it gets me home this curving track [ian penman]

Penman is an enthusiast. A music journalist, who in this collection of essays showcases his writing on artists he loves. The field is eclectic and for reasons which the book makes clear, translucently hip. So hip that he can include an artist like Donald Fagin of Steely Dan, who no-one really believes is hip now. But that is being hip: it’s being awake to those signs which are flashing, Pynchonesque, beyond the immediate. The dodgy looking back alleys of the Mississippi delta. The jazz club no-one’s ever heard of, before it becomes the jazz club everyone’s heard of. And this world fascinates Penman not because he’s some kind of would-be trendsetter, but almost entirely because he wants to escape the world of would-be trendsetters. Return to a world where people made music in order to live, rather than to acquire fame or glory. Where the music was a mirror to the soul.

The essays on Parker, Brown, Presley and, above all, Prince, investigate this territory. Penman identifies the way in which the music, for all these men, was a way of defining identity, an identity each in his own way became trapped in. The same applied to another unlikely subject, Sinatra, with a great observation about how Sinatra never wanted the night to end, as though he was frightened of what the day might bring. Penman, having traced where the spark for their creativity and genius originated, then goes on to describe how each, in their way, became trapped, seeking to replicate an unfettered drive to create within an increasingly commercialised context, one which hindered development of their creative horizons. In some ways, the most interesting essay in this book is one that hasn’t been written, about Miles Davis, a figure who recurs frequently, but one who succeeded in slipping the leash of his origins and reinventing himself, taking his genius with him as he explored other lands.

In this sense, the word “home” in the title is curious. The author explains that the line comes from an Auden poem. But the book’s collection of essays hints at various interpretations. A curving track which appears to lead towards the home which is death. The word “track” also suggests something that’s laid out, impossible to deviate from. The tragedy of genius, so often (and Penman mentions Billie Holiday as the “empty chair” of the book), is that by the time you’ve hit your stride, the journey is more or less over. The only destination left is the finale. If this isn’t quite so true for Sinatra and Fahey (because they’re white?), it’s still there. Once the trailblazers have escaped the cocoon, turned into butterflies, there’s nothing much left to achieve. Perhaps this is why the only true rock star is the one who dies young.