Stan Getz: "Dynasty" (1971)

Some rather late Stan Getz, and a very late release for Verve - they'd be absorbed into the Polygram conglomerate the following year.  Not quite the end of the line for Getz;  he'd continue recording pretty much up to his death in 1991. 

The tune is "Dynasty," and it's part of a double-elpee recorded at Ronnie Scott's jazz club in London in March 1971 and released as Dynasty the same year.  The backing musicians are all Europeans, and they're pretty good - Eddie Louiss on the organ is the one to pay attention to.  Unfortunately the recording isn't the best, and his quieter moments get kinda lost in the ether.  But he's a monster on this track (the only one I've heard from the album, actually - I have it on a Getz comp), one minute vamping like a seedier Booker T, the next sounding like Keith Emerson in a poker game against Gregg Allman.  A whole different bag than Getz's labelmate Jimmy Smith.

And Getz himself - well, if you still think of him as Mr. Bossa Nova and little else, then you really owe it to yourself to listen to this track.  He's clearly been listening to Coltrane, and brings both the soulful-wailing and polymathematical-abstraction aspects of Saint John into his soloing here, but he does it without losing the essential personability, the accessible emotion, the heartbreaking gentility of tone, that always marked Stan's own playing. 

In other words, this is a cool nine minutes.

Lady, Be Good! (Shedd Institute)

Only once in a blue moon do Mrs. Sgt. T and I go out for live entertainment.  Almost never.  This is one of the reasons it didn't bother us to move from a metro area of a millionish to one a tenth that size:  even with world-class music and theater venues all around us we hardly ever went out. 

But last night we did.  Saw a poster in a coffee shop and needed a night out and so we found ourselves at the Shedd Institute in downtown Eugene seeing a performance of Lady, Be Good.

Lady, Be Good!  It came at a good time.  In the last year, unbeknownst to my blogging self, I've been gradually (okay, maybe a little half-heartedly) exploring the Great American Songbook via jazz interpretations of it (there's a great series of Verve discs...).  And it got me intrigued by things I never would have approached willingly a couple of years ago - musicals, namely, and especially of the archaic Broadway variety.  I found myself excited about the prospect of hearing some of these songs (I only knew "Fascinating Rhythm" and "Oh, Lady Be Good") in their original context, sung straight.

I wasn't disappointed.  It's local theater, okay, so it wasn't perfect.  The orchestra took a while to get warmed up - they played the overture and everything, which was nice (it quotes from "Rhapsody In Blue," which had premiered not long before this shows did in 1924), but they didn't really hit their groove musically until near the end of the first act.  Same went for the actor/singer/dancers.  Their comic timing didn't really click until the second act.  It was a half-staged production - full costumes, minimal props, singing and dancing at the front of the stage, but dialogue delivered in read-through fashion with a narrator.  It might have been better if they'd gone ahead and acted the thing;  it might have helped with their timing.

But at its worst it was still entertaining.  And for most of the second half they managed to bring the farce alive, so that you could see how it was supposed to work.  They even pulled off the Charleston number in quite nifty fashion - nobody can match Fred and Adele, especially the Fred and Adele in my imagination, but these dancers at least made me feel like I could imagine Fred and Adele. 

Yeah.  So now I've seen a Gershwin musical, I've floated on the gentle swing of "Lady, Be Good" and "So Am I," I've had "Fascinating Rhythm" stuck in my head for twenty-four hours, I've, you know, figured out why all that fringe is there on flapper dresses.  And for the hundredth time, in the hundredth different way, I'm thinking what a surprisingly cool town the Euge is.  Only a hundred thousand people, in the middle of nowhere, Oregon, and yet I can go downtown and see a revival of a 1924 Gershwin musical.  And it's pretty okay.

That's all.

John Le Carré's The Little Drummer Girl (1983)

Obligatory first reaction, which I'm probably undercutting more than I mean to with this self-ironizing remark:  this book could have been written today, almost thirty years later, and not many of the details would need changing, and that's a disgrace.  Well, all of the details would need changing:  but not the overall arc.  And since Le Carré's genius is in the details, I guess it's better to retract that first claim entirely.  This book is not just about the heartbreaking intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  It's about the details of where that conflict stood in the early '80s, and how it was thought about by certain Western Europeans.  And for that, when you read it today, it's an education.

But like everything else I've read by Le Carré so far, this so far transcends the political and historical specifics of its subject matter as to make me all but forget that, oh yes, it's also about a young woman who gets caught up in the post-Munich '72 cycle of attacks and reprisals.  Because what resonates most about it is its portrait of a young woman who is so disenchanted with her home country, so disillusioned about her own background, so sick of her self, that she's all too eager to allow herself to be enchanted, illusioned, and healed by the Other.  Whatever Other presents itself, apparently.

In that, this book struck me almost as a modern retelling of Waverley - one of my favorite books, although I seem to have never blogged it yet.  That, too, is about innocent idealism and those who would take advantage of it;  but if anything, Le Carré is more evenhanded than Scott.  He doesn't have Scott's conservative faith that it would be an unqualified good for the girl to grow up and out of it.  Indeed, this book rivals Darkness at Noon in the rigor with which it makes us see the logic of both sides' positions.

The spymaster - or rather, one of them, the one known alternately as Becker and Joseph - also turns out to be a fascinating psychological study.  In Smiley we got a portrait of the spymaster as inertial force, somebody who, in the end, is struggling because he's always struggled, and because he's being struggled against, but whose ideological foundation has long since crumbled away;  in Joseph we get spymaster as psychologist.  Not as analyst, but as someone whose job it is to help the patient into and through transference - to be for the patient (the agent) whatever the patient (the agent) needs him to be, in order to create the patient as true agent.  To get Charlie to do what he needs her to do, Joseph has to let her fall in love with him.  In the hands of a lesser spy novelist this would be James Bond territory - sleep with a woman and she'll do whatever you tell her - but here we get glimpses of just how much it's taking out of Joseph to treat another human being like this. 

Walter Mosley: Blonde Faith (2007)

Fall term started up last week and I'm in a perpetual state of near-panic about my classes.  That explains the drastic downshift in posting frequency.  It'll probably be like that for a while, for what it's worth.

I read this knowing it was The End.  The jacket blurbage, the online reviews, everything was telegraphing that.  And, indeed, Easy dies at the end of the book.  That's no spoiler.

So I was all set to meditate on what it meant for the cause of black liberation that Easy couldn't make it out of the '60s alive.  But then I discovered that, oh, hey, looks like that wasn't the end after all.

And you know, that's fine.  Because of a number of things.  Most obviously, because the way Mosley wrote the end of this one it was clear he was leaving some wiggle room on the question of Easy's death (of course, it's always tough to have your main character die if he's also the one narrating the books - unless this is that fantasy story about pirates that I was trying to write in eighth grade where we get to the end and find out that the guy who's been telling us the story is a ghost!  cool, huh!  I bet it'll sell a million copies!  I bet it'll be featured in the Otherworlds club!)

Ahem.  But mostly because I didn't see any thematic necessity for Easy to die here.  The problems Easy was facing were tough, but tougher than '48 or '65?  I'm not sure Mosley made that case here.  In fact a lot of the tough issues he brought up in this one - Vietnam foremost among them - he didn't really resolve.  That is, the book didn't really leave me, at least, with a sense that we've gotten, through Easy Rawlins, a definitive statement from Mosley on how Vietnam affected the black LA underclass - that's what I mean by "resolve," since no real resolution is possible.  ...All of this is another way of saying that by this point in the series the milieu and Easy's negotiations with it are much more important than the individual stories.

So I'm interested to see where Mosley takes Rawlins next.

Walter Mosley: Cinnamon Kiss (2005)

It's 1966.  Easy's a licensed PI now.  He's got uneasy but real relationships with members of the LAPD, and with a white PI.  California's got hippies now.  Easy goes to San Francisco, to Berkeley, and meets some. 

Easy Rawlins is getting old now.  We're getting into times that his creator (b. 1952) would remember for himself, and meeting characters - including the book's eponymous femme fatale - who are almost young enough to have been people Mosley knew.  But Mosley stays true to his protagonist's perspective.

Take this encounter (p. 86 of my copy).  Easy's in a Haight legal-aid center, and in the waiting room with him is a woman who speaks "in a white Texan drawl I knew and feared."  But he helps her with her unruly child.

"Thank you, mister.  Thank you," the mother was saying.  She had lifted her bulk from the lawyer's folding chair and was now taking the grinning boy from my arms.  I could see in his face that he wasn't what other Texans would call a white child.

The woman smiled at me and patted my forearm.

"Thank you, she said again.

Her looking into my eyes with such deep gratitude was to be the defining moment in my hippie experience.  Her gaze held no fear or condescension, even though her accent meant that she had to have been raised among a people who held themselves apart from mine.  She didn't want to give me a tip but only to touch me.

I knew that if I had been twenty years younger, I would have been a hippie too.

Easy never lets us forget that prior to being an Angeleno he was and is a Texan, and his understanding of the world and his place in it is conditioned by his Houston experiences as much as his Californian.  So there's a special familiarity whenever he encounters a fellow transplanted black Texan, and a heightened tension whenever he encounters a transplanted white Texan.  It's happened before in the series.  Texans, Louisianans - Easy's LA is full of them.

That's what lends this encounter with a nonprejudiced white Texan woman such power - he's steeled himself for hostility, but encounters only acceptance.  These later books are full of encounters with white people that don't go as Easy had expected - some go worse, but some go better, like this one. 

But here's what I mean by Mosley being true to Easy's perspective.  The book's eponymous femme fatale is young, black, and well educated, and seems to have more confidence in the white world's acceptance of her than Easy does.  And so, perhaps, she appreciates it less - and I don't mean "appreciate" in the sense of feeling gratitude, but in the sense of understanding its significance.  Easy fully appreciates how revolutionary it is that this young white Texan mother - of a mixed-race child (like, we know, Easy's own daughter) - greets him with simple human warmth.  And it's that, rather than the romance of rebellion or spiritual abstractions or the pleasures of turning on, that he sees as the hippie movement's main promise. 

And notice the reticence that comes with age.  He would have been a hippie if he was younger.  Meaning, because he's older, he won't be.  Partly because, obviously, he's got a family and responsibilities he can't just drop out on (everything in this book, in fact, is driven by his urgent family responsibilities - he's got a sick daughter and has to raise money for her treatment). 

But also, one suspects, because he's wary enough not to jump into anything.  A young man might take this one encounter as indicative of a whole scene, but he can't.  And, indeed, in the following book Easy encounters a guy who to all outward appearances is a hippie but who treats him with all the surliness and violence of any redneck ever.  People change, but not all of them, and not all at once, in these books.

Walter Mosley: Little Scarlet (2004)

This one takes place as the 1965 Watts riots are winding down, and of course Easy's in the thick of them. His office - which he'd just obtained at the end of the last book - is nearly burned out from under him, and everywhere he goes he sees the traces of the violence, or feels them.

And it's how he feels about this, how he experiences it, that's so interesting about this book.  The case itself is suspenseful enough...and now I realize how little I've said about the actual cases Easy Rawlins solves.  Which is not because they're not enjoyable.  They are.  There's suspense, there's atmosphere, there's action, there's memorable character after memorable character - a panoply of black Los Angeleno life that never ceases to amaze in its variety and specificity.  But it's true that the real joy of the series for me isn't in the mysteries but in the worldview that those mysteries are there to help develop.  At their best, the Easy Rawlins books display a careful synergy between story and theme, where the details of the cases serve to advance or embody the larger ideas at work.

This is one of the best, and this case does that.  Easy is enlisted by the (white) LA police force to catch the white man who they think killed a black woman in Watts during the riots.  They put Easy on the case rather than sending in police detectives because they want to keep the whole crime covered up for fear that it might reignite the riots.  So Easy's investigative work brings him face to face with the causes and effects of the riots, and the fact that the white cops are asking him to track down a white killer of a black woman puts him at the heart of the race relations that the riots were all about.  And if you suspect, even from this meager description, that there's a cruel irony waiting at the end of this investigation, you'd be right.

Because for Easy, the central truth of the riots is that they turn the normal order upside down.  They contained violence, and Easy already suspects that materially they're not going to make things any better for the black citizens of Watts, but they represent for him, in the moment, the forceful claiming of a space for black self-expression.  Easy didn't riot - he says he sat at home "holding myself in check."  But now that he has to go out and function in the world created by the riots he finds that he's able to - he has to - go places he's never been able to go before, say things he's never said before to people he's never said them to before.  It's a brave new world, full of new perils but also promise.  And that's not something you'd get from most noirs.

Walter Mosley: Six Easy Pieces (2003)

This actually contains seven stories, not six, so the title is a misnomer...or is it?  Actually, I'm going to say it is, and I don't understand quite why it's there.  Yeah, I know that six is the next number after five, and the title is a reference to the film Five Easy Pieces (with Easy taking on a double meaning here, of course).  And the first six stories in the volume were excerpted in simultaneous reprints of the first six Easy Rawlins books.  So was Mosley actually only planning to write six, but then added a seventh for the book, but it was too late to change the title?  I dunno.

So these middle books - A Little Yellow Dog through Six Easy Pieces - in the Easy Rawlins series form an interesting cluster.  In Dog, Easy has settled into a job as a junior high custodian.  That it's beneath a man of his talents and accomplishments goes without saying, but he turns out to be good at it - this is his Candide period, when doing what he can to protect and cultivate young minds is its own reward.  And it provides good stable cover for his unofficial private eyeing, not to mention his under-the-table landlording.  He's got two adopted kids now, and by the end of the book he's in a committed relationship, a common-law marriage, with a sexy Caribbean stewardess named Bonnie.

Domestic bliss is what Easy has now.  Security.  Even a certain measure of prosperity.  But is it a false sense of security?  After all, Easy's still black in a racist city, and he's still an unlicensed p.i., constantly in danger of being sucked into the criminal shadows.  Plus, he's been here before.  Earlier in the series we saw him married, we saw him owning a house, we saw him playing stand-up citizen, and it didn't last.  We can't help but wonder, all through these middle books, if this is a false sense of security, if problems universal or particular are going to take it all away.  It's bliss, but it's precarious.  That's in the background of these middle books.

In the foreground is Easy's relationship to Mouse.  As we've realized by now, Mouse is Mosley's take on the Staggerlee archetype:  he's a badass motherfucker who'll shoot a man over a Stetson hat easy.  In the early books of the series, Mouse isn't much more than Easy's ace in the hole, or his chickens come home to roost.  But in these middle books Mosley explores Mouse's more mythical dimensions, and more importantly what he means to Easy.  What it means for Easy to have a man like Mouse on his side, and then not to have him on his side.

Mouse is, of course, a great destabilizing factor in Easy's life.  "Just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in" - and here, as often as not, they's Mouse.  And so as we see Easy blissing out with Bonnie and the kids, puttering around Sojourner Truth Junior High, we like he come to dread Mouse showing up.  So it's kind of a relief when Mouse dies. 

But in his absence, as we discover in Bad Boy Brawly Brown, Easy is forced to confront the fact that it's only been Mouse's shadow over his shoulder that has kept him alive all these years.  That continues in the first stories in Six Easy Pieces.  The idea is that a man like Easy - a black Everyman - couldn't possibly have survived the Jim Crow years without someone like Mouse.  Staggerlee was necessary.  And so in Brawly, Easy finds himself hearing Mouse's voice - he finds that he's internalized Staggerlee.  And that of course forces him to realize that he's conscioned Mouse's violence far more than he'd ever intended.  It's a powerful idea.

Six Easy Pieces was mostly, I think, written concurrently with Brawly - it had to have been, judging by the publication dates.  That might explain why, although it mostly seems to take place after that book, Easy's relationship with the Mouse in his head doesn't have quite the intensity it does in that book.  Gone are the internal debates.  Mouse is no longer the devil sitting on Easy's shoulder.  Instead he's the ghost that haunts black LA - rumors are spreading that Mouse is still alive, and Easy finds he can use those rumors almost as effectively as he could use the real live Mouse. 

All of this plus the serious, non-mystery mythmaking of Gone Fishin', contributes mightily to investing Mouse with some serious subtextual mojo.  And so when he reappears late in this volume, it's almost inevitable that it's going to be anticlimactic.  In fact, his reintroduction is so low-key that you half suspect it's an extended dream of Easy's.  But it's not:  Mouse is back.  And the very anticlimax of his reappearance becomes eery by the time you finish the book.  He's like a bomb that lands but doesn't explode.  You know he's got it in him to wreck Easy's life like never before.  But when?