I found recourse in Aretha’s cover of “I Say a Little Prayer,” which opportunely popped into my head. I told myself to keep my ear on the prize, the prize being Aretha’s deep churchical bite and benediction, the gravitas her low gospel chords, rolling gospel chords, bestow on her version from the very outset—no brass, no bounce, no perk, just piano. Her voice’s cutting dip into tenor, bottoming low from the outset, likewise proved an answer to perk, nothing if not the anchor that would steady my way.
Aretha’s remembered hums and moans kept bubbly lift at bay, champagne brass’s floataway auspices held in check. Lambert and I had gotten low and we stayed low, rummaging the horns’ low register, grazing black, piquant soil it seemed, the lips of our tenors’ bells nuzzling loam. Lambert’s tortuous “too” enlisted my low-lying “prayer” exactly where memory and sentiment met, albeit unbeknown to us at the time. We purveyed a run of rapid-fire, quick-trigger ignition allied with hiccuping rhythmic relay that brought Trane and Pharoah on a piece like “Leo” to mind we were told later. That we got there via deeply rooted pop reminiscence unbeknown to each other made it all the more post-expectant, all the more the quantum-qualitative increment it was.
This was during Lambert’s solo on “Sekhet Aaru Strut” at Onaje’s last night, a solo that at one point hit me in such a way I just jumped in, unexpected, unplanned, we two “soloing” at once. Everyone says it was the high point of the night.
I felt a corner of some sort had been turned, some sort of lesson learned, another in a long line of lessons come upon. I felt we learned something very important, very new and very subtle, something so subtle I can’t exactly say what.
Enclosed is a tape. Let me know what you think.
As ever,
N.
29.VI.84
Dear Angel of Dust,
There’s a review of Orphic Bend in the latest Cadence. We didn’t expect it to get any such attention, so this comes as a surprise. It’s the first review it’s gotten. The reviewer we neither know nor have heard of, but he seems to know the music and he has positive things to say. It’s not that there’s not the inevitable quibble here and there, but he does hand out a great deal of praise. One would definitely have to call it a good review. Indeed, friends are congratulating us, calling it a rave review. We don’t go that far, happy though we were to see it, and even if it were a rave we’d want to draw back, not get too excited.
As it turned out, we were surprised not only by the review but by our consumption of it, the elation we initially felt upon seeing it, caught out or caught offguard by how happy we were to see it, how greedily, at first at least, we ate it up. It was as though it was this that we put the album out for, as though we recorded it to be reviewed, written about. There was not only the question of why we were so invested in being reviewed and in what the review said but a certain disappointment, both with such investment and with our elation’s failure to live up to expectation, simply on its own terms and on the face of it, an expectation that, post-expectant as we’d have been or thought or wished ourselves to be, we didn’t know (or simply hadn’t admitted) we harbored. But we did, or had, and it was by that expectation that even our elation, on its own terms and on the face of it, was found wanting. Thus it was that elation mixed with or morphed into letdown. Happy wasn’t happy enough. And even if it were, we weren’t sure putting out a record to have nice things said about it, written about it, was what being a band amounted to.
The review, then, gave us pause, became the reason or occasion to ask, late to be doing so though it was, why we play. “It’s not about reviews,” Aunt Nancy emphatically said as we were discussing this at rehearsal. “It’s not even about aboutness. It’s not about being-about.” It was a thought we needed no time to reflect on, no time to digest. We all understood what she meant, all of us in our heart of hearts having long wanted exactly that, only that, to play not for the sake of what could be said but athwart it, play without claim or caption, advancing (if advancing anything) being-in-and-of-itself, self-evidence, hub and horizon rolled into one. We countered claim and caption, coupling or conflating claim and caption, because of the elephant in the room in the review, the reviewer’s reference to balloons emerging from his copy of Orphic Bend.
It was odd the way we tiptoed around the balloons at first. The review bringing them up made for mixed feelings, if it didn’t indeed bug each of us outright. It was our fear of them upstaging the music again. The reviewer’s recourse to them as a self-crediting tack, boasting or bragging it seemed, made matters worse. Critical authority seemed to be at stake, visionary credentials even. Such were the insistence and relish he reported having seen the balloons with. Even so, we were slow to get around to it. Perhaps it was all too obvious, going, as they say, without saying. Perhaps we were loath to admit mention of the balloons bothered us, loath to admit anything in a review, least of all that, wasn’t just water on a duck’s back.
Though we were slow to get around to the balloons we did get around to them. Not long after Aunt Nancy said it wasn’t about aboutness, Lambert ventured an equation of claim with inflation, aboutness with inflation, aboutness with would-be containment, cover. “Reviews are balloons,” he summed it up by saying. We laughed, relieved it was out in the open. But once the subject had finally been broached we found we felt no need to belabor it. It was enough to know we all knew it was on the table. We briefly kicked it around and went back to rehearsal.
I’m enclosing a new installment of my antithetical opera, a new after-the-fact lecture/libretto called “B’Loon’s Blue Skylight.” I won’t say it was inspired by the review but had the review not appeared it wouldn’t have been written.
As ever,
N.
B’LOON’S BLUE SKYLIGHT
or, The Creaking of the Word: After-the-Fact Lecture/Libretto (Djband Version)
Djband bumped into B’Loon at a newspaper vending box. One of the local weeklies featured a review of Djband’s album Orphic Bend, a review whose author took pains to announce that balloons had emerged from his copy of the three-record release, doing so not only during the bass solo on a cut called “Dream Thief ”—about which, he pointed out, there’d been a good deal of chatter on the underground grapevine—but at a number of other points as well. The reviewer took no small amount of pride alongside the pains he took to make this announcement, as though the balloons’ appearance, multiple as it was and occurring at points on the recording not reported by others, bestowed a mark of distinction, made him elect among the elect, confirmed his acuity and taste.
The newspaper vending box stood on the corner of Melrose and Fairfax, across the street from Fairfax High. Djband, spotting the title Orphic Bend in the subhead of the front-page review, had opened the door to the box, taken out a copy and read the review, looking up dismissively when finished and humphing, “He thinks it’s about him.”
“But it is about him,” an inner voice or an inner B’Loon reminded Djband, “as much about him as about anyone. Why not? Isn’t the music for and about each and every listener, there to have made of it what any set of ears can make of it, there for nothing if not laissez-faire audit? Anything goes.” The inner voice paused and on deeper reflection allowed, “Well, no, not anything. But where to draw the line is always an issue.”
The review was filled with such wording as “insofar,” “as it were” and “as if,” the language of qualification disqualifying language itself. So it was, the review suggested, the balloons fled language while carrying language, bearing it to more auspicious precincts, Djband’s music and any other music, all music. “Music,” it said at one point, “is language in exile, exile exponentially borne—that is, owned up to, lived up to.” The review went on and on about the balloons, not so much about the reviewer, when it came down to it, as about B’Loon (though the reviewer had no way of knowing the balloons’ avatar’s name). It waxed alliterative and assonantal regarding “the balloons’ d�
�tente between containment and contagion, forfeiture and fortitude,” as though, in so accenting sound, it sought or asserted its own balloon status, inflating its recourse to sonorous air, “aeriality,” sonority’s infection or effects. “Sound,” it went so far as to say, “is the deep, not so deep tautology of is, its flipped ipseity,” obliquely alluding to Oliver Lake’s Life Dance of Is.
Djband wasn’t sure what to make of such pronouncements. Using language to question language seemed only a roundabout self-regard. “He thinks it’s about language,” Djband grumped, “that old chestnut, no more than the balloons by another name. He might as well have called it l’anguish. He thinks it’s about the balloons.” The review got on Djband’s nerves, further mixing mixed feelings about the balloons. Could the intersection of two metropolitan avenues be called a house, B’Loon, a mixed blessing, was in the house.
Djband had been out of sorts to begin with, one of its members having awoken from a troubling dream. Aunt Nancy had dreamt an onslaught of Santa Ana winds dried out her skin, leaving her face, neck, legs and arms ashy. When she went to put lotion on, she dreamt, squeezing the tube nuzzling the palm of her hand, rather than a drop of lotion, albeit looking like one, what came out was a maggot. She immediately awoke, shocked by so brusque a reminder of death. She’d gotten up on the wrong side of the bed and been in a funk all day, Djband’s other members, having been told the dream, in it with her.
The lotiondrop maggot continued to spook Djband, a Creaking of the Worm compounding ricketiness with unguent, omen with unctuousness. Djband couldn’t help imagining an abruptly desiccated, husklike maggot, a stiff chrysalis rustling in the wind, no longer lotionlike. Knowing it meant skin would lose its luster, flesh be feasted on by worms eventually, Djband wondered what it meant regardless, wondered against knowing, not wanting to know. Knowing but not wanting to know what it came down to, body a balloon of skin with guts inside, “An offal thought,” Djband inwardly quipped, at odds with and wanting to make light of the unsettling truth.
Aunt Nancy broke away and spoke. “It’s not so much it all redounded to me. I’m not saying that. It’s not even it was me it had to do with,” she said. “It was anyone’s palm, everyone’s palm, the lotion came out on. It was anyone’s arm, everyone’s arm, the worm would eventually eat. It’s not that I’m the only one whose head a sword hangs over. No, I’m not saying that. Not even close.” She then took two, maybe three steps back, blended back in. “No, not even close,” Djband agreed.
Djband staggered along what seemed an exhaust wall, automobile and bus fumes attacking eyes, nose, mouth and throat. A white sedan darted in front of a bus in time to make a right turn from Fairfax onto Melrose, black smoke pouring out of its tailpipe as it sped up, black smoke pouring out of the bus’s tailpipe as well. “We’ll all die together, choke together,” Djband announced.
It was too much, as though, playing Monk, Djband forgot Monk’s chuckling grunt, his wry wink. There was none of Monk’s extreme right-hand hammering, his making the piano his toy, “Sweet Georgia Brown” turned “Bright Mississippi.” It was in fact the contrary, as though “Epistrophe” had been renamed “Entropy,” so doleful the note, so to speak, Djband repeatedly struck.
It didn’t help that the review described “In Walked Pen” as “Monk salad,” a phrase that, meant as a compliment from all indications though it was, got on Djband’s nerves. It deliberately mixed its message Djband couldn’t help suspecting, hearing overtones of “tossed,” “thrown together,” “hodgepodge.” At best it was merely clumsy. It came off, in any case, in Djband’s reading, as flip, too offhand, too casual, assuming unearned familiarity with Monk and Djband both. “Why not talk about a worm on a lettuce leaf as well?” Djband muttered all but inaudibly. “Why not say, ‘A worm nibbled away at the romaine,’ make an adage of it?” This was what Djband would have none of, a balloon of attitude meant to say, “I’m in the know,” a balloon inflating itself at “In Walked Pen’s” expense, Monk’s expense, trivializing “In Walked Pen,” trivializing Monk. “‘Monk salad’ my ass,” Djband added.
Thus it was there was much to be annoyed about. The need for an answering salve or an answering salvo couldn’t have been stronger. Neither much appealed to Djband however. A letter to the editor taking issue with the review was anything but the water-off-a-duck’s-back aplomb Djband liked to think it was an exemplar of. Salve, at the same time, couldn’t help but recall lotion, couldn’t help but conjure, in so doing, the lotiondrop maggot, the last thing Djband wanted a reminder of.
Djband turned its head to the right, looked over its right shoulder toward where the sound it suddenly heard seemed to come from. It was a rattling sound, as of bamboo slats knocking against each other. It was the sound of actuality falling short of expectation, the sound of a gap between ideal or imagined reception and actual reception, a discrepant rattle (discrepant rub) the review’s nondelivery of ideal audition helped arise and resound.
It wasn’t, Djband insisted, that there’s a hearing one’s mind’s ear hears, a hearing that can only be virtual, a hearing no manifest hearing lives up to. This could be argued and it had often been argued but it wasn’t what was going on here or it wasn’t, were it at all going on, all that was going on. Indeed, Djband quickly admitted, it was in part what was going on, which was that three sets of hearing obtained: a) the hearing one in the act of composition or performance imagines, b) the hearing that in fact takes place, and c) the distance or disjunction between the two, audibly manifest now in the form of a rattling as of bamboo slats, a veritable Creaking of the Heard.
Was it that all reception, all audition, was flawed, inevitably a fall from the imaginal hearing one thought to hear and one hoped would be heard as one penned a piece or executed a run? Or was the Creaking of the Heard a veritable Creaking of the Herd, reception no inevitable fall but instead the outcome of herded audition, corralled by such would-be pundits as the review’s author? These were the thoughts that ran thru Djband’s head.
Yes, the latter was the case, Djband went on. It wasn’t that reception was simply herded however. No, worse than that, it was hearded. Hear’s past tense’s past tense, hear exponentially past, hearded hearing was multiply removed from the present, someone else’s having heard presumed to be one’s own. It’s bad enough to presume to have heard with one’s own ears, Djband reflected, worse to allow someone else to have done so for you.
The rattling sound made it clear Orphic Bend had been hearded, the review’s corral evidently made of bamboo. Clunky wind chimes it occurred to Djband it sounded like, not at all graceful, not subtly insinuative, clumsily intrusive instead. “Clunk salad,” Djband muttered under its breath, putting water-off-a-duck’s-back aplomb aside for a moment, answering the review in kind.
“I want a big, bodacious onslaught of sound,” Aunt Nancy had stepped forward again and was saying, “sound enough to beat back dream thievery, lotiondrop-maggot sleight of hand, an advent sound.” She stepped back, blended in again, having had her say. “Yes, exactly,” Djband agreed, “a big, bodacious advent sound.” The contrast with rattling bamboo couldn’t have been more stark.
Defensive, water-off-a-duck’s-back aplomb notwithstanding, Djband was an ectoplasmic wall, a stone wall even, petrified by the specter of death. Either way, it was a wall from which its members might occasionally emerge. Up to this point Aunt Nancy was the one who had done so, soloist or soloistic, as though performing a piece rather than standing before a newspaper vending box.
For the moment time was an ancillary matter, not to be disregarded nonetheless. Tacit statements of tempo implied or insisted that point or presence might be other than outright, recalling something Mingus wrote about a leaky faucet in the liner notes to one of his albums. Djband knew itself to be there more as an aggregate shake or as an aggregate shiver than as corpuscular stump, a street corner symphony of mean provenance and prospect, time’s “will tell” a window impendence blew thr
u. It could hear itself no matter the time and the place, time nothing if not a suspended platform by turns made less than it was and made more than it was, a bevy of don’t-care notes and a preterite soapbox.
So Djband stood bunched at the “will tell” window, the arthroscopic, worm’s-eye glimpse into hearded audition the vending box had become. It heard itself beside the hearded rendition of itself the review purveyed, beside the rattling bamboo that was the gap between the two as well, the latter’s lapse or its falling away from the former, along the rickety would-be joint between the two. Hearded audition’s noncoincidence with Djband-as-it-heard-itself was only to be expected, Djband reminded itself or consoled itself, even scolded itself, angry at itself to have caught itself out expecting better.
A car’s horn caught Djband’s attention, a Toyota Corolla cut off by a Jaguar XJ-S changing lanes. The driver pounded the hub of the steering wheel and shook her fist as the Jaguar darted in. Oddly, it blended in perfectly, a staccato garnish to the music Djband would have been playing had it been playing, a defenestrated ragtag pomp.
All advent flew thru the “will tell” window. All admonition stood streetside awaiting it, a cautionary wall Djband did its best to embody or at least evoke, an admonitory shingle if nothing more. Warning both stood and ran, a cathartic récit audition sought to be door to, time’s indiscreet relay. Djband had seen it all. Warning stood and would always do so, it said and saw, knowing “always” to be the dangerous word it was but daring it, ran and would always run.
Djband pasted a poster on the bare wall it was, the bare shingle, the wall or the shingle it took itself to be. The poster bore After-the-Fact Caveat #1:
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