“Loneliness that swings” is how Wynton Marsalis once described Miles Davis’s early sound.
Prior to the pandemic, before the sliding scale of isolations—which in my case included the paradox of being confined with my family in a single dwelling—I might have said that loneliness could have an exquisite quality, something even aesthetically pleasing. What comes to mind as an example is Davis improvising the score for Ascenseur pour l’Échafaud as he watched the footage of Jeanne Moreau anxiously roam the streets of Paris in search of her lover. That particular loneliness, even as it wails and underscores three murders in the film’s storyline, is romantic, though hardly in a sentimental way. It is a crafted forlornness, decidedly different from the unsexy alienation experienced during the pandemic, which depended on many variables, contact with others being merely one of them.
In my own household, where jazz is often the soundtrack to daily life with my older son, the pandemic brought a seismic shift. Gabriel, who is twenty-four years old, developmentally disabled, and unable to speak, requires a ceaseless rhythm of care, part of which was undertaken by a day-program for adults. It also happens that he is a jazz fan, and has been since the age of nine, when he would rock and sway, à la Thelonious Monk, while listening to a live local band. After his day-program closed its doors for good on account of the virus, jazz in all its iterations became one of the things that saved us. Gabriel, with his particular neurology, has been the ideal conduit for the nuance and complexity of jazz, even—or maybe especially—dissonant expressions of it. The lights and sounds of Walmart might have set in motion any number of anxieties and upsets, but the bending notes of Thelonious or a high-register jab from Miles were not troubling at all. Jazz has taught us all along how to improvise with life, either going along in the flow or else creating a skillful argument.
When Gabriel’s program closed, suddenly he was there on the floor of my office, his favorite spot to sit in the entire house, deconstructing the arrangement of objects in his vicinity. He shoved out my books, armchair, cat toys, blankets, and cushions until an empty circle formed around him, then looked at me expectantly. I wondered what his loneliness was like, how much he must have been grieving for the lost rhythm of his days, the friends and staff he couldn’t see in person. It seemed to me that the thing to do was what we had always done: put on anything from the household soundtrack. This is a broad net, of course, containing swing, bebop, and funk, though with a heavy dose of Monk, Davis, Mingus, Adderley, Parker, and Coltrane, the usual suspects.
Chief among the suspects, for both Gabriel and me, is Monk, possibly because he expresses something playful at times, uncanny at others. There is the swinging petulance of “Well, You Needn’t,” the cumulative stutters in “Brilliant Corners,” the warmth in “Ruby, My Dear”—the splayed fingers, the plinks and plunks, the mesmerized spontaneous dances, the discomforting chord. Even when romping, the sounds are the content of night dreams and whatever seems unsayable. The canyons of silence in Monk’s personal life (maybe an embodied loneliness, or aloneness, depending on how you look at it), his vacating the premises whether actually or figuratively, again seems the stuff of the unconscious world. What we arrive at through his music seems both mysterious and commiserating, and I don’t know anyone who can do that in just the way he does.
Perhaps one of the most uncanny recordings we play is Milt Jackson and Ray Charles, Soul Brothers / Soul Meeting. I say uncanny here not to refer to the music itself, which is melodic, optimistic even when blues-complaining, certainly not unsettling; it doesn’t embrace dissonance or take overt risks. I say uncanny because something about these recordings, if played from another room, has given me throughout the years, and regardless of the speakers or stereo, the vivid impression of actual people: the feeling that if I just rounded the corner, I’d find a band playing. I hadn’t played it for Gabriel for a long time when our new situation developed. One day, in a fit of loneliness, I put on Soul Brothers and went in the other room. It isn’t a case of imagining either Jackson or Charles specifically, but of sensing a vibration so powerful it has the ability to conjure, to remind us what the presence of humanity feels like, delivered entirely through sound.
I agree with Carl Jung’s observation (in his book Memories, Dreams, Reflections) that “Loneliness does not come from having no people around, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.” I imagine here the well of ideas that Gabriel is unable to extend outward, and how jazz is capable of rendering just these things, how it seems to say that everything is admissible. It doesn’t seek to solve loneliness, or life, but rather to talk about it, be immersed in conversation with it. Jazz became an almost logical connector between the disparate points of the virus, the young man without words on the study floor and the moment our family had ended up in. The paradox is that I can’t think of anything more antithetical to jazz than all the blue masks, latex gloves, sanitized relations. As an aside, it is interesting that in a time characterized by breathlessness (George Floyd, COVID), the musical instruments requiring breath have gone so far out of fashion. Somewhere—who knows where?—there are lonely, glimmering heaps of brass.
In the Blue Note documentary Beyond the Notes, Herbie Hancock tells the story of playing with Miles Davis one day when he flubbed a chord and was mortified. “Then Miles took a breath and he played some notes that actually made my chord right. How do you do that, you know? I was ready to crawl under the floor, but the difference was that I had judged what I had done. Miles didn’t judge what I did. He heard it and heard it as a part of the music. You know, something new that came into the music and he found something that worked.”
What strikes me about this story—apart from Miles, not much known for his Zen qualities, delivering the lesson of accepting whatever turns up in the moment as viable, which strikes me as possibly the single best construct for wading through life—is how much it seems a repudiation of loneliness. It is an embrace of what has just been given, and who has given it, to the extent of raising both to another realm. This seems to me the essence of jazz and its improvisations: the way it fully experiences and lifts up whatever arises in this project of being a human, lonely or otherwise.
Maria Mutch is the author of Know the Night, When We Were Birds, and Molly Falls to Earth. She lives in Rhode Island.
