I found this in the library one day when I was expressly doing something else. But because I was (as always) dreaming of & in jazz, I decided to flip through this book on the shelves and because it was Matisse, and breathtaking, I took photographs too.
Jazz is, according to this essay/article on it (by Greg Kucera), the product of insomnia, and artificial lights; the child of a music-hall meets circus aesthetic. I think that’s apt enough: jazz is a nighttime madness, dogged by the stars and yellow lightbulbs. Colours that pop in one’s eyes because they’re caught in the headlights.
All pictures the product of Instagram, libraries and my procrastinating skills.
And just to finish this little word/photo vomit ramble up – if you didn’t believe that jazz belongs in the province of twilight/dark skies/faces lit up by cigarette ends, I give you – Glenn Miller & His Orchestra: Song of the Volga Boatmen.
Reality trying to mirror fiction (or front book-covers, anyways) as closely as possible.
A few days ago (though it feels like light years and lifetimes) I was sat in the college library – which smelled of dead rat, one (or some) of which was presumably beneath the floorboards… – and frantically hashing out an essay on Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, and ‘cinematic bodies’. Don’t ask me what that latter is, because I just don’t know!
But feelings of exaltation, desperation, pessimism and general agony all aside, I came across a couple of songs which really should go onto any soundtrack built to accompany the reading of Jean Rhys’s early fiction – all novels or short stories about sad and desperate women, seeking solace in drink & loving Paris but desperate to look right (think size 0 culture is bad? Imagine living in cosmetics heyday…)
Compliments of my iTunes on shuffle, I give you two particularly relevant songs (or two nice atmospheric songs with relevant lines which really make sense and seem poignant and heartrending/lifechanging after 12 hours in the library aka ‘ratland’):
1. Dance Anthem of the 80s – Regina Spektor. Note particular aptness of those climactic lines towards the end: “I went walking through the city, like a drunk but not, with my slip / showin’ a little, like a drunk but not, and I am / one of your people, but the cars don’t stop…”
2. Chelsea Hotel no.2 – Leonard Cohen. Just because it’s sad and about hotels, and all of Rhys’s heroines live out their sad lives in dingy little hotel rooms (which almost, in the final analysis, seem kinder than the world outside!). This could be the bathetic end to one of those novels.
I wish I had the patience to trawl through the worrrl’ wide web and/or my iTunes (which is quite big, insolent though it is to use ‘and/or’) and find more songs so I could build a decent ‘OST’ to the (cinematic ho ho!) reading experience that is reading Rhys. Unfortunately I don’t.
But I will leave everyone with these beautiful lines from Barnes’s Nightwood anyhows; that book confused me a whole lot, but moments like this one pop out at you and make you sad and exalted and astounded all at once.
“as a lover we are beginning to forget dwindles and wastes; for love and life are a bulk of which the body and heart can be drained…” (Nightwood)
On the 30th of August, Beirut’s latest album, The Rip-Tide, was released. Beirut hadn’t taken an unusually long break between albums or anything: Beirut’s previous EP had been released in 2009, but it wasn’t exactly everyone’s cup of tea (it was markedly different from his previous Balkan/French chanson sounds – it was recorded with a 19-piece Mexican funeral band!).
Image sources from http://fuckyeahzachcondon.tumblr.com/ (although it doesn't belong to them either).
But nonetheless, this new album still had quite some hype surrounding it, and it doesn’t disappoint. There are elements of some of his previous sounds in its different tracks – for example, redolences of A Flying Club Cup in ‘Port of Call’ – to entirely new sounds, like his slightly-Sufjan Stevensy sound (unusual for Beirut, who’s better known for his musico-cultural experimentation) in ‘Santa Fe’. But this is not going to be a track-by-track analysis of Beirut’s music, or the minute fluctuations in his general sound: artists experiment, and we are grateful for that. If Beirut had cut 3 albums & 5 EPs all with the same type of sound and theme running through them, it would have made this world a little less interesting. Sometimes you miss, sometimes you hit – this new album is very definitely the latter.
What really interests me are the conditions under which this album has been produced, and what it suggests about some of the best contemporary American bands making music today. An article/interview in The Guardian two days ago drew comparisons between the way in which Zach Condon sealed himself off to write this album, just as Justin Vernon (frontman for Bon Iver, who released their own loooong-awaited second album just a few months ago) did for his first album (For Emma, Forever Ago). The Guardian writes:
When Condon began working on the new record, he moved for six months during the winter to a log cabin in upstate New York. “Chopping wood, cooking duck…” he laughs. “I got really lonely.” It was an idea stolen almost wholesale from Justin Vernon, who famously wrote the first Bon Iver album in similar conditions. (“We joked about it. I said: ‘Sorry, man, I ripped you off.’”) But it allowed him to continue to find a new outlet for his imagination and escapist tendencies, adopting the habits and persona of an American backwaters recluse even while writing a record about home.
It got me thinking a lot about the sentiments that underlie a lot of this music coming out of America. Though they aren’t mentioned in The Guardian article (probably because they didn’t shut themselves up in a log cabin to write their music), Fleet Foxes are another band which channel that kind of log-cabin, lonely-mountaintop sound. There seems to be a move away from the sounds & beats that characterize a fast-moving urbanity (neon lights and all that) to sounds that characterize lonely night drives through sparse desert lands, or to guitars strummed softly and slowly beside a campfire. This is music made to echo against night-skies and to reverberate through empty unobstructed land (nature).
धर्म – Dharma
I spent one amazing – hellish, turbulent, but beautiful – summer in India, dealing with power cuts every other hour, so with no television, no Internet, nothing – nothing except for one Fleet Foxes album & Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. It was a hugely solipsistic experience – I had to be entirely immersed in something besides my own puny life, and so I immersed myself in American backwater-beauty: melodies, words, poetry. Fleet Foxes’ album (in case anybody’s wondering, their debut album – Fleet Foxes) and Kerouac’s novel seemed to fit together perfectly, as if the one had been written for the other. Fleet Foxes’ layers of sparse, sometimes a capella, harmonies echo the mountaintop meditations and winter-forest hymns of Kerouac; there seemed to be some kind of necessary relationship between songs about ‘Blue Ridge Mountains’ and Kerouac’s own Desolation Peaks.
(A man called Vincent Moon in Paris did these amazing Take-Away Shows, all of which he posted up on a website called La Blogothéque. The whole idea behind these ‘take-away shows’ is that artists play their songs in exotic locations, usually with sparse instrumentation & in a public space (lots of them are played or sung on the move through streets and whatnot). Most of them are, like this one, taken in Paris; all of them have beautiful colouring. Fleet Foxes performing ‘Sun Giant’ & ‘Blue Ridge Mountains’, the latter in the Grand Palais.)
In the novel, Kerouac ends up working alone in a log cabin, on ‘Desolation Peak’; the novel takes a new turn in its probe for understanding of the consciousness. To me, the Kerouac of then doesn’t seem too different from the Zach Condons & Justin Vernons of now. There seems to be this theme of straining to get away from the city, from the pressures of society and modernity (then & now), that springs up in American culture every now and then. Pangs of American asceticism.
To be in some river-bottom somewhere, or in a desert, or in mountains, or in some hut in Mexico or shack in Adirondack, and rest and be kind, and do nothing else, practice what the Chinese call ‘do-nothing’. I didn’t want to have anything to do, really, either with Japhy’s ideas about society (I figured it would be better to just avoid it altogether, walk around it) or with any of Alvah’s ideas about grasping after life as much as you can because of its sweet sadness and because you would be dead some day.
… and a bit of Vergangenheitsbewältigungfor that which one has never experienced. (New word, thank you The Economist! German is an amazing language.)
I was reading this article in The Paris Review today – one of the first by them I’ve actually (sadly) read – but it infused me with this crazy longing for all things dimmed and jazz, feather boas and crazy, inspiring little old ladies. It tells the story of a woman called ‘Bricktop’, who drove F. Scott Fitzgerald home every night in Paris (that city-saddened man); who exchanged wry jokes about lynchings with Cole Porter; who had Django Reinhardt and Fred Astaire playing and dancing on her bar floor; who was comforted by Langston Hughes… well, the article has a hundred other names to drop, and it’s just incredible.
Couple that with an episode of BBC Radio 4′s ‘Great Lives’ series on Samuel Beckett a few nights ago (I find it hugely relaxing to listed to podcasts while pedaling away in the gym; it’s a desperate bid to expand my mind and simultaneously contract my bodily fat) – and it seems like I am fated to dream of bohemian Parisian circles tonight.
Paris seems to have been where everyone fled to in a bid to escape the smallness of their own societies and lives – whether the racism of old America, or the religiosity of an emerging independent Ireland – and Paris was a city of Bricktop‘s and Shakespeare & Co‘s. A beautiful cluster of random things and poetic moments (smoky jazz; pornographic publishings; folies bergères; and error-ridden typesets) – which in many ways, I suppose, it still is: I got the strongest sensation when I visited Paris that it was (as I so eloquently/pretentiously wrote in my journal at the time) “a conglomeration of times & times & times…it’s organic history”. History that never stays still – but lives, thrives and symbiotically fuses with the future and the present and its own past like some kind of throbbing amoeba. It’s like a highly fertile soil covered in different kinds of fungi – the Napoleonic fungi-buildings; the Revolutionary fungi-buildings; the opulent imperial fungi-palaces… etc. (A tenuous analogy, but I can think of no better – except, I sincerely hope no mycologist comes to shatter my simile by telling me that different kinds of fungi cannot grow on the same soil.)
On the other side of the Seine... And some Mallarmé, fatally, and oh-so-pretentiously, scrawled at the bottom.
This post was meant to be an ode to Josephine Baker (who oddly enough hasn’t featured at all yet…), and the redolences of jazz and smoky Parisian corners that that article called up – but it wound up being an ode to Paris. Oh well. But maybe it’s not unfitting: she was emblematic of Paris in the most beautiful of ways, after all. But here it is at last, then – to make this post a truly synaesthetic experience (you’ve had Paris in poems, and Paris in purple hues – now have Paris in music). I’ve heard many versions of ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’, and most of them don’t do to me what this particular version does; they are too slow, too drawn out in a desperately ugly attempt to be that kind of cooling, drawling jazz – but Baker’s really jumps with her special brand of joie de vivre.
Now… all I’m waiting for is Woody Allen’s ‘Midnight in Paris’ to be released. Taking… so damn long!!!!
These sort of smooth ‘moonlight’ harmonies are so delicious to listen to at night, with a cup of warm tea and the yellow lights all on in the house. Warm glow inside, all dark and streetlights outside. The Mills Brothers are really one of the best, and surprisingly underrated, bands I’ve come across in recent(ish) days. Well, not so recent – I first came across ‘Paper Doll’ when reading Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge for dear ol’ A-Level English, but it’s hardly their best song (for me), so it took me a while to appreciate them properly. Songs & artists found in sad American plays are always good though – there was ‘Paper Doll’, and then ‘Paper Moon’ (A Streetcar Named Desire). Was it something about post-war America that attached itself to paper metaphors? Easily torn and fragile and all that? I wonder. Paper-metaphors do pepper those works, though, and my not-quite synesthetic remembrance of them is of silhouettes behind curtains; little paper lanterns (à la Blanche) over warm yellow lightbulbs; jazz into New Orleans nights (presided over by a yellow-glow moon, of course).
The Mills Brothers’ voices just cocoon you in warmth and love. I wish one could sink into opiate sleep through musical means (I have never been able to!).
The calm before sleep where one potters around one’s room alone with (hopefully) some soft music in the background, the lights all slowly turning off, books being shoved aside and the pillows laid out, is my favourite time of day. The nocturnal moment, encapsulated perfectly in nocturnes. I have been meaning to read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes for a long time because of this – I love nocturnes (be they Chopin’s or otherwise!) and I love a certain nocturnal feeling. I wonder if that can be properly translated into literature.
