About Ghosts of Our Former Selves - chapter 1 (subtropical skeletons)
About the inspiration for the album, Ghosts of Our Former Selves
Chapter 1 - Subtropical Skeletons
The songs that I am sending out into the world with this introduction, my Ghosts of Our Former Selves, were deliberately composed in a confessional mode. They draw on everything I have spent my six plus decades learning, (and some things I have not). They are the conscious response to the death of my parents, followed by the death of my mentor, all converging with the arrival of what, with a bit of luck given my not so distant serious illness, will be a few more decades of life. I have added a generous helping of anger towards humankind’s inexplicable willingness to accept hate and to engage in an unwinnable game of chicken with mass extinction.
These songs are my grief clarified and laid bare, as John Berryman wrote in the first Dream Song, “…for all the world to see”. They weave together ten memories and meditations to create a larger, forty-minute narrative. As I wrote the texts, composed the music, and produced these recordings over the past year, I found myself drawn toward greater and greater transparency. Even when a song demanded complex layers, each possible addition was interrogated and many were discarded.
The world we are facing now makes the total commitment to honesty and transparency imperative, and that urgency extends beyond any one project or any one artist. The year 2020 is our apocalypse - something I do not mean as hyperbole. A colleague recently explained to me that the word does not mean what most people think it means. “Apocalypse”, it turns out is ancient Greek for “an unveiling”. We know in our hearts, during this dark time full of despair, that unveiling must be the order of the day – that we must seek what is true. I am sharing this piece now with that recognition. Composers cannot predict what it means to send music out into the world. But even in the most fraught times, send it out we must, in the hope that we just might be sharing a perspective that makes some small, meaningful contribution.
These songs may, at first, sound familiar. Yet on further listening, one will notice the familiar being refracted and collided to create commentary and dialog. I have not taken lightly the choice to bring together references to familiar genres. Doing so risks that the songs may not really be heard. But I have come to this point through a personal history with all of this music and at this moment this is the story that I need to tell.
I was born in 1955 in that cocoon of post-war optimism that was accelerating the flight of families like mine away from their ancestral homes in Brooklyn and Newark, out to a colorless, newly middleclass, suburban landscape. My mother was only twenty and my father not much older, so even as the first born, I was immediately part of a large, multigenerational tribe whose secret memories dated back to eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. My grandfathers sold things and were good at it; one pedaled trucks, the other shoes, until the years of cigars and stress came home to roost, divesting them of their powers. My mother’s mother did piece work in a factory that I recognize in retrospect was maybe just one step away from a sweatshop. We were not born to this degree of economic struggle. It was something remote and foreign, though we were all expected to somehow honor and own it as part of our Jewish identity.
My paternal grandmother, Muriel was the dreamer in the family. Maybe that is how it all started for me. She harbored dreams of being a writer and, as a young woman of the 1920’s that seemed a real possibility until marriage and family interrupted. For her eight grandchildren her longing became a bittersweet story told often enough and with just enough intensity to become our cautionary tale.
My father was already working on the top-secret submarine defense project that would occupy his entire career when, in 1959, he packed us into the Studebaker for the trek to Key West. We loved exploring the creaky termite-ridden Victorian that the Navy had rented for us. The garden was occupied by aging and overgrown fruit trees. Guava, papaya, and fig attracted an array of wild creatures, including the possum that hid under the expansive porch. We felt at home. We learned how to pronounce conch (everyone knows the ch is hard – like “k”). We combed the beach, scooping up hermit crabs and polished sea-glass. Being red-headed and fair, my skin quickly turned a painful shade and stayed that way through that year, but I didn’t care. There were new things to discover, like floating out on that impossibly blue water to magically pull up a sand shark, followed, perhaps, by a big ugly grouper. There was one of the few times I can remember being out alone with my dad – riding out to the naval air station to see the 7th Voyage of Sinbad. I was only four, and the Cyclops and dueling skeletons were totally frightening, but that night was cool and humid and special.
By the time we moved back to New Jersey in 1960 so that Dad could continue his project at Bell Labs, waves of development had replaced the dairy farms and the fields planted to vegetables with, like the Pete Seeger hit said, “little boxes”. That white midcentury suburb where I spent most of the rest of my childhood was so safe and homogenous that to describe it as boring seems completely inadequate. Who was I here in this blank place? As we made the trip north I had felt a diminishing, as if some essential part of me was being gradually, inexorably erased. What had become of our colorful Key West selves? There was a powerful ache and then a deep longing, but over time these became motivating. I think it must have been these same forces that eventually brought me my identity as a composer. Seeking to reconcile the confusion, tension, and conflict of those decades, I was led to compose a highly personal music that takes a position on the past even as it looks to the future.
That I became a musician at all let alone a composer is almost a miracle. I had no models and came from a totally non-musical family. When I was five, my mother decided that we needed a piano. It seemed a strange, sudden, and puzzling decision. None of us had shown interest, and she could only coax part of a tune out after a mind-numbing repetitive struggle. Then, when I was almost eight years old, it happened. One day there was nothing and the next, Beatles music everywhere. Beatlemania was incredibly annoying, but the sound of that music was mesmerizing. I was obsessed. I wanted to “own” and reproduce what I was hearing. Why did one chord moving to another in exactly that way get to me? After that, music had my full attention. I couldn’t turn away.
My mother sang the American songbook around the house, lovingly and somewhat off key. So when my guitar teacher started putting those same standards in front of me instead of my beloved Beatles, I begrudgingly obliged, eventually learning to love them and in the process discovering jazz. By the time I started high school in 1968, I was sneaking into New York where being underage in the clubs didn’t yet seem to matter and I could hear Bill Evans, Ron Carter, McCoy Tyner, Freddie Hubbard, and so many others.
Right around that same time, stuck at home and miserable with a high fever, I found my brain was on autopilot, running through chord changes, chorus after chorus. Too weak to get out of bed or even think clearly, the mental improvising continued non-stop for most of that week. When the fever finally broke, I ran to the piano compelled to write things down but at the same time, having no idea what that would be. Fifty years later, this still seems a pretty good description of what it’s like to compose.
