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.
Below the chapter, you can read about how I integrate music with the words. 1
“Thank you . . . thank you . . . thanks,” says the old bluesman. He turns further and further away from his audience with each fading iteration of reluctantly offered thanks.
He pauses for too long after the applause dies down, staring off to stage right where there’s nothing to see but three dented and duct-taped mic stands, leaning up against a similarly dented black wall. The wall is covered with scratched-out white graffiti—messages from bands who happily moved on from this dive.
He holds both his stare and his resentment for another five seconds, just to make sure the crowd is that much more uncomfortable, then turns back to introduce the next tune.
“We’re going to play a little tune I call After the Beginning, Before the End. And by beginning, I’m referring to the very beginning—of the universe. So I guess it’s really not such a little tune. You know me. I like to think and play big.” He laughs, turning around to see if his band is laughing with him. Like most sidemen, they only pay attention when they have to and are annoyed by this sudden intrusion into the moment of non-attentiveness, which is part of their between-song routine. But he pays them well, so they offer obligatory chuckles.
The old bluesman is none other than the notorious, semi-reclusive, often peerless, though chronically erratic, Jehoshaphat L’BoDean—sur la Montagne, as the French dubbed him. Or, The Mountain, as we call him in the States. He’s the scion of the expatriate, African-American, astrophysicist John Bollard Dean and the French novelist, Adele Lecla. As is well known, L’BoDean playfully concatenated parts of their names to create his own last name. And he is, of course, the creator and sole practitioner of the Avant-blues genre, one that combines deep Delta blues with an assortment of 20th century modernist techniques, from Schoenberg’s twelve-tone serialism to Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics.
Granted, he’s fiction. I made him up so I would have someone to argue with in this creative nonfiction musical memoir. But I do like the idea of avant-blues. Someone should consider inventing it. Though, I hasten to add that he’s not entirely made up—he’s partially based on a few actual people in my life who, for various reasons, need to be fictionalized. And he’s not the only one. Other than my family, myself, and various well-known people, everyone who appears in this memoir has undergone a name-change operation.
The Mountain is performing here for a mostly white, upscale, but self-consciously dressed-down, suburban audience that he doesn’t like. He doesn’t like them because he suspects they like him for the wrong reasons. The venue is Orphans, a long-shuttered club on Lincoln Avenue in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. The time, though, is sometime around now. He has just completed the opening number of his first set, The Water is Melting—a swampy, asymmetrical Delta blues that somehow recalls Debussy’s whole-tone piano prelude, punctuated by a smattering of Anton Webern’s serial pointillism.
“However, before we perform it,” he continues, “to create the correct ambience for the tune, let’s have a moment of silence, yes?” He pauses, looks around, lets his words sink in. “A moment of silence to commemorate, as it were, the beginning of our one and only universe and its embryonic spark—the ineptly named Big Bang—which, as you’re no doubt aware, was completely silent.”
The Mountain’s request—though not the least bit unusual for his shows, which are always part concert, part ontology lecture, and part politics—is met with an anxious sort of silence, disturbed only by some inchoate rumblings: the high-pitched squeak of a woman’s truncated laugh, a young man’s mid-register clearing of the throat, the oy and swallowed gevalt of a middle-aged guy sitting alone at the bar.
He removes the guitar from around his neck, places it on the stand to his right, then removes his hat, holding it to his chest as he lowers his head and closes his eyes—the very picture of commemorative stillness.
But something is stirring within the stillness. An infinite, potential music is roiling about, trying to find its way into the world. The silence deafening . . .
Go to Chapter 1—Middle C is Not, in which I explore the world as a four-year-old from the starting place of an upright piano.
About the Music
The solo piano music included in
BPF
was not an afterthought. Rather, the story and music were meant to work together—in some fashion.
But I do remember struggling with just
how
they would work together cohesively. In the end, the music had to interpret the words. But I also wanted the music to be able to work as a standalone large-scale compostion (28 total movements for the first completed part of the memoir.)
While the two goals—having the music
serve
the story on the one hand, and having the music work by itself without referernce to the story—sometimes seemed to be in conflict, they actually weren’t. Though musical and literary forms cannot be perfectly equated, they do follow the same general principals: beginning, middle, end, statement of themes, developing themes, contrast. Even rhythm and tempo. The words told me what music needed to do, and the musical logic aligned with the narratice logic.
The music, at any rate, is a fairly even mix of written and improvised. (Obviously, the text is, well, completely written.) The decision in any given piece as to whether to improvise, compose, or some combination thereof, gets back to what the words are telling me. It’s an intuitive decision. Below are examples of the three possible methods.
The first track above,
Recitative,
is a completely written score:
The next track, a blues, combines written and improvised elements:
And finally, an almost completely improvised track. (This is connected the next chapter,
Middle C is Not.)