Eric Clapton
Delaney Bramlett
Leon Russell
This morning over coffee, my husband shared a tidbit from Eric Clapton's Clapton, The Autobiography about the musical genius of both Delaney Bramlett (of the group Delaney & Bonnie) and the rocker Leon Russell. How they could both compose perfect lyrics out of thin air. My husband is very deep into the connections between various blues and rock musicians so this conversation was not that unusual.
Speaking about Delaney Bramlett and Leon Russell, Clapton says:
"...we would be on the way to the studio in the morning and Delaney would say, 'What about a song about a bottle of red wine?' and he would start singing, 'Get up and get your man a bottle of red wine...' It would just flow out of him, and by the time we got to the studio, the song would be finished. I remember thinking to myself, 'How does he do it? He just opens his mouth and out comes a song.' We'd go straight to the studio and record it live. Then I would put a couple of vocal tracks down, with Delaney coaching me, and then it would be time for the girls and the horns. Rita and Bonnie would be given their parts and they'd sing it, Jim and Bobby would put some riffs on, and that was the whole thing wrapped up...Delaney had brought out something in me that I didn't know I had...Making that record was one of the most important steps I would ever take, it was a truly memorable experience. I remember going in one day when we didn't have a song planned, and Leon came up to me and said, 'I've got a line for you', and thinking aloud, he said 'You're a blues musician, but people don't know that you can also rock 'n' roll, so we can say...
'I bet you didn't think I knew how to rock 'n' roll.
Oh, I got the boogie-woogie right down in my very soul.
There ain't no need for me to be a wallflower,
'Cos now I'm living on blues power.'
Just like that, no effort, and that was the birth of the song 'Blues Power', one of my favorite songs on the album."
By the way, the "Rita" mentioned above is Rita Coolidge! Those connections...! Here's lovely Rita:
And this is where the Serendipity comes in:
Colette's Memoir
As you know from previous posts, I am interested in the power of genius. I am also interested in the power of the muse, manifested through whatever medium the artist chooses -- words, music, painting, sculpture, etc. So, after our morning coffee, I was still pondering Clapton's account of lyric-writing genius and musical collaboration when I picked up Colette's memoir, Earthly Paradise. Amazingly, she is writing about the same exact creative process Clapton was! Here is how she describes an encounter with the creative musical genius of Claude Debussy:
Claude Debussy
"All my meetings with Claude Debussy took place in the sonorous warmth, the delicate fever of an exclusively musical atmosphere. A composer at the piano, a singer leaning back with his elbows resting on its bare top, or a woman singer, not leaving her armchair, but singing, exhaling the melody like a cloud of unconsidered smoke, head tilted back...At such times, Debussy seemed to become intoxicated by the music. His ambered satyr's face, his spiralling locks of hair, in which the eye instinctively sought for a glimpse of vine leaves and grapes, would quiver with an inner delirium. In moments of fixed intensity, his pupils would cross their sight lines slightly, after the fashion of hunting animals hypnotized by their own watchfulness. It seemed to me that he loved music in the way a crystal tulip loves the shock that draws a pure note tingling from its bowl. One Sunday evening, after hearing 'Antar' played for the first time in France, unless perhaps it was 'Scheherazade', we both chanced to go on the same party, and Debussy, obsessed, overcome, was singing his symphonic memories of the work inside himself. He was giving out a sort of bee-swarm buzzing, something like the sound you hear from telegraph poles, a groping and hesitant murmur. Then the memory grew more precise, and his closed face suddenly opened.
'Wait! Wait!' he said very loudly. 'Like that...mmmmm...and like this: mmmmm...'
One of us caught at this remembered shred of melody before it could fly away again, and drew it out a little further.
'Yes, yes', Debussy cried. 'And then at the same time there are the cellos lower down, saying: mmm...And the kettledrums, oh heavens, the kettledrums, just the faintest murmur to tell us there's that explosion coming from the brass, and...and...'
Lips pursed, then miaowing as he went on to imitate the violin, he panted on, torn apart by all the different timbers vying for places in his memory. With the poker clenched firmly in one hand, he hammered on the rosewood of the piano. With the other he made a zzzzzzzzzzing! sound against the windowpane, then plopped his lips together drily to re-create the xylophone, and made a sound of 'duk, duk' in a voice like crystal, to recall for us the liquid notes of the celesta.
He stood up, using his voice, his arms, and his feet all at once, while two black spirals of hair danced on his forehead. His faun's laugh rang out in reply, not to our laughter, but to some inner solicitation, and I engraved at that moment in my memory this image of the great master of French music in the process of inventing, before our very eyes, the jazz band."
OK, Claude Debussy is no jazz artist, but the creative process, the ability to pull orchestration out of thin air and physically manifest it -- oh, to have seen that!
Sylvia Beach will appear very soon because she has a lot to say about associations and creative genius too.
Here are some samples of the music mentioned in this post. Enjoy!
Bottle of Red Wine
Blues Power
Debussy Arabesque No. 1 (an example of Debussy's style, actually quite subdued compared to the picture Colette painted above)
--Note--I am having terrible difficulties with my old laptop. It is running Windows Vista and things have gone downhill very badly all of a sudden. I am taking a short break until I get a new computer. See you on the other side!
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