Late Arcade Read online

  also by nathaniel mackey

  Fiction

  Bedouin Hornbook

  Djbot Baghostus’s Run

  Atet A.D.

  Bass Cathedral

  From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate: Volumes 1–3

  Poetry Books and Chapbooks

  Four for Trane

  Septet for the End of Time

  Outlantish

  Song of the Andoumboulou: 18–20

  Four for Glenn

  Anuncio’s Last Love Song

  Outer Pradesh

  Moment’s Omen

  Lay Ghost

  School of Oud

  Eroding Witness

  School of Udhra

  Whatsaid Serif

  Splay Anthem

  Nod House

  Blue Fasa

  Criticism

  Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing

  Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews

  Anthologies

  Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose, with Art Lange

  Recordings

  Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16–25

  for my cousin

  Kenneth Ray Kahn

  Late Arcade

  14.IX.83

  Dear Angel of Dust,

  Djamilaa brought a new composition to rehearsal today. It’s called “Sekhet Aaru Struff,” a title that immediately, as you can imagine, got my attention, alluding, as it does, to my own “Sekhet Aaru Strut.” Putting “struff ” in “strut’s” place, it alludes as well to the piece from which it borrows the term (if it can be called a term), Johnny Dyani’s “The Robin Irland Struff ” on the African Bass album he did with Clifford Jarvis a few years back. I’m inclined to say it pointedly alludes to both, albeit its “point” would appear to be a diffusion of point, an advancement of blur (with overtones of slur) tending to dislocate point. What, that is, was Dyani getting at with “Robin Irland” if not an ambiguation of “Robben Island,” a pointedly malaprop version bordering on slur? And doesn’t “struff ” go on in the same vein, subjecting “stuff,” “strut,” “straw,” “fluff,” “bluff ” and any number of other phonically related words to an ambiguating fusion and diffusion, upping the ante on the already indefinite “stuff ”? Djamilaa perhaps had this in mind. Perhaps she meant the replacement of “strut” by “struff ” as an ambiguating move, a deflationary tack perhaps.

  However much the replacement of “strut” diffuses and deflates a certain self-congratulation at the titular level, however much “struff ” does indeed mess with “strut,” does indeed mush it up, taking the wind out of the sails its apparent pleasure with itself could be said to be, I say “perhaps” because the music itself does anything but diminish or deride. “Struff ” notwithstanding, it conveys no loss or ratcheting down of dimension, no lack of majesty. It’s better, perhaps, to simply say a certain modesty obtains, a shying away from the presumption self-nomination can’t but entail. “Struff ” wants to lighten up, walk lightly, outflank if not entirely break free from such presumption.

  “Sekhet Aaru Struff’s” light tread compounds a sense of light as trepidatious gait with a competing sense of light as bouyancy, a saltatory élan nowhere more notable than in the bounding figure Aunt Nancy sustains on bass. Atop and to a degree at odds with the bass’s throb-inflected walk, I pursue a more tentative approach on trumpet, the trepidatious advance adumbrated by “struff’s” unraveling of “strut’s” edges, a frayed, fraught excursion bereft of any but ad hoc assurances. Drennette steps away from the traps in favor of bongos and conga for this piece, peppering and otherwise abetting Aunt Nancy’s bounding figure while helping propel and punctuating the piece on other fronts as well. Djamilaa herself plays synthesizer, though “presides on” would be a more accurate way to put it, so fully does she avail herself and the piece of a sense of ultimacy, majesty and moment, an incumbent cosmicity or an abiding ethereality the synthesizer is famously able to impart.

  The most unusual aspect of the piece’s instrumentation is that Lambert and Penguin don’t play their horns, assigned instead to something Djamilaa variously terms extended voice (nodding to Meredith Monk), prepared voice (nodding to John Cage) and amended voice or (further accenting her own intervention, underscoring her nodding to no one if not herself) amended mouth. Each is given a text to read, excerpts from a chapter of the Chapters of Coming Forth by Day. Lambert’s is taken from Chapter XV, “A Hymn of Praise to Ra when He Riseth in the Eastern Part of Heaven,” which mentions Sekhet Aaru toward the end: “Let him mingle among the Heart-souls who live in Ta-tchesert. Let him travel about in the Sekhet Aaru, conformably to thy decree with joy of heart—him the Osiris Ani, whose word is truth.” Penguin’s is taken from Chapter CX, “The Chapters of Sekhet Hetepet,” which concerns arrival in Sekhet Aaru and living in the city of Sekhet Hetepet, e.g., “Let me go forward. Let me plough. I am at peace with the god of the town. I know the water, the towns, the nomes, and the lakes which are in Sekhet Hetepet. I live therein. I am strong therein.” Lambert recites first, then Penguin.

  By extended voice, prepared voice, amended voice or amended mouth Djamilaa means that Lambert and Penguin each clamp three clothespins to their lips for the piece, two of them clamped to and hanging down from the sides of the upper lip, one of them clamped to and hanging down from the middle of the lower lip. The aim is to alter their elocution, to pidginize, as Djamilaa puts it, the papyrus of Ani. She instructed them not to let it stop simply at that but to assist the aleatory work done by the clothespins (or, as she sometimes terms it, the amendments) by furthering it, consciously recasting the text, at the point of enunciation, as universal patois, idiosyncratically conceived. “Think of Pharoah’s ‘Japan,’” she exhorted. “Think of the long line of scat behind it. You could do worse than think of Slim Gaillard or of Clark Terry’s ‘Mumbles,’ to say nothing of all the vatic chatter outside the music.”

  Lambert and Penguin wondered if Djamilaa was serious at first (Aunt Nancy, Drennette and I wondered as well), especially when Penguin noticed the sentence “Behold my mouth is equipped” in the text he was to read, at which point he started laughing and, sure it was all a joke, said to Djamilaa, “Okay, you got us. Touché.” Djamilaa, though, looked at him as if she had no idea what he meant. Quickly enough, we all saw that indeed she had no idea what he meant. She was nothing if not serious, though she did allow, responding a bit later to a question Lambert raised regarding “amendment as endowment versus amendment as obstruction,” that the tactic might be viewed as a bit quirky. “But who says quirky can’t be serious?” she rhetorically asked.

  Lambert and Penguin, then, approached their parts (in many ways the linchpin of the piece) with all due seriousness, holding any impulse to ham it up, go tongue in cheek or in some other way play for comic effect at bay. Each adopted a damped inflection, whisperlike but a whisper less in volume than tone, conspiratorial—open, even so, to exhortative, declamatory moments now and again. The clothespins did their job of detour, inhibiting certain habits of pronunciation while enabling alternatives, conducing to a pestered, repercussive manner of speech that did indeed, thanks to the synthesizer’s choric hints and empyrean laminates, seem the issue of a pidginizing “celestriality” (to use Alan Silva’s term), universal patois. I need to stress that this wasn’t arrived at quickly, that there were a number of false starts and a good deal of trial and error before Lambert and Penguin found the right vocalic balance and blend, the requisite pace and restraint to make it work.

  As I’ve noted, Djamilaa extracted a lush but buried oratorio from the synthesizer, interred, if on
e could so say it, in the firmament, a streaming advance and a sheeting sweep thru the heavens. Solemnity and moment, neither untouched by requiem, were hers to maintain, universal bounty both mourned and extolled. Swell had to do with it, as did surge, emanation, pulse—pressed amenities it was all one could do not to be borne away by, however much (yet all the more) one felt allied.

  As for my part, it especially fell to me, as I’ve already said, not to be borne away, to offer an astringent bounding bass and universal bounty could be qualified by. Counterpoise and parry were typically my lines’ relation to Lambert’s and Penguin’s readings, moments of convergence not altogether absent. Moot sublimity, all such rally was earned assurance’s emptying out, a hollowing out. Incertitude vied with assurance, earned assurance hallowing hitch, hesitation, sputter’s recondite remit. Lambert and I or Penguin and I, as were the trumpet and I, were each the other’s hollow extension.

  We played the piece a good number of times, even after we finally got it down (especially after we finally got it down). I’m enclosing a tape of the best version.

  As ever,

  N.

  19.IX.83

  Dear Angel of Dust,

  We played a gig at the Comeback Inn over in Venice night before last, a place on Washington about a third of the way between Lincoln and the canals that’s been around for about ten years. I heard Joe Farrell there five years ago. We were pretty surprised to get the call, our stuff being more outside than what they normally book. Evidently it had a lot to do with last year’s Kool Jazz Festival, a lineup called “New Directions in Sound and Rhythm” that most folks in town still haven’t gotten over—some in a negative way, some positive, as appears to be the case with the owner of the Comeback Inn. It was an unlikely lineup for a Kool Jazz Festival, especially one here in L.A., a bit like an invasion from Chicago, the AACM side of Chicago: Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Air, Lester Bowie’s From the Root to the Source, Leroy Jenkins’s Sting, Roscoe Mitchell’s Sound and Space. Also on the bill were James “Blood” Ulmer, the World Saxophone Quartet, John Carter, Laurie Anderson and the Nikolai Dance Theatre. Though we had mixed feelings about this kind of music being presented under as commercial an imprimatur as Kool (Aunt Nancy at one point claimed to wonder if the balloons would begin emerging as smoke rings), it was all rather beautifully anomalous, inspiringly so, nowhere near business-as-usual. One funny thing we’ve heard is that the night Laurie Anderson, Leroy Jenkins’s band, the Art Ensemble and the Nikolai dance troupe performed at the Santa Monica Civic more than a few people showed up expecting to hear Sting the rock singer. Anyway, the owner of the Comeback Inn specifically mentioned the Kool Festival. “It really opened my ears,” Lambert told us he told him when he called, going on to joke, “It might’ve even grown me a new pair.” He went on to say he’d been meaning to get in touch for a while and asked if we’d play there some night. Lambert said yes and they decided on a date.

  It’s a small restaurant with not much in the way of a stage, just a spot in one of the corners where they clear away a few tables. It was no great shakes, but a number of friends showed up and it all went well, with a few moments here and there that more than simply went well. Penguin took an alto solo on “The Slave’s Day Off,” for example, that had Aunt Nancy, draped over the bass like a rag doll, sustaining a rafters-rattling walk that belied her rag-doll diffidence, a walk whose lowest note repeatedly served as Penguin’s moment of truth. Repeatedly, Aunt Nancy’s walk’s furthering pulse notwithstanding, Penguin, with a broken gait and ghost timbre recalling John Tchicai, took stock of the wherefore of going on, assaying, it seemed, every reason not to. A rummaging hover, low to the ground it seemed, the horn’s low-register audit, Hamlet-like, left no dissuasive stone unturned. Repeatedly, Penguin pulled free of such hover by way of an angular but oddly damped move into the middle and upper registers, refusing to posit such ascent as triumphant (“flat” refusal, lateral dispatch), a resolution of the quandaries by which he was beset. Repeatedly, he offered no resolution, as though resolution could only be false, the more false the more triumphalist, the more false the more defeatist as well. It was some of Penguin’s headiest, most heartfelt playing ever, a mesmerizing insistence upon and abidance in a third way that wasn’t just a middle way, a hypnotic hum, hover and run of a solo that didn’t so much finish as fade, beg off ending, beg off going on, Penguin pulling away from the mike playing less and less loudly. As I’ve said, there were other moments as well.

  Arguably, however, the gig’s aftermath upstaged the gig itself, its most eventful moment occurring afterward, as though a time lag of some sort were in effect. Drennette, that is, tells us that two balloons followed her home (as she puts it) after the gig. She says that yesterday as she was unpacking her drumset, setting up to practice, they emerged as she lifted the lid to the parade snare’s container. Before she took the drum out of the container, before she even reached in to take hold of it, a balloon floated up out of the container, emerging from under the slightly lifted lid as though the opening effected by the lifting were the container’s mouth. The balloon, floating just above the opening, contained these words: Too funky. Too forward. So rude the way of the world, too crude. The nerve of him to come on that way, slick-chivalric. “Be my queen,” he said. “Let my face be your throne. I’ll lick your pussy, I’ll sniff at your ass-crack.” So crude a way to put it, so rude the way of the world. It hung there a while and then vanished, at which point a second balloon floated up out of the container and hung just above the opening. Inside the second balloon were these words: “You oughta not be so funky with it,” I should’ve said, semisung, Aretha-like, mock-operatic, and would’ve said, semisung, Aretha-like, mock-operatic, had I only thought of it in time. Instead, I stood speechless, taken aback. It hung there a while, just above the parade snare’s container’s opening, and then vanished.

  Drennette says the balloons (the first one in particular) remind her of the X-rated balloons that emerged from the dancers’ fists during our record-release gig at The Studio back in February, the emergence our recourse to a 4/4 shuffle meter brought about. She can’t help surmising, she says, that the two balloons might be tied to a somewhat similar moment during our second set at the Comeback Inn, a passage during “Tosaut L’Ouverture” in which Aunt Nancy touched ever so lightly upon a 4/4 shuffle, not so much committing unequivocally as alluding to it. In response, Drennette resorted to an obliquely stated backbeat, bordering on tongue-in-cheek, a manner of statement that had it both ways, both advancing the backbeat and beating it back, holding it at bay. It was a passing moment, not at all drawn out, but Drennette says it was that moment, she’s convinced, that passage, that gave rise to the balloons in the parade snare’s container. That they hid and followed her home, she says, rather than emerging right there during the gig (no balloons appeared at any point during the gig) adds a new wrinkle to this whole balloon phenomenon that we need to think seriously about.

  Drennette went on to say, as we talked about this during rehearsal, that she noticed a certain concord (as she put it) between the leverage she and Aunt Nancy had applied to the backbeat and the 4/4 shuffle and the casting of the first balloon’s X-rated material in quotes, to say nothing of the explicit distancing from and disapproval of that material the balloon expressed. She wondered if, consistent with this, the balloons’ delayed emergence doesn’t bespeak reserve, a sense of restraint, modesty even, albeit the business of hiding away and following her home does have, she can’t help feeling, a sinister side. Or does the delay, she went on to speculate further, have to do with the speechlessness or the inability to immediately respond, the being less than quick on the uptake, to which the second balloon confesses? What also strikes her, she went on to say in an outrush of questions and thoughts that made it clear how deeply the balloons had gotten to her, is that the balloons appear to have a sense of history, so unmistakably, in this instance, harking back to an earlier em
ergence.

  A good amount of discussion ensued, none of us quite sure what to make of this new development but each of us, notwithstanding, venturing a comment or two, a question or two, a surmise or two. Lambert, for example, led off by all but asking Drennette, whose manner was ponderous, weighty, bordering on distraught, to lighten up, noting that it wasn’t the balloons’ sense of history he was struck by but their sense of humor, especially the second balloon’s reference to Aretha’s “nasty gym shoe” ad lib on the Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky) album. Aunt Nancy, on the other hand, agreed with Drennette regarding the rapport between levered backbeat and 4/4 shuffle and the balloons’ recourse to quotation, adding that the use of the conditional tense appeared to her to have to do with this as well. Thus, things were off and going.

  Much got said during the discussion but we all continue to give this new development thought. And though much got said, not everything that might’ve been said got said. Djamilaa mentioned to me later that she didn’t bring it up, for obvious reasons, but there seemed to her to be a strongly personal element to the balloons’ manner of emergence and their content both, that it seemed they wanted to say something about Drennette or even that Drennette wanted to say something about herself: putatively hard-ass Drennette, putatively repercussive Drennette, Drennette Virgin. “‘Slick-chivalric,’” she said, “rhymewise and otherwise, has Rick written all over it.”

  More anon.

  Yours,

  N.

  24.IX.83

  Dear Angel of Dust,

  More balloons last night. It was during the John Coltrane Birthday Concert we took part in at the Century City Playhouse. The folks at Rhino Records organized it and a good number of bands played. The usual suspects from around town were there: Badi Taqsim’s trio, the Boneyard Brass Octet, SunStick and the Chosen Few, Horace Tapscott’s quintet. Bobby Bradford and John Carter came in from Pasadena, Roberto Miranda came in from the Valley. It was a marvelous event. Weatherwise, what had been a beautiful day turned into a beautiful evening, somewhat on the warm side, a touch of Indian summer, but unusually clear, sparkling, a bit of burnish left over from the day. Most of the musicians hung around outside when not playing. One could still hear the music and it was nice to see and talk with folks one hadn’t seen in a while. We milled around in front, some of us strolling a block or two up or down Pico. Badi Taqsim and I stood gazing thru the fence at the Rancho Park Golf Course at one point, talking about recent bookings at Hollywood’s Catalina Bar & Grill. Anyway, we played a couple of pieces, “Sun Ship” and “Sekhet Aaru Struff.” It was our first public performance of “Sekhet Aaru Struff ” and it was during this piece that the balloons emerged. It was actually, to be more precise, during a section toward the end of the piece that was a bit of a detour, a turn toward rumba initiated by Drennette.