Dec 2, 2015
On His Deathbed, My Father and I Could Agree on Only One Thing: Bach
Time was running out, he would soon be dead, it was now or never.
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Later, as I walked down to the Mount Baker Station, I decided that the next time I visited the nursing home, my father and I would do something together instead of just sitting around waiting for him to die. And because the only thing he and I enjoyed doing together was listening to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, I would bring a CD player to his room. Our favorites included The Well-Tempered Clavier; Goldberg Variations, a collection of his greatest hits; the Cello Suites; and the galloping Brandenburg Concertos.
The discovery of our shared love for the music of the 18th-century German composer happened when I was 19. It was the Christmas season, which in southern Africa happens in the summer, and I was visiting Harare, Zimbabwe, from Gaborone, Botswana. I was in the living room waiting for TV to start (Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation, then the only station in the nation, operated between 5 p.m. and midnight) and listening to the Brandenburg Concertos on the Philips stereo.
My father returned from work, poured himself a drink in the bar (whiskey he had purchased while visiting India), and entered the living room with a look of surprise.
"Bach!" he said, and not exactly to me but to the home stereo.
"Yes," I said.
"This one is one of my favorites." It happened to be the allegro in the third concerto.
"You like Bach?" I asked.
"Yes, yes. It's so rhythmical. Almost has an African beat," my father said.
And we sat there, me on the sofa and him on the easy chair, listening to the concertos together, silently, but this was not our usual sort of silence. Unlike my discovery of my father's love of baseball many years later in Seattle, my discovery of his love of Bach made a deeper impression on me. I cared far less for that sport than he did, but our admiration of Bach was on an equal footing. It was soul to soul. We weren't in separate worlds, waiting for the moment to end, waiting for either him or me to stand and leave the room. We were actually sharing a world, the music of Bach. And as long as the performances of Bach's music played, we were fully engaged, fully there. There was no rush. For once, I was happy to be with my father, and he with his son.
Over the years, we found ourselves connecting with Bach again and again, sitting in some room and just listening to a work. There would often be a little conversation at the end of a session: "Isn't Prelude 1 the most perfect piece of music ever composed? So clear, simple, lyrical. The music almost plays itself. It's as natural as a stream." Or, "He even knew what flying above the clouds would feel and look like. 'Air' is jet travel before the invention of the plane." Or, "It is interesting that three brilliant black American pianists—John Lewis, Bud Powell, Nina Simone—were profoundly influenced by Bach. I don't think it is an accident. There is something there." Or, "I'm beginning to think Bach was not European. He does not compose like one, but like an African. He really might have been black."
More than once, I looked at an album or CD cover that had a drawing or painting of Bach and tried to see if his face had any African features. I never found one.
"You can actually do Shona clapping to that rhythm. It's not pronounced. But you can hear it, and it's a perfect match. The German is Shona clapping," my father would say, and then he would clap African style to the beat of a concerto to prove his point. (Shona clapping, which was the foundation for much of our culture's drumming and dancing styles, has two quick double claps that go 1-2/1-2, followed by three staggered claps that go 1-2-3.)
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BACH AROUND THE CLOCK
(Town Hall) I have a big problem with the term "civilization": It implies that something is sophisticated and something else is not, while the culture that's infamous for making this kind distinction ("I civilized--you savage") has been Western culture. But whenever I listen to the greatest composer in the Western musical tradition, Bach, I can't help but feel that his music is the very essence of civilization. His dense fugues, smooth preludes, and graceful concertos are perfect forms, elegant systems. Even the best jazz sounds like it's full of unacceptable errors when placed next to the refined works of Bach (and I generally prefer jazz to classical music). With the possible exception of Debussy (whose music is also full of beautiful errors), no other classical composer has obsessed jazz players more than Bach. From the sheer genius of Art Tatum to the noble purism of the Modern Jazz Quartet to the troubled brilliance of Bud Powell to the academicism of Jovino Santos Neto--a Seattle-based Brazilian jazz pianist who will be part of Town Hall's Bach Around the Clock--we find and feel Bach's influence. I hope Neto plays Brazil's most famous tribute to Germany's most generous musical offering, Villa-Lobos' "Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5." Charles Mudede Also see The Score, page 67.
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