Late Arcade

February 27, 2017
In the fifth installment of the From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate series, Mackey (Splay Anthem) revisits members of Molimo m’Atet, an invented experimental jazz ensemble based in Los Angeles. The novel expands through a series of letters to an absent figure only referred to as Angel of Dust. In letters written between September 1983 and June 1984, composer and instrumentalist N. details the band’s dreams, creative process, live performances, and romantic entanglements. Floating comic strip dialogue balloons begin to follow the group’s drummer, Drennette, and soon appear during shows, revealing subconscious thoughts and erotic memories. Having encountered these balloons before, N. and others in the ensemble (Lambert, Djamilaa, and Aunt Nancy) suspect the balloons have originated from Penguin, one of the horn players. Aunt Nancy suggests preempting the conceptual balloons with literal ones. Encouraged by Angel of Dust, the group attempts to incorporate rubber balloons, distributing inflatables during a performance and inviting audience members to contribute to the orchestration. But the word bubbles are even more unpredictable. Mackey’s work is digressive and flowing, “a run of pure devotion, a poem, a paean, an oath.” Sprinkled with illustrations, a press release, an improvisational prompt, and excerpts from an “antithetical opera,” the book eludes easy classification. Mackey imbues the prose with music, and every sentence drives the feverish rhythm. The narrative moves through notes on Bedouin mysticism, environmentalism, African American history, and jazz criticism. Intelligent and widely imaginative, this is a story about embracing the unexpected and the unconventional, and turning peculiar circumstances into art.

November 15, 2016
An avant-garde jazz sextet hones its craft, hits the road, and tries to make sense of some unusual onstage goings-on.N., the narrator of the fifth in this series of jazz-themed novels by Mackey (Bass Cathedral, 2008, etc.), is writing letters to the "Angel of Dust" in 1983 and 1984 about his group, the Molimo m'Atet. It's an experimental group inspired by (to pick a few of the many names dropped) Yusef Lateef, Sun Ra, and Milton Nascimento, relying heavily on intuition and improvisation. The novel's language is similarly off-the-cuff, deploying abstracted wordplay that foregrounds sound and rhythm as much as sense. ("Rickety buildup grew possessed of growl and grumble, an aroused rattle and would-be rafter shake amassing senses of emergence or at least emergency....") Lines like those give the book a poetic lift, but Mackey is relentless in peppering the pages with such prose, recalling the line (often attributed to Thelonious Monk) that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. The skeletal plot turns involve N.'s flirtation with the group's percussionist; an approving but intellectually-wanting concert review that prompts a group emergency meeting and press release; and, most surrealistically, the appearance of comic-book-style word balloons during performances, usually delivering semierotic messages. What to make of that? Art, of course: the band responds by giving the audience at a concert blow-up balloons to do with what they will, popping and rubbing in support of N.'s theories about air, sound, and the nature of music. The m'Atet's performances in Detroit and their home base in Southern California uniformly receive wild applause, but this novel is a little harder to get behind: for all of its wild, free-wheeling spirit, overall it feels like an extended solo that keeps going after it's run through all of its themes. An appealingly brash if overworked experimental lark.

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January 1, 2017

National Book Award winner Mackey's latest installment in the multivolume (four and counting) "jazz novel," From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, continues the epistolary poetic narrative of musician N.'s communications with the Angel of Dust.

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