Midweek music
Goodbye Pork Pie Hat
Hi everyone,
Hoping to get back into a routine with my posts; like so many of us, I’m struggling these days with motivation and energy. For now, I’m sharing when and as I find things that seem to want to be shared…
Today I wanted to offer one of my favorite jazz tunes, Charles Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.” The recording here is from Mingus’s album Mingus Ah Um (1959). Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on learning this tune on piano, which is a new adventure for this very classical player.
Charles Mingus wrote “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” after learning of the death of his friend, the great tenor saxophonist Lester Young (1909-1959). When I first heard the tune, over ten years ago now, I found it some of the most evocative music I’d ever heard. I fell in love with it and sat down immediately to write a short story - the one and only time I've had a story present itself in my imagination in pretty much finished form.
If you’d like, please take a few minutes and listen to the recording, and see what the music might conjure up for you. I love its honesty: for me, it’s about sorrow that doesn’t try to be anything else, that allows the listener to sit with their own grief and weariness which, in the end, by virtue of its very realness, becomes something beautiful.
You might find it gives you creative inspiration too. Below, I’ve included the story I wrote in response to it (quite short, and one of the few times I’ve played with the “you” narrative voice). If the music conjures up images, scenes, or ideas you’d feel comfortable sharing, please feel free to post them in the comments. I’d love to hear about them.
GOODBYE PORK PIE HAT
When the man died, he took it all with him. He took the throaty coffee-and-cream sound of his tenor horn and the blackstrap molasses flow of his clarinet. Those were from the great years. He took the breathy rasp of that same horn and the fragile squeak of that same clarinet. Those were from the last years. He took the breath he couldn’t catch anymore and the legs that wouldn’t hold him up and the last sour whiff of the liquor he drank. And he took the muscles in his hands and the slow steady beat of his heart, and he took every last one of the tunes that slipped through his head and wrapped together like the strands of hair in a girl’s braids.
You never knew the man. Not to talk to. You never unpacked your gear with him, wedged in with the rest of the band like sardines in the green room at some club. You didn’t bum smokes or lights or hits or swigs off him. You didn’t listen with him to the roar outside like a train in the distance, or smell the blend of a hundred or so different cigarettes and two hundred glasses of alcohol. You didn’t walk behind him up the stage steps and get smacked in the eyes by the glare of lights and rolled over by the train roar, two hundred pairs of hands clapping and two hundred voices yelling his name. You didn’t step into the light next to him and move your music stand over a fraction of an inch on the scuffed parquet floor and hook your horn onto the strap around your neck at the same time he hooked his. And when the music started and everything else disappeared, and the coffee-cream sound or the blackstrap molasses sound poured out and wound around, so clean and strong you could taste it in the back of your throat, you didn’t shut your eyes there on the stage and forget where you were while you rode those notes down like beads on the most perfect string.
You were too young to meet the man. He never saw you or knew your name. You unpack your gear in the backstage closet in some club and listen to the thin sound of a dozen voices in the dark. You smell the smoke from a handful of cigarettes and the fumes from a dozen or so glasses of alcohol. When you walk onstage, no train rolls over you.
The man took it all with him. This is what you have: a hole-in-the-wall club with a scuffed-up drinks counter and a few falling-apart chairs and a blue glow-worm light that barely makes a dot on the throat of your horn. You have a bare-walled apartment with a sagging mattress and a record player, and three LPs with the grooves wearing out from all the times you played them. You have the black-and-white photos from those LP covers. They are good photos. You can look at them and not see how, at the end, the man’s cheeks went slack and his eyes sank into his head.
In the blue glow-worm light, you set up your music and tune your horn. You don’t see the drinks counter or the falling-apart chairs. Instead you see what is only in your head: a long, sleek black car pulling up to a sidewalk in thin drizzly rain. On the car’s back door, the yellow bulb of a street lamp makes a splash like the moon on water. In your head, you stand on the sidewalk in the rain and watch that door open.
The man’s trench coat could have come straight off the rack. Drops of rain fall on his black porkpie hat. In the yellow light they glitter like diamonds. Strong square fingers grip the handle of his horn case. Behind him, the club door stands open. White light gushes out onto the sidewalk, along with the blend of smoke from a hundred or so different cigarettes.
His cheeks are smooth and his eyes are young. He looks at you and smiles.
You stand in the blue glow-worm light and the thin hum of a dozen voices. In the back of your throat, this is what you have: the smoothness of coffee and cream, the rich tang of blackstrap molasses.
Tunes wind together for you like the strands of hair in a girl’s braids. Your horn sounds like strong, sweet, black coffee. You close your eyes and ride those notes down like beads on the most perfect string.
**
Thanks for being here. Take care,
Kris
About A Place to Stand:
I started this column in hopes of creating a bit of space and sharing light in challenging times. Drawing on my own experience as a trauma survivor, I offer meditative exercises using creative writing and music, my two professional/artistic pursuits. I also share some of my own writing and thoughts on the creative process. (You can find out more about me and my work at my website.)
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