Eleventh Hour

“‘Now if someone tells you in dreamtime that you better do something, you better do it.’”

— Abdullah Ibrahim

I see the grey of his hair first as he walks up. He does the namaste greeting and then sits down, much more frail than the last time, at a beautifully miked Yamaha piano in the upstairs theatre. The old stained glass windows of the church it once was are boarded up, but the light of late summer is crashing against and around them, outlining the vaulted shapes. The concert begins at 4 pm.

His hands are tremulous when not on the keyboard. Often he takes his right hand away entirely and touches the corners of his mouth. But he still hits the piano hard when he needs to. Hands trembling above the keys, then smashing down on them, even though the muscle mass has been winnowed away. I see the hands, the hands through which so much has flowed, reflected in the Yamaha. He starts to play Blues for a Hip King, disembodied fragments of it anyway, and my throat closes a little.

After the performance, he takes in the applause, then shuts one ear with his hand and sings a strange, tuneless song that sounds like a spiritual. At one point he stops and seems to glare at an usher who has perhaps opened the doors too early. People are coming out of the main theatre down below, a new musical called Langarm, its posters all over town reading: ‘He was white. She was not. They broke the law to dance’.

The maestro glares at the usher, one hand at his ear, the other palm lifted as if to say: What the – ? Wie’s die moegoe? Still a difficult man, still a badass. ‘A jazz pianist so excessively bitter, rueful and astringent’, wrote Lewis Nkosi in 1966, ‘that anyone able to endure his music for any length of time must often feel compromised in some obscure reluctant corner of the heart’.

The maestro resumes singing, and I can just make out some lines about crossing over the River Jordan. Then he walks off the stage and out, going down into the bright sunshine.

Monsoon Raag

A journey in sound.

Prufrock, May 2019.

The days would begin with singing, but we never quite knew where it was coming from. Male voices in unison drifting into our room while it was still dark, at the edge of waking. Early morning singing or chanting in Fort Kochi, voices coming from…we could never tell exactly: maybe the Basilica, the rooftop mediation hall beyond the football pitch, the Young Men’s Buddhist Association over towards Mattancherry. Days were edged by this unison singing, in and out of sleep, the sound of people beginning the day together.

*

‘Join us for a morning raag’, said the man at the Kathakali Theater, bringing his palms together, bowing slightly, dropping his voice to whisper: ‘Most welcome’. He had one of those voices that tickles the eardrum, that creates ASMR-like shivers even at a distance, that you want never to stop. We would bow and intone it huskily to each other all through two months of travel in south India and Sri Lanka: ‘Most welcome’.

The idea is distinctive to Indian classical music – that certain scales and melodic sets are associated with certain times of day, or seasons of the year: the heat, the rains. But it seems (once you have heard it) utterly logical, beautiful, impossible to do without. A raag, or raga, is not quite a scale (because many ragas can be based on the same scale), and not really a tune (because the same raga can yield an infinite number of tunes.) It has no direct translation in Western music theory, but with it comes the idea that certain patterns of sound have specific effects on the mind and body, that they colour things, hence the Sanskrit origin of the word raag: concerned with pigments and tinting, tingeing or dyeing.

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Juice Time

A wayward tribute to Alice Munro... and Raymond E. Feist.

Republished at Books of the Year, 21 January 2015.

Electricity gone down from Flower Road to Davenport. No internet on a Sunday. Peace.Electricity gone down from Flower Road to Davenport. No internet on a Sunday. Peace.

Yesterday’s swimming is still in me, in my shoulders and hair. Clifton 3 ½ beach with A. We splash out to the rock, but are too cautious to jump off it, slide back into the water over the barnacles. We run into Anna, Jemma and their friends, in knitted swimwear and dungarees. ‘Mary’s daughters’, says A., ‘They march to the sound of their own djembe.’ The beach is packed: the real girls thread their way between the incorrigible babes, looking for a place. Today the wind has stopped entirely and I want to go back. But she is having lunch with her grandparents and I know that a swim that perfect comes only once a year.

Reluctant to start work over the last weeks: lazy, a little depressed. To remedy it I try to break all routines, to force the days into new shapes. Sitting in a Turkish steam room in mid-afternoon. Shopping for shirts with D. at 9am, when the Waterfront is deserted. We have fish and chips at 11am and he says the harbour scene reminds him of the Canadian island where he grew up. Not the motorized pirate boat pulling out with the tourists, but the cranes and industrial mess behind. I ask if he is proud of Alice Munro and the Nobel.

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