TIME ON MY HANDS

 

Not long ago I had reason to say to a friend that I had ‘time on my hands’, and the phrase unexpectedly brought to mind a song of that name that I first heard in 1998 on an album called The McGarrigle Hour. A droll tune written and performed by Chaim Tannenbaum,  I’ve always thought of it, perhaps wrongly, as a charming tale of a New York flâneur set in the 1940s or ‘50s. I find it oddly touching.

I listened to the song again, enjoyed it, and found my way to Tannenbaum’s only solo album, which was made in his late sixties and released in 2016, by which time he had spent most of his musical career playing with the extended McGarrigle family, essentially as a sideman, adding touches on banjo or guitar and singing background harmony. This role seems to have suited him well, as he was - and is - an old-fashioned amateur who likes to live his musical life at a leisurely pace. Born to immigrant parents in Montreal, he went to the same high school as Kate McGarrigle, learnt to play several instruments, and then joined an informal band with Kate and Anna, with whom he developed a long friendship and musical camaraderie. He nevertheless continued to pursue his main professional interest, which was teaching philosophy at university.

Although it appears that Tannenbaum never had a strong desire to make his own record, he was eventually persuaded to do so when he retired from teaching and moved to New York with his wife. He said that he’d have a preference for an ‘Italian wedding band’ to work with, but ended up with musicians who usually performed French cabaret songs of the 1930s, as well as with a handful of guests. They were a good match. The resulting album was mainly made up of obscure folk songs and three original compositions, all of which are notable either for their wit or wistful nostalgia. Although not blatantly autobiographical,  his own songs seem to be based on personal experience; for instance, in what is probably the most striking of them, London, Longing for Home, Tannenbaum clearly draws from memories of the time he spent there studying for a PhD. It would be unfair to describe them as bitter, but the lyrics are decidedly gloomy,  amounting to a dour description of the city and its people in terms of an English ‘kitchen sink drama’ of the 1960s. Tannenbaum later explained that his songs were ‘about an irremediable sense of exile, an exile from one’s own past, where the monuments, the landscape, have been destroyed’, and that certainly rings true.

Fictional or not, Tannenbaum’s dejected portrayal of London took me aback, particularly as the track goes on for almost ten minutes, and you can hardly miss the point. It’s common enough to find songs about a longing for home or somewhere you love (the McGarrigle sisters wrote and recorded one such beauty, Mendocino, which Tannenbaum has covered on his album), but it is rare to find lyrics in which the place the singer wishes to leave is described in such disgruntled detail, so I tried to think of another, possibly written by an American in England, that might be compared to Tannenbaum’s plaintive and surprisingly agreeable lament.

I failed to find an equivalent, but I was reminded of Paul Simon’s Homeward Bound, which was recorded in 1965 and included on the British release of Simon and  Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence album. I knew that Simon had written it while feeling despondent at a railway station near Liverpool when he was touring England in the early 1960s, and for a long time I assumed that the song’s lyrics described his longing to get back home to America. I subsequently discovered, however, that he was actually writing about returning to his girlfriend Kathy Chitty in Brentford, Essex, where he had met her after performing at the Railway Hotel. Simon wrote several other beautiful songs about her that are included on his first solo album, The Paul Simon Songbook, among them the delicate April Come She Will and the lovely Kathy’s Song, in which, like Chaim Tannenbaum in London, Longing for Home, the drizzle and ‘rain-drenched streets’ are the context for his doubts and loneliness, but also, in this case, for loving thoughts about their relationship.

Kathy Chitty can be seen with Simon on the cover of the album, but she soon became uncomfortable with his growing celebrity, and they went separate ways. Nonetheless, she was not forgotten; memories of their intimacy resurfaced soon afterwards in one of Simon and Garfunkel’s most poignant songs, America, on their 1968 Bookends album. Describing a journey on a Greyhound bus, it vividly evokes a young man’s hope and anxiety as he and his companion set out on a quest for adventure and discovery. Its mood of sombre innocence, both emotive and affecting, is reminiscent of the final scene in the 1967 film The Graduate, which featured many Simon and Garfunkel songs on its soundtrack: joy and elation fade away and slowly turn to reflective melancholy.





For further exploration:

Chaim Tannenbaum:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUbBkjCyF14 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0upKZIWT2Q

 Paul Simon/Simon and Garfunkel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylCGvOUL938 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo2ZsAOlvEM 

Final scene in The Graduate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14pdNYXY3Zo

 PIROSMANI, PARAJANOV, AND KOMITAS

Before watching Giorgi Shengelaia’s  slow and poetic film I knew very little about the Georgian painter Niko Pirosmani, but by the time it ended I felt that he was an artist whom I might come to admire and perhaps understand. Later, as I read more about him and familiarised myself with Pirosmani’s work, I realised just how sensitive and restrained Shengelaia had been in his approach to his subject, and I began to develop a deeper appreciation of the film’s beauty and discretion, because it could easily have become sentimental. At its heart is a story about how Pirosmani, devoted to his calling, was determined to live a free life, unencumbered by commitments and the expectations of others. He paid a high price for his independence.  

Although unfamiliar abroad, Pirosmani is beloved in his own land, perhaps because of his obvious sense of belonging, both to his country and to its melancholy people. His main trade was that of an itinerant painter, producing shop signs and pictures that he exchanged for food, lodging, and alcohol. He never settled down. Born about 1866, his life appears to have been unfulfilled and sad; he was an outsider, a loner, and he died, forgotten, at the end of World War I. He worked on the railways for a while and briefly opened a shop, but his heart was set on painting and this is what he chose to do despite little success. Although he received some modest support from artists and the art world it seems to have made little difference to him, probably because of his dreamy nature and incessant drinking.

Pirosmani’s ‘primitivist’ style is disconcerting; at first glance it looks as though he barely knew how to paint at all. His images are simply and boldly outlined, their colouring coarse, and more often than not their background is dark, as he liked to paint on black industrial oilcloth. As sometimes happens, however, it is those very limitations that make his work so perplexingly effective. His figures are stiff and still, as if self-consciously posing, but they are nonetheless iconic; his many animals, which he once described as ‘friends of my heart’, are particularly touching. Infused with feeling, they seem to live in a timeless world, parallel to ours, but radically apart. They often have a certain urgency and a sense of foreboding, as if the artist felt that the world was under threat. A religious man, Pirosmani imbued his paintings with humility and awe.

As I thought about Pirosmani, the work of another Georgian eccentric, Sergei Parajanov, came to mind, and while reading up about him I was intrigued to discover that he had once made a short film called Arabesques on the Pirosmani theme. I was introduced to Parajanov’s films many years ago in the context of a discussion of his friend Tarkovsky, and I learnt to enjoy them very much, perhaps especially the extraordinary The Colour of Pomegranates, a visionary biography of Sayat Nova, the 18th century Armenian poet, singer, and musician. Parajanov, born in Georgia to Armenian parents, became devoted to Georgian and Armenian folklore and history, with the unfortunate consequence that he raised the suspicions of the Soviet authorities and came to be considered a dangerous subversive. He was later jailed on several charges, which many commentators have suggested were false and untrue.

Parajanov developed a luxuriant cinematic style that can seem excessively mannered; his dreamlike films, inspired by icons, traditional dress, folk artefacts, and Persian enamels, appear over-refined and decadent to contemporary taste. His art was akin, in many respects, to the Symbolist paintings of Gustave Moreau and to late 19th century Aestheticism, such as that of the novel À Rebours by J.K.Huysmans. Nevertheless, there is a sense of innocence in his films, which perhaps explains Parajanov’s admiration for Pirosmani; his cinematic portrait of the painter, whose pictures are so plain and earnest in comparison to Parajanov’s fanciful tableaux, is deeply respectful, even to the point of reverence.

With the Caucasus still on my mind, I also searched for the film on Komitas, the Armenian musician and composer, that I’d been hoping to watch for some time, but I failed to find it online. Born in 1869 as Soghomon Soghomonian, Komitas Vardabet is similarly revered in his home country, and it is sometimes said that whenever Armenians gather to honour their past, they sing his songs. Komitas spent his last twenty years in mental institutions, traumatised by the 1915 genocide of two million of his compatriots in Turkey. He wrote comparatively little; important works include some majestic choral pieces, arrangements of the Armenian mass, and a few dances for the piano, but it is as a collector and arranger of folksongs that he is perhaps most loved. Komitas did for Armenia what Bartók did for Hungary, turning simple tunes into more sophisticated compositions, always retaining the soul and spirit of their sources. His music can be exceptionally beautiful; after a concert in Paris, Claude Debussy once said that Komitas deserved to be recognised as a great composer, even on the basis of a single song. Sadly, outside Armnenia, few people even know his name.

For further exploration: 

Pirosmani:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=favP7b57y8E

Parajanov:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfu9KA78jI0 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZwhS_b4Df4 

Komitas:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW-zuBMOZNk