I’m Set Free

I May Be Through with 15, But It’s Not Through with Me

When I was 15, I wanted to be older, independent, established.  I thought I was through with 15 at 16, maybe even before, maybe the whole time I was 15.  We are never through.  It was all coming at me at once—girls, novels, poems, jazz harmony.  When we press play, we are voluntarily going back there, layered with whatever else.

I used to love the rainbow
And I used to love the view
Another early morning
I pretend that it was new
But I caught the darkness, baby
And I got it worse than you.

Leonard Cohen was new to me then, too.  Can we ever pretend anything is new?  Are we deceiving ourselves every time?  Is reality the endgame or the thing we learn to dodge, before we inevitably catch the darkness?

At 15, a piano teacher told me to get a record by McCoy Tyner called Just Feelin’.  His name was Ellingson, a near namesake to Duke and the author of Invisible Man. Is feeling ever just feeling?  Just feelin’ sounds like the most natural thing in the world—if you can play piano like McCoy Tyner.  Tyner played with John Coltrane, who practiced all day to sound like no one else.  It was his way of feeling, and that was the point.  Elizabeth Bishop wrote, “Writing poetry is an unnatural act.  It takes skill to make it seem natural.”

Are you at your most raw when you are discovering things for the first time, or is one more vulnerable later, when it’s gone?  I know when I knew less and felt endlessly.  Every time I fell in love with a girl or a song, a chord, a poem, a narrative--and these things were happening all at once—I was getting further away from 15 and closer to here, wherever that is.

I was a kid with perfect pitch who could read changes but not notation.  I felt like a con artist.  I loved what I loved and wanted to keep going.  At 10, it was Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel.  At 11, The Who.  At 12, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd.  And at 14, I went deeper into Dylan and was turned on to Steely Dan.   I saw Round Midnight starring Dexter Gordon and bought an album called Thelonious Monk’s Greatest Hits, as if he had them.  I played it during Sunday brunch with my grandmother, who asked, during “Epistrophy,” “Why do you like this music?” 

There were no lyrics printed on Blonde on Blonde, and no internet to search them out.  “My warehouse eyes / My Arabian drums.”  I thought it would make sense when I saw it, but I realized making sense was not the point.  I bought a Steely Dan fake book. This was a new difficulty, one as inscrutable as some of those Dylan lines.  I was used to thinking in triads or simple sevenths.  Every chord has a one, a tonic, and I learned it was uncool to play it.  That’s what the bass player is for.

It hadn’t occurred to me that chords could open up and become more sophisticated.  I did not know what chromatic harmony was, but I wanted to find out.  The colors lit up, and I realized that in combination, they could become more complex, that a touch of dissonance could enhance the harmony.  I knew that Steely Dan was named after a dildo.  Learning the chords felt counterintuitive at first but came out like pleasure.

At MOMA, I learned that Matisse got a color by mixing the other two in the painting.  And chords were like that.  The 12-tone scale was finite, but the range of how the notes could react to each other could sound infinite; language could be like that, too. 

I have never met Napoleon, but I plan to find the time.

Playing the chords of “Pretzel Logic” felt twisted, but it all made sense. 

Mr. Ellingson said that if I wanted to swing, I had to stop listening to rock and roll.  You don’t want to sound like Elton John, do you?  When I think about it now, I can’t believe that I, especially at that age, could possibly give up rock and roll.  Give up rock and roll?  Unthinkable. 

I learned how to take the rock and roll out of my playing, and how to put it back, too.  That square 4/4 beat turned into something flexible.  My voicings became hip.  I was a good mimic.   Moving beyond didn’t mean I couldn’t come back. I had to.

At the same time, I was discovering the Velvet Underground.  There was no swing in most of it, but those lyrics went to dark places where even Dylan didn’t go.  Taste the boot of shiny, shiny leather.  White light is lighting up my brain.  Between thought and expression, lies a lifetime.  I was too sweet for rock and roll.   

When I was 16, I took classical piano lessons with a prodigy a couple of years older than me.  I played pieces from Debussy’s Children’s Corner, and, since I do not read music, I learned it by listening to a cassette of Walter Gieseking, note by note.  I performed it at a recital, once.  The next summer, I asked the same prodigy to teach me again. 

“You know, you’re not a kid anymore,” he said.

I’m not a kid anymore.  But I can still pretend it’s new.

I've been set free and I've been bound
To the memories of yesterday's clouds
I've been set free and I've been bound

And now I'm set free
I'm set free
I'm set free to find a new illusion

After a certain point, I had to stop with the cassette player, pretending I could play classical.  I could never make up for a lifetime of slouching and hitting the keys with the wrong hand position, of never learning notation.   I would be who I was.  I did not know exactly what I would do with it. 

I do know that no one is telling me what I can and can’t listen to.  Mr. Ellingson told me to give up rock and roll.  My grandmother demanded to know why I liked “Epistrophy.”  I don’t like “Epistrophy,” I love it.   We often have to hide in our greasy cubby holes to listen to what we love, but I’m doing it right now, and no one is stopping me. 

I love to listen to Debussy, but only when someone else is playing it.  I’m not in the Children’s Corner anymore.  But when I’m right here with you, listening, I’m still taking it all in.  I pretended when it was new.  It’s not unfolded before me like it was at 15, but knowing what it is has its advantages. One day, this will all be over.  But not yet.  I pretend it’s new.  I’m set free to find a new illusion.