The Many Writings of

After a nice long hiatus and some vocal refurbishing, I've crawled out of my comfy little studio and back onto the stage. I'm performing in the pre-Broadway run of the world premiere of a new musical this summer at the Capital Repertory Theater in lovely Albany, NY. All the songs are famous hits by Neil Sedaka, hence the title of the show - "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do". I'm singing bass backup vocals and playing electric bass in the onstage band!

I’m very proud of my fingers. Not all of them, but most of them. The stubby things have been working hard lately, and doing a yeoman job, considering that they weren’t built for dexterity, flexibility, or speed. They are blunt, spatulate digits, issuing from thick, squarish palms – utilitarian and strong, but not in any way graceful – the truncated fingers of a brute.

Being a lefty and fond of sharp knives, all the fingers of my right hand bear crescent-shaped white scars, ugly testaments to my inattention or ineptitude. The tips of the first two fingers of that hand are now so thickly callused that I could probably punch them through a wall and not feel a thing. I won’t do any such thing, though, because I have become very protective of them. They, their neighbors, and their partners on my left hand have been wrapped around a bass guitar for many hours a day for months, and although they occasionally stumble over each other, they have risen admirably to the task I have demanded of them, which is to play reasonably rhythmically and righteously while other, more elegant parts of me are simultaneously engaged in singing contrapuntal monody. Sounds pretty impressive, doesn’t it? Well, considering the appendages that are doing the work, it is.

It’s strange, after so many years, to find myself once again holding an instrument in my hands on a stage, performing. Stranger still to be singing at the same time, feeling at the center of my own little vortex, the various themes of my life swirling around me, colliding and pulling me into a new and uncharted place. I had wanted to challenge myself, force myself into something new, and yet it’s all oddly familiar, as if the part of me that I put away with my horn so long ago has always been there, waiting in the wings, patiently biding its time until once again called upon. All the old habits – practicing, scanning a page of sheet music for changes of key and tempo, tuning up – effortlessly and nearly unconsciously insinuating themselves as if they never left. I guess they never really did.

The bass, I once told my father, was just for me. The horn had been, in many ways, for him, and singing was something I had felt madly and utterly compelled to do. Performing was a consequence of my heated desire to sing, and I gladly ceded control over my circumstances in order to fulfill the mandate of my heart. But there had to be some small parcel of my musical self that was just for me, a place where I could be the master of my musical soul, a place without compromise, a place of complete and intimate expression.

I had struggled with transcriptions of the Bach solo ‘cello suites as a hornist, seeing them as immensely difficult technical studies. I was too young, too raw, and too blinded by my own ambition to understand them musically. Returning to them as a bass player, I began to hear them differently. Relearning them as a stumbling novice, I slowly realized that they were far more than bitchy etudes. They were massive tonal meditations, arcs of pure music both simple and complex, vehicles for inner journeys through a soul-scape of perfection and peace. I never felt the urge to perform them, to expose the tenderest part of my musical self. The absurdity of playing these hoary pieces on a rock ‘n roll machine amused me, but the music, oh God the music, made supreme sense even as I mangled it.

When I am not involved in playing the music from the show I’m working in, and have a few moments to myself, I enter that little niche I’ve reserved for myself, and meander inexpertly through some of the music that Bach wrote as training exercises for one of his many children, an aspiring ‘cellist, and I wonder if he knew that he was creating something perfect.

Then I return to the playing/singing conundrum. I’m finally finding a new ‘zone’, in which I can give full expression to two instruments that, separately, normally demand complete attention. It’s a hard place to describe, but there is a fierce sort of exhilaration, an exultant righteousness I feel when I find it. It’s a place in which thought only gets in the way and trips me up if I pause to savor it. Analysis destroys it – it’s a ‘doing’ thing rather than a thinking thing.

For years I’ve watched artists I have placed in my little mega-talent pantheon as they play and sing, accompanying themselves with fluidity and style, self-contained units of expression, shaping the contours of their thought without compromise, and wondering at the level of ability that allows them to accomplish this feat, always feeling a tinge or a wash of jealous envy. As I become incrementally more fluent in this mode of creative discourse, I feel less of the jealousy, but oddly more mystified at where this effort might be leading me. Ironically – of course – I arrive at a place I long thought I wanted to inhabit, a place I have perhaps romanticized past any recognizable reality, only to find that it isn’t a place at all. It’s just another tool, another experience in the vast field of musical being, another avenue of expression – one option in an apparently limitless horizon. There’s no terminus, no place, at least in this life, at which I can say “Ah, so this is it. This is what I’ve been reaching for, a final fulfillment that settles my soul and fills me with peace and joy.” Where did I get the idea that anything on this earth would provide the bliss of heaven? I shake myself and remind myself for the umpteen thousandth time that this may be as close I’m going to get. And ya know, it really isn’t such a bad place.

All that having been confessed, I do have a goal in mind; being able to perform my little cycle of spirituals for bass & bass on a level that satisfies my evil perfectionist streak. I love those twenty minutes of music as much as I love my Bach suites. I’m not comparing, of course, but those arrangements mean something to me, and I have long envisioned being able to share them in concert. Yes, I know they’re eccentric, but I’m long past being concerned over their eccentricity. For me, they encapsulate a great deal of deep feeling that can only be expressed in that particular fashion, which is, after all, the element that attracted me to music in the first place.

So I put up with a salary that can only be described as an insult, being away from my home and family, living in a quasi-dump, and a grinding seven or eight shows a week in order to develop a skill set that will, I believe, ultimately allow me to occasionally do a twenty minute set of odd, self-arranged music. It’s an unbalanced, wacky equation, but when I look at it in the context of the rest of my improbable life it makes sense to me, which seems to be about all I can legitimately hope for.