April 17, 2013 The Music in Hopscotch“Hopscotch” is the most popular novel by Argentine writer Julio Cortazar. It was published in 1963 and in a short time became very popular. The first thing the reader comes across is the structure of the novel, inspired by the children’s game that has the same name, offering him multiple ways in which the book can be read. Because of its complex structure, many people spend a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to read “Hopscotch”. They search for alternative ways of reading the book that differ from the sequence proposed by the author in the “Table of Instructions”. They discuss what influenced Cortazar while writing the novel and try to rationalize and explain his employment of interior monologue, slang, punning and use of different languages. Despite the fact that all these aspects of the novel are explored in numerous essays, there are very few that research another interesting phenomenon in this book– The Music.
Interwoven in the plot is a progression of musical pieces that represent something that resembles a soundtrack of the book. By including music that belongs mostly to the jazz genre the author exhibits comprehensive knowledge about this music and its history. Although music is present throughout the whole book, the main musical part or the soundtrack takes place mainly at the meetings of “The Serpent Club”, a bohemian circle of artist, writers and musicians with whom the main protagonist Horacio Oliveira passes his time. In their dialogues concerning the music they are listening to, Cortazar creates a thought provoking picture about the evolution of jazz and indicates interesting opinions regarding the musicians playing the music that he chose.Knowing that “Hopscotch” is written and published in the sixties it’s easy to notice that Julio Cortazar is not hiding his nostalgia when he talks about the music present in this book, which belongs mostly to the period from the 1920s to 1950s. There is always a tone of mild disappointment when he speaks of music that doesn’t belong to that period.
An interesting perception of his about technology and art. Ronald, a musician and the person who decides what they’re going to listen in “The Serpent Club” says while listening to Bix Beiderbecke: “The influence of technology… In those days they couldn’t play as much as they wanted (before long-play), now you have Stan Getz he comes up to the mike and he has all the time he needs to say whatever he wants.” With this, the way I understand it, he wants to express that limitation is always important for the artist to express himself better, and that the pressure is crucial for the more truthful ideas to emerge. Furthermore I have to point out that Stan Getz in this case is not mentioned in a negative connotation, the author wants to let us know that whether we like it or not technology makes our life easier, and allows for a shorter and a more direct route to the goals we have set for ourselves but by taking those routes we also miss out on a lot of experience and precious fleeting moments.
Confusing is the fact that the main character Oliveira doesn’t like be-bop. While there is a record of Dizzy Gillespie playing “Good Bait” Oliveira thinks that there’s no point for him to listen those “games on the highest trapeze without a safety net”. After a while he asks Ronald to change the record, and tells him if he keeps playing that “circus monkey” he’ll stop coming at the club. Roland is sarcastic and says: “The gentleman doesn’t like be-bop… Wait, we’ll play some Paul Whiteman(Bix Beiderbecke plays in his orchestra) in a moment”. It is puzzling how the author of “The Pursuer” a book about Charlie Parker creates a main protagonist that hates be-bop. If I have to explain these things to myself I would say that one reason might be that: Julio Cortazar despises be-bop, but loves Charlie Parker. Despises be-bop because it is the starting point of the intellectualization of jazz and changed the direction of the music entirely; and the other that: He simply doesn’t like Dizzy Gillespie;
After the short quarrel about Dizzy Gillespie, “The Serpent Club” decides that it’s for the best for them to listen to Bessie Smith. With this seems that Julio Cortazar is calling upon the main value in music – the emotion. While the “Empty Bed Blues” is playing Cortazar describes the way Babs(a woman-painter-owner of the apartment where the meetings of “The Serpent Club” are held) cries and it seems that she shares the same feelings with the woman singing( Bessie Smith) who died years ago. And how all of that is a “illusion of a illusion linking us back to a monkey that is looking at his own reflection in the water on the first day of the world”. The scene gives the impression that the author is trying to tell us how important is to pursue the evolution of an idea and that self awareness is the starting point of self realization.
Whenever there is a discussion at “The Serpent Club” the opinions are usually divided, but it’s surprisingly how they all agree when the subject is the jazz legend Louis Armstrong. He is praised and considered genius when they talk about his early periods and cruelly criticized about his later works meaning the period in the sixties. The admiration towards Armstrong is expressed in a few sentences, it’s like Julio Cortazar is aware that all the people know the importance of the artist who presented improvisation as an art form. The harsh criticism is regarding his playing in the sixties that is described by Cortazar as a pure routine always escaping from true devotion. In the plot Roland is looking at all the Louis Armstrong records in front of him and expresses his disappointment saying that having in mind how the medicine is progressing, Armstrong is going to be alive for plenty of time to torture them. Ettiene states: That won’t happen to us (meaning the rest of “The Serpent Club”). We killed them long time ago (I presume by “them” he means the artists that disappointed them ). The discussion ends with Horacio Oliveira saying: It’s true that we killed them out of mercy. But we did it with a rose instead of a bullet. Through this conversation the author wants to point out that the creativity of an artist may expire and when that happens we should respect the things he has done to that moment and not waste our energy criticizing the upcoming ones that we don’t like.
It seems that the intellectualization of jazz music bothers Julio Cortazar the most. He gets back to that subject again in the story while the club is listening to Jelly Roll Morton singing “Mamie’s Blues”. Jelly Roll Morton is singing about how he stood on a corner with his feet soaking wet and everybody seems to enjoy to the moment where Ettiene interrupts them by saying:”It’s too much. I don’t know why I stand for this garbage. It’s moving, but it’s garbage”. Ettiene is referring to the plainness of the subject of the song. Roland asks him: “Have you ever stood with your feet in a puddle at midnight?” And then says: “Jelly Roll has, you can tell when he sings, it’s something you learn, man.” Horacio teams up with Roland against Ettiene saying: Don’t pay attention to him. He’s capable of believing in progress in art. Cortazar makes “believing in progress in art” one of the most offensive things in “The Serpent Club” that’s why Ettiene in his defense states that progress in art doesn’t exist and that art starts with the emotions and not the opposite.
And after all the discussions Julio Cortazar tells us the story of the music:
“No one seemed disposed to contradict him because Wong had quietly appeared with the coffee and Ronald, shrugging his shoulders, had turned loose Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians and after a terrible scratching they reached the theme that fascinated Oliveira, an anonymous trumpet followed by the piano, all wrapped up in the smoke of an old phonograph and a bad recording, of a corny prejazz band, all in all like those old records, showboats, Storyville nights, where the old only really universal music of the century had come from, something that brought people closer together and in a better way than Esperanto, UNESCO, or airlines, a music which was primitive enough to have gained such universality and good enough to make its own history, with schisms, abdications, and heresies, its Charleston, its Black Bottom, its Shimmy, its Fox Trot, its Stomp, its Blues, to label its forms, this style and the other one, swing, bebop, cool, a counterpoint of romanticism and classicism, hot and intellectual jazz, human music, music with a history in contrast to stupid animal dance music, the polka, the waltz, the zamba, a music that could be known in Copenhagen as well as in Mendoza or Cape Town, a music that brings adolescents together, with records under their arms, that gives them names and melodies to use as passwords so they can know each other and become intimate and feel less lonely surrounded by bosses, families, and bitter love affairs a music that accepts all imaginations and tastes, a collection of instrumental 78's with Freddie Keppard or Bunk Johnson, the reactionary cult of Dixieland, an academic specialization in Bix Beiderbecke, or in the adventures of Thelonious Monk, Horace Silver, or Thad Jones, the vulgarities of Erroll Garner or Art Tatum, repentance and rejection, a preference for small groups, mysterious recordings with false names and strange titles and labels made up on the spur of the moment, and that whole freemasonry of Saturday nights in a student's room or in some basement cafe with girls who would rather dance to "Stardust" or "When Your Man Is Going to Put You Down," and have a sweet slow smell of perfume and skin and heat, and let themselves be kissed when the hour is late and somebody has put on the "The Blues With a Feeling" and hardly anybody is really dancing, just standing up together, swaying back and forth, and everything is hazy and dirty and lowdown and every man is stroking shoulders and the girls have their mouths half-opened and turn themselves to delightful fear and the night, taking them with a single hot phrase that drops them like a cut flower into the arms of their partners, and there comes a motionless race, a jump up into the night air, over the city until a miniature piano brings them to again, exhausted, reconciled, and still virgins until next Saturday, all of this from a kind of music that horrifies solid citizens who think that nothing is true unless there are programs and ushers, and that's the way things are and jazz is like a bird who migrates or emigrates or immigrates or transmigrates, roadblock jumper, smuggler, something that runs and mixes in and tonight in Vienna Ella Fitzgerald is singing while in Paris Kenny Clarke is helping open a new cave and in Perpignan Oscar Peterson's fingers are dancing around and Satchmo, everywhere, with that gift of omnipresence given him by the Lord, in Birmingham, in Warsaw, in Milan, in Buenos Aires, in Geneva, in the whole world, is inevitable, is rain and bread and salt, something completely beyond national ritual, sacred traditions, language and folklore: a cloud without frontiers, a spy of air and water, an archetypal form, something from before, from below, that brings Mexicans together with Norwegians and Russians and Spaniards, brings them back into obscure and forgotten central flame, clumsily and badly and precariously he delivers them back to a betrayed origin, he shows them that perhaps there have been other paths and that the only one they took was maybe not the only one or the best one, or perhaps that there have been other paths that made for softer walking and that they had not taken those, or that they only took them in a halfway sort of way, and that a man is always more than a man and always less than a man, more than a man because he has in himself all that jazz suggests and lies in wait for and even anticipates, and less than a man because he has made an aesthetic and sterile game out of this liberty, a chessboard where one must be bishop or knight, a definition of liberty which is taught in school, in the very schools where the pupils are never taught ragtime rhythm or the first notes of the blues, and so forth and so on.
I set right here and think
three thousand miles away,
set right here and think
three thousand miles away,
can't remember the night
had the blues this bad any-way...”
The songs:
1. Frank Trumbauer & and His Orchestra – I’m Coming Virginia
2. Bix Beiderbecke & and His Band – Jazz Me Blues
3. Kansas City Six – Four O’clock Drag
4. Lionel Hampton - Save It Pretty Mama
5. Coleman Hawkins – Body and Soul
6. Dizzy Gillespie – Good Bait
7. Bessie Smith – Baby Doll
8. Bessie Smith – Empty Bed Blues
9. Louis Armstrong – Don’t You Play Me Cheap
10. Louis Armstrong – Yellow Dog Blues
11. Louis Armstrong – Mahogany Hall Stomp
12. Big Bill Broonzie – See see Rider
13. The Chocolate Dandies – Blue Interlude
14. Champion Jack Dupree – Junker’s Blues
15. Big Bill Broonzie – Get Back
16. Duke Ellington and His Orchestra – Hot and Bothered
17. Duke Ellington and His Orchestra- It Don’t Mean a Thing
18. Earl “Fatha” Hines – I Ain’t Got Nobody
19. Jelly Roll Morton – Mamie’s Blues
20. Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians – Stack O’Lee Blues
21. Oscar Peterson – Oscar’s Blues
"Jazzuela. Julio Cortázar y el Jazz" - Various Artists
January 16, 2013 Music is Spoken Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. What happens when the music is spoken? When a person speaking inspires music around him? Connects someone’s musicianship with a picture? He creates a type of synaesthesia where instead of translating tones into colors the listener is seeing whole situations followed by the emotions and the atmosphere they bring through music.
http://www.mixcloud.com/pekingese/music-is-spoken/ Jack Kerouac w/ Al Cohn&Zoot Sims- American Haikus After each verse that Jack Kerouac reads from his poetry, either Al Cohn or Zoot Sims are playing an improvised phrase. Their phrases tend to give Kerouac’s verses the right picture, tempo and emotion of the moment he is describing. That gives this piece of spoken music an ability to offer a synaesthetic experience for the listener. At first you hear a verse but the moment you hear the musical phrase you picture it. True masterpiece!
Ken Nordine – Reaching Into In Ken Nordine describes a dreamy atmosphere that resembles everyday life and those moments when all of sudden everything around you becomes mysterious. The music has the right intensity. It has lounge sound that reminds us of comfort, but also has a dark mystery moment that loops in a way which makes you feel like you’re stuck in a very strange place. Everything seems normal but your thoughts don’t allow you to think that way. Listen…listen….
Peggy Lee-Chinese Love Poems This just sounds beautiful! Peggy Lee’s voice reading and harpist Stella Castelluci playing impressionistic arpeggios that sound equally pleasant as the atmosphere of these Chinese love poems. Blossoms, lake, butterflies…
Charlie Mingus- Scenes In The City True masterpiece from “A Modern Jazz Symposium of music and poetry with Charlie Mingus”. The spoken part is written by Mingus but it is Langston Hughes who adapted the piece to sound like a short theatre play. It is about a young guy’s dreams and how the reality is crushing them. Mingus uses different tempos to make contrast between the main character’s mood swings. His nostalgic daydreamings expressed with ballad feel and his problems that destroy his dreams in the big city expressed with fierce tempos and wailing saxophones. Best example of a telepathic interaction between spoken word and improvised music.
Nat King Cole-The Three Trees Unlike the previous pieces of music that present spoken word with improvised phrases that draw the meaning, this piece has few important parts from the story and they have a certain melodic phrase. Beautiful bubbling spring, three trees, there, there and there, pretty little rabbit, run through the woodland forest, beautiful bubbling spring, three trees, there, there and there, pretty little rabbit, drinking, beautiful bubbling spring, three trees, there, there and there, a hunter, forest, pretty little rabbit, drinking, the hunter, beautiful bubbling spring, three trees, there, there and there, the hunter, shot, rabbit, beautiful bubbling spring, three trees, there, there and there.
Raymond Scott- Limbo: The Organized Mind Jim Henson and Raymond Scott are taking us to a journey inside a human brain. The music is so dark and creepy at moments, you will start to feel like Jim Henson is hypnotizing you to go to the same places in your brain. I am glad they are just joking, because if they didn’t they would have brain damaged a lot of people by now. Maybe they did? Who knows?
Babs Gonzales-The Be-Bop Santa Claus His opening statement about jazz and poetry is explaining a stupid problem that repeatedly harms art. A thing is big at the moment when everybody starts to copy it, but at the same time that distances the artist from his instinct which is the most honest part of his character. He says “Everybody is talking about jazz and poetry that happens to be the big thing right now, but about 1955 I did one that was the biggest to me and I know nothing about jazz and poetry, all I know was called entertainment”.
Henry Rollins-Cold Heart A piece from Hall Willner’s tribute album “Weird Nightmare – Meditations on Mingus”. The band is swinging and Henry Rollins reads a excpert from Charles Mingus’s autobiography “Beneath the Underdog” about the word- groovy.
Louis Armstrong-Lonesome The music master recites in rubato tempo. This track sounds exactly as I imagine ancient master poets would have recited accompanied by music. The words fall on time as the melody but they stay that way. They are words. Whenever I hear Satchmo I feel his desire to sing those words, but no! Singing is beautiful! This is something else! He is stuck in a moment from his past! The song is here, he hears it but he’s not able to sing it. Sweet and painfull!
Slim Gailard-Avocado Seed Simphony Soup Slim Gailard’s charisma allows him to do whatever he likes and people will be amazed. A real example of a true artist whose loyalty to his instinct distinguishes him from the others. I love this piece because it’s recorded live and you can hear the crowd and their excitement. The atmosphere is surreal. The music sounds like mixing stand-up comedy and a band rehearsal. I’m pretty sure that you won’t find anything similar to this.
Les Paul& Mary Ford-The Case of The Missing Lespaulverizer It’s “The Les Paul Show” that was broadcasted by NBC (The National Broadcasting Company ). Radio shows often pass into the territory of spoken music genre. Whenever a voice presents something you hear it and it catches your attention the same way music does. Radio shows are the most practical pieces of spoken music. There the music and the spoken word are equal.
