Janszoon

One night. Twelve hours. Twelve albums. One lonely, see-through bastard.

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A Night in the Life of the Invisible Man

Time & Place

25 Albums You Should Hear Before the Moon Crashes into the Earth and We All Die

last.fm

Janszoon

7:00 pm
Bud Powell—Time Waits: The Amazing Bud Powell (1958)

The invisible man sits at a table by himself, munching on a bread roll. He loves this restaurant—the godfather booths, the mood lighting, the jazz on the speakers—the whole kit and caboodle just has such fantastic ambiance. Normally just being here makes him feel mellow and content, but tonight he's feeling kind of anxious, worrying if his date is going to show up. She's almost forty-five minutes late and he's starting to wonder if he's been stood up, or for that matter, if she even knew they were supposed to meet in the first place. It wouldn't be the first time that's happened—meeting someone he likes at a party only to discover later that she had mistaken him for a coat hanging on a door and assumed she was talking to the cute guy standing nearby in line for the bathroom. He's not generally a morose sort of person, he usually tries to see the bright side of things, but it's moments like this when his condition definitely feels like a burden. He slouches down in his chair and tries to immerse himself in the sounds of the bebop album that fills the air around him, Time Waits: The Amazing Bud Powell.

Like our transparent friend sitting alone in the the restaurant, this album is generally upbeat but with a depressive undercurrent running throughout that it fights very hard against. It opens with the latin-esque "Buster Rides Again", which is one of those swinging, upbeat songs where it's almost impossible to keep your body from moving while listening to it, due in a large part to the interplay between Powell's rhythmic keys and the shapeshifting patterns of drummer Philly Joe Jones. The second track, "Sub City" is a little more mellow, but still a toe-tapping bebop classic, with somebody, probably Powell, off-mic scatting nonsense along with the melody. It's not until track number three, the title track, that the album slumps down into melancholy. Sure it tries to sound simply relaxed, but the subtly dissonant, off-kilter piano staggers reveal a heart that belongs more to the sad sack passed out at the bar than the hipster smoking a cigarette by the stage. Once revealed, the sullen soul of this album can't hide itself despite it's best stabs at being cheery. On the subsequent tracks, "Marmelade", "Monopoly" and "John's Abbey", for example, the tunes pump along in groovy bop fashion, but those off-mic vocals show up again, sounding less like scatting and more like a testy drunk arguing with himself in an alley. Beyond that, on the last of those three, the entire piece feels like it's teetering on the verge of mania. On the one hand it's straight-up bebop, but on the other, like a lot of classic bop, its formalism barely able to contain itself within a mechanism that's flying out of control. In the end, the album turns introspective again with "Dry Soul", another late night rambler that sounds anything but dry.

The despondency that seeps in around the edges of this album is unfortunately no surprise. It was recorded late in Powell's career, when his alcoholism and personal baggage were just on the verge of obliterating his talent. His brother had died less than two years before, in the same Pennsylvania car wreck that killed legendary jazz trumpeter Clifford Brown, but even before that Powell was not the most stable of characters. He was abnormally sensitive to the effects of alcohol and sadly also came to be dependent on it. He spent several years of his life in mental institutions, overmedicated and subjected to electroshock therapy. The result was a shattered man. A genius on par with Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, but one who was so tragically broken that in end he died young—only eight years after this album—of tuberculosis, alcoholism and malnutrition, no longer even able to play piano like he used to.

__________________
A Night in the Life of the Invisible Man

Time & Place

25 Albums You Should Hear Before the Moon Crashes into the Earth and We All Die

last.fm

Blarobbarg

It made me excited to see another Janszoon journal.

It's making me even more excited to see a Bud Powell album right off the bat... If all the reviews are like this one, I will be a very happy Blarobbarg indeed.

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Trollheart

Just stunning. Where do you get your ideas man? Incidentally, is the guy really invisible, or is that just how the world makes him feel? Again, as in most of your material, the music is not anything I would gravitate towards, but I always love to see your writing and this has as ever not disappointed. If "25 albums" was the dark epilogue to life, this is perhaps the lead-up to it, the last lingering gasps of life before we all succumb to the inevitable; the powerful yet dour realisation that, as so many doomsayers have told us on every street of every city in just about every century, the end is nigh.

Looking forward to the hopefully developing story of the I-Man, and great to see you writing again!

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Janszoon

Thanks for your encouragement guys! I'm really looking forward to writing these and hoping that I do so more frequently than I did with my last journal.

And yep, TH, this guy is really invisible. Though fortunately he isn't evil like Griffin or Kevin Bacon.

__________________
A Night in the Life of the Invisible Man

Time & Place

25 Albums You Should Hear Before the Moon Crashes into the Earth and We All Die

last.fm

The Batlord

Damn it! I've been trying to think up a funny idea for a journal, and you beat me to it again! Bastard. Great entry though. Makes me feel inadequate about my musical taste.

It's about time someone recognized that monster for what he is.

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Wolke9

Lovely album, great concept! Stunning write-up, I'm tickled.

Janszoon

8:00 pm
K-the-I???—Broken Love Letter (2005)

After waiting another hour, the invisible man finally decides that his date isn't coming so he pays the bill and he goes outside. Ducking into a nearby alley, he strips off all his clothes like some sort of reverse super hero and stashes them in a box, next to a doorway, behind a dumpster, in the cleanest corner of the alley that he can find. Now truly undetectable to the human eye, he does what he often does to relieve stress: he runs. The sun has just disappeared behind the downtown canyon walls as he starts, and he darts through a group of Red Hat Society ladies leaving each of them with only a vague notion that one of their companions may have bumped into them. He zigzags along partially clogged sidewalks, through clouds of fractured conversation and zoetrope-like movements, past high-end chain stores and tourist-trap restaurants, under el trains and through snarled traffic. He fills his lungs with oxygen then exhales. Fills then exhales. Lost in the rhythms of breathing and transparent feet pounding on cement, he vanishes further still into simple motion of the urban machine, pushing himself forward as the cityscape flickers by on all sides.

Appropriately for this situation, the album begin with a track entitled "Miss Gofuckyourself", which sounds like a whirlwind of heartbreak and is built on top of a looped sample of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds' "Cannibal's Hymn". It's a suitable introduction to this swirling maelstrom of an album, which feels more like the stomach-churning emotional turmoil of a recent breakup than any music I've ever heard in my life. Even when it's not immediately apparent what the lyrics are specifically referring to, there's this sense that we as listeners are on an out-of-control psychic train ride that could at any moment jump the track. Beats pound at us and then skitter away. Samples of everything from super-crazy record scratching to jazz to 70s-style analog synths to Italian folk to psychedelic rock to Portishead to the aforementioned Nick Cave echo in and out of this broken heart, courtesy of Thavius Beck. Bitter lyrics bang their way through the abstraction as K-the-I??? repeatedly reminds us in quiet moments that, "You're not that beautiful." It's not until the title track, three-quarters of the way through the album that things settle down in a groove that resembles normal hip hop, but that track is so angry and emotional that normal rap posturing is left sobbing in the dust.

Kiki Ceacz—the man behind this music—is the Jackson Pollock of rapping, his words splattering around in abstract patterns that nevertheless communicate something deep and human and raw. It's kind of an amazing feat when you think about it. Hip hop is so much about rhythm after all, but Ceacz's music somehow works by eschewing all that. Sure there are beats, but they don't necessarily line up with the words he's spitting or the enormous wall of noise that typically provides the backdrop. In some ways this feels more like a spoken word album than hip hop album—but really, really good spoken word. Spoken word that's on some level of emotion that's never even been considered in any coffee shop built by humans. Spoken word that will find your heart under that flinty exterior and bang the hell out of it with a tack hammer.

__________________
A Night in the Life of the Invisible Man

Time & Place

25 Albums You Should Hear Before the Moon Crashes into the Earth and We All Die

last.fm

Frownland

Definitely checking out K-the-I??? after reading this and listening to the tracks. Love his style and the beats are continually interesting. Great post, Janzs.

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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

Janszoon

Glad you liked it! I hope you think he's as great as I do.

__________________
A Night in the Life of the Invisible Man

Time & Place

25 Albums You Should Hear Before the Moon Crashes into the Earth and We All Die

last.fm