One of the MANY things I cherish about playing in our band, revolution, is the trust, skill, and creative vulnerability each person brings to the table. That most of us have been making music together in one form or another for almost 20 years is one of the reasons this band works. Another has to do with skill and trust: each member brings a unique skill set to the music with trust - and that trust includes feeling safe with one another, trusting that the Holy Spirit will show up when we need her, a commitment to the songs we bring for consideration, and an awareness that no one holds a monopoly upon wisdom. This is especially true when we're on a bandstand where we have to stand and deliver; but also whenever we gather for practice, too.
No where is this trust, skill, and creative vulnerability more evident than when we take an old favorite, deconstruct it in various ways, and then slowly reconstruct it to fit this moment in time so that our collective heart's commitment takes on shape, form, sound, and soul. Playing serious and spontaneous jazz with one another over the years has helped us let go of form so that we might playfully experiment with improvisation. Winton Marsalis wrote that playing live demands vigorous listening as well as a deep willingness to help one another out of the pit should a song start to go south. These three musical practices are a form of embodied spirituality and are grounded in faith: we believe that the sacred is every bit a member of the band as the rest of us. And the more we strive to honor this holy presence the more risks we're willing to take in pursuit of the pay-off.
About a year ago, while working on a benefit show for recently resettled Afghan refugees, we recognized that a beloved song, Jackson Browne's "Running on Empty," wasn't working for us when we tried to replicate it like the record. Our drummer, the wise and extremely tender-hearted Jon Haddad, suggested we try: 1) stripping the song down to just one acoustic guitar played in a finger picking style; and 2) emphasizing the haunting call and response nature of the tune's chorus: "running on - running on empty; running on - running blind; running on - running into the sun but I'm running behind." It took a few takes to find the right tempo - we finally settled on one about half as fast as the recording - then went to work experimenting with additional instrumental endings. In our rendering, this song highlights the spiritual quest that was always latent but hidden under the instrumentation. We can hear aspects of the dark night of the soul in the song - it is fundamentally a lament about feeling empty in the land of plenty - as well as an awareness that everyday life is a combination of trust and sacrifice: Gotta do what you can just to keep your love alive; trying not to confuse it, with what you do to survive. I will be forever indebted to Jon for his vision in helping us take this song apart and reframe it, and bring it back to life. It is still melodically recognizable, but now with added gravitas and grace.
Consequently, we're now playing with a few others: by applying the same insights to the Foo Fighters, "Times Like These," we've come up with almost a Latin driven call to compassion that's world's apart from the kickass rock'n'roll of the original. On a fluke, we discovered that "Groovin'" by the Rascals worked as an ultra-laid back invitation to sensual mindfulness. And that "Gimme Shelter" by the Stones can be an agonizing call to solidarity. We start off acoustically with women's voices ascending and descending in spontaneous chant; the first verse is offered in a hushed tone; adding drums and percussion builds the intensity so that the extended instrumental break into the middle with a searing electric guitar that kicks things into high rock'n'roll gear. We tried it that way last night after discussing these possibilities. Without having played it this way, we could've had a train wreck. But when trust, skill, and creative vulnerability are embraced by the Holy Spirit: it was a bit like Pentecost when that presence greater than ourselves lifted both the band and our gathered friends into another zone state of consciousness, Debriefing afterwards, confirmed that we all felt the buzz of being lifted beyond ourselves for about 8 sacred minutes.
Two other factors are worth noting, too. First, our lead guitarist, Dave McDermott, follows the flow of the Spirit in all his playing. If it doesn't FEEL real, he lays out, preferring silence to noise. Often he's said to me something like: when our music taps into the vibrations of life that are eternal but not often acknowledged, we are guided by a love greater than consciousness. David doesn't waste time playing random notes. Rather, he shares flourishes and fills as a song ripens and the offers up solos that come from some deep place within and beyond. When this happens, our songs become soul food. Second, each member of this ensemble carries with them a musical legacy that honors rock, soul, gospel, jazz, folk, and chant. I've rarely experienced such an eclectic mix before where we're just as much at home with Nora Jones, the Grateful Dead, and the Beatles as with Miles, Joni Mitchell, Hendrix or traditional country. Jazz poet, Jayne Cortez, put it perfectly when she crafted this:
I crisscrossed with Monk
Wailed with Bud
Counted every star with Stitt
Sang "Don’t Blame Me" with Sarah
Wore a flower like Billie
Screamed in the range of Dinah
& scatted "How High the Moon" with Ella Fitzgerald as she blew roof off the Shrine AuditoriumJazz at the Philharmonic
Add in the stunning natural beauty of taking in the music while contemplating the wetlands... and you get something that feels salvific. Jimi Hendrix once said: I used to live in a room full of mirrors; all I could see was me. I take my spirit and I crash my mirrors, now the whole world is here for me to see. Ain't THAT the truth? Dave and I will join the soiree as "Two of Us" tomorrow at the Sideline Saloon under the able guidance of host Elaine Morel @ 7 pm. Be there or be square!
As late summer slowly shifts into early autumn, and the multiple greens of the wetland morph into reds and browns, my heart returns to music-making. The next 90 days in these hills are my personal favorites: the luscious corn of Lamas passes the season's mantle to the wheat harvest, sumac and grape vines shimmer with their unique crimsons, the nights demand blankets on our beds again, and the autumnal equinox points us all towards Samhain and the liminal space of All Saints Day. David Cole writes in The Celtic Year that "the autumn season is the time when we lose all that has once been."
It is the season of harvest, when the crops get chopped down and the fields become empty. It is the season when deciduous trees drop their leaves and the ground becomes filled with yellow and brown... and it is the season which teaches us to let go: it carries with it the life-giving aspect of detachment.
Small wonder that our ancient Celtic mothers and fathers sensed that this was the transition that marked the start of a new year: November was the ancient beginning, not January, where darkness and death invite us into the primal womb of waiting in anticipation of new life. The Christian season of Advent is shaped by these truths where the days in-between show us how to slow down, focus, rest, discern, and return thanks for all that has been. We're not there yet, of course, but already the burning bushes are starting to look like fire and a few of the older trees are settling back in repose: a perfect setting for this year's Play Music on the Porch gathering.
The late Jerry Garcia of Grateful Dead fame hit the nail squarely on the head when he told us:
People need celebration in their life. It's part of what it means to be human. We need magic and bliss, power, myth, and celebration in our lives - and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it.
Another wise old soul, Nick Cave, put it like this in a book-length conversation entitled: Faith, Hope, and Carnage. In response to Sean O"Hagan's query about the meaning of music, Cave replies:
Music can draw people out of their suffering - even if it is just temporary respite... That's because music has the ability to penetrate all the fucked up way we have learned to cope with this world - all the prejudices and affiliations, agendas and defenses that basically amount to a kind of layered suffering - and get at the thing that lies below and is essential to us all, that is pure, that is good: the sacred essence. I think that music, out of all that we can do artistically, is the great indicator that something else is going on, something unexplained , because it allows us to experience genuine moments of transcendence.
As these two souls dance together while existing in completely different spheres - death and life; the folk/rock/jug band vibe of the Dead next to the T.S. Elliot punk verve of Cave and the Bad Seeds - a unique song is given voice where celebration is practiced in the presence of suffering while magical bliss accompanies the enigmas of our existence. Lou Reed called it magic and loss. I encounter it as trusting the mystery of the journey that carries both blessing and tumult. Cave speaks to my heart when he says:
As I've gotten holder, I have come to see that maybe the search IS the religious experience - the desire to believe and the longing for meaning - moving us towards the ineffable. Maybe THAT is what is essentially important, despite the absurdity of it - or, indeed, because of the absurdity of it.
That's the paradox of music-making as I experience it, yes? It's the absurd AND the ecstatic. The restorative AND ephemeral. Joy, sorrow, rhythm, sound, movement, discipline, and abandon resting within a trust that pulsates like the seasons both in and out of time. When asked how he chose to engage the world after surviving the Holocaust, the late Elie Wiesel said: "I dance." The dance of life is resistance and surrender - it is embodied spirit on a journey of faith that not only acknowledges but accepts grief and healing, assurance and doubt, sound and silence simultaneously as well as the power of vulnerability. Cave wisely says:
To be truly vulnerable is to exist adjacent to collapse and obliteration. In that place we can feel extraordinarily alive and receptive to all sorts of things, creatively and spiritually. It can be perversely a point of advantage, not disadvantage... a nuanced place that feels both dangerous and teeming with potential and the more time you spend there, the less worried you become of how you will be perceived or judged and that is ultimately where the freedom comes from.
And so, at this point in the journey, I choose to link myself to my music-making mates who bring with them their own wounds and wisdom to share in an aesthetic stone soup of sound. That's what the songs we've crafted for this year's Play Music on the Porch feels like to me: nourishment from within shared in community as respite and rebellion. Or prayer and party. Or maybe simply dancing in defiance of all that defiles us. Poet farmer, Scott Chaskey, wrote:
The challenges that confront us daily in the twenty-first century - familial, social, economic, political, environmental - can be overwhelming. As we encounter what is reported as the greatest challenge humanity has collectively face - climate disruption - it is timely to revisit an ancient theme, an interspecies them: our kinship with nature. (Soil and Spirit)
Many of the songs we've selected are chill this year. There are a few kickass rockers but those are the exception to the flow. As we've been practicing over the past month, I've wondered why the vibe keeps coming out subdued and introspective. And now I have a few clues: that is what the season is singing to us. Be still - and know. Be grounded - and trust. Be awake to one another during the insanity of this era and bless be the ties that bind. When we sit upon our deck facing the wetlands each morning, not only is the foliage changing, but so too the birds and four-legged critters. They dance, to be sure, and sing some, too but all in preparation for a deeper change.
An agitation of the air, A perturbation of the light Admonished me the unloved year Would turn on its hinge that night.
I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones, Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me The song of my marrow-bones.
Blue poured into summer blue, A hawk broke from his cloudless tower, The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew That part of my life was over.
Already the iron door of the north Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows Order their populations forth, And a cruel wind blows.
(Stanly Kunitz, The End of Summer)
No wonder it felt like we needed "Ripple" as well as "Gimme Shelter."
