From The Velvet Lounge (Columbia University Press

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-velvet-lounge/9780231510127

Dreaming of Roscoe Mitchell

1972: Bap-tizum

            September, the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival, John Sinclair the master of ceremonies, a stage among tall pines, the lineup of music unbelievable, encyclopedic, an historical reach from John Lee Hooker and Ray Charles to the Count Basie Orchestra, the Mingus band, Yusef Lateef, the Sun Ra Arkestra.  On one afternoon, Ornette Coleman dressed in black and red, the hard and sharp of the bright alto in sun speaking rigor and joy, a breeze blowing across the trees and on the body of the resined air a sound clear as light, a freedom running hard for a train, running for dear life.   

            AEC: an unholy ruckus.  Grating, mocking vocalese, a hullabaloo of declamations and shouts like fragments of work songs and gospel hollers and tremendous chokings and gaggings, not an intoning of history, a sober framing for meditation so much as the exposure of a crude plenum of harrying spirits, unruly forces, memories and ancestors not mounted in their shrines but messy, bloody entities mounting whomever would venture to touch them, their hungry flocking only purged through a sonic disgorging.  Except for the beating of drums, the players didn't take up their instruments, instead marching around the stage like mad clowns in an exasperated wrangle, paint and feathers and fringe, jackets and ties and wing-tips, Favors and Jarman at one point singing a verse about a flower that seemed devised to tear apart all hope of beauty and symmetry.

Somebody near us on the grass was shaking his head, asking aloud why in the hell they didn't just play music.  It was an understandable sentiment.  For most listeners, jazz performance meant taking care of business fast, delivering the goods—the hot ensemble work, the blistering solos--and even the edge-exceeding dissonances of Sun Ra's band, even Coleman's off-minor anthems had lost no time in attaining an impressive level of instrumental virtuosity.  My friend and I were drinking Rolling Rocks like water, the music so riveting we never once sat down for seven, eight hours, the bands and the crowd getting off like there was no end, this was for ever, no matter what happened before or after, Watergate, Nixon, the War, time was ours, we were continuously swept up and roaring for more.  It was like the place where all the trains came throbbing home, the trains all disembarked again gleaming on their runs, Capitol Limited and Zephyr and Silver Streak and City of New Orleans, an ultimate roundhouse privy to the secret codes of dispatch and tower, switches and lights and levers and controls, the Labor Day weekend dissolving the hours into an eager eternity where in the green chamber of the park the mystical body of jazz itself was in its real presence, all of it together, Basie to Mingus, Hooker to Ra to Coleman, stage and pine trees and proscenium lights the radiant innards of a gigantic console stereo-system where all the greats played themselves.

            AEC's shouts and theatrics were putting static on it, rumbling the needle.  The piece ended, another started, but there was little applause.  A judgment, almost--it was their right to do what they wanted, but it wasn't stuff for the master takes.  A paradox of jazz: glorified as free expression, passionate, improvised, risk-taking, its audiences nonetheless strictly demand a delimited, high-finish object.  There's a sacred aura about the record, the tape, the CD, those spinning train-wheels of glossy tracks that magically miniaturize, cool down, slot into an archive the musical event.  With that jive noise, AEC was instead fucking with our time, wasting it--and of course that was precisely the intention, though it was hard to deal with.  It wasn't only that history had to be changed, made, moved in another direction--most of us knew, or thought we knew, all about that.  It was that history had to be blown up, time exploded, so that some new creation might, or might not, be born.  How would it happen?  That was the problem.  The revolution would not be televised, nor would it be played on a record.  The question was back at us.

            A hard blast of the horns, led by the trumpet, roared into the Coltrane tribute "Ohnedaruth," Bowie's high-velocity runs at once jagged, brash, and elegiac, masterfully fleet while driving off their road and bumping through the dark, and Jarman, too, riding etheric, scaling the breakneck tempo on low-caving overtones, a message that might have said: you wanted your time, well here it is; stop this train, we're leaving.  The healing power, the soaring hope--Trane, Trane, the cry of the diesel through the night, the late-bloomer ahead of his time, the horn that thrilled a ladder to God, his track a road to freedom on a hard-labor machine, train man on the run, the five hour sets, the years of tours across the country and across the globe, and now the cool Michigan air was running with echoes, the boughs of the pines stirring and minutely trembling, the stage lights starring sharp like burning votives, a sweep of the festival's arm paused an instant in mortal lament, that instant railing the big train, the jazz train, running us off the track on a speedball like the one that had delivered up the master.

            With long white robe and a knit helmet, Mitchell looked a second to Bowie's lab-coat signifying, an imam-like corrective to the polymorphic Africanisms of Moye, Jarman, and Favors.  Bowie: as much as he hung back and coiled and whipped and struck unexpectedly around the beat, he seemed to be always riding a forward edge, delivering a restless, explosively generous outpouring--the dream druggist, the cosmic obstetrician.  Mitchell: the theorist, the master of doctrine.  On "Unwanna," his own composition, his tenor phrasings across Favors' lithe, hammering lines came from behind, between, with the runs absorbing the expectation of something like Coltrane, something like Coleman--and indeed the horn was full-bodied, bristling, loading on angular momentum.  Yet as the choruses accumulated there was a continuous break in the chain, a missing link, the lost step on the staircase where you tread a void.  The ear wanted to partake of a flow, wanted the train to get itself off, wanted to feel in one continuous motion the thrust of the engine and the pull of all the cars behind.  But each time through, the ear was stopped, arrested, baffled.  It was as though for one chorus to advance, the one before it had to be forgotten.  That in turn meant that the chorus here-and-now already was breaking free not only of the chorus that preceded it but also of the one that would follow.  Like a train impossibly hovering in the wake of its own motion: time at an impasse, time out of joint.          

            A scary roughness, that impending clanking shudder of the couplings, the spaces in between and the iron wheels turning below, that traveling place where you know you could get killed.  A delight anyway in the motion, since for all its gaps, the sway of the cars almost breaking the connection, the iron ladders offering you a hold that sweeps by faster than you could ever hope to grab it, the train keeps going, carrying on, carrying itself off.  But in that intransitive junction where the streamline of Mitchell's tenor promised the ear a ride but abandoned it in the offing--you heard a silence there, behind, between, maybe fearful, maybe awesome, maybe simply incomprehensible.  Time broken, and in that break another time, a time of creation, of birth, that you couldn't, however, put a hand on.  You could only listen to its echo.

            I dream one night of an extra-dimensional object laced through with streamers and holes, floating over the loaded deck of the stereo-system like a time-inscription of all the tracks it's ever played and replayed--until I realize such would be a dream of dream itself, and so I must awake.

            Bap-tizum.  I ponder the irreverent title given to the album of the Ann Arbor concert released the following year, perhaps a word dreamed up afterward since it designates none of the songs performed that day.  If baptism is the ritual of naming, bap-tizum names it again--bops and rocks its world. 

            Yet the word, too, says: there was a birth, and again there is a birth.  It commemorates an advent, makes present a past, makes past a present, in the here-and-now the gift of the chrism flowing, splashed, dripping with time.           

                                                            ####

            It may be a matter of indifference—amid the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s freewheeling theater of America and Africa, he’s the utility man, wearing whatever, his focus strictly on the work, the music.  Sometimes in suit and tie, sometimes in a dark turtleneck with denim jacket, sometimes in a white robe-like coat, he by turns suggests uptown elegance, streetwise radicalism, holy-book rigor, but never quite settles into character.  While Joseph Jarman, Malachi Favors Maghostut, and Famoudou Don Moye trance through ritual intensities in tribal paint and Lester Bowie in white lab-coat ponders that wild bloodwork, Roscoe Mitchell seems to float like a wandering ancestor, participating without exactly belonging.  Yet in the AEC’s hybrid commedia perhaps the trickster isn’t the one who catches the eye but the one who slides off from the gaze, forever switching tracks, hovering somewhere behind and between.

The between--the instant when we prick up our ears because, through whatever rhythmic or harmonic signal that's alerting us, we know something's coming, imminent, on the verge of a break-out.  There's a slight hurrying of the drummer's tempo, there's a propulsive chording on the piano, there's an upriding, double-stopped cry on the tenor saxophone, and we know we're about to get hit good.  If the word jazz really does mean sex, we're lubed and we're hot for it.  The main thrill: like one hell of a foreplay love-nest, each detail seems painstakingly structured to support a point of excess, a near overwhelming of that structure, and, as much as the listeners, the players participate in the paradox of making it and being made by it.  What are we waiting for?  The air ripped and luscious as silk, the ear with a heart beating fast inside, skins touching together with a shock, a yielding, an indelible perfume of time.  The first deep stab of a Coltrane solo, Elvin Jones running all over it while Tyner and Garrison comp with aerial calm; Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter in swooned surprise, trumpet and tenor luring each other (try "Iris," Sorcerer), Hancock, Carter, and Williams rustling in parallel frottage.  

            AEC: they concentrated the jazz-quantum of suspense and let it run riot and blossom in unexpected places, let it run to terminus and wreck, silence and echoes, swarming fermatas.  You sexy thing: trumpet, woodwinds, upright bass, and percussion, yes, a conventional lineup (though in free-jazz idiom foregoing the piano), but the instruments didn't keep in their stalls, the Ensemble notorious for the proliferating sound-apparatus with which the players surrounded themselves as though to assemble a mad bricoleur's orchestra incorporating bicycle-horns, African percussion, 'little instruments' (a particular interest: the sounding of everyday objects--cups, tins, bells, scrap metal), and a proliferation as well of scandalous practices among the families of brasses, woodwinds, strings, and percussion.  Jarman's or Mitchell's saxophone chants, threads a parcel of song, or all the horns vamp awhile, and without a warning something happens, you check the speed on the record, the display on the CD player, the window to see what's going on, and before you have a chance it's leaped, there was a sputtering alto glissando, a jerked bass line spanking off the tempo, a punctiform muddy honk or a triumphant trumpet fanfare, an embattled rattle over bells and chimes, but it's already retreated, perhaps coiling for another strike, perhaps fading, drifting, wandering off.  Or all the sounds seem to be warnings; the alarms are everywhere ringing, you're suspended in suspense, from every direction hammered and slammed.  Or just as disconcerting, there's a patch of silence that continues for too long, it won't let up--quiet, too quiet, and the pressure is tremendous, though a cry or whoop or sob might by now be emerging at the threshold of audibility, faintly scratching at the doors of the ear.  In other pieces--check the live "Dautalty" from early 1972--they strip to a lean quintet that from the basic kit of horns, bass, and drums produces sounds of an all-out emergency, the ensemble wound up like a fast, wreck-headed train upping its speed even as its brakes grip hard the long slide of its wheels.        

            Often with rich orchestrations, soloist showcase pieces, the lead voice in many compositions Lester Bowie's subversive though lush and full-bodied trumpet, gloriously drunk with what might be called voice itself--he speaks music's own speaking, interprets interpretation--the AEC's work could also be an elegant ride.  But they relinquished the plush saddle, the teasing nightclub smoke, the bosses nodding their money over who would be next young lion of the trumpet or the saxophone.  AEC--the group's name came about by chance, as story has it, their tag in France simply "Art Ensemble" and a promoter adding "Chicago" on a concert poster.  It was a strange echo: atomic energy, federal commissions, the University of Chicago with Fermi's first controlled fission reaction in 1945, when Roscoe Mitchell was just starting grade school on the

South Side.  Along with its renowned school of sociology, which sometimes used the nearby working-poor neighborhoods for studies of criminals, Negroes, and immigrants, the U of C was steeped in an atmosphere of arcane knowledge and advanced studies: Sumerian religion, existential psychoanalysis, biophysics.  In earlier years, when I’d dreamed of studying there, I imagined red-enameled university basements equipped with powerful cyclotrons trembling the floors, buzzing with rushing looped express-trains of subatomic particles, invisible almost-bombs subtly exploding inside immaculate shadowless chambers while white-smocked scientists recorded the distributions of infinitesimal series and dissonances, microcosmic apocalypses and disasters.  In later years, I learned that during 1965, in a South Side school a mile or so from the setting of those dreams, pianist-composer Richard Abrams initiated the Experimental Band, the basis of the AACM black artist's collective from which the AEC crystallized.  Away from the nightclub scene, it was a setting where musicians explored new directions in performance and composition, their work informed too by Abrams' encouragement of far-ranging researches into politics, history, and philosophy.     

            Behind, between--no leaders, no followers, all leaders, all followers.  A rare and fragile anarchy: the voices insistently singular expressions yet still within the fold of a collective endeavor, that collectivity, in turn, incessantly probed, stretched, distorted, transforming.  As though the cyclotron were to lose its chamber and its roof, be open to the sky and the elements, the world mix up with the very experiment determined to uncover its secrets.  Passing through the arched tunnels of the magnets, the shotgun trains of the particles gather an immense velocity.  They bump against, over, around time.  Lattices and filigrees, clusters, plasmas, and strings, ephemeral time-jewels blurring and flashing with multiple, disparate tracks.  AEC: time on their hands, all over them like pollen, steeped in time, time-travelers out of the jazz mainline, not just ahead but behind and between, in the flux and reflux pushing with or being pushed against, pulling or being pulled, they stop there a while for you waiting.             

            Behind and between--however shifting and elusive, Mitchell might have been the AEC's provisional center of gravity, the Tao-like hub from which the spokes of the wheels spun and ran, sped along or scraped over or jumped their road, a floating exponent, a moving pivot that traced its centrifugal swirl.  Yet listening to the recordings, I sometimes can't tell whether it's really him I'm hearing--it could be Jarman, who also plays alto and tenor, whose sound and attack at times are very close.  The heroic individualism of jazz, inspiring as it might be, seems beside the point.  Indeed, I hear the latter phrase differently--beside the point means moving off from it, the stylus inscribing the aural signature "Roscoe Mitchell," to uncertainty and indecision: I could just as well say it's Bowie, Favors, or Moye who's the hub.  The AEC's image in my mind after many years is still one of a darkened stage, an intimidating array of instruments, in different zones of the performance space elaborate batteries of winds and percussion and strings, and in the beginning dark, each of the players deeply occupied with his own research.  Jarman stalking around his shells and rattles and horns.  Moye touching, stroking, testing his equipage, every sort of drum, racks of bamboo and shining gongs.  Mitchell scarcely visible among racks of bells and a stand of woodwinds like the parts of a disassembled pipe-organ, Bowie meditating sitting on a stool, Favors assaying the resonance of a lone string—you waited in suspense for the music to begin, having paid for your ticket and found your seat, but it seemed anything could happen.  It might be only a single player permutating a scrap of melody, a serial echoing, an involuted mood, for twenty minutes or longer, it might be sudden duets, trios, or with a bold flourish the group jumping in full-tilt right from the start.  And always the possibility in the air that they might decide not to play at all (which did occur at least once, when at a concert in New Orleans Bowie stood and directed the audience to listen with them to the spirits of the ancestors, maintaining the silence for half an hour).  AEC: an enigmatic mechanism that worked precisely by not seeming to work together, the unfolding of the group's music apparently casual, extemporaneous, disorganized, drawn forth according to some inordinate principle: ensemble rather than band, quintet, or orchestra, associated with, between, and among one another by virtue of their separate tracks touching, binding for a time, again breaking apart.    

            I think of the mimetism of insects and birds, of humans daubed and masked, dance and ritual and the dreamtime.  I think of the contagious streamings and the infectious effervescences of sacrifice and magic.  I think of the condensations and displacements of the dream thick and braided, fine-spun and thin-stretched as lace, the track of the wish with its long and trembling and broken trains.  If jazz is music of desire, it's perhaps also music of the dream.  Not dreamy music, but as long tradition attests, train music.  The dream a thing composed of trains--loaded and overloaded with freights bursting from boxcar doors, a mob of passengers blocking the aisles and cleaning out the beers and snacks in the club car, the train so packed it sways over its rails, the sleepers creaking, groaning, the momentum headlong, runaway, the wheels throw off dark sparks, lights and shadows run swift in a whirl of stations and semaphores and switches and timetables, Freud traveling from Vienna to Rome, Breton from Paris to Zurich, Armstrong from New Orleans to Chicago, and the train sweeps up like a cloak its tunnel and its bridge, the cast of its lone eye light, the echoing fade of its horn, the boulders of the mountain pass, the waters of the river, the suburban yards and red-brick warehouses and the cracked-pavement parking-lots and silence that spreads behind, between, the lovers in the berths, fevered riders under blankets, at the X of the crossing riding an instant off its rails, arriving and departing, before and after itself, it rains time, we feel it coming, we feel it gone, when?  when? right here, right now, the train running through the great black music of the night.

1982: Ex Tempore

            It had been a solo performance, mounted on the stand a great, lowing woodwind, some rare monster akin to the bassoon.  Like an astronomer beside an exhibition telescope, Mitchell seemed dwarfed yet exalted by the outsize apparatus, its curator and its engineer.  Across its upper range he tracked a sharp-pitched, insistent cry, at the horn's bottom a series of flutters gruffly erupting in response as if unwontedly perturbed.  The large-bore instrument with its heavy pads made for a slight lag in transmission, a delicate fumbling in the otherwise aggressively agonistic exchange, from which there gradually emerged a deep, shuddering overtone impossibly edged with an altissimo shimmer, as though the air itself were caving in.  Distracted from the sparring figures, the punch-drunk, looping progress of the composition, I felt the pull of a contrary motion, an exuberant drag cutting across the grain of the music's brilliant dispatch, the walloping battle between high and low, and in the train of that interference an almost imperceptible backwash, a blurring as of something rushing by at terrific speed.

            Eternity is in love with the productions of time--later, thinking about the concert, still hearing the clinging overtone dashed across the gruff rumble of the music like a spider running its silk, I remembered William Blake's infernal proverb.  Its meaning, though, was equivocal as ever.  In one respect it sounded like straightforward idealism, with eternity in the slot for God or a realm of Forms above and beyond mere temporality and phenomenality.  Yet, characteristic of Blake's unorthodoxy, eternity's love wasn't necessarily a detached benevolence; being in love could just as well mean that eternity was seduced, provoked, in a passion.  Eternity wasn't master of the game, as first appeared, but was helplessly embroiled.  Indeed, if eternity were in love, it might be forever lost and wandering among time's productions. 

            The Ravenswood El train passes above me near Damen Avenue, throwing shadows in flickering ladders on the ground beneath the tracks.  The wheels rumble and clatter, a wind gusts, in a back yard a tall catalpa stirs, its fibrous, heart-shaped leaves trembling.  Late August, and the seven-year cicadas are singing in the trees.  In the wake of the train, there's a bare trace of sound, an uncertain ticking that seems very far away.  It increases through such minute gradations I can't discern any change until suddenly the cicada's racket fills all the air, as though it must be immediately near, maybe in the catalpa, the song attaining a strident, buzzing apogee, a sound like a live wire down from a line sputtering and crackling.  Just as imperceptibly, the shrilling vibrato subsides in a dry muttering, clicking down to quiescence.  And as though a tap has been shut off, it

abruptly stops.

            It was like music, but I had not really listened to a song.  I had, rather, construed song--a rising to a climax, and then a fade, a conclusion--when I didn't even have the time to measure it.  It was too fast; I was collared, arrested; like the Ancient Mariner's auditor, I could not choose but hear.  And in that moment after the El passed, I felt time too had come to a stop.  My ears importuned by the weird clamor of the cicada, and the look of the street and the buildings settling into a different focus, clarifying but also softening, the green of the lawns and the gray of the pavement and the brick of the walls struck with a fresh illumination, something tender and fleeting in it, I might have been touched by the eternity of which Blake spoke, its fortunate fall among the productions of time.     

            Walking back to my apartment, I heard the cicadas down every street.  I supposed they were calling one to another, a courting signal, but I couldn't discern any pattern--one seemed to start before another finished, others sang at the same time together, yet others halted midway through and went quiet.  It seemed as much a general sounding of desire as purposeful communication, and in some way a voicing of the trees that hid and harbored them, a raw vegetal lyric composed of the lush fragrances and seedy branches of late summer.  Simply though elusively itself, this too was a production of time.  Yet there was no need to impute eternity to it; the wonder of those cicada songs was their ephemerality, their confusion, their mystery.  They didn't need anything to be in love with them, they were carried away by their own nuptial serenades.  Soon enough they would fall to the ground, their dark-blue, almost purple bodies to be swept away from the walks by the brooms of homeowners and custodians or blown along the streets by the winds off the Lake.

            The cicada's music--was it a song before I heard it, so that my construction wasn't a rationalization but a recognition of something I didn't, however, know before?  It was unexpected, like hearing an echo with no idea of its provenance, like discovering a letter that falls out of an old book, the signature of a long-ago reader in a flourish across the bottom of a page.  Must there be eternity, because without it time would dissolve, would be a featureless uniform flow or a series of isolated instants each of which would have no memory or link to the other and thus would leave not a trace?  Perhaps being in love with the productions of time, eternity would both hold its distance from time and be liable to time's intrigues.  It would be a roiled, impassioned love, the two never quite in phase, always one drawing away the hand just as the other bends over to kiss it.   

            In the attack and pitch of Mitchell's giant baroque horn, as in the stretch of Blake's sentence, I divined a scraping or rubbing, an irritant crossing of planes like the friction that makes song from the cicada's whirring wings.  As the performance approached its close, long rests, tracts of silence, irregularly interrupted the truculent call-and-response.  It was a confusing signal, sounding each time as though the piece were finished, and after a while the audience stirred in their chairs, becoming uncomfortable.  Beyond complaint and mollification, the upper-range phrasings indefinitely pursuing and pursued in a circuitous courting with the low-riding guttural honks, the silence seemed to broach another issue, a stubbornly opaque matter that was forever being adjudicated, never coming to a decision.  I could be amused, nearly laughing aloud at the horn's risible tracking of duck-like muttering complaint, top bothering bottom, bottom mothering top, rocked in a cradle of irony.  But I could feel, too, with the blank pressure of air in my ears, my own audition abruptly exposed.

            The ear: open to the air, to vibration, to world, within its secretive chamber the steep angle of the tympanum offering a maximum receptive surface.  And the ear, more than the eye, making the heart beat with the measure of time--the organ of apprehension rather than of comprehension, the hole in the head without protection, without a door to close, time given by what the ear hears nearby and far away, the ear dividing off the before and the after, in between them a momentous trembling.  The melody that haunts the ear, that hunts it down, that sometimes lodges itself and insists, repeats, and, forgetting about memory, takes on a life of its own, is the song that catches the

frequency of that trembling.    

            Eternity is in love with the productions of time--Blake's sentence rides like a mighty train, the first word its iambic engine, the cars of the anapests following behind, but against that locomotion the terminal feet pushing back, the train's progress suspended there between, in love.

The Examples

On the cover of his Nonaah record he sits with one foot up on a spool-table, the sole of his boot dominating the foreground of Roberto Massoti's photograph as if to defy the conventions of portraiture.  It looks like army surplus, the boot of a worker or a militant, up in your face.  His arms are loosely crossed, the saxophone strap angling like a thin bandoleer over his chest and one jacket pocket.  The flap of the other pocket is undone, displaying a heart-shaped object difficult to identify.  It might be a case for glasses, a wallet for reeds, a packet of something to smoke.  In the background there’s a grillwork of pipes in staggered courses like bricks, a wall with paint delicately scaling, here and there peeling to a layer beneath, and on either side a door with inset panels making another gridlike pattern.  It’s Chuck Nessa’s recording studio or a practice space somewhere in Chicago, but the room seems abandoned, decrepit, the surfaces minutely scarred and pitted, the raw structures incubating decomposition.  The two doors are mysteriously close together, as if one simply offers immediate egress through the other, like stage doors, and the function of the pipes is unaccountable, the works of a fountain without a source.  Mitchell is leaning back in an attitude of listening, maybe hearing the tape of Nonaah for the first time, the expression of his face complex, equivocal, a very slight drift or squint in one eye like the trace of a gaze, a style of attention, difficult although imperative to maintain.  A face that appears abstracted, powerfully focused, yet washed over, touched by, liable or susceptible to his own listening--disinterested, dispassionate, the composer's stance, but also exercised, traversed, caught up or engaged, as though absorbing the furrowing of the music's track through the air. 

I can't catch up with him because he's before me, he's after me.  Sometimes I quail, shiver, in dread of those crooked paths so resolutely singular they teach me the productions of time can't be possessed, reproduced, or retained.  In the very instant I'm experiencing the live performance or listening to a recording, they're lost already or still coming, looming up in the past, fading into the future.  A convulsion, a thrilling vibration, it feels like church, it feels like a magnificent channeling of world, it is the world, the sublime here so overwhelming it reaches a plateau, very high or very deep or tilted in some extradimensional way, where there is no sublime anymore, only a tract of nudity, sex and death, yes, jazz, the ritual, the offering stripped to the air, intimate with the bodies of the day and the night, shaken out among the elements. 

As though time keeps measuring itself and stumbling over that measure, and such stumbling is the broken track of something other--call it eternity, or whatever--that doesn't so much participate in time as precipitate with it.   

Love of the air for the fog, the fog for the air.

            In a recent on-line interview, Mitchell is asked what he's been working on and replies that he has so many ideas he feels his head is exploding.  (Laughs).

My uncle tells stories about old days on the Southwest Side, the neighborhood around Midway Airport when there were still open fields among the city blocks.  When the Belt Line freights parked along the tracks near 55th Street, enterprising neighbors would pull up with trucks, break in and unload everything they could take.  At the Catholic church, just across from the runways, there was a popular priest, known for doing mass in half an hour and for the swift administration of communion.  The blessings came in an incomprehensible jumbled rush.  The hosts jumped from his hands like scared birds.

            I was about fourteen when, near the corner of Wabash and Van Buren, I saw a bearded man wearing a cloak looking up at the El train passing over the tracks.  He appeared to be studying the shadows and the light, listening to the irregular clatter of the wheels over the rails, the echo down the canyon-like street as the train made the turn.  I followed the track of his eye, his ear.  I thought then I wanted only one thing in the world: to be somebody like him.

The El trains are composed of cars each of which has its own electric motor, powered by the voltage from the third rail.  There is no locomotive, no leader; any car can run on its own. 

Tart and acerbic as Coleman, stringy as Stitt, swiftly sketching a succession of tilted syntheses, scuffed topographies, working maps of the alto tradition, the looped strokes of Johnny Hodges, the wired filigrees of Benny Carter, the dashed slants of Jackie McLean, the perfect prescriptive scrawl of Eric Dolphy--the almost-faltering of it, too, a strange wavering subject to echoes, the keening pitch of Mitchell’s saxophone on a ride that writes the alto’s signature in the air as though it all belongs to him, as though it all belongs to no one, the lean frame of his body hanging from, depending on the instrument, at the same time stepping to the lean and the dance of it, even with Mitchell right in front of me on stage I’m forgetting what I’m hearing, I’m in deep, suffering damage, inside a dark unknowing where the saxophone’s up and down are utterly confounded under a swept veil of time where I undergo judgment, accusation, sentences I can’t read though they read me off, in a long tunnel I’m trained by voices like those of the dream, outside time or itself a concentration or saturation of it, time’s lovers or beloveds or both.  Or the love of silence out of which every melody is apportioned in time, the suspended instant, the silence just in front of the onrush of the train—here I must stumble, fall, because music is not about time, nor about anything but itself--

But the ear: like the eye, it wants to have, to hold, to know. 

In the solo works, Mitchell's explorations strip naked the saxophone.  Not only the usual instrumental contexts, the support of bass and drums, the interweave of other horns, is taken away, but the horn's body itself is exposed, denuded.  The 1978 composition for alto saxophone, "Series II Examples": the horn's sanguine plenitude is beggared, its silver-and-gold teeth knocked out, its house-keys lost, the saxophone offered in rags and tatters—keening, vulnerable overtones sawed across by guttural harmonics, distresses of looping whistles and squeaks, one interference-pattern convulsed by another, stacked fractuosities.  The horn not anymore a speaking mouth but only a raw auscultation.  It shells wide.  You hear the sound of its inside turned out, skinned by every air.  You hear a listening no longer yours, but that of another ear, listening through you. 

            The pitch of Mitchell's attack: in that hollowness a sense of piping, strange as the word sounds, the tone starting off way up, a tight coupling of air.  It speaks a detachment, a distance, a holding back.  I hear Johnny Hodges playing a ballad—that manner of waiting, delaying, a poise and address that make time move while being moved by it.  And like Hodges, too, in the attack a softness, pliability: fragile, tender, the specific engineering of the alto's love-song leap that slides up with clarinet grace and bears down with a tenor's gravity, the stroke of that love an exquisite teasing friction.  On an earlier "Ohnedaruth," after Coltrane-style free-blowing from Jarman and Bowie, there's the same ritardando, against the tempo's push a suddenly open spacing, a diverging loop, a maximum exposure of line like Oliver Nelson's solo on "Stolen Moments," and sometimes across the purity of Mitchell's tone a very faint scratching or graining as if in all the fullness of sound there must also be fade and decay, a raking of time, of age.   

            But the saxophone is not being played right.  It's like the fantasy of the amateur, the basement experimenter, who, untrained and negligent of all technique, nonetheless plunges ahead and finds something being created by sheer luck.  Such birth is a delight, a gift, although because it’s unrepeatable it’s immediately tinged with regret and melancholy.  To track deliberately such crooked roads without improvement would require a research into shadows, a dream-science.  "Series II Examples": after several minutes a full-bodied saxophone tone emerges.  It seems not to be a single note; it weighs a chord.  Folded into it are countless adjacencies, misfires, sidetracks.  It bulges with unknowns, boxcars on a mystery train.  Already it's spilling, taking losses.  Already it's shadowed with the branches of the embankment trees, the grid of the Cyclone fence, the dark hide of the tunnel, the gliding fretworks of the iron bridge.         

            "Series II Examples": fury and babble, throating and roar, lush multiphonics, riffled tone-sheaves, a momentary defeat of the time dictated by the saxophone's stepped design, the diachrony of octaves and registers.  A running out of the arpeggio, a chasing-down of the run.  Time blurs, fuzzes, dreams, as the saxophone is revealed as no longer bucket or container but as a knife full of holes, a punctured blade.  The seventeen-minute cut feathers its edge across the air, dissolving as it goes.  Its seeming irresolution holds a refractory force.  It declines to develop--indeed, the least move toward a musical rhetoric of parts and whole would kill it.  Its ending: a conclusive surprise.  It closes off, having never caught up with itself. 

            Mitchell speaks of a compositional concept he calls stabilized tension.

The dream runs along the edge of time, the LP revolves edge-wise on the turntable and as you lean over it you see a distorted image of a finger, a hand, a face.  The stylus has a blunt snake's-head look, rides the grooves like a lazy locomotive, its track coming to meet it in a seductive ribboning glimmer.  A spiraling edge, a slow oblique corkscrewing, the trains of electrons routed through circuits to the mouthing ears of the speakers, the blank band where the music stops.  For a while, you hear the shadow of it still. 

            There's a sound in the small hours that wakes me from my slinging through the air, in response to an enemy's challenge, a long kidney-shaped mahogany table, an object I heave like an ungainly boomerang.  It breaks apart mid-swing, and I bat down one section of it with the other.  On a couch, a trumpet is waiting to be played, when I find the time.       

             1994: a composition for solo alto, performed live at the Hot House: "Near and Far."  With circular breathing, long looped processions of notes that for fourteen minutes don't once offer a pause.  An inexorable driving wheel, a mobile equilibrium perfectly geared, perfectly balanced--but in time it must falter, wobble, drift. 

            It is a wheel on a train that never arrives.  The train hurtles through the stations, the crowds stand and watch it pass, the express blowing by.  Occasionally it slows, as if to make a stop, and the people eagerly press toward it.  But just as it seems about to halt, it accelerates and continues onward.  The same thing occurs again, again, and after a time it's all but forgotten that the train is a thing that has any connection to stations and stops.  Its passage is viewed like that of a distant planet or constellation; clocks and watches are set by its motions. 

            Then, one day a long time after, the train is rolling into sight.  The same blast of the whistle, the same unsteady flickering of the headlight, the same obscure freight of promise and delay.  Its approach is scarcely remarked, but impossibly, uncannily, like a train in a dream, this time it really is stopping.  As it approaches the station the wheels ride solid and heavy on the rails, the lettering on the cars appears vivid and bright with meaning, the clangor of the bells loads the air with a new urgency.  

            In the interval, time hovers.  A distant vibration shudders through the whole system of trains and signals and rails and stations that has come to be called the world. 

            In the damp oiled air: a singing as though motion itself has just been born.    

A dream: to have no fear of time.  Out of sheer pleasure in your freedom, you would run fast and run hard, almost catching up your own footsteps.  Out of sheer pleasure you would let time pass, ride, or you'd turn easily and ride against it.  In enough stillness, you would feel where it breaks.

            Mitchell on soprano saxophone in 1997 performing Joseph Jarman's "Ericka."  Coming from a place very close, so close it could be inside my body, my brain, the ear has to be still, concentrate, absorb a quantum of silence to hear it clearly.  Nonetheless, it remains indistinct, wavering, hovering off from its own edge.  I want to call it a murmur, a burring, a blurring.  I essay it on my own lips, a humming throating breath, but I blubber over it or I break it off, I can't approximate it.  On the bare threshold of audibility, tentative, delicate, a seeming weakness in it as though it would after all withdraw, retreat, though now it's started it appears there's no turning back, it's become possessed of definition, gravity, increase.  At the same time, it continues to sound with a memory of its near-fading, a ring, an aura, a halo persisting around it, the ear pricked by a reverberation coming from somewhere far away, so far it could be outside, miles off in the city, the world.

            You might imagine that world into which it disperses, the rooms of your neighbor's house, the sidewalks and yards, the streets and the expressways, the bridges and the power-lines, the stretch of highways and rails and rivers and seas, the trains of clouds running their shadows over the land, the earth axled among the stations of the moon, the sun, and the planets.

            Eternity, naked in the arms of time, or time, partying through a long night with eternity.

            An advent, being born.

                                                ####

            The example--looked at closely enough, it begins to undermine or exceed the principle it's meant to demonstrate.  A particular escaping its general.

            Louis Armstrong said: the music is what happens between the notes.

            In The Thief's Journal, Jean Genet writes of his love for an older tough who had taken him in and treated him as an equal.  As much as he knows he's loved in turn, however, Genet leaves him behind in Brussels, travels on to pursue another destiny.  On the Paris express he gazes out on the trees and fields of the Flemish countryside and thinks about that love, how it's so strong that, if the railway bridge which the train is crossing were to blow up, that love would repair it, and indeed has already repaired it, in the very moment he's making that crossing. 

1994: Very Large Skips

L’esprit de systeme--it makes Chicago a modern city.  Unlike New York, London, older places, a city made not so much by accumulation, a tangle and weave of historical growth, as by the aggressive stamping of a grandiose pattern on Illinois mud and river and marsh.  A city presumptuous, encyclopedic, autodidactic: like a shelf of books by Herbert Spencer, the Nineteenth-Century intellectual jack-of-all-trades in whose work one finds every aspect of life and history and politics relentlessly slotted under headings and sub-headings, phases and sequences.  Laid out against the horizon by the outworks of railroads that made it all happen, Chicago might be Spencer's dream, a late-Victorian panopticon of orderly parks and boulevards and streets, a place there for everything and everything in its place.  The marshes were filled in by its own waste products, the Downtown lakefront built on its junk and construction debris.  Along the branches of the River that course through it, shipping was made to pass by means of movable bridges, the roadway tilting temporarily toward the sky and afterwards gearing snugly back into place.  With its monumental lakeview skyline, it offers a sublime by manufacture and design; with its engineering, a pooling and canalization effected by a huge working-over of raw material--embankments, viaducts, pumps and sewers and drains, the Sanitary and Ship Canal, product of a deep cut in the earth that forced the River to run backwards, clearing its mouth at the Lake and sending the city's excreta to points far south, downstate.  The Columbian Exposition, White City; the American Rome or the Paris of the Prairies; a city for Goethe, for Freud: where all had been mere waste, there

would be bildung, cultivation and mastery.  Coming back from Europe or the Southwest, I can't get over how big it suddenly appears, the broad streets and the buildings oversized, jumbo, as though a carpenter set out to design his own house and, with labor cheap and materials at a discount, determined to double the proportions of everything.

            The paradox of Chicago: metropolis of the early West, don't fence me in, but a city made of nothing but fences, itself a great exfoliation of lines and routes and barriers.  The very scale and scope of it perhaps self-defeating; all of Spencer was deflated by a few short passages in Durkheim that spoke of the force of the collective as opposed to an elaborate epistemological machinery of statics and dynamics, that simple concept serving to explain a vast range of social phenomena.  Yet Spencer has long been relegated to library discards, while Chicago lives on.  Because of its grand scale, it has the capacity to allow its own destruction, to cast off its parts seemingly without damage to the whole.  Hundreds, thousands of buildings, whole neighborhoods, have been torn down in the course of the past century.  Built upon the marshy ground of portages and passages, the city has spread and grown tall.  Still, the long stretch of its utilitarian grid overreaches and trembles toward its undoing: disorderly reversals, retrogrades, backslides.  Corruption, gangs, neighborhoods like armed camps.  Building up, tearing down, it rides on a sometimes frayed, sometimes glittering border of ruin and glory.

The confining rack of the city grid has its blossoms and weeds, like the grass that sprouts between sidewalk cracks, the frond-like trees-of-heaven that sway tropically from crumbling pavement and broken masonry.  On a hot August night, a drunken wind through your windows, a rolling and cavorting motion through the air upon which vague, fugal entities ride, miasmal marsh-ghosts and water-fairies that with a faint smell of mud and oil pour through a hole punched into space through which you feel the time where you’re held captive, tossing on your bed and dreaming the trite and secret motto of Chicago: to live is to work, to work is to live. 

In a city which, for all its diversity, still seems so oddly German--not really like Germany but a dream of it, an orderly dream of rows and columns and squares, of ample volumes and generous measures--I find in a bookshop a translation of Schlegel’s Fragments where I read that what matters isn’t so much the comprehensiveness of a system as our feeling for what is outside it, our human passion for something beyond the human.  For Schlegel, such passion is coupled with an ironic clarity that grants the justice of what cannot be grasped, comprehended, or ordered, that unknown which is eternal agitation, swarming chaos.  

Chicago: a system that would comprehend and contain all differences, manage each and every one of the productions of time, yet an irreducible friction, perhaps an effect of system itself, distempers its grand orders and harmonies.  Growing out of the tree-lined streets of the South Side, bordered by the Illinois Central tracks and the clattering Jackson Park El trains, AEC: jazz positionality, the bebop-quintet schema of back-up and sideman and lead, was tested, pressured, and exploded, as if among all those routes and tracks crossing their lines there must be a loose thread, not just a way out but a way altogether outside, not just a run at freedom but a freeing of world.  Accomplished though they were, the music wasn't a matter of first-rate players in an all-star setting where each would have a chance to shine in turn.  It was a matter of embracing the very factor a proper jazz combo usually excluded in the distribution of musical work and the management of time: stops and starts, clinkers and flubs; the too-loud, the too-soft, the too-dirty, the wrong.  Noise.

Some years back Jacques Attali argued that in the history of Western music noise defines everything that doesn't fit, those elements marginalized as static, nonsense, interruptions of the proper and the normal.  A distinction of music from noise has traditionally served the powers-that-be, harmonized a dominant political order.  Yet despite its service to power, music also has something inherently subversive and baffling about it.  It is like yet unlike language (at least in the conventional sense), is inherently unstable insofar as music doesn't necessarily refer to an object, locate a signifier in relation to a signified.  Music is signifying itself, signification at its furthest remove from designating objects.  This divorce from reference means that music has the possibility of doing no service, no work.  Western musical forms operate though stable melodic and harmonic laws.  The key signature sets the rules within which any given music may wander as it may but will always return to the tonic, the refrain, the chorus.  Order may be briefly unsettled, may drift toward dissonance and noise, but only to be reaffirmed and plumped down again into itself.  Noise, however, disturbs this order in a manner that defeats such a comfortable return.  Invested with noise, music is no longer comforting, is no longer orderly, no longer stages a disturbing yearning or fear that ultimately finds its rest, its peace.  Music becomes wildness, upset, an accelerating inward turning or a wobbling spinning outward, past control.  Or it becomes austere, distanced within its own realm of structures and techniques, perversely indifferent to making things whole.  Tones and tonal production, for example, can refuse the correct, the well tempered, the distinct identity of the scalar note.  Slurs, bends, split tones, microtones, overtones--those sounds that make music grainy, rough, that don't calm or reassure or follow a track of sentiment and containment but scratch, tease, and diverge from themselves, starting up into raw points, jagged planes, broken series, harmony no longer a concord in time but a parting and division that makes time beat, skip, syncopate.  

1969: breaking out, taking back time (Watch out for that time flak, William Burroughs had urged all resisters in his Nova Express of a few years before.  Ride music beam back to base.), sounding those intervals where systems and orders tottered and stumbled, where a track of freedom took its road as becoming, as creation, as surprise.  Malachi Favors recounts that the AEC became what it was because, although the group started as the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble, Mitchell didn’t want to be leader nor did anyone else.  A collective, then, without hierarchy; a creature, a monster, without a head; yet in such anarchy a power stronger than itself, as Mitchell describes it, perhaps a counter to the powers and principalities of the city, perhaps itself tapping those powers, looping, short-circuiting, crossing their wires.  Compositions from the early years like Joseph Jarman’s “Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City,” Mitchell’s “The Ninth Room,” and a host of later works—unlike the welling uprising of New York free jazz, the music out of Chicago was fugitive, devious, itself systematic in its breakout from system.  Albert Ayler, Pharaoh Sanders, Charles Gayle, David S. Ware—they screamed a glorious noise, often enough seconded in Jarman’s and Mitchell’s saxophone work.  But “The Ninth Room”: there’s an airy, more than ample musical space, plenty of compass for solo intensities in turn, yet the way the players lay back and jump in, the way they both wait on and don't wait on the time, effects an incremental, serpentine block on forward progress, a redistribution of such intensities through a series of restless twistings and windings that don’t roar up into sonic climaxes but trail through strange, elliptical backtracks and jumped, untimely advances, the instruments starting, stopping, wavering through nocturnal arabesques as ordered and as random as a dream.  It might be a small-hours dream that startles you into a wakeful listening: furtive, enigmatic noises overheard somewhere close by or in the distance, behind the wall of your room, behind the wall of night.  At your window something knocking, you uncertain whether it’s inside or outside your dream, in or out of this world.  Or the 1971 AEC composition, "Lebert Alay"—an elegy, a revision, a sort of manifesto, its title aphasically reconstituting the name of the free-jazz pioneer mysteriously drowned in the East River in 1968, the piece a reprogramming of the furious lyric surge of Ayler's tenor through a drifting reverie of time-dissolves and protracted silences, the horns essaying tentative, searching runs among a swamped labyrinth of thumps, whistles, and shrillings, an uncanny sense of suspended history, a time ended and a time beginning in some telescoped apocalypse, a judgment sounding through the vividly fading traces of Ayler's fiery vision as though meditating long enough on freedom one must hear its cry begin to echo, to resonate, to ring, its vibration provoking an oscillation, a flickering, orders and systems and worlds turning themselves on and off.     

Mitchell speaks of very large skips, those intervals steep with surprise where the creations of music and the world’s creation seem to bell and resound and inflect one another across divergent tracks.  Spaces and times you’re in and out of.  Dispositions, tendencies, angles and drifts--should this territory be called world?  Music; world: the very grain of where we are, that which nourishes us but is impossible to own. 

 In writing about Roscoe Mitchell perhaps I should simply write about the world.  Lake Michigan: the black stone smell, the clumping of wet sand, its color almost brown, almost clay-orange.  A night of winds, the lake waters driven, rising over the barriers, flooding the Drive near North Avenue Beach.  Out in the dark over the lake a distant beacon, among the turbulent waves its illumination sometimes steady, sometimes obscured by fog, sometimes pressed back upon itself like a blown flower.

1994: a chilly October evening, my son and I taking our walk despite the turn in the weather.  It’s one of those times when the lake, usually more or less a big lapping pool, approximates the power of the sea.  Across the Drive all the city looms behind us, lights already burning in the windows of the high-rises that wall along the park, beyond that wall the storefront thoroughfares and the bare-tree streets, our own apartment somewhere waiting like an open crate into which we’ll later be shipped on the giant stopped train of the city’s night.

The waves are rolling under the wind and moon, rising two, three feet, cresting and foaming, gaining ground on the beach where the water strands in deep puddles.  I tell Malcolm to stay out of those, but he’s not interested, already he’s gathering the stones for skipping, those perfect stones so abundant along this glacier-carved lake, smooth ovals tan or gray or black, their small weight on your palm like dream money.  

            An art to the skipping, on which he’s worked for several years.  One finger curves around the curve of the stone, the hand whips it on a level with the water’s surface, gravity pulling it down just a bit, momentum bringing it up a little, the stone getting lost a second, discovering itself again, a pleasing fort-da, but across the water it’s the event, the stone’s swift irregular imprint, that he’s following.  He’s determined to break his last record: ten, even fifteen skips it might have been, though the count seems to be forgotten each time.

            The thrust of the waves offers a stiff resistance, the stones veering off at crazy angles or failing utterly, deep-sixed.  But there’s plenty of time and plenty of stones, hundreds, thousands of them here at our feet.  The northern air is bracing, fresh, wonderfully clean.  After a while he’s made the corrections for wind and rough water and the things are spinning and shooting over the top of wave after wave, he’s breaking all records, the stones leaping across the water like waves themselves, sometimes flying way out into the churning dark and with a last lift jumping their track, overleaping their own wave-pattern, at the sight of which my son exuberantly laughs, splashing anyway in the water, and wondering how such rare miracles should be counted, calls them very large skips.        

 2002: Just Like Gold

            Holy Saturday night, in Chicago with a quartet, a birthday tribute to AACM comrade Fred Anderson, the drummer driving hard, the lustrous mercurial bravura of Roscoe Mitchell's alto arcing through slides and smears, stacked multiphonics and delicately whirring drones, the line of the improvisation so rapidly accelerating it seems forever to be leaping and overshooting its track, so abruptly retrograding it seems to be dragging gloriously through its wreckage, at one point Anderson's tenor chasing it down until with a harsh extended stutter the two seem to catch together a far-off echo of what might be Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt trading choruses on "Blues Up and

Down," at another, in disregard of the instrument's scalar increments, Mitchell deploying a meticulously convulsive fingering, not so much playing the horn as spelling over its air, a scratchy microtonal graffiti as though the alto is being signed by its double, inscribing the uncertain outline of a shadow toward which it irresistibly moves or by which it's being restlessly pursued.

            I almost can't bear it.  I'd like to escape from the club, stand among the streetlights and taxis on Balbo and listen from a distance, yet I'm stopped, arrested, outside the broad windows of the Hot House the El trains folding through the Wabash turn alongside the sodium-vapor lamps raying a color like burnished gold, in the near distance the Sears Tower blackly shining with its double antennas forked into the sky, the couple next to me in the booth stirring uncomfortably at my restless rocking of the seat, time is accelerating, rushing by, or just as likely frozen in its tracks, itself being pursued, harried, run to earth, an excavation where I'm indeed caving, my vision blurring, fading I've gazed so long at Mitchell, his gray, close-cropped head, his thin dignified face scored with two deep lines along the cheeks, his slender body bending slightly like a reed, a sly-fox look I think I see as he opens his eyes and then lets them close again.

            Facing the stage lights, in a dark-blue suit with the saxophone strap at his neck like a matching tie, his hold on the alto loose, his long-boned fingers tracking the keys in what seems an extra space, the horn engaged rather than gripped, at the same time his cheeks puffing and between his lips the steel mouthpiece nearly vanishing as if the reed would be engulfed, swallowed, fox eating a bird that sings down the throat, I too gorged among that plumage.  The saxophone won't play a low-down mellow blues, fine as that might be, won't ingeniously embroider a set of chord changes, wonderful as that might be; it's racked and screaming, it's sardonic or elegiac or tearing over the surface of its own lyric traction, fluttering and buzzing and skirling like mad bagpipes, reeling off staccato altissimo figures, answering itself with bumptious or lugubrious arpeggios bottoming out hard, sometimes long pitches sustained in humming musette-like vibrato or in heavy, booming double-stops, sometimes pitches by design misfiring, detrained, out of joint,

tonight at a juncture where concepts cross explosively with the soloist's passion for spontaneous creation, perhaps inspired by the showcase setting of the quartet, perhaps by the occasion of Anderson's birthday, perhaps simply because this is what he does, a music of rigorous invention at the same time so dazzlingly eccentric and exorbitant I despair of writing another word about it, only feeling an impolitic desire to shout, to roll on the floor--it's midnight, the horns are shining gold, pouring out time into the naked lilies of our ears, it's Easter--not because I'm being affirmed, the music giving me what I want, but because it's messing me up, it's taking me apart, it's a plaguing where I'm stalled, tranced in a rawly prepositional element, a wild territory of suspended objects, crisscrossed tracks, vanishing trails.

                                    ####

Like him I am consumed--later, imposing themselves on a swiftly fading memory of the performance, images and cadences from Rimbaud's poems insistently come to my mind.  After many years I hear again the intimate pressure of his generosity and his hunger; I quicken again to the great leaps he makes across time and space; I believe once more in the alchemy of vowels, the colors of words.  In the music's wake, I feel a hunger, a greed, as I did when first encountering those poems, so entranced by their art, so exhilarated by it, that I thought all I ever desired was his.  I had been tremendously grateful and tremendously jealous.  Not an uncommon response, to wish to stay in those books, to live there forever, fierce invalid in possession of tropic gold, wounded

soul enamored of the sun-running sea.  This inspiration proves that I have dreamed: the words at the beginning of A Season in Hell, in particular, had stuck with me, implicit in the phrase a passionate rejection of the bourgeois world, an audacious claim to a vision beyond it, a bold research into unknown powers of language and dream.  For me it was to be a credo that invited a good share of confusion and failure, and as much as I wanted to be him, and as much as I followed a well-worn path of idol-worship and emulation, among my dreams I often forgot that it was charite--generosity, disinterestedness--which had been Rimbaud's key.        

            Let us be as avaricious as the sea--wanting, wanting: of the music, too, I would like to live again each note and phrase, each motion and detail, would like to gobble it up, engorge it, have it on tape, on CD, on digital video, taking property in an ephemeral passage of time and sound and gesture whose essence must be its supreme indifference to being held, its singular ungraspability.  Like an ocean swell it washes over me, and in its element it is I who am possessed and shaken.  And as much as I would in turn like it to engorge and engulf me, dispossession yet another form of property, my own being owned, I'm thrown back on my own devices, landed somewhere else, here.

            Charity is that key.  In the fading resonance of the music's train, among the traces of Rimbaud's language, I begin to remember something of the dream of generosity, the generosity of the dream.

                                                ####

            Smokestack lightning, Howlin' Wolf sang, shining just like gold.  I later read that

smokestack lightning was moonshine, but on first hearing the lyric sung in Chester Burnett's hard-gravel voice I imagined the glowing steel of a fresh Santa Fe locomotive riding out of Chicago in the gray light of early morning, a first ray of sun striking the hard metal, a swift flash like a gift of good omen across the chilly air. 

            Once at a festival in Wicker Park, as Roscoe Mitchell was playing a solo piece, the sun caught the alto's bell in the same way I'd years before imagined, at that very moment an El train rumbling by on the Milwaukee Avenue line sounding its horn, and the sweet and tough music of the saxophone running up with it, against it, between it.

            Walking the other day through a light November rain in Baltimore, I reached a corner on Ann Street, and in a hurry, I suppose, or for a reason I don't recall, crossed to the other side.  The trees had all turned, the lindens mild golds, the maples flaring through rose and crimson and incarnadine, mostly young trees, not at all tall, maybe ten or twenty years old, nobody bothering about sweeping and raking the leaves, negligently letting their colors stay on the ground where, once the wind or the rain moved them on, their faint imprints would make ghostly cutouts on the pavement.

            And yes, in front of the neighbor's old Federal, dead in my tracks, the small maple flush with reds stopped me, arrested me like a signal flashing time, time, half of its leaves still clinging to the branches, washed with rain and streaked with running colors, the other half strewn thick across the steps, the sidewalk, the hood and the roof of the car parked there.    

            It made me happy--that corny word that smacks of smile-faces and product delivery seemed the only word for it, the sight of the tree gloriously shedding its leaves, the touch of house and street and the rainy day stained with time, and I went home and dreamed over the word, happy, hap meaning luck, hap meaning timing, time, as Thomas Hardy's poem reminds us in ironic and somber tones, as Mitchell's music dreams us the lights and shadows of a train passing us even as we’re riders on it, curving through a long tunnel and then coming out on a high bridge that sways under us and exposes us to a river wind that shears across our road, we feel the shaking, the vibration under our wheels, and we pass before we know it a place we travelers have never seen before, another earth like our own bearing valleys and trees and birds and cities and peoples, though when we do the only word we have for its advent is one we already know, is dream, or world.