Monday, October 11, 2021

When Herbie met Miles

11 October 2021

The web resembles an octopus, torn linen nested between beam and roof line. The hole at the top would be mouth, a flap at the bottom’s a flag fluttering in air (the breeze moves higher up in the `ohi`a). Screen of bird song, bass notes banging where I can’t see man or hammer. The difference between being one’s vocation and being: Herbie Hancock. “It sounds like a liver thing,” our tenant’s girlfriend says on the phone. I hear a brush move through hair. When Herbie ruined the show by playing the wrong chord, Miles carried on as if it were right. The Buddha Lilith and I visit is covered by vegetation; on his head a moss crew cut; in the ears, lichen; on the face a beard of green. Buddha also fades into forest, facing in from the road behind a fern screen. Historical smeared over geological time like vegemite. Miles’s voice was always over-heard. “Don’t play the butter notes,” he advised, in which “butter” meant “fat” or “obvious.” So Herbie played all the notes but those he usually rested on. Improvisation avoids whatever completes a phrase. She left, talking about jobs and an RV in California. Now a saw cuts bird song into slices, like bread. Morning gathers itself in time without asking any favors. Offers improvisation, and morning takes it up like a synthesizer or a dog tangled on her leash, bark raspy as Miles’s voice. Hers is not a call for help, exactly, but a comment on the failures of geometry. Her diagram of complaints was a dense squiggle of lines that appeared twice in her book. In the other book, book speaks, as does the boy inside the book. A twice told tale goes on a fugue. When asked what she remembered of her goal in overtime, my daughter said she remembered nothing. Her teammate’s dad watched it 40 times.

--details from Herbie Hancock's 2014 Norton Lectures on Poetry at Harvard


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