A River, a Well

I didn’t make it to Bridgeport for a concert last week as planned, but I’ve been down by the river with Susan Tedeschi as she sings:

I went down to the river

And I took a look around.

There were old men’s shoes.

There were needles on the ground.

So the ancient collides with the contemporary, so honesty looks out with the heart. The place of redemption (shall we gather there still?) pocked by blight. For musical marriages, I know nothing like Tedeschi’s belting as backed by the unostentatious virtuosity, always perfectly in place, of Derek Trucks’s guitar. Some comment on the the latter’s almost Buddha-like mien, as majestic in its impassivity as all the frenetic work of his hands, and there is a way in which Trucks seems to disappear deep within himself in the playing, whatever the decibel level. Two visions of the soul, then, in this union, two ways toward the voice discovering and declaring itself—the one drawing back into its own radiance (Trucks), the other hurling itself out of just such depths (Tedeschi). Rushing away in search of some still center, anyway—that’s one conceit that stands at this songbook’s core. Here’s the opening of “Anyhow”:

Running from a bitter taste,
Took a rest from all the chase,
Feeling something anchored on my soul.

But no need to get too fancy. There’s a wonderful simplicity of address in music that gets back, as this band’s does, to the beginning of beginnings; to a song that can ask, “What have we done?” and return to the question its worn-away rue and longing, an otherwise effaced measure of emotion. And that can do this, in “It’s So Heavy,” unheavyhandedly enough to keep us listening (but that’s the magic that a voice and guitar can work on lyrics we’d risk overlooking on the page, that vexed dimension, for their seeming straightforwardness). From the same song, take the following plaintive exhortation from Tedeschi, a cri de coeur we might set beside Emerson’s line about finding our way back to solitude in the crowd. Something in the tireless equipoise of Trucks’ guitar says the bright day could come:

'Cause it’s easier to be in the crowd.
Then cry alone, crying out loud.

I did find myself in the crowd for Yuchan Lim’s performance last week at the Philharmonic; he played Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 3. It may be a blessing or a blight to lack almost any formal language with which to discuss this kind of music, except to say—a half-minute or so in the second movement (the one whose tempo’s marked adagio religioso, which could be good words for the Tedeschi Trucks Band’s “Midnight in Harlem,” and for most music I love) I found unaccountably beautiful.

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In apposition to the river, a well: a poem from another life, nearly twenty years ago:

Calligrapher

He pictures characters on courtyard stone, the brush just as tall as he is,

dipping it in his own small well, an oval bowl full of water.

Now perfectly straight and still. Then a whole sudden sway of body, many

sways as he tells drops just where to fall with sidestrokes, downstrokes,

not drops but lines, though they seem as natural in sun as rain

disappearing almost as soon as he writes it down. As he did. When

the poem was done, he knelt by the bowl and used what was left

to wash his face with the very same care. There he was. Words, water.