This Is a Recording
Over at Parabasis, Isaac writes, excellently, at some length about the perfection of Gene Chandler's "Duke of Earl," music as a first love, rhythmic issues as a primary concern of the theatrical director, and the ultimate impossibility of trying to achieve the perfection of a popular song in theatre. He sums most of it up with:
Theatre can never achieve the neatness, the perfectness of that song, of any compact song. Or rather, it shouldn't try to. When it does, all the life somehow disappears. Music can remain alive and perfect at the same time. Perfection destroys theatre by fixing it to one spot, immutable and immoveable, forever.
Of course, and what Isaac is also referring to here is not even a "song" so much as a recording. It is that exact recording of "Duke of Earl" that conjures that up for him. A moment frozen in time. A moment not only created by human beings, but through the recording media as well - the certain quality of an echo chamber, the distance between singer and microphone, the quality of the magnetic tape, etc. It is perfection. It is also locked off, unchanging, unreplicable. Its perfection lives solely in the space between it and you, a perfection unsharable precisely with anyone else. Play the recording (THE recording, the only one) of "Duke of Earl" for a roomful of people, and if its perfection exists for everyone in that room, it is a personal perfection between each individual and the recording. That keeps a recording of a song alive.
When I started directing theatre I sought some of that same kind of perfection as Isaac did (though maybe more influenced by the frozen rhythmic qualities of film than recorded music at first). It was on my third or fourth play (I was directing two shows in rep) - Film Is Evil: Radio Is Good in 1998 - after many rehearsals and shows where I had been browbeating my actors to try and get the precise musical quality that I wanted (though I never gave line readings as Isaac did; I knew that much), they delivered a performance that astonished me in its brilliance - nothing like the "perfect" show I had had in mind in execution, but doing what I wanted it to do, and BETTER.
So, I relaxed, I began to let go of pop-song, recorded music perfection, and instead moved towards the feeling of live music. I cast actors for rhythmic sense, but even more so for timbre, how their voices go together like a group of instruments. Assign some of them (sometimes I tell them this openly if they're musically trained, sometimes I euphemize) to be the "rhythm section" so that others can "solo." And in doing this I continue to strive for a feeling I felt in particular on one occasion - and pardon me, but this is going to get long and off-track, just a bit.
I don't care much for jazz. I'm somewhat along with Frank Zappa on this when he said (I'm paraphrasing from memory), "I couldn't get jazz. It just sounded like noodling. Then as I got older, I came to understand why they were noodling, and where they were noodling, and where the noodling came from. And I could tell good noodling from bad noodling. But in the end, really, it's all still just noodles to me."
But there's some I like. One night in the late 80s I went to the old Knitting Factory (when it was still on Houston Street) to see Sergey Kuryokhin and John Zorn play together (a google search lets me know this was October 28, 1988). I knew and liked Zorn's work fairly well, and had seen a documentary on Kuryokhin that made me want to hear more from him, so I made sure to be there. And they were . . . okay. Lots of technique, brilliant technique. Impressive. But all parodic, no center. Silly. Fun, but insubstantial. A bit disappointing.
So I was going to leave after that set, but a stranger near me, a jazz fan, obviously, stopped me and said I HAD to stay for the next set. Well, what the hell? Didn't cost any more. I decided to stay, have another drink, and watch the next act, which was the duo of Mal Waldron (piano) and Marion Brown (alto sax).
I can't remember a note of what they played, but I remember in every part of me how it made me feel. Transcendent. Moved. Torn apart and put back together, better. I don't know if they played 20 minutes or an hour-twenty. Time was meaningless. Light, space, sound, performers, audience were all one. Eventually, it ended, when it was supposed to, when it needed to, when it was right to stop. A moment of silence, an intake of breath, and wild applause. I turned to the jazz fan who had insisted I stay, near tears, and asked, "Was that as special as I think it was?" Not knowing if this was just another set of live jazz like any other. "Yeah," he said, moved, "that was special."
Huh. On the other hand. It turns out Jon Pareles of the Times was there the same night and reviewed the show, feeling the same way as I did about the first set ("thin and jokey") and not at all the same about the second. I kinda wish I hadn't read that review now. What he saw and heard as Mal Waldron "dominating the set," leaving Marion Brown to "try and follow," I saw and heard as Waldron setting down a firm ground, with Brown entering only when it was ABSOLUTELY CORRECT for him to come in, and always leaving at the right time. Oh, dear, I REALLY wish I hadn't read that review. Now I see that Waldron/Brown recorded a duet album less than a month after I saw them, covering some of the same material. Do I get it, and see if a recording resembling that night has anything like the same effect on me still? Or let it lie, and just remember the effect it had on me, even if I can't remember a note of what was played? The question may be moot - it looks to be impossible to find the CD at this point . . .
In any case, a recording of that night would bear the same relationship to what really happened as a video recording of a play does to that performance -- very little. "I like to remember things my own way . . . how I remember them, not necessarily the way they happened." After all, I remember Waldron coming out, sitting at the piano, lighting a smoke, taking a drag, then setting it down in an ashtray on top of the piano, where it continued to burn for the entire performance, creating a perfect smoke effect for the lighting on the two of them. This, of course, did not happen, but it is as real to me as anything else from that night.
In my iPod is a playlist of my "25 Favorite Recordings." Not songs, recordings, for "Night and Day" and "Stardust" aren't on there. Just 25 songs that affect me in a "perfect" way when I hear them, no matter how many times I've heard them. They are my individual perfection.
But theatre, imperfect, impossible to perfect, achieves its greatness in those moments when all involved, creators, interpreters, and audience are all in one space, one time, experiencing something together and individually at the same time. Something abstract, musical, that can not be expressed in words or exactly creatively planned. It just happens. If you're on the ball, and working with collaborators who are on the ball, it happens more often.
Then, you can sit back and think about it and write about it and try to figure out exactly what it was that you did that worked so well . . .
Theatre can never achieve the neatness, the perfectness of that song, of any compact song. Or rather, it shouldn't try to. When it does, all the life somehow disappears. Music can remain alive and perfect at the same time. Perfection destroys theatre by fixing it to one spot, immutable and immoveable, forever.
Of course, and what Isaac is also referring to here is not even a "song" so much as a recording. It is that exact recording of "Duke of Earl" that conjures that up for him. A moment frozen in time. A moment not only created by human beings, but through the recording media as well - the certain quality of an echo chamber, the distance between singer and microphone, the quality of the magnetic tape, etc. It is perfection. It is also locked off, unchanging, unreplicable. Its perfection lives solely in the space between it and you, a perfection unsharable precisely with anyone else. Play the recording (THE recording, the only one) of "Duke of Earl" for a roomful of people, and if its perfection exists for everyone in that room, it is a personal perfection between each individual and the recording. That keeps a recording of a song alive.
When I started directing theatre I sought some of that same kind of perfection as Isaac did (though maybe more influenced by the frozen rhythmic qualities of film than recorded music at first). It was on my third or fourth play (I was directing two shows in rep) - Film Is Evil: Radio Is Good in 1998 - after many rehearsals and shows where I had been browbeating my actors to try and get the precise musical quality that I wanted (though I never gave line readings as Isaac did; I knew that much), they delivered a performance that astonished me in its brilliance - nothing like the "perfect" show I had had in mind in execution, but doing what I wanted it to do, and BETTER.
So, I relaxed, I began to let go of pop-song, recorded music perfection, and instead moved towards the feeling of live music. I cast actors for rhythmic sense, but even more so for timbre, how their voices go together like a group of instruments. Assign some of them (sometimes I tell them this openly if they're musically trained, sometimes I euphemize) to be the "rhythm section" so that others can "solo." And in doing this I continue to strive for a feeling I felt in particular on one occasion - and pardon me, but this is going to get long and off-track, just a bit.
I don't care much for jazz. I'm somewhat along with Frank Zappa on this when he said (I'm paraphrasing from memory), "I couldn't get jazz. It just sounded like noodling. Then as I got older, I came to understand why they were noodling, and where they were noodling, and where the noodling came from. And I could tell good noodling from bad noodling. But in the end, really, it's all still just noodles to me."
But there's some I like. One night in the late 80s I went to the old Knitting Factory (when it was still on Houston Street) to see Sergey Kuryokhin and John Zorn play together (a google search lets me know this was October 28, 1988). I knew and liked Zorn's work fairly well, and had seen a documentary on Kuryokhin that made me want to hear more from him, so I made sure to be there. And they were . . . okay. Lots of technique, brilliant technique. Impressive. But all parodic, no center. Silly. Fun, but insubstantial. A bit disappointing.
So I was going to leave after that set, but a stranger near me, a jazz fan, obviously, stopped me and said I HAD to stay for the next set. Well, what the hell? Didn't cost any more. I decided to stay, have another drink, and watch the next act, which was the duo of Mal Waldron (piano) and Marion Brown (alto sax).
I can't remember a note of what they played, but I remember in every part of me how it made me feel. Transcendent. Moved. Torn apart and put back together, better. I don't know if they played 20 minutes or an hour-twenty. Time was meaningless. Light, space, sound, performers, audience were all one. Eventually, it ended, when it was supposed to, when it needed to, when it was right to stop. A moment of silence, an intake of breath, and wild applause. I turned to the jazz fan who had insisted I stay, near tears, and asked, "Was that as special as I think it was?" Not knowing if this was just another set of live jazz like any other. "Yeah," he said, moved, "that was special."
Huh. On the other hand. It turns out Jon Pareles of the Times was there the same night and reviewed the show, feeling the same way as I did about the first set ("thin and jokey") and not at all the same about the second. I kinda wish I hadn't read that review now. What he saw and heard as Mal Waldron "dominating the set," leaving Marion Brown to "try and follow," I saw and heard as Waldron setting down a firm ground, with Brown entering only when it was ABSOLUTELY CORRECT for him to come in, and always leaving at the right time. Oh, dear, I REALLY wish I hadn't read that review. Now I see that Waldron/Brown recorded a duet album less than a month after I saw them, covering some of the same material. Do I get it, and see if a recording resembling that night has anything like the same effect on me still? Or let it lie, and just remember the effect it had on me, even if I can't remember a note of what was played? The question may be moot - it looks to be impossible to find the CD at this point . . .
In any case, a recording of that night would bear the same relationship to what really happened as a video recording of a play does to that performance -- very little. "I like to remember things my own way . . . how I remember them, not necessarily the way they happened." After all, I remember Waldron coming out, sitting at the piano, lighting a smoke, taking a drag, then setting it down in an ashtray on top of the piano, where it continued to burn for the entire performance, creating a perfect smoke effect for the lighting on the two of them. This, of course, did not happen, but it is as real to me as anything else from that night.
In my iPod is a playlist of my "25 Favorite Recordings." Not songs, recordings, for "Night and Day" and "Stardust" aren't on there. Just 25 songs that affect me in a "perfect" way when I hear them, no matter how many times I've heard them. They are my individual perfection.
But theatre, imperfect, impossible to perfect, achieves its greatness in those moments when all involved, creators, interpreters, and audience are all in one space, one time, experiencing something together and individually at the same time. Something abstract, musical, that can not be expressed in words or exactly creatively planned. It just happens. If you're on the ball, and working with collaborators who are on the ball, it happens more often.
Then, you can sit back and think about it and write about it and try to figure out exactly what it was that you did that worked so well . . .