The experience was breathtaking, and I’ll attempt to describe it here, as I hope to answer a question posed to me by an audience member as I was standing up with the rest of the musicians at the end of the performance while the audience applauded us and the dancers. He looked up at me on the stage and he said in a loud, earnest voice “What will we do without the avant-garde?” He was very concerned, and I, at a loss for words, just gave him an awkward smile. This kind of response is pretty typical for me. I have rows of dimples in my cheeks from smiling when I’m uncomfortable. But I thought the experience, if not the question, was so interesting that he deserves a response.

When I was hired to play trumpet on this piece, all I knew was that it would be a new work by Christian Wolff. (The piece turned out to be Song (for 6), a fragile but vivid and democratic music where individuals have an important role in the creation of an ensemble voice.) This was already a dream gig, and I eagerly said yes. I later found out that the performance was with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and a dream gig became the realization of two dreams. I took the opportunity to read several interviews and books about the company’s history– about Cunningham, Wolff, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage and all the other famous artists who have been associated with the company throughout its history. Learning about the humble beginnings of the MCDC put this man’s question into an interesting context.

I don’t want to attempt to define the avant-garde of today, if we can even use that term, or to tell this man where to look for it, if in fact he is actually interested in being exposed to it. I would rather look at how the company became what it was this year as it formally closed up shop, and then to draw lessons for how we might see the development of an arts institution approaching the significance of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in the future.

After sixty years, the company was a well-funded and fully-staffed organization, an institution. Given the challenging artistic choices that Cunningham and company made over and over, even through its last performances, it is a remarkable achievement that the company thrived in this way. In contrast to the MCDC’s final performances, where six shows in three nights were filled with 1,500 eager audience members, the first performances of the company were actively disliked by critics and audiences. It wasn’t until ten years into the company’s history that it achieved financial stability and a degree of favorable status with critics and audiences. Merce Cunningham and his partner and music director John Cage, saw a bright and productive future for this company, and over many years they realized this goal, with results probably beyond their wildest dreams.

In its early years, MCDC toured in a Volkswagen bus driven by John Cage with just enough room for six dancers, the two musicians, and a stage manager, who was often Robert Rauschenberg.

One of Cunningham and Cage’s most important innovations was the separation of the dance and the music. In traditional dance, the music supports the dance in terms of its rhythmic structure, and also in an echoing of the narrative or sensibility of the dance. The MCDC began disconnecting these elements by creating pieces where the dancers didn’t hear the music, and the musicians and costume designers didn’t see the dance until the dress rehearsal. Though a traditionalist might see this as a killing of all the meaning of dance, I see it as a great-hearted embrace of human potential. When I think of an ensemble learning a dance with complicated steps that move in and out of coordination with nothing to depend on but each other, I am moved by how they can work together to execute such a difficult task with such grace and precision. When I watched the dance, music and everything else each pursuing its own separate yet complimentary logic, I was struck by the vibrancy and the multiplicity of this created environment.

The potential of human beings as creators, working in collaboration among people with different talents, is greatly expanded by the company’s repertoire. More artists have been and will continue to pursue this goal, and fortunately, this is true among those who are following Cunningham and company’s line of inquiry, and those who have found their own. The exact mode of the work is not important, only the pursuit of broadening human potential. The “avant-garde” hasn’t disappeared; one just needs to know where to look.

So, to ask what we will do without the avant-garde is to miss what’s truly important. For anyone who is interested in new artwork, the only way to proceed is by looking forward. The most important part of my answer to this question is that there are plenty of artists out there in all media, working to find a new way to answer the same questions, and I hope there always will be. I hope this man will look for them and support them. For me, the most important lesson I learned from my experience was to continue working on the art that is important to me, and that if I work diligently enough, perhaps I can build something that will be as dear to me as the company was to Cunningham.

I was raised in and by the hills of Virginia so I am acquainted with bluegrass and the bucolic banjo pluck of the Appalachians. Life in the South to me has meant mountains and magnolias, bourbon and a sauntering pace of life. But until recently, I did not know the darkness of the deep musical movements coming from the South less than a half century ago. In this place, in the acapellas of low sadness and the hymns of wandering, I have found camaraderie with the land that hemmed and honed me as a young woman and as a contributor to family and place. The deeper I listen to Emmylou Harris, Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and the like, the deeper I enter the old South; a place where despondency, pride, and revelry exist within each other. Ever since the needle scratched and crackled through that first disc, the open space between me and my homeland, and all her past sins, triumphs, and profundity, has sealed.

Emmylou Harris was quoted recently in Garden & Gun magazine saying that she has given up on present-day country radio. “It no longer has that washed-in-the-blood element,” she said. And she’s right, alluding to this spiritually infused land where God is seen more with dirty shoes holding out redemption, rather than a glowing halo bestowing blessings. Some present-day artists–Gillian Welch, Patty Griffin, David Rawlings in particular–hold fast to the tenets of powerful, bleeding and vulnerable music of the South, but these artists are rare. The influence of the South is too often watered down to an occasional mechanized twang, girls who wear dresses with cowboy boots, and cheap beer cans. And behind the barbeque and pickup trucks, we have lost, or are at least losing, our edge.

William Faulkner at work.

It’s the same edge that the writers of our Southern fiction have made famous. The place of darkness which honed the literary voices of Flannery O’Connor’s grotesque, Edgar Allan Poe’s nightmares, and William Faulkner’s pontifications on death. The South provided a backdrop unmatched by other geographies, fostering art that feeds on our ability to make the worst of our lot.

This land of moonshine and muskets belies a deep disenchantment. O’Connor wrote that since we lost the war in the 19^th century, we have ‘had our fall’–the type of fall that keeps the whole populace awake to their potent inability to pride themselves on themselves. We are aware that we can believe deeply and still, with sweat and blood, lose everything. The artists who embody the South do not wash worries in whimsy, but attempt connection amidst isolation, loss, and disillusionment.

Flannery O’Connor herself said that we may not be Christ-centered as much as we are ‘Christ-haunted.’ And these ghosts, as much as they keep us fearful and frightened, keep us wide-eyed and questioning. We have been the “Bible Belt” for decades, a symbol of centrality as much as corporal punishment. And we Southerners have been beaten by our own faith. We are holy tormented and wholly sanctified.

The South has created from this fallen place and offered the nation a voice otherwise unheard. A perspective cast through an interminable mix of searing nostalgia, bated hope, and a weighty present balanced between the two. For decades, artists let this land mold their perspectives. It was the Southern zeitgeist, and it is this curious mix of hope and sadness.

More recently, the blurring of state and cultural lines has come as a detriment to artists. We lose our senses and loosen our allegiances, as we drift above the lands. As O’Connor said, when we cease to create from the reality of our place, this Southern place, we have lost ourselves, and we have lost the South. Makoto Fujimura has said before, we have a language for the waywardness. What the South is beginning to miss is the language for the ties that bind. So the challenge for Southern artists now is to stay connected–to keep the ankles in the mud and the fires smoldering. To be a product of the palpable senses, and to let the sights, sounds, emotion and memory of your place build your reality and your platform. We need to reorient our perspective to move beyond what we do in the South, beyond fishing, hunting, and cooking with butter, and enter into who we are, in joy and in trial.

And perhaps, optimistically, we can find ourselves anew in the people who understand and channel this spirit, regardless of their geographical upbringing. Because in the end, what the South did was connect in the darkness. It is the invaluable voice of a fallen community that still echoes from my record player, and is still found within my pages of “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

Johnny Cash sang that he wore black for the sick and lonely, for the reckless, and the mournin’, for the poor and beatin’, and the prisoner and the victim. And as artists create today, perhaps it is our duty to take on the strands and fringes of black both to honor and connect us to the spirit, land and people of our place. So we take from the fragmented pieces of our community’s collective conscience, take the black, and take the blood, and in doing so, create an enduring piece of work, reminiscent of this old melancholy.

Lately, however, I’ve noticed how many of my memories have a soundtrack. Not just a soundtrack of ambient sounds, or like a montage in a film, but particular songs have the ability to transport me back to a specific time and place, and open a window into who I was at that moment.

This phenomenon came to my attention recently when I reached into the deeper recesses of my music collection for some new commuting music. My twenty minute sojourn to my office is my last slice of free mental energy before the drudgery of the workday, and the return trip is my decompression chamber before a return to real life. But as soon as I slipped the disc for the Snatch movie soundtrack into my stereo, the drive, and the route suddenly changed.

Photo by Maggie Stein

I was transported to southern California, 2006. I was now behind the wheel of a gleaming red Dodge Magnum station wagon, careening down the 101 at a speed that almost matched the highway’s number. It was nearly midnight as I returned to my hotel in Anaheim, and my adrenaline was pumping along with the glitchy, thundering techno of the soundtrack. It’s impossible to drive slowly to this music.

I’d left Santa Barbara an hour before, leaving behind my high school crush and her recently minted fiancée. She and I had shared a celebratory dinner near her college on my expense account, and she’d discussed wedding plans and how much she enjoyed his family. I couldn’t have been happier for her; time since high school had proven our fundamental incompatibility, so there were no lingering hard feelings.

My expense account had also purchased the Snatch soundtrack, which accompanied me around the greater Los Angeles area that week. At the time, I was working in sales, and when I travelled (which was often) I had a habit of driving straight from the rental car pickup location to the closest place to purchase music that I could find. Subsequently, every trip brought home a new album along with a new batch of sales.

So as I listened to Massive Attack’s “Angel”, I almost missed the exit for my office, and I could well have continued on Interstate 10 all the way back to the City of Angels. Brought back to reality, I considered the differences between my 2011 and 2006 selves.  No longer selling, no longer travelling for business, of course, but more subtle differences, too. The momentum that sent me hurtling back to my hotel in Anaheim, and bouncing like a pinball between coasts and relationships and jobs has slowed considerably, too. But the inspiration of the bass and drums still makes it difficult to maintain the speed limit.

I began to consider the other albums accumulated in my travels, too. How The Zuton’s “Who Killed The Zutons?” takes me back to the piney woods outside Jacksonville, the day after the overwhelmed north Florida burgh had hosted its only Super Bowl. I arrived to a shell-shocked crowd of morose Eagles fans and rejoicing Patriots fans (who were just approaching their zenith of obnoxiousness), had one early morning meeting, and had to waste the rest of the day until my flight departed.

I saw Jacksonville from one city limit sign to the other, with the blaring clarinet and nasal harmony of The Zutons keeping me on edge. I almost accidentally drove into Georgia as the pines grew so close together that I lost track of time. I briefly panicked, remembering the somber rental car clerk who’d asked me accusingly if I planned on driving out of state. I found the first exit I could, and high tailed it back to the airport.

Another album was acquired when I became stranded in the smallish east Texas town of Tyler. My boss and I had flown up early in the morning for a nine o’clock meeting, which had wrapped quickly enough for us to return to the airport for the morning’s only flight back to Houston. There was only one standby seat available, and I certainly couldn’t pull rank in this situation. I fished the car keys out of the return box, and made my way over to the sad little shopping mall. I overpayed for The White Stripes’ “White Blood Cells” at Sam Goody, and went bombing down backroads until my afternoon departure, Jack White’s snarling guitar and petulant voice giving expression to my frustration.

In Tampa, Outkast’s “Speakerboxx/Love Below” double CD provided the much-needed running time after I failed to realize how far apart Tampa and its sister St. Petersburg are, and how setting appointments on the same day on both sides of the bay bridge that separates them is probably not a great idea.

All these memories are relics of a time in my life typified by searching, wandering, and a lack of solid grounding. Hearing these songs now is not always pleasantly nostalgic; regret buzzes faintly in the background, too. But reminders of these times are healthy. They remind me of the grace that brought me to where I am now. They recall immaturity, but also growth and discovery, both of musical and life varieties.

So take this challenge: dig into your box of CDs, or sort your iTunes library by date added, find the oldest purchases, and reflect as you listen to them. Who were you when you bought this music? (Is it old enough that you actually got it on Napster?) What does the music itself say about you at that time? Lord knows, the percentage of my music catalog occupied by metal and emo has dropped precipitously. Where does the music take you?  Back to junior high or college? Prom or your first job? I could write a whole thesis on the impact Snoop Doggy Dogg’s “Doggystyle” had on my first high school job, but I’ll spare you, gentle reader.

A well-selected soundtrack can elevate a meager narrative, ho-hum acting, or clunky dialogue in our favorite shows and movies. Our soundtracks are more complex, and not always as flattering, but they tell a story in tones that are just as vivid.  Listen closely.

As much as I enjoy all of the seasons, I’m glad to see the last flickers of autumnal warmth snuffed out by the cold. I enjoy watching trees shake themselves free of leaves. I like watching my breath roll away as I walk to work. I enjoy hearing the crunch of snow under boot. And I also enjoy the wood crackling in a fire, baking Christmas cookies, and noticing the first snow of the season dancing to the ground.

But what I really love is winter music. Not Christmas music — I do enjoy that too, but I consider “winter music” to be something different. My favorite winter music comes in two flavors: textured slabs of drone (guitar-based or not) or crystalline, atmospheric folk. (As much as I like other genres like jazz and R&B, I haven’t really found many examples that fit the bill here.)

There are many other albums that fall into this category, but for the sake of brevity, I only picked a few to highlight. I wrap up the article with an extended list. It’s not exhaustive (I could add any album by Mogwai there), but it covers some of my favorites.

Hum — Downward is Heavenward (1998, RCA)

Even though their indefinite hiatus as a band is interrupted by reunion shows every few years, Hum put their music career on standby after the release of Downward is Heavenward. What a note to go out on. Hum’s music was dense: waves of feedback and guitar effects coalesced into something quite melodic, and vocalist Matt Talbott’s quiet delivery of cryptic sci-fi poetry barely surfaced in the ocean of noise. Hum seemed equally indebted to the ‘90s shoe-gazer bands, prog metal, and Polish author Stanislaw Lem, and it’s a combination that worked perfectly for them. And I’ll repeat how thick their music sounds.

Though practically overlooked upon its release, Downward is Heavenward has gathered an incredibly positive reputation over the past decade. I think it’s deserved: the album shifts between complex, shimmering epics (“Afternoon With the Axolotls”),  space-bound pop rock (“Ms. Lazarus”) and tunes that are somewhere in between (“If You Are To Bloom”). While it’s a warm, rich, loud album, there’s nothing summery about it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs5nzdDExoQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEzPdbN2PK0

Son Lux — At War With Walls and Mazes (2007, Anticon Records)

Son Lux is one man (Ryan Lott), a handful of repeated lyrical fragments, and thousands of short samples arranged into something magnificent. The album has elements of trip hop and neo-classical music, both resting on a wonderfully ambient shelf. Lott uses sampled tones from opera singers, keyboard drones, string quartets, breakneck drums, and a host more; it’s meticulously constructed and wonderfully downbeat, despite the moments of musical euphoria throughout.

Lott’s brittle voice chimes in from time to time, using lyrical riffs to set the mood. There’s a meditative, monastic aspect to how he pauses between verses, eventually repeating a variation and then repeating it again. “Tell me anything you want to tell me, I have nothing to say,” he sings on “Tell.” He follows it up with “I have nothing to say to you / But you have everything to say to me.” It’s simple, but has impact. That the song is permeated by mournful slide guitar and pulsating samples only heightens this. It’s a chilly album, but there’s a lot of warmth sheltered in the ice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUSBXsd8NkQ

Idaho — Hearts of Palm (2000, Idaho Music)

Jeff Martin’s music project Idaho started moving away from a full-band rock sound almost immediately after they released their first album in the mid-’90s, but the drift to ambient soundscapes didn’t really register until Hearts of Palm. Martin uses piano and tenor guitar to create frozen skeletons of songs, only sometimes fleshing the music out with drums, bass or additional keyboards. The resulting songs, like “To Be the One” and “Alta Dena,” are hummable without being cloying, pensive without sliding into depressing.

My favorite cut on Hearts of Palm is also my favorite winter song, “This Cloud We’re On.” The warm, fuzzy guitars and shuffling drums part to let in fragile female backing vocals and stark piano. It’s like watching sun briefly cut through the cloud cover on a December day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZBHpXffkMU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IWn2t2KHZY

Other suggestions: The Cure — Disintegration, Elliott Smith — Either/Or, Okkervil River — Black Sheep Boy, Castor — Tracking Sounds Alone, The Twilight Sad — Forget the Night Ahead, Red House Painters — Red House Painters (Rollercoaster), Eric Bachmann — To the Races, Mogwai — Mr. Beast, Urge Overkill — Exit the Dragon.

Let’s start like this. Can you name any professional bass guitarists?

Mm-hmm.

And, how many recordings made by those bass guitarists do you have?

Good. Good.

If you could name one or two bassists, you have every musician’s respect and appreciation. If you could name a few, and own some of their recordings, you have our most sincere admiration. If you could name more than a handful and own their recordings, you should write the remainder of this column. Because in all likelihood you already own – and dig heavily – the record that sets my fingers to these keys.

I don’t know many musicians, if any, who do not recall with jaw-slacking stupor the first time they heard Jaco Pastorius play his Fender Jazz Bass (which he painstakingly customized by removing its frets, wood-filling the subsequent gashes, and applying coat upon coat of epoxy).

He played like no other had played before him. He changed a generation of players. He played jazz, funk, pop. He played with Joni Mitchell, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, David Sanborn; he was a pioneer of electric bass playing. So much could – and deserves – to be said about this complicated man, this artist. Yet, it’s impossible for me to summarize here the complex and tragic life that was Jaco’s. And not just because his wiki entry has more potholes than the 405. (Actually, I have no idea if the 405 has potholes or not. I’ve never even been to L.A. The 405 is in L.A., right? Well, whatever. I think you’ll still hang with the analogy.)

The words that describe his life form a perfect stereotype of “artist”: genius, friend, husband, alcohol, drugs, anger, bipolar, human, loving son, early death. There swirl around his greatness many stories of dubious authenticity. So, it’s hard to say what can really be said about him. Even his biography is considered a sham by some, and I’m not sure that that accusation is all that accurate, either.

What I can write about Jaco is really something that, well, was written by the great Pat Metheny. (And, in case you don’t know who that is-he’s really important.)

From the liner notes for the reissue of Jaco’s debut album:

Jaco Pastorius may well have been the last jazz musician of the 20th century to have made a major impact on the musical world at large. Everywhere you go, sometimes it seems like a dozen times a day, in the most unlikely places you hear Jaco’s sound; from the latest TV commercial to bass players of all stripes copping his licks on recordings of all styles, from news broadcasts to famous rock and roll bands, from hip hop samples to personal tribute records, you hear the echoes of that unmistakable sound everywhere. -Pat Metheny

As with all really great artists though, getting to know him is really a matter of getting to know his art. It is a matter of hearing him speak to us and tell us his story in every note and every gesture that emanates from the instrument that became a part of him. That is one way the truly great ones emerge from a crowd of excellent peers. They don’t simply wear their axe. They don’t just put it on and take it off. They are one with their instrument. There isn’t a point at which the man stops and his instrument begins. This was Jaco.

Like all greats, he raised the bar – both of the possibilities of the instrument, but also of the music itself and those that played with him. He made other players better players by his presence. And when on those rare occasions greats come together, each in their prime, something magical happens. Jaco’s album The Birthday Concert stands out as one of those special moments in music history.

In the winter of 1981, Jaco threw a surprise birthday concert for himself, gathering a superstar-studded cast of musicians for a performance that, praise God, was recorded. Here’s the a short list of behemoths that shared the stage that night: Bob Mintzer, Michael Brecker, Don Alias, Peter Erskine, Othello Molineaux, and others. I realize that unless you’re a jazz aficionado, you might not know many of these names, but it’s like saying that Kurt Cobain, Bono, Madonna, The Boss, and Eric Clapton played a concert for and with Stevie Wonder. And, since Jaco, Michael Brecker, and Don Alias are all no longer with us, the magnitude of this night looms.

The evening begins with the palpable anticipation of an audience that knows what is about to come. Before a note is played, we hear Jaco address the audience: “Good evening everybody. I’d like to say hello to my mother.” Ten seconds later the count begins. “One, two, three. Two, two” CRACK . . . and Soul Intro blasts off. Think Saturday Night Live, minus everyone save the band – to the tenth power. Mintzer squeals and screams and squeezes more funk from his tenor saxophone than one thought possible, until finally Jaco fully takes the reigns with a bass line so hair-raising it makes Rogaine look like a Flintstones vitamin. At this point we are fully into The Chicken, a tune with whaling solos by two saxophoning giants and a groove so fat it should have its own zip code. It’s the kind of tune that sends you into a funky stride embodiment of 70s John Travolta no matter where you are. (Save maybe funerals. And why are you listening to soul/funk/jazz during a funeral anyway. Have some decency.)

Check out this YouTube video of Soul Intro/The Chicken (from 1982).

After listening to The Chicken anywhere from two to ten times, we move on to hear the essence of Jaco’s playing in the floating and mysterious, Continuum. Harmonics, chords and strong melodic movement don’t usually characterize bass playing, but Jaco derives much of his distinctive style from them. This cut also brings an opportunity to soak in the sound of Jaco’s axe and his unique array of equipment. His tone is unmistakable and here we really get to know it best.

Every track brings gem after gem; from the lilting waltz Three Views from a Secret, to the exotic Reva, to the Stan Kentonesque Domingo. From start to finish, this record delivers. I’ve often heard a complaint about instrumental music; that it’s monotonous without lyrics, that eventually it gets boring and backgroundish. This album offers a rebuttal fit for John Grisham; a vibrant diversity of musical elements that appeals even to those who aren’t drawn to “jazz.” It’s a piece of history; a glimpse into the heart and soul of one man’s passion and genius – of his love for music.

So, whether or not you end up grabbing this disc from your local record shop, the big chain store putting your local shop out of business, or an online megastore putting both of them six feet under, you can at least name one more bass guitarist than when we began. Unless of course, you were already savvy to Jaco and own this record – in which case, be glad I reminded you to blow the dust off that old CD, load it onto your MP3 player of choice and strut your funky stuff.

The sentiment is an old one. Hippocrates said, “Ars longa, vita brevis.” Longfellow translated this, “Art is long, time is fleeting.” Some artists, like Grace Paley in a Paris Review interview, take this to mean that art is not the only thing they want to give their time to. Others take it to mean “life is short, but art endures.” Taking the translations together, a quandary arises: Art’s endurance makes it seem worthy of life’s time, but life is short and life is more than art.

Ron Thomas has been producing and recording original jazz and classical music since the 60s.  This enables him to look back over a strong musical legacy and forward to work ahead, and to comment on the relationship between art and time.

In terms of work already accomplished, Thomas has released eleven albums. If you begin to talk shop with him, you’ll discover he knew John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 1964, when Stockhausen was Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Thomas studied with him (or, as he puts it, “became glue on Stockhausen”).  Thomas teaches piano and composition with “a full, full heart,” he says. “It’s full-throated teaching.” He writes essays on aesthetics, musical theory, teaching, and more. If you visit him, I promise you won’t leave without a new book or photocopy in hand, fodder for new art.

His music is at once ethereal and comforting.  It delves into imaginative, cerebral themes—Blues for Zarathustra is the title of his 2008 collaboration with Paul Klinefelter, and 2003’s Scenes from a Voyage to Arcturus explores David Lindsay’s novel A Voyage to Arcturus.

In thinking of work ahead, Bartόk’s life and music have been on Thomas’s mind, and he hopes this will inspire new music drawn from the new experiences this stage in his life is presenting.

Pacing and Discipline

Working with an art form for several decades has given him a good sense of pacing. “I’ve never thought of composing as something I have to do every day,” he tells me over one of his four or five cups of coffee for the day. Instead, he laughs, “My craft is all designed for this total freedom that I seem to need.”

He doesn’t force himself to compose for long swaths of time every day, nor even necessarily every day. His creative routine is much more exuberant than that.  He believes that even though it may often make the artist sweat, his artistic process needs to bend away from “negative stress” and instead capture “ultimate liberty and ultimate fun.”

The one rule he does set for himself is not to end a work session with something questionable.  He has to reach the point where he can pick up from where he left off.  When he writes something good, though, he says to himself, “That’s it for the day,” and then, he says, “I go and jump around the room.  There’s only so much creativity I have in me. I don’t want to drain it dry.”

In writing classes, my professors always told aspiring writers, “Write every day.”   They advised this, I’m sure, because once we’d left the rigor of academic deadlines, who knows what non-artistic deadlines would swallow our days whole?

“But do you want to write every day?” Thomas asks me.  He has a good ear for artistic anxiety.

“Partly,” I say, “I enjoy giving myself this gift of time, and partly, I feel like I have to do this if I want to be a good writer.”

“I would drop the one that says ‘I must do this every day if I am going to be a good writer.’”

Photo: David B. Thomas

When it comes to being disciplined as an artist, Ron Thomas remembers that “it’s a discipline of the imagination,” and he leaves room for discovery.  His musical craft is “all about spontaneity. I want my music to be totally fresh. Maybe ‘alive’ is a better word.”

He believes that work born of surprise and joy is the ars longa, the work that endures.

Time and Detachment

This kind of art may be spontaneous, but it takes a great deal of freedom and space to cultivate, so that even when an artist is not making art, art might still be in the making. “You need to digest things,” says Thomas. Whenever he says “you need to,” his tone holds recommendation, more like let yourself do this.

Taking time to digest life and to let other art forms sink in means cultivating some detachment from the artistic work.  Feeling time pressure can push artists to compose too frequently, at a faster pace than new inspiration actually comes.  Thomas relates the story of painter Joan Mirό standing in front of his canvas for hours on end as idea after idea would come.  Mirό would stand and the ideas would flow, but he would not paint. When he’d accrued several really good ideas, then he would begin to paint them. “You should reject some things,” Thomas advises.

Similarly, Picasso’s pattern, says Thomas, “if a painting resisted completion because of some undetectable formal flaw, was to find the wonderful thing in that work and then destroy it.”  This would yield a breakthrough, “and the final form would come successfully: the one wonderful thing to which he was too emotionally attached” was setting the whole piece off balance.   People asked Picasso, “But what happens to the wonderful thing?” And Picasso would answer, “It comes back.”  Thomas  repeats, “It comes back.”

This holds true for Thomas’s own work. He has stumbled across fragmentary work he’d composed and abandoned fifteen years ago and been able to incorporate it. This perspective frees him to compose and reject, knowing that his process is fluid.

Competition and Hurry

His process not only banishes critics but also takes a gracious and realistic approach to competitors. Competition can easily add a sense of hurry and negative stress to the artistic process. He remembers his father saying that an artist’s only competition is with himself or herself.

“If I thought too much about Stravinsky and Miles Davis, I wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning. How could you possibly be in competition with them? It’s ridiculous!”

As a teacher, too, he dismisses thoughts of competition, favoring instead the saying, “Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.”

The Sound of Time and the Voice of the Artist

Even as he discusses his process, Thomas keeps perspective: what works for him won’t work for everyone. The discipline of art, he says, is not universal.  “Unilateral rules are counter-productive.  I have tricks to keep myself from thinking too much about the seriousness of what I’m doing so I don’t get too nervous about it, but you have to select and reject the tricks you will use. As long as it’s legal, and as long as it works for you.”

Thomas urges artists to find their own voices among the clamor of critics and voices that tell them what they “have” to do as artists.  What works for one may not work for another.  It’s true, too, that the voices that remind artists about time and tasks to be accomplished can become part of the chorus of critics.  They smack of the practical yet disciplinary reminders “Be back by midnight” or “Hurry up, you’ll be late.”  Hippocrates himself can thus become no more than a disgruntled adult, saying, “Kid, you haven’t got all day.”

So, if it helps you, listen to the tock of clock-hands or the screech of clockwork gears.  From this sound, find focus.  Hear, too, the tumble of future piano keys.  Trust that even though life is fleeting, the days allotted are enough, and in them, find space to enjoy the freedom and fun of the art that has been given to you.

We laugh and I tell her, “Honey, no they don’t.” But today I remembered, dancing alone in that very same living room, it is better when your eyes are closed. That’s when the dirty walls, unfolded laundry, and well-worn carpet disappear. Freedom dances in through the open window and raised blinds shake off their former importance.

Photo by Maggie Stein

It no longer matters who is watching, the way it did when I was growing up in a small town Baptist preacher’s home (who cares now if I am seen shaking my groove thing?), but for too many years of my life, it did. To be fair, there were times when we thought no one was looking, and Momma would turn up Elvis on the oldies station, and my sister would grab the small crystal owl from the display shelf for a microphone while I danced before a mirrored audience. Come Sunday morning, however, we donned our frilly dresses and patent leather shoes, braided our hair, and sat like model citizens on the front row.

Dancing had absolutely no place in church, and I’m pretty sure I will never get over that. By the time I was in high school, a couple of praise choruses had made their way into our services, and you might catch a few people clapping along. But emotion was reserved for the penitent during altar call, and even then you couldn’t let yourself get too carried away. Five verses of “Just as I Am” was about all the emotion any of us could handle on a Sunday evening.

Now, twenty years later, I attend a church whose band plays loudly and some in the audience even raise their hands as they move with the music, but I struggle to relax and let go. There are still many times when the most natural, real responses in me do not seem appropriate, so I bend them back in place. And I’ve been wondering lately, is this what it means, for me anyway, to “grieve the Holy Spirit?”

A few years ago, my husband and I went to see the band Over the Rhine at the Bijou in downtown Knoxville. We had returned the day before from a trip to Maryland for my cousin’s wedding. We were tired and scattered, but my mother-in-law came through as a last minute babysitter and away we went. It was a muggy evening, but as we walked up the hill from the parking garage, I remember feeling cooled from the breeze. In fact, I remarked to John that this time of year, this time of night, dampness was usually a relief, and here I was in holey jeans and a thin T-shirt with a chill. Why do I remember that detail? I’m not really sure. Is it important? Perhaps not, but the thing it reminds me of is how aware I was, of everything; how heightened my senses were.

I’d been listening to The Trumpet Child album non-stop the week before and the day of the concert, and “I’m on a Roll” was running around my temporal lobe with glee. I even toyed with the idea of purchasing a pair of black flamenco shoes just for the occasion. In my head, I pictured it: me all decked out, flowers in my hair, dancing alongside all the other girls gathered beneath stage front right. We were smiling, rolling our hips from side to side, and clapping — all delighted to share in some tangible warmth. Sadly, the concert did not completely live up to this happy vision.

I think it had something to do with the building. The Bijou, while a lovely venue, paled in comparison to the Tennessee Theatre we’d been to the year before for a Wilco concert. Then again, maybe it was the crowd that was different. College beer drinkers had swayed in the wooden aisles of the Tennessee Theatre and here at the Bijou, older academic types sat rigid on their cushioned seats.

For at least three days following the concert, Karin Bergquist’s voice rang out in my head, and I contemplated writing a song-by-song review of the show. I so wanted to write a good story for Karin and her husband Linford Detweiler. One that might salvage the night from the cold crowd and clueless patrons, a story to wash the dirt off their tired feet and keep them going, clean and strong, as they finished out the rest of their tour. The band deserved a good tale, not because of how they were received, but because of how they had given. It was the gift of authentic, live music, and that vulnerable gift led me to dance.

It was the beginning of the second song when this little white Baptist girl hopped up from her seat to find a deserted place in the wings of the mezzanine, so she could groove without blocking anyone else’s view. I slipped off my flip flops, and began to sway. Barefooted, slow falling waves moved me. My toes pressed diminishing circles into the worn red carpet. I closed my eyes, snapped my fingers, and mouthed the words I loved. So what if the theater felt more empty than full? So what if the performers gave off a slightly overworked and greatly underpaid vibe? What mattered to me was the dancing. Yes, I was completely alone and obtrusive, and maybe I wasn’t even any good, but I danced. And in my mind, we were all in heaven.

Not the kind you see in Philadelphia Cream Cheese commercials either. My heaven is a hardwood floor in an open country kitchen. Wind rustling light colored curtains as dusk falls, miles of nature looking through the open windows of a wraparound porch as friends and instruments make music together. Singing and dancing, long into the night; we live a pastoral life together and nothing separates the performer from the listener but space.

My dancing lasts exactly three songs, before the real world returned to me and I thought it best to rejoin my seated husband, my date. After the concert he teased me about slow moving melodies not really being the kind of songs you dance to. My answer to him was, “How can I not dance when Karin testifies that she wants to learn to love, without fear?”

“Did you just say testify?” he asked me.

Yes. I guess I did.

I’ve heard Wilco frontman, Jeff Tweedy, say that a good concert is what church should feel like — when people in the crowd set aside their individuality for a time and experience what it’s like to be part of something much, much larger. I have been in church services like that, but they are pretty rare. Maybe it’s the result of all that non-dancing tradition. Maybe it’s because we spend too much time with our eyes open, checking out the people around us, wondering if they’re also checking us out.

I don’t tell this story in hopes of fixing everything about worship services or rock concerts. (They’re not meant to be perfect anyway — just real and shared.) The secret I want to tell you is this: we can’t keep complaining about how much the perfume costs and still expect the tears to clean the dirt off our feet. The point is not what we give, but how. Whether we’re members or musicians, performers or even simple concert goers, the gift is in the bowing down, and the letting go. It’s in the looking up and the paying attention, the crying and the dancing. And if you have to close your eyes to really move, go ahead, you won’t miss anything you need to see.

The concert had been delayed for two months, and anticipation was high.  The last time the Avett Brothers had come to town was before the Rick Rubin-produced album, before the placement in Starbucks, before the performance at the Grammys.  Last time, they’d been at the outer stage of a second-rate venue while a metal show droned away on the main stage.  When their return finally seemed imminent, there was a last second snag.  Scott Avett was whisking away to attend the birth of his son.  Our town and several others on the tour schedule would have to wait.  Until tonight.

So when the lights dimmed, and the three members of the band crowded around a single microphone for a hushed rendition of the elegiac “Murder In The City”, a proverbial hush came over the crowd.  And when Scott made his way to the line about telling his sister that he loved her, we were surprised by his improvisation:

“Tell my son I love him…”

Photo by Jess Hodge.

Lumps appeared in six hundred throats instantly, mine included.  In some other context, this might’ve been a contrived tug at the heart strings, a crass attempt to gain the audience’s good graces.  But that’s not the Avetts’ game, and the fact that Scott’s sincerity struck such a powerful nerve is indicative of what we normally expect from musicians and the culture at large.

Earnestness takes us aback.  It elicits the question, are you for real?  When the indie tastemakers at Pitchfork reviewed the Avett Brothers most recent studio album, the incredulity was palpable. “(A)fter a while, you may begin to wish they’d get angry about something, or, god forbid, crack an ironic joke,” the review pleads.  It’s okay to express sincerity, but to actually be sincere is uncomfortable.

But music, as with all other art, is designed to elicit an emotional reaction.  It can be attractive and winsome, or abrasive and repulsive, and both have a rightful place as honest expressions of human emotion.  Yet we are often loath to approach the heights of real emotion in art, so we put on a protective cloak of irony, a distancing that allows us to laugh off any real sincerity.

“You didn’t really think I meant what I said, did you?”

Irony allows us an out in our personal lives.  It also provides an armor when we explore unfamiliar or dangerous territory.  Most of all, it maintains our cool.  Hidden behind sunglasses, covered with a smirk, and swaddled in a snarky t-shirt, we cruise by unaffected and uninfected.

Artists are by no means to shy from this.  In fact, after the optimism and idealism of the mid-twentieth century wore off, glossed over with disco and Saturday Night Live, then subsequently deconstructed by “alternative” rock and Fight Club, irony and detachment provide a unified theory of culture in the past forty years.

Even though there were voices calling in the wilderness during these times, harkening back to a purer spirit of expression, even some of these artists found it necessary to slather on a slick sheen.  The earnest Weezer of the Blue Album and Pinkerton becomes a YouTube joke soundtrack, and innumerable indie darling actors and actresses “sell out” by doing a Hollywood blockbuster between small-budget films.

I think Ryan Adams alternates albums based on how “cool” he’s feeling at that time.

Does it then follow that ironic entertainment and art are inherently inferior to their sincere counterparts?  Of course not.  It would be elitist and unrealistic to think so, and there have been many excellent examples to the contrary.  Nor is this tied to any particular genre of music or art.  There is as much true emotion in some rap music and Modernist architecture as there is in the most plaintive folk musician’s discography. But if you’re inclined to pursue beauty and excellence as ends unto themselves, a certain amount of concreteness is assumed and necessary.

As anyone who has been in love can tell you, moments arise when the emotions are too strong to contain, when they boil over seemingly of their own accord.   Being audience to sincere art, even when we’re feeling cold and detached, spills some of that emotion onto us, and we can’t help but feel it.  We sing along.  We pause to take in the canvas.

Our hard shell finally cracks and we weep.

Their emotion becomes our emotion.  Their soul speaks to our soul, and reminds us that we have one in the first place.   It’s healthy and it’s right.  It’s art at its most human.

The tide of cool often takes us away from this emotion.  We retreat into the cocoon, and take our cues from a culture that is aggressively indifferent, oxymoronic as that might seem.  To get too invested is to invite a label: Nerd.  Fangirl.  Dork.  Parrothead.

Okay, I even made myself shudder at that last one.

This isn’t a call to revisit the Good Old Days, when songs were honest, skirts were longer, and only Kennedys wore Wayfarers.

We must play the cultural hand we’re dealt.  But just as we can’t gorge on junk food without the occasional salad, we can’t deny the importance of allowing ourselves to feel through art, directly or vicariously.  Scott Avett could no sooner ignore the impact that the birth of his son had on his identity as a musician and on his music than he could stop breathing and expect to live.  So also we can feel free to let our context and our lives flow into the art we choose and the way that we experience it.

Just remember to bring a hanky.

Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" & Jakob Dylan's "Women and Country" point to signs of hope.

I spend a lot of time listening to music and reading at the same time. I’m not proud of this behavior—I end up giving neither music nor book the attention it deserves—but I have an excuse: my downstairs neighbors are beginning violin students. Given the choice between being distracted by a squeaky rendition of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” or Mark O’Connor’s “Appalachia Waltz,” I choose the professional. Sometimes, however, this desperation tactic pays off, as it did recently when I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to the accompaniment of Jakob Dylan’s album Women + Country.

I didn’t give much thought to my music selection as I started into the novel, though the spare, rootsy album felt superficially appropriate to McCarthy’s depiction of the postapocalyptic American West. I paid only occasional attention to Dylan’s lyrics as I read, but I could nonetheless sense a deeper convergence between novel and album. McCarthy’s father character, struggling to protect his son in a desolate and dangerous land, was reflected in the opening track of the album: “I give my tears and I give my blood / I’d give nothing but the whole wide world for one.” Songs like “Down on Our Own Shield,” “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” and “Everybody’s Hurting,” with their themes of struggle against desolation, resonated with the narrative of the book. Novel and album share remarkable similarities: each draws on the culture of the American West; each takes place in a desolate, postapocalyptic world; and each depicts the quest for hope in the midst of destruction. Yet despite the two works’ convergences, the signs of hope they uncover are strikingly different.

As befits McCarthy’s more intimate narrative, the sign of hope in his novel is smaller, more tenuous than Dylan’s. McCarthy’s nameless father and son are “carrying the fire,” the light of civilization, in their own bodies alone. Given the challenges they face, that fire is often a flickering candle at best. When the boy encounters another family, he asks: “Are you carrying the fire?” Joining the others, the boy himself becomes a sign of hope, carrying the fire forward into another tiny community. Two other children are members of this group, and so the fire seems to grow, ever so slightly.

The sign of hope after McCarthy’s apocalypse is closely to tied to the fragile human bodies of the novel’s protagonists. As the novel concludes, McCarthy gives us this depiction of the boy’s faith:

The woman when she saw him put her arms around him and held him. Oh, she said, I am so glad to see you. She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father… The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.

The boy thus begins to treat his father as a kind of saint, an intermediary between himself and God. And yet not precisely an intermediary, for there is no suggestion that the boy’s goal is to reach God through his father—indeed, the reverse might be more true. Yet this does not make the boy’s faith precisely idolatrous or sacriligious. In Christianity, arguably the primary background of both the novel and the album, God is understood as both immanent, wholly involved in the world, and transcendent, wholly other from it. Though his suffering could have driven him away from an immanent divinity—how can God be near us if he’s letting us suffer like this?—McCarthy’s boy clings to a hopeful vision of an immanent divinity. Despite his grief, for the boy the face of God remains the benevolent and intimate face of his father, and the boy’s own body remains the sign of divine hope. The Road thus allows to boy to retain hope in a loving God despite the destruction of his world.

The larger cast of characters in Dylan’s album allows Women + Country to present a more transcendent, mystical sign of hope. God is often only a distant presence, as when the farm laborers of “Everybody’s Hurting” ask “My eyes are open Lord / Where did you go, have we just left you bored?” Nonetheless, on the centerpiece of the album, “Holy Rollers for Love,” Dylan presents a vision of hope-beyond-hope, a wild and even irrational spirit discovered in a world “Filled with canteens and tear gas / From this last voyage of us.” The song’s verses are grim: “Hereafter’s bringing more funerals than fairs / And it’s a book of blank maps / That we’re using to get us there.” Directionless, humanity has brought itself to the verge of destruction, and there seems to be little hope until Dylan’s voice lifts in the gospel-tinged bridge and final chorus:

Glory glory hallelujah be warned

God is still marching, still raising his sword

Board these windows and guard your stretch of floor

Something sinister’s got you the minute you open the door.

With battle songs filling their lungs

Move them out down under the sun

Give them tears for cherry red blood

Stack them old, we cradle them young

World is crazy or maybe just holy rollers for love

World is crazy or maybe she’s holy rollers for love

World is crazy and making us holy rollers for love

In Dylan’s world, hope continues despite the terror and sheer unreason of divine glory. Hope is grounded in the mystery of the sufferings of the world, “making us holy rollers for love.” Divine hope is inexplicable, shining through violence and destruction to bring blessedness. Though God may be distant and inexplicable—even dangerous—hope endures not just in the flickering flame of human survival, but as a certainty that somehow, “God is still marching.” Dylan’s God is the Lord of Hosts—perhaps not as approachable as McCarthy’s father God, but a source of comfort in his power and eternal justice. Hope thus arises from the power and majesty, not the closeness, of the divine.

***

I had intended to end the essay around here. I had a nice conclusion about needing both McCarthy’s immanent and Dylan’s transcendent hope for a full picture of spirituality—true enough, as far as it goes. But having drafted the piece earlier, I intended to write my conclusion on March 10, 2011, the day massive earthquakes and tsunamis hit Japan. My wife spent two summers in Japan and we have many friends there, so we spent much of the day anxiously watching CNN and Facebook for updates. At the end of the evening, with most of our friends safely accounted for, I sat down at my computer as planned to work on the piece. As I tried to write my conclusion, writing about hope in literature and music began to feel increasingly strange. Can Cormac McCarthy really say anything to the suffering in Haiti, New Zealand, or Japan? Why bother with amusements like these? What hope can Jakob Dylan really give?

With these questions haunting me, I went rummaging through some old readings from a class on spirituality, and found an excerpt from Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope. Moltmann takes Kierkegaard’s phrase “a passion for the possible” to refer to a hope that is grounded in something real—a coming Kingdom which makes all our hopes possible. And for Moltmann, “the man [sic] who thus hopes will never be able to reconcile himself with the laws and constraints of this earth.” One who hopes cannot rest easy, because that person possesses a desire to see hope realized, and a belief that it can be. What profit, then, a passion for the impossible worlds of literature and music?

Again, it’s hard to see the relevance of McCarthy’s nameless fugitives or Dylan’s marching God to a situation that seems to call rather for the Red Cross. And yet “a passion for the possible” could also suggest that what we are tempted in our despair to call impossible—carrying the flame, justice rolling down—may in fact be possible after all: embracing the seeming-impossible, we hope for hope. We embrace what I might call a “prevenient hope,” riffing on a term originally used for grace. A prevenient hope would allow us to shake free of a despair which has closed off even the possibility of hope, limiting our imaginations to the realm of the actual. By enlarging the hopeful imagination, perhaps art can help in bringing us to the point from which we can begin to hope. Though prevenient hope is hardly the final virtue, neither is it merely trivial. McCarthy and Dylan, with their contrasting but hopeful visions, help keep that prevenient hope alive in me.