(five lives in the day of)
Miles Davis, ‘The Ghetto Walk’
About four minutes into this track, substitute(!) drummer Joe Chambers subtly alters his halting drum groove and Dave Holland plays the four ascending chromatic notes that’ve defined the entire arc of the tune so far, but in new time, slyly syncopated. John McLaughlin adds a couple of blues-rock guitar stabs, Herbie and Chick echo Holland’s line, McLaughlin takes to the air. There follows, then, a five-minute passage of primordial jazz-funk, coloured by Wayne Shorter’s quietly funky soprano solo. Miles doesn’t play here; the groove needs to cook awhile first. Miles’s trumpet appears, finally, nine and a half minutes into the performance, during a blues-balladic interlude that echoes the opening. And having led the band through five beautifully tense minutes of swells, sustains, echoic secret speech, Miles gives a wordless staccato instruction — 13:48 on the CD if you’ve got it — and the groove returns, this time a little more slowly, to give the magus a bit more room to work. Which he does. Miles’s solo is pan-fried sex and the whole band responds (in)appropriately, the rhythmic feel somewhere between a blues shuffle and the rock’n’roll that Miles’s teenage drummer Tony Williams had lately put him onto — though with none of rock’s urge to die before getting old. It’s grownup music, though the band was mostly young players.
With its extraordinarily patient full-band groove and rich atmosphere dominated sonically and conceptually by the Corea/Hancock electropiano cloud, ‘The Ghetto Walk’ is very much of a piece with the other Silent Way tracks. But it has a matter-of-fact eroticism that the rest of the session tracks, in all their jazz-psych-protoambient glory, still can’t quite touch. The slower passages deepen the pulse and the funk grooves attain the exalted status of cosmopolitan filth. That music can be this intelligent and this sexy gives us hope, however futile, for the future of our misbegotten species.
Talking Heads, ‘Once in a Lifetime’
The entire track consists of short sharp shocks with four exceptions:
1. David Byrne’s ecstatic hesitations on the chorus, as ‘days go by’ seems almost to be directed to another human being, to actually sing out, but ‘hold me down’ is basically muttered, not uncharacteristically, into his off-white Chuck Taylors (didn’t he wear those?)
2. What sounds like synth flute on the final chorus, so quiet you need a sense other than hearing to notice it, like a sugar-rimmed kiss
3. Adrian Belew’s huge affectionate-robot guitar on the outro, finally blessedly just spelling out the damned chords and giving us something to glide on, unwinding 210 seconds’ worth of the most cruelly tense pop of the 80s
4. And at the very last, as the track fades into — well not silence or nothingness, exactly, no not that so much as distance, or depth — heavenly transport: Byrne sings ‘letting the days go by’ and actually lets them go, joining the guitar in for once really singing as if it were possible for a second in this city of cities to be truly unashamed
Then he has to end ‘Seen and Not Seen’ with the line ‘He wonders if he, too, might have made a similar mistake,’ which despite its willfully stilted banality might be the closest Byrne has otherwise come to a declaration of fellow-feeling and normal human love, unless you count the perfect song ‘This Must Be the Place,’ which he sings to a lamp.
Sweet Honey in the Rock, ‘Deep Blue Sea’
I Got Shoes is a kids’ album, and we used to listen to it every day in the car driving my son to daycare. We’ve moved on — he likes Queen now, somehow — but this song calls me. There’s a children’s chorus behind Sweet Honey, and the women obviously love performing with them; you can hear their smiles as new voices rise around them, the song opening in welcome.
There’s a moment of unexpected comedy at the end of the track, or I like to think of it that way: on the final chorus, the group’s magnificent lead singer, founder, and den mother Bernice Johnson Reagon calls out ‘One more time!’ to the children, as does another member of the group. The kids sing a line, and the other woman yells out, ‘Bring it on home!’ It’s one of those earnest, slightly corny expressions of joy that fill nearly every Sweet Honey track. And y’know what? The kids do step up a little.
And then Bernice steps back from the mic and quietly, firmly, lets everyone in the room know what’s up:
‘Sing the song,’ she says.
Kindly, lovingly, happily. But no bullshit, please.
My mom had a way of smiling firmly — smiling so as to make sure you were paying attention. So you felt it.
‘Sing the song,’ she says.
And the kids belt out the rest of the song like the devil’s chasing them.
Spiritualized, ‘I Think I’m in Love’ (a cappella vocals)
love can make you live forever (the dope runnin down my) or (down my spine) feel (just me) it anyway (the warmth of the sun in the room) but (free) thinking (free as the water) you’re (freer than dmt) in (air that i breathe) love (love in the middle of the afternoon) is just (love) thinking (i’ve got nothin) and thinking will put you (got nothin to do) right in (but i don’t care) the (warmth of the sun in me) ground
we broke up after a year and the way he sings ‘feel the warmth of the sun in the room’ is so delicate sweet and sad, like he doesn’t think it’s real, or knows it isn’t; it’s almost wise, which seems funny since it’s only a breakup and breakups are things that don’t happen since it happened after a year and i don’t think either of us thought we would spend the rest of our lives alone but (the warmth of the sun in me) she was willing to take the risk, to step further out, to risk falling; and i once wrote — saw by writing — that you fall in love and and then out of it but but no one ever rises out of love
and but on the other hand he sings ‘spoon’ in the same sweetly broken voice, like a slowly collapsing building, as in: ‘just me and my spike and my arm and my spoon’
and look, neil armstrong’s first words on the moon were about a small step and a giant leap, words prepared for the occasion like winning the oscar, but the lunar module pilot followed him onto the cold stone and his name was edwin aldrin but he went by ‘buzz’ (because ‘buzzer’ is how his sister mispronounced ‘brother’ when they were babies and even that is beautiful in its strange way) and one of my father’s proudest stories his whole life is about the time he who dropped out of school in 9th grade met this hero who stood on the moon, and here is what edwin aldrin — Sc.D. aero/astro at MIT, 1963 — here is what he said when he whose mother’s maiden name honest to christ really was Moon, yes, when this smiling man (he would for years be depressed and a drunk and after he cleaned a conspiracist lured him to a hotel under false pretenses and demanded that he swear that the moon landing was fake and instead of swearing the old man clocked the son of a bitch in the jaw) followed his mission commander out of the lunar module and (the warmth of the sun in me) into the airless cold:
‘beautiful view’
‘magnificent desolation’
Ornette Coleman, ‘Lonely Woman’
Maybe there’s music even now that existed before time or place, before sound, and you can’t hear it — visions are granted to so few — but you can listen into it and inside you can hear, maybe, everything that was or will be.
