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Al Young’s Musical Memoirs

Excerpt

from “Body and Soul” in Bodies and Soul:
When the record came out, saxophonists all over the world, hearing it and sensing that things would never be the same, started woodshedding Hawkins’s impassioned licks in their closets and on the stand. Why’d he have to go and do that? Of course, everybody fell in love with it. My father would play it, take it off, play something else, then put it back on. This went on for years. What was he listening for? What were we listening to? What did it mean? What were all those funny, throaty squawks and sighs and cries all about? I knew what a body was, but what was a soul? You kept hearing people say, “Well, bless his soul!” You thought you knew what they meant, but really, you could only imagine as you must now. You knew what they meant when they said, “Bless her heart!” because you could put your hand to your heart and feel the beat, and your Aunt Ethel sometimes fried up chicken hearts along with gizzards, livers and feet. But a soul was unseeable. did animals have souls, too? Did birds, dogs, cows, mules, pigs, snakes, bees? And what about other stuff, like corn, okra, creeks, rivers, moonlight, sunshine, trees, the ground, the rain, the sky? Did white folks have souls?

… Thirty-nine, forty, fifty, a hundred, thousands–who’s to say how many rosy-chilled Octobers have befallen us, each one engraved in micro-moments of this innocent utterance, electrically notated but, like light in a photograph, never quite captured in detail, only in essence. Essence in this instance is private song, is you hearing your secret sorrow and joy blown back through Coleman Hawkins, invisibly connected to you and played back through countless bodies, each one an embodiment of the same soul force.

All poetry is about silent music, invisible art and the clothing of time for the ages.


Editor’s Comments

Not long after moving to the Bay Area in 1981, I picked up a copy of Al Young’s first book of “musical memoirs”, Bodies and Soul, and devoured it. Full of short, lyrical essays no longer than it took to spin a good 45, it was the perfect book for the moment. With money to spend, nights and weekends free, and no homework for the first time in 18 years, I was reveling in the wonders of live and recorded musical to be found within an hour’s drive from Sunnyvale. Max Roach at the Keystone Korner; Elvis Costello at the Paramount; Anita O’Day at the Great American Musical Hall; King Sunny Ade in Santa Cruz; UB40 in Palo Alto; the SF Symphony at Stern Grove; Rasputin’s and Amoeba Music in Berkeley; and the world treasure of Village Music in Mill Valley. And a Tower Records store just fifteen minutes from my house.

Where, about a year later, I saw a tall black man with a distinctive streak of white hair browsing in the racks. I immediately recognized him as Al Young, and went over to offer my praise for his book. He was helping a friend decide how to spend a gift certificate, and the three of us talked for a few minutes about some albums they’d picked out. Then we all went back to fingering through the trays of LPs. It was the only time I met Young–the only time I’ve ever met the writer of a book I liked, in fact–but it seemed proof that I was living in a magical place.

Al Young.

Young published three more collections of musical essays after that: Kinds of Blue in 1984; Things Ain’t What They Used to Be in 1987; and Drowning in the Sea of Love, which included pieces from the three earlier books, in 1995. All four books are unforgiveably but understandably out of print now. Understandably, because Young had the misfortune to sign up with two different publishers–Creative Arts in Berkeley and the Ecco Press–that since went out of business. Unforgiveably because nobody beats Al Young when it comes to capturing the mood and rhythm of good pop, jazz, and blues music in prose.

You can get a taste of Young’s writing from reading his essay on Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” on Salon, taken from Drowning in the Sea of Love. And thanks to their utter neglect, you can pick up used and remaindered copies of all four books for not much more than a buck total plus shipping. Until someone rights this wrong and puts at least a sampler back in print, this is what you’ll have to do if you want to experience a master at his instrument. As James Brown would have told us: “Give the writer some!”

Al Young’s Musical Memoirs:

1 thought on “Al Young’s Musical Memoirs”

  1. https://soundcloud.com/tags/a%20jazz%20life

    Carlton Jackson, the multi-dimensional drummer in Portland, Oregon. Po’town is a hotbed of fine and color-filled drumming and percussion across musical styles and global vocabularies, but few if any are as varied in what they play well as Carlton. He has a Sunday night radio show called THE MESSAGE. His Play-Lists reflect the varied and tasteful, not to mention exploratory scope of the bands, combos and larger ensembles he plays out with and the recording session work he’s done. Carlton Jackson’s unique aspect brought to KMHD’s weekly THE MESSAGE is his musical imagination, as he’s brought to the broadcast range of one of the few jazz radio stations left on the U.S. airwaves a spectrum of styles and types of recorded music that skate well above any genre or marketing categories superimposed onto what is and should ideally remain non-classifiable, if yet widely discussed and savored.

    Tonight, Sunday 10/26/14 Carlton played an oral history feature of KMHD that is archived on SoundCloud and retrievable for
    your delight and the delight of others here: https://soundcloud.com/kmhd-radio/andre-st-james

    This 21st C. revival of free-form and expanding community and public radio arts builds on the Al Young culture-building project he well-titled MUSICAL MEMOIRS that you so righteously celebrate here on your web page NEGLECTED BOOKS.com. Hopefully with the death of so many music appreciation ‘zines or the moving of the rolled-up back pocket variety to the internet as web sites, the vision Al Young brought into the world, that I would nutshell as a way to both spread musical enthusiasm and create the necessary community-market base to support musical expression that is essentially deemed unworthy by the “Hidden Hand of the Market” this Young-ian concept of the MUSICAL MEMOIR may live on and travel farther on as Joy Harjo might phrase it “Winding through the Milky Way” via public and community radio shows like THE MESSAGE and via web sites that replenish musical enthusiasm by retrieving it from the dustbin of the fashion industry like your wonderful NEGLECTED BOOKS.com web site. Long may y’all run!

    PS – The Andre St. James entry into the above-referenced A Jazz Life musical memoirs features reminiscences of Bay Area music educator and hot pianist of choice Ed Kelly bringing the incomparable Rahsaan Roland Kirk into a college music class for a hands-on nose-in philosophical lecture with vivid musical illustration. Student Andre was invited to sit in on bass with musical adept Rahsaan Roland Kirk and after the lecture and presentation the young lion-in-training wigged out. Terrific story to be shared and Carlton Jackson & The Message ought to be commended for weaving that oral history into a splendidly wide-ranging set of sounds over KMHD, the FM radio station licensed to Mt. Hood Community College and being put to good use as part of the OPB state-wide public radio imperium. Let us now retreat to the PURPLE GROTTO…

    Mitchito

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