A couple of weeks ago, Rebekah Weikel of Interlude Docs, an online collection of writing dedicated to all things vanished, invited a few of her contributors to submit songs for a playlist on the theme of ‘love lost.’ I chose three songs. Ray Godfrey’s metaphysical soul ballad ‘I Gotta Get Away (From My Own Self)’; 'Behind the Door' by Vernon Green & The Medallions, a doo-wop melodrama of abject proportions and which features near its close a vertiginous, high-wire male falsetto that’s virtuoso bordering on desperate; and Lotte Lenya’s rousing performance of ‘Lost in the Stars’ by Kurt Weill.
Weill’s song is about cosmic loss. It imagines God holding the stars “in the palm of his hand”, letting them run “through his fingers like grains of sand”. He loses one small star and when he finds it, promises to “take special care” not to misplace it again. The next lines observe how people assume God is upstairs looking after everything. Then comes the kicker. “But I’ve been walking through the night and the day, til my eyes get weary and my hair turns grey, and sometimes it seems maybe God’s gone away”—maybe God’s gone away, a line for our times if ever there was one—“forgetting his promise that we heard him say, and we’re lost out here in the stars…” The lyrics do not resolve. God doesn’t reappear. All we have in common—”little stars, big stars”—is drifting through the universe, “blowing through the night”, lost, looking to be found.
It is a beautiful piece of songwriting. Romantic, existential, and a touch bleak for a playlist of consolations. But the use aspect of the Interlude Docs exercise—that this was for a playlist designed to do something, to channel a set of experiences—reminded me how practical music is. It’s used for dance and worship. Pageant and poetry. Marking major chapters in life. For rebellion and propaganda, for seduction and play, workouts and sleep, for torture by the CIA, children, noisy neighbours and banks that value the hours they keep you on hold. Music is used to kill time and to time-travel. To distract, to study, to meditate, hype, soothe, provide catharsis. To drive commerce and productivity.
An endless number of playlists now exist to suit every filigree of emotion and occasion. (And still the dull-minded trot out the line that music isn’t “useful.” Still musicians are pushed into penury. Still Spotify gets richer.) I use music all the time. For writing, doing the dishes, jogging, for setting up the day and treating a range of moods and reveries. I use music more than I’d like to, meaning, I’d like to place it front and centre of my attention more than I do.
But last week I listened to Edward George at the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture in New York. Two luxuriously slow and detour-happy hours spent in a darkened listening room buried inside a monolithic university library. George—writer, broadcaster, musician, and founder member of the Black Audio Film Collective—told the story of jazz composer Billy Strayhorn. He took us into what he called “Ellingtonian space”, New York between the 1930s and the 1960s, when Duke Ellington’s orchestral jazz sound dominated the radio, dominated the way jazz organized itself. George talked, he played records. This wasn’t quite a lecture and nor was it the sort of associative, themed radio show that the likes of Time Is Away make for NTS. It was as if we were listening to a late night pirate station broadcasting some miles off-shore from time and Manhattan. He quoted from Strayhorn’s biographers Lisa Barg and David Hadju, from European philosophers and American botanists, all the while remaining attentive to musical detail and texture. The rush-hour bounce of Art Tatum’s piano, Ellington’s thick and dreamy big band sound, the percussive dissonance of Thelonious Monk. And George gave us the sheer pleasure of it all, knowing when it’s important to stop a song part-way through and restart it from the beginning, simply to emphasize how beautiful it is.
Strayhorn grew up in 1920s Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with a doting mother and an abusive father. He spent much of his childhood with his grandparents in North Carolina, who gave him a love of music and nature. Strayhorn was prodigiously talented and composed what would become one of his most famous songs, ‘Lush Life,’ before the age of twenty. Black and gay, he had wanted write classical music, but the classical world had no space for black composers and jazz musicians were not always accepting of his sexuality.
Yet it was jazz that offered him opportunity. His talent as a pianist eventually landed him a job as arranger and writer for Duke Ellington. He fast became Ellington’s right-hand man—“my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brain waves in his head, and his in mine”—and composed some of the Duke’s biggest hits including his signature song, ‘Take the ‘A’ Train’. Ellington reportedly had an ambivalent attitude to homosexuality, but his orchestra accepted Strayhorn as an out gay man, and the two men eventually became so close that Ellington adopted Strayhorn into his own family. Strayhorn, it was said, could finish the band leader’s thoughts. Their relationship bordered on telepathic.
Ellington knew what a talent he had discovered in Strayhorn. He could be controlling when his protégé received offers to write for other performers. For this reason and others, perhaps to do with his sexuality, Strayhorn remained in Ellington’s shadow. (The clip above includes a few rare seconds of Strayhorn footage, about one minute in.) George pointed out how often flowers occur as a theme in Strayhorn’s music: ’Passion Flower,’ ‘A Flower is a Lovesome Thing,’ ‘Lotus Blossom’. Echoes of his childhood visits to North Carolina. He observed that Strayhorn wrote about love that had been lost in the past or hoped for in the future. Rarely was it experienced in the present, although Strayhorn himself was not without relationships. ‘Something to Live For’ is a gorgeous example. Here it is performed by Lena Horne. She was another Pittsburgh kid. When the pair met in the 1940s, they discovered that they’d even shared a childhood piano teacher. The friendship between Horne and Strayhorn was intense and close. Their romance was chaste. Horne said she would have married Strayhorn, that he was her only real friend.
George’s talk traced the creeping erasure of Strayhorn’s name from jazz after the 1950s and ‘60s, as Ellington’s big orchestral style passed out of fashion, giving way to a new generation interested in more chromatic and modal sounds. Monk, then John Coltrane, Steve Lacy, Cecil Taylor and others. The rejection was not a complete one: Monk made an album of Ellington interpretations, and Coltrane recorded an album with him which featured a Strayhorn ballad, ‘My Little Brown Book.’ Strayhorn remained a spectral presence in the new jazz. By playing multiple recordings of the same song by different artists, George teased out the innovations that lay inside Strayhorn’s dance hits and torch songs. He got us to hear what the innovators were hearing—the abstractions, the dissonances, the influence of French Impressionist composers such as Debussy and Ravel. He showed how Strayhorn laid the foundations of a new vocabulary for jazz and, in some ways, for black gay artists outside the field. By the time of Strayhorn’s death from esophageal cancer in the 1960s, his name was lost. George was trying to rescue it from Ellingtonian space.
Erudite and measured, George’s voice had none of the forced cheer of the podcast presenter, and nor did it have the flat affect of the essay film which confuses dourness with intelligence. He never spoke over the music and the music wasn’t subordinated to the role of illustration. Songs were played to their full length, no matter how long. The talk demanded a reset to history’s slow turn, to the incremental emergence of cause and consequence. This was a live spin-off from George’s ongoing series ‘The Strangeness of Jazz,’ sibling to his excellent Morley Radio show ‘The Strangeness of Dub,’ an archeological dig into the origins of dub reggae. In ‘The Strangeness of Dub’, George walks his listeners across a vast excavation site, stopping here and there to inspect new finds and unearthed building foundations. Episodes focus on silence and distance. They examine slavery and religion, trace reggae and dub’s connections to Congolese music, to jazz and to European avant-garde composition. Specific historical moments such as Rock Against Racism are put under the spotlight, as are key figures including producer King Tubby and the sound-system operator Jah Shaka (featured above in a clip from Franco Rosso’s fierce, uncompromising film Babylon, made amid the racial strife of early 1980s London). Embracing one of dub’s central characteristics, that of the ‘version’ or ‘versioning,’ George frequently plays sometimes up to four different versions of a song back-to-back, getting the listener to hear for themselves what is being learned and developed with each new iteration, and what has been discarded.
During the Strayhorn session, George would occasionally make an observation and cap it with the phrase “the strangeness of jazz,” as if to emphasize the point, put it into verbal italics. If he gave an explanation of what this strangeness is, I missed it. But I don’t think I want it. That way, the balance can be maintained between information and feeling, between serious scholarship on the one hand, and on the other, the understanding that nobody could ever use music the way music uses us.
RECOMMENDATIONS
—Dug through some of my old records the other day and found this solid gold 1972 Latin rock eco-stomper, taken from the old Soul Jazz comp Chicano Power!
—Lucy Sante’s I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition will by now be on your book pile. Elegant author-designed cover too.
—I’d like this Jean-Claude Biraben ‘jacket’ chair from 1975. It looks horribly uncomfortable. When you send it to me I will put plants and rude guests on it.
—I only recently learned of this Ettore Scola film Le Bal. (Discovered via the work of Zenib Sedira.) You probably know it. Made in 1983, with no dialogue, only music and dance, it tells the story of a single Parisian dance hall from the 1930s through to the 1980s. I don’t quite know how to describe it. Art house Strictly? Dennis Potter in mime? The Singing Detective without the skin condition?
—Got to admit, I thoroughly enjoyed the new doc about The Birthday Party. Even the animated sections—typically used as visual filler in the absence of archival material—were done well. Being of a certain vintage, they reminded me of the title sequence to Grange Hill.
—The Bailiffgate Museum in Alnwick currently has an exhibition of Steve Goldman’s collection of the world’s worst record covers.