epilogue
Music & Literature
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
This was the music I was listening to, and most moved by,
when I started playing music myself in my thirties and forties. This particular anthology, assembled by a lunatic genius called Harry Smith, re-engineered American popular
music twice over (both on vinyl and on the occasion of the
CD re-release), in the process reminding us how unimportant ornament and musical pretension are. These are some
of the best songs ever produced in the American musical
tradition. And some of the simplest too.
Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy
by Sun Ra
In my forties, I began to like music that didn’t
sound like everything else. I liked music that
was casual about genre. I liked music that
prized its ability to express emotion above all
else. By this I do not mean songs about teenagers in love, but rather music that expressed
the complexity of feelings. Jazz, it turns out,
does this better than almost anything else.
Who knows where Sun Ra came from? He
says he came from Saturn, I believe, though he probably came
more from the racially segregated South. He had some strange
ideas, some sci-fi obscurantisms, but these ideas did not keep
him from being one of the very greatest bandleaders in the
history of the jazz idiom. Players stayed with him forever;
some of them stayed after he died, because what he did was
so singular, so unusual, so exuberant. I didn’t quite get Sun
Ra until my forties, but once I did, I found him inexhaustible,
especially in this period in the mid-60s in which he was experimenting with the free jazz approach. This
is really what beauty sounds like to me now.
Rick Moody’s acclaimed books include The Ice Storm, The
Four Fingers of Death, and most recently, On Celestial Music.