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The Unique Sadness of Mourning the Musicians Who Helped Us Grieve
With the deaths of Ellis Marsalis, Adam Schlesinger, and John Prine, I’m left wondering whether music really can help us heal
Over the past month, I have found myself relying on the warmth of familiar music. As bad news accumulates, I am returning to the records of my past — ones where I can identify every drum flourish and every guitar bend. I am craving the predictability of known sounds, at a time when I am without control in nearly every other aspect of my life. On a run through an empty street, I listen to the Coltrane my father loved. Sweat sits heavy in my too-long hair; my barbershop has been closed for weeks now, its windows covered in brown paper. But none of that matters as I hum the horn solo in “Cousin Mary” like I did as a kid in the passenger’s seat of our family van. The grocery store is a forest of reaching limbs and aisles packed with people both anxious about distance, but also anxious about what they have, and don’t have. Through headphones, I whisper along to the same De La Soul verse I memorized in the back of a school bus as a preteen, and try to make myself as small as I was then.
None of this helps me much in the large scheme of what is happening around me, around many of us. It feels especially foolish to look toward music as a source of healing in this moment, when so much actual, physical healing is needed. And so it has been useful for me to separate healing from comfort, even if the comforts are brief, or simply a needed noise to propel me from one fear to the next.
When the jazz musicians began to die, I thought about everyone I love who has loved jazz.
Like many people, I’ve settled into a routine, particularly around how I consume news, when I consume news, and what news I consume. Once a day, I check for any optimistic reports around curves flattening, medication or vaccine trials, the number of recoveries. At night, I look at the hard data before bed, interspersing it with video clips of live performances, or concert footage I’ve come to love. Early on in this pandemic, I worried about myself and about everyone I loved. I worried about falling ill and spreading…
