Where do we start on the issue of starting? How about the day? The day is the representative unit of your life. How do you start it? It’s getting to be a vexed issue, isn’t it? What do you allow yourself to see, hear or think about first? What areas of intake – screens, publications, conversations, broadcasts – are you carefully keeping away from you these days until you are numbed enough to take it? How can you be reasonably sure you’re going to have the optimism and energy to continue? The first move better be a sustaining one. It better take care of you.
All music must choose an opening move. Lately I have been thinking about opening tracks on records. There is a narrative convention of making a record’s strongest track the second or third or fourth, presumably on the theory that the listener must be led in gradually. These are ten great refutations of that convention.
1) Maria Monti: “Il Pavone” (from Il Bestiario, 1974, reissued 2018 by Unseen Worlds). Quiet, now. Concentrate. Deep breaths.
2) Sons of Kemet: “My Queen is Ada Eastman” (from Your Queen Is A Reptile, 2018). “I’m still here. I’m still here. I’m still here. I’m still here. Man still here. I’m still here. I’m still here.”
3) Candi Staton: “Here I Am Again” (from Candi, 1974). “Baby—I’d like for you to listen just a moment. I’d like to tell you something.”
4) Yves Tumor: “Devout” (from Serpent Music, 2016). Every playlist needs a middle, even one built of beginnings. This is an overture from a brilliantly puzzling new-thing record, two-chord jazz-funk from the inter zone of no-time.
5) Void: “Who Are You?” (from Faith/Void, split LP, 1982). The chord. The rise. The dive. The the feedback, the riff, the drum roll. “I wake up and I see you every day! You never hear a thing I say!”
6) Henry Threadgill: “100 Year Old Game” (from Where’s Your Cup?, 1997). Until further notice, Threadgill is the cosmopolitan ideal. The North American cosmopolitan ideal? Sure, if that helps.
7) Kyle Bobby Dunn: “Ouverture de Peter Hodge Transport” (from Kyle Bobby Dunn and the Infinite Sadness, 2014). A surprise at the end.
8) The Max Roach Trio featuring pianist Hasaan Ibn Ali: “Three-Four Vs. Six-Eight Four-Four Ways” (from The Max Roach Trio Featuring the Legendary Hasaan, 1964). A continuous surprise.
9) Ryuichi Sakamoto: “Amore” (from Playing the Piano). A dramatic reduction of a song from Beauty that once had shakers, shredding electric guitar, synths, and all manner of other things. Winding down now.
10) Susana Santos Silva: “All the Rivers” (from All the Rivers, 2018). An album opening track which is in fact its only track, and thus also its closing track. A performance for trumpet and architecture: Silva, alone, playing against the marble interior walls of the Portuguese National Pantheon.