Sonny Rollins and William Gibson and Music Writing

^{When Sonny Rollins puts down his saxophone and stops playing, for me, a large measure of what makes music great will disappear. That will be a terrible, terrible moment — a moment I don’t care to even think about.}

^{Gary Giddins. 2002}

 

^{Sonny Rollins is playing in Sydney for the first time ever in about a month. Ornette Coleman played here for the first time a month ago, and Dave Holland made his first Australian appearance last year. I’d been continually listening to Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters (a setting of songs by Joni Mitchell, which Dave Holland plays bass on) and the Grinderman album at that time and I was sorry to have missed Dave Holland’s concert but I’m sure he’ll be back, or I can see him play somewhere else in the world sometime. But Ornette Coleman? That might be another matter. It’s a delicate issue with the elderly jazz guys. The advertising doesn’t come right out and say it but there’s the inference that God’s the promoter on these tours, letting these guys have the chance to perform places they’ve never been before whisking them off to the great Birdland in the sky. But a Sonny Rollins or Ornette Coleman performance isn’t something dutiful, to check off a list of 1,000 musicians to see before they die. You have to see them because there’s hardly anybody as alive as them!}

^{In 2000 Gary Giddins wrote: We are witnessing something new in jazz: the triumph of the AARP (American Association of Retired People) musician. Through most of jazz history, elder statesmen were valued for continuing to play well, while the main focus was on younger players whose energy opened new channels. But who today plays with more energy, originality, and purpose than Cecil Taylor, Max Roach, Ornette Coleman, John Lewis, Roy Haynes, Lee Konitz, Sam Rivers, and Sonny Rollins? And which young tenor terror will make an album as strong as This Is What I Do [ by Sonny Rollins, released in 2000].}

^{Village Voice. 21 November 2000.}

 

^{The same is true for rock and roll. While short-sighted mainstream critics are agog and marvel that musicians they consider Methuselah’s are still able to lift a guitar, the astonishing, vital records I’m hearing are by musicians in their third decade of recording. It’s got to the point where I won’t pick up a rock and roll album unless the musician is at least fifty years old.}

 

^{Reading jazz criticism has always been a part of the experience of jazz for me. The liner notes on Blue Note and Verve LP’s, Leonard Feather‘s reviews, Studs Terkel’s profiles of musicians, and now Gary Giddins’s collected Village Voice reviews in two brick-thick volumes, all open up and deepen the experience of the music for me. The musical language of jazz, the technicalities of tempo and key are things I’ve never mastered. It helps – metaphorically – to stand beside someone who can indicate significant things I’d otherwise miss. It’s the critic as the equivalent of a literary translator rather than an intermediary.}

 

^{When I read an essay by Haruki Murakami in the New York Times about transferring the feeling he got from listening to jazz, into writing, it put into words what I’ve always been trying to put into words about music, particularly jazz but also rock and roll.}

 

^{“Practically everything I know about writing, then, I learned from music,” Murakami wrote. “It may sound paradoxical to say so, but if I had not been so obsessed with music I might not have become a novelist. Even now, almost 30 years later, I continue to learn a great deal about writing from good music. My style is as deeply influenced by Charlie Parker’s repeated freewheeling riffs, say, as by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s elegantly flowing prose. And I still take the quality of continual self-renewal in Miles Davis’s music as a literary model. One of my all-time favourite jazz pianists is Thelonious Monk. Once, when someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: ‘It can’t be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean.’ “}

 

^{In the introduction to the collection Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century, Gary Giddins explains the name he gave to his column in the Village Voice (1974 – 2003), which comes from a Louis Armstrong – Earl Hines duet because he objected to calling it the “jazz” column.}

 

^{“I was too sensitive to the implication – rampant at the time – that jazz and music were mutually exclusive. Most universities with jazz programs then, and quite a few now, inserted them into Folklore, African American and English departments, anything but music. So I reasoned: Let the banner be something neutral and personal. I chose Weather Bird mainly because the Armstrong-Hines record’s blending of humour and drama, finery and thrills, like-mindedness and canny aggression, and its uniqueness (even now, after more than 75 years) incarnates the essence and peculiar logic of jazz. Moreover, it is the greatest of all jazz duets, and I had thought of criticism as a dialogue between writer and reader – that’s the way it seemed to me, reading the great critics, their impressions fuelling my own.”}

 

^{My own writing about music is noodling in notebooks. A dialogue between the composers and myself where my questions are rhetorical. My essays are mostly to be printed in my book-binding prototypes and will have a limited life as manufacturer’s samples. But I want to read insightful reviews of the music that I’m listening to, and rock and roll stories mostly disappoint. Gary Giddins railed against the sloppiness of rock and roll writing when an interviewer asked him about Sonny Rollins playing with the Rolling Stones. “A not very good rock critic in Stereo Review reviewed that album, Tattoo You, where Sonny solos on three tracks. Sonny is not mentioned anywhere on the label, which is an outrage. This reviewer said there was a “rumour” that Sonny Rollins was performing on this album but he couldn’t hear him! What can you say?”}

 

^{I’ve been reading reviews of Nick Cave’s new album with the Bad Seeds, DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!! and find most reviewers so incurious that they’re discourteous but the feature stories disappoint more. The interviewers are hyper-aware of Nick’s escalating fame to the point that there is no other subject than the writer’s awkwardness in Nick’s presence. When Jean Claude Carriere, who adapted the Hindu epic The Mahabharata for the stage and screen, has written an introduction to a new translation of the poems of the Sufi mystic, Rumi, and was a practising Buddhist, was conducting a series of conversations with the Dalai Lama(published as Violence and Compassion) he wrote of finding the right tone and stance between the extremes of “paralysing respect” and “pointless disrespect”. Nick’s interviewers strike both extremes, often in the same story.}

 

^{When I heard William Gibson read from his novel All Tomorrow’s Parties in Los Angeles in 1999 he was asked if there was any relationship between the novel and the Velvet Underground song of the same name. No, he replied, it was just a great title and he’d been wanting to use it for some time. But his novels of the last decade have been populated with musicians who are in the art rock world whose fame warps the atmosphere.}

 

^{The Idoru, Rei Toi, is a wholly digital singer whose character deepens and becomes more complex as the story unwinds. Her code includes an intelligent database that learns from the desires and messages she receives from her fans, who adore her as if she were flesh and blood. Like Pinocchio and Data, the android in Star Trek: the Next Generation, she yearns to be genuinely human. Rez, from the art rock band Lo Rez, which is now only popular with the children of their original fans, becomes obsessed with her and wants to disappear beyond the screen and “marry” her. He’s isolated and diminished by fame. He has several houses in different parts of the world and his life is ordered and arranged by personal assistants but when Laney assesses the data generated by Rez, the only thing that has any life is the fan data, the sightings and imaginings and embellishments in their re-mixes of songs, the videos they create and the forums they hold in online worlds something like Second Life.}

 

^{In Pattern Recognition there’s an English punk rocker, Billy Prion, who paralysed the left side of his face as a publicity gesture and whose girlfriend is from a girl band called Velcro Kitty. Like Bill Murray’s character in Lost In Translation, he’s reduced to making commercials in Japan for a beverage manufacturer, although he also has a gallery in London that shows controversial contemporary abstract art.}

 

^{The heroine of Spook Country is Hollis Henry, who’d been the singer of a band called Curfew, whose guitarist was a brooding egghead with an interest in technology who is reminiscent of Brian Eno. It’s possible to imagine him producing an equivalent to the hazy sonic sheen that Brian Eno’s production gave U2’s music and being sharp enough to compose the chords that are the sound of Windows running through its system on start-up. Hollis is hired by the advertising shark, Hubertus Bigend, to research a technology that’s simultaneously being used by artists and old-fashioned spies. Hollis has been chosen with the knowledge that her fame will distort the atmosphere around her and that the artists and spies will both swoon, to differing degrees, in her presence.}

 

^{The musical fame that William Gibson writes about comes from what advertising has made of music, from criticism being indistinguishable from marketing, from the blanketing of every architectural surface with music videos, every human surface with hats and shirts and jackets and logos, and incessant audio pumped into the air or siphoned through headphones, making silence unimaginable. The conductor and musician Daniel Barenboim was asked by The Guardian what he thought the greatest threat is to music today. “Hearing it too often in public places — lifts, hotel lobbies,” he replied. “It gets people used to hearing music without really listening to it. But you must concentrate on music to get the most out of it.”}