`So Yours, So Mine'

Warne Marsh was one of the purest, most nimble of jazz improvisers. Since his death at age 60 in 1987, his reputation, never ample, has contracted to cultish proportions. His sound on the tenor saxophone was fluid and highly melodic but stringent, sometimes somber. He sounded nothing like John Coltrane. He was an intellectual player but never barren, accessible but not a crowd pleaser. In jazz history, despite his well-known associations with Lennie Tristano and Lee Konitz, he remains uncompromising and solitary. In his 1985 profile of Marsh, “A True Improviser,” Whitney Balliett writes:

“The saxophone is a hard instrument not to be emotional on. Marsh’s emotions are filtered through his mind. What is moving about him is the logic and order of his phrasing, his little, almost sighing connective notes, the sheen and flow of his ideas, his density and prolificacy and urgency.”

Only this week did I become aware I associate Marsh’s playing with J.V. Cunningham’s poetry, just as I hear Paul Desmond in the poems of L.E. Sissman. I’m not claiming influence or even knowledge of one artist by another. Rather, it’s an elusive kinship involving sound and temperament. In the Balliett excerpt, substitute “poem” for “saxophone” and reread it with Cunningham in mind: “Cunningham’s emotions are filtered through his mind,” and so on.

Listen to this 1955 recording of Count Basie’s “Topsy” by Marsh, Konitz (alto), Billy Bauer (guitar), Sal Mosca (piano) Oscar Pettiford (bass) and Kenny Clarke (drums). There’s a confident coolness in the swing, emotions filtered through mind. Then read Cunningham’s “The Man of Feeling” (1943):

“The music of your feeling has its form,
And its symphonic solitude affirms
The resonance of self, remote and warm.
With private acmes at appointed terms.

“So yours, so mine. And no one overhears.
O sealed composer of an endless past,
Rejoice that in that harmony of spheres
Pythagoras and Protagoras fuse at last!”

A cursory gloss: Pythagoras and Protagoras were pre-Socratic philosophers. The former, among other things, formulated the mathematical scaffolding of music. For Protagoras, a postmodernist before his time, all is relative. In Cunningham’s scheme, the “man of feeling” is a twit. “Fusing” the Greeks is impossible, and Marsh might have named a tune “So Yours, So Mine.”