Random Notes on a Writer's Life

Productivity: as usual, I am sporadic. As always those critics who think all composers, writers, and songwriters are (or should be!) daily-disciplined craftsmen who write every day, and who dismiss inspiration and the Muses as beyond the pale, are wrong. I've had that argument too many times for it to be interesting anymore: the "you're not a disciplined writer!" accusation against me, because I'm not a daily-disciplined writer, but one who waits and listens for those inner voices to bring something forward—and yet the critics and writers who would chastise me for being "undisciplined" by their standards still can find nothing wrong with what I write, it's not inferior to their own work, I produce enough work to satisfy demand, and despite grumbling they often accept it for publication. My discipline is to always be ready to write it down, whenever it comes forward to be written down. I find nothing kills freshness like stale rote "discipline." It's true that daily writing practice can help you polish your art, and improve your craft—but if you have nothing to say, so what? It's just hollow words.

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So, as usual, I'm sporadic. Yet, in the past week or so, I've gotten down three poems, two of which are probably more in the song lyric column, all of which will be worked on more, later. I've also had some musical ideas floating around. In the next few months, I need to write another larger choral commissioned work, and I'm putting out tendrils to gather in ideas, inspirations, and texts.

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Last night I rolled into the computer a cassette of a Barbaric Yawps live show, recorded in July 1996 at the Madison Art Fair on the Square. I was listening in particular to my own solos on Chapman Stick for those world-music-inspired progressive/free jazz band pieces that we worlked hard to perfect; the Yawps always played on the fractal edge where form and chaos touch, always intentional but near the edge of flying off in any direction. There was a power and life-force aspect to playing with the Yawps that was one of my favorite things about the band. We opened this Art Fair set with one of my own pieces written for the Yawps, "Nomads," which is written in a post-Ellington complex (world music inspired) scale, with polychords; I can readily admit that "Nomads" was my response to "Caravan," just pushed further and a bit more off-kilter and polytonal. (I wrote a few tunes for the Yawps, but most of the music was created by reeds player Tom Lachmund.)

Last weekend I was at Interlochen, in Michigan, for the biannual Interlochen Stick Workshop, my second time attending. I want to do more Stick workshops. I need to reconnect with the music and musicians, and begin doing regular gigs again. This is way of both improving my own playing skills, and networking; both are beneficial. The social aspect of the Stick seminar was actually as powerful for me as the actual classroom work.

Hearing the Yawps recording from 1996, I hear myself playing chordally-complex jazz solos that I can still hear in my head, but haven't played lately. I can hear my conceptual zone in play there, and I had finger dexterity I lack, now. I know I lost ground when I was really sick, a few years ago, and didn't have the strength to do much playing. Now, I want to turn that around. I'm getting my strength back, slowly, and want to get my playing skills back. I like what I heard during this 19 year old performance: recorded before I was really sick, and before I moved out West, and things got chaotic and my (as yet undiagnosed) illness worsened, and robbed me of life-force. I no longer had the strength to practice regularly, and even though I was gigging when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, it wasn't regular, and it was more on the avant-garde and free-jazz range of music-making, which doesn't require me to deepen my performance technique, in some ways. Being at a seminar that forced me at times to back up and re-learn some basic techniques and ideas was refreshing, stimulating, inspiring, and enlivening. Give me more!

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Downside of being a lifelong science fiction, mystery, and fiction reader: I often spot the plot twists well in advance. It's partly because linear narrative has s logic to it, and it's partly because, as a storyteller oneself you know how stories are constructed. Even more than that, as a student of myth and folklore, and of the archetypes, you look for and find patterns in how stories are constructed. It's no secret that Joseph Campbell, the mythologist and anthropologist, was a student of Carl Jung, the depth psychologist who proposed the idea of archetypes of the collective unconscious; and it's no secret that I am a student of both these teachers.

Still, when I encounter a storyteller who can really surprise me, or whose work is a fresh take on the oldest myths, I treasure being surprised. That itself is one big reason I still read SF.

(And for the record, nobody uses "sci fi" to describe the genre except outsiders and popular media junkies.)

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Meanwhile, I had a real, genuine, short story published this year, in JONATHAN magazine. An actual short story! An actual, for that matter, science fiction short story! It was titled "Shimmer," and is in the May 2015 issue. So I guess I can legitimately call myself a fiction writer now, a storyteller.

And I have had a scattering of short-short stories accepted for next year, as well.

I have also had a number of poems accepted for publication later this year.

I don't submit a lot, and I admit I'm sporadic about writing. Sometimes I do my best work under deadline pressure, and when I am asked to write something. It gives me a kick in the pants to get it done.

And my art installation at Silverwood County Park, The Temple of Deep Time, has been extended for a year. And I am being asked to submit proposals for new installations, for other settings and occasions. So I am being asked, and I am working to meet those deadlines.

This also reflects my increasing ability to actually Do The Work. The return of life-force and strength makes me able to meet these requests and goals. For now, it's very helpful for me to have an external push; at some point, the external push will be less necessary, but always welcome. I am still getting used to the idea that, for most of my adult life, I was not actually lazy and unmotivated, I was sick. I was sick! Sick with an illness that robbed me of strength, of life-force, of motivation, of mental health, and much more. I am too old now to probably ever fully recover; and yet here I am, able to do more now than I could imagine a few short years ago, and with the desire to do it all. I will never have "normal health" for someone my age—but I can do more than I have been able to in a decade. I am aware, today, that when I am not feeling PTSD or crushed down by life, I feel so energized I can barely keep myself in my body. And I am aware of how much I want to get done in whatever remaining years I have left.

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It needs to be said, again, though: I don't make art for purposes of "self-expression," that hoary Romantic myth. Sometimes I do, but mostly when I make art I feel egoless rather than ego-empowered. There are things I have to say, and want to say, but a significant percentage of what I Make just has to be made, and I don't feel like I'm in charge, or "controlling" that, or the master of it. It just happens. Often I don't know what's going on anymore than you do—until afterwards. Craft is great for analysis, and theory is great for figuring out what you just did. It's not a very good prescriptive master, though, but more of a tyrant when applied beforehand rather than afterwards.

Improvisation in Art & Life

I was referred to an article on All About Jazz: Louis Sclavis: Maps of the Mind. Sclavis is an improvising multi-instrumentalist and composer, a prolific jazz musician who rarely repeats himself, and is always exploring new directions, ranging from tightly-composed pieces to free jazz. I first discovered his work via ECM Records, a favorite recording label that I have discussed before. ECM hosts a large stable of brilliant improvising musicians, of which Louis Sclavis is a prime example, with his nine albums recorded with the label.

Here's the paragraph that caught my attention:

In an interview with All About Jazz in 2009, [free jazz pianist Craig] Taborn—one of the most fearless of contemporary improvisers [and one of Sclavis' creative collaborators]—described improvisation as the willingness to face the possibility of failure. Sclavis has his own take. "Everybody has their own thinking about improvisation," he says. "For me, it's simpler; since I started learning clarinet, improvisation has been something completely natural, like eating, drinking or walking. I don't always improvise in the same way, though, it depends on the musicians. It's like breathing. I cannot think more about this because it's what I am."

I've often thought of improvisation from Taborn's perspective: In various groups that mostly played free, in various styles of music, we often talked about playing without a safety net. Spontaneous music with no guidelines or rules, and the risk of crashing. We did sometimes crash, but it was always something to be learned from. Facing the possibility of failure is really the risk all artists take, all the time. Everyone does, really: risk is part of life.

I find Sclavis' definition of improvisation to be resonant with my own experience as an improvising musician, too: that naturalness, that effortless simplicity. You just do it. It's not something that you think about; it happens before rational mind, before analysis. It arises from a part of the self that is often pre-verbal, even non-verbal: that deeper place from where most art arises. Granted, that place arises from long practice, from self-confidence, from knowing through experience that you have something to say, and the skill to say it on your instrument. But once you have that experience, and the self-confidence that goes with it, it becomes as easy and natural as Sclavis describes.

improvisation in art and life.

That's something I find I do all the time. We all do, although we don't all think about it this way. It's not that one only improvises within the frame-of-reference of "this is improvised music." It's that we all are making it all up as we go. Life is neither a rehearsal nor is it scripted. We might develop plans and strategies, but in life as in music, these are neither universal nor, ultimately, completely possible. Living in the present moment is what we have, as much as we like to believe otherwise. We make plans, and we improvise, and which after all is more real, more true to the nature of life?

for Sonny Sharrock

Sonny Sharrock was one of the great free jazz improvising musicians of the past century. Both as a sideman and a leader, as well as a solo artist, his free jazz guitar work was influential and iconic. I have most the recordings he appeared on, and I freely admit he influenced my own playing. When I feel like playing jagged melodic lines, or shards-of-glass chords and arpeggios, I think of Sonny.

He should have been more famous as a musician than he was. He was often a sideman on other musicians' projects, brilliantly adding his brand of sweet and spiky guitar to their projects. He played with Pharoah Sanders, Don Cherry, and many of the other iconic free jazz musicians. Late in life he had a "rediscovery" resurgence of his career, leading to several new solo albums, as well albums as a band leader, produced by Bill Laswell, who also wrote his own tribute to Sonny.

One of Sonny's classic comments about what he wanted to do musically could stand as an artist's statement:

I want the sweetness and the brutality, and I want to go to the very end of each of those feelings. . . . I've been trying to find a way for the terror and the beauty to live together in one song. I know it's possible.
—Sonny Sharrock



Here's the poem I wrote after Sonny's death. It's my homage and memorial. It's certainly not the only such poem to have been written.

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for Sonny Sharrock (1940–1994)

Sonny,
your shards of glass
have caught you by the thumbs

and pulled you up:    up:
into extended chords.
They finally sound right,

ringing as they were always meant to.
You wanted the knife-edged tone
of your guitar to always be more
near Coltrane’s giant wail than it was,
forever tearing the envelope.
You ran your hands across the sharpened strings
till something bled:    our preconceptions.

Your fingers.
It’s not enough to just do.
You have to only be.    Be whatever it is.
Whenever.

Sonny, your in-the-moment
sheets of sound, wrapping around us
like the aurora, always caught me on fire.
Your desire taught you the way
to play without thinking; beyond thought,
in the music, in the instant, at once,
rising up,
perfection.     Melody.     The lion’s roar.

John Coltrane: the story of a sound

My review of Ben Ratliff's new book Coltrane: the story of a sound has been posted on Monsters & Critics. Enjoy!

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(Update: Here's the body of the review, reprinted here just for the heck of it.)


In the growing catalog of books on John Coltrane’s life and musical legacy, there tend to be three main species: 1. anecdotal oral-histories, along the lines of J.C. Thomas’ Chasin’ the Trane (1975); 2. fan-written, passionate, even spiritual books, including those that view Coltrane as a spiritual seeker primarily; and 3. cooler, more analytical books, along the lines of traditional academic music histories. Ben Ratliff’s new book on John Coltrane’s legacy falls into this third camp.

The overall tone of this book is cool and detached, yet easily readable. Most of the time this works well, although once or twice I wished Ratliff had tried less hard to be coolly objective. This is the sort of book only an enthusiast would write, so there were moments I wished for more enthusiasm revealed in the writing. Thus, those moments when I felt I was hearing Ratliff’s own voice expressing a strong opinion, the book seemed to come alive, and be more compelling.

Of all the existing Coltrane studies, this book has been claimed (probably more by the publisher than anyone else) to be the first to examine Coltrane’s contribution to jazz from the viewpoint of the development of his unique signature sound on his principal instruments, tenor and soprano saxophone. This isn’t a strictly accurate claim. There have been other studies that approach Coltrane from this angle, notably John Fraim’s Spirit Catcher: The life and art of John Coltrane (1996). I believe Ratliff is attempting to be intellectually rigorous, however; there is more than enough music theory in this book, short of actual transcriptions, to satisfy most jazz theory-heads. The musical analyses are detailed, and I find myself agreeing with Ratliff’s insights most of the time.

The single most important new contribution this book makes lies in its part two, in which Ratliff discusses the ongoing impact of Coltrane’s musical ideas on jazz, and on popular music in general. Coltrane’s influences on rock ‘n roll, and on avant-garde new-music composers, for example, are addressed as well as his influences on contemporary jazz. Musicians will continue to need to come to grips with Coltrane’s influence for a long time to come. Like John Cage’s musical innovations, John Coltrane’s musical ideas are ones every musician (jazz or otherwise) must deal with, sooner or later, whether or not one ultimately agrees with the questions they asked, or likes the musical answers that resulted.

Ratliff correctly points out, in his concluding summation, that Coltrane was the right man at the right time to bring the new musical ideas into the spotlight. Coltrane was the point man in music history during the last ten years of his life. That he was also a gifted and adventurous musician, in any context, only amplifies the power he had of being the right man at the right moment.

As part of his summation, Ratliff also speaks to the backlash against free jazz that has happened since its moment in the spotlight. Ratliff’s accurate summation of the aims and failings of the neo-conservative “young lions” in contemporary jazz, led by Wynton Marsalis and his followers, is a masterpiece of critical understatement. Not a dismissal, but devastatingly clear about where the holes lie in their counter-revolutionary arguments.

Ratliff’s new book is overall a very good read, but there are a few inexplicable oversights. Most of the best-known Coltrane biographies and musical studies are listed in the “Sources and Acknowledgments” section at the back of the book. One or two are conspicuously absent. For example, it seems odd to have included Ashley Kahn’s Kind of Blue: The making of the Miles Davis masterpiece (2000), a book only peripherally about Coltrane and mostly about Davis, and to have not cited Fraim (mentioned above). Granted, Fraim’s book falls more into the fan/spiritual category I listed above, but it is a well-written book with some insights into Coltrane’s sound that are very similar to Ratliff’s own.

Ratliff does address Coltrane’s world-wide, universal influence in part two, although he mostly focuses on American jazz and American popular music. Yet he also overlooks some children of Coltrane’s sound that seem important, to me, to have been mentioned, including musicians who took Coltrane’s ideas and ran with them, not all of whom played saxophone: for example, Derek Bailey and Sonny Sharrock, both important free jazz guitarists. (To be fair, Ratliff quotes Sharrock at length on what happened to jazz in the aftermath of Coltrane’s death; I admit my opinion is probably biased, because I feel that Sharrock never got enough credit for his contributions to free jazz as a whole.) European free jazz saxophonist Peter Brötzmann is mentioned, but the equally important Evan Parker is not. Nowhere is Jan Garbarek mentioned, the great Norwegian saxophonist whose soul-searing tone, especially on soprano sax, is to my ears one of the most direct descendents of Coltrane’s sound and sensibility. But these are all relatively minor caveats.

Perhaps Ratliff’s oversights can be explained by an attempt on the author’s part to distance himself from the sillier fan-based Coltrane books. It could also be the New York-centrism common to many music critics who still have difficulty accepting the reality that genuine musical life and music criticism does go on, west of the Hudson River. New York-centrism also possibly expresses itself as overlooking the important European free jazz innovators, all of whom owe a direct debt to Coltrane, as mentioned above.

So, I’ll give this new book on Coltrane a mildly qualified rave. Some of what Ratliff presents has been said before, although his approach is mostly new. Coltrane: The story of a sound is a genuine contribution to Coltrane studies, and worth reading more than once. It is a book dense with information, and you will get more out of it each time you re-read.