Ode to the Rhodes - Part 1

I can't have been the first one to write that sentence, to title something that way with a nostalgic longing for a time when technology was goofy and ridiculously and totally not portable.

I used to be in a band with an incredibly talented keyboardist/guitarist/singer named Joe Kennedy, who is now a professional touring musician. Joe owned a Fender Rhodes and used it quite a bit in our songs. When the band broke up, I remember Joe throwing the Rhodes down the stairs of our rehearsal studio and howling with laughter like someone who just did something totally forbidden. If my memory is anywhere near reality, Joe commented that he was "psyched" to "never have to carry that f*ckin' thing anywhere ever again."

And that's the fact of it. The Rhodes probably weighed, in and of itself, as much as the rest of our equipment all lumped together -- 2 guitar amps, bass amp, trap kit, cymbals, and so on. It was horrendous. It made us all wish we had spent more time thinking about things rather than just "doing" them. Of course, as soon as we would get to a gig, and Joe plugged it in and played a major or minor seventh chord, all was forgiven, and Jesus could have only always been right.

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If you drop a Rhodes on your toe, you might as well go home, in other words. Or at least to the podiatrist....

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The Rhodes -- what was also considered an "electric piano" -- has a distinct sound, simultaneously distant and close, like the past and the right now glued front to back. A weird image, I know, but only as weird as an electric piano could be, since the piano is built to be acoustic by default, it is the naturally occurring sound of elongated strings ringing out in space beneath a sea of wood. The Rhodes evokes an entire era, and an entire world, of sound. Of the 70's, of funk, and fusion, and someone deciding that a wah and a distortion pedal could take the mellow sound of chorused chords and transform them into the stripes jumping off the back of an angry tiger. (Watch out for that growl in your ears -- we will get to Miles' electric music soon enough!)

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Chick Corea's Return to Forever, (ECM, 1972) begins with the track called, perfectly, "Return to Forever" (totally great and eerie Lord of the Rings still shot You Tube vid here) (as an aside, I imagine that Night Ranger's debut record Night Ranger, with the track "Night Ranger" is a kind of off-kilter homage to this triple-naming of band, debut record, and title track; why doesn't every band do this? I have no good answer). A creepy, slinky Rhodes drone doubled by a ghostly voice ushers in this iced earth world (if forever is in the past, our return to it would have to be from above, down into a world of ice, would it not?) before Chick hits, of course, a minor seventh/eleventh chord, and then begins a circular Rhodesian riff that rides the rhythm entire of the next 9+ minutes. Chick keeps everything, in his own words, "Light as a Feather", because the Rhodes is, for him, an instrument of white magic, where the magus of music rides in from the deep white north, where the grey light of the sky is part of the world we hear humming within us.

Eventually, of course, since this is 1972, and jazz hasn't fully succumbed to the rock that would soon enclose it, Chick and Stanley Clarke (Electronic Bass) and Airto Moreira (Brazilian Percussionist Surprisingly Agile on a Trap Kit), eventually freak out a little bit, letting the Rhodes lead them in a minor dance of flickering night light while Flora Purim (Crazy Vocals, and, I mean, Really Crazy) surfs through the Rhodes waves to the jagged edge of a sunless sea. Returning to where we would always have been is not so silent, after all...

A Beginning -- Dino Saluzzi -- Part 1

I'm certainly NOT an expert on music, but I don't have to be. In fact, I will begin by saying that, given all the music I've listened to -- mostly in recorded form, since concerts are frequently and often (yes, that double adjective is intentional) disappointing -- I ought to know a lot more than I do. Shame begets shame, then, and the confession begins where the imagination lies silent....On this point, I claim absolute guilt, but the kind of guilt out of which ignorant bliss is born. Borne upon the wings of my guilt, then, I promise to bring you something I have heard that you may one day wish to hear, too.

I may also reach deep into the future as an example of honoring the past, which is never buried as deep as the future is wide. That is to say, I will reach wide into a future whose height exceeds us, only to remind us that we are going where from we whence came, which is from darkness and light.

I don't know anything about the Tango, other than that it's ferocious and sexy and seems dangerous (although, if you walk down the dark corridors of Venice in the middle of the night, and you meditate on their dangerous poetry, a Venetian in the light of day will screw up her face at you and interrogate you for poeticizing her ordinary reality). I don't know anything about Argentina, other than that Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar, writers who have spun reality into a dark web of fiction from which a reader cannot extract themselves, both claimed themselves to be "of Argentina". Such is the same knowledge that accompanies what I know of Dino Saluzzi.

Saluzzi plays the bandoneon, an accordion-like tango instrument, which seems to hearken back to some imagined time when a musician hunched over his tools at the end of a dark alley, his face breathing its way through each note to bear the storm beyond it.

(You almost think that what you imagine is true, except it has little if nothing to do with sound itself. What it has to do with, of course, is what sound is like. Meaning, the moment we determine that words are what we need to describe sound, we launch ourselves from what David Toop has called the "Ocean of Sound" onto the dry land of language. I chose a clunky image there because, well, it's clunky imagining what something could be in another form, you know? I mean, music SOUNDS to mean, words MEAN to mean. Anyhow....)

Saluzzi's music sounds like a whisper. I mean it. I have, I think, 6-7 of his records, all on the ECM label (www.ecmrecords.com; I will write on that label later). The records (I call them records because that's what they are; more on that to come as well) each show him in different musical settings -- Solo (Bandoneon, Voice, Percussion); Jazz Quartet (Bandoneon, Trumpet, Acoustic Bass, Percussion); Jazz Trio (Bandoneon, Acoustic Guitar, Acoustic Bass); "Classical" Duet (Bandoneon, Cello); "Classical" String Quartet (Bandoneon, 2 Violins, Viola, Cello); Orchestra (Bandoneon, Saxophone, Cello, Orchestra). Why list all this, which is kind of tiring to read through, let alone imagine? Because each instance of the musical grouping, the circle of instruments gathered to express Saluzzi's project, these moments (which are more than moments, but they end up being only what lasts slightly longer than a moment, which is a recording, or a record) end up gathering everything into Saluzzi's whisper.

What is it that he whispers? What is a whisper like that is a description of a sound whose description is the image of a whisper?

Now, it's kind of easy to use music as a way to throw an image into space, where it will only endlessly float, never to return...(I'm reminded of Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi's "fake" blues band "The Blues Brothers", with their song "Rubber Biscuit" -- "A Ricochet Biscuit / is the kind of a biscuit / that's supposed to bounce back off the wall / into your mouth / If it don't bounce back / you go hungry...") My image of Saluzzi as a whisper, though, is meant slightly differently. I'm aiming at the thought of what a whisper is, and what it is not. Of what it could be, and how you remember it. Of where it is, and what it reveals about the words that it surrounds.

I mean that it is as if Saluzzi himself is hovering on the outside of each note, as if each note is, in the words of the poet Gustaf Sobin, "the husk of experience". That would mean that the whisper of his bandoneon is the whisper of a world that is yet to come, whose passing is not yet past.