The Feel of Music

Over the past couple of years, Julie has cared for a girl named Ruby in our house. Out where we live, upstate New York in the Catskills, childcare is hard to come by, so it was at first a way to pick up some extra money during the pandemic and then it became a semi-regular gig. When we first met Ruby, she was four or five months old, and this past summer she turned two. Since we never had children, having her around the house was the most time I've spent with a baby (then with a toddler) in my life. I changed some diapers and watched Ruby for an hour here and there if Julie had to run an errand.

At some point during these days, Julie would usually put on a record and dance with Ruby around the living room. Sometimes I'd come downstairs from my office and join them. Most often, Julie would play side one of Rolling Stones' Black and Blue, in part because she loves the version of "Cherry Oh Baby" (as do I). Starting from when she was just over a year old and had only been standing for a short while, Ruby would hear the music and would dance. Sometimes one of us would pick her up and swing her around in time with the reggae groove, but just as often she would move around the floor on her own, contorting her body up and down while holding her hands over her head, with a smile on her face.

When we first played “Cherry Oh Baby” it was because Julie loved the song, and it was relatively slow and easy to dance to. But over time we put it on because Ruby so clearly loved it too. Another time Julie put on our copy of Funkadelic's “One Nation Under a Groove,” and I have a video of that playing while Ruby moves excitedly around the space, at times quaking her entire body to the beat.

Watching Ruby dance, a phrase kept coming to mind, and it was at first difficult for me to remember where it came from: “The feel of music.” I asked Julie about it and she said that it was the name of a CD she'd bought years ago to teach dance to small children. It was by a music educator named Hap Palmer, originally came out on the Smithsonian label. I dug her CD out of the closet. Titles include “Five Beats to Each Measure,” “Touch the World,” and “Quickly and Quietly.” It originally came out in 1974, and the music seems to embody this late-hippy idea of how teaching kids about music might enrich the world.

When I first met Julie in 1994, she owned a conga drum. It was a not-uncommon tool for anyone who taught dance for money, because you couldn't count on the studio to have a CD player. And besides, any one disc was unlikely to have all the rhythms that you might need. So she would lug this heavy instrument around and play the beats necessary for her class. Despite its size and weight, it was for a time the most efficient rhythm machine possible for her teaching.

Maybe 10 years later, Julie was teaching dance to a group of little ones and The Feel of Music served as a decent way to structure the class. The title lodged in my brain then, to resurface in the past couple of years as we moved around the living room with Ruby. The feel of music. There's something mysterious about this phrase. I have for a long time made at least part of my living analyzing and writing about music, and “the feel of music” seems to represent something that exists beyond words. It speaks to a kind of body knowledge, maybe, something you sense in your bones, like skiing or roller skating, rather than something you learn from reading and listening.

Turning this phrase over and looking at it from other angles: I think of Brian Wilson's “feels,” the fragments of sound and arrangement he would create in the studio when he might not have an idea for a full song. Earlier this year I picked up a copy of Beach Boys' Friends, an album I'd streamed here and there and half kept an eye out for many years but had never listened to in a serious way, and it seems to me to be filled with nothing but “feels” (and man do I love it). And of course Animal Collective borrowed from this concept and made their own album of this title in 2005. When I see the title of Talking Heads Fear of Music, I wonder if David Byrne might have seen the title of Hap Palmer's album in a record store in the ’70s and riffed on it (I'm aware of the story of the psychological condition that actually inspired the title, but hey, you never know).

The feel of music also makes me think about exploring sounds outside of my usual purview, how sometimes you sense an appealing essence in music even before you fully understand it. To me, this energy is present in Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, and also the 1962 Benny Carter album Further Definitions. The latter is a well-played and well-selected collection of tunes that date back to a band that first played together in 1937, but weirdly, when I listen to it, I don't hear the history or the room sound I hear an energy—or a feel, maybe. And it's perfectly coherent, though hard for me to articulate, even though I know little about Benny Carter or the band's style.

I imagine this to be an occasional newsletter where I talk about records and moments that orbit around these vague and still fuzzy ideas. Maybe they’ll become clearer over time and maybe they won't. There will be tangents. There will be typos. Here and there I’ll riff on music writing and criticism, because I so enjoy thinking about it. Sometimes I might not even talk about music at all, but I have suspect there will be connections that might not immediately present themselves, and maybe they’ll grow and become entangled over time. We'll see what happens.

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