The mystery at the heart of music

Michael Hann writes in The Guardian: 'If it feels as though you can’t move for new music, then books about pop aren’t far behind. This Christmas alone has brought weighty tomes by Bono and Bob Dylan, Nick Cave’s conversations with the writer Sean O’Hagan, Bez’s autobiography, and former GQ editor Dylan Jones’s book about 1995.'

For Surrender, Bono 'chose the title because, having grown up in Ireland in the 1970s, the act of surrendering was not a natural concept to him. Bono, whose lyrics have frequently been inspired by his Christian beliefs, said that “surrender” was “a word I only circled until I gathered my thoughts for the book”.

“I am still grappling with this most humbling of commands. In the band, in my marriage, in my faith, in my life as an activist,” he added, describing the book as “the story of one pilgrim’s lack of progress … With a fair amount of fun along the way.”'

Kitty Empire writes, 'The real eye-opener throughout is the depth, breadth and idiosyncrasy of his faith, a non-sectarian Catholicism that’s not strictly church-y.'

Wesley Stace begins his review of The Philosophy of Modern Song by pointing out that: 'In a 1997 Newsweek interview, Bob Dylan told “the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music . . . I’ve learned more from the songs than I’ve learned from . . . rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that.”

He made the point again in 2020’s “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” his valediction to the man he calls “the most country of all the blues artists in the fifties,” one of whose songs is under consideration in “The Philosophy of Modern Song”: “Goodbye Jimmy Reed, Jimmy Reed indeed; / Give me that old time religion, it’s just what I need.” Dylan’s religion, his philosophy, his code, is the music.'

In The Philosophy of Modern Song Raymond Foye writes 'Dylan finds profundities where others find ditties ... [in] chapters [which] take the song as a jumping-off point for stand-alone meditations on art, money, war, religion, etc. ...

Dylan’s view of life seems to be a lot of horror and a little bit of joy, which is where the songs come in: they are a source of comfort and hope for the downtrodden. They “take the sting out of life.” ...

Dylan sees the world crowded with angels and demons, with songs as the intercessors. Songs also represent a better life: you get there by wishing, hoping, and dreaming. For three minutes you too can be a king, a lover, or an outlaw.'

In Faith, Hope and Carnage Nick Cave 'explains his personal crossroads of rock and religion: “All my songs are written from a place of spiritual yearning, because that is the place that I permanently inhabit. To me, personally, this place feels charged, creative, and full of potential.”'

Lyn McCredden writes that 'One of the chastening effects of grief, for Cave, is registered in the experiences and expressions of religious faith. The conversation between Cave and O’Hagan leaves us in no doubt about Cave’s deepened religious beliefs. These have always been a part of him, through his post-punk, drug-fed years, but they are taking new turns.

To his strengthened Christian faith, Cave, often to O’Hagan’s bemusement, attaches a suite of moral human values he would now, through living with his grief and doubt and fear, like to nurture in himself: values of empathy, humility and vulnerability, mercy towards others, openness and tolerance, and acknowledgement of his need for atonement.'

Trailblazing saxophonist Albert Ayler, who remains an important influence among jazz and experimental musicians long after his death, is explored in an important new biography, Holy Ghost: The Life and Death of Free Jazz Pioneer Albert Ayler by Richard Koloda. 

'Ayler's turbulent, often polarising, music career and life, which lasted a brief 34 years, has been subject to myth and rumour right from his debut free jazz recording, Witches And Devils in 1964, through his 1964/5 dates for ESP (including the highly acclaimed, landmark album Spiritual Unity, which featured at No.28 in Jazzwise's The 100 Jazz Albums That Shook The World book) to his recordings for the Impulse! label, which signed him following a recommendation by John Coltrane. These included 1967's avant-garde extravaganza Live in Greenwich Village, Love Cry and 1969's Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe, which saw Ayler's music moving closer to spiritual redemption and R&B (the latter a return to the music he started out playing with bluesman Little Walter in the early 1950s), before his mysterious death in 1970.'

Ayler 'had a sound that was as big as a house and a way of improvising at times that blended tones into one big mixture that disregarded individual notes. He was as free as they come in avant-garde jazz, yet his themes were at times a mixture of gospel, folk and even simple nursery rhymes.'

'Ayler's work eerily recalled the ragged polyphonies, street-march beats, gospel songs and spirituals of the earliest African-American music.'

Nick Cave says that he believes 'that there exists a genuine mystery at the heart of songwriting' that 'Through writing, you can enter a space of deep yearning that drags its past along with it and whispers into the future, that has an acute understanding of the way of things.' In different ways, these books and the music they describe inhabits that space.

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Nick Cave - Spinning Song.