Hal Willner

One more Sonny Rollins video clip, the one from Night Music

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Many years ago now, my friend John Brower (the man who was in the Gamelan orchestra I mentioned without naming him earlier this month)  recommended a late night TV show to me, one called somewhat generically Night Music.  John was a font of recommendations, and no ordinary human vessel could pursue everything he would suggest. Years later, years too after John had died young, I followed up on that recommendation when the series became available on YouTube.

Night Music  as a series has some awkwardness. Looking at the series in order you get the sense that they were constantly rejiggering the presentation looking for the broadcast commercial viability they never could reach. I’d also suppose, that to some sensibilities, the attempts to render late 1980’s cool might look artificial and date-stamped – but what it was trying to do was worthwhile. The guiding hand of Hal Willner, the gifted musical eclectic was often apparent. Never more than in the video clip below.

It opens with the entire “God Bless the Child,”  a circa 1960 live performance on Jazz Casual  of Sonny Rollins and his group from the time of The Bridge  LP.  It assumes that there’s audience for that, sans any setup or context. Is that a foolish and unaware choice? Perhaps. Commercially unwise? Certainly. This is the dawn of the Alt-Rock era, and we see a group of dark-suited men on a gray screen playing a Billie Holliday ballad with no singer save for the man with the crooked brass saxophone and the balding man from accounting playing a big hollow-body guitar.

And then Leonard Cohen comes on screen. Cohen was still in his “we know you’re great, but we don’t know if you’re any good” era when his dour divine comedy was considered unsittable for release to American audiences by his own record company. And the song Cohen begins is his adaptation of the Jewish Unetanneh Tokef prayer, a meditation on death. Friday night, is it party time! or sabbath? Behind him is a large and mixed bag of great musicians, large enough that I can’t even say who all is playing. I see Robben Ford and members of the now more famous producer and record company head Don Was’ Detroit alt-soul music band Was Not Was, and they proceed to take the song to every kind of church, tabernacle, mosque, temple, ashram, and what not ever made. And the cantor isn’t necessarily Cohen, the song’s composer, whose baritone holds down the central drone of the melody, but this man Sonny Rollins, whose saxophone has become an angel he’s wrestling with in front of our eyes.

There’s about 15 minutes in this clip, completing with the roll the credits release of “I Can’t Turn You Loose”

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Sonny Rollins would live another 35 years after that, still performing for most of those years. He was capable of doing that kind of playing on any given night on any given song, usually to a modest-sized room, rarely on mass media. When I read last night of the completion of his life, I thought of this performance as the musical expression of the meditation of death, in gratitude and tears.

I Have Loved Hours at Sea

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I don’t plan ahead with this project much, which has it’s benefits and costs. Often one piece sort of kicks off the idea for the next one and so on. That was the case with doing my roll up of last year’s section of “The Waste Land”  for National Poetry Month, and then following it up with a very short poem by Sara Teasdale, T. S. Eliot’s contemporary in growing up in St. Louis Missouri.

But I had looked at doing another Sara Teasdale poem other than her “Morning.”   I even went so far as to write a sketch of the music I would use. I liked what I had there, but “Morning’s”  striking compression made it more of a contrast to Eliot.

This project has a lot of inefficiencies like that, poet’s collections I read or skim and then find nothing that inspires me to go further. Ideas for musical combinations that don’t quite bear fruit. Poems that jump out at me as compelling, only to find that they aren’t in the public domain and therefore free to use. Ideas that seem sound but get pushed aside by other ideas that step in front of them.

Given the extraordinary work that I put into this project: selecting my own texts, researching what to say about them, and then composing, playing and recording multiple musical parts, these inefficiencies could trouble me. I certainly don’t want to increase them, but I’m somewhat comfortable in them. Like a meditative walking maze, there’s something in the time and indirectness that lets other thoughts in.

Pink Moon

The Official Moon of Shelter in Place. None of you stand so tall. Pink Moon is going to get you all.

 

I’m continuing this project in a time of a global pandemic, which doesn’t aid efficiency either. Luckily so far, I haven’t had to deal with any family members or friends suffering from the Covid-19 virus. In their place, there’s the toll of artists who have succumbed to it. It’s been a tough week for that. Bill Withers, who in his too brief time singing through the music industry, produced songs and performances of them that could carry this troubled workman through his clocked-in days. Adam Schlesinger, a songwriter after my own heart who liked to jump and mix genres. Hal Willner, that most underappreciated functionary in the arts, the impresario, who melded other artists into projects many and wide, projects often aimed (as this one does) to celebrate other artists. And then John Prine, the singing mailman from the outskirts of Chicago, who came from nowhere quickly into the Seventies age of the singer-songwriter, and then stayed like a little public park that you knew was always there, visited by yourself, some others, some pigeons, but nothing elaborate and scenic enough to celebrate.

Prine had some interesting things to say about his job. He said that he considered his mail route as “a library with no books.” As it turns out, he didn’t fill it with books—though he returned more than he checked out—but with that portable, walking art: songs. Actor Viola Davis once said that graveyards contain the stuff of her art while urging you to make it part of yours too.

They are the only profession the celebrates what it is to live a life

“Become an artist. They are the only profession that celebrates what it is to live a life.” – Viola Davis

 

When something, someone, goes away it’s a good time to notice what a sum total of things are. Some people are heroes for one thing they once did. Some have career highlights, a dozen or half-dozen models of importance. Others do things for decades, just doing what they do. Prine’s like that. Here’s a guy that in the decade that got called “The Me Decade” wrote songs that had other people in them.  He kept writing, forging his trademark take on the human condition into song after song. No big thing. That’s what he does. Or did, because now he’s dead and you notice something: there aren’t a lot who did that, and we have songwriters and songwriters still who will do something other than that.

Anyway, these thoughts in a pandemic brought me back to this other Teasdale poem, the one I didn’t use, “I Have Loved Hours at Sea.”

It’s a premature, self-elegy. That’s a hard form to pull off, but I think Teasdale does. It’s bitter-sweet, but that’s what we should expect from Teasdale, poem after poem. It can be read as a poem with a moral, a lesson, that we should live our lives fully so that our container of time is fulfilled—but also as Teasdale often does, there’s a gothic undertone to it all: many the blessing she recounts is qualified or undercut and stated by this young poet in a past tense. Here’s the full text of her poem.

So, as you can see with the player gadget below, I decided to go through with performing this second Teasdale poem in a row. I even decided to write and perform a short piece for strings as an introductory lament. In the delay of inefficiencies and skimpy planning, “I Have Loved Hours at Sea”  now seems to have a reason to be performed, and perhaps for you to listen to.