Gabriel Ricard: One of the first things that caught my attention with your new book, Ghost and Ganga: A Jazz Odyssey, was that wonderful Cassandra Wilson quote on page ten. What made you want to include it in as the opening to the first of these three novellas?
Kirpal Gordon: "The blues move through, resurrecting the old to new; / the songs sleep inside us til we call them out" is Ms. Wilson's lyric to "Tutu," one the of the songs on her tribute CD, Traveling Miles. Those lines reveal themselves to be both the theme and the story line. New Orleans-born pianist Ghost Wakefield puts Traveling Miles on in the car to calm Ganga Ghose, a Calcutta-born impersonator of the great female jazz singers, who, while dressed as Billie Holiday, has just abducted a smooth-jazz DJ in Baltimore for not playing Billie's music but left him naked in handcuffs in the basement of the radio station. As Ghost drives west, Cassandra Wilson's tribute to Miles keeps interweaving with Ghost and Ganga's discovery of a mutual sexual interest, a parallel to the alchemy they create onstage. After encountering his dead relatives in a New Orleans mausoleum, she comes to understand how, through his playing, she becomes the voice of Lady Day and other immortals she impersonates.
GR: How does a project like this come about? Where does it begin?
KG: With thousands of hours listening to the great jazz singers, composers and instrumentalists and how they influenced each other. I was looking for a way to tell a story musically from that modal Kind of Blue Miles-Trane-Cannonball front line feel, but it wasn't until I moved to New Orleans in '97 that the story took new twists. Jazz is played everywhere there: civic events, krewe parades, bright moments in the French-Creole-Spanish Catholic liturgical calendar, barbeques, bars, hangs and corners. I grokked the tradition less as a commercial genre of recorded music-gigs-venues-stars, more as a transcendent reality shining through our lives. It ain't dead; people say, "Bird lives," and that can scare folks who grew up in a religious tradition with Numero Uno in the heavens disconnected from dance and chthonic root. Anyway, friends dropped by to share music, and I played tape mixes I'd made in New York that ran from Bessie and Ella, Sassy and Anita O, Nina and Dinah, Joni and Aretha, to Chrissie Hynde and Yma Sumac, Patsy Cline and Odetta, Blossom Dearie and Kiri Te Kanawa as well as Lakshmi Shankar and Angelique Kidjo. So when Cassandra's Miles tribute CD hit, we were so blown away and wove those songs into new mixes. A few years later, after returning to the Big Apple, I met Cassandra Wilson at a Jazz Journalists Association shindig and told her of the impact of her project. If diva means prima donna, she is the opposite: elegant, talented and straight-ahead. That's how I picture Ganga Ghose.
GR: It almost seems like you're using the literary form to get readers hooked on a very distinct kind of jazz. Would you say this is literature with a strong jazz influence or simply a musical concept set to a literary form?
KG: It's all jumbled up together. In "Come Sunday," for example, Ghost weds to Ellington-Strayhorn tunes a new kind of vocalese. When Ganga realizes these words foretell his comatose condition, she evokes the spirit of Mahalia Jackson, first lady of gospel and singer of "Come Sunday" on Duke's Black, Brown & Beige Suite, to bring her Ghost back from Dead's Town.
"Raid Kills Bugs Dead," which is a line of ad copy writ by poet Lew Welch while in the employ of Montgomery Ward, combines jazz and lit history. After listening to Ghost's arrangements of Duke and Strayhorn on the college station, Ganga hears her radio tell her, "Go ride the music," even though it's been shut off for hours. She loses her library job, studies the auditory hallucinations of Allen Ginsberg and William Blake and becomes a spy for a revolutionary Buddhist meditation society. When rival rebels hijack the jet she's on, she lands in Mexico and meets Ghost who asks her to sit in on a tune at a jazz fest and then invites her to New York to build their act.
GR: The flow of this book strikes me as one that would demand a lot of faith on the part of the author. Artists of any kind must trust their instincts when it comes to telling the story, but that seems to be even truer here. There are so many possibilities in a book like this, so many different places you could have gone. Throughout Ghost and Ganga did you ever find it difficult to trust your instincts as an artist? How much of an editing and rewriting process went into this?
KG: In terms of fire and water, revision for me is what water does to stone; for words meant to be heard, the dross burns off by the millionth intoning. In terms of music, the novellas are written like movements or suites. You can hear the tunes as you read, but the trust factor is allowing readers to enter the story their own way.
GR: Any reason why the three novellas appear in the order they do?
KG: The chronology is present-past-future, but in the spirit of their discovery that time is an illusion, let's say they enter a loka of everlasting music through their unique approach to the duet.
GR: Any significant literary or musical influences on the book?
KG: "Raid Kills Bugs Dead" opens with a William Burroughs quote: "Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to change." Like the rest of us but her only more so, Ganga knows she's living her life as an impersonation, a disguise preventing a larger life's birth. As a fool pursues folly until it leads to wisdom, so Ganga, lost in a cave, looking to go ride the music, leaps into the unknown and comes to find herself at last. Burroughs' eye to civilization as hoax, a cultural entrancement to advance non-human agencies in human addiction, also describes Ghost and Ganga's worldview. As in Borges and Kafka, the actual/factual mixes with the mythical-mystical, the gory with the allegorical and the historical with the hysterical. On the other hand, the book is a tribute to gal singers and their piano players.
GR: Although these three pieces are unified by certain themes and characters, they do seem to each possesses their own form, means of communication and style. They appear to go about their storytelling interests in a different way. Was this at all intentional?
KG: "Ganga Runs the Voodoo Down" tropes a dope with its Miles tribute via Cassandra and delivers its "word solos" in a freer, less restrictive narrative form—like the modal music Miles was so fond of. The thirteen chapters are call-and-answer blues choruses between his and her points of view, like their cabaret act of Lady Day and Jimmy Rowles.
"Raid Kills Bugs Dead" is a tribute to bebop. The narrative reads in places like a Bird solo looping and swooping. Ghost plays Bird tunes when he first meets Ganga, and his drummer shows her that the phrase, Go Ride the Music, bridges bop to the Haight via the Airplane, Neal Cassady and Miles' work in rock, as if it's one music under all these disguises.
"Come Sunday: The Stockholm Syndrome," is pure Ellington-Strayhorn in its tone poem approach and includes Ganga's impersonations of Lena Horne in her Hollywood years under Sweet Pea's eye. While I was working on it, I was performing word solos from the Strays-Duke songbook with jazz bands in and around town which sharpened each draft. Although no writing is ever easy, the immersion in music seemed to spur the narrative to unfold.
GR: Where does a character like Ganga come from? She certainly seems to have a presence and personality that can almost be considered larger than even these stories are capable of containing.
KG: In my experimental college program at Fordham's Lincoln Center campus I read Sanskrit, classical Hindu philosophy and the Buddhist yanas throughout Asia, lived with sufis and other mad-for-divine-union sadhus, studied with a kundalini yoga teacher and mahan tantric, Yogi Bhajan, who was a Sikh, and I became interested in gurbhani kirtan, their musical-poetic call-and-answer style, quite akin to the blues, and the Granth Sahib, the compilation of poems writ by seers of many sects including Kabir, Nanak and especially Ajrun Dev who spoke to me out of time, you might say. I've met a few people with a Ganga-like edge.
GR: Any other major projects lined up? Any more stories with Ganga or maybe Ghost?
KG: I'm leaving the gate open.
GR: I was particularly interested in your album, Speak-Spake-Spoke, which you released with the Clare Daly Band. Tell us a little about that and when we can perhaps expect a follow-up release.
KG: Claire Daly, the musical director of the CD, is the closest musician in my experience to the character of Ganga Ghose, doing on baritone saxophone what Ganga does in singing a song: she calls out the ancestors to give her music spiritual witness. I first heard her play in the San Miguel de Allende Jazz fest in '97. I was reciting spoken word with one band and she was playing in another. On her first solo I was knocked out and went backstage later to tell her so. We re-connected in New York around '03. I was doing a show at Tribes and Nick Drakidis, a singer who Claire plays with in a club date band, came out, dug the set, called her up and said, "You gotta meet this writer," and he quoted her a line of verse that ended in "speak-spake-spoke." We met the next week, fell in love and we've been together ever since. She is the real inspiration for the Ghost and Ganga stories.
As for the CD, which we named Speak-Spake-Spoke, Jordan Jones, publisher of Leaping Dog Press, had heard us while we were on tour in California in '04, getting the vote out and playing tunes from her new CD, Heaven Help Us All. I was compiling Eros in Sanskrit, a thirty year collection of lyrics and meditations, so he produced a spoken word CD with jazz ensemble as a companion and came to New York to be part of the session. It was his first date with Leslie who is also on the recording and is now his wife, so there's been a little Ganga-like kismet around that project.
GR: It's pretty impressive that your talents extend to so many different areas of writing, music and expression. Is there a particular venue that's the most satisfying to you? One that might be more difficult than the others?
KG: The most difficult form of writing is lit and music crit; the most satisfying has been working with musicians.
GR: I understand you also do extensive work as a ghostwriter. How did you fall into that line of work? Does it ever have any positive or negative effects on your own work?
KG: I collaborate with entrepreneurs on the use of the written word to drive their business and get what they do in front of more highly qualified prospects. So I would call my job "literary consultant" as the word ghostwriter has some dubious connotations. My clients are smart, organized and tend to be excellent service providers in industries like health care and education. We produce books, articles and projects that raise their customers' IQ and spread hope to folks whose lives change for the better through knowing my clients.
I've done plenty of freelancing—writing copy, proof reading, creating literary magazines and newspapers, editing and reviewing, teaching in prisons and adjuncting at various universities—but things got more focused when I moved to the Texas Hill Country in '93. An old song-and-dance man with a seminar company liked a series of articles I'd done on local artists for the Kerrville Daily Times, so he asked me to learned what each of his seminars were about and write them into books and articles. Some of my clients are folks I first met there who have gone on to run their own companies. As for influence, it's hard not to starve when the only shingle I can hang is "innovative writing." Though I don't know what people mean by the words poetry and prose because the former is often nothing but the latter with line breaks, I am sure that there are lyrics and stories, ancient to the future in a circle of wonder four seasons strong, so here's a story about lyrics that I hope speaks to your question on being a scribe to my tribe: I studied with Allen Ginsberg and Robert Duncan at Naropa one summer, and I saw the real hustle in Amelican poetry. At that time I was enrolled in a grad creative writing program at Arizona State University that didn't acknowledge the Projective, Beat or SF Renaissance lineages in its curriculum, let alone a kind word for Father Walt. I'd known AG as a correspondent who over the previous seven years had shared his discoveries, and in person he was not some raving beatnik madman or groping queen stoned out dope fiend but a real student of laya yoga, plugging into the sound current via mantric repetition, something I was studying as well but in a different tradition. He and Duncan both had ears out to here, as they say in jazz, oracular in their approach to verse. Duncan breathed "multi-phasically" and touched many galaxies. That these giants who sought to liberate poesie could be so misunderstood in this country is a crime. Much fecal matter was thrown at these poets who were contemporary with the bebop revolution, so much of which is still confused with drugs, bad behavior and fear of a black planet.I'm saying that creative writing is a service industry.
GR: In spite of everything you've accomplished and taken on as a writer and editor, would you say there's anything that still hasn't been tackled? Any dream projects?
KG: Recording the next CD! I've got the tunes, the players, the studio and the concept, just not the dough.
GR: Is there perhaps one work in everything you've done that would consider the definitive Kirpal Gordon?
KG: Whatever I would consider definitive wouldn't last long, but if pressed, I would say my current favorite, Nothin' But Blue Skies, a novel I've just finished, might come the closest. It's a sci-fi road adventure from the Sonora Desert to an enchanted isle in the Great Lakes. The other contender would be A Touch of Gone Beyond: Selected New York Stories, drawn in part from two fiction collections no longer in print that I am presently editing. The most definitive use of spoken word and jazz ensemble would be Speak-Spake-Spoke.
GR: Would you say you're "Riding the music?" Trying to?
KG: Jazz, the most American of art forms, is an ocean, full of streams and currents that connect us to our most original and primary identity. I don't know how I got on this surf board, but to turn your phrase slightly, the music is riding me as I ride it.
How much more does one need to know than that?
Gabriel Ricard is a Staff Interviewer at Unlikely 2.0. You can learn more about him at his bio page.