Good Friday Random Ten (or, I found my thrill on Calvary Hill...)


 


1. Cranes - Tomorrow's Tears
2. Ars Nova / Bo Holten - Tre volte haveva à l'importunae audace [Orlando di Lasso]
3. Kenny Clarke - Epistrophy
4. Chuck Willis - What Am I livin' For?
5. Thompson Twins - Love Is The Law
6. Sheryl Crow - My Favorite Mistake
7. Grateful Dead - Birdsong [Oct.1, 1980. @Warfield in Cali]
8. Jimmy Page - Prison Blues
9. Jaojoby - Mampanino Anao
10. Lavern Baker - Tomorrow Night

And the Eleventh Hour Rescue: Frank Zappa - It Must Be A Camel

Sorry I can't get that blasphemy fix out of my bloodstream. (Fats Dominus?). But whatever you say about christianity, and who doesn't, there's something just plain wonderful to call this holiday Good. Kind of like being thrown into a pit, and looking up and seeing the stars.

There are folks who don't like collaborative works: whether it's an opera with a composer or a librettist, or a comic book with a writer and artist: Only writer-artists produce 'real' or 'great' comics, and only Wagner wrote 'real' or 'great' opera. I've heard and read both.
My response has been (and I said it below in comments) that all a single source does is make a work easy to talk critically about. (Arguments from purity, moreover, always give me the whim-whams. They're bad in art--but monstrous in real life. 'Purity' kills. I don't like it.)
Individual creativity is easy to handle conceptually: the artist as hero. The artist as touched by God. The work of art as emanation from the divine realm--or the cry from the depths of the soul. A collaborative work is more difficult mythically. Do we ever see the climax of a sports movie where the team scores the last point by a dazzlingly complex manœuvre? By a dazzling weave across the court where there's a double-handoff to a layup? An unexpected lateral with great blocking that dumps the ball over the goal line? The World Series won by a triple play--or a bunt that brings in the winning run? Funny how we never see that.
The dominant music myth is Beethoven, the irascible, tormented, obsessed genius whose creative work flowed out of him like water from the Pierian spring. In the popular imagination, all composers have to be Beethoven, even if they're happy, or flighty, or stodgy. C'mon, Wolfgang.! look tormented!
But collaboration is even worse--even though it's at the core of our modern music. Collaboration is where the hero tends to disappear altogether. There's also an increasing problem with the divine: what happens when you're not listening to your inner daimon, but to the other members of the band?
So it's not only more difficult to decipher a collaborative work, there also seems to be less chance of getting an heroic or spiritual narrative out of it. The only narratives floating around are the uncomfortable Socialist worker's Collective idea (problematic since the East is no longer Red)--and the hippie mystical we-are-all-one thang.

The Dead seem to be the poster children for the latter--straight outta Haight, touring with a family, playing while on drugs--what more could you ask for? And surely their music must be either a) commie or be b) worthless shapeless drugged-out incoherent gobbidge.
The truth is it's none of that. (Well, maybe it's commie music. Hard to tell. What color is the East again?)
The members of the Dead are all careful, thoughtful musicians--and all strongly grounded in musical traditions. (One of the finest musical moments I'd seen on the tube in recent years was Festival Express , a documentary of a music festival traveling across Canada by rail in 1970. It was quite a cast: The Dead, the Band, Janis Joplin, Buddy Guy--and the thing that struck me is how, even at the height of psychedelia, how grounded in history they all were. A moment like Rick Danko singing old blues with Janis, with Mr. Garcia impeccably filling in the spaces with his guitar--not on stage, but jamming as the miles roll by--was both sweet beyond measure, and a testimony to the fact that they knew and loved the old stuff. And the Dead were, more than anyone else at the time, omnivorous: at the time when Nashville hated with pure white republican passion all that hippie rock'n'roll, the Dead would perform Hank Williams, as well as bluegrass and delta blues. There was scarcely a more tradition-rooted rock guitarist than Jerry Garcia. If you look at the individual members of the Dead, you'll find them all careful craftsmen.
The difference is how they worked together.
The Dead got on stage and just talked to each other for hours. It was an open structure--a familiar one in American music: the band. A Dead jam was shapeless--but so is an evening's conversation among smart friends, when you compare it to an essay. The reason The Grateful Dead had an ocean of fans is that the Dead had something to say--and they weren't just taking turns talking. They built on each other, interlocked, joined diverged and joined again, in twos and threes and a Captain Trips solo and tutti all the way, folks to the end. It's a wild, unplanned and challenging structure--the comfort and the familiarity of the audiences for the Dead is (was, alas) that the vocabulary was deep in folk, blues, country--the whole long dark river of American/African/Appalachian/Cajun/Cuban lower-class down-and-dirty backdoor music.
No one would ever mistake an hour of the Dead for an hour of Beethoven--but that's not to say that one's crap and the other isn't. It's also very little like Mr. Zappa, whose experimental structures were rigorously composed--or Yes, whose compositions were communally arrived at, but carefully plotted and structured beforehand. It's also very little like an hour of Ornette Coleman or the Art Ensemble of Chicago, who were collaborative and improvisational, but had torn themselves loose from all traditional structure and vocabulary. For many critics, it's just as hard to talk about a Dead performance as an Art Ensemble performance except in the most general impressionistic terms--certainly not in the way you can talk about Shostakovich. (Many, I suspect, would simply be scared to inveigh against the Art Ensemble for cultural reasons--but not against the genial Dead and their happy-go-lucky fans.)
We are taught that a work of art must be a unity, that it must be one cohesive thing. And certainly that is how all Great Art is presented to us as we are growing up. The splendid cohesiveness of Shakespeare, of Beethoven, of Michaelangelo, of Flaubert--each on magnificent thing, where every part works seamlessly together. And woe if it did not! When confronted with Shakespeare's comedic monologues, say, everybody runs to show how it all works together in the subtle master plan.
But there's no fundamental reason why a work's effect should be single any more than an artist should be a hero. Some are, and they're wonderful. But is everything else crap?
We certainly have lots of art that violates those principles: operas which are grab bags of wonderful melodies, novels which are long roads of vivid characters and provoking thoughts, and all the improvisational theater and dance and music there ever was.
If you have had a wonderful, spectacular evening of conversation, and somebody asks you, "And what was the result?"
"What do you mean?"
"What conclusion did you come to?"
"Why, er, um..."
"Well, then it couldn't have been all that good, could it?"
*whack*
An evening of conversation can be more worthwhile than any closely-reasoned essay. It can generate all sorts of thoughts in a hundred directions--and be a thing that everyone there was a vital participant in, and all the thoughts led from one to another in a non-jarring fashion. Nonetheless it's not 'one thing' in the conventional sense--and the temptation is to abstract and distill until something single can be gotten.
It's even worse for a long Grateful Dead conversation, since music is not about conveying ideas. But even though it may be multiple and discursive, a Dead performance can hold thousands of short-attention-span Americans enthralled for hours.
It may not be art, but if not, then it's something just as wonderful.
Naw: it's art.

Posted: Friday - April 06, 2007 at 04:05 PM        

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