Bass Cathedral
Description
Los Angeles, October 1982: Molimo m'Atet, formerly known as the The Mystic Horn Society, is preparing to release its new album Orphic Bend. The members of the jazz ensemble--Aunt Nancy, Djamilaa, Drennette, Lambert, N., and Penguin--are witness to a strange occurrence: while listening to their test pressing, the moment Aunt Nancy's bass solo begins a balloon emerges from the vinyl, bearing a mysterious message: I dreamt you were gone.... Through letters N. writes to a figure called Angel of Dust, the ever-mutating story unfolds, leaving no musician or listener untouched.Bass Cathedral is Mackey's fourth volume in his ongoing novel with no beginning or end, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. Thought balloons morph into mute-stereoptic emanations; N. encounters a master mouthpiece-maker; Drennette leaves Penguin dateless; Lambert's kicking it around with Melanie--much is abuzz but something else is happening to the ensemble. The music seems to be living them. N. suffers cowrie shell attacks and they are all stranded on an Orphic Shore. Socio-political forces are at play or has this always been the essence and accident of the music's resilience? And Hotel Didjeridoo must be resurrected, but how? Myth spins music spins thought spins sex--Mackey's post-bop boxless box set is, as the Utne Reader wrote, "Avant-garde literature you can love: an evolving multivolume novel of the jazz world that plays with language and ideas the way Thelonious Monk plays with flatted fifths."Product Details
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About the Author
Reviews
-- Jane Carr
More readable than its predecessors...fans of Mackey's poetry, and of jazz, may find themselves right at home.
Not once does the conceptual language dampen the sound of the music inhabiting the prose.
-- Douglas Mullins
Writes letters about the mystery of music that speaks to our core instead of ...allowing us to bask in sound.
It feels...like a work in the act of being created...not simply writing about jazz, but writing as jazz.
-- David Hajdu
An open-ended exegesis of musical meaning that is equal parts African American history, Bedouin mysticism, and Mackey's own imagination. -- Travis Nichols
In the fourth installment of this National Book Award-winning poet and novelist's ongoing epistolary work of fiction, Mackey (Splay Anthem) is never shy of the unwieldy or the recondite, plunging readers into the heady thoughts of N., narrating letter writer and member of the fictional early '80s jazz ensemble Molino m'Atet, who are releasing their first album, Orphic Bend. Like the plot points of Mackey's previous novels (which feature first concerts, new drummers and intra-band love triangles), the album release here serves mainly to trigger Mackey's singularly styled vamps on jazz and its mystical connotations. Mackey works in a kind of otherworldly reality, where recognizable situations quickly give way to the fanciful: the band, at one point, finds that cartoon speech balloons appear from the grooves of their album (as they appeared from the band's instruments in earlier installments), causing confusion among the band members and their fans. I dreamt you were gone... begin the balloons; from here, Mackey takes off into the wilds of abstraction and imagination. Less stridently avant-garde and more readable than its predecessors, this poetic novel is nonetheless dense and challenging. It may not be for everyone, but fans of Mackey's poetry, and of jazz, may find themselves right at home.
