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 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

An excerpt from “Under the Whitestone Bridge: Death at the Music Mansion Reunion” by Kirpal Gordon

 

Chapter 1

 

Playing the birthday concert for Faith, my mentor’s mentor, was a love supreme.

But if I knew that the concert’s aftermath would result in the felony arrest of my mentor Pavel Trzaska, I never would have entertained the idea of going. Nor convinced him to go. Nor convinced him that I, Orfea Goodnight, his twenty-two-year-old female writing apprentice and fellow musician, should come along on the journey from New Orleans to New York City.

From the second story bathroom window of Faith’s house, I watched red and blue colors flash like strobe lights from multiple police vehicles making the officials appear to be moving in slow motion. Under a dark orange moon that rose above Manhattan’s skyline in the west, police were cordoning off the side of the house with yellow NYPD tape just outside the parlor’s window where Faith spent much of her time. That’s where Gil and Red earlier in the evening had unveiled their birthday gift to her: a rocky grotto shaped in a semi-circle with a gurgling water feature. It was landscaped by Gil and the small wooden deer drinking at the pond’s edge was sculpted in wood by Red.

Now it was the scene of a crime.

At the end of a winding unpaved lane the Faith’s property sat hidden on three sides by Norway spruce, cedar of Lebanon and black pine. Bordering the East River near Boosters Beach, between the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge to the left and the Throgs Neck Bridge to the right, the house—what everyone calls the Music Mansion—was a sprawling three-story Victorian structure. With its wrap-around porch and large parlor that opened into a living room, it proved to be an excellent location for the Saturday night concert—at least until the last song when a gun shot rang out.

We heard a scream and then a splash.

Immediately, band members rushed to the grotto and pulled the victim’s bloody head out of the small rock-rimmed pond. I happened to be outside at the time talking on my cell phone with my boyfriend Rogelio, and I saw the whole thing go down.

My bandmates checked for a pulse, found none and called 911. A patrol car, which I later learned was sitting at Whitestone Park three blocks away, arrived two minutes later, took one look at what happened and called in. More police cars rolled up.

Watching the cops move around the crime scene showed me how clueless they were.

Compared to what I witnessed, all that they gathered from their interviews with the band and the audience was a four-word chronology: shot, scream, splash, death. How many variations would they consider: Was the victim shot dead by a bullet or frightened to death by getting shot at? Was the shot unrelated to the victim? What was that splash: the sound of a human head hitting the water or maybe just the victim’s foot or a rock that had been dislodged by the bullet? Was the bullet and the splash even related? As for who uttered the scream that followed the shot, was that the victim, the shooter or a third party caught by surprise chancing upon the scene? 

The evidence would not add up; it kept telling a different story.

I’m no expert on forensic science, but things appeared to be getting most foul, mon ami. When the medical examiners’ team patted down the victim, they found no entry wounds and no bullets. Instead, they found wads of cash in the pockets of his pants and shirt. I watched as they photographed and bagged five wallets, a collection of jewelry, a snub-nosed gun (possibly just fired) and a small vial (possibly of poison) from inside his overcoat.

Didn’t this new evidence suggest the alleged victim might also be a victimizer, likely to be found guilty of criminal trespass, theft, possible armed robbery and attempted assassination?

Back to shot-scream-splash-death: What if the victim had been rifling through people’s coats in the vestibule of the house, stashing the valuables in their coat and pockets, got discovered and called on it, ran at top speed out of the front door and down the steps, made a left, headed toward the water feature, turned their head, saw the gun in the hand of their pursuer and at the sound of its discharge simply dove for cover accidentally slipping on the wet mossy rocks and crushing their skull or drowning? That’s certainly not murder, but could be construed as involuntary manslaughter for the trigger-happy pursuer.

Instead, what if the fleeing victim/victimizer approached the water feature, turned their head, fired their snub-nosed gun at their pursuer, turned too quickly, lost their balance, screamed and made a splash by smashing their head into the pool or its rocky edge or its metal pipe? Involuntary manslaughter for the gardening team of Red and Gil would be a long shot. But suicide could be on the table just as easily as an accidental death.  

The slope was getting slippery, and until the arrival of the autopsy and toxicology reports, anything was possible. For example, was the alleged victim in bad health, inebriated or under the influence of drugs? In that case, merely running from a pursuer could give our victim a heart attack. To take it a turn darker and make everyone at the concert a suspect: Since poison is already in possible play and there’s food and drink everywhere, what if the victim had eaten or drank something intended to take their life? Such a possibility would prove pre-meditation and justify a claim of murder. But what if the victim had an allergy and died from eating something as common as peanuts or shellfish—then who’s to blame?

Nothing was clear and so much of the story seemed improvisational.

Who was the victim and who were their victims?

Little was said among the detectives, but the plot was thickening.

With their wall of lights turned up to superbright, the CSI unit inspected the grotto and sculpture. Sure enough, they found a bullet buried in the deer’s wooden left foot at water’s edge. When extracted with needle-nosed pliers and put it a plastic evidence bag, I got a bad feeling. Because the concert’s last song was a solo instrumental played by Hope, the police would soon realize that anyone else in the band—Smokey, Gil, Red, Liv, me or Pavi—could have slipped out of the parlor and onto the lawn or porch with time enough to shoot the escaping victim/victimizer at the grotto.

I’m not saying Pavi shot anyone, only that his return home was growing catastrophic.

The cops finished taking the last of the photos, put the dead body into a black bag, zipped it up and headed toward the flashing vehicles. Once the ambulance left the gray-pebbled driveway, I could see what had been hidden from my view: a blue squad car over whose trunk stood lanky, gray-haired, dumbfounded Pavi, spread eagled. New York’s Finest frisked him and handcuffed him, mirandized him and accordioned all six feet and three inches of him into the back seat.

Hope and Liv ran out from the porch.

“You got the wrong person,” Hope shouted.

“Come back and arrest us,” Liv shouted. “We did it.”

They failed to outrun the squad car which left for the police station.

From her room below me I heard Faith crying.

In the driveway under a taxus shrub Red and Gil were consoling a distraught gal who I had seen at the concert. I got the impression she was their old friend, but the news they shared did not seem good.

As for me, spying on everyone from the safe distance of the second-floor window, I felt less like an observer and more like an accomplice. I ought to have prevented this death from happening, and no matter how I tried to play it off, I knew I was responsible. I may only be Pavi’s sex-crazed, know-nothing writing apprentice and music nerd, but I had promised his girlfriend Cajun Karen in New Orleans that I would look after him. I owed it to her. Not only that, in a long line of writing apprentices he had mentored, I was only his second female apprentice—the first didn’t work out so well—and I felt a sisterly duty to those who might come after me.

I should add that I love the guy, you know, platonically.

I knew I had to do more than just watch the police haul his ass away. So I dashed down the stairs, collected what I thought of as relevant evidence of my own guilt, slipped into my blue Jetta and followed at a safe distance the caravan of civilian and law enforcement vehicles headed for the 109th Precinct in downtown Flushing.