Now's the Time: An Introduction
How music sets us free
Welcome to Now’s the Time, my Substack site devoted to the ever-verdant intersection of music and liberation.
Why “Now’s the Time”? For a few reasons: Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, rampant musical heterogeneity, political and spiritual freedom. Let me explain.
First off, “Now’s the Time” is a Charlie Parker tune, recorded on 26 November 1945. Just about every Parker recording merits consideration, but this one stands out even amidst Bird’s classics. At the time, the alto saxophonist and bebop revolutionary sought to uproot prevailing jazz conventions of harmony, improvisation, tempo, complexity, interactivity — reflected in performances of tunes such as “Ah-Leu-Cha,” “Anthropology,” “Moose the Mooche,” “Scrapple from the Apple” and many others — and reflected in his solos on “Now’s the Time.” The latter composition, however, reached back to his Kansas City blues roots, injecting modernity with a vibrant dose of where modernity came from, indicating the basis upon which Parker’s version of modernity was erected. In Clint Eastwood’s film Bird (1988), which stars Forest Whitaker as Parker, there’s a scene in which the band (with trumpeter Red Rodney) plays a date in the South and the audience — in a barn, if I recall correctly — dances joyously to the blues strophes of “Now’s the Time,” a jarring contrast with the stereotypical image of bebop as a kind of hyper-intellectual conversation (which, of course, it also was).
Second, the November 1945 version of “Now’s the Time” marked the recorded début with Bird of nineteen-year-old trumpeter Miles Davis. Davis’s presence is noteworthy for the way his measured pacing and limpid tone pull against Parker’s overflowing energy, just as Parker’s blues composition pulls against bebop’s frenzy. Miles, of course, would forge a colossal artistic career stretching conceptions of time, sound and silence. I aver that you can hear the seeds of later Miles milestones including Birth of the Cool (1949/50), Kind of Blue (1959) and In a Silent Way (1969) in his short 1945 trumpet solo.
(Plus, you can hear pianist Red Garland play a magnificent tribute to Miles’s “Now’s the Time” solo at the 7:28 mark of “Straight, No Chaser,” on Miles’s 1958 record Milestones.)
Miles’s artistic arc pulled relentlessly against any kind of jazz orthodoxy or business-as-usual. Paradoxically, it turns out, pushing against orthodoxy is jazz orthodoxy. Jacques Réda, a French classicist and inveterate jazz writer, put it this way:
Il semble que le jazz ait toujours voulu être plus ou autre chose que lui-même. [It seems that jazz has always wanted to be something more or different than what it is.]
Or in the words of future Davis sideman Herbie Hancock, describing jazz today as much as jazz historically:
The thing that keeps jazz alive, even if it’s under the radar, is that it is so free and so open to not only lend its influence to other genres, but to borrow and be influenced by other genres. That’s the way it breathes.
Miles’s flirtations with rock ‘n’ roll, with funk, with “world music,” musique concrète and other currents were mightily productive — I mean, this is a dude who praised and drew inspiration from the Fifth Dimension as well as Karlheinz Stockhausen. Miles’s example is a sustaining inspiration for the open-borders musical aesthetic of the writing I hope to do at this Substack account.
“Now’s the Time” as a title would certainly have carried a political sense to at least some listeners in 1945. If not then, certainly by 28 August 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his epochal address at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Dr. King came to the Lincoln Memorial, he said, “to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.” He continued:
Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children. (Credit where credit is due, to Andrew Curry’s Around the Edges blog, which made the link from the song to the speech.)
How does music, explicitly or implicitly, promote political freedom? Think of Sonny Rollins’s Freedom Suite (1958), or Max Roach’s We Insist! Freedom Now Suite (1960)… or much more recent records by Irreversible Entanglements and Damon Locks’s Black Monuments Ensemble.
Finally, “Now’s the Time” has a spiritual valence. As noted, Parker’s“Now’s the Time” as a composition and as a performance in 1945 marries timelines — the blues and R&B past, the bebop present, and the musical future so ardently pursued by bebop. All of these points on the linear timeline are present NOW, the performance says. A masterful nonverbal illustration of Buddhist teaching. Dogen Zenji (1200-1253), the founder of Soto Zen in Japan, wrote:
As the time right now is all there ever is, each being-time [uji, 有時] is without exception entire time… Entire being, the entire world, exists in the time of each and every now. Just reflect: right now, is there an entire being or an entire world missing from your present time, or not…?
Or, as Walpola Rahula wrote in What the Buddha Taught (1959):
Real life is the present moment — not the memories of the past which is dead and gone, nor the dreams of the future which is not yet born. One who lives in the present moment lives the real life, and he is happiest.
When asked why his disciples, who lived a simple and quiet life with only one meal a day, were so radiant, the Buddha replied: ‘They do not repent the past, nor do they brood over the future. They live in the present. Therefore they are radiant. By brooding over the future and repenting the past, fools dry up like green reeds cut down (in the sun).’
A musical performance is a powerful vehicle for this kind of mindfulness, this kind of spiritual freedom.
Free your mind — and your ass will follow: So counseled Funkadelic in 1970, famously. How music promotes political and spiritual freedom, this is the question I intend to pursue in this space. Welcome!