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.

....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.

-----

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...