The Dancer and the Dance: A Book of Distinctions

Glenn Spearman: The Musa-physics: Myth-Science-Poetics

194 The Dancer and the Dance Glenn Spearman The Musa-physics: Myth-Science-Poetics Most people don’t have any idea of what improvisation is . . . It means the magical lifting of one’s spirits to a state of trance . . . It means experiencing oneself as another kind of living organism, much in the way of a plant, a tree—the growth, you see, that’s what it is . . . It has to do with religious forces. —Cecil Taylor, quoted in Michael Ventura, Shadow Dancing in the U.S.A. “I asked him, ‘Are you dying?’ He said, ‘No.’” —Glenn Spearman’s wife, Shantée Baker Spearman, on the night before his death The death in 1998 of tenor saxophonist Glenn Spearman brought to an end his brilliant career as free jazz composer, player, teacher, and all-round energy source. Spearman was only fifty-one when he died, and in the notes to his last CD, Blues for Falasha, his associate Larry Ochs writes, “This recording, which seemed like the beginning of something new in his music, now must instead serve as a memorial . . . We’re left to imagine where his music might have headed next.” Spearman’s longtime friend and associate, bassist/painter Benjamin Lindgren, says, “He would tell us, ‘When we hit the stage it’s balls-out music,’ and he was always feeding music to the band to take it to the next level. Life for Glenn was always deep and spiritual, and he was cliché-free, going for the heart of whatever he was doing.” Spearman himself insisted that he was part of a long tradition: “It’s one music from Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller,” he said, “it’s one continuous push to bring beauty in[to] a world of madness and frustration.” I knew Spearman and participated with him and Lindgren in some memorable poetry and jazz sessions, one of which was recorded and broadcast on KPFA in Berkeley. Discussing his methods of improvisation, Spearman said to me, “Any individual note refers simultaneously to a number of keys.” I immediately thought of James Joyce’s FinnegansWake, in which any individual word refers simultaneously, by puns, to a number of contexts. Spearman’s remark seemed to me Joycean thinking applied to music, so it came as no 194 surprise when he told me that he was an enthusiastic reader of Joyce, and particularly of Finnegans Wake. It was also no surprise to discover that Spearman, who loved crossing over categories, wrote poetry and produced visual art. Shortly before he died, he told me how pleased he was that he had managed to publish The Musa-Physics (Ascension Publication, 1996), his book of poems and drawings. Like his music, his poetry is at once baffling, powerful, fragmentary, learned— “spiritual”: AFTER many multiplications ALL IN GOD REJOYCE, paint dancing the scene, as blood flows to be in rain, reflective absorbed continuance, MYTHOLOGY, YOU YOURSELF, REALISM PROCLAIMS the corners of the earth, the exotic spirit BIRTHS things beyond HER, yet the breath in BIRTH must be confirmed as flow to with from beyond to beyond, full liberty full freedom. . . . The capitalized words are like emphasized notes he might play. The passage, which ends with a statement about “everlasting song,” maintains a number of contexts in constant juxtaposed activity. “GOD” is there, as is the pun on James Joyce’s name, but so is “dancing,” “blood,” “rain,” “reflective / absorbed continuance,” mythology, realism, etc. Spearman “hears” the word “breath” in the word “birth,” and both words are essential to his concept of “full liberty full freedom.” But most important of all is the fact of movement: “to with from beyond.” The title of the piece from which I have excerpted these lines is “Gawwal; musician, rags; motion,” but the lines are a recapitulation (as one recapitulates musical themes) of an identical passage in another poem, “EAGLE FLYERS, MAMBO SAMBA.” Their repetition indicates not only their musicality but how important they are to this book. The concept of “music” in poetry is usually a rather loose, metaphorical, inexact one. Spearman, however, uses words exactly as he uses notes: BREATH TEXTURES ITSELF; A HOLLOW RING, surface resistance non-dimensional, inside leading, a SPACE place, hollow, but not empty, denoting sound . . . Glenn Spearman 195 196 The Dancer and the Dance Reading such passages, one thinks gesture: Spearman is “throwing” words on paper in the same way that an action painter might throw pigment on...