Lord Emsworth and the Asymptote

Published: Thu, 12/02/21

, and had more than one anthology in which Charles Schultz discussed the development of the strip and his own creative process. I was especially struck by his description of how, in the midst of a conversation with another person, he could be nodding and seemingly paying attention, only to realize with a start that for the past five minutes he had been looking at the person's shirt collar, imagining the feeling of drawing it on paper. I don't know if this is something everyone does, but by high school I was definitely staring out the window during Russian Literature, imagining endless improvised choruses on a shuffle in C and far more concerned about where the horns should come in than about Raskolnikov's metaphorical relationship to the River Neva.

This has never gone away, so I'm sure in my recent turn as inlaw-about-town at the recent Thanksgiving festivities I bore a more than passing resemblance to Clarence Emsworth, P.G. Wodehouse's vague and fuzzy-mind lord of Blandings Castle. Friendly and conversational? Check. Enthusiastic consumer of pecan pie? Check. Game for a long, leisurely cross-ranch ramble to the Native American hieroglyphs? A most emphatic Check. And yet. I'm pretty sure I spent the majority of my West Texas sojourn far up inside my own skull, pondering the details of a new project. Which songs to choose? Will there be enough different keys and grooves? Will all my parts work on the new guitar? And of course – how hard is it to write arrangements for two horns?

Back in Austin, I was out walking the Fretboard pooch and listening to a timely discovery, The Arranger's Podcast. In this particular episode, bassist, composer and bandleader John Clayton was asked what he was listening to lately. He said much of the time, his listening depended on his work. If he was about write string parts for a project, out came all of his favorite symphonies. Not to imitate or take directly from. Just so that, when the time came to write, he'd have the recollection of those timbres, those sounds, swirling around as a kind of reference and inspiration.

"Ping!" went the little light bulb over my head. I spent my next nieghborhood walk tuned in to Charlie Hunter's Everyone Has A Plan Until They Get Punched In The Mouth, and the walk after that with Blue Mitchell's 1962 Riverside LP The Cup Bearers. One of the things I love most about music is how at different times, the same recordings can hold different meanings and purposes. I am, of course, profoundly interested in that Charlie Hunter album for the way he combines syncopated bass grooves, improvised lines and voicings all on one instrument. But this time, I focused on the trumpet and trombone – where they felt arranged, where they seemed improvised, how they rounded out the ensemble. And while I mentally bookmarked Mitchell's sprawling solo on "Dingbat Blues" as one to return to for a bebop master class, I was there this time for the trumpet and tenor parts – where were they in octaves, where were they in harmony, where were they contrapuntal or call-and-response?

My fellow student Gus once dispatched a particularly esoteric professor in our university's music department with one sentence: "See, the problem with Art is he thinks talking about music can replace actually playing it." And it's true, they're not the same. But thinking about, learning about, hearing about music gives you new ways to take in what you're listening to, and trying your own hand at almost anything immediately sharpens your appreciation of how it's done by others. Eventually, you've got to crawl down out of your cranium and try things out, and sometimes it doesn't sound nearly as cool on the guitar as it did in your head. But closing that gap? That's the pursuit. And as my old professor of Medieval Jewish Thought used to say, relating human efforts to approach the Divine to the mathematical concept of the asymptote: "Are we going to get there? Yes. When? Never."

More soon,

David

P.S. You can find a playlist of these and other horn- and groove-inspired tracks on my Playlists page: www.fretboardconfidential.com/playlists

P.S.S. Join me at 10:30am this morning on Youtube for the rescheduled live stream on the shuffle groove: The Shuffle Groove plus Q&A