Saturday, May 1, 2021

Peter Cherches discusses Tracks: Memoirs from a Life with Music, a new chapbook, with interviewer Kirpal Gordon




author Peter Cherches; photo credit: Elder Zamora

KIRPAL GORDON: Pete, since we last talked on the release of your book Lift Your Right Arm in November, 2013 (Taking Giant Steps: PETER CHERCHES: AN INTERVIEW WITH AN ULTRA-MINIMALIST (giantstepspress.blogspot.com), you've published two more books with Pelekinesis: Autobiography Without Words, a collection of short tongue-in-cheek vignettes from your Brooklyn childhood, and Whistler's Mother's Son, a collection of even shorter meta-fictive pieces. Both exemplify what Publishers Weekly noted about your work, namely that you are “one of the innovators of the short short story.” So what's going on in your new chapbook, Tracks: Memoirs from a Life with Music? 

 

 

PETER CHERCHES: Since you mentioned Autobiography Without Words, I’ll start there. I really hadn’t written much personal stuff for much of my writing career, and what little I did was thickly disguised. When I started food blogging in 2006, after a long hiatus (nearly 15 years) from writing (well, if you don't include a doctoral dissertation), I started writing about early food memories, and that led to more in the memoir form, and many of those pieces became part of that book. At the beginning of last year, just before Whistler’s Mother’s Son was about to be published, I started to think about a next writing project, possibly a break from fiction. Around that time I remembered poet Al Young’s series of musical memoirs, which I had read some years ago. I decided that would be fertile ground for me. I’d written a little about music before, but very little considering how central music has been to my life both as a listener and a performer. I wanted to make something personal of music, talk about the music that was the soundtrack to different times and ages, and animate in words the way that music becomes part of the fabric of our lives. I was able to write a lot in a pretty short period of time, especially after I was furloughed from my day job. I actually came up with enough for a full-length book, but I wasn’t satisfied enough with much of what I had written. I felt some of the pieces were forced, some redundant, and a number too descriptive of the music without enough of the personal connection. Then, last fall, Mark Givens, my publisher at Pelekinesis, announced that he was starting a new chapbook press, a joint venture with Dennis Callaci, the owner of the indie record label Shrimper. They were talking about doing books of 25 to 50 pages. I approached Mark with the proposal to do a selected group of musical memoirs, and he liked the idea. So I went through my manuscript, choose the pieces that were the strongest in different ways, about the joy of discovery, the sustenance of enthusiasms, and appreciation of the artists whose work becomes part of us. A few of the entries were adapted from tributes I had written to individual musicians, and some were the result of merging two pieces that really were talking about the same thing. Bamboo Dart Press decided to publish the book, though it broke their original length limit and ended up at about 65 pages.

 

KIRPAL GORDON: I noticed on the Contents page a series of links. For the technically challenged like myself, can you explain how to find your blog and the play list of tunes and the specific version that relates to each vignette?

 

PETER CHERCHES: The URL to the blog, where the playlists are hosted, is https://cherches-tracks.blogspot.com/. There are Spotify and YouTube playlists in the right sidebar of the page with recordings of all the songs that form the individual section titles in the book. It's a little different on a phone, and that's explained in the informational post. I figured that with the technology that's available it would be nice to have an easy reference for readers who want to hear the music. The Spotify playlist is called Peter Cherches: Tracks, so one could also search for that directly on Spotify.

 


KIRPAL GORDON: Regarding your phrase “joy of discovery,” it’s all over this memoir. As you make clear in your opening pieces, your two brothershow many years apart?were a great aid to the discovery process. Come on, now: you open with the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” when you are eight years old, jump “Milestones” with that first great Miles Davis band and then it’s the Fillmore East and Mountain’s masterpiece cover of the Jack Bruce-Pete Brown epic “Theme for an Imaginary Western” with that great vocal from Felix Pappalardi.

 

It’s not just that you have a wide-open ear; your discovery process is contagious. I followed your directions and played every song as I read the piece. What a find: Oliver Nelson’s “Stolen Moments” with bop lyrics (I didn’t know!). You’ve penned quite a moving tribute to Mark Murphy as “the quintessential jazz singer.”

 

PETER CHERCHES: "Contagious" is a word I like! 

 

My oldest brother, who was a true mentor, was 12 years my senior. My other brother, whose tastes are rather pedestrian, is eight years older. Our father died when I was two, so my brothers kind of filled in the gaps.

 

I decided to sequence the pieces chronologically according to when the songs made their impact on me, so the earlier pieces lean toward those big discoveries, whole bodies of music (e.g., my intro to classic blues via blues-rock), and the later ones become more specialized as my listening becomes more broadly informed. Then, right at the end I return to childhood, because I wanted to go out with the warm memory of my grandparents and my first exposure to Billie Holiday. The penultimate piece in the book, "Turn! Turn! Turn!," is the last one I wrote, and I used the refrain, "To everything there is a season," as a fulcrum to get back to childhood after talking about my long hiatus from writing and performance.

 

I used the Murphy piece to both pay tribute to him and to talk about jazz singing from my dual perspective as listener and singer. He wrote a number of original lyrics to jazz standards, by the way. Freddie Hubbard's "Red Clay" is another one. Murphy is a hero, but he's Dionysian to my Apollonian. If I wanted to write about a more subdued hero, I could have chosen Bill Henderson, who for me is the king of understated swing.

 

 

KIRPAL GORDON: Regarding your brothers, the older as a Rat Pack lover and Great American Songbook fan and the younger “whose tastes are rather pedestrian,” Tracks reveals you as a synthesizer of highbrow and low, listener of popular and avant-garde. It reads to me like you are seeking the authentic, the true and the original. Even when you’re turned on to blues performed by rock guys, your predilection is toward the existential and the roots lovers (Johnny Winter, for example, rather than Alvin Lee). Your “sustenance of enthusiasm and appreciation of the artists whose work becomes part of us,” as you phrased it, has everything to do with your long love affair with the music. You got it bad, and that’s great for the reader.

 

You really celebrate New York City, too. Hank Williams in a Park Slope bar’s jukebox! Your report on Rivbea is one of the most impressive appreciations of the Loft Era and where Sam Rivers was taking the music. Likewise, your eye on Butch Morris and his Conductions. You catch Steve Lacy with Mal Waldron. Most evocative of the best of the Big Apple.

 

 

PETER CHERCHES: I'm not the type who fetishizes the "authentic," but I'm interested in roots, connections, and directions, so I always want to find what's behind something that strikes me. For instance, I came to Brazilian music through bossa nova, and MPB artists like Milton Nascimento, but when I'd see them covering an old samba by Noel Rosa or Dorival Caymmi, I wanted to know the originals. I'm one of those people who has to know all the sidemen on the record, and who else they performed with.

 

I'm very proud of the piece on Rivbea. There are other reports on the music, but I think I gave a feeling of what it was like to be in the audience. I wrote a version of the Butch Morris piece on my blog the day I learned he passed away, and adapted it a bit. Add Lacy and I think you've got an interesting trio of "representative men" of avant-garde jazz.

 

 

KIRPAL GORDON: Tracks has you literally traveling the world in search of music. You flew to London to check out Brazilian music at the Royal Albert Hall. In search of samba you travelled to the city of Salvador in Bahia. What were your other stops in Brazil? Did you get to the opera house in Manaus? In India you’re searching for cassette tapes of U. Srinavas, the prodigy who would later work with John McLaughlin in Shakti, and in Moscow you’re listening to “Feelings.” You make pilgrimage to Memphis, Tennessee, but it’s to the W.C. Handy Museum, not Graceland.

 

 

PETER CHERCHES: I didn't get anywhere near Manaus. In Brazil I was mostly in Rio and Salvador, with a short visit to Ouro Preto, the historic gold town in Minas Gerais (Milton Nascimento's home state). I didn't actually search for U. Srinivas, he was recommended to me by a guy in a little cassette shop: "Only 12 years old!" This was well before he started working with John McLaughlin, and I eventually saw Remember Shakti in Montreal.

 

 

KIRPAL GORDON: The other killer ingredient in the memoir is the inside dope on the music’s composers, performers and venues as well as observations cultural, historical and personal. I’m glad you brought up your fantasia on your grandparents listening to Lady Day’s “I Cover the Waterfront” on their old Victrola. It’s the Gestalt-ing of the personal remembrance in the context of Billie Holiday’s unique genius that makes the vignette so poignant.

 

 

PETER CHERCHES:  I've always been a voracious reader of music history and biography, so I have that kind of info at the ready, but I still do research to check my own facts. As far as your observation on the Billie Holiday piece, that's exactly why I ended with it. I think it came together nicely to make a full circle back to childhood. 

 

 

KIRPAL GORDON: Having been there, I am particularly fascinated by your incident at Epidaurus, the ancient healing center of Aesculapius, where it is said that the cure for illness can be found in the contemplation of the beautiful. It sounds as if you took quite a giant step. Here's the entire piece called “Thelonious Monk, ‘Blue Monk’ (1952),” followed by a clip of you singing the tune in question:

 

            In college I was working toward becoming a playwright, studying with Jack Gelber, best known for the play The Connection. Most of my literature courses were in drama, from the English, Comparative Literature, and Classics departments, and I took a number of courses in the Theatre department too. My professor for history of theatre was Benito Ortolani, a scholar of classical Japanese theatre, with a secondary focus on Western antiquity. Ortolani was as Italian as they come. He had a thick accent and his hands were in constant motion. One day a student asked him, “Professor Ortolani, how many languages do you speak?” He replied, “Seven living-a ones and two dead-a ones.” In Ortolani’s class I learned about the surviving ancient Greek theatre at Epidaurus, a magical place that since then had always had a bookmark in my brain.

            It was close to 40 years later that I finally got to Greece. From Nafplio, a beautiful coastal city on The Peloponnese, I took a tour to Epidaurus.

            The theatre was built at the end of the 4th Century BCE, not long after the death of Euripides, whose plays were surely performed there, along with those of Aeschylus and Sophocles. It’s famous for its acoustics, a marvel of ancient engineering. Our tour guide pointed out that if you stand in the center, at ground level, and speak at a normal conversational volume, your words will be heard in even the highest, furthest seats—and the theatre seats about 14,000 spectators. “Try it,” she told us. A couple of people went down and spoke a few words. What was I going to do? Here I was at a veritable shrine of the theatre world, long a destination of desire for me; I certainly wasn’t going to say something banal like, “Hello, everybody!” Then I had a brainstorm.

            My life in the arts has taken a number of twists and turns. By my senior year in college, it became clear to me that short fiction, rather than drama, was my true métier as a writer. By the early eighties I was doing what people were calling performance art, mostly monologues based on my own texts. Then I started working with musicians, and that inspired me to get serious about singing, so I studied for about five years with a fabulous jazz singer, Nanette Natal. In 1987 I did my first concert as a jazz singer, at the New York alternative music space Roulette. For the show, I had written lyrics for 18 of Thelonious Monk’s compositions. Now I’d take the opportunity to consecrate Epidaurus with the music of Thelonious Monk. 

            So when my turn came I started singing my lyrics to “Blue Monk.” I had finished one chorus when a security guard came up to me, sternly wagging her finger, saying, “No singing!” I stopped, but I should have said, “And what the hell do you think the Greek chorus did?”

            I tell people that singing Monk at Epidaurus was the closest thing this atheist Jew has ever had to a “spiritual” experience. I hadn’t really sung for close to 20 years, and this inspired me to get back in the game.

Blue Monk, Cornelia Street Cafe, March 13, 2016 - YouTube

 

PETER CHERCHES: My visit to Epidaurus was both a fulfillment of an old dream and an unexpected renewal, and from there I returned to childhood!

 

 

KIRPAL GORDON: For me the strongest combination of song and tale is Anton Webern’s “Six Bagatelles for String Quartet (Op. 9).” I had my own wacky Gestalt moment. As the composition played on YouTube, I read your praise of Webern’s restraint and reliance on silence. I started to experience the music differently. My ears stopped efforting, and the “silent sections” filled in the “musical sections.” Then I read Schoenberg’s response to “Six Bagatelles” and realized it’s an Ars Poetica for Tracks: “Consider what moderation is required to express oneself so briefly. Every glance can be expanded into a poem, every sigh into a novel. But to express a novel in a single gesture, joy in a single breath—such concentration can only be present when there is a corresponding absence of self-indulgence.”

 

 

PETER CHERCHES: I think it might be the longest piece in the book, but I'm nonetheless pleased by how much I was able to squeeze into it. It may be my most fully formed exposition of my own working methods and concerns, at least regarding the influence of work in the other arts. As far as moderation is concerned, that's why the book is 65 pages instead of 200!

 

Tracks is available from Bamboo Dart Press at https://www.bamboodartpress.com/store/peter_cherches-tracks_memoirs_from_a_life_with_music.html

Peter Cherches w/ mic, Dave Hofstra on bass; photo credit: Scott Friedlander


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