Listen to “Make Space 39” on Spotify
And tell a friend!
On the first day of school, I invited my students to share something beautiful they’d encountered over the summer—something small and precise, a moment where the ordinary turned extraordinary. They spoke, of course, of sunsets and trees and mountains. Small and precise, I reminded them. Things eventually got more interesting. There was that one about wrinkles on a grandmother’s hands. There was the rhythm of a blender. A solitary pinyon tree. Sun-cracked tomatoes in the garden. There was a sibling’s face as it shifted inexplicably from frustration to surprise, a question mark turned exclamation point.
And there was swimming.
You know this one. You’re wearing goggles. You’re cresting the surface for a breath and suddenly both water and air shift into focus, and you are, for one ephemeral moment, of two worlds. You’re above and below. Yellow and blue. You’re liminal. You’re liquid. It’s sorcery.
Summer has officially been over for a week, but I’m still swimming. Since May I’ve been in public pools, backyard pools, country club pools, hotel pools, kiddie pools, creeks, rivers, lakes, ponds, hot tubs, and plain-old-tub tubs. On several occasions I’ve dreamt of swimming in the ocean at night. Like all dreams, these ones haven’t been void of conflict. There’s a tension in the weightlessness—a paradox, I suppose—that reminds me of Emerson’s line about being “glad to the brink of fear.”
Carlos Niño’s “Nightswimming” is the crux of this playlist; it’s the moment where both water and air shift into focus. Washed out jazz and gamelan bleed into reggaeton and amapiano. Below meets above. The kick meets the snare. It’s extraordinary.
At the end of the day, it’s Pharaoh Sanders’ pool and we’re just swimming in it. He was undoubtedly the giant on whose shoulders stand the rest of the musicians on this week’s playlist, none more so than Carlos Niño. Sanders passed away last weekend at 81. He’s on the mind. In the 60s, he played regularly with John Coltrane, the two perfecting what jazz critic Ira Gitler called “sheets of sound.” They were friends, but supposedly the two barely spoke. They let the music do the talking, a sentiment that sheds all cliché when Coltrane and Sanders are involved.
Yesterday, on our drive to school, we listened to “Kazuko” from Sanders’ 1980 album, Journey to One, a masterpiece of spiritual jazz. N pressed her forehead against the backseat window. The clouds rolled in over the foothills. “They look like waves,” N said. “I wish we could swim through them.”
Thanks for listening.
Your bud,
Ross
Art @ Masuo Ikeda
A perfect, perfect post. Thank you.