Bass Cathedral

by Nathaniel Mackey

Los Angeles, October 1982: Molimo m'Atet, formerly known as the The Mystic Horn Society, is preparing to release its new album Orphic Bend. The members of the jazz ensemble--Aunt Nancy, Djamilaa, Drennette, Lambert, N., and Penguin--are witness to a strange occurrence: while listening to their test pressing, the moment Aunt Nancy's bass solo begins a balloon emerges from the vinyl, bearing a mysterious message: I dreamt you were gone.... Through letters...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811217205
• ISBN13: 9780811217200
• Release Date: January 2008
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

When Paragraphs Come Out Sounding Right...

Albert Murray, American man of letters, novelist and all-purpose literary intellectual, said "to me, you can write more poetry in prose than if you restrict yourself to certain verse forms." A staunch modernist who came of age in the 1930s, Murray's literary models were Eliot, Pound, Faulkner, Kafka and Mann. He said "but at the same time that I'm reading these guys, I'm also listening to Louis (Armstrong) and Duke (Ellington) and Kansas City jazz and coming to terms with that too....so it's all part of the same thing with me. When a sentence sounds right to me, it's probably some variation of the Kansas City 4/4, and when it has the right rhythm, it's getting close to what Hemingway and others did." Nathaniel Mackey's epistolary novel Bass Cathedral is rooted in the same 20th century elements, albeit with perhaps Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and Pan African worldmusic as additional musical influences. Mackey revisits and extends Murray's mental map, attempting to build the novel on a structure of sound and language that is inevitably postmodern--highly metaphoric and rhythmic with the feel of a poetry slam--a performance that is not simply writing about jazz, but writing that is jazz. Poetry is the language of suggestion, not the language of meaning. Mackey's love of words, their sound and their suggested intersection with the airy vibrations of music would certainly make sense to a jazz cat like Albert Murray or anybody else who can see with their ear's eye.

Good read; better on the second go 'round

Read it once, read it twice. You'll like it. Challenges the form of the novel; or is it even a novel?