Dreaming Of Hal
In late 1988 or early 1989, I bought a cassette of Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films. I don’t remember how I found out about it. Maybe I saw it on display at the then-new Boston location of Tower Records, in the freshly Frank Gehry-redesigned building at the corner of Newbury Street and Massachusetts Avenue, which I visited every Saturday morning after my piano lessons at the New England Conservatory. It’s more likely that I read about it, either in the Boston Globe, which arrived daily, or in Rolling Stone, which I would read in my town’s public library every other week, or even in Tower’s free Pulse magazine, which I read cover to cover on my train rides back to the suburbs. Reading was how I found out about most of the music that I liked. It certainly was how I found out about NRBQ, the Replacements, and Tom Waits, three of my favorite artists, all of whom were on Stay Awake. However I learned about it, these very grown-up performances of songs from kids’ movies made quite an impression on me. I remember many nights spent listening to this tape, drifting in the music’s strange ambience, a surreal atmosphere that somehow made the dream-like shifts from style to style make sense, or at least coexist, and poring over the microscopic text in the cassette’s liner notes, seeing names like Sun Ra, Ken Nordine and Yma Sumac alongside names I recognized like Los Lobos, James Taylor, and Ringo Starr. I wanted to inhabit this world, a place where music could exist without borders or labels, where the famous, the unknown and the forgotten could make music together on an equal basis, united by little more than an idea, a set of songs, a studio, an atmosphere.
Not much later, at some point in the spring of 1989, at my friend Neil Shapiro’s house, I saw what I still think is the greatest musical moment in television history: Leonard Cohen’s performance of “Who By Fire” featuring Sonny Rollins on tenor saxophone, which aired on the NBC show Night Music. I didn’t know Rollins’s work at all, but I knew “Who By Fire” well because Cohen adapted it from a Yom Kippur prayer. We sang his version every year in my post-hippie congregation’s high holiday services held at a Massachusetts church. Rollins starts with an unaccompanied introduction which gradually shifts from bright, declarative major-ish harmony to a nearly cantorial modality tinged with chromaticism as the band enters with drones and bells. At the end of the introduction, he holds a long, unstable trill, circular breathing until Cohen, barely able to hold back awestruck joy behind his trademark stoicism, starts the song, Rollins tracing his melody. Cohen can’t keep from smiling when the singers from Was (Not Was) add Gospel heat to the poise of his Greek chorus-like muses Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen. By the end of the first verse, when Sweet Pea Atkinson sings what sounds like an ad-libbed “I want to know” in response to “Who shall I say is calling?” and Rollins answers with a rising line, the band starts to levitate. Rollins’s line lifts them to a higher level of focus and intensity, an elevation that continues through Rollins’s two solos and then into another unaccompanied ending. It’s the purest example I’ve ever seen of a musician’s power to fracture a song and electrify a band through sheer melodic invention, rhythmic liberty and raw, unstoppable humanity of instrumental tone. It’s tempting to say that Rollins and the band “took it to church,” but “Who By Fire” already was “spiritual” to me, if a Yom Kippur prayer adapted into a pop song and re-adapted into a Reconstructionist high holiday service in a Massachusetts church can be called that. Cohen broke the prayer open in his way when he turned it into a song, but Rollins expanded it even further with the charged critical fervor of his playing. The spirituality, or to use a more humanistic word, the power of the Night Music “Who By Fire” was something that could only happen through the confluence, or the contrast, of musicians from different backgrounds crossing lines, ignoring rules, breaking tradition, together.
If the VHS tape of Night Music had gone on long enough to record the show’s credits, I might have seen a name I would have recognized from the back cover of “Stay Awake.” Hal Willner was the person responsible for bringing Cohen, Rollins and the Was (Not Was) singers together and the person who made Stay Awake happen, its producer. Even before I figured that out, I started buying any record I found with Willner’s name on it, like his double album tribute to Thelonious Monk That’s The Way I Feel Now and the Marianne Faithfull comeback record Strange Weather. The names on Stay Awake became a map to other music I would come to love, like the immense multiverse of the Sun Ra Arkestra, and even would lead me to an actual place, a world I would become a part of, the labyrinthine borderless collaborations of the New York Downtown scene.
From the vantage point of my suburb a couple of hundred miles north, New York was the place where people like Willner, David Byrne, John Zorn, and many others were forging a new way of thinking about music that united players from around the world, ignoring stylistic boundaries, old-fashioned ideas of appropriateness, and even the limits of music itself. Everything was fair game- Beat poetry, cult film, avant-garde composition, kitchy easy listening albums, ethnographic recordings and conceptual art, all smashed together in a glorious, incongruous urban mess fueled by improvisational energy and the devoted record collector’s omnivorous hunger for weirdness. Just from the perspective of the electric guitar, there was room for the glowing, soft-edged chords of Bill Frisell, the brutal twang of Marc Ribot and the clattering noise of Arto Lindsay, who, despite his seeming inability to play anything resembling music, was everywhere. Somehow, people like Willner, Zorn and Byrne were able to convince record companies, TV networks and the film business to fund this music and send it into stores around the world, even deep enough into the suburbs to break through into the sheltered mind of a pre-internet teen like me.
By the time Willner’s next large scale tribute record, Weird Nightmare: Meditations on Mingus came out in 1992, I was in college, already working with Anthony Braxton and developing mostly spurious opinions about things like jazz aesthetics and authenticity. Weird Nightmare was a big deal to me, a “who’s who” of musicians from the interlocking downtown scene I’d been tracking playing the music of one of the jazz composers I most revered. But Weird Nightmare also was different from Willner’s earlier tributes. Rather than a compilation of performances by self-contained units like NRBQ, the Replacements, or the Sun Ra Arkestra as on Stay Awake, it looked like Willner had put together his own band that played on most of the songs, featuring Frisell, Byron, Ribot and trombonist Art Baron among others, doubling on their usual instruments and the homemade microtonal instruments of the experimental composer Harry Partch. This made it more a coherent construction than a compilation and made Willner’s role as producer closer to auteurship than curation. By putting those musicians in that studio with those instruments and those songs, it seemed like Willner had more direct control over the musical material than he’d had on his earlier projects, even if he had no role in the mechanics of how the music worked or the playing. It’s almost like this is not a compilation at all, and more a record by a loose, confident band that plays Mingus’s compositions in a way that respects and preserves their basic material, but doesn’t play them like a Mingus band, or any band that self-consciously tries to play idiomatic jazz. The percussionists Don Alias, Michael Blair and Francis Thumm play complex layered grooves and chaotic accents that never sound like what Mingus drummer Dannie Richmond played. The Partch instruments constantly destabilize the harmony, pulling the arrangements further away from jazz and deeper into the eerie dream zone. When it breaks away from the core band, results are mixed. Bobby Previte’s bluegrass-like “Open Letter to Duke” is a pleasantly jarring textural change, but also captures some of Mingus’s anarchic freedom with tempo and his readiness to pull the rug out from listeners and players with radical arrangement shifts. Keith Richards’s version of “Don’t Drop That Atomic Bomb On Me” is actually one of the record’s more jazz-like pieces, but jazz-like in a clichéd, clumsy way that almost reads as disrespectful. The tension in Willner’s bridging the worlds of rock stars and creative musicians starts to become audible. The line that Willner’s compilations constantly cross, the rampart of celebrity power, of showbiz economics, of industry-determined taste, rebuilds itself.
A few years later, I would cross a sort of line myself and become an inhabitant of the world I imagined on Willner’s records. Sometime in the mid-90’s, not long after I moved to New York, I ran into Willner at a raucous NRBQ show at Tramps, possibly this one from 1997. I recognized him from magazine articles and from his brief appearance in the Charles Atlas film about Sonic Youth and John Zorn Put Blood In The Music, which I’d taped off of PBS and watched obsessively, one of the few representations available at the time of what the Downtown scene actually looked like. I sheepishly introduced myself and told him I’d been following his work for years. “You're the one!” he said, laughing, before disappearing into the dancing crowd. Then, in October 2001, Halloween to be precise, I worked with Hal for the first time. My memories of this show are hazy, part of the general insanity of the fall of 2001. Between Labor Day and Halloween, I watched 9/11 happen from my roof in Brooklyn, got married less than three weeks later, then flew to Germany over the smoking wreckage of the twin towers to play at Pina Bausch’s festival in Wuppertal with Romanian/German singer Sanda Weigl. Just a few days after I got back, I was in Los Angeles with Jennifer Charles and Oren Bloedow as a member of their band Elysian Fields participating in “Closed On Account of Rabies,” a night celebrating Edgar Allen Poe, one of a series of live events Hal produced at UCLA’s Royce Hall.
These shows seemed to be modeled on his albums, expansive in length, chaotic in process, and diverse to the point of near-incoherence, including actors and comedians like Harry Shearer, Jimmy Fallon, and Ving Rhames and musicians ranging from legendary, like the great Van Dyke Parks and Pere Ubu singer David Thomas, to the borderline unknown, like Anohni, or Antony as they were then known, several years before releasing I Am a Bird Now, the album that made them a worldwide underground star. Through the long days of rehearsal, Hal hovered on the edge with his colleagues Rachel Chanoff and Janine Nichols, taking notes, making choices about the set list and who should play on what. Hal had set the musical wheels in motion by creating a certain atmosphere in the rehearsal studio, a certain group of sympathetic participants, then he guided the results through his presence more than by anything he overtly said or did. I only remember him gently offering encouragement and praise. I was in the middle of this swirl of words and music, actors and musicians, people I’d been listening to and watching in films my whole life and people who I was hearing for the first time. Even so, it was impossible to tune out the ambient post-9/11 anxiety. I remember an edge to the backstage conversation at UCLA - Parks grimly predicting the US military taking out its aggressions on Iraq as we chatted outside the rehearsal hall. By the time I made it to the late night meal in Thai Town after the concert with Oren and friends, it felt like the vision of global music-making that I’d had as a teenager listening to Hal’s records had somehow become a head-spinning reality, while at the same time, geopolitical events showed the fragility, or even the naivety, of the idea of a borderless world united by culture.
My next trip to LA to work with Hal was for “Shock and Awe,” a tribute to Randy Newman that took place again at Royce Hall in 2004, the name a rather ironic throwback to the pre-Iraq War conversations of 2001. This time Oren was not just a performer, but music director. He convinced Hal to take me on as a general keyboard player for the house band. At one point I looked around in a rehearsal as I was playing “I Don’t Want To Hear It Anymore,” a Newman song best known from the Dusty Springfield record Dusty in Memphis, in a band with Frisell, Parks, David Hidalgo from Los Lobos, and a bunch of other outstanding LA-based musicians. I realized that I was taking part in exactly the kind of project I had imagined as a teenager, with the same people whose names I’d read in the liner notes to Stay Awake. I spent several days in this dream-like state, playing Newman’s songs, then among my favorite music in the world, with all of these incredible musicians, singers and actors. The epic concert remains one of the peak experiences of my musical life.
I never became one of his core players, but I would go on to do other projects with Hal, and every time I would have the same eerie sensation of time collapsing, like I was living in a dream future where my teenage vision of music existed in a swirl of logistical chaos and odd encounters with the famous and the notorious, the musical, the cinematic and the literary. Hal was in the middle of all of it, both at the beginning of that journey as a name on a tape, and in the middle of the vortex of the present, as a real person making things happen in his shambling, muttering, inspired way. When Hal died suddenly in April 2020, a victim of the early COVID-19 wave in New York City, I remember walking in a daze through the early spring sun, shocked that he had been taken by this still little-understood disease. A wave of grief spread across the entire entertainment industry, a testament to Hal’s reach into the worlds of TV, film and music. It deepened the apocalyptic feeling of the early pandemic, especially from the perspective of a music business already transformed by two decades of shocking change. The loss not only felt personal, but part of a larger cataclysm beyond the pandemic. Would there be a place for Hal’s kind of large scale, high budget work in a music business trending towards the microgenre, the hyper-specific algorithmic playlist, and the anonymous artist tailoring generic tracks for passive income on the web? Who would care enough about the music, film and literature of the past to put so much effort into its radical reassessment in today’s rapidly deteriorating world? The record labels had no budgets for big projects like these anymore. The large studios were closing. The idea of a four hour long concert with a hundred participants seemed increasingly fantastical.
Almost two years later, this February, after things started to open up, I was working on my own version of “Weird Nightmare.” My NEC colleague Frank Carlberg had invited me to create an interpretation of the song for a 100th birthday celebration for Mingus at Jordan Hall, something a little bit like a Hal concert, with students, faculty and a few honored guests. Before I could proceed, I needed to hear Costello’s “Weird Nightmare” again. I couldn’t find my copy, but deep in the box of tapes that takes up space in my studio, I did find my cassette of Stay Awake, its clear plastic cover heavily scuffed from the years I carried it in my backpack to and from high school. Distracted from my work on “Weird Nightmare,” I played it on an old boombox. I was first struck by the over thirty year old cassette’s sound quality. The engineers who mastered this tape did an elegant job of making songs with widely disparate instrumentations, recorded in different studios, go together seamlessly, even on an over thirty year old cassette. Maybe this was part of Hal’s genius, a way of working in the studio to smooth the rough edges of his musical omnivorousness, to unite music in a practical sense, not just through the unity of the overarching concept. This was part of the ambience I had noticed when I was a kid, and now understood from a technical perspective. The record flows like a dream, the songs overlapping, bleeding into each other, with surreal transitional improvisations sometimes joining them - especially the lava-like electroacoustic moments by Frisell and Wayne Horvitz. The songs I knew from movies in my childhood, played in these sophisticated ways on recordings from when I was a teenager, and now delivered into my middle-aged ears via magnetic tape warped time and space, the conscious and the unconscious, a dream of classic Hollywood, conjured from Hal’s late 80’s ears and exuberant intuition.
My Stay Awake cassette, showing wear patterns.
Since I couldn’t find my Weird Nightmare tape, I did what any internet-enabled music listener would do in 2022- I googled it. The first link that popped up was a shocker. Unbeknownst to me, Ray Davies of the Kinks made a documentary about the Weird Nightmare project and of course, there it was on youtube. I watched the whole thing immediately, entranced, wishing I could have seen it in 1992. It’s a dense, complex film, at once a verité portrait of the Weird Nightmare sessions and a primer on Mingus and his work including archival footage and extensive interviews with his family and collaborators, even his psychologist Dr. Edmund Pollock. The editing is fast, as if Davies were trying to capture some of Mingus’s wild energy, as well as the jittery anything-can-happen feeling of early-90’s New York City. Amid the tightly knotted threads there is time for extensive B-roll of the elevated subway tracks and still-gritty streets of Astoria, where the sessions take place in a large studio in the historic Kaufman Astoria Studio complex, where films have been shot since the silent era. It’s a film about a city where Mingus’s music and his personality still strongly resonate among Willner and his community of musicians, a city where outsiders - especially rock and roll stars like Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Elvis Costello, and in a way Davies himself - have come both to pay tribute to Mingus and his music and flex a little bit of their celebrity power over it. The Stones' reminiscences of seeing Mingus on one of their early trips to New York and their speculations about how his music was made are heavily romanticized. Costello’s comments regarding Mingus’s relationship to jazz walk right up to the edge of presumptuous offensiveness. When these celebrity egos stop talking and confront Mingus’s music in the studio within the circle of musicians Willner assembled, magical alchemy starts to happen.
To Hal, it wasn’t just the celebrity singers who were the artists, it was the musicians he hired, players from the vast, constantly shifting community of New York musicians who might play a wedding in the afternoon, a Broadway show in the evening, then a wild late night improvised set at the Knitting Factory, at that moment going strong on East Houston Street. In Davies’ film we see the studio, dominated by Partch’s microtonal instruments lurking like sculptures in a gallery or even statues in a church, become a forum for these musicians to realize Willner’s concepts with seemingly no limits on their creativity. They aren’t just professionals hired to execute a part in an arrangement, they are fully engaged creators in their own right, empowered to do whatever it takes, to play any instrument, to go down any rabbit hole of overdubbing or rearranging in order to find that magical sound. We see them bring Henry Threadgill’s reworking of “Meditations On Integration” to life, Threadgill singing parts to them, slowly teasing out his arrangement, developing a clear idea as he hears each player’s sound. Vernon Reid, then at the height of his fame in the metal-like band Living Colour but also an established member of the community of Downtown improvisers, listens to a Mingus recording of “Work Song” in the control room with the band, including Geri Allen on piano and Don Byron on clarinet, then puts together a lurching, almost violent interpretation of it live, conducting percussion hits with the neck of his guitar. Then he rips a shattering, heavily distorted solo that pushes the song into near-mayhem. Costello walks into the studio and after exchanging pleasantries with Joe Ferla the engineer and a few of the players, delivers a spine-tingling performance of “Weird Nightmare” over a bed of Partch instruments that provides almost no trace of the song’s original harmony.
After watching these revelatory sessions, I went back to my version of “Weird Nightmare.” I was working with students in a music school instead of with Downtown musicians in an NYC studio, and Hal wasn’t there to mutter his approval or ask us to try something else, but I could feel how deeply the ethos and methods I absorbed from Hal’s work still guided me. The big New York studios may be turning into luxury condos, the record stores and magazines may be gone, the Manhattan venues where the musicians of Weird Nightmare pushed the limits of music night after night might have disappeared or spread out across Brooklyn and Queens, but as I prepared my own Mingus arrangement for Frank’s NEC concert, Hal was still there. In 1992, thirty years after Mingus’s epochal early 60’s band with Eric Dolphy, Mingus’s work still resonated, and thirty years after the Weird Nightmare sessions, Hal’s work still resonates. His dream of music and culture as a vast, unified field, with no distance between show business and the underground, a dream that swept me up and took me to New York City and beyond, goes on, even as the world keeps showing us that maybe it all is just that, a dream.