Related CD ID: HRM007 HR021 | HR025 is part of CD Set
HRM007
| Artists: | Mike Heffley |
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| Title: | Double Bill Heavens 2 |
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| Released: | 2007/03 |
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CD2produced by Randy Porter (randyporter.com); thanks for his excellent Steinway grand and recording studio and expertise.
This CD is part of CD Set HRM007
a. Playground Song (Alan & Marilyn Bergman lyric)
Serene, sweet, lovely...all natural descriptors here, especially heard on the heels of “Crystal Silence.” Heffley’s voice and playing bear a similar spirit as in the latter, but here we are another decade or so down the road. His voice has mellowed in affect and richened in sound with age; his playing, at first hearing, seems to have evolved and refined down more conventional lines too. It could be any piano-bar or cabaret trooper tickling out the refined words and chords for the folks and their background.
Second hearing and beyond suggests something else: whether accompanying the vocal or soloing, the rhythmic sculpting and breathing of the keyboard world is that of language; it is both emanation and shadow of the voice and its words. It ignores musical meter to stretch and contract melisma-like, taking its time or killing it off quick, at will. It makes Heffley’s highly poetic sensibility physical-oral, rather than mental-literate. (The man is aging, musing unpressured back to earliest memories, as aging people will do...)
b. Peri’s Scope (Jack Scalese [verse 1] & Mike Heffley [v. 2-3] lyrics)
He spells the piano-poetry connection out in spades here. The virtuosity is clear and unarguable, and so is the poetry within it. He is a pianist and a poetist both, and takes the time (six choruses, three sung and played, three played, alternately) to know it and show it. The tune echoes “Playground” in its harmonic-melodic simplicity and relaxed pace, but the former was delivered in a pure, unaffected (effectless, in the mix) way, with harmony flowing as the traditional river under melody and its bridges.
“Peri’s Scope” complicates that simplicity, revealing the Western music mind’s glory with each lifting of those six veils covering its form. As pianist, he does it with a command over chromaticism and rubato time as organic and personal as any of the piano giants he names in his liner notes. Indeed, he’s lining out the tune, in fine (European- and African-) American fashion. (One account of early American Sacred Harp singing had it that the people sang the melody so slow, even with all the willy-nilly filigrees within it, that you had to breathe three times for every syllable. This, of course, tells us in our own time what the original spirit of the first Western organum was probably like. Heffley’s sense of time[lessness] suggests the same quality, on all these tracks.) Production-wise, the reverb effect added on the home version transports us from the small world of the playground to the cosmic echo-chamber of the stars above which love’s periscope peeks.
Similarly, his poetic genius extends the words from
(v. 1) Mr. Scalese’s original love song to...
But I really must say, my happiness is not gay,
although I’m singing of the charms of someone by the name of Peri.
I really don’t know who the hell Peri is anyway, when I sing these lyrics,
but this bliss-heaven’s stillin’ my eyes: like a periscope they
see past the stars, right to Paradise when I make mine Peri’s eyes.
...(v. 2) who is this beloved? what is love? narcissism, straight, gay? (the latter question is answered, the former two not) to...
So why don’t I just sing a new and better refrain? Why don’t I
make up something I can realize inside this melody?
Smiles light up my face, every time I enter this race from the be-
ginning to the sweet ending bliss: Heaven’s hearin’ my eyes.
Like a pair o’ specs they see past the scars, right to Parrot Eyes
perched on a parrot’s beak.
...(v. 3) prime original statement: original statements are impossible!
This extendable scope could magnify Heffley’s whole body of work as comfortably as the microcosm of it this track is. The verses were added so as to expand the song’s terrain with each new verse, to counter the deepening action of the repetition of the form. Literary and musical universes spawning and spinning off each other...
But what is there for you to hear now? The same as above, for the first sung verse, and the second-chorus piano improv on the song. After that, you get only the other piano solo chorus (4) of the complete 5 choruses between the sung 3 and 5. It is a richness of music made such by lyrical interludes; you hear the richness, but not its source.
c. B Minor Waltz
Down to the mines to work the day; some guys feel fine, some not,
all gotta make their pay. Not unlike the men who cut and ran
the stones for Pharoah’s grave pyramid, coal miners in America
they go down into the underworld for their families and they know
there’s a chance every day that’s where they’ll stay for eternity, forever,
forever and a day’s end...
This performance takes us out of the traditional harmonic-melodic Evans-heavens and into the realm of another of the influences named in the liner notes: Borah Bergman, for his concept of the pianist’s left hand as a symbol of the oppressed workers of the world. Heffley doesn’t take the concept as far as does its originator—no crossed hands here, no systematically developed new fingerings—but he does take it far in a direction that adds to the definition of his style. Heffley’s left hand is uncanny in its precision-bomb-like way of hitting bottom notes, forging bottom lines, that are clearly unplanned, unscripted, unpredictable. If the freedom of the world’s working class is analogous to the freedom of the body’s hands from its mind’s stifling control, some such liberation is afoot here. The contours of the tune are always visible, yet as though harboring the beginning rumbles of some disaster—tsunami, earthquake, volcano—about to wash, shake, burn them away.
Dear wife and children be at ease; I and my brothers are leaving you in peace.
Even as I write, the air is thick and cold, the light is turned to darkness.
We feel death coming on like sleep, we love you all in our dreamy deep,
won’t you keep us in your hearts, where it’s warm and full of light,
all through our night, our good night, shining night, manly nightwatchman
keep us through this fright end....
Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton, as word-artists as well as pianists, likewise loom in this track. Miners trapped in a mine, eventually dying and leaving behind notes that told their wives not to worry too much about it, were in the news when this lyric was conceived (out of its resonance with “B-Minor”...). Another effect on the home version: v. 2 features two copies of the same vocal track staggered in time a second or two, suggesting the singer beginning to disassociate from his own body in the moment of death...
What do you hear? Something like Frankenstein’s monster: emotional turbulence without the transition of organic context...a lurch from one plane of affect and meaning to another, without rationale. Something interesting and brilliant, to be sure...but also disturbing, missing something you know should be there.
d. My Bells (Gene Lees lyric)
Gene Lees takes Our HeRow back to the same general period as “Playground” with this lyric: Edenic childhood...only this time with a follow-up look at the loss of same, into the dreary adulthood—jangly-flashing peals of surprise burst in on that as the surprise happy ending B of the AAB form here kicks in.
The piano plays like some 88-piece giant wind chime in a forceful storm. Alice Coltrane, Don Pullen hover above it, like some sacred harpists. The same bells ring in both home and studio keyboards; the falsetto too, at just the moments it should.
e. Laurie (Bob Dorough lyric)
From the modal (with a few complex twists) feel of “My Bells,” and its classical narrative, we move into one of those parts of Bill Evans’ corpus that suggest Schoenbergian Romanticism (and harmony, with melodic stretches up and down through its own kind of 12-step program)...complete with a lyric not so far from those of the lieder of Expressionistic Vienna (from Georg Traeger). Both vocal and piano treatments of this piece comprise a tour de force of the spontaneous and organic complexity that Heffley has claimed for his style. The single chorus—the opposite kind of gesture from the six rounds of, say, “Peri’s Scope”—serves as the signature showcase for such finely wrought compositions.
f. Quiet Now (Denny Zeitlin, Suzi Stern lyric)
This is one of those tunes Bill Evans made his own by treating it as such. In this case, the composer was one of his peers in the most crucial respects, and the tune might well have been made, not only re-made, by Bill, for its music’s poetry. Suzi Stern’s lyric rhymes on every level with the latter.
If “Laurie” was Schoenberg, “Quiet Now” is Debussy, with its augmented-chord opening. As if still buzzing with the former, however, the piano remains as busy as ever, contraindicating the title. The voice is not so quiet either...but it is calm, relaxed...and then...ahh, there is the quiet, finally, in the first notes of the piano solo, after the verse is sung through. Of course...the singer’s finally quiet, so the player finally hears that. Still, the solo fast reverts to more bird-trilling complexity, only now embedded in the simple hush. Like Art, Bird, Bud playing ballads...(not so much Miles, say, or Bill himself...or Denny himself, as Heffley himself reflected in the playing, recalling his early 20s as a budding young trombonist in The Trident club in Sausalito, California, where Denny held a regular gig with drummer Oliver Johnson and Heffley’s housemate, bassist Joe Halpin...music is the ultimate Proustian mnemonic, both in the hearing and the making of it)...After that parenthetical solo, he comes back in to reprise the bridge out (check out the falsetto swoop up to the word “a-LIVE”...), all settled down now into the eyes of the storms of the history of the first voices afloat on the strings of the first lyres...
g. Very Early (Carol Hall lyric)
The piano playing evokes mood and meaning to great effect: right-hand single notes are the rain’s drops, left-hand chords the resonances and hushes of air and its distant, gentle thunder. Meter is always suggested, but never clearly stated or sustained when touched (just as no straight line exists in nature; this hybrid of hard swing and no meter recurs as forcefully in “Waltz For Debby,” ahead...something about the ghost of ¾ time?).
Two influences sound here for those who have the ears: Braxton’s “active existential rhythm”—the other side of his system’s complete embrace of meter—is a cornerstone of Heffley’s more narrowly literary system...or rather the seeds of it this almatouristic, grad-school body of work comprises. The other presence is that of the late Mal Waldron, who put it as personally and directly into Heffley’s conception, when he was still a trombonist, that good solo piano music was a conversation between the body’s two hands. He made the sense of that expand to include his body’s one voice in the talking.
h. Remembering the Rain (Eleana Steinberg-Tee lyric)
This poetic echo of the previous track reminds the keenest hearers of the instrument, as well as the speaker of words, the singer’s voice is, especially when it falsettos. We wonder if he’s recalling the ancient heartbreaks of 500, 1000 years ago, from the first pair of CDs, or something from just the other day.
The keenest hearers will also notice his first departure here from the master’s chordal fabric, in adding an F-natural to Bill Evans’ A-sus chord. All previous tracks, however improvisatorily elaborate, explored and built upon, rather than changed, the original changes.
i. Only Child (Roger Schore lyric)
This is the first of three successive songs centralizing a single child. After all the natural/falsetto dynamic of the previous tracks, the relaxed father voice that never leaves its natural range is a breath of fresh air here. His grip, and nostalgic presence...especially after it comes back in after a piano solo to take the bridge out. As the lyric says, time has moved on, during that solo....and both singer and player end so gently, like an aged father, after the absolute wildest dance of the improvisation.
j. Letter to Evan (Bill Evans lyric)
The falsetto returns, to match the bright and height of the star in the lyric (also sounded in an off note at the end, beaming high above the left-hand bass). The strength of the father love is found after all the more bruised, precious ripeness of it. The word “Evan” is not sung, in compliance with copyright law...because this is a song everyone should be able to sing with his or her own child’s name, as Heffley sang “Geva” here, then bleeped out with a moment of silence for legal public consumption.
k. Waltz for Debby (Gene Lees lyric)
But then that father moment in life is over, and the girl is gone away into her womanhood, the man left with his emptied nest. This is the first of the Evans repertoire Heffley learned and performed, first as a trombonist, around the time his own only child was a little girl dancing in the sun. As in the trio version on Songs of Nature and Love, the long familiarity shows in the vagaries of meter and line (one can let go of what one knows well) in the piano solo. The voice come back in on the bridge is strong, but like a death grip loosening its hold on life by its very firmness...
l. Turn Out the Stars (Gene Lees lyric)
Like John Dowland’s “In Darkness Let Me Dwell,” this sounds like a broken man’s plaint...but on the heels of the last track it reverberates more as one rattling around in that empty nest: “The child is grown and gone, I can relax and die now...what’s the point of my life going on? Love with her mother and all others failed...father-love didn’t, but its moment is over”...the magic and power here is, like all darkest statements, simply that its performance as music is so much livelier than the deathly content of its words.
m. Blue in Green
is his reclamation of the jazz freedom...the phoenix rise from the sad ashes of the life just lived, back to the improv of free play inFormed by mood (mode)...
Blue in green is you in me now, now that you are in the sky, in trees
and seasoned green eyes, seeing blue eyes greening earth, and water;
now that I am on the fly and free, and easily seen, I love to play and sing away.
The test of all this improvisatory virtuosity is to slow it down, and see if it holds together like a composition. The lyric recognizes the child in her adulthood, and the parent self in its new incarnation as elder (next stop: ancestor...)
Lush, clashing clusters (clushters)...flushed out, flashing lustrous...unflustered, lashed to the mast of a sea-shocked ship (yes!—there are the words I was fishing for..) So sing both home and studio versions of “Blue in Green,” in two different ways around excision of the words. The home version took advantage of the Korg’s range of settings to overdub a high electric-piano track, a single-line improv piercing through the slosh of chords and melody already underway. The lyrics were stuck onto the last couple of minutes of the original track, so this version just faded out before them.
There were three studio takes, all shorter than the home version; the piano prelude of each was much less lush, much more stark, stinging, and stung, both in the vertical and lateral runoffs of notes. Heffley sequenced them, starting with the least and ending with the most favored track: the evolution of a statement.
n. Time Remembered (Paul Lewis lyric)
Finally, the most challenging melody line is sung once and twice, played, and sung out, with a casual aplomb that belies its inherent drama. Perhaps such mountain peaks, so daunting in youth, look and feel like level terrain to the elder who has climbed, conquered, and come to tread upon them as such beyond all challenge, defeat, or conquest. It’s just home now, the place above time and space where one can reflect on past and future as the two wings of an airborne present.
The voice steps carefully, yet often slips and slides, high and low, through the enunciation of time standing still above its pianizzimo river...
continue to...
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Tracklisting of HR025
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