Martin Siewert/Martin Brandlmayr - Too Beautiful To Burn (Erstwhile)

Four days after the spring semester ends, I am taking a plane from New York to Amsterdam. From there I will catch a connecting flight to Johannesburg, and then a flight to Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. The trip, including layovers, will take in excess of 30 hours. My stay in Namibia is going to last 28 days, and I’m going by myself.

As I think about how I am going to manage living by myself in a Third World country for one month (this will be my first trip to Africa, let alone Namibia), I try to focus on bringing things that will remind me of home: pictures of my family, yes, but mainly music. I don’t have an Ipod (and no, I’m not getting one anytime soon) so I have to strategize about which cds to bring. What are the really essential items in my collection? Many nominees come to mind, but this I know for certain: if I could only bring one disc, it would be this one, Too Beautiful To Burn, which I’ve compared in the past to Kind of Blue. But really, that isn’t a fair comparison. Too Beautiful To Burn is better.

For some reason, I remember very well the day that I bought this album. It was late May, 2004, during the Vision Fest in New York City. I didn’t go to the festival, but I did attend one of the hangs in lower Manhattan, where for the first time I met several people I had previously known only through online message boards, including Brian Olewnick, Jon Abbey, and Michael Schaumann. The only thing I remember about the conversation we had over our imported beers was a discussion of the outfit Cecil Taylor wore to Elvin Jones’s funeral, and also something about Boston Red Sox second baseman Mark Bellhorn.

As I got ready to leave, Jon, playing the role of a drug pusher to perfection, opened up his black duffel bag filled with cds, and asked me if I wanted to buy any. (I’m not sure if I have ever seen Jon without his duffel bag full of cds. I like to think that if I ever run across him in the supermarket or at the bakery, he’d have that duffel bag with him.) Anyway, he asked me if I wanted to buy Too Beautiful To Burn, which I had never heard of before. I was a bit dubious; up to that point I had only purchased two or three cds from Jon, and while I liked what I had heard, I recognized that the music he was pushing was a radical departure from everything else I listened to. I think I feared that the music would brainwash me to the point where all I would want to do with my life would be to sit in an empty room and stare at a blank wall, pondering the futility of all human activity. Of course, later on I discovered that this is pretty much what eai does to listeners, but it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds. Anyway, I was unsure whether to get the disc, until Michael jumped in and said, “Yeah, get it. It’s fucking awesome.” So I did.

I went home and listened to it, and felt something I had never before experienced as a music listener. It wasn’t quite as profound as an epiphany, but nearly so. The music was like the sculpture of Apollo which prompted Rilke to conclude one of his poems with this stirring line: “You must change your life.” That is what this music was saying to me: You must change your life. You must think differently about music. Listening to the music for the first time, all categories dissolved. I didn’t care which musician was making which sounds, whether what I was hearing qualified as “electro-acoustic improvisation” or which portions of the disc were improvised and which the result of post-production editing. It didn’t matter. It still doesn’t.

I realize that I have made it this far into this piece and haven’t actually described any sounds on the disc. This is as it should be. The music is there to be heard, and it certainly doesn’t need any artificial elaboration from me. Rather what I have tried to focus on is the human dimension of my encounter with this music, the memories and feelings it evokes for me when I listen to it. That warmth, that vitality, is what the album conveys: on the first listen, the fiftieth, and the hundredth. It is not just another disc to be assessed with a one sentence review, another piece of plastic to be piled onto the heap of “good” or “great” releases that emerge every year to earn our praise. It is sui generis, too beautiful to burn, and too beautiful to pass over.