RAG RADIO / Thorne Webb Dreyer : Composer, Musician & Beat Movement Pioneer David Amram

David Amram at the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, September 28, 2012. Photos by Jim Retherford / The Rag Blog.
Rag Radio Podcast:
Virtuoso composer, jazz musician &
Keroauc collaborator David Amram

By Thorne Webb Dreyer / The Rag Blog / October 5, 2012

David Amram, a virtuoso composer and musician who has been a trailblazer in the American arts scene for decades and was a pioneer of what became known as the Beat movement -- and who was called “the Renaissance Man of American Music” by The Boston Globe -- was in Austin for the September 29 Texas premiere of This Land is Our Land, his folk-inspired Symphonic Variations on a Song by Woody Guthrie.

The orchestral work, which was commissioned in 2007 by Guthrie’s daughter Nora and son Arlo through the Woody Guthrie Foundation, was performed by the Austin Civic Orchestra under the spirited direction of Lois Ferrari as part of the year-long, nationwide Woody Guthrie Centennial celebration.

Amram was also Thorne Dreyer’s guest on Rag Radio, Friday, September 28, from 2-3 p.m. Rag Radio is a syndicated radio show produced in the studios of KOOP-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer radio station in Austin, Texas. On the show Amram discussed his storied career and performed live on several instruments.

You can listen to the show here.


David Amram's symphonic composition, This Land is Our Land, was first performed in 2007 by the Symphony Silicon Valley in San Jose, California, and was performed on September 21, 2012, by the internationally renowned Colorado Symphony Orchestra, and recorded for later release as a Master Recording.

In his "Symphonic Variations," Amram draws from what Guthrie might have experienced traveling around the country, tapping a range of musical genres including a Cherokee "Stomp Dance," gospel music, a "Texas barn dance," Mexican music rooted in Guthrie's time as a farm worker, a "Dust Bowl Dirge," and ethnic music Woody would have encountered while living in New York City, including Caribbean and Middle Eastern sounds and the rhythms of a jazz block party.

"And," David told us, "in each variation you hear, snuck in there, the 'This Land is Your Land' melody in counterpoint to everything else." "Creating the work," he said, "was almost like building a boat inside a bottle."

Amram first met Woody Guthrie in 1956 and remembers that "he spent the whole day talking about politics, about traveling around the world as a merchant seaman, about Bach and Beethoven and Shakespeare, and country folks and Cajun music."

"He was like an encyclopedia," Amram said. "A wonderful, vital guy."

David Amram, who will turn 82 in November, was a major figure in the early Beat movement. In December 1957 Amram participated with novelist Jack Kerouac in the historic first jazz-poetry reading at the Brata Art Gallery in New York City, which was, according to writer Paul A. Bergin, "the moment most chroniclers of the period regard as the birth of the Beat Generation." (Amram said he didn't even know there was such a thing as a Beat movement, "until I began to read about it.")

In 1959 Amram collaborated with Kerouac on the landmark film, Pull My Daisy.

Rag Radio host Thorne Dreyer with David Amram at KOOP-FM in Austin. Inset below: David Amram joined local activists and musicians at a Rag Blog Happy Hour, Friday, Sept. 28, 2012. Photos by Jim Retherford / The Rag Blog.
"I met Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso in 1955 when I was playing at Café Bohemia with Charles Mingus," Amram said on Rag Radio. "I was a 24-year-old hayseed studying classical composition at the Manhattan School of Music on the GI Bill... and Mingus chose me, by a miracle, to be in his band."

Then, at a "BYOB party" at an artist's studio in New York, "a young man came up with a red-and-black checkered shirt looking like a Canadian lumberjack, and said, 'Play for me.' I had my penny whistles and my French horn with me and so I began to play. Then I kept bumping into him, and finally he told me his name was Jack Kerouac."

Kerouac "was a wonderful, friendly, warm person," Amram says, and "was one of the first writers I met who really understood jazz." Then, "On the Road comes out and in one night he became a world-famous figure." He was shy, though, David said, and never dealt well with the celebrity that followed.

"Kerouac," according to Amram, "was the engine that pulled the train."

"Like Woody Guthrie and Will Rogers and so many others, he makes us see ourselves and treasure the place that we live, treasure the blessings of our own country, and realize that we live in a global culture, and we can all somehow join hands in some way.

"And it all starts out by digging yourself, and your own story."

A virtuoso musician who was a pioneer on the jazz French horn -- and also plays the piano and dozens of woodwind, percussion, and folkloric instruments -- David Amram was part of the Charles Mingus Quartet in 1955 and has played with such luminaries as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk.

Over the years Amram has collaborated with artists ranging from Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, and Pete Seeger, to Dustin Hoffman, Langston Hughes, Elia Kazan, and Arthur Miller. He is the author of three books -- Vibrations: The Adventures and Musical Times of David Amram; Offbeat: Collaborating with Kerouac; and Upbeat: Nine Lives of a Musical Cat -- and is the subject of Lawrence Kraman's new documentary feature film, David Amram: The First 80 Years.

David Amram has composed more than 100 orchestral and chamber music works and two operas, and his film scores include Splendor in the Grass and The Manchurian Candidate. In 1966, Leonard Bernstein chose Amram to be the New York Philharmonic's first composer-in-residence. Also a pioneer in World Music and multi-culturalism, Amram has traveled all over the world as a musical goodwill ambassador for the State Department.

Amram, who has consistently merged various musical genres in his work -- including popular and folk forms -- remembers how the manager of the New York Philharmonic reacted to his approach: "'How can you equate barroom entertainers with the treasures of European music?' he asked. And I said, 'it’s very simple. The commonality is that they both have purity of intent, and an exquisite choice of notes.' I thought that would do it. And he looked at me like, 'Man, what kind of psychotic, career death-wish moron has Leonard Bernstein chosen?'"

Amram, who has traveled to Austin since the ‘40s, told the Rag Radio audience that, in Texas, “the country players, the jazz, the folk players, the Western swing players, the symphony players, the opera singers... everybody who loved music or participated had a place in their heart for everyone else’s work, and everyone else’s expression.

"And it’s still that way in Austin today, all these years later...”

At the urging of singer-songwriter and historian Bobby Bridger, with whom he shared a passion for Native American music, Amram first attended the Kerrville Folk Festival in 1976, and has been back more than 30 times. He also has performed with Willie Nelson at his Farm Aid events.

David Amram said, "I’m still a work in progress as I approach 82." Looking back over the decades, he says he tries to approach music "with an open heart and an open mind and to listen for the soulful, human, cultural qualities."

"Even though I was living on a little farm during the depression, I had a sense that there was something out there, and that music was a gateway to traveling to those places and to look and listen. And it’s something that I’ve tried to do ever since -- to learn how to pay attention.

"And once you do, you can see that there are things that are so beautiful that you’d like to share them."

Pete Seeger’s Clearwater Foundation is honoring David Amram with the Power of Song Award on Friday, November 9, at Peter Jay Sharp Theatre at Symphony Space, in New York City. Lawrence Kraman's film, David Amram: The First 80 Years, will have its world premiere, followed by a concert featuring Pete Seeger, Paquito D'Rivera, Peter Yarrow, Tom Paxton, and many more.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin. Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP, 91.7-fM in Austin, and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
TODAY, October 5, 2012: Author Tova Andrea Wang and Journalist Harvey Wasserman on Voter Suppression in America.
October 19, 2012: Singer-Songwriter Guy Forsyth.

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Marc Estrin : Mob 'n Maul

Buddy Christ statue from the movie Dogma.
MOB 'N MAUL

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / December 30, 2010

We seem to be bombarded lately by “random acts of culture” both in the real world (if such a place exists) and on YouTube. Handel's Hallelujah Chorus seems to be popping up all over -- almost expected at shopping malls and food courts.

I love Messiah. I've made it a point to sing, play, or conduct it almost every year since I've been 20. The Hallelujah Chorus is an astoundingly effective work of its time -- and ours -- and one can well imagine King George rising in ecstasy when hearing it. I've written about Messiah in several of my books, and it is a major altar in my church of worship.

But does it belong in a shopping mall? In the midst of ongoing orgies of consumerism, here we have enthusiastic artists, most often volunteers, singing “for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.”

In the context of the shopping mall, who is the Lord God omnipotent that reigneth? Surely more Mammon than Jehovah. The Lord God of Capitalism here reigns, “and he shall reign for ever and ever!”

While this may in fact be true, at least for the moment, is it worth putting so much energy into celebrating it? The Hallelujah Chorus is not Muzak, especially in live performance. People hear it, understand it, and receive it positively. What is it they are joyfully hearing in the context of the mall? The delight of Christmas shopping. The triumphant assertion of their own culture. The craving for that culture to reign forever and ever.

But is this the function of art? Should great music be an accomplice to great crimes? Should it enable and abet destructive capitalist madness?

In One Dimensional Man, Marcuse speaks of the Great Refusal -- the protest against that which is. That is great art's function in society -- to refute, break and recreate "the modes in which man and things are made to appear.”

I have been invited several times to participate in a Hallelujah flash mob. I know the bass part well, and could easily do it. But the idea of singing such praise in a shopping mall -- to a shopping mall -- to the activities of a shopping mall -- makes my gorge rise.

When I got my most recent invite, I suggested, as an alternative, a flash mob which would sing a neighboring chorus from Messiah -- “Surely He Hath Borne Our Griefs And Carried Our Sorrows.” The music is truly harrowing, filled with dotted rhythms of the lash and dissonances of pain. The words go on to say, “He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruisèd for our iniquities.” And was he not? What would Jesus buy at the mall? The text of “Surely” concludes, "The chastisement of our peace was upon him.”

Singing "Surely" at the mall? Now that would be a surprise event, an invasion of culture by Culture.

Of course whenever I hear the word Culture, I think of Goering and his remarkable assertion, “Whenever I hear the word Culture I reach for my gun.” I understand what he was talking about. Because real Culture is always and immensely subversive of great schemes human and inhuman.

Brecht nailed the oppositional function of art in the closing speech of his teaching play, The Exception and the Rule. Concerning the actions of the characters in the one-act, the narrator instructs the audience:

Observe the conduct of these people closely:
Find it estranging even if not very strange
Hard to explain even if it is the custom
Hard to understand even if it is the rule
Observe the smallest action, seeming simple
With mistrust
Inquire if a thing be necessary
Especially if it is common
We particularly ask you -
When a thing continually occurs -
Not on that account to find it natural
Let nothing be called natural
In an age of bloody confusion
Ordered disorder, planned caprice
And dehumanized humanity
Lest all things
Be held unalterable!

That, I think, is what random acts of Culture should be doing.

My next week's essay will discuss the healing potential of infiltrative art.

[Marc Estrin is a writer, activist, and cellist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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Marc Estrin : Music Hath Charms...

Music hath charms to
soothe the stinking breath

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / December 13, 2010

A recent revelation: rehearsing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, I was in the cello section mentally drooling over the carpet of harmonies we were laying down under the solo violin during the gorgeous slow movement. Not much to concentrate on other then how very beautiful this moment was.

As I breathed in the slow movement of the Mendelssohn, I realized that this music, this moment, and others like it, were SPECIFIC antidotes to the poison spewing from the mouths of politicians. I realized too, that without my frequent hits from the music inhaler I would probably be dead, or at least reduced to zombiedom. My life's balance was suspended between the poison of politics and the healing of music, which interaction created a space for my writing.

I had long been aware of “the healing power of music” inasmuch as it was the arena of "music therapy" and the tool of music therapists. But I had never been so acutely aware of its specific purgative and remedial effect.

Coming up soon are Beethoven's two birthdays, December 16 and December 17. As one of the characters in my novel, Insect Dreams, says: “Extraordinary people do extraordinary things.” (Not to be coy, there are two different documents with two different birth dates. I celebrate both.) And this week, too, Donna and I begin rehearsals for a New Year's Day performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which will hopefully become a tradition here in Burlington, Vermont. In any case, Beethoven is often on my mind.

It's somewhat predictable, then, that the combination of Beethoven, music, and healing would find its way into my writing. I want to share with you this week a particularly ridiculous scene based on a particularly amazing piece of music -- a movement of the A minor String Quartet which Aldous Huxley called “proof of the existence of God." The movement was labeled by Beethoven “Heiliger Dankgesang eines Gesenenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart”–a "Holy Song of Thanks from a Convalescent to the Godhead, in the Lydian Mode."

Beethoven was known to have serious stomach problems which bothered him increasingly as he aged. I put this all together and came up with the following note in my recent novel, The Annotated Nose.

The hero, Alexei Pigov, has become the Glenn Gould of the accordion. He is befriended by a fellow lab tech, William Hundwasser, who exploits and markets his strangeness, creating from him the public figure of a medieval plague doctor come to heal The Contemporary Plague. Here he is in Hundwasser's lab, experimenting with Beethoven on Hundwasser, and Herman, the tarantula:

44. Studying tarantellas and subtly applying them was my first experience of being a healer. Hundwasser kept several in a terrarium in his lab as a conversation starter for the “pretty young things in their white lab coats” he enjoyed cultivating. I began with one named Herman.

Herman was a dancin’ fool. He (?) would jump out of hiding -- or hibernating, or estivating, or whatever tarantulas do for sleep -- at the first peep of the accordion, and would then stand thoughtfully, taking the music into his ganglia. Then he would begin to sway, and after a minute to dance, and to dance appropriately to whatever I was playing, almost in rhythm, but definitely fast for allegros and slowly for adagios. When I stopped, he stopped -- and waited. He could outwait me. When I left, I would just leave him there, waiting.

I figured if an insect person could react this way, with so few nerve cells, human persons must be able to process such signals with far more complex consequences than simply dancing.

As you probably know, Beethoven suffered from chronic abdominal problems and severe intestinal inflammation. Fortunately Hundwasser suffered similar symptoms. An experiment was staring me right in the face. The famous Heilige Dankgesang in the A minor quartet, the “Holy Song Of Thanks From A Convalescent To The Godhead," was written after recovering from a serious bout with abdominal pain. Surely the tones, the great ideas of that movement, beyond being “proof of the existence of God” (Huxley), the successive integrations of disparate elements, must have something to do with disease, and with (Beethoven’s) stomach disease in particular. It was worth a try.

I made an accordion arrangement of the three adagio sections, and played them daily to Hundwasser during lunch break. We used the animal room for privacy. He just sat and listened. I suppose the rats listened too, but I had no parameters to measure the effects on them.

Hundwasser, however, had lots of parameters. Or, like the hedgehog, one big parameter: the number of Rolaids he popped each day. It took a week or so before R began to drop. From an average of 20 to an average of 12. On weekends, no music, R rose again. Come weekdays, it began to fall by Tuesday. In a sustained three week experiment, no days off, R fell to 3, then climbed to 12 again with a week off. We were on to something.

Neither of us had the time for a full and lasting cure, but after we stopped the experiment, he bought a record of the Budapest playing it, and has used that routinely to calm his symptoms. Saves him money on Rolaids, and he can listen while washing the dishes during the rare moments that he washes the dishes.

Flush with success, I looked more closely into the tarantella situation, the Antidotum Tarantulae. I would need to study the phenomenon first hand.

But there aren’t a lot of tarantula bites in Manhattan. There aren’t many tarantas [women bitten by tarantulas] to whom I could offer treatment -- especially if it were just an experiment by a newbie. What to do?

Herman to the rescue! I could get him to bite me, and then, in the heroic tradition of the great doctors and medical researchers, I could try to cure myself. I admit such research is small potatoes compared to the guy who shoved a catheter into an arm vein and guided it up into his heart, or the guys from Walter Reed’s team who invited malaria mosquitoes to bite them, so they could test drugs, or even the guy who gave himself ulcers so he could prove it was bacteria that caused them. Small potatoes unless I died. But I know that though tarantula bites were toxic, they were not often fatal.

And of course, we have to remember Dr. Curt Conners, aka, the Lizard in Spiderman Comics, who lost his arm in a war, and experimented with reptilian DNA to try and grow it back, a great example of be careful what you wish for: the therapy caused him to mutate into a creature half-human and half-reptile. He became a villain, too, and even uglier than I am. I wondered if I might turn into a tarantula person -- from the saliva -- but it wasn’t very likely.

I knew this self-experimentation would be looked down upon at the Berg Institute for Experimental Physiology, Surgery and Pathology, even though experimental physiology, surgery and pathology was exactly what I was doing. So it was 1 A.M. when I let myself into Hundwasser’s lab, took Honey [his accordion] out of her case, and aroused Herman with the traditional slow, lamenting introduction to Borodin’s Polovetsian Dance #2, “The Wild Dance of the Men."

Out he came on cue, staring at me through the Adagio, and when the fast part started, gave a shiver, and went into nothing short of a frenzy, leaping high off the terrarium floor, doing 90º, 180º, 270º, and 360º spins in the air, landing on his feet, rolling over on his back, and dragging himself miraculously by hyper–extended forelegs reaching up, over and behind his head, engaging the sand. It was so amazing, I almost forgot what I had come for. He must have been a Polovetsian spider, or at least have Polovetsian blood, perhaps from the Russian steppes.

When the both of us stopped to get our breaths, I thrust my left arm into the terrarium, and, though normally a pacifist, he leaped at it, and sunk his fangs in midway between wrist and elbow. Good Herman! I had to pull him off. Within a minute and a half, I was, as they say, possessed by the spider.

Though being somewhat atypical myself, I was that night afflicted with all the typical tarantula bite symptoms: feelings of prostration, anguish, psychomotor agitation, clouding of my sensory apparatus, difficulty standing, stomach cramps, nausea, paresthesia, muscular pains, extraordinary itching, and best and worst of all, vastly heightened sexual desire. I took a cab home; the cabbie thought I was way-drunk.

Lying in my bed, I felt wounded and weary, and aware of the deep tediousness of all things. Still, after a short sleep, I was able to drag Honey out of her case, and begin a medley of tarantellas I had learned.

Somewhere toward the end of the 1490s, the great Neopolitan scholar Alessandro d’Alessandro described the treatment of stricken tarantas by the local folk musicians: “they play different dances according to the nature of the poison, in such a way that with the victims entranced by the harmony and fascinated by what they hear, the poison either dissolves inside the body and dissipates, or else is slowly eliminated through the veins.” And with (wouldn’t you know it?) one of the Neopolitan tarantellas, I could feel just that effect, a veritable exorcism, a return to life, possibly to love. By the next day I was weak, but feeling basically normal via my iatromusical practice.

Plague doctoring is not so much different, though I suffer less, and my patients suffer more.

[Marc Estrin is a writer, activist, and cellist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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Terry Townsend : John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution

Trane photo used on jacket of The John Coltrane Quartet: Visit to Scandanavia. Image from Seattle Blogs.
'A force which is truly for good':
John Coltrane and the jazz revolution

By Terry Townsend / October 7, 2010

"You can play a shoestring if you're sincere." -- John Coltrane

John William Coltrane (abbreviated as "Trane" by his fans) was born on September 23, 1926. Since his untimely death on July 17, 1967, saxophone colossus Coltrane has become an icon of African-American pride, achievement, and uncompromising determination. He led a revolution in music that mirrored the turbulent growth of black militancy and revolutionary ideas within the urban black community. Today, Trane continues to inspire.

Coltrane has often been likened to Malcolm X. U.S. jazz writer and socialist Frank Kofsky, in his classic 1970 book Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music (Pathfinder Press, New York), wrote:

Both men perceived the reality about [the USA] -- a reality you could only know if you were Black and had worked your way up and through the tangled jungle of jazz clubs, narcotics, alcohol, mobsters...

Both men called upon their followers to break out of accustomed ways of thinking and feeling, and they themselves were willing to lead the way by challenging all the conventional assumptions and discarding those that failed to meet the rigorous test of reality -- even if, in doing so, they were forced to sacrifice their own material security.

Both men could have assured themselves of lives of relative comfort and wellbeing merely by making a few seemingly minor compromises; yet both refused to exchange a mess of consumer-goods pottage for the right to seek after and enunciate the truth as best they could.

John Coltrane in 1960 at the home of the late San Francisco Chronicle jazz critic Ralph Gleason. Photo by Jim Marshall.
It is no accident that references to Coltrane appeared in the films of Spike Lee -- most prominently in Mo' Better Blues but also in Malcolm X. That film features the haunting composition "Alabama'' -- written by Coltrane after reading a speech by Martin Luther King eulogizing four black children blown up in a racist attack on a church in 1963.

African-American culture often reflects the political and ideological moods and aspirations of the community from which it springs. It sometimes anticipates them. Coltrane's music evolved during a political upsurge of the African-American people.

Through the late 1950s and into the '60s, the momentum of the civil rights movement gathered pace. In the cities, the militant ideas of black nationalism and black power were embraced by larger and larger numbers of African Americans. Black youth were fired up by the struggles of their compatriots in the South and the liberation movements in Africa and the Third World.

A significant number discovered the works of Lenin, Mao, Castro, Nkrumah, Fanon, and Ho Chi Minh. This powerful movement for freedom combined with, and inspired, the huge anti-Vietnam War movement and women's liberation movement to spark a massive youth radicalization that shook U.S. society.

There was also a vigorous cultural radicalization. Many African Americans explored art, music, culture, and religious and philosophical ideas from Africa and Asia that they felt were more in tune with their aspirations and desires. Others set about rediscovering their African heritage and history. It was a period of turbulence, impatience, excitement, frustration, and determination to create a better society.

John Coltrane provided the jazz soundtrack of the '60s. Anybody who has attempted to come to terms with Coltrane's music is immediately struck by its brooding impatience, absence of compromise, and sense of a tenacious quest for an undefined goal.

Coltrane's musical quest began in earnest when he joined Miles Davis in 1955, played for a period with Thelonious Monk in 1957, and rejoined Miles in 1959. In this period, it was clear Coltrane was champing at the bit to break free of the constraints of the now accepted conventions of the previously avant-guard form of jazz, be bop (which itself had developed in the early 1940s among mostly African American musicians as a rebellion against the commercial homogenization of big band "swing" jazz).

His celebrated "sheets of sound'' were first heard as his sax solos raced faster and faster, cramming notes into each other to create harmonies of fascinating complexity. His surging solos built around recurring motifs are prominent on Mile Davis' forever fabulous Kind Of Blue. His recording debut as leader in 1959 with Giant Steps, soon followed by My Favorite Things, found him beginning to explore improvisational freedom.

John Coltrane quartet. Photo by Herb Snitzer / jazz.com
By 1961, the classic Coltrane quartet was in place -- McCoy Tyner on piano, Elvin Jones on drums, and Jimmy Garrison on bass. With this band Trane created some of his greatest work. From 1961 to 1965, they explored new terrain in improvisation as they attempted to extend beyond the limits of bop. They investigated adventurous new polyrhythms and tempos borrowed from African, Arab, and Indian music.

Taking up soprano saxophone allowed Trane to focus on "Eastern'' tonalities. He studied sitar and began writing to the great Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar. He experimented with drone instruments and chants. He investigated the use of unusual combinations of instruments to replicate the sound and texture of African and Indian music.

Yet as he experimented, he continued pushing and accentuating his characteristic dense, surging, complex sax lines. Albums such as Coltrane, John Coltrane Quartet Plays and A Love Supreme are great examples of this period.

By 1966, Coltrane's ceaseless search for musical "progress'' led to the demise of his classic quartet with the departure of Jones and Tyner. As far as they had traveled with Trane, they were not prepared to follow their leader further into the uncharted waters he was now exploring.

Respected Australian jazz critic Gail Brennan aptly described the music that followed the quartet's disintegration, until Coltrane's premature death from liver cancer at the age of 40, in OK Music magazine: "Some, but not all of the music of Coltrane's last period pushes emotion, energy, sheer momentum and rhythmic, textural and harmonic complexity to the point where it seems that it can only seize up or explode'."

Archie Schepp. Image from 123Nonstop.
Coltrane had been increasingly drawn towards the emerging generation of radical young black musicians who were abandoning the accepted rules of be bop and hard bop jazz to play "free jazz'." Coltrane was soon seen as the leader of this iconoclastic movement, the first among equals of players like Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, Pharaoh Sanders, Archie Shepp, Eric Dolphy, and Cecil Taylor. Sanders, Shepp, and Dolphy played with Coltrane's band prior to Jones' and Tyner's departure.

Coltrane never explicitly embraced black political black militancy or radical politics but was uncompromisingly in the vanguard of the cultural and spiritual radicalization that was political black nationalism's constant companion. He buried himself in books on Indian, Asian, and African philosophies and African history -- topics which recur regularly in the titles of his songs. His music was a source of black pride and consciousness.

Yet Coltrane was not opposed to radical politics nor was he apolitical. Many of his later musical collaborators were convinced radicals. Free jazz was considered to be the musical equivalent of the radical black politics. Archie Shepp said in 1968: "We are only an extension of that entire civil rights-Black Muslim-black nationalist movement that is taking place in America. That is fundamental to the music.'' His saxophone, Shepp added, was "like a machine gun in the hands of the Viet Cong."

It was not unusual for Coltrane's performances to attract political crowds. According to one patron at New York's Half Note club, young blacks would shout "Freedom Now!'' as Trane's long solos reached their climax.

Coltrane was an admirer of Malcolm X. He agreed to play benefit concerts for civil rights organizations, and many compositions were dedicated to Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. He opposed the Vietnam War.

Trane in Chicago, 1965. Photo by Ted Williams.
In 1966, Coltrane told Frank Kofsky:

Music is an expression of higher ideals... brotherhood is there; and I believe with brotherhood, there would be no poverty... there would be no war... I know that there are bad forces, forces put here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be a force which is truly for good.

John Coltrane was responsible for some of the most beautiful, controversial, and challenging music ever created, as is well illustrated by two brilliant albums. Bye Bye Blackbird is a live concert recording made in Europe in mid-1962 consisting of two fantastic, surging 20-minute work-outs. First Meditations was recorded in late 1965 in the twilight of Coltrane's classic quartet. While it precedes much of his most extreme work, its mystical, turbulent power is hypnotic.

If you have not listened to John Coltrane, these albums are as good a place to start as any. But be warned: experiencing the magic and tumult of Coltrane's later music is not for the faint-hearted, but it is a challenge well worth meeting.


The militant and the mystic

John Coltrane's music evolved as black America moved from the optimism sparked by the political and social gains of the mass civil rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s, through the mid-'60s explosion in black pride and militancy, to the late '60s era of "black power'."

From the mid-'60s, the optimism began to falter. The promise of equality evaporated as the cities and ghettos became increasingly run-down and the reality that the U.S. system was racist to the core became obvious. The militant ideas of "black nationalism," black power, and socialism were embraced by large numbers of African-Americans as they sought solutions outside the system.

Coltrane's music was the jazz soundtrack of black radicalization. Coltrane's classic quartet -- with McCoy Tyner on piano, Elvin Jones on drums, and Jimmy Garrison on bass -- from 1961 to 1965 was in the vanguard.

But by 1966, Jones and Tyner were not prepared to follow their leader further into uncharted waters. Coltrane increasingly was drawn towards a younger generation of radical young black musicians who were abandoning the accepted rules of jazz to play avant-garde or "free jazz'."

Pharoah Sanders. Photo from Axiom Images.
Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders soon became Coltrane's most regular and important collaborators -- at live gigs and on records -- until his untimely death in 1967. As these brilliant '60s reissues prove, they were capable of startling work in their own right.

Between them, Shepp and Sanders personified the two allied streams of black radicalism in jazz in the late '60s -- the political and the spiritual. As U.S. socialist Frank Kofsky pointed out in 1970, both trends reflected the black ghettos' "vote of `no confidence' in Western civilisation and the American Dream'."

Politically, black youth were fired up by the civil rights struggles in the Southern states, the liberation movements in Africa and Asia, and the struggle to end the Vietnam War. The ideas of Marx, Lenin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Kwame Nkrumah, Franz Fanon, and especially Malcolm X were popular. Revolution was openly espoused.

There was also a vigorous cultural radicalization. African Americans explored art, music, and religious and philosophical ideas from Africa and Asia. They set about rediscovering African history. It was a period of turbulence, impatience, excitement, frustration, and determination to create a better society.

Shepp embraced political black nationalism and Marxism while Sanders, like Coltrane, was uncompromisingly in the vanguard of the cultural and spiritual radicalization.

Fire Music, released in 1965, was Shepp's second Impulse album. Every track radiates warmth and determination. It has a horn-laden big band feel without any of the staidness that tag implies. While challenging many preconceived notions of jazz, it is thoroughly accessible. Shepp's tenor sax exudes a rich, hoarse tone that can move from "down and dirty'," to plaintive, to insistent in a single tune.

The album conforms to Shepp's 1968 statement that free-jazz musicians were "an extension of that entire civil rights-Black Muslim-black nationalist movement."

John Coltrane in 1960. Photo by Francis Wolff.
Fire Music opens with "Hambone'," a tribute to African-American folk music -- gospel and blues, and a touch of r&b. The simple melodies contrast with soaring solos and complex rhythms. The album also closes with a mind-boggling live version. "Los Olvidados (the forgotten ones)'' is about the frustration Shepp felt when employed as a counselor with a government-funded program aimed at reducing "juvenile delinquency'' in New York. The program was under-resourced and was simply a band-aid which, said Shepp, allowed the wealthy and powerful to "assuage their own guilt about the forgotten ones'."

"Malcolm, Malcolm, Semper Malcolm'' is a moving, moody eulogy to the radical black leader Malcolm X, who was assassinated that same year. Shepp, with sax and poem, conveys respect, love and anger while David Izenzon's beautiful bowed bass "sings'' along. It was first composed as part of "The Funeral'," a longer composition dedicated to murdered Southern U.S. civil rights leader Medgar Evers.

"I call it 'Malcolm forever' because [although Malcolm] was killed, the significance of what he was will grow. He was the first cat to give actual expression to much of the hostility most American Negroes feel. A further significance of Malcolm was that toward the end of his life, he was evolving into a sound political realist'," Shepp explained.

Pharoah Sanders' radical egalitarian cosmic mysticism, which also characterized Coltrane's last years, is central to Tauhid (1967) and Karma (1969). Sanders seems to begin where Coltrane left off. Like many other African Americans, he sought to go beyond the hypocrisy of mainstream white Christianity and philosophy to find a creed that was inclusive, non-discriminatory, and tolerant. Finding none, he invented his own.

Karma best illustrates Sanders' utopian outlook. "The Creator Has a Master Plan'," a majestic 32-minute opus not unlike Coltrane's seminal "A Love Supreme," is both deeply melodic and "caconophonic'."

Sanders lures the unsuspecting listener with a beautifully conventional introduction which gently leads to his trademark wild and wonderful screams, squalls, squeaks, and growls, all the time softened by the soothing background pulse of bells, shaker, and percussion. Sanders' world view is summed up by the chant that pervades "Creator'': "Peace and happiness for every man, through all the land."

Tauhid concentrates on the historical and spiritual heritage of African Americans. "Upper and Lower Egypt'' is the product of Sanders' long research into the history and religions of Egypt. Using the unusual-in-jazz piccolo, Sanders glides through the Lower Nile, moving deeper into Africa. Once in the upper reaches, the mood changes with energetic, chant-like cadences that make the hairs rise on the back of your neck.

Archie Shepp's political radicalism led to a falling out with Impulse, and he found it extremely difficult to persuade other U.S. record companies to record him. Instead, Shepp taught music at the University of Massachusetts after 1978. Sanders, his radicalism being far less threatening, continued to record and perform. Neither compromised.

What makes these artists great -- as all the albums mentioned above reveal -- is not simply their immense musical ability, but the fact that they drip with passion, honesty and commitment. Check them out.

Source / International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

The John Coltrane Quartet (John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones) on the 1963 TV program, Jazz Casual, playing "Alabama," written by Coltrane after reading a speech by Martin Luther King eulogizing four black children blown up in a racist attack on a church in 1963.

Thanks to Carl Davidson / CCDS / The Rag Blog

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Marc Estrin : What's a Jew to Do?

Photo from the USHMM / National Archives / About.com.
What's a Jew to do (with you)...

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / September 4, 2010

...you, in this case, being the arch-conservative Catholic composer, Anton Bruckner, next to Wagner, Hitler’s favorite, whose birthday it is as I write?

I knew I wasn't supposed to like Bruckner when, in my Jewish-guilt ridden, self-assigned curriculum, I decided to spend a summer listening to and learning all the Bruckner symphonies during my back and forths to Bread & Puppet. But it turns out that the orchestration is such that I often could hear only the upper half of the sound over the interstate tire noise. So I gave up that project, to fill in my Bruckner gap more slowly, as it comes.

For The Education of Arnold Hitler, my novel about a really sweet guy with a really shitty name, I knew I'd have to write a section on Bruckner, so I listened up on the Seventh, and wrote the following. Evelyn Brown, Arnold's new girlfriend, a performance artist investigating evil by playing at neo-Nazism, and Arnold, have built him a bunker under an on-ramp onto the Bruckner Expressway in the Bronx out of stolen cement blocks and plastic sheeting. They have a bunker-warming for their little love nest as follows:

  “Whatcha got for music?” he asked.
  “Bruckner, what else?”
  “Ah.”
  She switched out the light. There was only the ghostly glow of distant streetlamps through the mirror film. Arnold crawled in under the quilt.
  “I brought you the slow movement from the Seventh Symphony.” She was somewhat slow herself. “Here.”
  She pushed PLAY, and the small room was filled with the rich sounds of low strings and horns in C# minor, a long, sinuous phrase culminating in surprisingly masculine chords, and lapsing back into a gentle feminine ending, serene, consolatory, moving.
  “Nice,” he said. “I’ve never heard Bruckner.”
  “You told me that. I thought this would be a good place to start.”
  “Beautiful, but so sad,” he said, as the melodies spun out of the original germ.
  They lay there silent, sipping their glasses as the harmonies and textures grew ever richer, and the keys slipped by until one amazing moment when the music, with a thrilling shock, slips and falls a half-step to climax streaming out on C major, filling the dark room with light.
  “Jeezuz!” Arnold muttered,.
  The music quieted, and the movement ended with a transfigured major version of the opening funeral music, a majestic threnody framed by the sound of Wagner tubas. They were silent for a long time after it finished.
  “The Nazis dug him too,” Evelyn finally said, “his monumental scale, grandiose, lavish, spiritual... They’d play him in Dunkelkonzerte -- lights all out, sacred space. Listening to Bruckner was like going to church.”
  She snuggled in under the quilt.
  “His most famous piece, that,” she murmured. “They played it on German radio after Hitler died, after he was burned to a crisp. Hey, you wake?”
  She nudged him. No answer. She pulled off her clothes and lay her body against his as the kitties and bunnies watched the night.

OK, so Hitler and the Pope notwithstanding, Bruckner writes some fabulous music, even for a Jewish ear. So did Wagner, the fulminating-enough antisemite.

Which brings up the larger, long-standing, subtle, difficult question: can one detach an artist's life from his or her works? Celine is a great writer, but a murderous maniac (as was Gesualdo). Heidegger was IMO the most important philosopher of the 20th century, and ended his inaugural address as rector of Freiburg Universtiy with three "Heil Hitler"s.

What are people, Jews especially, supposed to do with this gorge-rising stuff?

One approach has been "if you can't beat 'em, recruit them" -- as in this scene from my novel, Golem Song. Alan Krieger gives his shiksa German psychiatrist girlfriend a present of Arthur Naiman's wonderful little book, Every Goy's Guide To Common Jewish Expressions, Also Recommended for Jews Who Don't Know Their Punim From Their Pupik. I'll save you some space: Open the link if you like. It's pretty funny.

(Nice little side story: when I wrote Arthur, asking for permission to quote his book in mine, he wrote back, "Permission is for goys. Fair use is for Jews," and gave me... what?... who knows? Anyway a "Sure, go ahead.")

OK, so Beethoven was Jewish, black jazz heroes are Jewish, all the (Good!) antisemites were Jewish, but what about Netanyahu? Lieberman? the politics of the current state of Israel? Are THEY Jewish?

Here's what Alan Krieger's brother writes him -- interspersed in a scene from Golem Song in which the Ursula of the link above, takes Alan out to a French restaurant (Alan is very bad at French restaurants).

So, yes, what's a Jew to do? What are any of us to do? It's worth writing novels about.

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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Marc Estrin : Night Dreams of Another Life

Photo by Eric Pouhier / Wikimedia.
Listening to our local Leiermann:
Night dreams of another life

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / May 31, 2010

Every now and then -- and again last night -- I am awakened at 3 a.m. by the sound of a shopping cart rattling past my house. No voices. Just a lonely, ghostly, shopping cart. It has that eerie sad-ness Woody Guthrie used to sing about -- like “that long lonesome train a-whistlin’ down.” Ex-cept it rattles.

The sky is dark, the street lights bright outside my window. All other noise has ceased. Squad cars prowl silently, if at all. Donna is sleeping, and the cats breath quietly at our heads and feet. Wordsworth said it: “The holy time is quiet as a nun/breathless with adoration.” Except there is a shopping cart. Rattling.

Who is out there, pushing? Who is searching the recycle bins and garbage for nickel bottles and cast-off clothing? Who must be up this early in the morning to ensure his meager catch?

In daylight hours I would probably revert to my social/political thought chain: the ghastly state of current American capitalist politics, the ripping away of the safety net from under the free-fall of the poor. But in the middle of the night, my thoughts often go to the amazing end of Schu-bert’s song cycle, Die Winterreise, the Winter Journey.

In the standard frame of nineteenth century romantic poetry, a lover, spurned by his beloved, must “get away” from his memories of her, must avoid the possibility of seeing her with her new husband. He wanders out into the winter, his tears freezing in the icy landscape. He has dreams and nightmares. He longs for mail, though he has no address. He communes with birds and beasts; he hallucinates.

There are many amazing and moving images in these 24 connected songs, but none is more mysterious and compelling than that of the last song, “Der Leiermann," the Hurdy-Gurdy man. Of all the songs, it is the quietest and simplest, a bare vocal line alternat-ing with a little organ-grinding refrain in the piano.

After all the wildness of nature and passion -- this last strange encounter: with an old man out-side a village, playing his music as best he can, his fingers numb, standing near his empty cup, barefoot, on the ice. Nobody listens to the organ-grinder, nobody pays any attention to him -- except the dogs, who come -- to bark and growl. But the old man just lets it all happen without complaint, grinding out his simple tune, never stopping. Coming upon him, our heart-weary traveler is dumb struck.

We think it is a simple little story, a narration about some striking character met along the path. The first surprise comes in the last verse. Is our sad young man repulsed by the organ grinder, frightened by his situation, thinking “there, but for the grace of God, go I”? No. “Strange old man,” he says to himself, “shall I go with you? Will you grind out music if I sing?” And the sec-ond surprise is -- that’s it. That’s the end. The hurdy-gurdy phrase runs it’s course and this in-comparable masterpiece just stops -- quietly, with a question, a question leading out into infinity.

As I lie in bed listening to our local Leiermann, his shopping cart singing its sad, repetitive song, I -- this person snuggling next to his sleeping wife, nuzzled by his trusting kitties -- I want to go out there and join him. I want to experience the emptiness and beauty of the street late at night, the sense of the world stopped around me, the non-hustle and non-bustle and time of my own creation.

I want to give up my deadlines and assignments, my enslavement to the little property I own. I want to simplify my life, and have the basic tasks of my cro-magnon ancestors, to live from day to day, to hunt and gather, to relate to the turning of the sky.

Not to romanticize the brutal life forced on the poor by devil-don’t-care capitalism. My late-night dream does not contain having to figure out where I can poop, or where to get a shower after two weeks without. I don’t have to scrounge for quarters for the laundromat, or worry about my things being stolen while I sleep on someone’s porch to stay dry.

I don’t even have to hang on to my empty bottles and cans -- but can give them, a pathetic, inadequate gesture, to those who build their lives around them.

Still, there is freedom out there, late at night. Dream-freedom. We humans have always paid a lot for freedom. At this very moment, somewhere on earth, there is blood being spilled -- for free-dom.

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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Marc Estrin : Wagner -- Oi!

The giants seize Freya. Illustration for Wagner's Das Rheingold by Arthur Rackham (1910).
WAGNER -- OI!

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / May 24, 2010

I didn't begin "getting into" Wagner till I was 30ish. Who had the time for five-hour operas? And who had the money for 12- or 15-LP sets, or fifty bucks a pop for way-high at the Met? Forget it. Plus I didn't even like opera, and still mostly don't.

And what Jew could become a fan of Hitler's favorite composer? My father wouldn't even ride in a Volkswagen. Nevertheless, he did name our first family car, a 1950 Dodge, Brünnhilde. I should have known some interesting paradoxes were at large.

Jews, however, are big on Jewish guilt, so sometime in the mid-sixties, to make up for my reprehensible ignorance, I taped a Ring-cycle (at slowest speed, fidelity trumped by pennypinching) and discovered that this stuff did need some looking into. Quite interesting, it was. Quite.

As a musician, I was already familiar with the short, commonly played selections. I loved the various preludes and overtures -- the complex stateliness of Meistersinger, the ethereal spirituality of Parsifal and Lohengrin, the drunken passion of Tristan. I was well aware of the revolutionary role of RW in western musical history -- his breaking open the tonal paradigm, and clearing the path for complex contemporary music. But other than that, I hadn't "gotten into" him -- which would involve serious listening to, and study of, the operas.

Teaching at Goddard, I had the opportunity to do just that. (In the Goddard model, without departments, one could teach what one wanted to study.) I offered a course in The Ring where we listened with scores, studied the texts, read the criticism and Jungian analyses, and "grokked" the work. THAT was "getting into" it. I didn't need any more convincing. Even putting its anti-capitalist nature aside, The Ring is big, deep stuff, just meant for me.

It was inevitable that crazed Wagnerians would show up in my fiction. So I share with you in honor of Wagner's birthday, a little section of a vast chapter from my Insect Dreams.

Gregor Samsa, a six-foot, talking cockroach, having just made a disastrous attempt at lovemaking with Alice Paul, has come to see Dr. Lindhorst about amputating his middle legs so that he might be more attractive to women. Lindhorst tries to dissuade him with the story of Pygmalion -- complete with all its subsequent disasters -- but Gregor decides to go ahead with the body-sculpting. Gregor is strapped to the operating table, and Lindhorst's assistant, Miss Mozart, is called in.

I think this will excerpt tolerably, but should you want to see the whole, you can probably find the book at your library (it won all sorts of awards), and you'll certainly find it at Amazon. Here's the scene:

Gregor, Love is brother to his sister, Death. Eros and Thanatos, my friend. Longing always leads somewhere, and that somewhere is not always longed for. You must appreciate this -- deeply -- before you take an irreversible leap of mutilation in the service of love. If you understand and truly accept, your tissues will heal. If you do not understand, if you do not truly accept, you will carry yet another unhealing wound.” He paused to let his words sink in. “Miss Mozart, you may begin.”

The slim, intense woman took off her shoes, and sat down at the Bösendorfer, barefoot. Smoothing back the sides, and reaching behind her neck, she encircled the long fall of her golden hair with her fingers, moved it from her gown, and let it fall loosely onto her half-bare back. Though Gregor could see every detail with his immense peripheral vision, he felt himself drifting back into a hazier space deep inside his cuticle. Long echoes of Lindhorst’s hypnotic voice rippled slowly in circles of ever-softer sound.

Miss Mozart placed her right hand on the keyboard. The first gentle A reached up a plaintive minor sixth, and hung there, suspended in non-time, until it’s own weight eased it down to the supporting net of the note below -- only to immediately fall through that net -- oh surprise! -- to the accented half step below, the awe-full D# of the Tristan chord, the chord of chords, that miraculous find of ambiguous, melancholy longing. Miss Mozart’s left hand joined her right to urge the F and B below, while her right fourth finger struck the G# that would resolve upwards, and upwards again beyond what might have been its goal. The Tristan chord, F-B-D#-G#, a chord so extraordinary that one can search in vain through music to find its like. Search was its name, and its mode, and its function. Search. But for what? The beauty of despair? The despair of beauty? What trembling question was being asked by this voice in the night? In the long pause which followed, Lindhorst whispered,

“Be in the silence, Gregor. Let the sweet pain soak in at your soft joints.” Then he signaled to Miss Mozart to continue.

The second phrase, a step higher, infinitely slow, exaggeratedly, tormentingly slow, left Gregor hanging as did the first, the Sehnsuchtsmotiv, the Leitmotif of Longing, calling him from the vast darkness of What. His wound began to weep into its new dressing. His dorsal gland began to moisten. The meat at his leg joints began to soften, as if to bid welcome to the knife.

“Something is dissolving, Gregor. What is it? Don’t answer.” He couldn’t have.

A third time the phrase called out, higher still, and longer, reaching upwards by two more notes, as if its fingers were stretching from an already outstretched hand.

“It hurts, my friend, does it not?”

As if to answer, the phrase returned, the same last, rising pattern, an octave higher, and then only the last two notes, a half-step reaching upward, and once again, the two reaching notes, an octave above, harmonic tension so great as to be humanly unbearable. And yet it hung there, radiating, in the silence -- until beginning again, it pushed beyond itself, and with a final leap, reached beyond itself, above and below, to a land that could be footed, an almost safe place -- an accented chord of F-A-C -- but with a B above, a skyhook which let gently go, and allowed the hearer -- and the universe -- to collapse down to the floor of an ever-rising, but graspable flow of molten melody, the Motif of Love.

“Now you can swim, Gregor. Your wings are beginning to spread.” And indeed, G could feel pressure at his back, once associated only with sexual excitement, but now with something more mysterious, sexual in part, but as larger as the sea is to the drop. Miss Mozart’s fingers called forth the Bösendorfer’s magic, and the melody rang forth in quiet, sensuous richness, as if from twelve pianissimo cellos, though there was not a cello in sight.

The clock had ticked off ten minutes, but there were no minutes here, only an expanded, warping space-time, similar to Gregor’s flight, but now colored with the depth of new emotional and spiritual dimensions. The labyrinthine melody rolled on and on, reaching ever higher, falling back and reaching again, a melody of melting and surpassing tenderness, sweeping up in its wake the mists of the sublime -- that world so far beyond perceptual or imaginative grasp, that our sense of its beauty is deeply mixed with dread. Alarming and reassuring both, it sweeps along, in ecstatic prolongation, immensely complicated, dissolving tonal language -- and any other -- as if God himself were exhuding enharmonics. Complicated, yet beyond complicated, and thus simple: exaltation, transformation, an intoxicating brew of idealism and lust, delirious forces striving to embrace, exchanging the Kingdom of Day for the Kingdom of Night.

Fingers flying, Miss Mozart piloted this extraordinary tone poem back to its unsafe harbor, the Sensuchtsmotiv. The Prelude to Tristan and Isolde sank down to its embers.

“After such love, why is there still longing?” Lindhorst whispered, tears in his eyes. Miss Mozart turned quietly to the very last pages of the piano score, and in hushed tones, began Isolde’s song of Love’s triumph over Death. “Mild und leise,” Gregor knew the words, “wie er lächelt, wie das Auge hold eröffnet...” She sang beautifully, as extraordinarily well as she played, and not having to overcome an orchestra, she was able to evoke the most delicate nuances of emotion and inflection as Isolde gazes upon her lover, transforming his death into eternal, living, life. In the intimate murmurings of the first serene phrases, slowly rising through unbelievable ascending passages of modulating sequences, wave upon wave, lyrical, rhapsodic, ecstatic, to climactic heights of passion and transfiguration, Isolde makes her decision to die, to melt with Tristan into ultimate ground of being, to leave behind the torment of the finite doomed to infinite yearning. Together they will be at home in the vast realm of unbounded night, borne on high amidst the stars, and then down, down, to where there is no down

In dem wogenden Schwall,
in dem tönenden Schall,
in des Welt-Atems
wehendem All --
ertrinken,
versinken --
unbewußt --
höchste Lust!

Release! Death powerless against the Inextinguishable -- love’s vast, immeasurable redemption. Yet even here, after this inspired surging of metaphysical perception, even here, in the midst of yes, even here, appear the ineffable harmonies of the Sehnsuchtsmotiv, longing beyond longing, even in final exhalation -- longing. Then silence. Profound silence.

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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Marc Estrin : George's Messiah

Happy Easter,
But crucify him first

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / April 3, 2010

This morning, the cheery NPR voice announced that today was Good Friday -- but not for the Catholic Church, which was reeling from you know what. Good Friday -- good.

I suppose it can be seen as good if you like nailing people onto crosses and the institutional power secreted from those wounds, but for most followers of Jesus Who Is Called The Christ, it's a pretty sad end of the week.

Here in Happy-face Land, we love Easter, pink, white, and blooming. And now even Good Friday has been gobbled by Goodness. But George Fredrick Händel was not so easily scammed.

Most American performances of Messiah offer only the Christmas portion with tacked-on Hallelujah and Amen celebrating a babe not yet messiahed. But Messiah was written as an Easter piece, full of pain, suffering and transcendence. The familiar Christmas portion was a prologue only -- to contrast with the anxious and metaphysical burden of the work. But Hallmark will have its way.

I am the president and only member of the National Bring Back Messiah As An Easter Piece Society. I have little influence on American cultural practice. But I do get to write novels with their interior rants.

Tweaking When the Gods Come Home to Roost for possible publication, I came across this short chapter I thought you of classical music persuasion might enjoy:

George's Messiah

George loved Messiah. It was nothing a Jewish boy in Levittown had been expected to love, but it happened. Until he was fifteen, he had steered clear of this goyish mania. But one day, a lovely young girl with long, dark hair handed him a leaflet for an afternoon performance a busride away in Queens. Maybe she sang in the chorus. It must be all right for a Jew to go into a church, he thought, if it’s for a concert, and not to eat the body and blood. He wouldn't tell his parents. They’d never know.

The young man was ravished by the experience. He used the word in every possible meaning: he was seized and violently done to; he was overcome by horror, joy and delight; he was pre-sexually bewitched, for the long-haired one was in fact singing soprano in the front row, and never had such an angelic voice issued from such sensuous purity. This concert was of the Easter portion of the work, and from “Behold the Lamb of God” to the last “Amen”; he was transfixed with wonder.

From the three bar mitzvahs he'd attended he knew Jews didn’t make this kind of sound. Synagogues were filled with the discordant rumble of davvenning, each worshipper finding his individual prayer voice and rhythm, chanting, whispering, singing, crying, repeating phrases over and over, lost in the brumming of the crowd. Sometimes a cantor sang. But this -- this! It is music, music that hath ravished me! He got home at an unsuspicious five o'clock, and never mentioned his encounter.

He had tried to hear Messiah every year since then, but with all the changes that had occurred along the way, he had managed to bat only about .300. So what a boon -- right here, in his own community, that he could conduct an annual Messiah! The sad part was that he could never share this joy with his family, old anti-clerical mom and pop ever more rigid in their disdain for religion. The idea of their very own son promoting Christ the Jew-killer might, he thought, send them each into heart failure. So this was his one activity he never called home about.

Choosing to do the Easter portion of Messiah for Christmas was George's little revenge on America. Though written as an Easter piece, and traditionally performed in Europe during Easter time, in coming to America Messiah had shifted seasons, and along with them, content. Though the Puritans had banned the celebration of Christmas, post-Puritan America has embraced it with a vengeance, currently exhorting all to worship at the mall of one’s choice.

Perhaps in the land of the Easter Bunny and the lethal injection, crucifixion is seen as barbaric. Christmas, not Easter, is where most American celebration is concentrated, and with it, most concertizing. Messiah has become a Christmas piece, and most American performances restrict themselves to its first section concerning Advent and the birth of Christ. The meat of the oratorio is left out, and the introductory portion is capped with the Hallelujah chorus -- a masterwork written to praise Christ’s ascent to his heavenly throne, unreported in these Hallmark card performances.

“A premature ejaculation at best,” George thought when feeling generous. But if Americans were determined to hear part of Messiah at Christmas, he was going to be damn sure it was the Easter portion that attacked them.

At 6:30 on the evening of the concert, Betty cell-phoned in to say that she had had a flat on I-680, that the AAA said they'd be there within fifteen minutes, and that being the case, she'd be at the church by ten after, and could they hold the performance? As if there were a choice.

So George came out at 7:05, and announced that the concert would begin at 7:20 because, as the contemporary world amply demonstrates, the Messiah always comes late. Then he did a remarkable thing, unexpected, certainly, because of his refusal of the first part of Messiah, but unexpected, ever, in any form, under the eye of God. He sat down at the Steinway, and played the slow opening of the opening "Symphony" of the work. Twenty-four stately, double-dotted measures marked grave -- this the limit of his keyboard technique.

When the moment came for the Allegro moderato to begin, George stood up, walked to the curve of the piano as if for a vocal recital, placed his right hand on the rim of the case, and performed that three-part fugue all by himself. He whistled the soprano voice out of the right side of his mouth, the alto out of the left, and vocalized the bass part with accurate, wordless humming. You don’t believe this. It is true. Upwards of a hundred people heard it with their own ears. He must have been practicing this in the shower for the last twenty years in preparation for that night.

Now Messiah is one of the grandest works of western culture. It is simply not appropriate for a serious conductor to whistle the overture in public performance. But the effect, rather than being ridiculous, was to create a churchfull of gaping at the wonder that is man. No problem was too great for one who set his mind to it, no achievement too difficult. The room was riddled with people who had dedicated themselves to Bay Area excellence: none could gainsay George Helmstetter's accomplishment.

Betty arrived, pumped and wired. The chorus filed on to the risers. In spite of George Bernard Shaw’s opinion alleging “the impossibility of obtaining justice for that work in a Christian country,” mid-Messiah instantly summoned the audience to pain and passion including even them, the guilt-free of the world. "Behold the Lamb of God," the sacrifice upon whom all sins would be heaped and slaughtered into renewal, the Lamb whose blood would be smeared on door jambs to frighten Death away, the Lamb that would conquer the wolves, the conquering Lamb.

What about this Lamb? Handel took great pains to describe its scorn-filled whipping. “He gave his back to the smiters, and his cheeks to them that pluckèd off the hair.” Blood and hair clotting together on the prison floor. Here is perhaps the only major artwork which celebrates saliva as such: “He hid not his face from shame and spitting,” spit in the face, a cadence, ach-ptoo!

The listeners were assured, in no uncertain terms, that the Lamb was burdened with their very own doings: Surely he hath born our griefs, and carried our sorrows. The fierce F-minor cries, the painful, discordant suspensions: He was wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities, a catharsis of pity and terror.

Even the Jewish mothers of many in the audience would not have been able to evoke such a sense of guilt. The thoughtful were carried emotionally along, while at the same time wondering about the phenomenon of the Messiah. Is this suffering lamb the Saviour of the world? How odd.

The Messiah’s function is to be victorious. Christians thought of Christ. Jews thought through their own lens of the “true” reference, the continued oppression and persecution of Israel throughout the Christian and pre-Christian centuries -- the Nazi destruction, the pogroms of the nineteenth century which had brought their parents to the New World, the persecutions of the eighteenth century, the seventeenth, and on back to the Exile, where the image of the Lamb converges with that of scattered Israel.

“And with His stripes we are healed.” What is that about? Why should one’s agony be inversely proportional to another’s? Conservation of Wound? Conservation of Tears? Conservation of Pain? Beckett has told us: “The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”

Handel lingers over the word “healed” as if to lay soothing balm upon Christ’s -- and our -- wounds. Yet even this very moment, was beyond a definitive scan. The perverse listener -- and who is not perverse? -- could easily hear the melismatic syllables of “healed” as “hee-hee-hee-hee-heeled," in effect a subtle but demonic, underlying cackling, as if to say that no matter what the unction, the wound is too great to be cured -- you’ll see. Hee-hee-hee. George was haunted by this dopplegängbanging effect, but was unable to phrase his way around it. The Lamb of God, and the sheep who have gone astray.

“All they that see him, laugh him to scorn. They shoot out their lips and shake their heads, saying”: Enter the scornful, the brutal choral metamorphosis from a confessing people of God to an unruly crowd in obscene play at a public execution. So does Jekyll turn unexpectedly to Hyde.

He trusted in God that He would deliver him: let Him deliver him, if he delight in him. Such assertive contemptuousness! The trivializing, de-legitimizing of God, putting his capitalized pronoun on a syncopated weak beat, now ironically, self-flatteringly strong. What pristine nastiness, abundantly clear. Thy rebuke hath broken His heart. He is full of heaviness. He lookèd for some to have pity on him. But there was no man, neither found he any, to comfort him.

Not only was this George’s favorite moment of Messiah, with the single most touching note in music slipping into place in the piano’s middle voice, a pensive entwinement of suffering and beauty. In the pause after pity on him, a luminous E rises half step to a questioning, consoling F, as if at least one human heart might go out to Jesus from the frigid emptiness answering his gaze.

But it was also the theological key to the work: Here was the heart of it. As every culture has known and proclaimed, something is wrong with the human race. Things are not as they should be. There have been many intellectual explanations -- mythological, religious, philosophical. But here is the psalmist’s prophetic assessment: the primal fault is that we disdain God. We have turnèd everyone in his own way. The biblical word for this is “sin.”

Since by man came death... The listeners had to interpolate the moment of death. But George found this not egregious. The whole textual strategy of the Messiah is one of brilliant, evocative avoidance. Charles Jennens, an otherwise unremarkable British gentleman, had provided his friend George Fredrick with a libretto of theological genius, portraying every shade of devotion from piety, resignation and repentance to hope, faith and exultation.

And all this without resorting to narrative, as in the Passions of Bach: Christ did this, and then he did that, the misery composed directly into the music. The Messiah commands attention because of what it does not show, for the most part indicating, rather than depicting events. And therefore the death of Jesus, that epoch-making moment, really could exist as a lacuna between his unrewarded search for comfort and the triumphant Lift up your heads which followed. Praise be to Handel for demonstrating this.

Lift up your heads; The Lord gave the word; Their sound is gone out. And so, for the Jews, the Ark takes its place in the Temple, for the Christians, the Son takes his place in Heaven, and the preachers tell the world -- but some do not hear. Why do the nations so furiously rage together? Tim Eckleburg stepped out to sing, less than accurately but with conviction, to sing of the kings of the earth, of the rulers that counsel together against the Lord.

Again, the demonic chorus: Let us break any bonds with the Anointed, and cast away their yokes from us. And what will happen? This time Willy Higinbotham, a “real” tenor from the Cal music department, stepped forward to describe the smashing and breaking that will ensue, an image which always reminded George of the piled up debris confronting Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History.

And then, the great moment, the moment incoherently misplaced in American versions, the phenomenal Hallelujah Chorus. The piling up of debris? Hallelujah! For the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth -- which at first blush is not a very encouraging vision of the future. But what if it were to become the case -- that the kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord, and that over such a peaceable kingdom He shall reign forever and ever ? It did give one pause, in the midst of the war on drugs and the war on terror.

Almost three hundred years earlier, King George had stood in his excitement, dragging the court to its surprised feet around him, and now the audience at the Mt. Diablo Unitarian-Universalist Church took this traditional ninth inning stretch incapable, however, of diverting the impregnable momentum of the music.

For all the radiance of the performance, there was one moment that stood out above all others. Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, with his strong baritone, came in too soon after George's breathtaking pause before the final cadence, shattering the loudest silence in creation. After the concert, BB commented to another alto: “I’ve sung Messiah many times in my life,” she said, “and I’ve always waited for someone to come in too soon. It was very satisfying to me.”

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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