“When I play it I’m gonna raise my horn a little bit,” Miles said. His customary playing stance, onstage or in the recording studio, was to point his trumpet straight at the floor as he played, a position that communicated contemplation and moodiness, though it was primarily a way of regulating his tone. “Can I move this down a little bit?” He indicated the mike.
“It’s against policy to move a microphone,” Townsend said, deadpan. The old church echoed with laughter.
Outside the 30th Street Studio, Manhattan was Manhattaning: rounded buses and big yellow cabs grinding up and down the avenues; car horns and scraps of radio music and pedestrians’ voices echoing in the deep-shadowed side streets. Outside, the everyday clamor and clash of a city afternoon in late-winter 1959; inside, the densest quiet as a passage outside of time proceeded: the recording of CO 62291, the number that would come to be titled “So What,” leading off the album soon to be known as Kind of Blue.
Folklore has existed in some form in every culture and, in each, it has brought underrepresented groups to the fore. As we look to expand the canon, folklore is a rich source of thought on topics of philosophic interest with the potential to uplift a wide range of voices who have thus far been largely overlooked.
Folktales puzzle and surprise and haunt. They make us ask ‘Why?’ And they invite us to imagine new ways to respond
What ultimately makes this book such a pleasure, though, is the uniqueness of its perspective. Reading a translator translating a translator is a brain-twister like no other, and it can’t fail to change the way you think about language. It feels like a privilege, too, to appreciate the passages that seem to have been written specifically to amuse her colleagues. Notably English’s version of a work by a Polish poet deemed untranslatable, which runs: “The world persists, but insecurely! / The rustling trees grow ultratreely!” You can picture translators gleefully texting it to each other with laughing-face emojis. It’s a glimpse into a profession that serves as a fascinating metaphor for our parasitic, multilingual, creatively prolific world.
This is a wonderful book about growing up, about a very young father raising his son, about the importance of school and its often special teachers, and about how much a caring community can contribute to a child’s life. We talk blithely of how “it takes a village,” but do we really know what that means? The Irish writer Elaine Feeney explores its many layers in her second novel, a work of such depth and compassion that it was no surprise to learn that it was on the Long List for last year’s Booker prize.
French’s dialogue is some of the best in the business, and it’s a delight to watch her move between American and Irish vernacular. In general, the novel’s greatest pleasures — genuine twists aside — reside in the specific intersection of outsider and native, and particularly the former’s determined need to idealize, to claim, to tint whole rivers green — “a bad case of allurement.”
Whether it is confronting the messy realities of death that leaves a trail of material and emotional debris for the living to clean up, or unpicking the intricacies of the familial and human ties, this collection turns out to be a potent distillation of lessons learnt over a lengthy life.
In 2002, Ishiguro chose a track by the American jazz singer Stacey Kent on Desert Island Discs and a friendship developed. Kent’s husband and collaborator Jim Tomlinson suggested to Ishiguro that he try writing her some lyrics – his first in 30 years. These were much better. Now, Faber has collected 16 of them (five as yet unrecorded) in The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain: Lyrics for Stacey Kent, with elegant illustrations by Bianca Bagnarelli.
Ishiguro’s lane-changing is not unique. There are songwriters who write novels (Nick Cave, John Darnielle), novelists who have written lyrics for musicians (Michael Chabon, Polly Samson), songwriters who publish poetry (PJ Harvey), and poets who release albums (Kae Tempest). But whether lyrics are themselves a form of literature is still an open question. While they can certainly be literary, a lyric is just one channel for conveying meaning in a song. The vocal delivery, melody, rhythm, arrangement and production are all used to enhance, or sometimes subvert, what the words are saying.