graceland

Among other things, I spent the month of August teaching at fiddle camps, practicing George Crumb’s sonata for solo cello and underlining nearly every other page from Madeleine L’engle’s A Circle of Quiet. Her book is so inspired and honest, crowded with creative insight, that I felt confident I would base my next post on her writing. I tried numerous drafts until I finally realized that the best I can do is recommend you read her book.

And then, last night, I began watching Under African Skies, the 25^th anniversary documentary of Paul Simon’s Graceland.  Maybe it’s because I don’t get out enough, but it is rare that I find myself in a moment of undiluted, aching beauty; when my heart surges for a brief and breathtaking fifteen seconds with awe at what music can do.  This is precisely how I felt during original 1985 in-studio footage of “I Know What I Know” in which the background singers are wearing matching outfits and dancing like they’re onstage and the guitarist and bassist are twisting in crouched circles around their instruments, left legs over their fingerboards.  Not only are the women wearing matching outfits, they have choreographed their moves.  Simon’s shoulders are humming.  One drummer says that they didn’t know when they were rolling or when they weren’t, they just played and played and, at the end of the day, listening back, thought, we just did that?

One night, when Mia and I were in the last stages of mixing Unruly Heart, we had finally arrived at a good mix for Track 3. It was late. We were exhausted and starving and we had to listen to the whole track one last time. As we did this, something in the stale studio air shifted and we began to spin each other, a contra dance swing, unhinged and wild, this unexpected delight rising from the embers of a tune.

All I’m saying is I wonder what would happen if we danced a little more. Not alone in our rooms, no.  But out, out in the world, colorfully, loudly. This is, after all, why Graceland is on so many of our top 5 lists, right? It’s not just Paul Simon’s brilliant songwriting; not just the talented musicians and their incomparable South African grooves.

It’s the dancing. 

It’s that we can hear them dancing.