Kleinzahler's Music

August Kleinzahler, Music I-LXXIV (Pressed Wafer)

This is the heaven-sent sort of book that lends itself perfectly to bedtime or bath-time reading, being a generous collection of diverting essays on music that are just a few pages long, just the right length to entertain and amuse without demanding you have to concentrate for too long. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book from the beginning to the end as it is arranged if I didn’t have to, like if it’s a novel or a biography. With poetry books I pick out poems here and there, re-read favourites, find others and probably completely miss the point of any deliberate ordering until much later, if ever.
Kleinzahler’s pieces cover a range of musical interests not necessarily coincidental with my own but you can see where he’s coming from. In fact, out of his Desert Island 25 albums I’m not particularly ashamed to say that I’ve only heard of the artist or composers concerned on 8 of them. These are such people as Thelonious Monk, Coleman Hawkins, Bartok, Bach, Dizzy Gillespie, Cole Porter. It is interesting to note that, having advertised his recent reading in London to my friend by saying that he might be poetry’s answer to Tom Waits he says he doesn’t care much for Tom Waits. Neither do I, although I’ve got nothing specific against the man. I only hope that my reservations are a bit like Kleinzahler’s in as much as I suspect Waits’ gambit of deep authenticity as being somewhat inauthentic. On the other hand, if the raw and real are things that Kleinzahler admires in music (John Lee Hooker mainly in the solo 1940’s recordings, or the dismissal of the vast majority of Johnny Cash’s albums, thank you very much), I’m afraid I don’t even care for ‘authenticity’ that much anyway and recently made the point that given the choice between seeing The Mothers of Invention or Buck’s Fizz, I’d go for Jay Ashton and The Land of Make Believe every time. And I won’t have a John Coltrane album in the house just in case it takes up space that anything with Marc Bolan on might occupy.
No music fan is a music fan at all if their music is limited to any particular genre. That’s not an interest in music, that’s a fetish. I look back in disbelief at the tribal attitudes of the 70’s when one’s identity was either ‘rock’ or ‘soul’ and it was regarded as hugely inclusive when Gloucester’s Cohesian Tentacle disco, obsessed with ZZ Top, Alright Now and Freebird, actually played Boogie Nights by Heatwave.
Kleinzahler’s taste, running from blues and Stax (rather than Motown’s cleaner commerciality) through jazz like Monk and Charlie Parker to Karajan, Glenn Gould, Beethoven, Bach and Bartok, is wide enough but not so wide that you have to admire him for it. But he’s always good, whether relating anecdotes about the stars or from his own life. You do need to know a bit about music to know what he’s talking about but you don’t have to know it all to enjoy reading his reflections on music and it’s always interesting to be offered such a detailed look into the mind of another music devotee.
I don’t remember The Beatles getting a mention but he’s interested in the Stones; he doesn’t appear to be interested in the Velvet Underground and you might have thought Aretha would be given more consideration but Monk is a genuine passion and, in this context, rightly so. He knows about Satie, Delius and the implications of Beethoven being made a Nazi icon, played by a Berlin Philharmonic with all the Jews removed from it and still brilliant.
This is a fine and wonderful book to which the epithet ‘idiosyncratic’ will have to apply until one thinks of a better one but it’s perfectly sane and reasonable, genuinely entertaining and it is the answer to the questioner who asked at the LRB reading if Kleinzahler was going to write a further book of memoirs to follow up Cutty, One Rock. Well, actually, sir, this is it. He’s done it already.
I don’t know how easy this book is going to be to get hold of in the UK but somebody will post it to you from America, I’m sure. It’s well worth having if you like the sounds of it. The only trouble with a book that you keep dipping into is that you are never really sure when you’ve read it all.