Take Five: Connections and contexts
Five things that caught my ear and eye this week: The Chills, Forrest Gander, Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Caroline Shaw and 'The Swimmer.' Yes, I know that's six.
So here’s the goal: I’m going to try to post something I’ll call “Take Five” each Friday. This will be five things that I spent some time with over the course of the previous week. No criticism, no in-depth analysis, just a few things I think you might be interested to check out. When the spirit moves me, I’ll post other things at other time times.
These are all a bit more expansive this week. Instead of a book or an album, I’ll touch on a band, some connections among works of art, a listening practice of mine, and a film. Let’s dive in.
When the documentary about someone's work and life is titled "The Chills: The Triumph and Tragedy of Martin Phillipps," you probably shouldn't be surprised when they leave us early. But things seemed to be moving in the right direction for New Zealand songwriter Phillipps, whose band, the Chills, has been back making wonderful music after two decades lost to Phillipps drug and alcohol use and the resulting ill health. At the close of this 2019 film, Phillipps is told he is free of the hepatitis C that had dogged him for years. After being told at one point early in the film that he wouldn't make it more than a few months if he didn't stop drinking, he now asks the doctor about his potential lifespan, "You could live to 90." He breathes a sigh of relief. Alas, we got one more album of new material from that point before he succumbed July 28 at 61. Still, that new work, while not displacing early classics like Kaleidoscope World, Brave Words and Submarine Bells, was better than we had a right to expect. Silver Bullets from 2015 was better than anything since 1990's Submarine Bells. Listening to something as startlingly good as "Heavenly Pop Hit" would make the most spiritually skeptical among us wonder if Phillipps is performing a new theme song wherever he now resides.
"'Sangam' refers to a gathering of individuals united in spirit, sharing a common vision, and, in a metaphysical sense, seeking meaning and purpose in a state of togetherness." Such is the opening to an essay about sangam by N. Manu Chakravarthy to be found in Forrest Gander's 2021 poetry collection, Twice Alive. The book features a series of poems titled "Sangam Acoustics," and Gander asked literary critic Chakravarthy to provide some context about sangam poetics. I'm probably the least spiritual/mystical person on the planet, but I do appreciate and enjoy seeing the connections, overt and otherwise in the art I experience. Gander's book was a rich seam. The notion of sangam took me to Charles Lloyd's album of the same name, a trio date with drummer Eric Harland and tabla player Zakir Hussain. This aptly named album was probably the second I heard from Lloyd, whose 2000 album The Water is Wide caught my eye one day at the library and I fell in love with his playing. I had the pleasure of hosting Lloyd when he performed at the Iowa City Jazz Festival in 2015.
The final poem in Gander's collection is "Rexroth's Cabin," which sent me to Greg Brown's own wonderful album from 2000, Covenant, home to perhaps his finest song, "Rexroth's Daughter." On the off chance that there was a sangam-Rexroth connection that would close the circle, I hit Google. Instead, I found this interview between Gander and poet Zack Finch that provides valuable context that has me re-reading Twice Alive. By the way, I picked up Gander's book because he will be appearing at the Iowa City Book Festival on Oct. 19. Yes, my reading at this time of the year is almost exclusively in preparation for that week in October.
I wholeheartedly endorse listening to an artist's entire catalog front to back. At any given time, I am usually in the middle of someone or another's body of work. At the moment, in addition to taking another pass through the Chills albums, I'm also working my way through the rather lengthy discographies of Nick Cave and Tom Waits. Cave because he has a new album, Wild God, coming out at the end of the month, and Waits because of a connection to Marc Ribot. The Book Festival will host Ribot on Oct. 19 where he will talk about his memoir, Unstrung: Rants and Stories of a Noise Guitarist. When people unfamiliar with the name ask me about him, I usually say, "he played on Tom Waits' '80s albums." That elicits a nod of either comprehension or further confusion. My own grasp of early to mid-career Waits is lacking at best, so I thought I would start from the beginning. The same goes for Cave. I've heard some of the earliest work, but didn't really get on board until the early '90s. For both, it has been fascinating to see how their sounds evolved and were refined. I'm on the sixth album for each: Blue Valentine for Waits and the soundtrack to Ghosts…of the Civil Dead for Cave. I'm sure I'll have more to share in subsequent weeks, but suffice to say, taking a chronological dive into an artist's work can be a rewarding exercise.
In what has become a rather work-heavy list, here is another connection. I have become a huge fan of the contemporary classical composer/vocalist Caroline Shaw, and urge you to listen to the new album by Shaw and Sō Percussion, Rectangles and Circumstance. I fell for Shaw's music when her composition, "E'ntracte" was part of the program on the City of Literature's MusicIC festival a few years ago. The piece is haunting, and I quickly sought out other work and fell for her compositions. I subsequently heard her sing, and contrary to my usual response to vocals in such contexts, I was drawn in by her voice. I was fortunate enough to hear her perform twice in the past year at Hancher Auditorium. The first with the Attacca String Quartet, the second with Sō Percussion. At each performance, Shaw sang her song, "And So." In each context, her voice is what draws me in, its clear tone soaring above the music.
Another standout is “Sing On,” which finds masses of Shaw accompanying her lead vocal while the four percussionists provide a bed of rhythm. No one would consider this to be classical, contemporary or otherwise, and it is this continual subversion and expansion of form found in Shaw’s music that makes her such a compelling artist.
I somehow recently came across the fact that Burt Lancaster was 54 when he filmed "The Swimmer." The film follows Ned Merrill, a fiftysomething businessman and father, as he swims his way home one summer afternoon through the Connecticut countryside one backyard pool at a time. The 1968 film is based on a classic New Yorker short story by John Cheever. The story is more abstract, leaving much to the reader’s imagination as Merrill’s path reveals that all is not well in his world. The film fleshes out that story, adding scenes and characters not in the source material. Still, the surrealistic bent remains, and Lancaster does an admirable job of inhabiting the bubble that surrounds Merrill while he goes about this atypical day. The seasons seem to change along his path, and the reception he meets at each new house seems to follow that waning of the summer sun, everything growing chillier as he goes. As someone who is 54 myself, I marveled at Lancaster's fitness as he traipsed through the woods while still viewing him as an older guy sliding out of his prime. What was once a view into another world now feels all the more ominous when watching it again with this new perspective.