think I finished Billy Budd. Bo-ring. Crime and Punishment, what a drag. And all this despite having really great English teachers. (Take heart, all you teachers out there, and remember Helldriver when you are losing patience with your students.) My first two years of college I was a physics major, and I kept on taking science courses as electives after switching majors. But there was something else I was doing the whole time that served as a thread linking everything together, and keel and rudder for wherever I happened to be going. I came to literature through a back door, figuring that if I wanted to write, I should have a better idea about how the craft had been practiced in the past. I had somehow managed to get a B.A. in The Writing Seminars with only three straight-up lit classes under my belt. (Do the seams show? It’s all homespun.)

With music, the story is somewhat different. I grew up with it all around me. But the trajectory has been similar: wanting to write about music has opened doors I would otherwise have been disinclined—whether too scared, lazy, or just too preoccupied with other things—to open. Writes Jacques Barzun: “Perhaps it [music] must be talked about if it is to give its devotees full measure in enjoyment and significance.” Or, perhaps it is the desire to talk about it, to articulate and find meaning in what we hear, that predisposes us to apply our emotional and critical faculties most fully.

Glee Metal

3 Replies

In the summer of 1994 my girlfriend and I went to see Metallica at Wolf Mountain, a ski resort-cum-concert venue near Park City, Utah. The Suicidal Tendencies were on the bill as well, along with overnight grunge superstars Candlebox; our plan was to catch the former and miss the latter. Would that we had read the tea leaves, or at least looked at Billboard, because we ended up doing the reverse—missing the venerable Tendencies, that is, and suffering through a Candlebox set that slouched its livelong way to the one-hit vanishing point “You.”

I was still smarting from being denied the “How Will I Laugh Tomorrow” pit—there’s nothing like an outdoor mosh pit on a hot summer day—when Metallica came on a little after dusk. By the time the sound of machine gun fire rippled over the PA, signaling the beginning of the Johnny Got His Gun-inspired ballad/suite “One,” it was full dark. The lighters came out, the crowd held its breath. Then, high up on a riser, James Hetfield appeared and played the opening minor arpeggio: ding-ding-ding-dang. A collective exhale.

Well … “appeared” isn’t quite the right word. He sort of swung around like he was mounting an invisible horse, assumed a cock-legged pose, backlit and frozen. And my girlfriend and I, we just burst out laughing. How could we help it? That pose—it didn’t signify Metallica anymore, or even metal; it signified rock star. Mind you, at that point I was still going to the mat for the so-called Black Album, and if you give me more than thirty seconds I’ll regale you with what I believe to be that album’s many merits. But this? Load, Some Kind of Monster, “Nothing Else Matters” with strings—in that moment, I saw it all, the whole ugly coast into ignominy.

Could we have been the only ones who laughed? I doubt it. Maybe the crowd roared with laughter.

Almost twenty years later, I’ve stopped blaming Metallica. I’m blaming Anthrax instead. That’s right—Anthrax! I blame Anthrax. Why, you ask, would I blame such a fun-loving bunch of guys, the band that epitomized the warm-and-fuzzy machismo of thrash metal in its heyday? A willful contentiousness? Partly, yes. But you see, I fell out with Anthrax back in ‘88, years before Metallica’s apostasy, at the very noon of thrash’s day. In hindsight, I think my quarrel with Anthrax—a premature quarrel, I admit, but a quarrel nonetheless—sheds more light on thrash’s then-incipient demise than the oft-cited narrative of Metallica’s starstruck fall on the one hand, and the rise of grunge, hip hop, and other heavy alternatives on the other. But don’t despair: my counternarrative has a happy ending. It’s called Worship Music, and it’s really what brought me to want to write something about Anthrax in the first place.

*

     1987 was a banner year for Anthrax. It was the year of their seminal Among the Living, the band’s second album with singer Joey Belladonna, their third overall, and the gold-selling metal-rap crossover “I’m the Man.” With Living, Anthrax’s sound had crystallized into something immediately recognizable: “buzzsaw” guitars, furiously-pedaled double bass licks, groovy mosh parts, and catchy, melodic choruses. The lyrics, which Belladonna delivered with a mix of opera aria and Bronx sneer, were as likely to adapt Stephen King as to address social issues—“Star Wars,” racism, drugs. And yet, despite their penchant for horror and social commentary, Anthrax were a good deal less bleak than their thrash counterparts. You could hear it in those chipper choruses, so unusual for the genre, and in the words that tended to look past problems, to solutions: flags of many colors, fighting for peace.

“Imitation of Life,” the last song on Living, is a genre-appropriate paean to authenticity, a great “be yourself” underground anthem against the “plastic” world of media-driven image-making that Anthrax was likely just beginning to encounter. The chorus is indicative of the tenor of the song: “There’s nothing I hate more than all these plastic people/ With all their plastic promises, and all their plastic deals/ They just can’t be themselves, and live their own lives out/ They’re just an imitation of what life’s all about.” Once it revs up, “Life” is easily the fastest cut on the album, as if the breakneck tempo were necessary to assure both band and listener of each other’s authenticity, their underground pedigree.

If you can see past the homophobia*—I won’t blame you if you can’t, but I’m going to—one verse is a nutshell response to the more lucrative, radio-friendly glam or “hair” metal that dominated the charts during the same era: “Bands dress like women, with hairspray and lace/ I’d pass an image law, stick it in their face/ Let’s see how long they keep dressing this way/ Wearing their image twenty-four hours a day.” Image versus reality; pop versus underground; poseurs versus “true metal.” One can’t help but wonder whether these lines are directed at the “friend” mentioned in the first verse: “Whatever happened to the guy I knew?/ A media creation, a monster grew.”

Now, replace “guy” with “band,” and by 1988 you could have asked Anthrax the same question.

“Monster” is maybe too strong a word, but “media creation” nonetheless … and one that the band, the whole scene, participated in creating: instead of “hairspray and lace,” high-top sneakers, jock socks, baseball jerseys or concert T’s, Bermuda shorts or cut-off jeans.** And here’s the really insidious part: the band that wears hairspray and lace might, if they so choose, remove it after a performance. But by ‘88, I have the impression that Anthrax was wearing their image 24 hours a day, trapped in the mirror they held up to themselves, and to the scene. Anthrax, that is, became “Anthrax,” a parody of themselves, an image they fell in love with and, like Narcissus, died trying to embrace (well … almost).

Is that your fist I hear, beating on the computer screen? You’re saying, They didn’t sell out. Metallica did—put on the eyeshadow and the furry vests, grew the Beatnik goatees and started listening to indie rock, went all Billboard on our asses. Anthrax always dressed that way. Yes, yes, all true … but isn’t this precisely how it happened? Anthrax were so preoccupied with authenticity—with the idea of thrash (“true”) metal being no-image music, and the scene a big family—that as they achieved greater success, they had no choice but to create an image of authenticity to project for their fans.

Look at the photo on the sleeve of 1988’s State of Euphoria: the band members shine like wax effigies of themselves, cutouts against a postcard New York. Quite a switch from the leather-clad Anthrax in the 34th Street subway station on the back of Living: from the underground to the top of the world. But it’s not the backdrop that really matters here, or the clothes. As for the music, what’s notable about Euphoria is not how different it sounds from Living—the sort of about-face we would expect from a “sell-out”—but how similar. It sounds, properly enough, like the zombie- or pod-version of Living (as in the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

I’m pinning a year on it, but in hindsight it’s clear the tendency was there all along: the progressive ossification of their sound between ‘85’s Spreading the Disease and Euphoria; the line-drawn caricatures of the band on the sleeve of Disease; the proliferation of their little Mario Bros.-style mascot; the increasingly tedious use of “mosh” and “not,” which by ‘87 had begun to creep their way into titles, choruses, and verses. This is how it happens: Anthrax lingo, Anthrax gear, Anthrax themes. The music becomes the logo, the image grows legs; the songwriting gets stilted, the lyrics predictable. At the time, though, it seemed to happen almost overnight, a crash landing off the peak of Living into the stale slough of Euphoria. (“His meridian is at once the darkening and evening of his day,” says the Judge about the human species in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Would that Anthrax had put down the King for a while and picked up McCarthy. Not that I dislike Stephen King, but I’m still waiting for the metal band that will tackle Blood Meridian with the combination of aplomb and naïve faith Mastodon did Moby-Dick.)

You’ll say I’m not giving them enough credit. There’s not a metal band with a better sense of humor, or one more adept at self-parody, and this should imply a certain level of consciousness about image-making: the tongue-in-cheek side project S.O.D. (Stormtroopers of Death), with their LP Speak English or Die; the tracksuit-and-Anthrax-bling cover photo on the puerile but well-intentioned “I’m the Man.” And yet, like the very “un-thrash” upbeat optimism of much of the music, humor was just part of who they were—part, that is, of the fun-loving bunch of down-to-earth Bronxites that coalesced into the master-image “Anthrax.”

In fact, it’s hard to think of a band that better embodied the goofy camaraderie of the scene: punk with the edges sanded off; a sort of feel-good hardcore, if such a thing is possible. Maybe this is why it was so easy for them to become an image not just of themselves, but of the scene. After Anthrax became “Anthrax,” it wasn’t long before thrash became “thrash.” Images live forever, but the scenes (and bands) that produce them, like the hapless characters in Adolfo Bioy Casares’s La invención de Morel, rot to death.

I have the feeling that if any devout thrasher were going to blame Anthrax for killing the scene, it would be for a reason opposite the one I’m arguing. Anthrax were one of the few bands—thrash metal so incestuously devoted to maintaining the bulwark of its authenticity against the dreaded pop Other—audacious enough to reach outside the genre for inspiration: into rap (“I’m the Man,” and later the cover of Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise”) and British pop (Joe Jackson’s “Got the Time”).*** Anthrax, my imaginary devotee might argue, were too open to rival musics, so that, even as they remained one of the lead proponents of genre, they were simultaneously breaking down the very musical barriers that defined it. They let the wrong ones in. (It should be noted that this openness to musical innovation was of a piece with their politics—a schmaltzy one-world liberalism they espoused when they weren’t singing about Judge Dredd, Randall Flagg, or poseurs. The band’s anti-racist tracks on 1990’s Persistence of Time could be read as responses to thrash’s genre jingoism.)

I don’t disagree with this argument, just with the sentiment that often accompanies it (i.e., “letting the wrong ones in”). I think the scene needed to die. The music needed to move on; the death-in-life of Euphoria needed to be transcended. I think that if you did a survey of metal albums in 1988, you’d find a lot of bands either stalling out or beginning to move in new directions. Anyway, that Metallica did what they did, as they did it, is hardly Anthrax’s fault; they just happened to arrive first, or maybe just most transparently, at that combination of ossification and innovation that happens in all scenes once they begin to become successful. Anthrax had to kill the scene in order to escape it; Anthrax had to help create the ‘90s in order to escape themselves.

There are some fine moments on Euphoria, of course, and even more on 1990’s Time, an album that was just beginning to break free of what had become Anthrax clichés (e.g., “Misery Loves Company” and “Who Cares Wins”), in part by digging in a more organic way into hip hop (listen to “Blood” and “Discharge”), helping forge a style that would explode as groove metal. By 1993, everything had changed: music had moved on; Sound of White Noise, with new frontman John Bush has little in it to identify the old Anthrax; it sounds more like Alice in Chains. The album would turn out to be their last hurrah, and the fact that it went gold probably allowed Anthrax to store up their proverbial acorns for the long, bitter winter to come. For the next eighteen years would be a limbo of delayed and squelched releases, remixes, remasters, reunions, best-ofs, rotating singers and lead guitarists, and guest appearances—a time, for all but the most observant and least jaded, of white noise and silence.

*

Before Worship Music finally arrived in record stores (metaphorically speaking) last September, turning the hometown tour-ending “Big Four” show at Yankee Stadium into a giant release party, Anthrax were probably the only of the better-known thrash bands that hadn’t yet put out a new album. Not for want of trying—I won’t go into the reasons for all the delays—or for lack of new material. Or, for that matter, for lack of energy: they had already been on the road with the Big 4 for a year, and were about to jump into another tour, supporting the new album, with Testament and Death Angel sharing the bill. But then a band with a day named after them (last year, Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. declared September 14th “Anthrax Day in the Bronx”) has certain responsibilities—ribbon cuttings, ship christenings, and relentless touring being just a few of them.

The tour wrapped up early last month at Times Square’s Best Buy Theater—the Venue Formerly Known As Nokia, and before that, something else; its “original” name, if it ever had one, has been buried under the rubble of a thousand brands. Part celebration, part history lesson, part nostalgia trip, the Best Buy show presented a perfect opportunity to gauge the health of a music enjoying a sort of second teen-hood … or, perhaps, suffering a mid-life crisis.

The Best Buy crowd was the typical mix of geriatric metal fans from the ‘80s and high school- and college-aged kids, and the bands’ song selections tended to mirror that generation gap, straddling old and new material and mostly ignoring anything in between. Death Angel’s set was an extreme example: they only played stuff off their debut The Ultraviolence and the new record, Relentless Retribution. It reflects both the arc of their career—at this point, DA’s revival has lasted twice as long as their first run, and has been equally prolific—and, I guess, the limitations of a thirty-minute set. Testament’s choices were a bit more varied, albeit very much first-songs-and-title-tracks fare. There were a few pleasant surprises—opening the set with “The Preacher” (from 1988’s The New Order) was a nice touch, and I was happy to see them still pushing full-throttle renditions of “D.N.R. (Do Not Resuscitate)” and “Three Days in Darkness” from their middle-years masterpiece The Gathering (1998).

While all the bands were clearly old hands at playing on the expectations of a mixed-age audience, Anthrax had it down to a science. “How many of you here are seeing Anthrax for the first time?” (Cheer!) “How many of you crazy fuckers have seen us before?” (ROAR!!!) You know, that sort of thing. They certainly hit the peaks of their early career, spending the most time on the Everest of Living, and ignoring the ‘90s completely (if there was a token song from White Noise, I missed it). Somehow, the fact that they only played the covers off Euphoria and Time—regardless of the fact that these were singles—felt like an even bigger post-‘87 smackdown. No “In My World”? No “Now It’s Dark”?

All of the above suggests that the Worship Music tour was something of a continuation of the Big 4: after all, Testament and Death Angel are children of 1987, both born at the watershed moment the Big 4 was meant to commemorate. And yet, the fact that both these bands chose to close their sets with new material should not be lost on us—or on Anthrax, who went for the old, safe standbys “I’m the Man,” “Madhouse,” and “I Am the Law.”‡ I know they’re the quintessential NYC metal band—the blue-and-white jerseys, Joey’s Yankees cap pulled low on his head, Frankie and Charlie playing their first (and last) show after attending somebody’s grandmother’s funeral. This is metal concert as sporting event: you come to root for Anthrax like they’re the home team, and they give back that tough New York love (and buckets of popcorn nostalgia). But then I think of Testament playing “D.N.R.” Maybe that should be the injunction to all these comeback bands: We love to hear your old shit, sure. But 1987 is dead and gone, never to be revived. What have you done lately?

For what else can you say to a band that releases one of the finest metal albums of the last who-knows-how-many years, and then only plays four songs off it live—the same number they played off Living? Not that the choices weren’t good: the opener “Earth Is On Hell,” the pump-you-up zombie-killing anthem “Fight ‘Em Til You Can’t,” the Dio-worthy “Devil You Know,” and the metal mass “In the End.” But with an hour and a half to burn, I expected at least a couple more. There’s more than enough depth on the record to warrant it. Proportionally, Anthrax played less new material than either of their warm-ups, and Testament wasn’t even pushing a new album. Even before their set had ended, the shadow of the Big 4 growing ever longer, I started to wonder whether the band fully understood what a gem they had in Worship Music: not so much an album as an exercise in imitative magic, perhaps the only thing capable of breaking the thrall of the image of 1987 that threatens to pull the genre back under.

*

Death Angel’s frontman Mark Osegueda has always struck me as a bit of a prophet. He has the godlike ability to go from a growl to a shriek and back to a growl again in a breath, a hyperpitch jump across five octaves. (Eat your heart out, Captain Beefheart!) And the things the man says. No matter how tough you think you are, you’re never too tough to let yourself go. Yes. Despite his claims to have never quite fit thrash’s vibe—a little too flamboyant, a little too interested in Tom Waits and The Velvet Underground—I think his combination of waist-length dreads and tight black jeans/leather vest for the Best Buy show beautifully articulated the divided ethos of the Bay Area scene: part ganja-smoking hippie, part brassknuckled Hell’s Angel. Anyway, he didn’t let his reservations get in the way of being the genre’s oracle that night, with a pronouncement that disciples like myself would spend the next hour pondering for ever-deeper layers of meaning: We’re Death Angel from San Francisco, and we play thrash metal.

Inspirational, no? Rather sums the whole thing up. Very much the sound of the new Death Angel, too. In fact, the new Death Angel sounds more like they did in ’87 than in ’90, when, like Anthrax, they had begun to chafe at the boundaries of the genre. (The result was their masterpiece, Act III; there never was a IV or V.) The stuff they played live, at least—that endless gritty chugga-chugga-chugga on the low E string—suggests they have made it their mission to epitomize the genre-as-it-was.

This desire to thaw the frozen image of 1987 and breathe life into it, or at least nuke it, is sadly typical. The back-to-back nostalgia tours and reunion with Belladonna would suggest that Anthrax, too, have embraced the revivalist spirit. But Worship Music suggests something different, or at least something more vital and interesting. For even as that record looks backwards, reaching all the way down into the choral-melodic elements of the band’s power metal roots and the heavy riffage of their thrash metal coming-of-age, it manages to draw these sounds together with ‘90s grunge into an impressively syncretic whole. It is free of the late-‘80s clichés that hamstrung so much of Euphoria, and to a lesser extent, Time—yet it is still recognizably, inimitably Anthrax. In looking back neither from a desire to “relive” the ‘80s, nor to show they have “outgrown” the ‘80s—to cheapen it with an ironic sneer—but rather to work with and attempt to reinvigorate that musical tradition, Worship Music evinces a rare maturity of vision. This isn’t maturity in the sense that people said Anthrax “matured” after Euphoria—the meaner, darker Anthrax of Time and White Noise. They’re as full of humor and hope as they ever were, and as melodic, too—even moreso.

In some ways, the album seems to want to be heard as what the band would have put out after Persistence of Time had Belladonna stuck around. The ticking clock on the breaks in “Earth is on Hell” recalls the opening of Time; the solo cello of “Hymn 1,” which is really the introduction to “In the End,” is an instrumental quote from “Be All End All” on Euphoria. But in a transformation that is characteristic of the new record, following “End”’s break for chimes, as Belladonna comes back in to chant the hymn, he is accompanied by the guitars, which, buzzing with sustain and sweeping up and down the low strings, themselves sound bowed. Rather than a follow-up, then, Worship Music sounds like it’s having a conversation with the Anthrax of 1988-90 … but a conversation that could only be had at two decades’ distance.

As I noted earlier, Anthrax’s music was always more cantabile than that of their riff-centric comrades, and on Worship Music this element of their songwriting definitely comes into its own. Call it glee metal: upbeat, chorus-driven, effortlessly melodic. I can’t think of a metal band that writes choruses like this anymore, and it’s not like nobody’s trying: all those dreadful emo-death bands put a lot of stock in melodic choruses, the obligatory counterpart the growled verses. These desperate attempts to sound both heavy and emotional … as if they were mutually exclusive! I sound mean, but I’m really just hurt. Ugh. Anthrax could teach these bands a thing or two, and not just about attitude (metal! no wallowing!), but about composition: the call-and-response formats, the clear melodic climaxes, the canny uses of repetition in rhythm and phrasing.

I could go on about the unreasonably good songwriting here—pretty much everything on Worship Music is lean and harmonically seamless—but I’d rather focus for a moment on the use of breaks, of silence, to create a sense of space—always a gamble in a style of music defined by relentless noise. “The Devil You Know” is the most obvious in this respect: the two-measure-long riff is followed by two measures of silence, as if the band had stopped to listen to their own echo. With each break the sense of expectation grows; the breaks changes the way we hear the verse when the spaces have been filled and the song settles into a groove. This use of silence in the intro is mirrored later by the way the riff disappears at the choruses, then edges its way in at the ends of the choruses, and then finally overwhelms them, before a coda of (almost) fully-silent breaks in the “false endings” outro. “Devil” isn’t the only song that uses silence to build and release tension and to create space and contrast. There are well-placed (if briefer) pauses before the choruses of “Fight ‘Em,” dividing the pre-chorus football-squad riot vocals from the rise-up singalong that follows; the bridges of “Earth is on Hell,” “I’m Alive,” and “In the End” use pauses and silence to similar effect. I wonder if it’s this sense of space that allows Charlie Benante, always ranked among the genre’s top  drummers, to shine even more than usual, from the opening blast-beat of “Earth is on Hell,” through the tight, straightahead groove of “Devil,” all the way to the brick-throwing storm at the end of “Revolution Screams.”

     Which brings me, somehow, to “Fight ‘Em Til You Can’t.” It’s not just the soundtrack for a zombie movie-to-be (a few people have already made zombie-killing videos for the song; rhythm guitarist and founding member Scott Ian has posted one of them on his Facebook page). It’s also the Rocky theme of the band’s comeback … though the title’s reference to defeat suggests, once again, a more mature perspective. On the CD gatefold, together with all those photoshopped action-shots of the band in mid-shout or mid-leap, there is a cartoon (of course!) of the bandmembers fighting zombies. It takes a moment to notice that the zombies are actually deathly versions of themselves—that is, Scott Ian fights a skull-Ian, Frank Bello a decomposing Bello, and so on. A loaded image for sure, and one that speaks very much to the themes of this post. Is it the dark side of themselves the band is fighting, a spiritual message to accompany the praying hands on the cover? Is it the Anthrax of middle age, fighting back the image of their own death, recognizing that life is short, health not a given, time precious? Or is it not the future, but the past, the 1987 that refuses to die, that the band cannot quite manage to shoot in the head, even as they try to make themselves anew?

Like the cartoon, both the beauty and the problem of “Fight ‘Em” is that it can be taken so many different ways. Who are the zombies? Well, that’s just it: we don’t know. But it doesn’t matter—just fight ‘em. That’s the key; the vaguer the signifier, the more people who can sing along. The zombies are your parents, your teachers, the bully down the street, your two-year-old, your mother-in-law, the cops, the criminals, the government, the corporation, the terrorists, The Man. This is the strength and weakness of the comic-book approach, at once clear-sighted and myopic, deeply felt and shallowly conceived. The two lyrical faces of Anthrax have always posed this problem: they shift so easily between comic strip and protest that the one tends to bleed into the other: Marx (or at least Mill) is neutered by Judge Dredd; Reagan is still and always the Hollywood cowboy, just wearing a black hat instead of a white one; Indians become Injuns. Of course, it was just this ease at crossing over that made a peacenik protest song like “One World” palatable to the metal crowd. But at least there, when they sang “America, stop singing hail to the chief/ Instead of thinking SDI he should be thinking of peace” back in ‘87, their target was clear. Worship Music’s target, if it has one, is muddled. The lyrics are chock full of lines suggesting something more radical than the safely liberal Anthrax of the late ‘80s: “If you look for a monster you’ll find one”; “Find the monster, start the war”; “Heaven lives in every gun”; “One nation under me”; etc. It seems to be an album that celebrates the “beautiful violence” of revolution (cf. the major key chorus of “Revolution Screams”); we’re just not sure whose revolution it is—whose empire is falling, for what cause. All that matters is action: you have your back to the wall. Are you ready to fight? That’s cartoon politics: whatever you’re saying, just make sure you say it emphatically. Maybe that’s the problem of revolution itself.

Then again, this sort of ambiguity has always been part and parcel of metal, a genre perennially caught between fetishizing the power of authority and the glamour of rebellion. Hence the love for the righteous outlaw: Judge Dredd, Dirty Harry, The Gunslinger on “Lone Justice.” To be punk because it’s the only way to be straight; to choose, with Huck Finn, to go to hell; to embrace the noble monster and the outlaw with the heart of gold—these are the myths of America as much as metal. It’s just these tensions that make the music so fascinating, and certainly the reason it has lasted: metal might have swallowed punk’s rage, but it was never able to stomach its nihilism.

All this leaves me wondering where Anthrax’s politics are today.‡‡ Honestly, though, I’m not wondering too hard. There’s more than a little Phil Ochs in me (“I’d rather listen to a good song on the side of segregation than a bad song on the side of integration”). And so, with Worship Music, I’m content to worship, to marvel at the musical achievement, at the unlikely and contradictory rebirth of one of the better metal bands on the planet. On “The Giant,” they sing, “Drowning in an ocean to find my soul.” And so they have—not drowned (note the gerund), but dipped deep into the water to take hold of an image that has been rotting since State of Euphoria—their image, the genre’s image—wrestled with it, and come back with something worthy of the fight. It’s not an about-face, or a pastiche, or a nostalgia trip. It’s an unapologetic affirmation of who they are: melodic, comic, hopeful, and heavy as hell. And if I’ve been happy to point the finger at Anthrax for mercy-killing thrash, I’m more than happy to credit them for ushering in a new, tradition-savvy, roots-conscious way forward. I just wonder if there are any new bands out there with the ears to listen.


* For a good discussion of homophobia in metal, see Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City (Scribner, 2001), pages 79-81. For a more theoretical take on the same, see Robert Walser’s Running With the Devil. (You find the pages; it’s got an index.)

** Scott Ian, who has always been quite the genre spokesman, seems fully aware of thrash’s own fashion-consciousness, at least in hindsight. In his liner notes to the remastered Megadeth debut Killing Is My Business … and Business is Good, he describes the mid-‘80s metal underground, with a nostalgic sigh, as a time of “long hair, tight jeans, and big sneakers.” (That’s actually a paraphrase from memory; I don’t own the disc.)

*** By 1990 the strictures on what thrash bands could cover had begun to loosen, and anyway, those bands would soon have the choice of clinging to the life rafts of hip hop and grunge, or going (back) under. (Megadeth’s wonderfully vulgar “These Boots” cover (1985) isn’t really an exception.) Still, as late as 1994 Pantera was putting a ridiculous disclaimer next to their cover of “Planet Caravan,” assuring fans (probably still rending their garments over the Black album) that they were not “selling out” … by covering Black Sabbath!? Today it’s almost de rigeur to metalize something non-metal: Christmas songs, jazz standards, etc.

‡ Belladonna actually dedicated “I Am The Law” to the NYPD. (In fact, on my way in I had to wait for a convoy of beefy middle-aged guys holding printout tickets, one of whom I could swear was wearing a blue NYPD jacket.) All I could think was that it was a little tacky to dedicate a song to the NYPD only a week or so after officers had chased 18-year old Ramarley Graham into his home and shot him in his bathroom. I know, I know: a few bad apples. But then there’s the ticket-fixing, the spying on Muslims, the pepper-spraying of OWS protestors, Sean Bell … I’m still waiting for someone to convince me the barrel’s not spoiled. Is this the band that dared cross over back in ’87, and toured with Public Enemy in ’91? Does Chuck D still have a radio show? Chuck, can you hear me? Maybe it’s time to give Scottie a call and have a little on-air heart-to-heart.

‡‡ The one concrete reference I could find to activism on Worship Music appears on Scott Ian’s thank-you list: a call to support the PPA, Poker Players of America. The organization is apparently in a tizz about legal restrictions to online gaming. On the other hand, when I consider Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine’s recent endorsement of Rick Santorum, maybe I should be thankful for silence … those beautiful breaks again. Compared to Santorum, the PMRC—Mustaine’s favorite anti-censorship piñata—looks like a branch of the ACLU. And then I can’t help but remember Mustaine worked on MTV’s Rock the Vote drive back when he was still a junkie. (N.B.: When I lived in Utah, the state government listed “interest in politics” as one of ten warning signs your child might have a drug habit.)

Live Birds

Leave a reply

     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 4th 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 14th 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

Leave a reply

       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 7th ave shuffle down to 10th 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

Leave a reply

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

1 Reply

     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

1 Reply

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

1 Reply

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

Leave a reply

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

Leave a reply

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 125th 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.