Late Arcade

by Nathaniel Mackey

  “Things are that way sometimes,” Djamilaa said, laconic, blasé, unperturbed.

  “I know,” I said. “Things are always that way.”

  It had to do with angles. The piano’s legs buckled for an instant and rebounded, then they buckled and rebounded again. The right side of the keyboard crumpled. The hand that played it crumpled as well. Had they been glass they’d have shattered, besetting one’s ears, by turns bodily and cerebral, with sharp, intersecting planes rolling Duchamp’s descending nude and Picasso’s weeper into one. But they were not glass, however much the keyboard’s keening ping made it seem so.

  Dressed in a light cotton shift whose hem touched her ankles, Djamilaa stood caught between bouts and volleys of agitation and arrest, her lank beauty all the more lank finding itself so caught but unavailable all the same, it struck me, not to be lastingly caught. A lack of lasting hold or lasting capture pertained to the music plaguing our heads, mine maybe more than hers but hers as well, a music it seemed we each heard with a distinct incorporeal ear or perhaps together with a shared incorporeal ear.

  Djamilaa again offered generic solace, oblique as to what was at issue still, so compellingly we both felt it. “Not always,” she said. “But their effect when they are is to make it seem that way.”

  “Yes, I guess so,” I said.

  The music itself seemed an oblique telepathic dispatch, however much it appeared woven into textile and skin tone, the music of Djamilaa’s bare arms and bare neck emerging from her cotton shift. It obtained in her skin’s lack of lasting hold and in the wrinkles and folds of her shift. Had she said, “Fret not thyself,” I’d have said, “Amen,” but we were beyond that now, the music insinuating itself, issueless issue, the nothing it let it be known it will have come to, the nothing that had never been. It wanted to keep convergence at bay.

  It plied an odd, contrarian wish but it was moving and emotive all the same, anti-intimate while inviting intimacy, anti-contact while acknowledging touch. It plied an aloof tactility, love’s lank tangency, verging on emotional breakdown but brusque, pullaway catch or caress.

  It was an actual music we heard and let have its way with us, Paul Bley’s “Touching” on the Mr. Joy album. No way could we say title told all.

  As ever,

  N.

  14.XI.83

  Dear Angel of Dust,

  Yes, that one has “Nothing Ever Was, Anyway” on it, as do several others. It does appear, as you say, we let “Nothing Ever Was, Anyway” infiltrate “Touching,” title not telling all notwithstanding, title not telling all all the more. But there’s an asceticism to Bley’s playing that comes across no matter what the title. Djamilaa’s been thinking about that, wondering about that, drawn to it a lot of late. It’s not that less is more, she likes to say, nor that nothing is all, nor that nothing, as Ra says, is. All those ways of putting it only let sensation in thru the back door, she likes to say. No, it’s not about that. It’s not as recuperative as that, not as categorical. It’s an angled attrition, banked extenuation, she likes to say.

  It’s as if, when she speaks this way, she’d come to me in a dream and vice versa, each of us the other’s wished-for rescue, each the other’s wariness as well. It’s not unlike what sometimes happens when we play. One becomes the extenuation of oneself and the emanation of something else, someone else, ghost and guest arrivant rolled into one. What is it or who is it steps in at such moments? It could be anything, anyone, one senses, but the hollow one’s evacuation puts in one’s place appears to afford strangeness a friendly disguise. One’s fellow band members pass thru that hollow, step into it, relieving the brunt of an attenuation one might otherwise be unable to bear. It’s something like what Roy Haynes must have meant by saying that playing with Trane was “like a beautiful nightmare.”

  Come to as in a dream, yes, a dream dreamt on a rickety bed, springs creaking, home like as not an illusion of home. To speak was to bank one’s breath within angular precincts, wall intersecting wall’s proprioceptive recess one’s being there had become. Stereotactic as well, one touched upon aspect, facet, crater, protuberance, grade finessing grade, tangency’s wont.

  As ever,

  N.

  6.XII.83

  Dear Angel of Dust,

  I was trying to call back time. The time I was trying to summon I’d in fact found distressing at the time but I was trying to bring it back nonetheless. I put two records on the record player, Etta James’s At Last! and Bobby “Blue” Bland’s Two Steps from the Blues, records that had been staples during the time I sought to call back, certain Sunday afternoons when I was a kid and my mother would play them again and again. She would usually have played Mahalia Jackson and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama in the morning, music that I heard as pretty grim, going on about a life beyond life as it did. That by itself was enough to pervade the house with a heavy mood, a mood Bobby and Etta not only kept going but took deeper come afternoon. I understood—or felt, if not exactly understood—that theirs was an even more somber church.

  It was always as if time had stopped. The music and the mood brought everything to a standstill, causing me the kind of unease I’d later read Melville write about suffering during calms at sea. The music or the need for the music seemed to come out of a suspended state of some kind—not only to come out of it but to usher us into it, if or as though we weren’t already there. But we were already there and always there it said or made it seem. That we were, the sense that we were, hung heavily over everything.

  The music and the mood took my mother to another time and place, it seemed, a time and place given over to reflection as it touched on regret. She’d sit nursing a drink, a sad, distant look on her face, beset by some deepseated sorrow. It was a sadness I couldn’t keep from getting to me, a disappointment she appeared to feel not only with her own life but with life more generally, a disappointment that boded well for no one’s prospects. She’d stack the two records, listening to the first side of one followed by the first side of the other, then turn them over to hear the two other sides and when they were finished turn them over again, start over again. She’d play them again and again—two, three, four, five or six times. It was hard to miss the mood or what it meant. It hung heavily over the house and over the afternoon—heavily over the world, it seemed. When I went outside to find my friends and play, it went with me.

  It was the same when there were people over, when my mother sat not alone but with company, one or both of my aunts, a friend or a neighbor or a few. When they got to drinking and talking loud and laughing, with Etta and Bobby in the background, they couldn’t fool me. I knew it was a ruse. I knew adult life was no fun, life was no fun. Neither my apprehension of the arrest underlying it all nor my distress was diminished by their festiveness. I knew Bobby and Etta were the truth.

  Those afternoons, whether sullen or festive, filled me with desolation and dread. It’s odd I’d want to retrieve them, but I did. Day before yesterday, Sunday, I played the two records. I hadn’t listened to them in ages. Right away they brought those afternoons and all the feelings they were filled with back. I’d forgotten how many of Bobby’s songs are about crying, forgotten the reliance on strings throughout Etta’s album, forgotten the poetics of plea winding thru both. It was a world of adult longing the two albums conjured, a world of desperate affirmation where there was affirmation, one of dejection more often. I listened to them repeatedly just as my mother would, putting side one of At Last! on the turntable, followed by side one of Two Steps, then side two of Two Steps, followed by side two of At Last!, then starting again with side one of At Last!

  I didn’t set out to write a new composition when I did this, just to see if the music could return me to a certain mood and moment, just to relive, if I could and to whatever extent I could, my mother’s blue Sunday afternoons. I did indeed call back time, did manage to recapture or be captured by those earlier afternoons, desolate and dejec
ted as they were. It’s almost as if I so succeeded in doing so, fell so deeply into that early apprehension and dread, that I had to write my way out of it, come up with a piece that, touched as it couldn’t help but be by Etta, Bobby and my mother’s blue Sunday distress, would take it to another place. In any case, I started the piece on Sunday, finished it yesterday, and we took it up today at rehearsal. I’m enclosing a tape. I call it, as you can see, “Some Sunday,” meaning to draw on the utopic senses given to Sunday by Etta’s “A Sunday Kind of Love.”

  The title echoes Duke’s “Come Sunday” of course, but it was actually Monk’s “Children’s Song” I was thinking about, the rendition of “This Old Man,” the traditional English nursery rhyme, that he plays on the Monk album. I wanted a folk song-sounding or a children’s song-sounding phrase repeated on piano throughout, a simple, “childlike” melody built on an emphatic key variation. Djamilaa, as you’ll hear, delivers on that in a big way, drawing out the phrase’s evocation of childhood by seeming at times to take a learner’s tack, a beginner’s tack, mock-awkwardly “losing” the time only to regain it. Drennette’s reliable conga throws that all the more into relief.

  Please pay close attention to Lambert. He’s the lead voice throughout on alto, Penguin on bari and me on trumpet offering choral support. Lambert’s sound on alto tends toward tenor, without, of course, being tenor. I wanted that. “Bruised bell,” I leaned over and whispered into his ear right before we hit. He got a gleam in his eye and he grinned. As you’ll hear, he brings out the hollow the horn ultimately is, exacting a haunted, harried sound recalling John Tchicai somewhat. He plays hurt, I like to say. Hurt in his case, however, gathers an extrapolative whimsy, a wistful élan holding heaviness at bay, hailing some Sunday, soon come.

  As ever,

  N.

  17.XII.83

  Dear Angel of Dust,

  Just as I’d begun a letter to you Djamilaa showed up. The doorbell rang just as I’d finished the first paragraph. Once again, I’d written, we will have stood in a drapeless room filling up with light. I will have held her close, held her tightly, my chest against her shoulder blades, my arms around her waist. We will have held hands looking into a mirror, her left in my right. Once again we will have imagined a life to come, a slice of time we looked in on, looked like we looked in on. Once again I will have held off breathing deeply, not daring to take in the smell of her hair and her neck. I will have had none of night’s mare riding me, none of her my horse. The aromatic incubus will not have been let in. The doorbell rang and I got up and went to the door and opened it. There she stood.

  It was as though a balloon had turned itself inside out, a gloved hand ungloved itself unassisted, by itself, script gotten itself big and delivered itself both (vain presentiment, vacuous portent) right at my door. Djamilaa stood there, in one of her nothing-ever-was-anyway moods I could tell. She gave me a light kiss on the lips and came in.

  “Would you rather love or write a love song?” she asked right off. “Play free jazz or be free?” There didn’t seem to be much question or much choice. I laughed, hoping she would as well, but she only stared at me, the nothing-ever-was-anyway look now indisputable. She’d been listening to piano trios again I could tell.

  “Have a seat,” I said, not really needing to, not buying time so much as rejecting the questions. It wasn’t even that so much. The questions, I knew, were rhetorical. Djamilaa had already been about to sit down on the couch and she sat down on the couch. She audibly exhaled, looked up at me in an almost moist-eyed way and laughed, a nothing-ever-was-anyway lilt of a laugh that nonetheless turned the sides of her mouth down. I sat down next to her. I touched her right hand with my left and took hold of it.

  Looking away but with the sides of her mouth turned up again, she asked, “Would you rather celebrate the Beautiful One or be the Beautiful One?”

  It appeared she’d read my thoughts and was alluding to a piano trio that wasn’t, Cecil Taylor’s bassless trio. I shrugged it off and said, deadpan, “Djamilaa, the Beautiful One Has Come,” as she was indeed that, all of that, all the more that the more the nothing-ever-was-anyway look undercut surface allure, a demure, dissenting look that gave her close-to-the-bone beauty all the more depth.

  Djamilaa turned back and looked at me but held off speaking, as close to a Mona Lisa look on her face as I’ve ever seen on anyone. For some reason, I thought of Andrew Hill’s triplet-laden “Laverne,” the mix of hurry and restraint he works into the head, the almost muzzled way the horns announce it on the quintet version on Spiral, Chris White’s bass gallop on the trio version on Invitation, etc. For a moment I couldn’t shake the way the horns, even as they play in unison, break the line between them, breaking bread it seems, a by turns beaked and bleary nudge, a drawn-out, busily punctuated nudge.

  When Djamilaa spoke again I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I was thinking about the almost perky uptake Ted Curson imbues the head with on certain edges, as though gesturing toward an audience that isn’t listening as though they are. I was thinking that music is a way of going out of our way not to speak as we otherwise would. I could see Djamilaa’s lips were moving but what she said I couldn’t hear, whatever it was drowned out by the quintet version of “Laverne” in my mind’s ear.

  I was thinking about the first time I heard it, recalling it coming on the radio in the car. I was remembering it coming on as I turned off Beverly onto Spaulding. I remembered pulling to the curb and stopping to listen, so taken with it was I from the very first note. I was caught up wondering what the word or words would be for that opening triplet and for the way of stating it the horns have, caught up trying to figure that out, wondering whether “quip,” which had just occurred to me, fit, wondering whether “sotto voce quip,” which occurred almost immediately after that, fit better. Djamilaa’s lips were moving but I couldn’t for the life of me make out what she was saying, caught as I was between cerebral quip and corporeal audition. She might well have been casting a spell. “The carnal ear,” she might well have been saying, “heareth nothing. The carnal tongue speaketh not.”

  Or was it that the horns’ curt buzz and crackle took the words out of her mouth I wondered, her carnal teeth, gums, lips and tongue all the more inviting or alluring even so, their nothing-ever-was-anyway stolidity daring one to hungrily have at them hoping to prove otherwise. I found it was all I could do not to lean forward and press my mouth to hers, testing its philosophic pout, its meaty but reticent fullness, its nothing-ever-was-anyway remoteness and detachment, abandonment and containment rolled into one. Her mouth was nothing if not the muzzle my mouth cried out to be quieted by, clutched and covered by, music, muse, mute and removal all rolled into one. I wanted only a moan to come out of my mouth and her mouth were any sound to come out at all.

  I was wondering whether “the meeting of quip and quizzicality” did the horns justice when Djamilaa’s eyes locked on mine. I could see that she saw they were fixed on her mouth. Mine met hers and then they went back to her mouth, its fullness and potential generosity, philosophy notwithstanding. I was in Duke’s prelude zone (kissical buildup, kissical prelude), not without reason to think she was there too.

  Even so, the horns were still in my head, deep in my head, some gregarious animal’s nuzzling snout it now seemed. When Djamilaa stopped speaking, finished with or simply breaking off what she’d been saying, I moved ever so slightly toward her, still not having heard a word she said. She moved her eyes off mine and to my mouth for a moment, returning them to my eyes while moving ever so slightly toward me. We leaned and moved our faces toward each other. I could feel the breath from her nose on my upper lip, our faces a couple of inches apart, her feeling mine as well.

  We were in Duke’s prelude zone, both of us now, kissical runup. Oddly, though, holding back was all and all was hesitancy, hover, an aromatic, haptic swell welling between us, pure draw, pure impending, willed and rested, ripening restraint. Th
e word “prance” had come into my head as one that might possibly get at how the horns acquitted themselves, the equestrian way they had of bounding between triplets. It was exactly then that something else came in that I had no way of knowing from where or to whom it might be addressed, me or Djamilaa, if not both, or, for that matter, about what. “Hold that thought,” it occurred to me to say, unexpectedly, out of the blue, looking straight into Djamilaa’s eyes, her breath my breath, our noses now touching. “Hold that thought,” I found myself saying, pulling back as I did. “Save it for the gig tonight.”

  Djamilaa pulled back as well, nonplussed, her Mona Lisa look back in place. “Yes, you’re right,” she said. “It would only have added up to nothing.” Her eyes were on mine but it appeared she looked at something in back of me, some remote something I wouldn’t have otherwise known was there. How was it her nothing-ever-was-anyway look or élan cast or captured something I wondered, the “Laverne” horns having at me still, their prancical nudge not affected by my pulling back. Nonetheless, we were no longer in Duke’s prelude zone.

  It turned out we did indeed hold whatever thing or thought that moment amounted to or that Djamilaa, at least, did, the remote something she saw in back of me the thing or thought it perhaps came down to for her. We did indeed take that something or that thing or thought, whatever it was, to the gig that night, last night, or at least Djamilaa did. We played the Blue Light Lounge in Long Beach again and during the piece that was the evening’s highlight, “Book of Opening the Mouth,” Djamilaa stole the show.

  Djamilaa’s show-stopping solo was all the more unexpectedly so, coming on the heels of a solo by Lambert that none of us envied her having to follow. If it could be said, that is, that anyone or anything had stolen or stopped the show up to that point it would be Lambert and the solo he took. It is, after all, his tune. He knows whereof it speaks and of whom it speaks and, pardon the pun, he ate it up. Following the statement of the head, on which he plays tenor, my solo on trumpet and Penguin’s solo on soprano, he switched to sopranino (one-upping Penguin?) and built from a back-to-basics tack (if not a back-to-before-basics tack) to mount a thick disquisition on light, namesake light, the very light the venue we found ourselves in wants to credit itself with, blue light.