Love, Gloom, Cash, Love by Joe Milazzo is a collection of eight distinct yet interlaced fictions whose general subject may be jazz music, most especially that style of jazz often labeled "hard bop" and played by African-American men gigging in the New York City of the late 1950s and early 1960s, but whose lens of individual focus is successively trained upon actual historical persons. However, the book does not purport to be a dramatization of actual events from these lives. Rather, the stories are speculative extemporizations based upon the content of these artists' music. In other words, if Love, Gloom, Cash, Love could be assigned a "premise", it might be: What if the jazz player's oeuvre could be listened to not just as melodic, harmonic and rhythmic invention, but heard as a set of transparent autobiographical declarations? This mulling, by no accident, poses itself as a convenient simplification, but it is not so convenient as to preclude the consideration of other inquiries. For, being about jazz and jazz musicians populating the foreign yet contiguous territory of our shared American past, the book's thematic map is intersected by meridians which point towards greater distances, or questions about racial identity, the meaningfulness of urban living, aesthetic choice and the pursuant moral contingencies, and how the dramatic human compulsion to create operates on and within the social tissues in which the artist (and by extension, all of us willing to notice) is bound up. These eight stories also orchestrate themes and variations upon those topics often linked in the popular imagination with jazz, from the country blues to organized crime to drug abuse to the Beat Movement to highly politicized Afrocentrism. And Love, Gloom, Cash, Love writes its paths through all these matters as means of exploring a fundamental and very common human experience: the unforeseen ways in which even the most private products of our imaginations (in this case, improvised and deeply coded -- technically and culturally -- music) manage to transcend themselves and their ostensibly lonely function, whether that be to soothe, please, divert and/or otherwise engage only the imaginer's attention.
Throughout Love, Gloom, Cash, Love, characters are brought into drastic circumstances either by fleeing or doggedly following the many connections suggested by their musical preoccupations.
In "I Feel A Song Coming On", the star tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, paranoid about turning into a self-parodist, abandons a hip, relatively comfortable life in the tolerant community of the East Village for a nearly penitential existence as a stranger in the economically depressed, working-class and largely Italian borough of Bushwick. But Sonny finds a kind of magic, and a kind of hard-won self-renewal if not re-creation, with these new neighbors and in these apparently drab surroundings where his saxophone and the innovative music he is crafting with it meld into an ever more incongruous emblem of his personal energy.
Likewise, in the collection's final story, "Slop", the great bassist and notorious bully Charles Mingus finds himself returning to Tijuana and aspects of his youth in the hope of dispelling bad business and personal relationships. However, what he discovers in an annoying hitchhiker and in what has changed in a city he once knew as drunken release combine with what he would like to forget to deafen him with new music.
The background for "Who Killed Cock Robin?" is the original 1960 Living Theater production of The Connection by Jack Gelber, a play that featured actors and a working jazz quartet improvising around the situation of waiting for a heroin "score", and improvising in such a manner as to foster suspicions as to whether what the individual spectator was participating in was true or staged. In this environment, pianist Freddie Redd finds himself drawn into debates centered on art versus artifice while he simultaneously harbors doubts about the character of his band's main soloist. The fate of a young musician, an understudy, in need of guidance seems for Freddie to hang in the balance. It is the memories the pianist draws upon, like a method actor, to aid in making a convincing performance which lead him to an insight which in turn, acted upon by the object of his distrust, makes his judgment cleave deeper that he had ever thought it should.
"Twisted (Blues)" examines why the murder of Wardell Gray, one of the original "bop" musicians, in mid-fifties Las Vegas effects those he has mentored, those who are rankled by the esteem in which he is held, and those who hardly know him at all, including a State Trooper and a "Tom-ish" comedian.
And in "Crepuscule W/ Nellie", the reader glimpses via proliferating points-of-view pianist/composer Thelonious Monk juggling loyalties to his extended musical family and the family he has chosen by marriage. The story is partly one of the discordant complexities which result from his prestidigitations. "Crepucule W/ Nellie" could be construed as an interpretation of the traditional love triangle, but the geometry whose points are Monk, his wife Nellie, and his patroness Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter has neither static contours nor an easily calculable area.
Love, Gloom, Cash, Love is an attempt to fully amplify the overture its very title makes to the reader. So that the book, like its title, does not shun repetition or circularity as it vies to encompass the complicated mass of life without resorting to clichés or mythification. It is not a work which travels from place to place in straight, chronological arcs, nor is it overly concerned with the classic virtues of unified narrative. In being about music, the book has necessarily been informed by musical ideas of formal organization. For example, the stories -- at least this is my hope -- are syncopated by an experimenting with prose rhythm as a real conveyor of narrative and metaphoric significance. Or, in some of these fictions, diverse perspectives, each with their own idiosyncratic timbres, pick up different parts of the performance just as jazz soloists take turns speaking their piece on the musical theme they have agreed upon. The fact is, jazz offers an over-abundance of associations to a writer, both literary and extra-literary. My goal has been to be alive to as many of these associations as I can. That said, Love, Gloom, Cash, Love is not some vain endeavor to simulate the supple, abstract virtues of music with voices sonorous of resolution. But it does aspire to lay claim to one quality which inheres in the best music, jazz in particular, and that is the ability to make the revelation of naked process an intellectually passionate motion between minds.
Love, Gloom, Cash, Love, and all contents
thereof, Copyright © 1998-2005 by Joe Milazzo; Dallas, Texas; USA.
