Jarring Juxtapositions & Radio Revelations

Music is among other things a physiological phenomenon, so it should not be surprising how vivid the memories it can imprint on us can be. I've written before about the transfixing moment I first heard R.E.M. on a jankity little boom box in my bedroom. Similarly, I can well remember more or less exactly where I was when I had what I think of as a series of moments of discovery-by-way-of-juxtaposition—Reese's-peanut-butter-cup moments when one musical flavor mixed with another in such an unexpected way that I initially thought something else was playing along with what I was hearing, or there was something wrong with the appliance I was listening on, but which, once I was properly reoriented, ended up introducing me to sound worlds I hadn't imagined existed.

In three out of four of the cases that come to mind, a radio was the conduit (how bittersweet, now, to think how rare it is that a radio of any kind is ever on anywhere in my vicinity). I remember I was driving home from L.A.'s Universal City late on a weekend night when the reception near the mountains got sketchy and I could swear I was hearing two separate pieces in the space between two stations, one on the classical KUSC and whatever was next to it: I heard a big old-time Broadway chorus belting out a number while an orchestra pounded out what sounded like a Prokofiev battle scene. As the reception got clearer and I realized that this was somehow all one song, my excitement only grew, and it has scarcely dimmed since then: This was "In Dahomey," a satirical number from the original Show Boat. Before I say more you need to hear what I mean:

There's an excellent reason why this isn't included in revivals of this classic 1924 musical, which most point to as the first exemplar of what we now think of as the American musical drama. And it's not just because it doesn't really advance the plot, though it certainly hits some of the Kern/Hammerstein musical's themes about the performance of race and showbiz artifice. In a nutshell, the song is a triptych, beginning with an "exhibit" at the World's Fair of ostensible Africans got up in "savage" garb—this is the music I thought was Russian, but is instead meant to be a kind of forbidding atavistic jungle music, with racist nonsense lyrics like "Dyunga hungy ung gunga." The next bit has the white patrons of the exhibit freaking out and fleeing ("Though I'm not fearful/I'll not be a spearful"), followed by the Black actors playing the Africans breathing a sigh of relief, shedding their ridiculous costumes, and singing the praises of their true home: the Lower East Side.

In Dahomey
Let the Africans stay
In Dahomey
Gimme Avenue A
Back in old New York
Where yo' knife and fork
Gently sink into juicy little chops
what's made of pork!
We are wild folks
When de ballyhoos bawl
But we're mild folks
When we're back in de Kraal
'Cause our home
Our home ain't in Dahomey at all

The joke here is squarely on the panicking white folks (listen to the melodramatic flutter of their indignation), but to get to that punchline obviously requires a labored set-up of hugely questionable taste. In short, I don't ever need to see this number staged. But surely I can't be the only one who finds the song's marriage of show-boat-banjo exuberance to minor-key primitivism exhilarating. (This song surely deserves its own niche in my Private Canon.)

Another road revelation: I was driving on the 5—I remember it was from Orange County back to L.A.—and a Tom Waits cassette had either jammed or simply ended and popped out of the car's tape deck, and without a break I heard, at the same volume, a gravelly voice howl "Danger!" at me. My initial thought: Wait, what Waits song is this? In fact it was the radio playing a track by New Orleans-based rapper Mystikal:

 

I was knocked out by his flow, but also by what seemed to me the inspired and (as far as I knew) rare idea of using a James Brown/Little Richard-style blues holler in hip-hop. I liked it enough that I went out bought his album Let's Get Ready, which also featured the hit "Shake Ya Ass." Honestly, nothing else on that record hit me as hard as this initial impression, and I didn't keep up with Mystikal's work (which in recent years has all but dried up, due to some arrests for assault). But I had a moment with this music that's worth honoring here.

The next radio revelation came at home, again courtesy of KUSC. One night I turned it on and came in on the middle of an orchestra-and-piano piece that had a nice chop and sweep to it; it was in the vein of 20th-century dissonant-but-not-atonal music I often gravitate to. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, I heard a crazy whistling-siren sound I thought for a moment couldn't be coming from the same speaker (was it a neighbor's tea kettle? a sci-fi film on a nearby TV?). No, it was the ondes martenot, a theremin-like electronic organ, and it hovered over this swirling orchestra like an alien beaming an aria from a UFO hovering in mid-air. Hooked, I listened through to the end, not least to hear what I'd been listening to: It was Messiaen's vast Turangalîla-Symphonie. (I'm pretty sure it was one of the "Chant d'amour" movements, i.e., the second or fourth movement of the symphony's 10, that was playing when I tuned in, but I can't be sure; it is also possible that it was the 8th movement, excerpted below, in which the entrance of the ondes martenot is genuinely startling and full-voiced.) Like Ives's Fourth Symphony or Shostakovich's 7th, or even Carmina Burana or Le Sacre du Printemps, this is now a 20th-century monument to me.

The last example, and in many ways the dearest and subtlest, came via an iPod, with a track I owned but obviously hadn't paid close attention to. I was walking on Bedford Ave. in Williamsburg maybe a dozen years ago, around dusk if I recall correctly, and an angelic falsetto voice began singing a folklike melody in oddly accented Spanish over a classical-sounding woodwind ostinato in a gentle but insistent triple meter. So far so hypnotizing...and then, about a minute into the track, I thought I must have stepped into earshot of someone else's speakers, as a palmas-like hand-clap beat seemed to collide with the art song. But I soon realized, with mounting joy, that it was all the same song: Caetano Veloso's exquisite cover of Venezuelan singer/songwriter Simón Diaz's "Tonada de Luna llena," or "full moon song." There were more sonic surprises in store—some intermittent rattlestick buzz that starts around 1:43, a completely a cappella conclusion at 2:58, with just a final minor-key chord as a period for this gorgeous run-on sentence. This is one of those tracks I played over and over because I couldn't quite believe what I'd heard, but the more I heard the more I believed.
 

I've only recently learned more about the song, which is rooted in a tradition of Spanish folk songs, tonadas, which Diaz took it upon himself to revive/preserve in the 1970s. The lyrics seem to paint a dramatic allegory about a man killing a heron by the light of the full moon and (as far I can tell) thereby committing a deeper sin against someone he loves (which he then tries in vain to wash away). Veloso, who is Brazilian, doesn't typically sing in Spanish, making this song even more of an outlier. I could hardly have known all this as I strolled in rapt awe through the Brooklyn twilight. But music communicates on many more levels than the literal, and who's to say it wasn't somehow conveying some or all this to me on a certain wavelength? Or that each of these musical coincidences weren't somehow synchronistic, arrows meant to point me in new directions, if I could make myself available to them? Count me a believer.

(Speaking of "Tonada," here's a beautiful live a cappella version by Veloso, an intense rendition by Natalia Lafourcade and Gustavo Guerrero, and a lovely, classical-sounding version by Birds on a Wire, which starts to jam about halfway through.)