Rytius Records (Substack Edition), Ch. 7.3c

Ch. 7.3: The Comedy Games: Thelonious Monk, “Body and Soul,” Monk’s Dream (1963)

7.3 The Comedy Games

Thelonious Monk, “Body and Soul,” Monk’s Dream (1963)

June 14, 2132

The aroma of fresh-baked bread filled Kloz’s Clauses, as he had a table full of French-style baguettes sliced into sections for the taking. He had cut thin slices from a whole leg of dried and cured North Carolina ham, which he displayed prominently on the table, and he had laid out an assortment of cheeses—a Munster from Connecticut, a wheel of soft triple cream from Upstate New York, mozzarella from Maine, aged cheddar from Vermont. There were jars of blackberry and raspberry preserves, and several wines—Virginia Rieslings, some Pennsylvania Pinots, and a dry sparkling blueberry wine from New Hampshire.

Kloz opened his game with no words, as promised. He simply put the record on and played it. When the song was over, he sat silently.

“OK…,” began Wascal, hesitant.

“What the hell was that?” asked Sugarpie.

Kloz passed her the album cover. “ ‘Body and Soul,’ recorded in March 1963. That’s during the civil rights movement, but before the laws were changed,” she said.

“What are we supposed to think? I thought you were going to say something about comedy?” Carnation asked. Carnation Adams was Pastor Snap Arnold’s sister Kullers’s daughter-in-law, from her husband Presto Adams’s first marriage to a woman named Skysong, née Street. Presto and Skysong also had a son, Erron, Carnation’s brother. She was the youngest recordkeeper then, at 18, but she was sharp. She and Fila had been courting for a few weeks.

“I can’t follow the melody?” asked Wascal.

“And it’s the opposite of funny,” Fila offered. “It sounds like somebody being disappointed.”

“I agree. It’s not much of a song at all, but if it is, it’s mournful,” suggested Tellem. “But there’s something weird about it. Like he can’t figure out exactly how he’s supposed to feel.”

“But the bass line seems consistently sad,” said GJ.

Kloz nodded and smiled. He took the cover from Sugarpie and resleeved Monk’s Dream, and then he put on Coleman Hawkins’s Body & Soul, and dropped the needle into the groove of the title track.

“Well, that’s not the same song at all,” sighed Tellem. Kloz passed him the album cover.

“Let’s see… It’s supposed to be the same song, but this one is from 1939,” Tellem announced.

“I guess I like it,” said D-Man. “It sounds less sad.”

“The feelings are still confused, I think,” said Carnation. “I think it’s still mournful,” said Fila. “But I can’t really tell they’re the same song. And it’s certainly not funny.”

Tellem returned the cover, and Kloz put on the third album, replacing Coleman Hawkins’s Body & Soul with Billie Holiday’s Body and Soul. The guitar strummed in.

Sugarpie was weeping before the second verse. GJ sniffed.

“Now that’s a song,” said Tellem.

“Ooh, wee, now she’s singing something,” said Fila, surreptitiously wiping a tear from his nose. “Who is that?”

Kloz handed him the cover. “Billie Holiday, 1957,” Fila reported.

“That’s beautiful,” agreed Carnation, swaying in her seat.

“It’s sentimental,” said Wascal, voice cracking. He cleared his throat. “Is that the same thing as sad?”

Kloz shrugged suggestively, lifting his eyebrows, maintaining his wordlessness.

“Good question,” Sugarpie said. “I think it sort of is. But sentimental can’t be only sad. It needs something else. Fila said ‘disappointed’ earlier…”

“You can’t be disappointed unless you were hopeful,” said D-Man.

“So to be touching, the song needs to be a mix,” GJ said. “And that can be confusing, like Tellem said.”

“OK, but what does any of this have to do with comedy?” asked Sugarpie, eager to get to wherever Kloz was trying to go.

“Since he’s not saying anything,” Fila began, giving Kloz a sly eye, “let’s remember what he said. He said he wanted to do this because words got us turned around before, and we couldn’t tell cause from effect or subject from object. We couldn’t tell whether Pryor was embodying or resisting or representing or corrupting. We got confused. I think Kloz is trying to say something about communicating contradictory things.”

“Yeah, but we’re all still confused,” Wascal chuckled.

“Not about this song,” Carnation said. “This song is absolutely clear and beautiful and sad.”

“It’s also the only version of the song with words,” D-Man noted, to murmurs of appreciation from those gathered.

Kloz rose dramatically to retrieve the Holiday album cover, and he put her album away. He pulled out another, much smaller record, and presented it to everyone: Louis Armstrong and His Sebastian New Cotton Club Orchestra. He put it on.

Everyone was horrified.

“This is nothing like that woman, what’s her name, singing this song,” said Wascal.

“Billie Holiday,” said Fila.

“He ain’t right,” said Sugarpie.

“He’s making a mockery of it!” said Carnation.

“He’s a vandal,” said D-Man.

“Why did you play that mess after what’s her name?” said Tellem.

“Billie Holiday,” said Sugarpie.

“When is this?” Wascal asked.

Kloz passed him the album cover.

“Oh, wow. This is from 1930,” Wascal said. “That’s the earliest one we’ve heard.”

“Older ain’t necessarily better,” said Carnation.

Louis “Satchel Mouth” Armstrong, Chicago, 1932. Public domain.

Kloz stood and finally spoke. “That’s not only the oldest we’ve heard, but that’s the first recorded version ever. And it looks like everybody hates it.”

No one enjoyed hearing that fact. “I feel like you might be playing us,” said Tellem. “Distorting the record.” Fila grunted and folks started grumbling a little.

“I admit it. I did distort the record,” Kloz said. “But only by playing them out of order.”

“I still can’t quite see what this musical exploration has to do with the last game,” said D-Man. “Not yet, anyway.”

“It’s about context, and what it’s made out of,” Kloz continued. “It was obvious that Pryor was engaged in some sort of social struggle, so the context was society. He is a man struggling against society. He is a subject working on that object. But that’s not enough to be able to decide anything about his work from the record of his work. In fact, it’s not even really true, because he comes out of a part of that society, and he’s been affected by it, and both subject and object are conflicted. He’s all messed up and so is society, in the same way. There’s a sort of undecidable, indeterminate oscillation of subject and object, what Fila was just talking about. And that’s why a bunch of intellectuals genuinely got caught in a circular argument last Saturday.”

“So what’s the context here, with music?” asked Tellem.

“Exactly,” answered Kloz. “And how could playing it out of order cause such a problem? We didn’t know how to hear the two instrumental versions, 24 years apart. Billie’s vocal version, in between those two, is so beautiful it can make you cry. That’s when we figured out what the song was about,” Kloz said. “But that’s not really what the song is about at all. That was an illusion, like an optical illusion, except in history.”

“The words took over,” nodded Sugarpie.

“A lexical illusion,” Fila added.

“But it’s not just the words, because the same words made everybody mad when Armstrong sang them,” Carnation said.

“So what makes the difference?” Wascal concluded the thought.

“The structure of feeling,” Kloz answered. “Music is so flexible that you can make the same song sound and feel many different ways, obviously. It’s flexible because it’s abstract. Billie’s words nailed it down, removed the ambiguity, and it actually froze our hearts in a particular posture. Armstrong’s original somehow became offensive to our frozen hearts.”

“I wonder what would have happened if Armstrong wasn’t singing,” asked Fila.

“Good question,” said Sugarpie.

“Probably the same confusion as with the other instrumental versions,” Kloz said. “There’s something similar going on here to what was going on in Pryor’s work,” he continued. “The mixture of the hope and the disappointment, the mourning and the morning. This musical idiom in particular is known for exactly that. But for us, without words, all we could do was identify the most basic emotions like sad and arguably hopeful, but we couldn’t draw anything out of the conflict between them, not like Fila identified the shared context, the assumptions and values lurking in the background of Pryor’s work in the 1970s.”

“The clash was not fruitful,” offered Fila.

“Not yet,” granted Kloz. “With Pryor, he was clearly the subject, and society, his object, was also the context. With music, it’s not clear what the subject and object even are, let alone any shared context. But because I know, I’ll tell you that modern music, from the turn of the nineteenth century on, with Beethoven, chose subjectivity itself as the object, so the artifacts are a record of the self-development of the creative subject.”

“In music, you mean?” asked Fila.

“Yes, of course,” agreed Kloz.

“If it’s all subjective, then who’s to know what’s being communicated?” asked Tellem.

“Subjective doesn’t mean solipsistic,” Kloz answered. “There is a shared context, and it is still social, but it’s not like Pryor’s work. Subjects and objects normally make history in time, but music just puts sound into time. You need some sort of way into it.”

“Like what?”

“Some sort of cultural key that lets you understand what the musicians are doing. The way they’re evolving the structures of feeling, changing how they’re built, new feelings they’re trying to express, what they have to say about the old ways and old feelings, and on and on like that,” Kloz said.

“What, you can’t mean that we need to learn how to put it together?” asked Fila. “We need to become musicians?”

“No, we just need the contextual knowledge. Familiarity, basically. In this case, how to listen to it. But that’s lived culture, and so you can’t assume that you know how to listen to it, even if it seems obvious. Like we can’t say that Billie’s version is the right one or the best one, just because it comes through best,” Kloz said. “It’s the same kind of knowledge Sugarpie was trying to conjure out of Pryor’s ‘nigger’s, imputing knowledge to the audience. But that’s a logical fallacy. Here our feelings hardened, and we were prejudiced against other expressions.”

“An emotional fallacy,” chuckled Wascal.

“Exactly. And the thing about Louis Armstrong’s version is that even in the 1930s, musicians like him were sort of poking fun at the material they had to work with, taking it tongue in cheek. He sings the lyrics however he wants, whimsically, like to say they don’t really matter, and they’re sort of silly, aren’t they? Hawkins sounds like he’s making fun of the song, too, but it’s more sophisticated, because he’s doing it with no words. He has to do it with the melody, making it sound self-serious and just barely not ridiculous. Holiday, as we know, sings the hell out of the song, pouring her own body and soul into it. It’s not funny, and it’s not ironic—it’s just soulful. Monk, finally, just shatters the song, and plays like a child with the pieces, now almost unrecognizable, but in a musical structure that he helped to invent, and that was by then familiar to listeners, and capable of conveying subtle shades of feeling. Holiday is the odd one out here, not Armstrong, Monk, or Hawkins.”

Carnation nodded her reluctant assent.

“And that’s my joke on you,” Kloz said. “Because modern music is the record of the subject reflecting on its own development, its own sense depends on that chronology. I tricked everybody by changing the order.”

“OK, but you’re almost making it sound like music should be totally opaque without familiarity with the structures,” GJ said. “So how were we able to understand any of the emotions in the instrumental versions?”

“I don’t know how to explain that,” Kloz admitted, “except to say that maybe there’s something about certain harmonies having a certain effect on the brain and therefore the mind—maybe musical structures correspond quite physically to structures of feeling. Or maybe it’s just cultural knowledge lingering, surviving, even after all this…”

“And how could we ever decide that?” asked Sugarpie.

“Very, very carefully,” yawned Fila, who stood and stretched.

“We have a lot of memory going on here,” Wascal said, handing Kloz back the Armstrong 45 cover. “We have Pryor recalling unity in shared values honored in the breach and we have a mysterious musical memory, which could be either biological or cultural.”

“Well put,” said Carnation.

“I want to see if I can tie all this together,” Wascal said. “Music and memory, I mean. Plato has some good stuff on this, so I’d like to do something next week.”

“Let’s do it,” said Fila. “Next week at Wascal’s Wadius, everybody! Don’t forget!”