2020 Coda (12/20/2020) HBDMG
About a month into the pandemic, I began to write blog posts, recounting times in my life when music seemed to communicate something immediate and meaningful to me. One of the happy surprises in doing so was the way in which recording these recollections served to bring a new sense of awareness of past experiences, and the ways in which some of the most powerful episodes continue to reverberate through my life up through the present. With that in mind, I’d like to share another fun story from “back in the day.” (“the day” of course being college! Duh!)
This is also going to be a reflection on the idea or concept of “swing.” Having just about finished teaching a semesters long jazz history course, I have had the responsibility to put characteristics to, and parameters around, the specific rhythmic pattern(s) created by African Americans in North America that bear this term. “Swing” is the word that we use to differentiate the feel of Louis Armstrong from Sousa, Stravinsky or Pixinguinha. It describes the multi-layering of darting eighth-note melody over an insistent and even “walking” quarter note bass. “Swing” is summoned to describe the rolling sensation created by subtle “syncopation” at both of these levels, including the preference for a 2 & 4 “backbeat” over 1 & 3 and the delicate lilt of eighth notes whose value is doled out in an off-kilter allowance. This rhythmic signature is seen as providing not only the basis for jazz music but also as reaching to affect distant tendrils of Black American Music’s evolutionary tree.
“Swing” is also commonly used as a genre of music[1]
in and of itself; buttressed, clarified and amplified by attendant traditions of specific instrumentation and dance, sartorial fashion and slang. “Swing” music was so popular and unifying a force that it even lends its name to a whole era of American culture (roughly 1930- 1945)
However, just as with the concept of “jazz” itself, it seems that something more organic and infinite baked into the idea represented by the word “swing” from the very beginning, as if the same spirit of improvisational liberation that animated the music itself also informs the use of language in and around it. Even before the aforementioned “Swing Era” the term was used in a larger sense, to refer to the felt sensation of potent rhythm, not just the particulars of its execution or language. It’s a word that (when applied to music!) signifies on a level of perception as often as on one of analysis. The feeling that we are attempting to lasso with this short word is one of communal connected energy and joy. It’s as mysterious and common as fire, and it has to be shared before it even really exists.[2]
That is all to say…that I would be hard pressed to decide on and describe for you the most “swing” that I have ever experienced, but if I did pose that question to myself, I would be thinking pretty generally about experiences in and around music and not just about one list of technical attributes. A select few intense episodes are golden-hued in my mind, and all from early adulthood, high school and college years, when it seems everyone’s most definitive and dramatic memories are enshrined! If I was to try and recount the times when I experienced the most swing:
- 1992? Feeling the spiritual intensity with which Abraham Burton and Eric Mcpherson burned uptempo Minor Marches in the small, oblong black box theatre of the old Clark Street Artists Collective in Hartford CT. Young men themselves, (still some of my idols!) performing for a gang of mostly younger musicians; a seminar for padawans in the Jedi temple… (Ack!!! Sorry!)
- 1994? Witnessing the telepathic hookup of my good friends, Jimmy Greene and Jim Oblon playing a medium tempo blues at Natures in Manchester CT, buoyed by family members and friends whose responsive energy was every bit as much a part of it as that emanating from the tiny stage.
- 1996? Playing a 20 minute exploration of Freddie Hubbard’s “Thermo” on the 4th floor of the Hartt School building, (with Stephen “King” Porter, Tony Leone and others..) when the groove seemed to flow so effortlessly that all present just kept on passing choruses around the room, unwilling to let the moment die even after all rehearsal business was more than taken care of.
However, I can only remember one time when music brought about an uncontrollable physical reaction, and this memory (and this music) is pretty firmly lodged in my mind as “exhibit A” of “swing.”
Many who read this will be familiar with one the most beloved albums in jazz history, Hank Mobleys “Soul Station” Blue Note 1960, featuring Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and Art Blakey on drums in support of Mobley’s tenor saxophone.
This was the album (CD to be exact) that I chose to put on as I slid into my parents’ living room recliner one day in the fall of 1995, home for a couple of days for the purpose of wisdom teeth removal (all 4!) and the subsequent convalescence[3]
There is of course nary an “un-swinging” note to be found. I’m certain that my enjoyment of the first track (a version of Irving Berlin’s “Remember”) was thorough and electrified. The 2nd track on the record is a Mobley original (and a jazz “standard” that by now I have played and taught countless times) “This I Dig of You”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yocco67La8
As the melody concludes there is an abrupt solo “break” intended to give the first soloist a chance to launch dramatically into the top of the form ( 0:37) When I listen to this tune nowadays I develop the clear suspicion that there had been inadequate communication or faulty assumptions in Van Gelder’s studio that day; an entire bar of silence is observed (I imagine anxious sideways glances from Mobley to Kelly and back; “no…You!”) before the pianist picks up the thread of the beat and finishes out the break.
The ensuing almost -2 minutes of music are swinging, and immediately, elementally so. See if you don’t agree! It’s Kelly, its Chambers, its Blakey, it’s the fourth shared spirit in that space that is conjured and sustained by their awareness of and synchronicity with one another; a spirit that is apparently humble enough to inhabit the ones and zeros of digital remastering and is thus unencumbered by time. I’ve had (and discussed in this blog) many treasured memories with recorded music, but that day I felt it in a very different way. I had a very real physical tremor, a shiver that swelled to a shaking through my arms and legs.[4] I’m pretty sure that this feeling was brought on specifically by the phrases that end Kelly’s first chorus and begin his 2nd (roughly 1:06- 1:18), but I doubt very much, (that if we were listening to this recording together) I would have to bother pointing out these specific phrases. It was, and is all swinging and it felt very, very good. [5] In case you’re wondering, while yes, I do very much enjoy listening to this specific music regularly, no, it does not have the prescriptive power to duplicate this response each time I do; (If it did I fear I might have been far less productive over the past decades!) and I in fact have never before or since experienced anything similar through music.
So then…….what about all that muckety-muck before about “experiences reverberating…?
This little episode (and the desire to relate it) was actually jogged into mind by a similar sensation that I had just recently.
Sunday October 25, 2020 was a beautiful day. As on most of the Sundays of this newly concluded autumn, I spent the morning out hiking with my girlfriend Melanie while my teenage kids slept in. We were in Bloomfield CT’s Penwood State forest, and have a really cute picture to capture the morning.
We’d been hiking all over the place for months, including multiple visits to this park. It was getting noticeably colder! The trees were well past peak color, and shedding leaves so rapidly as to make some of the trails a little hard to discern at points. We love the scenery, the fresh air, the exercise, but mostly the chance to talk. There was plenty to unpack, what with both of us in full-on teaching mode at the peak of our respective college semesters, not to mention the doom and gloom of the weeks Covid statistics, and stress over the then-upcoming presidential election. On hikes such as this one, we have time to process pretty much everything that is on our minds individually, and clear the way for other deeper memories, feelings and ideas to surface and beg to be shared. I don’t remember everything that we spoke of that morning but I can recall that I recounted some especially painful and definitive moments from my past, retelling conversations that ended up shaping me and my relationship to my family, and being pretty much emotionally overcome in the process. We had to double back a bit once we had otherwise finished the loop to the parking area, because I didn’t want to be seen crying in public! (Oh yeah, it was one of those mornings!) Melanie isn’t ever put off by anything difficult that I might share; she knows who she is, by now she knows who I am, and we both have a respectful reverence for the connection that we have.
And then she dropped me off at my house, and we both went about our days, dealing with school-related work, house cleaning, shopping, what she and I usually refer to as “adulting.” I didn’t see her again or speak to her all afternoon, I’m guessing that we just texted a goodnight at some point.
If an omniscient observer (or film crew!) had captured everything that transpired between she and I that morning, every word, every glance, every prolonged snuggle against the cold on Penwood’s handful of bare lookout-worthy cliff side outcroppings, they would clearly see two people very much in love, no matter their definition of that concept. Of course, that could be said of just about any of our days passed in 2020, and as I lay dozing off in my bed that night, I wasn’t thinking about any particular emotional or relational milestone relating to Melanie and I. There was no particular question that was answered that day, no specific step of brave new vulnerability or trust. I was just thinking about her, about how wonderful she is, about how sure I was that she loved me, and about how very fortunate, undeserved, unexpected, how given this all was.
And I had that same deep nervous system shiver…radiating from my gut out to my toes.
Swinging![6]
I do such a crappy job of consistently journaling but I was sure to jot this little episode down, including my instantly clarified memory of Wynton Kelly’s oh-so-swinging piano solo.
To my love Melanie, on her 40th birthday- thank you for loving me in my shallowness and depth and being there in all the laughing crying mystery of it all. I am going to need to acquire far more words to make an attempt at conveying all the things that I “Dig of You”
[1] To Quote Sherrie Tucker “Genres are mostly advertising strategies that must be analyzed and problematized”
[2] Even pre-“Swing Era,” the lyrics of Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing” make it clear that the title is not a rhythmic-purity litmus test: (the phrase “It makes no difference if it’s sweet or hot” would have represented a wide ranging and open musical catholicism to it’s original late 1920’s audience; a hundred years later those terms have decidedly slunk back into the world of take-out menus!)
[3] I know what you’re thinking: Heavy narcotics! There is probably a chemical explanation for this extra-normal experience…. I can neither confirm nor deny, but you might have a point
[4] Not sexual
[5] Still not sexual
[6] Maybe just a bit sexual