I scare easily, but I’ve become more and more accustomed to being spoken to from beyond the grave. Writing this book has allowed me to adjust to the voices that come to me, the patterns that make themselves known to me, to look in the eye what startles me.
I’m listening to Eric Dolphy speak—caught on tape after a gig in Amsterdam in 1964. A season before his death the same year: it was mid-spring then and he’d leave by summer—neglected in an ER bay under the false assumption that the onset of a diabetic coma was drug withdrawal he needed to sweat out. I’m not surprised when the serene voice, who says the names “Mingus” and “Coltrane” with whimsy and reverence, speaks on the exact thing I’ve been writing about. The exact word. Because everything has been talking to each other, hasn’t it? It’s really about surrender, about developing an ambivalence to my own weak logic, and giving myself up to the cosmic one.
My love encourages me not to pathologize my forgetting, instead to follow the winding path down memory with openness. When I hear “Trouble Sleeping” I remember the first CD I ever bought on my own. When I am prompted “green”, eventually, after much strife, I call up the high ceilings and mint walls of the cafe I like—tiny jars of Bonne Maman asked for to accompany so much brie. I’m capable, after all, of calling it up. And maybe my dispatches from the dead are just as valuable a calling up as memory.
When I was a little kid, my aunt made sure to tell me that my sensitivity was a gift. She knew I was born into a world where sensitivity would be a curse. There’s that church song—when he calls my name I will hear him, when he calls for me I will answer. So many people who sing it will not hear because they are not willing to sit with the dead with sensitivity. Sitting with the dead is but a delicate listening. These days, I stay ready. Inclining my ear and my heart. What always scared me (the open-mouthed articulations at the end of “Mercy, Mercy Me” — the skit in “Living for the City” ) now shows me the expanse of the whole world. Fear is a portal.
Eric Dolphy speaks on what I’m writing about because he’s at the long table with me having a strawberry pop, because without knowing it I called. His “Something Sweet, Something Tender” sounds like neither because it refuses to resolve. But resolution is saccharine—not sweetness or tenderness. I have to remind myself to listen more sharply.
And sometimes that involves tracing my steps. Sometimes it involves looking straight ahead and not back. Sometimes the dead are sitting on my settee whether I have set anything out as offering or not. And what remains: the barest, wordless exchange of signs between bodied and disembodied, passes underneath or beyond my own comfortable logic. It’s just that Dolphy’s there, and I’m the interviewer, and jazz is our religion. Leaning not on any understanding, just on delicate listening.