An audience member has asked me for my opinion of the new Jon Batiste album Beethoven Blues. This is a solo piano album in which Batiste remixes some of Beethoven’s most famous music with jazz licks and Batiste’s own improvisations.
I’m a Prince Edward Islander, so I’ll go around this a bit, since we don’t have straight roads on this island. Eventually every road will swing around and reach an intersection, where you see signs to town, often pointing in the opposite way to what you’d been thinking. But you don’t follow the signs, because you just glimpsed where the purple house used to be and so you go that way, since you know that it will lead to where your dad always took that shortcut into town.
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The way to my place is either via a high road – a highway built for fast cars – or a low road, an older shore road passing by now-abandoned wharves from which people used to embark on travel. I don’t know where I learned the old Scottish song, but I sing it in the car whenever I come to the fork between these two roads.
“Oh, ye’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low road, and I’ll get to Scotland afore ye”.
The low road gets me home not only faster, but also through an actual old Scottish settlement, where my dad’s wife’s aunts used to hang on the telephone party line to hear what was going on. The high road is the commercial way to town, featuring a roundabout, grocery store, and of course the necessary Tim Hortons coffee drive-thru. I usually take the high road to town.
Speaking of town, a few days ago I was at my mom’s small care home there, when a trio of musicians showed up to play some tunes for the ladies. As I was going to get something out of my car, I ran into the musicians in the little parking lot unloading. I knew all three to be elders of the Island music scene. That was Alan MacDonald with his fiddle and guitar cases, and the Matheson fellow with his keyboard, and the other fiddler I wasn’t sure of his name. Matheson was approaching the back porch and I said to him, “There’s a nice piano inside, tuned by young Max Keenlyside.” He brightened up, though he kept bringing his own keyboard in. “Do you know how to reach Max now, we’ve been trying to do that!” he said. Then he looked at me more sharply. “Heather Taves”, I said. “Yes, yes,” he said and gave me a broad grin. “I have Max’s contacts”, I said, “though he’s slow to respond, you’ll have to try a few times.”
Max is a pianist who took a degree in classical piano, plays in pop-rock cover bands, composes ragtime music, collects old upright pianos, and moonlights as a piano technician. In other words, a normal Island musician.
We Island musicians do know – and often have rare and detailed knowledge about – what a genre is, knowledge still impossible for any Spotify robot to parse out. However, superseding any smart aleck genre knowledge is the imperative towards Island gentility. We are a culture that stops the car, midblock, for a pedestrian who stands by the road to cross. We are a culture that doesn’t head straight to anywhere. We make allowances. We have to. We are huddled together, once the tourists go home, amidst a great, unforgiving ocean and a North Atlantic climate.
I’ll say this about Jon Batiste: if he was to move here, he’d be more than welcome at the kitchen parties. He might need to take on a moonlighting job or two, but he’d be loved.
Lots of people, starting from Beethoven himself, have done what Baptiste is doing with Beethoven tunes: braiding them into one’s own voice, and into whatever popular styles seem to bear some resonance. I’ve done it myself, when I play with Scott Parson’s blues band around here. Scott likes to introduce me as a “concert pianist”, then ask me to “take it away” for a few minutes midstream in the show. The audience really likes this. On our Remembrance Day show last year, I mixed it up with a medley of vintage WW2 tunes. This stuff happens in our music scene with nobody thinking twice about it.
Jon Batiste says he’s having a conversation with Beethoven. Seems to me like the most obvious thing you can think of to do with Beethoven, and I’m sorry he even has to explain that. Beethoven didn’t live in a world of superhighways. He didn’t even live in a world of standardized clocks and time. Of course, he had detailed knowledge of whether a piece of music owed something to Italian, French, Viennese or Prussian regions. He moonlighted as an arranger of hundreds of Scottish folk songs. But I can’t even begin to imagine that he had the mindset that would prevent any of these influences from coming into his music in whatever way appealed to him on a given day.
It’s when you straighten out the roads of genre and make them into superhighways that they get so separate and you start having to follow the signs.
I don’t personally know whether the great Island musician Alan MacDonald is of the Scottish Catholic MacDonalds (who first came ashore on the Alexander in 1772 to the area around Scotchfort on the wild, dune-lined north shore), or of the Scottish Presbyterian Protestant MacDonalds (who came with Lord Selkirk’s Polly ship in 1803 to the south shore not far from where I live). My Dad’s wife descends from the Polly settlers, as does my snow plow guy Alan Beaton. My close friend from elementary school who lives up the hill is married into the Catholic MacDonalds.
I do know this matters. It matters to Scottish fiddling what specific location, religion, and clan you are from. I would compare the degree of difference between, say, the fiddling on our Island and that of neighbouring Cape Breton to, say, that between Haydn and Beethoven.
Someday, I’ll ask my friends which exact lineage Alan MacDonald is from, likely in some form of the question used by all Islanders, “Who’s yer father?” But I don’t have to do that to know that he respects and accepts me, and my Mum’s humming, and my iPhone snapping a few pics, carefully and quietly, and me audibly stamping my feet in time, but gently for the sake of the elder ladies. In this type of context, Jon Batiste playing some Beethoven blues would be so natural and uncontroversial as to be completely unremarkable.
Alan MacDonald’s trio sat down in the dining room of Mum’s home, and with no fanfare or spoken intro, picked up their instruments and began with an old popular tune. Not Scottish fiddling. Just an old tune of the type your grandmother hummed decades ago. Mum hummed along to more of them than I did, but I knew, for instance, “Beautiful Dreamer.” Then they began to mix it up with airs, jig, and reels from the Island fiddling tradition. They didn’t choose to play the hardcore Scottish strathspeys they surely knew, which have an intricate, moderately-paced but intense rhythm and biting bow style. They stuck to straight-forward tunes everyone knows here, like the St. Anne’s reel. After one small group of tunes I didn’t recognize, they casually offered that they’d made those ones up, and didn’t have a title for them yet.
Scholars of Scottish fiddling come here from Scotland because the subtleties of tuning systems, bow holds, accentuation, they say, got “frozen in time”, and can teach them about their own history. I wouldn’t put it that we’re exactly frozen in time, but we have a unique sense of time.
Compare the bow hold of the men at the home with a modern classical bow hold.
Island Scottish fiddler bow hold
Modern classical bow hold.
Up on the high road, which ends in one direction at the big ferry and in the other, at the Confederation Bridge to the rest of Canada, everyone knows that the Tim Hortons drive-thru is Canadian. Though of course it’s not, economically speaking, any more than Starbucks is about Seattle. It’s commercial iconic Canadiana with local sides of tribal nostalgia. Tim Horton was a Canadian hockey player. Our Islander tribal knowledge about Tim’s that their franchises got established here by the Murphy’s (Irish Catholic) – they grew up on the next street over from me in town – who’ve done a lot of spending on everything from cathedral bells to a culinary institute around here.
Lately, the Tim’s on the Island are mostly staffed by folks who’ve recently arrived here from India. This is also true of the staff at Mum’s home. Gradually, we are braiding our family experiences with theirs.
If I’m driving with the car radio on and hear the political talk of “immigration” these days, I’d have to guess these newcomers are some of the folks being referred to. It’s Canadian economic talk, sometimes with an ugly side helping of racism, and it can sometimes be heard around here too.
But cultural Island talk, traditionally, has been about our strands of immigration past and present, as ones which we have an imperative to braid together. There are healthful habits still alive in our community, like humour and humility, that help with this.
On the high road I take to town, immigrants from India man the Tim’s and the gas stations. On the low road I take home, families and friends from India have a cricket league at our nearby park. There they gather on the green grounds next to the shining ocean waters. We hear their music and parties, softly and gently, from our deck. We take a walk past the grounds, and notice that they have got together to build a high net to protect us from any stray hardballs.
And now, take it away, Jon Batiste!
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I greatly enjoyed this to-the-point meandering. Like the Batiste, too.