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
brothers—how
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 |
