Once Upon a Summertime

Betty Carter, Kierkegaard, and my obsession with the ghosts of 1968

If she’s meant to be symbolic, she does not exist at all. — Amiri Baraka

I want to move from Sean Carter to Betty Carter, from infamy’s dim embers, to the formidable near-anonymity of masters so slick you’ll never have time to ask and flaunt their names and deeds as they assemble and become the names and forms of unimpeachable deities, oracles. We’ll encounter Betty by way of her interpretation of a song written by Michel Legrand in French, where it was called “La Valse des Lilas” or The Lilac Waltz, and translated into English as “Once Upon a Summertime,” to become a quiet scion of the adagio in the jazz tradition—a black ballad coded in fairytale semiotics. Its lines rush toward the ecstatic, only to recoil into open-hearted regret. The song is versatile that way; improvisers need songs with emotional range and texture, the ability to tempt you back-and-forth between brooding and swooning as the unscripted early phases of romantic love do. What seems frivolous or minor becomes the center of the universe and that blur and merging of self with sensation gives us the nerve to follow our hearts, to be the singer of lyrics that would make us feel silly if we weren’t in love or ready to be.

Betty Carter’s pivotal performance of the standard is at the Playboy Club in Cannes, 1968. My affinity to it doesn’t surprise me because the year 1968 is a home I’ve always felt exiled from and promised as or in songs. I wasn’t there, but I’m there all the time in fantasy and spirit, crying outside the club filled with people who witnessed or invented what I can only accompany or herald. I dodge disappointments with the technocratic present by trying to attain the grit and integrity of 1968, a potentiality still in limbo at the bullseye of high stakes militancy and movements, a flustered renaissance that knew it was haunted by assassins, the precipice of the philistine’s heyday, live at the bitter end, which we want to skip over but it’s tripwire and it’s bugged and bloated with the pop art meaning of how to brand the thing we used to just be. Jimmy Baldwin gave a brief interview in April of 1968, the night before the assassination of Martin Luther King:

Interviewer: In a nutshell what is happening?

James Baldwin: Rage is happening.

How did he know?

Rage is a mechanism of passion and passion is imperative to once upon a time-ing, to predicting returns to forever, to making the static gerund and run free, toward the eros and some semblance of love. The king of love would be dead tomorrow. Rage now. So that while black writers were promising vitriol and poems that draw blood, and black spiritual leaders were being killed in cold blood the next day in Memphis outside of a place as unassuming in sound and presentation as the Lorraine Motel, black singers were in Cannes, France praying for a fleeting, lighthearted glamor and elaborate reprieve.The stakes being higher, in my wasn’t there but love everyone who was, imagination, make the rewards of love and heartbreak more dulce, more poignant, less petit-bourgeois performance or pseudo-radical boasting of the ideas of what one might do in a time of drastic change and flux. In my dream of that rubaiyat year, a person’s actions toward each given and catastrophe invented and reinvented that soul, and it was harder to hide in hypotheticals and bureaucracies or use what you might do under the right terrible conditions to distract from what you did. The conditions and opportunities to respond were there and then. That shipwreck and its inevitable captains is my kind of romance. I hear Laura Nyro’s “Captain for Dark Mornings, (1969) ” you my captain/ are grace in action/ to my satisfaction, I’ll be your woman if you’ll be my captain, she demures, on the way back to Cannes.

How do I make Betty Carter’s fairytale my harbor for dark musings, wedging the portal between what might have been and our ships coming in, assuaging the fear of excess joy which all of us who have known pain also know like a dread of something wonderful threatening to disappear in the moment of becoming real? Our expectations become trained on casual devastation, and when we recover or outgrow this, on hyper-independence so that we are the only ones who can let ourselves down.

The intermediary is summer love, its buoyancy and subtle belligerence, its ability to humor or invent delusions, to turn a tinny infatuation cinematic. It’s a waltz, your heart has to dance to perceive the song at all, and if you can’t swagger at its paces, indecent with giddyness, it will eject and betray you, place you in some premature torrent or torment. But if you remain in the music, affection unscathed, the diminuendo of sailboats in the moonlight, here are Betty Carter’s perfect teeth easing into the flower shop as her idyllic smile— lightbulbs for teeth and eyes. Once upon a summertime if you recall, we stopped beside a little flower stall. Her spacing, her sense of interval, makes the love song a slave song, shackled to her by the shame and shambles of loss or worry. She continues a bunch of bright forget-me-nots were all/I’d let you buy me. But between the all and the letting, a scandalously abrupt, ponderous pause makes I’d let you buy me its own comment, an independent clause, a dagger and thief of the peace that was only almost there.

The song becomes about the sale, the price, the transaction, and a shadow of disenchantment hacks her call, the end of love already, or the brutal echo of Love for Sale, a more popular jazz standard, more mercilessly guided by commerce. The phrase I’d let you buy me, (because Betty Carter is telling a story the writer of the song will never live using his perhaps mistranslated phrasing), is so subversive it subjugates the whole theme, loots its meaning and the meaning of the lovers actions here, and snatches us out of whimsy and into winter as fast as sudden affection turns redundant and blasé. But now another winter time has come and gone … she slumps, optimism fleeing the scene. Winter in America, insatiable inscrutable winter, not even cold enough to bite the skin, but frigid enough to induce an armor of fog around the heart. Betty Carter turns this simple lyric into an epic, just by holding her gaze as that of a disappointed child bucking up to bear witness. Her silent communication, I saw something I never intend to see again but make it last forever. Everything but her lips and eyes are still on that stage, she’s in the hold, she’ll let you buy her, before any embrace, she’ll let you indulge her version of the story, she’ll lay her burden down in a single note you might collapse under but it’ll be worth the trip, the lost-at-sea feeling, and its come-down.

—

It’s not that I’m stuck trying to reach or reenact the upheaval of 1968, that I find it cool or hip or stylistically empowering though in base ways that might be true in that rebel spirits need our critiques of pure reason, but what’s more alluring is the sense that April 1968 was the end of the adolescence of black culture, the end of our will to invent archetypes and become them, and we emerged too grown, too good for summers in the streets protesting peacefully, too wise to loot right, too jaded to dance among the lilacs and taste their price, their pollen, too addicted to that mutual surveillance that is visibility to know what we like when no one is looking and we’re in a fit of rage or a fix of flowers. Our reflexes are shrinking into little buttons others press in effort to manipulate our spirits until we can’t reach them ourselves and need the buttons and the others, but not for love, for mechanics. Our once upon a times are smug and virtual and the former rage is now blithe entitlement. Keep scrolling, one day your flickering wand will land on its blisses and stall, peace be still.

And stole a kiss in every street café ey… Betty sings, back in the better days, a destiny defeated by sentimentality though the torch endures. There’s an alchemy in slowing down and speeding up in response to touch and temptation that only this vocalist singing this song can understand and jolt or jut out into the personality of her voicing, a longing that desire oversimplifies, but what is it for, why does it keep haunting so many years after that perfect black summer is cast into concepts? Maybe it’s longing for a manifestation in the French sense, where that word accented by swift leaps where the vowels of its English counterpart hangs, means protest, bodies outside together walking in the direction of their togetherness toward a feast the will feel like famine most of the time until the revolution swoops in one morning and proposes happily ever after.

It’s almost winter solstice, 2024, the skies of America are full of drones and orbs, psyops or stories no one who has lived them can tell—nuclear warheads maybe, meteors, and the yelping noises all these machines make in chorus with unaccompanied swarms of angels, incapacitated hysterics floating into mysticism, a terrible intergalactic homecoming dance. In L.A., it’s 80 degrees most current late autumn days, the night winds drag the air like sand and the coyotes are massacring the farmers’ chickens. An emergency is declared over this notion, some sick birds proliferating. I’m planning Grammy parties and research trips to the region of the country where everyone might get low-grade radiation poisoning if the rumors are true. We can call it anything though, to soothe the ache of reality setting sail, leaving the harbor. All speech in this city is rumor, don’t listen too closely on the coasts except for patterns that might ruminate into song. To listen intently to each rumor is to invite its predictions to occur. Try hearing into next summer’s unmarked lilacs instead, abandoned graveyards, the drastic turn of events we can all feel approaching the way our bard might have felt it in 1968, the night before an assassination or the months after when albums and books and articles still had to be released and their muses were dead or in jail or belonged there and you were their remains, the incoming reckoning she serenaded forth. For the hope of love we entered the gates of hell, merrily.

Betty Carter was supposed to act heartbroken, moody, and sing a sad song, but instead we find her beaming, ravaged by equanimity, unscathed, and practically grinning at everything that is aggressively haunting her, so that she can tell you about it with annunciation so precise it’s almost cruel to the one she mentions was once beside her, who is negated now, symbolic, and would ruin it by being anything more or less than letters pressed into the flutter of thick eyelashes against a warm cheek. I think we’re on the edge of the next world, something unrecognizable, the way rage was on its way to sorrow then bravado in 1968, love is today, fading into mere ideas of itself and inviting crisis for fuel, it’s that depleted and in need of real renewal. Our guesses at the impending menaces are naive and banal, but we need them circulating like hawks for comfort against the brigade of motored wings. When I look up again the sky might be full of retribution and a sun that refuses to set on empire, forcing it to self-immolate or corrode in its own heat and chatter. It’s 80 degrees, dry as bone, a sharp wind is hissing coyote drones. Will contentment become an obscenity in the next phase of surviving America? Will love become a dilemma antagonizing us out of change? A Ye line from vultures humors all of it: beautiful buck naked women just don’t fall out of the sky you know, they’re so valuable. But it’s not funny in print cause the buck is too prominent and invades a fairy tale with vulgarities, and the sky is falling out of us. A deeply horrified woman is smiling; we’ll never know what she sees coming.