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An instrumental interlude

It took half a day, but all the books which have arrived here these last two years are almost entirely off the floor and on shelves where they belong, or in the mail to new homes. It won't last, and I need to busy myself building another set of shelves so as to get the vintage magazines safely off the floor (one of the cat thinks Life a good place to sleep, the one with the Gordon Parks photo essay on Harlem in it). But in the midst of a stack where I'd carefully placed it a year ago, so as not to lose it, I found once again the slim, bound volume Maxine Cushing Gray published on the tenth anniversary of her newsletter, Northwest Arts: Twenty Articles on the Art of Criticism.

Maxine died October 25, 1987, only a few days after publishing Vol. 13, #13 of Northwest Arts, and I have written here before of her importance as a kind and subtle mentor (and not just to me, for I am the least of her spiritual heirs). It is unlikely that I would have sustained a writing career without her support in the 1980s, nor that I would have had anything worth saying -- even today, if I do -- absent her careful guidance. It seems to me, without digging through old banker's boxes of magazines, that her series on criticism continued after this volume, for it was a subject in which she was deeply interested, and invested. And I am quite certain that typesetting this booklet, and her newsletter, and occasionally sharing a tea bag in her kitchen, has much to do with the standards I seek constantly to employ and evaluate and reevaluate as a critic.

So I greeted this slim, 64-page salmon-covered volume tenderly, as an old friend, and I mean to read it again. To see how I have been shaped, how I turned out. The first entry comes from John Ardoin, who was then music editor of The Dallas Morning News and a frequent contributor to The New York Times. (Ardoin died in 2001, and wrote four books about Maria Callas.) Maxine reprinted the piece from a spring 1976 edition of Catalyst, about which I know nothing.

(I realize much of this discussion marks me, too, as an antique, for we live, it is said, in the era of unmediated media, surfing a democratic internet in which everybody's opinion is of equal merit. They are not. Criticism is meant to be careful and knowing work, and does not involve thumbs. This is not a Luddite's attack on technology -- not today, anyhow -- but I am absolutely opposed to society's growing disregard for accumulated knowledge, for expertise.)

Ardoin writes, toward the end, "Every instrumentalist I have admired has turned out to be passionately fond of singing and did everything in his power to imitate the way a human voice at its best molds a phrase and imparts emotion and inflection to a line. This is as it should be, for the voice is the most natural way of making music."

In some way this is helpful. Atop the turntable, in a stack of like-minded things I sometimes mean to write about, and other times hope simply to contemplate, are a handful of instrumental albums. They trouble me, these albums. They suggest new limitations. Strongly prejudiced toward the song, we do not much cover instrumental music in our pages, and so when the kind folks at Drag City suggest attention should be paid to Sir Richard Bishop's Polytheistic Fragments I am quite certain it is not because anybody remembers whatever kind words I may have written about his first major presence, as a member of the Sun City Girls. No, they think it belongs here somehow, and perhaps they're right.

But I have nothing much to say about the music, nor do I quite understand its purpose. It plays peacefully in the background, but would I not better be served by opening the windows to the tree frogs and crickets and subwoofers of awakening college students?

Perhaps because it draws more explicitly from folk traditions, I have an easier time with Chris Murphy's Luminous (on Kufala: The leader in authorized bootlegs, which whimsy one must stop to applaud). It, too, is experimental music -- not quite new acoustic, certainly not jazz as we now think of jazz (though, to be fair, I think of jazz as I think of red wine: something to enjoy, but to study no more than I would study chess) and not even contemporary classical music. It is chamber music, of a kind, with support from an array of familiar names, including Victoria Williams, DJ Bonebrake, and Victoria Williams, and, in my sheer ignorance, I imagine something of the gypsy in Murphy's electric violin.

The curious banjo fusion of From Mali To America (5-String Productions), an album of duets between the American clawhammer player Bob Carlin and Cheick Hamala Diabate, a Malian master of the ngoni, the banjo's precursor, makes better sense. It has a didactic purpose, drawing parallels, tying traditions together.

Somewhere, now gone to ground in the swirling chaos of my random stacks of things, is a new Bill Frisell album on Blue Note (with drummer Matt Chamberlain and guests Viktor Krauss, Ron Miles, and Eyvind Kang; they're calling it Floratone) which seems to signal that, at least for the moment, his foray into American roots forms has run its course. A pity.

And yet...

Jazz was born playing in New Orleans whorehouses, or at least that's the one-sentence caricature. Born in a hard place I would never have visited, and a long time ago. This is not about authenticity, though jazz as conservatory music is about as interesting as watching neutered cats fight. I simply cannot imagine a context, save at some future and entirely imaginary job as a film music supervisor (neither a goal nor a possibility), in which I would play this music. And I was raised on Mozart and Beethoven and all that, in addition to my dad's late-night adoration of Tiny Freeman's bluegrass program on KRAB.

I think Ardoin has hit on it, though I am recontextualizing him for my own needs. It is the voice I miss in this new instrumental music. It does not sing from the heart, it thinks. It is more about technique than passion. It does not blush.

In the crush of the crowd hearing Pere Ubu or Mudhoney or the Undertones or the Cowboy Junkies or Lucinda Williams or...one wishes to lose, only for a second, one's sense of separateness. To be joined in involuntary communion. One wishes to be touched by the power of the human voice, by the passion of an idea. By the human experience. Even here, alone, listening to stacks of music, I wait for that touch. And rejoice when I feel it, when I hear it, for it is still a rare thing. And treasured.

Posted by grant on September 2, 2007 10:37 AM | Permalink