Bass Cathedral [Paperback]

Nathaniel Mackey (Author), Wilson Harris (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 17, 2008

The Great American Jazz Novel by Nathaniel Mackey, winner of the 2006 National Book Award.

Los Angeles, October 1982: Molimo m'Atet, formerly known as the The Mystic Horn Society, is preparing to release its new album Orphic Bend. The members of the jazz ensemble—Aunt Nancy, Djamilaa, Drennette, Lambert, N., and Penguin—are witness to a strange occurrence: while listening to their test pressing, the moment Aunt Nancy's bass solo begins a balloon emerges from the vinyl, bearing a mysterious message: I dreamt you were gone.... Through letters N. writes to a figure called Angel of Dust, the ever-mutating story unfolds, leaving no musician or listener untouched.

Bass Cathedral is Mackey's fourth volume in his ongoing novel with no beginning or end, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. Thought balloons morph into mute-stereoptic emanations; N. encounters a master mouthpiece-maker; Drennette leaves Penguin dateless; Lambert's kicking it around with Melanie—much is abuzz but something else is happening to the ensemble. The music seems to be living them. N. suffers cowrie shell attacks and they are all stranded on an Orphic Shore. Socio-political forces are at play or has this always been the essence and accident of the music's resilience? And Hotel Didjeridoo must be resurrected, but how? Myth spins music spins thought spins sex—Mackey's post-bop boxless box set is, as the Utne Reader wrote, "Avant-garde literature you can love: an evolving multivolume novel of the jazz world that plays with language and ideas the way Thelonious Monk plays with flatted fifths."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In the fourth installment of this National Book Award–winning poet and novelist's ongoing epistolary work of fiction, Mackey (Splay Anthem) is never shy of the unwieldy or the recondite, plunging readers into the heady thoughts of N., narrating letter writer and member of the fictional early '80s jazz ensemble Molino m'Atet, who are releasing their first album, Orphic Bend. Like the plot points of Mackey's previous novels (which feature first concerts, new drummers and intra-band love triangles), the album release here serves mainly to trigger Mackey's singularly styled vamps on jazz and its mystical connotations. Mackey works in a kind of otherworldly reality, where recognizable situations quickly give way to the fanciful: the band, at one point, finds that cartoon speech balloons appear from the grooves of their album (as they appeared from the band's instruments in earlier installments), causing confusion among the band members and their fans. I dreamt you were gone... begin the balloons; from here, Mackey takes off into the wilds of abstraction and imagination. Less stridently avant-garde and more readable than its predecessors, this poetic novel is nonetheless dense and challenging. It may not be for everyone, but fans of Mackey's poetry, and of jazz, may find themselves right at home. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

More readable than its predecessors...fans of Mackey's poetry, and of jazz, may find themselves right at home. (Publishers Weekly) REVIEW: Writes letters about the mystery of music that speaks to our core instead of ...allowing us to bask in sound. (Santa Cruz Sentinel) REVIEW: It feels...like a work in the act of being created...not simply writing about jazz, but writing as jazz. (The New York Times Book Review, David Hajdu) REVIEW: Not once does the conceptual language dampen the sound of the music inhabiting the prose. (Bookforum, Douglas Mullins) REVIEW: His thick referential imagery highlights his acuity with literary and jazz history. (Princeton Alumni Weekly, Jane Carr) REVIEW: An open-ended exegesis of musical meaning that is equal parts African American history, Bedouin mysticism, and Mackey's own imagination. (The Believer, Travis Nichols)

Writes letters about the mystery of music that speaks to our core instead of ...allowing us to bask in sound.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 183 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (January 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811217205
• ISBN-13: 978-0811217200
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,213,383 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars When Paragraphs Come Out Sounding Right..., May 20, 2008

By 

Barry M. Wightman (Milwaukee, WI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Bass Cathedral (Paperback)

Albert Murray, American man of letters, novelist and all-purpose literary intellectual, said "to me, you can write more poetry in prose than if you restrict yourself to certain verse forms." A staunch modernist who came of age in the 1930s, Murray's literary models were Eliot, Pound, Faulkner, Kafka and Mann. He said "but at the same time that I'm reading these guys, I'm also listening to Louis (Armstrong) and Duke (Ellington) and Kansas City jazz and coming to terms with that too....so it's all part of the same thing with me. When a sentence sounds right to me, it's probably some variation of the Kansas City 4/4, and when it has the right rhythm, it's getting close to what Hemingway and others did." Nathaniel Mackey's epistolary novel Bass Cathedral is rooted in the same 20th century elements, albeit with perhaps Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and Pan African worldmusic as additional musical influences. Mackey revisits and extends Murray's mental map, attempting to build the novel on a structure of sound and language that is inevitably postmodern--highly metaphoric and rhythmic with the feel of a poetry slam--a performance that is not simply writing about jazz, but writing that is jazz.

Poetry is the language of suggestion, not the language of meaning. Mackey's love of words, their sound and their suggested intersection with the airy vibrations of music would certainly make sense to a jazz cat like Albert Murray or anybody else who can see with their ear's eye.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good read; better on the second go 'round, April 25, 2008

By 

Jazz - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bass Cathedral (Paperback)

Read it once, read it twice. You'll like it. Challenges the form of the novel; or is it even a novel?