and other studies in Cold War melancholia—he seemed to require morose chromatic lines to set the tone. A lamenting pizzicato bass prowls through Sinatra’s “Angel Eyes,” whose Scotch-soaked emotional state goes from the vengeful to the suicidal (“Excuse me while I disappear”).
Sinatra’s nocturnal ballads of the fifties forecast a weird and wonderful twist of musical history: the return, circa 1965, of the chromatic basso lamento, in strict, almost neo-Baroque guise. Why it came back is difficult to explain. For one thing, the American folk-music revival of the fifties gave new life to ancient ballad forms, which depended on strophic repetition. Also, Baroque music was much in vogue in the later fifties, with I Musici’s recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Glenn Gould’s account of the chaconnelike Goldberg Variations selling in mass quantities. And perhaps Brazilian bossa nova played an assisting role; as Peter Williams points out, in his wide-ranging survey The Chromatic Fourth, liquid chromatic lines course through Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Corcovado,” also known as “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars.”
Whatever the reason, by the mid-sixties the lamento bass was again the rage. You hear it in “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” the waltzing chimney-sweep song in Richard and Robert Sherman’s movie musical Mary Poppins. You hear it also in “Michelle,” on the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, and in various later Beatles songs. It sounds seven times in Bob Dylan’s psychedelic manifesto “Ballad of a Thin Man,” setting up the refrain “Something is happening here / But you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mr. Jones?” (The song’s dramatis personae, consisting of one-eyed midgets, circus geeks, and sword swallowers in high heels, vaguely resembles the guest list for the wedding of Almadán, as described in Juan Arañés’s “Un sarao de la chacona.”) The rock scholar Walter Everett has catalogued dozens of chromatic basses in sixties and seventies pop: a peculiar playlist could be assembled from the likes of “How Could I Be Such a Fool?” “Can’t Take My Eyes off You,” “My Way,” “Hooked on a Feeling,” “Time in a Bottle,” and the Eagles’ “Hotel California.” As Everett notes, the last song is fittingly set in a decadent Spanish-mission town, by the side of a desert highway.
It fell to Led Zeppelin, the behemoth hard-rock band of the seventies, to perfect the rock Baroque. Dylan and the Beatles may have won the plaudits of the intellectuals, but Led Zeppelin launched a no less ambitious raid on music history, commandeering rock, folk music, Delta blues, Indian and other non-Western music, and smatterings of classical tradition. “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” and “Stairway to Heaven” both take off from meticulous finger-picking exercises for semi-classical guitar, with descending chromatic lines interwoven; washes of Bachian organ playing give a churchy aura to “Your Time Is Gonna Come” and “Since I’ve Been Loving You.” Several of the band’s weightiest creations rest on artfully repeating bass lines: “Kashmir” is built on a riff that climbs step by chromatic step.
Led Zeppelin’s early magnum opus was “Dazed and Confused,” a tormented love song that Jimmy Page, the band’s fleet-fingered, mildly satanic guitarist, first started playing when he was in the Yardbirds. Page borrowed many elements of the piece from a New York singer-songwriter named Jake Holmes, who included a track with the same name on his 1967 album “The Above Ground Sound” of Jake Holmes. Holmes’s song is anchored in consecutive chromatic descents; they were the work of an itinerant bass guitarist named Rick Randle, whom Holmes later described as “absolutely stone, raving mad,” and who was last reported living in Utah with a witch.
In the Led Zeppelin version, which appeared on the band’s debut album of 1969, John Paul Jones gave the bass line a forbidding, organlike sound—the Delta blues riff monumentalized. In recordings from the band’s stadium tours of the early seventies, where the song stretches on for half an hour or more, the bass motto undergoes ostentatious transformations, sometimes shimmering on Page’s bowed guitar, sometimes shrieking in the high falsetto zone of Robert Plant’s voice. For long stretches, the bass falls silent while singer and guitarist call out to each other, like wanderers lost in a desolate landscape. Finally, in a climactic passage, the theme is thundered out on guitar and bass in tandem, saturating the musical space.
When the chacona first surfaced, at the end of the sixteenth century, it promised an upending of the social order, a liberation of the body. The same outlaw spirit animates modern rock and pop: the swirl of a repeating bass line allows a crowd of dancing fans to forget, for a little while, the linear routines of daily life. When Frescobaldi and Bach recast the dance as a stern, inward-turned form, bending it toward lament, they hinted at a different sort of freedom, that of the individual defining himself in opposition to the mass. “Dazed and Confused,” in its inner sections, implies a similar quest for self: the raw drive of rock and roll gives way to spacey variations. It’s a big, brash rock anthem at heart, but, just as the dance abides in Bach’s chaconne, the lament lingers in the rock arena. Above all, the song demonstrates how the same deep musical structures keep materializing across the centuries. If a time machine were to bring together some late-sixteenth-century Spanish musicians, a continuo section led by Bach, and players from Ellington’s 1940 band, and if John Paul Jones stepped in with the bass line of “Dazed and Confused,” they might, after a minute or two of confusion, find common ground. The dance of the chacona is wider than the sea.
3 INFERNAL MACHINES HOW RECORDINGS CHANGED MUSIC
More than a century ago, the composer and bandleader John Philip Sousa warned that technology would destroy music. Testifying before the United States Congress in 1906, he said, “These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy … in front of every house in the summer evenings you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left.” Sousa expanded on the theme in subsequent articles and interviews. “The time is coming when no one will be ready to submit himself to the ennobling discipline of learning music,” he declared. “Everyone will have their ready made or ready pirated music in their cupboards.” Something is irretrievably lost when we are no longer in the presence of bodies making music, Sousa also said. “The nightingale’s song is delightful because the nightingale herself gives it forth.”
Before you dismiss Sousa as a curmudgeon, you might consider how drastically music has changed in the past hundred years. It has achieved onrushing omnipresence in our world: millions of hours of its history are available on disc; rivers of digital melody flow on the Internet; MP3 players with forty thousand songs can be tucked in a back pocket or a purse. Yet, for most of us, music is no longer something we do ourselves, or even watch other people do in front of us. It has become a radically virtual medium, an art without a face. When we walk around the city on an ordinary day, our ears will register music at almost every turn—bass lines pumping from passing cars, bits of hip-hop seeping out of the headphones of teenagers on the subway, a lawyer’s cell phone tweeting Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”—but almost none of it will be the immediate result of physical work by human hands or voices. Fewer and fewer people know how to play instruments or read music. In the future, Sousa’s ghost might say, reproduction will displace production. Zombified listeners will shuffle through the archives of the past, and new music will consist of rearrangements of the old.
Ever since Edison invented the phonograph cylinder, in 1877, people have been assessing what the medium of recording has done for and to the art of music. Inevitably, the conversation has veered toward rhetorical extremes. Sousa was a pioneering spokesman for the party of doom, which was later filled out by various reactionaries, contrarians, Luddites, and post-Marxist theorists. In the opposite corner are the utopians, who argue that technology has not imprisoned music but liberated it, bringing the art of the elite to the masses and the art of the margins
