CAN’T KEEP MY HANDS OFF DAUTEL

I’m not that much of a weeper, though I don’t mind crying and I do it easily when it’s worth doing. I think of Roger Ebert’s line about crying at the movies: we don’t cry from sadness, we cry from goodness. That is true for me. But I’ll go weeks without tears and then I have a couple soggy days in a row. As happened recently.

I have a folder of bookmarks of musical performances, and I was thumbing through it when I had one of those time units where I couldn’t start something but I could easily linger around aimlessly, opening this and that. I happened upon an Albert King clip, a live recording of him doing the Ray Charles classic “I Believe To My Soul,” and thinking I hadn’t heard Albert for a while, I started it up.

I should tell you, I was (and still am) into guitar players, having played myself for several decades, and the guys I liked were all chops-meisters, they played fast, which I thought was exciting. When I first heard Albert (at a concert at the old Fillmore East in NYC, on a bill with – believe it or not – Chuck Berry and The Who) I was perplexed. Because I couldn’t understand why I was so moved. If you don’t know Albert, he was a left-handed man who played a guitar strung for a right-hander; upside down in effect. He had huge hands, and didn’t use a conventional pick, but instead he used a thumb pick and played his solos that way. He only seemed to have maybe five or six licks and he never played fast. So I’m sitting there confused and unable to fathom how good he was, and when he played the closing solo on “As The Years Go Passing By” my sixteen-year old self sat there in the dark with tears streaming down my face.

Forgive my exegesis on Albert King, but briefly: he was always in the pocket and he had the sweetest vibrato, and there was no one, no one,who could make a guitar wail and cry like that man could. Lots of people tried (and Stevie Ray came closest) but Albert would have been called “seminal” except he never spawned offspring who could imitate him.

On the Ray Charles song he ups the tension by delaying his solo until after three verses – he was an excellent singer also – and man, when it finally comes it’s like a hurricane of tragedy, and 72-year-old me, who had heard Albert many times before, sat there crying like a little boy, that this was something a human being could do. And do it with no more than a dozen notes and a paltry few licks.

Larry Coryell, a chops god if ever there was one, told me “My intention, no matter the number of notes, is to make them all be music.”  Indeed! I think I’ll never understand how Albert King was able to summon such an oceanic sense of sorrow, playing his tiny shoebox of notes – but he could, and nobody else has ever matched him.

We move across the universe, and consider the songs of an Indonesian-born singer called Sandrayati, specifically a song from her CD “Inhabit” The song is called Ashes, and I don’t know how it could be more beautiful and stirring. It’s a wee bit of a thing, two verses, maybe all of three minutes including an instrumental coda, but the song is warm and mysterious, and the way she sings it makes the little hairs stand up on your neck. It too is unfathomable, that someone could do this, that such a voice lives in a woman’s throat, and that she controls its uppermost register not to show her “range” or her “chops” but to pass along some unearthly beauty she has somehow captured, and needs to convey.

Is the song sad? I don’t know! I was so lost in the spell I didn’t consider the lyrics. Maybe I’ll look for them where such things are found. And maybe it doesn’t matter what she’s singing about, because we don’t cry at sadness, we cry at goodness. So I wiped my silly weeping eyes thinking “How does someone do this?” or even How can anyone do this? And why?

It could be a human need to pursue the exquisite. A pursuit that takes many forms. Those thoughts deposited me at the threshold of a wine estate I love, whose wines I’ve been tasting for a couple weeks, and which I want to tell you about now.