This was during a gig at The Studio we finished a few hours ago. We were playing “Like a Blessed Baby Lamb.” I was on soprano. We’d recently played it at the Comeback Inn and we go back to it now and then at rehearsals. We’ve played around with different instrumentations, different ways of voicing it, and Lambert wanted to give one of the new ones a try at the gig—him on tenor, me on soprano, Penguin on alto clarinet, Aunt Nancy on violin, Djamilaa on harmonium and Drennette on tablas. How to open up and open out from the gruff stamp Archie put on the piece and how to work the time in a way that keeps to a certain signature drag (as though tar were stuck to the soles of our shoes) but keeps to it otherwise is what we’ve been asking. How to get gruff stamp and signature drag to coexist with Eastern sinuosity and cut is what we’ve been asking.
I was the last to solo. The order was Lambert, Aunt Nancy, Penguin, Djamilaa, then me. The violin and the harmonium did exactly what we had in mind. Aunt Nancy and Djamilaa lent signature drag a vectored swell, a diagonal swell, an upward and onward tending, tumescent lilt. (“Lilt” puts it too lightly. It was nothing short of hallowed what they brought to an essentially profane wager, titular lamb notwithstanding. “Lift” says it better, “coronal lift.”) They gave it a keening, devotional air, Drennette’s tablas adding duly acute prance, due traction. This they did without speeding up the tempo, turning signature drag into Baul-Bengali saunter.
Djamilaa’s solo had drawn us into a sacred cave, drawn us in and drawn us in effigy on its walls. It was a crystal cave, a sphere rayed out in all directions like fireworks exploding, shooting radii the spokes of a ball that would swell and contract, the harmonium’s bellows lungs and hallows both. Things had gotten religious, as in fact, Djamilaa implied or insisted, they always are. She had taken the title’s wager to heart. When she finished and the applause died down, the ground I found myself on, the cave I found myself in, gave me pause. I stepped into my solo with a phobic, philosophic tread, a duly fearful tread.
I tend toward Pharoah’s way of playing soprano. I like a little constriction in my sound, long on shading, not the tabula rasa sound we were taught was the goal. I like a nasal burr or a nasal buzz along the edges, a bit of abrasion. The soprano’s ability to glide, the auto-pilot sense it can fall into, needs to be guarded against, as does its ability to soar. Room has to be made for creak and squeal, subdued crackle, a ducklike sotto voce, not without an R&B twinge. Pharoah tends to glide and soar more than I felt was called for, so it was Wayne’s ictic, foraging way on “Dindi,” which, as you know, I’ve never gotten over and will never get over, that was more the tack I took. It was a more grounded sound I sought or at least a sound that sought to be grounded, a sound that felt its way, even groped its way, seeking ground.
Djamilaa’s harmonium had subsided to a carpetlike lowing, ecumenical seep and support. Aunt Nancy’s violin was a holding action, airborne glimmer if not watery glare atop distant asphalt on a summer day. Drennette’s tablas partly kept time, partly bought it, marking it no matter which, a pinged, ringing press or appeal that tolled an announcement of dues accrued. I stepped cautiously into this coven or cave as though barefoot on a bed of hot coals, tread nothing if not trepidation and vice versa, hesitant from heel to toe, tentative, testing. I temporized for a few bars before what I’ve come to call the Nine Golden Precepts, the desiderata I listed above, came to me in a flash. I repeat them here for emphasis:
THE NINE GOLDEN PRECEPTS
1. Angle at the exact amount of incline.
2. Lard lead-in with absence in the most parsed and plotted manner possible, lace or load it in such fashion as to make tread trepidatious, the ground trepidatious, trepidation the ground itself.
3. Titrate touch in such a way as to build while disbursing twinge, verge on twinkle perhaps.
4. Coax or connive, eke sound out, so situate twitch or its adumbration as to extenuate love’s least integer, so reside within extenuation as to mitigate timbral collapse.
5. Wring the notes as much as play them, wring fully in league with an implied play on toll, twist each note as though it were cloth and the drop squeezed out of it both.
6. Placate momentum’s demand while recruiting an abiding pocket, a cyst or an insistence indigenous to suasion or swell.
7. Confess to a certain dismay or admit my impatience, pound against time until the beat wears ragged.
8. Ply layers of waywardness, an annunciative ken peppered with and paced by hesitancy throughout, an arrhythmic hitch cognate or conjugal with nothing if not rhythm.
9. Be at large in a twilit fallback, relaxed albeit beset by combinatory chagrin, fallen shade’s fluency and fount.
After temporizing for those few bars, I went on, I can say without bragging, to make good on all nine.
I’m not saying this was the best or the most dazzling solo I’ve ever taken. There’s something about the Precepts coming to me the way they did, incumbent upon me all of a sudden as if I took dictation, a suddenly scribal providence or at least provision on the tips of my fingers, on my lips, teeth and tongue, on my diaphragm and in my lungs, that made it get to me and stay with me, still stay with me, to such an extent I haven’t been able to get to sleep. Was it the suddenly scribal providence or provision or was it Djamilaa sitting on the floor crosslegged and lotuslike before the harmonium, dress modestly pulled over her knees, covering her open thighs, that did and does it? Was it the unquenchable glimpse I closed my eyes and imagined I got of what lay under her dress, the bulge of hair beneath cotton or silk, such fit I felt exhorted by, rich beard and lift and betweenness, that did and does it? Was it that the harmonium seemed as much incense holder as axe, the ecumenical seep and support it disbursed as much musk as music, the very floataway musk Djamilaa’s nightie dilated Dredj’s nostrils with? Was it that I could’ve sworn I sniffed it wafting from under her dress, a newly mixed Vedic neroli, an infusive attar, an infinitely penetrant perfume? Was it this that did and does it?
It was all these things. Djamilaa is my muse and will always be, the someone I need and will need on my bond, as the old song says. She led and leads me thru love’s long-tenured bazaar, love’s late arcade. Whatever probity, whatever duly theophobic tread, theophanic tread, I acquitted myself with (and my solo did, I know, do nothing if not that), I owe to her inspiration. The Nine Golden Precepts themselves, I’m sure, were the work of her inspiration. Even now, going on five in the morning, I feel I can’t but be longer with it.
The Golden Precepts readied my way. Such bearings as they gave me gotten, I left off temporizing with an annunciative, almost airless flutter, a fledgling, asthmatic burst whose asthmaticity rhetoricially asked how to speak of things of which one does not speak. Aunt Nancy, Drennette and Djamilaa knew this to be rhetorical, understood it as a preamble to doing exactly that. We would indeed speak the unspeakable Drennette affirmed with a run of karate chops to the tablas, shunting my almost airless flutter along. Aunt Nancy and Djamilaa were likewise all horizontality, Aunt Nancy with a series of tonic-tending bowswipes, Djamilaa with a sirening ride of the harmonium’s high end.
That played or that said, I told myself, “Take your time.” I let my embouchure go loose as I played the first seven notes of the head, cutting it off as if interrupted by a better option than mere completion, had at or put upon by some lateral enchantment. Aunt Nancy’s bow was that enchantment, as commanding as Cupid’s arrow, picking up and repeating the first five of those notes, identification, if not identity, up to more than identification. Djamilaa meanwhile settled into a low-lying, mist-on-the-moors creep, a droning amble ever close to the floor, the stage floor it made feel earthen, rolling earth. Drennette had increasing recourse to the heels of her hands on the tablas, coaxing a fat sound out of them, all reach and rotundity, itself a rolling aspect as well, fat wheels we rode.
My loose embouchure caught air and the vibrating reed was a drill or a jackhammer against my teeth, bodily abidance’s du
es, I meant to insist or insinuate, nothing more. Djamilaa, who knew my mouth as no one knew my mouth and whose recondite musk had my nose open, at once caught my insinuation. She answered with a skein of sound, a ribbon of sound, still close to the earthen floor, bodily abidance’s reap or condolence. She pulled it from the harmonium’s bass register, a grumbling, organlike run Alice Coltrane would’ve been proud to call her own.
The Nine Precepts ushered me along, Djamilaa’s undulance under cloth an abiding bond and trust, rolling bulge, rolling fit, rolling traipse I felt furthered by, a whiff-quickened wraith of myself chasing myself. Robert Johnson’s hellhounds were a walk in the park up against the chase I gave myself, a counterintuitive, slow-tempo chase I now tightened my embouchure to ante up on—eked-out advance, eked-out inveterate lag, eked-out inconsequence.
I took my time. My sound opened up, unpinched, not the zero degree at which the horn extends the esophagus without seam or serration, the sound Oliver Nelson, for example, gets on soprano, but less given to the pulverous fray around its edges I started with. Dust off a moth’s wing was there to be heard even so, but less of it, my sound as open-throated as it gets. It was cool, collected, not entirely without strain but backing away from it, pointedly announcing a parting of ways with it. I thought of when I was a kid and of my mother’s friend Mary who’d always say, when things were getting to her, “I can’t be strainin’-up here,” which was always exactly what she was doing. Everyone called her Strainin’-up Mary. Strainin’-up soprano was the horn I blew.
Things were getting to me. The coven or the cave I’d been inducted into or stepped into played briar patch to my Brer Rabbit, no place I more wanted to be. Announcedly not strainin’-up, I remained calm and collected, my backing away from strain belied by moth-wing dust though it was. Even as things got to me in what was at bottom a good way, my response above bottom was nothing if not mixed. Cool and collected as I was, I played scared, wanted to be scared and grew scared of the very place I wanted to be, feet shod, so to speak, in theophobic, theogonic tread. Djamilaa, Drennette and Aunt Nancy, my three witches, were divinatory and divine in laying down, ladies though they were, the brer patch it was now incumbent on me to traverse.
I couldn’t be strainin’-up but I was ever so detectably strainin’-up, moth-wing dust my boon and my betrayal. Strainin’-up Mary was to me as Trane’s Cousin Mary had been to him or as Horace Tapscott’s Drunken Mary had been to him, a makeshift Madonna or a makeshift Magdalene or a third, entirely makeshift muse for the occasion. Cauldron Mary I wanted to rename her, a fourth, faraway witch in league with the three with whom I played, but Drennette, sensing this it seemed, gave one of the tablas, which might as well have been my head, a resounding slap. I stood by tradition and stayed with “Strainin’-up.”
Horace’s Mary was more than a passing thought. Strainin’-up Mary was known to have a drink or two or three throughout the day. “Drunken Mary’s” head seemed exactly the groove to “Like a Blessed Baby Lamb’s” tongue, so I paired it now with the full first ten notes of the latter’s head, a joint or a joining I parsed out using Horace’s tipsy waltz time approach. This gave it as much jaunt as our slow tempo could accommodate. We did so without at all speeding up.
I bleated lamblike, reminiscent of Wayne’s “Dindi,” a connect-the-dots tack with which I stated the two heads, conjugated the two heads, all the while observing the Nine Precepts to the letter. Djamilaa’s bellowing hallows put me in churchical stead, though Aunt Nancy’s wicked bowswipes and bowsweeps were yet another matter, as were Drennette’s crescendoing tabla slaps, not to mention a certain way in which I scared myself. My tipsy traverse of the brer patch was, by turns and at times concurrently, god-fearing, goddess-fearing, witch-fearing, propriophobic, whichever as the case might be.
Strainin’-up Mary showed me the way. She magnified and illumined the way the Nine Precepts had made ready. I staggered, bounding laterally and at times diagonally between lamblike bleat and capric slur, Djamilaa’s goatlike beauty a heady brew aligned with Strainin’-up’s unsecured walk. I stole a peek at her seated at the harmonium. She shot me a grin. Undulance under cloth, I couldn’t help noticing, had nowhere near subsided. “Waft be thy name,” I hummed into the horn, a recourse to heteroglossic traipse Djamilaa met with harmolodic tryst, sounding organlike again, Larry Young meets Ornette.
Drennette was all fingertips now, digital dispatch and acrobatic display, a boon to my every capric slur. I walked sonically cool and collected even so, incongruous capric aplomb. Had I been walking nonsonically I’d have turned sideways and dragged a leg, harked back to a dance we did when I was a kid called The Stroll, a dance that danced us as much as we danced it, a dance I’ve never been able to shake. Thus the slur, the slide away from collectedness, its merger with incongruous aplomb.
Aunt Nancy picked up on Drennette’s fingertip attack and went from arco to pizzicato, from swipe and sweep to pinch and pluck. Djamilaa picked up as well, now dispensing staccato runs as if at the wheel of a car, pumping the brakes. The ground we crossed was all the more a brer patch now, bristling with divinatory aspect and pop, divine, prestidigitator snap.
Brer patch was hopping ground, a dense arena rocked by ricochet, detonation, ignition. Vex and revisitation ran side to side, to and fro. I lowered the horn and pointed its bell at the floor, bent over the way I’ve seen Miles bend over, listening for a certain sound. I was still all lamblike bleat and capric slur, at the brer patch’s mercy it seemed I was told later, coaxed, baited and beset by prestidigitator bristle, pinch and pop. I wanted a hollowed-out sound if not a hallowed or haloed sound, moth-wing dust mixed and congealed with ambient humidity, for all its airborne humors a conical or cylindrical wrap of paste.
A conical or cylindrical compress applied to the open wound the air itself now was, the sound I wanted was buoyed by Aunt Nancy, Djamilaa and Drennette’s brer patch rotunda, churchical girth I tried in vain, straining, to get my arms around. Churchical girth would not be gotten around, not be embraced but at a distance, an ever so discreet hydraulics of approach it demanded, mandated. The sound I wanted was the sound I went down and got, bent over, horn pointed at the floor, an expectorant howl, no longer cool, collected, an expectorant croon that brought up a shake-the-rafters descent into the horn’s low register, a rafters-rattling landing on the horn’s lowest note.
The sound I wanted, not quite knowing I wanted it, was the sound of the shaken rafters, the rafters rattling. I now saw what I wanted, that this was the sound I wanted, the highest rafters of a wooden palace rattled by the note I hit and held, wood rubbed to a sheen by oneiric return and revisitation, another strangely familiar house I dreamt I was in. I didn’t open my eyes and I didn’t need to. I knew we were in that house, that palace. I kept holding the note (holding on, as Bobby Womack would say), doing so with circular breathing. Aunt Nancy, Djamilaa and Drennette kept their plucked and popping rotunda alive and played louder now. I knew we were in that house, that place, that palace.
The audience had begun loudly applauding as I held the note and the rotunda popped and bristled, Pharoah’s “Let Us Go into the House of the Lord” having nothing on our stringent, less unctuous approach. I didn’t open my eyes and I didn’t let go of the note as Lambert and Penguin came back in, restating the head over my sustained note and the brer patch rotunda, only for us all to stop on a dime at head’s end. We had built.
As ever,
N.
3.V.84
Dear Angel of Dust,
Drennette called Penguin on the phone last night about an hour after rehearsal. Balloons had followed her home again, she told him, just like back in November, stowed away in her drumset. After getting home she went to unpack and set up the drumset to practice some more, she said, and, just like before, balloons emerged when she lifted the lid to the parade snare’s container. They floated out of the container before she could reach in to take the drum out, rising up from under the lifted
lid just like before, as if out of the container’s mouth. She sounded upset, Penguin said, telling Lambert and me the story this afternoon.
Drennette had called Aunt Nancy and then Djamilaa but neither answered. She then called Penguin, she explained, shaken by the balloons having shown up again and needing to talk with someone. What made their appearance this time especially creepy, she went on, was that they didn’t disappear into the air after a while the way the balloons usually do but hung there, above the parade snare’s container, instead. They had emerged one by one, the first bearing these words: I tread lightly, ever so lightly, in my approach, feet an awkwardness I’d be done with if I were able, so badly I want myself unsoiled and off the ground, free of the ground and of contact with the ground. All for you, I’d be entirely of the air, all for you, treading lightly, light itself. Footless were it mine to decide, I come to your window, a ripple in the breeze, tread of wind at your balcony, you my belovéd.
The first balloon hung there, Drennette told Penguin, moving to the side to make room for the second when it floated up but still not going away. The second bore these words: Not to mention heat. Doesn’t it go without saying that heat brings me and I bring it, light not lacking heat and heat not lacking light, a harmattan rippling the entirety of air I’d aptly be? I come to your balcony bearing heat, a nuzzling breeze at your neck. I carry your perfume into the surrounding air, belovéd broadcast, happy to have in the least lifted it, the subtlest waft I’d be. The second balloon took its place next to the first, hanging there above the parade snare’s container, hanging there still, Drennette explained to Penguin, even as she spoke with him on the phone, as did the third.
The second balloon had moved over to make room for the third when it floated up out of the container. The third bore these words: All aspect and approach I’d be, beauteous tread not quite arriving. An awayness infinitesimal but palpably felt I’d be, could airy entirety be said to know touch. So it is I come to speak of touch, prime among the unmentionables, gone without saying or scared away by saying, so it is I come not to speak of touch. I pledge fealty to that which remains unshown or, shown, unspoken-of, unmentionability’s own, liege and lief. No matter what I mention, more remains unmentioned. It took its place and hung there, Drennette told Penguin, the last to emerge she concluded after waiting a while and seeing no fourth balloon float up.
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