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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

....Like Sand Under Glass....

Eberhard Weber's 1975 album (is this jazz?) Yellow Fields contains the 15:34 track "Sand-Glass". The instrumentation, and the actual things the instruments play, begin in straightforward, nearly overly simplistic fashion, mimicking the form of the music, its undulation, the curved pulse, a slowly motioning wave of forward thought, aiming what appears to be nothing, (or perhaps this all sounds like it aims at nothing) -- fretless electric bass, drums, electric piano, soprano saxophone -- the song (usually instrumental pieces are called "tunes", but this track crosses over into "song" territory, capturing the flag of genre overseen by the guardians of musical categorization, there is nothing to "tune" here, only a singing to be sung through the frozen object of petrified time) barely moves, it's a drone, a repetition of each moment (which is sort of what every object is, isn't it, a thing that appears and reappears only as what it always only is), an ostinato, things that appear and disappear and reappear and elongate and contract and that are altered over time but whose basic shape and scope and intent remain as they always were.

Intent in music is a curious object -- not on the level of the "player", but on the level of the musical "idea" or "phrase". Where does this phrase mean to go based on the form it has taken? How is the form the expression of its own direction?

The song is hushed and appears fragile, it crawls slowly across some perilous surface -- a feeling of floating, or drifting, as though the thing this song is, in its fragility, is terrified to be seen, to be destroyed, it is only to exist under glass. The movement is more water than air, since it doesn't seem that at any point in time all movement would cease if the object moving suddenly accelerated and hurtled through space and crashed into a surface...

It doesn't seem that the disappearance of what holds it up will change the velocity of the world, what separates it from where it currently is and where it may be if everything beneath it ceased to have ever existed.

At the beginning of the piece, behind the ever-repetitive bass pattern and Rhodes chords cloaked in dusk air, there's a sound of a synthesizer, but it's not recognized as a sound that is "produced" through an artifice, a form of sound meant to represent the source of yet another sound. You think of an alien animal at the bottom of a quarry or bog that has, for the moment, awoken into the world, to walk the black earth in the black night. As though it wasn't in the world when it was sleeping, that was simply the image of space that had dreamed it, just then. I think of the giant sand worms that emerge in David Lynch's Dune -- the worms are made of the same substance of the planet in which they bury themselves, and they exist to consume everything that lives on the planet in order that these things become part of the planet.

The synth in "Sand-Glass" hides behind the other music in the song, its mutilated motif that of a melody sleeping, but that of a melody that has awoken the sleeping giant beneath the earth. The synth reappears at the end of the Rhodes solo, which has the feel of something close at hand, something imminent, to elongate a new distance between the sound of an amplified piano (one world) and the sound of a slithering depth that slips past us and pulls us away from ourselves (a subterranean future).

At a certain point in the song (you can see where if you watch the time go by, but the time seems to stay exactly where you are when you are listenining), the horn sound changes from that of a soprano saxophone to either a shenai or a nagaswaram. What you hear when this change occurs is an increase in melodic intensity, although what happens is not a "melody". The horn until this part in the music has hovered above everything else that is hovering, committed to nothing, lilting and treading even more lightly than that. But the change in timbre is like the change from surface to face, from what lies underneath to what is buried at the bottom of the world.

Everything has passed into an immediacy that can't be tracked through thought, just then (and then, then, too). It is a cry of the buried thing unburied, the hidden world unburdened, repression freed from the unconscious, the night made into the night it has always been.

Of course, the song continues, so there's time allowed to track things, to think them, to trace your thinking amongst them. Fifteen minutes for a song is quite a while, but in life, it's hardly anything. A drive across town, a walk to the grocery store, ten pages of a book, a paragraph of written words, a phone call to tell her or him how you feel. In the 70's progressive rock and jazz fusion records were generally filled with 15 minute, 16 minute, 20 minute tracks. It was a way for a band to say something longer than a song, more than simply make a song that you could simply come to know in the time it took to listen to it. Parts dissipated and dissolved, motifs established themselves and recapitulated after 12 minutes of departure....in pseudo-70's fashion, "Sand-Glass" develops, but I'm not sure it has parts -- or even departures, for that matter -- similar to its instrumentation and overall sound, which are of its time, but which seem to be from no time, or a time that knows itself and that is also unknown to itself. Like the sand worms from Dune, who can't know themselves, who can't know anything but themselves, it's a large structure made up of completely identical structures. It rises and falls, eventually, like the creatures who burst through the surface of the earth to announce themselves in space and time, but it's reason to be is simply that it is and that it won't disappear.

After the foreign horn fades, there's a Rhodes/bass/drums swollen sea interlude, only to be followed by a return to the beginning of the song...except with a double-tracked staccato horn melody that indicates some dramatic developments are taking place, at the level of structure, at the level of what the structure contains. And then what might be a "solo", although it's hard to tell if the fretless bass or the Rhodes is doing more of the soloing. But everything is controlled, is inside the container of the song, even when the drummer accelerates and is crashing a massive cymbal (his missive from beyond?) and the synthesizer draws down the moon, and you are too soon staring into the mute face of the moon, reflected in the dark, idle pool before you.

And then there is only the moon, strange as it is above us, as if it, too, is behind glass, perfectly framed, inanimately white, made of nothing but bleached sand, filled with the anticipation of an even clearer, darker, night -- one in which nothing can be seen, and everything is to be heard.

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...