Man with an Axe

by Jon A. Jackson

  One of the things I especially liked about the music was that, while unabashedly modern, advanced if you will, it didn't turn its back on earlier jazz. It clearly was based on an admiration for what had gone before, in a way that bop hadn't seemed to manage. That is, the boppers seemed contemptuous of their predecessors, although as Books had suggested, perhaps that was more hype than reality. Anyway, this music did not make me feel that I didn't want to listen to Ellington anymore; indeed, its echoes of Parker and Monk and Powell, as well as Ellington and Basie, made me want to get out some of my old records.

  But what endeared the music to me was its ingenuousness. It didn't try to be liked. And it didn't take itself too seriously. It was full of self-referential humor, I felt. From childhood I had been very wary of my own tendency to play to others’ liking for me. It was not an attractive trait. I had to learn, in a way, not to be loved—no easy task when you're the only child of overaged parents. This music was intelligent and splendidly performed, but it got that way without trying to be loved, which is my point.

  My first thought in the morning was: Where can I buy more of M'Zee? I thought of a jazz shop on Mack. I thought of this while I wondered what had happened to Grootka's notebooks. My mother, as I now realized (this was thought number four, while drinking the last of the microwaved coffee) was in Siberia. Yes, actually in Siberia, in cruel April, to observe the arrival of some rare cranes to the great marshes. I hoped she had remembered her boots; no doubt she had. She wouldn't be back for at least a week, perhaps longer.

  Siberia, of course, was the birthplace of one of the Red Wings’ new stars, Vladimir Konstantinov, alias “the Gladiator.” I'd dreamed about him last night, along with the rest of the Russian Line, skating furiously through a kind of Sun Ra Ice Show Extravaganza.

  All of these things were swirling in my mind when I saw in the Metro Times (the Free Press and the News were on strike, still) that M'Zee Kinanda was performing in concert tonight, at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Ordinarily, this would simply be viewed as a serendipitous occasion: an opportunity to go see the man himself and hear his interesting music up close. But I also had tickets to the seventh game of the Red Wings-Blues playoff, at the Joe Louis Arena. Even for a cop, these tickets were hard to come by.

  The million-dollar question: Since the Wings were in some kind of weird spiral of self-destruction (probably a consequence of relying so heavily on a brilliant front line of ex-Soviet stars—Fedorov, Konstantinov, Fetisov, Larionov, and Kozlov [talk about alien mercenaries!], who were subject to spasms of Slav fatalism, apparently), ought a fan to desert them in this perilous hour and go to the M'Zee Kinanda concert? Or was it not true that since one's presence at the other games had not helped, that one's absence at this game might be a decisive factor that would make victory possible?

  I decided to abandon my Red Wings tickets. It was a bold move, one that only a true fan could understand and appreciate. I invited Agge Allyson to accompany me to the M'Zee Kinanda concert and she accepted. This made the sacrifice of the Red Wings tickets easier to bear, as did the eager purchase of the tickets by Maki, for little more than I'd paid for them.

  But I emphasize that this was no minor gesture. Much against my will I had found this team occupying my thoughts. Particularly the Russian Line. I had a notion that the Line was constituted of at least two distinct and well-known Russian types: the aristocratic, intellectual, poetic, or even mystical type, as exemplified by the brilliant and dashing Sergei Federov, Slava Kozlov, and Igor Larionov, and the pragmatic, indomitable, tough, salt-of-the-earth-peasant, tank-commander types embodied in Konstantinov and, especially, the thuggish-looking Vyacheslav Fetisov.

  Of course, I hasten to say, these are mere simplifications: I'm sure none of these men were in fact mere exemplars of such a reductive dichotomy. That is, in real life they are certainly more complex, complete personalities. But these categories are sometimes useful. There was something dreamy and creative, romantic even, about Fedorov: he fairly swooped about the ice, creating plays, flashing brilliantly across the blue line in his scarlet road jersey like a cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis, according to my mother), a regular Ariel on skates. But then, at times, he would go into eclipse and seemingly brood, despairing, paralyzed, as if in molt.

  And no one could deny that the brutal faces and the hard, mean body-checking style of Konstantinov and Fetisov had something of the earthy peasant about it. Chekhov and Tolstoy would have recognized it, I'm sure; and especially would have Gogol. They were hard men, actually former officers of the Red Army, strong workers, untiring, the kind of men who led tank regiments into Krakow. And naturally afflicted with a semimystical fatalism. This seemed to be the current problem. It was as if an overwhelmingly superior Red Army had stalled in the suburbs of Berlin because they knew, deep down, that they were inferior. (Just for a day, of course: the following day they awake with a familiar hangover and without hesitation roll on, crushing all opposition.)

  I had dreamed that their brilliant, interweaving ice dance was suddenly thrown into chaotic confusion, not unlike the music of M'Zee Kinanda, which was playing furiously. I feared that they had fallen pray to a despairing belief that they could not win, and so the beloved Red Wings were doomed. I knew this was bullshit, but in my “Russian mood” I couldn't shake it. As rational a person as I like to think I am, I fell back on the petty magic of seemingly ignoring them—in the hope that they would then prosper.

  It was all nonsense, to be sure, but I think it's fairly common nonsense among American men, perhaps among Western men generally. (I'm thinking of what I've heard about European soccer fans here.) I took the precaution of programming the VCR to tape the game, just in case.

  In the afternoon Agge Allyson and I had gone to the warehouse on Atwater (an apt name) and been confronted with the boxed files. With the help of an amiable clerk we were dismayed to learn that the files were organized on a principle of case histories, which meant that you had to start with a file name and number and then begin to ransack the boxes. It was no use asking, “Where are the Grootka files?” It didn't work that way. It was dusty and dirty and daunting.

  Nor was there, for instance, a master file entitled “Riot—1967.” You had to know what you were looking for before you could look. I had some experience with this, of course, but without the assistance of the clerks at Records, it's the old haystack again. Agge took a few notes, but after only an hour or so of cursory poking about, she declared that she needed to rethink her approach. She fell eagerly on my suggestion that we'd better get out of there if we were going to go home, shower, dress, and so on, before the M'Zee Kinanda concert.

  The M'Zee Kinanda performance, as often happens, was nothing like I had expected. I suppose I was influenced by the Sun Ra image, although the only comparison was in the music rather than the appearance. Kinanda and his musicians did not wear ludicrous costumes, robes and bizarre headresses from the B-movie space-opera property room, as I'd seen in photos of Sun Ra. (Some of those getups were wildly wacky, suggesting that his mom had whipped them up out of towels and sheets; the headgear often had a suspiciously ex-pantry aspect: you wouldn't have been shocked to detect a handle obscured by the glued-on antennas.) It was this theatrical tawdriness arid spoofery that had hampered serious appreciation of Sun Ra's music, in fact, and I'll be damned if it wasn't hard to shake.

  M'Zee Kinanda and his ensemble were only vaguely suggestive of Africana. There were some stylized masks and fancy drums on the stage, as decorative props, but the players were dressed in a variety of more or less ordinary casual clothing—jeans and sweaters, a tweed jacket, a kind of Nehru jacket, running shoes, for heaven's sake. The woman who played the synthesizer wore something that might be construed as a dashiki, though most would just call it a colorful dress. And most of the men wore a hat or cap of some kind, usually a round one with colorful patterns or brocade, rather like a yarmulke, although the French horn and tuba player wore a Detroit Tigers baseball cap.

  All th
e musicians were evidently African-Americans, to use the currently favored term. The titles of the musical pieces were ostensibly African in origin, though even that wasn't clear. I wasn't sure what to think when Kinanda, in his rich, attractive voice, said, “And now we'd like to perform a piece that I wrote a few years ago, entitled ‘Kilwa Kisiwani.’ It's in three parts, reflecting the Indian, Bantu, and Portuguese influence on this medieval trading center of East Africa. The first part opens with a soprano sax interlude, followed by May anna's solo on the Yamaha DX-7 . . .”

  I don't know . . . it didn't sound particularly African to me. It sounded like wild and beautiful Free Jazz. The percussion was terrific, but it was mainly a bop drum kit, as far as I could tell, and the drummer sounded a lot like Roy Brooks, an old Detroit player and drum teacher, who was pretty familiar to me. It wasn't Roy, it was a younger man, but it sounded like him.

  The tunes, or whatever you call these musical pieces, were wonderful. They weren't tunes, in the sense of “My Funny Valentine,” but they weren't ragas or fugues or concertos, either. They were fairly brief, somewhat evocative tone pieces, or mood pieces, with definite melodies, some of them even a little bluesy. There seemed to be a basic simple structure, a theme or a melodic phrase, and a general but fluctuating rhythm, with a lot of improvisation. But I think I'd have to listen to a lot more of it before I'd like to describe it further. And I plan to hear a lot more of it.

  The audience definitely loved it. The audience seemed more familiar with the music than I was, certainly. It was a mostly African-American audience, young but not very, and evidently a bit upscale, judging from the dress and the cars in the Art Institute parking lot. There seemed to be at least a minority academic element in the audience: beards and conservative suits, horn-rimmed glasses.

  I was happy to take up Agge's suggestion that we go to the reception after the concert. It seems that she knew one of the musicians, or a friend of one of the musicians, and she thought we could at least meet Kinanda and shake his hand. I was all for it, although these scenes often seem a bit uncomfortable or awkward to me—but then I'm not averse to social awkwardness: you can often learn something from such situations. It isn't always clear just what is supposed to be happening. Are the musicians really interested in talking to their fans and admirers? Or is it an obligatory thing? Or maybe they're just happily greeting their old pals and other musicians who have come to pay a little compliment, a courtesy. Anyway, as a cop, I'm naturally curious, not to say nosy. I want to know what's going on, what different kinds of people are like. I don't mind seeming awkward.

  Kinanda was a pleasant man about my own age, tall and good-looking, with a graying beard that made him look distinguished, an effect aided by horn-rimmed glasses that he hadn't worn onstage. He had, as I mentioned, an especially fine voice. Agge's friend introduced us.

  “So glad you could come,” Kinanda said. “Did you enjoy the program?” He seemed genuinely interested in our reaction. “You're familiar with the music?”

  “I'm just getting into it,” I told him. “A friend introduced me to it and I like it. I like it a lot.” I started to say that my listening background was in hard bop, but he interrupted, asking the name of my Virgil—that was his phrase. I started to say “Books Meldrim,” but that didn't seem quite appropriate, and for the life of me I couldn't remember Books's real name. I ended up stammering out, “Buh—, uh, a guy named Meldrim.”

  Kinanda frowned. “Is he a musician?”

  “Sort of semiprofessional,” I said. “He plays a little jazz piano . . . Teddy Wilson style, maybe a little ‘Fatha’ Hines.”

  “Books Meldrim? Why, I know Books. Is he still . . . around?” This last was phrased as one might say “still alive.”

  “Sure. I don't know if he plays in public anymore, but he's still kicking, still in good health. I saw him last night, as a matter of fact.”

  Kinanda seemed interested. A young woman came into the room, a gallery of the Art Institute actually, a kind of reception area. They were serving wine. The young woman wrapped herself around Kinanda, perhaps seeking warmth, as she was inadequately attired (if you take clothing as essentially a form of shelter, rather than decoration; she certainly didn't need clothing for decoration). “Baby, you were bewitching,” she declared. It seemed an appropriate appreciation. The music had been bewitching. Kinanda tolerated the frankly erotic embrace with a graceful reluctance. Not obviously insane, he didn't, apparently, want to cool the young lady's ardor or affection, but he was also not comfortable with her demonstrativeness. He may have been conscious of Agge's sniff of disapproval.

  I should say something here about Agge. She was looking rather stunning herself. I never knew you could wear a T-shirt with an evening gown. She certainly perked up when Kinanda managed to fend off his sultry assailant long enough to ask, “Is Books still hanging out with Grootka?” I know it caught my attention.

  “You knew Grootka?” I asked.

  “Knew?” Kinanda said. “Do I detect a past tense? Yes? I'm sorry to hear it.”

  “It's been a while,” I said. “Four years, anyway.”

  Kinanda pursed his lips. “Line of duty, I suppose?”

  “Well, yes,” I said. “Although he was supposed to be retired.”

  “Hard to imagine Grootka retired.” But he didn't ask for details and I didn't volunteer them. “You are a policeman too, I suppose.” I admitted I was. “Mulheisen,” he voiced my name, almost to himself, as if committing the name to memory.

  “How do you know Books and Grootka?” I asked. But Kinanda had turned away, happy to talk to the young woman and several other people who were eagerly demonstrating to one another how familiar, even intimate, they were with the celebrity of the moment. “My man!” they exclaimed and, “Brother!”

  My old friend Jimmy Singleton suddenly materialized. Jimmy will occasionally run a blind pig, for a few weeks at a time, until its natural half-life expires. “Mul, what you doin’ here? You dig this shit? I didn't know. It's cool, eh?”

  “What happened at the Joe?” I asked, referring to the Joe Louis Arena, the home of the Red Wings.

  “Blew ‘em out,” Jimmy said. “Six-two. Yzerman scored two goals, the Russians got all the others.”

  Blessed relief. My sacrifice had paid off. I was shocked at how good it felt.

  “Do you know these guys?” I asked, meaning Kinanda.

  “Known ‘em for years,” Jimmy said.

  “Kinanda says he knew Grootka.”

  Singleton nodded. “Yeah, he would.”

  “Well, Grootka knew everybody,” I said. “But is Kinanda, or was he, a local guy?” I was puzzled: Grootka's unusually wide acquaintance could hardly extend to, say, New York, or Chicago, which is where I presumed Kinanda was based.

  “He used to play around here, in a previous life,” Jimmy joked, “but he made his name in L. A. He usually has a couple of the home cats in his band.”

  “Ah, that explains it. I guess he likes the Detroit sound.” Although, I thought, what is the Detroit sound?

  “You mean that hard edge?” Singleton said.

  “Yeah.” I thought I knew what he meant. It was a legacy, I thought, of a couple generations of Detroit players, dating back to the twenties with the McKinney's Cotton Pickers, through boppers like Wardell Gray, and up to and including Roland Hanna, the Jones boys, Barry Harris, Paul Chambers, Ron Carter, Kenny Burrell, Louis Hayes, Pepper Adams, Donald Byrd, Marcus Belgrave, and Geri Allen. It was a straightforward, technically brilliant style that was devoid of sentimentality, but not unemotional.

  Reflecting on the music I had just heard, I found a definite affinity. This music was not mainstream, certainly not bop, but there was that same wry, unsentimental edge that said “Detroit” to me. The only thing I missed was a lack of a strong tenor or baritone sax presence. The only sax in the lineup tonight had been a soprano, played virtuosically by a young black woman named Karen Tate. She was a terrific player who doubled on clarinet and bass clarine
t, but she didn't blow with that characteristic Detroit edge. I mentioned it to Singleton.

  “The man didn't blow,” he pointed out.

  “You mean Kinanda? I thought he was a piano player.” The tape Books had given me had listed Kinanda as a keyboard player and composer, but there had been some mention of “saxes.” I'd heard some powerful saxes on it, but I'd gotten the impression, as I had tonight, that Kinanda was a pianist.

  “He also plays sax,” Singleton said. “Damn good, too. Tenor and bari. I guess the music didn't call for a big horn.”

  The featured composition had, in fact, been an extended series of reflections on a theme, presumably about African life, except that the composer didn't bother to tell us anything about the theme, just the somewhat evocative titles of the relatively short pieces that made up the suite: “Kilwa Kisiwani,” “Victoria Nyanza,” and so on. It wasn't unusual: music lovers are used to titles that are vaguely evocative without being very descriptive of the music itself, as in Schubert's “Trout” quintet.

  When I saw an opportunity I approached Kinanda again and asked him straight out what the composition was all about.

  “It's about jazz,” he said, promptly. “Music and instruments. Keyboards, drums. Music is always about that. But we give it other names sometimes, maybe because we think it should be about something . . . something out there.” He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the city. “Tchaikovsky got together an orchestra and wrote a piece about Napoleon and the invasion of Moscow, but it's really just orchestral music, no matter how many cannons are fired.”