My latest essay for 3 Quarks Daily went up last week:
It’s about my relationship with Charlie Keil, from the time I read Urban Blues in the late 1960s up to now, more or less.
As for the bopi, Charlie tells me that’s what the Tiv – of Nigeria, where he did some fieldwork – call an area that’s set aside for children’s play. Not only that, but adults are forbidden to enter. When I was a kid there were areas that more or less functioned like that in my neighborhood. It’s not that adults were forbidden to go there, or even that these areas were unofficially understood to be ‘kids only.’ But adults simply didn’t go there. They were interstitial spaces, liminal, boondocks. Alas, I keep reading that these days the lives of children are being micro-managed by adults. No bopi, no more.
It’s been a long time since either of us were children, but we’ve each spent our adult lives in interstitial spaces of one sort of another. The early success of Urban Blues earned him a place in the academic world that I was never able to secure for myself. But, by the end of the century, it became a bit much and he squeezed himself out to rural Connecticut, making occasional sorties into New York to march and make music in the cause of peace. I was happy to join him there.
We both found the academic study of music rather too Platonic and too lopsided in favor of The Classics. He spent his career dancing to different drummers and exploring paths. My intellectual interests, though were somewhat different – literature, cognition, the brain – but at the end of the millennium I wrote a book about music (Beethoven’s Anvil) in which I argued that it’s the socio-cultural glue that transformed clever apes into dancing humans, thereby giving intellectual expression to some of Charlie’s themes. Call it collaborative groovology with a neurocognitive twist.
For that matter, I suspect it’s Charlie’s interest in fostering music and dance among children that got me watching YouTube videos of children making music (and at play) – see these YouTube play lists: prodigies, kid dance and music, kids at play, Japanese school bands, Twinkle Twinkle, patty-Paddy cake, Double Dutch.
It's been a fruitful collaboration.
More later.
The photos are from Charlie's place in Lakeville, Connecticut, in September of 2012.
