Max Roach

Max Roach died a few weeks ago. He was one of those human beings who seemed to be an elemental force of nature and it's hard to believe that such a force is quenched. Of course his music is still around, caught on tape, frozen in amber. Not all of the life of it is preserved in the electronic amber but enough so you can fill in what's missing. You all know he was a drummer in the bebop era of jazz, famous for his polyrhythmic capabilities. I made a little trip to youtube because while I have some of his recordings I had never known what he looked like. Then, running out of the small supply of his videos I started searching through the ranks of some of the famous jazz drummers of past decades. Chick Webb, Cozy Cole, Jo Jones, Dave Tough, Buddy Rich and a fantastic film of Barrett Deems. I don't even know who Barrett Deems played with but he was phenomenal. Feeling too confined by the limitations of his drum set, in this clip he migrates from the bandstand to the club floor and finds a chair to beat on. Then, just for comparison sake I took a look at some rock drummers. But there is no comparison.
There was a koto player I saw and heard at Vancouver's long defunct Classical Joint in Gastown. Japanese music is an acquired taste for westerners and I acquired it during my two year stint in Yokosuka. Takemitsu is one of the few modern composers I like. Abstraction comes naturally to zen conditioned Japanese and his music reminds me a lot of haiku. Never liked saki or sushi, never learned to use chopsticks, but I like Japanese music and poetry. Music has the advantage of not requiring knowledge of the spoken language of the composer. Listening to that koto player I realized what was unique about Japanese music. I don't know anything about scales and harmony so I have nothing to say about that, except that the 'frets' on a koto are adjustable according to the scales and harmonics the performer wants to use. What really struck me was that the rhythm of her music was implied rather than stated openly. This has the effect of releasing the musical phrase from the confinement of a strictly observed beat. This was a very emphatic impression. Haiku is like that, too. Most of the meaning of a haiku is not in the words used in the poem. The words on the page are meant to stimulate the mind so that other, deeper, meanings are sensed. In the koto song the rhythm is not stated overtly so the listener must supply his own rhythm, which may be more subtle and meaningful than even the finest musician can express. Or at least those were the thoughts I had when I came away from that lady's performance.
When thought of this way western music, even the music of the master composers seems crude. Not really. The great composers incorporated rhythm into the structure of the musical line. They knew what they were doing. And they were aware of the confinement problem, if the story is true of Wagner's putting down a famous conductor by calling him a Bavarian timebeater. Mediocre musicians pay excessive attention to timekeeping, as all good conductors know. It's the hobgoblin of little minds.
One of the reasons Negro music in America became so popular, I think, is that it found a way of keeping a strong rhythm while still leaving room for phrasing. Synchopation they call it, and it's what they mean when they say "it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing." I think it's just as important for jazz development as the blues -inspired bending of notes. All those influences evolved together in the early twentieth century until it reached an apogee in the bebop era. But by then it had become too arty and self indulgent to speak to an ordinary audience. Myself, I like the jazz from the swing era the best, before it got too proud to play for dancing teenagers.
Still, here I am listening to Sonny Rollins' quirky take on "The last time I saw Paris" -I'm not sure who's doing the drums but it might be Max Roach- and loving it.

The Faerie Queene

I was reading David Frum's Blog on NRO today about his attempt to listen to an audio book reading of James Joyce's Ulysses. Aha, famous writer, I have read Ulysses, the whole thing. Once. The trick is to read it really fast and resist the urge to nod off. When you do that you get the whole picture, which is this: it's just one big Irish joke. And the joke is on the solemn denizens of University English faculties and newspaper culture pages who don't want anybody to know they don't understand a word of it. James Joyce wasn't the only Irish writer to pull the literary world's collective leg.
His secretary, confidante and successor, took the cue and played the same game...only better. Who could be more hilarious than Samuel Beckett? "...There's this man who comes every week. ...He gives me money and takes away the pages.,' is how he begins his trilogy, apparently. "Yet I don't work for money. For what then? I don't know. The truth is I don't know much. For example my mother's death. Was she already dead when I came? Or did she only die later? I mean enough to bury." There's an Irish way of joking about things that can't be joked about, apparently. The Greeks saw paradoxes and made philosophies, or wrote plays about human fate and brutality. James Joyce saw bathroom humour: "When I makes tea I make tea and when I makes water I make water. But I don't use the same pot." Apparently.
Flann O'Brien aka Myles na Gopaleen wrote a send-up of Ulysses called "The Dalkey Archive," but I like "The Third Policeman" much better, maybe because I have always been concerned about stolen bicycles. Throw in the strangest haunted house ever imagined and that illogical Irish logic and you have a book unlike any other.
"What is your attitude to the high saddle?" inquired Gilhaney.
"Questions are like the knocks of beggermen, and should not be minded," replied the Sergeant, but I do not mind telling you that the high saddle is alright if you have a brass fork."
"A high saddle is a power for the hills," said Gilhaney."
I see that audio books have been made of both Molloy and The Third Policeman and I think either of them would be great to listen to on a long car trip.
I haven't heard these editions, but I do have Edmund Spenser's "Faerie Queene" on a Naxos audio book which I heartily recommend to David Frum. Couched in what was probably archaic English even when it was written this is a poem meant to be absorbed through the aural apparatus. Somehow a poem takes different pathways into consciousness when it is heard. I have it on my iPod and am always delighted when a verse wedges itself between Helen Humes and David Oistrakh. Spenser fits right in. Yes, I know he was anti Catholic and an oppressor of ireland but it's still one of the greatest poems ever composed. What amazes me about this work is that while Spenser was contemporary with Shakespeare he couldn't be more different. While Shakespeare looks ahead to the psychology of the inner man, Spenser is looking backward at the great literary tradition of Chaucer and Dante, of mythic lore and the problem of knowing good from evil. At first I wasn't especially impressed with the adenoidal voice of reader John Moffatt, but the more I hear this recording the more I like it. I have always loved this poem, the last of the great medieval allegories. It's Homeric in scale with lines as pungent as any found in the Iliad. I've memorized a few verses and I like to read it out loud so I had my own preconceptions of how it should sound. But reciting a few lines is a vastly different enterprise than telling the whole thing. The beauty of a poem of this stature is that you can focus on a verse or two from anywhere in the poem and then gradually build up an understanding of the whole. Poetry isn't linear. Hearing Moffatt's magesterial sonorities I realize why poetry doesn't really flourish in a print oriented culture. Without the sound of the language ringing down the depths of one's soul there is no poetry. Spenser was the last great master of the ancient Saxon device of alliteration.
I have some more recent poets loaded onto the iPod: eecummings, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, T.S.Eliot read by the poets themselves. Actually, I quickly tired of cummings and dumped him, and I more often than not hit the skip arrow when Robert Frost comes on. The most interesting of them is T.S. Eliot and comparisons can be made between Spenser's poetry and his. Eliot knew about music and yearned for the epic scale, medieval allegory, but he had to struggle with the train wreck of 20th Century art. So he wrote "...in my beginning is my end..," "...like a patient etherized upon a table...oh, do not ask what is it, let us go and pay our visit." One can admire the sunset poetry of expiring western poetry but enjoyment isn't part of the equation. Perhaps Spenser was right to look to the myth of chivalry for poetic material. Maybe he knew already that Shakespeares's inner man was doomed.

Miss Lee from Korea

If there's one thing good about growing old it is this: you are no longer the slave of sexual passions. This makes it possible to concentrate on other things which are decidedly more interesting than the old in/out, in/out. Still, those hormones never entirely subside and you never know when some female is going to come along to get them boiling again. Maybe not boiling, but at least asimmer, with unmistakeable signs of wanting to start bubbling. That's how old guys like me get into trouble.
Yesterday a young Korean girl sat down next to me at the coffee bar and when she tried to take a picture of herself I offered to do the honors. This led to further conversation. Now it seems Korean girls haven't been brainwashed into fearing old guys the way their North American sisters have and I was a bit surprised at how friendly she was. She was visiting friends in Victoria but had been studying English in vancouver for the past few months. Victoria does a roaring trade in ESL schools so young Orientals are quite commonly seen in the various caffeine joints and most of them are Korean. She mentioned that she was going on a bus tour to the Rockies and I said, better watch out for the bears. That was a word she had never heard before and when I tried to find a picture of one in my laptop she perched on the arm of my chair. That's when the heat came on. The pilot light hadn't gone out and enough fumes were available to ignite a small flame. Her hands were what did it, hands being for touching. Oh, nothing came of it. She was on her way to catch the ferry.
No, I'm not one of those honkies who idealize oriental women. The two years I spent as an American sailor in Japan cured me of those illusions. I rather disapprove of older white men who shop for wives in poor Asian countries. I know a few who have done it and I don't hold it against them but then I try not to think of reservations when I meet them. Once done you want it to succeed, of course. And knowing all this I would have happily made a fool out of myself yesterday if I had been given half a lightly larger window of opportunity.
A book I often go back to without ever quite figuring out what he's talking about is Robert Graves' "White Goddess." Ostensibly about the origin and meaning of archaic European alphabets, it's above all about poetry, the language of poetry, the craft of poetry, and what it's for. The White Goddess in her various manifestations is who the poet serves. Her service is far from gentle. Now from where exactly Graves derived his wild speculations I do not know. I think modern anthropologists and mythographers would question his sanity. But there is something irrevocably true about his ruminations, but it's poetic truth which differs from prosaic truth. In his words, a real poem that engages the worship and awareness of the godess will makethe whiskers on your face stand out enough to shave. I'm not acutely sensitive to poetry but when one catches me unawares (that seems the best way. When you sit down to study a poem its 'meaning' seems to evaporate) Afterwards, when the shock dies down a little and I try to analyze it, the music of the words obviously has a significance over and above the literal meaning of the words. Not that the poet is thereby absolved of the requirement that the words make sense. Quite the opposite. Through the music the words devlop an aura, a super meaning that isn't constrained by the linearity of normal language. Most of these thoughts I'm trying to express I got from The White Goddess.
Although he tried to backpedal from the implications of some of the ideas he wrote about, I carried some of his logic a little further. I can't say I can prove it, but let's say I have a working hypothesis about one essential element of poetry. Only men can be poets. A poem is an offering of love to a woman...not just to any woman but to the woman who the poet identifies as an embodiment of the Goddess. Only a man can love a woman in that way. And so, although a woman can write verse as well as any man, she cannot write a true poem...any more than a man can have a baby. And I don't think a man can write a poem without the stimulus of a beloved, just as Graves contends.
Graves envisioned a return to an imagined prepatriarchal era of European culture but I don't. I think there may well have been such a phase, but I don't think it was as idyllic as some of us believe. For a long time I have thought abortion, which has become acceptable since the advent of feminism, is a form of human sacrifice. On the other hand I think something is missing from Christian belief. The three aspects of the Goddess as Graves saw it was the Goddess as virgin, the Goddess as Mother, and the Goddess as bitch/slut and I think he wanted to say that modern patriarchal cultures have supressed knowledge of the third aspect at a heavy cost, and sometimes I think he's right. Poetic language is above all ecstatic and our Judeo/Chritian/ (and especially) Islamic religious legacy is revolted by the ecstatic. Maybe frightened is a better word. All I know is that these are deep waters.
The image I keep on my desktop most of the time is of Alice Faye. A very popular movie star of the '30's and'40's, she died about ten years ago and I only saw her for the first time when I bought a DVD of a musical, "Alexander's Ragtime Band." I can't look at this face without feeling like I'm falling into some deep chasm. A sweet ache comes over me. I want to touch her, kiss her. So what is it about this face, her face? Why not another face? Don't all faces have lips, eyes, nose, hair, skin? Why should it matter? But any man knows that he's attracted to some faces and not to others. Women, too, are drawn to certain faces and not to others. My Korean friend noticed the image right away. And she had some quality of her own, not only in her face but in her movements, her manner, unfathomable depths I wanted to explore. Sex? Is it only sex? The old in/out, in/out? If that was it why should the face matter at all. You've heard the age old coarse male joke, "They all look the same upside down." It's not true. The face matters, and for some reason the face is a signal of something else. Sometimes the signal is wrong. Sometimes a lovely young thing gets in my cab who looks absolutely adorable but as soon as she opens her mouth and spews the vulgarisms of the street she doesn't look so lovely any more. She reminds be of the dead dog I found under a hedge when I was a boy. He looked like he was asleep, but when I turned him over he was stiff and underneath he was swarming with maggots.
In another musical, "42nd Street," a song goes "I'm young and healthy and so are you." This could be a theme song for a Darwinist theory of human attraction. Utilitarian. The genetic imperative. There's something to it. Biologically we are animals and must reproduce. Youth and health are essentialfor 'reproductive success.' Until the last few generations in modern societies hard, demanding work was required for survival. But it isn't the sturdy ones we men go for, is it? I go for the delicate and demure every time. Like the little Korean girl.
No there's something else involved. It's almost like gravity. We do speak of magnetism but usually as a metaphor. But I think it's a fundamental law of the universe, maybe even more fundamental than gravity or space and time. That's one of the reasons I believe in god.
Here's a little poem of mine I wrote many years ago after meeting a beautiful young woman From Seattle at Second Beach in Vancouver. Since I can't get this blogger software to put the lines down as I want them I'll use slashes to denote line breaks.

I met lovely Linda so proud and so free,/
From soggy Seattle's steepy streets a refugee/
At English Bay- down by the edge of the sea./
We talked about something, everything, nothing,/
While the tide licked our feet- bare feet, felt neat, frothing./
I'll always remember the wealth of her hair, falling/
Over the glint of her eyes, green eyes, May eyes, searching./

I saw something sad there/
I wanted to kiss;/
After many a long year,/
When I strain to remember,/
It'll be something I'll miss.