I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: AMIR ELSAFFAR & TWO RIVERS-“Hemayoun” (Field Recordings, July 3, 2013).

I was pretty excited to see the start of this Field Recording [Amir ElSaffar & Two Rivers: Golden Sound In A Gleaming Space] because it begins with hammered dulcimer and oud.  I have never seen these two instruments used in jazz before.

But once the band starts the jazz pushes out he Middle eastern instruments somewhat.

The oud is certainly drowned out by the horns, but you can hear it plucking away.  And the hammered dulcimer is hardly used at all.

I had never heard of the participants although apparently

The session had the feeling of a reunion. ElSaffar — a trumpeter and santur (hammered dulcimer) player who was born near Chicago to an Iraqi father and an American mother, and who grew up immersed in both cultures — had recently moved from New York to Cairo to pursue his work with Arab classical music. But this group with Ole Mathisen on saxophone, Zafer Tawil playing oud, Carlo De Rosa on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums shifted into Two Rivers gear immediately.

At 3:49 when the sax solo starts the minimal oud is used more to keep the beat than anything.  At 5:10 the trumpet returns playing a riff with the sax.  By around 7 minutes its all trumpet and drums (some good improv) with the bassist adding rhythm but playing very hard and being barely heard.  At around 8 minutes there’s a minimal oud solo that runs through to the end of this song.  This is particularly cool, although I kind of wish the other guys didn’t drop out entirely–I’d like to see the oud share the stage with the traditional jazz instruments.

I love that the music has non-Western instrumentation but I feel like it is underutilized.  But maybe that’s not the point

 ElSaffar has found a beautiful and singular way of pairing the sibling spirits of jazz and the classical maqam system of the Arab world, with their shared spheres of improvisation, deep knowledge of tradition and urge to keep innovating. Two rivers, but they lead to the same ocean.

[READ: October 22, 2017] “The Sinking of the Houston”

O’Neill has a way with making stories amusing despite the tension underneath.

It begins with a defense of sleep. The narrator says when he became a parent of young children, he became an opportunist of sleep: “I found myself capable of taking a nap just about anywhere, even when standing in a subway car or riding an escalator.”  But when the boys grew up into “urban doofuses neurologically unequipped to perceive the risk incidental to their teenage lives,” sleep became much harder to get.  He would lie awake until they were all home, and then every sound in the house would be meaningful.

Then comes the phenomenon of Dad Chair, a black leatherette armchair which he has designated as his haven.

It has worked pretty well except when the boys disrupt the peace.

The middle son asks if he’s heard of Duvaliers, the dedicators of Haiti.  The dad says he knows all about them–they were horrible.  When the boy tries to tell him more details, he retorts: “I lived through it ! I don’t want to discuss it!”  The boy logically says you didn’t exactly live through it.

Another son asks where East Timor is.  They all want to talk about atrocities.  But he has a new philosophy–Cest la Vie–it works pretty well.

Then one night the middle child comes home and says he’s been mugged.  He says he and his friends were on a subway when a guy showed them a gun and demanded their phones.  Which they gave over.

The dad says they will call the cops, but the boys says the dude has his phone and knows all about him.  The dad concedes no cops and then tells us

I don’t mention that I have already resolved to find this man and break his fucking legs.

The phone has a tracking app of course.  He sees his sons phone.  But rather than travel to Brooklyn he’s going to wait for the guy to come to him –they live near Times Square.

He relates a story once before when someone criticized his children in an airport.  When the guy sad to control your children he got in the man’s face and said “I’ll control you.”  “You don;t mess with my children.”

At last the guy appears in Port Authority.  He narrator grabs a bat and runs out.

On the way out he meets his neighbor Eduardo.  He is a kindly older fellow–they are social but not friendly. Eduardo asks where he’s going.  The dad makes up a story and Eduardo says he’ll walk with him.  The dad is none too pleased about this, but he agrees.  And suddenly the story changes entirely.

Eduardo tell him of his own childhood.  Eduardo tells him he was on the Houston during the Bay of Pigs.  He was sixteen when it sank.  He also met Che Guevara.

This story has a very real ending but it’s not a very satisfying story ending.

But I loved the narrator’s voice throughout the story.