I made a playlist for my trip from Durham to New Orleans: thirteen hours of music for a day’s drive plus time to stop and charge the car. I was coming to my natal city, the only place where I actually make sense to myself, for my, on average, twice-yearly composing stint, a time to marinate in the world that made me a composer in the first place and to get some work done. Most of my best music over the last five years has come from here.

The rep on the list was made up of things I first got to know as a kid in New Orleans, in the 70’s (Brahms 2nd Symphony; Stravinsky Apollo and the Violin Concerto; Henze, 2nd Piano Concerto; Miles, In a Silent Way; Weather Report, Mysterious Traveller and Tail Spinnin’; Bartòk, Music for Strings…; Penderecki, Polymorphia; John Abercrombie, Timeless; Bill Evans, Sundays at the Village Vanguard; Professor Longhair, Red Beans; Mahalia Jackson, Didn’t it Rain; Walk in Jerusalem) along with things that take me there in my dreams (Donald Harrison, Spirits of Congo Square; John Luther Adams, Become Ocean; Natalia Lafourcade, De Todas las Flores; Dutilleux, Sur le même accord). There are trancy things (Miles, On the Corner), things that are assertively funky (Herbie Hancock, Thrust) and things that are funkily flexible (Keith Jarrett, Belonging). There are also Neil Young, Harvest Moon and Paul Simon, The Rhythm of the Saints, who knows why? There’s a wide variety of stuff, though not as broad a spectrum as one would find in some of my, probably younger, friends’ collections, but still, not bad. What I was looking for was music that would pull me in, take me by the collar and demand my attention. It worked.

But why this sudden need for a playlist? I never make them; I’m happier free-associating from one track to the next, though my desire not to end up in the ditch or worse acts as natural brake on that. So I generally find myself where I didn’t want to be today: getting sucked into the vortex of despairing hand-wringing that is NPR (and sometimes, if you’re lucky, Pacifica), swirling over the bottom third of the radio dial. You can’t blame NPR, of course; what else are they supposed to report on? But today I didn’t want those voices in my head, any of them, and one voice especially, that voice, the one the nation has become inured to, along with the horrors it carries with it. No thanks, count me out. Hence, the playlist.

I liked what I came up with, liked the warp and woof of it, the way it moved unpredictably from one thing to the next. It was as free from being “curated”, whether by man or machine, as possible. Apollo inhabited its own traffic-free, predawn stretch from Durham to Graham, its unlikely gene-splicing of Bach and Delibes creating that essential distance that allows the counterpoint to speak for itself, elegant but never snide. The joke is not in the individual gestures, the weirdly seamless way in which this pageant of restraint finds itself suddenly onstage at Pigalle, but in our having fallen for Stravinsky’s posture of expressive refusal, as we are ultimately poleaxed by the Apothéose, its upward line colliding with the downward suspensions such that we are pulled further and further into a tonic/dominant fusion of profound emotional depth. I am reminded that Boulez hated this music, and I think that sometimes it must have sucked to be Boulez.

Where Apollo dovetailed with the early-morning stillness, the Henze exploded and obliterated it, illuminating not the landscape but its long and violent history. That’s what this piece does, exposes collective terrors with such unrelenting force that personal ones rise up and take their place among them; here we’re all in the same boat, and it’s taking on water fast. That Henze manages, with neither mawk nor a god in the machine, to bring this around by the end to something like consolation is a testament to the brilliance, the sheer craft, of this criminally underrated composer. Come to think of it, Boulez hated this too…

In a Silent Way took me to Charlotte. I don’t know what to say about this music because I’ve loved it so much for so long that I’m prone to unleashing torrents of purple in the effort. But there’s this: if you were looking for music to act as a soundtrack for an early morning drive you’d need look no further. And yet, once you were lulled into thinking that this was going to be 40 minutes of mood enhancement you’d notice the quarter-tone inflections (or is he just slightly out of tune?) of John Mclaughlin’s guitar, coloring the dominant 11th chord welling up from the keyboards with something like a Western śruti; the at first imperceptible but eventually total transformation Dave Holland wreaks on the opening two-note bass groove; the weird, keening, wildly beautiful dissonance that Joe Zawinul conjures from the Fender Rhodes at the climax of the title track; the fact that Miles’s solo on It’s About That Time is not only one of his best from this period but also the most athletic, the most in the pocket on the album. What you might not notice on a first listen are the repeats, the much-maligned edits that allowed Miles and Teo Macero to shape the music in post-production. Once you know they’re there they’re still surprising, both for how organic they seem and at the same time how they mess with your sense of narrative flow: at the end of Shhh,Peaceful Teo lets the repeated section play out further than he did in the first iteration; thus what you’re hearing as the dreamlike coda was actually played much earlier, at the end of the first big span. You suddenly find yourself back near Durham, but now headed north.

The next two hundred miles alternated between playlist and extended spells of silence, just the hum of the tires and the din of thinking. Brahms’s 2nd gave way to Spirits of Congo Square, with its 2nd-line re-tellings of Bye-Ya and Oleo. Weather Report ruled from Greenville to Atlanta, Bartók and Bill Evans got me to Alabama. These two albums, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (with Berlin and Karajan) and Sundays at the Village Vanguard (actually a two-record compilation on Milestone called The Complete Village Vanguard Sessions, a Christmas present from my brother), were in constant rotation on my Realistic all-in-one stereo back in the 70’s. I’d had the same experience of both Bartók and Evans when I first encountered them, that this was the music I’d been hearing in my head but hadn’t known existed. I’d heard the New Orleans Phil under Werner Torkanowski play Music for Strings… live and had thought my heart was going to explode. I couldn’t believe such a thing was possible, and yet it confirmed what I knew I wanted from music, how music could map the soul. The first bars of Evans, Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian playing Milestones had the same effect on me. What’s amazing about how they got me into Alabama, though, was that this was no trip down memory lane: both Music for Strings… and Some Other Time were, like all art that endures, entirely new experiences. The first movement of the Bartók, in particular, was revelatory; I didn’t hear it as “night music”, didn’t stand in awe (well, I was driving…) at the fearsome architectonics of it, the symmetry, the entries in fifths expanding to the massive spacing of the tritone. These all form the background experience of the piece for me at this point. What I heard this time was a life-process, a recognizable interior trajectory, beautiful and terrifying, an opening up of something truthful and implacable in the psyche. I think that was what I connected with at that NO Phil concert back in… 1975 (good god!), why the piece lit me up the way it did, why it felt like a séance gone suddenly very real. Never mind that the piece was entirely new to me then, speaking a language that seemed to exist only in dreams, I knew what it was saying.

Alabama fell into northern and southern halves, as different as they could be: from West Point, Georgia to Montgomery I dove into the four immersive wave-movements of John Luther Adams’s Become Ocean; from Montgomery to the Mobile-Tensaw delta it was all Herbie Hancock, first Thrust and then The New Standard. What unites all of this music for me is that when I first encountered it I was skeptical. I’d heard a lot of JLA’s early work and was underwhelmed; I couldn’t escape the nagging sense that environmental urgency was standing in for musical imagination. Become Ocean changed all that, and when I went back to the earlier works I realized I’d been wrong about most of them, too. There’s no denying the level of mastery in the pacing, the orchestration and the harmonic evolution in Become Ocean. This goes beyond the specifics of the craft, of course, and straight to the experience the piece makes possible for the listener: an exhilarating progress of immense phrases that break upon us with palpable force, self-similar and yet endlessly varied, their sensual beauty making us complicit in our own destruction as water surrounds and engulfs us. We’re left with the weirdly consoling sense that the planet will be better off without us.

When Thrust appeared in 1974 some of us thought that Herbie had lost his mind. Or, more to the point, that he’d lost his way. Everything about it, from the stylized, way-out cover art (had any of us even heard of Afro-Futurism at that point? Uh, no), to the apparently cheap double-entendre of the title, to the dyspeptic belching of the clavinet, we could come to only one conclusion: Herbie had sold out. He wasn’t the only one, of course. Lots of people doing fusion were up front about how crazy it was to play jazz and make big money (Miles told of taking his check from the Filmore East to Sly Stone to make sure there hadn’t been some mistake). But we expected more from Herbie, and as the enlightened white-boy teenage gatekeepers we imagined ourselves to be, we knew what was best for Black music. That we were completely full of shit is of course self-evident. Thrust is a masterpiece, a work of genius on every level, one that we need even more now than we did 52 years ago. Herbie had always been the most committed of his generation to a sophisticated music that came from, and would speak directly back to, the street. Miles could never quite pull this off. Bitches Brew filled big halls, but not with the audience he most wanted to reach. On the Corner was an abject failure until its afterlife as the most sampled album in recording history, right up there with James Brown’s Cold Sweat. Herbie managed, again and again, to find the sweet spot between art and commerce, fulfilling the most basic musical desires while at the same time exciting cognitive engagement with complex musical processes at the highest level of the art. In this he’s in rare and privileged company (Mozart, Ellington and Steven Spielberg come to mind). Never mind the drop-dead force and precision of the grooves; the funk-meets-West Africa clarity and complexity of the polyrhythms (clarity and complexity; now there’s an idea); the compositional virtuosity of the electronics and how they’re employed. Listen for shape, and how it arises from a masterful interaction between long spans of carefully orchestrated rhythmic texture and improvisational abandon. Listen to the modulation to IV that signals the bridge in Spank-a-Lee, then groove on the fact that this motion to IV is absent during the long, volcanic solo in which Bennie Maupin tears a hole in space-time, appearing again only at the climax of the solo, where it finally erupts and sweeps away everything in its path. After that there’s nothing left but to let the coda play out, with its jagged stop-time figure that makes it impossible to sit still. What doesn’t happen at this point is a return to the opening, A material. The long wait for the bridge, for the move to IV, has rendered it entirely superfluous.

Listening to Thrust while driving through southern Alabama I’m struck by the cruel irony that this music, a triumph of Black culture, of American culture, the work of one of the greatest Black artists alive today, one of the great artists of the turn of the millennium, is bringing me joy, beauty, complexity of thought and emotional release as I drive through a state in which a large number of the rural poor, most of them Black, have open sewage running through their back yards and backing up in their bathtubs because they cannot afford a septic system. A federal program was in place to help these people obtain this state-of-the-art 19th century plumbing. Trump killed it.

Mobile to New Orleans, lots of silence intermixed with Abercrombie, Jarrett, and (full circle) Stravinsky. Then, as I-10 shoots out over the eastern panhandle of Lake Ponchartrain, radio station WWOZ greets me with Jelly Roll Morton and his Red Hot Peppers doing Original Jelly Roll Blues. The past isn’t even the past.

I thought it would be fun to see what kind of playlist I’d have gotten had I let AI curate one for me. Based on the prompt, “contemporary classical music; contemporary jazz; indie pop”, I got the following: Ludovico Einaudi, Experience; Max Richter, The Four Seasons; On the Nature of Daylight; Philip Glass, Mishima Quartet; JAWNY, Honeypie; Happy Imaeda, Spruce Specter, and on and on. Einaudi and Richter are, of course, commercially successful post-minimalists with a decidedly New Age bent; Glass is Glass, here represented by a film score as opposed to the more visionary music from, say, Einstein on the Beach. The jazz is all essentially Bass and Drums grooves on one dreamy chord with a modicum of jazz-inflected soloing over the top; the pop is…thin. What distinguishes all of this music, and allows it to slip like Cinderella’s foot into the perfect glass playlist is its unrelenting sameness, its absolute unity of groove, of texture, of melodic or improvisational contour, its harmonic non-dimensionality, with two (sometimes three) chord pivots that remain resolutely unchanged regardless of form (verse? chorus? it’s all the same), or lyrical content. Think I’m picking on Minimalism? Where’s Steve Reich? Terry Riley? LaMonte Young? Gavin Bryars, for pete’s sake? Not here. In the pop category we don’t even have Real Love by Francis of Delirium, which I actually really like, in spite of the fact that it does everything I’ve just laid out. But it has lyrics that demand one’s attention and that complicate the overall erotic fever dream that the song inhabits, so it’s probably out on those grounds alone. It’s not a matter of style, of tonal vs. atonal (god help us), hegemonic vs. radical (there’s nothing radical in any of this music, it’s too comfortable feeding the algortihm), it’s not even generational, the result simply of my being an old crank. The whole point of this music is to work purely in the limbic system, to trigger the neurotransmitters that keep the listener in one, consistent and unbroken emotional place (Spotify’s helpful blurbs say as much); it’s to act as a musical narcotic, and so the level of cognitive engagement one seeks in any exciting music, whether by Bartók, Wayne Shorter, St. Vincent or Spencer, is out of the question.

We’ve been slow to recognize just how total this shift has been, from music as a primary experience with its own integral nature and resultant demands on the listener’s attention, to a kind of aural gummy intended solely to give the consumer exactly the solipsistic, entirely self-contained emotional experience they demand. Even Rick Beato (and I love Rick Beato, I’m a huge fan) talks with real technical precision about what’s missing in contemporary pop music without wanting to acknowledge that none of his criteria have any meaning in this new context of algorithmic capitalism. In this universe, holding Taylor Swift to account for the juvenile repetition of a digitally sequenced guitar riff is a little like being irritated with an oyster because it can’t be taught to fly. And as the culture feeds the algorithm that now feeds it, we’re talking about one gigantic, intransigent mollusk. We’ve become like the medieval scholar who, in describing the monochord, the one-string instrument that was used to teach everything from sight-singing to interval relationships to the harmonic series, “I marvel that the monochord, having been created by Man, now teaches him.” Our monochord is teaching us to look to music for immediate emotional gratification and nothing more. And this comes at a price.

Today, as I sit in my beloved city writing this, the supreme court has just eviscerated the voting rights act in their Callais decision. The almost immediate result of this mephitic ruling has been to strand Black voters in Louisiana in majority White districts that do not represent their interests or concerns. Their voices have been silenced, their votes neutered, no poll tax necessary. This latest attempt at electoral redemption by the ruling class has initiated a wave of similarly racist gerrymandering across the South, some of it immediately effective in disenfranchising Black voters. I’m happy to say that as of right now, and in spite of its recent history of perpetrating the most mendacious, laughable attempts to gerrymander people of color out of the electorate in the nation, my adopted state of North Carolina has not followed suit. But in Louisiana the radically ignorant, minority governor (Jeff Landry was elected with only a thin plurality of votes; he has no real mandate, and most Louisianians do not support him), dissolved the majority Black district that section II of the voting rights act had required and suspended primary elections, already in progress, in spite of the fact that the supreme court’s ruling in no way called on him to do so. I wonder what’s in his playlist.

More to the point, what could I include in my playlist that would even come close to honoring the crisis faced right now by Louisiana voters? The only thing I can come up with would be to loop Jennifer Hudson’s performance of A Change is Gonna Come from Jesse Jackson’s funeral (YouTube it. It’s worth it.). Anything else, even the great 60’s tradition, from People Get Ready to Ohio, is too familiar, too stylized, too fixed in memory to have the kind of impact we’re looking for. Besides, the billionaire tech bros who have literally financed this court and cheered its decisions listen to all that music already, without a trace of irony. And I think matching the moment with the political intent of the music is not what we need anyway, and there’s hubris in thinking otherwise. What I listen to in the car does nothing to alter the balance of power in Louisiana politics. But it can alter the balance of feeling, thought and action in my own little corner of the collective unconscious. Remember that the now hated participle woke isn’t just a whipping-boy for Tucker Carlson and Ron DeSantis. It means awakened, and anyone who wants to stay awake needs to stop anesthetizing themself with music designed to induce a pleasant state of semi-consciousness.

It’s a bipartisan affliction, this hearing the Four Seasons of Vivaldi played into an echo-plex and mistaking it for a profound re-hearing of a canonical text, or finding inane repetitions of the word honeypie indicative of some ironic position with regard to sexual tropes, or whatever other falderol one can come up with to try to make the witless seem meaningful. Left or Right, gay or straight, urban or rural, we Americans just love stupidity. On the Left we keep a brush handy for gleefully painting the Right on this with big, extravagant strokes, while seeing ourselves as pure and unsullied. But a president who speaks giddily of destroying civilizations, or consigns whole families to the living hell that is the Dilley Immigrant “Processing” Center in Texas, or hands himself and his family $1.5 billion in taxpayer dollars, or a supreme court that views the Voting Rights Act as a racist instrument that disenfranchises White voters, don’t suddenly rise up from the void on their own power. They’re enabled, called forth as if by some necromancer’s spell, by decades of political complacency, economic convenience, and intellectual laziness. When the Left enjoys its guilty pleasures of reality TV and social media chatter, then calls Beethoven hegemonic and the whole Western canon elitist, we’re laying solid gold track for the demagogue express.

So make your playlist out of whatever you want. Just don’t think a series of jello shots to the ears is going to cut it. Let your playlist lull, console, evoke sultry dreams of lost love, whatever you like, but also let it challenge, confound, and rewire your psyche. And most of all, let it SCREAM. A music that whispers to us only of what we want to feel will lead us all to the slaughter.