listening enough I acquired sufficient love of the music-with-
lyric to be one with my generation; and it changed the second
time, years later, maybe decades later, when his mar iage fel
apart and I found out that he had been a batterer. He lost
me. I can’t claim any purity on this, because I’ve never lost
my taste for Miles Davis, and he was a really bad guy to
women, including through battery. So I love ol’ Miles, but I
sure do have trouble put ing any CD of his in the machine. In
Amsterdam I met Ben Webster, but so did any white girl. He
was way past his prime, but he still played his heart out.
I remember the saliva dripping from his lips and the sweat
that blanketed his fat body or the visible parts of it. He’d sit
in the sun in Leidseplein; he always wore a suit; and he’d be
the Pied Piper. I wished he had been Fats Wal er, whom I’ve
rediscovered on CD. I heard B. B. King in concert a few times
there, and the Band once. I loved B. B., whom I met years
later, and I loved the Band.
But it was Bessie who came to stand for art in my mind. I
found her albums, three for 33 cents, in a bin on Eighth Street
while I was in high school, and once I listened to her I was
never the same. I don’t mean her kick-ass lyrics, though those
are pretty much the only blues lyrics I can still stomach. I
mean her stance. She had at itude on every level and at the
same time a cold artistry, entirely unsentimental. Her detachment equaled her commitment: she was going to sing the song through your corporeality. Unlike smoke, which circled
the body, her song went right through you, and either you
took what you could get of it for the moment the note was
moving inside you or she wasn’t for you and you were a bar ier
she penetrated. Any song she sang was a second-by-second
lesson in the meaning of mortality. The notes came from her
and tramped through your three-dimensional body but graceful y, a spartan, bearlike bal et. I listened to those three albums hundreds of times, and each time I learned more about what
art took from you to make: not love but art.
Before the compact-disc revolution, you couldn’t get good
or even passable albums by Ma Rainey, so she was a taste
deferred, and the brilliant Alberta Hunter came into my life
when I was in college and she was singing at the Cookery in
New York City, a very old black woman with a pianist as her
sole accompaniment. I would have done pretty much anything
to hear Big Mama Thornton live, and, of course, for me,
college-aged, Janis Joplin was the top, the best, the risk-taker,
the one who left blood on the stage. When I lived on Crete,
