'Comin' Back To Me', Rickie Lee Jones' cover of the Jefferson Airplane original on repeat. 'Comin' Back': how many times have I heard this song over last two decades (it is nearly two decades)? Her low contralto (is it a contralto?) warm, close. It's intimate, very close to you, the listener. She's telling you a secret. You have to stoop to listen. Bend down, lie down. The song asks for you to listen at its level.
Comin' Back … 'I saw you, I – saw you …': held back, restrained. A song that doesn't say itself, the capacity to sing, to play. That seems to issue from an incapacity, a kind of interruption. Singing wasn't possible. There was no one to play. And in infinite weariness, in a kind of wearing away, infinite. Singing bound to its own impossibility, playing to what it cannot do.
I'm sitting up by the window. Sitting up, the monitor before me, the wall behind me with Blue Note jazz albums reproduced: The Incredible Jimmy Smith, Our Man in Paris … she's a jazz singer, too, Rickie Lee Jones. Pop Pop, from which 'Comin' Back to Me' is a jazz album, and with the usual jazz vices: too much confidence, proficiency, too much complacency as it remains within an idiom, bathing in it. Pure indulgence, pure smugness (there's not enough asceticism in jazz).
And yet 'Comin' Back to Me' … yet a performance, like those of Tomas Stanko that opens jazz right out again, right open. That opens it to the afternoon and the wearing of the afternoon, to the great erosion that robs us of ourselves. That doubles it up, that wearing away, hardening it into a form – impossible! That gives it a body, a kind of consistency – impossible! That thickens the afternoon in the afternoon.
It is what I want in artworks, I think. As though art was by definition a denial of the afternoon. As though it could let the blankness of days harden into glass. As though it could slow light down, could set the passing of the day on pause. You caught it: the day. You caught it out, interrupted it, as it would interrupt you.
'Comin' Back to Me': sung below psychology, below expressiveness. Played down where the lake reflects the sky. It's a horizontal music. It is music lying down … a lake, an expanse. A lying down that expands the space around it, lets in breathe. That draws the days to itself, letting it turn around itself. That turns your attention elsewhere, losing it across a shimmering surface.
'But I saw you, I saw – you, coming back to me …' A song sung after song. Music after music, after everything's been played, everything sung. And now it's coming back, it's returning. Now you're coming back, the song, the centre of the song, as you set out from the far corner of the day to find me …
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