"Nice Jazz Music"

 

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When I was in my early 20's, I was in a band -- a trio, mostly, guitar/bass/drums, later adding keyboards and occasional second guitar, which rounded us out as a quartet -- and we were trying to "do something within music". One meaning of this phrase is that we were moving through music towards something -- I guess you could say we were "exploring the landscape" of music, or "seeking out the distant horizon" of sound, or any similar esoteric phrase of poetic effort. "Doing something" meant, to us, "not doing what had been done". An idiot's dream of a new world, a beautiful dream of shining things in the aging light of a new dawn, but also the willingness to try to see the world anew through sounding out the undone. We know you can't really do anything that hasn't been done, but it's the bravado of trying to do something that makes something happen (to someone). So, we played music, however we could play it. We'd stretch tempos, drop bars, go from loud to soft or vice versa, use effects and echoes and wrap our sounds in pillows of deep galaxies, we'd immediately play something almost pop long enough to stab it to death with steak knives of steely cloud sounds. We'd open the space between verses so that you'd forget there once was a verse. We didn't sing much, or if we did, voices would fall in and out of the time of the music in order to reveal to anyone listening that what we were saying were the words of ghosts hovering just behind everything, just to the side of what might be there in front of us....It was a time of strangeness, of playing things that filled the air with the mystery of their unknowing.

One day, in a quite moment, or between saturnic journeys, we heard a knock at the door. Our rehearsal space was in a pretty "hard to find" spot, on the mezzanine floor of a building that had a Jillian's pool hall above it, down an accidental open door-ed corridor you'd have to either be drunk to enter or unconcerned as to the danger you might find down there. No one besides us ever "meant" to walk down it. The knock rang out like a shotgun -- Who was it? Were we doomed? Had we paid the rent? (We were young and poor and notoriously irresponsible...) Was this the end of love as we had known it? We all shrank back from the sound of the knuckles rapping against the wood as if it were the sound of something that were to seal our fate were we to acquiesce to it. Our freedom, at that silent moment, was expressed in our refusal to respond with anything but our own silence.

But this was a fist aimed at breaking us apart, and it knocked again, and again. The bass player, a smiling guy for whom even going to the moon in music was a reason to smile even more at the glory of space, moved towards the door, then deftly flipped the lock and pulled the door open towards him, moving back lightly and quickly. A tall man stood there, quite crisp, a grey wool overcoat on his shokders, beige cashmere scarf across his collar, matching beige cap, matching smooth grey slacks, dark business shoes. We wondered if he was lost. Or, in fact, if we were even more lost, even though we thought we knew where we were on what we still call "planet earth."

He looked soberly into the sad disheveled room of our rehearsal space, the walls covered with incomprehensible hidden agendas. Then, he smiled wider than the horizon and exclaimed, "You all are playing some nice jazz music in here!" We wondered, just then, what "lost" could mean, what it was for us to be so. We were playing some nice music -- we were trying to make something in music that was the likeness of something that invited the listener in to listen -- but "jazz"?

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I generally listen to instrumental music -- not as a rule, but then, kind of as a rule. Partly it is because I prefer not to spend my listening time concerning myself with the words that someone may be singing and attempting to make meaning of those words amongst the forest of sounds swaying everything around me - as if I were looking at a row of blended green trees and, instead of losing myself in the true contemplation of nature for a moment, were called upon to attend to the bird call that isn't meant for my response. And what I like to hear in instrumental music is the sound of the instruments interacting in time in a manner that could be thought of as freedom -- that is, the open space to move amongst everything that there is to move within. So, there would be improvisation within what I like to hear, since part of this listening is hearing what is to come that is not to be known to come, even by the musicians who are there leading me on towards what is to come. But I also would like to hear a thematic element to the music, perhaps a repetitive phrase, a melody, perhaps some instant where the music unscatters itself, is gathered for a moment into something distinct, defined, co-committed. And then the sounds can go scurrying merrily along a harmonic footpath, fast or slow, mean or sweet. I want to be near this inconsistency, this constant change from one thing to another thing and then back. I want what ends up being within jazz. But I don't want jazz. I don't want a genre; I want what the genre might contain, might hide, might exhibit despite itself and despite the marketplace that craves the simple fact of its finite existence.

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There are a lot of "I wants" in the above paragraph -- perhaps too many for a reader, perhaps not enough for the writer declaring themselves aloud in a silent room. But that's part of it, too -- for me, music is what fills the silent room with an additional silence through which I complete a contemplation. Of what? Well, the music itself, which is to say everything that the music evokes - images of the world in which I have lived, times, places, images of images, shades of shades of suggested feelings. There's an Eberhard Weber piece called "Visible Thoughts" -- I think of the music I most want to hear being what lies behind the thoughts that emerge in my mind, the thoughts I think I see by thinking them. Sometimes there are fields of grass, greenish-blue, so vast I disappear in simply thinking of them; these fields are the vastness of everything I could think, ambiguous and open to the world, closed to everything that has vanished from the earth, open to everything that could appear right after this.

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Jazz, of course, has an important and essential history, and it cannot be referred to without evoking the space and time and cultural context (in?/out of?) which it arose. I pause to formally evoke history here, partly because, when I listen to recorded music, I both exist in the historical moment of the music I am hearing, as well as the past through which this music shines to alight itself upon me, or the space I am in. And then there is the historical moment in which I coexist with the sounds in the room or air around me, and the historical moment that makes the moment of all these coexistences possible, too -- while rooted in the purest chronology, I am also suspended in the impossible time of hearing something that can always repeat if I play it again. Jazz, by definition, as it is linked through identity (what is it?) to improvisation, has always resisted the recouperation of recording. It has always existed only in the moment it is being played, and it cannot repeat except by not repeating itself. So, perhaps we were playing Jazz Music that day in our shoebox, with an unknown stranger outside in the brightly lit hall, because the music disappeared upon his hearing it. Perhaps everything I listen to that has been pre-recorded only attempts to reconstruct the possibility of the music's disappearance, and it is all a wonderously lost hope. If so, then there is no style at all, no genre that can even be declared. We can all sleep gently in the noise of the thoughts we would like the genre to make of us, that it hasn't known how to make.

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There are also practical reasons for my "disowning" of jazz. Ever just like the sound of an instrument? You know, just hear it and not want to stop hearing it? (I feel that way, for example, about the sound of my wife's voice. I just want to hear it and not stop hearing it.) That's the guitar for me. The guitar, while "allowed" in jazz, is actually an instrument that enters jazz to tear it open a bit, to push it against and then through the wall into the sea, beyond the sea, into the sky, beyond the sky. The guitar soars into the sun and melts a firey path downward, and the whales jump up to greet it as it hurtles past them into the center of the earth. "Nice Jazz Music" is exactly what the guitar needs, exactly what history has given us, finally, the finality of things as they once were ending.

Can the Ocean Be Described?

First, start by hearing this, broken into 3 sections by You Tube User "bebodrummer".

The three sections are of Miles Davis' 28-minute-and-change "Great Expectations", from 1970's-and-change Big Fun. Meaning, I don't know how long the track is, and I don't know when the album came out. I'll even say that it doesn't seem possible to "know" when "it" (the track, the record, the sound?) was made. Miles' music in the late 60's through mid 70's, when he vanished post 1975 into a silent bedroom of white cocaine magic is all vague cosmetics, blurry rainbowed edges, smudged makeup -- all which show the weird similarity of skin and bones and costume between it -- is music of complete indefiniteness, undefinable as praxis. There's a lot of documentation on "what actually happened" at this time -- and a good article here by Electric Miles Scholar Paul Tingen. I'll leave the detective work to you, whoever you are. Let me know what you find and if we learn anything that defines this weird washout period of Miles' music -- from 1967 to 1975 -- that helps us to know any more about HOW to listen to what happened there. To me, all of Miles' music in this time period appears to be about something that hasn't yet happened, but which is always threatening to split the sky in half. It reminds me of a moment in Andrei Tarkovsky's "Mirror" where a little boy may have seen a ghost. How do we know? Because the camera fixes on the evaporating condensation from the cup of hot tea upon the wooden table, the vanished cup of tea that the ghost may have been drinking, but the boy who saw the ghost is now, of course, alone in the room.

I recently restumbled upon this track in making a mix through 8tracks, which allows you to upload tracks from your iTunes collections to make web-based mixes that you can share with other users. Pretty cool. My innovation is to narcissistically make mixes for myself so that I can listen to tracks not uploaded to my iPhone's iPod on our iPod dock while taking a shower (say that 10 times fast, then silence yourself, which is what I did). Pretty silly, and also pretty wonderous. The best part of doing this isn't "making mixes", which I personally dislike -- I'm an album listener, a staunch traditionalist, and a pain in the ass all at once, making pleasing me impossible, so I stick with myself sometimes -- the best part is rediscovering music that, in iTunes, becomes no more than a list of names and titles, so voluminous that one's categorization of music is the shorthand mechanism for the possibility of listening to it. Great Expectations, indeed. (We all hope that iTunes will mean we never have to LOOK at a record cover ever again. But the thing about looking at a record cover is that, through it, we actually associate image and sound, color and depth, timelessness and time passing.....)

But, enough technology aggression for now, since the point is the music and what it SOUNDS like. Because of this weird double technical of iTunes and 8tracks, I found myself looking at my music as if it were an email inbox with messages whose value I suddenly needed to prioritize -- or at least refamiliarize myself with, since the messages were mine, yet I had forgotten them, or what they might mean or say or do or be. And so, I saw "Great Expectations 28:25" and uploaded it to my mix, curious what I might hear later, in the shower, after I had forgotten what I hadn't read or heard but wanted to remember....

Ever since I was a kid, I've always thought the long songs on a record were the best songs. Exactly what a kid ought to think... I mean, more doesn't mean better, does it? Except for the Big Gulp is better than a 12 oz can of soda, and what makes it better is that it is a better value, penny for penny, sip for sip. I think from the start, part of me was a total capitalist consumer of music -- I figured that the song was longer and had more music in it, and because it was more, and the others were less (shorter is less music) -- then it had to be better....I know, that is some deeply circular logic, tautological and impenetrable. A=B because A and B are equal, so if A>C, then A>C. Yet, even now, I can't quite dispute this immature thinking. Perhaps because what I want to do, when listening to music, is be occupied by something, to be taken by something, to have something be there for me to attend to, in time, through time, with everything that I am that listens. If there is MORE TIME in the music, there is more for me to attend to, and more listening for me to do across time (diachronic). Music happens in time, and its happening through time is part of what it engages us within -- time passing, things moving or repeating, things starting and stopping, things vanishing, things appearing, things thinging through something that is a space we can't see, that we know is moving because it gets later when we are hearing it.

I thought Great Expectations, being 28-minutes-and-change, would make good sense to have on a "mix" because it would kill the mix, since a mix gets its power from the movement from track to track, from sound to sound, from artist to artist or style to style or time period to time period or all of these. A mix needs to "move". But I wanted to confuse that for myself, I wanted my mix to get stuck in the mud of the horizon, which stretches out to infinite blindness. I wanted to hear "Great Expectations" again with no expectations of anything -- I've been listening to it for 20 years now, but what have I really heard?

It's hard to describe music -- I've said it elsewhere, and I will say it even more so now -- in fact, one can't describe music, and yet, there are words to know it with. On Miles Davis' Live Evil, there's a really freaky track called "Inamorata and Narration by Conrad Roberts". Basically, it's a spaced firefreeze where, at some unknowable point, the music receding into an echo chamber, a deep, dark voice narrates a poem of the impossibility of speaking of, of knowing through speech, what music is. He chants "Can the Ocean Be Described?" He kinda takes the fun out of everything there. But the fun is gone, because we fall mute at the center of it. Yet Conrad knows Miles' game -- he ends his poem game with the bext next move: "I love.....tomorrrow". Great Expectations! (You can hear Roberts below, at 6:12 of the 9:33 below. Volcanic Ash Wowzer. Relistening to it, I want to run and hide and have his voice blanket the earth so that I can come out from below and lie down on top of it and forever sleep....)

So, in the center of the mix, anonymously, it came on. How to begin with it? Great Expectations has a riff in 7/4 time. What does that mean? Well, generally, most figures in much western music -- rock, pop, jazz, blues -- have lengths that fall into some category of beats, and that category is "even". Meaning, it usually is 4 or 8 or 16 bars of "pulse". If you tap your foot, every 4 taps, something ends and starts over, or every 8 taps, or every 16, or 16 is made of of 4 somethings that start over once again after 16. There's more to say about this, but for my point, most western music uses phrases that are EVEN, for every yin a yang, for every odd an even. Yet, Great Expectations is built on a phrase (really a guitar riff, but, then, everyone is playing a "riff" here, meaning a series of single notes that repeat in some foundationally rhythmically spaced way) that is 7 beats. Tap your foot and count -- when you get to seven, start back at one. And go on, from 1 to 7 each time. The thing is lopsided, asymmetrical, oblong, jutting out into space, contained yet in the rollicking of its repetition. Because your hips move. There's a drum riff, a percussion riff, a bass riff, a tamboura wave, trumpet soaring echoed over it like a discontinuous seagull. In the depth of the night behind it, a rhodes is plucking away, a bird pecking at the heart of the sky. But "Great Expectations" keeps shutting down after a few phrases, the riff resisted, resetting, releasing. It's very weird. You keep thinking the song will push again out into something else, but the expectation, the loved tomorrow, is the same uneven keeled thing that crashes into the edge of the sea and reemerges careening.

At 13:30, though, the song totally resets. Whatever restarting happened once and many times before does not restart. The day is now awaking, the sky placid, plastic, performed. They bide their time, and you wait. For something. Else.

I've only actively sat and watched the sun rise a few times in my life -- on one hand, enough to know what it looks like, on the other, not enough to be fair to myself and the world around me. One thing about the sun rising is that even while you are watching the sky and you see it change, you also see nothing. Because changing is like something and nothing all at once, it is the fact that things become different and express difference through the repetition of and reiteration of their sameness. Perhaps something is drastic -- as in "Great Expectations", every time the rhythm escapes and there is only floating sky sound of horn, rhodes, tamboura, percussion -- but even what is drastic only expresses everything that came upon it, everything that preceded it.

As you wait out the sky in "Great Expectations", you wonder if everything has always been this way, if things will ever change, if difference is only in your perception, if perception is only in what you have had to unknow.

Eventually, as in everything we come to know, a rhythm settles in, the drums are the end result of it, and everything reiterates into a blend of earth and sky, all of which makes the world return, reappear, remain.

I guess what we can expect, then, always, only, is the world unfurled, unfolded, recapitulated. That is, we can expect only what is always great. This is the essence of Miles' silence, the ocean undescribed in, as music.

Budd-ahh

Listening to "The Pavilion of Dreams", by Harold Budd -- while trying to relax and let the mountains fall into the sea, the room dark around me, my wife curled up against my chest sleeping softly and ever more softly against the madrigal's song enclouding us -- I realized something weirdly simple, yet aesthetically profound, so much so it feels like I've stumbled upon an open sourced kernel of worldly truth whose value is located in the following epiphanic API: Harold Budd has devoted himself almost exclusively to producing sounds of utter beauty and perfect consonance, that his music is a expression of the shining sea or the forest in the distance of the sea, of a beautiful smile or the face on which the smile's beauty beholds an even greater beauty. His music is the path of wisdom sounded out through the wisdom of what sounds beautiful.

Strange that I never thought of this before, since I've been listening to Budd's music for 25 years now. But partly (or maybe totally) it's because when I listen to things, I listen to everything I think might be there within the sound, including superimposing what I would think would make me make that sound. But that's the thing with Harold Budd -- like his name, the music is humbly there, almost infinitely invisible, but not because it shouldn't be any more visible than it is. There's nothing to see, almost, there is the wind and the fog and the sky and a tree in a field. There's the loss of your breath when everything, for a moment, is as stark as everything really is. I imagine that Harold Budd sees the world as it may be with the heartbreaking nature of each second running through him, the sea behind the sea, the flower behind the flower, which flows towards itself, and towards you, me, him, too.

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But everything does not sound the same, either. The track listed above -- Bismillahi 'Rrahman 'Rrahim -- is a lush pool of deep beauty, some sacred ground found in the middle of an even lusher forest, with still air and the coolness of knowing that everything around you lives and is safe in living where it lives. But these images seem to reduce the music to something seen, rather than something heard whose hearing is also the richness of seeing and knowing through seeing that what you see is what you are. The music is the beauty, too, deep inside you, but it isn't there to make you feel better about yourself. You don't have the right to even exploit the beauty for that purpose. Marion Brown's saxophone lilts across a tidal shimmering of Rhodes, and there are a billion chiming bells you can't have ever heard but which you could only have already known were there, where the world is smiling at nothing, at space, simulating space without the darkness of space. It's weird, because describing the beauty of Budd's music seems to remove the self from everything I'm describing, yet the self seems to be what is experiencing this same beauty. (I write "seems" because we are getting into a precarious place here, with self and other, with "who" knows "what" and "who" is "what is known"...). But, then, check out these other examples of beauty that is the eternal recurrence of the same, the difference that is everything recreated....

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...The Aperture, from 1995's "Glyph", a collaboration with Hector Zazou, is a more "known" affair, with the signature elements of what we call "downtempo" (or something like that -- I don't get the word even when I know what it is intended to signify) -- a "light" beat, reverberating snare, open space, a repetitive fake bass track, sultry trumpet, and so forth. I hate thinking about it this way, though, because it reduces the music to a style, and the style, while completely present in this track, is very sneaky, and, in fact, the same beauty that is in Bismillahi can be -- actually, is -- found here. It's as if Budd is saying, hey, look man, the Buddha finds the beauty at the heart of everything, whether at the top of the mountain or at the edges of a cocktail bar. And The Aperture is just that -- a cocktail bar that extends into the night, all sleek red lights and flashy glowing tiny gadgets lighting up the pockets of slacks and clutch purses costumed as radio phones for the end of the technological age. Or its new beginning....

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...Not Yet Remembered, from 1980's collaboration with Brian Eno, "Plateaux of Mirror", shows another side of this beauty, or maybe the same beauty seen from in a new light, the light of the repressed past whose repression is known, meaning what exists within it is something to become unknown. The piano trembles like someone terrified of what lies beneath, but who is being held gently in a space such that their terror, too, is warm and dry. And when, in the bridge, a voice wordlessly rings out over higher chords a melody curled around the edges of fall(ing?) (en?) leaves, -- "ahhhhhhhhhh; ahhhhhh-ahhhhhh" -- we know the light of the new day is the light of the afternoon fading from view and into a colder night, a night that we must know, a night we may have always had to have known through our fogged forgetting. I wonder, too, if what is hidden from us is always in plain view as in Poe's "Purloined Letter",  and the game we play with ourselves (or that our mind plays on our brain) is the game of swimming to the surface and taking a breath of that deliciously cool air we need in order to become ready to dive more deeply beneath the earth. This sound of our breath hitting the air is the sound of the voice at the center of Not Yet Remembered, which is always remembered when sung, and always not yet when listened to again.

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....As Long As I Can Hold My Breath, from "Avalon Sutra", Budd's (almost) final album from 2004 (he stopped and then started again after publicly declaring he was over, how perfect, as if he knew exactly how his music making was to the world outside of him while staying inside of himself) -- which, on the double disc set, is given a 73 minute remix, the same gorgeous phrase, repeating over and over, although the repetition is hardly known, you feel when you listen to it that you keep remembering you've heard this slowly ascending violin repeating itself before, that within the 73 minutes you are remembering something -- seems to hover and settle, then realign itself with the air around it, then float away, then hover and settle, then realign itself with the air around it, then float away, then hover and settle...But on what does it settle? Does a feather -- or bit of dust, for that matter -- settle upon anything at all, or merely air itself? A feather seems only to have already settled, that its process is an end result that results in nothing but the result you can't observe anything from, since the position of the result is situated in time before everything else happens. To observe things would mean to slow down time to infinity, would be to stretch each note out into an everlasting phrase that wraps around the earth and ties it up that is the beautiful eternity of every moment.

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...Fragment 2, from "Music for Fragments from the Inside", a 2005 collaboration with Eraldo Bernocchi, a meandering melancholia piano fragmenting and rolling over a snapping snare drum. In a way, that's all that happens, for 8:35, although, really, it's all that happens for the 70 minutes of the record. Budd improvises his lushness, spinning webs of empty space, piano notes sparking the darkness with the light that is inside us all. I imagine Bernocchi creating electronics around all of this, while unable to perforate the bubble of Budd's winding world, which seems to move right through the heart of the wicked machine and collapse it in a pile of wind swept stardust, whatever that all is.

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I know nothing of the Buddha. I may know the exact nothing of the Buddha needed to know what I hear when Harold Budd's music plays. My mind is empty, my heart cries out for the emptiness to continue, my mind empties itself even further when the beauty around me is completely, complacently, extant.

Ta(l)king Stock

Talk Talk's Laughing Stock. Such an incredibly weird and unexpected album, full of silences and pauses, explosions and estranged river winter sounds. Listening to it is an experience alienated from "culture" -- it doesn't relate in any fashion to the time and place around it; it follows no cultural signs, it represents nothing of "pop" music or culture. I don't know if I know anything as far from pop that seems to still be linked to the notion of its existence. If Laughing Stock evokes, say, Miles Davis' Bitches Brew -- the first "fusion" album (not true yet who cares, it is still a recording that evokes a watershed moment, partly because, looking back at Bitches Brew, it doesn't sound anything like what you might expect something that is a landmark recording in a particular genre) -- it does so in a way that we, as listeners, hardly ever really consider, which is the tone of the record. It sounds like it is made -- and that listening to it, we are there while they are making it -- along the edge of a swiftly flowing and soft grey river, and the sky above us is filled with soft grey clouds, the sun sleeping beneath (or behind?) this lush blanket. But the sun is there, since its absence is an absence that evokes a whispered presence, a hushed, yet heightened present. This swift river pours into the center of the music, flooding it with a liquidity that pushes the distance between each instrument yet blurs the boundaries between them, too, so that you don't really know what you are hearing, or what it is you are hearing, or who is is that you are hearing be what it is they are being. It's a uniquely disoriented experience, and you adjust yourself to it. Perhaps you think they made a mistake, that the instruments spilling into each other, bleeding sound into other sound, shouldn't be like this but they let it somehow slip past. But that slipping, too, is part of this waterlogged world, a world that is waking up under the sea, a world that looks up from the bottom of the ocean through a cracked rain spattered windshield at the empty green grey valley.

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It was 20 years ago that I found this silence, actually stumbling upon it accidentally as a birthday present for my (then (first!)) girlfriend, my (now (long ago (ex-)))wife -- I knew she liked music I didn't know and didn't think I'd ever come to know or ever come to like (both of which ended up as being weirdly true, perhaps prophetic, perhaps predictive, perhaps predicated on my willingness to keep things between us boundaried, perhaps caused by my unwillingness to move towards things around me that were not what I knew), but I thought, since it was her birthday, and she was my first real girlfriend, and there were used record shops everywhere around me (this was Boston, 1991, too many shops to count, but just enough shops to frequent daily), that I could give things a chance, since I wasn't yet anywhere far along enough to give up on anything, yet.

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She'd showed me The Color of Spring, Talk Talk's 3rd record, a mixture of 80's synth pop and brooding emotional season tones -- a record clearly produced in a studio, with layered sounds of various instruments placed in mid to late 80's context, but with a larger sense of sound itself, guitars sounding like guitar, piano like pianos, choruses of voices choruses of voices shouting out and making contact with the heavens. I liked it, and I was surprised to like it, since 80's pop wasn't what I liked then, and the fact that I liked it and was surprised to like it made me want to engage that surprise even further when I bought my girlfriend something for her birthday. In the record store, I came across the image of Laughing Stock's cover, and thought it might be nice to buy her this, something I thought she'd like, something that reflected our commingling tastes. She smiled widely when she unwrapped it, she seemed delicately touched that I had reached out to her taste rather than simply reflecting my own, which, at the time, was quite dominant, a voice too loud in a public space to acknowledge the space as public. A few days later, however, when I came over to her place and saw the CD case sitting next to the CD player (but something else was in the player, not this), I asked her what she thought. "That's the worst thing I've ever heard," she said, turning towards the wall. "I hate it."

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Later that night, while she was sleeping, I quietly glided out of the bed and slid along the wall to the CD player resting on the dresser. I extracted Laughing Stock from its cover and silently slipped the disc into the player and pushed my thumb down on the play button. I held my breath. What could she have hated so much? What could Talk Talk have done on Laughing Stock that could turn such an ardent fan so definitively against them? Surely aesthetics are forgivable throughout history, and this forgiveness is what we, as consumers of creative product, are what we use to make up for the distance between what those who produce give us to experience and what we actually think of these art objects, right?

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I could quote lyrics as a way to explain the profundity of the sentiments, the deep humanist philosophy that Laughing Stock proposes. But the lyrics are intended to be unheard -- the words that Mark Hollis sings seem only to be sounds that allow his voice to move between one moment and one other. I almost wonder if the lyrics are actually written down in retrospect, as potential visions of what these sounds could signify in a world in which signification means more than empty thought. If you get the CD (or cassette, possibly, or more possibly) the lyrics are handwritten on the inside in a script that is nearly illegible, neatly and essentially organized, as are the actual words sung. I've often wondered if lyrics exist in order that we have the option to no longer listen to the sounds of the music we are hearing, that if all lyrics were actually sung in a language foreign to us, or if they were sung in order to obscure the words we are hearing and not clarify them, we might actually have the opportunity to hear the human voice in its true place amongst the distant lands of the instruments that always approximate it. We might actually hear the person shining through the rain spattered windows to the outside world, which crowds in from all around us, which is always speaking to us of our difference to it, its indifference to us. The world floods into us, and we withstand it by speaking back to it in the voices that dazzle it with ineffable alienation.

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Of course, my girlfriend was right, as any pure Talk Talk fan had to have been in 1991, 5 years after The Colour of Spring (although, to be fair to both history as well as their audience, Talk Talk did release Spirit of Eden in 1988, which clearly opened the path through a misty musical forest, on the other side of which is Laughing Stock, along the banks of the sopping river; this essay COULD be about the radical step Spirit of Eden was from The Colour of Spring if the goal was to talk about the relationship between an artist and their audience, but that's another topic for someone with a larger sociological mind than I. And, for the record, this essay is not about the value of Spirit of Eden as opposed to Laughing Stock -- it is simply about the total oddity of Laughing Stock as an object of art, and I refuse, for the moment, the applicably progressing context of Talk Talk themselves.) She was right because this record was totally unintelligible, muffled, mumbling, hesitant, definite, cloudy, obscured, fogged, elongated, diffused. It was everything you don't want to hear in pop music. It was all the content that pop music has nothing to say about, all the waste pop music discards, all the words pop music never uses. My girlfriend hated it because she couldn't recognize anything in it that was what she knew to be "Talk Talk"; but, more than that, she couldn't recognize anything in it that was what she knew to be what music was supposed to be or had been.

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It was dark and quiet in my girlfriend's studio apartment, with the parking lot streetlights peering in through the half-closed blinds. It was as if they were seeking me out; as if they, too, wanted to know what I would hear, as if they wanted me to tell them what I heard and explain to them what my girlfriend heard that freaked her out so badly, what jarred her and upset even the simple order of a man in a dark room listening to recorded music on headphones in the middle of the night with the light of the street illuminating the corners of the walls. And then, in the distance, at the edges of the headphones, a sharp pulsing like a tape machine, interrupted by a deep, clean, trembling guitar chord, soon echoed by wind instruments and the whimper of a snare drum being righted and set in place. The chord rumbled a second time, and the elongated notes of the woodwinds lighted up the night air beneath this liquid thunder. Everything was of a depth, submerged in something full, something invisible, something to be seen later. "Place my chair at the backroom door" sang Mark Hollis, the words less sung than chanted, less chanted than lamented, less lamented than flung to the floor with the energy of a man tired of everything, especially that which he has to say, especially that which he says and which no one hears. My eyes were open. My heart was quick, then quicker. I understood immediately what my girlfriend did about this music, but from the perspective of someone with no expectations, with nothing of the future, with nothing but the moment in which everything is being heard and will continue on in its hearing. I understood that what I heard at that moment was something that had never been in any moment I knew; I understood that I knew less about what I was hearing than about what listening was to mean for me later, after I knew what I was hearing. 

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If whoever you are that is out there could meet me, I'd choose a coffee shop where the coffee is fresh, dark, and strong; where there are not too many laptops to clutter up the silence; where at least a few conversations are punctuated by passion, gesticulating hands, perhaps even gazes towards the sky evoking the real world of the false god; where the windows are filled with either sun or rain and the chalkboard menus reflect the nature of the day outside. If we were to meet, I would say more about Laughing Stock and how it still, to this day, if I am able to listen to it, makes me rethink what I think about things in general, and things in specific -- about what I say and what I see, about what I hear and what I know. It makes me reconsider what luck is and who has it; what fortune is and where it goes. Who men and women are and how they interact. But none of this seems relevant to the actual content of the recording, which is the content of something other than what you may or may not be willing to know. And willingness, we know, is where aesthetics imprint themselves on the name of the world. Willingness is how we know what we may love, and why we can decide to hate something dear. I'd tell you about that girlfriend I once had, who then became my wife and then became my ex-wife, and how her hating this record impacted my experience of music more than almost anything, and that the rabbit hole of exploration down which it led me does not yet end, even when I remember her being gone, long ago, in the future that is ours to dream in time, the rain softly beating back the soft waves of the grey river.

Desert Marauders

I will readily, yet reluctantly, confess, I didn't come up with that name. But, well, ain't it just the coolest? "Desert Marauders"? Even cooler, the group who decided their record should be called this (although I don't know who decided what, nor even what decision was made, only that there is this thing named "Desert Marauders", and this thing named this is a thing of music, the sound of music, the object that contains the sound, the object that is a record, the record that records what happened, once, many times) is Art Lande and Rubisa Patrol. I mean, they sound like a bunch of guys in a sandblasted space jeep who roam the edges of the desert and ensure that that which must be safe is safe, that attack that which must be attacked. I imagine bearded faces plastered with black sand, with white earth, with space between them and the edge of the world, the only thing behind them the blinding horizon.

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Like any good group that knows you can never overname something perfectly named (for example, Night Ranger and, also, Iron Maiden, amongst others), the first track from "Desert Marauders" is perfectly named "Rubisa Patrol", because the group that Marauds also Patrols, the desert is also somewhere we are not and will only have tried to have been.  When Ozzy Osbourne sings "Please God Help Me!!!" on "Black Sabbath", from Black Sabbath's "Black Sabbath", he's also enacting the remaining name, the public and the political, that lies outside the personal out of which he sings. The name that is the sign, the sign that makes the name of the world. Desert Marauders maps a world that the musicians patrol, inhabit, dominate, deploy, duplicate in sound from word. There is nothing left to say, nothing less to say, than what they wordlessly leave behind them.

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All good music seems to be plagued by the failure of description. It exceeds all description, but, also, the description of the music exceeds the effort made to know it in words. Yet, there's never a reason not to try; as James Brown crooned, "Nothing beats a try but a fail". The try here is the excellence of the raucous midnight that is the 16 minute opening track, where the piano plants a staccato palm tree in the midst of a sea of sand, and what arises are the cool pool of southpaw trumpet, bass bouncing and then bobbing along the imaginary waves on an imaginary sea, the drums the thunderhead in the distance, the war planes and dreamtime drama of the new day. All of this is the failure to describe itself, only to mimic and homage Miles Davis' best years, from 1967-1975 all in a brief whisper of progressive distancing, de-stancing..

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You can't really find "Desert Marauders" on cd, I don't think. If you buy a turntable and hunt down some used records, you can pick it up on album, which is kind of cool, although probably more obscure than is necessary, because you join yourself to the legion that are their own desert marauders. those fast flipping fingered men who mine the faded cardboarded past of smudged black plastic. But then, this is necessary, so the obscurity is worth everything, even if it means you become someone you thought you'd never mean to be. The record starts, also, in a kind of obscurity, the sound of a banging piano on a simple chord, rhythmic and near, immediate and suggestive of some infinite distance beyond it. A drum trots out, silently rolling in like wind to kick up sand in the face of the blazing sky, the piano standing firm with its mechanical rhythm, one chord, full and round and stern and stoic. A horn whines, it's a trumpet but you might not know it, it might not matter what the horn whining is, it may only mean that what matters is that it whines and whimpers and breathes and burns into space. Of course, this happens for a little bit, there's a drama to building what is to come, cities are not the result of one or many days, but of every day that it takes to take what is empty and forge walls and caves and what links these two forms in the beyond of the world, above ground, reaching all arms up towards the sky.

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The thing, then, that happens, is that the piano changes and swells and advances into a rhythmic romp, a riff open to the new world -- dah-dah-dahhhhh-da-da da-da-dah-dah-dahhhhhhhh -- in a strange time signature and signalling a strange time of the world just then. Just then because of the immediacy of the change and the intensity of the tone and the open ended nature of everything that comes forth, the drums skipping down the side of the mountain and jumping into the sea, the trumpet jabbing out into space as if to knock down the danger at the edge of the desert with its pointed fists and knife-edged knuckles, the bass burrowing deep into the sand and hiding amongst the beetles and worms that sleep in the cool earth. The quiet night of the earth that arises with the cacophonic polyphony that rolls out of the record, of the circle, of the system that is theirs, that is there for us to hear.

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There's more to this record than just the opening track -- and all of it is to be known, to be heard, to feed the mind with the sound that lies inside the mind. But all of it comes after the announcement that the landscape of the moon is the empty desert the patrol will ride and protect. Protect yourself, I say, from what is out there, by venturing into the white empty distance, the black open evening. Everything is there for us all, even when we close our eyes and our eyes become the ears through which we see the dark sky, the open book of the dark sky.

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Interesting, then, that the second track on side one is called "Livre (Near The Sky)" -- a book that lies in proximity, then, to the open air that yawns over us. But what an odd juxtaposition, an impossible imposition that -- that anything is ever "near" the sky -- the sky is up there, always over us, and the only thing anything can be is "in" it. But then, when you mine the desert -- when you ride along the edge of the cursed earth, the crest of the morning and the deep crusted sand that curdles against the sea -- perhaps what you are is only where you are: near the sky, pages upturned towards the yawning night, the wordless dawn of man and of the battle for the end of time.

Who is Stephan Micus, and is He like Us?

I'm not even sure that I can ask the question. I mean, you could start here, with his bio, from the ECM records site, which is quite nicely written and dainty and which gives a clarified butter-sense of his lost, wandering-journey-world-rover-spirit, his singular vision(ary), his smiling-beggar-exile, his smiling man. And good ol' west(ern) Wikipedia lets you briefly linger over him and know that he is, eternally, "new age". And this, here, is a great discography. I'm being quite informative sure, thank you, you're welcome, but you know nothing more except a few static pages. And you have heard nothing. Let's start with hearing, then.

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There, you could keep looping this stuff endlessly. Which is kind of what Stephan Micus does, except for that he loops nothing, he makes everything, and everything he makes he makes anew with the deep intent to make everything anew. Now, intent, as we all know -- or all ought to know, at this late point in the very early history of the world we do know -- is tricky to assume and even more conniving to dodge. We can assume nothing of it, and less than nothing from it, but we also cannot not know it as it comes towards us. And what Stephan Micus comes towards us with -- and he is coming towards an "us", totally solitary, not necessarily alone, as his recordings are layered affairs where nothing is alone and everything is the work of the solo traveler who arrives in solitude to express the fate of the world he comes upon to express the fate of that same very world he carries within him -- is something that can never be found, regardless of the clearwater wholesome and shining window effort of s/he who searches for the truth that lies behind all things, in that musical space named "new age" (which I will champion, despite the furious fists of rebellious freedom reigning down on us all, because, simply, I, too, need to relax my shoulders and meditate on an emptied river) -- Stephan Micus is, um, sincere about what he does, he means it, meaning that he means the it that it is and can forever be once it has been stated as being, and will always be, it.

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Right. As though what I wrote was to be understood. And yet, of course it was, because if not-understanding was the point, I would shriek to the heavens and tear my eyes out, I would exile myself to the darkness that is the darkest hour of man. I would lament in a language that no man would understand, which would mean my lament would be the lament of a man without any other man, a man with no other but himself beneath the sun that burns him, the night that abandons him, the mountain whose avalanche traps him, the bloodline whose ancestry he escapes. I mean that he spaces himself out, he is only always a distance from everything, from this thing, from things, from this.

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With Stephan Micus, though, something is very unique, almost too much so, and its uniqueness lies both within and without the music. First off, he's a craftsman in the purest sense, in the ancient sense, because he learns how to play the instruments that are out there, the cosmos of the world is the locality of his touch. He learns them, he is the teacher and the taught, the chanter and the enchanted. You almost start to dream, yourself, of going anywhere, everywhere (Steve Tibbetts' "Going Somewhere" comes to mind here), becoming anything, fantasizing that the distant mountain is your home, the eternal village of strangers is your people. But, furthermore, and yet, simultaneously, there is something inside the sounds that is bursting out, but almost beneath the music, too, a whisper beneath the whisper, a shadow of a shadow, an expression that is of the face and beyond the face, the symbol of a fading face on an ancient stone. It's hard, because all description of Stephan Micus' music seems to lead to the top of a mountain with a bearded white figure in a mysterious cloak on bended knee, the heavens all around him, the earth always eternally below. It's hard, because this description is what the music is and is everything the music avoids and becomes all that there is of the world that is all there is of a lone figure with a pile of instruments beside him, testing each in the empty air, bringing his breath and his hands and his fingers and his chest to bear upon strings, upon reeds, upon skin and earth and bone. The body of music is the body of all humanity.

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1994's "Athos - A Journey to the Holy Mountain" -- which is just that, a pilgrimage to the Greek Island home to 20 monasteries, a land only accessible by sea -- and 1986's "The Music of Stones" -- which is just that, a series composed around a series of large resonating stone blocks that sound, when struck, like the resonance at the bottom of a bottomless well -- each reveal the larger structure at work in Micus' world of music, music that is of a world that is ours and that is of a world that we could have only forgotten. Every thing is ancient, from a limit that lies outside time, that lies only at the very end and the very beginning of time. There are scrolls with words on which we write more words, there is the air that is ours, that is air we breathe, the air in which sages declare their silence and breathe out that same silence, the air in which the sounds of stones resonate around us and rumble beneath us.

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It's fitting to end with a tai chi performance -- and Micus is nowhere to be seen here, only slightly heard, with nothing but air around and inside him -- to the distant stones that encapsulate the resounding air, although there are no stones in this sound, because they have vanished, they are finished, their smooth surface is outside of us and what we touch with the movement, the performance, of our bodies. The performance is like the air filled with a sound of something that is only the breath of the world. The performance is like the body that moves with the light of the air, with the breath of the spirit. Of course, Stephan Micus has gone past all that, and there is only the life within us to mourn the life that has passed behind us, that passes us in the understanding that the world we are is the world at the top of the mountain, the beard of the oldest man, the cell of the unborn child. The oldest man and the unborn child, of course, are each like us, what we once were, what we will be, what we close our eyes to see. Is he like us? He is more than "like", he is what is, which is us.

Turning the Tables

I just bought a turntable, a week ago Thursday, tragic to say that it took me this long to visit the land I come from, the land of plasticized, double-sided dreams. It took me buying a record -- which turned into 5 records, because the inexpensiveness of records and the randomized element of their eternally earth scattered endangered species selection makes buying just one not only impossible, but predetermined -- for my buddy Joe for his birthday (because he has a turntable, he loves it, and he seems to have something to love in this world that having it gives him to love) -- to realize that I was partly buying the record for myself and my own disowned dreams. Only disowned, though, because I decided I wasn't going to have a turntable, which means that records are, for me, to be held, touched, gazed at, but never HEARD. Now, perhaps the smartest thing I did in this whole confused jumble of ambivalent cinched up inaction was have Joe as a friend, because Joe saw all this and said "You should get a turntable, man, mine was $125, go here...(more details, etc)." Now, what do you do when your buddy looks you in the eye and says "You ain't me, man, you is you?" You be you, that's what...

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A similar, yet longer term memory -- years ago, in the same life that is also the other life that was mine and that is the "you be you" of any past for any wo/man -- my buddy Brian had a turntable, and with it, he was able to expunge himself in all the used record shops of Boston, he was able to take that city and make it come across the country with him to California because that city was the shops where the circular shapes of tender, imprinted grooves held their secret lives in dazzling silence. I carried on a secret war with him, I carried myself across time and space by refusing to join him, I pulled a "u-ee" and went in the other direction, towards CDs (which, at that time, were the new best next thing on earth, since they would LAST FOREVER). What's sad (and another kind of memory, that of the past sadness of something that is passed over in time) is that those records he bought were records that CDs would never become, because records are to be forgotten, while CD's, which LAST FOREVER, become a reason for Bryan Adams, for example, to give us 75 minutes of unbroken stardom to gaze into and become dulled from. But Brian would show me a record he found in his wanderings across town -- always something that he was proud to show me, and always something I would have wanted to own but had decided I never could -- and I would REMEMBER IT. Always. Even now. Even later, when I'm too old to remember the name of that girl I copied out Black Sabbath lyrics for as a token of my gnarled heart.

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But, today is today, which means turntables don't fall from the sky and into our preamps, even though the sky is more wounded than ever and less things stay there than ever. I can't easily walk down the street and trip over an inexpensive record player without finding myself in a part of town where the record player would matter much less than my making my way home, NOW. So, I amazon'ed this Audio Technica for $79 and sat on the edge of the couch and waited and stared out the window into the street where the UPS van would come and lift me back up into the falling sky. Because I don't care about anything else than the record when I have the player. Because the player is the record, and the record is the thing I'll play and the turntable will fade into the sky, too, like a bird whose flight is more than the bird itself, is only the arc of the air on which it has flown.

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For the record -- pun intended -- CD's don't LAST FOREVER. At least one I have owned needed a complete clutch overhaul. I had a 1980 Honda Civic with a broken carburetor that lasted longer. Actually, if I remember correctly, the thing about CD's was not that they LASTED FOREVER so much as that THEY WOULDN'T WEAR OUT. What's funny to think of in response to that marketing fact is that wearing out a record was like proving your deep love of it, like Velveteen Rabbit-ing it into its own alternate reality, such that the crackle and hiss of the sunken, collapsed grooves meant that the music on that record had melded with your mind and become that very thing that walked around with you and thought two steps behind you. You wanted to wear out a record, but you wanted to do so simply by living with it, by playing it whenever there was time and space to have the sound of the world be the sound of that record. I don't actually think anyone anywhere ever bought a record and thought that it was a too-difficult-fact of the world that they may have had to one day replace this record because it might wear out if they loved it too much. In fact, no one has ever known how much they might really come to love a record until they bought it, brought it home, removed the tenuous plastic coating, and gently placed it on the rotating wheel, so how could anyone have ever worried that they might love it too much and kill it? A record isn't a person, so what could you ever worry about? Spilling bongwater? A CD is no improvement there, el capitan....

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The thing that Brian had, which is what Joe has, which I now have, with a turntable, is ACCESS. This access is to two basic and totally essential things in musical life -- one, to the fullest sound there has been of what has become recorded. While I declare that I think records "sound better" than CD's, I'm not very interested in that argument. I am happy to inform the world that what they sound, doubtless, scientific, is FULL. Like the sky with clouds, the sea with water, an ancient tiger with stripes, a contemporary novel with tropes. There is a totality to music on record that no other recorded medium provides. This is not the fascist view of the natural world, where you must do something specific in order to be anything at all; it is a totality of the sound that you then are finally in a position to interpret, let come to you, succumb to in the name of your ears and your eyes and your mouth and your hands, fill the ceiling with something you can't see but will try to see. The second bit of access is to the actual recordings themselves. There are the ones that you can find also on CD, the recordings that you can find in their native state, that nativity that is the reality of technological form informing the thing that has been mutated to ever meet that form's requirements. When records were "being made" -- and each era of recorded music, as well as the genre and styles that existed within each era in relation to each other and in relation to the eras themselves -- the recordings themselves were made with the record as the God of the form the music was to take, in terms of the TIME of of the music (how long is this going to go on for, anyway?) and the BREAKS in the music (when does one thing end and another begin? When's the intermission? When can I go outside and have a smoke and come back and have missed nothing?) All of this is built in to the music, just like turning the page is built in to the writing when you read a book, which means the writing of the book means the page must always be turned until there are no more pages for you to turn, which means there is no more writing, which means there is no more book, because a book is the writing that writes it, right? The access to the recordings also means access to the records that are now only scattered amongst the endless debris of the world, the debriefings of those documents in time when these things were made, reproduced, and abandoned, and which will never come in from the cold unless we gather them up in our solidarity to the remembrance of records past. It is access to the endangered species that are the beaten, battered, weathered cardboard squares with images and photos and illustrations and titles and informatives, all older than everyone who doesn't know them, all handled by multiple parties, all fingered and which put the finger of ownership right on you, right now, when you realize that if you don't take them, they will disappear and be melted into uncut ozone.

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As a perfect example, and essential epilogue to my turned table, where what was once on it is on the floor, and what was once under it is now the only thing I can attend to when I sit at it, I give you Alphonso Johnson's Spellbound. I'm sure you could find it on CD, but this is one of those recordings that is an ALBUM, from the cover of Alphonso with a Chapman Stick, to the wicked double tremoloed guitar kraut of Pat Thrall, to the vocals that seem both strained and restrained, stranded and standing tall. The whole thing could only have been made as an album where there are such things as rock and jazz and fusion and cars and sensitivity and industry and ambition and thoughtlessness and thoughtfulness piled into pure plastic form.

There is funk everywhere, but politely, with old timey moog synths that make you think of the old west, like a gunslinger with a gun just a little weirder than everyone else's. Now, the record, here, in MP3-post-CD-newspace, sounds super thin, fusion goof earnest world road trip innocent sunscreen. But on record, this whole thing is ALL BOTTOM, the only thing that goes out are your geeky lights because you realize that what's dark about this stuff is that there is actually muddy soul at the bottom of it, which the record lets hang in the air, lets distort and then fly off into dream drama realspace.

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I could always upload all my records, through my turntable, onto my laptop using its USB. When the martians come for me, I will make sure that I keep Alphonso Johnson in my space disaster kit and take everything with me to the moon. I'll find myself an old couch and have all my records eternally ready to be played into the purest crackle.

Something About Alice Coltrane

Ok, so she's John Coltrane's wife. By that, I mean that I think that if you didn't know anything about her and you came across her records (or just her name, for that matter), you might think, "I didn't know Coltrane had a wife!" Or, "who was this woman married to Coltrane?" Which is probably, in some ways, the perfect question to ask. Who was she? Why did he marry her or she him? What does her music have to do with that marriage? What does the marriage of the higher order spiritual soldier of interstitial (I thank my grad school buddy, Fitz Fitzgerald for that word) spatial species (him) to a master mistress player queen of harp, piano, organ, strings, and divine-ated concept mean (her) for the world of music? Is music greater than the world itself? Is music the most divine expression of the greatest world there will ever have been?

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But, you know, she isn't anyone's wife. Her being a "she" doesn't give anyone the authority to "marry" her off to anyone and have this marriage define the "she" that is her. Or maybe she's a wife but we don't get to know anything about what her wifeliness is because no one but one man - which isn't us -- is married to her. Meaning, the wife part isn't ours to assess, isn't ours to imagine, is only ours to project. So what we then get is the music part, the everything that are her endless sound. But it is interesting, too, because Alice seems to have never presented herself without the "wife" part, and not just by using the name "Coltrane". She seems to have always presented this aspect of herself with pride, this wifeliness, this timelessness that links her to the name "Coltrane", because she and he were family, the familar, and their music is each part of a familial and existent world, a world of the beyond of music, a world of the beyond of spirit where the music they made is the music that seeks the spirit beyond the spirit, the light that shines behind the light that shines, the cloud whose unknowing is that by which what the world has become undone and remade in an image of absolute light, a room inside, a passageway to the immediate melody of the highest of all worlds.

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I am already terrified to write about this subject. Mostly because I don't want to go anywhere besides into the heart of the sunrise that is the music of Alice Coltrane. But the heart of the sunrise (Yes lyrics -- "Love comes to you and you follow / Lose one on to the heart of the sunrise") is where the terror lies, not because love hurts, but because fire hurts, and if love is fire, then love is the fire that burns me with the promise of tomorrow. And the promise of tomorrow is the utter inferno of today.

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It isn't easy to find all of Alice Coltrane's records. Her complete discography is listed here, on her website. I have a few "easy-to-gets" -- A Monastic Trio; Ptah, the El Daoud; Journey in Satchidananda. I have a couple "stumbled-upon-can't-believe-I-founds" -- Huntington Ashram Monastery, Universal Consciousness. I have one "I-have-never-seen-this-before-and-won't-again" -- Lord of Lords. I owned Transfiguration for a time, but the organ solo on "Leo, Part One" and "Leo, Part Two" was so intense I thought that just having the record around would burn my house down, if not a sharpshoot a pure bullet hole of love in my heart, so I sold it back and I hide my eyes when I go to the store and see her face staring off to the side as she sits at the organ on the album cover, not because I am ashamed, but because I know she will have never been ashamed of anything, and that she would speak to me with a soft ecstatic compassion and know that if I didn't ever understand, that my not knowing this would harm nothing but the sun, and not even the sun, but the sum total of my inner image of the sun. (One afternoon, as Leo, Part 1 became Leo, Part 2, the organ that filled the stereo and then the bedroom and then the hallway and the closets and the living room and kitchen and doorways and doorframes and windows all around with the flames of fury, the flames of impossible and essential loss -- one afternoon, I think I learned that it might take me 30 years to hear what I was hearing and beat back against the flames with my own mind. That same afternoon I brought the record back to the record store with a promise to remember my development of that single moment, my mind half-melted and half mettled.) There's a record with Carlos Santana, Illuminations (I won't give a link to it because I protest Carlos in the name of Alice, my contribution to what she contributed to everyone) -- I have never trusted dear Carlos when it comes to improvisation, but that's why I'm me and Alice is Alice. World Galaxy can't be found anywhere (I mean, conveniently or within a reasonable price for a record whose reason transcends that of all musical economies). Perhaps it is lost so that we can imagine it, and only misimagine it. First, though, let's go here to lose what we have so as to rebuild our imagining:

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The thing I always immediately think when I put on Journey in Satchidananda is that that is one deep well of feeling, and at the bottom of the well is where every sound begins, and the sky is where every sound arises, and the sun is where each sound separates, and the All Knowing is where listening creates the sound that begins, that has arisen, that will separate, that will return. The first track of the album begins with a bass figure from the bottom of the earth, a simple figure that you can immediately recognize as part of the known world, and then the otherwordly ancestry spiderweb of the tamboura falls across it, a shaft of piercing light through a window, and then Coltrane's harp comes into the thick, begins the pure thinking that is surrounded by a sea of percussion, sailed upon by a saxophonic melody, a deepest feeling that is the blissful consciousness of satchidananda. We are on the journey within this bliss, and every harp note plucked and picked and rattled by Alice is the sound of this bliss explicitly named and framed before our vanished eyes. We see only what we hear, which is what we feel, which is where we go and how we have gotten there.

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I imagine it must have been strange for her, making her own way, after being so close to the giant that Coltrane always was. But I don't think I can imagine it right, because partly what I can't imagine is Alice herself, with everything she thought about music and everything she heard music to be. The music that is hers is music that can only be heard as its own music. It is jazz because the music she made is meant to deepen the well, sweeten the water that is jazz, but it isn't jazz out of the convenience that instrumental, improvisational, African-American music is jazz. I imagine it must have been strange for her in that she seems estranged from everything but the Lord of Lords, the holy night that is the top of a lonely mountain and the lightning flash that composes the terror of the oldest world we have ever known.

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Universal Consciousness -- first off, how can that be an album title? Sure, they are just words, and words can be the title of anything, but the that begins with the meaning, which is tendered heavily, a price to be part of paying as being part of the universe that encompasses our consciousness. Alice Coltrane's concept of the conscience -- the inner knowledge of -- the thing that makes us us and not us in being beyond us -- shines, radiates, remembers, inculcates, calculates....

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The record begins with something that seems like the sound of what would lie on the outskirts of the world, as if these sounds could only be heard in a very specific place, a place that, paradoxically, one could only get to through hearing these sounds. There are a quartet of violins that squeal a punctual and punctuated melody interspersed with panicked and wracked nerve percussion, like jazz and like what jazz would be if the jazz were religious and sun baked in the religion of a sea-swept world, with only the sea to guide us further away from the universe that drags us, stone-henged, back to the mundane earth.

By the time we get to "Oh Allah" (above), the violins hover over us like a cloud of credible proof that there is something about all of this, a spirit that is the body, a soul that is the flesh. Alice uses this intro to set up one of those organ solos that she makes, over bass, drums, and air and wind -- I don't know how to describe one of her organ solos other than it sounds like wind blowing through stiffer wind, like water flowing through stiller waters, and this doubling of form with another form is the forum that allows her to flow through everything. But her playing, too, aggressively pursues the highest calling, its as if it can only always ascend in a way so as to open the sky and burst through it with the flames that are the meaning of the deepest cracks in the deepest earth.

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Alice Coltrane was as heavy as a bright sky that fills itself with the possibility that you are part of its delicate fabric, the clouds that remember the sea.

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The heaviest of her records is Lord of Lords, a heavy set of heavy-set tracks. "Going Home" (listed here --

)

is almost just like "Oh Allah" in that the main content of the 10 minute piece is a wonderfully distended and swelling organ solo, like waves that rise and crash against a set of cragged rocks hundreds of feet tall. Each note that Coltrane plays seems itself hundreds of feet tall, and when there is no organ, there are choruses of strings and voices stretched across the window of the sky, taut and tight and open and emptying everything out of sound but ringing notes notation the triumph of faith over the will. It's hard to describe about this music partly because the form of it is the form of the prayer it seeks to invoke, which is a heavy prayer, a prayer to the heaviness of the One that is All.

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But I think it makes sense to honor the mystery of time and sequence end with something earlier from Alice, from Huntington Ashram Monastery.

This track shares elements with Journey In Satchidananda -- simple, immediate bass floor rumble non-jazz jazz riff, handclap church percussion, and the flurry of harp spider ice dance all atop everything. Huntington was Alice's 2nd solo record, from 1969, and the opening track, which is just her harping her way through every corner of the universe over the simplified rhythm section, is her happiness and hope for all of us, for mankind, even. It's this piece that shows me that the world through her eyes was the world of the Coltrane that he didn't know how to have, that he knew he couldn't have unless he married this world and it became the past of his family, the essence of that something he needed to have, that something about everything that is the piano, the harp, the organ, the strings, the sound of everything shaking the sky and tearing the night into ecstatic harmony.