Hey pals,
Without getting too deep into it, the last week has been kinda rough. Layoffs and instability at my job (although I am, for the moment, still employed) and the passing of a very close family member have rocked my boat a little bit.
But, as it says on the seal of Paris:
Fluctuat Nec Mergitur
Storm-tossed, but never sunk.
On Sunday I attended the release of Skullcrushing Hummingbird vol. 4 - a zine curated by Laurence Lilvik - to which I had contributed a piece of art/poetry made from a cutup of a Big Nothing article. At the event I was talking to someone about the value of arcane discovery in an age governed by algorithms. His story was that as a young skateboarder he went to hang at an older skater’s house after a session and heard Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” for the first time and was just totally mindblown by it. For me it was Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie doing Bloomdido on “Bird and Diz” which hit me like a ton of bricks when I was 17, so much so that I had to pull over to the side of the road and start the track over again.
The next morning my aunt passed away after a battle with a rare kind of cancer that moved from her pancreas to her spine. I drove across town and listened to the Live at Juan-les-Pins version of “Love Supreme” that features truly excellent solos from both Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums.
Although I’ve never been to Juan-les-Pins, the resort town situated between Cannes and Nice occupies a special place in my heart for two reasons. First is this live recording of “Love Supreme” with André Francis’ iconic introduction (“A la contrabasse, Jee-mee Gahree-SON, au piano MackCoy TYner!”) and the crowd booing at the end as Coltrane played the four-month-old record front to back without including any of his more well-known hits at the time.
Second is one of may all-time favorite novels, “Voyage de Noces” by Nobel laureate, Patrick Modiano. In the book, the protagonist - an adventurer known only as “Jean B.” - decides that he has had enough of exploring the far reaches of the Earth and plumbs the unknown wilds of his own memory. The particular thread that he begins to pull leads him back to a summer in his late teens when he met a mysterious couple while hitchhiking. The couple had weathered the Nazi occupation of France by hiding out in a resort in Juan-les-Pins, posing as newlyweds on their honeymoon (or voyage de noces, en Français). It is a lovely, short, sad book like most of Modiano’s work and if you’re in the mood for getting bummed out in a very particularly French sort of way, I can’t recommend it enough.
Something struck me while I was listening to the album yesterday. The tracklist goes like this:
Acknowledgement
Resolution
Pursuance
Psalm
I’ve always found it interesting that Pursuance follows Resolution. Resolution has a sort of finality to it, especially in a musical context. When a chord or a melody resolves, it moves from a place of dissonance to one of consonance or harmony. It’s the end of a phrase, the end of the song, a way to indicate to the listener that something is ending. And in a way, in “Love Supreme”, Resolution is an ending. It marks the final groove on side one of the LP. But, of course, there’s a B-Side to the record which he begins with Pursuance, with renewed movement after the Resolution. And as I listened to it yesterday, thinking about my aunt who’s time with us had ended, I took some solace in that. The other side of the record. A place to explore like Jean B. after the physical limitations have been exhausted. Somewhere outside the world this existence where the wind always blows off the Mediterranean through the stone pines while a saxophone wails into the night.
Bonus: Here’s the poem/art piece I did for Skullcrushing Hummingbird vol. 4:
That’s it for today. Thanks for listening.