Do the Dean

Belated "In the trenches" post coming later today, as well as a takeoff on that ubiquitous Facebook "15-Movies" meme, but wanted to get this online in a timely fashion:

My friend Dean Magraw (Twin Cities) is quite sick. He's one of my greatest and most admired musical inspirations. Please visit dothedean.com and send him a get-well message. And if I've ever given you a free lesson--*please* consider sending the value of that lesson his way.

We love him & we want him to get well.

"100 Greats" #070: Martin Grosswendt, Call and Response

A few weeks ago, while I was working on other projects, Martin Grosswendt’s version of Blind Blake’s hilarious “Police Dog Blues” came up in the iTunes headphones. It had been months since I’d heard the tune, and years since I had tried to learn to play it—in fact, the last time I tried might have been in the 1970s, when, listening to and watching Grosswendt play live at little coffeehouses on the North Shore of Massachusetts, it was just purely beyond my ken to figure how a piece of music like that worked.

I am sometimes astonished by aspects of my own musical good fortune. Not the “talent” sweepstakes—if “talent” means having musicianship come to you easily, then I must have been behind the barn when they handed it out: when I started playing guitar I couldn’t even tell when two notes matched in pitch (Dharmonia has hilarious—to others—stories about the anguish I would evidence when I got an incorrect answer in her Guitar Workshop ear-training class, where we met).

Years later, though, this led me to an awareness that talent is like a dry day in Ireland: it’s a wonderful surprise that makes life much more pleasant for anybody lucky enough to hit the jackpot that day, but it damned sure it isn’t something you can count on. Years after that, when I went off to a righteous conservatory and met a population of people with the sense of entitlement that always results from having things (even “talent”) handed to you, and started teaching and seeking to motivate others who didn’t have that natural luck, I formulated the aphorism (which I mostly only used when confronted by that sense of entitlement) “Talent ain’t shit; what matters is effort.” Because talent is based upon the luck of the genetic draw, you can’t count on it—and it can be damned difficult, for those to whom musical things have come easily, to develop the self-discipline and the just-plain mental guts that result from facing up to doing things that are hard. And boring. But you can count on effort, if you can learn to count on yourself.

No, I didn’t catch any breaks in the “talent” sweepstakes. But I’m happy to have traded very bit of any of that kind of luck for the astonishing good fortune I did receive—of hearing absolutely peerless music very early, very often, and (seemingly) always when I needed to. I have heard more absolutely transformative music, at more felicitous moments in time, than just about anybody I know. That’s actually, now that I think about it, why I’m a teacher of music: because I am so deeply conscious of the atypicality of my good fortune that I feel a cosmic obligation to try to spread that good fortune. I can’t make somebody talented—but I can damned sure give them the tools and the self-discipline they need to overcome any “defects” of “talent”, because if I could do it then anybody can do it. And I can make damned sure that my students, formal or informal, have a better shot at encountering just how much magnificent music there is in the world.

I first heard both the country blues and Irish traditional music around the same time: around summer 1973, first at the old Me & Thee Coffeehouse, a satellite holdover from the early ‘60s Boston/Cambridge Great Folk Boom. Those experiences absolutely changed my life: growing up in the boring middle-class suburbs (or almost middle-class: my parents had bought a home in a working-class neighborhood, and I and my brothers got the shit kicked out of us by junior-high-school thugs regularly until we each, individually, learned to turn and attack—a major rite of passage for each of us, after which it didn’t happen anymore), I had almost no opportunity to hear any music—there was no music in my immediate family—and certainly hardly any live music, with the exception of the folk and pop acts booked by the Arts Festival my father ran.

Hearing those incredibly visceral, idiosyncratic, and powerful musics, live in a room, eight feet away, changed my life. At the age for 13 or 14, especially if you’re an adolescent male, and most especially if you’re an adolescent male growing up in the boring-ass middle-class white suburbs, you may not know what the hell it is, but you know that you want to make that noise. The first times I heard Bob Franke, or Geoff Bartley, or Paul Rishell, or Paul Geremia play, it was the same—I thought, “I want to be able to make a noise that cool, and I want to be a person that cool.” I knew, as I’ve said before, that the music could provide an avenue to whole realms of experience and expression, and even more profoundly whole communities of people, whose existence I hadn’t even previously glimpsed. I even thought these musicians might provide me vision of a different, better life than the ones I could imagine.

But the king of them all, for me, was Martin Grosswendt, a tall spindly guy with lank blond hair who looked like the post-60s prep-school escapee he probably was. He had none of the affectations of some of us white boys playing the blues: didn’t wear the porkpie hat, or the sunglasses, or the all-black clothes, or affect the mannerisms or accent of a Deep-South bluesman. He was just a funny, articulate, obviously erudite guy, toting a battered National Duolian and a Stella 12-string, who played the country blues with more fire, passion, fluidity, and wit than anybody else. I loved that he had such command of the guitar style, but without the sort of studied (or mannered) self-conscious precision of some others—with Martin, you got the sense that he was playing the parts a certain way, every bit as complex, contrapuntal, and beautiful as Blind Blake or Bill Broonzy, but that he could equally well have played them six other ways. There’s a confidence that comes from having such total command of an instrumental style that you don’t have to trouble yourself with replicating the models exactly, because you trust your own grasp of the idiom, and your ability to get around on the instrument, that you can diverge from the marked trail and strike out cross-country. You don’t have to “play it just like the record”—you can be confident of your ability to say something new with this old music. This is tremendously liberating, both to be able to do and to be able to hear; it’s something that my old friend and musical mentor Dean Magraw, another hugely influential discovery from a few years later, equally had in spades. At the time, I couldn’t do that—I understood that this music was both technically and conceptually incredibly sophisticated, but I didn’t (at age 15) have the skills to hear or replicate what they were doing.

On top of that, I loved Martin’s singing—not just the way he shaped and inflected the songs, with all the bends and whines and microtonal inflections that the style called for, but how naturally it came out of him, and how much it didn’t seem that he was trying to “sound like” Charlie Patton or Son House or Blind Willie Johnson. Partly this was because he had something of a bent for the Memphis and Piedmont blues of Blake, Willie McTell, the Memphis Jug Band, a much more raggy and hokum-oriented approach than the tortured (and thus difficult to imitate) intensity of Patton or House or Robert Johnson.

But it was also that Martin just didn’t try to imitate: his vocal timbre was still that of a white guy with a decent education, his accent still that of a Rhode Island native. Somehow, by letting go of the mimetic/phonographic attempt to “sound just like” the Delta players, he was enabled to access the intensity with which they sang. He still sounded like a white boy—but he sounded like a white boy who was playing and singing just as hard as anybody on the old 78s. That was a great lesson for me—that what made the blues real was not your age, or your accent, or the percentage of melanin in your skin; what made it real was the quality of your experience, your effort and your commitment. Nature and nurture, talent and effort, genetics and aptitude—every individual brings different combinations of experience and resources to the table. I learned that lesson, and it saved me, years later, when various academic types who couldn’t look past skin color were deeply offended by the fact that I played, and knew, black music better than they did. Because I had worked at it longer than they—and because I had the extraordinary good fortune to hear these musicians at the right time.

And, at the same time, he had all the stage-tricks of a Booker White or a Charlie Patton: tossing the guitar in the air, spinning it on its axis or around his neck without missing a lick—I’m not sure he didn’t dance on its top, the way Patton did.

I carried an analog cassette of a Martin Grosswendt concert, circa 1974, at Bob Franke’s Saturday Night in Marblehead coffeehouse, for at least eight years after that, playing it in dorm rooms and job-site boom-boxes, on bookstore sound-systems and in restaurant kitchens. I have it still—a beatup, grease-stained Audiofidelity cassette which I’m afraid to play for fear of totaling it into spaghetti.

Then for years I went away from that music—got my jazz degree, wrote my dissertation, made my medieval CDs, beat my brains out playing catchup in the world of classical music. It was only after my degrees were done—even after I had rediscovered and began to recover my Irish trad music chops—that I began to think about revisiting the blues, about which I’ve blogged before. I knew that there had been one Martin solo LP—a nice effort now long out of print called Dog on a Dance Floor—but I hadn’t heard anything from him in years, although I never forgot his music. But that new-fangled thing called “the Internets” made it possible for me to find Martin Grosswendt again—he’s not on the ‘Net himself, but the Google had actually heard of him, and led me to this record. He plays a lot of Cajun fiddle and double-bass these days, but this record features tunes I remember from the ‘70s—meaning he’s been playing some of them 30 years. And it shows.

Perfectly titled Call and Response—after both the fundamental music texture that is a thumbprint of African music in the Americas: the preacher and the congregation, the singer and the choir, the soloist and the horn section, and also the fundamental way in which any modern player has to deal with a tradition that’s essentially 60 years “out of date” (whatever that means)—this record captures most of what I love about Martin’s music: the chops, the great slide and fingerpicking, the wit, the groove, the intensity, the impeccable (and hilarious) song selection, the great singing:

“Screamin’ And Hollerin’ The Blues”: Charlie Patton’s ferocious, and seminal, take on open-G tuning, from which both Son House, and later Robert Johnson, got their greatest licks;

There’s “Floating Bridge”, the hilarious, mandolin-driven Sleepy John Estes tune detailing a misadventure John’s jug band had, coming back in a Model-T drunk one night from a juke-joint gig and not realizing that the 1937 floods had taken out their bridge home—until they were considerably more than halfway over; best line “Five gallons of muddy water/I had drank”; and whose long shaggy-dog introduction I stole from Martin in 1975 and still use;

“Savannah Mama,” one of the only representations here of his wonderful take on the 12-string Piedmont blues of Blind Willie McTell;

“Going to Move to Alabama,” the mordant Patton/Lemon Jefferson party-piece in which, on this record, the “call and response” is between Martin’s own voice,and guitar, and the wonderful fiddle of Karl Dennis (about whom Martin himself says "He is a bluegrass fiddler, for which I forgive him").

Barbecue Bob’s “Mississippi Heavy Water Blues,” which recounts his loss to floods of house and wife with the same matter-of-fact bleakness;

“Pony Blues”; Son House's version of Patton’s 1929 slide masterpiece which became the cutting-contest litmus test for every guitarist in the Delta, like House, after him—and they all came after him;

And then there were also tunes I hadn’t heard him play, like the funky, three-finger banjo version of Dock Boggs’s dark “Prodigal Son”—which just goes to confirm that, in the ‘20s, while there might have been the most hateful divisions between black and white people in the South, there was really no difference between black and white musics (a point that the Coen Brothers’ fabulist masterpiece O Brother Where Art Thou makes even more subtly and eloquently).

And then there’s the tune that made me want to play this music in the first place, Martin’s transcendent take on Blind Blake’s “Police Dog Blues,” a masterpiece of musical and textual composition: funny, rueful, blindingly contrapuntal, and absolutely hilarious. Best line (about the dog): “His name is Rambler, and when he gets the chance/He leaves his mark on everybody’s pants”. As I said, it was my favorite of all the tunes he played, virtually perfect in every way, but completely impenetrable to me as a 14-year-old from the suburbs. But just recently, when it came up in the iTunes rotation, I happened to have a guitar handy (the revved-up National knock-off which I’d wanted for 30 years but had never, until I was a tenured college professor, been able to afford). And, astonishingly, the tune just fell out of the guitar and into my lap: tuning, percussive syncopations, form, distinctive contrapuntal licks. I even found myself singing it, from memory and with his phrasing, intact after 30 years. That’s how much I had imprinted on his music.

There are a few more I’d still love to hear Martin play live: his titanic 12-string-driven version of Lead Belly’s raging “Mr Tom Hughes’ Town”, the hilarious “Don’t Sell It, Don’t Give It Away” (by the perfectly-monickered “Oscar ‘Buddy’ Woods and his Shreveport Home Wreckers”), and the remarkable two-handed percussion part he’d play on guitar for “Booker’s Jitterbug Swing”—when he wasn’t flipping it up in the air—and catching it—between verses;

But hell, this is enough: it’s been a privilege to reconnect with this music, these songs, and this musician, which made such a profound positive impact in my life, so many years later.

Finally, there was the unexpected bonus—that the intervening decades of working so hard at other musics had actually given me the ability to play this one. It was a great blessing to be able to finally learn the Bill Broonzy and Blind Blake songs I’d heard from Martin in the ‘70s—the songs that made me want to play the country blues in the first place, but which, as a 14-year-old I hadn’t the skills (not the “talent”) to learn—and this time find them falling out of the record and into my hands. As I’ve said elsewhere, it’s a wonderful, unexpected, twilight-years reward to return to a music you loved as a kid and realize, all those years and many musics later, that it really was as brilliant as you thought it was—a tremendous validation not only of the music but of your own self, and of what mattered to you so much, so many years before.

This is the music that made me want to play the blues. That he’s a wonderful man is a bonus.

Or maybe that’s the point.

[NB: One of the nicest things about rediscovering this music through the medium of this record was to make contact with Martin himself, who—remarkably—remembered me 22 years later.Though he’s a brilliant, well-educated guy (degrees in semiotics and law, that kind of thing), and incredibly active as a musician, Martin is seriously old-school when it comes to self-”promotion: no website, barely an email presence. If you want this disc—which is probably my favorite CD of country blues ever, as I’ve only been waiting for it 30 years—here’s his snail address; tell him I sent you!]

"The Office" (workstation series) 089 (keep-on-keeping-on edition)

Meta: In this, the third weekend of the semester, I can definitely tell I'm back from sabbatical. Dharmonia's out of town, but so far I can still keep to the schedule that's shaping up: whereas over the course of the sabbatical, it was five-days-a-week of "The Office" series (charting research and development of the minstrelsy book proposal), and weekends were for "100 Greats", the procedure that's come into focus for the semester of return is five-days-a-week of "In the Trenches", with weekends for "Office" work and, when I can give birth to 'em, the last third of the "100 Greats." Even if the topics of the various series are different, they share reasonably consistent goals: to use this medium to try to boost the transparency of a public scholar's life, either for the morale or sense of solidarity of those in parallel situations--that is, colleagues, or for the (hoped-for) edification of those who are aiming toward this kind of life--that is, students.

So the "Trenches" series is an attempt to make-more-transparent the 5-days-a-week reality of teaching musicology to undergraduate and graduate populations; the "100 Greats" an attempt to both turn folks on to great music (the High Fidelity "Top 5 records" syndrome; cf the "Comic Book Guy" on The Simpsons) but also to try to show how great music might help shape, and save, somebody's life and sanity; the "Office" series to depict the process by which a large-scale project of musicological research might be conceived, mapped, pursued, and submitted for publication.

I suppose it's metaphorically apt that all three of those are still very much works in progress. That's life, I guess.

Back to "Office" work today: I will be waiting on notifications from the target publisher's outside readers for some time yet (at least another 3-5 weeks, I'd guess), so the only work I can/should do on the minstrelsy project would be that work I know I want to do anyway, regardless of the readers' favorable/un- reaction. So I'm filling in the gaps in some of the background reading:

• Robert Toll's Blacking Up, one of the important and relatively early (1974) studies of blackface. I didn't prioritize this in the initial Lit Review for the proposal, because Toll's book is mostly about the shows and their content, not their cultural/sociological intent or meaning (cf Lott and Lhamon), their roots in European carnival as well as African festival (cf Cockrell), their musical construction (Nathan) or performance practice (Carlin). And its focus is late: the shows only really became the focus of the idiom in the mid-1840s, which is approximately where Toll begins. I'm interested in the 'Teens and '20s, when the creole, improvisational, boundary-crossing street idioms that would be borrowed for the stage were first coming together on the Lower East Side;
• Lynne Emery's 1972 Black Dance, to which I'm returning, having previously read and note-taken, because the proposal in its final form identified movement vocabularies (specifically as captured in my target painter's oils) are going to be a key topic for analysis of cross-cultural borrowing; re-reading a good text in light of an evolved thesis is never a bad idea, because you see different things than when you are looking for evidence of a prior thesis;
• Leonard Curry's The Free Black in Urban America, 1800-1850, because another theme that has emerged throughout the research, particularly in the urban outskirts of antebellum New York (to north, west, and east of the city--especially on Long Island), is that free versus bonded and white versus black categorizations were nowhere near as consistent, impermeable, or contemporaneous as as been thought. The reality is that, even if there were not a great deal of mixed-race children born, outside the very low-income environs of Five Points, where blacks and whites, natives and immigrants lived, worked, danced, and slept together, there was a great deal of cultural exchange, and that cultural exchange blurred not only cultural but also racial boundaries. My crucial insight: that such blurring of cultural/racial/musical boundaries happened in rural areas--very much ignored by the scholarship, in favor of the more colorful, better-documented urban environments.

Gotta go to work.

[Oh, and by the way: if you're within striking distance of the South Plains, feel free to come out for this]

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Now playing: Dave Swarbrick & Martin Carthy - The Pepperpot/Sailing Into Walpole's Marsh/Bunker Hill

"100 Greats" #069: Charles Ives, The Holidays Symphony

Around 1985, after a crisis of conscience and career on a bridge in Nova Scotia, I had gone back to school at the University of Massachusetts/Boston, a concrete canyon of a campus at the south end of the Red Line, at the opposite end of which Dharmonia and I lived in Cambridge’s Porter Square. Given our poverty—voluntary, because either one of us could have gone and gotten a soul-killing straight job, and yet we both persisted in trying to make it work as free-lance musicians and music teachers—UMass Boston was my only option: tuition was $79 a semester and they had a department granting an undergraduate music degree. I met some great teachers there, including my mentor Bob Prins, who first suggested graduate school, and then Indiana University, in that order; Joe Dyer, whose gentleness and mild librarian’s manner concealed a ferocious intellect and first-rate scholarship; Dianthe Myers-Spencer, an excellent jazz pedagogue; Robert Peatty, a crewcut ex-Marine, formerly stationed in Japan, teaching East Asian history and now, I realize, perhaps the first Buddhist I’d ever met; and I also met some nimrods.

I didn’t really know where an undergraduate music degree was going to take me—all I knew was that it was the closest disciplinary concentration to being a freelance musician that was available. I certainly wasn’t thinking in an informed fashion about where I’d end up, or the long, complex, and infinitely rewarding journey that Dharmonia and I would take to get there. But I was starting to discover the places and environments within academia that felt workable and comfortable. After the days of my depressed winter at the University of Chicago, where I cut classes to read and sleep in the library, it was a wonderful and very welcome change to slog up to the top floor of the UMass university library, a reasonably well-stocked collection with coincidentally amazing views of Boston Harbor, and, on breaks between classes or before schlepping back to the Harbor Campus subway stop, to wander the aisles of the stacks. It was there, literally just by trailing my finger along the titles in the ML410s (biographies and studies of individual composers), that I stumbled across David Wooldridge’s From the Steeples and Mountains, a rather impressionistic and subjective study of Charles Ives. I would subsequently come to see that book rather differently, but at the time it moved me inexpressibly, because it captured the ways in which Ives’s compositional philosophy—contradictory, judgmental, ideological, but at the same time open, deeply compassionate, inclusive, and heart-on-the-sleeve honest—was a reflection of who he was as a person: a product of his background, terrain, historical moment, and personal experience.

Ives’s music expresses, more clearly than any book or (certainly) than he was capable in his own convoluted writing, precisely who he was, warts and all. He was a Yankee tinkerer and a secret lover of Dvorak and Debussy; a straitlaced Victorian who ranted about the “long-haired nancy-boys” and “pansies” that he saw the late Romantics and (especially) the Impressionists to be, but who also (secretly) paid the legal and bond costs to get Henry Cowell out of jail after he was imprisoned on a criminally unjust morals charge; a devotee of Thoreau and Emerson who—realizing that writing the music he wanted to write would preclude ever making a living as a professional musician—made himself a millionaire in New York insurance company, virtually inventing the concept of life insurance (and, for that matter, worker’s compensation) at the same time; a man who prized “manliness” and “vigor” in music and in life but for whose last four decades was virtually an invalid after a series of massive heart attacks, and who would break down in tears after visits by younger composers who he admired but who couldn’t get performances or even readings of their own works. He was an infinitely brave, infinitely contradictory man—both in his Memos (autobiographical and philosophical jottings and scribblings which are often hilarious and apposite but equally often contradictory and incoherent) and in his personal conversation—who said “I’ve never written anything I couldn’t hear” but hated recording his own music; a man who idolized his Civil War bandmaster father to the extent of turning George E. Ives into a larger-than-life myth and denying the influence of his college composition teachers.

To quote his disciple Cowell, Ives wanted to “live in the whole world of music.” Raised as piano accompanist for folk fiddlers, as church organist and snare-drummer in his father’s bands, trained by George in the European skills of harmony, theory, and counterpoint, intimately familiar with the German Romantic tradition and proud of his allegiance to it, he simultaneously concealed his debt to Debussy and Wagner, two composers who had an enormous impact upon him but whose public personae he felt obligated, as a staunch small-town Connecticut Victorian, to repudiate. He himself had the public persona, late in his life after the heart attacks had almost killed him and had ended his active period of composition, but was kept alive by the careful calm ministrations of his wonderfully-named former nurse and current spouse Harmony Twitchell, of the white-bearded cranky old Yankee (there’s a wonderful photo of him, age 70, glaring fiercely into the camera while clutching a canoe paddle, which comfortingly down-state prop had been suggested by the photographer).

But that was all a mask: a mask for the gentle, sensitive, idealistic, courageous, endlessly creative man that he was. Ives never resolved the conflict between his personal ethos of Victorian morality, the mask of old-Yankee idiosyncrasy that was imposed upon him by his younger ‘rediscoverers’, who desperately wanted to find in him a rough-hewn genius who would finally, after centuries of Europhilia, give them their “American Beethoven,” and his prototypically 20^th-century modernism. In fact, it was that fruitful conflict—the rough edges of his personality and artistic identity—that made his personality impossibly contradictory and his music astonishingly innovative. He never resolved that conflict in his personal worldview—in fact I think it’s that conflict which damned near killed him with a series of heart attacks—but at the same time, I think it’s what gives his music its intensity, its courage, and its power. His only peers in the century are Schoenberg and Stravinsky—both of them far more public, far better known, far more influential, the scions of compositional schools, far more extensively feted and idolized, but not a bit more creative than he.

He made C’s at Yale University, but unlike a much more recent “Gentleman’s C” from Yale, whose name I won’t even write in the same essay but whose greed, sociopathy, sense of entitlement, and pure unremitting ego have destroyed as many lives as Charles Ives’s music enriched, Charley earned his low grades honestly—by refusing to write in the way that his (Germanophile late-Romantic) composition teachers wanted him to. Horatio Parker, founder of the Yale composition department and a noted member of the “Boston Classicists” (McDowell, Paine, Griffiths, Parker), has gotten an unfairly bad rap in pop-Ives scholarship, mostly because Charley himself, in the Memos, says such dismissive things about him. But that dismissal had more to do with Charley’s frustrated (and unrealistic) attempt to compare Parker to his father—and it was exacerbated when Charley lost his dad at the age of 20, while he was still at Yale.

Charley tried, briefly, to make it in the world of late-Victorian “respectable” composition: writing a first symphony after Dvorak and a cantata (The Celestial Country) under Parker’s later-repudiated influence, and putting his virtuoso organ chops at the disposal of a succession of Congregational church congregations. But around 1899, he underwent something of an artistic crisis, concluding that the kind of music that he wanted to write, the values he’d learned in Victorian Connecticut, and the lifestyle, economies, and (let’s face it) disreputability of the composer’s associations were inimical to one another, and he went to work in the nascent insurance business—at that time (some different from today!) an industry with relatively high moral goals: e.g., promulgating the idea that a “workingman” could invest a few dollars a week in a life-insurance policy, and thereby assure a minimal living stipend for his family if he should be maimed or killed in one of the notoriously hazardous factories of the day.

It made Charley a millionaire, but it robbed him of the irreplaceable treasure of a lifetime’s worth of time to compose (say, 30 hours per week times 50 weeks per year times the 31 years he worked in business = 46,500 hours), and it meant that he wrote music at night and on weekends and on the commuter train between New York and Connecticut, and piled up the music in his barn and his spare music room. And during his active years of composition, the only people who heard his music were his bachelor-flat roommates, who thought much of it great japes & pranks; his saintly wife Harmony; and the occasional small-eared and tiny-minded New York violinist or flutist who he would pay to come out to Danbury and sight-read haltingly through the manuscripts.

There are two things that happen to a composer who is forced by choice or circumstances to work in this kind of isolation. The first is that she or he has remarkable freedom to hear outside the box of fashionable or “good” compositional technique—to try virtually any sonic idea that occurs, and typically to avoid the closing-down of the ears that academic composition can impose on too young a developing musician (Frank Zappa avoided conservatories like the plague for precisely this reason). But the other impact, the negative one, is that a composer working in isolation typically lacks the feedback from players—or from mentors—that lets them begin to learn the boundaries of the possible, and to recognize that player’s-knowledge might both help him get the effects he wanted, but also elicit the kind of feedback that made sure those effects were scored in sufficiently playable fashion that they could be executed well. Ives never got that latter feedback, until the far-too-late contributions of pianist John Kirkpatrick, who only began working with him years after Ives’s active compositional career had ended.

So he worked at Ives & Myrick during the day, and piled up music in his barn at night and on weekends, and (always anonymously, always generously) used his fortune to subsidize younger composers and their publications (Perspectives in New Music would never have debuted the hundreds of pieces it printed over the years without Ives’s subvention).

Dharmonia and I moved to Bloomington in 1987, not really knowing what we were getting into, scared but intrigued about the possibility of “graduate school” (whatever that was). If we’d known it would take 12 years, we might not have done it at all—but we also would never have met the great Buddhas and comrades-in-arms which the experience was going to provide. By the time we arrived in a hot July, I had already fought my way through the alcoholic incompetence and backhanded sabotage of the two associate deans whose every effort for the balance of the time we were there was aimed at purging the place of just such as we (it’s no coincidence that these two bums hated Tom Binkley and roadblocked him every chance they could get) and had gained admission, through the intervention of my revered teacher David Baker, to the Master’s/Jazz program, and Dharmonia (after a hair-raising audition with Tom, which I’ll let her tell in her own time) to the Early Music program. So we were there, and we weren’t gonna leave—and certainly not at the bidding of cowardly and bitter jumped-up accordion players and music theorists.

That same year I met the Ives scholar Peter B, who though only a few years older than I, was going to be one of my chief mentors, and someone I still look to for advice and as a role model. He’d written probably the best-informed dissertation about Ives, as a student at the University of Chicago, and he had transformed the field of Ives studies, both in adding to the information about the indigenous and specific musical sources tunes in Ives works, and more importantly by demonstrating, in the calmest and most precise way possible, the degree to which despite his own denials Ives had been indebted to the lineage of the 19^th century symphonists. It changed how people thought about Ives, allowed scholars to let go of the tired old canard that Ives was a primitive genius “original” (as if that was mandatory to explain his greatness) and in turn the stupid burden of “only when we find our ‘American Beethoven’ will our music measure up”.

That clarity—that Quaker-theology-rooted ability to see and acknowledge what was there, instead of what someone wanted to find there—and the calm and objective acknowledgment of the truth, are some of the greatest gifts he gave me. Peter is one of the bravest scholars I’ve ever met—not least because too many scholars are too cowardly, too opportunistic, too indebted to the power elites who endow buildings and sit on Boards of Regents. He showed me both the moral relevance and the pedagogical validity of being a true public scholar: someone who manifested the high ethics and the commitment to the truth-without-bias which scholarship is supposed to espouse—but which too few scholars, their personal lives inadequate to scrutiny, are prepared to embody.

Peter was.

I remember when Dharmonia and I were invited to his wedding, the first Quaker meeting I perhaps had ever been to. The Quakers are an old, old tradition in North America, and they’ve done a remarkable job of retaining the anti-war, anti-class, “speaking truth to power” strictures of their first immigrant founders (see David Hackett Fischer's wonderful Albion’s Seed for a fascinating exegesis of this intellectual heritage). And I saw that in Peter B: in the calm, the objectivity, and the unflappable and unflinching dedication to principle which he tried to teach me (I was a slow learner but a hard worker). Peter later married a man named Doug, who he’d met in the local Friends Meeting, and that local Meeting was, despite the resistance of the Yearly Meeting (the regional organization that is Quakerism's closest analogue to a diocese or Presbytery), sanctioning the wedding. As I understood the story, the Yearly Meeting had said to the Bloomingtonians, “we can’t sanction this,” and the local Meeting had, calmly and unconfrontively but with remarkable clarity, said “we don’t care; WE are sanctioning it.”

It was held in the upper floor of the local arts center, and run like any other Quaker meeting: there was a brief formal address by community leaders, and then brief statements of intent and commitment from Peter and Doug, and then we sat there. And sat there.

Because that’s what they do, in the Society of Friends, and have done for the past 400 years. There is no hierarchy in the Friends; there is also remarkably little dogma. There is simply a conviction that individuals should be allowed (expected, required) to rule themselves, and to make life decisions based on the dictates of the Spirit moving within them. And that, if the Spirit intends something, it will be revealed. Finally—and most radically and disorientingly, considering in the cacophony of most North American religious denominations—the Friends believe that the way provide room for the Spirit to speak is to sit quietly and listen.

What a remarkable thing: a church service, a community of friends, the celebration of a marriage and a new life together, in which the expectation is simply that all present should sit quietly, reflect, and await the Word. It’s as close as we ever got in North America’s Anglo traditions to the “just sit” dicta of Zen Buddhism, and it’s a remarkable experience and vision of how to be a community.

In the event, it was remarkable: people sat and simply felt (if others were feeling anything like what I was) grateful to be there, to be able to contribute to this celebration by their presence, and joyful about this union. The words that rang in my head all during that time of silence were, curiously enough, a quote from Rastafarian doctrine: Give thanks and praises.

There was a lot of humor, too: when, eventually, individuals began to speak, there were funny and loving tributes to Peter and Doug as individuals, including some ruefully affectionate reminiscences by friends and prior partners. I remember when, in line to inscribe the guestbook commemorating the occasion (a signature which felt like more than just a memento—it felt like a commitment) my great teacher David Baker, a Naptown-born and –bred bebopper of the Old School, who’d gigged with Wes Montgomery and written charts for Eric Dolphy and George Russell, was introduced by Peter to “my new husband, Doug”, and, after they’d turned away, shook his head and said “well, I ain’t used to it, but I’m workin’ with it.”

And there was one moment in which the magnitude and the beauty and the courage of what we were sharing snapped into focus: that moment when a late-middle-aged gentleman in a conservative blue suit stood up to speak. Peter picks up George’s story:

He gave us a hideous yellow glass candy dish that we treasure and leave out on display because we treasured him (he died, alas, more than ten years ago).

Anyway, George stood up, and it became apparent that he was almost completely overcome with emotion—he could barely get the words out. And you realized, at that moment, that this conservative-looking banker-suited gentleman, at that moment, to the Friends’ Meeting which was celebrating Peter and Doug’s wedding, was coming out as a gay man.

He said, stumbling over the words, “I am so grateful to you young men….Because…when I was young…we had to love in secrecy and in silence”. And it brought home both the sadness and injustice of that past history, and the joy and import of what we were all there to do.

And the entire room gasped with tears.

That love, that conviction, and that deeply American internal paradox between what we say we believe in the abstract about “those People,” and what we realize we feel in the flesh-and-blood moment of those we love right now, runs throughout Ives’s music. It’s the sense, as the great Hunter Thompson put it, of the gulf between what we are as a nation and what we could be, if we could “just keep the nation out of the hands of greasy little hustlers.”

There was nothing small about Ives, no “foolish consistency as a hobgoblin of little minds” about his music. In Ives’s music—in the tactile nostalgic beauty of Three Places in New England, the magnificent detailed sonic memory of Central Park in the Dark, the mourning and healing Transcendentalism of From Hanover Square North at the End of a Tragic Day—there is (almost) everything that--at the opening of the “American Century,” with slavery (seemingly) ended, the shadows of our imperialist damnation not yet looming over the horizon, the chance of a New Jerusalem still seeming possible--made us think we could still be great.

Ives believed that: he believed that art could make us bigger, richer, more joyful, more (let’s face it, he was a conservative patriarchal New England Yankee) “manly”—and that art that failed to do that was bad art, and bad for us. He believe that art could heal us. That it could make us great. That art could make us what the Creator had intended us to be.

There’s a beautiful, heart-wrenching story about Ives in Vivian Perlis’s wonderful and loving Charles Ives Remembered collection, late in his life long after he’d ceased composing, and had abandoned the idea of ever completing his planned Universe Symphony, a magnum opus intending to express nothing less than the beauty of the entire creation, to be scored for four orchestras playing from each of four adjacent mountaintops. Harmony tells the story of a beautiful summer afternoon in Danbury, when Charlie was “staring out the window and looking at the mountains, and humming and whistling under his breath. Finally he stopped, and he turned and looked at me with tears in his eyes. I said ‘what on earth is the matter, Charlie?’, and he said ‘The Universe Symphony—it’s all out there, in the fields and mountains. If only I could have done it.’

Whitman said “I am large—I contain multitudes.” Whitman had the courage to acknowledge those multitudes: both divine and earthly love, the beauty of the natural world and of the New York streets and of common people’s conversation and of the boys he desired, the colossal waste of Appomattox and Shiloh, the greatness of Abraham Lincoln and the catastrophic loss of his death, and the possibilities a true democracy might still realize.

There was nothing small about Charlie Ives, and the courage, stamina, and honest internal contradictions with which he struggled to integrate the irreconciliable. There was nothing small about Ives, or Whitman, or Stephen Crane, or Henry Cowell, or about the love, respect, and moral courage that Peter and Doug taught me.

I hope I live up to their example.

Thanks to Peter B for his clarifications of Quaker terminology. 20 years on, he is still (gently, accurately, wisely) helping me correct my errors of fact.

This post is dedicated to my great teachers.

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Now playing: Zappa - 04 Black Napkins

100 Greats in 100 Days" #068: Bruce Springsteen, Darkness at the Edge of Town

My brother-in-music Steve once articulated for me a thumbnail rule I’ve used myself to assess the quality of certain humans’ interactional behavior. I called it the “barroom test”; he called it the “jobsite test”—really we were talking about the same thing. He was speaking specifically of the way that some anonymous tough-guys behave on the world wide web, when the possibility of any meat-space repercussions for their behavior is remote.

Whether it be the 101^st Fighting Keyboardists who think that poor kids “should fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here,” or Dick Cheney with his “other priorities,” or every other cowardly suit who’ll send poor boys to fight rich men’s wars—or even just gutless punks overseas who’ll say threatening things because there are 4000 miles and an ocean between, Steve observed, “Well, I just used to always apply the “job-site” test: I figure, if somebody in a conversation says something that, on a job-site, would get them a pipe wrench upside the head, then I pretty much figure that person’s a windbag and I don’t have to take them seriously anymore.” It’s a piece of profound wisdom, a rule of thumb particularly useful in the rarefied world of academic politics (whose turf wars, as someone famously said, are “so ferocious simply because the stakes are so small”). Steve learned the job-site test as a journeyman plumber, I learned it as an apprentice framing carpenter; we both learned a lot from working in the trades—knowledge and insights that are simply not available if you’re never swung a hammer or hefted a pipe wrench.

In the spring of 1979 I had moved back from Chicago to the Massachusetts area (trying to shake off what I now realize was probably clinical depression) and my dad had managed to find me a job as a “carpenter’s helper” with a small independent house-building company in my home town. Carpenter’s helper is the apprenticeship analog: you carry 2x4’s, refill the nail aprons (this was long before framing carpenters ever had nail-guns or other hydraulics—the only power tool we knew or used was a circular saw with a rough-cut blade), go for coffee and cigarettes and Little Debbie snack cakes, put up with a lot of abuse about how anybody could be so stupid, and you shut up and watch and learn.

I learned how to frame a house that summer, from the concrete pad or block foundation to the roofing, insulation and sheet-rocking. And I learned some things that college didn’t, and couldn’t teach me. The crew was three guys, plus the company owner (a workaholic German immigrant whose occasional appearances on the site we hated, because he would instantly take over as foreman and make everybody work about 20 per cent speedier): myself—bottom of the food chain, shutting up and watching and learning; Brian, an Irish kid from Swampscott Mass who had been working construction since he was sixteen, but was still biding his time as he waited and took and re-took the entrance exam to try to get on the Swampscott Fire Department (a suburban FD post was a good gig for a kid who hadn’t gone to college: excellent benefits, early retirement, absent the “what the fuck might I walk into?” risk of being a big-city FD or EMT; hence the competition was fierce; I didn't know if Brian would ever get onto the SFD); and Phil, the master carpenter who was the foreman, had the chops, and ran the job site.

I cut 2x4’s, framed up studs, nailed off wall sheathing, and occasionally laid in window headers and footers (because they were doubled up, and would be covered/corrected by the window jamb, sill, and unit itself); Brian did that stuff, laid in doors (which really have to be square, but whose tolerances are pretty broad), and told me what to do on days when Phil didn’t show up in the mornings; and Phil did the hard stuff: ordered the sequence of the job, did the corners and any preliminary finish work, and—the master carpenter’s litmus test—laid out the spiral and curving staircases which were his speciality. Phil was a swarthy (probably Italian) guy of middle height, with a tanned bald head and a black goatee, and he’d drink at least one and sometimes two 1-quart “40s” of Miller beer every lunchtime; I realize-now, belatedly, that he was probably a “maintaining” alcoholic. Phil's entire vocabulary for describing various degrees of measurement precision depended upon references to the female anatomy, but by God he was a craftsman, though—never needed a blueprint, seldom drew out a sketch, measured-and-cut casually and as if his mind was on other things. And his staircases—stringers, risers, treads, nosing, and winders—were beautiful and true.Among other things, we built six duplexes in 8 weeks that summer; they weren’t great construction (4-inch insulation, fibreboard sheathing, 2 or 3 grade studs), but still, 28 years ago, were better than structures costing 4 times as much now, when you can’t even get an 8-foot 2x4 of decent pine because deforestation is so much further advanced. And they’re still standing, and I can still drive by them on my annual visits to my home town, and look at them, and say “I made those. People are warm and dry because of something I built with my hands, 3 decades ago.”

I learned to build houses that summer, and began to make friends with the tough-minded, foul-mouthed resilience of people who know they can make a living with their hands. I also learned how to pass the time: I’d become a serious LP fan and collector 2 years before, while at the New School in Manhattan, and certain LP’s had been essential in getting me through the New School and my (abortive) year at Chicago: I’d come home from class in the afternoon, and put on Born to Run or Live at Fillmore East or Songs from the Wood or Never Mind the Bollocks or Le sacred du printemps (Monteux) very loud, and sing along to the discs while I did homework. It not only helped me cope with the very considerable stress of NY, and the depression I’d experienced in Chicago, but it had also, I now realize, been my first intensive training in phonographic listening, and it served me in good stead working in the West Texas oilfields and, later, the Massachusetts job sites (and, still later, in the restaurant kitchens and behind the bookstore counters).

I learned to come on the job site in the morning (we’d work 7am ‘til 4pm, to maximize the light—and that summer is also when I learned to get up at 4 and practice before I went off to work, because after a day on the job-site and a hot shower, I could practice about 20 minutes before nodding off), fill up my apron with the 10d nails that are the framer’s basic arsenal (and I still, 27 years later, have the framing hammer that I inherited from my father and used throughout that jobsite year), clamber up onto the foundation or up a ladder to the second floor’s sub-flooring, lay out and snap off the chalk lines for the walls we were working on. In “stick construction” you build the wall frames out of 2x4’s laid flat on the foundation—you can even snap the chalk lines on the subflooring, to make sure you’ve got the angles and dimensions of the studs right—then tie together the headers, footers, studs, and cross-braces, nail on the exterior sheathing for rigidity, and only then raise the wall. I’d get up there, tighten the double-weight laces of my “punkin boots” (steel-toed leather construction boots, which I still own and wear when I’m doing construction), and then I would start singing in my head.

This was long before the days of the iPod, or before that the CD or cassette Walkman. Phil would sometimes bring along a boom-box to listen to baseball games or to contemporary rock stuff, but mostly it was just the three of us, not talking very much (when you’ve worked together long enough to make a competent framing crew, you don’t need very many people—three is the right number for a 4-story townhouse—and you barely need to talk anymore), and move through the shit.

So I would sing. In my mind, I’d put the needle down on the first band of the first LP side, and I’d sing the instrumental introduction, and then the first solos, or the first verse, and then the first chorus, and then the bridge. All the way through the record. I got to where I knew those records so well that I could anticipate the clicks and pops and scratches of that generation’s vinyl technology (I could even anticipate, in my mind’s ear, when the repetitive skips on some of my favorites would come up, and mentally bump the needle over one or two grooves to minimize the repetitions).

Bruce Springsteen had released his towering Darkness on the Edge of Town in ‘78, the spring I was at the New School, following belatedly on the heels of his Born to Run, which in 1975 had put him on the covers of both Time and Newsweek, invoked the infamous “I have seen the future of rock & roll, and its name is Bruce Springsteen” from Dave Marsh, and extended the legendary idolatry which Jersey Shore hipsters had held for him, first to New Yawk and the Eastern Seaboard, and then across the country. That 75 disc, good though it was, with its sprawling, epic, Phil Specterian and Van Morrisonian pastiches and echoes, probably was doomed to a critical backlash as a result, and it’s no wonder to me that Brooce took 3 years for a followup—how could you do Born to Run II?

So he didn’t: he made a record whose brevity, crunching hard-rock sound, screeching guitar solos, howling vocals, and raging, dark topic matter was BTR’s antithesis—BTR’s dark and bitter older brother, turned squinting and silent by betrayal and disappointment.

“Badlands” opens the disc on a familiar note, one of Bruce’s dependable anthems, whose text, imagery and block-chording piano from Roy Bittan are pretty much a throwback to the gilt-edged approach that had worked so well on Born to Run. But even here, on the track laid out as the reassuring opener for fans of the earlier disc, there are hints of new sounds, most notably in the roaring guitar entrances and traded-fours with Clarence Clemons’ booting tenor sax, which had been the most distinctive solo voice on Run. This is one of those songs that works much better in concert, where Little Steven Van Zandt’s howling Jersey-guy vocals also make for some great visual choreography. And it does have one of Bruce’s great lines, one that captures the guys on the corner and the jobsite: “I want to spit in the face of these badlands.”

The disc turns darker quickly, in the second track, “Adam Raised a Cain,” which inhabits something of the same doomed, raging, Old-Testamentary terrain as Steinbeck’s masterpiece East of Eden. It’s an intention that Springsteen acknowledges, in a song he calls “emotionally autobiographical” and which, in its assignment of blame not to the vengeful elder brother but to the neglectful father who sowed the seeds of that anger, and it captures in four verses and a towering guitar solo the cyclic tragedy of the stories told in the titanic contemporaneous noir films like Taxi Driver or Mean Streets of the ‘70s (the greatest decade ever in American film). It also has one of the great rock guitar solos of the decade, which takes off from a Jeff Beck lick into a sonic portrait of rage and loss. Of course it’s melodramatic—Bruce’s entire oeuvre, even when he’s singing “Tom Joad” or “Nebraska”, is melodramatic: because, when you’re getting physically beaten into the ground on a daily basis for the sake of seven dollars an hour and (maybe) workers’ compensation, you tend to see your life in pretty broad strokes of rage and loss, good and evil, Saturday night and Monday morning. Of course the rock critics (many of them) hated him—because if you haven’t worked 40 hours of hard physical labor for a lot more months than you planned, you don’t fucking know how soul-killing it can be.

Bruce, whose daddy was a bus driver, fucking does.

“Adam” was one of my favorites, but, honestly, I loved “Candy’s Room” the best of all. Probably, I know realize, mostly because of its beautiful and unusual orchestration: opening with Bruce’s mumbled monotone, over Roy Bittan’s hammering octave lines, and Max Weinberg martial doubletimed 16^th note high-hats—and then suddenly cuts off, for a screaming stop-time guitar riff—maybe the first rock guitar lick I ever learned.

The beautiful, mournful gospel piano of “Racing in the Street”—a song that three years before Bruce would have made another anthem, but which here is almost a lied: an elegy to one’s own adolescence, which opens in media res like a traditional ballad:

I got a ‘69 Chevy with a 396
Dually heads and a Hearst on the floor
She’s waitin’ for me out in the parkin’ lot
Outside the Seven-Eleven store

“Promised Land” is another that seems like it could have come off Run, complete with heroic text and doo-wop vocals, driven by Bittan’s percussive piano and Danny Federici’s skirling organ. It clearly takes off from the anthems of the Rascals (another bunch of Italian boys from Jersey), and Sprinsteen’s cornerstone influence Phil Specter.

Way back in the ‘70s, when this record first came out, somebody (maybe Dave Marsh, again), talked about the new sounds on the disc, particularly in the “wailing and humming” verbal glossolalia that opens “Streets of Fire” and closes “Candy’s Room”. It’s as if what Bruce has to say is too deep, too painful, even to put into words. And, it’s 1978, and he’d just written and recorded “Because the Night” (one of Dharmonia’s favorite songs ever) with the great Patti Smith. And the guitar solo that closes “Streets of Fire,” that takes over from the vocal glossolalia that opens the track, sounds like he’s flaying the skin off his fingers as he plays.

At least the disc isn’t unremittingly dark: there’s the playful erotic metaphor of “Prove It All Night (for your Love),” which boasts Little Steven’s great howling harmony vocals (Stevie’s presence as co-vocalist usually lightens Bruce up and improves the comedic quotient), one of Clarence’s great honking tenor solos (every one of which sounds like it comes off a 1949 Illinois Jacquet jukebox hit), and a wonderful Bruce guitar solo—this record, throughout, feels like Bruce decided “fuck the big orchestral arrangements, let’s just fuckin’ play”—incredibly inspiring for someone who was trying to find his way, belatedly, into rock guitar playing.

I saw Bruce in that New York winter of ‘77. I had never been to a big rock show, but by God that was a good way to start. It was epic, it was 4 hours long, it roared through every one of the great rock touchstones (from Ray Charles to the Kinks to Van Morrison to the Stones to the Rascals to Little Richard to Born to Run), and at the climax of the show, Bruce told a long, two-part shaggy-dog story as the introduction to “Growin’ Up”, over the beautiful filigree of Roy’s Alberti-bass piano; “I was goin’ to this Catholic school [crowd screams] and I got sent home for pissin’ in my desk [laughter] and the nuns told my parents I needed psychiatric attention.” It’s a mock epic, all about a crisis of confidence around the family kitchen table—where all Italian-American domestic tragedies focus—and Bruce is sent off to see Father Ray. The audience is laughing hysterically, and Bruce goes to Clarence, and Clarence says “we gotta go see God”, but first they have to go to Earl Scheib to get Bruce’s mom’s Rambler repainted, and they drive out to a “dark hill next to the cemetery”, and they go out into the field to ask about “Clarence’s Nakamichi and what am I gonna do with my life?” And there’s thunder, and lightning, and then I just heard three words: LET IT ROCK!”

And they crashed into the closing verses:

I stood stone-like at midnight, suspended in my masquerade
I combed my hair till it was just right and commanded the night brigade
I was open to pain and crossed by the rain and I walked on a crooked crutch
I strolled all alone through a fallout zone and come out with my soul untouched
I hid in the clouded wrath of the crowd, but when they said, "Sit down," I stood up
Ooh... growin' up

"When they said 'Sit down' I stood up."

I don't know of another line in rock 'n' roll that so perfectly captures both the defiance and the hope-for-escape that that music represented to me and the guys I worked with. It was the greatest rock ‘n’ roll show I’d ever seen, and it helped me understand why the guys I worked with, the guys on the jobsite who’d show you how to make a living with your hands, lived and died with BROOOCE’s music. Because he was theirs—he spoke for them. At the end of a soul-killing week of cooking burgers, or framing houses, or cleaning oil-field mechanics, or sacking groceries, or (if you were lucky) data-processing or (if you were unlucky) collecting unemployment—all of which I’ve done—on a Saturday night you just want to go out, drink a bunch of beer, and dance to a rock ‘n’ roll band, and hope that next week is a little better. Bruce knew it then, and, 30 years later, he still does. He’s still ours.

The disc ends with the title track, one of his first grown-up elegies: not for the lost adolescence mourned in “Jungleland” or “Thunder Road” or some of the other teen epics of Born to Run, but for the scarred, calloused toughness that lets some of us carry onward into adulthood’s heartbreak:

Well they’re still racin’ out on the trestles
But that blood it never burned in her veins
Now I hear she’s got a house up in Fairview
And a style she’s tryin’ to maintain

There’s an infallible litmus test for the blue-collar guys’ understanding of Springsteen: they call him “Bruce” because they know that he is like them—that he would drink the same beer they did, that his daddy was a bus driver like theirs were truck drivers and worked factory lines and did heating-and-cooling, or plumbing. Or worked framing houses.

I left that job around November, when Brian finally got on the Swampscott FD, and we had schlepped from Beverly to Chelsea to Charlestown on various sites, and Phil was laid up with a bad back, and I was finally able to get work at a bookstore in Harvard Square. But I never forgot those guys, or what I learned (and they taught me) that summer. And those houses are still standing.

I’m proud of that.
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Now playing: Bruce Springsteen - Born in the USA

"100 Greats in 100 Days" #067: Martin Simpson, Prodigal Son

This record will break your heart.

Of course, that is part of what traditional music has always done: it helps people mourn, just as it helps them celebrate, give birth, be born, and die. Martin Simpson has made a lot of great records—or great single tracks—in his career, not only on his own discs but also as a hired-gun/accompanist on others’ records (his work with June Tabor is a complete benchmark both in her career and in the Revival’s generation of English traditional singers). His is a particularly rich and particularly idiosyncratic artistic lineage: the line of descent from the insights of Nic Jones and Martin Carthy; their inheritances from Roscoe Holcomb and Jinky Wells and Bob Roberts, and the influence of A.L. Lloyd’s looping, asymmetrical, odd-meter realizations of traditional song; the astonishing free-spinning accompaniments and floating vocal phrasing of Nic Jones; the spooky, stark, wandering accompaniments and wispy singing of Skip James and the slide ruminations of Blind Willie Johnson. Simpson’s a fine frailing banjo player and that instrument’s uniquely West-African approach to picking (downstrokes on the downbeat with the index fingernail, thumb trailing on the short drone string on the offbeats) informs his approach to the guitar as well—he finds the polyrhythmic vocabularies, the modal bends and slurs, that link across barriers of time, space, and ethnicity, between traditional English song and African-American blues. He was a schoolboy-prodigy banjo- and guitar-player in the ‘70s English folksong revival, but has continued to develop ever since, particularly in company with other like-minded “avant-traditionalists”—in this respect, his time living in the Finger Lakes region of New York (an old, old part of North American cultural history, reaching back to Washington Irving and Fenimore Cooper, to the Iroquois Nation and Uncas and Chingachcook) was probably particularly important. It’s a beautiful part of the country, full of forests and hills and waterfalls, and the folds and wrinkles in the landscape would seem to mirror the twists and turns in Simpson’s own playing.

I grew up in the suburbs of Massachusetts, in a beautiful old colonial town with a long and honorable lineage of working-class, blue-collar, farming-and-fishing culture, which was (although we didn’t know the term at the time) rapidly being gentrified into a Boston bedroom community. There were still families running their own personal lobster traps, people still cleaned fish on the wharves down the street from my house, kids like me still worked the fishing and lobster boats, but the harbor was rapidly being taken over by ugly fiberglass weekend toys, and the high-school by guys whose sum total in life was to be a yacht broker and have a winter skiing condo at Mt Sunapee.

It wasn’t a lifestyle or culture I cared for, but I was lucky enough to hear Mississippi Delta blues and Irish traditional music, played live in a room, the summer I was 14, first at the me & thee Coffeehouse and then at Bob Franke’s Saturday Night in Marblehead (more probably at the latter, which had a much hipper and more discerning booking policy). When you’re that age, and bright, and bored snotless by the culture you‘re growing up in, and you hear real traditional music, played and sung by someone sitting eight away from you in a small room, it does something—it can rearrange the organs inside your body, move around the molecules and synapses inside your brain, and you’re not the same thereafter.

I sure wasn’t. The summer of 1974 changed who I was, and who I wanted to be. It took me years, and many twists and turns and peaks and valleys and folds and wrinkles, but the early imprint stayed with me. I heard the links between the two great musics I loved: black blues and white trad music—the voices of poor people who fought to retain a sense of themselves.

Prodigal Son features a cast of graying old friends, a modal chamber ensemble of strings and winds, and a few famous types lending voice here and there, who understand that the very greatest virtuosity is the virtue of knowing what to leave out. And it’s full of the eloquent guitar fireworks that have always distinguished Simpson’s recordings.

One of the unexpected pleasures of Simpson’s later career, however, has been the way he has gradually discovered a distinctive and expressive voice as a singer. He was always a fantastic guitar-slinger, able to adopt others’ versions of songs and adapt to others’ singing, and make his playing part of the bigger picture. But it would almost seem as if it took him the 30 years from his first recordings (1976, for the legendary and omniscient Bill Leader’s Topic label) to find his approach as a vocalist. When he sings, you can certainly hear Bert Lloyd, and Carthy, and Tabor—but you can also hear Skip and Willie and Nick Dow and Nic Jones. Maybe all those years as an accompanist to genius vocalists meant that, when he finally stepped forward as a singer on his own, that voice would emerge fully fledged.

Taking off from Tabor’s earlier model in her award-winning 2004 An Echo of Hooves, Simpson on this record goes back to the marrow of his own tradition, the “big ballads” of the English and Scottish borders. In these performances, of the songs he probably heard as a Lincolnshire schoolboy and a guitar-picker-for-hire in the early ‘70s folk clubs of London, you hear all the older elements, all the other influences, all the source voices, coming through in his own.

That voice is there throughout this record: absolutely distinctive, completely masterful, utterly ageless:

In his beautifully understated version of “Batchelor’s Hall,” a rueful American song from Appalachia, based in a Thomas Moore text from the mid-19th century. Moore’s Merrie Melodies was one of the most popular printed music collections in America, one of the first to collect traditional Irish song melodies (albeit with new texts by Moore) in commercial form, and it found its way into an awful lot of middle-class parlors and Appalachian hollers;

In “Pretty Crowing Chicken,” a triumphal return to his frailing banjo days, an Appalachian tune related to the standard “Greasy Coat”, and which comes to Simpson through the North Carolina singer Hattie Presnell and the great Frank Profitt, where he’s accompanied by a magnificent trans-Atlantic chamber ensemble of Barrie Phillips’s cello, Danny Thompson’s arco bass, and Andy Cutting’s melodeon;

“The Lakes of Champlain,” a North American version of a song that comes from Scan Tester, originally, but versions of which by Jones and Carthy both seem to inform Simpson’s. His version is swifter, and more dance-like, and more driven by his percussive frailing guitar, but equally powerful and wistful;

“The Granemore Hare,” which begins with a stunning taksim­-style free-time improvisation, that evokes Simpson’s collaboration on Water Lily with David Hidalgo, Viji Krishnan, and Srinivasan. This version, which owes a debt to versions by Steeleye Span (poor) and Dervish (magnificent), is sung much more freely, with the voice driving the phrasing and expression, and it captures, better than any of those other versions, the mournful sadness that lurks under the most fervent propounding of blood sports—and which lurks there because they are, ultimately, about suffering;

It’s there equally in Simpson’s “Little Musgrave,” which is based in Nic Jones’s earlier guitar/vocal version, but which has the balls to take on Christy Moore’s much-better-known version with Planxty—and win. And in his “Louisiana 1927,” Randy Newman’s bitter elegy to the greed and negligence that gave us the 1927 Levee Break ignored by Silent Cal Coolidge, and the 2005 ethnic cleansing of Katrina engineered by the sociopathic Karl Rove (the Goebbels of the Bush Administration) and George W Bush (the homophobic towel-snapping pledge-branding cheerleader for fraternities and war crimes). Simpson’s version of "Louisiana" takes off from Aaron Neville’s--easily the gutsiest programming decision on the disc--and, like Stevie Ray Vaughan’s version of Voodoo Child, fails to match that archetype (whose could? it's Aaron fucking Neville, for Christ's sake!)—but succeeds nevertheless as an honorable and courageous homage.

That grainy, expressive voice is even there in the instrumentals—the Renaissance dance piece “La Rivolte”, driven by Cutting’s melodeon and Phillips’s cello, and Simpson's own “Kit’s Tune,” which opens his version of Jan Struther’s great alternative lullaby, “When a Knight Won His Spurs”, set to the Baptist hymn tune STOWEY.

It’s there in the mournful resignation and gratitude of “She Slips Away,” an instrumental on the death of his mother, where the slow, sad keening of the slide says things no words could, and puts Simpson within hollering distance of the Heroes’ Hall where sit Blind Willie Johnson and Duane Allman, drinking whiskey, jamming on “Little Martha,” and telling stories about their mamas.

It’s there, most particularly and most heart-breakingly, in the disc’s centerpiece, the nine-minute Andrew Lammie, in which, like his mentor June Tabor, Simpson himself finally trusts his own expressive vocal skills to tell the stark tragedy of “Miller Tifty’s Annie,” who in the Beckettian brevity of the big ballads dies (is killed) simply for loving and being loved by the wrong man. There are no frills in the narrative and the accompaniment reflects that, building with sad inevitability over the bed of Cutting’s melodeon, only gradually adding Simpson’s slide and the balance of the consort.

Lord Fyvie had a trumpeter
By the name o’ Andrew Lammie
He had the art tae win the heart
O’ Mill o’ Tifty’s Annie

It’s not “like” a Greek tragedy, building from a single tragic error to an inevitable denouement. It is tragedy, of the particularly rooted and hard-eyed sort known to country people, who understand that suffering is eternal and ubiquitous, that not only gods or nobles, but poor people too, experience the pain of love that cannot win through. It has the darkness of Skip’s “Devil Got My Woman,” the measured, inured loneliness of Roscoe Holcomb’s “Wayfaring Stranger;” the tight-lipped cold rage against privilege and power of Tabor’s “Duke of Athole’s Nurse,” and Carthy’s “Famous Flower of Serving Men”;

“The first time me and my love met
“Twas in the woods o’ Fyvie
He ca’d me ‘Mistress’, I said ‘No
I was Tifty’s Bonnie Annie’”

One of the biggest misconceptions about traditional music—hell, about traditional culture—amongst those who don’t really know about it, is to presume that “tradition” and “experiment” are mutually exclusive phenomena. “Traditional” is not the same thing as “conservative” and “conservative” does not mean—at least, outside the psychotic delusions of the American political Right—an opposition to experiment, or to revolution. You can seek a revolution in order to overturn hateful new ways, to try to recover wiser old ways.

The best traditional music, as with dance, folk theater, and story-telling, is both abstract and concrete, both ancient and modern, at the same time. This is because no-one who lives close to the earth, the seasons, and the natural world can escape both the concrete details—the muck, blood, discomfort, damp, hunger, and cold—that the world contains. But neither can you avoid the mystery, beauty, visceral emotion, and sense of cosmic connection that living so close to that natural world creates. As Henry Glassie puts it, in his great Passing the Time in Ballymenone, a book like Ulysses or a play like Godot are both experimental and “traditional”: the mysteries and rituals of the natural world and of the human experience within each can be deeply symbolic and archetypal, and at the same time gritty with the human stink and physical textures of birth, sex, and death. Hence, Ulysses or Godot, or Gary Snyder's Axe Handles or Ginsberg's bardic Kaddish or Moby Dick or any/every other "modernist" work rooted in tradition, need not be "greater than" or "opposed to" tradition--it can be be a continuation, a new manifestation, of that tradition.

“Tradition” is a process—not an object: the process by which people over forty millennia of human culture (less the last 250 years of widespread literacy and the Industrial Revolution) have passed along knowledge, insight, and history down through the human generations. The difference between traditional culture and contemporary post-industrial culture is that traditional culture is grounded in the world as it is and has been, and post-industrial culture in the world as it is represented and fantasized. We are taught—we are programmed—to the fantasy: to believe that the only lives worth noting are those of the packaged media personalities whose foibles—personal, political, financial, and reproductive—are “real”, and that all other lives are somehow less real, less valuable. How else explain the Paris Hilton’s of the world, who have no talent beyond the (very real, but demagogic) talent of being noticeable?

The lessons of traditional culture, of the traditional process, are those of the “long memory”—of the human capacity that remembers when to plant, when to reap, when to marry, how to birth a child, how to choose a leader, how to read the sky and the ground and the behavior of the myriad other sentient beings who share Gaia with us and will still teach us how to live, if we will just shut the fuck up. And listen.

The great poet Gary Snyder managed to find the watersheds, flora, and fauna in Manhattan and San Francisco, just as present and just as eternal in those riverine cities as on the San Juan Ridge in the Yuba River bioregion, under the streets of Kyoto and on the volcanic ridges of Suwano-Se Island. The point is that the natural world is not absent from our post-industrial media-saturated existence—it is only obscured under the avalanche of shit designed to separate us from nature, the cycle of the seasons and the planets, and from our own bodies’ experiences—of birth and death, sex and death, and the mysterious visceral processes of being human. We are all—still—traditional beings.

This is what Martin Simpson finds on this record: the eternalities of traditional song: the way that—regardless of time period or language—the modality of the melodies, the grain of the traditional voice, and the eternal archetypes of the stories told, are both ancient and post-modern, both “conservative” and deeply radical. These stories were as true, their telling as stark, in the Scottish Borders, as they later were in the high hills of Southern Appalachia; in the Mississippi Delta as they were in the rich paddies of Okinawa. And these stories and songs speak to intuitions and visceral human knowings that, no matter how deeply buried under media, materialism, and the endless chattering noise of a culture that says “Forget! Don’t think! Buy shit! Sit down! Shut off! Be afraid! Do what you’re told!”, are still there. Joe Cooley said “this music can bring us to our senses”; Bob Dylan said “you can learn everything you need to know from traditional music.”

These knowings are still there, to be found in embedded in the genetic code of these ancient, and eternal, and traditional, and deeply contemporary songs: beneath the avalanche of information, past the calluses we grow upon our skin, deep in the marrow of the human consciousness.

This record speaks—and sings—to that marrow.

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Now playing: Martin Simpson - Andrew Lammie

"The Office" (Workstation series) 56 (maiden-voyage edition)

Another jammed day. This past weekend was taken up with:

Friday "fall break": which is only a "break" for students who checked out mentally around Thursday noon--for faculty and staff, it was a full work-day during which we all desperately tried to catch up);

Remarkably excellent pub session Friday evening: in a music town like Lubbock, it's a real watershed when the local music-heads, who've been going out to hear live music ever since Stevie Ray and B.B. played the barbecue joints around town, discover trad music and decide they want to hear it in the pub: when the cackling guinea hen who's talking through the quiet song gets shushed by a woman who's listening, and the guinea hen's male companion says something snotty, and then the massive ex-Marine who's also listening says "Excuse me?" and the guinea hen and mate depart swiftly. We sang songs all night long, and we toasted English Dave at the end;

Saturday work-day, during which I blew off a volunteer obligation because I fuckin' forgot it (shit), but during which the late-afternoon teaching session had some good new youngster players--it's always nice to grow the next generation, in case I get hit by a bus;

Sunday: three rehearsals--one for the loud band, a second with Dharmonia for a duo gig in Florida, a third with the Celtic Ensemble. All three good: by the fourth rehearsal, the loud band is starting to sound like we know each other plays--and we've already got a demo in the can. Nice to be in a situation where all four disparate personalities are gettin' their goodies without anybody having to bend too far--and great players!

Dharmonia rehearsal also great. It's a remarkable sensation to revisit a repertoire with a brother/sister musician that you learned together 20-25 years before, and realize again that the music you created at age 20 was actually good music. We didn't have the chops to execute it, in 1980--but by God the ideas were sound. Nice to have the chops now to play it the way it was intended to sound then.

Celtic Ensemble is working out really well. Our annual calendar has evolved so that the Fall semester is the break-in-new-talent, work on a small/light calendar, deal with the various service obligations (Madrigal Dinners, Celtic Xmas), and mostly get people up to speed period. Then, we hit hard in the Spring semester, doing a January concert of the Fall repertoire, and then jumping into a much more complex and elaborate repertoire for a second concert in late Spring. Also working on a bunch of morris dance stuff and lucky enough to have a motivated core group of dancers for the morris side.

Then the maiden voyage of the loud band: quintessential West Texas Sunday night barroom jam session: wall-to-wall bikers, burnt-out fraternity boys (on the downward slide since they eked out their 2.0 GPA and barely graduated), and a roomful of the kind of top-notch musicians who, around here, have been blowing out great music in bars ever since the 1940s. There's a reason that the great musicians who are born and raised in the Lubbock area wind up getting out as quick as they can: the music scene is excellent--because chock-full of great unknown players--but also incredibly demoralizing because the audience, while digging the music, is overall pretty much indifferent to the musicians' or scene's ongoing well-being. They're good diggers, but their ability to absorb pretty much any idiom outside the familiar grooves is pretty much nonexistent.

We played Meters and Bob Marley obscurities--and the band played great--but pretty much the only people who responded were the other musicians: the bikers were waiting for the next shuffle, and the burnt-out frat boys only recognize "I Shot the Sheriff" because they blared it out the windows of their boozing halls. But we played good--and there's something really gratifying about playing music as one-among-equals with your students. I started playing bars around 1976 or '77, before several of these guys were born, but I don't want to be the authority figure. As I said to the bass player, "There's no way you're calling me 'Dr Coyote' in the context of the band, because if you have to turn around and tell the rhythm guitar player his time is bad, it's not fair that you'd also have to call him 'Doctor.'"

It's also a pretty wonderful experience to be able to play all the diverse musics I rehearsed on Sunday, knowing that my job description, whose teaching--research--service ratios I insisted upon tailoring, includes "performance" and "vernacular musics" as principal research and teaching areas. So it's all research and it's all part of my job. In two weeks I'm going to go off and anchor the house rock band at the international gathering of my discipline's tribe. Some difference from the snotty "why is he even enrolled in our musicology program?" questions I got during my graduate study, because I had the temerity to argue that the music of someone other than Joseph Haydn might be eloquent, beautiful, and merit study. Regardless of the dishonest and spiteful actions of individuals who tried to chase me entirely out of this field, I and we are here now. The world of academic scholarship done caught up with us.

I'm reminded of a button Dharmonia gave me years ago, which I eventually had to stop wearing around my grad program's Musicology dept, because it made the guilty-conscienced social misfits on the faculty too uptight:

"Laugh while you can, but we will be in charge someday."

It's a strange (but very welcome) sensation to spend 20 years (1987-2007) with your head down in the tumpline, feeling like a Sherpa slogging up an Everest of requirements, seminars, exams, accreditations, dossiers, annual reports, and various other hills to climb, only to emerge out on the flat near the summit, and realize that all those years paid off--that you really are in charge.

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Now playing: Albert King - Blues At Sunrise

"The Office" (Workstation series) 26 (Quincentennial edition)

"The Office" at the (real) office. Trying to keep a low profile during sabbatical (I've already had 4 knocks on the door in the 10 minutes I've been here) but had a bunch of on-campus stuff to do. Self-made bookshelves, too many instruments stored here because there's no other space.

Lots of news to share but no time to do it now: two gigs to play tonight. Also wished I could have made this the "two-thirds and counting, bitches!" edition of the "100 Greats" (#67 coming up) but there just isn't time on the Friday before classes start.

Will just have to settle for this as the 500th post to Coyotebanjo. Thanks to all beings in the 10 Directions, and to the readers and commenters, who have made the writing possible.



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Now playing: David Lindley - Brother John

"The Office" (Workstation series) 19 & 20 (double-espresso edition)

Aug 16.

Barnes & Noble cafe on the TTU campus. This is a preferred workspace for me when I have to be on campus. If I'm in my faculty office, I'm vulnerable to the kids who'll come knocking. It's not that I don't want to see them--it's just that they can eat all the time allocated for own-work. Historically this is why faculty run office-hours, but with the insanely busy and on-demand lifestyle that a lot of the students (and the faculty!) maintain, fixed office hours usually result in no takers and a faculty member pinned down in the office awaiting those no-shows. Makes more sense to have office hours "by arrangement," to do as much using email/remote means as possible, and to work away from the faculty office. Of course this means that I have to relocate periodically, because once I've been sighted, then some percentage of folks know where they can find me.

This cafe is part of the massive renovation of the Student Union Building completed about 24 months ago. Prior to that time, we were mired in the 1960s Ag-school decor (furnace brick, ugly stacking chairs, and lunchtime options limited to sub sandwiches, barbecue, and pizza (which Dharmonia termed "sliders" for their gastrointestinal motion). This renovation, undertaken by the same teams of architects who redid our English & Philosophy complex, succeeded at the remarkably difficult task of matching the existing architecture, making it seem much more elegant, and providing modernized facilities of the sort that both incoming students and prospective faculty count on: post office, computer support, healthy-alternative food options, and, crucially, a coffee shop with a good cafe and serving good coffee. With the campus-wide free wireless, it's a nice place to work, while also being 2 minutes' walk from the School of Music, 1 minute from the library, and equidistant b/w my office and Dharmonia's.

Aug 17. Back at The Office, but later in the day, so had to settle for station along the front wall. Overcast day today with bits of rain: we're at the far NW edge of expiring Tropical Storm Erin, just getting unexpected rain, instead of getting flooded out as in Houston and the Hill Country. Late start due to three hour plumbing job this AM--not the plumber's fault, just pipes that, for TX, qualify us as an "old" (e.g, more than 15-year-old) house. Ouch!

Mostly working my ass off to get department, systems, and staff ready for start of fall semester. Any problems I solve now, while in residence, are problems I don't have to solve later, at long distance. After 7 years renovation, departmental offerings and procedures are actually in pretty good shape: we are finalizing the third part of a tripod revamping (graduate, undergraduate, non-major) and it's all pretty much done; that "non-major" renovation goes online this fall semester. Expanding de facto "adjuncting" (really, a practicum for finishing doctoral students) to teach Music Appreciation; consolidating various classes for greater efficiency; integrating more consistent syllabi, delivery, procedures, course requirements. Hoping it all pretty much works while I'm gone.

Still slugging away at the minstrelsy material. Almost through the re-read of Lhamon's Raising Cain; my own contribution (performance practice, context, and musicianship in early minstrelsy) continues to come clearer. Seeing more and more extensive overlaps b/w African-American and Anglo-Celtic sonic and visual vocabularies in this period, up to and including not only tune types and rhythms, but sounds, instruments, and dance moves. You can see these overlaps, syncretisms, and creolizations in my artist's works. 3-week research trip coming up, also involving taping for a banjo documentary and meeting with publisher's rep for the "100 Greats" project.

Apropos "100 Greats", friends and other readers continue to be very encouraging about the writing, most recently about Blind Willie Johnson. It's hard to understand one's own writing, and, especially in the immediate aftermath, it's damned near impossible to judge it. I finished the Blind Willie, which has been gestating for at least a year, and thought, "Well, shit, I dunno. Maybe that's just going to be one of the second-string near misses." And then various kind correspondents write to say "fuck no! This is one of the best." This is the most tangible argument for the inevitable and essential separation (preferably in two different bodies) of "editor mind" versus "author mind", a distinction that we try to teach to students also. In my observation, writer's block usually emerges from a combination of insufficient time or preparation, lack of confidence, lack of experience, or--most immediately and most tangibly--the attempt to simultaneously compose and edit. You write a sentence and a half, you run into the "oh, that's not the right word, let me delete that and think of another," and then you scroll back a little more and say "oh, God, that's not the right word either, I have to fix that one too," and you scroll back and get entangled in fixing something before it even exists. We try to teach students to free-write (close your eyes, turn off the monitor, recite into a tape recorder, visual someone with whom you're conversing, whatever it takes to turn off the editor mind--I even have one student who plays Tetris for a while before writing, just to shut down the editor mind) first, and edit later. Preferably way later.

So you finish Blind Willie, and you think, "oh, fuck it. Maybe next time." Then readers turn themselves inside out over it, say "they're getting better and better," and you think, "Oh yeah. Shut off the editor. Just write the fuckin' things; let somebody else worry about which are good."

Hence the editorial meeting, in NYC in September.

Hence also this experiment: an audio podcast of one such "100 Greats" post, the one on Lou Reed's Rock & Roll Animal. The idea is to imagine the same material in a different medium, one that could be used to complement the written essays. Though I've produced good radio for at least 15 years, this experiment brought home to me just how much there is a gap between what makes good prose versus what makes good radio--they are dissimilar media with dissimilar needs. Not sure this works--but in the spirit of the above, I don't have to know whether it works. You try something: you take an idea and you bring it into existence--e.g., you make something--and you worry later and in a different mindset whether it works.

Back on the docket.



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Now playing [nb: This is a fuckin' awesome trad record, recorded live in a room the way it should be]: Zoe Conway - Wild Strawberry Hill Live/The Horse's Tail