I'll Know My Song Well 7/2/2020

A kid in his basement rec room slowly figuring out the chords to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

or a woman in the shower singing along with Roberta Flack, absolutely nailing the chorus but a bit fuzzy on parts of the verse.

or jazz musicians on social media sharing videos of themselves performing transcriptions of favorite solos by Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, or Joel Frahm….

All of these folks have fallen in love with, (or at least nursed a decent crush on) a song, a melody, a beat, a feeling. Something about this attraction has made them unsatisfied with merely admiring; they want to participate and merge with the music, inhabiting it and experiencing it as did the performer who first picked it out of the ether. At times this impulse can’t even be helped and drifts below the tidemark of conscious thought. I’ve certainly done my part to try the nerves of folks around me with out of tune sub-tone whistling and pencil percussion, musical tics of which I’m barely even aware until they are (ahem!) brought to my attention. Has this ever happened to you?[1]

When a performing artist nurtures this impulse, culminating in a presentation of material created by or associated strongly with another, we typically call this a cover. I love this aspect of music, seeing songs that in being shared and shared alike take on lives of their own, growing under the loving commentary of countless retellings. In American music, there has long existed the concept of a “standard;” songs by the likes of Gershwin, Porter, Berlin, Bacharach or King, that at one time were seemingly performed by everyone. Nowadays this practice doesn’t seem quite so universal or assumed, and covering another artist’s work is more often interpreted as some kind of statement or commentary, or indicative of a particular discrete project, [2] (as in “so-and-so plays the so-and-so songbook.”) Sometimes, (speaking from personal experience now) there is no specific angle, agenda or desire to improve upon or correct or update that which one is “covering,” just this sense of infatuation in action.

However, believing as I do in each of our inherent individuality, I think that any material well-loved (like a person!) can’t help but be a bit transformed, [3]and there are also many covers in which an artist, (besides just plain old loving something publicly) is making a deliberate and calculated move to change, add to or amplify some aspect of the work being covered. I’d like to share one such recording by the terrific jazz vocalist Kurt Elling, which in my mind seems to take narratives and ideas already present in a fantastic piece of songwriting and make them even more potent, bolder, and timely.

Hard Rain

Bob Dylan wrote “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” in 1962 and recorded it on his second studio album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” It is lyrically modeled (in a conversational question-and answer style) after a traditional Anglo- Scottish British ballad called Bob Dylan wrote “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” in 1962 and recorded it on his second studio album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” It is lyrically modeled (in a conversational question-and answer style) after a traditional Anglo- Scottish British ballad called Lord Randall[4]

“Hard Rain” is generally considered a protest song, most often rhetorically linked with the Cuban Missile Crisis due to the time of its release, although in interviews Dylan has repeatedly claimed a broader and less specific sense of foreboding as the emotional background for his poetry, and the song was actually written before the crisis broke into public awareness. In Dylan’s words about “Hard Rain”:

"After a while you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course. It’s all one long funeral song."

Here’s a video of Dylan performing this song live.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXn9ZKPx6CY

The scary, stark imagery of the lyrics are thrown into relief by the patience and dependability of this song’s simple cadence, and whatever you think of Dylan as a vocalist (I’m a late-in-life convert!) his delivery is arresting and absorbing. I’m drawn into the fantastical tale of the young son’s travels by the great scenic variety. There are clear-cut warnings of terrible collapse, be they environmental: (“a dozen dead oceans,” “pellets of poison”) or societal: (“guns and swords in the hands of young children,” “one person starve, many people laughing.”) There are cryptic yet ominous images such as these consecutive verses that seem to be ripped from apocalyptic scriptures:

“I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin'
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin'”

However, there are also lines which strike an ambiguous or neutral tone: (“white ladder covered with water”, “white man walked a black dog”) and even a glimmer of joy and lightness: (“I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow.”)

Now listen to Kurt Elling’s version, off of his 2018 album “The Questions”

In addition to Elling, the group features Branford Marsalis on soprano saxophone, John Mclean on guitar, Stu Mindeman on piano, Clark Sommers on bass, and Jeff “Tain” Watts on drums.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WlqZxw2QNM

From the outset, it’s clear that Elling wants to steer a deliberate path through Dylan’s imagery. The first thing you might notice lyrically is his re-ordering of the verses, a move that seems intended to create a gradual building of tension, with visions gathering in doomsday portent with each successive stanza. Also notable is his gesture of inclusion and universality in changing up the eye color of the son with each question posed by the “mother” figure, from blue to green to brown and black, rendering him even more protean and relatable.

For me though, It’s the musical arrangement[5]here, (for which pianist Stu Mindeman deserves a heavy dose of credit) more than any textual alignment or edit, that completely opens me up. Elling delivers the first verse dramatically, with comfortable pauses, completely unaccompanied. The second verse (not just out of order, but answering an unasked question- “Who did you meet?”) adds a ghostly glimmer of guitar effects. When Elling finally gets to the lyrical release of “It’s a Hard..” the band asserts itself and swaddles the repetitive word with harmonic expectancy.[6] Through changes in tone color, rhythmic density, the addition and subtraction of soprano saxophone doubling the interstitial piano “hook,” (which itself expands and retracts backwards upon itself) the pot is gradually brought to a boil. Listen to the way that simple, unremarkable decisions of the band members can aggregate into completely fresh environments, casting melodic and lyrical material in successive shifting lights. “Where have you been, what did you see, who did you meet, what did you hear?” Dylan’s words and this musical arrangement are working in tandem to hold us still through a montage of suffering, turning uneasy feelings over as a peculiar cloudy gem stone, searching for a coherent foothold.

After Marsalis’s saxophone solo momentarily draws down the intensity only to come charging back, we get to what now feels like the inevitable climax of the story, a moment of decision that flew beneath my radar in the original version, but is now foregrounded by the swirling agitation of Elling’s group.

“What’ll you do now, my black-eyed son, and

What’ll you do now my darling young one?”

Musically we’re cast off a cliff, only piano and voice remaining. It’s the sound of floating, not away but inward, no longer looking at the tumult of the world and the assault of its ills but at the state of this son’s heart. What is this traveler’s response to all that he has seen?

“I’m going back out ‘fore the rain starts a falling.

I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest.

Where the people are many and their hands are all empty….”

This turn (and I picture it as a physical motion, the son about-facing his way back out of the safety of home..) catches my breath up by the collarbone.

Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden..

Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison”

This son has seen every bit of the worst that the world has to dish out and is steadfast in his determination to be a part of the necessary healing work. If the first verses were Old Testament chaos, fear and trembling, this is New Testament resolve and purpose. The music here responds in kind to the words, with harmony mirroring their descent back down into that “home in the valley,” resting finally at “none is the number,” in a spent equilibrium before charging up the hill once more…

“and I’ll tell it and think it and feel it and breathe it

and reflect it from the mountains so all souls can see it

I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinking

but I’ll know my song well before I start singing”

That’ll preach!

In the musical setting, a short chordal pattern used in the previous interludes has been transfigured, from a gentle, irresolute gospel-tinged cadence to defiant, upward bounds. I still wince and shake my head on cue each time I hear this. All of the energies and warring feelings of the song and this setting are given one last chance to sort themselves out over and through a Jeff Watts drum solo, and it comes to an end, introspective, questioning, an altar calling “What about you…..?”

With all due respect and love to Bob Dylan, and ascribing the larger part of this sentiment to my own insensitivity, without this arrangement I don’t think I would have received these same messages. I’m well aware that the original musical setting also provides a meaningful ballast against which to display the wild-eyed scenes of the poetry, as a stark white gallery wall focuses one’s attention on a painting. I’m not trying to provoke any arguments about better and best, and I don’t think that we should even think about creative acts such as these on an “improvement” continuum, but rather just enjoy this output of beauty and meaning made even sweeter for the ties that draw it back and forth across decades and generations of performers and listeners.

Coda – Some Children

There is another similar arrangement by this band that works on me in the same way; Elling’s version of “Some Children See Him” from his 2016 release The Beautiful Day- Kurt Elling Sings Christmas. Much has been written about Kurt’s musical upbringing in the church, and his iconoclastic route to jazz stardom through divinity school; he very dependably weaves themes of spirituality and social consciousness through the majority of his work and I would certainly put in a plug for this album if you’re in for a thoughtful, expansive examination of the feelings associated with Christmas season. “Some Children” is not all that common, but is definitely one of my favorites. It was written by Alfred Burt in 1951. If you’re familiar with it, I’m betting it’s on account of James Taylor’s version. Here’s an earlier version by Andy Williams:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifgnXSB4M60

and now Elling’s, (a collaboration with guitarist Jon McLean) which girds this ballad with taut rhythmic assurance and opens it up harmonically and even theologically!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfCITFKaI9E

There is a moment in this arrangement that is a kissing cousin to the “going back out” moment in Hard Rain; did you hear it? A place of leaning-in intimacy in order to help the song open up to something fresh and unexpected, despite being totally consistent with the spirit of the song as originally conceived. I don’t want to spoil it for you; perhaps it will bring you a few tears and thoughts of loved ones as it did for me.

[1] I mean, do you yourself have a habit of subliminal music making, not have you yourself been annoyed by yours truly. Don’t answer that one.

[2] Of course, there’s no shortage of bands whose entire reason for being is to cover or pay tribute to an earlier more famous band.)

[3] . Some of these themes are touched upon in a previous entry entitled “Higher Ground”

[4] which had already been recorded by several American artists including this 1954 version by Harry Belafonte https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acWQMs6BXX8

[5]“Arrangement” is the term more often used among jazz-folk for “cover” (which seems to be more from the world of pop.) It implies a focus on changing any or all of the elements of the piece besides the melody, which is typically seen as the most essential element (an idea that is also borne out in our present intellectual property laws.)