19. My Uniquely Unique Times
Bob Dylan and Thelonious Monk walk into a bar where they run into Igor Stravinsky who is already drunk.
This is an ongoing story, meant to be read in order. If you’re just arriving here for the first time, please start at the beginning by following the index.
I was born both too late and too early for my own good.
PART TWO BEGINS…
At the time of my birth in April of 1961, Johannes Brahms had been dead for only 64 years and a day.
Brahms represented the end of the great German tradition, and he knew it. The musical ideals upon which he had built his edifice stretched back to Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn—even Bach and Handel. But that grand tradition was collapsing under the weight of its history. Like the enlightenment ideals upon which it was tenuously founded, German music was undergoing a rapid atomic level decay that would lead first to anarchy and then, to reign it in, a kind of musical totalitarianism. Brahms knew he was the end of the line: his late music has a sort of swan-song regretfulness to it.
On my first day on the planet, Gustav Mahler celebrated his 50th year of non-existence—not counting the initial 13.78 billion years of non-existence preceding his 51 years of actual existence.
The brilliant but neurotic Austrian symphonist-conductor was a Jewish convert to Catholicism—a bit of selling-out that allowed him to work in a radically antisemitic Austria, so leave him the hell alone. His music has a kind of post-end-of-the-line macabre cynicism, which translated to some forward-looking modernistic meandering. Brahms, who was not the least bit anti-Semitic, saw a glimmer of hope in the young man’s music. Unfortunately, Mahler suffered from a miserable case of hemorrhoids, perhaps due to the inner battle between his Jewish self and the need to fit in. Imagine trying to conduct a five-hour antisemitic-infused Wagner opera while dealing with that...He had a deep soul but a weak heart and died at 51.
Arnold Schoenberg, the creator of the 12-tone (or serial, or dodecaphonic) system of composition in response to the cumbersome nature of free atonality, which was itself a response to the aforementioned Brahmsian swan song, and whose music has been annoying most people who bother to listen to it ever since had been dead almost ten years on my first day.
Schoenberg was deeply indebted to both Brahms and Mahler (and, like the latter, converted to Catholicism, but then back to Judaism after escaping Nazi Germany.) Ironically, Schoenberg, an otherwise almost pathologically rational man, suffered from an acute case of triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number 13), a fear that may have played a role in his death on Friday the 13th, 1951.
Igor Stravinsky, the great Russian modernist-primitivist-neo-classicist—who rejected Arnold Schoenberg's 12-tone system of composition until the latter died, at which point he happily embraced it—had ten years and two days yet to live on my birthday, thus becoming the first famous/great composer to still be alive during my existence.
Duke Ellington, who had 13 years left, is one of the all-time American originals, ruthlessly straddling the lines between popular and high art, the way all great composers do.
I was lucky enough to hear Ella Fitzgerald, then 61, perform Ellington's Don't Mean a Thing at the Drury Lane Theatre in Chicago in 1978. It was, at the time, the most extraordinary concert I had ever heard. It’s still in my top five all-time live music experiences. She had an unforced virtuosity that no other American singer has ever matched.
Unfortunately, I never heard Billie Holiday, who died two years before I was born, perform. Initially, I had a hard time relating to her vocal style. The sadness, and perhaps subtly, was too much for my young ears. Later she became my biggest vocal influence. I’m shocked every time I hear her sing. It’s the most original voice of all time.
John Coltrane, who had released My Favorite Things a month before I was released from my mother's womb, and who is possibly my third favorite musician ever, had only six years left before he succumbed to liver cancer at 40. If I’m sitting in a restaurant, discussing whatever with whomever, and say, My Favorite Things comes on in the background (as it has at least five times in my life) I can no longer talk, eat, or be in the moment. I’m transfixed by a single note of Trane’s music; I leave this world and enter the world of his creation. There is a Church of John Coltrane in San Fransico for a reason.
Miles Davis, who had two years before my deliverance released Kind of Blue, had 30 years left, but the last decade or so wasn't all that interesting for my money. Most of what preceded it was astounding.
Thelonious Monk, a far better pianist than Miles Davis credited him for being, was 44 and was nearing the height of his fame—fame being a relative term in jazz. He appeared on the cover of Time in 1964.
Speaking of fame, the Beatles (between 17 and 20-year-old at the time) were just getting started, playing eight-hour gigs in Hamburg. They were awaiting the arrival of Ringo as the final piece of the puzzle before they would go on to create the greatest pop music of all time.
Bob Dylan, who would record his first album six months after I first met my parents, was almost 20. He was hanging out in the Village in NYC, trying to line up gigs. He walked into a club one time, hoping to audition for its manager. Thelonious Monk, who happened to be practicing on the club’s piano during off-hours, told him that the manager wasn’t in. Noticing that Dylan was carrying a guitar, Monk asked him what kind of music he played. Dylan told him, “Folk music.” Monk remarked that he, too, played folk music.
Paul Simon, learning in the next few years how to write real lyrics in no small part due to his exposure to Bob Dylan, was also pushing 20.
Stevie Wonder, who would record his first hit single, Fingertips a year later, was 10 when my path began to unfold. Eleven years later, his masterpiece, Innervisions, would radically alter that path.
Sting was nine, hanging around the Wallsend shipyards, where he presumably learned to love the Dorian mode, the mode being common in the folk tunes of English-speaking countries. (I would later learn to love it from Miles Davis but appreciated Sting's use of the same.)
Kurt Cobain, who I saw performing "Teen Spirit" on Saturday Night Live (a performance that astounded me), was negative 6 and died only three years after Miles.
Shawn Carter (Jay-Z) was negative eight—as Vonnegut would say, barely a wisp of a possibility—not even close to becoming the world-class poet-capitalist mogul he became.
The wonderfully soulful Jewish-British singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse was negative 22 when I was born. I was 50 when she died. What a horrible waste of exceptional talent—not unlike her hero, Billie Holiday.
I could go on, but that seems like a good place to stop.
Everyone thinks they are born in unique times, and everyone is right. As the philosopher, Roberto Mangabeira Unger (14 years old on my birthday) points out, everything in this universe changes, including change itself. But the reason I provide this sometimes morbid litany of artists I've admired is to offer some musical context for my uniquely unique times and how those times would come to shape my musical thinking.
Like every other living and non-living thing in the cosmos, I am the center of my own universe. Sure, the majority of that universe was constructed before I arrived; only a minuscule corner has been built by me in the course of my existence. Still, I consistently find myself at the center of things.
This is an unavoidable fact of a universe lacking a center: wherever you are, that is the center. Everyone and everything else radiates in multiple directions in spacetime. The point, for me, is that my arrival here musically fits somewhere in the middle between the deaths of Johannes Brahms and Amy Winehouse. And that I have to deal with the consequences of both and everything in between, not to mention everything of significance well before. If you are wondering, Beethoven (dead 124 years) is my #1 favorite, J.S. Bach (dead 211 years) is #2.
In a nutshell: by the time the Beatles broke up, Stravinsky still had a year to go. Crazy. Crazy because these were effectively two completely separate musical universes, yet they were operating simultaneously.
And yet, not so crazy, because this is exactly what always happens in the world: as one thing is dying, another thing is starting, and yet another is sailing along in middle age.
In 1961, what we call classical music was dying (though even in its death throes, some interesting things were happening), jazz was in the middle of its most fertile creative period, and modern pop (the confluence of rock, R&B, radio, and a smidgen of Tin-Pan-Alley) was being born. All of this was happening at the same time. And that all-at-once-ness was a source of both incredible inspiration and frequent creative confusion verging on crisis.
Leading to what exactly? Well, this I suppose. If you are patient, you can create something useful out of an artistic crisis, as you can out of any sort of crisis—political, scientific, cultural, etc. That's what I keep telling myself.
The confusion was multi-layered (as confusion tends to be, otherwise it wouldn't really be confusion) because while I was indeed born in the middle of all of this musical fecundity, by the time I came of musical age, where I could actually begin to process, internalize, and make something of it as a thinking and acting musician, it was all pretty much over. And that, for me, accounted for the crisis.
By 1977 (the year I'm calling the beginning of my first creative awakening, the beginning of my Early Period), what we call classical music was, from a cultural standpoint, almost pathetically irrelevant (with the possible exception of minimalism which was just seemed pathetic to me.) Jazz, possibly due to the early death of its greatest prophet Coltrane in 1967, was in a state a decades-long drift. There was still some culturally important pop to be made (e.g., Michael Jackson and the Police—I loved the latter, am completely indifferent to the former), but the most fertile and wildly creative period (Beatles, Stevie Wonder, Dylan, etc.) was also over.
True, hip-hop and Grunge, which are arguably the most creative movements in the last 30-odd years, and to some extent, evolved out of the crisis' of the aforementioned dying movements, were about to emerge. Still, though I love a lot of this music (and hate some too), it was not so much irrelevant to me as I was to it: I was too old to participate in those revolutions.
I was born both too late and too early for my own good.
And yet, as it turns out, I was born at precisely the right time to do what I'm doing. Either that or I'm doing what I'm doing because I was born exactly when I was born.
And what exactly am I doing?
Next: Chapter 20-Gnawing Old Piano Bones: “I’m sitting at the piano in our basement somewhere in the mid-1970s, struggling through the opening movement of Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata, imagining that I’m playing it well. A persistent smell of dog urine envelops the music.”