Pithecanthropus Erectus & M. Daguerre

Jazz is like wine… if I try to say something smart about it, I’m just repeating something I heard.

There might actually be something to that comparison, though. You’re welcome to enjoy these things even if you haven’t made a devoted study of them, but there’ll always be the lingering feeling that intricacies and subtleties lie just beyond your reach—that there’s something a bit “surface” about your appreciation. That’s how I feel about it, anyway. But does it really matter? What’s wrong with just taking the simple view that you know what you like?

There’s a lot of revered jazz that’s lost on me, but I know that I like Mingus’s “Pithecanthropus Erectus.” This song is actually a jazz tone poem because it depicts musically Mingus's conception of the modern counterpart of the first man to stand erect – how proud he was, considering himself the “first" to ascend from all fours, pounding his chest and preaching his superiority over the animals still in a prone position. Overcome with self-esteem, he goes out to rule the world, if not the universe, but both his own failure to realize the inevitable emancipation of those he sought to enslave, and his greed in attempting to stand on a false security, deny him not only the right of ever being a man, but finally destroy him completely. Basically the composition can be divided into four movements: (1) evolution, (2) superiority-complex, (3) decline, and (4) destruction. 

... as promised, if I say something smart about jazz, I'm repeating something I heard. I lifted the above explanatory text from the album liner notes. I never would've picked up on any of that stuff... but it's pretty cool, right?

And perhaps my lack of technical knowledge has freed up my mind enough to associate “Pithecanthropus Erectus" with an unlikely match: “M. Daguerre” by the 1990s chamber quartet The Rachel’s.

Here's another instance where I'm a bit ignorant, but if you're like me, you hear "Daguerre" and some faint bells begin to ring. Daguerre... daguerre... daguerreotype... that's an early photography thing, right? 

It was. It was the very first photographic process, and this 1838 photo by Daguerre features the earliest known candid photo of a person (thanks, Wikipedia). 

It's a happy coincidence that this photo depicts a city street. These songs, for me, were connected in my mind without any regard for their titles or backstories. I'm putting them side by side because I feel that each could serve as a score to the same silent film: two different takes on a midnight walk through a city—strolling beneath street lights, dodging angry traffic, ducking into dark alleys, confronting, clashing, fighting, getting up, dusting off, moving on.