The Unhearable
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” ― Hannah Arendt
Jim Dickinson once said that the greatest music ever made was that music which you could not hear. At the time, he was referring to those moments in the recording studio when the RED BUTTON is not glowing…nothing is being recorded…and an artist or band, while fiddling in the studio, does something wonderful. There is a tragedy of it being lost forever, and for the producer and engineer in the control room, the only silver lining is that they were the only audience to a great musical moment.
The comment goes beyond just recording studio moments. Jim and I dug into all those sounds lost forever…all the artists who never got recorded when there was no such thing as recording….hearing Nero’s violin (fictitiously?) played while Rome was burning…hearing Buddy Bolden blow his coronet down in the Big Easy or Scott Joplin keying some rags. And then there are all the live shows we have not attended, that had not been taped…all of the blues parties in the wee hours of Juke Joint, USA…all the nascent throat singing deep in the Himalayas or late night ragas in the small villages in Northern India. The greatest music is that which we cannot hear; a mythical perfect thing that we can only imagine…and inspire to find or recreate.
The start of recording history is a marker of a lost, un-hearable thing. 144 years ago today, 1877, Thomas Edison made the first sound recording (ok, MAYBE it was really done in 1860 by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville) by reciting the nursery rhyme Mary Had a Little Lamb into his newly created phonograph machine. That moment gave birth to everything that followed it…and ironically, that moment cannot be heard, the recording was lost. Edison recreated the recording in 1927 as an attempt to fill in a historical gap, but it is clear in his voice full of pomp and grandeur that what he was doing here was defining history, not making it.
And thus the start of the recorded sound, is lost…and we have spent 144 years attempting to recapture the excitement of that moment every time we press the record button in the studio or on a tape recorder in a crowded audience…as we attempt to contain the uncontainable: the fiery, beautiful, complex and ever evolving sound of music that really sounds best as the molecules in the air change when the notes are initially being struck.
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DREAM BOOGIE
By: Langston Hughes
Good morning, daddy!
Ain't you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred?
Listen closely:
You'll hear their feet
Beating out and beating out a -
You think
It's a happy beat?
Listen to it closely:
Ain't you heard
something underneath
like a -
What did I say?
Sure,
I'm happy!
Take it away!
Hey, pop!
Re-bop!
Mop!
Y-e-a-h!
