A Tribute, Of Sorts

maybe there's a lesson in this for some of us

The deaths of only two musicians have moved me spontaneously to tears ever. The reason for one was obvious to me whereas I’ve been pondering and puzzling over the why of the other. The first was Dave Brubeck many years back. And now Glen Hansard.

Dave Brubeck’s music was my first exposure to modern Western music; not The Beatles, not Michael Jackson, not Jefferson Airplane. Well, there was its influence in Indian film music which along with Indian classical music is what I grew up with but Indian film music form retained its Indianness. So for most purposes it wasn’t Western music. Then a friend from back when I was in school played me a cassette of The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s music. I heard - no, not “Take Five” - “Blue Rondo à la Turk” for the first time and then I listened to it. Again and again and yet again. I didn’t progress to any of the other songs on the tape. It was just this. An infinite loop of wildly cascading notes set to strange rhythms. Exhilarating. Of course, I had not heard anything quite like it. That song is almost two but held together so beautifully by exceptional composition. It opened my ears, my heart, and my mind to music’s infinite possibilities. Without realising it then, it divested me at an early age of all notions of genre-loyalty and ‘purity’ and dumb, mean strictures on what constitutes good music. It set me up to listen to all kinds of music and form my own opinions; opinion, not high-throne judgement. I took to listening to even the music that I was familiar with from when I was a child with intent and an evolving comprehension of it. If I didn’t get a piece of music, I just set it aside and came back to it later - sometimes years later - when my senses were perhaps ready to receive it with understanding. That remains true even now. My life is that much richer, not just for the music that’s suffused it, but for how this attitude has shaped how I’ve gone about living and tried to make sense of the world. So when Brubeck died, I felt the loss of my greatest, albeit accidental and unknowing, teacher.

I’ve heard very little of Hansard’s music. It’s been mainly two albums, “Didn’t He Ramble” (coincidence?) and “This Wild Willing” and a few songs from elsewhere. So my emotional connection with him, specifically the musical him, is tenuous if it exists at all. His spare, bare-bone-heart-mind-and-soul music is of the kind that normally deeply affects me yet my listening to it has been only in passing. Maybe I listened to it at a time when I wasn’t quite ready for it fully. I came to know of his death on Instagram (I think it was a post by anti-, a label that he had been part of). Then the flood hit me; the outpouring of love for the man from people of so many different countries and the unfettered grief. He seemed to have been a good man, definitely one who made a difference to many and who gave so much to receive all this, even if it came when he was no longer around for it to matter to him.

I suppose that’s what this is, although I’m not entirely certain it’s the only reason I felt a similar sense of bereavement for Hansard that I did for Brubeck. Our waiting till they pass beyond care, beyond hurt, beyond joy, beyond sorrow, beyond smiles and cries, to tell them that we love them, that they made our lives just that bit better. That is a tragedy. I feel the import of it get heavier with age. Not for myself - I have for long been very clear and unabashedly expressive of what I feel about those whom I care for - but for us.

We should all be able to say this for ourselves:

I have loved. And I have been loved.

I have lived.

I can’t speak for you but for myself, I shouldn’t have to ask for more.