Must admit, I felt lousy yesterday. Not sure if I am coming down with the crud or if the regular culprits are acting up, fact is, I was in pain and I needed a boost. So I splurged, bought a new album on Bandcamp and can now pretend that my head spinning comes from some truly captivating music, rather than a shot immune system.

Not so many words then, today, to give you more time to listen. Just an introduction to the young composer who posesses what I count as some of my most admired attributes: curiosity and an integration of learning across categorical boundaries. Said more simply: during the isolation of the Covid epidemic, the guy devoured literature, poetry and film from a particular historical era (the 1930s), listened to classical music from same period, and then synthesized all of this into music for an octet. The jazz album has now come to fruition: For these Streets, by Adam O’Farrill.

His trumpet is embedded in a stellar cast, with Tyrone Allen II on double bass, Patricia Brennan on vibraphone, Tomas Fujiwara on drums, Mary Halvorson on guitar, David Leon on alto saxophone & flute, Kalun Leung on trombone & euphonium and Kevin Sun on tenor saxophone & clarinet. So much talent in one place, often split up in sub-sections, so it always feels intimate, not overpoweringly loud.

So much insight, too, into the realities, despair and precoccupation of an era some 60 years before the composer was even born, now just 30 years old. From what I have read, he explored books about wanderers, Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, describing the loneliness and isolation of the expat walking the nightly streets, and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath witnessing the misery of the Depression (4 tracks echo this novel, Swimmers, Migration, The Break had not come, and Rose, like a mini Suite.) Virginia Woolf’s The Waves was absorbed, as was the poetry of Octavio Paz.

The track Nocturno, 1932 riffs off one of his poems, “Nocturne of Saint Ildefonso,” that is a contemplation of the evolution of one’s life time, a circular tale about origins and endings, walking the streets of Mexico. It is a tricky feat of temporal dislocation, embedded in the poet’s ever recurring theme of searching for one’s identity. The central square in Mexico City is focal, thus today’s photographs of the Zócalo and surrounding streets. Linked to at the end of the post.

The musician watched Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, and listened to various classic composers who found their way into his tracks: Carlos Chavez’s Preludes for Piano, Messiaen’s “Diptych,” Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major and Stravinsky’s “Dumbarton Oaks” chamber concerto among them. Probably my imagination, but I hear late Frank Zappa here as well. Christopher Laws at Culturedarm has a more learned review. (I would not be able to identify the particular pieces, just the likely classical composers.)

This was a poster I photographed at the Hotel Majestic. My shots of the Zócalo were from their restaurant balcony.

I can only describe impressions, after just a few rounds of listening, obviously. The music captures some of the despair of the era, the hectic brought on by industrialization and the introspective quality of artists thrown into a time not unlike our’s, when big changes loom, and external forces close in, depriving us of the ability to prosper psychologically as well as existentially. But the album also conveys, besides the imagery of walking the streets at night in anguish, the freedom of walking through environments that stimulate you and feel like home. I used to walk in New York at night, during the various years I lived there, and remember that feeling of both, being safe among all those people, part of some amorphous sense of shared humanity, but also alone, always a foreigner.

Very, very grateful to this music for bringing back those memories. I am reminded of a freer, more adventurous, more optimistic self, instead of today’s aching crone who hasn’t walked at night in I don’t know how long. Must change that. Except here I’d be in the company of coyotes…

Then again, I am determined not to get sucked into reminiscence tunnels, leaving that to Paz. Here and now: a brilliant album by one of Brooklyn’s most promising young musicians. I feel better already.

Here is the original Spanish version and here the English translation of the Octavio Paz poem. Yes, I lied. More to read. I’m keeping up with posting long poems this week…)