Sad news from Italy earlier this week: the great Giorgio Gaslini passed away. Here are my booklet notes for one of his albums:
Over
the course of his long and fruitful career, Italian pianist/composer Giorgio
Gaslini has taken on some daunting musical challenges and emerged with shining
success. This is, after all, the man who previously released a solo piano album
of Albert Ayler pieces (Ayler's Wings, Soul Note 121270); the man who
jazzed up Robert Schumann with trio arrangements (Schumann Reflections,
Soul Note 121120). And, although it was less startling, he's the man who
recorded an album of solo Thelonious Monk (Gaslini Plays Monk, Soul Note
121020) back in May 1981, while Monk was still alive and such tributes were
less common. There's also Gaslini's big band arrangements of Jelly Roll Morton
(Jelly's Back in Town, DDQ 128020), not to mention operas based on Othello and the life of Malcolm X. The
dapper Italian maestro is, in short, a man of imagination and creativity not
only in his own considerable music but also when playing other people's music,
even when their strong personalities would overwhelm those of most other
musicians.
Certainly
Sun Ra, AKA Le Sony'r Ra, AKA Herman Poole "Sonny" Blount
(1914-1993), was one such original, one of the most distinctive, innovative
composers and performers in jazz -- a genre overflowing with strong
personalities. Gaslini's way with Ra's music is sometimes whimsical, but never
capricious; he takes it seriously, yet never sounds academic. The paths of
these two musicians from different worlds (the Deep South of the United States,
the North of Italy -- or, as Ra would have it, from Saturn and Earth)
intersected on the physical plane twice, both festivals when Gaslini's group
played the first set and Ra played the second set. The first time was on
Gaslini's home turf in 1973 at the very first concert in the history of Umbria
Jazz in Perugia; the second time was in 1987 on Ra's old stomping grounds, at
the Chicago Jazz Festival.
A
stronger link than having met twice is their insistence on making music that,
though it comes from strong roots, is allowed to flourish without boundaries,
to expand beyond mere genre (like Gaslini, Ra would occasionally translate
classical pieces into jazz). One of the most startling expressions of that
phenomenon on the present set is the way Gaslini interpolates bits of The
Well-Tempered Clavier of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) into each of
the tracks. One connection between Bach and Ra could be the importance of
counterpoint in their musical conceptions, however differently expressed;
another is that both built their art on foundations considered obsolete by the
time they found fame. While the streamlined style galant bloomed around him
(even his own sons preferred it), Bach continued expanding the learned
counterpoint of older generations. Famously, when he played for German organ
patriarch Johann Adam Reincken (1643-1722), who had studied with a student of
Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562-1621), Bach improvised on the same chorale tune
as Reincken's famed showpiece, the Fantasia on "An Wasserflüssen Babylon," leading the elder to
exclaim, ""I thought this art was dead, but I see that in you it
lives!" Sun Ra's Arkestra, though pegged as avant-garde, could and did
play note-perfect Fletcher Henderson swing arrangements decades after swing was
considered an anachronism. A final link is found in Gaslini's statement,
"I found a special similarity between the cosmological conception of Sun
Ra and the metaphysical vision of J.S. Bach. It was for me a spontaneous
connection." More on that in a moment….
This
is just Gaslini's third solo piano album. As he did with Ayler's music, Gaslini
made transcriptions from Ra's band recordings (he has not chosen any pieces
that Ra made solo piano recordings of),
then arranged them for piano, as he puts it, "preserving the purity of the original themes and
seeking to capture the harmonic and polyphonic physiognomy that were so often
implicit in the composer’s orchestral versions." Gaslini professes to find
"a surprising sort of modern 'classicism'" when Ra's arrangements are
thus clarified, a "tendency towards objectivity" that is emphasized
even more when set alongside the Bach fragments. On
about two-thirds
of the tracks, the Bach quotes are easily heard; on the rest, they are harder
to catch.
When,
as Gaslini says, "the earthly
metaphysics of Sun Ra are set beside the serene metaphysics of Bach," it
is worth pondering what those metaphysics are. Both composers, whether despite
or because of their great rationality, also had a strong strain of mysticism.
In Bach, this apparently found some expression in his music through number
symbolism; the pioneering research in this aspect of his creativity was done by
German scholars Arnold Schering, Martin Jansen, and Friedrich Smend. While
interpretation of this symbolism ranges from the innocuous to the extreme,
there seems to be some core truth to it. (Ruth Tatlow's article in Oxford
Composer Companions: J.S. Bach, edited by Malcolm Boyd, concisely
summarizes the methods, provides examples, critiques the results, and
delineates the controversies surrounding the use of number symbolism in Bach
analysis.) Numbers strongly associated with Christian faith -- 3 for the
Trinity, 10 for the Ten Commandments, 12 for the disciples, Psalm numbers, etc.
-- mingle with word conversion through use of gematria (application of a
number alphabet: A=1, B=2, etc.). Thinking of this as riddles or secret
messages embedded in the music misses the larger point; it's a way of making
the structure of the music reflect its overt message, making it a holistic
reinforcement rather than a hidden meaning. The focus of numerical symbolism
research in Bach's music was long on his church works, but more recently, Helga
Thoene has posited codes in Bach's solo violin sonatas, not only numerical
analysis but also obscured quotations of chorales with strong emotional
content; chorale quotations pop up in instrumental contexts in other Bach works
as well, including The Well-Tempered Clavier. Ra also referred
to earlier religious music in his own works; some of the Arkestra chant-songs
can be partially traced back to spirituals.
Bach's otherworldly outlook came directly from his
strong Lutheran beliefs, at least partially touched by the Pietist movement and
its incorporation of the strains of mysticism
found in much earlier writers such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas à Kempis, influences on Luther himself. (However,
Bach was definitely not sympathetic to the Pietist opposition to concerted
music in church services!) Sun Ra's mysticism -- perhaps better characterized
as his highly personalized way of reinterpreting the world -- came from a wider
variety of sources. A telling glimpse comes from the Spring of 1971, when he
taught an Afro-American Studies course at Berkeley (as pithily described by
John F. Szwed in his invaluable Ra biography, Space Is the Place: The Lives
and Times of Sun Ra). The course was called The Black Man in the Cosmos;
the reading list included The Egyptian
Book of the Dead; David Livingston's Missionary
Travels and Researches in South Africa; the King James Bible (which on the
syllabus Ra called "The Source Book of Man's Life and Death"); P.D.
Ouspensky's A New Model of the Universe;
Yosef A.A. Ben-Jochannan's Black Man of
the Nile and His Family; Frederick Bodmer's The Loom of Language;
and a host of others, many even more esoteric. For the students to track down
much of the list was a nightmare.
The Bible was a constant reference for Ra throughout
his life, but his attitude towards it shifted to a belief that it required
radical reinterpretation through permutation of passages into new meanings,
sometimes the opposite meanings from what were ordinarily imputed to them. In
effect, Ra was a modern-day Gnostic preaching that the world we live in is a
world of illusion; he was fond of saying things such as, "I'm talking
about space; I'm talking about not being part of this planet, because it's not
proper," and, "This world is not my home. My home is out there."
Compare this to the Lutheran sentiments in so many Bach cantatas: sin corrupts
this world, and death is a passage into new and better life. Of course, to try
to force too great a correspondence between Bach and Ra is unproductive, but
the parallels are definitely there. Ultimately, there's no reason to try to
prove a connection that's not a matter of fact, but rather intuitive and metaphorically
enriching. Similarly, one need not be fluent in gematria to enjoy the contours
of Bach's music.
Nor, for that matter, would a listener have to know
any of the above to enjoy this album. Maestro Gaslini has constructed a varied
program of Ra rarities and familiar items. "Out in Space" and "A Quiet Place in the
Universe" exist, as far as is known at this time (certainly plenty of
concert tapes continue to pop up) in only one version each, both recorded
"live." Then there are pieces that perhaps existed only in the
studio. "The Perfect Man" is an exceptional case, originally released
only on a single. It's seemingly an unlikely candidate for this sort of tribute, an
oddball attempt at pop that's peripheral to Sun Ra's jazz legacy aside from its
use of synthesizer, on which Ra was a jazz pioneer. Gaslini can't duplicate the
textures on a piano, but he largely keeps to the use of more vernacular style,
especially boogie-woogie, with another Bach interpolation (with similar motion
and rhythm, however) and an eruption of free playing just before the end.
"When Angels Speak of Love" (Gaslini wonderfully captures its quirky,
off-kilter lope), "Kingdom of
Not," and "Lanquidity" are the other unique items chosen for
this album.
"Yucatan" was
released on only one album, Atlantis,
but exists in two versions because when the album, first on Ra's own label,
Saturn, was issued on the Impulse! label, a different tape was substituted. Gaslini ends his arrangement with a
brief Bach quote that rhythmically matches the drums at the beginning of Sun
Ra's versions, most closely the Saturn. "Satellites are Scanning" is
the same piece as "The Satellites
are Spinning," merely mistitled on the Enja album Destination Unknown
that documents a March 1992 concert. But, of course, that's not to say that "Satellites are
Scanning" sounds the same as "The Satellites are Spinning." The arrangements are
really quite different, partly because the recording of "Scanning"
dates from Ra's post-stroke period, when his left hand was greatly weakened.
Gaslini's arrangements are also considerably different from each other. "Spinning" is noteworthy
for several Bach insertions that move in and out in the tightest Bach/Ra
integration of the album; they're themes that inherently suggest spinning. The
first is soon dovetailed with Sun Ra's theme in a sensually and intellectually
pleasing counterpoint that banishes sorrow just as June Tyson sings in the
famous version from the soundtrack to Space
Is the Place.
There
is only one released studio recording of "Fate in a Pleasant Mood," but Ra revived it several decades later
as a concert staple. "Images," "Medicine for a Nightmare,"
"Saturn," "Tapestry from an Asteroid," "Discipline
27," and "Interstellar Low Ways" were all revisited multiple
times. The Bach in the middle of "Discipline 27" offers one of the
starkest contrasts in this program as the spare first four measures of the
Fugue in C minor from WTC II enter shortly after hectic, extreme dissonance; it
proves to be a bridge to a pretty little vamp. "Interstellar Low
Ways," closing the album, finds Gaslini, through the use of overdubs, also
playing inside
the piano, brushing and plucking the strings to add special colors to the
stately presentation of this wistful number. As the tune gently dissolves into
swirling, tinkling dissonance and then silence, we seem to have drifted into
the quiet weightlessness of space, an apt place to conclude this interstellar
journey.
