Unfathomable With Time

We have had a CD in the car CD player for some time now.  It is possible to connect one’s phone in the vehicle and if it was a long drive I might do that for some variety.  My wife throws on the radio when she drives around, but I haven’t heard much of any music (Shan Tian Feng is storytelling) that I’d want to listen to on Beijing radio in many years now.  So for the last four months or so I have listened over and over to a wonderful disc that always felt like nighttime Manhattan and now feels like anytime Shunyi:  “The Prophetic Herbie Nichols Vol. 1.”

Born in the African American community of San Juan Hill Manhattan in 1919, long before there was a Lincoln Center, Herbie Nichols parent’s hailed from St. Kitts and Trinidad.  This remarkable, highly original composer only recorded four albums in the mid fifties, when he would have been in his mid thirties.  He died of leukaemia at the age of forty-four.  I think the first time he entered my consciousness was late eighties, early nineties when I read a hagiographic account of him in the Village Voice.  I’ve had all four of his recorded for many decades now and have certainly played them all hundreds of times. 

But this first album in the car, or at least my reluctance to replace it, has been a deliberate conditioning to associate that disc with this time and place.  I did such a good job of not removing it though, that up until today, I wasn’t sure which of the three “Complete Blue Note Recordings” was actually in there.  And I knew that one of jazz’ greatest drummers was on one of the disc and that another of jazz’ greatest drummers was on the other two.  But, was the drummer on this disc in the car Max Roach or Art Blakey?    The prior I always associate with sharp precise staccato fills and Blakey, of course, is famous for his thunderous rolls.  I guessed the first disc was Roach, before verifying today, but upon examination I am crestfallen.  Art Blakey is the drummer on “The Prophetic Herbie Nichols Vol. 1.”

One gets the sense that these Blue Note compositions were long in gestation.  The songs were treasures he buffed and polished over time before he was able to finally record them.  There is a great consistency of tone, at once illuminated and crepuscular, erudite and folksy.  The final album, “Love, Gloom, Cash, Love,” featuring no less a drummer than Mingus’ long time collaborator Dannie Richmond, has a notably different feel to it than these three tight, sharp, illuminated sessions recorded with Blue Note.  Unfathomable with time, how these albums weren’t immediately lauded, how he wasn’t encouraged, how ferociously music seems to devour its own, so that he died unsung.  I noted two well-reviewed biographies on the man.  I’ll have to get one and learn some more about this, now essentially, Shunyi music.

Friday 02/10/16