by Ruairí McCann
1991 was a turning point in the life and work of Loren Connors. The catalyst was a long-anticipated move with his partner and frequent collaborator Suzanne Langille and their young son Jaime from New Haven, Connecticut, where Connors was born and raised, to an apartment in Manhattan. For Connors, this move was critical for not only putting him in close proximity to a wide array of new collaborators but also in how it opened up acres of time to practice his art, for this swell in the number of opportunities to play live and in the studio and Langille’s work as a lawyer, allowed him to leave behind a string of part-time jobs and focus on making music and painting every day.
This newfound freedom of time spilled over to other areas of his life. Connors would spend considerable time frequently walking some of the oldest and most storied neighbourhoods of Manhattan. His interest in learning more about his Irish heritage drew him to parts of the city with a strong Irish identity and what he learned through flânerie and direct observation he burrowed into further with trips to the library. All this walking and reading would flow through his music and emerge in a series of albums, recorded and released throughout the 1990s, namely Hell Kitchen’s Park (1993), 9th Avenue (1995), The Carmelites (1997) and St. Vincent’s Newsboy Home (1999).
Improvisation is often presented as a vessel for communication that is rooted in the present moment. While more prepared or determined modes of composition involve writing for the future, for some later performance or recording, and playing from prepared material, improvisation encourages the potentially potent immediacy and unexpected insights of the here and now. It would seem then like a process that was antithetical to history as defined as the slow and careful study, sequencing and analysis of past events and their impact on the present. In other works, the process of arresting the past and deconstructing its many knots, loops, and complexities before reconstituting it, frozen, on the page or screen in a more legible form.
Connors’ music would seem to remote from this practice of concerted reflection, as art that is conceived, composed, played, and recorded all at once in real time. However, it’s important to keep in mind not the image of the improviser as an unbridled creature of the present moment and instead how Connors’ approach has varied over the years. The former may be entirely the right metaphor for his earliest music such as the rampant moaning, yearning and string bending and bowing of the Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations series (1979-80) or his vaporous recent work which, whether recorded live or in studio, solo or with collaborators, has generally been embarked on with minimal or no preparation.
This modus operandi of following a mood, phrase or feeling and seeing where it leads is not the set-in-stone underpinning of his entire, voluminous discography. It doesn’t apply to his solo music during his first decade in New York. The upswing in his good fortune included being able to invest in a multitrack recorder. He could now plan out and record multi-layered compositions consisting of multiple guitar lines, carefully and pointedly overlapping.
There are instances where this new setup transforms Connors into a one-man band. In other words, tunes where there is a discernible, forward-moving rhythm section supporting a more free-floating but still melodic lead on top as well. The booming, doom-laden blues rock of ‘Death Avenue’ on Hell’s Kitchen Park is one such example, from whose peals of thunder one could imagine multiple musicians playing altogether in a room. However, more often these albums, and other home and studio recorded solo work of the time, are stacked with compositions of two or three guitar lines coexisting in interplay but with no clear hierarchy between them. Instead, they each dance around each other, repeatedly meeting or separating as wander down their parallel path out into a contorting but intimate space.
These sidewinding approach conjures an abstracted but emotionally true evocation of how the past lingers in a landscape as violative as New York City. The lives of the working class, the orphaned and the forgotten of the late 19th and the early 20th centuries have been in the main erased from the surface of the city through redevelopment and gentrification, and yet traces persist, then, on the eve of new millennium, and now, in plaques, street names and perhaps the occasional old building or fixture. It just takes a certain pace and way of seeing, a slowed step and an eye for detail which Connors had certainly honed during the late 80s when he briefly departed from music in order to focus on writing a unique form on diaristic observation and reflection rendered as interlaced prose and haiku. This work was collected in a chapbook entitled Cardboard Boxes (1987) which was later republished in 1999 under the title, Autumn’s Sun, along with a 1987 essay co-authored with Langille, The Dancing Ear, wherein the blues and the haiku, his music and literary vocations, are closely associated.
Connors’ resulting musical seances with old New York are not straightforward charts of his peregrinations and their geography, past and present. Rather than detail and shape into narrative, the character, aspirations, the social status and the sufferings of the many, too many, New Yorkers who lived out truncated, hard-bitten lives in the places he visited, he has created music that attempts to unravel the expungements of time and capital in order that the loss of these people can be registered and felt. And so Conners forgoes literal, realist description of these lost souls and their environs, even when Langille joins in with her voice. Instead, he offers up a series of articulate, musical rendings and weepings to fill rather than elide these absences. Tears to make up for those multitude that were not shed while the ghosts that drift through these places transpose from their graves into their ears and thoughts. It’s an attitude and effect summed up that Langille’s plaintive lyrics in Child, also from Hell’s Kitchen Park, which puts into words the act of seeing and communing with a ghost.
“Do your feet have wings?
How come nothing holds you down?
Every day I see you,
lifting from the ground.
Does your heart have wings?
That’s the way it seems.
Every night I feel you,
flying in your dreams.”
These eulogistic compositions draw from forms contemporary to the time and people they are in tribute to and which are preoccupied with dying, death, and reflection. As in all of Connors’ music, there is the foundational American art of the blues, which you hear in many of his rhythms, his distinctive playing and placement of worried notes for emotional emphasis but also to bloom an air of mystery, and a sense of swing that pervades even the most abstract passages. There is also the touch of Irish folk ‘airs’, a more recent influence on his music. It can be heard with the slowing down of his playing in this period and its altogether calmer mien than the jagged, torrent rendition of the blues form he would unleash, full flow, on his earliest solo albums and then refashioned in a more controlled, song-based form in his albums with Kath Bloom.
The music in these historical 90s album is also similar in spirit to another kind of Irish music, one intensely intimate with the end of life. Caoineadh, meaning to cry or to weep, or as it’s known in its anglicised form, keening, was once widespread across Ireland and parts of Scotland. It is a ritualised form of vocal lament performed at wakes over the body of the deceased. Folklorist Margaret Bennett describes it as a kind of ‘Gaelic Blues’, as an expressionist folk form which mediates and magnifies the experience of sorrow through a combination of direct expression and stylisation. Sung without a standard metre in a style that mimics the groans of the bereaved, it consists of repeated passages that describes the departed, their death, grief at their absence and the condition of those they have left behind, interspersed with passages of abstract vocal sounds. Keening could take many shapes and form. Sometimes it was accompanied by instrumentation, though it was mainly performed a capella. Lyrically speaking, it could be very descriptive and story-driven, other times sparse and poetic. It could conjure a hushed atmosphere, while some performances could be turbulent, sweeping up the mourners along with it. What is constant is the passionate expression of grief combined with a formalisation that transports the performer, the audience, and the late subject into the other world.
Although some intrepid Irish artists, such as Róis and Rún, have recently incorporated keening into their music in new ways, it now largely exists as a fossilised form of archival recordings, all post facto renditions, for it was intrinsically tied to funerary rites that by the turn of the 20th century were essentially extinct, through the general repression of Irish culture, particularly the language. Intrinsically tied to this repression, the mass emigration of Irish people across the water to cities such as New York was also a factor.
For keening was not to performed just anywhere but in the presence of the dead, and not just by any member of the deceased’s family but by certain, elder women of the community as their deeply respected vocation and an invaluable service to both the dead and living. For through this aestheticization, the experience of death is not hidden or belittled, like it is by so much of modernist thought and art, nor is the suppression of grief valued, as it was and is domineering WASP culture. Instead, death and the pain it causes is heightened, shared out in the open, honoured and then, to some degree, consoled.
Connors’ music is modern through and through in how it appropriates old forms and reconstitutes them in a challenging individual expression, but in his New York albums, he embraces an age-old onus towards collective healing and communion.
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