Travels, Books, and Pinkwater
I have been negligent towards my nascent blog the last two weeks, but I have a good excuse. I don’t take a computer with me while I’m touring, so while I occasionally get a chance to catch up on email on a hotel computer or a bandmate’s laptop, I rarely get the chance to do any more in-depth work. This is primarily because my wife and I share our one laptop, and I don’t want to leave her sans-technology for weeks while I wander, but I must admit it is quite a feeling of freedom to be computer-less these days.
But now I am home, and recovering from jet lag, so I can catch up on my writing. It was a lovely tour: some excellent UK gigs with the new British/Canadian/American ensemble called the Convergence Quartet (a short review from the Oxford Times is here), and one thrilling trio performance with Anthony Braxton at the Motives Festival in Belgium. And I also had the chance to visit a variety of friends while traveling. I went to Lewes, England, to see the writer Susannah Waters, the actor Jonathan Cullen, and their two children, Noah and Isobel. In addition to being outstanding artists in their own right, Susannah and Jonathan are also deeply involved in developing ways to create locally-based, community-driven art of the highest quality (check out Susannah’s organization called the Paddock). I also happened to arrive the day of Lewes’ famous Bonfire Night, which turns a quiet little English town into a crazy scene with fifty thousand people in costumes, including Victorians and Vikings, cowboys and Indians, and, of course, Elvis, waving torches, chanting, and setting off firecrackers. With a multitude of English marching bands (dig the cornets) creating some real Ivesian textures as they collide in the narrow, cobblestone streets. But the highlight of the visit was definitely playing soccer (sorry, I mean football!) with a cool 5-year old, and checking out Philip Pullman books with a cool 8-year old. At the end of the UK tour, I got together with trumpeter Byron Wallen in London, to play some duets and watch some Kurasawa, always the ingredients for a good hang. Byron’s playing in Andrew Hill’s ensemble now, so hopefully some more folks in the States will start to recognize the excellence of his playing. Then before the Braxton gig, I visited Brugges and Ghent with my friend Rik Bevernage of De Werf and his family. As I’ve mentioned before, De Werf is one of the best run and most artist-friendly cultural centers and record labels I’ve ever encountered, a model for how it can be done. Thanks to Rik, I now have one of the best Belgian jazz CD collections in New York, documenting a truly active and creative musical community, and De Werf deserves much credit for nurturing that scene. It is ironic that while on tour thousand of miles away from my own home, between Rik’s work in Belgium and Susannah’s work with the Paddock, I was so inspired by and reminded of the importance of creating sustainable, local, artistic communities.
Then the day I returned to the States, I ran down to DC for a gig with Jason Kao Hwang’s Edge. It’s always interesting to play when you’re totally exhausted, and the line between your subconscious and your conscious is frayed to the point of non-existence; the music can be particularly free and inspired. (At least I hope so! I was so out of it I wasn’t really sure what I was doing, but others assured me everything sounded cool.)
The other nice thing about being on the road, especially without a computer, is it gives me a great chance to get caught up on my reading. I’ve always been a voracious reader, mostly fiction. I keep trying to get into poetry, and I’m a bit embarrassed that I don’t enjoy it more, though Wallace Stevens and Ishmael Reed both consistently kill me. And I occasionally read a book about music or some other non-fiction; I found Jared Diamond’s books fascinating and scarily relevant, and I’m doing some research for a friend’s book on the Cold War so I’ve been reading some books on that. But generally I stick to novels.
I just finished Iris Murdoch’s The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. This was only my third Murdoch book, following The Sea, The Sea and The Black Prince, and I’ve loved them all. She has a way of digging deep into her characters’ psychology that is almost disturbing in its intimacy, and while she deals with very realistic characters and situations, she maintains a whiff of the fantastic and the dreamlike that keeps the line between the real and the imagined just blurry enough for my taste.
I’ve spent so much time studying music and musicians that it is now rare for me to make a new discovery, while in literature, I am always stumbling across someone, like Murdoch, whose work I’ve never previously experienced, yet who blows me away. However, with as much inspiration I’ve gotten from reading, I’ve rarely incorporated text into my music. (This is all the more surprising since I grew up in a household full of opera singers!) While I’ve always liked a narrative element in my compositions, I’ve liked that narrative element to be abstract; I guess I’ve felt that text locks in the music too specifically. But I also used to hate writing about my own work, and always wanted to music to speak for itself, and here I am writing thousands of words on this blog. Things can always change! So in the last few years, I’ve started to experiment with using words, especially from books that have the semi-abstract, dreamlike quality that I so love (see my Quixote post; the authors on that list of favorites, while diverse, all deal with this aesthetic).
I’m presently working on a new piece for my SpiderMonkey Strings group, using excerpts from the novel Madeleine is Sleeping, by my sister, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum. (Obviously I’m biased, but this is a magical, brilliant book! I cannot recommend it enough.) But this builds off of the first piece I wrote using text, Borgel Songs, which I composed a few years ago, appropriately enough using the words of one of my first favorite authors, the marvelous Daniel Pinkwater.
When I was growing up, the excellent children’s section of the Brookline Public Library was a regular haunt of mine. (Yes, perhaps I was a little bit nerdy.) I must have been about ten when the title Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy From Mars caught my attention. I loved it; I think I read the whole book that very afternoon sitting on the floor between the stacks of the library. I immediately took a pile of Pinkwater books home, including the essential Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, probably my all time favorite. The Snarkout Boys introduced me to many wonders, including the Marx Brothers, the culinary joys of avocado, and the potential of surreal urban adventure. But most importantly, Pinkwater’s books gave me an appreciation for, and even pride in, being weird in a way that certainly helped develop the personal confidence to play the strange sort of music that I now make.
So when I first decided to work with text, Pinkwater seemed a natural choice. I used three short fables from a novel called Borgel. (The fables, kind of Aesop meets Dada, are actually almost completely unconnected to the main plot, a wonderful story of a vaguely related great-uncle taking a boy on a wild intergalactic trip chasing the Great Popsicle. Right on.) This also gave me the excuse to make contact with Daniel, who, not surprisingly, turned out to be a generous and delightful fellow. He not only gave me the permission to use his words, but once he heard and enjoyed the compositions, he sent me a set of his recent children’s book series about Larry, the “good” polar bear, and Irving and Muktuk, the “bad” bears, with the thought of collaborating on a “polar bear cantata.” So as soon as I can find a willing children’s choir, I’ll start pursuing that project.
I recorded Borgel Songs back in January of 2005, and have been waiting to find an appropriate context to release it. (If all goes well with the Madeleine project, hopefully I will record that and release a combined album of vocal music sometime in the next few years.) In the meantime, I’ve put the first of the Borgel Songs, The Rabbit and the Eggplant, up on the free download section of my website. This recording means a lot to me, I was blessed to have the participation of some of my favorite people and musicians on it. My friend, mentor, and musical father Bill Lowe played bass trombone, and the amazing soprano Lisa Saffer sang (one of the opera singers in my home growing up, and also a masterful musician on everything from Handel to Berg to Feldman.) The remarkable young jazz pianist David Bryant completed the ensemble. It was a real honor to have musicians of this caliber helping me with my first real vocal piece, they brought so much music and wisdom to the compositions, yet also captured the humor and personality of Pinkwater’s words. So please enjoy, and also check out Daniel Pinkwater’s website, where he is offering serial installments of his newest book, the Neddiad.