CECIL, KERNELS, AND FLAN

  Last night, I drove to my dad's Senior Commune for dinner. On the way over, I listened to a Cecil Taylor album, and worked on my spiel about abstract music.
  On the Hot Plate radio show, I'll attempt to do something that may be even harder than getting Americans to talk civilly about politics-- I'm going to try to get people to accept abstract music. Or at least to learn to think about it beyond the "I hate this, therefore I question whether it's even music at all" response. I plan to demonstrate that abstract music can actually be a lot of fun, rather than the torture it's perceived to be by the uninitiated.
  By the time I got to my dad's, I'd gotten weary of the Taylor album I was listening to. The piece had done something many of Cecil's performances do-- gradually bumped up the dynamics and activity until by the end it's loud and busy. I was surprised at my reaction, because I like his work in general, and his work with the Feel Trio is some of his best. Willam Parker is one of the finest "avant-garde" bassists, and Tony Oxley is a spectacularly inventive drummer, with ideas on rhythm and texture that fit beautifully with Taylor's.
  Then I realized my error. You can't listen to music passively, drift away from it, and drift back in to dismiss it. I was rehearsing my talk about this very issue while I was "listening," and didn't really focus on the music while it was gradually building up. Cecil's high-energy climaxes are arrived at in an organic way, and if you're not onboard for the development, you're not going to enjoy the majestic clutter he's worked up to.

  When I first got interested in classical music years ago, I didn't know much about it, and I tended to stop paying attention to it after a few minutes of listening. I'd suddenly recall that I was listening to music, and was usually not able to get back into it. At this point, I'd figure I'd had enough Beethoven or Bach for the day, and turn it off.
  Later, following a lot of listening on my own, and a lot of learning in music classes, I was able to focus for longer periods of time on classical performances. I remember one weekend when, to satisfy a Howard University course requirement for "enrichment," I willingly went to two full-length performances of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire in the same weekend. For those who haven't had the pleasure, this long vocal and instrumental piece is sort of the Ernest Tubb of 20th century classical composition. There may be compositions with more dissonance, but this one combined Schoenberg's polarizing musical language with an approach to singing that would strike most listeners as extremely mannered and affected.
  Before one performance, a group of musicologists sat on stage with microphones and warned the crowd about how hideous the music would be after the intermission. They talked about how many venues are reluctant to even mention Schoenberg's name in the paper, for fear of driving away audiences. During the break, I heard two ladies in front of me say, "We should probably just leave. The music coming up sounds like it's going to be horrible." Another victory for musicologists!
  At last night's dinner, we sat with a sweet old granny who'd been a nurse in "the war." She told me she'd been widowed for ten years, had a dance partner for eight, and been engaged for six. Noticing the giant bloody scab on my dad's forehead, she asked him if he'd had a fall (a common occurrence at the commune), and he explained that he'd wrecked his car. "Did you- wreck it much?" she wondered. "Completely," I said, waving my arms in a gesture of clarification. "I hope I don't wreck MY car-- it's new," she said, before adding some curriculum vitae about contests she and her dance partner had won. As a couple, they'd been voted Most Adorable, and as a solo he had recently guessed the number of popcorn kernels in a giant jar. "Just the kernels," she was quick to add, and for this he had won some movie tickets and a few boxes of Good and Plentys.
  My dad then mentioned that we were sitting with a couple who'd had kids at the same private Catholic school where I'd been miserable for much of my childhood. I won't mention their name, but it occurred to me that the lady had driven a birthday party full of fourth graders (me included) to a movie theater in 1975, when "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" was quietly rearranging the DNA of a generation of American boys. This movie changed our idea of humor the way Jimi Hendrix changed what people thought music could be. I didn't say all this at the table; the discussion topic at the moment was dessert. My dad said he was leaning toward cherry cobbler, while another dining companion had both bread pudding and rice pudding on his mind. In the end he couldn't choose. I was full of okra, and ignoring the dessert options, in spite of the Holy Grail lady's well-intentioned suggestion to not rule out flan. (I calmly told myself she couldn't possibly have known about my checkered past with regard to flan. I once ate a Chinese meal which had broken glass in it; when I complained to the waiter, he brought me a plate of flan. "On the house!" he said, and walked away. I learned that day that narrowly escaping violent death can lead to complimentary flan, and I've more or less lived my life based on that lesson ever since.)
  A couple minutes later, four people at our table were chowing down on flan. And a few minutes after that, my dad and I were back at his apartment, which is largely a conduit for Fox News, watching a panel of luminaries argue about which Trump attribute was the very best. I gathered that they were most excited about his approach to immigration, but with the sound off it was hard to tell.