Time Feel- 4/18/2020

I want to share something that happened to me the other day, first thing in the morning.

Scrolling aimlessly through Instagram, with mind relatively empty and un-primed, I heard Madison Cunningham’s cover of John Prine’s song “Summers End” and was moved to tears almost instantly, within seconds. At the moment it felt as if nothing quite like this had ever happened to me before.

Just two chords, one lyrical line brought it on:

“Summer’s end, around the bend, just flying..”

The next lines undid me completely:

“The swimming suits are on the lines just drying,

I’ll meet you there, per our conversation,

I hope I didn’t ruin your whole vacation”

Even now typing this I feel it rising up in my throat!

If you’d like to see this particular video..

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=3635132183225825

What is it about these words, the tone of her voice and guitar, the see-sawing harmony that opened me up this way, so accurately tapped into and exhumed something unbidden? What did these images mean to me specifically, that day, yesterday, and still today? I was torn between the desire to dig deeper and the fear of unintentionally neutering what felt like a pretty mystical experience through over-analysis…

This being early 2020, with browsers at the ready and an unhurried quarantine schedule, the temptation was too great to act upon any and all curiosities and I dove deeply into this song. I found the original version, from Prines 2018 Album “The Tree of Forgiveness” to be just as moving. I confess that I had never even heard of Prine before tributes to him had flooded my social media feed last week, another of a daily list of musical heroes and icons succumbing to Covid-19. I saw the official video for the song directed by Kerrin Sheldon and Elaine McMillion Sheldon and read this piece by Lars Gotrich (which contains the video if you’d like to check it out; it is so well thought out and acted, beautiful in its own right.)

https://www.npr.org/2018/09/28/652520122/john-prine-tells-a-devastating-story-at-summer-s-end

(Now you’re possibly crying too!)

The video and quotes from Prine link the narrative of the lyrics to the ongoing opioid crisis. I’m a little unclear as to the degree to which this was his original intent vs. a connection made by the Sheldons (though clearly embraced by Prine either way) and I’m not inclined to care a whole lot.* In any event, I wasn’t thinking about opioids, or even the passing of loved ones more generally that morning. Clearly, to me, “Summer’s End” wasn’t precisely “about” the same things that it was “about” to Prine. So what exactly was this song doing in me?**

One obvious explanation for my feelings would be the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic. This crisis and its emotional, social and economic fallout give us all a common pool of grief and fear to bob around in, and this frightening unknowing mixed with low-grade ambient grief over the loss of acquaintances could easily make me (and all of us) more raw and ready to have emotional nerves plucked and resonant. This thought occurred but still didn’t feel on target. There was more there, other grief and stories being summoned.

Sorting through the images called to mind as I listened, it was clear that the bittersweet sadness I felt had a lot to do with my ex-wife, but not in an immediate or even accurate way. “Summer’s End” felt quite unlike the many songs that I compiled months ago on a Spotify playlist, intended to help me “go through and not around” the feelings of grief and stress that were/are part and parcel of the separation and divorce process. I knew that this song didn’t belong on that list; the lyrics taken as a whole didn’t really apply to me, her, or our situation, and the song wasn’t amplifying or rephrasing any current emotions. Rather, it was calling me back in memory’s time through isolated, hazy scenes, half-imagined ones at that.

When Prine (or Cunningham) sung “In your car, the windows are wide open..” it was an image of the two of us from early in our relationship, with her driving us somewhere on the highway, most likely to or from a visit to her family a state away. The line “I still love that picture of us walking” made me envision a picture that doesn’t even exist, (although hundreds like it do…) of the two of us, on vacation in Maine walking a dirt road at twilight. These images, and others that I can’t quite wrestle into actual words, are all from my/our very-young adulthood, from the beginning of our relationship, from a period of relative innocence and lightness.

After many listens, the most potent part of “Summer’s End” for me is still the opening verse, which to me calls to mind a brief meeting, perhaps a summer romance, or even two young kids simply meeting and becoming fast friends for just a couple days while their families happened to vacation at the same destination. I think there is something in the way these lyrics gently lead me to emotionally hold this simple, light and airy image next to what feels like an enormity, an 18-year marriage. It’s as if they are the same in the end, just as fleeting, just as impermanent; “the past” as a great equalizer, gobbling up all!

What I was/am feeling is really about time, its passing, its scarcity, its preciousness, its loss that no sense of accomplishment or pride can soothe. At this point, I really have relatively few regrets about my marriage or its conclusion, but as these images all cycle through my mind, I ache with the phrase “I hope I didn’t ruin your whole vacation.” This line, which makes very little sense applied even figuratively, goes deep within me to call out a deeper sadness at the passing of time. Major life events, like a cadence at the end of each repeating chorus, serve as nodes in time, little hills whose tops afford us the chance to look around a bit in all directions.

It occurred to me that I have had a similar feeling just once before, with a song and words evoking an overwhelming flood of images and feelings. To contrast with “Summer’s End,” the first time that I heard Sufjan Stevens’ fantastic album Carrie and Lowell, I was not particularly moved. I was preoccupied with my own parental judgement, having brought my entire family to see my friend Ben Lanz perform this music live with Stevens in Hartford CT. On that night, I was paranoid about how the loud volume was going to affect my then young kids, about what they would think of the couple aggressively making out in front of us, and especially about the constant refrain of “We’re all gonna die!” in the song “Fourth of July.” I mean, I wanted them to have a healthy sense of mortality, but was this age-appropriate?

At some point years later, I sampled this record on a long, late car ride, (a regular aspect of holding a teaching job far from home.) This time “Fourth of July” hit me so hard that I had to listen repetitively, in the driveway, at 1:00 am, in an attempt to inoculate myself against the emotions it brought forth. You can listen here if you’d like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTeKpWp8Psw

As before, I can’t even type this title into a search engine without feeling my eyes wet, and I expect it will ever be so! Just the fact that this song exists scares me a bit.

The lyrics here are clearer, it’s about the death of Stevens’ mother, and he is calling on a collection of memories, observations, regrets, and appreciations. I love how he bounces back and forth from contemporary scenes to childhood, and keeping that bird motive in play! From the beginning I (we) am (are) led into a space of loss, but I am still taken aback by the specific visions that I have through this music. These mental pictures are so clear and persistent that I feel as if I’m viewing a film.

One moment sticks out: When Stevens sings

“Shall we look at the moon, my little loon, why do you cry?”

I instantly see myself as a toddler with my mother at twilight on a beach, but just as soon as this image arises it is swirled together with one of myself and my son on an early morning in a New York apartment, and these two visions and feelings spin back-and-forth beyond steadying, similar to the faces of people after one wakes from a fainting spell.*** It’s as if I am being forcibly confronted with both the impermanence but also the connectedness between these various experiences of love, and yes, of course (thank you Sufjan) the ends of all of our lives!

I’m a musician myself by profession and affection. Performing, practicing, studying, teaching mostly jazz (for lack of a better word) or BAM (a better word, an acronym for “ Black American Music”) and the majority of the music that I’m involved with in one way or another has no words, and oftentimes no programmatic associations or robust “meaning” or message behind it.****What about music in this sense? I’m well aware that I’ve been mostly talking about the lyrics to these songs; the ideas expressed, their poetic grasping at something elusive. Being moved by the astute marriage of music and words is old hat for me; Folks like Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, and Eliot Smith would be shoe-ins to my “desert island” playlist. I do see all of their songs ( and the ones discussed here) as truly equitable “marriages,” as I can easily imagine being underwhelmed (or maybe just less whelmed?) at the same words in less artful musical settings, and I don’t necessarily see this music having the same impact without the words to direct my emotional attention.

But what about all of my other, older musical loves? What about songs written without words, songs only titled after the fact? I have felt this same feeling with wordless “undirected” music. Once I had mentally journeyed from Prine to Stevens the next jump was seemingly larger. In the same way that John Prine had been “hidden in plain sight” to me, (so similar to many artists that I listened to and was familiar with, so beloved by close friends of mine) I had another “discovery” of sorts earlier this week.

Here is “Sure Thing” by pianist Bud Powell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzvpzSaBDc4

I have so much experience wearing out folks’ eardrums with appreciation for Bud Powell that I’ve managed to make it a part of my career. He is one of my very favorite musicians, or artists in any medium, form or genre. I consider myself to be as familiar with his works as anyone I know. In my own study of the jazz “language,” (including the important quasi-monastic practices of transcribing solos, playing passages through 12 keys etc.) I would claim Bud as my most important influence, despite his being a pianist and I a saxophonist. It’s not a stretch to claim him as a musical grandfather of sorts. (My most important mentor as a young musician was the great Jackie Mclean. Bud was that same person for Jackie). However, this recording grabbed my attention thanks to an Alexa- shuffle in the background while cooking. I surely must have heard it before; I’ve definitely listened to all of the records on which it appears. (Jazz recordings from this era are often repackaged in a variety of re-issues). It’s a live recording from 1953 at Massey Hall in Toronto, with Charles Mingus and Max Roach rounding out Bud’s Trio. This piece is similar to others by Bud, displaying a big-time baroque influence. Like “I’ll Keep Loving You” “Dusk in Sandi” and “Glass Enclosure,” “Sure Thing” is meant to be played straight through, unexpanded by any improvised solos. Although Bud was most famed for soloistic brilliance and right-hand power and dexterity, he always seemed to include a piece like this on records and in documented live performances. I can’t think of any contemporaries who did this to this extent (to my knowledge) but Thelonious Monk’s “Crespuscule with Nellie” comes to mind as similar (Monk himself was an important mentor to Powell! We keep on going back…)

Among Powell’s output “Sure Thing” fits right in, unremarkable really. (I’d love to find an “unremarkable” synonym with positive connotations!) That’s the thing, for me, about Bud. Everything he plays or composes is imbued with a taste of the same lightness/heaviness coexisting that I felt from Prine and Stevens. I only ever feel one emotion from Bud, but I can’t sum it up in one word. It’s joy, but at joy’s conclusion. It’s a feeling of childhood but not less serious than adulthood. It’s about life and it’s brevity, the cruelty and holiness of time.

The whole world has had time on its mind lately, thinking of lives shortened by the virus, time wasted and opportunities lost to economies and societies shutting down, and enduring the biggest “ are-we-there-yet” of most of our lives as we wait for some kind of “normalcy” to be re-asserted. In a broader everyday sense, most of us are fairly consumed with the idea of time as a precious resource to be maximized through efficiency, a treasure impossible to savor thoroughly enough. Time feels “beyond” us and our thinking capacity. (I think I “understand” Einstein’s theory of time dilation and relativity in a limited get-it-right-on-the-exam way, but it will never not be mysterious and challenging.) It’s a dimension many theological systems ascribe in particular to the divine, a confinement for humankind outside of which God moves freely about.*****

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel describes the Jewish Sabbath as a “cathedral of time” and repeatedly argues for a privileging of time over space. He says, (in The Sabbath): “For where shall the likeness of God be found? There is no quality that space has in common with the essence of God. There is not enough freedom on the top of the mountain. There is not enough glory in the silence of the sea. Yet the likeness of God can be found in time, which is eternity in disguise”

This quote grabbed my attention weeks ago, and I even posted it on social media (sorry for the repetition!) but I think that in this music, in this poetry, in Bud Powell, John Prine and Sufjan Stevens, (and many, many others) I’m getting closer to feeling an understanding of this idea, enigmatic but true-feeling. Perhaps when these moments of breaking, of openness, of raw feeling happen, they are Eternitys disguise slipping a bit off Eternitys (really big!) face.

Coda: (and tribute to those lost)

The further I go with my own musical study, it seems I am more and more taken and occupied with the elemental, the micro-level, the instrumental or artistic voice in particulate form. When I’m in preachy mode with my students, one of my old warhorse “bits” is to assert that the creation of compelling music involves mastery over just two elements: Tone and Time. When asked to describe what sets musician x apart from musician y, from where does the sense of mastery, expression and identity issue, most often folks end up appealing to these basic ideas. With Time, when discussing beloved players such as Wallace Roney, Onaje Allan Gumbs or Lee Konitz, it’s their “beat,” “time-feel,” or “eighth note” that is simultaneously seen as one of their most inimical characteristics and sources of greatest appeal. It’s as if the most Michael Jordan-y thing about Michael Jordan wasn’t the dunk contests or game winners, but the specific way he walked, dribbled the ball, his posture while sipping water during a 30 second TV timeout. (The analogy breaks down over us musicians being not so results-driven! There isn’t really a hoop to shoot for or a scoreboard to tally our progress.)

Later tonight I’ll probably be transcribing a solo by the great Kenny Kirkland on his arrangement of Powell’s “Celia” and long after getting the raw materials I’ll be enjoying the struggle to match his beat, to meld my time with his, to feel the specific connection and relationship that his rhythm had to that of bassist Andy Gonzalez, and ironically becoming a little more of myself through this deliberately self-forgetful discipline. It takes a lot of time to develop good time! I suspect that a big part of what we construe as emotionally potent, soulful, genuine and honest in the simple playing of a melody, a simple eighth-note line, is the refraction of the time poured into the craft. Perhaps there is a deep understanding in each of us, a terribly accurate meter that perceives subconsciously the precise weight of time that has been poured into a craft, a purpose, a cause, a relationship, and responds emotionally, spiritually in kind.

Time to practice!

Notes/Tangents:

 *One thing that frustrates me in some musical criticism or commentary is the underlying assumption or inference that the artist themselves, their personality, intent and message is the true treasure to be had, with their work ending up as just the attractive means to that end.

**I’m aware that the “me” part of that sentence could also be ultimately obscuring a big chunk of the insight that I sought; it could be that most of this song’s poetic power for me was bound up in something mystical, something universal. But I’m as self-centered as the next fellow!

***That analogy may or may not resonate; I used to have a nervous system condition that caused me to pass out fairly regularly, I’m fine now, but it was a trip! (Buh dum, dum) If you’ve never been unconscious, more power to you and just use your imagination!

****This statement probably opens a can of worms that would take several more blog posts to close; to be clear, although many of the pieces written and performed by (for example) Charlie Parker don’t seek to communicate of reflect any particular idea unique to the individual tune; the title may be trivial or just a single-dimensional reference. (There may or may not have been a backstory to the title “Sure Thing” but either way the importance and relevance of such backstory is not accentuated of forwarded in the culture of jazz performance). However, this is a far cry from saying that the music doesn’t have meaning, or its creator intent. Jazz musicians often speak of someones  “voice” which can be taken in the sense of a signature, a fingerprint of sorts, but also as a grand over-arching meta- statement. It’s as if we’re all at work on just one art project, and it’s ever present, ever involving, impossible to segregate into episodes

*****Time-boundedness could also serve as a barrier to full interaction with the natural world, not just the spiritual.  One of the larger themes in Richard Foster’s beautiful novel The Overstory (recommended quarantine reading!) is the frustration of potential communion between humankind and trees due to vastly different experiences of time.

****** If time travel were possible, how quickly do you think you would tire of it?