I am not really a writer, and as a result their lives hold little interest for me.
What I do instead is assume the guise of dead jazz guitarists, and now that John Abercrombie is gone
I have traded in my current guitar face – the one that shifts between stubbed toe, premature ejaculation
and unexpected bereavement, and was derived from a number of earlier sources –
for John’s lightly self-involved air, the mildly frustrating loss of a very specific memory,
and occasionally the face of one talking or even singing in his sleep.
I have also employed the face of the late Derek Bailey. Although my personal acquaintance with Derek
amounted to a couple of lessons in which he rapidly undid any preconceptions I had of my instrument
and therefore of myself and my own artistic purpose, I was greatly affected by the paradox of his openness
and the strictness of his innovation, as well as his innocent love of the guitar. I have tried to imitate
the professorial attendance he brought to his own hands. He did not regard the music he played as difficult,
austere, or in any way superior: he just liked it better. Derek used the bridge humbucker so he could splinter the
note prismatically into its harmonic constituents, which is the payoff for the kind of asperity the guitar will then produce.
It was also a rebellion against the sine-wave sweet nothing of the neck pickup that most of us favour.
Derek was not from the Orphic tradition but the Maenadic. His ability to diffract the note
was more important than its singing, and unlike me and Orpheus, he didn’t really give a shit
if anyone was listening or not. I wish I didn’t either, but it’s literally all I think about.
There are few faces among the living I admire enough to wish them dead. Ralph Towner, god no:
Ralph can keep that face as long as he wants. Kurt Rosenwinkel, of course, though we’re all waiting
for Kurt to drop anyway. Strung out, sweating, mumbling, radiating the fear that accompanies a huge soul
when it has to pilot blind through the wrong world without much analytic intelligence
and a fatal vulnerability to new age claptrap, Kurt is John Clare, and breaks your heart by existing.
The others, not so much. Pat Metheny is a cult of one and seems to know little of human relations;
his face is screwed up and his head shaking in the constant denial of the born-again.
And I don’t do smiling. Of the many jazz smilers, I could only ever tolerate John McLaughlin,
who earned his bliss through meditation, and Bill Frisell, who has passed from bashful and boyish grin
to senile contentment with no intervening stage. The rest can go to hell, especially Julian Lage
and even Gilad Hekselman, who is clearly a decent man, and the only improvising guitarist
to manage counterpoint since Jimmy Wyble. We do not live in a world where we should be constantly smiling
while we’re making art about it. Of the kids I follow with interest, I covet the already-dead face
of Charles Altura, whose unblinking too-large eyes look like he is trapped in a pseudocoma
but when closed show a deeper retreat into his own being than one so young should have any need for.
In the three-quarters of my waking life I am not playing the guitar, I will take on the faces
of my casual interlocutors, from a vicious economy. I am probably doing you back to you now.
Because you cannot not see yourself you are unaware of it, but we are all vulnerable to self-love
which is why you think I’m a nice guy. I have impersonated the living for a living
which is actually a form of instant hell for us both. I am in many ways a psychopath.
The most intense ‘feelings of love’ I have experienced have been for other psychopaths,
but like most psychopaths, I recovered far too quickly from their absence, being so quickly absent myself.
Not being anyone helps. The truest love I have felt for anyone is for a woman who named herself the Unmasker,
whose appalling early years, as well as the unconscious replication of that abuse in her adult life
left her in a state of frozen hypervigilance, and therefore unable to filter out the real motivations of adults.
She taught me it is possible to think the worst of everyone and still be correct; and furthermore, not to hate them for it.
She named me ‘Reflecto’, and setting aside the barely calculable algebraic complications of our superheroic encounter
(does the Unmasker unmask her own reflection? Or if she unmasks Reflecto, does she stare into the abyss?
Does the abyss have a face, and if so, what shallows does it conceal? Or does Reflecto become the Unmasker?
If so, does Reflecto then unmask the Unmasker? Do they both then disappear?)
she saw that my believing I had no face of my own meant I was absolutely never to be trusted.
I stopped singing not because she disliked my voice – au contraire – but because she found my expression ridiculous
and said so. I am glad I no longer sing. My voice, while pretty serviceable, was too full of feeling
and my goal is to eliminate all sentiment. Anyway. Reflectors gotta reflect. This is anterior
to any actual reason for doing so. Likewise, unmaskers are what they are, and they do less well
with the transparent, the maskless, and those they have already seen through, who can cease to interest them.
My hope now is that before I die – even if I cannot achieve a human face of my own –
I will find, at the very least, the honest face of my musicianhood, which is why I still put in five hours straight
on those nights I am not resentfully socialising, as I did tonight, blowing over ‘26/2’,
‘Have You Met Miss Jones?’, John’s ‘Labor Day’ and Ralph’s ‘Green Room’, trying to make the bar-lines blur into one bar,
the keys into one key, the fretboard to a single fret, the strings to a single string,
at which point one will have officially run out of excuses. Since this is precisely what Coltrane was trying to achieve –
the transparency of form, leaving just the mirror of a perfect art – I am not particularly optimistic.
When I die and all my old faces have fled like racing clouds, when they have all shaken themselves out
or have been sloughed away, it will be just too late to see if anyone had been there.
My death mask will reveal him, though, and I ask that this be cast by my younger brother who is,
I suspect non-coincidentally, a first-rate naturalistic sculptor, and thus reliable in these matters.