A DARK SPELL: a poem

I wrote this poem in 1983. It had been germinating since a Christmas a few years before, but it was  listening to Eberhard Weber's 'A Dark Spell', from his 1980 album Little Movements, that helped it coalesce. Here's a link to the tune, see if you can feel how. It hasn't changed very much since then, but I also don't seem to have considered it for publication anywhere in the ensuing decades. But I am putting together a collection of poems I've written inspired by ECM records, so here it is now, for the first time....

A DARK SPELL
                                   after Eberhard Weber

between now &
closing we
both could lose

this unmeasured
sense of
freedom, which

is freedom it-
self. A fire
might die in

our faces be-
fore we reached
its flame, be-

fore we saw
each other
by its light.

SILENT FEET (a poem after Eberhard Weber)

When I found the manuscript pages of Silent Feet I was pleased at how well I remembered it, and how well it held up. I wrote it 40 years ago, just after the poem Coachwheel Yellow, a villanelle which I posted here back in 2016, and to which you can link here. Or look on the side of the blog page, where you can link to all the poems posted here.

The connection is the studio/greenhouse, and the same very specific place and situation in both poems. 'Silent Feet' is another ECM poem, inspired by a song, in this case the title track of Eberhard Weber & Colours' 1977 album. It remains one of Weber's best songs, and the way his bass swirls and builds around the other players (Rainer Bruninghaus on piano, Charlie Mariano on reeds and John Marshall on drums) is superb. This would be around I time I saw them at The Round House in Camden.

Today I was looking at the album's cover art, by Maja Weber, and wondering why when I wrote this I did not make more of the Watership Down connection (to the cat were given silent feet and eyes that can see in the dark; I have another poem with the latter title which remains unfinished) at the time. Maybe I wasn't looking at the LP sleeve. I wrote it originally in August 1978 and changed it only slightly in the next year. It was accepted for publication by two magazines which folded, before being published in 1987 in a very small magazine called Magazing, in Glasgow, but the 'finished' version appeared in Brief (Canyon, California) issue 5, 1989. I made a few more changes recently in the version you are reading here.

SILENT FEET

                                                 (after Eberhard Weber)

The colours jump off his brush, names on a list

Eager to complete itself.

The canvas stretched like a target; his eyes

Controlling a weapon he cannot dismantle.

The angle of the easel is determined by

The relationship developed between hand and eye.

It can be considered

From the outside, by a woman watching

In the doorway, on bare feet, silently

As his arm reaches

To connect the line of the body

With the canvas, reclining

In its plane. He senses

Her presence, still outside but changing

The contours of the studio. The patterns

roll against his eyes like waves. She hears

Him turn before he does, before she sees

It happen. Her eyes are nervous, bird's song;

They meet his askew; they move away,

Return; she hears him move again; he sees

Her, a flutter of wings outside;

She is gone.

LAST STAGE OF A LONG JOURNEY: A Poem After Eberhard Weber

The Last Stage Of A Long Journey is a song by Eberhard Weber which first appeared on his 1980 ECM album Little Movements. You can listen to that version here. It's a slow builder, but I especially like Charlie Mariano's moves from harshness to sweetness, and Rainier Bruninghaus' piano, and the way it seems to swirl around with Weber's bass. The song also appears, and lends the title to, Stages Of A Long Journey, another ECM disc recorded in 2005, for Weber's 65th birthday. This version features Jan Garbarek on sax, Gary Burton on vibes adding extra texture to Bruninghaus' piano, and a full orchestra in the background.
I was listening to that version a couple of years ago, and thinking about the stroke in 2007 which left Weber unable to use one hand, and thus play the bass, when the poem below appeared to me. I haven't made many changes in those two years, and I feel like the texture is somewhere between Weber's song and the rhythms of Woodmont beach, where I grew up.

Weber's since released two albums of bass solos he recorded in live performance over the years with the Garbarek group, with edits and improvisations, including his own one-handed keyboard playing; there has also been another tribute concert in Stuttgart, this one for his 75th birthday, where Garbarek and Burton returned, along with Pat Metheny, Paul McCandless, Danny Gottlieb, and composer/arranger Mike Gibbs. This time he plays one mallet with Burton on the vibes, worth a close listen if you can hear it. I've told the story elsewhere of my one meeting with Weber, he remains an inspiration to me. Here is part of my appreciation.


THE LAST STAGE OF A LONG JOURNEY

(after Eberhard Weber)

Snow falling on the Sound, wind scrapes like a dinghy on shore,

Off the jetties blowing sand across the beach into my face &

Forcing my eyes shut. It's winter

Where I grew up,

Winter in the place I would remember forever

If I could.

                    I turn

My back to the wind & without needing

To open my eyes I walk home, up & down the Central Avenue hill.

The back door is open; my mother & father never

Leave it locked. I float through the kitchen &

Just to the right of the hall is their desk. I open it, take

Some pictures from the middle drawer, to show my son

So he will remember the grandparents he never met

Then

My eyes open & I cannot remember

Who or what or where or when anything was

Or is. I show him the pictures; ask him to try

To remember for me. He is not there. The desperation

In my voice calling for him echoes down that narrow hallway

Full of far-off music I move through
Searching for him.

'NO TREES?' HE SAID (a poem)

I wrote this originally in April 1982, after a walk through the woods in Wiesbaden, Germany. I brought it back to London and rewrote it listening to Eberhard Weber, and titled it 'No Trees?' He  Said, which is one of the cuts on his album Little Movements. The poem seemed to pick up darkness from the music; also the album cover seemed appropriate. I've changed it a little bit in the past few months, which may reflect the 34 years or may not. I believe this is the first time it has appeared in public.



'NO TREES?' HE SAID      
                                                   for Ulrike Hoffmeister, after Eberhard Weber

Tomorrow we will find
ourselves walking inside
of our cities again.

Today, moving slowly
through the shadows
of trees we remember

too much. There is no
future, you say. The day
is only itself, I say. We

follow muddy trails toward
a sunset our footsteps
tangled amidst the leaves

disappearing, in between
the trees the sunlight
captures us, holds us

closely, while we're still
walking out of the forest,
as if it cannot let us go.

NANA VASCONCELOS: A REMEMBRANCE

I met Nana Vasconcelos once. I was flying to Oslo in June of 1987 to cover the Dream Mile and Bislett Games for ABC Sports. As I got onto the plane in London, I could smell the guy in front of me, and hoped he didn't sit next to me. He was with a couple of others, one of whom took the seat next to mine; the other two moved a row back on the other side of the aisle. I looked around and realised I was sitting with Jan Garbarek; across the aisle were Eberhard Weber (at whom I had turned my nose down) and Nana Vasconcelos. They making a connection back to Oslo after a tour performance.

I went into fan boy mode, something I wouldn't do a few days later at the track meet. As it happened I was carrying my latest chapbook/pamphlet of poetry, Mucho Mojo, from Northern Lights, and it contained poems based on songs of Weber's (and Keith Jarrett's, but not Garbarek's!). I later sent Garbarek another pamphlet with a couple of his songs on it--'send it to Jan Garbarek, Oslo, it will get to  me' he said. I got all three to sign the pamphlet, talked with Garbarek a lot and Weber a little, and barely to Nana. In truth, he seemed so laid-back as to be flying metaphorically. I just looked at that pamphlet again: his signature has a joyful little star over it; not dotting any 'i', just his exuberance.

He was a great percussionist, who fit in beautifully to the textures of the Garbarek band. Here's a link to them performing in France a few years later, with Rainer Bruninghaus on keyboards, it's wonderful. I can't recall who the pianist was on that flight; I think it was Bugge Wesseltoft, but it might have been Lars Jansson. Whoever it was was, he was sitting in coach, while we were in business; Garbarek joked that was because he was Swedish.

It wasn't just Garbarek, of course. Nana played with almost all the great ECM musicians, and he also made his own records for the label. He was not just an accompanist: with voice and percussion he could lead and provide his own polyrhythm section. Sometimes I think his best music comes in collaboration with Egberto Gismonti; look for the early ECM record Saudades, but here's a link to a tune, Bianco, from their 1994 record Duaz Voces, linked here.  Or go backwards, to his work with Milton Nascimento, or Gato Barbieri, or Gilberto Gil. I know I did after that short plane ride, which was a real highlight of my ABC Sports career. RIP Nana.

THE COLOURS OF CHLOE: A POEM (AFTER EBERHARD WEBER)

I wrote this poem in January 1977, in my hometown of Milford, Connecticut. I had left Montreal in late November '76, having completed my master's thesis in August, to avoid having to register (and pay) for another academic year. I was about to fly to London with Theresa. I can't say I ever imagined I would stay more than a few years.

The title, of course, comes from the title song of Eberhard Weber's first ECM record, which was one of my favourites in the tiny flat Theresa and I shared on Lorne Avenue, and I'm sure I set my simple stereo up on my parents' porch, listened, and wrote. I may have been looking at Maya Weber's cover painting while I did. And it may have been the last thing I wrote before I arrived in England.

It seems it was published in something called Chock, which may have been the same as the Chock Freesheet, in October 1979. I've probably got a copy of it in storage somewhere. But this is its first appearance since then, 35 years ago...


THE COLOURS OF CHLOE      (Eberhard Weber)

Why is she sleeping
           underneath
the rain

while her cello sits
unbowed just out of
the shadows
                         cast aside
by a cypress, reaching down
to touch her?

                         She surrounds
               the sunset in
                                       her eyes.

The path of her dreams can be
followed on her face
                                     by anyone
                who drifts by
& happens to look.

As slowly as the music lures
her back to consciousness

she sees a spectrum
rising, below the horizon

the redness of angry
sky, crackling louder
than the cold blue of crying

          than a yellow straw forgetting

colours

broken in the wind.

QUIET DEPARTURES: A POEM FROM EBERHARD WEBER'S JAZZ

Today the three-disc box set of Eberhard Weber's Colours albums Yellow Fields, Silent Feet, Little Movements) arrived; my sister's birthday gift to me reached me on siblings day, a contrivance which appears to have arisen in the interweb of its own time-wasting accord. By a not very eerie coincidence (as I ordered the disc myself) I'd been reworking another of the poems I'd done inspired by tunes from jazz records, Weber's Quiet Departures, which comes off his 1979 album Fluid Rustle, the same time frame as when I saw Colours at the Round House in Camden.

I can't figure out when I first jotted down a few lines based on it, but I think I drew a little on New Haven's Union Station. I know I did a big revision after reading Steve Hamilton's novel Let It Burn -- but this version has been rewritten almost completely, and it heads in a different direction than where I thought it was going in either of those first two incarnations.....and I took a final walk around it this afternoon while Charlie Mariano worked out on Yellow Fields in the background.

QUIET DEPARTURES

                               (for Eberhard Weber & Steve Hamilton)

This building used to be

A station. Now shattered

Mosaic of faded brick

Broken glass, disjointed

Frames. It is still. Life

Clings to ruin, frozen

Boards with stops unmade,

Dead shadow whistles,

Lost scents of steam, echoes

Of hydraulic brakes over

Farewell tears. We hear

Noises of departure fill

The concourse with silence.

It is the sound of a dry sea

Trapped inside an empty shell.

THE CROSSING PLACE: TRANSTROMER VIA GARBAREK

In 1984 Jan Garbarek released a record called It's OK to listen to the gray voice, whose title I recognised as a line from a Tomas Transtromer poem. I'd been reading Transtromer for a long time, and I had already written poetry inspired by various jazz tunes, including some by Garbarek and Eberhard Weber. Listening to this music prompted a couple of poems, a second-generation pass-the-parcel regeneration. I find they're closer to the music than to the original poem, though not a shade on either, but I am pleased I can still find echoes of music and poetry in them.

I wrote this poem in July 1986. As it happened, the next summer I met Garbarek and Weber on a flight to Oslo for the Bislett Games, and I got them to sign a chapbook of mine called Mucho Mojo which I happened to be carrying, and which included a poem written after a tune by Weber. I sent the two Transtromer/Garbarek poems to him ('just put Jan Garbarek, Oslo,' he told me. 'That's all the address you'll need') but I heard no more.

Now Tomas Transtromer has died. I'll likely write more on him soon, but for now I'll share one of those poems. 'The Crossing Place' was published in Hollands Maandblad in 1988, and in The Windhorse Review (Yarmouth, Nova Scotia) in 1993. I was intending it to be the title poem of a short collection...


THE CROSSING PLACE

Empty borders extend
All the way into the center of the night
I could be
Driving a heap through downtown Bridgeport
At 3am snow falling & wipers
Rocking me to sleep. I know
If I sleep now, with this image in my mind
I will have dreams, & I may never wake
Again. They may take
Me across the ocean which divides me
From myself, never again be there
On the other side, where you were
Waking, sleeping, peacefully where
Falling snow makes a blanket, sparkling
Then melting, to keep us warm.

A SMALL MEDITATION ON VINYL AND LOSS

I began my downsizing yesterday by unloading some vinyl to my friend, the guitarist Andy Wiersma, at Harold Moore's. Among the records was Elliott Carter's Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello and Harpsichord with the intellectual Nonesuch cover. I used to go to sleep listening to it in college, and sometimes stare at the artwork while under the influence.

There were the early 70s ECM records which played on the turntable which sat on the amp which sat on one speaker on the floor of the closet, as I wrote my McGill masters thesis in the tiny flat on Avenue Lorne I shared with Theresa. I wrote poems based on the tunes I was hearing: one of the joys of my later life was meeting Eberhard Weber and Jan Garbarek, and sharing some of those poems with them.

These were records I'd brought with me, from Montreal back to Connecticut, and then to Britain when I moved to London in 1977. There was also some Ives, from the same time, and some lovely Savoy jazz collections I'd picked up early in my stay in this country. It's a cliche to call it the background music of a life; it was part of the foreground of my life, a palpable part of it.

I wasn't a fanatic, nor an anorak. Oddly, I learned this week that one of my teammates on the freshman football team at Wesleyan, Skip Wood, had passed away. I still have the first Earth Opera album which I bought from Skip, who had the biggest record collection I'd ever seen, probably in 1969. I know this because the sleeve boasts the words 'Skip Wood Record' and a control number, written in large letters with a magic marker. It saddens me to think that record too will be sold off soon; my only link to Skip will be gone.

I felt a great sense of loss, of time that will never be recovered, and the pressures of change brought on by circumstance, not time. Even though I don't have a turntable, and haven't listened to the vinyl in years, when I sorted through them, taking them from the wine carton in the attic, holding them and reading the liner notes, I felt a warmth emanating from them. I could hear and see the passage of more than four decades of time. And while I still listen to the same music on CD, I don't feel that warmth. I don't hold the cases and feel as if they're alive the way record albums were. Listening to a CD is more like a business transaction than a communing ritual. The feel and look and sound of those records was the first thing I thought of when I woke this morning. I felt a great sense of loss. Goodbye old friends.

SEA JOURNEY: A TWISTED SONNET

I came across the manuscript of this poem the other day; I don't recall when I wrote it, but it was published in Tokyo almost exactly twenty years ago, in a nice magazine called Printed Matter. It probably originated in the early 1980s, and was written out around 1990--I was trying to put together a sequence called Jazz Suite in those days, and this one was written around a Chick Corea tune as performed by the Gary Burton quintet on his Passengers album, which was released in 1977. This was the quartet with Pat Metheny, Steve Swallow, Dan Gottlieb, and the wonderful Eberhard Weber added as a second bass player. It's a beautiful tune, and Weber's pulsing bass lines really make it work. You can hear it here.

I've redone it considerably from the published version; we change in twenty years and time does things to our perceptions and how we express them; I think it's closer to the flow of the music now, and the bent-up sonnet is clearer now....

SEA JOURNEY

(Chick Corea/Gary Burton)

This is something different from what we knew

Was true, when we stared across the narrows

Between our pillows & found ourselves lost

In wonder when storm tossed thoughts inside find

Faces we had just caressed, & whether we'd dare

To share our guesses. Trying to trace form

Mirrored in moving water, each impulse there

In the shifting spaces of our lonely minds,

Where waves crashed & broke, short of the places

We thought we'd choose. Where we might share storms

Or lose. Might hold each other & not get soaked

By tears. Then your voice rose, like foam from wave,

Saying why do we roam with the water near

If staying dry is what we really crave?

MIDNIGHT SWIM: A POEM

I was thinking about a poem I had written that mentioned Magnolia, a dog named after JJ Cale's song. I couldn't find it in my files, but I came across this one, intended for a collection called Signal Rock, loosely about my beaches, but which has yet to be collected.

I wrote this in Oslo, in June of 1982. I was there to cover the Bislett Games and the Dream Mile; that may be the trip I met Jan Garbarek and Eberhard Weber. The poem was published by Rialto, in Norwich, in 1985, and the following year in the US, in Gil Ott's lovely magazine Paper Air, from Philadelphia. The photo comes from the website Ossipee Lake Webcam, which stuns me time and again with photos taken from the same location...

MIDNIGHT SWIM

Coming out of the water when the moon has gone
behind the clouds, the phosphorescence in
the ocean disappears. Shale splinters
& cuts my fingers as they grab a hold;
water runs off me like a peeling skin.
I dry myself in the sand, but it sticks
to my hands. The moon returns. I pull
the remains of a sweater over my head.
The wool is moist; the weather's changed,
the water is starting to move.
When my breath comes back I begin
To rearrange the sand, as if I had never
been there. Behind the rocks it stretches
for miles, in every direction but one.
A long way to go before I've got it right.
The tide, moving out, covers nothing up.

CHARLIE MARIANO: IN MEMORIAM

Charlie Mariano died Tuesday in Cologne. I first heard him playing in Eberhard Weber's Colours band, in the 1970s, with Rainer Bruninghaus and Jon Christensen--Yellow Fields (1975) remains one of my favourite records. Interestingly, Charlie played mostly soprano sax (and nagaswaram, the Indian oboe), for Colours, although he was by trade an altoist. I remember seeing them sometime in 1978-79 at the Round House, and being mesmerised by the way, playing live, they could add layers to the music they were recording, and how Mariano's work seemed somehow stronger live, his presence almost mystical.

Doing some research, I hadn't realised he was born in Boston, and came up with guys like Quincy Jones and Herb Pomeroy, played with Serge Chaloff and Dick Twardzik. He played in Stan Kenton's and Charles Mingus' bands, and as an accompanist; in fact as I looked deeper into his history I realised he was unique in having careers in Europe and Asia as well as America. I haven't heard his recordings with his Japanese wife, Toshiko Akiyoshi, on piano, nor had I realised he was an early teacher at the Boston music school which became Berkelee, which is where she was a student.

In Europe he played in a couple of jazz-rock bands, the German Embryo and in the Dutch combo Pork Pie, with Jasper van't Hof on keyboards and Philip Catherine on guitar; they made duo and trio albums which are often interesting. His versatility is amazing; another of my favourite records is Blue Camel, with Mariano accompanying the Lebanese oud virtuoso Rabih Abu-Khalil.

I followed Weber and Mariano to the United Jazz and Rock Ensemble, a fusion band of sorts with a horrible name but often some very captivating music,in a fine horn section with (from left to right, Mariano second from left), Barbara Thompson on tenor, the great German trombonist Albert Manglesdorff, and Ian Carr, Ack van Rooyen, and Kenny Wheeler on trumpets. They were excellent live, not quite as good on record. Mariano was never a standout in any of those bands, never up front, never showing off. In that sense, he was the perfect sideman, and it helps explain how he could fit in so seamlessly with so many different kinds of players. You have to admire his creativity, and his flexibility, his curiosity and his openness to new musical directions. It's what jazz is all about.