I’m not much of a concert-goer but yesterday was the third time my wife and I went to see blues guitarist Buddy Guy in 15 years. He’s 89 now, and according to Wikipedia officially retired. We probably caught the last show of what might be one of his last tours.
I first saw Guy play when he opened for B. B. King 15 years ago at a concert in DC, in 2010, when King was younger (85) than Guy is now. I had no idea who Guy was at the time.
King was already in declining health at the time, and it showed. He didn’t play much, but Guy pranced around the stage having a great time like he was 20 (he was 74), exuding more energy than I’ve ever managed to in my own 50 years. When I saw him next, in Seattle in 2018, King had been dead for a few years, and Guy was the headliner. Somewhat more sedate, but still fit, and bursting with top-decile energy for his age.
I also saw B. B. King perform live twice — in 2000 in Ann Arbor and 2010 in DC. Since King was overweight and in poor health, his decline between 75 and 85 was much more noticeable. Both performances were still powerful though. I suspect blues guitar is particularly friendly to long careers since it features both frenetic high-energy/dexterity playing that allows younger musicians to show off, and meditative playing with long, drawn-out notes, which allow the narrative arc of the performer’s life to shine through in a signature voice. High-tempo performances reveal the quality of your talent. Low-tempo performances reveal the quality of your life. This is one reason the latter are more interesting when put on by musicians in the later stages of their careers. Late style and low tempo go together. While younger musicians can often demonstrate technical virtuosity at low tempos, they haven’t lived enough to have much to say at low tempos. Older performers, even if their control shows some signs of shakiness and fragility, have a good deal more to say.
It’s a bit like how tech commentary is more compelling coming from people who’ve lived through a few tech cycles (and since a tech cycle typically lasts about 7-8 years, that means 20-25 years for a “few”). There’s probably a Nyquist frequency joke here.
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Though I know nothing about the blues tradition, beyond being able to recognize the signature chord progressions, I suspect one reason I’ve enjoyed it whenever I’ve listened, (though not with any depth of literacy or connoisseurship), is that I find artistic evolution over a lifetime more interesting than any single performance. And blues is a great canvas for cradle-to-grave performances.
In expressing this sort of life-as-performance quality, blues is closer in spirit to raga, the tradition I am most literate in, than to jazz, to which raga is often compared. What jazz and raga share is a kind of cerebral approach to structured improvisation, and both can fail by getting too cerebral. But what blues and raga share is this quality of being affective-life-canvas performance modes. As with blues, good raga musicians have very long careers, and the late stages of their careers are often the most interesting, their health permitting. At that point their music and their biography merge into one. Younger raga musicians can be… a bit boring.
Guy didn’t play much last night, but he had a bunch of shorter energetic bits. Notwithstanding my comment about low-tempo being better suited to aging performers, Guy established his identity (better informed people correct me if I’m wrong) with something like a high-tempo biographical claim (“Damn Right, I’ve got the blues”).
Even at 89, meditative, the adjective that comes to mind for B. B. King, is not how I’d describe Guy’s playing style. But the low-tempo meditative late style came through in the troubadour storytelling part of the performance. In the previous concerts where I saw him, the storytelling and dialogic banter with the audience had something of a stand-up comedy set feel to it. This time, it felt like reflective storytelling. The spoken word part had what can only be described with that overused word, authenticity, which came through even though I missed probably a third of the actual words and many of the punchlines. The stories were of the sort where even hearing only fragments is enough to convey mood. The impact doesn’t rest on the setup or punchline, but in the manner of telling (Mark Twain once observed that the American humor story, unlike the British comic story, relies on the manner of telling rather than the contents).
Curiously, the storytelling, to my ear, had some similarities with the storytelling in The Canterbury Tales, which I’m reading for our book club this month. There is a similar mix of bawdiness and caper-comedy on the one hand, and philosophical and moral reflection on the other.
But there’s more to the connection between music and history than the obvious one represented in any sort of troubadour tradition, where the music “officially” has a history-chronicling societal purpose. Art doesn’t just occasionally pull duty as historical memory. It is a form of historical memory.
August is medieval fiction month at the Contraptions Book club, where you get to pick from: Canterbury Tales, Decameron, Divine Comedy, and Don Quixote. Pick your edition/translation carefully. I am reading Canterbury Tales. Declare your choice in this chat thread.
In the case of blues, Buddy Guy is probably among the last musicians who can talk of things like growing up picking cotton without either irony or bad faith (there is a great bit in Ghost World (2001) where Steve Buscemi’s blues-connoisseur character rants about a band of young, white blues singers at a bar singing about picking cotton and mules).
Music theorists and historians probably have a lot to say about how the entire genre is rooted in a history of pain. My own gloss on it is that though the technical innovations of blues live on in newer genres, there is a sense in which the blues is something like a finite chapter, not just of the history of music, but of history period. A record of the subjective pain of that history is a necessary part, perhaps the necessary part, of that chapter. The chapter is currently in the process of ending, as musicians like Buddy Guy retire.
You can’t tease apart a genre of music (or more generally, any kind of art) from the history that produced it. The genre is the musical equivalent of a retired soccer jersey number associated with a famous player during an era.
All closed chapters of music seem to have this quality of being inseparable from the historical eras that produced them. Even the most cerebral sorts of classical music. But some genres seem to have more of this historical entanglement quality than others. In fact, more than the pop vs. classical distinction, it’s perhaps interesting to plot musical traditions on a spectrum stretching from memory music to non-memory music. Increasingly, to the extent I listen to music, I tend to listen to memory music.
This spectrum, I think, shapes which performers are drawn to which genres at a young age. You are either a high-context historian of moods, participating in creating a musical record of the world’s affective evolution, or a low-context historian, programmatically exploring the abstract possibilities of musical design spaces, and systematically tracing out the ways in which they might approach the frontier of pure dissonant noise, starting from some set of formal premises.
To an engineering eye, the latter sort of music looks like formally assessing the information-carrying potential, or expressivity, of a form, while the former looks like actually saying things. It’s the difference between studying thermodynamics and designing car engines.
Individual artistic practice of the high-context memory-embodying sort appears cumulative in two ways. First it is cumulative in the sense of accumulating and differentiating virtuosity that starts out rehearsing, then driving, the evolution of its home tradition, including its historical thematic concerns. Second, it is cumulative in the sense of eventually becoming capable of serving as a living, non-verbal mood record of the history itself. Not all artists graduate to being historians of mood, or seek to. And it isn’t a matter of talent or inclination alone. Your life has to get tangled up with history worth recording. Otherwise, perhaps, abstract explorations are a better use of your talents.
First the art takes your measure, then you take the measure of the art. Then finally, as an embodiment of the art, you take the measure of the world itself, particularly its history.
If I may be forgiven a labored signal-processing metaphor, these are the convolution, deconvolution, and expression stages of an individual artistic career, viewed as a measuring instrument.
This phenomenon, I think, can be found beyond music.
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