There was no way not to see it made sense. We decided we’d end the second set with “Fossil Flow,” a fitting end not only to the set and the gig but to the day, a fittingness Lambert would accent by switching from English horn to tenor for this rendition, more deeply resonating with dark unction. Flow, the more we thought about it, cut more than one way, not spoilage or spill alone but excursion. We had, after all, driven up the coast. We had, after all, enjoyed it. There was a principle of nonexemption we grew apprised of, automotivity a fluid aspect itself: we were part of the flow, in on the flow. (I remembered the Buick Dynaflow my uncle had been so proud of back in the fifties. I thought of Ray Charles mentioning a Dynaflow in “It Should Have Been Me.”) Enjoyment lent undulacy a lilt unction wanted in on. This was the truth we both averred and would keep at bay.
We played “Tosaut L’Ouverture” next to last. When it ended we went right into “Fossil Flow,” not waiting for the applause to subside, not announcing it. We came on with a slow lope led by Aunt Nancy’s pensive, three-note ostinato on bass, a descending figure whose rotundity of tone edged over into omen, apprehension, foreboding, robust as it otherwise was notwithstanding. A table of sorts was being set—implicative, dark but brightened by the bit of shimmer Drennette’s ride cymbal worked in, the calm, confident way she kept time. Djamilaa took up with that bit of shimmer when she came in on piano five bars in, starting out with a subtly happy-hand garnish that had something of glimmer and gleam to it and a prance aspect as well.
The horns, when Lambert, Penguin and I came in, stating the head on tenor, oboe and cornet, respectively, had an unprompted sense of aside, sotto voce not so much as reaching out from it, doing so with annunciative blare. Call and cry factored in as well, as also did no small amount of tartness, a ribald arrest of all one thought one knew, knowing the pensive lope it was. It seemed we wanted to say something about moment and simultaneity, moment’s dismay at simultaneity’s largesse, its doling out, moment’s dismay at sequentiality’s parsimony; it even seemed we had already said that something. This was in large part, insofar as we already had or possibly had, the work of Djamilaa’s tolling chords and her solemn, sometimes grumpy left hand. Chorded ploy contended with chorded plenitude, sequential disbursement pressed and vied with by both. How to both unbraid simultaneity’s bounty and give it its due, unpack to the point or brink of undoing, was the question we were called to confront in our solos.
The first to solo, Lambert was all business. He restated the head, grudgingly it seemed, put upon by quizzical misgiving, pestered by qualms. Calling to mind, in that regard, the solo Joe Henderson takes on McCoy Tyner’s “Contemplation” on The Real McCoy, he allowed himself a certain hesitancy, opening gaps in the head’s articulation, not so much a stutter as being repeatedly given pause (albeit stutter, sputter even, was obliquely the case). Bellow and beguilement volleyed, haloed by complaint at every point. Caught in a related quandary, Drennette beat the parade snare as though beating back tears, choking up on the stick and holding it at midpoint, swiping—rare vulnerability, rare admission, rare forthrightness, a clipped, cutting pleat, cropped egress.
I stood to Lambert’s left, looking over his shoulder. When he got to the “Wild Card” gap within the head’s elaboration it seemed it was the oil-drop extremities in the drawing that caught his eye, the figures’ oil-drop hands, toes, fingers and feet. Working changes on classic teardrop tenor, he built on Drennette’s choked-up admission but also brushed it aside. A parodic, moanlike drop to the lower register picked a bone with lachrymosity and, by implication, unctuosity as well. He would have nothing to do with suspect suavity, he declared by way of a more forthright return to the horn’s middle octave, no matter the oil on his and everyone else’s hands. It was a beautiful boast, made all the more so by his maintenance of a sober, unflustered tone worthy of Dewey Redman, a soothing, unhurried—did one dare say suave?—uptake or attack.
(No, one dared not say suave. What might’ve seemed so or one might’ve said seemed so was in fact a heuristic roughness Lambert plied and parlayed into scoured sobriety, sensibility abraded, a bumped entitlement or sense of entitlement tending more than one way.)
Drennette saw that her choked-up address of the parade snare no longer held sway. She returned her hand to the base of the stick, took the rim of the ride cymbal between the forefinger and thumb of her left hand and began to slowly mark time, the stick’s tip hitting the cymbal with a tolling insistence Djamilaa quickly joined in on, repeating a single note in unison with it. Together the two chimed, Djamilaa’s “tallywise” limpidity (one-two, one-two, one-two…) auditing and all the more endorsing the ride cymbal’s understated ring. They too now bore the figures’ oil-drop extremities in mind. It seemed they especially wanted to say something about digits, counting, and what it was they said or wanted to say Lambert agreed with, moving to the high end of the horn while remaining sober, keeping calm, as if to give them his blessing, say their tolling rang true.
Lambert allowed his solo to end there, a light, breathy peal floating above cost, consequence, toll. It floated above but not free of toll, telling, in its unperturbed way, of debts paid and debts yet to be paid, soberly tolling but no less tolling than Drennette and Djamilaa’s ritualistic audit. It lay there a beat and a half, a thin, breathy peal whose remaining aloft ritual audit implied but quickly drew back from, Aunt Nancy, whose repetitive pluck had become part of it, announcing a new direction by pulling out the bow and proceeding to play arco. She gave the bass a cello’s Orphic swell, fraught songfulness and fret, a teetering on the edge of elation she let sweep thru the “Wild Card” gap she stepped into, treading gingerly as though her toes were dripping oil, her feet soaked in oil.
Aunt Nancy bowed with a wincing resonance, as though the bow were an exposed rib—as though, indeed, it were her exposed rib, as though she were the see-thru masthead whose ribs the “Wild Card” drawing apprised us of. She bowed as though coaxing the bow across the strings at points, a jittery luxuriance given uncommon reach, uncommon albeit reluctant reach. Drennette peppered Aunt Nancy’s resonance and reach (plumb resonance and reach) with rapid-fire outbursts on the orchestra snare, sanctified, spasmodic, pentecostal hammerings à la Sunny Murray.
Djamilaa had all but fallen silent, serving up chords every now and then, a more slowly doled out tolling meant to recall what had gone before. This left Aunt Nancy all the more at the mercy of Drennette’s infectious pepper, a fact or effect eventually made evident by the percussive tack she resorted to. She came to a point where she lifted the bow and tapped the strings with it, letting it bounce lightly on them, much as Ron Carter does on “Barb’s Song to the Wizard” on Tony Williams’s Lifetime album, a piece, a passage and a technique Aunt Nancy had excitedly turned us on to ages ago. Here she took it further, sustained and stayed with it to an extent barely broached by Carter’s jagged innuendo. Rickety buildup grew possessed of growl and grumble, an aroused rattle and would-be rafter shake amassing senses of emergence or at least emergency, rummaging for voice, viability, ground.
The bow was a mallet, the strings a throaty dulcimer, Aunt Nancy’s fingers, thumb and wrist exquisitely schooled. Though she made it seem the bow simply bounced, no aspect of touch or attack went without thought, throaty dulcimer by turns a croaking cimbalom, by turns a raspy santur.
It became clear, though, that the strings were neither dulcimer, cimbalom nor santur, that the masthead’s exposed ribs were the focus of Aunt Nancy’s solo, that the strings were indeed those ribs, vertically though they lay, the fact that the bow was itself a rib notwithstanding. Indeed, Aunt Nancy’s rib-on-rib address accented intimacy and consolation, exactly the embrace the drawing shows the masthead held in, Dredj’s embrace—rib-on-rib contact, rib-on-rib caress, rib-on-rib assumption of Dredj’s counsel. Here, however, rib crossed rib and was let percuss upon rib, a fact that not only accorded with but in part conveyed the disconsolate tone of Aunt Nancy’s solo, the worked arousa
l refusing to be put to rest it so starkly was.
Eventually Djamilaa fell completely silent and Drennette soon followed suit. Aunt Nancy’s solo was now exactly that, Djamilaa and Drennette having bowed out as if to suggest the bass’s taut strings had to do with tautology, the solo’s disconsolate temper with self-induced or self-digested ordeal, self-conducted ordeal—a suggestion to which, given the way Aunt Nancy’s bass revved its own ennui, the way she ransacked it for sound, there was more than a grain of truth.
Aunt Nancy played alone and was all alone, played along with being alone, left alone, “all alone in the world.” She allowed a hint of self-pity in, part parodic host, part woebegone orphan, not unrelated to Lambert’s recasting of teardrop tenor. More specifically recalling Carter, she put the emphasis even more on rev, letting the bow ride and bounce on the strings with new and old verve, new and old volatility, mimicking or mining automotivity’s old and new dream. A Model T on a bumpy road the bow might’ve been, so loudly did brake and sputter vie with flow.
Aunt Nancy played for all the world to know she stood alone, for all the world to know we all, no matter rev’s would-be amelioration, stood alone, as though flow itself stumbled, stuck. Sputter never spoke more eloquently but even so she would not be done with fluidity, full-bodied arco, letting the bow glide between bouts or outbursts of coughlike exhaust, Carteresque bow-bounce. Such answering fluidity was nothing if not outright elegy, forthright lament, Aunt Nancy allowing the bass its low-throated moan. She spoke from nowhere if not from the heart (ribcage apse, alcove, atrium), no way if not on two fronts, both fronts, deep throb and bow-bounce both.
Point made, she put the bow away and went back to playing pizzicato, plucking the strings with chill serenity, ritual aplomb. She stood with her back straight, addressing the strings with a churchical assurance, churchical rectitude, as patient a fingerwalk as there ever was. She closed her eyes, exuding meditative calm, each ascending run seeming to say, “Alas,” each descending run whispering, “Amen.” Abidance was the overall note she struck, if there could be said to be an overall note she struck.
Djamilaa had left the piano to pick up one of her guitars. As the audience applauded Aunt Nancy’s solo she began to play, pointedly chiming in on strings. She started off in what initially struck one as a Spanish vein but as she went further along one recognized a Malian or Guinean provenance, a guitare sèche excursion (it was an acoustic guitar she picked up) whose ambulatory rhythm feasted on recurrence. It sought to make its home in a reverberant ping a shade beyond the upbeat, a treble chime not so much home as haunt but beckoning as though haunt could make heaven home. Indeed, treble chime verged on going out of bounds, off scale or off record, verged on heaven itself, rang heaven’s bell.
Aunt Nancy picked up on Djamilaa’s Mande invitation and replied, playing the bass like a big guitar (rhythm guitar to Djamilaa’s lead, bass to Djamilaa’s treble), whereupon Djamilaa, gratified to hear her call responded to, shot her an appreciative glance and began to sing. Together they plied a Malinke roll built on repetition, the chords fraught with a certain drama or an inference of drama (false drama perhaps), an inkling, inference or sense Djamilaa took pains to fend off, paradoxically furthering, in so doing, the very inkling, inference or sense it was her one wish in life (or so it seemed) to hold at bay. A buoyant bout with quicksand, were such possible, her voice took solace in its ability to declaim while being taken out, courting hoarseness to extol its testificatory prowess. Rescue was only what witness one could manage, were there rescue at all, and witness, were there, would suffice, it seemed she said or sang more than said or made singing say. Witness or no witness, her singing summoned words like aria, recitative and recital only to say that they fell short, failed when what was really real was afoot, that exactly that, the really real, was afoot. Strident, abrasive, bent on scouring the air itself if need be, her voice built with a certain insistence toward something none of us, her included, could name, imprecatory at points, complaint piled on complaint, coax plied with complaint.
Drennette joined in with a repeating figure that marked the strong beat on the high hat, setting it up with a tap on the bass drum, the barest percussive presence one could want. The three of them effected an ictic, riverine amble, Djamilaa’s treble chime, as time went on, arriving a lengthening shade late, a hitch or a gimp or an eddy in the flow. It brought to mind, for me at least, the “Wild Card” drawing’s abstract bench. It sat one down and it gave one pause, giving one to reflect on water’s indifferent flow, time’s indifferent flow. One sat on a bench on a bank overlooking the Niger.
Lengthening shade suggested the drawing’s black sun had caught Djamilaa’s eye, the river’s consolation an intricate mix of solace and complaint. The river’s destination was there by inference, the salt air that had nipped our noses complicating time’s occult remit. Lambert, Penguin and I picked up on this and instinctively bowed our heads, letting Djamilaa, Drennette and Aunt Nancy’s amble have its way with us as waves or rapids might. Shade-late arrival’s beneficiary, Djamilaa’s treble chime gathered extrapolative reach. Eking out a summons or a receipt that would be the chime’s equivalent, her voice every now and again leapt, its timbral bound and embrace as raw-ribbed as Aunt Nancy’s bow-bounce had been, a miraculous mix of stridency and grace.
Lambert, Penguin and I now lifted our heads. Carried in or carried out, we stood athwart all emollience, amenity’s reset, lengthening shade’s limp a new boon nonetheless. Listening to Djamilaa, Drennette and Aunt Nancy, one heard again and saw again, as though for the first and final time, that sound was the inner skin of things, the other side coming over, inside turning out. A fool’s errand it might’ve been to see it so but one saw it so. It was ground we’d been over before, ground we’d go over again, ground that somehow never got old.
As Djamilaa’s voice began to trail off, letting us know she’d had her say, the audience began to applaud and Lambert and Penguin glanced at me and nodded to say the floor, so to speak, was mine. I put the cornet to my lips and began with a run meant to recall Aunt Nancy’s Model T on a bumpy road, eventually stating the head with a hesitancy aimed at recalling Lambert’s grudging address as well. I stood with my back straight but churchical rectitude wasn’t what I was after, at least not to begin with. Gaps and crackle made their way out of the horn, more “ahem” than “amen.” Indeed, sputter might’ve been my middle name for all anyone knew, so hard-won was any articulacy (or seemed so at least).
I say “seemed so” because sputter was more than sputter. It was an archarticulacy, fraught with meaning, “meaning” meaning “wanting to say.” It wanted to bear on exhaustion, eventual eclipse, fossil fluency’s abject eloquence, black sun. It wanted to find fulsomeness in hemorrhage, bumpiness, unable not to know it fed on exhaust, extinction, fumes. Sputter was double-jointed. Wanting was to say.
I stood with my back straight, parsing, repeating, teasing out the slowgoing unfolding of black sun. My not aiming for churchicality notwithstanding, there must have been something of it to the way I made my way. Lambert, that is, bowed his head and lightly put his left hand on my right shoulder, a deaconly hand (mock-deaconly perhaps), as if to say, “Take your time, son. Take your time.”
I took my time. It took all the calm I could muster not to be caught up in fossil fluency’s depth and dilation, not to be carried away. I offered myself every caution not to resort to barrage, the Gatling-gun spray of notes I’d have bugled had bump’s double joint had its way. I picked my way as though I walked in a minefield. A novice at a typewriter hunting and pecking, I pecked at sound and the possibility of sound. Aunt Nancy, Djamilaa and Drennette picked up on my cautious tread and lent themselves to it, letting their riverine amble subside. We no longer sat or stood on the bank of the Niger. Time dissolved into an aroused momentariness peppered by random event or invention—bass interjection, drum interjection, guitar interjection—isolate, asymmetric, intermittent, each a law to itself it s
eemed. It wasn’t that time stood still but that time twitched, a volley of quivers that went for how long no one could say, trumpet, guitar, bass and drums each other’s ricochet, no less random even so.
After however long it was, Djamilaa put the guitar down and went back to piano. She played a series of chords at the low end of the keyboard, a slow tolling that was a call to order, ominous and wistful at the same time—one-two, one-two, one-two again, a two-beat rest between each pair of chords, a space Aunt Nancy noticed and filled with a two-note descending ostinato. Drennette heard the call and went from sticks to brushes, applying a tight, circular stroke to the parade snare, stirring the pot. The three of them laid down a midnight creep that brought “Mood” on Miles’s E.S.P. to mind.
I took my mute out of my coat pocket and put it into the bell of the horn. I blew a needle of sound that rayed out as it went thru the air, a tremulous ribbon whose advancing edge was a vibrating blade. It wasn’t that sputter had been seeking this, that obstructed speech ironically or fittingly found its voice in the mute. Sputter, I’ve been saying, spoke. Djamilaa’s call to order, moreover, calling randomness to a halt, was itself random. There was no reason for it to flow out of what preceded it and equally no reason for sputter to be said to have evolved into mute fluency. What happened happened. It was as simple as that. Sputter had spoken no less than mute fluency now spoke.
No less had sputter called flow obsolete (fossil flow indeed) than the mute bestowed fluidity and focus (mute fluency). I not only blew, as the old saw has it, from my diaphragm but set my collarbones abuzz with a sense of yet more remote origins, a faintly remembered myth involving clavicular spillage I’d read about ages ago in some Dogon lore. I vaguely recollected a creational aspect to it, something to do with Amma’s collarbone marrow spilling out. My sound thus had an occasional raspiness at its edges, escaping or expiring breath a constitutive leakage. My collarbones hummed and from time to time knocked, shook like radiator pipes in winter. Part leak, part letting off steam, it was a sound I let the valves tease out, expelled or expired breath conducing to a theme of extinct heat.
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