nostalgia, and a guitar solo.

2. nostalgia, and a guitar solo

sounds and places that tug at us:

nils lofgren. “black books." acoustic live. (1997)

black books first two minutes are a class in nostalgia: thematized in lyric, embodied in sound. 

How does nostalgia sound? Some touchstones, to my ear:

irma thomas, “anyone who knows what love is (will understand)” (1964)

al green, “for the good times” (1972).     

hayden, “dynamite walls” (2001).

bruce springsteen, “racing in the street” (Live 1975-1985).
 

iron & wine, “flightless bird, american mouth” (2007)

What is most curious to me is how these calls out from the past (some of which aren't even that old, and certainly don't come from the listening of my childhood). They transmit a message of such urgency. Why does the warmth of nostalgia promise something so important? What is left there, lurking in the lost past, that nags and nags at our desire? What extra, beyond the actual stylistic similarities (arpeggiated guitar? oldies? wholesome?) says “listen again and get back there!”

What brings me back Black Books, almost against my will, is the impossible surprise of the guitar sounds at 2:50, when the dense, overcast sky of chorus and keyboard opens upon a shower of guitar solo. Notes fluttering, floating, sliding through the moist atmosphere of longing . . .
Note for note magic. in that way not unlike David Bromberg’s solo to christen his telling of “Mr. Bojangles” (Demon in Disguise, 1972).

solo

. . . and then, at 3:46, a revelation, like divine birds chirping, falling somewhere between the silken kora of “Bi Lambam” (Toumani Diabate with Ballake Sissoko, New Ancient Strings, 1999) and Jerry Garcia’s creaky ballet on Live/Dead (“Dark Star," starting around 12:36 through the cricket song of minute 14).

. . and then the pure pleasure at 4:12 and 4:28 . . .

solo

If nostalgia is a feeling of pure memory from a past that you never even visited (real memories only complicate and confuse), Black Books sounds like the memory you somehow believe you can still reach . . . 

 . . .  something on Kalidasa Shakuntal and memory that allows for rasa?

more traces from encounters that aren't done with us:

playlist

traces.

1. the approach.

little strokes from life, tentatively marked.
following traces from a life of encounters that aren’t done with themselves.
count what something struck there . . .

ernst bloch. traces. (stanford university press, 2006): 6:

In short, it’s good to think in stories too. So much just isn’t done with itself when it happens, even where it’s beautifully told. Instead, very strangely, there’s more going on there. The case has something about it; this is what it shows or suggests. Stories of this kind are not just recounted; instead we also count what something struck there—or we listen up: What was that? Out of incidents comes a “Mark!” that would otherwise not be thus; or a “Mark!” that already is, that takes little incidents as traces and examples. They point out a “less” or “more” that will have to be thought in the telling, retold in the thinking; that isn’t right in these stories, because things aren’t right with us, or with anything. Some things can be grasped only in such stories, not in a more expansive, elevated style, or then not in the same way. How some such things came to notice will be retold here, and tentatively marked; lovingly, marking in the retelling; by marking, intending the retelling. It’s little strokes and such from life that haven’t been forgotten; our refuse is worth a lot these days. But an older impulse was also there: to hear stories, good ones, poor ones, stories in different tones, from different years, remarkable ones that, when they come to an end, only really come to an end in the stirring. It’s a reading of traces every which way, in sections that only divide up the frame. In the end, everything one meets and notices is the same.

fra damiano. 

in walked bud.