concatenating cogitation

My father liked to use the word "cogitation." He was a junior-high science and math teacher and then principal.


Tonight his word works in me while I watch the evening sun on the mountains after a spring storm and listen to the Craig Taborn Trio in concert at the Village Vanguard.


It was the New York Times that sent me into my study to find the NPR recording of the set.


For 25 minutes I've been listening to the first number, jazz piano so thoughtful and so thoughtfully comped by bass and drums that I have enjoyed just sitting here looking out the window and alternately thinking about the douglas firs slashing from lower left to upper right up the mountain in the first photo and about the paired trills of the piano leading into a melody in which it's almost impossible to distinguish immediately whether the notes are from the bass or the piano and about my friend Zarko in Cologne, a jazz aficionado extraordinaire, and about the quiet light framed by my windows and about the repetitive nature of this music and of all art and about the rhythms of life and about the coming years and about Taborn's ability to play two instruments at once on the keyboard, rhythm and melody, about Taborn's simultaneous patience and insistence, about the clouds sliding south to north across the tops of the mountains, about New York City and my son Tom earning his living there playing jazz, about whether Taborn will break the repetitive pattern that builds as it continues sooner or later -- there it comes, powerful chords put an end to the dominant rhythm and give way to single light notes, bass and drum coming to the foreground, about change and continuation, about thoughtful jazz and thoughtful minutes passing while the light begins to fade—


all framed by thoughts and feelings and gathering experience and enhanced by an Italian white wine in the context of a still evening with nothing pressing and an open day ahead with good work planned and big fat bass notes against tapping percussion and rocking and running piano and alpenglow sweet and deep and on and on into the night, 44 minutes now into this concentrated and baggy number and crash!—final chord and applause.

Barbed Wire, Jazz, Thoughts About Meaning and Life

Last night, while the Spanish Fork Rodeo came to its climax and Pioneer Day fireworks erupted across Utah Valley, I sat in front of my computer writing about the meaning of barbed wire. Gloria Anzaldua's poem about her existence as a border creature had me transfixed:

1,950 mile-long open wound 

dividing a pueblo, a culture,

running down the length of my body,

staking fence rods in my flesh,

splits me     splits me

me raja     me raja

This is my home

this thin edge of

barbed wire.

The Bill Evans Trio (Evans, Scott LaFaro, and Paul Motian) worked the changes of "Gloria's Step" in their first evening set at the Village Vanguard in 1961. They had played the tune in the first afternoon set and would improvise on its chords in the third evening set as well.

I thought how my life too has been lived in the dangerous, fecund borderlands whose competing cultures and languages Gloria Anzaldua sees as barbed wire.

What cultures? What languages?

LaFaro thought his way through a long solo, Evans commenting now and then, Motian laying down the path they're treading.

I looked up at my brother's footprints. They hang on the wall like an icon. Days before he died of pneumocystis pneumonia in Boise, John cut these shapes in a cardboard box. He lined his shoes with the cutouts, the shoes he wore while cooking at the T & A Cafe, the grease-spattered shoes whose soles had cracked across.

John lived in borderlands of his own.

I lined the shapes of his feet with large postcards Zarko gave me the year I spent at the University of Tübingen working on my book about Freemasonry and the German novel. The postcards are themselves drawings of feet, done by Zarko's friend Miroslav Mandic who was walking from   the Slovenian home of France Preseren, an early 19th-century poet, to Tübingen, the home of Friedrich Hölderlin, a German contemporary of Preseren.

It was with Zarko that I first read Peter Handke: Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied.

Last night I looked at the feet on the wall and wondered about the path of my life. What if John had not been gay? What if we hadn't grown up Mormon? What if I hadn't met Zarko? What if I hadn't found jazz? What if I weren't the father of Ben and Tim and Tom and Maren and Sam and Nate and Joe? What if I still believed in God?

I do believe. 

Just not in absolutes.

I understand the actor in "The Great Fall" who "worships" in the church he comes upon while walking. Meaning comes from form. Form comes from the hands of an artist. Repetition is meaning. The frame holds absence in the shape of feet over the representations of feet and walking. The Great Fall is from the first and second gentle walking. The Great Fall is out of and into language. Each step is a falling caught by a foot and then by the other foot. Walking is falling and standing. Life is walking.

Conflicting Thoughts/Feelings

It has been an almost unbearably beautiful evening.

The light, of course, has a lot to do with it. Coming now from well north of the desolate southern regress of the dark winter solstice, the sun's late-afternoon light on Loafer Mountain (see photo) reminded me that the sun had appeared from behind the mountain this morning at 8:30, rather than the 9:00 appearance of just a week ago.

More light! Goethe's last words. And my constant hope.

A thirty-minute bike ride this afternoon up Woodland Hills' steep geography landed me just in front of a snowboarder as he failed to land a jump he and his friends had created at the top of the highest road in the town. Nice jump, I told him as I rode past in my bike shorts.

Much of the day was spent productively. I'm working on a paper for the conference of the International Kleist Association called "Andere Umstaende: Erection as Self Assertion in Heinrich von Kleist's "Die Marquise von O. . ." The day's scholarly highlight came when I found this passage in Schopenhauer's "The World as Will and Representation," published just a few years after Kleist's story of a woman raped while unconscious who finds her way to a decent new life when she decides to stand up (the metaphor abounds) and abandon the society and family constructed according to a system that has no room for her:


 "As an extensionless point," Schopenhauer argues, the present "cuts time which extends infinitely in both directions, and stands firm and immovable" (vol. 1, 280).  He identifies this standing present (a manifestation of the essential in things, of will) with the "nunc stans of the scholastics" (vol. 1, 279). A person who wills to live in that present, desirous of an eternal recurrence of both joy and sorrow, "would stand," Schopenhauer writes, quoting Goethe's "Grenzen der Menschheit," "with firm, strong bones on the well-grounded, enduring earth" (vol. 1, 284).    Schopenhauer says that such a standpoint (and he repeats the word "standpoint" [Standpunkt] four times), a living in the nunc stans, would arise if one were "clearly and distinctly oneself" (vol. 1, 285, 1818/19), that is, if one completely affirmed what he calls the "will-to-live."


Light is good. Scholarly productivity is good. Lyn's potato and leek soup is good for dinner. And then, reading Mathias Enard's novel Zone while listening to my son Tom's new recordings with his Big Bang Big Band (tight, swung, thoughtful, and surprising -- like the Strayhorn and Ellington models), I'm struck by the creative process as essentially human, as necessary for humanity, as secular salvation in the face of a chaotic and often dangerous world.


Enard's protagonist, a conflicted product and producer of espionage and torture and war, is on a train from Paris to Rome. He spends the night passage thinking about his brutal, alcoholic life, about the bitter knowledge he carries in his briefcase, about family and lovers and comrades in war. He's no sweetheart, for sure. He reminds me, tonight, of aspects of myself, of traits and habits I wish weren't there. And -- surprisingly -- he represents aspects to which I aspire. What attracts me to this man, I think, is his honesty, his admitted frailty, the depth of his self awareness. And the beautiful bleakness:


“. . . nothing returns from what has been destroyed, nothing is reborn, neither dead men, nor burned libraries, nor submerged lighthouses, nor extinct species, despite the museums commemorations statues books speeches good will, of things that have gone only a vague memory remains. . . .”


He quotes Ezra Pound, what feels like holy scripture from a poet who was no saint:


To confess wrong without losing rightness: Charity
   have I had sometimes, I cannot make it flow thru.
A little light, like a rushlight
To lead back to splendour.


Light. Even a little light. Exercise. Philosophy. Soup. Jazz. Introspection. Cynicism. The honesty to confess wrong without losing rightness.


Unbearably beautiful.

The Blue Vipers of Brooklyn: Permanent Magic

 My son Tom was in town last week, visiting from his home in Brooklyn.

Tom's a professional jazz musician. He makes a living playing with various groups, including the Drunkard's Wife, Lapis Luna, his own Big Bang Big Band, his wife's Kelsey Jillette Quintet, The Dreamland Orchestra (featured twice recently in the New Yorker) and The Blue Vipers -- check them all out in the internet.

Tom brought me the latest CD by The Blue Vipers of Brooklyn, a New Orleans-flavored group he has played with for several years -- in fact, when he drove from Utah to NYC a decade ago he made his rent money by busking in the subway, where he met Billy Nemec. Their recording, rough and early, called the "Henry Jones Swing Trio," is still one of my favorites.

After winning a street-musicians competition, what were now The Blue Vipers of Brooklyn used the prize to record a fine CD called "Forty Days and Forty Nights," the name from a Billy Nemec tune. Check it out at their website.

And now they've released (well, they'll release it in the next weeks -- the NY snowstorm kept the original release party from happening) Permanent Magic, a new album that carries on the band's eclectic and sometimes uneven but always gritty and creative and jazzy and lowdown tradition.

The album begins with a clarinet trill that announces a slow, easy, and haunting rendition of J. Myrow's Blue Drag. Nemec's New Orleans' flat, slack, and still forceful singing sets the tune off from other versions, including this one from the New Orleans Jazz Vipers [click here], which is a fine rendition, and this wonderful version by the Wiyos [click here], and the early version by the immortal Django [click here]. But the Brooklyn Vipers, for me at least, create a version of the tune beyond the others. It's partly because of Nemec's voice -- which I find off-putting and extremely attractive -- and partly because of the way the group works the tune, with voice and then a trademark double, entwined solo featuring Tom's lyrical clarinet and Sam Hoyt's intelligent and fanciful trumpet. Again and again on this and the earlier album, those two voices create a single/double voice I haven't heard anywhere else. The word "entwined" is an attempt to think the simultaneous solos that embrace each other sinuously, respectfully, delightfully. And then Nemec sings the slow drag, the blue drag, and I'm depressed in ways only the blues can accomplish, depressed and delighted at the same time.

Tom's composition, Viperation, is the ninth cut on the CD, a fast moving, intricate instrumental piece that makes good use of Tom's clarinet, Sam Hoyt's trumpet, David Langlois' washboard percussion, Chris Pistornino's bass, and Matt Musselman's guest trombone. In a clarinet solo, Tom effortlessly reaches notes higher than any I've heard on a clarinet, the highest of which he claims is still a note short of Benny Goodman's "B" on a recording of "Sing, Sing, Sing."

There are additional delights here, eclectic (as I've already noted) enough to reach from Willie Nelson's "Nightlife" to a crisp version of Hank Williams' "Hey Good Lookin'" (Tom's invocation of Boots Randolph here is enough to make me laugh out loud).

When the Vipers release the album, buy it.

You'll love it. And that's not just a proud papa speaking.

Sonny Rollins Plays the Brecht/Weill "Moritat: The Alienation Effect

Driving through central Utah the other day, feeling loose and even easy, I listened to Sonny Rollins' album "Saxophone Colossus," recorded in Hackensack, New Jersey on June 22, 1956 (not long before my seventh birthday).

Critics all agree it's a breakthrough album by what Ira Gitler called a "colossal" talent.

And this critic (driving between snow-capped mountains and blooming orchards) shivered with a sense of the sublime -- according to Kant a combination of irrational awe and rational understanding -- awe and understanding in the presence of overwhelming nature, and in the presence, as well, of the Colossus and his side men Tommy Flanagan, Doug Watkins, and Max Roach.

"St. Thomas," first, Rollin's own calypso melody repeated twice and then investigated thematically (-- the thematic variation Rollins admired in Thelonius Monk being the basic modus of this album). The second tune is a jazz standard, "You Don't Know What Love Is," a plaintive ballad that evoked in me what my dad used to call "cogitation." Then Rollins' percussive composition "Strode Rode," named after a Chicago jazz place, drew my close attention especially when Rollins and drummer Max Roach start trading thoughtful fours and I thought how like a saxophone the drums can be, and how like drums the saxophone.

My mind relaxed when Rollins slipped into a song I know well from my German studies, Bertolt Brecht's and Kurt Weill's "Moritat" from "The Three Penny Opera." In fact, I sang along as Rollins stated the theme: Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne, Und die trägt er im Gesicht / Oh the shark has pretty teeth dear, And he shows them pearly white (Marc Blitzstein's 1954 translation).

And then there was trouble! Swinging the tune, even bouncing it, Rollins adds (or rather forgets to subtract) a note at the end of the the line that ends with Gesicht/white. Where the rhythm had been bouncing along with two unaccented syllables followed by two accented ones (>>!!, >>!!, >>!! >>!), the phrase is supposed to end with a single accented syllable. That's how the lyrics are. That's how the original music is. That's how it has to be sung.

And then more trouble. Rollins repeats the four bouncing bars, as does Brecht/Weill's original, and again adds, or fails to subtract, the note leaving "sight" the last sound: Just a jack-knife, has Macheath dear, And he keeps it out of sight.

Rollins keeps bouncing on: Sight Sight?

Now I'm perplexed. And when I'm perplexed about jazz I often turn to my son Tom, a professional jazz saxophonist and band leader who lives in Brooklyn (click HERE for his BigBangBigBand), or to my favorite jazz singer, Kelsey Jillette (Merrow), another professional from Brooklyn (and my daughter in law).

Kelsey,

A question about Sonny Rollins' "Moritat." When he plays the head he swings it in a jazzy way, even makes it a little bouncy, but it's still straightforward enough that a singer like yourself or Louis Armstrong or Lotte Lenya could sing along, in German or English -- could sing along, that is, till he adds a bouncy beat where the lyrics and original music break off. None of the other versions I can find do that ‑‑ Sinatra, Armstrong, et al. Rollins, in later performances, continues to play it his way, which jolts me every time I hear it.

I don't think I'm talking about thematic improvisation here ‑‑ that comes immediately after he plays the head. But maybe I am and just don't know it. Which is why I turn to you: what the hell is going on here?

thanks,

Scott

Kelsey replied almost immediately:

Scott,

I think you are talking about when he plays the melody and then starts to improvise early.

Basically, when the melody ends, there are still 2 bars (eight quarter note beats) before the top, or beginning of the song starts. those two bars are called a turnaround, because instead of the song resolving in a final and consonant way, the band plays chords that turn the music back to the beginning again. Instead of waiting for the top, he begins his solo early, and plays through the turnaround and on into the form of the song. Doing that gives a soloist a lot of momentum heading into his solo.

Kelsey

And I emailed right back:

Kelsey,

I'm talking about before he starts to improvise. He plays four bars and the lyrics require that in the fourth bar there are only three beats + a silent one. The last word of the lyrics in English is "white" and then four bars later "sight." The way he plays it, it might as well be "whiteness" and "sighted." He adds a beat. Then he plays the next four bars, and again adds the beat. Only then does he head into the improvisation.

If you listen to Louis Armstrong play the same head, you'll hear the difference, although there's a bit of talkover in this London performance (like the Rollins recording, 1956) which you can find HERE

And there's an early recording in German of the Brecht/Weill song HERE

I'm not trying to be a purist, but could you possibly sing the lyrics while Rollins plays his version, a live version of which you can hear HERE? What would you do when he continued while you cut it off?

And while we're at it, here are the lyrics with music (click on the music for a larger version) and also a link to a 1955 recording by

Louis Armstrong with Lotte Leyna HERE

thanks,

Scott

Kelsey and Tom and the rest of the Kelsey Jillette Group had to drive from Brooklyn to Ohio for a performance at Shawnee State University, so I haven't received a response. (There's a link to Kelsey's group HERE)

Left to my own thoughts, I turned to the effect the break in what I was expecting had on me. "Disruption" was the first word I thought. And from there, especially in the context of Brecht, it wasn't far to the idea of "alienation." In the service of making audiences think as opposed to feeling, to break them out of their trances, Brecht kept trying to think of ways to disturb expectations. When two characters, for instance, begin to kiss on stage, Brecht was apt to drop a sign in front of them telling the audience to STOP GAZING SO ROMANTICALLY AT THESE LOVERS!

Maybe Rollins is trying for the same thing here. And even if not, even if he's just loosely quoting the tune, he certainly achieved alienation with me.

I've listened and listened again. Thought and rethought. And I'll never hear "Saxophone Colossus" the same way again.

What the hell was he doing?

Zarko Radakovic, Writing/Painting a Life

In the mid-1980's I worked for a semester at the University of Tubingen in southwest Germany. While there I met a writer from Yugoslavia, living in Germanybecause his wife, a theoretical physicist, had a position at the University.

Over the years we have exchanged visits, have traveled together, and most important for me, have written together. Like no one I have ever met (with the sole exception of Alex Caldiero), Zarko is alive with ideas.

He knows jazz and writes about it.

He knows contemporary painting, and has, for instance, a book about his friend Julije Knifer. It's no biography in the sense we're used to, but an exploration of ideas that come bubbling up in Knifer's presence. With Zarko, I visited Knifer in his Paris apartment and came away with my head spinning. He paints only one thing: what he calls meanders. Black on white or white on black. Like the one at the bottom.

Zarko is a master of travel narrative. Together we once followed Filip Kobal, a character in Peter Handke's novel Repetition, from Austria into Slovenia, and later published our joint accounts as Ponavljanje (Repetitions).

He's a prolific translator, with more than a dozen translations of Peter Handke's work into Serbo-Croatian.

He's a former performance artist, I just learned this week. Belgrade about 1973.

He's a photographer (the photo at the top of this blog, of the goalie on a rural Austrian soccer field, is his).

He's a fine novelist, with six or seven works to his credit.

To my mind, each of these activities informs each of the others. He's a good novelist because he's a translator and jazz critic. He's a thoughtful travel writer because he knows art. Even when he's focused on one activity, interdisciplinary work is the result.

When Zarko last visited me in Utah, he gave an autobiographical lecture, part of which I'll include here:

Approximately fifteen years ago I left my country. Back then, in 1978, it called itself the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. . . . I didn’t have the least suspicion that in fifteen years, that is, now, my country would no longer exist. . . .

My ancestors were Serbian refuges. After the defeat on the Kosovo Polje, the Field of Blackbirds, they served as guards on the southern borders in the Dalmatian, Croatian, and what was then Austro-Hungarian hinterland. From there they moved as nomads to the fertile and sparsely inhabited plains of Pannonia, to Vojvodina – between Hungary and Romania. Several centuries later I was born there. I grew up in Belgrade. And since the late seventies I have lived in Germany.

Haven’t I always had something of the nomadic spirit of my ancestors in me? Haven’t I shunned every uniformity and every emphasis on a center? To be Serbian and not simultaneously some second or third thing on this always complex (unintelligible) Balkan peninsula – that seems to me today an impossible thought. . . .

Now the country has split into warring ethnic groups, of free movement in Yugoslavia there remain nothing but memories.

The war turned out badly for everyone involved; but even though political events may have made him "Serbian," he is very much still a second and third and fourth "thing."

Recently, a friend of Zarko's, Nina Pops (http://ninapops.blogspot.com/) has been painting Zarko's work, painting his life. Like Knifer's meanders, her complex, compartmentalized, connected and intricately related warrens or paths or lifelines represent the six decades of Zarko's rich life.

I can't wait to see painting number 7 in this series.

PHOTOS and MEANING

I've been writing and thinking (the two are almost invariably intertwined for me -- writing focuses my random thoughts) about photos.

One of my favorite writers, John Berger, has a book of poetry called "And our faces, my heart, brief as photos."

That's pretty much the crux of it for me. We're mortal. Our faces will disappear. And even, or especially the photos that might "capture" and preserve our faces are brief.

Take this photo of my son Tom playing at EZ's Woodshed in Harlem.

http://www.bigapplejazz.com/sched.htm

What does it mean?
What does it mean to me?
Those are two very different questions.

To me, to Tom's father, it means -- it's a means to see Tom, or at least a picture of Tom. It makes me wish I had been there to watch and hear him perform with his trio in front of the painting of John Coltrane. It brings back all sorts of memories and makes my mind race to the future when I'll fly to New York to hear and see Tom in early December. It means that Tom is working and can pay his rent. And so on.

But all of these meanings are mine. I'm the one reading the photo this way. Those meanings are exactly as brief as I am. They'll be here for a few more years if I'm lucky.

By itself, the photo is some kind of historical record and could be read in terms of the shirt Tom's wearing, the way he wears his hair. A reader of the photo might conclude things about the myth of Coltrane from the train that sweeps across his body in the painting.

But personally, the photo is as brief as our faces.

That's all the more apparent in another photo I've been thinking about. It was taken in 1966 or 1967 on a landing strip near Lake Powell.




If you found this photo and had absolutely no context outside what you see, you could figure out several things.

The red-rock desert landscape makes some sense; and with enough effort you might even pinpoint this as a place overlooking Lake Powell. The clothing and hair styles might indicate the 1960's, although this is an eclectic bunch. There's a lot of information to be read from the boy on the far left: a basketball player's legs and height and Converse shoes. His shirt says "Farmington Scorpions" -- this group is from Farmington, New Mexico. The kneeling man has boots and haircut that might indicate some sort of educated outdoor profession. There's an FFA cowboy in the middle of the front row. And so on.

The brief meaning I bring to the photo is more personal and much more extensive. The basketball player is named Willard Washburn. The cowboy is Delbert Slaugh. The kneeling man is a petroleum engineer. The man in the blue shirt standing in the center has a trading post on the Navajo reservation. The man to his left owns a car dealership and will become the mayor of Farmington.

I'm standing behind the boy in the red shirt, Larry Echohawk, who will become the first Native American attorney general of any state and will only narrowly be defeated in a bid to become governor of the State of Idaho.

There's lots more to be told; but important here is that most of the meaning to be read from a photo (there's no meaning inherent in the photo -- it's just a bunch chemicals adhering to a piece of paper) is tied to memory. And memory is as brief as we are.

Finally, John Berger brings this all back to the value of diverse or interdisciplinary approaches to meaning:

There is never a single approach to something remembered. The remembered is not like the terminous at the end of a line. Numerous approaches or stimuli converge upon it and lead to it. Words, comparisons, signs need to create a context for a printed photograph in a comparable way; that is to say, they must mark and leave open diverse approaches.

Going Back to College: the oil patch, jazz on the street

After graduating from high school in 1967, I had trouble concentrating on college English and calculus and chemistry. Being away from home, with at least theoretical access to thousands of college girls, passionate about skiing, it was difficult to focus on the research paper I was supposed to write or the daily math assignments.

Later, after having lost my 4-year scholarship, I basically reinrolled in my first year of college. Without the scholarship, I paid tuition and room and board with money I earned working summers in the New Mexico oilfield. I enjoyed the work, and went back to what we called the oil patch for four summers. It was good money, earned outdoors, and it kept me in great shape. It also helped me focus on just why I was in college, learning skills that would serve me well after my body got too old for that kind of backbreaking labor.

So why should I have been surprised when my son Tom dropped out of college after his first year and headed to New York City to be a jazz musician? He spent two years playing on the streets, in the subways -- busking for his food and rent. It wasn't easy, but he got lots of practice. Finally he decided he wanted to go back to college. He enrolled in the jazz program at New York's New School University.

This time he wanted the education. This time he was focused. This time he flourished. Check out his website if you like jazz: http://www.bigbangbigband.com/live/

Integrated-studies students at UVSC fit Tom's and my profiles more often than not. They may have a few years of experience after high school. They may be working to pay for the education. They may be doing exactly what they most want to do after taking time to figure out just what that is.

For example, one of Tom's friends and fellow musician, Craig Sowbey, is an IS student here, with emphases in music and business. Craig pays for his education by running his own recording studio.

But I still haven't run into a fellow roughneck. When I do, I hope I get to be an advisor for the thesis.