Searching

Music always seems to be searching for something, even when it just seems to be wandering around in space, or entertaining grocery shoppers. I saw a symphony once disguised as a cluster of ferns in a forest of words and said to myself it takes a lot to make a sound extend itself across the desolations of modern life. You need a lot of geometry and towels. D minor on a Fender Stratocaster, squeaky bedsprings, ionized arias, and jingly implications. How many drugs does the body manufacture? Enough to function. How many drugs does an individual require to commune with the universe? Depends. Sometimes the moment calls for Duende. Sometimes Baton Rouge. Life can be rigid as a stripper pole. But given the right music, it can bend.

Music might be defined as “a vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion.” It might also be a man preparing to eat a hot dog, wheezes of air squeezed out of a bottle of relish, or that deep audible breath Marianne Faithful takes before launching into “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.” There’s the music of audition, which is a persistent anticipation mingled with anxiety and the propellers of ambition, and the music of Stephane Mallarmé leaning against the wall of a garage churning with wind & Paganini. Summer rain. Gunfire in a sugar refinery. An old woman milking a cow. 

I love that cocktail lounge jazz which sounds defeated, but defeated in a good way, resigned, that sweet feeling of relief that envelops you when the realization finally unfolds revealing all the formidable obstacles and impossible feats you’d have to perform to conquer whatever evil, whatever depravity, whatever arrogance, whatever stupidity, whatever asshole held all the cards. It’s really not a defeat at all, it’s more of a triumph. The triumph doesn’t feel like triumph, not until a spirit takes you out of yourself and puts you somewhere else. It’s a form of transcendence with a hint of hedonism. The quiet, unvoiced rebellions learned and refined in adolescence that blossom in the adult mind like a golden abdication. It feels cathartic, like all the birds and barking dogs going silent during a solar eclipse and watching moon shadows roll over the earth. 

Music is personal, sympathetic as a home. Gustave Mahler’s Adagietto. Absolutely sublime. Eileen, by Keith Richards, performed on stage. He plays the guitar with such joy, such confidence, such easy skill and impish insouciance, that he can’t remain still, he’s all over the stage, kicking a leg as if in a mock alley fight, pulling out chords with limber panache. 

Etta James. Live at Montreux, 1975. Look out, she says. And launches into I’d Rather Go Blind with a full spectrum of feeling, so broad, so full, so intense it rips a new reality out of a world of stupefying indifference, and coaxes it into being with a husky female fire. Somebody in the crowd shouts something witty and smart and she responds, “you should be up here.” 

Leaving, by Chet Baker. It begins with a cello, segues to a trumpet and ends with a long slow purgation. And because this is YouTube, his face fills the screen: craggy, beaten, sad, but undefeated, there’s heaven in his eyes, and the quiet dignity of pain.