On Trains and Whales (2018)

Dec 30

MELINDA MAE

Have you heard of tiny Melinda Mae,
Who ate a monstrous whale?
She thought she could,
She said she would,
So she started in right at the tail.
And everyone said, “You’re much too small,”
But that didn’t bother Melinda at all.
She took little bites and she chewed very slow,
Just like a good girl should…
…And in eighty-nine years she ate that whale
Because she said she would!

– Shel Silverstein

Here are some scattered musings on the year 2018, where I was presented with three tests of endurance that showed me a few things about success and failure that I’d like to share. I’m writing this mostly so that I can remember the lessons, but what’s here may also be useful to others. Ok, let’s go. Keeping with the alliteration of Melinda Mae, here’s the form: Monk, Marathon, Mitchell.

I) Monk:

May 30th, 2018 — this was the deadline I set to finish tracking the complete compositions of Thelonious Monk on solo guitar. There were a few practical reasons for it, the kids’ school year coming to an end (after which work time evaporates), increasing construction noise in the neighboring building, and especially the fear of losing momentum. This passage kept coming to mind:

“To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow. The problem is getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed – and to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage.”

– Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (p. 5)

By mid-winter the flywheel was spinning, but my will was flagging. I was considering a lesson from a previous obsessive project, when I decided I could dash out a book quickly based on some teaching materials (Fundamentals of Guitar) and the process dragged on for three years of cans of worms inside of Pandora’s boxes. Setbacks, excuses, derailments. Thus the deadline for the Monk project, which I saw as a solution to this open-ended problem. Boundaries in a normal recording project are drawn by budget, studio hours, and other musicians’ schedules. Recording at home erases the line in the sand, but watch out for sand in the gears.

Questions that come up in long, solitary projects — Will this ever end? What were you thinking? Have I lost my way? Will this amount to anything? Of course the answer to all of them is the same — don’t worry about it, just go to work. I started recording in September of 2017, working steadily every time that I could get a full day or a few hours free. Once I committed to the project, I knew that the only acceptable approach was a deep dive into the details. Listen to and memorize every note of every tune from original recordings and cross check with available manuscripts in order to have a valid basis for improvisation. Monk’s music is hallowed ground, and while working it out for the guitar I imagined the attention to detail of a translator approaching a sacred text.

What this means is a lot of time sitting in a chair, repeating phrases over and over until a manifestation of the passage reveals itself on the guitar in a fingering pattern or formation. The nine month gestation from September to May remained fixed and immovable in my mind. Here’s the thing — the problem with rigid materials (like concrete or ceramic) is that they are inflexible and break easily. Good for compression, bad for tension. As I sat in the chair for hours, I felt some warning signs — a creeping pain in my back and neck that I dismissed as momentary fatigue. I was unwilling to make an concession to my deadline. I never took breaks for fear of losing momentum. By April I was hitting the wall. I had pain every time I sat down with the guitar, but was putting in longer and longer hours, putting the kids to sleep and going back to practice and record until the early morning. Computer, guitar, computer, guitar. The trapezius system wasn’t built for this kind of repetitive abuse, and was stiffening up, turning to stone.

On May 30 I squeezed the last blood from the rock (“Well You Needn’t”) and knew that I had made a mistake. My back and neck were in continuous pain. I couldn’t sleep, sit in a car or a plane, type, or practice. I went to doctors and physical therapists, who shook heads and wagged fingers. I had finished the project, but my process was unsustainable. My pacing was off, against natural limitations. The deadline wasn’t a bad idea, but the inflexibility of the plan defeated me physically.

Growing up in the Northwest, I remember seeing videos of the 1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which was resonated to death by the wind like a giant guitar string in a feedback loop. Bridges, skyscrapers, and other structures made to exist in the natural world are made to bend a little. Solitary projects require discipline, but discipline in turn requires some accommodation to the curves of reality.

*By Monk’s childhood home, Rocky Mount, N.C.*

I had taken a trip to Rocky Mount, N.C. earlier in the year to visit Monk’s birthplace, and after seeing the trains running through the neighborhood a recurring theme of the project became the locomotive. The train moves forward with massive momentum, flywheels and inertia carrying the machine forward, arriving on time at the station. I formed the project with idea of the train, but it became more of a whale, refusing to submit to the plan. Melville explains:

“And as the mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway is so familiarly known in its every pace, that, with watches in their hands, men time his rate as doctors that of a baby’s pulse; and lightly say of it, the up train or the down train will reach such or such a spot, at such or such an hour; even so, almost, there are occasions when these Nantucketers time that other Leviathan of the deep, according to the observed humor of his speed; and say to themselves, so many hours hence this whale will have gone two hundred miles, will have about reached this or that degree of latitude or longitude. But to render this acuteness at all successful in the end, the wind and the sea must be the whaleman’s allies; for of what present avail to the becalmed or windbound mariner is the skill that assures him he is exactly ninety-three leagues and a quarter from his port? Inferable from these statements, are many collateral subtile matters touching the chase of whales.”

– Moby Dick, chapter cxxxiv – The Chase, Second Day

So I chased and caught the whale and kept it in the can for a while. A big can. I had to get Liberty Ellman to clean it up and make it beautiful. I wanted to wait until August, after the drop of Steve Coleman and Five Elements Live at the Village Vanguard, which for me was the culmination of the previous ten years of extreme study. A week later I released the fish into the wild and let it swim away.

II) Marathon:

February 28th, 2018 — this is the day I was accepted by lottery to the New York City marathon. I had only done a small amount of short distance running up to that point and entered on a lark. It’s a stroke of luck to be randomly selected, so I figured I better do it, even though I was already in the weeds with Monk. I would have 8 months to train, which is enough time if you don’t delay.

I’m a believer in persistence over talent. I don’t have much so-called “natural” talent in music, but I’ve been very persistent in trying to improve over the years. And it turns out that you can get a lot done if you just work consistently and don’t wait for some special moment when inspiration is striking (again, the flywheel). I started training regularly but without any particular plan. Just go out every other day and try to go a little farther each week. Ignore the weather or anything else that might give you an excuse, and get to it.

By the time June came around, I had finished the Monk project and found that the back pain dropped off quite a bit once the psychological pressure of my deadline had passed (thanks to John Sarno), but I really wanted to avoid another injury with the marathon training. My problem with the Monk project was lack of a plan, which led to bad pacing and then to burnout. Unlike the Monk project, thousands of people have run marathons according to well tested training methods. So as the Summer started, I decided on one of Hal Higdon‘s programs and followed it to the letter.

In August I got a bad cold and kept powering through the workouts — the same mistake I made with the recording sessions — my times got slower, and I got sicker. Experienced runners know to back off training when they get sick — the result is better if you don’t force the body, even if you fall behind schedule. Still suffering from the Monk injury, I sacrificed a couple of weeks for health. I got back on track, and by the time of the taper (where you recover in preparation for the race) at the end of October, I had run over 700 training miles. My weekly long runs were 22 miles at an 8:45 pace. Ready for white whale #2.

November 4th, Race Day: Unbelievably beautiful weather in New York, exhilarating. The cannon goes off, corral opens, and the crowd starts up the long hill heading east across the Verrazano Bridge. A couple of miles in I look at my watch — 8:15 pace. A fast pace for me, but the running feels effortless. Mile after mile I look down at the watch and it continues to read right around the same time for the splits (8:12, 8:09, 8:07, 8:08, 8:12, etc). I attribute this to my proper training and the two week taper, and the things that I had read about adrenaline giving you an extra boost in the race.

Going out too fast is the most common rookie mistake. I turned the beat around and lost the form. By mile 14 I was having a twinge in my knees from the pounding down the ramp of the 59th street bridge (neglected to train for downhill running). This developed into instability in the quads that I compensated for by trying to back off slowly (splits now at 8:45, 9:06, 9:08, 9:11). But it was too late, and the damage had been done — I hit the wall at mile 23, with sharp pains running up and down the legs and feet, quads turning to jelly. I slowed to an embarrassing slow jog until the finish line. The final time (3 hours, 51 minutes) was objectively fine, but based on my training I was hoping for a more consistent run, and the way that it ended was basically a disappointment.

The thing is, I knew I was doing it while it was happening, but did it anyway. I knew I was exceeding my race pace by at least 20 seconds every mile, and my target heartrate by at least 10 BPM. How was is possible after so much careful training to make such an obvious and avoidable error in pacing? It’s just a matter of experience. Without the necessary reps, it’s easy to confuse euphoria and excitement for relaxation and fitness. The mistake here was different from the Monk project, where I had a great deal of experience in the activity but no plan except for the location of the finish line. In the marathon I had a very good plan and no experience, so I let between irrational exuberance affect my perception of reality. In both cases the problem was pacing. After the race I picked up Alex Whitman’s Endure, which addresses this problem from many angles:

This inescapable importance of pacing is why endurance athletes are obsessed with their splits. As John L. Parker Jr. wrote in his cult running classic, ‘Once a Runner,’ “A runner is a miser, spending the pennies of his energy with great stinginess, constantly wanting to know how much he has spent and how much longer he will be expected to pay. He wants to be broke at precisely the moment he no longer needs his coin.” . . . As I started my second lap, I had to reconcile two conflicting inputs: the intellectual knowledge that I had set off at a recklessly fast pace, and the subjective sense that I felt surprisingly, exhilaratingly good.” (p. 11–12)

With students at the University of Michigan, one of my main subjects is connecting the mind to the body. Sing what you play, play what you sing, clap rhythms to embody them, observe your movements, breath, way of speaking, try to bring your skills on the instrument into the natural realm of gesture and speech. I’ve made a lot of progress in this area over the years in music, and I have a feeling that something from it can be applied to this new pursuit of running, where I’m still a novice and the intellectual and physical aspects haven’t been properly wired together. Training has begun for 2020 with this in mind.

*Marathon stages: Anticipation, Fired up, In the groove, Breaking down, Pushing through, At threshold, Relief*

III) Mitchell:

March 6th, 2016 — This was the debut of Matt Mitchell’s group “Phalanx Ambassadors” at The Stone in NYC. The gig showed a lot of potential, and Matt eventually decided that he wanted to make a quintet record in December of 2018. Matt is a pianist, about my age, and although I’ve dealt with a lot of situations his music presented some new challenges to me, some that I was genuinely perplexed by. Confession — I’m primarily an ear player. I learned how to sight read fluently when I moved to NYC in 1997 and found out that it was an important skill if I wanted to work, but I still don’t consider working straight off the page to be my strongest area. I trust my ear a lot more than my eyes, so with new material I’ll try to put in enough reps of personal time to get the lines singing along on the unconscious internal loop. That means the pathways have been burned in. A time honored and reliable but time-consuming method, and with Matt’s music there is just an incredible shitload of information. I asked for scores instead of a guitar part so that I could figure out options and see what’s going on, but the music seemed to be an endlessly branching decision tree, where any momentary lapse of concentration would just leave you lost in the wilderness. Anyone who’s seen Matt play can relate how he seems to have trained himself to reach and maintain extreme levels of focus, navigating multiple streams of information that would clog the synapses of two or three competent players. On several of the Phalanx compositions, he’s playing three staves by using his thumbs as a kind of third hand in the middle. Really nuts.

For me to approach this music in an authentic way (that is, not skating), another solitary training period was required in advance of the group rehearsals, working through the seven compositions and finding my way in. I had from the Spring of 2016 to December of 2018 to get to it, and the music sat on my stand for month after month, Leviathan hanging out in the deep waters, waiting for poor Geppetto to sail by and get swallowed. I picked away at sections of it but the approach remained hidden. The summer had begun, which means travel for gigs and family time. Marathon training was in full effect, time slipping away.

26.2 miles seemed like an impossible distance in early 2017, but by the time I was looking at the Matt Mitchell music every day in September, I was already running 6 loops around Prospect park on the weekends. It’s not the distance itself that’s difficult — it’s maintaining discipline over time. Consistency. If you start by running 8 miles a week and increase the mileage by 10% each week (a normal and recommended amount to avoid injury), at the end of four months the weekly total will be about 40 miles. The incremental approach takes away the intimidation factor as long as you allow enough lead time to get the pacing right. One bite at a time, for whatever task. But for any given project, how small should the bites be, and at what speed? In his double edged way, Shel Silverstein got at it with “Melinda Mae” — simultaneously a lesson in persistence and a terrifyingly bad choice of pacing.

I don’t read much fiction any more, but every Summer I seem to circle back to Cormac McCarthy. In the Summer of 2017 I had no time to read, so I was listening to McCarthy while running. The language and imagery of the writing is so dense that you miss a lot of details in the audiobook format. While listening, I’d make mental notes of particular passages that I wanted to go back to and look at on the page. Here’s one. The scene is a father and two young sons looking around in an old cabin for wolf traps and bait:

“There in the dusty light from the one small window on shelves of roughsawed pine stood a collection of fruitjars and bottles with ground glass stoppers and old apothecary jars all bearing antique octagon labels edged in red upon which in Echols’ neat script were listed contents and dates. In the jars dark liquids. Dried viscera. Liver, gall, kidneys. The inward parts of the beast who dreams of man and has so dreamt in running dreams a hundred thousand years and more. Dreams of that malignant lesser god come pale and naked and alien to slaughter all his clan and kin and rout them from their house. A god insatiable whom no ceding could appease nor any measure of blood. The jars stood webbed in dust and the light among them made of the little room with its chemic glass a strange basilica dedicated to a practice as soon to be extinct among the trades of men as the beast to whom it owned its being. Their father took down one of the jars and turned it in his hand and set it back again precisely in its round track of dust.”

– The Crossing (p. 17)

There’s so much here. With little warning the narrative cracks open into a wolf’s-eye vision of the cruelty of humans over the ages, countless generations of slaughter that will be forgotten as the arbitrary needs of men change and move on to the next way to satisfy their appetites. The passage is bookended by “dust,” itself a potent symbol of the inevitable end, things forgotten and decayed (dust to dust). And so on, go as deep as you like.

There’s something about McCarthy’s granular detail that reminds me of Matt Mitchell’s music. You can go in with the microscope, and it holds up under scrutiny and keeps revealing new worlds. I remember an earlier experience of this kind of nested reality about 20 years ago, transcribing a passage from Coltrane’s “Brazilia.” Playing it slowly and uncovering secret information, things that pass by as gestures and shapes on casual listening. Improvised lines with multiple levels of interpretation, spiritual force, melodic integrity, and functional meaning. Massive amounts of information, but nothing unnecessary. McCarthy’s obsessive details are in service to the story. The language isn’t pretentious — it’s functional. If you choose the words with enough intent you don’t need all that punctuation. When I have the book in my hand I tend to go back and read passages over several times. Listening to the book prevents this — you get as much detail as you can and keep moving, follow the through line, trust the narrative. This gave me some ideas for approaching the Matt Mitchell music.

So throughout the Fall I methodically made my way through the pages, keeping up a solid but not excessive pace, programming the muscles, adding distance, increasing threshold. Eating whale. After November 4th (marathon day), I went in deeper, looking at the miniature episodes that appear in looped sections and phrases, internalizing, polishing, finding the through line that sings. By December’s group rehearsals it was clear that everyone else had done some version of this — a very prepared band. The only thing to do was to assemble, file off the rough edges, wind it up and let it loose. Two days in the studio and the project was in the can — two of the hardest compositions were first takes. The details were in place because of preparation, and the focus was on the energy and vibe. Studio pacing is a delicate balance of technical and psychological factors, and Matt had producer David Torn on hand, a master train conductor.

In the marathon there are runners called “pacers,” who hold up a sign with a desired finishing time. If you want, you can run with the pace group and alleviate the responsibility of monitoring your own time. Actually, the pacers run slightly ahead of the target time, so that if people lag behind at the end they may still hit the mark. The psychological advantage of knowing that someone is setting the pace is significant. Fewer distractions, better focus. With a solid producer in the studio, you can just concentrate on performing and executing. Torn’s method is to be invisible but functional. You might say, a Freddie Green approach. And with such difficult music, I would say that a producer/pacer is essential.

Questions: What is the benefit of an extreme approach — couldn’t things be less punishing? Don’t you just want to play, and do your thing? Don’t you just want to enjoy yourself? Not really. The impulse is more to explore and expand, which is different than fun and enjoyment. In this case, Matt gave the band a very clear idea of what was involved, what kind of challenge it would be to nail the music, and set the pace precisely. Leaders will attract like minded collaborators through the audacity of their plans and ideas. To take an extreme example, Ernest Shackleton didn’t have much trouble enlisting the crew on his quest to cross the Antarctic continent:

“When Shackleton announced his plans he was deluged by more than five thousand applications from persons who asked to go along. Almost without exception, these volunteers were motivated solely by the spirit of adventure, for the salaries offered were little more than token payments for the services expected.”

– Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage (p. 18)

Shackleton’s mission failed, but is remembered as an incredible tale of endurance. The thing about physical territory is that it runs out. With music, you can just keep building more territory and expanding into it, as far as the spirit of adventure leads. If the music presents the opportunity to expand, other people will probably get involved — as Monk said about his compositions: “Those pieces were written so as to have something to play, and to get cats interested enough to come to a rehearsal.” Still a good strategy.

So as more birthdays pass (I’m at half a piano now), there’s little room for delay or compromises. Projects are more challenging, and time is harder to come by. Cormac McCarthy, tongue in cheek (but maybe not), says, “Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.” Talk about extreme. I prefer David Torn’s response during the Mitchell session when I marveled about his knowledge of some piece of audio gear: “Is there any other way to be in than deep in?”

D.C.:

Deep in. In the territory of the imagination and human nature, the most fearless explorer that I can think of is Toni Morrison. I think it’s important when talking about endurance to think about the difference between these tests we choose to take individually (marathons, children, etc), and the tests brought about by the unintended circumstances of life on individuals and communities, the “push to the abyss”:

“I think my goal is to see really and truly of what these people are made, and I put them in situations of great duress and pain, you know, I ‘call their hand.’ And, then when I see them in life threatening circumstances or see their hands called, then I know who they are. And some of the situations are grotesque. These are not your normal everyday lives. They are not my normal everyday life, probably not many peoples’. It’s not that I deny that part of life in life. It just doesn’t produce anything for me. If I see a person on his way to work everyday doing what he is supposed to do — taking care of his children, then I know that. But what if something really terrible happens, can you still — so that it is always a push towards the abyss somewhere to see what is remarkable, because that’s the way I find out what is heroic. That’s the way I find out why such people survive, who went under, who didn’t, what the civilization was, because quiet as it’s kept much of our business, our existence here, has been grotesque. It really has. The fact that we are a stable people making an enormous contribution in whatever way to the society is remarkable because all you have to do is scratch the surface, I don’t mean as individuals but as a race, and there is something quite astonishing there and that’s what peaks my curiosity. I do not write books about everyday people. They really are extraordinary whether it’s wicked or stupid or wonderful or what have you.”

– Conversations with Toni Morrison, (p. 180–181)

Morrison’s characters are forced into the boundaries, the margins of society, the thresholds of human endurance. Through their grotesque suffering they show us what is possible. The boundary is where the trickster lives, turning the rules upside down, revealing hypocrisy and telling truths. A bluff only works if nobody calls your hand. Musicians search for the boundaries of their abilities because that’s where breakthroughs happen. Performing under extreme conditions filters out the extraneous and the mundane. The fact that Thelonious Monk created his body of work, given the circumstances of his life and time, is a miracle of human creativity, focus, and imagination. Studying and learning this body of work is none of these things — it’s a personal challenge, an interpretation of the existing canon. Some publications have remarked on the “devotional” quality of my recording of Monk’s music, which I think is an accurate word. Playing Monk’s music is serious business – don’t disrespect it, please. Think about what that music represents for so many people and that fact that nothing like it will ever be made again.

al Coda:

Recently there was an article in the New York Times about ultramarathoner Courtney Dauwalter, titled “The Woman Who Outruns the Men, 200 Miles at a Time.” It included this quote from biologist Heather Heyeng:

“This is about stamina, and stamina is some combination of yes, strength, but also psychological will. It begs the question, is there something going on for women perhaps given our very long evolutionary history as mammals who spent a long time gestating and then giving birth, that gives us a psychological edge in extremely long-term endurance events?”

I certainly don’t doubt it, based on personal experience. Whatever your bet, your hand will be called by childbirth and found wanting. And in terms of taking the long view on things, the women in my life have certainly been the ones to show the best judgement. My running mentor is Ellen Rowe, a celebrated professor at the University of Michigan and ultramarathon trail runner. The last time I saw her she had just completed a 100K in California. While struggling with pacing, I asked for some rules of thumb — she says: “start slow, then go slower.” Advice for a person who tends to lose patience. Although Ellen posts excellent finishing times, her goal isn’t purely speed. At the most extreme distances, over unfamiliar terrain and unpredictable weather, the main goal is to finish. Starting slow doesn’t mean actually running a bad pace, it just means run slower than you think you can, because your perception of what pace you can maintain is probably inflated. While listening to a podcast, I found out about a new book by the champion runner Deena Kastor that focuses on the power of the mind. Here’s a relevant passage:

“I noticed my coach kept emphasizing good attitude. At first, I thought this meant being upbeat. Eventually, thought, I realized a good attitude went far beyond the general idea of staying positive. It was part of a discipline, a long-cultivated habit of building and sustaining a positive mind capable of turning every experience into fuel.”

– Deena Kastor, Let Your Mind Run (prologue)

Kastor distinguishes between the clichés of positive thinking and the discipline of “emotional control” — “let your mind dictate your pace, not your emotions.” As an elite athlete, Kastor is able to concretely measure the effects of different psychological approaches in minutes and seconds. In order to get consistent results, she needs to find reliable ways to enter a place in the mind and stay there as long as necessary.

Being somewhat impatient, this kind of steady, long term mental discipline isn’t naturally my process. I’ll go deep for a while down in the whale’s belly, then come up for air, and so on. More of a roller coaster than Metro North. I can reach emotional states in performance that I find impossible to remember later on. I’ll work out concepts in practice that become impossible to access in the heat of the moment on stage. This means, work on control. The primary goal is to be able to pick up the instrument and play exactly the sound that comes to mind, every time, regardless of how your day went, who’s in the audience, etc. This doesn’t happen through magical positive thinking — it’s incremental training, at a snail’s pace.

New Year is here, goal setting time, and I’ll make a few for 2019. 2018 taught me that I need to work on pacing, and be careful about how many trains are on the tracks. I’ll aim for a few reasonable targets and see about setting the right tempo. Resolutions often don’t amount to much, because they are momentary aspirations (“I think I can”). A higher goal is Kastor’s permanent “positive mind,” or Murakami’s reliably spinning flywheel (“I know I can”). And yes, this brings us to the inevitable Shel Silverstein ending:

THE LITTLE BLUE ENGINE

The little blue engine looked up at the hill.
His light was weak, his whistle was shrill.
He was tired and small, and the hill was tall,
And his face blushed red as he softly said,
“I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.”

So he started up with a chug and a strain,
And he puffed and pulled with might and main.
And slowly he climbed, a foot at a time,
And his engine coughed as he whispered soft,
“I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.”

With a squeak and a creak and a toot and a sigh,
With an extra hope and an extra try,
He would not stop — now he neared the top —
And strong and proud he cried out loud,
“I think I can, I think I can, I think I can!”

He was almost there, when — CRASH! SMASH! BASH!
He slid down and mashed into engine hash
On the rocks below… which goes to show
If the track is tough and the hill is rough,
THINKING you can just ain’t enough!

– Brooklyn, Dec 30, 2018