Unless you’ve been in a medically-induced coma for a year or two, you will have noted that the times are, as the supposed Chinese curse would have it, terribly interesting. “Things fall apart; the centre will not hold” is not so much a line from Yeats as daily reportage.
Even immersing oneself in an all-consuming occupation (such as publishing The Syncopated Times) it’s hard to avoid distracting undercurrents. Editing a periodical about jazz and ragtime has been fairly effective insulation between me and reality, so-called. Except sometimes, that is. Occasionally I come up for air and turn on the radio or scan the internet, and what’s happening outside my safe haven of syncopation is brought home to me. Egad. That medically-induced coma begins to sound pretty good, actually—or it would if I didn’t have work to do.
When faced with Things Not Making Sense, one is tempted to seek refuge in nostalgia, or more accurately, anachronalgia (which I’ve previously described as “a wistful longing for a past one could not possibly have experienced”). Living in the past (in the present) is something certain people love to do—especially if they gloss over the uglier aspects of the earlier time and play up the music and the fashions. While doing my radio program, I heard from those people all the time.
“Greetings Mr. Senior! My girlfriend and I are a young couple from Erie, PA and we’d like to drop you a line telling you how often we listen to your show and how much we enjoy it. We are avid ’30s-’40s enthusiasts, Second World War re-enactors, historians, and fans of period music. Our house is from the ’20s and still retains much of its original look and feel (also helped by our vintage themed interior decorations) and the music you play adds greatly to our home. You can rest assured, there will be many evenings to come where you can find Nicole, the dog, and myself, sitting by the fire, smoking a Camels, and ‘warming up the tubes’ to dial into your station. Thanks Again!”
I expressed my gratitude for the kind note (which I received via Facebook in 2013), but I couldn’t help wondering how they had taught the dog to smoke Camels. And I’m not so sure I would want to reenact World War Two voluntarily. (I’ve known people who participated in the original, and they suggested it wasn’t that much of a hoot.) What somewhat makes my skin crawl is that any adult would want to pretend that hard they were living in a prior (allegedly better) period of history.
I love old music and I delight in the look, utility, and workmanship of the old things which fill my house—but I can never, for a moment, forget that I’m living in 2016. Even if it were not impossible, I would not travel back in time, not even to hear Buddy Bolden or Bix Beiderbecke play “live.” Nor would I ever attempt to make today an ersatz 1928. (More than getting it wrong, I’m afraid I’d get it right.) The present, for all its real discontents, is where I am obliged to navigate.
With today’s ugliness, noise, and strife, I don’t always feel at home here. Nonetheless, this is my home. As much as we are citizens of any nation, we are citizens of our own time. We seldom sense that because our time usually makes no real demands on us. And then there’s today. At the moment, I’m afraid I feel those demands all-too sharply. We are compelled by nature to participate in the present. How we do so is entirely up to us.
My own choice is to proceed without undue emotionalism. There is much static outside my attic calculated to draw one into the zeitgeist. As wonderfully cathartic as it would be to embrace irrationality and give in to the mood of the moment, I can’t bring myself to do it. Shouting my head off would just elevate my blood pressure.
I realize that my best response to a mad world (from which I have no sane or ethical means of escape) is to do as I have been doing. The Syncopated Times is my sustained response. Jazz is not a form of denial or negation; it is a celebration and an affirmation of all that is truly good in us.
People who would never agree about anything else can get together and make and enjoy this music. They can listen and dance without faction dividing them. It brings us together in the best way possible: as a community of like-minded souls. In jazz there is individuality and unity; the finest of each of us making the sum of all of us being far greater than its parts.
We face bitter and painful upheaval; we may never entirely concur on matters of considerable importance. But, in the here and now, we can always syncopate.
