Carole King's "Jazzman"

After a long and intense post like the Hopkins one I thought I might do a shorter one covering Carole King’s “Jazzman.” A good deal of my enjoyment of this song comes from its use in The Simpsons episode “Round Springfield,” where Lisa plays it in a duet with Bleeding Gums Murphy. Their duet is well-done, and it makes a satisfying end to a really nice Lisa arc (plus I loved the Bart-Krusty B-story—the whole thing is a great example of the glory of the early The Simpsons, mostly seasons 3-6 with mixed results a few seasons before and after, and then total dreck afterwards).

Here's the Simpsons version. You've gotta love the dancing people in the hospital it is just too ridiculous and amazing. Anyway, not to pontificate too long about The Simpsons, “Jazzman” is a nice little ditty that I don’t have too much to say about, most of it is just about the (near) heavenly power of jazz music. 

 Most of the examples of its power are relatively unremarkable: 
 
“When the jazzman’s testifying
The faithless man believes
He can sing you into paradise
Or bring you to your knees.”

But there are some examples that stand out near the end:

“When the jazzman’s signifying
And the band is winding low
It’s the late-night side of morning
In the darkness of the soul.”

I like King’s play with the idea of the “dark night of the soul” and the phrasing of the “late-night side of morning.” The whole thing speaks to a cathartic musical moment. However, that catharsis is itself perhaps a little too cliche an idea to stick, no matter how well it is expressed.. Better are the lines that follow it:

“He can fill the room with sadness
As he fills his horn with tears.
He can cry like a fallen angel
When the rising time is near.”

In my opinion it is these last two lines that make the song worthwhile, or to put it another way, that elevate it above the status of “just another song” among a sea of songs. This particular image introduces something striking and relatively original in terms of musical affect.

I’m not sure if a causal listener is going to catch the depths of the sympathy for the devil that King introduces here, but the kind of sadness that King evokes with this figure is truly cosmic (and probably outside of the scope of this song). Consider the position of a fallen angel at judgement day (the “rising time”; presumably King describes it that way in order to capitalize on the contrast between falling and rising). The angel has known paradise and (especially if you buy the Romantic-Miltonian version of Lucifer’s principled rebellion against the tyranny of heaven) has chosen to reject it, betting on the worthiness of a different kind of life. Judgement day means the failure of that gamble, and that failure, coupled with the knowledge of just what has been lost, seemingly for nothing, is surely profoundly devastating. Given little to go on, I go with what is most compelling to me and interpret the fallen angel’s tears not merely as sadness for having failed, but for what that failure means. The fallen angel has spent so much time and effort rebelling against heaven only to realize the error of that rebellion when it is too late. It is painful to have failed in the service of one’s ideals, but far more painful when that failure reveals that one’s ideals are false, that one’s entire worldview is lost. Hegel called this process of the negative discovery of the truth, particularly the untruth of one’s fundamental way of looking at the world, the “way of despair,” and I think that this terms is accurate here.

Now, it is possible that King doesn’t mean to go so dark, and the fallen angel is actually crying from joy because he has seen the light and gets to go home, and that too has the potential to be a beautiful moment, but it isn’t as compelling as the sadness of a fallen angel realizing the true extent of his fallenness at the very point at which the possibility of redemption has passed. There is room in the world for music that speaks to the sadness of those who are beyond redemption and know it.