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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
At 81, the man who brought the world Word Jazz (and whose voice any god would envy) has released a dazzling new CD.
Jul 11, 2001 | Ken Nordine has made his way through this world with his voice. He has made a good living by pitching paint, jeans, coffee and cars. And he has made a fascinating life with something he invented called "Word Jazz." Originally the title of his seminal 1957 album, the term now designates a genre. And if you know the right people, dropping that term elicits a conspiratorial grin.
Nordine, who's lived in Chicago all his life, is in the enviable position of being respected for both his commercial and artistic work. His phone is as likely to ring with an invitation from Laurie Anderson as with a voice-over offer from Chrysler-Plymouth. His artistic collaborations have found him head to head with Tom Waits, Brian Eno, Smokey Robinson and Jerry Garcia.
Nordine's latest CD, "A Transparent Mask," was recently released by Asphodel Records. Attempting to describe it is a delightful and impossible task. Start with the voice. Not just a voice but The Voice. Nordine, now 81 years old (and still vocally blessed), claims his voice is a gift from God -- which one he does not say, but it is a voice that any god would envy. Single adjectives like deep, dark and rich are anemic, shallow and inadequate means of description. The voice is a one-off secret blending whose ingredients we can only guess at. A crude attempt at reverse engineering might reveal the hypnagogic tones of Franz Mesmer and the cathedral crypt timbres of Orson Welles, Barry White or Lord Buckley. We would also find a handful of charcoal, a dollop of urban 3 a.m., the subsonics of Poe's "Tell Tale Heart," Tom Waits' bass growl buff shined with diamond dust and a pinch of Nordinium (the rarest of all the hip and heavy elements).
Nordine's voice and mind are employed to dazzling effect on the 20 tracks of "A Transparent Mask." Some cuts approach linear story telling, some are tethered so tenuously that just the thought of a pair of scissors would set them free, while others unapologetically shoot straight for Mars with not even a casual nod towards Houston.
Nordine's topics range far and wide. The opening track, "As of Now," is based on the writings of the second century Roman philosopher and emperor Marcus Aurelius. In "The Akond of Swat," he blasts away at the world of a Middle Eastern despot by utilizing the text of the pioneering 19th-century nonsense writer Edward Lear. And in "You Were So Crazy," Nordine comes as close as anyone ever will to anthropomorphizing a cello.
I spoke with him on June 11 at about 11 a.m. Pacific Daylight time. Timothy McVeigh was only hours dead, and the execution was the first thing on Nordine's mind.
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I had a spooky morning, you know, with the McVeigh execution. It was a very strange feeling I had about it because almost 50 years ago I actually filmed the poem "Invictus" [the poem that McVeigh submitted in writing as his final statement] but I did it as sort of a satire in a barbershop at the Ambassador West Hotel. I rented the barbershop for the whole day. And there was a manicurist and a black guy who, you know, did the shoe shining, way back then. And there I was sitting with the sheet over me with a scotch in the right hand. It was a voice-over kind of thing, so (while you hear the line) "out of the night that covers me," you see the barber put the sheet over me so the hair clippings wouldn't fall on my clothes. And with the line in the poem "I have not winced not cried aloud," you see the barber stropping the old-fashioned straight edge razor. And then with the line "My head is bloody but unbowed," I was over the sink with the barber washing out the shampoo. Then with the closing line "I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul," Happy Herman, the black guy, was sweeping up my hair clippings on the floor, a good closing shot to go with putting my glasses back on; all scenes of vanity.
But it lacked one thing, so I got Jack Brickhouse, who has gone to the great baseball bleachers in the sky, to give me a piece of his play-by-play for a baseball game, which the Cubs lost. And I put that behind the thing in the final film. It had one showing in a theater, the Esquire Theater in Chicago, and I was sitting there proudly watching people wonder what the hell was going on. It lasted about two and a half minutes, something like that, and this old guy in front of me said, "There's a radio on, there's a ball game on." He didn't understand that it was part of the track. I must say the poem itself just cried for a satire. The idea that we are masters of anything is belittled by fate and time.
