Listening to Sun Ra, Birds Convene Outside my Window
A friend of mine likes to chide me
for what he calls my bourgeois proclivity
to listen only to music played in time.
So each time this afternoon I’ve put on
volume one of The Heliocentric Worlds
by Sun Ra, I’ve thought of that friend,
and wondered whether he would let this
qualify as sufficiently experimental,
though it isn’t the full recorded chaos
he often argues is the only moral
kind of music left. A silly pretense
of his, but one I can’t help sometimes
measuring myself against. And, I admit,
though there are stretches of incoherence
on this record that try my patience,
I can usually find a definite plotting,
particularly the sections where the bass
begins a walking line the other instruments
organize themselves around; making what
Sun Ra, in his own way chiding one critic’s
attempt to classify his compositions
as free jazz, more accurately dubbed
“phre” jazz: the ph signifying the definite
article, and though I don’t know how
in English to make that claim cohere,
it’s an assertion I’ll grant Sun Ra
not just because he may have meant
the definite article of some form of speech
not yet part of human understanding,
but also because it imbues everything
in his songs with purpose. There in the word,
Ra said, indicates the sun, so that his music
is the music of the sun. And really,
though I don’t hear on this record
the enveloping whiteout of sound
I think of when I try to imagine the music
of the sun, I appreciate his gesture
at something so large. And, in the most
chaotic moments, where I hear him
fumbling with the meter, when Sun Ra
lets out a too-quick flurry of notes and the band
behind him lets the song dissolve into
something like the noise of two dozen
pinched balloons deflating as they streak
across a room, I hear in it their collective
enthusiasm, all of them overeager to enjoy
at once all the notes in the song, which
validates the notion of this music as
a perpetual celebration of motion and being.
Perhaps that’s the thing that’s got
these two mottle-headed blackbirds
returning to my windowsill each time
I put the record on. Now, because I’ve made
my friend’s voice into one of the many critics
always running through my head, and so
clearly hear his claim to distrust something
as cogent as the pleasure one might take
from listening to arranged sound, I think how,
seeing this scene, my friend would say
that these two birds can’t be lingering here
to enjoy the songs with me; he’d claim how
they sometimes caw and flap around is proof
of agitation, their dancing a defense,
a sign they fear the source of such adamant,
inscrutable music, and he’d say that if there’s
a lesson to take from the nature these two birds
exemplify, it’s in the way they distrust art
like it’s some classic predatory foe. Granted,
I’ve stacked my lines against him; granted,
I’ve heard him sing “Daisy, Daisy, give me
your answer, do” to his daughter in perfect
tender pitch, and though when singing it
he did disrupt the tune’s rhythm, it wasn’t
to deconstruct the body of the song,
but so he and his girl could exchange
a bit of laughter. But I’d like to think
he would agree with how I’ve drawn him,
that this is an accurate description of how
he prefers to think about music, diminishing
the notion that art can provide joy,
calling me either wrong or naive
when I disagree. I can see him citing the way
I’ve made a prop of him here as proof
that coherence is all a false elaboration.
So what can I say to such a claim, other than
to admit I know no more than he does
how birds experience joy, and that
my pleasure in this scene comes as much
from listening to Sun Ra dismantling a melody
as it does from the wonder of these birds
returning to hop and sputter along my sill,
whether they gather here by chance, delight,
or to try to call the song to order.
by Charlie Clark
from Blackbird, 2011