On (Un)groundedness

Some music from last week, and what it made me think about. (Plus, as always, a rec.)

Last week, I had the privilege of improvising with Thomas Rosenkranz and Seth Davis, two formidable musicians in the Kansas City area. There is an “improvising ensemble” at UMKC, which functions as kind of a lab for students to explore game pieces, meditation scores, and other “non-idiomatic” approaches to spontaneous musical creation.* This year, Dr. Rosenkranz had the brilliant idea to organize a concert series at the Diastole Scholars’ Center so that this student ensemble would have built-in performance opportunities to work up to. Once a month in September, October, and November, there’s a show comprising a set from students, followed by our faculty ensemble performing unstructured improvisations to cap off the evening. These concerts have so far been warm, intimate, and invigorating, the early budding of an eager community. I’m very grateful to have been invited to participate. 

As it turns out, I’m also really happy with the music that we made, so much so that after the first concert, I decided I’d record the second one. If you’d like to check it out, you can hear the entirety of our 17-minute set below. I love the way Thomas intentionally evokes various romanticisms and impressionisms selectively and at just the right times. Seth helps keep the music unexpected with an unbelievable array of sounds and judicious use of his blistering technique. It’s just a joy to play with these two.

Since moving to Missouri, meeting and playing with musicians has been the slowest and most difficult aspect of my transition, no surprise given my full-time job and often weekly commutes across the entirety of the state. Last year, I played exclusively in Ohio, despite working and often living a 10 hour drive away, in a city with a strong scene and a famous reputation for jazz. It was and remains worth it, always, to play with some of my oldest friends, despite sometimes having to turn around and leave the next day, knocking out the 10 hours in a single sitting so I can teach on Monday. At the same time, the kind of rootlessness I’ve felt since leaving Columbus is getting harder and harder for me to deal with. When you repeat something often enough, it becomes etched into your body, and what lives in the body manifests in the spirit. As someone without a stable sense of home, what is my personality becoming? 

So far, the people who have subscribed to this newsletter are predominantly my dear friends, turned out to support me (thank you 😭😭😭). They will know that I find myself in the—enviable! impossible!—situation where my partner and I both got academic jobs that we wanted, both in the same state. They will also know what this means, the significance of it, the genuine miracle it represents in a world where academia and adjacent fields have been systematically delegitimized and defunded, so that more and more of us are competing for fewer and fewer jobs. After five years of precarious employment and a pandemic that saw us both broke and living with our parents, the luck and often joy involved in where we have landed does not and will never escape me. At the same time, living across St. Louis and Kansas City—close enough to commute, far enough to require two apartments—has been more than I bargained for.

In these last years, my friends will have heard me complain that I feel I have forgotten how to talk with people, a feeling I usually blame on the long consequences of our “lockdown” era. But there’s something else at play, too; when I really think about it, it’s less that I don’t know how to converse and more that doing so leaves me feeling frazzled. I have adopted, since being here, a kind of self unrecognizable to those who have known me the longest, someone who doesn’t spin silently over people’s possible reactions to what I’m saying but who says the first thing that pops into his mind, waving his arms with a bemused look, and sometimes receiving chuckles in return.

I have liked to think of this as growth, the result of softening towards the world, which I previously couldn’t trust enough with anything that hadn’t been premeditated, worked over. But at the end of any given social event I have surprised myself by navigating, I often feel more untethered than when I started. I’m able to converse, it seems, but not connect. As a Scorpio, this is troubling to me. It’s also difficult feeling to describe—but I know that it has something to do with the fact that when I’m leaving wherever I am, I’m not just going home; I’m often getting in the car again to travel one of the three places across which lies my distributed heart.

The other day, in Kansas City, I turned around to grab something that wasn’t there; more accurately, it was there, but in the corresponding place where I had set it down in St. Louis a few days prior. And this happens all the time—I keep my silverware here but have gotten used to it being there. My everyday choreography is confused, sedimenting in me a somatics of disjointedness so that in the hustle from one drive to the next, this kind of surface floating is the only thing I feel with certainty. Let me tell you a story, I say, forgetting exactly where I was and who I was talking to the last time I brought it up, forgetting that it was you all along.

If this post is a little myopic, it’s at least in part because I know that distance is something the majority of us have in common—distance from friends, family, or something of fundamental importance, out of reach. Especially in this gigantic country, with its indefensible lack of train routes and its cultivation of one value above all else (WORK!), we find ourselves variously scattered and longing.

Leaving aside the question of coping, I want to say simply that I feel this, too, pulled by my twin and directly oppositional desires to be close with my people and to do the work that matters to me. “Finding a sense of purpose is key to longevity,” some podcast I listened to on some commute told me. “Loneliness is an epidemic that lowers health outcomes,” some podcast I listened to on some commute told me. “The United States is a country perfectly engineered to isolate us from both community and meaning,” said no mainstream coverage of anything, ever.

This year, I’ve been able to make some progress meeting folks, and have already had a handful of different gigs in KC, helping click some fundamental aspect of my identity back into place. I’m still trying to figure out how to feel settled and coherent across 2.5 cities and so many different priorities. But playing good music with good people absolutely does help.

Let me leave off with a recommendation, as I imagine will be my tendency.

Rec

I don’t really understand anything about this album, which feels both heavily sample-based and also constructed through live recreations, which is to say great playing. I think “Hether” is a guitarist, but I don’t really want to look it up. The point is that this album of covers evinces a refined discernment in its choice of tunes and in their rendering, unified by an atmosphere both vintage and contemporary. It’s moody like Portishead but romantic like Chet Baker. cry hard!

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*They are idiomatic! I know! It’s just still unclear to me what the best adjective for something like this would be. Experimental? Free? Ungrounded? See what I did there?