Listening to Chico Hamilton has taught me that you needn’t feel helplessly powerless in the face of the most painful of problematic loves. Just listen to a few songs and you’ll soon find your own power for finding tenderness in even the bleakest and craziest of failing romances.
Come on, you probably do it. You know you already do it. You’re heart broken and you listen to your favorite Rock or Heavy Metal, Classical or 80s Pop. Or maybe it’s Doo Whop or EMO or 60s Mod as you hurt over him or her, or them, what have you. You put on the song with whatever device, could be just your memory, and you start to feel better. Could be just a sweet release, a distraction, or maybe like morphine it gives you a distanced perspective as you go through your pain—the experience becomes more than just hurting. It becomes maybe something like living and hurting.
I’m here to argue that you can do more with your listening experience. Instead of listening like a lump to your favorite music and using it as an aural form of Tequila shots, you can use it to wake you up, make you a more powerful connoisseur [It’s all about the flipping connaitre, people!] about your own love, about your own living with your own love. You can get results after listening to JUST FIVE jazz songs, all for the bargain basement price of,…I don’t know, demonstrating what you think is $19.95 worth of respect to the genre of jazz music—in as many installments as you can afford.
It beats a stick in the eye. It beats powerlessly hurting over the person you’re currently hurting over.
TO REPEAT: THE POWER OF MUSIC AS A PHENOM TOOL
Love and music, you can’t write enough about it. How it inspires, captures the passion, and soothes one through the pain. There’s been a lot about love and jazz in these columns: Miles Davis and sweet heartbreak; Billy Strayhorn and the heroism of loving despite everything, and— covering different ends of learning to love oneself— Sun Ra and Hank Mobley.
This specific column will focus on using the music of Chico Hamilton to meditate upon the tenderness of love through even the toughest of pains. It will also be very practical: how to use just five pieces to get some Zen insights on love.
As always, the principle underlying these columns is the same: life is hard, confusing and often painful and music can help you be smarter in weathering the madness. For those who don’t need to think too hard about their love, more power to them. This column is for those who have to eke love out of the toughest circumstances, for a troubled heart inevitably makes the mind an exhausted servant. There is no shame in fighting ferociously to pull love out of a few moments of each day. In fact, it’s quite brave.
It need not be jazz. It need not be even music. You could use sunrises, or people watching, looking at crazy patterns in your expensive coffee. I’m gonna hit you with a crazy, only moderately pretentious, word: It’s all about the phenomenology. It’s about being savvy about your experience. Zen monks and artists and philosophers and probably loads of successful people have been doing it for years. It’s about simply doing more than sitting on your Tuckus like a garden Gnome and realizing: “Shazzbott, I think I feel something!”
CHICO HAMILTON AND THE PROMISE OF LOVE
Alright, take a deep breath, try to clear your mind and start off this process by listening to the piece This Dream.
This Dream is like a Latin-y, jazzy exploration of a single theme of longing, of wanting, that is lush, rounded, red and warm, like a hot glass of Merlot mixed with honey, cloves, cinnamon and orange. There, to me, sounds like an expression of connection, coming and going. It’s like an escalating dance between two minds, two souls, two powers as they explore how far and how fast and how slow they can make this interaction. There are explosions. There is shyness. There is playfulness and sure as heck there is aggressiveness. There may be sweating.
It’s almost as if the two powers portrayed in this piece are exploring different kinds of harmony. There is running away, catching up and outright ensnaring. There is slowing down and reconciling. There is a buildup of sorts towards different ways of committing to this dance. At least this is what happens when I listen to this.
Ok. Now rest a bit, do the deep-breath-and-relaxation thing and listen now to Mysterious Maiden.
Holy Caramel Apples Batman! There is sweet and chewy romance in this piece. This is a declaration of excitement, and awakening, of unadulterated hope. This is the sunny sense you get after the first flush of confidence in love. This is when you are finally certain that someone cares about you and is equally crazy enough to hum silly tunes with you as you climb them mountains, or really high sidewalk islands, dance in the streets or even smile to that really scary neighbor who walks his iguana outside with a dog harness. You dare to be excited about getting up in the morning or even looking at what is around the corner—as you walk at your own speed. It is silly, gushy, goofy and makes others either smile or go overboard on ironic monotone one-liners. It’s the brightest, shiniest, and sweetest slice of sentiment.
Saccharine-much? Of course it is, but not all sweetness leads to tooth decay.
I would argue that one of the many, many gifts of Mr. Hamilton’s music is the ability to portray the innocent promise of that first blush of love– at the beginning when it is most pure and vulnerable. Mr. Hamilton was one of jazz’s earliest and broadest fusion innovators, daring to mix cool California sounds with Mexican flare or even classical music. He loved to put together bands that included guitars, violins and other instruments that pushed the envelope of strict jazz.
Mr. Hamilton was also an artist who dared to feel. During eras when many jazz artists got bogged down in treating their music as opaque phenomenological chess games, Mr. Hamilton embraced emotion. This was a man who wrote a legion of film themes, and covered armies of others. He was also an actor, and had the courage to allow emotion to be simply and clearly felt in his music. And he paid for it sometimes.
He was able to portray that first star you navigated towards when you left the safe Haven of your emotions and tacked out for the first time on that tempestuous ocean of your passions.
Now why am I asking you to listen to these two pieces? The first reason is for you just to feel them, and then to do the typical neurotic New York thing, and overthink the heck out of them. The beauty of listening to good music sometimes is that it can teach you to be a wine-taster of your own emotions.
In this case, we’re talking about love and all the sweetness you derive from it.
Alright, why do you love, who do you love and why are you doing this at all?
Do you love this person because he or she is beautiful and this reinforces your self-worth? Is this person a carbon copy of you, or the opposite? Are they able to serve as the Devil’s Advocate to your craziness and are able to tease out silly happiness out of your existential bumbling?
Did you love this person once, can’t find that feeling anymore and are just remaining loyal to an experience that once was but is no more?
Let’s make this harder. Maybe you love someone who is addicted, or failing, or now angry and mean, or just lost. Maybe you only see this person once a month due to economic or career circumstances.
Maybe you just love that quizzical contrariness this person displays alternate Thursdays during lunch-time walks on the High Line in Chelsea.
The love you feel for a person can be rare, conflicted or just so hard to access—and only by way of the craziest levels of work and sacrifice. Trust me, I know these experiences. Maybe you can’t help but love the one who just hurts you. Believe me, I feel you.
Sometimes you can’t help it. Sometimes there is nothing to do. Sometimes you have to do too much. But understanding a little more of what it is you feel and how and why, yada, you have a little more power. You’re still tacking in that torrential, crazy wavy ocean, but you appreciate why.
THE RHYTHM OF RELATIONSHIPS
Ok, onto the two next songs. Do the same focusing exercise that works for you and then turn on Blue Sands.
Listen to the beats, how the pattern of sounds goes faster and slower, almost as if on a curve. Many of the notes hit at times that you don’t expect. Many things in this piece don’t happen as you expect them. It’s like listening to two dancers playing tricks on each other. Instead of bowing at the beginning of the dance, they kiss passionately and then walk off or maybe one is ready to take the other’s hand, but the hand is not given. One is definitely leading, one is chasing. These wacky accelerations are not unnerving, instead they feel exhilarating, like watching a formulaic romantic comedy or cop show, but from another country and in another language. Just similar enough to what you are used to, but different enough to put a shine on everything, a new awareness. Oh, I never realized the partner cop always made that kind of goofy face when making the non sequitur.
Now, on to Peregrinations.
The beats here are rich, complex. Sometimes it feels like there are too many of them. Sometimes the rhythms are dissonant and other times distracting. Other times they jive exactly with the way your pulse and you excitement and your passion is running and the whole piece seems to jump start your own personal exultation. At other times the beats start to join together, in some kind of harmony. Sometimes, the harmony seems like a compromise, a cobbled together alliance for the next few measures. Other times, it’s a beautiful union. There is not perfection, never total perfection, as if it is an acknowledgement that you have to find that on your own elsewhere. It’s almost like you are dancing with a partner with a genius IQ who has already thought about the music on five different levels, while you are still trying to figure out where to put your feet without falling on your ass. While this person is perennially out of your league, for right now, maybe always, maybe for just a few minutes, this person is in synch with you. As the beats build and join, your hearts explode.
Now, why did I ask you to listen to these two songs: Rhythm. Glorious rhythm.
An important point to remember, Mr. Hamilton was one of the foremost, if not the foremost, jazz percussionist in the past century. Combine his mastery of beats and sound shapes with his composing ingenuity and you have a triple threat in musical illumination.
Mr. Hamilton once said that the only personal innovation we can add to any piece of music is the rhythm, that the colors and the feelings of the sounds have already been expressed for time immemorial behind us.
What the heck does any of this have to do with relationships and love? Consider this insane notion: every relationship has a rhythm.
You’ve experienced it. Your partner says something that annoys you or vice versa. And one of you then comes up with a nasty rejoinder or not. Conversation over dinner involves this amount of time talking about the other person’s stuff and then time about yours, etc.
Consider this about rhythm, it involves time, decisions and a sequence of actions. Do I put this beat here, or here?
The same can be said about relationships. Do I raise this uncomfortable question now, or later? Do I confront my loved here or tomorrow? When do we do what I want? And so on, etc.
Maybe the only time you get a moment to be romantic is Wednesday evening after 1 a.m. in between colic episodes of your baby and the banging of the water heater. Two or three minutes of blessed reminiscing of the sweetness of your love now defined by cycles of diaper changing and variations of strained tubers in jars.
The more attention, the more appreciation you can develop on the placing of a beat here or there could possibly sharpen your appreciation of when you say this, or hold back on that or start on that other thing.
Again, it is all about time and sequences of actions and the appreciation of the decisions you make from moment to moment. It is one of the most personal things you can bring to any relationship: your choices about every little piece of now.
GETTING MY MOJO WORKING
Ok. One last time. Back to your focusing thing. Breath. Yada. Focus. Yada, and then listen to Got My Mojo Working.
Look out, got it going on! This is a funny, goofy, just-not-caring piece, like those rare times when you have the courage to drive that powder blue Cadillac through Park Avenue, JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN. No neuroses, nothing about what your Mommy or Dad did. It’s just about being alive and just, yes indeed, embracing your sexuality, sex with the one you love and just not messing it up. Just being happy in that moment. Having some flipping fun. Careful! Careful! That’s it! Whooo! Looook out!
I asked you to listen to this piece because, just as it is important to turn on your brain now and then, it’s just as important, now and then, to turn the flipping thing off.
Stop thinking. Stop worrying. Stop prevaricating, strategizing and risk managing. Just live it.
Your mind is a fine instrument that must be used sometimes, a lot. Sometimes you have to stop using it. Period.
And that’s the key. Learning to use your mind like a fine musical instrument so your life can sing like your favorite musical pieces. You have to exercise it [Like it or not, when it comes to things that hurt you, you have to think. Metaphorical, or not metaphorical, hernia or not.]. You have to appreciate the tones and its workings.
And like any good player of any great instrument, now and then you have to show some appreciation for those who made you your tools.
In this case, a great deal of thanks to Mr. Hamilton and his pirates of insanely beatific passion.
May we hope that every love he has, has had, and will ever have are happy, and if they aren’t all happy, we hope at least that all of them were brilliant and worth having.
And I make the same wish for you.
Happy Holidays.
[This new format of "Listening to" hopefully will run more frequently, and will be written not only by Tommy Fernandez but by Mr. Tom Powers as well. Feel free to keep us honest with email suggestions on jazz artists and important themes of love.]
