Sunday night at the Apohadion
KURT WEISMAN Even this late in human history, a bluesman can apparently still make a deal with the devil. The narrator of "Rainbow Blues" has sold his soul in exchange for extraordinary powers of vision (this blues' turnarounds are little holographic movies that seem to step outside the song's time, rainbows whose arcs unfold kind of perpendicularly to the staff paper (though this blues rolls forwards not left-to-right but like a country road going under you (the melody is sweet, but the singer's questions are kind of chilling for anyone who's been tempted to ask of their imagination more than God gives freely, or who wonders whose voice, exactly, is speaking through them
ROBERT STILLMAN'S "HORSES" Kind of hard for me to separate the music from the pathos of the had-a-bright-future-in-an-advanced-kind-of-jazz-but-walked-away narrative, especially since I like getting my socks knocked off by advanced kinds of jazz (like An Introduction to Kalifactors, for example). In my favorite music, many players' lines seem to be coordinated as if in a living intelligence, but when the many lines really are coordinated by a single musical being, the unity loses its appeal; the magic is all in the as if. (I managed to suspend this prejudice when I closed my eyes, but it's hard not to watch a one-man band—the real-time production of Horses is pretty unique, as human actions go—and being a spectacle does seem to be part of the point: Horses refers to an era, real or imagined, of fly-by-night novelty entertainers (though why Horses' music is so somber is beyond me; I can't imagine it would have lasted long in the bygone marketplaces it posits (interesting that Stillman will play-act the Royal Nonesuch in this icy fashion, but refuse to flaunt his talent in a way that would actually have the vulgar appeal of an itinerant showman
MICAH BLUE SMALDONE Though I've known Micah for a while, I'd somehow never heard him play. Living in Portland, one gets used to responding politely to one's friends' performances, but on this night I needed neither tact nor artifice, for, as it turns out, Micah is one of the real guys and requires none of our nepotism. Hilary once told me, "People say that Micah has the voice of an angel." I now understand her to mean that Micah is a righteous, destroying angel who scares the shit out of his audience. You feel like he's watching you burn in hell, and he's wicked angry. His 12-string sounds like a machine, some tank from the Great War, a combine rolling through the grain, capable of mangling the body of a careless farmhand. It would be a mistake to say that Micah has "peeped into the heart of man" or something, for the evil in these songs is not buried in the breast, but embodied in things people do (like when the murderer raises his dagger, the evil's pretty much right there). I am still spooked by the way Micah's face looked for a second.
"Whatever turns the soul inward on itself, tends to concenter its forces, and to fit it for greater and stronger flights of science." (Edmund Burke, preface to the second edition of A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1759)
2 comments:
A few things on the Bobby section: lines-coordinated-by-single-intelligence part: You're thinking of jazz (of a jazz ideal) because you want Rob to be playing jazz saxophone. Surely you are untroubled by Bach (though much of it is also executed by a single performer). Or the one-man-band of the overdubbing recording artist. Look: I understand. I have a lot of Stillman-plays-saxophone-again fantasies (so do his parents) but: Kurt could've been the best trombone player of his generation too. What can you do?
As for the darkness of Rob's shit: I don't know it seems natural to me. It's a lot like Elliott Smith. I like the act.
"As a matter of fact it's all dark."
Oh jeez. Worm city
You're thinking of jazz (of a jazz ideal) Maybe this is a jazz ideal, but the many-as-wobbling-one this occurs to me while listening to rock. Jazz I guess is a pretty broad field, and sometimes there's a real group jam, sometimes there's perceptible counterpoint, and sometimes it's a matter of checking in every couple bars but mostly being ballsy about aggressively negating groove. I heard this Styx song on the radio the other day, and it was like going into this thinking church on a monorail, but it's not like each guy was thinking of this church, he was just playing his part. Or "Tell Me Why"--it's always reminded me of skating around a roller rink, collecting high-fives as you go. But the rhythms only get to live because the players have different understandings of time.
because you want Rob to be playing jazz saxophone I don't know if I want this. I do like to have my ears kind of overdriven by excess content, and a saxophone can provide that. At the show my fantasy was a solo Rhodes improvisation. And I do desperately want DIY startup venues like the Apohadion to dare to present music, maybe jazz, that dares to be musically literate. That's something I really respect about Rob, and that's encouraging about his success in the indie scene--a slumming amateurism typically carries the day, so it's nice to see brains and ears getting some cred. Maybe our generation's children will drop out of this scene and only want to play at Zachary's at the Holiday Inn.
Surely you are untroubled by Bach (though much of it is also executed by a single performer) To say that I am untroubled by Bach would be an understatement. (Glenn Gould's Bach does make me feel uncomfortable.) Maybe it was a matter of Rob's lines not being different enough to create something fractal and webby? I think something can happen where doubling can ultimately be subtractive. Like if the two aren't really two, if there's not enough space between them, the unity feels forced. Like this Zappa song on, I think, You Are What You Is, where his shredding is pretty much perfectly tracked by xylophone. It's pretty clear that Zappa (or someone) went back and transcribed the improvisation for the mallet player, who's really good at reading. It sounds miraculous at first, but when you realize where the unity comes from, the correspondences seem less divine. (With respect to lines coordinated by a single intelligence, in Bach's case, the single intelligence is probably God.)
Or the one-man-band of the overdubbing recording artist Am I untroubled by this? I think the most successful self-recordings are ones where the artist manages to sound different from himself, where some of the tracks manage to escape the musical personality of the artist, and not everything bears the same stamp.
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