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.

You Know, You Know

A common practice I've engaged in over long years of music buying is the selling back of used albums -- this practice has outlasted even the change in media (note, you can't sell back mp3s or anything downloaded, really, for that matter. Let's take a moment of mourned silence; even though selling something back to the store nets you nearly zero profit, the feeling that something that is no longer worth owning to you is worth something to the store that can then recycle it to a new and anonymous fan, someone awaiting the sounds of their lives -- this recapitulation of the same into what is always eternally different (it is always new to someone else, even if it is dried up of all tantalizing possibility for me, it is a shining honeyed grapefruit ripe on the possibility tree for the figure behind me) is the magic economy of the real.) from records to 8-tracks to cassette to cds. The best thing about cds is the fact that they "last forever" (as if we needed them to!), but they are now, outside of well kept record albums (like well-kept baseball cards), the only thing you can really "sell".

Selling Back is essential in BUNCHES. I mean, you could sell one or two cds, but the fact is, you generally get no more than $3 in store credit or $2 in cash for them. In the world I'm operating within, cash is meaningless except for what you need to bring in if you don't get enough store credit to exchange for what you want. In other words, we're looking at the $3 store credit, which is basically a future option on the record store's current or future inventory. The whole exercise is a total gamble, but a gamble for the rush of the gamble that leads to the rush of the victory over winning. This rush only has a success rate that starts at $50 -- because, at even the cheapest used record/cd shop, to get anything cool that is more than just one cool thing, you need about $50. Meaning, you have to sell back at least 15 cds. And if what you have to sell, for example, are 80's metal cds, or orginal issue Blue Note Jazz cds -- all of which they sell to you for no more that $5 -- you will need at least 50 cds. So, you really have to be willing to be arrogant with yourself, you have to strip everything you have away to the essentials, which you can never do, which you must do if you want to bury your doldrums at the center of your troubled, discarded mind.

The Sellback is basically how you overcome depression. You know, life gets boring sometimes. You look at your music collection, and everything is grey sand, dark dirt, decades of indecency, decades of over-dependency. You're like the philosopher who realizes he's never read a novel; the high fashion shopper who is surprised by her ignorance of much needed flip-flops; the gourmet chef who has lost his taste for the simplicity of peanut butter. You lie there, with the articles of faith strewn about the world, and at the center of your bible is a black and white image of the devil yawning. Yup, there is no question about this, my son; your lifeblood is ebbing into the ether of the past.

So, you get yourself up (the Republicans were right; bootstraps do mean something; you grab them and lift them and you fall flat on your back, and you realize the pain in your backside is, well, you), and you limp on over to the tape case, or the record cube, or the cd rack, or the hall closet, or whatever. And you start picking your way though the graves of what you were once so promiscuous to freely love, now hell bent anything that you HATE. Now, this gets really interesting, because the impetus for doing this has little to do with your feeling about the recordings; what it has to do with is the feeling you MIGHT HAVE once you get rid of these recordings and replace them with something else that you "feel better" about. Notice that I'm not talking about what you "like". As soon as you own a recording, you are beyond the point of "taste"; you are now at the point of determining where, relative to your aesthetic sense, what you now own is placed, what world it lives within, and what space within the sum total of that world that it, curiously, owns. You may own the recording, but it knows more about you than you do about yourself.

When you comb through your collection and let yourself hate what you've become, you are reinventing yourself from the past to dwell in an ambiguous future. (Perhaps what will happen, when it is time for you, is nothing, and your depression may have been the true state of things.) But you don't know what this ambiguity is -- that's what ambiguity is, of course -- and this unknown is what you convert into a hope that you then use to stare into the heart of your error'd ways (all the music you own that you hate, that you should have once known to never own), rip out that very heart and stuff it into a bag, and then race out the door while it still beats, determined to make it to the record store before all that past blood spills out and dries up and leaves you with no possibility of a future life.

-----

Once the cd or record buyer flips carelessly and tired-eyed through the pile of your losses (the causes of which are even greater losses than the objects themselves) -- the only sound being the click of opening and closing the cd case, with a 5 second pause between the click open and the click shut to turn the disc upside down and stare at its imperfections -- your own living heart rumbles in your chest, your breath quickens while they calculate the value of what you have found meaningless and write it down with furrowed brow on a post it. They don't do this without first creating separate piles of value, things worth almost nothing, more than nothing, possibly something -- these piles are, for you, the visible result of everything you have discarded coming to bear on the moment. These piles are what you begin to doubt about yourself, your loves, your life, your pleasures. Yet, when the post-it reveals a sloppily "$90" on it, who "you" are is suddenly cast in the light of the wistful summer sun: you can now go play and make a bunch of new mistakes you never made before and become that "you" that the memory of the sun promises you.

But the strangest thing that happens with the Sellback is its binary correlate -- the Buyback. You come across a record you once had that you once had determined that you hated and all of a sudden you redetermine, anew, that you might possibly love it (or have loved it and didn't know it at the time, or never gave yourself the chance to love it, or were blind to your love of it, or that you weren't advanced enough to love it, or you were too refined to love it). And so, in the privacy of your own mind, with the true embarrassment that can only be the personalized experience of someone recognizing something in themselves that no one else could ever have the subjective knowledge to reveal, you add the Buyback record into the pile of records that the $90 post-it will cash out for you.

----

All of the above is my preamble to a VERY strange record I once tried to love but truly hated -- in my late 20's -- that I sold back -- in my early 30's (as you can see, I endured this conflict for a few years) -- that I recently bought back -- at 40. The record is Keith Jarrett and Jack Dejohnette's Ruta and Daitya, a 1973 post-fusion noodle space spirit empty mind dharma jazz session. Drums, Rhodes, Flutes, Chants, all that cool stuff (or stupid stuff, depending on late 20's, early 30's, 40 mindset). These guys were post Electrice Miles, Post Charles Lloyd at Monterey, and probably ecstatic to go to Oslo, Norway, and make a gorgeous sounding record in a pristine studio with the attentive detail of classical musician sound and a label ready to take jazz to somewhere non-jazz. So, what happens, when I buy back this curiosity? Well, I LOVE it. Egads. Is that me? Is this me? Am I now a you to my me because of what I now know?

Here's the track that does it for me -- You Know, You Know (interestingly, this is the name of my favorite Mahavishnu Orchestra Track, too, also slow and simple and brooding and bursting, just like this, with a sense that the knowledge one knows is the knowledge one ought to have always known). Perhaps this song is the Sellback/Buyback dilemma perfectly named -- you sell back what you know, and you buyback what you have already known. You Know (once you buy/sell), You Know (second you buy again).

-----

The world is what we know and have always returned to have known, you know? Yes, you do know, if you are me. If you are you, only you know your hates that you may return to love.

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.

-----

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

-----

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!)

-----

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...