Writing Obsessions
If you, like me, have any interest in older music or those enigmatic creators of it, whom we could not enjoy today’s music without, please consider reading these two pieces:
James Baldwin- Sonny's Blues. Jazz is one of the dearest things to my heart which I don’t enounce enough. It's always disappearing and reappearing. My parents have played jazz for me since I was young, and somehow even earlier… (I heard lots of music in the womb!) but I rarely get to talk about it. It's a unique kind of art in its spontaneity. With such looseness and bending of traditional rules, you might compare it to free form poetry.
I’m not great with free form poetry. I strive to inhabit that level of loose, controlled chaos that masters like Coltrane and Monk embodied. Not just in music, or art en generale, but in the way I live!
The short story (26 pages) Sonny’s Blues is about the trials of a life lived so freely. Restraint is a virtue that many of the masters did not have. Why do you think they were so often killed by their vices?
But it’s also about much, much more. James Baldwin is, in my heart, the most important writer of the mid 20th century. He has much to say about the Black experience that you can’t glean from just history books. Baldwin lived it! And he writes with so much passion that you can easily imagine the characters of Sonny’s Blues being real people out of history. Their highs and lows are shockingly realistic.
By the 1920s, developers had managed to build a jetty to control the waters, pave a road leading off the peninsula, and construct a town to host thousands of people. Key parts of Bayocean included its heated wave pool, its dance hall, and its many hotels. For all these developments, the optimistic town of Bayocean would pay the price.
Just like jazz, this story often returns to me when I’m in dark times. If you are into short stories, Black history, empathy, jazz, or even just music, you owe it to yourself to read Sonny’s Blues. I hope it touches your heart like it did mine.
Tucker Zimmerman - Biography I & II. You have never heard of Tucker Zimmerman, and this is a great shame… The ultimate sadness of this biography... I happened upon it by chance and devoured the whole thing in an evening (Roughly 80 pages of pure biographic action! Sheesh!). But, in short, he’s a musician who grew up in the 1950s near L.A. He’s one of those invisible masters close to popular music of the time who never quite reached stardom.
The entertainment system is such a terrifying circus of chance. Zimmerman gave it a go with a very strong array of songs in the ‘60s/'70s. Some were protest songs, others were ballads, but most were little whimsical musings about the world-- This is the stuff folk music is built on. However, Zimmerman was once called “too qualified for folk” by David Bowie, and he wasn’t incorrect. He never had even one hit song.
Ol’ TZ comes from a background worlds apart from folk musicians of the time. And his repertoire of sounds reflects that! From folk, to blues, jazz, and classical piano, to straight poetry, TZ has never stuck to one sound. He strikes me as something of a contrarian: While influenced by popular sounds, never submitting to them fully. A face that hasn’t sold out.
The biography is very tender, telling the story of one man’s long history with music and all the friends and mentors who have enabled it. Some of Zimmerman’s achievements are spectacular. I would like to be a bit like him when I grow up.
From here on I will be repping Zimmerman hard (At least ‘till he stops collabing with Big Thief). But seriously, please read this if you are into music history, song writing, your uncle, friendship, or bildungsroman.