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Yul Agee Manu: Of Why Am I As I Am With Women? Heffley wrote:
This is one of several recordings I've done with two trombone tracks dubbed over a piano track. There's something about the symmetry of the two hands and the two horns, and the contrast of the clean, new powerhouse-chromatic hammered strings with the dirty sliding ancient voice of the horns that really fascinated me in the studio. That, and the push of my envelope to maximum information density (how many notes and how much speed is just shy of too many and much?)
This music set 7 poems with 5% sketched motifs, 95% improvs.
Even though I paired this CD with the preceding one for their titles’ common theme of sex and love and the deaths thereof between man and woman, this one also compares well with another of those “several recordings,” Meditations on Early Braxton for the more sheerly musical reasons that drew my comparison between Marriage, Disease, Divorce and Nine Medieval Troubador/Goliard Songs.
The common such ground here lies in the dense texture and intensity of the sound and aesthetic. Every track, every phrase, harmony, and note is like a bramble in the tight interlock of a briar patch. Like the chaotic swirls of a hologram before the laser light hits it, those components seem indistinguishably jumbled when they break upon the ear...until the light of brain waves interferes with their patterns to simulate different orders and dimensionalities. The trinity of composer-improvisers--itself something of a holographic product, of one creative spirit, two instruments, and three tracks--makes for an in-growth of male parthenogenesis that suggests why the theological conceit has had such legs in history.
The fertility thereof makes for a field bursting with the kinds of pattern generation that so fascinated Heffley in his doctoral studies of free improvisations. The point of that research was to show the order arising spontaneously from music-making organisms refusing to orchestrate it. Such order invariably expanded fractally from individual units of time through larger sequences of them, as is the case here.
We have nine tracks--three 6-7 minutes long, two twice as long, three more 5-7 minutes, then a second take of the first track’s piece, to end the CD with the statement that opened it, and on the shortest track (4:11). The energy grows sporadically through the first three, digs in on the high and wide plateau of the fourth, dances around more loosely on that terrain through the fifth, then eases back to the ground of the first through the sixth, seventh, and eighth, again sporadically, as such comings up and goings down do unfold in life.
Graphically, it runs so:
1. = = =
2. ----
3. ----
4. --------
5. --------
6. ----
7. ----
8. ----
9. = =
Suffice it to say that such gestures/sitings of symmetry and periodicity in unorchestrated musical time have charmed and bewitched the aesthete in the artist in proportion to the obliviousness in which he spun them out.
As for the lyrics, one would think one’s obsession with one’s love life would finally die its death, natural or unnatural, after such a statement as Marriage, Disease, Divorce...but one such love gives way to the next, until all do fall and fade. In any case, to ask Why Am I As I Am with Women? may not be an obsessive question here. It may rather be the quizzical musings of a man no longer with a woman, wondering what all the fuss was about.
1. Astarte Won That is, version/track number one of the piece called “Astarte”. Why that? Part of the art of spontaneous improvisation; it was just a start, one (the first) of two takes here. Heffley played with the words (a start 1) that way, and followed its sound down through the opening piano notes’ reflection of it into the subsequent free-associated lyrics.
“Did I startle you?” he asks the listener...why? Because he startled himself with the opening. The word has a lift and accent of its own that jerks one from silence to music abruptly and decisively. The piano dances in like water rippling after receiving the thrown stone of the word, pulling in and drawing out the two trombones, one bucket-, one straight-mutated. Nice sound and balance, a tasteful touch of reverb...
“A start!” he claims again. “Goddess as tart as you wanna be.” Or was it “Got us Astarte as...” Either way, we are entered upon an invocation of the pre-patriarchal goddess of fertility, sex, and war--an interesting follow-up to the imagery in Marriage, Disease, Divorce. The tri-one of instruments covers, chases after rather than puzzles over, all possible meanings. Themes and motives are discernible in the piano, but as a kayak running down the rapids of improvised ornaments and diversions; the bones, soft-toned and cracky, fluffy-inflected, signify on that riverring key-board motor.
“From a start to a finish,” intones the voice back to the ground of mundane meaning. The music has worked its magic well to this point, establishing the temporal architecture of cathartic ecstasy so temperately that the deep calm of the voice is a force it has borne aloft, not drowned or been quelled by. “Affinity’s end:”--(see how he free-associates from the sounds of the words to spin out new meanings? a-finish/affinity)--clearly meaning goal attained, not death. As such, the music plays on and out agreeably, a reprise to the sound and senstrate of the words, their sound, their meaning.
We’re in the realm outside time, the alpha and omega Female invoked by the parthenogenic male, couching/entraining all tracks out from and back to her. She is the highest thought that can be thought, but still just a pale ghost of the unthinkable, ineffable reality she signals.
2. MalPractice Suit Heffley had the good fortune to get to know, spend some session time with, and sit in with pianist Mal Waldron in the 1980s in Eugene, Oregon--one of the first of many subsequent such musical engagements with the masters and heroes of his youth in adulthood. This tune was his awkward attempt then to capture something of the clunky yet cool efficiency and soul he felt from Waldron’s “Hard Talk” (recorded here on another CD).
This is one of those tracks that aspiring improvisers--especially pianists and trombonists and composers for improvisers--would benefit from slowing down, as perennial students did and still do play Bud Powell and Charlie Parker records on slower speeds. What sounds like the reflexive thrash of the instinctive cathartist shows itself so slowed to be the virtuosity of years of formal theoretical and practical training and craft.
The words of the first track invoked and evoked the Goddess, woman; these expound on the spirit and body in music, presented as the scribe’s literate rendering of his mentor’s wise oral pronouncements. Waldron’s male power--like that of Miles Davis, Anthony Braxton, Lester Young, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor and others in the jazz tradition--was that of the androgyne, the shaman both wounded and empowered by the Goddess within and without.
(Generally, the sound quality on this CD is among the better of the home-engineered projects, but the word “humble” was buried at the end...for those of you who will wonder what it is...)
3. Thanks Giving Day Here is a perfect statement beyond the fear and pain of loneliness: not pining, not whining...not winning, not losing. The pure and simple Being beyond renunciation of family and social ties, of worldly distractions, the glad embrace of solitude is described in the words; the actual experience--of meditation, where stillness bears struggle leads to conflict leads to resolution via energy in the stillness--is expressed, demonstrated by the music.
The music--a slow, pensive piano, wah-wah and open-harmoned bones gently rolled in like dice--clearly dominates the voice, as a force...but the voice never submits to force. It floats on force, guides force, names it like the beauty and the beast that it is. The voice and music thus are extensions of both affect and meaning of the previous track, about Mal: the piano is as forceful, but in a slower, more relaxed tempo; the bones are double now, and mute-altered; the voice is deeper, clearer, more audible, its words pithier. Breakthrough achieved, third track’s the charm...
4. Who Is She? is the summit of this CD. The entrance into it defines the tracks leading to it as a climb up a roughly sheer cliff face to the top of a long mesa. The interval of the first notes--an octave, sounded by the horn--figures the bottom and the top of that vertical bluff; the chunky-rhythm piano improvs on it show the little finger- and toe-holds that make the climb possible, and interesting. The track as a whole is greater than the sum of these parts; it is the flat top of the elevation after it’s been scaled--something an airplane could land on, or a couple of football games share a common end zone in the middle of--where the artist walks and runs us through his paces across and around the thing. His music is that motion, and his words are the rare, enchanting view of the world below.
That world is a moment in the flow of normal time. As music can do best, we are lifted out of that flow to that place that can stretch a moment into eternity, and can compact the static span of years gone past into a dynamic moment surfing the wave of the now.
That Moment: the Male gaze upon the Female--his first-sited sight, the scrutiny and thought applied thereto, the sating and sad or happy end thereof. His lyrics--lines of minimalist poetry set between thick rigors of starkly clustered sound, mirroring verses differed only by the shift from present to past tense--could be describing his glimpse and rapid assessment of an impressive woman and the impression she’s making/made on him...or his timeless meditative muse on a woman who played a big, longtime role in his life and is now going/gone, through departure or death, her own or his.
This shift from first to second verse, from present to past, happens almost at the dead center of the 14:34-minute track. It has already stopped time in its tracks by then, and we think that surely it must end, as the tracks preceding it had around the same point. When it continues on into and through another cycle, the rational part of us knows it is doing so not on its own free momentum but because an overarching structural principle is commanding it to. The mystical part of us knows we, with the player, are now officially seized and possessed by his daemon, the genius of the piece.
It is even slower than the increasingly slowed prior three tracks, in the beginning, more ominously so...more reverb and volume, more clarity in its complexity. The first (open) bone opens it up; the second (bucket-muted) eases in sly and gradual.The effect is of a rapid snowballing of detail, yet all remains transparent throughout the density and business, because it is a magnification of quiet (buzzing/chattering/tongue-tripping/lip-breaking) soundplay, not a loud virtuosity or primal screen. The voice sounds relaxed and normal, thoughtful, an inner monologue; the music is the microscoped close-up of unarticulated but hyper-articulate emotion generating the words and silences between them. Bones and ivories don’t let each other, let alone voice, get their words in edgewise, so, again, they skip across the waters like stones. The structure of the piece redefines cathartic ecstasy’s baroque unity, steamrolling universalism, into a train of two segments (engine-and-caboose) rolling down the track’s two rails, slowing to end in the energy that began it.
5. Eye Spring The two verses of this song paint a picture of eternal rebound: however low love lays him, he will always bounce back, ever higher. The song was written in the wake of his small success with “Once Upon a Tempo,” written for and recorded by singer Meredith d’Ambrosio (It’s Your Dance, Sunnyside Records). Heffley had fantasies of following Yip Harburg, Cole Porter, David Frishberg and similar artists in new pages of the American Songbook...but the impulse faded and gave way to the overgrown weed gardens of performances such as this.
Two images apply here: a dancer leaping and airborne, and Sisyphus on his way up the mountain. Both are of the initial “spring” before the inevitable “fall.” Actually, “Who Is She?” was the summit plateau just after ascent, this the same plane just before descent. The music voices the opposites of tightness and rigor, though of like intense pitch. His voice is ridiculously louche, as singers go, but it rephrases the old maxim about teachers as “those who can’t, do.” The whole track devolves more than develops through the verses, voice and instruments ending by trading fragments rather than anything so prosaic as “fours.” It indulges in overwrought rubato rambles, no grooves but much digging for them...again, a weed garden sprouting on the summit and its own terms, wild and high.
Midway through, the intensity of cycling straight through the song’s two verses flags, deliberately, plays with the flag...thus reflecting the image of energetic start and limping decline. The wandering voice wanders off even further, turns from song to speech and then free vocables, somehow fitting in with the ‘bone-piano improv continuing unabated. It is Palestrina-like, in the sense that piano right hand and bone are jam-dancing single lines around the lefthand bass punches and chords, the whole effect more that of a wandering caesura than the fixed tonal center of the prior track.
6. So Long Eugene If ever either summit or carefully cultivated weeds had to be renounced and left behind by wallowing in and going through rather than hacking away or going around them, this is the song of that. The trombones buzz around voice and piano like bus-sized bumblebees, showing both the labor and the love-handles of their flying apparati. The lyrics state the problem: paradise and bliss can fast become stasis and rut. Muggy heat on a mountaintop? It doesn’t compute...
Musically, it extends the entropy of the previous track--through the slow rubato, the voice suggesting decadence and dissipation via the timid ascetic rather than the feckless dissolute, the trione of instruments articulating the inarticulate so oxymoronically--then brings it to its postlogical conclusion in the next one.
7. Why Am I As I Am With Women? A look back on what can no longer be, but also on what is taking its place, from the ashes. More than all the others, the title track’s lyric is its foregrounded, driving and central thrust; the music, compared to this lyric and to the other tracks, is something like a vina in relation to a sitar--not a drone, but dronelike in its wanderings.
As we hear him ask his questions of why we have mixed feelings--how is he with women, that he should be taking such scrupulous stock of his whys? Can we trust him? do we like him? is he alone because he’s impossible to be with? How do we square the bleakness, including the bleak upbeat ending of the verse, with the aggrieved and jaded lover of years and CDs past? Is he bitter, bittersweet, transcendent, or broken...or all of the above?
8. Beauty, like sum di Vine-lee Blown wound... marks that point in every descent where the legs have finally reversed their ascension mode, gotten through their loosey-goosey transition from it to its opposite, and clicked and locked into the surer-footed march toward gravity’s end. It steps in as an answer to the last track’s questions, and his; pumping and pouring the flow of music back into the pipes, his words here drive the piece from its back seat, while the actual driver does as it pleases, in the piano and its two bones.
This is a tune Heffley composed for one of his pre-Oily Daze club bands--his response to the spirit of “Impressions”...thus the image of Coltrane blowing at the center of the lyric--a romp over old fields with his own newest tools and techniques. The listener has to listen hard, focus, to figure out what they might mean...
9. A Start, Too We finish on the piece begun with, in fine theological tradition of cyclical Return--to the source, to the garden, to the golden age...to home, the end of all pilgrim progress, seeing the place as if for the first time. The two horns of the first rendition have become one here, and the time too has been cut by a third. One piece, two plays: the CD’s title question asked and answered only, if at all, by this casting of Goddess rather than God as Alpha and, here, Omega.
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Tracklisting of HR003
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