John Mayall and Shakespeare

When I get to work in the morning I usually set up my ibook to play my itunes library while the office workers come through the lobby on their way to work. Set on shuffle, any of about 3500 items may come up, including opera, Hank Williams, Bing Crosby, Bach's cello suite, Scotch bagpipe music, and even some Van Morrison and Chuck Berry. I still like the Beach Boys after all these years. In other words, just about anything, as long as it's good. Volumes and volumes of really good music have been recorded since Edison made his first grammophone cylinder and I haven't even scratched the surface.
While I wait for the staff to file in I usually stand by the door until it unlocks, so I get to listen to the music and observe people's reactions. Often they stop and ask me what I'm playing or what radio station it is. Most of it they've never heard before, but they like it.
Poetry and all art has this quality that it makes the biggest impression when it hits you while you're not looking. Your guard is down, your habits of mind have not been erected, the door is left open to that deeper stream of consciousness where it can be deflected for a moment from the relentless task of protecting your psychic space. In pagan times it was claimed that you were most likely to see a god out of the corner of your eye when you weren't looking. Poetry and music are like that, too. You can listen to something a hundred times without it making any particular impression, but that hundred and first time you might hear it as if for the first time and your eyes open to it's wonders. Jazz has been like that for me. I have heard jazz or jazz influenced music all my life without paying much attention and I think it was Sarah Vaughan who finally penetrated my inattention. I've always liked great singing and it was obvious she was a great singer. Then I started to notice the sidemen backing her up and I would say to myself, "Who are these guys? God, but they're good."
The conventional wisdom is that improvisation is what distinguishes jazz from classical but I think the difference is this: classical is all about the composer and jazz is all about the performer. A classical performer's main concern is to fulfill the composer's intentions. To that end scores are studied, historical information as to instrumentation is researched, and the interpreter, whether conductor, singer or instrumentalist devotes all his efforts to getting as close as possible to those intentions. The composer is looked upon as a demigod.
A jazz player by contrast takes a song apart and reassembles it, sort of how a hot rod enthusiast takes apart a '49 Ford or a computer modder transforms his logic board. To some extent this has to do with how music has been disseminated since the invention of recording devices. Previously, the only way to learn a piece of music written by someone who lived far away was through a written score. It was an incredible innovation in its own right. Good music readers do not have to play a score to know how it sounds. They can hear it in the inner ear where it is unaffected by deficiencies of performance. I wish I could do that, but to me when I was a boy music was something that came out of a radio.
Without detracting from the great jazz artists of the last century I think it's important to point out that they were blessed with a plethora of wonderful song writers who provided them with themes for their variations. I'm astonished at how many great songs were written in that period. These are still the songs that mean the most to me, the songs I grew up hearing on the radio, the songs I took for granted, never imagining that it was the end of an era.
Usually I think the fault of post modern popular music is a lack of intelligence. But this morning as I listened to the tunes that came on I realized it a decline in aliveness is also involved. This would be the kind of aliveness needed to percieve the god in the first place, and if there has been any poet who was alive to the presence of the god it was Shakespeare. I don't read his dramas very well, but his sonnets amaze me. It was the sonnet number two that came on as I waited by the door:

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field

and I was almost thunderstruck at how alive he was to every nuance of existence. As you get older you get lots of opportunities to see spritely little girls change into sleek beauties who turn into buxom matrons, and at last become elderly. I can't help now looking for the young beaty in an old lady's eye or the serene elder in the ypung woman's prancing figure. This is love, not in the abstract as in 'love of humanity,' but love of one special, unique, never to be duplicated person.
A song by John Mayall came up next, "Thoughts on Roxanne,' and I was thunderstruck
by the contrast. John Mayall was one of the best of the British blues artists but he was fully infected with the post modern malaise which I identify as a failure to be alive to another person's being.

I think she's pretty as a rose
I take her out and buy her clothes
I'd like to take her home with me
But I must wait until she's free.

There is almost nothing in this lyric about Roxanne as a person, she is wholly reduced to being the object of the singer's needs.

Roxanne will always be my friend
And that's the way I'll keep her there

But what does Roxanne get out of it? And who exactly is Roxanne? What is she like, how have you changed by knowing her? The song doesn't say, but one senses the only thing of interest to the singer is that she lets him screw her. A saxophone bridge alternates between hopeless languor and manic furtiveness, and then:

I love to touch her when we walk
I love to listen to her talk
The way I feel I can't explain
But I will wait for her again.

There is a bit more to it but the singer hasn't the wit or aliveness to even wonder why this girl more than others makes him want to make his little sperm donation. He has no interest whatsoever in any consequences.
John Mayall is perhaps enough of an artist to be aware of the sub text of his song, unlike most of his contemporaries, but let's go back to the match up with Shakespeare's second sonnet which continues:

Thy youth's proud livery so gazed on now
Will be a tattered weed of small worth held.
Then when asked where all thy beauty lies...

We see a difference. Not only does this sonnet sing of her present beauty, it foresees the inevitable decline of her youth. And yet the singer loves her still, and offers his gift of immortality.

If thou could answer
This fair child of mine may sum my count

Because, of course, without her lover's gift she would not merely die but become extinct. Sex for the sake of pleasure alone leads to death, while love leads to life and more than life. These sonnets of Shakespeare explore all the permutations of love and the infinitely variable meanings of love in the same way that Bach in his Goldberg Variations explores all the permutations of key changes and chromaticism. In neither case are these mere technical exercises, the real intent being to show the gifts God has provided for his poor creatures, if only we can open our hearts. This is the aliveness I mean.
It may seem unfair to John Mayall to use Shakespeare as a touchstone. But I don't think an artist should mind. Shakespeare is the standard, like the North Star to navigators.