Willie Dixon: I Am The Blues (1970)

At the end of the '60s, Willie Dixon left Chess Records, which was circling the drain anyway.  Having performed in a kind of desultory way all throughout his years as a songwriter, session man, and A&R man for Chess, he stepped up as a performer, recording a number of albums as a leader beginning in 1969.  The new Willie Dixon website lists them, and there are more than you'd think in the '70s.  I say that because the only one of them in print is 1970's I Am The Blues. 

I suspect that what we have here is record company muscle, pure and simple.  The others were on small labels:  Dixon's own Yambo, or Ovation.  But this one's on Columbia.  Everybody seems to agree that it's no great shakes, but it's still in print;  Willie Dixon is a name, and Columbia is a name, and so it sells.  Without the others as a context, though, it's hard to know quite what to make of this record.  The roster of players is stellar (although you wouldn't know it from the CD, which leaves out all such frills as musician info):  Sunnyland Slim, Walter Horton, Johnny Shines.  But was this Dixon and the band at their best?  Or just their safest?

It's not bad by any means.  The backing is solid, and at times nearly definitive;  the arrangements are loose but careful, at least attempting to give these chestnuts a fresh look.  And I won't even take Dixon's singing to task.  He doesn't have the power of Wolf or Muddy, to be sure, but there's a wry intelligence in his voice that almost compensates.  He wrote these lyrics, some of the best ever written, and he sounds comfortable singing them.

I think what underwhelms me about this album is the feeling that, in 1970, it's so far out of time.  It's hard to know what an old bluesman could have done in 1970 to sound right, though;  Electric Mud is as scary as you'd think.  Were the only choices an embarrassing capitulation to young, mostly white trends or an embalmed classicism?  This isn't quite the latter, but close.  It sounds like music made on a Thursday morning when the rest of the world is at work and you're not.  Not like a stolen rest, more like a befuddling idleness. 

This version of "The Same Thing" I do love, however. 

Oliver Nelson: Verve Jazz Masters 48 (1995)

Impulse! has more cachet than Verve.  It was and is a cooler label.  It's a fact - don't try to argue.  And Oliver Nelson's 1961 album The Blues And The Abstract Truth, on Impulse, is his best known.  I won't argue with that:  I've had it for nearly twenty years and it's never failed me yet.  "Stolen Moments" pretty much defined my sense of what was cool in my twenties.

This disc draws from three albums Nelson recorded for Verve in the '60s, plus a few rarities.  It's a good next step after The Blues And The Abstract Truth.  And more of this chronically, criminally underrated musician, arranger, and composer is always welcome.

He was a man out of time, is what Oliver Nelson was.  He wrote cool jazz for biggish, and outright big, bands in an age when cool jazz was played by small, lean combos, while big bands tended to the lush, the Latin, the goofy, or the nostalgic.  Nelson was none of that:  his music certainly has a lot of Duke in it, and a sense of adventure in the instrumentation that betrays an awareness of Evans, but he's more in tune with Coltrane and Miles than anything from the swing era.  He's about thirty years ahead of his time, in other words. 

(You want evidence that Impulse! has more hip value than Verve?  How about this:  I can't find anything from this album to link to on youtube.  But all of Blues and the Abstract... is there.  But:  choice tracks are "Full Nelson," from 1962, which is almost as coooool as "Stolen Moments";  "Ricardo's Dilemma", which is a lot more rewarding than a straight cop of Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" should be;  "Complex City," which has Stravinsky taking the A train;  and "Patterns For Orchestra", one of the rarities, which is probably the best place on the disc to hear Nelson's ingenious combination of a hot '60s rhythm section [Albert Dailey on piano with Ron Carter on bass and Grady Tate on drums] with a high-gloss orchestra.)

John Le Carré: Smiley's People (1979)

The missus' reading of the film version of the first book, suggesting that we could suspect Smiley himself of being the mole, turned out not to be tenable in the book itself.  But she was on to something, of course, because by the end of the third book, the parallels between Smiley and Karla are almost painfully inescapable, and at the end of the third book we're forced to think that, for all intents and purposes, they're no different.  Or maybe Smiley's worse. 

In other words, this book is just as full of that intoxicating Cold War pessimism as the first two were.  Stings like whiskey going down.

But of course what Le Carré gives us is more than just trenchant commentary on the Cold War.  What we realize at the end of this book, when the man we all assume to be Karla (itself an assumed name) walks out of East Berlin, is that this enemy, this nemesis, this namesake for the trilogy, has been entirely unglimpsed until now.  All we've "seen" of him is a single encounter, shrouded in mystery, buried in the past, given to us only in Smiley's deadened memory.  Everything we (i.e. the Circus) "know" about him is speculation - worse, deduction.  Karla is as much as anything a construction of our minds, based on ambiguous clues and tortured logic, and suspicion.  Which isn't to say any of it is wrong - after all, he does come walking out of East Berlin, and he does have Ann's lighter - but a correct guess is still a guess.

Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Derrida:  all the ontological nyets that haunt the modern solipsistic consciousness.  Le Carré gives them all to us in Smiley and Karla.  But the genius of it is that this isn't a piece of navel-gazing, ennui-ridden literature - following Vonnegut's advice, the characters all want their own glasses of water - there are stakes here.  It matters whether or not the cat is dead.  The popular fiction nature of it demands it, but more than so does the urgent emergency of the modern world (that's why the second book is so important).  Smiley, or Karla, ponder silently in London or Moscow, and another bomb goes off in Vientiane. 

John Le Carré: The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)

The old BBC adaptations of these books skipped this volume, and it sounds like the new film series will too.  I guess I can see why, if you see the project as a star turn for Smiley/Alec Guinness/Gary Oldman.  Smiley's certainly a major character in this book, but he doesn't dominate it like he does the first and third books of this not-really-a-trilogy.  Here he divides our attention with a field agent, Jerry Westerby.  Who's almost as interesting a character in his own right - Le Carré's people are just as compelling here as they were in Tinker, Tailor.

But really Westerby is just a vehicle, a set of eyes, to get us, the reader, into the field.  The first and third books are mostly armchair spycraft - almost all the work takes place in Smiley's head.  Here we're thrust out into the world.  A world that's falling apart:  Southeast Asia in the wake of the US debacle there.

That's the overriding impression this book leaves with me.  Actually most of the field agenting parts of the book take place in Hong Kong, which gets echoes of the war but not much else, but it's the tour of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand in the last third of the book that really sticks with you.  We don't actually see many Americans - they're conspicuously absent, busy getting airlifted out of embassies.  Nor do we really see much of the actual killing fields.  We get a lot of bombs, random bullets, junkies, casual corruption, and violence just around the next bend.  In other words Le Carré is giving us the feeling of touring a war zone, rather than fighting in it.  That's scary enough, and allows us to preserve something of the journalist's objectivity (back when there might have been such a thing).  No room for obfuscation:  look at what the US did.  Look at the world we made.

Gil Evans: Verve Jazz Masters 23 (1994)

This is a compilation of sessions that Gil Evans recorded for Verve Records between 1963 and 1965;  mostly under his own name, for The Individualism Of Gil Evans, but some done for Kenny Burrell (for Guitar Forms) and Astrud Gilberto (for Look To The Rainbow).  It comes just after, in other words, Evans' last major collaboration with Miles Davis, the troubled Quiet Nights.  And like that one, there's a lot of bossa nova here.

The Tanuki is a '70s rocker at heart.  Fist-pumping arena rock, lighter-flicking power ballads:  that's the ground from which I sprang.  I've always listened to more than that, but unsurprisingly I don't think I've ever completely outgrown my early training to put most of my faith in music that rawks and to mistrust music that's too soft.  At some level I'm still that adolescent sitting on the queasy avocado-green nylon seats of his grandmother's over-air-conditioned Chrysler squirming because she insisted on the easy listening station (Percy Faith! the Sandpipers!) and wouldn't let me switch to KATS-FM (Van Halen! Loverboy!)...

Like I say, I've always listened to more than that, and for most of my adult life, in fact, I've been aware that some of the artists I've come to care deeply about I probably first heard, fingers in ears, on the easy listening station.  Astrud Gilberto.  Ella Fitzgerald.  And Gil Evans.

And while I try to apologize to no one and make no excuses for my taste in music, sometimes I find myself arguing with that adolescent within about what I'm listening to.  Case in point:  mid-'60s Gil Evans.  He's working with some good soloists here, but there's no denying that none of them have the draconian economy of emotion of Miles - none of these recordings, therefore, have any of that harsh austerity to counterbalance Gil's lushness, none of that fire to counterbalance Gil's air-conditioning. 

So is this easy listening? is what that adolescent within asks.  There's no question I like it.  While I have probably never voluntarily listened to Percy Faith, it's easy to hear that Gil Evans is doing some pretty serious stuff here - it's not lounge music, not cocktail music, but put-on-the-headphones-and-pay-attention music.  The subtle discord that he specializes in, the softly seething rhythms almost but not quite obscured by the gliding winds and horns...  Evans is making here the kind of tension, the kind of moodiness, that I usually point to, in these arguments with myself, as evidence of music that's not (just) easy listening, but that's something more.

And yet I have to admit:  for all the tension, for all the moodiness, for all the headphone-ready attention to detail...it's pretty gentle music.  Soft.  Easy.  And at 42 I find myself reaching for that kind of thing a little more often than I used to.  Not necessarily dreaming of kid-free lawns yet, but I may be getting there. Was Grandma right?  Maybe, maybe not - that's not what I'm trying to get at here.  I'm not sure what I'm trying to get at.  The frustration of not being able to articulate or hold fast to any absolutes of taste? Anxiety about getting old?

Well yeah, that for sure.

Artistic tastes, fashions, aesthetics, canons:  in a way these are always a battle between generations, between old people maintaining that the young whippersnappers have lost the plot and young people complaining that the old farts have missed the boat.  And in this battle, the young have always already won:  the old people will die first, and the younger people will write their obituaries, and they'll write them their own way.  One of the frustrations of getting older, I'm learning, is realizing that the American Idol take on Queen has already triumphed over Queen itself, because Freddy Mercury's dead and Roger May is old while Phillip Phillips is young and pretty, and there ain't nothing anybody can do about it. 

It's some consolation, of course, to step back and realize that in the long run, we're all dead, and that for the most part, the good shit lasts, so that we can all look back and enjoy the best of what each generation had to offer, acknowledging the generational battle without having to endorse either side of it:  we can listen to the Sex Pistols and Led Zeppelin, Nirvana and Guns 'N' Roses, Queen's Jazz and Gil Evans's...  In other words, youth has always already lost to age.  Some consolation, like I say:  but only some.

Enjō Tō: Dōkeshi no chō (2012)

Dōkeshi no chō 道化師の蝶 shared the 146th Akutagawa Prize, awarded early this year for work published in the second half of 2011, with Tanaka Shin'ya's Tomogui.  It's by Enjō Tō 円城塔, who prefers to romanize his name "EnJoeToh."  He's been writing for a while, so his followers may feel this prize is overdue him.

The title story ("Clown Butterfly") is about an entrepreneur named Abrams who sponsors a mysterious author named Tomoyuki Tomoyuki, who writes in several languages including Latino sine Flexione.  Nobody knows anything about the author:  nobody seems to have met him.  And of course nobody can actually read his complete works.  But the narrator, or sometime narrator, is hired by Abrams to write a comprehensive bio of him, or is to catalog his works, or is it just to track him down...

It's that kind of story.  It also involves Abrams' signature invention, a kind of gossamer silver hairnet that catches the fleeting ideas of people sitting next to him on airplanes, which he then converts into successful mass-market products.  Ideas such as "the perfect kind of book to read on airplanes".

Which, irony of ironies, sounded like a real good idea to me when I was reading this story, because I was mostly reading it on airplanes, and it's most definitely not the perfect kind of book to read on airplanes.  It's that kind of story. 

I won't bother with more plot summary, partly because I don't know that I'm up to it (it's that kind of story), and partly because plot summary in this case will be misleading.  Just re-reading what I wrote above, I'm thinking, that sounds like a pretty interesting story, like Murakami Haruki or Shimada Masahiko at their best.  But that's not how it shakes out in practice.

In practice, I found it a maddening read.  Impossible to follow.  Willfully obscure.  Offering almost none of the pleasures that I look for in a novel.  What makes me love Haruki or Shimada even, or perhaps especially, at their most surreal is that their work is entertaining, fun, even when it's playing with your head.  What made me such an avid reader of Kafka in my youth was that, even at his most surreal, and even when his stories aren't fun or entertaining (and they frequently are), you could feel the passion, the emotion, behind his head-games.  Enjō is all head games, as far as I can tell.

It's clear there are ideas behind his stories but part of his game isn't to present those ideas clearly, but to dangle them in front of you and then snatch them away when you try to bite into them, then dangle them in front of you some more when you've just made up your mind to ignore the tease...

The omake story, "Matsunoe no ki" 松ノ枝の記 (A Record of the Matsunoe Family;  or, A Record of a Branch of the Pine), is even more maddening.  It's about a Japanese hack writer who ends up translating the work of a foreign writer, which the foreign writer then translates back into his/her native language, which the Japanese writer then retranslates, which the foreign writer then re-retranslates...  Which all, again, sounds like it ought to be catnip for yours truly, but isn't.  

But, as always, this may be just me.  Enjō is clearly a gifted puzzle-constructor, and what he's made here are two enigmatic fictional edifices whose foundations are squarely set in the shifting sands of death-of-the-author postmodernism and whose spires soar into Nabokovian heavens of erudite intellectual play.  If this is your cup of tea, Enjō may be your gyokuro.

Levon

The inestimable Charles Pierce says most of what I'd say about Levon Helm - what I'd say if I was as Irish eloquent as Pierce.  I'm not, so I'll refer you to him.  (And I like Pierce's idea of outpouring the love now, while there's a chance some of the vibes might make it Levon's way.)

All I'll add is a few of my favorite little touches of Levon.  Like, it seems, most who heard them, the Band touched me deeply - defined a particular kind of faith in the unseen, made you believe in an America that you just couldn't, can't, find much in evidence around you.  But they also just taught me a lot on a musical level - they're like the finest of wines or the craftiest of craft beers, every sip a complex combination of grace notes and oblique attacks.  These are pretty obvious choices, but worth savoring anyway.

"When I Paint My Masterpiece."  As a Levon number this is a bit unexpected, because of course he sat out most of the Band's extended dalliance with Dylan.  But he does this song justice.  And if you need reminding of just what a sensitive, character-ful singer the man was, notice how he pronounced "everywhere" in "ancient footprints are everywhere."  That aspirated "wh" - it totally sells the lyric.  The speaker in this song knows he's not much in the face of all this glory, but he's still got a little bit of dignity.  He's not defensive, either.  He's just going to do the Old World the politeness of speaking correctly.  That or it's just the way Levon sings, but damn:  it fits.

"Daniel and the Sacred Harp."   Levon only sings half of this one, of course, but he does it with his usual elan.  Listen to how he handles the climactic verse:  "Then to his father Daniel did run / and he said Oh Father what have I done? / His father said, Son, you've given in / you know you've won your harp but you're lost in sin."  Listen to the touch of delirium he brings into the second line there - "Oh Father" - not enough to overpower the melody, but enough to scare the bejeezus out of you, for sure.  And yet not enough so's he can't turn right around and give the father's words all the matter-of-fact moral weight they need, too.

"Don't Do It."  Nobody but nobody could rock soul music like the early Band.  And everything about this track is Levon.  He plays and sings the fuck out of it.  Listen to that little swaggery stutter he puts on the beat (he was, as somebody - Greil Marcus? - once said, the only drummer who could make you cry with his drumming).  And the way he shouts "PLEASE" - this is the kind of scream that tenses your neck muscles and your collarbone. 

Okay, here's a less obvious choice.  Levon belting out "Further On Up The Road" back when he was a Hawk.  The thing about the Band, see, is that they were basically the only American rock act of the late '60s and '70s who owed exactly nothing to the British Invasion.  They didn't need the Beatles to entice them, or Dylan to permit them, to switch from folk to rock.  Levon learned from one of the actual original rockabillies, the Hawk, and the rest of the Band, straggling in one by one until it was the Band, did too.  They were always playing rock and roll.  Blues.  R&B.  Levon was not turned on to the blues by the Rolling Stones or the Yardbirds, but by listening to Sonny Boy Williamson his own self.  Dig how at the 2:10 mark or so he's singing it:  "'uthah on up the road".  And then at 2:30 that dirty growl: "aaaanggg!"  He completely owns this song.