John Carter - Fields (Gramavision)

Long before I ever heard Horace Tapscott's The Dark Tree or learned of the man's Revelation recordings with long-time collaborator Bobby Bradford, I had read and heard stories about John Carter. The premier clarinetist of the "free jazz" era, an esteemed educator, and, most intriguing to me, a Dallas native who spent years, decades perhaps, creating a conceptual masterpiece similar in concern but towering and windy than anything Ellington, Mingus or Marsalis ever tilted at, Carter nevertheless proved to be quite invisible by the time I was ready to start hunting down his records and exploring his legend. My searching finally paid off one terrifically hot July afternoon in 1995, at a tiny Half-Price Books off Garland Road. That's where I found a cut-out copy of Fields in the "50 Cent" vinyl racks. Ring me up, please.

But I was not exactly sold on the music itself until much later. On my first listen to this, the fourth of five installments in Carter's Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music, I was put off by Don Preston's wacky synthesizers, Terry Jenoure's histrionic vocals, Carter's rather cloaked presence as a soloist, and the general lugubriousness of the whole thing. Then again, a musical suite that purports to portray the life of subjugation, back-breaking toil, and yearning for deliverance to which Black agricultural laborers in the American South were yoked is not going to be a real briar patch. And the four tracks that make up Fields original side 1 are a dark and troubling and spiky affair indeed. The record begins with a sort of death chant -- "Ballad to Po' Ben" -- in which the singer does not intercede for the departed's soul as much as she bitterly mourns the lot of those Ben has left behind. "Bootyreba at the Big House" carries echoes of N'Awlins second line parade, but, as expressive as the individual instrumental voices are, they are too workaday woozy -- drunk, exhausted, beaten -- to be grotesque. Escape via heightened states of distraction is fruitless. "Juba's Run", the pace and tone of which is set by the desperate sprinter's panting, finds literal flight from these circumstances equally impossible. The final track delivers the coup de grace. But this blow does not take the form of a last lash across the back. It is shod within a boot, the toe of one kicking the defeated of off their belly so they be reminded that the victor is always gazing down on them. "Seasons" serves to remind us that it is not just the whip of merciless masters that harnesses (to use the verb Carter does in his annotations) these lives to cycles of anchoring, extraction, and accumulation. It is the nature of the land, which may or may not be the promised land, and it the state of the universe, which is indiscriminate with its promises. Spring, autumn; fat years and lean years; more hands to send out to the field, but more mouths to feed. What faithful servant or even army of righteous men will not be plowed under by the turning of this wheel? "Seasons" with Jenoure reciting the following:

What time is this? What place? What space does my existence fill? What melody sings in this song of pain and sorrow? Am I enduring some intense drama judging my own right to my own initiative? Or am I the prisoner of some ungodly historical circumstance? Is home tomorrow, or is tomorrow another hour, another season, or another lifetime in this cruel drama?

This is no doxology. And these are not the questions of an Uncle Tom, but of a Schopenhauer or Kierkegaard.

If the album ended there, on that deterministic and despairing note, well, we would be left with something that, while infinitely more interesting musically than Marsalis' Blood On The Fields, would be just as grave. Not to mention just as exploitatively violent, and just as petulant in its attitudes towards guilt and exculpation -- shaking the first in the audience's face in a game of "keep away"; pushing away an offer of the latter like a child refusing to eat his lima beans. But Carter knows this more about this rural life than Marsalis can imagine, and his "research" of it grounded in actual and personal experience. Carter knows he cannot completely shun pastoralism. He also knows that, with pastoral ways, he cannot wholly separate out the threads of adversity and contentment that weave through it. Marsalis, with the narrow-mindedness so many African-American associate with "white people", is out to erect a monolith. But Carter is making a quilt. He takes a scrap here, finds a scrap there and the stuffing may be thin in one spot, but it is so pillowy in another. Carter is working in a completely different economy. He embraces his grandchildren, whose playful yet thick, firm voices leap up in the mix on "Children Of The Fields", but he acknowledges the filthy rednecks that live a few acres over. Carter understands that you have to take the bullshit with the sunshine. The apparently bifurcated structure of Fields is a n ingenious and even necessary narrative strategy. It is almost a ruse. The form of the piece reflects not history in simple Antebellum / Reconstruction halves, but that very same dialectical state of mind which Carter wishes to transcend, in the sense of rising above it, and not to fly away, but just to get the bird's-eye view. Moreover, Carter knows such transcending cannot be purely providential. Although the triumph is touched by grace, what is more fundamental to its savor -- and solace -- is that it is earned.

It all comes together on the long, long title track. It begins in Africa, or with memories of tribal chants (so it sounds), and goes on to incorporate "field recordings" of children's song as well as the reminiscences of Carter's namesake, his own Uncle John. In the field, of the field, surrounded by the field, but, metaphysically, so far distant from it, yet transported in part by its sights and smells and difficulties… Something is brewing, and brewing with mysterious indolence, here. Eventually, everyone solos, and the composed elements are handled brilliantly by his Carter's ensemble, especially Benny Powell, Marty Ehrlich (this is the record that made me notice him) and Andrew Cyrille. Just as it seems that the labor must continue, that everyone is bending back down into the harvest -- or shoeing mules or blocking out wagon wheels, or swinging the hammer; stepping back into a river of sweat -- there is a flurry of little airs, those songs meant to make work more endurable. Quickly, it grows into jubilation, honest-to-goodness jubilation. It still sends the chills up my spine, the way it arrives, and the sheer presence it has. Then the track plays out, Jenoure's ecstatic screams fade, and we hear old Uncle John muttering out the rhythm that supplied the force for that eruption. There is still something imponderably joyous about this little revelation, not least because of the way Carter stages it. I know it should not be momentous, it is textbook stuff (field hollers, blues jazz, etc.), but pivotal, thus full of implications for the future, is how I experience it.

With Fields, Carter to be saying: if you don't understand the complexity of slavery and its byproducts, and if you don’t understand all this through individual character, how can you hope to recognize slavery as it is present today, and the ways in which it is coercing you into doing that which, at your core, you would never want to do? Loathe the powers that be, but don’t shrink from them in fear. But -- and this, more than its ostensible scope, is what lends Carter's great projects its greatness -- that is just of Fields' layers. There are a lot of stories imbedded in Fields, but Carter isn't telling them for the sake of scaring or admonishing his audience. Carter is telling tales because he wants them to be remembered. Only on Fields's last performance, "On A Country Road", does Carter step forward, playing the "circular breathing" phrases that were his trademark. With it's old-folks, loping gait and its use of instrumental colors that were familiar to a curly-headed, bespectacled post-adolescent who never farmed a day in his life but who spent many a summer in Omaha, Texas, draining Dr. Pepper bottles and waiting for the next train to rumble hootingly by and punctuate the growing of the tall, brown grass, for a good while "On A Country Road" was the one piece here that immediately resonated with me. Later, I began to comprehend how all of Fields is about the confluence of West and South that is East Texas. Though I can’t explain exactly how, but I can assure you that there is something of the humidity and heat of the region in the music, the oppressive air that you gulp as much as breathe. And the brilliant greens, blues, yellows and oranges, each as hot as the exposed head of a nail glinting in the noonday sun. The music is daubed too with the red dirt of this place, and, like that clayey soil, the music smells of both dust and mud. But, gradually, in my experience with Fields, I ceased having truck with mudpies and started to wonder about exactly where that country road led… Carter, I think, has a certain destination in mind, one that is essentially poetic and resembles a country described by fellow East Texan (and perhaps even kindred spirit) William Goyen in his "A Shape Of Light":

So following this ghostly little lamp of light, we came, of a sudden, into this unearthly landscape, the one I have told you about, with the white beings. We knew the country, you understand -- our ancestors had broken it as wilderness and started all their seed there, my grandfathers and their fathers, me, all my blood-kin, children and children's children. We descendants thought we had measured and blazed it all. But there is always some unknown part of all that is known -- and we had stumbled into it, following this light. I knew my ancestors had followed this light, it was that ancient a thing, this light; that they had ridden behind it, over branch and pasture, thicket and prairie, from supper till sunrise, when they saw it sink into the ground. There are the records to prove it, for these old men made records, stopping to put down what happened, even as I am doing: "Around us were disorder, rancor, words gone sour in the mouth like persimmons; thoughts turned rotten in the mind, crops eaten, droughts and floods, poorly wives and an evil chance of children; but when we saw this light, we left the worst behind and followed to see what it was, that it might show us what our sorrow meant." (The Collected Stories Of William Goyen, p. 108).

~ Joe Milazzo