Water Music
[This piece was written as a real-time prose response to the duo album Water Music, from myself and bassist John Pope.]
Finger snapping. Eight fingers on eight strings. Black and white echoes of crooked cops and damply reflective midnight streets. Quicksilver flight. Ocean surge. Pedantic, relentless deformation, forward motion. Fifth mode of the melodic minor, major in the bottom and melancholy on top, the supposed dichotomy of existence. Pull the wool from your eyes. Wool from where, and who put it there, from which monstrous sheep? Stuck in a groove, mutation every 33 and a third revolution, not a line but a circle.
Sweetly consonant, unapologetically humorous commentary. In the face of such hardship and disbelief. Hard to believe you can keep smiling when even Miles hates you. Be more like Clark. He’s there with a shoulder even when you pawn his horn. Here’s the madness behind the grin, driven to breaking point. 100 mph on the freeway. A borrowed narrative, the radio playing unwelcome notes of lingering concerti.
A challenge for Eric Dolphy? No challenge needed. The man was his own challenge, and continues to challenge us decades after his premature departure. Not interested in boxes - not interested in cans and cannots. Not buying into cons or conservatism. Prematurely dead because they couldn’t believe he wasn’t a junkie. Please help. I’m diabetic. Hidden behind a stumbling excuse for a way of being. Sociopathy as diatonics.
Dangerous edges. Uncertain footing. Another premature departure. This one driven not by ignorance but hopelessness. The Baptist in the wilderness, wide-eyed and bloated on locusts. Epigenetic hunger, unnecessary but summoned nonetheless. Voices multiply, walking bass in the distance, nearer, nearer, nearer, nearer, nearer. Adobe walls trembling, clouds of sand, prayer bells calling, shining through the haze, thirst, parched, Partched. Mirage. Too little too late. Bloated corpse softly sleeping.
Camel back, lockstep cross-step. Cosmic metronome, clinging on for dear life. Vast distance, unimaginable speed, G-force ripping the skin from muscle. Ecstatic dissonance. Cells explode, multiply, dance, grow, vibrate, walls burst. Emergence, the same but not the same. Gentle rest, joyful rest.
Unison attempted. So many voices. Is there logic here? Some kind of bastard canon, the same tune played in disparate galaxies. Noises that should. not. be. †here. Radio static (didn’t they take that off the air? — how can you take something OFF THE AIR? What does it sit on anyway?) and momentary samba. Ultimate resignation. Unison isn’t and can’t. More madness - skeleton dance (only douchebags don’t stay dead). Pitch won’t meet, so we join in rhythm, in pulse, in heartbeat. Too much too soon. Nowhere left to go. Ground coming near.
The fourth. Perfect ratio. Safe territory, calm and orderly. Diminished fifth. Terribly confusing, best not to linger (the old folks had it right). Here’s a tiny double bass plucking tiny strings, effecting tiny change. Fundament in the sky (firmament?). Phrygian buzz, moment of retuning, new channel. The wrong pentatonic, but fifths can’t lie. Ethiopian mode can’t hold the flood for long. Munch scream won’t let go, horrible paralysis with a slimy escape. We’ll pretend like nothing happened.
Distant Christmas, brittle voices grievous supplication. Something felt but not heard. Here we find no keys, no frets, no buttons. Left behind or never arrived at. Waves bend and stretch and curl, a non-earthly dynamics. Wind whistles a beautiful melody, echoed in the throats of a thousand scorched humanoids. Flight through a tip-of-the-tongue memory, or was it a dream? Does it even matter? Lone figure in the sands. Peeling away. Robe, skin, muscle, bone. There’s an absence where you used to be. An almighty absence which suffocates the air itself.
Night club fifty-eight. Smoke. Voices. Lone figure in the corner. Joined by a second. Single finger snaps. Shot down by fifty-eight knowing stares. Swing won’t stop. We don’t see. We won’t see. This is more important than your petty (petit) bourgeoisie. Now that I’ve got your attention, we’ll begin again. Weird finger snapping. No 1s and 3s, no 2s and 4s. This is something new. Perhaps something will come of it?
