So, first a few words on where I’m heading: this is supposed to be frequent and short as opposed to infrequent and lengthy, yes? Here’s a plan for the next few weeks:
On Twin Talk and Edith Judith—at least a couple of posts, maybe more
On Ashes and Diamonds, the forthcoming release by Rob Clearfield
On the pandemic, personally, and on musicians, music, and the scene
On my transition from professor to musician, and a bit back (teaching now)
On hearing music live
On being a musician in the United States
OK, so into Edith Judith, the band created by Katie Ernst and Dustin Laurenzi, who are also two-thirds of Twin Talk (the band I am opening for in Eau Claire on October 25, tickets here). Their album Bones and Structure was a pandemic project from these two mainstays of the Chicago jazz scene, here moving into the realm of popular song.
It feels like a great place for me to start writing, in part because the emotions of this work are perhaps a bit more accessible than that of instrumental jazz ensembles. It’s not the first time I have felt this way—hearing Rob Clearfield and various other jazz musicians performing in the bands Information Superhighway and District 97 ten years ago was also important in widening my conception of the emotional landscape of jazz.
So my working thesis is that this apparently non-jazz songwriting project can inform our sense of the emotional life of music with no words (or relatively few words)—music like that of Twin Talk.
Feel Everything: Feel Nothing
One possible supporting piece of context for that argument might be the way jazz musicians are encouraged by turns to enhance and repress their emotions. Let me take a little sideline on this. Jazz gives the opportunity for spontaneous creation, and jazz musicians work to make themselves vessels through which powerful energies can flow. As actors (at least in the broader Stanislavskian/Method tradition) train themselves to be able to access potent experiences from their lives so as to pull forward emotional depths at the drop of a hat, so musicians put endless hours into refining their technique but also their sensitivities to the emotional character of any kind of musical event. This allows them, on any given night, to be both responsive to the texture of color of the music they are playing, but also all the exigencies of the moment: their fellow performers, the audience, the room where they are playing.
I feel like I am making some “progress” with this development of myself as a musician since I retired from being a professor. I spend more time thinking about and listening to music every day, and now I spend long hours on the road listening to music almost without interruption. In general, I’m having more and more powerful responses to music of all kinds, and when I was an amateur, all that was already pretty strong.
But there are also plenty of forces pushing in the opposite direction, toward feeling less. One is the desire for consistency and precision: it gets harder to execute what you want to do musically as you are feeling more emotions. Feeling things strongly can lead to tensing up muscles unnecessarily and that can lead to injuries. But I certainly think that the right response to this problem is not to suppress your feelings: rather it is to practice feeling them, and not letting tension into your body: practicing feeling the emotions and continuing to be relaxed, steady, in control, even as the spirit flows freely. You can see this happening in great performers—at least, I feel like I have seen it in folks like Yusef Lateef and Gidon Kremer. Kremer I feel I can speak about a little more easily since I play the violin: I have watched him fill a hall with sound and energy, which obviously is present in his whole body, and yet the muscles of his fingers and arms are also visibly at ease: he is using just the tension needed to do the work while allowing everything else to be utterly relaxed as (massive) energy flows.
But the social forces pushing against emotional expressivity and vulnerability are just as strong, and there is much less of a practical solution for them that I can see. As someone still at the beginning of my professional career, I’m feeling the social forces all the time: every time I write an email to a music venue proposing a performance; every time I reach out to a new musician to put together a performance; every time I attend someone else’s performance and then stay after for the “hang,” and do some hobnobbing; every time I log into Facebook or Instagram and see what my fellow musicians are up to. It’s a minefield: one always wants to project confidence, and a sense of ongoing success that is constantly on the rise; one always wants to be complimentary and supportive to other musicians; one always wants to be positive and optimistic with club owners or booking people. But, as will likely shock no one, it is just the nature of life that one doesn’t always feel aligned with those expectations—sometimes one is disappointed with a performance; sometimes one feels insulted or slighted by booking people or club owners; sometimes the job of “working the room” seems impossible for whatever reason.
And let me be clear: I have it good. I made the decision to make a life in music having already had a successful career, and with enough financial security that I don’t have to work every night to make rent. Most musicians are on much less steady ground, especially if they are young and starting out in a new city like Chicago. For them, the emotional game is that much more consequential: every contact with someone who might be able to book you or hire you feels freighted with significance. Every slight might be evidence that you won’t make it, that you are in an artistic death spiral, or that you never should have tried to do this in the first place. So, one must try to summon a thick skin: but having a thick skin is literally the opposite of what this music calls for artistically.
If you make it through the first months and years, you may find things starting to stabilize: some kinds of gigs become “steady”; you develop some musical friendships, and with those people you feel you can be yourself, and not just a hyper-optimistic/confident version of yourself; you may get steady teaching work or a music-related or non-music-related job that provides financial stability. You make your way to being “established.”
But what if one day, and all at once, all the “steady” gigs evaporate? What if your day job in, say, the service industry, also evaporates? That is of course what during the pandemic we just went through. Many musicians are still recovering, but for plenty of them, the time of unprecedented crisis was also productive, even if the productivity was under circumstances that they would never have willingly chosen.
Two of the albums I am writing about first here are products of that period. Bones and Structure and Ashes and Diamonds.
Bones and Structure
Bones and Structure is a gorgeous, unified record, in a popular idiom but full of complexity that rewards repeated listening—many songs sound harmonically straightforward, but include rhythmic layers that are a bit out of sync with each other. The lyrics (and my sense is that Ernst takes the lead on the words) often seek ambiguity or double entendre, like the line “we’re not going anywhere,” singled out in the accompanying notes as both a statement of despair and defiance. But coming back to this music after a few months, the presiding feeling is more clear to me, and it is one that aligns well with my sense of this period: it is a feeling of grief and loss, that can’t really be indulged because it isn't specific enough; a feeling of mortality that is more impending than actual, doom that is hanging like a shadow over the world. If the force that is killing your dreams for the future is so impersonal that it cannot take your blame, then how are you supposed to feel?
When Katie Ernst was playing a recent group of shows with John Raymond and Sean Carey (supporting an album called Shadowlands), she sang Leonard Bernstein’s song, “Some Other Time.” The feeling of that song also resonates with the songs from Bones and Structure that I want to focus on: a sense of inestimable loss, and that the only thing to say is, “oh well.”
For me, the two poles of the expressive territory of the record are “Luna,” and “Sleeping Beast,” the latter about Edith Judith herself, the three-legged dog who names the band. Together, we have two pandemic visions: of a sleeping pet who knows nothing of the cataclysm shaking the world around her, and of the moon, likewise unaware of the fortunes of the distant, infinitesimally small beings on the planet she circles.
It has taken me a while to come to grips with the structure of “Sleeping Beast,” mostly because I had trouble understanding its ending, where after the song has unfolded with acoustic guitar and woodwinds, it breaks into electric guitar and synthesizers. My theory now is that we are contemplating something like the tiny, world-enveloping disaster depicted in the film Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008) where a young woman trying to make her way to economic stability has to face the loss of her dog Lucy. That is, we are facing the prospect of betraying—through economic hardship or through our own mortality—the total love and total dependency of our relationships with our pets. That prospect is also next to our knowledge—at some level—that though the love is total, these beasts are adaptable, can heal, and they, as a vet once told me, “live in the present,” and they could love another with the same purity, totality, and dependency: so we are replaceable, as they are. That can be true and our loves no less pure.
Sleep on, peaceful beast
Feel your heavy head
Sink into the silence
Do not think of me.Like a dream that fades with dawn,
When you wake I will be gone.
And maybe what is being evoked is not just this both warm and tragic vision of the love between our species, but also the even more infinitely vexed relationship of human beings to the natural world writ large: the relation of dependency and love and exploitation and suffering. That all seems to be bubbling up at the end of the song from the peaceful vision of its start.
Luna
Ernst introduced “Luna” at the performance I attended in November of 2022 by reading the lyrics aloud—practical because the style of singing here is counter-syntactic, counter-expressive, just off-beat quarter notes following the austere motif that runs through the piece. And what are the words? Words about the moon, found on an internet search from something called “moon facts.net”—shitty questionable internet source, that is to say. What facts? These: “The moon is the earth’s only moon.” And then, “the moon is in synchronous rotation with earth, / Meaning the same side is always facing the earth.” And finally, “The moon is moving away from the earth.” These are repeated. So: a joyfully anti-lyrical piece of found poetry.
The simple, miraculous operation of the song is then to infuse these pedestrian, coldly expressed and unsympathetic facts with human sadness and living energy. It was a reverse operation to what those facts also stated: a universe without the imaginative clothing of humanity, without our mythologies and religions and symbology: without us. The moon as meaning, then, mostly, loneliness. Two objects forever close, but gradually separating, always showing just one side to each other, a couple in perpetual isolation, drifting away. In the pandemic moment, when it seemed as though all the joy of life also might be slipping away, just out of reach, the metaphor gains that much more power.
Ernst also spoke about the music’s origins in private dialogue, then correspondence across the country with drummer and musical polymath, Ben Lumsdaine, and finally arrival on stage in a room of Chicago friends—that progression as being a part of the energy of the room and the night, with the L.A. drummer present, and other local friends enlisted to cover the layered final product. And despite a relative lack of improvisation, the performance felt improbably more risky and effervescent than jazz. Who knows when these people could be assembled again to bring the music live to an audience? And here as well, in contrast to music that can shrink and expand with the energies of a room on given night, where musicians can call tunes from the stage and count on their common repertoire and vocabulary, here it was just the songs from the record, played in order. And when they were done, that was it.
What does it mean for jazz musicians to write music in a “pop idiom” like this? It’s a good thing: the approach to relative simplicity from a place of wide-ranging complexity is one that can be profound. One enters the spaces of these culturally central harmonies and rhythms with appreciation of a traveler from distant lands. The deadness of the cliché drops away and things are there like the first time, discovered anew. And then we get to carry this experience and knowledge back to the jazz and feel it all the more deeply.
Edith Judith, Bones and Structure is available in various forms for purchase on Bandcamp, here. Edith Judith will perform in Chicago again on Sunday, November 19, 2023.
Ernst and Laurenzi will appear with drummer Andrew Green as the band Twin Talk in Eau Claire on Wednesday, October 25, 7:30 pm, at the Plus (208 S Barstow Street). Tickets are $20 in advance available here. I will be opening for them with my trio that includes Graydon Peterson on bass and Pete James Johnson on drums.
