RENE CHAR : Isle-Sur-Sorgue
It was early July, 1970, and we were at Le Chateau d’Lignane, guests of the Boutié family in Aix-en-Provence. Laura had spent a month with them when she was sixteen. The house had an all but empty long room, not part of the house, really, with a curved ceiling. All it had in it were a few tables and chairs. We worked there during the ten days we stayed with them. I can still hear the sound of my flute echoing in that monastic chamber.
We knew that René Char lived in a town not far from Aix. One day we drove to Isle-Sur-Sorgue, found his house, entered the yard, and parked. I’d been translating his poetry for the past year and wanted to see the landscape around his place--the river, the stones, the low hills, the bridge--and to meet him if possible, even without a letter of introduction.
Quietly, we walked around the yard looking at things, trying to get up the courage to knock on his front door. We noticed a marble slab lying on a patch of grass, with a line from his poetry carved into it. “L’aigle est au futur.” My god, we thought, it’s his headstone! Did he die? But then we saw other slabs, planted here and there, memorable lines culled from his poems.
Three steps lead up to the front door, the house a dull-white two-story stucco with red trim. When we finally knocked, hoping to meet him, his housekeeper answered. I told her that I’d been translating the poet’s work into English, and hoped to meet him. She said, with kind regret, “Il garde son privé.”
We wondered if he was inside, peeking out of an upstairs window at two young Americans, uninvited, poking around his property with shameless audacity.
Nothing to do but get back in the car and drive away, disappointed, but armed now with the inscription on that stone: “L'AIGLE EST AU FUTUR.” Was it a prophecy? A projection? Symbolic or natural?
If “the eagle is in the future,” what did it mean?
BLOSSOM DEARIE
Did Blossom Dearie sing the Johnny Mercer song, “When The World Was Young,” the night we heard her at a club in New York City, twenty years ago? I can’t believe I’d forget it if she had. It’s lyrics are etched in my brain. Blossom knew the song as if it had been written for her, and maybe it was. Small in stature, small in voice, but large at the keys, Blossom was born to ride a piano bench, if anyone ever was, triangulate with bass and drums, and sing tender, topical, and wit-driven songs like “My Attorney Bernie,” by Dave Frishberg, and “I’m Hip,” by Frishberg and Bob Dorough. Or Cy Coleman’s “When In Rome,” or Rodgers & Hart’s “Everything I’ve Got Belongs To You,” among other Tin Pan Alley immortals--to an adoring audience.
We took our seats at a small table, about twenty-five feet from the piano. We nursed a drink, gobbling up her patter, her girlish tonality, and her seasoned sophistication as if it were a drug. There wasn’t a cluster of just arrived tourists from Germany disrupting her set, as friends have reported having to put up with when they heard Blossom in the city. That particular night she’d had to take the time to shush them, to scold their rudeness with professional impatience.
Even the sound of applause was musical the night we heard her.
Spirits lifted, the air a resonating chamber of show-tune gold, and deathless keyboard voicings, we had clearly been mesmerized, lulled by romantic yearning, bewitched by a Circe, which is why I can’t remember if she sang one of my all-time favorite songs, nor leaving the club, nor even how we got home.
NTOSAKE SHANGE & DAVID MURRAY
The name of the club was Mapenzi, near the corner of Adeline and Ashby, on the Berkeley/Oakland line. Though short-lived, Mapenzi’s owner showcased avant-garde jazz musicians. The club itself was a bar, a wonder, an aesthetic refuge: every square inch of its surfaces had been attended to by the artistic eye of the owner. Mosaic, collage, decoupage, paint: he left nothing the way he found it, and his taste was superb. What was his name? How long was he open? Why’d the place close? As a mad labor of love it had no peer in the Bay Area.
One night in 1977 with jazz critic Tom Albright in the audience, alto saxophonist Anthony Braxton played an intense solo set of his thoughtfully composed and intensely improvised music. A day or two later Albright’s glowing review lit-up the San Francisco Chronicle.
Ntosake Shange had blown up in 1975 when her choreopoem, “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf,” took the theatrical world by storm. Now she was thirty, sharing the bill at Mapenzi with young tenor saxophonist David Murray, himself a graduate of Berkeley High, just a few miles north of the club. Unbeknownst to me, they’d been married at Mapenzi a short while earlier.
“It was the jazz artists' wedding of the century,” Murray said. “Don Moye (of the Art Ensemble of Chicago) did the drum libations. Everybody who was anybody was there. Stanley Crouch was there, just taking pictures. He didn't even mumble a word."
But this is a different night, not long thereafter. Ntosake Shange is standing in front of a microphone stand, a sheaf of poems in hand, reading to an audience seated in the bar, and behind her, shining Selmer tenor in hand, stands David Murray, responding to her lyrical voice with a voice all his own.
No bass, no drums, no piano. Just the written word sounded by Shange, with local tyro David Murray responding in short bursts and slowly held notes, listening to image and sentiment, words as sound and sense. To anyone who has heard the record of Lester Young playing tenor behind the early recordings of Billie Holiday (with the great Teddy Wilson on piano), there was precedent, extra drama, a rare hope in the air. “Miss Brown to You,” “If You Were Mine,” etc., etc. from back then.
“We were married for three months,” David said. “That was a long time, boy. After two months, that shit got tired.”
We had no idea what the couple was going through, only what they were doing in front of us. For me their performance revived a tradition in the Bay Area of poets working with jazz musicians. In the fifties, Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, and Kenneth Patchen had recorded with musicians responding to their work. As had Kerouac, on TV and on record. Not much later, in New York, Amiri Baraka did likewise, on many occasions, and brilliantly. And let’s not forget The Last Poets doing “The White Man’s Gotta God Complex,” in the very early 70s, among other literary musical moments recorded on lps.
Voice and horn, horn and voice. Commingling. Female, male, meaning and sound; image and integrity, working together, sharing the stage. For one great set the charge in the air was real. That’s what I remember. Then, as Eric Dolphy said a year before he died in 1964, “When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone, in the air, and you can never capture it again.”
If Shange and Murray recorded their work together, I’ve never heard it. A once in a life-time thing, then memory’s faint reverberations melt into the fog. You can never capture it again.
