I’m almost finished with Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue, a story crafted in thick, rich prose with sentences that go on for miles. Music plays a central role in the book, and Chabon manages to make music with his writing, crafting fictional songs with language to the point where I actually went looking for the album he described. This passage is about a fictional musical interpretation of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar:
Cochise Jones always liked to play against your expectations of a song, to light the gloomy heart of a ballad with a Latin tempo and a sheen of vibrato, root out the hidden mournfulness, the ache of longing, in an up-tempo pop tune. Cochise’s six-minute outing on the opening track of Redbonin’ was a classic exercise in B-3 revisionism, turning a song inside out. It opened with big Gary King playing a fat, choogling bass line, sounding like the funky intro to some ghett0-themed sitcom of the seventies, and then Cochise Jones came in , the first four drawbars pulled all the way out, giving the Lloyd Webber melody a treatment that was not cheery so much as jittery, playing up the anxiety inherent in the song’s title, there being so many thousand possible ways to Love Him, so little time to choose among them. Cochise’s fingers skipped and darted as if the keys of the organ were the wicks of candles and he was trying to light all of them with a single match. Then, as Idris Muhammad settled into a rolling burlesque-hall bump and grind, and King fell into step beside him, Cochise began his vandalism in earnest, snapping off bright bunches of the melody and scattering it in handfuls, packing it with extra notes in giddy runs. He was ruining the song, rifling it, mocking it with an antic edge of joy. (p. 279)
It goes on for another paragraph or two…amazing, intriguing, engaging. And the whole books is like that, whether describing the flight of a parrot over Oakland in a sentence that lasts for four or five pages, or the lives of his characters as they struggle to live authentic lives that seem out of step with the mainstream. Ultimately, the book is about race but it is about so much more.
There is plenty of real music in the book, though, and that you can find on the Internet as Forrest Wickman at Slate has thoughtfully put together a Spotify playlist.
