Nate Mackey’s new book, Bass Cathedral, arrives as the fourth installment of an ongoing novel, From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. Beginning with Bedouin Hornbook (1986), the project stands separate from Mackey’s equally inexhaustible serial poems, Song of the Andoumboulou, and Mu (represented most recently in Splay Anthem, winner of the 2006 National Book Award for Poetry). But Mackey’s books, fiction as well as poetry, exist separately only in the way neighbor galaxies are separate from one another. Each book spins its own distinct ellipse, but ultimately shares an elemental sameness with the lot.
Bass Cathedral reunites readers with N., a member of a jazz ensemble known as Molimo m’Atet (dubbed “The Mystic Horn Society of Los Angeles,” in prior books). Each chapter is a letter from N. to one he calls “Angel of Dust.” The band resembles both workaday musicians and near-supernatural figures, and N.’s letters reflect such duality. A new reed for a horn is mentioned with the same pokerfaced delivery as a description of a ghostly, balloon-like emanation from a record. The subject of N.’s correspondence, and Mackey’s book, is jazz as mysticism—a higher consciousness an artist can be ensconced in yet hardly grasp.
So when that balloon-like object emanates from the grooves of the band’s own spinning record, such mysteries come to the fore. The band copes, puzzled, and the reader feels deputized, sat in the corner during rehearsal, also seeing, hearing, but not fully comprehending what the music has conjured and from where.
Jazz, unlike literature, entails the moment-to-moment flux of performance. Mackey loans his writing chops to N. in exchange for the vicarious experience of performing within the literary. In these passages, the novel’s finest, the band’s playing seems autonomic, a euphoria N. describes from within the moment. As they play, formerly relaxed sentences work themselves up into an awestruck, self-propelled expressiveness, as seen below:
Drennette’s drumming accented the horns’ metallic boisterousness and weight with an equally metallic lightness, an itinerant shimmer she let loose on cymbals and kept aloft, an aureate lightness our dawning sound relied greatly on. The risk of topheaviness we ran she outmaneuvered, leveraging a pointillist attack with coloristic stick work, a brush thump thrown in every now and again. Our sense of liftedness and rise owed as much to the barrage of keening chatter she kept up as to Djamilaa’s happy-hand treble and Aunt Nancy’s new-day weft. We were off to a good start.
In an interview with Front Porch, the author said he wants readers to “...bring his or her own experiences with music to bear on the imagining of the music...evoked by the words.” Bass Cathedral provides such opportunities to interact, to improvise. Though part of a longer project, a profitable reading of the novel requires negligible familiarity with previous works. Mackey’s penchant for well-timed comic relief, and the enigmatic central conflict, will alone sustain readers new to the work of one of the more consistent, and consistently daring voices in contemporary letters.