More immediate, though, was the impact of what had now caught my attention in the “Wild Card” drawing, the wishbone above the masthead’s ribs. It was this that my collarbones vibrated in affinity with, humming like sympathetic strings on a sitar. No matter how whimsical or wistful, I couldn’t help noticing, it was a wishbone as black as the sun, as though to acknowledge wish’s role were a dark admission, which in fact it was. The fact that it was was a fact I couldn’t get over, though I made my peace with it by way of a Dixonian recourse to flub effects, extenuating breath into what gave sound to my exasperation. Nothing could’ve been more slick than our midnight creep but Bl’under blew with me now and again. Mishaps would occur, I said or let Bl’under say, wish otherwise though we might.
Dinosaurs and birds popped into my head, the thought of them having wishbones in common. The wishbone struck me now as an emblem not necessarily of extinction, a harbinger of ostensible extinction evolved into flight. A furcula technically speaking (Latin for “little fork”), it was eponymously the fork in the road leading toward one or the other. Where there’s a fork there’s a chance I told myself, admittedly wishful but not, I hoped, overly so.
It was a quick train of thought, feather and scale. Almost before I knew it, the horn emitted a Bowie-esque ratchet of sound, a careening squib that had a Dixonian contour as well, shades of November 1981. Feather outran scale, run reigning supreme, skid’s indigeneity to squib newly audible, flight’s tangential drift. Drennette went back to sticks to keep flight in line, upping the tempo after an onslaught of rolls that announced a new-day disposition tending toward all-out sprint (scale train, feather train). Scale to Drennette’s feather, I lagged ever so slightly, a syncopic microbeat behind the beat, an ever so exactingly maintained messianic stagger, the gap, looking forward, saving grace turned out to be.
Aunt Nancy jumped on the new tempo right away. The fingers of her right hand scurried back and forth across the strings, those of her left scurried up and down. It was an avian pulse if there ever was one. She bore down, biting her bottom lip as she played, as though the pulse, the proverbial bird in hand, would fly away were she not to or did indeed, from moment to moment, fly away, notwithstanding she did. The flying, flown altercation she laid under it all gave the music wheels if not wings, legs and feet if not wheels. Djamilaa prodded us with pianistic chirp.
Hearing the buildup and sensing we’d soon crescendo, Lambert and Penguin took up their horns, Lambert his tenor still, Penguin soprano now rather than oboe. They saw me my wishbone wager and raised me a ribcage crown, blurting out the head with cairologic urgency again and again, four times in all. We played more loudly with each iteration and peaked on number four, whereupon I took the horn from my mouth and stepped back from the mike as Lambert did likewise, Djamilaa, Aunt Nancy and Drennette pulled back on the tempo and took the volume down to a whisper and Penguin, as the audience applauded my solo, embarked on his.
It was clear why Penguin had switched from oboe to soprano. He made a point, it seemed, of putting the oboe’s pinched, eked-out sound aside, its inturned embouchure aside, opting for a soprano sound as open as a duck’s cry, open as all outdoors. It was an openthroated sound à la Steve Lacy, with no tightness or constriction to it, resounding of nothing if not laryngeal openness, nothing if not esophageal openness, nothing if not, in a word, flow. He seemed intent on saying something about acceptance, something about flow bearing on depletion, departure, fluidity’s eventual arrest. It was a duck’s cry but without its frayed perimeter, the firm inside part of a strand of spaghetti cooked al dente.
Djamilaa, Aunt Nancy and Drennette continued at whisper level as Penguin started off. It was an unrushed, riverine amble they found their way into, Djamilaa now reprising on piano the Malinke way of knowing she’d earlier offered on guitar. Penguin’s accent on flow they backed up and embroidered with a subtle, sotto voce roll extolling furtherance, a felt, otherwise fugitive equation of brightness and time.
For all its accent on furtherance and flow, there was an elegiac strain woven into what Penguin played. The horn was somehow buoyed by sadness, a deep, thoroughgoing sorrow so abstruse it could only turn sanguine, moan though it otherwise did.
The river, in other words, was back and along with it the lachrymosity Lambert and Drennette had earlier touched on or choked up on. Silly as it seemed, one couldn’t help thinking of Julie London singing “Cry Me A River,” especially if one had, as I had, seen the movie The Girl Can’t Help It as a kid in the fifties. That she sings it as a specter haunting Tom Ewell especially came back to me now, conducing or contributing to a theme of payback and retribution I’d have sworn I heard coming out of Penguin’s horn.
Penguin repeatedly had recourse to an E-flat pedal in such a way as to suggest conscience and also to say (or at least to imply) that he too, as I had in writing the piece, wondered if prehistory’s grudge against the present were at work. The horn cried a river of regret, disbursing mixed-emotional strains of remorse and recrimination, as though evolutionary succession exacted dues, which evidently it does. Not since body first met soul had confession so wed complaint. It was a cry surmising gnostic entrapment, thug gnosis, the most accusatory mea culpa one would ever hear. Retributive spill was our fault but no less retributive it seemed he said, fossil fluidity’s ominous underside. That it was our fault was not our fault it seemed he said.
I took my cornet up again, put it to my mouth and offered punctuation, endorsing Penguin’s theme of demiurgic sting with a braid of mordents around E-flat. It was no more than punctuation, no more than a quick, ratifying run, but I too admitted fault while claiming fault to be a setup, I too took sublime umbrage.
Penguin shot me a glance, an appreciative gleam in his eye, going on as though newly fired up, made all the more adamant by my corroborative run. Newly adamant or renewing its adamance, his tone blended accepting with incensed, a tendency toward trill making its way in or having made its way in, a descending trill bottoming out into drone recalling Jo Maka, the Guinean soprano saxophonist. There was no way this would’ve been accidental. The river was back, decidedly so, running with quaint strain, uncustomary hustle.
Hearing her Mande insinuation expanded on, Djamilaa took to singing again or, to be more exact, semisinging, humming a song from Upper Guinea, “Toubaka.” A few words from the song’s lyrics emerged from her humming now and again, but mostly what she did was hum, a one-woman chorus commenting on Penguin’s solo. She sang or semisang from a position of elderly repose, wise, as the expression goes, beyond her years. All weight, all ministry, all measure endowed her voice, an endlessly calibrated “alas,” an extended sigh. Penguin now shot her an appreciative glance. Her voice was drenched in time.
The river had come around again. Malinke ambit had come around again. Penguin blew beyond the horn, the river’s quaint strain and uncustomary hustle prompting him to heave an arc of implied intonation not unlike a fisherman casting a line. This arc was Dredj’s arm around the figurehead’s shoulder, the feature of the “Wild Card” drawing that had most caught Penguin’s eye, an extrapolative embrace whose coo and consolation he now beautifully brought to bear on the horn. His new recourse to diaphragmatic oomph aired a light-bodied bigness or a big-bodied lightness, his eye also caught by the figurehead’s thoracic largesse.
It seemed all we could do to contain ourselves. We stood poised on a precipitous edge it seemed. With the merest abrupt move we’d erode or evaporate, the figurehead’s thoracic transparency suddenly at large. All we could do, it occurred to Lambert, Aunt Nancy, Drennette and me at exactly the same time, was hum. All we could do was catch, as it were, Djamilaa’s choral contagion and hum “Toubaka,” which is what we did, the four of us easing into it, joining her, an antiphonal consort of sorts, a chorus beyond her chorus or, all of us having heard the version of “Toubaka” done by Les Ambassadeurs Internationaux, chorus to her Salif Keita.
It was an immediately soothing hum
, a sonic lozenge at the roof of the mouth apportioning balm. Humming drew us back from the edge. We stood stout again, lodged resolutely where we stood, readymade remit, the fossils we’d eventually be. Hum’s vibratory dispatch came into collaborative play with solidity’s transit. It was nothing if not flow’s disclosure once and for all, an aggrieved emollient.
Thus it was that aggrievement and approbation ran as one. So it was we sang, if it could be said we sang, or, if not, semisang with our teeth clenched. Peal and ping rang from the keys under Djamilaa’s right hand as we hummed, as poignant as a Guinean guitar. Penguin worked and worried the arc Dredj’s arm inspired, a breaking wave, he’d have had it, as it broke, less a wave than a trace, audible to an imagined ear alone. The river and what it went out to were back.
Penguin leaned back a bit, mentally and physically both. He let himself be caught by the cushion of sound our humming had become, so relaxed he became all breath, all respiration, resorting to circular breathing as the music peaked. Circularity said it all it seemed he said, “What goes around comes around,” “Where there’s a wheel there’s a turn” and so forth, Malinke furtherance a dream of empathic escort come true. Breath was a ball rolling atop our Malinke hum, a wheel buoyed by and rolling on water, wind roughening water.
The ball or the wheel gathered momentum and the music sped up, Aunt Nancy’s bass advancing a jump-up rumble as Drennette’s high hat hissed, hum nearly brimming over, a collective croon. There was more and more swell to it, more and more lift as well. We rode a low-spoken undulance, borne or abetted by Penguin’s extrapolative surmise.
Just as it had as I ended my solo, the music crescendoed as Penguin ended his. Djamilaa, Aunt Nancy and Drennette again took the volume down to whisper level as the audience applauded. All the while we continued humming—quietly so, at whisper level as well. Once the clapping subsided an insinuative quiet obtained, an almost ominous calm. Penguin now joined our humming, the six of us ever so low-key yet stalwart, savoring the impromptu vibration humming had brought, the low-key visitation humming had become.
It was a soothing song our humming amounted to. A lullaby it might’ve been except its unremittingness roused us. We hummed possessed of alarm and assurance, an agitant mix whose intensification varied inversely with the tempo at which we hummed. We gradually, that is, hummed more slowly, curiously building intensity while winding the piece down, agreeing, without having to say so, not to return to the head. We instinctively and collectively knew that this was the way it should end—not so much end as fade.
Aunt Nancy, Djamilaa and Drennette eventually let their instruments go silent and we all continued humming a cappella. Here and there a few people in the audience picked up the tune and joined in, humming along with us, but it would be a stretch to say we set the entire crowd humming. Still, an infectious vibration seemed to affect everyone. When our humming finally subsided the audience sat silent for a while as though entranced, as though unaware the piece had ended or taken by surprise that it had, lost in thought. We felt we knew what they felt. Applause was beside the point. Yet when they snapped out of whatever it was they were in they rose from their seats and gave us a standing ovation.
We too were affected by the reading we gave the piece. I’m not sure I can say exactly how but even now it stays with us. How long I’ve gone on about it is a measure of that no doubt but I’m not sure I can more precisely pin it down. I will, though, mention something we’ve been wondering about. We couldn’t help noticing and now can’t help reflecting on the fact that, fossil fluency’s extremity notwithstanding, no balloons emerged during the performance. Could it be that the “Wild Card” drawing was preemptive? Could it be that the drawing, conceding to caption as it does, inoculated us? Could it be that “Molimo m’Atet’s Figurehead Consoled on the Revival Bench” kept the balloons at bay by rendering them redundant? Elated over the performance though we were, we began to wonder not long afterward and we still wonder.
As ever,
N.
30.X.83
Dear Angel of Dust,
No, it’s not that the balloons have gotten into our heads. We’re not Maxine Brown, we’re not singing “All in My Mind.” The problem is that it’s not that. It’s that the balloons are actually out there and evidently they have a mind of their own. They dwell, as I’ve said before, in a deepseated impulse toward caption, a deepseated captivity they seek to leaven with whimsicality—true to themselves, unable to help themselves, insouciant, insecure. They body forth inflated claims to translatability only to beg off or betray them, burst as balloons at times do. Sometimes they renege before the fact, backtrack in advance, decide not to show up. Sometimes they make themselves known by their absence, a conspicuous reticence one would need to be dead not to notice. But who knows? Maybe even then one would see or sense it, pick up on it somehow. We know they show up camera shy when they do show up. Could the difference between alive and dead be only that shyness?
I’ve been listening to “Autumn Leaves” on the Miles Davis in Europe album, a record I cut my teeth on as a teenager. The vibratory blade Miles uses the mute to make sound into amounts to a balloonlike adjacency, an off-to-the-side reticence or recoil I can’t help hearing as recondite presence and manifest absence’s mix or mating dance. What but the implications of that sound could so be there but not there, what but the balloons’ adjunct agenda, the occult itinerary none but they seem to know but that, possibly, not even they know? Miles’s recourse to flutter early on in his solo might be heard as onomatopoeic by some, the “sound” of autumn leaves, falling leaves. I tend to agree but I take it further. We hear the sound, in hearing it so, of a concession to caption, the hovering fall oblique afflatus turns out to be. We hear that concession’s glide into an offhand rumble, a sly glide that will agree to caption only to nudge it toward refractoriness, as if caption and captious were somehow kin. This, moreover, comes of a sound that could not be more introvert, more introspective. Shy sound. Sly.
I’d say don’t get me started but you’ve gotten me started. Listen, then, if you will, to the hover-and-dip, hover-and-dash dexterity Miles brings to that flutter, a not quite flight-of-the-bumblebee élan and agitation, buzz the recondite balloons’ masquerade. Falling leaves’ equation with not-quite bee flight is nothing if not a fractious caption, a lateral feint bursting with drift and flotation, border on tissue paper and comb though it does, nothing if not wind-aided cascade. That he can go, soon after that, from Gatling-gun staccato to quasi-whimper is what I mean by feint, drift and flotation, a tremulous resolve to be to the side or get to the side of besetment.
Not as blatant as Dizzy’s ballooning cheeks, Miles’s autumnal bob and weave imparts a balloon salience nonetheless, a balloon detour from Dizzy’s overtness and extroversion, a balloon extenuation or, to use Duke’s term, extension. I can imagine listening to this track thirty or forty years from now and still finding it fresh, the advent of my own autumnal prospect lending it all the more relevance and resonance, a time-capsule bubble or balloon loaded with decades of what won’t tell itself but does, caption after caption donned and auditioned only to be cast off.
Let me know what you think.
Yours,
N.
PS: I left out the good news. We’ve been invited to play at the Detroit Institute of Arts in January.
6.XI.83
Dear Angel of Dust,
Once again it will have come to nothing. Again we will have sat exchanging thoughts on what was to be. Again we will have heard music, albeit not music so much as music’s trace, music’s rumor, pianistic breakdown as an archetypal he and she gazed out drapeless windows. What stayed with us will have been a wincing, distraught right hand backed by a grumbling left on an abject keyboard, a right undone or done in as much as backed by a disconsolate left. We will have stood and stretched as gray, wintry, late afternoon light filled each window, a wounded look on what lay outside and on our faces as we looked
out on it. An archetypal he and she alone but for the music, aloof to each other even but each the music’s intended, we will have so seen ourselves but no sooner done so than drawn back. Something found in a wrinkle, something found in a fold, it will have been this that set our course and put us on it, collapse and come to nothing though it would.
So I thought, at least, earlier today at Djamilaa’s. What will evanescent splendor have come to I wondered as she stood at a window and at one point leaned against the window frame, her left arm raised, her left hand touching the curtain rod. She stood that way only a moment but the way she stood highlighted her long beauty, lank beauty, her long arms and legs a miracle of limbs. For an instant something jumped out at me and at the same time jumped inside me, a mood or a mix of elation compounded with dread. I saw what so much rays out from and relies upon, however much it shook me with apprehension: lank intangible grace, nonchalant allure, love’s modest body. It was the news of the moment but yesterday’s news as well, something aspect and prepossession seemed intent on saying. What that something was, as Penguin would say, more than met the eye, but it did nonetheless meet the eye. My heart leapt and my stomach dropped.
“Leave it alone,” Djamilaa said, demure as to what was at issue but sensing my mood.
“I wish I could,” I said.
The right hand on the keyboard prompted me perhaps, apprehension of any kind its mandate, apprehension of any kind’s fraught base. Thought’s ricochet played a role as well. Momentary angst was its immediate heir, an ungainliness of thought in whose wincing retreat one felt elation well up and right away subside. Fear of being caught out, knowing no way not to be caught out, factored in as well.
Late Arcade Page 5
