Get Rhythm and Get Slinky

A line is a point that has fallen in love, discovered the infinite, taken flight, found something within itself that frees it to go anywhere. A line, in other words, arises when a point becomes a succession of points, each an echo of the first, and this repetition is what enacts its integrity as a line, that repetition being rhythm, an instance of balance or form, what in the end I want to call a kind of shelter.  

Follow me?  Let me say all this in more concrete terms and draw a line to the recent string of reissues from the old Oakland-based label called Black Jazz, which I’ve been loving a lot lately, and from there to how we’re living now, and how music is keeping love alive, against all odds.  

A few years ago, a neighbor here in New Orleans was diagnosed with cancer. To mitigate his overwhelming sense of downward spiral, his doctors installed tiny metronomes in his ears— -- the steady beat, they told him, would calm, energize, and focus him, keeping his spirits up. A year or so later, he recovered.  Coincidence?   

Consider that, when an embryo forms in the womb, the part of it that will become the brain first registers, as its inaugural cognitive event, just above its head, its mother’s heartbeat. That steady groove, sometimes a little faster, sometimes a little slower, pulses through its whole being all through gestation, setting in motion what will become its own mental rhythms and, eventually, its walk, and perhaps even its broadest dynamics of daily give and take with the world— – its talk. What else can explain the way rhythm creates a sense of connectedness? Rhythm always echoes, if only in faint trace and at great distance, the individual’s original connection to mom’s heart.  Because these dynamics are foundational to how we talk to each other, they are themselves difficult to talk about.  But, by way of illustration, listen to the ecstatic sense of unity in Makaya McCraven’s recent remake of Eddie Gale’s 1973 anthem, “Black Rhythm Happening.”. 

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A version of the same vibe can be heard in Jelly Roll Morton’s voice, near the end of his life, during the nine hours of storytelling that Alan Lomax recorded at the Library of Congress. At various phases of the session, a metronome knocks along in call-and-response, summoning wave after wave of words from the jazz pioneer’s depths. When these recordings were made, Jelly Roll had been on hard times for a long, long time: he hadn’t had a home since he was in his early teens, when his family threw him out for working as a pianist in the nearby red-light district. ; Atand at roughly age 50, when Lomax recorded Morton’s memories, his circumstances were such that he died soon after—r -- having suffered a series of stab-wounds in a barroom scuffle that were never properly treated.  The stress of continuous drifting for nearly forty years, of never seeing any serious money, in spite of having played a central role in launching the sound that swept the country, perhaps explains the need for a metronome in order to loosen up enough to talk about his life to a stranger in The Library of Congress.  That choice to use a metronome when talking to Lomax anticipates what Johnny Cash had in mind when he wrote,

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Come on, get rhythm - when you get the blues -

A jumpin rhythm makes you feel so fine -

It’ll shake all the troubles from your worried mind -

Get rhythm – when you get the blues

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The point: rhythm figures in human development well beyond the moment when the mother’s heartbeat registers in the embryo and thereby launches what will become its consciousness;  and even beyond the next major developments, the capacity for walking and talking, for as these latter two rhythms become more and more refined, more and more elaborate, you perhaps arrive at adulthood when you feel that you’re far enough into the beat to anticipate – and participate in - most of the movements in your surroundings. At that point, you come to feel that you know your world to the degree that you can settle into a reliable, worthwhile livelihood and a long-term bond with a mate. You’ve grown far enough into the beat to feel ready to ride it for the long haul.  In short, you’ve grown up. You’ve found your groove. 

And thus the current crisis:  as Jonathan Haidt and others have argued, the cell phone in your pocket, that infinite firehose of information, blows out any chance that you can ever feel that you know enough to settle into that groove that is adulthood. Instead, its incessant assault on your attention drives the archetypal downward spiral— - the signature of the archetypal troll - into the parents’ basement, anxious, depressed, and desperate for an authoritarian buttress against the roaring particle storm where your grasp of your world would have been. To paraphrase Scott Galloway, a society in which most 25-twenty-five year- olds feel they have nothing to lose is a society in collapse. And the shit-show of our national politics could soon deliver large-scale economic panic, as in The Great Depression. 

Our collective memory of the grim re-set that was the stock-market crash of October 24, 1929, might shape in large measure how we come to terms with what’s coming at us. Consider two folk-heroes of that era, Bonnie and Clyde, who met just before The Great Depression, when they were both living with their families in a loose mash-up of slum and labor camp known as West Dallas. Clyde’s family had moved there a few years earlier, living underneath a wagon til they could scrape together enough money to buy a tent. There were no paved roads, no sewers, little by way of reliable electricity and running water. Again, these were their circumstances before the crash. Clyde dreamed of studying music in school, but, soon after meeting Bonnie when he was just out of his teens, he was sent to the infamous Eastham prison, where, after being raped, he beat his rapist to death with a lead pipe and, with Bonnie’s help, escaped into the desperate late-autumn Texas countryside of 1929; driven by sheer hunger, they embarked upon their two-year crime spree.  Clyde kept an alto saxophone in their Ford V8 the entire time, using it to serenade Bonnie around the campfire as they hid in the recesses of a succession of state parks each evening. While he played, she would work on her poems, both their ears reverberating with the chugging rhythms of that Ford V8 motor they had been hearing all day, the metronome that had managed to keep them free, alive, on the move and in love at least one more day.  

Bonnie and Clyde, in their time, were probably understood as modern versions of the Wild-West outlaws of the frontier era, but patterned on the still earlier template of Robin Hood. A fFew decades later, their legend was rebooted for a new phase of upheaval with an album named after them that Merle Haggard recorded in Hollywood in 1967, the same year as the hit movie about them that starred Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. But it was in Paris the following spring – at the height of the revolution of May 1968 – that Brigitte Bardot and Serge Gainsbourg found a groove that distilled what was exploding in the streets around them and named it after that pair of stone-cold love-struck Dallas wild-asses. (If you’ve just clicked on that link to hear it for the first time . . . you’re welcome).

Why all this now?  

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Many these days are likely wondering what, in the digital age, a mass-uprising would look like.  A clue: some have said that those who were caught up in the revolution in Paris in May ’68, as Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot were when they recorded Bonnie and Clyde (in case you need that link again) were beginning to speak to each other with a new directness, a new warmth, openness, and wit, leading with their ears newly attuned to the poetry that can flicker within natural, truthful speech. They spoke, that is, with the sort of rhythmic thrust that suggests one is speaking from the heart, echoing the original maternal metronome, that one is making a fresh start, breaking free from the ego’s prosaic banalities and petty fantasies of autonomy to ride waves of collective movement far beyond what any external authority might try to impose. Just as Bonnie and Clyde built a future for themselves, albeit a very brief one, out of an earlier lore about cowboys and Robin Hood, maybe some version of the 60s reboot of their legend – evenings of saxophones, poetry, and campfire, the free movement and steady groove that together are human dignity -- will lead us through what lies ahead.  

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Which brings me to the recent reissues from that old Oakland-based label, Black Jazz, which flourished from 1969 to 1975. Understood at the time to be, alongside New Orleanian Harold Battiste’s AFO Records, the first Black-owned jazz label to emerge in the half-century since recording began, Black Jazz would release some two dozen records during the half-decade of its existence. All the personnel on all of them are Black. The music itself hovers between the funky, vernacular drive of the sanctified church and the daring, oblique angularity associated with Wayne Shorter and Eric Dolphy. In all the imagery and language of the packaging, the politics of Black Nationalism and the spirituality of the African diaspora shine through.  If revolution starts as a rhythm, it is here. 

My favorite lately is an album called Mirage by one of the lesser known Black Jazz groups, a sextet from Chicago called The Awakening. The lead-off tune expresses more effectively than I have all of what I have tried to say above. It'sIts called – but, first, turn up your volume, get ready to move in the groove, and now, at last, click on this next word  -- “Slinky” 

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If you’re still reading this as that tune plays, stop and reach for the sky. Say hello to the sunshine. Sway. Make eye contact with whomever is swaying nearest you and hold that gaze. That’s how a point becomes a line. That’s how we’re gonna beat this. Here’s a playlist of all the reissues from Black Jazz.  Next time: some related reflections on Les McCann’s 1972 masterpiece, Talk to the People.

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A version of this piece first appeared a few months ago in T. R. Johnson’s substack, @trjohnson2

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