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    Go Ride the Music
    Go Ride the Music
    Go Ride the Music
    Ebook107 pages1 hour

    Go Ride the Music

    By Kirpal Gordon

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Ganga Ghosh, a jazz singer in Varanasi, hears pianist Ghost Wakefield on her radio and stays up all night enchanted by his playing. Although it's shut off, her radio tells her, "Go ride the music," setting into motion a wild road story and romance, at turns comical, seductive, criminal and redemptive. In these three interlocking novellas, they meet in Mexico, build a duet in New York and discover during a tour of the South that she becomes, through his haunted, New Orleans-flavored introductions, the voice and presence of Billie Holiday, Lena Horne and the other immortals she impersonates, a gift she returns to Ghost in a most unusual way and at a most opportune hour.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGiant Steps Press
    Release dateMar 12, 2015
    ISBN9781508453154
    Go Ride the Music

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      Book preview

      Go Ride the Music - Kirpal Gordon

      Go Ride the Music

      ––––––––

      Desperation is the raw material of drastic change.  Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.

      —William Burroughs, The Western Lands

      1

      Go ride the music, the silent radio said to Ganga Ghosh in the dead of night, clear as a human voice.

      Ganga felt her skin crawl, made sure the radio was off, pulled the cord out of the socket, plugged it back in, turned the radio on, listened, moved the dial around, turned it off, wondered what it meant to go ride the music and tried to get a grip.

      Looking out the dorm window at the campus of Benares Hindu University, she saw that nothing moved. Everything was silent, bathed in twilight. It was the hour before dawn, considered most auspicious for meditation, and an inanimate object had just spoken four words to her.

      Should I visit the infirmary, she considered, am I nuts? Overworked? Not getting enough love?

      She decided that her resistance was low—that’s when strange things happened—and having trained all Wednesday morning in song and dance and worked all afternoon in the library, her resistance had been at its lowest. That’s why she spent every Wednesday evening like she had tonight, sprawled out on her bed in her dorm room listening to jazz streamed weekly via WBHU from a San Francisco radio station.

      She loved studying classical Indian music and dance in ancient Varanasi, located on the river Ganges, her namesake, but Ganga felt drawn to this hybrid African-American music on the radio which, like her own tradition, relied so much upon improvisation and in-the-moment responsiveness. Writing down the names of the singers who moved her, she learned more about their lives the next day in the music library.

      Sometimes the song she was researching played non-stop in her head all day and night long, as if the melody had woven a musical web around her ears and she had become its enchanted prey for it was only after succumbing to the spell of the song and getting eaten alive by its notes did she begin to sing it, and only after viewing and reviewing hours of performances of the song did she find the place within herself that gave birth to such flights of overwhelming sorrow and ecstatic joy.

      Per usual, Wednesday’s San Francisco broadcast, Music out of Time, Time out of Mind, avoided chronology to better deliver jazz as a collective lifting up of a folk music into a classical expression using to unique advantage every bit of hard time, soft touch, riff and rhythm hell-hounded or heaven-bounded that came its Jus Grew way.

      Thanks to the cosmopolitan milieu of her parents, Ganga spoke as much English as Bengali, but having had little contact with American culture, it wasn’t until she connected the history of the song and the bio of the singer that the music took shape within her as a living spiritual entity. She felt India’s classical music tradition living within her as well, but daily rote repetition of practice exercises had depleted some of her enthusiasm. Blessed with impeccable pitch and a great first take, she didn’t seek technical perfection when she sang a raga; she searched instead for a deeper openness within her, the effortless source where she found the raga’s ascending and descending scale already singing itself within her.

      This was the gift of her teenage years when she ran with Purna Das Baul and his merry band of minstrels in Bengal. Though she’d grown up in Calcutta to wealth, the family estate bordered a cremation grounds, and from her bedroom’s open window the smells of burning flesh from funeral pyres mixed with hashish smoke from the chellums of sadhus made a stronger impression on her than the modern suburb she lived in. The nightly call-and-answer chants sung to Bom Bom Bolenath, Shiva Nataraj, lord of the dance of life and death, Hara Hara Mahadeva Shambo, by long-bearded nagas smeared in ashes and dung, became her lullabies. When she turned sixteen and ran away from home and her family’s ersatz, modern version of India, she told Purna Das that joining the bauls was like coming home to an authentic, timeless India.

      Unlike her Bengali Renaissance parents or the Victorian boarding schools they sent her to, the bauls she ran with celebrated Tantric Yoga. In its wild, earthy and often misunderstood left-handed tradition, Tantra made sacramental ritual out of the five elements Indian culture considered most unholy or taboo. Unlike proper yogis in their proper ashrams, the bauls were mad for God and wandered and traveled, chanted and strummed, puffed and drank, danced and drummed, charmed and made love to whomever they pleased. Whether the lyrics came from Kabir or Tagore, Mirabai or Arjun Dev, since the bauls sang that the illusion of a separate self was Maya’s greatest hustle, that underneath our competition to be top dog there was only the divine making love to the divine, Ganga’s apprenticeship had taught her to give up the quest to be the best and lose herself in the song instead. After all, she thought, who can separate the dancer from the dance?

      That’s why some of the over-trained undergrads in her scholarship program sometimes made her ill at ease. They seemed walled in from the mystery ever reaching them and left her feeling cynical about everything except the music. That’s why she called Mondays stormy, but Tuesdays were just as bad. Wednesdays were worse with the chatty performance feedback reports that made her late for her library job. So with her old band mates far away and her doe-eyed dorm mates clueless, she came home on Wednesday evenings, fixed herself a brandy, her drink of choice to loosen her vocal chords, and took to singing American jazz to her radio.

      Tonight, however, when the last selection was played, Side Two of The Brothers Grip Salute Duke & Strayhorn, she fell into a deep and abiding silence, astounded by the dexterity of the three Grip brothers on alto sax, trumpet and trombone, how each summed up the previous player’s ideas before launching into the unexplored. This ensemble mood kept growing as Ghost Wakefield, the piano player, served up glorious gems of Duke and Strays in his comping and solos.

      By the time Ghost had unfolded the last melody in the suite, Come Sunday, Ganga was weeping with joy. Yes, she decided, rocking back and forth in her bed, this is what music is about: invocation, presence, openness, exchange, communion, cosmic connection. The way that the band responded to one another was the quality she’d been seeking at BHU but to limited success. By contrast, the Grips blended notes beautifully, but they also knew how to make use of Ghost Wakefield’s inter-galactic suggestions.

      As "Music out of Time, Time out of

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