Our Kind of Spirituals, No. 63: Ornette Coleman Trio, “European Echoes”

At a book party twenty years ago a trim man in a dark suit, after a brief conversation, which I had initiated, gave me his business card.  

He was Ornette Coleman, and the unlikelihood of meeting this most original of originals at a book party was topped only by the unlikelihood of him representing himself to me with an ordinary business card, and of him representing himself to me, not the other way around.  

That was Ornette Coleman, who died this week, age 85.   Most artists we like we consider originals, and we’re probably right.   They are originals.   They sound like themselves and not somebody else.   But not so many are such originals that you couldn’t imagine a whole way of art-making without them.   These artists paint in their own colors, speak a language in which they alone are articulate.   In their work the push-and-pull in all art between the original and the good can be heard loud and clear.

The alto sax playing lines at once thin and strong, earthy and a touch sharp, simple and yet jagged and polyvalently complicated: that’s Ornette Coleman’s language.   Coleman was so voluminously original that it has taken his death – and WKCR’s weeklong memorial broadcast – for the extent of his expression (thousands of recorded hours) to become clear.  He was so insistently original that much of his music, sounding like nobody else’s but his, also winds up sounding much like much other music of his. A musician who expresses himself in a musical language he alone speaks is bound to sound narrow to the rest of us – is bound to sound, at times, unmusical, even unlistenable.      

Ornette Coleman always sounded like Ornette Coleman.  In his work, the spiritual proposition that every human person is an original, a one-off, recognizable finally and when it counts as no one but ourselves, is made music.

This track is simply the Ornette Coleman tune I know best, because I (not so much an original as he – but who is?) based a song of my own on the opening riff when I was in college.

Our Kind of Spirituals, No. 62: The Who, “I’m One”

In the Who show at the Barclays Center the other night, “I’m One” stood out as fresher than anything else Pete and Roger played, and at the same time as more permanent – more than “My Generation” or “Pinball Wizard” or “Baba O'Riley” or “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

I’ve had it in the mind’s ear since then, hearing it, for the first time, as a country song – akin to the country songs the Who’s London counterparts the Kinks were doing on Muswell Hillbillies and other records in those years.

Hearing it as the answer to the question “Why did people find Quadrophenia so confusing?”  Here’s why: it was confusing because it was supposedly about a kid who was double-schizophrenic, inwardly divided four ways – quadrophenic — but its strongest song is about a young man’s strong sense of himself and his inner unity.      

Hearing it as a kind of explanation of why so many artists’ personal lives are such a mess.   (Pete Townshend’s certainly was at the time.)  Here’s why: they’re finding, or maintaining, an inner unity through their art (“I’m One”) and this crowds out the quest for unity and order in their lives.

Hearing it as a spiritual.  More than Townshend’s avowedly spiritual songs – the ones inspired by Meher Baba and directed at God, or a god – this one touches the poles of confusion and order, vulnerability and strength, that are the basis for so much that we call spiritual.

Our Kind of Spirituals, No. 61: Sawyer Fredericks, “Man of Constant Sorrow” 

Sometimes justice is done; sometimes the best man wins, etc.   That’s what happened the other night on The Voice, when Sawyer Fredericks won the popular vote and the contest (a hundred thousand dollars, a recording contract, a new Nissan …).

“Man of Constant Sorrow” was his breakthrough in the blind audition phase, and what’s striking, hearing it now – a few weeks and many episodes later –  is how fully his version carries everything that he brought to the several dozen songs he sang as the competition progressed: vocal strength, grit, restraint, a keen sense of roots that is more punky than curatorial – and above all, the sense that he is singing something he knows and feels.  Other singers in the course of the competition; Sawyer seemed to have it all from the get-go.    

There’s much to say about him – a home-schooled kid who lives on a farm near Fultonville in upstate New York – and I hope to place a profile of him somewhere.   But right now, two things about this song come to mind.

One is that he learned “Man of Constant Sorrow” from the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack – the soundtrack to a movie released, if you can believe it (I can’t believe it), before he was born.   This – strangely, as I tried to work out in  The Atlantic – is how folk traditions are perpetuated: a movie with a roots-music soundtrack puts a young musician in touch with those roots, and eventually tens of millions of people are hearing roots music sung on a slick TV stage – but sung in a way that is anything but slick.   The song, and the singer, are strong enough to withstand the setting.  

The other is that the song – the whole idea of a man of constant sorrow – runs against everything in Sawyer Fredericks’ self-presentation, but it doesn’t matter.   He is sixteen years old, gifted, successful, charming, and evidently happy.  What can he know of constant sorrow?

Through the song, he can know a lot.  This is what art does: it gives us something like direct access to experiences and emotions that aren’t strictly speaking our own.  And this is what artists do: they give voice to a sense of humanity that is larger than their literal selves.

Our Kind of Spirituals, No. 60: B.B. King, “Sweet Sixteen / Don’t Cut Off Your Hair”

In Washington in 1999, B.B. King explained why he played the blues:

“Growing up on the plantation there in Mississippi, I would work Monday through Saturday noon,” he said. “I’d go to town on Saturday afternoons, sit on the street corner, and I’d sing and play.

“I’d have me a hat or box or something in front of me. People that would request a gospel song would always be very polite to me, and they’d say: ‘Son, you’re mighty good. Keep it up. You’re going to be great one day.’ But they never put anything in the hat.

“But people that would ask me to sing a blues song would always tip me and maybe give me a beer. They always would do something of that kind. Sometimes I’d make 50 or 60 dollars one Saturday afternoon. Now you know why I’m a blues singer.”

It sounds reductive, but it gets to the heart of what made King an original.   As Muddy Waters uncoupled the blues from the travails of rural life and made it the sound of the city – Chicago in particular – King uncoupled the blues from its roots in African-American spirituals and made it the music of African-American cosmopolitan man.  

He wore a tuxedo, lived in Las Vegas, and fathered (by his own count) fifteen children by fifteen different women.  

Still and all, he wound up playing a command performance for John Paul II – and gave the pope one of his signature “Lucille” guitars.  

This grainy video from New York’s Cafe au Go Go in 1968 shows King at his worldliest, shortly before the performances at the Fillmore West later that year that King considered the turning point in his own career – the point when he ceased to be a roots musician and became a world-class showman.

The blues would never be the same.  

Our Kind of Spirituals, No. 80: Sufjan Stevens, “No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross” 

Just before Easter Ann Powers of NPR snuck in a lovely, rangy, authoritative post about the new music of solitude.   She named Leonard Cohen as its avatar and Sufjan Stevens as its strongest current practitioner, and name-checked Pico Iyer’s TED Talk about stillness as its defining text.  

This new one from Stevens – an “idiosyncratic Christian,” Powers calls him – is in the shadow of the Velvet Underground’s “Jesus” and also “Heroin,” where images of addiction and religious yearning mix it up together.  

“I slept on my back in the shade of the meadowlark /  Like a champion, get drowned to get laid / I take one more hit when you depart …”

Simon & Garfunkel … the acoustic Velvet Underground … Nick Drake …  Cohen … The Who of the ukelele-strummed “Blue Red & Grey” … the odd acoustic Smiths song … Elliott Smith … Bon Iver and Grizzly Bear … No question there’s a strong line of affinity here – of spiritual affinity.

It’s not folk music, really.  But “the music of solitude” sounds like a critic’s tag, not an artist’s.

Myself, I think of it as “chamber music.”

Our Kind of Spirituals, No. 78: Steve Tilston, “Sometimes in This Life”

DannyCollins will be here and gone in a flash, but Steve Tilston is here to stay.  

Danny Collins is the new Al Pacino movie, about a dissolute musician who forty years after the fact receives a letter written to him by John Lennon telling him that he is a major talent.

In fact, Lennon did write such a letter, and the by-the-numbers press for the movie has recounted how it was written to one Steve Tilston, an obscure folk singer who, alas, has remained obscure.

In fact – in actual fact – Tilston is a major figure in the post-Sixties English folk movement, in which quality counts as much as popularity; and his 1987 record Life By Misadventure is certainly in the top ten of the several hundred folk records in my own shoebox collection.   It’s a perfect record: grown-up, original, ruminative, and (unlike many folk records) unfailingly musical, with a light touch on the folk roots.

This trio arrangement of its concluding track brings out the song’s communal, call-and-response quality.

“One day we’ll reach out and touch the stars / Some times in this life are beautiful / One day we may see  just where we are / Some times in this life are beautiful …”

Our Kind of Spirituals, No. 77: The Melodians, “Rivers of Babylon”

Georgetown undergraduate Caleb Weaverspent spring break in Jamaica, leading one of several trips organized through the university’s alternative spring breaks program – a trip meant “to immerse students and faculty in grassroots and faith-based responses to global economic inequality.” 

One aspect of Caleb’s leadership involved scripting biblically rooted reflections for the trip, and he organized these around Psalm 137.   “The psalm’s lament is a powerful testimony of exile, oppression, and faith, all issues with which the participants grappled during the week,” he explains.

“Our experience illustrated the parallel between the suffering of the Isaraelites and that of the Black diaspora, a metaphor which informs Jamaican social consciousness and its most well-known products, Rastafarianism and reggae music.”

Psalm 137 is the basis of “Rivers of Babylon,” a reggae classic that has become a Rastafarian anthem.   The recording here is the original version, by the Melodians, from 1972.   Jimmy Cliff recorded it two years later for the soundtrack of The Harder They Come, and Boney M had a huge UK hit with it in 1978.  But in spirit this song dates to the sixth century B.C.

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down / Ye-eah we wept, when we remembered Zion …”

Our Kind of Spirituals, No. 76: Chanticleer, “O Lord, rebuke me not" 

Once upon a time, musicians sang and played instruments and people went to the places where they were in order to hear them, or the musicians went to the places where the people were and sang and played for them.   And then along came audio recordings, and people who were somewhere else than where the musicians were singing and playing “played” a recording of the music and heard it that way.

The supplanting of live music by recorded music is more complicated than that: complicated enough that I could take two hundred thousand words to set out the relationship of performance to recordings in the music of a single composer – J.S. Bach – and could have taken another two hundred thousand.  But on some level, a century ago it was pretty straightforward.   You heard the music where it was performed, and if you couldn’t get there, you played the recording.

That’s how it was with Chanticleer this weekend.  The sacred-music vocal ensemble was singing Saturday night at the Brooklyn Oratory, where I go to Mass most Sundays.   I had other plans and so didn’t get tickets.   Other plans turned into other other plans – but I didn’t get to the Oratory, and I felt the loss.  

Instead, in the overnight I fished out a CD of Chanticleer singing Henry Purcell, a disc I hadn’t listened to – “played” – in something like ten years.  And there it was, the miracle of recording: I wasn’t in the place half a mile from my apartment where Chanticleer sang, wasn’t there when they were singing there,  but here I was, hearing them here and now anyhow.  

No, it wasn’t live; it wasn’t “like being there”; it wasn’t a substitute for a live performance; but it was Chanticleer I was hearing – I was more “there” than “not-there” – and it was immeasurably better than not hearing Chanticleer at all.

This somber anthem by Henry Purcell, written for the Chapel Royal at Hampton Court Palace in the 1680’s, is as gorgeously austere – as austerely gorgeous – as Lenten music gets.   The words – from Psalm 6 – are as powerful as the music:

“O Lord, rebuke me not … / Have mercy upon me, O Lord, for I am weak; O Lord, heal me, for my bones are vexed … / My beauty is gone for very trouble, and worn away because of all mine enemies.

"Turn thee, O Lord, and deliver my soul …”

If you’re reading on a phone, I know it’s unlikely you’ll listen to all nine minutes of this – but if you listen to a minute of it, you’ll be a little more “there” than “not-there.”

Our Kind of Spirituals, No. 75: Billy Bragg, “Valentine’s Day Is Over”

Every right-thinking congenitallysuspicious cultural critic knows that half the holidays on thecalendar were invented, or intensified, in order to help companies drum up business and make money selling something – and none more so than Valentine’s Day, right?

Right – except that in the case of Valentine’s Day, this year at any rate, it was the cultural critics themselves who seemed to take advantage.  For a full week, there was a Valentine’s-themed trend piece wherever I looked: a piece about the price of chocolate, about romance in the age of the iPhone, about fifty-year-plus marriages, about a consulting firm that helps people and companies (mainly companies) compose romantic-seeming tweets.   Did anybody read those pieces?  I am convinced nobody did – except for the eight million people who wound up taking part in a participatory romance quiz.

“Valentine’s Day Is Over” is probably the least romantic song by a singer who – although nobody ever says it about him – is one of the most romantic-minded musicians going.   That’s right: Billy Bragg, romantic.  What fires his ardor for revolution in the present other than his love for revolutions past?  What sparks his songs-of-the-people approach other than his love for Woody Guthrie and the Clash?  What has carried his career into its fifth decade other than his love of the idea that he is the last man standing from the Eighties and his topical songs are built to last?  

“You will see that what’s wrong with me / is wrong with everyone / that you want to play your little games on …”

The video artfully blends footage from a 1987 solo performance at Victoria University in Wellington (New Zealand) with footage of people in love (and maybe not in love) on the campus and environs.