Ben Ratliff

Chatting About Writing About Running About Listening with the Run the Song author

For a curious listener/ cultural imbiber/ music writer of a certain ilk, reading Ben Ratliff in the NY Times was one of city life’s little treats. Even if you didn’t know the artist being mentioned, or enjoy the music itself, or just disagreed with his take, just having access to his mind and thought process (somehow transferred intact onto newsprint) on a weekly basis was well worth the time spent.

But somewhere along the way, Ratliff lost his way. Or perhaps –to use a running metaphor– he just struck out on a path different from the one he was already on, eschewing a straight line for a wobbly desire line that led to who knows where. He became disenchanted with what being a critic meant in an ever-shifting media landscape, where new and different demands were made on staff. Or something like that. Ratliff mentions it in passing in Run the Song, but is too busy on the way to another destination to linger on himself for long.

Run the Song, as Ratliff himself might say, isn’t quite about running and what to listen to while running. His proposition is more singular than that. He isn’t trying to follow in the footsteps of say, Murakami’s book on running (never trust anyone who willingly runs to RHCP), and he’s also not interested in training. Or keeping tracks of his miles. Or his steps. Or starting a subscription to Runner’s World. Or becoming more efficient and data-driven in his running. Or working his way up to marathons, much less super-marathons. Or helping you to find a killer running soundtrack. Or even trying to find the ideal soundtrack for his own run. He’s not trying to maximize or optimize anything. The chase is the thing. Much like the musicians he listens to, he too is chasing something ineffable in the music. The music itself is always changing, so why stay static?

After listening to a conversation between Ratliff with Keiran Press-Reynolds at NYU the week of the book’s release, I had a few questions spring to mind and followed up with him via email.

We had lunch about a year ago and you mentioned the rather obscure pianist Elmo Hope. And then at the reading the other day, he came up again. And in a fascinating stretch of the book, Elmo Hope also figures into a section that’s also about his fellow South Bronx neighbors, Thelonious Monk and Arsenio Rodriguez. What strikes you about Elmo Hope’s music and the specificity of his South Bronx street?

Well, if you run around Morrisania, which is the area east of Yankee Stadium in the mid-south-west Bronx, and make your way to Lyman Place, now known as Elmo Hope Way, you’ll enter a short block lined with houses on both sides, sort of hidden away between 169th and Freeman St. That’s the word: enter. You can imagine feeling very safe and enclosed here, maybe protected, maybe encouraged. I don’t know what the rule of definition is for streets in New York called “Place,” but I think it means a street of limited length. Lyman Place is only one block long. It’s not a Mews--that’s a one-block-long street formerly used as horse stables, usually gated on either side--but it has a similarly enclosed and protected feeling to a mews—it is a place where you might hang out on the stoop with your family, exchanging inside stories.

It’s right by Prospect Avenue, which is a main drag; Hope could easily walk to Club 845, one of the city’s great jazz clubs back then, and maybe a little off the radar for your casual jazz fan, because it’s not 52nd Street and not Harlem–who knows, maybe you could play there without a cabaret license. Elmo Hope spent some young time there, with Antiguan parents, and came back there to live with his wife Bertha. The feeling I get from his records is of a precocious, self-assured young person who developed in encouraging circumstances, in the right time and the right place, and who wasn’t professionalizing himself, flattening himself out. His music is kind of slangy and bumpy. He hung around with Bud Powell, who went to DeWitt Clinton high school in the Bronx. People around them must have thought them young geniuses.

What running around that area reveals to me is issues of proximity–how close they were to things, how removed they were from other things; various levels of noise and street energy, or calm, from the routes they must have taken. I mean, to me Elmo Hope was a great composer and improviser fair and square, but he’s always going to be less legible than Powell or Monk. Running with music has helped me realize that I am generally more oriented toward smaller musical gestures that don't necessarily “tell a story,” rather than universal ones–I get more mileage (hee hee) out of that.

What do you prefer: to have the music you are running to perfectly sync up with the surroundings like an ideal soundtrack or have it be wholly off and dissonant with your surroundings? (Knowing your interests a bit and from passages in the book, I would think the latter, but I also wonder if you just wind up being suspicious of the former if it’s too tidy, too perfect.)

You’re right. I often prefer that music and place have a relationship that isn’t pre-existing, that I've got to process in my own head. To put it another way, I like the idea of music and place having a counterpoint relationship to each other vs. a unison relationship, or maybe a translation kind of relationship: the translation of one complex language to another. Also–this may sound strange, but I don’t really know what an ideal soundtrack is. Music of a specific culture, heard in a place where that culture is dominant? That would be pretty obvious! Often I think a great film soundtrack involves some kind of juxtaposition: imaginative or unexpected association-making, something like that.

You talked about the physicality of running and how it puts you in closer alignment with the musicians rather than say, dancing to the music. And it made me think that maybe it also comes close to the physicality of a musician, the actual physical feeling of playing the music and having those vibrations move directly through you.

Oh yes. Running with music is the closest I’ve come to the feeling of playing it. But you’re not playing it–you’re mirroring its motion in another form. You have some independence from it. Yet sometimes you can feel very aligned with it. The drummer Ed Blackwell in the early ‘60s, on the Eric Dolphy and Ornette records, is my standard example: I often think that I want to run the way that he plays.

What on earth would that mean? Running and playing don’t have a one-to-one relationship. I hear Blackwell’s beat as clipped and also loose; minimal and also flowing. He doesn’t bash, he doesn’t hit hard, he doesn’t go for grand or handsome gestures; he doesn’t care about that. He keeps it tidy and bouncing and just slightly inscrutable, which is to say he’s saving something for himself. Also, he’s almost preserving energy as he’s playing. He won’t tire out fast. He is one of my unheroic, un-grandiose ideals. That’s how I’d like to run.

How far you were into this running/ listening practice when the seed of the book began to take form?

Ten years. Before that, as a runner I normally used music toward a certain end that lay outside of the music itself—maybe I wanted it to suggest a pace or a feeling that might help me, or to take my mind off things, or sometimes I was listening to something I had to write about on deadline that same day, so I’d listen to it as reference or to reconfirm things. I think a lot of people use music-with-running as a means to an end. It wasn’t until the early pandemic period that I realized I could actually do otherwise and not be the boss: instead I could let the music tell me things, or could use running to understand the music better, toward no particular end, with no desired outcome.

Your previous book (2016’s Every Song Ever) utilized playlists in some form and I wonder if there was an early version of the book that had that functional “run to this” kind of playlists or if that was never the intention?

Not at all, no, never the intention. I don’t want to make a prescription for what to run to. I realize that people will ask me for this–for running playlists–and already are asking me to, and I’m happy to oblige. But I have no sense of "this is the perfect music for running,” because then we’re getting toward that area of ideal BPM optimization for maximum running performance, etc., which I have no interest in at all.

It’s pretty obvious that running with James Brown’s “There It Is” might be a “fuck yeah” kind of physical experience, and it is—fascinating shapes of sound fly out of his mouth and the tune could conceivably go on forever—but that’s not what I’m writing about per se. The question I’ve been asked by music heads lately is “You mean you can run to one of those super slow Morton Feldman string quartet pieces?” Yes, that is what I mean! Running to very slow music can be amazing too.

I’m suggesting that there is a way to get closer to the marrow of music, to its life-force, which I think about as its motion, beyond genre or historical categorization and even beyond matters of structure. I have lots of respect for structure in music and harmonic relationships; I am interested in that insofar as music can be laid down flat on a table. But I think that the question of music as it is played, at a certain place, at a certain time, as it moves through time and measures time, as the listener runs alongside it or enters it in their own time and place, is a different matter. For running I orient myself toward music that I feel is “on”—how I hear that and how anyone else hears that will definitely vary--and then try to get as close as possible to the source of its “on”-ness.

But ok, favorites, moments of transcendence: I have really gotten a lot out of running with two records involving Ed Blackwell in particular—Eric Dolphy at the Five Spot and the Ornette Coleman record called Ornette!. Any record with Ismael Rivera singing- the Cortijo y su Combo records and any of his solo records after that, like Lo Ultimo en la Avenida. Sade’s Love Deluxe. Ice Spice. Those last Thelonious Monk records made in England, The London Collection. Masabumi Kikuchi’s last things, too. Solo Bach and solo Cecil Taylor always. Lester Young in almost any context. Any number of DJ sets by Theo Parrish, Lena Willikens, DJ Anderson do Paraíso. Ken Carson. Walt Dickerson. Gal Costa. Tension, life-force, the non-grandiose, the non-nostalgic, a bit of unknowability, joy without a story, preferably some open space of some kind, preferably a sense of endlessness, the headlong feeling…even frailty is ok. Doesn’t have to be all bursting out. Or it could be something that bursts out in a very subtle way.

How much do you plan out just what you will run to on any given day?

I want to be surprised as much as possible. I want the idea of “I don’t know where I am”–I want the feeling of trying to figure out the landmarks as they come along. Typically I’ll wait for the last minute or last second before going out to decide what to run with. Sometimes I’ll have a great idea the night before about what to listen to the following day, and sometimes that will be a piece of music I already know. But better if I don’t know it, or don’t know it very well, or if it is the kind of thing that will always be running away from me, no matter how many times I’ve heard it.

I feel like the book is your most personal, from the parts about your parents to your own career crisis. Did the practice of running provide clarity/ catharsis/ therapy for this transition/ these transitions?

Yes, it did. But this is nothing special. Running creates clarity and catharsis. Pretty early into running I started thinking “Am I running from something? And what is it?” My answer then and my answer now is that I am running from my old assumptions. Music moves, and it moves away from things, and I assume that most music critics are aware of the fact that old assumptions calcify quickly. In related news, the kids are often (though not always) right, and people in their 40s and 50s are more and more (though not entirely) wrong.

I came across the word “ongoingness” early on in the book (page 12), which I think which I think is in relation to running. But then it also seems to apply to the longevity of certain careers, like that of Blackwell or pianist Mal Waldron. At times, I felt like it might be a central theme of the book, the word having a slightly different quality than just “perseverance” or “survival” or what have you.

Yes. Ongoingness implies a sense of eternity, which I think is implicit in music, in an ideal form. Music moves ahead toward an uncertain future, and so do we. We don’t know how it’s all going to turn out. But if we have a sense of ongoingness somehow built into our bodies, that'll be fine.

Behind the paywall, more insight and some recent listening suggestions from Ben Ratliff in the year since he submitted the book.