The Journey of August King (1995)

Starring: Jason Patric, Thandie Newton
Music: Stephen Endelman
Director: John Duigan
Screenplay: John Ehle
Director of Photography: Slawomir Idziak

I’d never heard of this before it came up on TV last night: a very fine, understated historical drama, based on a novel by John Ehle, who adapted his book for the film’s screenplay. The journey referenced in the title is that undertaken by Jason Patric’s character, August King: a widowed homesteader in 19th-century North Carolina, he’s coming back from market having bought a cow, a pig and a couple of geese with the profits of a year’s work. On the way, he ends up aiding the escape of runaway slave Annalees (Thandie Newton, here following up her performance, also as a slave, in the same director’s ‘Jefferson in Paris’), and in the process loses his newly-acquired animals and his home (it’s burnt down in retribution).

In large part due to the contribution of cinematographer Slawomir Idziak, perhaps best known for his work with Krzysztof Kieslowski (this was his first American feature), it’s beautiful to look at; scenes often open with lingering shots of natural details (a butterfly, a leaf, a ray of sun through the trees), and, as the film progresses, there’s a dark tint at the edges of the screen and a progressive lightening in the centre which gives an almost storybook, fairytale quality to the images.

Yet this isn’t a film aiming for a fairytale quality: careful attention is paid to verisimilitude in costumes, dialogue, and narrative action. There are no manufactured moments of drama, overwrought confrontations and raised voices, but, rather, successions of small incidents (usually, the risk of being discovered by other people on the trail), the gradual development of narrative dilemmas, considerations both practical and moral – all of a piece with the careful attention paid to the complexities of character, of human behaviour. This puts a lot of focus on the actors – if they do not succeed in fully inhabiting their roles, in retaining interest and being more than just masks, facades, while at the same time not over-acting, over-emoting, then such a slow-paced film, filled with spaces and silences and dialogue which – as in life – verges on the inane, could become simply empty, going through the motions, the semblance of profundity, without the necessary substance behind that surface (for Roger Ebert, this was a trap not successfully negotiated: “The pacing, which is meant to be thoughtful, is lethargic. The silences grow longer than the moods they are intended to establish.”)

Credit, then, to the leading players: in particular, Jason Patric, whose expressions create August King as someone surprised by his generosity, sorrowing at his wife’s death (as we learn towards the end of the film, she committed suicide after the death of their baby), something of a loner, hard-working and quietly determined – someone, who, as he repeatedly states, has never broken the law in his life, and can’t quite understand (or, perhaps, can’t face the full implications of) why he’s doing so now. Roger Ebert argues that August is made too good, but to me it seems like a much more reluctant heroism, or maybe something that just arises from his pragmatic approach: the woman has entered his camp, is in need of help, so he gives it, and it wouldn’t do to abandon her on the route. Once one’s started, one might as well go on – almost a kind of fatalism, or, more likely, an understated self-sacrifice: a realisation of consequences, but a refusal to let these outweigh ‘doing the right thing’.

But this isn’t just ‘one man’s journey’, though it could easily have become so: Annalees could have become simply a cipher, the pivot around which the narrative turns and the motivating force for much of the action, but not necessarily an individuated figure, someone whose sufferings, though undeniable, risk becoming generalized into the sufferings of a people, a race, and thus losing their personal force (whereas King’s can seem a more singular sorrow – the loss of a wife not emblematic of an entire system of injustice). That she is more than this can be partially credited to the nicely-judged dialogue she is given by Ehle, but Thandie Newton’s performance catches just the right pitch too: at 17, her character is toughened by a life of hard service, but she also maintains a certain girlishness, a playfulness which pokes through despite her hardships (as when she comments on the oddness of naming people after the months of the year).

And then one must take into account the relations between the two leads: the lack of romance, which Roger Ebert felt weighted against the film, seems to me one of its main strengths. This makes it harder to talk about ‘chemistry’ – a word invariably dug out when a man and a woman play opposite each other in a film, and something which Patric and Newton could easily have played up. There may nonetheless be something of a sexual dimension to the relationship; August’s attraction to Annalees is shown pretty clearly in the scene where he rubs ointment into a scratch on her back. In a lesser film, this would have turned into a sexual encounter; when I say ‘lesser’, this isn’t merely moral prurience, but practical – with no birth control, it would hardly do for the 17-year old Annalees to have to trek north, heavily pregnant, and then to have to look after a baby to compound her hardships. In such a world, ‘romance’ is something of a dud concept (there’s no leisure for fancy speculations), and even ‘love’, still figured as something inexplicable and mysterious, is brought down to something of a pragmatic level: in a campfire scene, Annalees asks August what love is, and his reply – that he heard a preacher say that it was the overflowing of need for another – could be read on several levels (as well as deferring it from personal experience to theoretical speculation, in a way that suggest, not so much that ‘love’ doesn’t exist, but that it might make more sense to live ‘love’ as it emerges in life, rather than to organize one’s life around vague and possibly spurious concepts). In terms of August himself, the reported explanation has a very real application to his own loneliness; his relation with Annalees is much more about companionship than sexual spark, about mutual comfort – he comforts her by actually treating her as a human being and helping her escape, she comforts him by her vivaciousness and by such gestures of kindness as telling him that God probably caught his wife when she feel from the ledge. Newton’s delivery of this line presents it not as emerging from a naïve religious hope; she says it to offer comfort, rather than because she believes it herself, nor does she think that August will believe it either. This could come across as condescending, or foolish, but in this instance it seems like a carefully-weighted (yet spontaneously generous) judgment in human interaction, a realization that she may have probed too far into feelings that hurt (by asking what became of his wife), and an attempt to salve that wound. Such interaction is typical of the film’s portrayal of its leads’ relationship, refusing to settle for ‘romance’ and instead going for the whole complex of emotions that appear in life, if not in the movies. Perhaps for this reason – because ‘August King’ doesn’t go for the sort of solutions we expect from films and their artificially-ordered lives and narratives – it often feels more like a well-crafted short novel, a story, even as it uses cinema’s advantages, particularly (as we shall see) in photographic terms, in the quality of its images.

If Patric and Newton are exemplary in their roles, Larry King, too, deserves praise for playing Olaf, the slave-owner, as someone who does things which most would describe as ‘evil’, but who is not a stereotypical snarling or smiling racist – in contrast to his underlings, who in one scene are overheard debating whether black people have souls (probably not, is the conclusion), he responds quite angrily to August’s faked naivety about African-Americans – “they’re people just like us,” who eat the same things that we do – and is particularly vehement that Annalees “ain’t a thief.” He’s almost as confused as August is, though he chooses to remain on the wrong side of that confusion, rather than working through it as August does, and often comes across as a hurt child lashing out, in a mixture of sorrow, longing, and anger, at the loss of his prize possession (to whom he also has blood ties – she’s his daughter). It’s a beautifully-judged mixture of brutal action and child-like confusion – when August encounters him camping at night, he’s banging on a metal pan like a kid with a toy drum, in the vain hope that Annalees will hear the sound and come running back to him, but he’s also capable of extreme violence, slicing a man in half with a meat cleaver in the film’s most explicit scene. This is perhaps best summed up in the scene where he catches up with August at his house; demanding to know where his slave is, he seems genuinely hurt that the man should have helped her escape, responding first through lashing out, knocking him to the ground, and then by the colder, more pre-meditated (and legally-sanctioned) revenge form of destruction of property, watching as the house burns down.

The lawman and his family, King’s fellow homesteaders, present in this scene, are similarly, not ‘evil’, even though they accept (or try to ignore) the inhuman system of slavery going on in their midst: ‘decent’ and ‘hard-working’, they’d probably have been well-intentioned liberals a century later, but have a block against breaking the established order: that of the home, the (white) community, the law.

And the aforementioned cinematography, the beauty of the film’s visuals, helps to underline this appeal – to law, order, custom, the local, the settled – for, at times, it seems as if the film yearns for this simpler time, of small log cabins and a few livestock in a green land where eagles fly and call in the sky, where showers leave a moist freshness in the air and on the ground: for the pioneer spirit before settlement solidified into technology and massiveness, when just the fingertip of civilization touched the land, barely disturbing it – a harmony with nature, something closer to a natural state, as in the little interlude where Patric and Newton let out long whoops of delight as they refresh themselves under a waterfall. This sort of thing might seem antithetical to rules and regulations, but it’s precisely because of legal codes that potentially dangerous wildness can be balanced with a feeling of being settled, of being at home; thus, Stephen Endelman’s rhapsodic bursts of vaguely Copland-esque strings, played over particularly panoramic shots, are more folky than ‘sublime’, and the trek through the forest would be nothing if it did not have a solid, permanent home as its ultimate goal.

The community which manifests these impulses, which we catch in glimpses along the route, as August encounters various neighbours, and which we see in its gathered, collective form as he enters the last stage of his journey, is not shown as inherently evil – indeed, it seems that the film-makers rather like the idea of this ‘simple life’– but it is shown to have a dark side (literally and metaphorically), which it tolerates by turning a blind eye, inherently naturalizing something which would instinctively repulse it by pretending that it is just part of the way things are, and is thus not worthy of too much attention. That dark side is, of course, slavery, and it’s significant that this practice is shown in its harshest colours precisely when it locates itself at the heart of the community, at the festive gathering through which August travels. Having finally caught the male slave who escaped with Annalees, Olaf strings him up upside down on a three-part wooden frame, in between two pigs (an echo of Jesus’ crucifixion between the thieves, presumably), and slices him in half with a meat cleaver when he refuses to divulge the location of his fellow escapee. That this is a background event to the briefly-glimpsed Punch and Judy show at which the children gleefully laugh indicates how easy it is to ‘naturalize’ (or to simply ignore) extreme brutality, and how the brutality of slave-treatment is displaced into the brutality of the puppet-show: ‘civilization’, for all its claims to oppose wildness and brutality, to harness nature into a harmonious working relationship with man, enshrines exactly that brutality in its law codes and in its entertainments. A distinctly pessimistic suggestion, this balances out the more sentimentalized/ idealistic elements of the film: thus, even given the pride which August claims to feel as a justified individual in the penultimate, house-burning scene – he can ‘stand tall’, despite the loss of much of his livelihood, and enjoy moral, if not fiscal, contentment – the community of which he is a part is ingrained with the prejudices to which he has run counter (to his surprise as much as anyone else’s, it must be remembered). Similarly, the Punch-and-Judy show and its juxtaposition with the execution/murder appears as a counter-example to the innocent children (all of a part with the ‘young land’/ new-generation pioneer elements) from an earlier incident in the film, where August bribes two little boys not to tell their parents that he’s hiding Annalees in his cart; they respond by telling him they don’t need to be bribed, in contrast to the intolerance of their parents.

It’s worth noting, too, the presentation of the simple settlements and homesteads as the result of hard work, of this simpler life as a tough way to survive. In losing everything, August doesn’t go through the overblown tragic rigmarole of so many films which depict their hero’s descent into hard times; rather, slaughtering one cow, losing one pig in a torrent, losing two geese in the forest – all these are big sacrifices, however matter-of-fact August is in the face of these hardships. Similarly, despite the occasional, rather jarring and overtly ‘weighty’/symbolic shots of an eagle soaring in the sky, what hope there is at the film’s end – August’s moral, if not physical, ‘salvation’, Annalees’ achieved escape – is not allowed to overwhelm the realities of the situation. Thus, the film’s final scene (over which the credits role), depicts Annalees walking along the trail to the North, to her new life, overlaid with a quiet female vocal on the soundtrack, gently yodeling: no blaring, triumphant orchestra, no over-stated ‘hopeful’ melodicism, just one voice and one person, moving out of shot, as if singing to themselves, uncertain of what might lie ahead (more hardship, despite nominal ‘freedom’, for sure – think Lars Von Triers’ ‘Manderlay’ for what happens after one is freed).

Moments such as these, embodying as they do the balance between optimism and pessimism, criticism and something approaching myth-making, a consideration of realities and a desire to overcome these in a spirit of ‘goodness’ and ‘love’, are what distinguish ‘The Journey of August King’, what render it more than what it could so easily have been: a project ‘worthy’ in intentions but not in execution. It rings just right in keeping within the specifics of its situation, realizing that it’s by being true to historical specifics (even if the actual story is fictional) and to human actions and motivations, rather than by ambitious over-reaching, that genuine scope can be accomplished. Indeed, I find myself surprisingly close to James Berardinelli’s apparently overstated position: “The Journey of August King is as close to a flawless motion picture as is likely to be produced by the film industry (independent or mainstream).”

Other Reviews:

James Berardinelli http://www.reelviews.net/movies/j/journey.html
Roger Ebert http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19960322/REVIEWS/603220305/1023

The Evil Dead (1981)

Starring: Bruce Campbell
Music: Joe LoDuca
Director: Sam Raimi
Screenplay: Sam Raimi
Director of Photography: Tim Philo

Coming to this film of course aware of its inflated reputation (though not that the reputation was actually inflated), I was somewhat peeved when it turned out to be neither scary nor particularly funny (each ‘shock’ is signposted a mile off, lack of plot and incident made up for with endless P.O.V. and tracking shots). OK, Sam Raimi (this is very much a director’s film) is playing with the formulae of the horror genre – the sense of something stalking its victims, the zombie-movie gore, the cheesy ‘ancient curse’ scenario that gets all the mayhem rolling, and the stock characters so barely sketched that they only just register as stock characters, let alone human beings whose fate is of much interest beyond visceral identification at the most basic level (i.e. you don’t really care that a particular character is about to get their leg ripped off, but you do care/wince that someone is about to get their leg ripped off).

Sounds pretty good, no? And every time I criticise the film I realise that what I’m saying will probably be precisely what it gets praised for by others; horror reduced to such bare bones (yes, pun intended, ha ha) that it becomes nearly pure image and sound, without the need for the justification of ‘plot’, ‘continuity’, or ‘realism’ (compare this with Fulci’s supposedly Artaudian approach in films such as ‘The Beyond’), and/ or done with such zest that it’s a thrill and a pleasure to watch such obvious manipulation, even while one is aware that it is manipulation and that it is obvious. The enjoyment, then, unfolds in much the same way that we enjoy the cinematic virtuosity of a Dario Argento flick while realising that it is completely artificial – the red-herring shot swooping, down from a height, accompanied by the sound of fluttering wings, in ‘Suspiria’, throwing us off the scent of the attack from below; the endless baths of red light and red blood (maybe something that Raimi parodies in the scene where blood runs down the walls in front of a projector?), the close-ups of eyes and faces, the intrusive and absurd yet intimidating and insinuatingly disturbing prog-rock scores by Goblin.

OK, but actually try watching the cartoonish gore-for-gore’s sake (ketchup-spurt and various foodstuffs and milky liquids spilling around all over the place, with a few maggots thrown for good measure; amusing enough, I guess, in a Peter Jackson ‘Braindead’ kind of way, thought neither as extreme nor even as tongue-in-cheek as in Jackson’s film). Try the uneasy balance between laughter and the sort of lurid love of extreme violence (HIT that zombie with a wooden pole…CHOP that zombie’s limbs off) that characterises recent Hollywood actioners like ‘300’ or ‘Watchmen’ – a balance that, as in those films, isn’t made to feel uneasy and thus loses the impact it might have had (maybe ‘Evil Dead 2’ brings out that awkwardness out more; I haven’t seen it, so couldn’t comment).

And try enduring the film’s continuing misogyny. Consider this: all the demon-possessed characters who become zombies are women (apart from ‘Scotty’ towards the end, when the farrago of female evil has been going on for so long that it far outweighs the impact of this male transformation). Now that they’re zombies they can suffer violence at the hands of men – beating, slapping, and dismemberment. (Though the film’s hero does stop short of chainsawing his zombified girlfriend, said girlfriend is depicted (when in zombie form) as a laughing idiot, a kind of caricature of the ditzy, air-headed female, made sinister.) My problem isn’t so much with violence being shown to be done to women: ‘Witchfinder General’, for example, explores the persecution of women in a way that would lose much of its moral force if such violence was not shown, even if Jess Franco then exploited this in his rip-off ‘The Bloody Judge’, merging titillation and violence through the distasteful spectacle of torture scenes filled with writhing, bloodied nudes or near-nudes. What I object to is the gleeful relish with which it’s shown, the way it’s treated as a joke or gimmick (the ‘tree rape scene’, which is the film’s first full-blown horror set-piece), the lack of moral consideration to it, for which Raimi’s juvenile approach to horror has no place.

Beyond a series of endless trick effects and knowing or unknowing comedic moments, then, there’s basically nothing here – and the implicit values, or assumptions, that are there, are deeply questionable. Dead loss.

Day of Anger (1967)

Starring: Lee Van Cleef, Guiliamo Gemma
Music: Riz Ortolani
Director: Tonino Valerii
Screenplay: Ernesto Gastaldi/ Renzo Genta/ Tonino Valerii
Director of Photography: Enzo Serafin

Quick rundown of the plot: Guiliamo Gemma plays Scott, parentless kid who takes out the town’s shit and is generally brow-beaten. Into said town rides Lee Van Cleef’s gunfighter Talby, who invites the kid into the saloon for a drink. The town bully doesn’t want to sit next to someone who stinks of shit, provokes a fight, is predictably finished off in the film’s first gunplay. At the hastily-convened trial, Van Cleef’s acquitted because he drew in self-defence, leaving him free to get the plot proper underway. Turns out he was fleeced out of $50,000 dollars by the leading citizens of the town, and he proceeds to take his revenge, in the meantime taking Gemma under his wing (becoming a gunfighter allows him to become one of the leading men in town rather than the bottom of the pack). Turns out Van Cleef’s not so much interested in revenge, though, as in turning the situation to his advantage and taking over the town. Gemma comes to realise that his new mentor’s just as corrupt as his former oppressors, and the inevitable showdown occurs in front of Talby’s brand new saloon.

At first glance, this seems as if it’s ticking the standard spaghetti western boxes, and a few extra ones as well – it’s entertaining and well-shot, which already makes it stand out from much of the crowd, a pleasant hour-and-a-half for genre fans with little touches to make it stand out even more: Lee Van Cleef in mean form, all growling voice and squinting eyes, a jazzy Riz Ortolani score, making a change from all those Morricone-derivatives, details like a saloon decorated with giant wooden guns on the front (see picture below), and a focus on the machinations of what it actually means to be a gunfighter (however gimmicky – Van Cleef’s series of one sentence ‘lessons’ to his young protégée Gemma).



Also fairly standard is the cynical attitude whereby the ostensibly ‘genteel’ citizens of the law-abiding town of Clifton oppress the illegitimate hero (the son of one of one of the whorehouse girls) even as they thrive on the services that that whorehouse provides, and the gambling available in the saloon, and where the judge, banker, saloon boss and rancher are all corrupt (a la ‘The Great Silence’ or ‘High Plains Drifter’). That said, I think there may be something more to ‘Day of Anger’ in the way it treats such corruption (though it’s not nearly as bleak in the way it follows through on this as either of the aforementioned films).

Caught between them (the judge survives at the end, though most of the rest are dispatched) and Talby (Van Cleef’s equally cynical gunfighter), it’s hard to know what our hero’s meant to do. The film is clearly going to culminate in a showdown between him and his mentor, but that’s not necessarily going to solve much. Having been wounded, Talby begs for mercy – for Gemma to let him ride out of town – but Gemma, remembering the various ‘lessons’ the older man has taught him throughout the film, recalls a similar moment earlier in the film, where Talby was the one in control and another man lay grovelling in the dust. The cold-bloodedness of the killing is somewhat surprising, given Gemma’s baby-faced innocence and ‘hero’ status (for, despite this being a spaghetti western, its main character is more in the vein of a Hollywood-style likeable youngster than a seedy double-crosser), and it’s also something of a shock to see a Van Cleef character bite the dust in such undignified fashion (reinforced by the low-angle close-up of his face as it hits the ground, with Gemma towering over in the background, left screen).

There’s also an after-taste from Van Cleef’s final ‘lesson’: “when you start killing, you can’t stop it.” Years before Eastwood’s ‘Unforgiven’, that one line suggests not just that being a gunfighter is hardly glamorous, but that gunfighters might in fact be regarded as akin to mass murderers: for all the enshrining of western lore in the talk about Gemma’s gun belonging to Doc Holliday, for all the enjoyment in action set-pieces such as Van Cleef’s horseback rifle duel (a western update of the medieval joust), what this ultimately suggests is that such spheres of activity are merely those of serial killers. The film doesn’t exactly build on that, mind – it’s caught between being an action adventure, aided by the boisterous Ortolani score and by some well-shot and conceived set-pieces (which are, moreover, spread out through the film rather than packed in a dozen at a time, so the killings don’t lose their force) – and between this more questioning mode.

Still, in order to negotiate the afore-mentioned problems of finding a ‘conclusive’ ending, the film does attempt some resolution: Gemma’s gesture of disgust, whereby he throws his gun in fury through a window after finishing off Van Cleef (and anticipating the gesture of John Wayne’s youthful protégée in The Shootist, some ten years later). Nonetheless, what ‘Day of Anger’ ultimately suggests is that the town’s corruption can only be changed by the physical violence, the costly ‘gunlaw’ of the likes of Van Cleef, who are always waiting on the margins.

And that’s how the ‘legitimate’ forces of authority gained their power in the first place – not by committing the violence themselves, but by hiring (and double-crossing) villains like the suitably grimy ‘Wild Jack’ (played by Al Mulock, of ‘Once Upon in the West’ opening scene fame), who appears earlier in the film. What the film suggests, then, is that violence is endemic to peaceful law and order – despite the fact that the marshal at the beginning of the film and his replacement, Gemma’s initial mentor Murph, are opposed to the wearing of guns around town – as well as to the more rough and ready ‘frontier justice’ brought in by the destructive force of Van Cleef.

But it’s not just a simple contrast between the men who know how to control and exploit these more ‘primitive’ forms of coercion and the out-dated gunfighters who are thus exploited (as would be the case in ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’, with the railroad tycoon Morton providing an example of the former and Henry Fonda’s Frank an example of the latter); Talby is something of a wily businessman himself, burning down his rival’s saloon in order to establish his bigger, better whorehouse/gambling house/ drinking house as the town’s primary centre for entertainment. That this ostensibly swisher, more urban and sophisticated location, all plush red carpets and sweeping grand staircases, as opposed to the rough and ready wooden structure which it replaces, is built just as much on crime (is, in fact, probably more corrupt, given that it is less honest about its violent foundations – shootings happen out the back entrance, rather than in the saloon itself), is indicated by the aforementioned production design master-stroke: the giant guns that flank the entrance. Indeed, during the ‘new saloon’ sequence, I’m reminded of a prohibition-era film, a ‘roaring twenties’ crime pic. Given the music – a distinctly 20s-flavoured vocal feature with a backing band of banjo, violin and double bass – that’s hardly surprising.

Returning to the ending, after Gemma throws the gun away there’s a beautiful final touch (though, from the sudden deterioration in the quality of the print, it appears that most versions cut out the very small segment I’m about to describe): he goes off walking down the street, literally hand in hand with the half-blind old tramp who’s turned up at various points in the film as one of his few friends in the town. In a film which focuses even more than most genre pics on the standard spaghetti western trope of relations between young protégées and old mentors – Gemma is taught to shoot by the old ex-sheriff, now stable-hand, Murph, jokes with the old tramp, and is taken under Van Cleef’s wing – it’s perhaps a fitting ending, after two of those mentors have been killed. Yet it doesn’t feel so much like that: rather, what we see is two fools, two lost souls wandering absurdly down the street for no particular purpose, the tramp’s stick la parody of a prophetic staff, like those held by the old beggars in Breugel’s ‘The Blind Leading the Blind’.

And, indeed, the more one thinks about it, the more the film reveals the fundamental absurdity of the spaghetti western, replete as it is with generic formulae which we viewers find ourselves conditioned to believe as ‘natural’ or at least ‘expected’ through repeated exposure (‘naturally unnatural’, one might say). It doesn’t do this by outright parody, or even, perhaps, by intention (though, as I said before, its intentions are somewhat muddled). But think to a moment such as that when Talby rides from the western town of Clifton to a ‘For a Few Dollars More’-style whitewashed Mexican village (despite the name ‘Bowie’ connected with the Alamo – the anti-Mexican statement part excellence, at least in John Wayne’s patriotic hands – and run (for the moment) by a bunch of white gangsters). Rather than the character moving from one (real, geographical) place to another, it seems more like Lee Van Cleef taking a horse from one film set to another, highlighted as an ‘unreal’ movement, a movement between and within generic conventions rather than a ‘real (real-seeming), motivated’ action contained within the bounds of the illusion of the fictional world we’re being asked to suspend our belief towards. We might explain this historically – Clifton is on the edge of the Mexican border, Bowie is one of those border hide-outs beloved of westerns both Italian and American – but, even though Van Cleef is shown riding over the Almerian scrubland hills between his arrival in the two towns, it still remains, my impression of this disjunction.



Perhaps it’s reinforced by the way in which the music – for all its use of hard-edged Shadows-style electric guitar, Dollars-trilogy style – has more of a spy-film vibe than any of the western score Ennio Morricone or Luis Bacalov or Bruno Nicolai might have penned. There are no vocal choruses, there’s no Edda dell’Orso, no Spanish-tinged trumpet melodies; instead, swelling brass flourishes accentuate particularly dramatic moments in a manner so over-the-top it must be at least slightly tongue in cheek. Given all this, when, towards the end of the film, Gemma shoots a harmonica-playing deputy, it seems at once a pseudo-plausible ‘historical’ reference and another knowingly deployed generic gambit designed to catch one just slightly off-kilter: the harmonica deployed not so much as a western prop but as a ‘western’ prop, a genre-object fore-grounded as such.

That’s not to say that the film is as wilfully surrealist as Questi’s ‘Django Kill’ or Jodorowsky’s ‘El Topo’ (which, for all its art-house qualities and refusal to be boxed into any one genre, still frequently has the feel of a spaghetti western). Historical touches are present: the detail about the best way to fire a gun, the court-room scene (saloon shootings are shown to have consequences, rather than just being set-pieces which everyone forgets about after they’ve happened), the appearance of a fire engine during the saloon fire. After all, the more careful film-makers, like Leone, undertook meticulous research to make sure that their vision at least appeared accurate, in contrast to the distorted Hollywood stock-image of what the west was like, even if historical accuracy went out of the window if it could be replaced by a visually arresting shot or by some parallel or symbolism (think the trench warfare-style scenes in ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’, or the assassination of James Garfield reconfigured as that of JFK in ‘The Price of Power’), and even if their vision of the west was as much as the commedia dell’arte background to a twisted morality play as a representation of ‘how things were’. (Perhaps that’s why the western lends itself to the sort of odd generic fore-grounding mentioned above: though tangentially more related to historical reality than a superhero movie or a space opera or even an Italian gladiator pic, perhaps even more so than those it’s actually composed of highly artificial elements from which the film can be pieced together, jigsaw-puzzle style. Thus, it can feel self-conscious even when not self-consciously self-conscious).

All that being said, there are a number of anachronisms which are presumably intentional: as previously mentioned, Van Cleef’s grand new saloon (see pictures below) seems more reminiscent of the 1920s than of the early 1900 setting which, presumably, is the film’s approximate temporal location. I’m not sure whether this is meant to underline a thematic point at all – America as a land built on crime, ostracizing its criminals, its gunfighters and its gangsters as individualists in the bad sense, rather than the ‘good sense’ wherein everybody has equal opportunities to pull themselves to the top of the ladder, as long as they do it with ostensible appearance of fairness, confining themselves to ‘lawful’ pursuits (by which I mean those which the rules allow, rather than those which have any moral weight behind them – bankers take note). While condemning Van Cleef’s gunman and attempting to phase out the guns which are associated with the old, rough and tumble west, the town authorities are still perfectly willing to do deals with him, and to hire ‘heavies’ like him when it suits their interests. They are no less criminals for sitting behind desks than he is for openly making killing his living. Given that this sounds like a plausible interpretation, I’m not sure that such a bleak historical analysis is within the scope of ‘Day of Anger’ – though it certainly emerges through Leone’s films, particularly ‘Once Upon a Time in America’, though with more optimistic qualifications – notably, the great railroad scene which ends ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’.





Still, the temporal and generic blurring contributes to an atmosphere occasionally reminiscent of the McCarthy-era delirium of the American western ‘Silver Lode’ (1954). Like that film, it creeps up on you ‘reasonably’ and insinuates itself in with you, before suddenly catching up with jolts like the transition between the two towns, or the harmonica moment, or the saloon design, inner (as above) and outer (the giant wooden guns affixed to the entrance).

As usual, there’s little interest in women, and the few female roles that do exist are presented in a way that’s borderline misogynistic – the largest is for the judge’s daughter, on whom Gemma has a crush but who he is forbidden to see, given his lowly origins. Later, however, when he’s become a big-shot, the judge hatches a plan in which his daughter is used as bait to lure the youngster in to an attempted assassination: willing bait, it seems, as she is well willing to go along with his duplicitous schemes (although, given the scarcity of screen time, it would be a stretch to say that even this motivation could be elucidated from the on-screen evidence with which we’re presented). With the opening of the new saloon, another actress makes a speaking (and singing) appearance, though only briefly, as a sex symbol and as a prop to further the plot.

It’s a regrettable blindspot in the genre as a whole, and one which few films attempted to redress (‘Hannie Caulder’, starring Raquel Welch, is the only example I can think of). In fact, it’s doubly regrettable, because the spaghetti western tended to have a fairly safe Italian Marxist background even when not being overtly political as in the Zapata westerns: an opposition to racial and class oppression (abused old tramps, or, as in ‘Keoma’, abused old black tramps played, with his usual nobility, by Woody Strode) and even, in ‘Day of Anger’, an opposition, however tentative, to macho individualism (as much as that’s a trait whose celebration is integral to most films in the genre). It’s by no means a bad thing that the Italian western rejected the Hollywood western’s relegation of women to love interests who could ‘humanise’ the gunfighter hero and settle (or re-settle) them down to a life of law-abidin’ domesticity, home-baked pies, and red-and-white check-patterned tablecloths. But the alternative presented – where women were, at best, ignored (Leone actually cut a love scene out of ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’), featuring only briefly as whores or virgins most likely to be raped or murdered – was hardly much of an improvement. One might argue that presenting women as either irrelevant to the macho world of gunplay, or as oppressed figures, was historically accurate (aside from such unusual cases, ‘manly’ women like Belle Starr or Calamity Jane). But the Italian westerns end up celebrating this – at last, we’ve managed to get away from the sissy feminine touches of Hollywood to present some gritty masculine truth! – or, at least, accepting it as a generic pre-requisite, part of the way things are in the world of the 60s western.

I guess a paragraph of summary, some sort of concluding remark, is expected, but I think I’ve said most of what I had to say on this particular viewing. If you haven’t seen it already, go watch it – the whole things’ up on youtube, and it’s also available on a DVD from Spaghetti western experts Wild East.

Dunois Jazz

Quick heads up on a fantastic channel I just discovered on youtube - short (1-2 minute) videos featuring many great jazz and improv performers during the 1980s, recorded at a jazz club in Paris. American jazzers like Sonny Sharrock (kicking out the jams in typically mind-boggling fashion and breaking a guitar string in the process without missing a beat - total, joyous concentration - just look at his face in the clip embedded above! - and then spinning out some surprisingly gentle jazz balladry) and Mal Waldron (with some great, hard blowing from saxophonist Richard Raux), British free improvisers Lol Coxhill (doing one of his wonderful spoken word pieces with the Recedents), Steve Beresford, and John Stevens, and European mavericks like Jac Berrocal (swinging bells and cymbals around while dressed in leather trousers and jacket). Of particular interest for me are the two videos of a band I've recently discovered - Ted Milton's British No-Wave-style band Blurt. Great chance to see his performative antics as lead singer and saxophonist. And then there's the extremely powerful vocal stylings of Basque singer Benat Achiary, duetting with soprano saxophonist Michel Toneda: a blend of raw folk tradition with the unpredictability of improv that reminds me a little of the work of Ghedalia Tazartes. Will have to track down their recordings together - I could do with some more of that! Would be nicer if the clips were longer, but, as it is, it's a great cross-section of things - give yourself half an hour, pop all the videos into a youtube playlist, and watch multiple delights unfold.

Link is here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/dunoisjazz

The Universal Mind of Bill Evans (documentary)

Just stumbled across said programme on youtube; looks to be an unusually thoughful jazz documentary. Too often even quite promising modern jazz docs are overly scattershot in their approach: for example, you arguably learn more about Sun Ra from the fiction film 'Space is the Place' than the more recent 'Brother from Another Planet' (which draws on 'SITP' as well as the 1980s documentary 'A Joyful Noise' - 'AJN' does the right thing in letting Ra and members of the Arkestra speak their mind without 'amplification' or 'enhancement' from obtrusive journos or critics). 'Talking heads' (whether these be critics or musicians) tend to be used merely to deliver fairly obvious factual snippets or unsubstantiated opinions, with short bits of music that aren't given time to breathe amongst the commentary. A good example might be the film about 'New Thing' jazz released on DVD by ESP Disk, 'Inside Out in the Open', which is admittedly hampered by its length - it feels like it's trying to cram a whole TV series' worth into a mere hour. But even those programmes which have the luxury of giving more time to their subjects, such as Ken Burns' 'Jazz', fall into the same trip - most infamously when Cecil Taylor could be dismissed by a wilfully ignorant Marsalis comment and an extremely brief snippet of a piano solo whose overall feel is actually very different to the chosen excerpt. (Full video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP5L8tjnB6w) Some might argue that, as with television news, an agenda is being pushed - the impression of 'neutrality', of hearing several sides of the issue, is foisted upon us by the wide variety of talking heads, even as they merge into one voice, crowing the party line. This might not even be their fault - but selective editing can make it so. And, importantly, it might not even be the fault of the film-makers (debate Mr Burns' motivation in the aforementioned Cecil Taylor example as you will), as much as a result of the constraints they have to work under - most obviously, with regards to length, and to the sheer scope of material they have to address within such limiting confines.

Which is why I think the 'small is beautiful' approach is probably where the best jazz docs come from. There are no such compromises, no glaring omissions and skewed/chopped viewpoints in the Bill Evans documentary. By limiting things down to three people - Steve Allen, for the introduction; Bill Evans, as the documentary subject; and his brother Harry, as interviewer - it allows their thoughts to emerge at greater length, and with greater clarity; allows us access to the creative process of an artist without the talking-heads' schizophrenic data-barrage of dates, annecdotes, narratives. It's willing to be slow and to give time for actual thought about jazz as a serious artform.

As for the actual content of the prog, there are some interesting ideas, though I'm not sure I agree with all of them. The intro from Steve Allen is surprisingly shtick-free (apart from the rather forced gag where he pretends to forget his name), and his point about technique becoming so ingrained that the spontaneous aspects of improvisation can flow naturally, without forced or pre-planned conscious thought - that the artist can think with/through technique - actually parallel some of the comments Evan Parker makes in David Borgo's book on improvisation 'Sync or Swarm': Parker backing up his ideas with scientific reference to the left and right hemispheres of the brain, or to psi phenomena.

The statement by Evans which opens the doc is particularly controversial: the notion of a "universal musical mind" somewhat similar to Chomsky's 'universal grammar', or even to Hegel's 'Absolute Spirit', relies on non-interrogated notions of the 'real', the 'true', the 'good'. (Though admittedly, later on, Evans demonstrates (by some variations on the tune 'How About You'), how playing 'simply' can be more 'real' than approximating a more complex approach for which you do not have the technical skill). I'm also intrigued by the way in which he thinks a 'sensitive layman' may have more insight than a hardened professional, unconcerned as they are with the technical niceties of performance, more able to appreciate the spontaneous joys of creation. I'd only go along with that so far, though I think it's a valuable corrective to the 'high priesthood' of critics telling us what to think, whose opinions may be no more valuable than those they 'teach'.

But let's not get into that whole 'role of the critic' debate. There's much to digest on this documentary, so click the play button and enjoy. I'd be quite interested to generate some discussion about this, so, once you've seen the thing, do leave a comment below if you have any thoughts.

The Convergence Quartet Live in Cambridge

Photo from here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38Y-5zsX-x8

THE CONVERGENCE QUARTET
Churchill College Recital Room, Cambridge, Saturday 2nd May 2009

A co-operative, trans-Atlantic group whose previous visit to the UK resulted in a fine album (this tour also involved a recording session, so keep your eyes peeled for future developments), the Convergence Quartet boast a wealth of combined experience: Taylor Ho Bynum’s immersion in the complex musical worlds of Anthony Braxton, Harris Eistenstadt’s fine work as a leader, and Alexander Hawkins’ and Dominic Lash’s involvement in the UK improv scene. As might be expected then, they played a fascinatingly varied programme, but there was also a real sense of a group identity – perhaps cemented by the fact that this gig came towards the end of a week spent touring the UK.

The concert began with Lash and his woody, twangy ‘improv bass’, Eisenstadt inquisitively testing the waters alongside. A few minutes in, and Bynum began to play a muted and moody melody with the softest of touches, continually cycling back to the original theme as the piece developed, rather in the manner of Miles Davis’ ‘Nefertiti’; it certainly gave an unusual structure which would prove to be typical of the group’s atypical ability to create something diverse but not perversely scatter-brained, to balance composition and improvisation, to create new configurations and patterns afresh, at will.

Formal experimentation was perhaps most notably attempted about half-way through, with a performance of Dom Lash’s piece ‘Representations’, in what was announced as its 15th configuration (previous performances have included a rather fine one at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music festival, available as a free download on Lash’s Last FM page). While its restraints (involving much page-shuffling and stern concentration, and afterwards described by Hawkins as akin to Russian roulette!) could potentially have zapped some of the spark from the group, on this occasion they provoked a degree of interaction that was quite different from the improvisations on the composed pieces, but no less fascinating. Hand signals led to transitions between sections or signalled duets, trios, and whole group configurations, different musical events occurring on different planes – thus, a series of vaguely Messiaen-like chords carried on underneath several other switches from the rest of the group (though this never felt like a changing background, an accompaniment to the piano). All this resulted in a kind of textural overlapping which meant that the piece, which might otherwise have seemed rather austerely episodic, instead seemed purposeful and knife-edged poised. It was fascinating indeed to watch musical minds at this level of concentration, to see if the risks taken paid off.

A Leroy Jenkins piece dedicated to Albert Ayler emerged in heartfelt quiet, cornet and trumpet delicate with their unison melody. The band certainly have an ear for not often-heard compositions: it’s nice to hear this legacy of the underrated jazz masters getting its due, rather than endless re-hashings of 1930s popular songs and jazz standards. And they proved this once again by performing Tony Oxley’s ‘Crossings’, which juxtaposed full-throttle free jazz squall, full-band cluster climaxes, bowed drone tones, and a pretty melody whose appeal was illustrated when Bynum spontaneously whistled along to Hawkins’ rendition.

There was much to notice about the individual players. Bynum plays his cornet loud (those high, brash tones!) and with some style too – by which I mean to suggest, not that he demonstrates a polished virtuosity (though virtuosity it is), but rather, that his playing locates him in the great tradition of ‘bad-taste’ jazz trumpet, with cartoon parps (which, perhaps not entirely due to coincidence, require a lip position which gives him the temporary appearance of Donald Duck) and ‘distortion’ through the use of an ‘on-off’ mute effect. Indeed, he has rather a lot of these tricks up his sleeve – including pouring water down the mouth of his flugelhorn, which gushed out in irregular spasms as he played (though it didn’t really seem to effect the sound of the instrument), and using a ‘jazz hat’ as a mute. But they never really felt like ‘tricks’ – sure, he does them because he can (and what’s wrong with a bit of showmanship?) but he also does them because they make musical sense, and they never distract from the overall direction of the particular piece in which they are employed. This was best demonstrated towards the end of a piece where Bynum circular breathed to sustain a one-note drone. Many players, I’m sure, would have employed it to generate applause in their solo (nothing like that sort of display to get listeners excited) but – proof that Bynum didn’t want to be the flashy focus – it ended up being probably the quietest element in the texture, occasionally rising in volume to create odd harmonisings with the bass as things were dominated by sprightly piano.

Hawkins seems to get better every time I see him live; every solo he took tonight was a journey, or, if you prefer, a well-told short story. They would begin as jazz explorations, or even boogie-woogie-flavoured romps, before whipping themselves up to a frenzy of clanging clusters, rolling glissandi, and fast-paced, dissonant runs, like a dancer tripping over their feet as the speed of their performance spins out of control. This was both tremendously exciting and the consequence of a logical development – jazz taken to the edge and then pushed over, because there really was no where else to go – and it was always – somehow – contained within the framework of a two or three minute showcase.

The afore-mentioned ‘Representations’ demonstrated Lash’s skills as a composer, an organiser of sounds, and he proved equally capable slotting in with Eisenstadt to provide tight grooves on the jazzier numbers, though the most notable moments in his performance were when he made full use of his instrument’s range, bowing behind the strings, teasing out harmonics, changing the whole texture of a piece with sensitive arco work.

Eisenstadt is not the most flashy drummer, but a vital part of the Quartet’s musical identity: he has a tendency to go for the slightly off-kilter groove, loud, chunky, thumping beats and cymbal crashes just past the point you’d expect them to occur. He’s a sensitive ballad player as well, mallets making cymbals sigh, barely there as the group trod more tender lines; and he proved his improv credentials in the freer passages, with moments of perfect quick-thinking, most notably when he followed two taps on the snare with two on cymbal, almost as if he was in dialogue with himself as well as with the other musicians. A small moment, easy to miss with all the other activity that was going on around it; there were probably many more of a similar kind which I failed to notice, indicating the music’s real fullness and richness.

The audience was not particularly large, but clearly appreciative, and so the Quartet finished with an encore: a slice of South-African good humour via Dudu Pukwana. Bynum inserted a neatly-disguised ‘Happy Birthday’ quotation into his muted solo in honour of the pianist (incidentally, who knew that Mr Bynum was such a good SA jazz player?), and everything ended with a series of churchy and completely satisfying chords, bass and piano linking tones and the last reverberations of the piano’s sustain pedal fading away with an effect that almost sounded electronic, merging with the short, satisfied sigh of a listener in the audience to perfectly satisfying effect.

HENRY GRIMES – SIGNS ALONG THE ROAD: POEMS

[The following review originally appeared in Issue 3 of 'eartrip' magazine.]

Publisher: buddy’s knife jazzedition
Publishing Date: 2007
Number of Pages: 129
Contents: signs along the road being put there; the march; easternal mysticism, virtue, and calm; sed; the arch stairwells; the walk in the dark that was heard at night; ortherama the king; of europe; untitled; untitled; the rivers run into the sea; amazed heart, all ponderous eye; the infant of attention; the luckbill; death; ghost and spirit; the place; the world our society, society our world; the chime around above time; lilith; the feeling of ahaz; that was the quip lib; as oceans – head; coasts; at any; a pre-revolutionary cabin; moments; egregious grows the light of dawn; adama and pourquory; hieroglyphics; to adopt a child; grenth; prose lefthand; in the day; the river end; peace; monk music; friend; apologia pro vita sua; water wax; back to down along spring street; in case the place should change; the ground; gage’s pick-ups; two; metabites; against the shadow of the moon; a chart of heart a chart of mind; the last chord
Additional Information: Available from http://buddysknife.de/

The facts are well known. Henry Grimes, established as absolutely one of the leading figures in the new music of the 1960s, through his work with Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry and Pharoah Sanders, disappeared in 1968. Presumed dead ever since, he was discovered in 2003, subsequently remaining in demand around the world, playing with many different groups and in many different contexts, creating anew the wonderment of the 1960s’ fervent ferment, with that same energy and ear for the serene howl of uncouth beauty. In the thirty-year gap, he did not touch a bass once. But neither did he suffer from the ills that forced so many jazz musicians off their paths of brilliant creation – drink and drugs. And thus his mind still roamed, seeking other avenues down which to travel, apart from the music which it sustained and which sustained it. It was to words that he turned, and though Marc Ribot claims in his introduction to this book that Grimes is “a man who almost never speaks,” through writing he was able to exercise his mind, to make that transference from thought to art. Filling thousands of pages with his thoughts, with diary entries and with poetry, he had no audience but himself (how different to the glass-clinking, cash-register-ringing, conversation-ringing atmospheres of the jazz-clubs in which he had played!).

Yet writing with this freedom imposed more discipline, not less – one should not expect anything otherwise, given the beautiful freedom of the bass playing. What emerges out of this selection from Grimes’ notebooks is that he was truly was using poetry to think, deeply and seriously. As he treated music as a philosophical and spiritual activity, so he understood that poetry can be fundamental to an understanding of where and what one really is. It could be argued that this absolute concentration of faculties emerged from necessity, but it was also self-imposed: no one told Grimes to write, it was his own compulsion to do so. In the thirty silent years during which he remained virtually alone, poetry was a way of reaching deep into his own innermost recesses, but also of engaging with the world from which he had cut himself off – whether this be through the use of history and mythology (‘a pre-revolutionary cabin’, ‘ortherama the king’), religion (‘easternal mysticism, virtue, and calm’) or consideration of the surrounding urban environment (‘the arch stairwells’).

Paradoxically, it may have only been by cutting himself off in this way that he could manage to so deeply engage, with the world and with himself – although it is worth noting that quite a few of these poems were written after Grimes’ re-emergence. Nevertheless, it was arguably that extreme cut-off which presented the conditions in which this poetry could be brought into existence (though one must be careful not to romanticise solitude, ‘dropping-out’, as one might be tempted to in the cases of Sonny Simmons, Charles Gayle, or Guiseppi Logan (himself perhaps on the verge of a return)).

Part of the poetry’s beauty is its individuality. Not for the sake of wackiness or trying to seem/appear anything. Compare these lines to your standard jazz poetry: “Distance was spatial/ and the time drew/fathomless,/ in quire to condescend/in the mystic measures/overlapping” (‘the walk in the dark that was heard at night’). This is difficult stuff –not just because of the use of obscure words like ‘quire’, ‘mien’ or ‘zygocity,’ but because of the whole construction and content of the poems’ almost every line. Grimes’ phrasing is genuinely knotty; he is genuinely attempting to say things that cannot be said any other way. Prose paraphrase will really not do. Recently I’ve been thinking about how it would be possible to develop a new vocabulary, or set of vocabularies, to deal with the intense demands that music like Grimes’ makes on the traditional resources of music criticism/journalism. I think that ‘Signs along the Road’ is the closest that anyone has so far come to doing this, the trade off being that it is so much a poetic conception that I’m not sure it would, or could desirably, be fitted into the confines of criticism.

In any case, music is far from Grimes’ only theme. “Events are the polarizing of urban waves in spiritual displacement”: this is a poetry that addresses that great theme of Frank O’ Hara –the contradictions of living in the modern urban world, and specifically, in the modern American city. Admittedly, Grimes’ methods and results are very different to O’ Hara’s, his city poetry being interior and private-public. By this I mean that the initially inward meditations reach outward to encompass the public (most often in its facade as architecture and constructed living space – hotels, roads, churches, parks) rather than starting out and moving in. This is a more complex process than I allow, in fact, for an observed image tends to be the initial trigger (‘signs along the road’, ‘the arch stairwells’), and the inward/outward relation often exists, as far as that is possible, in a simultaneous relation. Yet still I think there is a difference to O’ Hara’s predominantly social and public-private sphere – by which I mean that even though one is alone, one always writes about one’s friends, about lunches and parties and boat trips and sexual couplings, that even one’s deepest fears are considered in terms of others, and probably could not exist without them (“when anyone reads this but you it begins/to be lost” cements the very personal address of ‘A Letter to Bunny’). Grimes’ scope is both wider and narrower: ‘the world our society, society our world’ – this ‘world’ feels much more abstract than that of O’ Hara, which is constructed almost entirely out of those that people it.

Considering one’s environment so deeply inevitably leads one to question how one is placed within it. The poem just cited does this, to be sure, but perhaps the most direct engagement is in ‘the place’, found on pages 52 and 53. By its final lines (“and i was right: i knew/ just where i was”), one knows without a doubt that the piece’s journey is genuine. It begins: “The place was always – a thing/ to wonder, and/ always it seemed like/ it had propensity/ to outright.” This seems relatively straightforward, compared to some of Grimes’ other contortions of syntax, but read those lines again. “The place was always – a thing/to wonder:” the dash placed between the first four and last two words of the first line, importantly adding an extra dimension of meaning. Not just “the place was always [some]thing/ to wonder [marvel at]”, but “the place was always [in existence],” as well as “a thing/to wonder.” Why would this be? Because ‘place’ is not just the realisation of where one is at any one particular moment (‘I am standing on Fifth Avenue/ I am standing on 52nd street’), but of where one is placed as a human being within the world at large – beyond that, within the cosmos. “Going to the ritual,/ grown in time and beyond the gate…to the indoor place” (‘eastern mysticism, virtue, and calm’) – this awareness of the very largest context within which one is placed is the very truest way of understanding the very smallest context – one’s self, one’s body and soul. This mystic background forms an unspoken, but to my mind crucial part of ‘the place’s argument.

That should not imply any sort of shallow mysticism – rather, much of the poem is concerned with observations of thing seen, with sense-data – “a place, a hotel room…architectural archetype sameness…roadside slides”. But these things are always more than single, solid concepts, leading instead to trains of thought and association; in this highly charged context words assume more than themselves, have the ghosts of other words behind them – so that the beautifully assonant “roadside slides” conjures the phrase “roadside dives”, and makes one ponder the use of metaphors of movement (‘slides’, ‘dives’) to talk of places, buildings which do not move – and this ties back to the road (‘roadside’), to the way that cars slide or dive (in rain) along its surface, or that people slide from their cars out to these ‘low dives’, dive out (while never escaping) the cold comfort, the “couching ambiguity/ of modern life”. And then those roads connect to those “signs along the road” which make the subject matter of the titular first poem. Grimes is not necessarily thinking about these connections explicitly – they are not necessarily ‘there’ in the surface linearity of the poem’s observations, but, because of his depth as a thinker and artist, they enter his words anyhow, as if oozing from the fibres of his being.

In the poem discussed above, Grimes notes that “the place has…propensity to outright.” One can clearly not take ‘outright’ as meaning any bald, factual, common-sensical statement. The sense of Grimes’ poetry, so much a product of his senses (sensual attune-ment to, at-one-ment with the world), is far from common, if ‘common’ means ‘repeated into triviality’. Yet the humanity it translates to words could, potentially, be common to us all – it’s just that there are only some people who are willing to confront themselves and their environment with as much as honesty as to be able to access it.

Based on all this, one should be able to class Grimes, along with Cecil Taylor, as the jazz musician-poet par excellence – or, like Taylor, as more than this: as a poet whose conception is undoubtedly musically informed, displaying the same resources, reflexes, turns and emotions as his music-making, but whose writing stands alone, independent of the music. Grimes captures this best himself, in one of the few poems explicitly about music, ‘monk music’: “Music functions in a pattern./Patterns.” That line-broken, end-(full)-stopped ambiguity is something to be savoured, as it teases out this meaning: that music is both patterned and patterning, the patterns created by the musicians in some mysterious way turning round to pattern them. In that sense, Grimes goes some way towards allowing us a glimpse into just what people mean when they talk about the ‘magic’ of free improvisation – the sense of being both in and out of control, of controlling the music’s flow while also not knowing what is going to happen next. Grimes is also saying that music cannot be limited to just one pattern (the full-stop and line-break act as a pause, a hesitation before a correction – “Music functions in a pattern – no, wait, that’s not quite right, it functions in patterns.”) If we apply these insights to the poetry, I think we gain something useful: Grimes’ poems use patterns, but not so much the traditional patterns of strict metre and regulated stanzaic shapes, coming nearest to such a tradition only insofar as the ‘open field’ of Charles Olson hovers somewhere in the structure of ‘signs along the road being put there’ (Olson’s conception obviously a reaction against those older patterns, anyhow). Instead, these patterns tend, perhaps, to emerge more from a way of thinking and speaking unique to Grimes (just as reading J.H. Prynne’s prose helps one understand some of the characteristic twists of phrasing that contribute so much to the strangeness of his poems).

Perhaps they emerge from the patterns of jazz also– the sense of placement and timing in ‘monk music’ does become a lot more comprehensible if one thinks of Thelonious Monk’s playing. This is a poetry with an intensely oral/aural effect (as indicated by the fact that Grimes now recites his words as well as playing bass and violin), but the intricacy of its many effects is very textual – not in terms of numerous allusions requiring hoards of footnotes to decipher (though the range of reference is very wide), but the way in which many of the twists of meaning simply cannot be understood by hearing the poem read aloud – line breaks, punctuation, differing implied emphases which occur simultaneously. It is perhaps for this reason that ‘signs along the road’ seems to read itself aloud inside one’s head as one reads. It’s a phenomenon that I don’t recall ever happening to me with any other kind of poetry – the voice that plays itself out in my head is not that of Henry Grimes, nor is it mine, and perhaps it is not even fully a voice, but it does exist in some capacity. This sounds fanciful, but one could describe it as the voice of the poem itself, speaking independently of writer and reader but emerging only from the encounter between them. I hope, and I don’t think, that such philosophical considerations are something I am imposing on the poetry; rather, they arise from the conditions which it creates – it makes one think in this way. It forces one’s experience to become enriched, with the gentlest and most studious of touches.

It’s a shame that the book doesn’t seem to have received much coverage, either from the jazz critics (who might not be quite sure what to make of it), nor from the literary critics (for whom this is off their usual radar – ‘what does a free jazz bassist from America have to tell us about poetry?’). There are ways of writing about it intelligently, though, as Marc Ribot’s introduction shows. Thankfully, he doesn’t try to grasp for too many literary parallels – but he does mention Celan, which I think is appropriate, given the stress that both place on individual words and phrases, the way they force language to say things that one almost feels it doesn’t want to – the way that their poetry is wrenched into being from the very depths of their self. Such poetry is incredibly honest, and incredibly generous; it is what is meant by being aware, awake, and alive.