About My Latest Story: “Animals with Nowhere to Go”

I was so happy to see my story, “Animals with Nowhere to Go”, published this month (January) at Jerry Jazz Musician. I wrote “Animals” specifically to enter the Jerry Jazz 55th short fiction contest last fall. Even though it only wound up short-listed (go to “Chromesthesia “ here to read the wonderful winning story by Shannan Brady) it is an honor to see my work alongside so many other great creative people’s.

I discovered Jerry Jazz about fifteen years ago while researching material for my novel Notes on the Golden Country (still a few years to go before it’s out). At the time, I was writing a rather freeform essay on the effect that Ralph Ellison’s work had on American literature. You can read that brief essay here. JJM is a wonderful repository for all things Ralph Waldo Ellison. I’d found my people.

I am a writer who has a tendency to connect his fiction and essays to musical questions and mysteries. I often go find the Jerry Jazz Musician website whenever I’m feeling beat up and ragged out from projects I’m working on. It’s a great source of inspiration for jazz culture lovers on all sorts of levels with poetry, essays, fiction, photos, videos, and book reviews on everyone from John Coltrane and Thelonius Monk to James Baldwin and jazz chronicler Gary Giddins.

As a lover of all things improvisational, I gave myself the goal of publishing at Jerry Jazz years ago, but I could never seem to come up with something worthy of them. Then the pandemic of 2020 (and 2021) set in. So did a heck of a lot of unnecessary police violence. A bunch of our neighbors and co-workers jumped down the rabbit hole of chronic misinformation and anger.

By July, I began to wonder how artists of all stripes were feeling about their work. How do you end a story or a play, or a piece of music at a time like this? How do you paint a portrait of someone or even photograph a wedding if there is no sense at all of where the world is going? Could we ever feel safe in each other’s presence again? Will any of us ever fully be able to relax in crowds? When will all the anger and hostile rebellion from common sense and decency become obviously pointless and counter-productive?

I was listening to a lot of new jazz in the middle of all we were going through — created, generally, by millennials all over the world. Christian Scott ATunde Adjuah calls his music “stretch music.” I want to apply that term to so much of what I was listening to. It’s stretching the boundaries of every form and bringing African, Caribbean, South American, and Middle Eastern rhythm and beat into everything much more directly than ever before (as in the 60s and 70s). Tradition and innovation with structure, melody, and sonic chemistry are all mixed together.

I’ve always paid careful attention to music, but somehow this past year I opened up in ways I’d never imagined. I managed to become more centered and careful in how I heard music as art — especially the innovative work created by young people (note to those afraid of aging: the number of “young people” doing amazing things increases dramatically every year you mature beyond 60). Somehow, it seems like I became more rooted and willing to connect to what I was listening to.

I fell deeper and deeper in love with what jazz represents and means as an art form — freedom, unfettered joy, musical poetics, improvisation, intelligent play with time, melody games, sound, and emotion. As a nation, we were in more turmoil than perhaps ever in modern history, and yet there I was discovering an ever deeper love and appreciation for jazz. What the heck? Why is that?

A partial list of the great jazz music I have stumbled across this past twelve months includes: Kamasi Washington, Christian Scott ATunde Adjuah, Anouar Brahem, Nils Petter Molvær, Robert Glasper, Terrace Martin, Tord Gustavsen, Matthew Halsall, Mammal Hands, Kokoroko, Nubya Garcia, Ezra Collective, GoGo Penguin, Esbjörn Svensson Trio, and so much more. Some of these artists are younger than others.

Of course, all of us (myself included), remain confused, angry, and desperate in one way or another about life in this new decade of the 21st century. It’s almost like we are unable to remember who we were trying to become and that either pisses us off or makes us feel sad and a bit worried.

However, from my writing desk here on the third floor of our house, I have a view of the woods in our neighborhood. For most of 2020, I kept wondering if I could simply walk into those woods and start a pointless project like digging a large hole — maybe the dimension of a large casket or a very small bathroom — and keep at it with enough dedication that I might eventually uncover some way out of this mess we’re all in. Good jazz should do that to your brain, jazz and how it makes you feel about life — a desire for holes, impossible ideas, hope, fancy, the possibility of being entertained by something pointless but mysterious.

I would head downstairs at the end of a day at my desk and make dinner for the two of us. We’d watch TV and eat well. Sometimes I’d wish that I was still a drinker and a smoker. I know a lot of folks have enjoyed drinking more in the past year than is normal. Sadly, I did my battle with alcohol about ten years ago. I still occasionally try to enjoy a few drinks on special occasions, but mostly I think about how great those early times were when I ended my days out on the back porch or sitting with friends somewhere having a few glasses of wine and smoking a cigarette.

(Another Note: One of the great things about this nutso virus time is that while — yes — it has probably created problems with alcohol for a lot of folks, many smokers and vapers have finally quit or at least come closer to that goal. We aren’t hearing about that on the news).

A lot of these issues found their way into “Animals with Nowhere to Go” — music, hole digging, smoking, drinking, sex a little, making food, and our constant need to figure out the meaning of life. As I wrote, it was clear to me that the story I was coming up with was something I wanted to submit to Joe Maita, founder and publisher of Jerry Jazz Musician. Without doubt, this is my small contribution to Jazz in the Time of Covid.

None of us can escape where we’ve been over the last year, not like we used to be able to escape at the end of the day, anyway. The last year happened to all of us … together and alone.

There’s a terrible beauty in that realization. Certainly, a lot of folks have tried to escape it all by refusing to wear masks and by ignoring the idea of social distancing and taking care of each other, but the reality is we’re all accompanying each other through the same situation.

We really don’t have anywhere to go even if we can create the illusion of escape. There’s only one way out and that’s through Honesty and Reality and understanding that the future is coming and we can make it anything we want it to be.

My thanks, again, so much to Jerry Jazz Musician.

And for what it's worth, I have some great news coming soon on more projects and stories.