Tagged — Jamie Lyons
Music doesn't influence shit. Influence. That's the word people use when they're afraid of the truth, the word critics use when they want to commit to the smallest possible claim, a word that hedges, a word that lies. Music doesn't gently suggest. Music doesn't politely recommend. Music doesn't influence. Music grabs you by the throat at two forty five in the morning and makes you remember that one spring night when everything mattered, when you were alive enough to bleed, when you hadn't yet figured out how to wall yourself off from the world… for what you thought was your own protection.
Every type of music. From Callas murdering them softly at the Palais Garnier to Ron Pigpen's whiskey-soaked blues, from the avant-garde noise merchants torturing their synthesizers in basement venues to whatever saccharine pop garbage my nephew won't shut up about (and yes, even that, especially that, because the saccharine pop is doing the same work just with worse production values), they're all doing the same essential thing. They're telling me who I am before I figured it out myself. That Kronos Quartet piece that made me weep? That wasn't them. That was me. That was me recognizing my own ghost in the sound, the ghost that was already in the room before the music even began, the ghost the music just gave a shape and a body to.
The cathedral organs. The three-chord punk snarl. The Indian tabla conversations that spiral into infinity and don't seem to need a destination. They're not backgrounds to my life. They're the architecture of consciousness itself. Sound shapes the spaces I inhabit, builds the rooms I'm able to think inside of, decides what kinds of thoughts are even available to me on a given morning, afternoon or evening. Sound tells me when to fuck, when to fight, when to weep at a stoplight for no reason that would survive being explained to anyone… when to finally admit I'm terrified of dying alone.
I pretend I choose my music. Like I'm some discriminating consumer at some sonic buffet, picking what suits my mood, sampling the offerings, exercising my refined taste. Better than you, more sophisticated than you. Bullshit. Music chooses me, just like it chooses you. It finds me when I'm vulnerable (drunk, heartbroken, young, old, whatever, the list of vulnerable states is just the list of being alive) and it carves itself into my DNA. That song from 1989? It's not nostalgia. Fuck nostalgia. Nostalgia is the polite word for what's actually happening, which is that a specific arrangement of vibrations is functioning as a time machine, built out of guitar feedback and regret and whoever you were when you first heard it and couldn't yet imagine being anyone else.
Here's the truth I usually don't lead with. I tried to be inside the music. First chair trumpet, San Francisco Youth Symphony, the top of that particular pyramid, the seat you only get if you've spent your adolescence in a practice room while everyone else was doing whatever the hell normal teenagers do. Weekends at the Conservatory of Music, learning theory from people who actually knew it, learning that talent isn't the thing, discipline is the thing, talent is the entry fee. Summers at Tanglewood. Stockbridge. The Berskshires. Fifteen years old, brass embouchure that could hold for hours, surrounded by the Empire Brass Quintet, Seiji Ozawa and the Young Artist Orchestra and the best brass players in the country, learning what it costs to be that good, and it costs everything, the practice rooms eat your twenties and your thirties and your friendships and most of your love life and your back and your hearing and you do it anyway because the music demands it. First quarter at Northwestern, in the school of music, on the track. I was supposed to be one of them. The horn players. The professionals. The ones who spend their lives inside the architecture instead of standing outside admiring it. Then I left for Stanford. Traded the practice room for the seminar room, the embouchure for the essay, made a choice I've spent the rest of my life either ignoring justifying or trying to understand and mostly failing at all. The trumpet went in the closet. The music didn't. The music followed me out of the conservatory and into every room I've ever sat in since, every seminar, every studio, every relationship, every late night writing something nobody asked me to write. Which is how I know what I know about it. Not from outside. From a brief stretch on the inside, a Tanglewood-summer-and-Northwestern-fall stretch where I was being inducted, and a much longer stretch of being someone who got close enough to professional musicianship to feel the heat coming off it, and then walked away (or pushed away), and then could never quite walk far enough away to stop hearing it. The walking is still happening. The hearing is still happening.
The experimental composers torturing cellos in abandoned warehouses. The grandmother humming Puccini while folding laundry. The kid in his bedroom making beats on a laptop held together with electrical tape and refusing to wait for permission. They're all engaged in the same savage, necessary act. The same one. Translating the inchoate scream of being alive into something the rest of us can finally understand, or almost understand, or at least be in the same room with for three or four minutes without flinching.
Music is the thing that was there before language. It will be there after. Before and after. It's not about anything. It is everything. The shape of every moment I've ever lived, every moment I've ever lost, every moment I'm still hoping I get to live, crystallized into vibration and air.
Industries 2026
December 30, 1994. Madison Square Garden. Phish, “Wilson.” The king was fake. The devotion wasn’t. I was there. I want that on the record before anything else, because what follows is going to be cruel, and cruelty from a distance is cheap and shitty. I was in the Garden that night with a friend. He […]
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FalseArt 2026
Look at them. Four guys in suits that probably cost less than your cell phone bill, standing under studio lights in grainy black and white… they look like insurance adjusters. Like men who file their taxes early. Joe Morello starts that shuffle on the cymbal, Brubeck drops that chord on the piano and something cracks… […]
ReadFalseArt 2024
Here’s what happened when the Duke walked into God’s house with a swing band and told the congregation to get off their knees: September 1965, Grace Cathedral, and Duke Ellington’s bringing the whole damn orchestra into this Gothic pile of stone and righteousness like he’s staging a raid on heaven itself. Not asking permission. Not […]
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FalseArt 2018
December 19, 1958. The Palais Garnier. You want to talk about a moment when the universe temporarily stopped fucking around? This might have been it. Maria Callas didn’t just perform that night. She walked into that gilded Belle Époque monument to French self-satisfaction, all those marble staircases and chandelier’d horseshoe balconies where the bourgeoisie had […]
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Collusion / Industries 2018
Big name/legendary collaborations are usually a letdown. Two “titans” get in a room together and suddenly everyone’s so fucking precious about their legacy that nothing actually happens, just a lot of careful posturing and committe meeting compromise dressed up in press release language about “exciting new directions” and “boundary-pushing work.” But thirty-five years? Thirty-five years […]
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Industries 2018
I’m not going to pretend I understand what Alonzo sees when he makes a ballet, but I know what it feels like to hunt something elusive with a camera, that split second when bodies in motion become something else entirely. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, October 2018, Alonzo’s remount of his baroque meditation Handel, […]
ReadCinematics 2018
This city used to be where you could fuck around and find out. Not in some precious way, but in the way that actually meant something, where a choreographer could look at a quartet that’s been demolishing the boundaries of what four strings can do for decades and say, “Yeah, let’s see what happens when […]
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Individualism 2018
You don’t understand what it means to be in that room until you’re in that room. Not watching, that’s what tourists do, what the assholes with the expensive seats do. I mean in it, close enough to see the sweat, the micro-adjustments of his fingers, the way his whole body becomes an argument with silence. […]
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Industries 2017
The lobby at Bing Concert Hall is all soaring glass and clean California geometry, the kind of space that makes you wonder if anyone’s actually allowed to breathe wrong in here. I’m here to photograph which means I’m basically a voyeur, trying to freeze what shouldn’t be frozen: movement, breath, sculpture, sound, the precise moment […]
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Industries 2016
There’s this thing that happens when you walk into a space like YBCA and someone’s decided to call the thing a retrospective. That word alone, retrospective, it’s already half-dead on arrival, embalmed in institutional reverence before the first note even sounds. But what I’m getting from this image, from whatever the hell Luciano conjured in […]
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Contemporary chamber ensemble Wild Rumpus perform Fausto Romitelli’s 2003 video opera An Index of Metals at Freight and Salavage in Berkeley. Nathaniel Berman conductor…
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Speculation 2016
Industries 2016
The academics want you to believe that live performance (the sweating, breathing, bleeding out loud presence of actual human bodies in actual space) carries some sacred charge that recordings can’t touch. That there’s magic in the ephemeral, nobility in the disappearing act. Every moment unique, finite, gone the second it happens. Like watching your best […]
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FalseArt 2015
Here’s the thing about Glass hauling Disney’s corpse onto the stage at Teatro Real, it’s got that particular American genius for taking something everybody thinks they understand and then shoving it into the meat grinder until nobody’s quite sure what they’re looking at anymore. The Madrid premiere went up in January 2013, and you’ve got […]
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Individualism 2015
Last week I spent some time with this gentleman outside the Old Mint. He’s a jazz musician. Played with some of the greats up and down California, the kind names you’d recognize if you knew anything about the real music, the stuff that mattered before everything got packaged and sold back to us as nostalgia. […]
ReadIndustries 2014
We Players Vessels for Improvisation at Hyde Street Pier with inkBoat and Rova Saxophone Quartet. In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed. Charles Darwin
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FalseArt 2013
So here I am at Fort Mason, in some rehearsal studio that smells like last week’s ambition and tonight’s desperate grab at relevance. The Magic Theater closed Buried Child and somebody thought I needed cheerleaders. Fucking cheerleaders. And a tuba, or maybe they’re gogo dancers, at this point, who gives a shit? The distinction matters […]
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Wanderlust 2013
Wanderlust along the Coast: Beach Piano I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a […]
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Industries 2013
There’s this guy Luciano Chessa, Italian, classically trained at Bologna’s conservatory, PhD from UC Davis, teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory, and he’s here at the Performance Studies International conference making a goddamn piano sing like it’s possessed by the ghost of Luigi Russolo himself. He’s performing Variazioni su un Oggetto di Scena, Variations on […]
ReadIndustries 2012
Underground venues are a photographer’s nightmare. The light’s always wrong, some amber wash from a single gel, maybe a practical lamp someone dragged in from their living room, and darkness everywhere else. Viracocha is no exception. I’m fumbling with ISO settings, knowing most shots are gonna have grain like sandpaper, trying to find an angle […]
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