In a world without much hope, there’s still José Henrique Bortoluci, Barry Lopez and Bridget Hayden, writes Ian Preece.
Snow is falling on Leytonstone, late on a Saturday night – but tomorrow we’ve got to take the Christmas tree down. As someone who feels the onset of post-Christmas blues around 22nd December, I passed up the opportunity to see the Christmas lights in Kew Gardens in early January. Kind of wish I hadn’t now . . .
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Momentarily confused by the rhythmic intensity of Andrew Tuttle’s ‘Wholly Unrelated to Four Seasons’, I was getting Angela, in the passenger seat, to check whether the track was actually from Tuttle’s CD of Chapman reworkings and inspirations, Another Tide, or the companion CD in the double-pack: Michael Chapman’s unfinished demos, Another Fish. The result was I completely missed the junction where the M1 flows into the A1 and ended up getting sucked into the semi-industrial wasteland, suburban sprawl and heavy traffic of the eastern half of Leeds. I started yelling, my mum was in the back – all a bit embarrassing. Still, with clouds scudding across a pale blue sky, and Chapman’s dreamy, trebly, slightly distorted/echoey epic ‘Untitled #4’ now playing, it felt at least apt to be totally lost in this part of Yorkshire.
Back then, in the autumn, I was really into Chapman’s half of the album, his guitar sketches, unfinished symphonies and rolling, expansive workouts: the aforementioned ‘Untitled #4’; the beautiful pellucid wash of ‘Untitled #2’; the close-mic’d bluesy jam of ‘Untitled #7’ where you can hear the vital hum of the guitar strings. I dunno, but somehow it almost feels like some kind of über essence of Chapman has been captured in these grooves: urgent yet full of composure; raw and in the moment and impossible to be anyone else, really, too. As such the disc would fit neatly into Michael E. Veal’s paradigm worked up in Living Space: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Free Jazz, from Analog to Digital wherein the marginalia and detritus (as in, literally, works harbouring decomposition, erosion or distortion), the raw live documents and scuzzy bootlegs and unfinished recordings, are as valid a resource when it comes to assessing historical perspective as the more fully rounded and polished studio productions of mainstream lore. Veal writes beautifully in places on music, distortion in photography, of flowing-but-disrupted architectural grids and of real-life comings and goings in 60s and 70s jazz – but, my god, have I run out of steam/road/patience/comprehension with academic writing’s self-reflectiveness: the justification and framing of an argument; the concern with where something might sit in the broader discourse; the cross-referencing; the need for a conclusion, which often kind of repeats what you’ve already read anyhow (though, to be fair, Veal is not guilty of that; and I guess it’s the diktats and terms of having an academic publisher that demand such fussing). But life is not really like this – once you’ve left the lecture theatre. Still, Living Space makes a good case for the fluid but structured revolutionary moment of free jazz and late period Coltrane/Miles – it wasn’t just ‘noise’, but firmly rooted in a response to the times and music – and makes you dig out long-buried, forgotten blasts like Live in Seattle, Interstellar Space and Sun Ship – and, finally, after all these years of cool, minimal, modal living with Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Lift to the Scaffold) and In a Silent Way I perhaps feel ready to plunge into the maelstrom of funky jams that is Bitches Brew.
It’s not that I’m only going to read Richard Osman, E.L. James and Dan Brown from now on – just that the search for fresh, vital, original, earthy, unfiltered, honest, clear, down-home, real writing seems harder than ever at the moment. I’ve struggled massively with contemporary fiction of late – this year it took me forever to get through a critically praised but somewhat stagey and characterless new ‘music’ novel, as well as a major prize-winning eco thriller that, while excellent on a certain strand of the natural world, felt a bit laboured, wooden and sometimes corny as hell in other aspects. One much lauded American millennial novel/series of musings drove me completely insane with its arbitrary over-conceptualised/intellectualised in one-ear-straight-out-the-other metaphysical insubstantialness (lovely cover though). (All those, on the back of a relatively recent Booker Prize winner billed pretty much universally as ‘the sharpest, funniest book of all time’ – I got to about p.49 – and another ‘music’ novel of recent times loved by absolutely everyone on the planet – other than, it seems, by me – and my mate Doug, neither of us finding anything to latch onto or care about.) I’ve always got a book (or two) on the go. I take the The Wire, Mojo, Uncut, When Saturday Comes, the London Review of Books, Electronic Sound magazine, the Observer and the Athletic on subscription; I always pick up the We Jazz magazine quarterly; I usually pick up Maggot Brain and Oh Mist Rolling In (Nottm Forest fanzine); some months Shindig!. I read for an hour or so in the bath every morning; I read all day for my job (book editor); I can’t nod off in bed without reading some album reviews or a few pages of my book. This is probably too much reading. The paint in my mind is flaking – like the pressure scraping away at my optic nerve (happily glaucoma is treatable; my idea of hell is the abridged audiobook – more so the meagre selection of books, i.e., celebrity autobiographies, that become audiobooks). I should be very erudite, and appear on panel discussions, but I’m hopeless at remembering quotes – often, even what I’ve just read. (One quote I can remember from years ago is Nicholson Baker’s, ‘I remember almost nothing of what I’ve read.’)
I have to keep reading to keep trying to get back to that thrill of reading in my college years and twenties; being completely hooked on Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage on a crumbling hotel balcony in the Baixa district of Lisbon; racing through Alan Sharp’s A Green Tree in Gedde, Nausea and The Roads to Freedom trilogy in cold, rented rooms; Sons and Lovers and Wuthering Heights for A-levels in my mum and dad’s back garden; devouring Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, appropriately enough, in lunch hours at work; devouring Jon Wilde’s book column in Blitz magazine; Michael Bracewell’s The Conclave and Divine Concepts of Physical Beauty; Ben Hamper’s Rivethead; the complete works of Raymond Carver. Lives, sort of laid out (with mine still before me). That all took place in the last century; these days, saturated bandwith and all, I’m finding myself increasingly drawn to sort of fragments of books, collected writings, essays; writing about writing; things like Alejandro Zambra’s Not to Read, Annie Ernaux’s I Will Write to Avenge My People. I’m eleven years late, but the Granta translation of Valeria Luiselli’s Sidewalks – short pieces about writing, lives, other people, cycling around Mexico City, smoking, cemeteries, trying to just sort of live (and write) – has a great piece that mentions a train journey across India: ‘the chai vendors, the blue plastic seats that made your legs sweat, the impossibly large families picnicking on the floor of the carriages, the immense, beautiful, complex, fucked-up country out there…was a mirror to Duras’s Écrire, Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist, Orwell’s essays, Borges’s Ficciones. I used to sit on the steps of one of the open doors at the end of a carriage and light a cigarette, take out a pen and pencil for underlining, and read until my eyes burned.’ Luiselli remarks that she has ‘never again read a book with the same sense of rapture’. She was born in 1983, the year I left school – so maybe there’s no hope. But my favourite book this year has probably been What is Mine (Fitzcarraldo), José Henrique Bortoluci’s book constructed from a series of interviews with his dad about the latter’s life as long-distance lorry driver in Brazil from the 1960s until the mid-2010s. All of life – and the highs, and many low lows of Brazilian truck driving – is crammed into 147 pages – and Brazil, as a country (well, the whole world)…fucking hell. ‘I like hearing him talk about the day-to-day, about the sensations and small memories that mark out the rhythm of life,’ writes Bortoluci, of his interviews with his dad, Didi, before quoting the inimitable Svetlana Alexievich – ‘mundane feelings, thoughts and words, I am trying to capture the life of the soul’ – before continuing: ‘I often catch myself trying to find out details about his stops along his routes, where he ate or washed, what he smelt, the people he spoke to. The things he saw and tells me about, the things he will never tell me, the things he merely suggests, the things already lost in time, the things entirely reconstructed by memory.’
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One more spin of Dean Wareham hushed ‘Old Toy Trains’ and ‘Snow is Falling in Manhattan’ from my new favourite seasonal album (Dean & Britta & Sonic Boom’s A Peace of Us) before that gets filed away till next December. That’s the problem with Christmas albums: they don’t sound right in April. Even though this one was unwrapped early, that coincided with an aborted tooth extraction. By December 19th lingering post-trauma from ten minutes of being roughed up by the pliers had given way to waves of pain: my mangled gums and cracked tooth had become infected – eating something as soft as a croissant or grapefruit set off a nuclear chain reaction/felt like I’d dabbed the open wounds with battery acid; by December 23rd I was on a second set of super-strength antibiotics with a fairly strict ‘no alcohol’ warning due to reported side effects (vomiting, nausea, severe headaches and ‘one recorded death’). Nursing my ‘virgin mojito’ during my kids’ birthday meal in a nice restaurant by the Thames on Christmas Eve; a can of R. White’s lemonade through Christmas dinner; tap water at my mum’s on Boxing Day, I wish I could report some profound insights from a dry Christmas. I can’t – other than: fuck dry January.
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In a way, with What is Mine José Henrique Bortoluci has constructed something using secondary material to produce so much more. Not unlike Andrew Tuttle, with his versions of and new creations inspired by Michael Chapman’s Another Fish (Basin Rock). There’s a couple of tracks in the middle of Tuttle’s CD that I can’t stop playing: the gorgeous, tumbling airy banjo of ‘Amidst a Half Dozen Saplings’ that, midway through, slows down and pans back to beautiful mountain vistas, as if updating a scene from Bruce Langhorne’s The Hired Hand for the 21st century – ditto the kind of harmonium drone that gently unfolds into ghostly banjo on the following ‘One Lateral Line’ has a similar effect, one happily also relayed by Andru Chapman in the sleevenotes, who mentions how Tuttle’s Fleeting Adventure brought similar Langhorne(ian) associations to mind. Another Tide, Another Fish has taken up residence on the stereo in recent weeks, alongside: Jeff Parker and the Enfield Tennis Academy IVtet’s excellently chilled, fluid, stretched out The Way Out of Easy (especially the final dub side); Errol Dunkley’s ‘A Little Way Different’ 45; the supremely ace ‘One Way Love’ by Leon Dinero; awesome Peckings 7-inchs, ‘Do it Right’ by the Three Tops and Joya Landis’s ‘I Love You Baby’; Eva Novoa’s moody, nocturnal, Novoa/Carter/Mela Trio Vol.1 on Brooklyn’s 577 Records; Pharoah Sanders’ ecstatic, cosmic 20-minute version of ‘Love is Everywhere’ reissued on 1974’s Love in Us All; Leila Bordreuil’s 1991, Summer, Huntington Garage Fire tape; Raphael Rogiński Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes; Simon Joyner’s The Cowardly Traveller Pays His Toll (wish I could say I caught John Peel playing it in its entirety one night back in 1994) and Coyote Butterfly; The Innocence Mission’s Midwinter Swimmers; Dennis Bovell’s Sufferer Sounds’ early dubs that really swing; Etran De L’Aïr’s total groover 100% Sahara Guitar; Squarepusher’s Dostrotime and Ultravisitor; Fennesz’s Mosaic and Philip Jeck’s rpm on Touch; Rod Modell’s Music for Bus Stations; and, for late at night, with the lights low and just the Christmas tree bulbs flashing, Tucker Zimmerman’s Dance of Love.
Perfect for the relentless grey of these January mornings is the first great LP of 2025: Bridget Hayden and the Apparitions’ Cold Blows the Rain (out Jan 10th on Basin Rock). Like all great covers records, Hayden makes this collection of traditional numbers all her own: the voice of a softer Nico with a banjo (and cello) sits atop Sam Mcloughlin’s harmonium drones like fog or mist above the Calder Valley. I was only really previously aware of Hayden’s solo LP Pure Touch Only from Now on They Said So (I must have bought it for the final couple of tracks – the swampy almost grungy guitar is darker than I remember – makes the Vibracathedral Orchestra sound like the Beach Boys) and her ‘Sage’ contribution to Folklore Tapes’ The Folklore of Plants, Volume 1 (still haven’t planted my mugwort seeds that came with the record) but, with Cold Blows the Rain, the closer you listen to the (not so) buried melodies of tracks like ‘Blackwater Side’ and (especially) the desolate beauty of ‘When I Was in My Prime’, ‘Factory Girl’ and ‘The Unquiet Grave’, the more the record glows and it’s clear it’s full of love (and loss) as well as beautiful interludes of Dan Bridgewood-Hill’s violin – not icy doom, dolefulness or dirges. There’s the terrific Southern gothic blues of ‘Red Rocking Chair’ too. It’s not background music, but the LP’s a triumph: as singular and immersive a record as, say, Anne Briggs’ The Time Has Come, Sibylle Baier’s Colour Green, Josephine Foster’s This Coming Gladness, or early Kath Bloom sides with Loren Connors. As Bridget herself says, ‘The weather speaks the most eloquently about human loss. It’s good to feel enveloped by something so much vaster than ourselves. The rain and the tears all become one.’
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I’m getting sucked deep into Barry Lopez’s posthumous Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World (Notting Hill Editions) now. A book that dismisses television as ‘cultural nerve gas’ as early as p.5 was always going to grab me – but Lopez’s lovely clear writing and deep connection to place, his attentiveness to nature, stress on the interplay of minute detail (watching a man sell a single pomegranate from a small tray of pomegranates, and noting some herdsmen steering their goats through stinking street-corner rubbish tell him more about Kabul than a politician he’s been speaking with) and of getting out in the world, away from the desk-bound view of things, are like a breath of fresh air. Lopez liked travelling in winter: ‘I wanted to see the land obscured by weather, see it covered over with snow, its colours muted, its edges rounded, its plants quiescent. Watching someone you love asleep is what I thought.’