from From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, by Nathaniel Mackey __________________3.XII.82 Thank you for the liner notes. Who but you could've written so movingly about Orphic Bend? It seems you've removed at least one wall (perhaps two or three) between reflex and assignation. We ourselves now hear the music in another light. I say so using that expression after a great deal of thought. Isn't it the otherwise nonevident pulsation of light, an achievement of tension between tendency and torque you apprize throughout, the bent, burnished body of tone or intimation torn toward the other meaning of turn (to go sour)? Isn't such an aggrieved or aggressive turn, severing wisdom and resignation, glare's rough acoustic approximation? You lend such light an ear it wouldn't have were it not for you and we follow suit. Your words become the axe we each unwittingly played, an interpolative wrinkle apportioning lapse and oblique sustentation. It's as though your notes were the music's destiny all along, unbeknown to us, axial immensity's come-up largesse. We read our music in what you've written and the ear you lend it amplifies ours. Who but you could do that? Speaking of liner notes, I just picked up Frank Lowe's Skizoke, which carries a reprint of an interview he did with Cadence on the back. I'm struck, especially in the wake of the brass epiphany I wrote about in my last letter, by him talking about stealing licks from trumpeters to get away from Trane's influence. I'm even more struck by how he puts what this led him to, the "experiment in time and colors" he calls "just having the horn sound like it's having a big laugh." He mentions Lester Bowie in connection with this, shedding new light, without referring to it outright, on Lester's trademark lab coat, allowing one to see such attire in relation not only to Miles's "We were like scientists of sound" and his diver-gence from Satchmo, but also to Satchmo's Elizabethan clownish license (as Ellison puts it). One would want to stop short of calling mad scientist or mad professor Lester the synthesis of Miles's anti-thesis and Louis's thesis, but the near rhyme of Lester's coat with jester's cap bespeaks a need to keep alive, if not sublate, the two contraries. Such attire, in concert, so to speak, with Lester's decidedly tongue-in-cheek instrumental tack, re-dresses both (Miles, for example, on "Dreaming of the Master" on the Art Ensemble's Nice Guys, Satchmo on "Hello Dolly" on his own Fast Last!). Ripped and retributive, Lester's coat and jester's cap's near rhyme reveals a need or an appetite for (or the need or the appetite of) mad science, knowing's need to laugh at itself or lose its head, know it doesn't know. Coat and cap augur a no longer mystic (no longer only mystic), suddenly scientific (mad-scientific), post-Hiroshima mushroom need to clown, cloud one's knowing, a need steeped in parody, pastiche, mad profession. So maybe "Reverie's Reveille" isn't a matter of switching over to trumpet but of playing trumpet-in-cheek tenor, lending tenor trumpet's bluster and blare. Frank also mentions Roscoe Mitchell, who, I realize now, does exactly that. Listen to his tenor solo with the Art Ensemble on "Unanka" on Bap-tizum. A vaguely brass timbre at the solo's outset eventuates in a profusion of quasi-brass cackle (mad profusion), a "trumpeted" sense of urgency, seizure, stampede. Bluster, yes, and blare, but, even so, it works an aroused, otherwise quietist impulse, annoyed, it seems, at the very need to make sound. As if to announce, à la Rufus Harley, "I didn’t ask for this," it begs off its calling, besets vocation with qualms. One hears brass implied in some of Roscoe's alto work even -- as in "Sing/Song," on the Snurdy McGurdy album, when his descending figure on alto emerges to call the "noise" passage to a halt, only to at once give way to Hugh Ragin's bread-and-butter new-bop trumpet, as though trumpet, if not, granted, in his cheek, had been up his sleeve. To be rubbed off on by an alternative axe is to question one's calling, pose an alternate calling. Gnostic resonance or residue accrues to such rubbing off, an exquisite receipt rendered moot by ensuing detour. And if not rendered moot made to answer to a need to buy time, bartered rapport translating quizzical grip to "inquisite" grasp. I want that to be what "Reverie's Reveille" does. Yours, _________________4.XII.82 Thanks to brass epiphany I've been thinking about Dizzy's ballooning cheeks. As my wording may have already made evident, they strike me as of a piece with the balloons we've been visited by, in some oblique, subterranean way related. Dizzy's trademark cheeks comply with a principle of exertion and exaggeration, factoring inflation and elasticity in as well. Still, them being a visual trademark may well be their signal feature, trademark visuality itself the signal fact worth attending to. Trademark visuality, it seems to me, seeks to domesticate or mask an acoustic risk the music otherwise runs, the risk of acousticality itself. I've touched on something like this before, I realize, but bear with me long enough to consider Dizzy's recourse to scat and his affection for "oo" ("Oop-Pop-A-Da," "Ool-Ya-Koo," "In the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee," etc.), his love affair, more generally speaking, with the vocable, as an explicit, so to speak, vocalization if not verbalization of the occult clamor whose risk he runs on the horn. Please also consider an apparent need to eclipse or in some other way recuperate such clamor by way of the purchase visuality provides or appears to provide. Does trademark visuality sugarcoat, for the public at least, the bitter pill of occult clamor? Does the public seize upon consumable, commodified visuality, trademark purchase, as a hedge against acousticality's furtherance of itself, risk of itself, a furtherance and risk the public wants but only on its (the public's) own terms? I'm thinking of Sonny Rollins showing up for a concert in Japan without his Mohawk haircut and the audience not believing it was him. Bird's "Another Hairdo" takes on new meaning, prophetic meaning, and I'm wondering if Dizzy foresaw this problem as well. Are his ballooning cheeks a bone he throws the public or a bone he picks with the public? Or are they, in some way we've yet to understand, both (bone-in-cheek)? I've suggested before that the balloons we're visited by are the shadow visibility casts on the music. Are they also a bone in our collective cheek, a bloated bone we let rip or let go? This is only a quick note, a kind of addendum to yesterday's letter. Were it to eventuate in music entailing balloons they would beg off being balloons, enclosing words to, say, the following effect: "A psychopompic foray into occult acousticality...." So began the balloon, the aborted balloon I glimpsed in the interstice between thought and articulation, waking and sleep. "Spied 'er" was the thought occurred next, balloonless but at large it seemed, in the air if not itself the air. It hung there, a whisper ubiquitous lips momentarily shaped, the lips as well, albeit invisible, in the air if not themselves the air. (Pause, new balloon.) "Spied 'er's" apostrophized "h" intimated excision, absence, yes, but also a withheld expulsion of breath, an exclamatory burst born of eight-limbed embrace held under test-tube arrest. It had to do with goings-on in Hotel Didjeridoo, keyhole inquiry, door-peep surmise. Someone assumed himself to have stolen a peek at the proverbial "her," the proverbial muse animating industry and art, the anansic muse on whom "Spied 'er" shamelessly punned. (Pause, new balloon.) A random scrap of song, a strung bauble of sound rode a gust of air, a strangled address as of cotton caught in a singer's throat. Sheer insistence held it aloft, sheer anxious energy, adrenal straw, ambient strain drawn of combinatory qualm, coaxed emolument, cracked air's ambient whoosh.... In other words, a bone within a balloon picked by shaman and showman alike.
If you liked this story, head to the subscription form or your local independent bookstore to pick up this issue. Nathaniel Mackey (ZYZZYVA 21) is professor of literature at UC-Santa Cruz. His most recent book is Whatsaid Serif (City Lights Books, San Francisco). These letters are from an ongoing series written by composer/multi-instrumentalist N., founding member of a band formerly known as the Mystic Horn Society. Volumes I through III are Bedouin Hornbook, Djbot Baghostus’s Run, and Atet A.D. |