Secret Carnival Workers: Paul Haines

by Stuart Broomer, Editor
Coach House Books, Toronto, Ontario, 2007
256 pp. Paper, CDN $19.95
ISBN: 0-978-342-607.
Distributor’s website: http://www.secretcarnivalworkers.com.

What is Free to a Good Home?

by Emily Haines & the Soft Skeleton
Last Gang Records, Toronto, Ontario, 2007
CD, $ 12 US
Distributor’s website: www.lastgangrecords.com.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University, Michigan

mosher@svsu.edu



When this reviewer first saw a student in a t-shirt "Vassar," I asked if she'd gone to that Eastern college, thinking perhaps that after a year there she'd transferred to our less expensive university in the middle of Michigan. She laughed, said Vassar was her small-town high school, about a half-hour down country roads. The fact that Paul Haines was born there in 1932 led me to investigate this posthumous anthology of his writings on jazz, early fiction, poetry and lyrics.

From Vassar, Haines schooled himself in jazz at concerts in Michigan cities Saginaw (some featuring hometown hero Sonny Stitt) and Flint, then New York and Paris. The writing that gained Haines the most notice was his lyrics for Carl Bley's jazz song-cycle Elevator Over the Hill. This reviewer remembers it being featured on Detroit's WABX-FM, and as a young teenager seeing the album cover's close-up photo of Bley's sculpted features and challenging eyes staring out from under her bangs, sexy indeed.

Haines' poetry from his book called Third World Too feature slight, sometimes cogent observations of the moment, then often distracted by the flashes of whimsy found in his contemporaries Ron Padgett and Ted Berrigan. The texts are marred by Haines' odd habit of using all capital letters, which typographically convey A VOICE THAT IS LOUD AND UNMODULATED, HOLLERING INTO A MEGAPHONE rather than subtle and close to the listener as the content suggests. Yet indeterminacy and ambiguity in words can be an advantage when set to music.

A section called Jazz Journalism is wisely separated from his Music Writings. Haines journalism is lively and engaged, good readings filled with impressions of jazz festivals, their cultural contexts (including cuisine) and their personages. His music writings are inspired responses to music, presumably as it is being played, letting imagery and impressions generate in the music's wake. Rock writer Lester Bangs once brought his typewriter onstage with the J. Geils Band's concert, performing on it as a percussion instrument; Paul Haines produces more sensitive and enduring results, swirling words into his musical bath.

One of Haines' musical collaborators, Stuart Broomer, assembled this collection with care and affection for his departed friend. Eight years before Haines’ 2003 death, Broomer had written a biographical sketch of him, included here with an update for the final years. The book is handsome and well-designed and produced, the text given its proper due on laid paper. Some of the generalized photo dates may be off; Haines was probably gray and bearded in the 1980s.

Though Paul Haines or Stuart Broomer might first have recommended seasoned jazz, a good accompaniment to reading this book is Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton. This songwriter Haines is Paul's daughter, and at one point, you could even purchase the book and CD together through her website. She sings her songs in a vulnerable young voice reminiscent of Aimee Mann or Feist, playing thick piano chords and interesting arpeggios ("Bottom of the World") and ostinato forms with tasteful additional instrumental accompaniment. The track "Sprig" uses one of Paul Haines' poems, and the six-song CD's title What is Free to a Good Home? is a line from Paul's poem for Robert Wyatt.

Like her contemporaneous album Knives Don't Have Your Back, the songs were recorded in Toronto and Montreal. "The Bank" has the clarity of Liz Phair's "Exile in Guyville" songs, "Telethon" has thoughtful wordcraft, lonely solo piano until musicians assemble on the bridge. "Bottom of the World", with its echoey refrain "Fresh, fresh when sleeping", swallows a dose of selective sideband distortion that I haven't heard since the Small Faces' "Itchykoo Park". "Mostly Waving" is an infectious dub track, eminently danceable like that early-'90s remix by DNA of the Susanne Vega song “Tom’s Diner”.