“We’re lost in music“
-Sister Sledge
What does it mean, that word? On tour, I used to get lost a lot, mislaying myself in the mazes of unknown streets. After a while I’d be almost scared to go out, and I couldn’t ask people the way because…well, that’s part of a longer story.
Being lost in something can be an “immersion”, like a warm bath, but you can also find yourself, as either player or listener, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or, as happened to me, you can watch yourself, in slow motion, lead a whole band down the plughole.
Teaching on a summer school, I found myself replacing an absent drummer in a group who were completely new to playing jazz. They were perpetually lost, and deliriously happy. I, on the other hand, knew exactly what I needed to do, as a non-drummer, and sat on something simple within my meagre capabilities. Everyone knows the drummer is in charge, and as long as you hit something at the main junctions and roundabouts of the tune, everyone also knows where everyone is. You just need to jump out of the pattern for a moment to do it (sounds easy enough on all those records)…but…I hadn’t figured out how to make that single change, to move one arm to the cymbal and keep my feet going. It was like I gained a momentary leg in a Sousa march….left, right, left, right, left, right, left, left, right….in this case I wasn’t lost, just nine thousand nine hundred and ninety eight hours short of the ten thousand hours needed to do what was necessary, to paraphrase Jay Z (…editor’s note, maybe leave that Jay-Z bit out). In the absence of the necessary traffic calming amenities, there were numerous collisions, but it’s only music and no one was hurt.
More recently, in lockdown, I was drafted into a student led workshop to assist musicians and dancers find ways to improvise together online. There were a lot of break out rooms, and people briefly talked about their feelings of isolation and whatever else came up (not much else came up) before being catapulted (“ok, thanks everyone, that was very meaningful“) back into the communal awkwardness of a zoom call with fifteen strangers in it.
Eventually, I played a bit and some people danced impressively towards the back wall of their bedrooms, which if nothing else emphasised their feelings of imprisonment. One dancer, however, did something unusual. She leaned in towards the camera and did a kind of finger dance, peering at the camera as her hand became a strange, five legged insect. Anyone could have done it, and yet it seemed like the only sane response to the situation, sane and imaginative, a moment of communication across the unnerving distance. She used the space, the frame of the camera, the fact of our isolation. I had a hunch we could do something together, but I didn’t know what.
We kept in touch, I played in her final Masters recital, and now we are thinking about more collaborations. I’m drawn to the beauty of her movement, but not only that, there’s something awkward about it, and something resilient too (her five legged insect would, in its asymmetry, understand). I’m drawn to her work as I am drawn to Monk, to the wobbly gait of Billy Higgins’ smiling cymbals, to Arto Lindsay’s spoken song. Underneath the language, which I am slowly growing to appreciate and understand, there’s a fundamental way of thinking about the world.
I can’t, and don’t, dance. I barely move. But I’m starting to think about the movement involved in the playing of an instrument, to look for connections, lines of communication. We both, I suppose, deal in architectural structures that dissolve in the memory as soon as they are created but, in reality, to move upwards in a melody is not the same as that same movement in space. Gravity pulls us musicians towards a key, a feeling of “home”, in a partly man made system of tonal relations- but for a dancer, gravity is very real. There are bruises I hear.
So I think I’m lost because, as somebody once said to me whilst trying to play an unfamiliar tempo, “none of my shit works”. I don’t know if my people are talking to her people, or if they, in fact, should? Perhaps we just wind up the two clockwork toys and let them go their way, and the connections are made in the minds of the audience.
It’s as if the map in your hand suddenly demands that you smell your way home, or the scent of your neighbour’s roses becomes a cloud of tumbling, nonsensical letters. The chance that it all might fail, or that it may succeed without you knowing it, is part of the appeal. For Sister Sledge, being “lost in music” was an experience that made them quit their day jobs. But to “feel so alive”, as they did, you must sometimes feel scared to death.
Brother Face 