In 2016, Lau­rie Ander­son recre­at­ed the expe­ri­ence of Lou Reed’s Met­al Machine Music in Saint Mark’s chapel in Brighton. The five-day-long per­for­mance piece involved “some eight unmanned gui­tars lean­ing on a sim­i­lar num­ber of vin­tage amps,” Mark Sheerin writes, all of them cranked up, feed­ing back, and echo­ing around the Angli­can church’s vault­ed ceil­ing. It was a fit­ting trib­ute to Reed, a sus­tained, dis­so­nant drone that also invokes “the mys­ter­ies of faith and the incar­na­tion of rebel angels.”

If five days seems like a long time to hold a sin­gle note, how­ev­er, con­sid­er the per­for­mance of John Cage’s com­po­si­tion “ORGAN/ASLSP” or “A Slow as Pos­si­ble” that began in the St. Bur­char­di church, in the Ger­man town of Hal­ber­stadt, on Sep­tem­ber 5th, 2001, what would have been Cage’s 89th birth­day. The artists stag­ing this piece intend it to last for 639 years. If the organ doesn’t fall apart and if a new gen­er­a­tion of cura­tors con­tin­ues to take the place of the old, it will play until the year 2640.

Those are some big Ifs, but as long as it lasts, the piece should draw crowds every few years when a chord changes, as just hap­pened recent­ly, despite the pan­dem­ic, after the organ had played the same chord for almost 7 years. The change occurred on Sep­tem­ber 5th, 2020, Cage’s birth­day, 19 years after the per­for­mance began. Lest we think its length insane­ly per­verse, we should bear in mind that Cage him­self nev­er spec­i­fied a tem­po for “As Slow as Pos­si­ble.” The score itself only “con­sists of eight pages of music, to be played,” writes Kyle Mac­don­ald at Clas­sic FM, “well, very, very slow­ly.”

Typ­i­cal­ly, organ­ists and pianists have inter­pret­ed this direc­tion with­in the space of an hour. Some have stretched sin­gle per­for­mances “up to, and beyond, 12 hours.” Obvi­ous­ly, no sin­gle per­son, or even team of peo­ple, could sus­tain play­ing the piece for 233,235 days. Nor, how­ev­er, has the extreme slow­ness of the John Cage Organ Project ver­sion been made pos­si­ble by dig­i­tal means. Instead, a group of artists built a spe­cial pipe organ for the task. Each time a chord changes, new pipes are added man­u­al­ly. On Sat­ur­day, a masked crowd gath­ered “to see the G sharp and E notes metic­u­lous­ly installed.”

The organ is auto­mat­ed, by mechan­i­cal means. No one needs to sit and hold keys for sev­er­al years. But can the long-term coor­di­na­tion need­ed to main­tain this solemn­ly quixot­ic instal­la­tion extend over six hun­dred years for a grand finale in 2640 (IF the organ, the church, and the plan­et, sur­vive)? The ques­tion seems almost irrel­e­vant since no one liv­ing can answer it with any degree of cer­tain­ty. It depends on whether future gen­er­a­tions see the St. Buruchar­di “As Slow as Pos­si­ble” as a phe­nom­e­non that should con­tin­ue to exist. But why, we might ask, should it?

Maybe one way of think­ing of the John Cage Organ Project is through the lens of the Long Now Project’s 10,000 Year Clock, a device being con­struct­ed (“no com­ple­tion date sched­uled”) to rad­i­cal­ly change humans’ rela­tion­ship to time, to push us to think beyond—hundreds and thou­sands of years beyond—our mea­ger life­times. Cage, I think, would appre­ci­ate the effort to turn his eight page com­po­si­tion into a musi­cal man­i­fes­ta­tion of the future’s longue durée.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Impres­sive Audio Archive of John Cage Lec­tures & Inter­views: Hear Record­ings from 1963–1991

Nota­tions: John Cage Pub­lish­es a Book of Graph­ic Musi­cal Scores, Fea­tur­ing Visu­al­iza­tions of Works by Leonard Bern­stein, Igor Stravin­sky, The Bea­t­les & More (1969)

John Cage’s Silent, Avant-Garde Piece 4’33” Gets Cov­ered by a Death Met­al Band

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Jazz has often moved for­ward in seis­mic shifts, pow­ered by rev­o­lu­tion­ary fig­ures who make every­thing that came before them seem quaint by com­par­i­son and radi­ate their influ­ence beyond the jazz world. Per­haps no fig­ure epit­o­mizes such a leap for­ward more than Char­lie Park­er. The leg­endary inven­tor of bebop, born a lit­tle over a cen­tu­ry ago, may be the most uni­ver­sal­ly respect­ed and admired musi­cian in jazz, and far beyond.

Kansas City trum­pet play­er Lon­nie McFad­den, who grew up hear­ing sto­ries about home­town hero Park­er, was told by every­one he met to learn from the mas­ter. “Every­body. It was a con­sen­sus. All of them said, ‘You got to lis­ten to Bird. You got to lis­ten to Char­lie Park­er.’” Fur­ther­more, he says, “every tap dancer I know, every jazz musi­cian I know, every rock and blues musi­cian I know hon­ors Char­lie Park­er.”

Park­er has been called “The Great­est Indi­vid­ual Musi­cian Who Ever Lived.” Not just jazz musi­cian, but musi­cian, peri­od, as the PBS Sound Field short intro­duc­tion above notes, because there had nev­er been one sin­gle musi­cian who influ­enced “all instru­ments.” Kansas City sax­o­phone play­er Bob­by Wat­son and archivist Chuck Had­dix explain how Park­er made such an impact at such a young age, before dying at 34.

Unlike the swing of Ben­ny Good­man or Louis Arm­strong, Parker’s bebop is com­plete­ly non-dance­able. He didn’t care. He was not an enter­tain­er, he insist­ed, but an artist. Jazz might even­tu­al­ly return to dance­abil­i­ty in the late 20th cen­tu­ry, but the music—and pop­u­lar music writ large—would nev­er be the same.

The video’s host, LA Buck­n­er gives a brief sum­ma­ry of the evo­lu­tion of jazz in four region­al centers—New Orleans, Chica­go, Kansas City, and New York. Park­er made a tran­sit through the last three of these cities, even­tu­al­ly end­ing up on big apple stages. “By 1944,” Jazz­wise writes, “the altoist was… mak­ing a huge impact on the young Turks hang­ing out in Harlem, Dizzy Gille­spie and Thelo­nious Monk in par­tic­u­lar… no one had ever played sax­o­phone in this man­ner before, the har­mon­ic, rhyth­mic and melod­ic imag­i­na­tion and the emo­tion­al inten­si­ty prov­ing an over­whelm­ing expe­ri­ence.”

It’s too bad more musi­cians didn’t lis­ten to Bird when it came to play­ing high. “Any­one who said they played bet­ter when on drugs or booze ‘are liars. I know,’” he said. Hero­in and alco­hol abuse end­ed his career pre­ma­ture­ly, but per­haps no sin­gle instru­men­tal musi­cian since has cast a longer shad­ow. Jazz crit­ic Stan­ley Crouch, author of Park­er biog­ra­phy Kansas City Light­ning: The Rise and Times of Char­lie Park­er, explains in an inter­view how Park­er cre­at­ed his own mys­tique.

Park­er some­times gave the impres­sion that he was large­ly a nat­ur­al, an inno­cent into whom the cos­mos poured its knowl­edge while nev­er both­er­ing his con­scious­ness with expla­na­tions.

The facts of his devel­op­ment were quite dif­fer­ent. He worked for every­thing he got, and when­ev­er pos­si­ble, he did that work in asso­ci­a­tion with a mas­ter.

Park­er was not appre­ci­at­ed at first, either in his home­town of Kansas City or in New York, where “peo­ple didn’t like the way he played” when he first arrived in 1939. He respond­ed to crit­i­cism with cease­less prac­tice, learn­ing, and exper­i­men­ta­tion, an almost super­hu­man work eth­ic that prob­a­bly wasn’t great for his health but has grown into a leg­end all its own, giv­ing musi­cians in every form of music a mod­el of ded­i­ca­tion, inten­si­ty, and fear­less­ness to strive toward.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Char­lie Park­er Plays with Dizzy Gille­spie in the Only Footage Cap­tur­ing the “Bird” in True Live Per­for­mance

The Night When Char­lie Park­er Played for Igor Stravin­sky (1951)

Ani­mat­ed Sheet Music of 3 Char­lie Park­er Jazz Clas­sics: “Con­fir­ma­tion,” “Au Pri­vave” & “Bloom­di­do”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness