Three Cheers for the Minor Seventh: Murakami, Jazz, and Regret
I’ve read, I confess, next to no Murakami. For a while, I’d put off reading him—not quite deliberately, but then not wholly accidentally either. I’d paid him something like the vague, desultory inattention one pays a nearby landscape until a slim volume called Desire introduced me to his work: here were five stories, in 100-odd pages, plucked from their original volumes and assembled around the titular theme—desire, desire in the amorous rather than the acquisitive sense.
And here, I thought as I read, was something strange: here was writing redolent less of other literature than of music—writing redolent, in particular, of jazz. Yes, ‘The Folklore of Our Times,’ the best story in that patchwork collection, is a tale suffused to the core with the spirit, even the ethos, of jazz.
But to clarify, I must digress.
As long as I’ve been listening to Chet Baker, something about his version of ‘There Will Never Be Another You’ has troubled me. Don’t misunderstand me: I love Chet Baker Sings. I even like aspects of the song in question. But I’ve always preferred instrumental versions of that old jazz standard, like Joe Pass’s, whose virtuoso guitarwork makes the piece a paradox of languor and intricacy. But Baker’s take and Nat King Cole’s, even Shirley Bassey’s—these all leave me somewhat cold, and often a little perplexed.
The issue is one of discordance, I think, even of fundamental contradiction. Music and lyrics diverge, in this song, beyond all hope of reconciliation; and the listener, try as he might, cannot travel with both—cannot be carried away by the jubilant trumpet solo, the sunny vocal line, the walking bass, and at the same time give credence to the lyrics’ plaintive claims of irreparable loss and irreplaceable love. Sure, singing this one largo can make the problem less glaring—stately and glacially, as Joan Merrill does in Iceland—but strong or soft, fast or slow, the song remains a problem.
That said, Baker’s version is instructive: it’s an instance—and maybe the sole instance—of his overdoing what he normally does to perfection. Witness, for example, this flawless live performance of ‘You Don’t Know What Love Is,’ way back in 1956. The coiffed hair, the eyes at once deep-set and oddly mobile, the adamantine jaw and the profile like a dream of Arno Breker’s—and, of course, the voice. Lord, the voice. What is it that makes it so captivating?
To answer that question, you need to set Baker alongside a contemporary, even a rough contemporary like Frank Sinatra. Compare his ‘I Fall in Love Too Easily’ to Baker’s version: Sinatra, the older man, delivers the lines straight, with aplomb and swelling sincerity; Baker’s delivery, in contrast, is cool and almost affectless, coquetting with the key in notes that approximate, but never quite reach, flatness. Sinatra’s take is the more forceful; Baker, on the other hand, takes the song’s shifting minor sevenths and drapes languidly over them a kind of thewless vocal gossamer. The cumulative effect is of a sprezzatura americana: music that admits, between the declared emotion and its seemingly effortless, almost flattened articulation, a surprising capaciousness—space into which an arch and knowing poise, a sense of irony, even a playful self-mockery, can enter.
In other words, Baker’s performance derives its energy from counterpoise, maintaining an impossible balance between the lyrics’ emotional demands and the airy indifference of his smooth, trumpet-tongued delivery. This is what Baker does to perfection—and this is where ‘There Will Never Be Another You’ falls flat. There, instead of balancing equably the competing demands of music and lyrics, the song seems to succumb to the strength of its own divergences, and sunder entirely. (The conjoined yet strangely unrelated halves like two coupling strangers, falteringly abed.) But Baker’s touch, applied just right, possesses an almost alchemical ability, clarifying and drawing to the surface of jazz standards (of torch songs, in particular) a latent emotional tension—rooted in the music’s Ovidian ethic …
If you were in any doubt, the man pictured above is neither Haruki Murakami nor Chet Baker. This is a bust of Publius Ovidius Naso, AKA Ovid, the Augustan poet who lived from 43 BC till around 18 AD—author of the Remedia amoris, a gadabout’s guide to love’s conclusion. This 814-line poem offers lovelorn readers much advice on dealing with breakups—some of it sage, some less so. (Less so, par exemple: avoid onions—they’re potent aphrodisiacs.) Among the more sensible and less culinary recommendations is the following tidbit, given here in Dryden’s translation:
In plain words, Ovid’s advice is to fake it till you make it: ‘In spite of torture, still from tears refrain; / Laugh when you have most reason to complain.’ (What’s that line in ‘Born to Be Blue’? ‘I’d like to laugh / But there’s nothing strikes me funny.’) Assume, in other words, an air of jocular indifference and it will in time achieve sincerity: ‘Love comes by use; disuse will love expel: / Learn to feign health, and you will soon be well.’
Is this not the exact logic implicit in Baker’s vocals, in those self-consoling, almost self-deluding songs?
A heart full of joy and gladness
Will always banish sadness and strife—
So always look for the silver lining,
And try to find the sunny side of life.
Jazz, after all, doesn’t really lend itself to anguish. There’s something to the swinging syncopation and ubiquitous minor sevenths that precludes actual despair—as though the seventh disclaimed the full force of the minor, adding to its articulation a mitigating note of humour, distance, irony. (The minor seventh is thus the sonic equivalent of a sad tale told with a wry smile, the sevenths cocking an eternal snook at the minors’ dark morosities.) This is why in jazz everything ostensibly grave seems lightened and ironised, aerated by a half-achieved and aspirational levity. ‘Almost blue,’ after all: only ever ‘almost’ …
Murakami’s ‘A Folklore of Our Times’ begins strangely, with an odd little disquisition that recalls nothing so much as Philip Larkin’s ‘Annus Mirabilis’:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me)—
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.Up to then there’d only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.
Like Larkin—who, by coincidence, spent a decade as the Daily Telegraph’s jazz reviewer, and once remarked that he could live a week without poetry but not a day without jazz — Murakami is interested in the lives of those left behind by the sexual revolution. ‘I was born, he writes, ‘in 1949’:
I started high school in 1963 and went to college in 1967. And so it was amid the crazy, confused uproar of 1968 that I saw in my otherwise auspicious twentieth year. Which, I guess, makes me a typical child of the sixties.
To come of age in the sixties, in Murakami’s Japan, meant to enter awkwardly on a scene of confused sexual mores—an interregnum of intimacies—between the lowering of the flags of the old regime and the hoisting of those of the new. As elsewhere, there existed both the traditionally minded, still ‘adamant that girls should stay virgins until they were married,’ and the free-thinkers, who saw sex ‘as a kind of sport.’ But massed messily somewhere between these poles were most of Murakami’s contemporaries—a generation a little hesitant, a little uncertain, about personal conduct in the brave new world of premarital sex.
‘The Folklore of Our Times’ is the story of a story, unfolding fireside in a little Tuscan restaurant, over dinner and a bottle of Coltibuono ’83—a restaurant, as it happens, in Lucca, where Chet Baker spent sixteen months in jail for drug offences. Thankfully, Murakami’s diners are more sedate than Baker: they are two almost-middle-aged men—former schoolmates, never quite friends—who have met by chance in an Italian hotel, and reconvened to reminisce. One, a Murakami stand-in—who, for want of another name, I’ll simply call ‘Murakami’—barely speaks. But speak the other man certainly does; and his topic of choice is Yoshiko Fujisawa.
Yoshiko was to this unnamed man what Americans call a ‘high-school sweetheart.’ Outwardly, the pair seemed imitable—‘Mr and Miss Clean,' two clean-cut, straight-edge, good-looking high-achievers. But in truth they were both lonely, confused young people, admired from a distance by their peers but friendless barring one another. The relationship that arose between them, then, developed all the muted intensity and semantic charge that can grow when two essentially private people fall in love: the compensatory depth, the hermetic expansiveness, the almost esoteric store of memories and argot. But it remained—for all that—sexless.
I recently read Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, in which she reflects on a lovely sentence written by the artist and photographer David Wojnarowicz:
‘I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life.’ That’s the dream of sex, isn’t it? That you will be liberated from the prison of the body by the body itself, at long last desired, its strange tongue understood.
Elsewhere, Laing defines loneliness as ‘an erotics of insufficient intimacy,’ a formulation not unlike one Murakami’s unnamed companion might devise: all his life, he’d felt hemmed in, inhibited, controlled—but now, he thought, sex offered him an escape:
“Never once in my life had I felt completely united with anything or anyone. I was always alone. Always cramped up inside that box. I wanted to free myself. I wanted to discover the real me. By sleeping with her, I thought I might be able to break out.”
This exalted and almost metaphysical view of sex was, unfortunately, not one Yoshiko shared. Unmoved by the rhetoric of the revolution, she planned to remain a virgin until she married—and she had no intention of marrying her high-school boyfriend:
“It’s impossible,” she said. “You and I will never get married. I’m going to marry someone a little older than me, and you’re going to marry someone a little younger. That’s just how it goes. Women mature earlier than men, and they age faster, too.
So, Murakami’s classmate went to study in Tokyo. Yoshiko remained in Kobe. Eventually, the pair broke up.
That’s not quite where the story of Yoshiko ends, but it is where I’m going to drop it. Read the story if you want to. What matters, for our purpose, is that things didn’t work out; Yoshiko eventually married someone else, as did her former boyfriend. (One suspects, though, that if they did love again, it was—to quote another story in Desire—at most ‘75% or even 85% love.’) And so, decades later, when Murakami and his classmate meet, the latter’s still coddling the memories of his lost love and brooding over missed opportunities. There is to the story, then, an air of recollection, of wistfulness, nostalgia, and regret; an awareness of the imperfect operation of ‘time’s eroding agents’—silence, and space, and strangers (Larkin again); and a kind of cross-decade parallax, as hopes expressed in the present conditional lapse into the conditional perfect (life’s cruel and inexorable modulation of would bes to would have beens—the unrealised hopes like expired cheques, useless yet cherished, attesting to a vast and now-irredeemable fortune...)
It is the stuff, in other words, of jazz—especially of tender, torn, retrospective arrangements like ‘Almost Blue’ (composed by Elvis Costello, but inspired, and later covered and improved, by Baker) and ‘Les feuilles mortes’ (known in its English version as ‘Autumn Leaves’). There’s something hurt, comprehending, and seasoned to these songs, something appropriately autumnal: like Murakami and his classmate, they revel in reminiscence. The summer of the singers’ and of the diners’ lives has passed. Now autumn beckons and, beyond it, deciduity.
Bob Dylan, who covered ‘Autumn Leaves,’ noted that, to do the song justice, ‘you have to know something about love and loss, and feel it just as much, or there’s no point in doing it. … A schoolboy could never do it convincingly.’ It’s as though, with age and experience, thought grows gothic or baroque, as complication overlays the clear, plain sentiments of youth. Where adolescence envisions a cloudless dream of order and simplicity — a kind of Parthenon of the heart — life will always interpose complexity: recesses, apses, and bijouterie, the shadowy nuances of seasoned and patient thought. In middle age, then, the mind tends to echo less resoundingly — and yet richly, subtly, and more humanely for that.
For me, ‘Les feuilles mortes’ is the definitive jazz ballad. The sound is archetypal—the chord progressions consisting almost entirely of ii-V-i sequences, and, yes, abounding in minor sevenths—the lyrics articulating a buttoned-up half-grief, the refrain ‘an ascending melodic phrase repeated in a descending series’ that evokes ‘the leaves’ eddying fall.’ Like Murakami’s story, the song too deals with a lover’s memories and regrets; and when Murakami's unnamed diner concludes his tale with the line, ‘I don’t know what it is, but sadness always seems to contain some strange little joke,’ I can’t help but feel that jazz has been his tutor. Because that is how jazz instructs the heart, after all—with an open invitation to an unmerited levity. Listen, it says: in life — if only you have ears to hear — all our minors are minor sevenths.
