ALL THE DREAMS YOU SHOW UP IN ARE NOT YOUR OWN

 

 
I’ve been listening to We're New Again,  Makaya McCraven’s reworking - or ‘reimagining’, as he puts it - of the late Gil Scott-Heron’s last album, I’m New Here.  It is the second such record, which indicates something of the significance of the original. McCraven’s arrangements, in many ways closer to Scott-Heron’s musical roots than those of the earlier albums, run from blues to ‘spiritual’ jazz, with the singer's voice given due prominence, and because he was starting with fragmentary material, he had to be much more than a conventional producer. That may have been part of the attraction of the project.

While working on  I'm New Here, Scott-Heron was in bad shape, with serious health problems and addicted to crack; he had recently been in prison on Riker’s Island, which is where he was first visited by Richard Russell, the English producer who was to work with him on the original record. In a New Yorker profile, Scott-Heron later admitted that the finished album was more the producer’s work than his own, and that he had been happy to accede to Russell’s enthusiasm and direction.  'All the dreams you show up in are not your own’,  he said. There was barely a handful of songs on the record, only one of them written by Scott-Heron;  the remaining tracks were spoken or recited with musical accompaniment. I’m New Here had little of the socio-political content that Scott-Heron had been known for in the past, but it was engaging and unexpectedly emotional, touching on themes such as fear, mortality, and isolation, and it is perhaps not coincidental that Scott-Heron died not long after the album was completed. The record begins and ends with a poem entitled On Coming from a Broken Home, a tribute to the grandmother who helped to raise him, and the rest dwells sorrowfully on the consequences of his insecure childhood, revealing how a sense of caring and safety had been replaced by rootlessness and torment. Nonetheless, although I'm New Here is a bleak record, it is not without moments of wry hope and reconciliation, its tone set by the line in the title song, written by Bill Callahan, that ruefully remarks: ‘no matter how far wrong you’ve gone, you can always turn around’.

I’ve also just finished reading Wilhelm Waiblinger’s brief book, Friedrich Hölderlin, Life, Poetry, and Madness, an account of the poet’s sequestered life in a tower of the house in Tübingen that belonged to the carpenter, Ernst Zimmer, who kindly took him in after he was released from a clinic in 1806, diagnosed as incurably insane. The young Waiblinger, entranced by Hölderlin’s novel Hyperion (subtitled The Hermit  in Greece), visited the older man over a period of four years and wrote the biography shortly before he died in Rome, aged only twenty-five. Describing Hölderlin’s decline into an eccentric who delighted in bowing to his guests, addressing them as ‘Your Royal Majesty’ or ‘Your Holiness’ and conversing in inanities, Waiblinger refuses to give up faith that his friend might yet recover his senses and return to his hitherto elevated state of mind. This was not to happen. Before his mental collapse, Hölderlin, Romantic poet and philosopher, had hymned the eternal values of art, beauty, and truth, inspired by nature and classical Greek culture, but after the breakdown his style, as well as his personality, changed. He continued to write poetry in seclusion, but it was simpler and fragmentary, often with unfinished lines and unconventional sentence structure, and yet, like shards of glass in sunshine, his verses sometimes emitted intense and unexpected rays of illumination.

Reflecting on these melancholy examples of breakdown and isolation, I turned to an alternative perspective sent to me by a friend, an extract from Inducements to Retiredness by the 17th century English metaphysical poet and mystic Thomas Traherne. As my friend observed, Traherne seems to suggest that the more cloistered our physical existence, the more potential there is for extensive vision.

All objects being most excellent which in Retirement we behold, it cometh to pass hereby that Retirement is the Sphere of Treasures, the Point of Concurrence, wherein all the Influences of Heaven meet, the Pupil of Vision out of which all the Rays and Beams of Sight disperse themselves and so, like God, an Invisible Sphere of all his Kingdom.

 

For further exploration:

We're New Again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jfvh07FIDM&list=OLAK5uy_niTp864avMp4Wy3m1_giuaEytm9o1iMdo&index=15

Gil Scott-Heron: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/09/new-york-is-killing-me

Makaya McCraven: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gil-scott-heron-makaya-mccraven-were-new-again-a-reimagining-by-makaya-mccraven/ 

Hölderlin and Waiblinger: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/friedrich-holderlin-poet-life-madness/

 

 

  

 SATCHIDANANDA




The Indian rudra vina is a wonderful and imposing instrument that is said to have had an ancient origin. Although its currency gradually diminished in the 19th century following the development of the surbahar, the bass sitar, there has since been a revival of interest in its sonorous music, and the rudra vina has been significantly modified, most notably by Zia Mohuddin Dagar, who added bigger gourds and thicker strings to enhance its resonant softness and depth. Best suited to slow alaps in the vocal dhrupad style, the introspective sound of the rudra vina is seductively immersive, its typically meditative mood evoking the ‘imaginal world’ or mundus imaginalis that Henri Corbin wrote about with reference to the Sufism of Ibn al’Arabi - the  liminal realm where invisible realities become visible and material things are spiritualized.

John Coltrane might have had some understanding of the idea of the ‘imaginal world’. Sympathetic to all kinds of metaphysical thinking, Coltrane had a spiritual awakening in the 1950s, about a decade before he died, which helped to free him from the narcotic and alcoholic addictions that had been ruining his life. From then on, his consciousness shifted from a focus on the purely musical to the mystical, his flamboyant improvisational technique subjected to what he felt was a higher purpose. His classic A Love Supreme, a work of intense, hymn-like spirituality, recorded in 1964 and released a year later, was a case in point. In the album’s liner notes, Coltrane alluded to the difficulties he had been experiencing and how he was overcoming them: ‘As time and events moved on, I entered into a phase which is contradictory to the pledge and away from the esteemed path. But thankfully now, through the merciful hand of God, I do perceive and have been fully re-informed of his omnipotence. It is truly a love supreme’. Widely acclaimed as a jazz masterpiece, the record proved to be hugely popular and influential, Coltrane becoming revered enough for an African Orthodox Church in San Francisco to incorporate his music and lyrics into its liturgy, and to elevate him to sainthood. 

Described as one of the most complicated and misunderstood of all 20th century musicians, ‘a respected yet divisive figure who was scorned by the jazz mainstream for most of her life’,  Alice Coltrane suffered greatly after the death of her husband. After seeking help from two gurus, she immersed herself in Indian culture and philosophy, changed her name to Turiyasangitananda, became a spiritual leader, and in 1982 founded an ashram in southern California. Hitherto a bizarre mix of modal jazz, Indian influences, and string orchestras (with Coltrane herself playing harp, piano, and organ), her music was transformed into something more cosmic and psychedelic, dominated by choral voices, percussion, and synthesizers. Its avowed purpose was devotion and rapture. On Sundays Alice Coltrane would lead the community, many of whom were musicians, in gatherings that were like Gospel services sung in Sanskrit; many of their devotional songs, very similar to Indian bhajan music, were later released on private press cassettes for a limited audience, and some years ago David Byrne included a selection of them on an album for his admirable Luaka Bop label. They are extraordinary pieces of music, trancelike and exultant.

Alice Coltrane may have known that she was a part of a long lineage of bhakti music and poetry that originated in the 7th or 8th century CE in South India. With an emphasis on devotion and surrender to God that brought spiritual experience to many marginalised people, especially women, whose opportunities for religious expression were often very limited, bhakti removed all need for an intermediary between an individual and his or her personal relationship to God, and as such it challenged the conventional Brahmanical hierarchy. Women bhakti saints, many of whom led normal domestic lives, rejected asceticism and wrote about their love of God in songs and poems that used the vernacular language of ordinary people. While Alice Coltrane’s life and ideas were colourfully different, especially in relation to the norms of American culture, they were just as brave and radical; decades after it was recorded, her music still seems joyous, eccentric, and necessary.

For further exploration:

 Rudra vina:  http://www.rudravina.com/

Zia Mohiuddin Dagar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5trNs7M3MU

A Love Supreme: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21158-a-love-supreme-the-complete-masters/

Alice Coltrane:  https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23135-world-spirituality-classics-1-the-ecstatic-music-of-alice-coltrane-turiyasangitananda

 

 

 GURU  MAA

I’ve been spending time with Garden & Cosmos, a catalogue of an exhibition of Indian paintings from the collection of the Maharaja of Jodhpur that took place in 2009.  Much of the work is typically rich and exotic, reflecting the pleasures and luxuries of life at the Jodhpur Royal Court, but the pieces that really engage me are the more religious images, especially those that speculate about the origins and mysteries of the universe, which bring together a Mogul Muslim style of painting and ancient Hindu beliefs. In the early 19th century the Maharaja, a devotee of the Nath gurus and mendicant ascetics, commissioned paintings that mark a dramatic shift from those that went before. Instead of flattering and charming pictures of a courtly world there are surreal representations of metaphysical realms where, for example, Brahma, god of creation, emerges from a golden lotus flower that sprouts from the navel of the deity Narayana. Such images, uncommonly large in reality, are truly magnificent.

The paintings in Garden & Cosmos are usually to be found in a museum in the great and forbidding Jodhpur fort of Mehrangahr, where the album Junun and its accompanying  documentary were recorded and shot in 2015. Junun is the fruit of another cultural fusion, this time between the music of Shye Ben-Tzur, an Israeli who lives in Rajasthan and composes versions of Sufi Qawwali songs, and local drummers, a six-piece  Hindu brass band, two women singers, and musicians from the Muslim Manganiar community who play bowed-string instruments. Jonny Greenwood, the composer and guitarist from Radiohead, produced the record and brought in his friend and collaborator, Paul Thomas Anderson, to make the film. Its highlight, perhaps, is the wonderfully ecstatic Allah/Elohim, named after the Muslim and Jewish words for God, but the overall exuberance of the project, happily captured in the informal and rough-cut film, is just as joyful and uplifting.

Indian court patronage and the intersection between Muslim and Hindu culture are also at the heart of a quite different musical story, one that makes for a sombre contrast to the more confident and extrovert narratives of Garden & Cosmos and Junun. The celebrated sarod player and teacher Allauddin Khan, at one time employed at the court of the Maharaja of Maihar, was the father of Annapurna Devi, widely considered to have been one of the finest classical Indian musicians of the 20th century. Born a Muslim, Roshanara Khan was later renamed by the Maharaja, an incident that was in many ways typical, for as one obituary put it,  if outsiders knew of her at all, it was probably only as an accessory to the men in her life. It is said that her father had pledged not to teach her music, but when he heard Annapurna, at the age of ten, correcting her brother’s practice, he could no longer ignore her talent. She began learning the sitar, but Allaudin Khan soon encouraged her to take up the bass surbahar, telling her that while it would never be as popular as the sitar, the instrument’s refinement and musical depth would suit her well. 

At the age of thirteen Annapurna met Ravi Shankar, one of her father’s students, and they married two years later, Annapurna converting to Hinduism on the day of their wedding. A conventionally arranged marriage, it began to fall apart not long after the birth of a son. The worldly Shankar blamed his sheltered wife’s tantrums, but he also admitted that she was aware of his persistent affairs with other women. Annapurna, however, suggested that the the cause of the breakdown was her husband’s jealousy of her talent. ‘Whenever I performed’, she said, ‘people appreciated my playing, and I sensed that Panditji (Ravi Shankar) wasn’t too happy about their response. I wasn’t that fond of performing anyway’. Shankar didn’t agree. ’She maybe doesn’t like to face the public or she is nervous or whatever’, he told an interviewer. ‘This is very sad, because she is a fantastic musician’. Annapurna subsequently called Shankar’s accounts of the collapse of their marriage and the premature death of their son ‘false and fabricated stories’. ‘I think Panditji is losing his sense of propriety or his mental balance’, she said; ‘or he has turned into a pathological liar’.

Annapurna Devi withdrew from public life in the 1950s, choosing never to play in public again, and because the only extant recordings of her playing are of poor quality, her reputation is based on memory and hearsay. Many serious students were nonetheless drawn to her, among them the distinguished sitar player Nikhil Bannerjee, the flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia, and her nephew, the fine sarod player Aashish Khan. It is rumoured that the only outsider to hear her play was George Harrison, whom she allowed to sit in on a daily practice session, a privilege granted only after persuasion from India’s then prime minister, Indira Gandhi. Becoming known as ‘Guru Maa’, she refused to be photographed, was rarely interviewed, and seldom left her apartment. Some years before she passed away in 2018, she said that she was happy in seclusion and was at peace when teaching, practicing, and feeding pigeons on her balcony.

A sign on the front door of Annapurna Devi's Mumbai apartment read:

A Request

Please Ring The Bell Only Three Times
If Nobody Answers, Please Leave Your Card/Letter
Thank You for Being Considerate
Smt Annapurna Devi

Some references:

Review of Garden & Cosmos:   https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/may/31/exhibition-art

Junun:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgTK7S97EQU

Article on Annapurna Devi:  https://www.mansworldindia.com/people/annapurna-devi-the-tragedy-and-triumph-of-ravi-shankars-first-wife/

Obituary of Annapurna Devi:  https://www.npr.org/2018/10/23/659786993/annapurna-devi-poised-star-surbahar-spent-60-years-her-apartment