A few years ago I saw famed jazz clarinetist Anat Cohen play downtown in Manhattan at the Village Vanguard, finding myself utterly unprepared for what “jazz clarinet” might really entail. As the jazz unfurled, it entailed an intensely personal form of musical communication, laden with emotion, interjection, assertion, charisma. I read a story about her recently here — and was intrigued by her description that she can now play “as if it is part of my body.”

Though I am, by many orders of magnitude, by no means as accomplished on bass guitar as Cohen is on clarinet, I do know the experience of feeling like my Fender or Rickenbacker basses are an extension of my body. Only in the last few years have I really begun to feel like I am in a relationship to these basses, neck, body front and body back, strings, headstock, and frets, in a way that approaches something like a feeling of “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh,” to use the old biblical phrase. I think that I have been playing my way toward this relationship to my basses over the course of 27 years. When I stop to think about it, what happens in this relationship between my arms/hands/fingers and wood/metal/wire is something (more…)

The other night on Colbert, Paul McCartney reiterated the well-known story that the Beatles stopped performing live because they couldn’t hear themselves over the screaming. “We were musicians,” McCartney said, “but in the end we were sort of puppets on stage.” So they left the road and concentrated on the studio.

That got me thinking about a couple weeks ago, when I watched The Breeders on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. They performed “Cannonball,” which is a really chaotic song. What struck me was how static, motionless, and disengaged the performance felt. It was like they were going through the motions – hitting their right marks, but without life or any sort of emotional commitment.  After all this time, I think (that is, I hope) this is not the result of stage fright. Instead, it seems to me to be a studied indifference, an aesthetic of indifference.

(Fallon no longer has the clip available, but there is a recent performance of the song here.)

For a study in contrasts, I was pleased to run across this clip by 90s flash-in-the-pan Spacehog, recorded recently at NYC’s Mercury Lounge: (more…)

Last Sunday, I went to the gathering on “Creativity and Trust: A Performance and Conversation on the Art of Improvisation,” at Trinity Rivertowns Church in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, just north of New York City. It featured well-known and revered jazz musicians John Patitucci (bass), Jay Azzolina (guitar), Rogerio Boccato (percussion), and John Ellis (saxophone). It was hosted and moderated by the Rev. Jim Kirk.

Patitucci, Azzolina, Boccato and Ellis played through several different ways of improvising: they began by playing and riffing on John Coltrane, they improvised with the aid of the audience by putting into music an emotion that was written down by an audience member (“excitement”), they improvised on the sounds of the audience singing spontaneous tones together, and more. Here is the group in action (left to right: Ellis, Azzolina, Patitucci, Boccato):

John Patitucci made some comments between songs about improvisation, and hinted at its spiritual resonances and significance. After playing, the (more…)

That was my first thought, or at least my fourth or fifth, when I read the headline over music critic Ben Ratliff’s review of a drone concert in last weekend’s New York Times. The print headline read: “A House of Drone, Ecstatic and Raw, With a Potent Aura of Largess.” I wondered: with this evocative headline, what are we really talking about here?

(I have frequently quoted and celebrated Ratliff’s reviews, such as here and here.)

The theological significance of drone may have to do with Holy Mother of God! Before anything else happens, take a look at this picture that accompanied the story, of Kim Gordon (formerly of Sonic Youth and now of Body/Head), taken by photographer Brian Harkin:

I hate to ask so pedantically whether you consider this as remarkable as I do, but ask I must. This is an ornate, even extreme position in which to posture an electric guitar. I can only surmise that by driving the headstock into the top of the amp, hunching over the upturned instrument from shoulder strength supported by delicately bent knee inside the carefully calibrated leg-stance, working the tremolo with her right hand, and steering the balance from her left hand, she is summoning feedback. For some reason the picture reminds me of the disturbing provocation of an upside-down crucifix, an (more…)

From the musical “Passing Strange” (about which I have written at R&T here, here, and in a three-part meditation, here, here, and here) comes the beautiful tune “Come Down Now.” The song includes the lyrics: “Come down now / remove your mask, you see / all you have to do is ask me / I’ll give you all the love life allows”…

This scene and this song often put me in mind of basic spiritual tasks in which “religions” can engage: ceasing to mistake yourself for divinity (“come down now”); shedding personae that inhibit a deeper yes to the depth of existence (“remove your mask”); consenting more openly to ultimate reality (“ask me”); taking as gift the fullness therein for more life (“I’ll give you all the love”). It is too much to say that these elements are “essential” to “religion,” but they are often enough found by those who end up being categorized as “religious” or “spiritual.” This song offers a space to hold important spiritual experience. Spiritual traditions offer ways of making further sense of this song.

Tommy Beaudoin, Yonkers, New York

Two recent concert experiences have me thinking about shifting moral commitments in the USA, and the role of music in these shifts. (Thanks to K. for a conversation today that led to this post.)

A couple of weeks ago, a band (The Raina) in which I play bass did a show at a local bar. I gig with this band or with another one, The Particulars, every few months. And I always notice the alternative community that comes into existence in the club, festival, house party, or wherever it is we’re playing: People mingle with other people whom they know well and don’t know well; they revel in “non-productive” activities like listening, dancing, talking, drinking, smoking, hanging; they generally relax their personal boundaries (standing close to others, sharing some emotional talk while imbibing), while at the same time usually respecting others’ boundaries in a somewhat heightened way (politeness in line for the bathroom, care for anyone who has partied a little too hard, adopting a live-and-let-live mentality).

And a few nights ago, I went with friends to see The Black Crowes at the newly and gorgeously renovated historic Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York.

Here is some footage from one of the Crowes’ Port Chester shows:

On that evening, whether it was in the Capitol’s bar beforehand, or at the concert itself, the fans seemed to enjoy themselves and make room for each other. It was time to share drinks, smokes, and above all, songs — a shared submission to an extraordinary live blues-rock band. It’s the kind of (more…)

I spent the last four days at the South By Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, launching ground for a good number of new bands over the past many years, and major meetup for those interested in the state of popular music. With a couple thousand bands, presentations and panels, exhibits, and a whole lot more, it is by any measure a major music gathering, featuring music across many genres. (I even heard “country rap” last night as I saw Colt Ford perform a raucous set, including covering “Give it Away” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers to an enthusiastic crowd.) I have a few “religion” pictures from SXSW to post soon. But before I do, a brief thought:

Religion in its “overt” forms seems to play a very minor, and almost absent, role at SXSW. I say this with little experience, though, having only attended for two years. I’m not suggesting that it needs to have a more prominent role, only that I notice being in an environment of tens of thousands of people, amidst a ton of bands, and having almost no “explicitly” religious talk or images. I wonder: do people check it at the door? Is this a liminal space where religious/spiritual/faith/etc investments are laid aside, and in that way is a “secular” space? Please don’t hear me to be saying that I wish things were otherwise, only that I think these spaces in public life are significant ones, even if I cannot put my finger on why and how. Okay, let me suggest one possible meaning: popular/secular music culture, which itself grew in close relation to church contexts in the USA, is able to provide an experience-rich arena that speaks to spiritual/carnal needs, in a way that lets the focus rest more on commonalities among peoples than differences, and triggers an access to shared sentiments that — as long as the festival lasts, and sometimes longer — make doctrines and practices that might otherwise divide people seem less important. In other words, music culture changes religious/spiritual culture even as it feeds off of it. There is an (more…)

I just saw this news that Robert Plant is (at long last) apparently open to a Zeppelin reunion. If you have any doubts about whether they can still do it, you should see the Celebration Day film, which recounts their one-off 2007 show in London. Here is a clip:

Such a reunion, which would probably be among the biggest concert events in decades, reminded me of the remarkable book by Susan Fast, In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). If this tour materializes, I’m going to have to go back to this book and write a commentary about its spiritual significance for R&T. My thesis would be something like: this book is laden with examples of how rock and roll is a spiritual exercise. (In fact, now that I am writing this out, I think I might choose a few examples from Fast’s book to punctuate my upcoming talk at South by Southwest.)

Here are just a few suggestive examples: Writing about Jimmy Page’s way of holding his guitar on his hip, and how it creates a “fictional body” that performs on stage, she writes: “The way in which Page moves the guitar over to the side is a metaphor for this decenteredness: the right side of his body and the hip on which the instrument rests in particular form a zone of psychological difference; it signals that now Page has moved further into the subjunctive, further into his otherness, further into the music. Raising his leg deepens the movement further, creating even greater instability. Raising the leg also points more directly to the materiality of the instrument: “Look; this is the vehicle through which I have become other.” (p. 152)

“Many Zeppelin fans link sex with spirituality in their experience of the music” (p. 174), and this is exemplified in the (more…)

A few weeks ago, I was sitting at Joe the Art of Coffee on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, and this relatively new song — “Every Man Needs a Companion” — came on over the speakers (presumably through one of the barista’s playlists). I had never heard it, but I was taken up by the singer’s vocal aura. It turns out it was Father John Misty, also known as Joshua Tillman (formerly of Fleet Foxes). Check out his recent performance of the song here:

When the line about “Joseph Campbell and the Rolling Stones couldn’t give me a myth” filled the cafe, a few heads turned, and at least one woman smiled in acknowledgment. It reached me, too.

This is a song registering a deep struggle with what we have come to think of as religion, and I think it does speak and will speak to many precisely for that reason — or what I should say is: for that reason only because of Father John Misty’s affecting rendering, redolent of an ache that dances through each lyric phrase.

He mentions some major candidates for the religious attention of people in our culture: the Bible, Joseph Campbell, and the Rolling Stones. Because we make a fair number of references to the Bible and to classic bands here at Rock and Theology, let me say a brief word about Joseph Campbell. Professor Campbell (1904-1987) was a celebrated scholar of mythology and comparative religion who taught for several decades at Sarah Lawrence College. His work is now somewhat out of vogue, but in the 1980s and ’90s he achieved a (more…)

Tonight, I saw Soundgarden at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan. Ponderous riffage, minor chords, and an urgent straining wail for almost two and a half hours.

Here is footage from their Lollapalooza set in 2010:

During the last third of the show tonight, a mosh pit of a couple dozen people got going on the floor, and a few people perilously crowd-surfed from the middle of the floor to the arms of security near the stage.

As I watched all this from the second-floor balcony, I identified with their response to the music and felt gratitude for their expression, as if they were doing it in my place, because I couldn’t mosh or crowd-surf from the balcony, and probably wouldn’t even if I were on the floor. The actions of others, simultaneously spontaneous and elicited (by the music, the memories), helped me identify what I myself felt about the music.

On the way home, I wondered about this experience of a fruitful ritual “sacrifice” of others on my behalf. Religions have generated many theologies of vicarious benefit, sacrifice, atonement, and the like, in which one person or group are thought to accomplish things that benefit others across time and space.

Presuming that these theologies, which always risk being “magical,” have some origination in ordinary experience, from where do they come? Social scientists and religion scholars have long pondered this question. Tonight’s experience had me thinking about it, too.

Tommy Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

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