Over the past month, I have found myself relying on the warmth of familiar music. As bad news accumulates, I am returning to the records of my past — ones where I can identify every drum flourish and every guitar bend.
I am craving the predictability of known sounds, at a time when I am without control in nearly every other aspect of my life. On a run through an empty street, I listen to the Coltrane my father loved. Sweat sits heavy in my too-long hair; my barbershop has been closed for weeks now, its windows covered in brown paper. But none of that matters as I hum the horn solo in “Cousin Mary” like I did as a kid in the passenger’s seat of our family van.
The grocery store is a forest of reaching limbs and aisles packed with people both anxious about distance, but also anxious about what they have, and don’t have. Through headphones, I whisper along to the same De La Soul verse I memorized in the back of a school bus as a preteen, and try to make myself as small as I was then.
None of this helps me much in the large scheme of what is happening around me, around many of us. It feels especially foolish to look toward music as a source of healing in this moment, when so much actual, physical healing is needed. And so it has been useful for me to separate healing from comfort, even if the comforts are brief, or simply a needed noise to propel me from one fear to the next.
When the jazz musicians began to die, I thought about everyone I love who has loved jazz.
Like many people, I’ve settled into a routine, particularly around how I consume news, when I consume news, and what news I consume. Once a day, I check for any optimistic reports around curves flattening, medication or vaccine trials, the number of recoveries. At night, I look at the hard data before bed, interspersing it with video clips of live performances, or concert footage I’ve come to love. Early on in this pandemic, I worried about myself and about everyone I loved. I worried about falling ill and spreading the virus, I worried about friends and family and wondered how likely they would be to die if they contracted it. Before a wave of musicians began dying or falling ill, it would have seemed foolish for me to concern myself with tracking the health of people I didn’t know — as if I had the emotional space to do so, even if I wanted to.
But, of course, there are some ways that grief and fear are tied to people beyond the people who are sick, or dying. When the jazz musicians began to die at the end of last month, I thought about everyone I love who has loved jazz, or who passed a love of jazz on to me. Mike Longo died on March 22nd, and I thought of my old music teacher who kept Dizzy Gillespie records in his conservatory, the ones Longo played piano on. Ellis Marsalis died on April 1st, a patriarch of a family that helped to shape the genre in its modern form. I thought then about my father, who wanted nothing more for me to learn the trumpet when I was young and would play records by Wallace Roney, who died at 59 just one day after Marsalis. He’d released an album just last year, and was still turning creative corners — dipping toes into funk, and fusion. In the same week, Adam Schlesinger died, and I thought of all the rooms I’ve packed into with friends, singing along to “That Thing You Do” while the movie played on a small TV in front of us.
I’ve long thought about the death of celebrities or musicians or artists in this way. I’m not necessarily mourning a person I didn’t know at all; I’m mourning the many connections and memories that person’s life afforded me. The bridges their creations built between me and an elder, or a beloved.
I’ve needed this, especially now, because it has been difficult for me to identify distinctive sadness apart from the general cloud of it all. There was a time when I considered myself good at elegy, particularly when it came to musicians I’d grown up with. It always seemed to me that a part of loving someone was to have already mourned the possibility of a world without them, so unlocking that grief was rarely a challenge for me. But, with new universes of grief opening almost daily, I don’t have much space to mourn. A tweet for Schlesinger. A video shared for Roney.
Still, some rise to the top and linger for a bit longer. John Prine died late last night, after being hospitalized after he developed Covid-19 symptoms. Prine had battled health issues since the ‘90s, most notably having a cancerous tumor removed from his neck in 1996, and beating lung cancer in 2013. I’ve done away with most of my foolish optimism, but still thought the virus would be yet another thing Prine could conquer. He was resilient, thoughtful as a writer.
His great skill — one that I watched and learned from — was his ability to make a listener feel like an active participant in his songs, as opposed to a distant witness. He was curious about the cruelties of the world, and the smallness of the world’s pleasures, but didn’t present himself as an expert on much. He was a narrator, someone who would point to a landscape of violence, or sadness, or joy, and leave it up to a listener to take their own understanding from it all. While some musicians were my bridges to other people, John Prine was a bridge to my understanding of the world.
I am using music as a coping mechanism again, this time knowing that I am unable to cope with the growing loss of musicians. And so, I am keeping up with a different kind of news. I find myself checking in on older musicians, searching names entirely at random. When I see the name of a musician trending on Twitter, elder or not, I anxiously scroll through whatever I can find about them. It’s hard, for me, to define where one heartbreak ends and another begins. It’s equally difficult to assign a hierarchy to the many layers of sadness, or worry, that I’m grappling with.
For those who love music, or who have made a career out of attempting to write beautifully about music, the messaging is sometimes that music can transcend all manner of grief, that it can uplift and push people beyond sadness and toward something better. I’m once again seeing the flaws in that idea, how hard it is to believe in this when musicians are dying and I am left mourning their loss and the losses in my own life — parents, friends, people in the financially vulnerable neighborhood I grew up in. It makes for another brick in an almost insurmountable wall. In this way, music serves a baseline purpose. For me, it is something loud, to drown out every other cacophony.