Broad Strokes
I inherited my copy of Sun Goddess. Like many of the records that kick-started my collection when I was a teenager, it came to me through the hands of either my mother or one of her siblings. They have good taste in music, but none of them, as far as I know, is a particularly devoted follower of jazz. In that, I assume, they were not unlike many of the listeners that turned Ramsey Lewis’s exuberantly funky 1974 album into a crossover hit, propelling it to No. 1 on the Billboard Soul Albums chart and No. 12 on the pop chart. A traditionalist might question whether Sun Goddess counts as jazz at all. Its vocabularies of harmony, rhythm, and form have as much to do with pop and R&B; its first track is an Earth, Wind & Fire collaboration and its second is a Stevie Wonder cover. It arrived about a half decade before the codification of smooth jazz as a genre and radio format, but to contemporary ears, that’s often what it sounds like.
I’ve loved Sun Goddess since the first time I dropped the needle on the two-chord strut that opens the album, but I’ve never thought of it as being particularly cool. Decades after it became a major hit, it had faded pretty much entirely from any discourse among critics or musicians that I was aware of, if it had ever had a place there. Though I sometimes saw its glittering cover in the cheap-o sections at record stores—a portrait of the model Susan Leigh Scott in gold facepaint, whose promise of fantastic decadence I have to imagine had something to do with all those album sales back in the ‘70s—I almost believed it was mine alone. I’d made attempts at sharing my private infatuation over the years: including the title track on mixtapes and in DJ sets, sampling the “Tambura” drum break in a piece of electronic music, throwing the album on to the delight of a charmingly impudent houseguest who asked if I had anything funkier than whatever I was playing before. But I never encountered anyone else who knew it well, who loved it as much as me—or was willing to talk about it if they did.
So it was a sweet surprise to see several peers coming out as Sun Goddess fanatics, or enthusiasts of other Lewis albums, when the keyboardist and composer died at age 87 this week. A couple of music critics, the founder of an indie label—people in my millennial cohort or a little older, some of whom, perhaps, had also inherited their appreciation from a relative. Of course there were other fans out there: Lewis was the “Jazz Pianist Who Became a Pop Star,” as the headline on the New York Times obituary put it, not some obscure ascetic. More importantly than the sales figures, there is the sound itself. Lewis paints in bold colors and broad strokes; his music is not coy or withholding about its own pleasures; they are as clear and direct as afternoon sunlight. Maybe the qualities that relegated the album to dollar-bin-relic status are the same as those that made it a hit in the first place. Though Lewis is a gifted soloist, he never lets sophistication or complexity get in the way of the music’s prime directive: to make you happy. You don’t have to work hard to love or understand Sun Goddess. You just have to hear it.
This sort of aesthetic generosity had been on my mind for a few days before I heard the news of Lewis’s death, in part because I’d been revisiting the early albums of Kris Kristofferson. The two don’t have much in common musically—joyous jazz-funk on one hand and melancholy country-rock on the other—but they are alike in their willingness—their ability, really—to move you whether you’re paying close attention or not. A song like “Me and Bobby McGee” is rich with narrative detail and emotional subtlety, but you needn’t follow the story of Bobby’s separation from the narrator to feel a rising in your chest when Kristofferson tells you that freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. And just as Kristofferson draws you in with these swerves from the personal to the archetypal, so does Lewis with his moves from the fine brushwork of a solo to the broad strokes of a melodic theme.
There are, of course, many others who are capable of such maneuvering. Just about any music worth hearing performs a similar dance: alternately satisfying and challenging your expectations; drawing you close in one moment and then receding to the corner of the room, inviting you to make leaps of your own to meet it there. Music that spends most of its time in the corner we might call difficult or experimental; music that spends most of its time cradling us we might call pop. I enjoy lots of difficult music; not everyone does. I also have the snob’s tendency toward a certain suspicion of pop, a suspicion that in my view is not entirely unfounded. The less active involvement music requires of its listeners, the more easily it can be transmogrified into a product. Commerce can only move art in one direction, away from mystery and toward comfort, away from the corner and toward the cradle. And yet: Who can deny the rush of a good pop song?
Lewis had other crossovers before Sun Goddess; Kristofferson penned several songs that became big hits for other artists. But I’d like to think they weren’t driven by commerce, at least not entirely. There is plenty of music that was conceived as a product from the get-go. For these two, and all truly great pop artists, commercial viability was perhaps more like a byproduct of purer impulses: a need to express something deeply rooted in their idiosyncratic experience of the world, coupled with a desire to connect with listeners in terms they can readily understand.
Like anyone who pursues music as a way of life, I’ve made sacrifices for it: personal relationships, financial stability, a regular schedule. Lately, as music’s role has grown to the exclusion of much else, I’ve wondered in lonely moments whether those sacrifices are worthwhile. What, after all, are we doing, broadcasting these sounds into the void? I find comfort sometimes in the knowledge that our craft, useless though it may seem in a world that trudges ever closer to economic optimization as an all-governing ideal, has existed since long before there was a music industry to exploit it. It has existed for nearly as long as people have—no, longer than that, in birdsong, and the sound of waves unfolding at the shore.
My interest in difficult music stems partially from revulsion to the idea that profit is the only thing that matters. I am drawn to those artists who work from a place of burning need, with no regard for how the marketplace will receive their creation. (A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity, as Rainer Maria Rilke wrote and Harmony Holiday recently quoted on Twitter.) But Lewis and Kristofferson remind me that the impulse to be heard—to be received and understood—is not strictly a commercial one. It, too, has existed since long before capitalism, since the first time a person pounded out a beat with two sticks for another person who moved their body in time.
Why do we make music? I’m sure I’ll never know. One reason, maybe, is that it satisfies, however fleetingly, our craving for connection between one person and another. That craving, I think, is just as artistically valid as the craving for personal expression. Without one, music would be impenetrable to all but those who created it; without the other, it would be devoid of personality and surprise. And though the commercial recording industry has complicated and perhaps even corrupted that impulse to be heard—has at least made it much more difficult to disentangle from the impulse to make money—it has also expanded to near-infinity the possibilities for connection through music across space and time.
For years, Sun Goddess was the only Ramsey Lewis music I knew. That changed in late 2020, when I heard “The ‘In’ Crowd,” his first crossover hit, on my local oldies radio station. A swinging instrumental for acoustic piano trio recorded live in Washington, D.C., and released a decade before Sun Goddess, it assimilated rock’n’roll and earlier strains of R&B just as smoothly as the later album assimilated funk and disco. I didn’t know it was Lewis when I first heard it, but I knew its easy swagger made me feel good. I Shazamed it and added it to a Spotify playlist of songs that cheered me up that winter, when I was enduring one of the blackest depressions of my life.
There were several layers of corporate mediation that “The ‘In’ Crowd” had to pass through in its journey across decades and miles to reach me in my old Subaru Outback in upstate New York, all of which inspire some uneasiness in me. But none of them prevented me from receiving the good humor and irrepressible style that Lewis and his band transmitted from the stage that night in 1965.
I called the playlist with “The ‘In’ Crowd” ‘Simple Pleasures,’ and filled it with music that worked in similarly broad strokes. At the time, I was having trouble relating to some of the more difficult music I had cherished in the past, which could send me into infinitely recursive spirals of questioning about what it all meant. If I could no longer hear the beauty in John Coltrane’s ‘Concert in Japan,’ did beauty really exist at all? The songs on ‘Simple Pleasures’ reached out and urged me back to the world in a way that was involuntary and non-negotiable. It didn’t cure my depression, but it helped.
It’s not entirely true that Lewis’s death marked the first time I found others who loved Sun Goddess like I do. Just a week or two before he passed, I was bartending when a DJ I’d never met before played “Love Song,” the album’s gooey and orchestral third track. The room was nearly empty, and those who were present weren’t having it: this was a soundtrack for pirouetting in verdant fields, not drinking away your afternoon. But it touched me in the way the album always touches me, made me light and free of worry. I crossed the bar to tell the DJ I appreciated his choice, and he seemed surprised that I knew it, as surprised as I might have been if I were the one behind the decks. We talked for a while about Lewis, and then about jazz fusion in general. Just a glancing connection, but a real one. And then we both got back to work.