Written in 2005 for Post Road
Largely forgotten seventy years after his death, his books rarely in print, Robert Dean Frisbie—a tall, humorous, skinny American who, just after the end of World War I, settled in the farthest reaches of the South Seas to write novels—was, in the words of James Michener, “the most graceful, poetic and sensitive writer ever to have reported on the islands.” Frisbie realized a fantasy many men dream about: a tropical vision of island beauty which included local maidens, a large family, solitude to write in, and surviving a hurricane. It meant tragedy, too, for after the death of Frisbie’s beloved Polynesian wife Nga, as a colleague wrote, “Paradise found his weakness and had no mercy.”
Robert Dean Frisbie was born in Cleveland in 1896 and grew up in California, nurtured on the South Pacific books of Robert Louis Stevenson. His health was frail; a wartime training camp left him under permanent threat of tuberculosis. In 1918 he received a medical discharge, a monthly pension of $45, and orders never to spend another winter in America. Frisbie happily obeyed.
Leaving behind his job as a newspaperman in Fresno, in 1920 he made his way out to Tahiti and was immediately befriended and encouraged by that patriarch of expatriate writers in the South Pacific, James Norman Hall, later of Mutiny on the Bounty fame. Within a year Frisbie had bought four acres of land, taken a Tahitian mistress, learned the language, built himself a bamboo-and-palm house, and acquired the name “Ropati” which he would carry for life throughout the islands. He also started his relentless reading of “great books” to make up for a lack of higher education. He began writing short pieces, sending them the long sea-road back to American magazines without success. He spent several years expensively refitting a yawl with a couple of friends. A 3,000-mile sailing voyage, through the Society Islands, the Tuamotus, and the Samoas, ended in Fiji after a heavy gale. Frisbie sold the wounded boat and returned to Tahiti.
Seeking an island more removed and deeply Polynesian, Frisbie in 1924 sailed from Tahiti to Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands, with the legendary trading schooner captain Andy Thomson. Through Thomson’s intervention Frisbie got a job as the only copra trader and storekeeper on the remote northern Cook island of Puka-Puka, also known as Danger Island. Copra—dried coconut meat—was many South Pacific islanders’ only income.
Puka-Puka, with three villages and six hundred inhabitants, was over 700 miles from Rarotonga. Really three small islets in a lagoon formed by a barrier reef, it was about as far away from “civilization” as a Westerner could get. Left here by a supply schooner that would come only once or twice a year, Frisbie blossomed as a writer. He at last began publishing short sketches of his island life in the Atlantic Monthly—though the delay, of course, was immense.
To be Puka-Puka’s sole white man and storekeeper for four years was an ideal way to learn about locals’ character, and he became fluent in their language. As on Tahiti, he enjoyed a few mistresses, but soon Frisbie married a petite island girl, Ngatokorua (“Desire” and “Miss Tears” in his books). They had five children, whom the Polynesians called “cowboys” in honor of their American father.
Determined to write the great South Pacific novel, over the years he managed three, of diverse quality: Amaru (1945), Dawn Sails North (1949), and his best, the autobiographical Mr. Moonlight's Island (1939). It has a tremendous local color and feel for the society, but Frisbie lacked the sense of fantasy of a true novelist; his principal characters and stories never quite live up to his background material.
Frisbie’s memoir of his earliest encounter with the region, and the two memoirs of his time in the Cook Islands, are his supreme achievement. As visions of South Pacific life, written from deep within the dream yet harboring no illusions, My Tahiti, The Book of Puka-Puka, and The Island of Desire have never been equaled. To my mind they compare favorably with Thoreau—as the experience of a man living in a close relationship with nature while questioning the tenets of his own civilization, thankfully left far behind. And Frisbie’s writing is always sublime.
My Tahiti (1937)—long unavailable except for the odd bootleg edition—is an unmatched portrait of one of the most written-about islands on the planet. His Tahiti was already obsolete when he wrote the book; it would rapidly become more so with World War II. Here's how he gently describes his first night with a young companion: “I began to think how fantastic it was that the same world should hold cities and armed men, and this strange and beautiful creature. Only a score of miles away was Papeete with its scheming traders, grasping officials, Chinese slum; while farther away was civilization, where the fundamental beauties of life had been lost ages ago.”
In The Book of Puka-Puka (1929) he wrote, “Without a thought for the white man’s code of ethics, I have been happy, enjoying a felicity unknown in right-thinking realms.” He described how natives “sink into trances with perfect ease, bolt upright, eyes open, completely unconscious of the world about them,” and he learned how, too. He had no illusions about Polynesians, seeing them as full of fantasy and short of memory—except for their family trees and poems, some of which he translated. “Puka-Puka is, perhaps, the only example on earth of a successful communistic government,” he wrote, “ . . . due to the fact that no other community equals this one in sheer good-natured indolence.”
What makes his work so vibrant are the islanders: Sea-Foam the Christian and William the Heathen; Bones, the old wrestling champion, with his mouth organ; Ura the drunken chief of police; the beautiful Little Sea and her more tender cousin, Desire; the village debates, the gambling, fishing, gathering coconuts; the sensual dances by moonlight; the life of gossip, habit, and ease.
In 1928 Frisbie and his wife left Puka-Puka for Rarotonga, and began two decades of moving from island to island. They had a happy and productive few years on Tahiti and neighboring Moorea, even though Frisbie published little in that time and was beset by horrific fevers and elephantiasis. The solution to his acute physical torment was rum, and both followed him thereafter. He and Nga ended up back on Puka-Puka, but in 1939 his wife died of tuberculosis, and from then on Frisbie—no matter how much he produced—was a haunted and doomed man. He wrote his old friend James Norman Hall on Tahiti: “If I could only kill this cursed desire to write I could be happy. How can you expect a man who writes in English and thinks in Puka Pukan to be able to know what kind of work he is doing?” Frisbie would die penniless.
The Island of Desire (1944), his final masterpiece, begins with him back on Puka-Puka and describes with great sweetness his renewed life there until Nga’s passing. The book’s second half covers his experience with his children on Suwarrow, an even more remote and uninhabited atoll of twenty-five islets where he took his motherless family in late 1941. This desert island paradise was all but destroyed by a monstrous hurricane, and Frisbie’s account is unforgettable.
Time after time, he caught exactly the sense of island life: “Of a sudden I understood: all this land and sea, dormant by day, had awakened at dusk, refreshed, hungry. . . . ” He described an old woman “singing a little song as silly as it was beautiful” and the “great seas bombarding the reef” in a hurricane, in which he had to strap his children high up in tamanu trees so they were not washed away. Most moving of all, he described, after the death of his wife, a visitation by her ghost.
“I hunted long for this sanctuary,” he wrote. “Now that I have found it, I have no intention, and certainly no desire, ever to leave it again.” But this wasn’t to be. Rescued from Suwarrow, always unhealthy, he took his family back to Rarotonga, then Puka-Puka, then Tongareva, where he contracted tuberculosis. (A Lieutenant Michener was put in charge of bringing the dying American writer back to the hospital in Pago-Pago.) Samoa had use for him as a teacher once he recovered, but his fevers and drink got to him badly and he ended up on Rarotonga. The administering New Zealand government, disgruntled at his alcoholism, tried to kick him off the island, and his last years were frustrated by official bickering. Meanwhile, his books failed to achieve what he hoped, partly because war had brought a newer story to his isles.
In our era of infinite electronic memory, it is still easy for a great writer to slip between the cracks. I happened on Frisbie’s work not because I wrote professionally about the South Pacific many times over the years and did copious research—my sources never heralded him—but because of the accident that he was a family friend. My father, a war correspondent, at Hall’s suggestion met him on Rarotonga in 1943 while en route from Aitutaki to Bora Bora, brought together by Captain Andy Thomson; they stayed in touch, and years later, coincidentally, my father brought the sad information of Frisbie’s passing to Tahiti, and Hall. (He also did his best, via an extensive readership in the Chicago Daily News, to raise money for the now-orphaned “cowboys”.)
Frisbie died of tetanus in 1948 and is buried on Rarotonga, across from the Avarua library, in a simply-marked grave beneath a paw-paw tree in the Catholic cemetery. His eldest daughter’s own writings show us Frisbie as he would wish to be remembered—the inventive father, reading to his remarkably self-reliant children (“Ropati’s Slave-Labor Gang”) from the thousand books brought to a remote isle. No outsider ever lived closer to South Pacific culture, lore, and daily life than he, nor recorded so eloquently what it taught him, before he struck his own reef.
Today Robert Dean Frisbie is known mainly to those travelers through the South Pacific who look past the more familiar names and hunt down copies of his books—which were in their day well-received in England and the States. “A man who destroyed himself through the search for beauty,” is how Michener described him. In some ways Frisbie’s extraordinary journey also seems the “standard” American literary life: so much purity of expression ending in frustration and drink. Yet Frisbie’s poetic touch, his gentleness, his sympathy, are rare, and anyone dipping into his books feels immediately the unique warmth and tone of his voice. I like especially to remember a letter Frisbie sent to his brother—
“The old man looks long across the lagoon and reminisces on his past futile days. Then he wades out until the water comes to his shoulders. He swims with long strokes until he is a mile or more from shore, and quite exhausted, and realizes that now it is absolutely impossible for him to return. He rolls over on his back and stares heavenward, then he looks to land, and suddenly he smells the fragrant mountain wind, sees the moonlight throwing the shadows of articulated ridges across the water. He for the first time in his life realizes that there is beauty.”
[Those interested in the life as well as the work may wish to read The Frisbies of the South Seas (1959), by his eldest daughter, Johnny Frisbie, as well as her earlier book, published when she was only fourteen, Miss Ulysses of Puka-Puka (1947), which Frisbie co-wrote. The Forgotten One (1952), by James Norman Hall, contains an illuminating ninety-page essay on Frisbie, with excerpts from his letters. James A. Michener’s memoir, The World Is My Home (1992), has a brief portrait, too.]
Monday, April 18, 2005
Monday, January 24, 2005
Rey de la Torre (1917–1994)
Written in 2005 as the booklet essay for the Bridge disc Works for Guitar
José Rey de la Torre (Dec. 9, 1917-July 21, 1994) was one of the greatest classical guitarists of the 20th century. This is the first CD issue of any of his thirteen LPs which, recorded from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, are treasured by connoisseurs but long out of print. It also includes a previously undiscovered live track.
Born in Gibara, Cuba, like many virtuosi Rey got off to a fast start as a child prodigy (“El Nino”). When the family moved to Havana, he took up the guitar at age ten under the guidance of Severino Lopez ((1907-1978), a “young and shy” former pupil of the Catalan Miguel Llobet (1878-1938), who was the foremost guitarist of the era. Rey made fast progress: his first solo recital in Havana, at age twelve, included Sor’s variations on a theme of Mozart, “Granada” by Albeniz, Tárrega’s “Capricho Arabe” and “Recuerdos de la Alhambra.”
In 1932, at fourteen, his family sent him to Barcelona to study with Llobet. Rey wrote a detailed portrait of the master and a tender account of those two and a half years in Guitar Review (Winter 1985). What he left out was his own success there just before returning to Cuba, when Llobet presented him in concert—his programme included a work still at the outer limits of guitar technique, Alfonso Broqua’s “Ritmos Camperos.”
Rey received raves from the tough Barcelona critics, who compared him not only to Llobet but to Casals; composer Jaime Pahissa declared Rey the most complete guitarist he’d ever heard, with “a sweet but powerful tone and an extraordinary technical perfection that permits him to play the most difficult passages with ease.”
The composer and pianist Joaquin Nin-Culmell (1908-2004) recalled meeting Rey back in Havana just after his return. “As a young performer he was astounding. His playing was aristocratic and exact, quite different from the romantic, improvisational school of Segovia. He had a truly purist mind; this purism went into his concept of technique, which he got from Llobet but which he took much, much further. He was one of the very few guitarists with a respect for the musical text. And I’ve met very few musicians as well read as Rey, a man of extraordinary culture and interests. Even when he was twenty, he had a tremendous literary, cultural, philosophical, and political point of view.”
When Rey began his career, the present worldwide popularity of the classical guitar, so easy to take for granted, was still many years away. The guitar was, as Rey wrote, “practically unknown to musical audiences and. . . largely ignored by the classical performers.” Beginning with his Barcelona debut in 1934 at sixteen, for over four decades Rey concertized across North America, Europe, and parts of Central America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East, and did much to bring the instrument the worldwide respect it enjoys today. His New York recitals (mostly Town Hall, but also Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully, and the Metropolitan Museum) became annual milestones. He made countless radio and TV appearances.
For the historical record, Rey gave world premieres of Joaquin Nin-Culmell’s “Six Variations on a Theme by Milán” in (Town Hall, N.Y.C., Nov. 10, 1947); of José Ardevol’s “Sonata” (Woodstock, N.Y., Sept. 3, 1950); of Julián Orbón’s “Preludio y Danza” (originally “Preludio y Toccata,” in 1953); and of Carlos Chavez’s “Three Pieces for Guitar” (Alice Tully, N.Y.C., Nov. 14, 1969; written back in 1923). He also performed in the premiere of Villa-Lobos’ “Introduction to the Chôros” (N.Y.C., August 1962). And I believe but cannot confirm that he was the first guitarist to perform in its totality the seven-movement suite, “Evocaciones Criollas,” of Alfonso Broqua.
Rey made the first recordings of works by Sor, Giuliani, Tárrega, Cervantes, Falla, Grau, Torroba, Rodrigo, Ponce, Lee, as well as the Boccherini, Nin-Culmell, and Orbón pieces included here. He may also have been the first guitarist to record duets by performing both parts himself.
As Michael Lorimer says, “When the guitar world had few great performers, Rey gave a standard of excellence to which to aspire. As the outstanding student of Miguel Llobet, who was the most distinguished performer in the school of Tárrega, Rey directly linked us to that fountainhead of guitaristic tradition. At the same time, Rey’s collaborations with composers provided the literature beautiful new vistas.”
When the two recordings presented herein were made, Rey had built a busy concert career in the USA over the years since his 1938 New York debut. He’d also made five prior LPs which, for various reasons, were unsatisfying to him. However, once he met the two Shulman brothers, his recording luck changed. Though their Philharmonia proved a short-lived label, Rey accounted for two of Philharmonia’s dozen releases, and under several titles the solo LP thrived for many years as a Nonesuch LP and cassette.
It remains one of the essential guitar recordings, with all the glories of Rey’s poetic, precise playing evident a half-century on—his rich and nuanced tone, his exquisite phrasing and sense of line, his bravura technique and profound musicality. (Let those who insist that today’s players have surpassed those of yesteryear consider the fact that this recording was made without any edits.)
The Boccherini Quintet in D—of which this is the first recording—was done just three days before Rey’s 33rd birthday. He had recently received his first of two superb guitars from Hermann Hauser I, arguably the preeminent luthier of the era, and this instrument would prove his beloved “workhorse” for the rest of his career. (Prior to the Hauser, Rey faithfully performed and recorded on a 1931 Simplicio chosen for him in Barcelona by Llobet.)
The Stuyvesant Quartet was one of the finest mid-century chamber groups in the U.S., with a repertoire of remarkable breadth. The quartet’s founders, Alan and Sylvan Shulman, had started Philharmonia, and this disc was the label’s second release. (Side Two was Gian Francesco Malipiero’s “Rispetti e Strambotti,” already reissued on CD.) Apart from its historical importance, the Boccherini performance is notable for a warmth and dynamism that remain unsurpassed. One reviewer pointed out that “the guitarist. . . fits into the quintet group as though he had been a regular member of long standing.”
Here the famous ‘castanets’ passage in the closing Fandango—usually handled by the cellist, tapping the instrument’s body—was played by Rey with his fingernails on the side of his new Hauser, while cellist Alan Shulman took over the pedal figure from the guitar part. (According to Rey, this was Alan’s idea; he was trying to protect the finish on his cello, made by Joseph Dalaglio in Mantua, circa 1800.)
The solo LP, which Rey remembered as “a work of love,” was made over the course of a couple of days in July, 1952. As legendary engineer Norman Pickering recalled, fifty-two years later, “Rey and I had a short but intense relationship. He was a wonderful man, and a wonderfully sensitive musician. I liked him enormously; to this day I’ve never heard another guitarist like him. He was so smart, so easy to work with. He didn’t have any problems, he was totally non-temperamental about recording. He would play things over and over with no objections so I could get the right sound. Complete takes, with no splices—this was how I always worked. Both discs were recorded in the same church. It’s large, of rough stone, with a long reverberation time. I used a single microphone recording him solo, and for the quintet too, placed carefully: a Neumann U-47.”
Rey’s abiding memory of the session was carpets hung in the church to help the sound, and a touch of whiskey being drunk by those listening, not working.
We have included Rey’s original liner notes, which appeared in part on the Philharmonia version of the LP (and an Elektra reissue) and in full on the Nonesuch version. It would be difficult to praise this recording too highly. Though Rey’s later five Epic LPs are superb, revered within the guitar world and awaiting CD reissues of their own, they were made under trying circumstances, far removed from the ease and camaraderie of working with Pickering and the Shulmans. The present two LPs were an Eden in Rey’s recording life, and he looked back on them with pleasure and pride.
It’s worth noting that the pieces in whose development he had a hand have some aspect which is entirely new on the instrument (like the “false harmonics” in the final crescendo of the Orbón). Because of his deep friendships with Nin-Culmell and Orbón, as well as Llobet’s urging, Rey always thought of the guitar in orchestral terms. His attention to dynamics, muting, and registration, his devotion to finding ways to give a score maximum life on the guitar, came from constantly thinking orchestrally.
The Villa-Lobos Etude #11 shows how electrifying a live performer Rey was. Having already recorded the piece for Epic, his interpretation reflects a longstanding friendship with the composer (who praised Rey for playing his work “like a great guitarist and like a true Brazilian.”). This track was only recently unearthed.
As his career flourished, Rey began to have increasing trouble with his right (plucking) hand, a problem unrelated to the later rheumatoid arthritis which would end his concertizing. During the late 1950s and 1960s he found his middle finger weaker and less responsive, with a tendency to under-reach; having never had any problems with technique, he was forced to compensate via complex re-fingerings.
The solution came through Marianne Eppens, a Swiss physical therapist whom he met socially. She realized the problem was due to Rey pampering his right hand to avoid injury or breaking a nail; the delicate mechanism of muscles had become imbalanced from unnatural under-use. She encouraged Rey to put his hand back to active everyday use, and in months he was cured. In 1969 he and Marianne married and left New York for California. Except for two years on Staten Island in the mid-70s, Rey spent the rest of his life in the San Francisco area.
In 1975 Rey was diagnosed with the rheumatoid arthritis which soon twisted his hands and left him crippled. His final concerts, in ’75 and ’76, were played while heavily dosed on anti-inflammatory drugs. The last twenty years of his life were spent in severe pain, and his courage in the face of major setbacks (both knees replaced, a quadruple bypass) was heroic. His marriage to Marianne was profoundly happy and her devotion was, as he put it, “saintly.”
He continued to teach until even that became too arduous. It was inexpressibly poignant to see him during this time—a giant who had once played the most difficult pieces with grace and ease, now unable, as he said, “to play even first-year positions.” Still, even as illness ended his performing at its zenith, it made him a better teacher. Childless, he was loved by students as a surrogate father. Rather than clinging to the faded splendor of what his playing had been, he tried to pass on all he knew, sharing his knowledge (as he wrote of Llobet) as one shares one’s daily bread with a friend. He could explain anything.
It is unfortunate that we have had to wait so long for these discs to see the light of day again. Sometimes it is difficult to grasp how very quickly the vagaries of time can erase a performer’s legacy; the familiar name becomes an unfamiliar ghost. Now, at least, the classical guitar audience will have one of the instrument’s great poets, at his magnificent best, before them again, more than a half-century later. May he never be forgotten.
José Rey de la Torre (Dec. 9, 1917-July 21, 1994) was one of the greatest classical guitarists of the 20th century. This is the first CD issue of any of his thirteen LPs which, recorded from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, are treasured by connoisseurs but long out of print. It also includes a previously undiscovered live track.
Born in Gibara, Cuba, like many virtuosi Rey got off to a fast start as a child prodigy (“El Nino”). When the family moved to Havana, he took up the guitar at age ten under the guidance of Severino Lopez ((1907-1978), a “young and shy” former pupil of the Catalan Miguel Llobet (1878-1938), who was the foremost guitarist of the era. Rey made fast progress: his first solo recital in Havana, at age twelve, included Sor’s variations on a theme of Mozart, “Granada” by Albeniz, Tárrega’s “Capricho Arabe” and “Recuerdos de la Alhambra.”
In 1932, at fourteen, his family sent him to Barcelona to study with Llobet. Rey wrote a detailed portrait of the master and a tender account of those two and a half years in Guitar Review (Winter 1985). What he left out was his own success there just before returning to Cuba, when Llobet presented him in concert—his programme included a work still at the outer limits of guitar technique, Alfonso Broqua’s “Ritmos Camperos.”
Rey received raves from the tough Barcelona critics, who compared him not only to Llobet but to Casals; composer Jaime Pahissa declared Rey the most complete guitarist he’d ever heard, with “a sweet but powerful tone and an extraordinary technical perfection that permits him to play the most difficult passages with ease.”
The composer and pianist Joaquin Nin-Culmell (1908-2004) recalled meeting Rey back in Havana just after his return. “As a young performer he was astounding. His playing was aristocratic and exact, quite different from the romantic, improvisational school of Segovia. He had a truly purist mind; this purism went into his concept of technique, which he got from Llobet but which he took much, much further. He was one of the very few guitarists with a respect for the musical text. And I’ve met very few musicians as well read as Rey, a man of extraordinary culture and interests. Even when he was twenty, he had a tremendous literary, cultural, philosophical, and political point of view.”
When Rey began his career, the present worldwide popularity of the classical guitar, so easy to take for granted, was still many years away. The guitar was, as Rey wrote, “practically unknown to musical audiences and. . . largely ignored by the classical performers.” Beginning with his Barcelona debut in 1934 at sixteen, for over four decades Rey concertized across North America, Europe, and parts of Central America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East, and did much to bring the instrument the worldwide respect it enjoys today. His New York recitals (mostly Town Hall, but also Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully, and the Metropolitan Museum) became annual milestones. He made countless radio and TV appearances.
For the historical record, Rey gave world premieres of Joaquin Nin-Culmell’s “Six Variations on a Theme by Milán” in (Town Hall, N.Y.C., Nov. 10, 1947); of José Ardevol’s “Sonata” (Woodstock, N.Y., Sept. 3, 1950); of Julián Orbón’s “Preludio y Danza” (originally “Preludio y Toccata,” in 1953); and of Carlos Chavez’s “Three Pieces for Guitar” (Alice Tully, N.Y.C., Nov. 14, 1969; written back in 1923). He also performed in the premiere of Villa-Lobos’ “Introduction to the Chôros” (N.Y.C., August 1962). And I believe but cannot confirm that he was the first guitarist to perform in its totality the seven-movement suite, “Evocaciones Criollas,” of Alfonso Broqua.
Rey made the first recordings of works by Sor, Giuliani, Tárrega, Cervantes, Falla, Grau, Torroba, Rodrigo, Ponce, Lee, as well as the Boccherini, Nin-Culmell, and Orbón pieces included here. He may also have been the first guitarist to record duets by performing both parts himself.
As Michael Lorimer says, “When the guitar world had few great performers, Rey gave a standard of excellence to which to aspire. As the outstanding student of Miguel Llobet, who was the most distinguished performer in the school of Tárrega, Rey directly linked us to that fountainhead of guitaristic tradition. At the same time, Rey’s collaborations with composers provided the literature beautiful new vistas.”
When the two recordings presented herein were made, Rey had built a busy concert career in the USA over the years since his 1938 New York debut. He’d also made five prior LPs which, for various reasons, were unsatisfying to him. However, once he met the two Shulman brothers, his recording luck changed. Though their Philharmonia proved a short-lived label, Rey accounted for two of Philharmonia’s dozen releases, and under several titles the solo LP thrived for many years as a Nonesuch LP and cassette.
It remains one of the essential guitar recordings, with all the glories of Rey’s poetic, precise playing evident a half-century on—his rich and nuanced tone, his exquisite phrasing and sense of line, his bravura technique and profound musicality. (Let those who insist that today’s players have surpassed those of yesteryear consider the fact that this recording was made without any edits.)
The Boccherini Quintet in D—of which this is the first recording—was done just three days before Rey’s 33rd birthday. He had recently received his first of two superb guitars from Hermann Hauser I, arguably the preeminent luthier of the era, and this instrument would prove his beloved “workhorse” for the rest of his career. (Prior to the Hauser, Rey faithfully performed and recorded on a 1931 Simplicio chosen for him in Barcelona by Llobet.)
The Stuyvesant Quartet was one of the finest mid-century chamber groups in the U.S., with a repertoire of remarkable breadth. The quartet’s founders, Alan and Sylvan Shulman, had started Philharmonia, and this disc was the label’s second release. (Side Two was Gian Francesco Malipiero’s “Rispetti e Strambotti,” already reissued on CD.) Apart from its historical importance, the Boccherini performance is notable for a warmth and dynamism that remain unsurpassed. One reviewer pointed out that “the guitarist. . . fits into the quintet group as though he had been a regular member of long standing.”
Here the famous ‘castanets’ passage in the closing Fandango—usually handled by the cellist, tapping the instrument’s body—was played by Rey with his fingernails on the side of his new Hauser, while cellist Alan Shulman took over the pedal figure from the guitar part. (According to Rey, this was Alan’s idea; he was trying to protect the finish on his cello, made by Joseph Dalaglio in Mantua, circa 1800.)
The solo LP, which Rey remembered as “a work of love,” was made over the course of a couple of days in July, 1952. As legendary engineer Norman Pickering recalled, fifty-two years later, “Rey and I had a short but intense relationship. He was a wonderful man, and a wonderfully sensitive musician. I liked him enormously; to this day I’ve never heard another guitarist like him. He was so smart, so easy to work with. He didn’t have any problems, he was totally non-temperamental about recording. He would play things over and over with no objections so I could get the right sound. Complete takes, with no splices—this was how I always worked. Both discs were recorded in the same church. It’s large, of rough stone, with a long reverberation time. I used a single microphone recording him solo, and for the quintet too, placed carefully: a Neumann U-47.”
Rey’s abiding memory of the session was carpets hung in the church to help the sound, and a touch of whiskey being drunk by those listening, not working.
We have included Rey’s original liner notes, which appeared in part on the Philharmonia version of the LP (and an Elektra reissue) and in full on the Nonesuch version. It would be difficult to praise this recording too highly. Though Rey’s later five Epic LPs are superb, revered within the guitar world and awaiting CD reissues of their own, they were made under trying circumstances, far removed from the ease and camaraderie of working with Pickering and the Shulmans. The present two LPs were an Eden in Rey’s recording life, and he looked back on them with pleasure and pride.
It’s worth noting that the pieces in whose development he had a hand have some aspect which is entirely new on the instrument (like the “false harmonics” in the final crescendo of the Orbón). Because of his deep friendships with Nin-Culmell and Orbón, as well as Llobet’s urging, Rey always thought of the guitar in orchestral terms. His attention to dynamics, muting, and registration, his devotion to finding ways to give a score maximum life on the guitar, came from constantly thinking orchestrally.
The Villa-Lobos Etude #11 shows how electrifying a live performer Rey was. Having already recorded the piece for Epic, his interpretation reflects a longstanding friendship with the composer (who praised Rey for playing his work “like a great guitarist and like a true Brazilian.”). This track was only recently unearthed.
As his career flourished, Rey began to have increasing trouble with his right (plucking) hand, a problem unrelated to the later rheumatoid arthritis which would end his concertizing. During the late 1950s and 1960s he found his middle finger weaker and less responsive, with a tendency to under-reach; having never had any problems with technique, he was forced to compensate via complex re-fingerings.
The solution came through Marianne Eppens, a Swiss physical therapist whom he met socially. She realized the problem was due to Rey pampering his right hand to avoid injury or breaking a nail; the delicate mechanism of muscles had become imbalanced from unnatural under-use. She encouraged Rey to put his hand back to active everyday use, and in months he was cured. In 1969 he and Marianne married and left New York for California. Except for two years on Staten Island in the mid-70s, Rey spent the rest of his life in the San Francisco area.
In 1975 Rey was diagnosed with the rheumatoid arthritis which soon twisted his hands and left him crippled. His final concerts, in ’75 and ’76, were played while heavily dosed on anti-inflammatory drugs. The last twenty years of his life were spent in severe pain, and his courage in the face of major setbacks (both knees replaced, a quadruple bypass) was heroic. His marriage to Marianne was profoundly happy and her devotion was, as he put it, “saintly.”
He continued to teach until even that became too arduous. It was inexpressibly poignant to see him during this time—a giant who had once played the most difficult pieces with grace and ease, now unable, as he said, “to play even first-year positions.” Still, even as illness ended his performing at its zenith, it made him a better teacher. Childless, he was loved by students as a surrogate father. Rather than clinging to the faded splendor of what his playing had been, he tried to pass on all he knew, sharing his knowledge (as he wrote of Llobet) as one shares one’s daily bread with a friend. He could explain anything.
It is unfortunate that we have had to wait so long for these discs to see the light of day again. Sometimes it is difficult to grasp how very quickly the vagaries of time can erase a performer’s legacy; the familiar name becomes an unfamiliar ghost. Now, at least, the classical guitar audience will have one of the instrument’s great poets, at his magnificent best, before them again, more than a half-century later. May he never be forgotten.
Sunday, August 15, 2004
A Novelist in My Suitcase
Written in 2004 for Sky magazine
Being both a novelist and travel writer for a quarter-century has made me all too aware of how suddenly, how powerfully, the world is changing. Every time I go back to a foreign destination I feel I know well, I realize I am out-of-date. The place in my mind’s eye is already obsolete; and the articles I wrote, about Fez or Georgia, Delhi or Rarotonga, seem to be describing destinations inexorably far-off—because they no longer exist. Why didn’t someone warn me? How could it happen so fast? This is why, ultimately, travel writing is more an experience of time than of space.
And yet, as we all know, what we seek when we travel is not primarily what’s current. We would rather come home with an understanding of the eternal aspects of Paris than having learned our way around the metro. It can be argued that there’s an archetypal date one can assign to any place, and the right fictions transport you there in time as well as in space. A better way to read the unchanging essence of a destination is not by devouring stacks of guidebooks, but by visiting it through the eyes of novelists both great and small, who used it not just as a stage set but as the heart of a book.
Think of the following personal suggestions, then, not as a voyage around one man’s bookshelves, but as a few choice pages from an inexhaustible literary atlas.
ITALY
Although Irwin Shaw (1913-1984) built his reputation first as a short-story writer, he was also a novelist of considerable worldliness and depth for years before becoming known as an author of bestsellers. One of my favorites is Two Weeks in Another Town (1960), set in the Italian film milieu. An American, an ex-actor long out of the profession, returns to help out a director friend. It is at once a portrait of a man in midlife crisis, of the unreal fishbowl of Cinécittà movie society in the 1950s, and of Rome at the summit of its modern glamor. (One chapter, which will never age, captures all the contrary characters at a Roman cocktail party.) And as a French journalist in it recalls, “When I saw the color of the walls of Rome for the first time on a summer morning, I knew I had been longing for the city all my life. . . .”
MOROCCO
The American writer and composer Paul Bowles (1910-1999), an expatriate from his early twenties, made his home in Morocco for a half-century. Though not as celebrated as The Sheltering Sky, to my mind The Spider’s House (1955) is an even finer novel. Its setting is not Tangier, where Bowles lived, but the labyrinth of Fez. It follows the country’s accelerating struggle for independence from France through two radically opposed points of view: of a Moroccan teenage boy, and of an American journalist. It is that rare achievement, a superb political novel, subtle in every way and saturated in Bowles’ knowledge of North Africa: “Stenham smiled: unaccountable behavior on the part of Moslems amused him. . . because, as he said, no non-Moslem knows enough about the Moslem mind to dare find fault with it.”
IRELAND
Much of the work of Dublin’s odd comic genius, Flann O’Brien (1911-1966), has echoes of Alice in Wonderland, steeped in mystic Celtic twilight. His real name was Brian O’Nolan, and for years he wrote a word-mad, hilarious column for the Irish Times. One novel in particular is extraordinary: At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), the only book I know to earn a cover blurb from James Joyce. Like most of Flann’s work, it is constantly, fantastically turning in on itself, a book inside a book inside a book. It contains few descriptions of place, yet it is filled with Dublin’s lacerating talk—of half-crocked boyos, a philosophical Good Fairy small enough to fit in a pocket, and the malicious Pooka arguing through the night. It is, therefore, full of Ireland.
RUSSIA
Victor Pelevin (b. 1962) is the most fascinating of Moscow’s younger writers, an amusing and acidic observer of the new Russia; as he points out, he has lived in several different countries in the last decade simply by staying home. His first novel, Omon Ra (1992), is narrated by the hero, Omon, in the final years of the Soviet Union. Having dreamed of becoming a cosmonaut, Omon joins the space program and is chosen for a glorious mission: to drive a supposedly “unmanned” vehicle on the moon (Russian technology can’t handle any technical difficulty), set up a radio transmitter to beam Lenin’s words to far galaxies, then hang around till his oxygen runs out. It would spoil Pelevin’s fun to give away any more surprises.
FRANCE
Michel Tournier (b. 1924) has written at least three remarkable novels: The Four Wise Men, Friday, and The Ogre (1970), which won the Prix Goncourt and was called by Janet Flanner “the most important book to come out of France since Proust.” Beginning in 1938, it chronicles the odyssey of Abel Tiffauges, a giant misfit who works in an auto shop and has only a very limited understanding of the historic upheavals he witnesses—and little more of the youths, both French and German, he does his best to protect. Philosophically it is as much about Germany as about France, shot through with bursts of observation and landscape—as when he speaks of Les Halles as “that deluge of fruit and vegetables which creates in the heart of Paris a kind of super-kitchen-garden with sharp sweet smells and crude colors brought out by the metallic light of acetylene lamps.”
TURKEY
The British thriller writer Eric Ambler (1909-1998) is still best known for The Mask of Dimitrios or Journey Into Fear, which brought a new sense of political reality to the form in the 1930s and paved the way for John LeCarré. By the ’60s Ambler’s novels were acquiring a sly wit as well. “The Light of Day” (1963)—narrated by Arthur Simpson, a charmingly inept small-time con man with passport troubles—contains a realistic portrait of Istanbul and its diverse security forces at the time. Arthur gets conned into assisting a team of jewel thieves burgling the sultans’ palace (it was filmed as Topkapi, with Peter Ustinov). Poor Arthur, so misunderstood! “I am not asking to be loved. I am not asking to be liked. I do not mind being loathed, if that will make some pettifogging government official happier. . . . Sheep I may be; and perhaps certain persons find my breath displeasing; but I am no longer merely indignant. I am angry now.”
INDIA
R.K. Narayan (1906-2001) is spoken of as the Chekhov of India, for across six decades of novels and stories he chronicled with vast humanity the denizens of a fictional village, Malgudi, in their gossips, rivalries, friendships, and quarrels—from the sign-painter to the English teacher, from the financial expert to the taxidermist to the astrologer. It’s impossible to go wrong with Narayan, for all Indian village life is here. The Vendor of Sweets(1967) concerns Jagan, a widowed candymaker who is also a frustrated writer (his book on diet has stalled at the local printer’s). His son returns from America with both a young woman in tow and a modern invention: a story-making machine. ‘“Conquer taste, and you will have conquered the self,” said Jagan to his listener, who asked, “Why conquer the self?” Jagan said, “I do not know, but all our sages advise us so.”’
ENGLAND
Recently filmed, The End of the Affair (1951) by Graham Greene (1904-1991) takes place in London just after the war, and its setting of rainy streets and grim buildings bombed half to smithereens aptly conveys the torment, chapter-by-chapter, of a clandestine affair that ends in profound sadness. “So this is a record of hate far more than of love,” the narrator writes, a novelist midway through a career like Greene’s (who was himself in the throes of a similar relationship). Here is the gray city that was: the daily paper, the gentlemen’s club, the crowded tube, the gas-fires, the post-war rationing, the daily whiskeys and the pain of other people. A hundred years from now Londoners will still be reading it to discover themselves.
SPAIN
Juan Goytisolo (b. 1931) is one of our most experimental novelists, a writer unafraid of not being understood. Though the texture of his later prose will confuse some readers, his earlier books are direct, vivid, and powerful, often with political themes (I recommend especially The Young Assassins and Children of Chaos). Island of Women (1962) is a satire of the decadent rich, sunning themselves in Torremolinos on the (then) newly-developed Costa del Sol. It is a Spain of foreign tourists vying to infiltrate the locals, of idle women on holiday quite bored with their husbands. Put this way, the novel sounds trapped in its era, but Goytisolo’s eye and ear are so acute, his touch so deft, that an entire society seems to be on the operating table. “Time went fast and the erosion continued.” And thus Spain’s mid-century.
CZECH REPUBLIC
Every writer has his creative homeland of recurring themes and recurring loves. For the magnificent Czech writer Josef Skvorecky (b. 1924), who has lived in Canada since 1968, the glory of jazz has coursed like a deep ceaseless Mississippi through all his books, set against the frustrations of being a teenage boy encircled by desirable young women. In The Swell Season (1975), a series of linked long tales, his narrator Danny is consumed by a passion for jazz and an inability to penetrate the traps and teasings of his fellow village schoolgirls, all under the eye of the Nazis. Skvorecky’s gift is an ability to construct a novel out of seemingly inconsequential parries between characters, yet you soon find yourself in the presence of something deeply humane and deeply wise. “When a girl says she has to think something over, she’s thought it over already. . . A star that would not be blacked out hung over the castle tower and I was blissfully happy. It looked like a swell season was about to begin.”
MALAYSIA
Paul Theroux (b. 1941) has always been fascinated by outsiders—from the inventor Allie Fox building an ice machine in the jungles of The Mosquito Coast to Theroux’s own presence on foot or on train throughout the world from The Great Railway Bazaar on. (Looked at after close to forty books, his career most resembles Mark Twain’s in its scope and energy.) His point is that outsiders often see the most: like the American consul stationed for two years in a dusty Malaysian town for the short-story collection The Consul’s File (1977). Here are the locals, with their superstitions, their fevers, their ghosts, their intrigues; the Chinese and Indians running shops and coffee-houses; the white expatriates who see themselves as characters out of Maugham and are the more real for that; and the interlopers passing through, from the Yankee tourist or travel-writer to a Japanese businessman or a Malay maharajah, afloat on his own whimsy. Theroux, one of our most candid travelers, is showing us an alternative Asia on the heels of Viet Nam. The question, as always with Americans, is what we are or are not prepared to know.
Being both a novelist and travel writer for a quarter-century has made me all too aware of how suddenly, how powerfully, the world is changing. Every time I go back to a foreign destination I feel I know well, I realize I am out-of-date. The place in my mind’s eye is already obsolete; and the articles I wrote, about Fez or Georgia, Delhi or Rarotonga, seem to be describing destinations inexorably far-off—because they no longer exist. Why didn’t someone warn me? How could it happen so fast? This is why, ultimately, travel writing is more an experience of time than of space.
And yet, as we all know, what we seek when we travel is not primarily what’s current. We would rather come home with an understanding of the eternal aspects of Paris than having learned our way around the metro. It can be argued that there’s an archetypal date one can assign to any place, and the right fictions transport you there in time as well as in space. A better way to read the unchanging essence of a destination is not by devouring stacks of guidebooks, but by visiting it through the eyes of novelists both great and small, who used it not just as a stage set but as the heart of a book.
Think of the following personal suggestions, then, not as a voyage around one man’s bookshelves, but as a few choice pages from an inexhaustible literary atlas.
ITALY
Although Irwin Shaw (1913-1984) built his reputation first as a short-story writer, he was also a novelist of considerable worldliness and depth for years before becoming known as an author of bestsellers. One of my favorites is Two Weeks in Another Town (1960), set in the Italian film milieu. An American, an ex-actor long out of the profession, returns to help out a director friend. It is at once a portrait of a man in midlife crisis, of the unreal fishbowl of Cinécittà movie society in the 1950s, and of Rome at the summit of its modern glamor. (One chapter, which will never age, captures all the contrary characters at a Roman cocktail party.) And as a French journalist in it recalls, “When I saw the color of the walls of Rome for the first time on a summer morning, I knew I had been longing for the city all my life. . . .”
MOROCCO
The American writer and composer Paul Bowles (1910-1999), an expatriate from his early twenties, made his home in Morocco for a half-century. Though not as celebrated as The Sheltering Sky, to my mind The Spider’s House (1955) is an even finer novel. Its setting is not Tangier, where Bowles lived, but the labyrinth of Fez. It follows the country’s accelerating struggle for independence from France through two radically opposed points of view: of a Moroccan teenage boy, and of an American journalist. It is that rare achievement, a superb political novel, subtle in every way and saturated in Bowles’ knowledge of North Africa: “Stenham smiled: unaccountable behavior on the part of Moslems amused him. . . because, as he said, no non-Moslem knows enough about the Moslem mind to dare find fault with it.”
IRELAND
Much of the work of Dublin’s odd comic genius, Flann O’Brien (1911-1966), has echoes of Alice in Wonderland, steeped in mystic Celtic twilight. His real name was Brian O’Nolan, and for years he wrote a word-mad, hilarious column for the Irish Times. One novel in particular is extraordinary: At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), the only book I know to earn a cover blurb from James Joyce. Like most of Flann’s work, it is constantly, fantastically turning in on itself, a book inside a book inside a book. It contains few descriptions of place, yet it is filled with Dublin’s lacerating talk—of half-crocked boyos, a philosophical Good Fairy small enough to fit in a pocket, and the malicious Pooka arguing through the night. It is, therefore, full of Ireland.
RUSSIA
Victor Pelevin (b. 1962) is the most fascinating of Moscow’s younger writers, an amusing and acidic observer of the new Russia; as he points out, he has lived in several different countries in the last decade simply by staying home. His first novel, Omon Ra (1992), is narrated by the hero, Omon, in the final years of the Soviet Union. Having dreamed of becoming a cosmonaut, Omon joins the space program and is chosen for a glorious mission: to drive a supposedly “unmanned” vehicle on the moon (Russian technology can’t handle any technical difficulty), set up a radio transmitter to beam Lenin’s words to far galaxies, then hang around till his oxygen runs out. It would spoil Pelevin’s fun to give away any more surprises.
FRANCE
Michel Tournier (b. 1924) has written at least three remarkable novels: The Four Wise Men, Friday, and The Ogre (1970), which won the Prix Goncourt and was called by Janet Flanner “the most important book to come out of France since Proust.” Beginning in 1938, it chronicles the odyssey of Abel Tiffauges, a giant misfit who works in an auto shop and has only a very limited understanding of the historic upheavals he witnesses—and little more of the youths, both French and German, he does his best to protect. Philosophically it is as much about Germany as about France, shot through with bursts of observation and landscape—as when he speaks of Les Halles as “that deluge of fruit and vegetables which creates in the heart of Paris a kind of super-kitchen-garden with sharp sweet smells and crude colors brought out by the metallic light of acetylene lamps.”
TURKEY
The British thriller writer Eric Ambler (1909-1998) is still best known for The Mask of Dimitrios or Journey Into Fear, which brought a new sense of political reality to the form in the 1930s and paved the way for John LeCarré. By the ’60s Ambler’s novels were acquiring a sly wit as well. “The Light of Day” (1963)—narrated by Arthur Simpson, a charmingly inept small-time con man with passport troubles—contains a realistic portrait of Istanbul and its diverse security forces at the time. Arthur gets conned into assisting a team of jewel thieves burgling the sultans’ palace (it was filmed as Topkapi, with Peter Ustinov). Poor Arthur, so misunderstood! “I am not asking to be loved. I am not asking to be liked. I do not mind being loathed, if that will make some pettifogging government official happier. . . . Sheep I may be; and perhaps certain persons find my breath displeasing; but I am no longer merely indignant. I am angry now.”
INDIA
R.K. Narayan (1906-2001) is spoken of as the Chekhov of India, for across six decades of novels and stories he chronicled with vast humanity the denizens of a fictional village, Malgudi, in their gossips, rivalries, friendships, and quarrels—from the sign-painter to the English teacher, from the financial expert to the taxidermist to the astrologer. It’s impossible to go wrong with Narayan, for all Indian village life is here. The Vendor of Sweets(1967) concerns Jagan, a widowed candymaker who is also a frustrated writer (his book on diet has stalled at the local printer’s). His son returns from America with both a young woman in tow and a modern invention: a story-making machine. ‘“Conquer taste, and you will have conquered the self,” said Jagan to his listener, who asked, “Why conquer the self?” Jagan said, “I do not know, but all our sages advise us so.”’
ENGLAND
Recently filmed, The End of the Affair (1951) by Graham Greene (1904-1991) takes place in London just after the war, and its setting of rainy streets and grim buildings bombed half to smithereens aptly conveys the torment, chapter-by-chapter, of a clandestine affair that ends in profound sadness. “So this is a record of hate far more than of love,” the narrator writes, a novelist midway through a career like Greene’s (who was himself in the throes of a similar relationship). Here is the gray city that was: the daily paper, the gentlemen’s club, the crowded tube, the gas-fires, the post-war rationing, the daily whiskeys and the pain of other people. A hundred years from now Londoners will still be reading it to discover themselves.
SPAIN
Juan Goytisolo (b. 1931) is one of our most experimental novelists, a writer unafraid of not being understood. Though the texture of his later prose will confuse some readers, his earlier books are direct, vivid, and powerful, often with political themes (I recommend especially The Young Assassins and Children of Chaos). Island of Women (1962) is a satire of the decadent rich, sunning themselves in Torremolinos on the (then) newly-developed Costa del Sol. It is a Spain of foreign tourists vying to infiltrate the locals, of idle women on holiday quite bored with their husbands. Put this way, the novel sounds trapped in its era, but Goytisolo’s eye and ear are so acute, his touch so deft, that an entire society seems to be on the operating table. “Time went fast and the erosion continued.” And thus Spain’s mid-century.
CZECH REPUBLIC
Every writer has his creative homeland of recurring themes and recurring loves. For the magnificent Czech writer Josef Skvorecky (b. 1924), who has lived in Canada since 1968, the glory of jazz has coursed like a deep ceaseless Mississippi through all his books, set against the frustrations of being a teenage boy encircled by desirable young women. In The Swell Season (1975), a series of linked long tales, his narrator Danny is consumed by a passion for jazz and an inability to penetrate the traps and teasings of his fellow village schoolgirls, all under the eye of the Nazis. Skvorecky’s gift is an ability to construct a novel out of seemingly inconsequential parries between characters, yet you soon find yourself in the presence of something deeply humane and deeply wise. “When a girl says she has to think something over, she’s thought it over already. . . A star that would not be blacked out hung over the castle tower and I was blissfully happy. It looked like a swell season was about to begin.”
MALAYSIA
Paul Theroux (b. 1941) has always been fascinated by outsiders—from the inventor Allie Fox building an ice machine in the jungles of The Mosquito Coast to Theroux’s own presence on foot or on train throughout the world from The Great Railway Bazaar on. (Looked at after close to forty books, his career most resembles Mark Twain’s in its scope and energy.) His point is that outsiders often see the most: like the American consul stationed for two years in a dusty Malaysian town for the short-story collection The Consul’s File (1977). Here are the locals, with their superstitions, their fevers, their ghosts, their intrigues; the Chinese and Indians running shops and coffee-houses; the white expatriates who see themselves as characters out of Maugham and are the more real for that; and the interlopers passing through, from the Yankee tourist or travel-writer to a Japanese businessman or a Malay maharajah, afloat on his own whimsy. Theroux, one of our most candid travelers, is showing us an alternative Asia on the heels of Viet Nam. The question, as always with Americans, is what we are or are not prepared to know.
Saturday, February 21, 2004
Luiz Bonfá
Written in 2004 as the booklet essay for the Folkways disc Solo in Rio
This is the historic first release on CD of one of Luiz Bonfá’s masterpieces, complete at last. Because the Smithsonian possesses the original master tapes (part of the generous legacy of the innovative recording engineer Emory Cook), the disc comprises all seventeen tracks from the 1959 Cook LP (#1134),O Violão de Luiz Bonfá, plus nearly another half hour of never-released material. This includes not just alternate takes but pieces which Bonfá never recorded elsewhere.
Even within Bonfá’s enormous output, the Cook recording remains very special. Every guitar aficionado will enjoy hearing Luiz thrive in that most challenging situation, of playing solo. His warmth, intimacy, and dynamism suffuse every track; he plays the most treacherous passages with characteristic effortlessness, and sounds absolutely free and relaxed on this unforgiving instrument. The number of tracks apparently improvised on the spot only adds to the virtuosic allure. It is simply how the man played, on one of his best days before a microphone.
Though Bonfá was technically superb — to my mind, one of the great guitarists of the 20th century — he always puts his prodigious abilities at the service of the music. It is never virtuosity for its own sake, or to impress; his innovations always arise with some specific musical effect in mind. As Cook wrote in his original liner notes: “The ten Bonfá fingers, presumably in a fairly marital state at birth, are now collectively and separately divorced, each from the others to such an extent that it has been facetiously suggested that he should carry at least five paid-up union cards.”
Luiz Floriano Bonfá (October 17, 1922—January 12, 2001) was born in what he called the “jungle village” of Santa Cruz, Brazil, the son of an Italian immigrant. He took up the guitar at age 11 — it was a birthday present — and, serious from the beginning, quickly absorbed all the local teacher had to offer. With the apparent luck that seems to follows people of unusual destiny, a short time later the boy was at a party in Rio and met the Uruguayan classical guitar master Isaias Savio, a resident of the city, who asked him to play and then immediately offered to teach him.
By that time — the mid-1930s — Savio (1902-77) was one of the finest and most widely knowledgeable guitarists in South America. He had studied with the great Miguel Llobet (a Catalan, the most eminent disciple of the 19th century Spanish master Francisco Tarrega), and was thus able to pass on to the young Bonfá a demanding, systematic approach that would also encourage an original and flexible style to develop freely. Three years of these weekly lessons, which meant a 2½ hour train trip each way, gave Luiz a thorough knowledge of 18th and 19th century repertoire and of the most highly developed “school” of the classical guitar — which remains a notoriously individualized instrument in terms of technique compared to, say, the violin or the piano.
“Savio was extraordinary to study with,” Bonfá remembered years later. “Unlike many teachers, he was the friend of his students. We were like one big family of pupils with a spectacular father.” Bonfá would eventually reply in kind by sending a promising boy named Carlos Barbosa-Lima, now one of today’s best-known classical guitarists, to Savio.
Though Savio had declared that Bonfá could become one of the world’s top classical soloists, Luiz was increasingly drawn to the idea of dedicating himself to Brazil’s popular music. (The ever open-minded Savio supported this decision.) By his late teens Luiz was expanding his formal training to the work of making a living playing in Rio’s nightclubs, hotels, and casinos.
This was a tremendously creative era in Brazil’s popular music culture, due partly to a hunger for live music on the radio stations. Traditional forms like chôro, serenata, and samba were being invigorated and reinvented; others, like waltzes and boleros, were being given an ever more Brazilian intonation as their own local roots deepened. The influence of jazz from the U.S.A. was penetrating as well. Bonfá ended up performing and recording as both guitarist and singer with a successful vocal group, the Quitandinha Serenaders; when he left them, his stand-in was briefly the young João Gilberto. Luiz eventually wrote several songs that became hits for other singers, like “Ranchinho de Palha,” “Sem esse Céu,” “Cançao do Vaqueiro,” and most notably “De Cigarro em Cigarro” (‘From Cigarette to Cigarette’).
Many of Bonfá’s most dramatic instrumentals(“Sambolero,” “Uma Prece,” “Batucada,” “Dança India”) similarly date from his early twenties. His compositional style on the guitar was already mature — a sense of exuberant virtuosity allied to a mood of tender joy, amid a still-audacious ability to imitate several percussion instruments at once. What would come later was an equally daring, liberated harmonic sensibility which sprang from his deep love of impressionism and of Debussy in particular.
Around 1946 Bonfá met his other main mentor, who was less a teacher and more a musical elder brother: the guitarist Anibal Augusto Sardinha (1915-55).“Garoto” was a rare original who managed to combine a range of disparate classical and folk influences into an impressionistic, fervently Brazilian style that was passionate, technically brilliant, and harmonically idiosyncratic. Though only seven years older than Bonfá, Garoto had become extremely well-known through many radio performances, and was able to help Luiz in the early stages of his career.
Bonfá called Garoto “my dear friend by whom I was greatly influenced, a musical genius far ahead of his time . . . it was he who got me my first job with Radio Nacional. In spite of his great ability he was a truly humble man. We used to get together at his place in Copacabana and jam for hours, just the two of us.” Garoto’s stepdaughter Maria Alice de Medeiros Rosa — Luiz was later best man at her wedding in New York — remembers that Luiz and his guitar were constant visitors in the Rio household, along with other luminaries of Brazilian music. As she put it, “In terms of the guitar, Garoto always spoke of Bonfá as the best. And of course Luiz always spoke of Garoto as the best.”
Luiz first recorded as a leader in 1945, and by the time of the present disc (1959) he’d released under his own name about fifteen 78 rpms, mostly for Continental, and about a dozen LPs, mostly for Odeon — and played on plenty of other artists’ discs. [This is all detailed on the Bonfá Discography Website, the labor of love of two collectors, Koichi and Motoko Yasuoka, who have tirelessly put together the world’s most extensive Bonfá archive. [Http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/%7Eyasuoka/Bonfa]
Brazilian popular music was changing rapidly, as the old forms acquired a languid, contemporary cool that was eventually labeled bossa nova (“the new knack,” “the new thing,” or “the new swing”). Bonfá was an architect of this sound, along with Antonio Carlos Jobim, João Gilberto, Baden Powell, and others, but the movement’s popularity sprang from an authentic feeling that was now simply in the air, and seemed to reside in every melody.
Bonfá was both partly responsible for it and partly absent from it. In 1957 he’d gone to New York, knowing little English, and found that “no one knew me or anything about Brazilian music.” Once again a chance invitation to a cocktail party brought him luck, for Mary Martin — an enormously successful singing star, Broadway’s Peter Pan — heard him play that night for fellow guests, and straightaway offered him a feature spot on a 60-city tour. Subsequent tours with her, and frequent TV appearances, helped him establish a Brazilian beachhead with U.S. audiences and record labels. For the next fifteen years Luiz lived in both countries, with a steady emphasis on the U.S.A.
The year before, 1956, Luiz had been the guitarist in a Rio musical theater piece with a marvelous ensemble; he’d added one number to the score, which was by his friend Jobim, with a libretto by the prominent poet Vinicius de Moraes. Orfeu da Conceição set the Orpheus legend in Rio, and got enough notice to attract the French director Marcel Camus, who in 1958 went down to Brazil to film the story within the setting of carnaval.
By this time Luiz was busy in the States, but he returned to Rio during a month off from the Mary Martin tour. When director Camus heard that Luiz was in the city, he asked him to write a melody for the main character. With a mere week to go before his flight back to the U.S., Luiz came up with a theme overnight that was liked by everyone involved except Camus, who asked him to try again. He did so, but when the new theme was approved by the director, Luiz insisted that the prior song was better, and argued until Camus relented.
When Orfeu Negro (‘Black Orpheus’) went on to win the ’59 Palme d’Or at Cannes (and the Oscar for Best Foreign Film), Bonfá’s “Manhã de Carnaval” became the #1 hit in Europe and one of the most recorded songs in history. The entire soundtrack, which included Jobim’s “A Felicadade,” helped coalesce the coming awareness of bossa nova. (Over the years, Bonfá wrote or participated in quite a few soundtracks; his “The Gentle Rain,” from a lackluster 1966 film, has become a jazz mainstay.)
In the late sixties and early seventies Luiz rode out the bossa nova wave and, by spending more and more time in the U.S., became far better known here than in Brazil. Despite his uneven records during this time — which often feel as if it wasn’t he making the paramount decisions — Bonfá remained as innovative as ever, ready to experiment with a subtle compositional use of electronic effects like echo and delay on his classical guitar sound.
In 1971, apparently mid-career, he left the States and moved back to Rio. Afterward he explained that, “An artist has to look out or all the pressure will destroy him. Brazil is a slow, relaxed country, and I have many things aside from music that I enjoy doing.” These included collecting vintage cars and raising exotic birds and plants. On a visit to New York he told an old friend, “You’ve seen what it’s like in Rio — which would you choose?”
Bonfá’s later career seems a gradual happy withdrawal from the rat race of the music business. Always peripatetic, he still did concert tours to Europe and Australia and the occasional U.S. concert with the likes of Dave Brubeck. Regrettably, he rarely recorded solo after the superb 1972 LP Introspection, though with customary amiability he continued to record, often with lesser musicians. Still, it is impossible to know his magnificent early solo work, like the present disc, and not dream about the later introspections we never got to have.
In the 1980s and early 1990s Luiz returned to New York for several club dates and made a couple of compact discs. All the old gentleness of touch was still there, but soon afterward Alzheimer’s set in, and eventually left him unable to play and ever more remote from the person he’d been. He died in his beloved Rio from prostate cancer at 78.
It is a sad truth of the music profession that though a performer may sustain a long and fruitful career, his recordings usually telescope into a much shorter period with the kind of public attention that supports record contracts. Yet Bonfá’s recording career ran from 1945 until 1996 and spans over fifty discs; indeed, he was one of those rare performers whose first recordings were issued on 78s and whose last appeared as CDs.
Bonfá’s golden era is the decade that began in the early 1950s, when he and Jobim and Gilberto and a few others were inventing a fresh sound. Everyone knows about the popular boom of the bossa nova — so often degraded across a half-century by overuse in the wrong hands, yet in retrospect so remarkably invulnerable, for those original recordings still glow with the luminous poetry of a new magic entering the world.
One can debate the relative strength of its different roots — strains of jazz, the rich tradition of Brazilian popular music of earlier eras, plus elements of a South American classical tradition particularly as incarnated by Villa-Lobos — but at the heart of bossa nova were a dozen extraordinary young musicians who all listened to each other, and together heard life differently than anyone before.
This decade is the gravitational center of Bonfá’s most fascinating work. Sadly, very few guitarists nowadays, of any genre, are aware of Luiz’s mastery. Like the general public, they remember him not as a guitarist but only as the composer of three standards: “The Gentle Rain,” “Samba de Orfeu,” and “Manhã de Carnaval” (the latter variously referred to as ‘A Day in the Life of a Fool,’ ‘Morning of the Carnival,’ and ‘Black Orpheus’).
It seems surprising in the face of fifty-odd records, but until very recently it took determination to hunt down any discs of Bonfá’s serious work; even now many of his best LPs have not yet been re-released on CD. One danger of living in an age of cultural achaeology is that it’s easy to assume the treasures of yesteryear have all been unearthed and re-issued. The collectors know different.
Emory Cook (1913-2002) was once referred to as “the best ear in the U.S.A.” In an era when most classical guitar LPs can seem as if they were made in the same tiny bathroom, the sound Cook achieved here is detailed, unadorned, spacious, and uncolored by the usual mushy reverb. His widow Martha Cook has pointed out that Cook “liked the guitar in general, and played classical guitar quite well himself. When he began to court me, this is the record he brought to my house and played over and over.”
His trademark was an ability to make vital recordings on the spot, with no need of a studio. “He’d take his microphones and his Nagra — a portable tape machine — and go travel for months at a time. He specialized in field recordings; he had started off by recording the sounds of the sea and the sky. He always worked relentlessly at placing his microphones. He just wouldn’t give up until he got perfection.”
On this particular odyssey he also recorded in Mexico, Ecuador, and the Caribbean; Martha believes that Luiz was the only artist Cook recorded in Brazil. Unfortunately, the Cook archives contain no information on where the LP was made, or over how many days. The cover merely states, “... popular, serious, samba and a few songs / all recorded on Nagra in Rio de Janeiro.”
1959 was a busy year for Luiz. He toured with Mary Martin as a featured soloist until the spring. At some point he did a first-rate recording in the U.S. for Atlantic Records (Amor!) then returned to Rio, where he made this recording, using (according to the original liner notes) a “Model HS Series E Do Souto.” It sounds — and looks — like the same guitar Bonfá used on many LPs he made at about this time: a spruce top with Brazilian rosewood back and sides, judging by the cover photo.
In delving into the work of a popular instrumentalist like Bonfá, we’re appreciating someone who is creating music not for the larger world of many other interpreters (as a composer usually intends), but primarily to play himself. As a result we sometimes end up judging him on the collective strengths of his artistic personality, the sum of all the work, rather than on the quality of an individual piece. His style, not any particular composition, in effect becomes the opus.
The 31 extremely diverse cuts on this disc fall into three categories: original compositions (19), which Bonfá played somewhat differently each time; probable outright improvisations (9), done on that day’s spur-of-the-moment; and his semi-improvised versions of other’s compositions (3).
Thus, except for three cuts, the music on this disc is entirely by Luiz. This alone made him a rarity within the guitar world of the 1950s, no matter what style. Even rarer was that so much of this particular LP was improvised.
One crucial aspect of Bonfá’s artistic personality is that he was happy to make up the music literally while he played it. The guitarist, musicologist, and composer Brian Hodel has recounted a puzzling Rio afternoon spent trying to extract an ideal performance of “The Gentle Rain” from Luiz to transcribe, and watching him play it totally differently a few times before it dawned on Hodel that Luiz was not only improvising, but instinctively disinclined to repeat himself. Each version was unique, and valid.
The implicit question — How much is improvised? — tends to be knotty for any genre that involves musicians making up substantial parts of a performance as they play. Every jazz musician improvising on “Summertime” assumes his colleagues know the song’s structure and have sufficiently acute ears to follow any harmonic substitution and melodic byway that strike at a moment’s whim. (Ditto a flamenco guitarist, a blues saxophonist, an Indian vina player.)
Jazz scholars sometimes argue the point of honor of how much so-and-so is making up on the spot — as if a wholly-improvised performance is more “honest,” whatever that means — without admitting that a large percentage of a piece is necessarily agreed-on in advance. In effect, what is occurring in all these genres is improvised variations on pre-existing material.
This is far from the Western classical tradition of improvising that has, save among master organists, largely died out. In Bach’s day, for instance, any keyboardist worth his job could create a four-voice fugue from scratch, and there are many accounts of Mozart’s and Beethoven’s improvisational abilities, only hinted at by the piano Fantasy, op.77.
The chief drawback of improvisation is that it’s difficult to invent a compelling structure off-the-cuff; hence the long tendency of musicians to turn to the ready-made one, be it a fugue or a 32-bar song. For the musician giving it life, the structure is liberating by being understood from the start, a skeleton waiting to be fleshed out. But even with no structure at all, there’s often considerable beauty in an improvisation intended solely to express the mood of a moment, the free-flowing river of an acute musical imagination and its fingers. That fleeting sense of pure fantasia, of expressing the tidal currents of a dreaming mind even as an idea quickens to life and then vanishes, is one of music’s unique capabilities. At this, Luiz Bonfá was a master.
In practicing the rigorous art of improvising an entire piece from scratch, Luiz is a virtual anomaly within the world of Brazilian guitar, at least as preserved on record. There are plenty of accounts of major Brazilian guitarists as adept improvisers — say, Garoto (1915-55), Bola Sete (1928-87), Paulinho Nogueira (1929-2003), and Baden Powell (1937-2000), among others — but precious few recordings as examples. Yet for cut after cut, Emory Cook allows us to hear Luiz doing it in front of the microphones. [I suspect that part of the LP Introspection was also improvised.]
Naturally, we as listeners are inevitably always up against our own expectations. We approach a Schoenberg sonata differently than a Bach mass, an Indian raga, a tango, or a Broadway song; this is as it should be. In a wide world where all are far more easily available than a decade ago, it is important to try to hear what each is trying to say, to learn to listen in as many different ways as possible — both to appreciate what each is, and not expect any to be what they are not. (As the artist and poet Dolber B. Spalding aptly wrote in a 1977 essay for Chelys, a music quarterly, “One thousand mice do not equal a horse.”)
What I’m getting at is that even though this disc contains magnificent performances of several melodies that will still be played long after we are all dead, it also contains a number of slighter Bonfá pieces, made up on the spot, that are only passing remarks and fancies — albeit of a singular musical personality. They would sound quite different played by any another guitarist, no matter how good, and probably come across wrong in those other hands. Their purpose is merely to express a brief human moment, not to construct a cathedral. They are best approached as part of a visit with Luiz Bonfá, which is the overriding mood of this record. As a guitarist he could do no wrong; no one has spoken more deeply, intimately, and exuberantly on six nylon strings that — until just a decade before this recording — had always been spun from animal’s guts.
Having now lived with this recording over many months in preparing these notes, I’ve been reminded countless times of the sense of wonder and mystery with which, as a young guitarist, I first encountered it over twenty-five years ago. Now I know — most of the time — what Luiz is actually doing; and yet it is no less wondrous. I have played my original scratchy copy for many friends across the decades, and whether or not they were musicians, they were all aware of being in the presence of true human magic, and that almost tactile thrill which comes from hearing a performer on one of his best days. Luiz Bonfá was one of nature’s musicians: a man who could transmit beauty easily and intimately, and who was afraid of nothing on the guitar. I am happy to be able to say, after all these years, that he remains as great an inspiration and a joy as when I first heard the sounds of that unique poetic spirit.
Selected Luiz Bonfá discography:
Luiz Bonfá (Continental, 1955)
Orfeu da Conceição (Odeon, 1956)
Alta Versatilidade (Odeon, 1957); issued as Brazilian Guitar (Capitol Records)
Violão Boêmio (Odeon, 1957)
Bonfafá (Odeon, 1958)
Meu Querido Violão (Odeon, 1958)
Amor! (Atlantic, 1959)
A Voz e o Violão (Odeon, 1960)
Pery Ribeiro e Seu Mundo de Canções Românticas (Odeon, 1962)
Luiz Bonfá Plays and Sings Bossa Nova (Verve, 1962)
Violão Boêmio vol. 2 (Odeon, 1963)
Jazz Samba Encore! (Verve, 1963, with Stan Getz, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and Maria Toledo)
Introspection (RCA, 1972)
Bonfá Burrows Brazil (Cherry Pie, 1978)
Non-Stop to Brazil (Chesky, 1989)
Selected reading:
Scores
Brian Hodel, “The Brazilian Guitar,” (Dennis McMillan Publishing,1983; out-of-print; contains 5 transcriptions)
Luiz Bonfá, “The Music of Luiz Bonfá: Four Pieces” (ed. Carlos Barbosa-Lima, Guitar Solo Publications, 1987)
Musicology
Brian Hodel, “Luiz Bonfá, Ambassador of Brazilian Swing” Guitar Player, May 1983
Brian Hodel, “Spotlight on Luiz Bonfá,” Guitar Review, Winter 1984
Brian Hodel, “The Brazilian Guitar,” Guitar Review, Winter 1991
Selected filmography:
Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro), dir. Marcel Camus, 1959
This is the historic first release on CD of one of Luiz Bonfá’s masterpieces, complete at last. Because the Smithsonian possesses the original master tapes (part of the generous legacy of the innovative recording engineer Emory Cook), the disc comprises all seventeen tracks from the 1959 Cook LP (#1134),O Violão de Luiz Bonfá, plus nearly another half hour of never-released material. This includes not just alternate takes but pieces which Bonfá never recorded elsewhere.
Even within Bonfá’s enormous output, the Cook recording remains very special. Every guitar aficionado will enjoy hearing Luiz thrive in that most challenging situation, of playing solo. His warmth, intimacy, and dynamism suffuse every track; he plays the most treacherous passages with characteristic effortlessness, and sounds absolutely free and relaxed on this unforgiving instrument. The number of tracks apparently improvised on the spot only adds to the virtuosic allure. It is simply how the man played, on one of his best days before a microphone.
Though Bonfá was technically superb — to my mind, one of the great guitarists of the 20th century — he always puts his prodigious abilities at the service of the music. It is never virtuosity for its own sake, or to impress; his innovations always arise with some specific musical effect in mind. As Cook wrote in his original liner notes: “The ten Bonfá fingers, presumably in a fairly marital state at birth, are now collectively and separately divorced, each from the others to such an extent that it has been facetiously suggested that he should carry at least five paid-up union cards.”
Luiz Floriano Bonfá (October 17, 1922—January 12, 2001) was born in what he called the “jungle village” of Santa Cruz, Brazil, the son of an Italian immigrant. He took up the guitar at age 11 — it was a birthday present — and, serious from the beginning, quickly absorbed all the local teacher had to offer. With the apparent luck that seems to follows people of unusual destiny, a short time later the boy was at a party in Rio and met the Uruguayan classical guitar master Isaias Savio, a resident of the city, who asked him to play and then immediately offered to teach him.
By that time — the mid-1930s — Savio (1902-77) was one of the finest and most widely knowledgeable guitarists in South America. He had studied with the great Miguel Llobet (a Catalan, the most eminent disciple of the 19th century Spanish master Francisco Tarrega), and was thus able to pass on to the young Bonfá a demanding, systematic approach that would also encourage an original and flexible style to develop freely. Three years of these weekly lessons, which meant a 2½ hour train trip each way, gave Luiz a thorough knowledge of 18th and 19th century repertoire and of the most highly developed “school” of the classical guitar — which remains a notoriously individualized instrument in terms of technique compared to, say, the violin or the piano.
“Savio was extraordinary to study with,” Bonfá remembered years later. “Unlike many teachers, he was the friend of his students. We were like one big family of pupils with a spectacular father.” Bonfá would eventually reply in kind by sending a promising boy named Carlos Barbosa-Lima, now one of today’s best-known classical guitarists, to Savio.
Though Savio had declared that Bonfá could become one of the world’s top classical soloists, Luiz was increasingly drawn to the idea of dedicating himself to Brazil’s popular music. (The ever open-minded Savio supported this decision.) By his late teens Luiz was expanding his formal training to the work of making a living playing in Rio’s nightclubs, hotels, and casinos.
This was a tremendously creative era in Brazil’s popular music culture, due partly to a hunger for live music on the radio stations. Traditional forms like chôro, serenata, and samba were being invigorated and reinvented; others, like waltzes and boleros, were being given an ever more Brazilian intonation as their own local roots deepened. The influence of jazz from the U.S.A. was penetrating as well. Bonfá ended up performing and recording as both guitarist and singer with a successful vocal group, the Quitandinha Serenaders; when he left them, his stand-in was briefly the young João Gilberto. Luiz eventually wrote several songs that became hits for other singers, like “Ranchinho de Palha,” “Sem esse Céu,” “Cançao do Vaqueiro,” and most notably “De Cigarro em Cigarro” (‘From Cigarette to Cigarette’).
Many of Bonfá’s most dramatic instrumentals(“Sambolero,” “Uma Prece,” “Batucada,” “Dança India”) similarly date from his early twenties. His compositional style on the guitar was already mature — a sense of exuberant virtuosity allied to a mood of tender joy, amid a still-audacious ability to imitate several percussion instruments at once. What would come later was an equally daring, liberated harmonic sensibility which sprang from his deep love of impressionism and of Debussy in particular.
Around 1946 Bonfá met his other main mentor, who was less a teacher and more a musical elder brother: the guitarist Anibal Augusto Sardinha (1915-55).“Garoto” was a rare original who managed to combine a range of disparate classical and folk influences into an impressionistic, fervently Brazilian style that was passionate, technically brilliant, and harmonically idiosyncratic. Though only seven years older than Bonfá, Garoto had become extremely well-known through many radio performances, and was able to help Luiz in the early stages of his career.
Bonfá called Garoto “my dear friend by whom I was greatly influenced, a musical genius far ahead of his time . . . it was he who got me my first job with Radio Nacional. In spite of his great ability he was a truly humble man. We used to get together at his place in Copacabana and jam for hours, just the two of us.” Garoto’s stepdaughter Maria Alice de Medeiros Rosa — Luiz was later best man at her wedding in New York — remembers that Luiz and his guitar were constant visitors in the Rio household, along with other luminaries of Brazilian music. As she put it, “In terms of the guitar, Garoto always spoke of Bonfá as the best. And of course Luiz always spoke of Garoto as the best.”
Luiz first recorded as a leader in 1945, and by the time of the present disc (1959) he’d released under his own name about fifteen 78 rpms, mostly for Continental, and about a dozen LPs, mostly for Odeon — and played on plenty of other artists’ discs. [This is all detailed on the Bonfá Discography Website, the labor of love of two collectors, Koichi and Motoko Yasuoka, who have tirelessly put together the world’s most extensive Bonfá archive. [Http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/%7Eyasuoka/Bonfa]
Brazilian popular music was changing rapidly, as the old forms acquired a languid, contemporary cool that was eventually labeled bossa nova (“the new knack,” “the new thing,” or “the new swing”). Bonfá was an architect of this sound, along with Antonio Carlos Jobim, João Gilberto, Baden Powell, and others, but the movement’s popularity sprang from an authentic feeling that was now simply in the air, and seemed to reside in every melody.
Bonfá was both partly responsible for it and partly absent from it. In 1957 he’d gone to New York, knowing little English, and found that “no one knew me or anything about Brazilian music.” Once again a chance invitation to a cocktail party brought him luck, for Mary Martin — an enormously successful singing star, Broadway’s Peter Pan — heard him play that night for fellow guests, and straightaway offered him a feature spot on a 60-city tour. Subsequent tours with her, and frequent TV appearances, helped him establish a Brazilian beachhead with U.S. audiences and record labels. For the next fifteen years Luiz lived in both countries, with a steady emphasis on the U.S.A.
The year before, 1956, Luiz had been the guitarist in a Rio musical theater piece with a marvelous ensemble; he’d added one number to the score, which was by his friend Jobim, with a libretto by the prominent poet Vinicius de Moraes. Orfeu da Conceição set the Orpheus legend in Rio, and got enough notice to attract the French director Marcel Camus, who in 1958 went down to Brazil to film the story within the setting of carnaval.
By this time Luiz was busy in the States, but he returned to Rio during a month off from the Mary Martin tour. When director Camus heard that Luiz was in the city, he asked him to write a melody for the main character. With a mere week to go before his flight back to the U.S., Luiz came up with a theme overnight that was liked by everyone involved except Camus, who asked him to try again. He did so, but when the new theme was approved by the director, Luiz insisted that the prior song was better, and argued until Camus relented.
When Orfeu Negro (‘Black Orpheus’) went on to win the ’59 Palme d’Or at Cannes (and the Oscar for Best Foreign Film), Bonfá’s “Manhã de Carnaval” became the #1 hit in Europe and one of the most recorded songs in history. The entire soundtrack, which included Jobim’s “A Felicadade,” helped coalesce the coming awareness of bossa nova. (Over the years, Bonfá wrote or participated in quite a few soundtracks; his “The Gentle Rain,” from a lackluster 1966 film, has become a jazz mainstay.)
In the late sixties and early seventies Luiz rode out the bossa nova wave and, by spending more and more time in the U.S., became far better known here than in Brazil. Despite his uneven records during this time — which often feel as if it wasn’t he making the paramount decisions — Bonfá remained as innovative as ever, ready to experiment with a subtle compositional use of electronic effects like echo and delay on his classical guitar sound.
In 1971, apparently mid-career, he left the States and moved back to Rio. Afterward he explained that, “An artist has to look out or all the pressure will destroy him. Brazil is a slow, relaxed country, and I have many things aside from music that I enjoy doing.” These included collecting vintage cars and raising exotic birds and plants. On a visit to New York he told an old friend, “You’ve seen what it’s like in Rio — which would you choose?”
Bonfá’s later career seems a gradual happy withdrawal from the rat race of the music business. Always peripatetic, he still did concert tours to Europe and Australia and the occasional U.S. concert with the likes of Dave Brubeck. Regrettably, he rarely recorded solo after the superb 1972 LP Introspection, though with customary amiability he continued to record, often with lesser musicians. Still, it is impossible to know his magnificent early solo work, like the present disc, and not dream about the later introspections we never got to have.
In the 1980s and early 1990s Luiz returned to New York for several club dates and made a couple of compact discs. All the old gentleness of touch was still there, but soon afterward Alzheimer’s set in, and eventually left him unable to play and ever more remote from the person he’d been. He died in his beloved Rio from prostate cancer at 78.
It is a sad truth of the music profession that though a performer may sustain a long and fruitful career, his recordings usually telescope into a much shorter period with the kind of public attention that supports record contracts. Yet Bonfá’s recording career ran from 1945 until 1996 and spans over fifty discs; indeed, he was one of those rare performers whose first recordings were issued on 78s and whose last appeared as CDs.
Bonfá’s golden era is the decade that began in the early 1950s, when he and Jobim and Gilberto and a few others were inventing a fresh sound. Everyone knows about the popular boom of the bossa nova — so often degraded across a half-century by overuse in the wrong hands, yet in retrospect so remarkably invulnerable, for those original recordings still glow with the luminous poetry of a new magic entering the world.
One can debate the relative strength of its different roots — strains of jazz, the rich tradition of Brazilian popular music of earlier eras, plus elements of a South American classical tradition particularly as incarnated by Villa-Lobos — but at the heart of bossa nova were a dozen extraordinary young musicians who all listened to each other, and together heard life differently than anyone before.
This decade is the gravitational center of Bonfá’s most fascinating work. Sadly, very few guitarists nowadays, of any genre, are aware of Luiz’s mastery. Like the general public, they remember him not as a guitarist but only as the composer of three standards: “The Gentle Rain,” “Samba de Orfeu,” and “Manhã de Carnaval” (the latter variously referred to as ‘A Day in the Life of a Fool,’ ‘Morning of the Carnival,’ and ‘Black Orpheus’).
It seems surprising in the face of fifty-odd records, but until very recently it took determination to hunt down any discs of Bonfá’s serious work; even now many of his best LPs have not yet been re-released on CD. One danger of living in an age of cultural achaeology is that it’s easy to assume the treasures of yesteryear have all been unearthed and re-issued. The collectors know different.
Emory Cook (1913-2002) was once referred to as “the best ear in the U.S.A.” In an era when most classical guitar LPs can seem as if they were made in the same tiny bathroom, the sound Cook achieved here is detailed, unadorned, spacious, and uncolored by the usual mushy reverb. His widow Martha Cook has pointed out that Cook “liked the guitar in general, and played classical guitar quite well himself. When he began to court me, this is the record he brought to my house and played over and over.”
His trademark was an ability to make vital recordings on the spot, with no need of a studio. “He’d take his microphones and his Nagra — a portable tape machine — and go travel for months at a time. He specialized in field recordings; he had started off by recording the sounds of the sea and the sky. He always worked relentlessly at placing his microphones. He just wouldn’t give up until he got perfection.”
On this particular odyssey he also recorded in Mexico, Ecuador, and the Caribbean; Martha believes that Luiz was the only artist Cook recorded in Brazil. Unfortunately, the Cook archives contain no information on where the LP was made, or over how many days. The cover merely states, “... popular, serious, samba and a few songs / all recorded on Nagra in Rio de Janeiro.”
1959 was a busy year for Luiz. He toured with Mary Martin as a featured soloist until the spring. At some point he did a first-rate recording in the U.S. for Atlantic Records (Amor!) then returned to Rio, where he made this recording, using (according to the original liner notes) a “Model HS Series E Do Souto.” It sounds — and looks — like the same guitar Bonfá used on many LPs he made at about this time: a spruce top with Brazilian rosewood back and sides, judging by the cover photo.
In delving into the work of a popular instrumentalist like Bonfá, we’re appreciating someone who is creating music not for the larger world of many other interpreters (as a composer usually intends), but primarily to play himself. As a result we sometimes end up judging him on the collective strengths of his artistic personality, the sum of all the work, rather than on the quality of an individual piece. His style, not any particular composition, in effect becomes the opus.
The 31 extremely diverse cuts on this disc fall into three categories: original compositions (19), which Bonfá played somewhat differently each time; probable outright improvisations (9), done on that day’s spur-of-the-moment; and his semi-improvised versions of other’s compositions (3).
Thus, except for three cuts, the music on this disc is entirely by Luiz. This alone made him a rarity within the guitar world of the 1950s, no matter what style. Even rarer was that so much of this particular LP was improvised.
One crucial aspect of Bonfá’s artistic personality is that he was happy to make up the music literally while he played it. The guitarist, musicologist, and composer Brian Hodel has recounted a puzzling Rio afternoon spent trying to extract an ideal performance of “The Gentle Rain” from Luiz to transcribe, and watching him play it totally differently a few times before it dawned on Hodel that Luiz was not only improvising, but instinctively disinclined to repeat himself. Each version was unique, and valid.
The implicit question — How much is improvised? — tends to be knotty for any genre that involves musicians making up substantial parts of a performance as they play. Every jazz musician improvising on “Summertime” assumes his colleagues know the song’s structure and have sufficiently acute ears to follow any harmonic substitution and melodic byway that strike at a moment’s whim. (Ditto a flamenco guitarist, a blues saxophonist, an Indian vina player.)
Jazz scholars sometimes argue the point of honor of how much so-and-so is making up on the spot — as if a wholly-improvised performance is more “honest,” whatever that means — without admitting that a large percentage of a piece is necessarily agreed-on in advance. In effect, what is occurring in all these genres is improvised variations on pre-existing material.
This is far from the Western classical tradition of improvising that has, save among master organists, largely died out. In Bach’s day, for instance, any keyboardist worth his job could create a four-voice fugue from scratch, and there are many accounts of Mozart’s and Beethoven’s improvisational abilities, only hinted at by the piano Fantasy, op.77.
The chief drawback of improvisation is that it’s difficult to invent a compelling structure off-the-cuff; hence the long tendency of musicians to turn to the ready-made one, be it a fugue or a 32-bar song. For the musician giving it life, the structure is liberating by being understood from the start, a skeleton waiting to be fleshed out. But even with no structure at all, there’s often considerable beauty in an improvisation intended solely to express the mood of a moment, the free-flowing river of an acute musical imagination and its fingers. That fleeting sense of pure fantasia, of expressing the tidal currents of a dreaming mind even as an idea quickens to life and then vanishes, is one of music’s unique capabilities. At this, Luiz Bonfá was a master.
In practicing the rigorous art of improvising an entire piece from scratch, Luiz is a virtual anomaly within the world of Brazilian guitar, at least as preserved on record. There are plenty of accounts of major Brazilian guitarists as adept improvisers — say, Garoto (1915-55), Bola Sete (1928-87), Paulinho Nogueira (1929-2003), and Baden Powell (1937-2000), among others — but precious few recordings as examples. Yet for cut after cut, Emory Cook allows us to hear Luiz doing it in front of the microphones. [I suspect that part of the LP Introspection was also improvised.]
Naturally, we as listeners are inevitably always up against our own expectations. We approach a Schoenberg sonata differently than a Bach mass, an Indian raga, a tango, or a Broadway song; this is as it should be. In a wide world where all are far more easily available than a decade ago, it is important to try to hear what each is trying to say, to learn to listen in as many different ways as possible — both to appreciate what each is, and not expect any to be what they are not. (As the artist and poet Dolber B. Spalding aptly wrote in a 1977 essay for Chelys, a music quarterly, “One thousand mice do not equal a horse.”)
What I’m getting at is that even though this disc contains magnificent performances of several melodies that will still be played long after we are all dead, it also contains a number of slighter Bonfá pieces, made up on the spot, that are only passing remarks and fancies — albeit of a singular musical personality. They would sound quite different played by any another guitarist, no matter how good, and probably come across wrong in those other hands. Their purpose is merely to express a brief human moment, not to construct a cathedral. They are best approached as part of a visit with Luiz Bonfá, which is the overriding mood of this record. As a guitarist he could do no wrong; no one has spoken more deeply, intimately, and exuberantly on six nylon strings that — until just a decade before this recording — had always been spun from animal’s guts.
Having now lived with this recording over many months in preparing these notes, I’ve been reminded countless times of the sense of wonder and mystery with which, as a young guitarist, I first encountered it over twenty-five years ago. Now I know — most of the time — what Luiz is actually doing; and yet it is no less wondrous. I have played my original scratchy copy for many friends across the decades, and whether or not they were musicians, they were all aware of being in the presence of true human magic, and that almost tactile thrill which comes from hearing a performer on one of his best days. Luiz Bonfá was one of nature’s musicians: a man who could transmit beauty easily and intimately, and who was afraid of nothing on the guitar. I am happy to be able to say, after all these years, that he remains as great an inspiration and a joy as when I first heard the sounds of that unique poetic spirit.
Selected Luiz Bonfá discography:
Luiz Bonfá (Continental, 1955)
Orfeu da Conceição (Odeon, 1956)
Alta Versatilidade (Odeon, 1957); issued as Brazilian Guitar (Capitol Records)
Violão Boêmio (Odeon, 1957)
Bonfafá (Odeon, 1958)
Meu Querido Violão (Odeon, 1958)
Amor! (Atlantic, 1959)
A Voz e o Violão (Odeon, 1960)
Pery Ribeiro e Seu Mundo de Canções Românticas (Odeon, 1962)
Luiz Bonfá Plays and Sings Bossa Nova (Verve, 1962)
Violão Boêmio vol. 2 (Odeon, 1963)
Jazz Samba Encore! (Verve, 1963, with Stan Getz, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and Maria Toledo)
Introspection (RCA, 1972)
Bonfá Burrows Brazil (Cherry Pie, 1978)
Non-Stop to Brazil (Chesky, 1989)
Selected reading:
Scores
Brian Hodel, “The Brazilian Guitar,” (Dennis McMillan Publishing,1983; out-of-print; contains 5 transcriptions)
Luiz Bonfá, “The Music of Luiz Bonfá: Four Pieces” (ed. Carlos Barbosa-Lima, Guitar Solo Publications, 1987)
Musicology
Brian Hodel, “Luiz Bonfá, Ambassador of Brazilian Swing” Guitar Player, May 1983
Brian Hodel, “Spotlight on Luiz Bonfá,” Guitar Review, Winter 1984
Brian Hodel, “The Brazilian Guitar,” Guitar Review, Winter 1991
Selected filmography:
Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro), dir. Marcel Camus, 1959
Sunday, March 23, 2003
Bermuda
Written in 2003 for the New York Times Magazine
Location is everything. Ever since childhood, my idea of islands was tropical, or at least Mediterranean, so I’d always been skeptical of Bermuda, only two hours’ flight from New York. It never occurred to me that here was an island with virtually no resources, a lump twenty-two miles square in the middle of the Atlantic, which had traded for generations on little more than ingenuity and beauty to create a calm, prosperous society.
As one of Britain’s earliest colonies, on the same subtropical latitude as Shanghai and Charleston, Bermuda enjoys a fiscal Gulf Stream of its own creation. When I arrived, the place struck me as highly British—from the pillar postboxes to the serenely assured, idiosyncratic architecture—but it became less so the longer I stayed, and began to sense what being Bermudian (that floral word) means.
The surprise comes from what the island is not. It is not greedy, not poor, not full of junky T-shirt kiosks. Its high season is April through November, not the reverse. There are no casinos. It does not allow tourists to rent cars, which keeps down the traffic, encourages bicycles or motor-scooters, and guarantees work for the taxi drivers incessantly polishing their shiny vans. Less starchy than guidebooks would have you believe, it is unfailingly polite.
Best of all, unlike many small places with a deep colonial past, it never feels like a client state, a humbled dependent. Bermudians resent being lumped with “the other islands” and will remind you, with a relaxed pride, that they’re as distant from the West Indies as Washington is from Dallas. They know they are more worldly, more well-spoken, more well-off. And they pay no taxes.
Visitors come for the plentiful beaches, which are Caribbean-lovely, and for the golf courses. But the island now earns far more from the trickle-down of offshore businesses and insurance than from tourism. Locals call it a virtual economy, afloat on the billions flowing through daily, just as it once rode the currents of other ideas it got to first— resort tourism, or trade with the U.S. in a commodity like Revolutionary War gunpowder, Civil War rifles, Prohibition rum, or Bermuda onions.
Another first, I’d hazard, is that the premier is a black woman who succeeded another black woman.
Like Gibraltar, it really is a rock: all water comes from the sky, collected deftly off the ridged roofs, and residents speak of Rock Fever from not getting away enough. Bermudians do tend to live elsewhere for years, then return, and one result is an unplaceable oceanic accent, neither British nor American nor Caribbean, to which everyone seems to give a uniquely different inflection.
The broad ethnic mix of the island can be grasped in any large supermarket. Alongside a wall of British jams and marmalades, for example, are Greek, Thai, Chinese, Indian, Moroccan, Mexican, Italian, Japanese, and Caribbean sauces, spices, or chutneys. The frequency of a red bean soup on menus will remind you that a quarter of the population is, in some Bermudian sense, Portuguese. There’s a long tradition of Italian restaurants; as locals say, the Italians lost the Second World War, so they decided to conquer Bermuda.
I was happy to meet up in Hamilton, the intimate capital, with an old friend. John Zuill is a fourteenth-generation Bermudian I’d known back in the U.S., now co-director of a theater company, Waterspout, whose current season included Mishima, Mamet, and Shakespeare. Over coffee we talked about The Tempest—the play’s shipwreck was prompted by one here in 1609—and gazed toward the harbor. Often people came over to greet Zuill, which he made light of.
“People on Bermuda have to say hello to everyone they know, or they’re in trouble. There’s not enough room for people not to live together, and everybody knows everybody else’s business. So there’s a wide range of toleration, a pragmatic acceptance of eccentric behavior. You can be different—just don’t mention it. Whatever you do will be forgiven, but it won’t be forgotten.
“The key to Bermuda has always been that unless you apply your wits, there’s nothing here. All we have are sunshine and brains. There was never any money to be made here unless you were actually here. There weren’t estates to control from afar; there wasn’t even fresh water. The slaves weren’t plantation labor, because there weren’t any plantations—they had specific skills. Cabinet makers, carpenters, whatever. And a lot of big ideas, like coffee or rubber or onions, failed. So in the end, nothing’s made here. But as long as the U.S. and European tax codes don’t change, we probably have a secure future.”
One deep Bermudian tradition is the nickname. As John said, “You get it young, usually from your friends, not your parents, and it sticks, to the point where nobody can remember where it came from.” It’s not unusual to read an obituary in The Royal Gazette that begins: “Muriel, beloved wife of the late Charles (Sheik), mother of Howard (Boxhead), friend of Alma (Champ).... ” Then turn to the Letters page, and enter an extremely eloquent maelstrom.
Yet there’s nothing “wild” about Bermuda; it’s a highly cultivated island in every sense, careful to dispel any unpredictable sexiness in its ads, relying on the affection of repeat visitors who aren’t seeking adventure. As I wound from parish to parish, either coast road instead offered a sea crashing mildly on the rocks, the lilt of gospel halls, tilled tomato fields nestled in palms, fresh fish or lilies for sale beside the limestone walls and low shuttered houses— some in pinks or cream yellows, some in sorbets of grape, peach, mango. As Winslow Homer proved here in 1899, there is still an immortal calm in the watercolor disarray of a cove, a spit of beach, a peeling red-and-white wooden boat leaned on pale sand and fallen fronds, while an ever-changing force of intensifying blue moves horizonward.
Bermuda’s style is a gentle truce of climate and empire: formally relaxed. In Hamilton, you’d never guess that 13,000 registered companies are squeezed into those scalloped stucco buildings of yesteryear with their breezy wooden verandas. During the hot months, business attire for men becomes tie, jacket, shorts, and knee socks. For lawyers, it’s a half-wig and robes; for magistrates, the full wig. “Never mind summer,” one eminent lawyer told me. “You’re itchy in any weather in all that clobber.”
If you amble by the Hamilton shops once known as The Forty Thieves, on Reid or Front Streets, “the City” (pop. 1,100) feels resolutely upmarket, though without the posh of, say, St. Bart’s. The emporiums still bear family names: Trimingham’s (est. 1844), Smith’s (est. 1889), A. J. Cooper (est. 1897) with its surprising Wedgwood door handles. A world of Irish linen, not sunstruck flesh; indeed, one day I saw a young woman in a rare miniskirt stared at en masse—not in disapproval, but amazement.
My favorite nook was on Queen Street, just below the graceful shade of Par-La-Ville Park. This was the Perot Post Office with its white walls and black shutters, its native orchids in planters, its slots marked Local / Boat /Airmail. Perot, the first postmaster, had also built a large home behind a big rubber tree next door, now a museum of the Bermuda Historical Society. I stopped in to see his first stamp (1848), of which only eleven exist, and found Colin Benbow, dapper in blue Bermuda shorts and knee socks. A history teacher since the 1950s, Benbow is known as a fount of local knowledge.
“Two samples of the stamp left the island last month to go to auction,” he said drily, when I asked if he had one. “The last time, it fetched $300,000.” And what of the WWII spies, “the codebreakers with shapely ankles”—those thousand-odd young women who read the transatlantic mail borrowed off the flying boats that stopped to fuel up here? “They lived at the Princess Hotel, and worked across the street at the Bermudiana. It’s now six feet under a couple of vast re-insurance companies.”
Over in Somerset Village, nine miles west, I walked one of the most evocative stretches of the old railway trail. The “Rattle and Shake” train ran only from 1931-48, before being dismantled soon after cars were permitted on the island. The trail, paved now, wandered through foliage, past limestone shoulders, morning glories, and tart loquats which I picked and ate. Then it became a neighborhood road, behind little houses with boats in their gardens.
From Somerset Drawbridge—the world’s smallest, now never used, with an opening barely big enough for a ship’s mast—I took a chugging ferry up to the green island’s western tip, which locals call Dockyard. This sprawling stone fortress was the Royal Navy’s base from the early 1800s. Restored, with cannon lying about, it’s still active as a boatyard. A Maritime Museum has exhibits from 16th century shipwrecks to 1930s cruise ships to the Bermuda dinghy, that fourteen-foot anomaly with an absurdly tall mast, a huge sail, and an inexplicable way of cutting rapidly through rather than over the water. This means one man bails nonstop; in a race, crew members are eventually allowed to jump overboard.
Nearby, in the grandiose Commissioner’s House, the displays devoted to the slave trade, complete with shackles and collars, were enough to make me want to go stand in the sunshine and weep. At least Bermuda was one of only two colonies to immediately free its 4,200 slaves in 1834, right after the decree of abolition—about half the island’s population.
At the island’s eastern end, I spent a day exploring the slow lanes of St. George, the first settlement—preserved cottages in lime, lemon, mustard, salmon, set amid palms on Featherbed Alley, Barber’s Alley, Pound Alley, Princess Street. It has its personalized museums, from Tucker House with a George III chamberpot hidden in a mahogany chest of drawers, to the Globe Hotel where blockade runners conspired to outfox Union ships, to a homespun Black History Museum with mementos of cricket teams and a diorama of the slave trade using children’s dolls, to a wharfside Town Hall with its signed, faded portraits of Elizabeth and Philip. And there is St. Peter’s, the hemisphere’s oldest Anglican church continuously in use, its interior rich with the cigar-box fragrance of local cedar. In the churchyard, past graves shaped like picnic tables, lies a slaves’ burial ground of smudged irregular headstones.
Bermuda is small, but on the other hand, I haven’t seen anywhere else this large without any ugliness. I hadn’t expected such a diverse and amiable island, with none of the historical darkness of disenfranchised peoples that one often senses in the Caribbean. Go for a walk in Hamilton up Cedar Avenue, past the Queen’s Club, past a church of Christian Scientists and a house of Bahai’is, to the Catholic Cathedral and its convent next door—now a mosque. Or, better yet, take a morning stroll in Victoria Park to see the black, white, Asian schoolkids, of every continental extraction and possible mix, hollering and playing hand-in-hand—just as, in the Botanical Gardens, I came upon a gigantic banyan tree, with innumerable, ever-multiplying downward roots.
Location is everything. Ever since childhood, my idea of islands was tropical, or at least Mediterranean, so I’d always been skeptical of Bermuda, only two hours’ flight from New York. It never occurred to me that here was an island with virtually no resources, a lump twenty-two miles square in the middle of the Atlantic, which had traded for generations on little more than ingenuity and beauty to create a calm, prosperous society.
As one of Britain’s earliest colonies, on the same subtropical latitude as Shanghai and Charleston, Bermuda enjoys a fiscal Gulf Stream of its own creation. When I arrived, the place struck me as highly British—from the pillar postboxes to the serenely assured, idiosyncratic architecture—but it became less so the longer I stayed, and began to sense what being Bermudian (that floral word) means.
The surprise comes from what the island is not. It is not greedy, not poor, not full of junky T-shirt kiosks. Its high season is April through November, not the reverse. There are no casinos. It does not allow tourists to rent cars, which keeps down the traffic, encourages bicycles or motor-scooters, and guarantees work for the taxi drivers incessantly polishing their shiny vans. Less starchy than guidebooks would have you believe, it is unfailingly polite.
Best of all, unlike many small places with a deep colonial past, it never feels like a client state, a humbled dependent. Bermudians resent being lumped with “the other islands” and will remind you, with a relaxed pride, that they’re as distant from the West Indies as Washington is from Dallas. They know they are more worldly, more well-spoken, more well-off. And they pay no taxes.
Visitors come for the plentiful beaches, which are Caribbean-lovely, and for the golf courses. But the island now earns far more from the trickle-down of offshore businesses and insurance than from tourism. Locals call it a virtual economy, afloat on the billions flowing through daily, just as it once rode the currents of other ideas it got to first— resort tourism, or trade with the U.S. in a commodity like Revolutionary War gunpowder, Civil War rifles, Prohibition rum, or Bermuda onions.
Another first, I’d hazard, is that the premier is a black woman who succeeded another black woman.
Like Gibraltar, it really is a rock: all water comes from the sky, collected deftly off the ridged roofs, and residents speak of Rock Fever from not getting away enough. Bermudians do tend to live elsewhere for years, then return, and one result is an unplaceable oceanic accent, neither British nor American nor Caribbean, to which everyone seems to give a uniquely different inflection.
The broad ethnic mix of the island can be grasped in any large supermarket. Alongside a wall of British jams and marmalades, for example, are Greek, Thai, Chinese, Indian, Moroccan, Mexican, Italian, Japanese, and Caribbean sauces, spices, or chutneys. The frequency of a red bean soup on menus will remind you that a quarter of the population is, in some Bermudian sense, Portuguese. There’s a long tradition of Italian restaurants; as locals say, the Italians lost the Second World War, so they decided to conquer Bermuda.
I was happy to meet up in Hamilton, the intimate capital, with an old friend. John Zuill is a fourteenth-generation Bermudian I’d known back in the U.S., now co-director of a theater company, Waterspout, whose current season included Mishima, Mamet, and Shakespeare. Over coffee we talked about The Tempest—the play’s shipwreck was prompted by one here in 1609—and gazed toward the harbor. Often people came over to greet Zuill, which he made light of.
“People on Bermuda have to say hello to everyone they know, or they’re in trouble. There’s not enough room for people not to live together, and everybody knows everybody else’s business. So there’s a wide range of toleration, a pragmatic acceptance of eccentric behavior. You can be different—just don’t mention it. Whatever you do will be forgiven, but it won’t be forgotten.
“The key to Bermuda has always been that unless you apply your wits, there’s nothing here. All we have are sunshine and brains. There was never any money to be made here unless you were actually here. There weren’t estates to control from afar; there wasn’t even fresh water. The slaves weren’t plantation labor, because there weren’t any plantations—they had specific skills. Cabinet makers, carpenters, whatever. And a lot of big ideas, like coffee or rubber or onions, failed. So in the end, nothing’s made here. But as long as the U.S. and European tax codes don’t change, we probably have a secure future.”
One deep Bermudian tradition is the nickname. As John said, “You get it young, usually from your friends, not your parents, and it sticks, to the point where nobody can remember where it came from.” It’s not unusual to read an obituary in The Royal Gazette that begins: “Muriel, beloved wife of the late Charles (Sheik), mother of Howard (Boxhead), friend of Alma (Champ).... ” Then turn to the Letters page, and enter an extremely eloquent maelstrom.
Yet there’s nothing “wild” about Bermuda; it’s a highly cultivated island in every sense, careful to dispel any unpredictable sexiness in its ads, relying on the affection of repeat visitors who aren’t seeking adventure. As I wound from parish to parish, either coast road instead offered a sea crashing mildly on the rocks, the lilt of gospel halls, tilled tomato fields nestled in palms, fresh fish or lilies for sale beside the limestone walls and low shuttered houses— some in pinks or cream yellows, some in sorbets of grape, peach, mango. As Winslow Homer proved here in 1899, there is still an immortal calm in the watercolor disarray of a cove, a spit of beach, a peeling red-and-white wooden boat leaned on pale sand and fallen fronds, while an ever-changing force of intensifying blue moves horizonward.
Bermuda’s style is a gentle truce of climate and empire: formally relaxed. In Hamilton, you’d never guess that 13,000 registered companies are squeezed into those scalloped stucco buildings of yesteryear with their breezy wooden verandas. During the hot months, business attire for men becomes tie, jacket, shorts, and knee socks. For lawyers, it’s a half-wig and robes; for magistrates, the full wig. “Never mind summer,” one eminent lawyer told me. “You’re itchy in any weather in all that clobber.”
If you amble by the Hamilton shops once known as The Forty Thieves, on Reid or Front Streets, “the City” (pop. 1,100) feels resolutely upmarket, though without the posh of, say, St. Bart’s. The emporiums still bear family names: Trimingham’s (est. 1844), Smith’s (est. 1889), A. J. Cooper (est. 1897) with its surprising Wedgwood door handles. A world of Irish linen, not sunstruck flesh; indeed, one day I saw a young woman in a rare miniskirt stared at en masse—not in disapproval, but amazement.
My favorite nook was on Queen Street, just below the graceful shade of Par-La-Ville Park. This was the Perot Post Office with its white walls and black shutters, its native orchids in planters, its slots marked Local / Boat /Airmail. Perot, the first postmaster, had also built a large home behind a big rubber tree next door, now a museum of the Bermuda Historical Society. I stopped in to see his first stamp (1848), of which only eleven exist, and found Colin Benbow, dapper in blue Bermuda shorts and knee socks. A history teacher since the 1950s, Benbow is known as a fount of local knowledge.
“Two samples of the stamp left the island last month to go to auction,” he said drily, when I asked if he had one. “The last time, it fetched $300,000.” And what of the WWII spies, “the codebreakers with shapely ankles”—those thousand-odd young women who read the transatlantic mail borrowed off the flying boats that stopped to fuel up here? “They lived at the Princess Hotel, and worked across the street at the Bermudiana. It’s now six feet under a couple of vast re-insurance companies.”
Over in Somerset Village, nine miles west, I walked one of the most evocative stretches of the old railway trail. The “Rattle and Shake” train ran only from 1931-48, before being dismantled soon after cars were permitted on the island. The trail, paved now, wandered through foliage, past limestone shoulders, morning glories, and tart loquats which I picked and ate. Then it became a neighborhood road, behind little houses with boats in their gardens.
From Somerset Drawbridge—the world’s smallest, now never used, with an opening barely big enough for a ship’s mast—I took a chugging ferry up to the green island’s western tip, which locals call Dockyard. This sprawling stone fortress was the Royal Navy’s base from the early 1800s. Restored, with cannon lying about, it’s still active as a boatyard. A Maritime Museum has exhibits from 16th century shipwrecks to 1930s cruise ships to the Bermuda dinghy, that fourteen-foot anomaly with an absurdly tall mast, a huge sail, and an inexplicable way of cutting rapidly through rather than over the water. This means one man bails nonstop; in a race, crew members are eventually allowed to jump overboard.
Nearby, in the grandiose Commissioner’s House, the displays devoted to the slave trade, complete with shackles and collars, were enough to make me want to go stand in the sunshine and weep. At least Bermuda was one of only two colonies to immediately free its 4,200 slaves in 1834, right after the decree of abolition—about half the island’s population.
At the island’s eastern end, I spent a day exploring the slow lanes of St. George, the first settlement—preserved cottages in lime, lemon, mustard, salmon, set amid palms on Featherbed Alley, Barber’s Alley, Pound Alley, Princess Street. It has its personalized museums, from Tucker House with a George III chamberpot hidden in a mahogany chest of drawers, to the Globe Hotel where blockade runners conspired to outfox Union ships, to a homespun Black History Museum with mementos of cricket teams and a diorama of the slave trade using children’s dolls, to a wharfside Town Hall with its signed, faded portraits of Elizabeth and Philip. And there is St. Peter’s, the hemisphere’s oldest Anglican church continuously in use, its interior rich with the cigar-box fragrance of local cedar. In the churchyard, past graves shaped like picnic tables, lies a slaves’ burial ground of smudged irregular headstones.
Bermuda is small, but on the other hand, I haven’t seen anywhere else this large without any ugliness. I hadn’t expected such a diverse and amiable island, with none of the historical darkness of disenfranchised peoples that one often senses in the Caribbean. Go for a walk in Hamilton up Cedar Avenue, past the Queen’s Club, past a church of Christian Scientists and a house of Bahai’is, to the Catholic Cathedral and its convent next door—now a mosque. Or, better yet, take a morning stroll in Victoria Park to see the black, white, Asian schoolkids, of every continental extraction and possible mix, hollering and playing hand-in-hand—just as, in the Botanical Gardens, I came upon a gigantic banyan tree, with innumerable, ever-multiplying downward roots.
Monday, January 20, 2003
Get Me to the Church on Time
Written in 2003 for Sky magazine
One of the reasons I travel—and travel overseas as much as possible—is to do things I never do at home. Not worry about bills. Not worry about returning phone calls or mail. Not worry about work. Most of all, I travel out of a deep need to become someone else, or at least to see how different I become when I’m abroad. As masochistic as it sounds, I like to find out how I am often wrong and how foreigners are often right.
This means trying to keep an open mind no matter where I am, no matter how strange the place seems, and doing my best to understand why they live and think the way they do. One of the most immediate, friendly ways I’ve found to enter a foreign culture, and even another state of mind, no matter how exotic the place, is to go to church.
Church? It could be a temple, a cathedral, a mosque, a synagogue, or a hut on a beach. All that matters is that it’s where the locals go, a place of worship where, as T.S. Eliot put it, “prayer has been valid.” This may sound hypocritical, since (being a jaded American who lost patience with organized religion in this country some time ago) I rarely attend any services back home. I do, however, nearly always enjoy other cultures’ sense of wonder and community; I learn more in a church than by going to a cafe or a sporting event, which are fun but less idiosyncratic.
Now, obviously, my motives are far from purely religious—but they are communal, for no other human activity so efficiently cuts through barriers of class, profession, and all the rest, and shows you a foreign society writ large. It’s also a great way to meet people.
I’ve never found it mattered much whether I witnessed some important holy ceremony; the ordinary days tells you just as much, and sometimes even more. I got a better sense of Balinese belief from wandering into every stony temple courtyard where I happened to hear gamelan music pinging forth than from successfully chasing down that tourist grail, the cremation ceremony.
And I’d even argue that many cultures are incomprehensible unless you get a look at their religious life. How can you ever understand the Italians if you’ve never been to mass? (It may be just as important what people are consciously rejecting as what they’re unconsciously accepting.) Not to mention the Balinese? It always amazes me that people will visit Egypt but never set foot inside a mosque.
In what was formerly Rangoon, dusk prayers at the Shwe Dagon pagoda—ceaselessly gold-leafed by the faithful in one of the poorest countries on earth—will tell you more about the Burmese than any political analysis. Ditto any of the pandemonic processional dances in Morocco, like the festival of Fes, when you can see people whipping themselves through the medina into a mass frenzy. And someone lucky enough to visit, say, Raiatea in the South Pacific, or Lamu off the coast of Kenya, or Eleuthera in the Bahamas—or any island anywhere on the planet that’s not utterly urbanized—cannot begin to know the people unless he goes to a Sunday church service.
The wonderful surprise is how warmly one is usually welcomed. The more outlandish destinations come to mind first—like the Golden Temple of the Sikhs, in Amritsar, up in India’s Punjab—a small jewel box burning at sunset in a vast pool of brimming water, where the turbanned, dagger-toting worshippers give you hearty grins and congratulate you for coming to watch them gently dip their hands into the holy nectar. It is to my mind every bit as majestic as the Taj Mahal, and spotless besides: to see it helped me understand why the Sikhs are so very confident and enthusiastic. It made sense that they welcomed foreigners, while throughout India non-believers were often barred from the great holy temples of Hinduism. (Imagine a sign at Nôtre-Dame, saying Non-Catholics Keep Out!)
At the other end of the architectural scale, but no less moving, was St. Philips Native Baptist Church, in Smith Bay, on Cat Island, in the Bahamas. I had been to an absolutely raucous dance the Saturday night before, till quite late; here, transformed, were the same faces—the women fanning themselves in broad hats, pearls, floral dresses, the men far the worse for wear, sweaty in their suits, mopping their brows. The little choir was accompanied by a bearded guitarist, playing almost a calypso beat; the reverend was a speaker of grave eloquence who received “Amens” with every phrase and reminded me of how, all over the world, there seems more true religious feeling in the small churches than in the grand.
Then there was the tiny village of Taunovo, on the small island of Vatulele, in the island universe of Fiji. It is difficult to explain the well-being one feels in South Pacific churches; perhaps it comes from the communicants’ evidently profound belief. Most of the village’s three hundred residents were here for the Methodist service—the women swishing plaited palm fans and invariably in white, the men in short sleeves and sarongs. The singing was full-voiced and heartfelt, its harmonies setting off the dynamic Fijian syllables. “Onward, Christian Soldiers” became Cavu tu na i valu and shook the rafters—and I was invited back to the village the next day to meet the chief for a kava ceremony.
Equally imposing was a service on Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands, with the service conducted in both Maori and English (which sums up the natural welcome of the people) followed by a thunderous call-and-response singing of urgent joy, full of high-pitched cries and cross-rhythms—the equivalent of the complex dancing that was intoxicating in quite another way. In such societies, where church is the high point of the week, the fact that you are freely taking part, wanting to get to know them, immediately sets you off from the common tourist. Had I never gone to that lovely church in Titikaveka and enjoyed that phenomenal musical experience, I’d never have been invited to the night-long ceremony of stories around an umu kai (sand oven) on a hidden beach.
In Havana a few years ago the contemporary frustrations of the people were obvious. It wasn’t until I went to Sunday mass at the glorious 18th century cathedral, and saw, after the service was over, a teak-colored man in his best clothes, ragged as they were, intoning a prayer to himself, that I understood the city’s timeless solaces. As he was finishing, in the plaza outside the cathedral an orchestra began playing.
At these services I sometimes met people I saw again on my journey. In any case, afterward, to a modest degree, I always felt I belonged, was part of the place in a way I hadn’t been a few hours earlier. I still remember people whom I never met, remember their faces bent in prayer or joyously singing, because they showed me their private selves in a public place, among friends. They also allowed me my private fantasy, of being part of their community and even imagining what it might be like to live there. At least until I had to go home.
One of the reasons I travel—and travel overseas as much as possible—is to do things I never do at home. Not worry about bills. Not worry about returning phone calls or mail. Not worry about work. Most of all, I travel out of a deep need to become someone else, or at least to see how different I become when I’m abroad. As masochistic as it sounds, I like to find out how I am often wrong and how foreigners are often right.
This means trying to keep an open mind no matter where I am, no matter how strange the place seems, and doing my best to understand why they live and think the way they do. One of the most immediate, friendly ways I’ve found to enter a foreign culture, and even another state of mind, no matter how exotic the place, is to go to church.
Church? It could be a temple, a cathedral, a mosque, a synagogue, or a hut on a beach. All that matters is that it’s where the locals go, a place of worship where, as T.S. Eliot put it, “prayer has been valid.” This may sound hypocritical, since (being a jaded American who lost patience with organized religion in this country some time ago) I rarely attend any services back home. I do, however, nearly always enjoy other cultures’ sense of wonder and community; I learn more in a church than by going to a cafe or a sporting event, which are fun but less idiosyncratic.
Now, obviously, my motives are far from purely religious—but they are communal, for no other human activity so efficiently cuts through barriers of class, profession, and all the rest, and shows you a foreign society writ large. It’s also a great way to meet people.
I’ve never found it mattered much whether I witnessed some important holy ceremony; the ordinary days tells you just as much, and sometimes even more. I got a better sense of Balinese belief from wandering into every stony temple courtyard where I happened to hear gamelan music pinging forth than from successfully chasing down that tourist grail, the cremation ceremony.
And I’d even argue that many cultures are incomprehensible unless you get a look at their religious life. How can you ever understand the Italians if you’ve never been to mass? (It may be just as important what people are consciously rejecting as what they’re unconsciously accepting.) Not to mention the Balinese? It always amazes me that people will visit Egypt but never set foot inside a mosque.
In what was formerly Rangoon, dusk prayers at the Shwe Dagon pagoda—ceaselessly gold-leafed by the faithful in one of the poorest countries on earth—will tell you more about the Burmese than any political analysis. Ditto any of the pandemonic processional dances in Morocco, like the festival of Fes, when you can see people whipping themselves through the medina into a mass frenzy. And someone lucky enough to visit, say, Raiatea in the South Pacific, or Lamu off the coast of Kenya, or Eleuthera in the Bahamas—or any island anywhere on the planet that’s not utterly urbanized—cannot begin to know the people unless he goes to a Sunday church service.
The wonderful surprise is how warmly one is usually welcomed. The more outlandish destinations come to mind first—like the Golden Temple of the Sikhs, in Amritsar, up in India’s Punjab—a small jewel box burning at sunset in a vast pool of brimming water, where the turbanned, dagger-toting worshippers give you hearty grins and congratulate you for coming to watch them gently dip their hands into the holy nectar. It is to my mind every bit as majestic as the Taj Mahal, and spotless besides: to see it helped me understand why the Sikhs are so very confident and enthusiastic. It made sense that they welcomed foreigners, while throughout India non-believers were often barred from the great holy temples of Hinduism. (Imagine a sign at Nôtre-Dame, saying Non-Catholics Keep Out!)
At the other end of the architectural scale, but no less moving, was St. Philips Native Baptist Church, in Smith Bay, on Cat Island, in the Bahamas. I had been to an absolutely raucous dance the Saturday night before, till quite late; here, transformed, were the same faces—the women fanning themselves in broad hats, pearls, floral dresses, the men far the worse for wear, sweaty in their suits, mopping their brows. The little choir was accompanied by a bearded guitarist, playing almost a calypso beat; the reverend was a speaker of grave eloquence who received “Amens” with every phrase and reminded me of how, all over the world, there seems more true religious feeling in the small churches than in the grand.
Then there was the tiny village of Taunovo, on the small island of Vatulele, in the island universe of Fiji. It is difficult to explain the well-being one feels in South Pacific churches; perhaps it comes from the communicants’ evidently profound belief. Most of the village’s three hundred residents were here for the Methodist service—the women swishing plaited palm fans and invariably in white, the men in short sleeves and sarongs. The singing was full-voiced and heartfelt, its harmonies setting off the dynamic Fijian syllables. “Onward, Christian Soldiers” became Cavu tu na i valu and shook the rafters—and I was invited back to the village the next day to meet the chief for a kava ceremony.
Equally imposing was a service on Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands, with the service conducted in both Maori and English (which sums up the natural welcome of the people) followed by a thunderous call-and-response singing of urgent joy, full of high-pitched cries and cross-rhythms—the equivalent of the complex dancing that was intoxicating in quite another way. In such societies, where church is the high point of the week, the fact that you are freely taking part, wanting to get to know them, immediately sets you off from the common tourist. Had I never gone to that lovely church in Titikaveka and enjoyed that phenomenal musical experience, I’d never have been invited to the night-long ceremony of stories around an umu kai (sand oven) on a hidden beach.
In Havana a few years ago the contemporary frustrations of the people were obvious. It wasn’t until I went to Sunday mass at the glorious 18th century cathedral, and saw, after the service was over, a teak-colored man in his best clothes, ragged as they were, intoning a prayer to himself, that I understood the city’s timeless solaces. As he was finishing, in the plaza outside the cathedral an orchestra began playing.
At these services I sometimes met people I saw again on my journey. In any case, afterward, to a modest degree, I always felt I belonged, was part of the place in a way I hadn’t been a few hours earlier. I still remember people whom I never met, remember their faces bent in prayer or joyously singing, because they showed me their private selves in a public place, among friends. They also allowed me my private fantasy, of being part of their community and even imagining what it might be like to live there. At least until I had to go home.
Sunday, January 5, 2003
Josef Škvorecký
[Written in 2003 as the Afterword for an edition of Emöke & The Bass Saxophone]
“Exile,” Graham Greene wrote in an essay about the Czech writer Josef Škvorecký (b. 1924), “is like some herb which gives its distinct bitter flavor to many different forms of writing: the comic, the ironic, the tragic… to experience exile a man doesn’t necessarily have to leave his country. The sense of banishment can be felt on one’s own hearthstone. Exile is a deprivation—to be an exile is to be unable to communicate freely… The sadness in comedy, the comedy in sadness—of this Škvorecký is a master and this too is the mark of exile. . . . ”
The pressures of internal exile, of banishment from one’s innermost being, from one’s love and from a freedom of expression, run consistently through all Škvorecký’s writing. Like his two constant passions—the detective story and jazz—they suffuse these haunting early masterpieces, Emöke (1963) and The Bass Saxophone (1967). “Extremely modernist short novels,” is how he once described them. Both are written in a style Škvorecký has returned to only occasionally, poured forth with the full intensity of a lyrical jazz cadenza, a fantasia of constant digression and incandescent emotion. In such a closing cadenza the soloist stands alone, ranging freely from subject to subject in a concentrated recapitulation of themes, revealing all that he can before he lets you get away. The style is at its summit, the voice at its most fervent. It takes perfect pitch to write this way, and in both novellas Škvorecký is carefully pushing the limits of how long a cadenza can last. The effect is of a voice telling you urgently what must be told, what almost cannot be controlled, and yet this is an illusion, for each novella is a model of control, meant to be read in one sitting.
Stylistically far removed—apparently—the detective story is a form for which Škvorecký has shown a particular fondness over the years. He has written his own series with a Czech hero, the mournful Lt. Boruvka, but my favorite is a novel known in English as Miss Silver’s Past (in Czech and French, more slyly, as The Lion Cub). It features one of his classic unattainable heroines, older, more erotically mature and more formidably purposeful than most of the girls who torment Škvorecký’s frustrated young narrators.
Emöke too, surprisingly, turns out to be a detective story of the most subtle kind. All throughout, the young narrator is searching for a key that will open a locked door—a solution to the cipher of this strong, vulnerable creature who is in her own way as rare, as gleaming, and as close to extinction as the bass saxophone in its coffinlike case. Like the mythical instrument in the other novella, she is out of the narrator’s natural range; she plays too deep for him. (Emöke is never quoted directly, as the other characters are, which gives her a unique instrumental timbre, like a voice heard in dreams.)
The narrator sees the hypocrisies in the winding paths of her personality; he even senses that they are what saved her during hardships he doesn’t quite understand. He knows she is not some toy to seduce, and too substantial for his rival, the cloddish schoolteacher. He reaches the threshold of leading Emöke into the only equivalent depths he has to offer: the sensual music still alive in her, waiting to be released. On the dance floor he improvises her a blues, and because it is spontaneous—unlike the schoolteacher’s glib pickup lines—and because it is truthful art, it seems to be working. Jazz, the freedom it represents, is the solution.
What happens next is one of my favorite small gestures in the novella. Our hero goes to the toilet, and this proves his undoing. It is a deft, realistic moment (usually left out of fiction, naturally). Overcome by the blues he has miraculously pulled out of himself, he winds up in a bathroom conversation with one of the musicians who momentarily feels like a colleague—and when he returns, he has lost Emöke. The schoolteacher has told her who the narrator is at his worst, and now she can’t let herself believe in him. And yet he keeps trying: by the time he sees her off on the train, she is almost ready to believe in him again. All he has to do is become that person once more.
The passage which returns him to the urbane life he left, the long train journey that is the schoolteacher’s undoing, is sadly, quietly, the narrator’s undoing as well. He gets his revenge on the rival, demonstrates his superiority, but was that ever in doubt? The guessing game leads him farther and farther away from Emöke, and by the time he reaches Prague he no longer feels ready to go after her, to become again the person she wants to believe in. He is instead “permeated with an indifference toward the legend. . . . ”
And there is now tragedy behind that indifference. The world is wide, but Emöke’s world is narrow, and perhaps no one else will come along with the key to her cipher. It is a detective story in reverse, which ends with the narrator retreating, backing away from the solution. The world has not been put right at all, and can never be put right again. In time nothing will remain of the mystery, only a name. And the wonder, the wonder.
Škvorecký has spoken of an actual historical basis behind The Bass Saxophone. “There was no bass sax player in town, but a friend of mine was forced to replace a German saxophonist in a German band in Nachod, and he told me how embarrassed he was about the experience… The primary inspiration for the story, however, was literary.” Meaning stylistic. Alongside the innovators of the early ’60s, despite the prior success and censorship of his first published novel, The Cowards (1958), Škvorecký was now “viewed as something of a traditional realist.” The Bass Saxophone was his way of answering that charge. “I wrote it, really, as an aesthetic statement, not at all in the vein of realism.”
Ever since The Cowards, finished when he was twenty-four and not published for a decade, the glory of jazz has coursed like a deep, ceaseless Mississippi through all his books. “The music was not from heaven but from somewhere else, and I knew where but I wasn’t telling. . . . ” This comes from The Swell Season, but the paradox is that this Czech writer has told of it so wisely and so well, evoking jazz with a profound understanding of its peculiar charged beauty and of its practitioners’ obsessive longing to master it—and with awareness of the inescapable, permanent, improvisatory vanishing which is at its heart.
Speaking as both a writer and a professional musician, I would argue that the list of novels and short stories that deal successfully, meaning not superficially, with jazz is very, very short. Any novelist who tries to write about jazz is asking for trouble. Musicians will invariably cringe, or laugh at him, and in no time all his finest sentences will sound silly even to non-players. Virtually every aspect of the jazz life is different than it appears to outsiders, and it is notoriously difficult to bring melody, rhythm, and harmony to life on the printed page. Plus most descriptions of the act of making music end up sounding like complex troop movements. The players are moving their fingers, but all we readers get is silence.
Why? Apart from Aaron Copland’s remark that whenever a non-musician writes about music every other word is wrong, there’s the deadly temptation of a heightened verbal virtuosity, a panic in the prose, that’s meant to convey the experience of the jazz club (or the concert hall, for that matter) and of what’s going on in a musician’s brain.
All the arts are different, and the novelist who assumes, because he knows what it took to become a writer, that he understands instinctively the process of becoming a musician, much less that odd hybrid, the jazz player—which is to say part instrumentalist, part composer (which is to say: part interpreter, part creator)—is stepping off a tall cliff. Difficult to write fictionally about any of the arts, of course, but music especially has its own ways of thinking, its own maps, and these tend to be different from what most writers imagine. As Paul Bowles, unique in being both a superb composer and a superb novelist, once told me, “The two worlds don’t overlap at all.”
Škvorecký surmounts these problems marvelously in The Bass Saxophone and in the rest of his books, and I can vouch that many musicians who otherwise might not know his work admire it for these very qualities. A sense of severe internal exile suffuses this novella too; as in Emöke, he writes about the Czechoslovakia of those days as if it were as wide as a continent. There are also detective echoes, though in this case the young hero is in the role of the hunted criminal who is at last discovered in disguise, and trapped by both the local Nazi commander and the real saxophonist he has temporarily replaced. He turns out to be an obvious imposter, both as a professional musician and as a German.
One of my favorite moments comes at dinner, when each member of the orchestra, hated so automatically at first, expresses a touching link with the narrator’s small town. Even though he is not one of them—most are Germans, adult, and theatrically grotesque except for the singer, that angel with the Swedish hair—they are likewise victims of the war, stuck in a traveling musical sideshow. Behind it all is the overwhelming sadness that he will never learn to play well enough the jazz he longs to attain. His youthful dream of music is as unwieldy as the dying, blinded bass saxophone he only gets to play this once—“for that desperate scream of youth is still inside me, the challenge of the bass saxophone. I forget it in the rush of the day, in the rush of life. . . . ” It was his best chance; yet despite what life will withhold, in dreams he will keep touring with them, he will keep playing.
A dream of youth resides, lifelong, in every jazz musician. As you get older and become, unexpectedly, the player you were meant to be, the confrontation of those several selves—the youthful dream faced with the mature person you turned into—gives the sensation of being a musician its poignancy, for every stage, every age, remains tactilely alive in you. The dreaming youth is still there at all times, beyond the trained fingers and the experience and the endless nights of playing when either no one was listening or maybe everyone was listening. This is what Škvorecký understands so magnificently, and because it is just as true of everyone else as it is of musicians, the jazz in his work constantly opens out into something embracing and immense and very wise. There is no pretense here but much understanding, and an eternal wonder.
Many great writers rely on keeping a careful, superior distance from the reader. Josef Škvorecký is one with whom we are always—in the familiar way jazz musicians speak of colleagues they’ve never even met, much less played with—on first-name terms.
[Josef Škvorecký: born September 27 1924, died January 3 2012.]
“Exile,” Graham Greene wrote in an essay about the Czech writer Josef Škvorecký (b. 1924), “is like some herb which gives its distinct bitter flavor to many different forms of writing: the comic, the ironic, the tragic… to experience exile a man doesn’t necessarily have to leave his country. The sense of banishment can be felt on one’s own hearthstone. Exile is a deprivation—to be an exile is to be unable to communicate freely… The sadness in comedy, the comedy in sadness—of this Škvorecký is a master and this too is the mark of exile. . . . ”
The pressures of internal exile, of banishment from one’s innermost being, from one’s love and from a freedom of expression, run consistently through all Škvorecký’s writing. Like his two constant passions—the detective story and jazz—they suffuse these haunting early masterpieces, Emöke (1963) and The Bass Saxophone (1967). “Extremely modernist short novels,” is how he once described them. Both are written in a style Škvorecký has returned to only occasionally, poured forth with the full intensity of a lyrical jazz cadenza, a fantasia of constant digression and incandescent emotion. In such a closing cadenza the soloist stands alone, ranging freely from subject to subject in a concentrated recapitulation of themes, revealing all that he can before he lets you get away. The style is at its summit, the voice at its most fervent. It takes perfect pitch to write this way, and in both novellas Škvorecký is carefully pushing the limits of how long a cadenza can last. The effect is of a voice telling you urgently what must be told, what almost cannot be controlled, and yet this is an illusion, for each novella is a model of control, meant to be read in one sitting.
Stylistically far removed—apparently—the detective story is a form for which Škvorecký has shown a particular fondness over the years. He has written his own series with a Czech hero, the mournful Lt. Boruvka, but my favorite is a novel known in English as Miss Silver’s Past (in Czech and French, more slyly, as The Lion Cub). It features one of his classic unattainable heroines, older, more erotically mature and more formidably purposeful than most of the girls who torment Škvorecký’s frustrated young narrators.
Emöke too, surprisingly, turns out to be a detective story of the most subtle kind. All throughout, the young narrator is searching for a key that will open a locked door—a solution to the cipher of this strong, vulnerable creature who is in her own way as rare, as gleaming, and as close to extinction as the bass saxophone in its coffinlike case. Like the mythical instrument in the other novella, she is out of the narrator’s natural range; she plays too deep for him. (Emöke is never quoted directly, as the other characters are, which gives her a unique instrumental timbre, like a voice heard in dreams.)
The narrator sees the hypocrisies in the winding paths of her personality; he even senses that they are what saved her during hardships he doesn’t quite understand. He knows she is not some toy to seduce, and too substantial for his rival, the cloddish schoolteacher. He reaches the threshold of leading Emöke into the only equivalent depths he has to offer: the sensual music still alive in her, waiting to be released. On the dance floor he improvises her a blues, and because it is spontaneous—unlike the schoolteacher’s glib pickup lines—and because it is truthful art, it seems to be working. Jazz, the freedom it represents, is the solution.
What happens next is one of my favorite small gestures in the novella. Our hero goes to the toilet, and this proves his undoing. It is a deft, realistic moment (usually left out of fiction, naturally). Overcome by the blues he has miraculously pulled out of himself, he winds up in a bathroom conversation with one of the musicians who momentarily feels like a colleague—and when he returns, he has lost Emöke. The schoolteacher has told her who the narrator is at his worst, and now she can’t let herself believe in him. And yet he keeps trying: by the time he sees her off on the train, she is almost ready to believe in him again. All he has to do is become that person once more.
The passage which returns him to the urbane life he left, the long train journey that is the schoolteacher’s undoing, is sadly, quietly, the narrator’s undoing as well. He gets his revenge on the rival, demonstrates his superiority, but was that ever in doubt? The guessing game leads him farther and farther away from Emöke, and by the time he reaches Prague he no longer feels ready to go after her, to become again the person she wants to believe in. He is instead “permeated with an indifference toward the legend. . . . ”
And there is now tragedy behind that indifference. The world is wide, but Emöke’s world is narrow, and perhaps no one else will come along with the key to her cipher. It is a detective story in reverse, which ends with the narrator retreating, backing away from the solution. The world has not been put right at all, and can never be put right again. In time nothing will remain of the mystery, only a name. And the wonder, the wonder.
Škvorecký has spoken of an actual historical basis behind The Bass Saxophone. “There was no bass sax player in town, but a friend of mine was forced to replace a German saxophonist in a German band in Nachod, and he told me how embarrassed he was about the experience… The primary inspiration for the story, however, was literary.” Meaning stylistic. Alongside the innovators of the early ’60s, despite the prior success and censorship of his first published novel, The Cowards (1958), Škvorecký was now “viewed as something of a traditional realist.” The Bass Saxophone was his way of answering that charge. “I wrote it, really, as an aesthetic statement, not at all in the vein of realism.”
Ever since The Cowards, finished when he was twenty-four and not published for a decade, the glory of jazz has coursed like a deep, ceaseless Mississippi through all his books. “The music was not from heaven but from somewhere else, and I knew where but I wasn’t telling. . . . ” This comes from The Swell Season, but the paradox is that this Czech writer has told of it so wisely and so well, evoking jazz with a profound understanding of its peculiar charged beauty and of its practitioners’ obsessive longing to master it—and with awareness of the inescapable, permanent, improvisatory vanishing which is at its heart.
Speaking as both a writer and a professional musician, I would argue that the list of novels and short stories that deal successfully, meaning not superficially, with jazz is very, very short. Any novelist who tries to write about jazz is asking for trouble. Musicians will invariably cringe, or laugh at him, and in no time all his finest sentences will sound silly even to non-players. Virtually every aspect of the jazz life is different than it appears to outsiders, and it is notoriously difficult to bring melody, rhythm, and harmony to life on the printed page. Plus most descriptions of the act of making music end up sounding like complex troop movements. The players are moving their fingers, but all we readers get is silence.
Why? Apart from Aaron Copland’s remark that whenever a non-musician writes about music every other word is wrong, there’s the deadly temptation of a heightened verbal virtuosity, a panic in the prose, that’s meant to convey the experience of the jazz club (or the concert hall, for that matter) and of what’s going on in a musician’s brain.
All the arts are different, and the novelist who assumes, because he knows what it took to become a writer, that he understands instinctively the process of becoming a musician, much less that odd hybrid, the jazz player—which is to say part instrumentalist, part composer (which is to say: part interpreter, part creator)—is stepping off a tall cliff. Difficult to write fictionally about any of the arts, of course, but music especially has its own ways of thinking, its own maps, and these tend to be different from what most writers imagine. As Paul Bowles, unique in being both a superb composer and a superb novelist, once told me, “The two worlds don’t overlap at all.”
Škvorecký surmounts these problems marvelously in The Bass Saxophone and in the rest of his books, and I can vouch that many musicians who otherwise might not know his work admire it for these very qualities. A sense of severe internal exile suffuses this novella too; as in Emöke, he writes about the Czechoslovakia of those days as if it were as wide as a continent. There are also detective echoes, though in this case the young hero is in the role of the hunted criminal who is at last discovered in disguise, and trapped by both the local Nazi commander and the real saxophonist he has temporarily replaced. He turns out to be an obvious imposter, both as a professional musician and as a German.
One of my favorite moments comes at dinner, when each member of the orchestra, hated so automatically at first, expresses a touching link with the narrator’s small town. Even though he is not one of them—most are Germans, adult, and theatrically grotesque except for the singer, that angel with the Swedish hair—they are likewise victims of the war, stuck in a traveling musical sideshow. Behind it all is the overwhelming sadness that he will never learn to play well enough the jazz he longs to attain. His youthful dream of music is as unwieldy as the dying, blinded bass saxophone he only gets to play this once—“for that desperate scream of youth is still inside me, the challenge of the bass saxophone. I forget it in the rush of the day, in the rush of life. . . . ” It was his best chance; yet despite what life will withhold, in dreams he will keep touring with them, he will keep playing.
A dream of youth resides, lifelong, in every jazz musician. As you get older and become, unexpectedly, the player you were meant to be, the confrontation of those several selves—the youthful dream faced with the mature person you turned into—gives the sensation of being a musician its poignancy, for every stage, every age, remains tactilely alive in you. The dreaming youth is still there at all times, beyond the trained fingers and the experience and the endless nights of playing when either no one was listening or maybe everyone was listening. This is what Škvorecký understands so magnificently, and because it is just as true of everyone else as it is of musicians, the jazz in his work constantly opens out into something embracing and immense and very wise. There is no pretense here but much understanding, and an eternal wonder.
Many great writers rely on keeping a careful, superior distance from the reader. Josef Škvorecký is one with whom we are always—in the familiar way jazz musicians speak of colleagues they’ve never even met, much less played with—on first-name terms.
[Josef Škvorecký: born September 27 1924, died January 3 2012.]
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