life as literature

THAT WAS A DAY. It was the seventh of May. It was gray, mildly humid, the exhausted underbelly of a spring that had otherwise been pined after all winter. I know the date because I sent a letter on May 7. It read, “I’m sitting here in Tartu at her cafe, it has been completely redone.” There was more on top, but some of it is too incriminating to go into, even in this kind of story.

How had I even arrived at the place? My path was certain, to cut across one street, then another. In Tartu, the streets are wide and obvious. Follow them down to the bus station. If you have time to spare, wander through the market and along the river, take a picture, mind your own business. But while my mind was minding its own business, my feet carried me in another direction, here.

Why did I come here? She probably drank coffee in this cafe every day. Multiple times, in fact.

“I once sat right here with Fred Jüssi,” I wrote to my friend. “Just like this. And he took me aside, and said, ‘All of the things you think are so important in this life actually aren’t.’ Or something like that.” The old naturalist had told me other things, like how he knew when to initiate love and when to break it. “When it’s time to burn it all!” I wondered why Jüssi had told me those things.

But this was a love that didn’t seem burnable. It outlasted others. She was the woman you think about when you are in the arms of other women. You stare at the ceiling, her name on your lips.

I had gone to the cafe because I knew she worked there. There was thus a chance I might see her. “Admittedly stalkerish,” I wrote. “At the same time, I just wanted to cross paths with her, or more like put myself in her path, just to see what happens. I am curious.” This was my reasoning.

I wasn’t really dangerous, anyway, I thought. I was just sitting there drinking carbonated water.

Someone decided to play the Bee Gees at that moment, as if the whole pathetic scene couldn’t get any more weird and ridiculous. It was “More Than a Woman.” “But she is more than a woman,” I typed. I imagined her appearing in slow-motion, her hair glistening like the cosmos.

“She is young, but she knows that I like her and seems unfazed by it,” I wrote away in the cafe. “And I specifically like her for that reason. No need to discuss anything. It’s been understood.”

Or so I imagined, because she wasn’t there that day, and I didn’t have the nerve to seek her out.

I left the cafe thinking about that scene in Tender is the Night where Dick follows Rosemary to the set of her latest film and calls her from a phone booth from around the corner. Where every sane, sober-thinking man would have said no, he said yes, on total impulse. I knew that story was true, at least at heart, and was really about F. Scott Fitzgerald and the actress Lois Moran. “I went there because I knew Fitzgerald would do exactly that,” I later confided in my friend. “Because Fitzgerald wasn’t always a good person, but at least he was alive. Fitzgerald would have gone.”

When did life become literature? Or had it always been this way? I remember when she first emerged into view, lurking at first on the periphery, just another cafe girl. But slowly, she took shape, the eyes, the lips, the fingers with their silver rings. I could sense her when she brought me my drinks. I didn’t even have to look up, and sometimes when I did, her cheeks were rosy. I measured my affection for her in the reams of sentences these moments produced. My notebook served as a kind of romantic barometer; the better the writing, the deeper the feeling. Fitzgerald would have approved, I thought. Somewhere he was looking down at me, or up at me. Scott. Somewhere he was scribbling into his notebooks about some lovely young woman just like this.

And then one day, while marching back into town, I stepped into the cafe and demanded to know her name. Sometimes I wonder where that impulse came from. She told me her name, of course. This was a name I learned to take very good care of. I would never say it. I kept it hidden away.

Scott Fitzgerald emerged into my world in a similar way. First he was a wispy apparition, later he took full form. The Great Gatsby was compulsory reading in any high school literature course. There, in the halls of a brick high school, deep in the Nineties, our teacher, Mr. O’Connor, who refused to retire, taught us about Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and the Lost Generation. But I know these faces, I thought. These are people like us. When I looked around the room, I could see them sitting there. It wasn’t hard to imagine Hemingway as the brooding student to my left, with the smart answers. It wasn’t hard to imagine Fitzgerald by the door, a well-dressed preppie, always ready with a poetic line. I knew Fitzgerald before I knew him. He had just been waiting.

After Mr. O’Connor’s heart attack, we had a succession of substitute teachers. One of them, a gray-haired woman who wore a red turtleneck, started to call me “F. Scott” because of my style. I took it as the greatest compliment. To be a proper F. Scott, one needed a Zelda, a lifelong muse. Wasn’t it Scott Fitzgerald who taught me that people were material? That experiences were to be transformed into story? Scott shamelessly stole from his wife’s diary, sometimes word for word. There’s the “beautiful little fool” line that he smuggled into The Great Gatsby. But supposedly whole sections of 1922’s The Beautiful and Damned were lifted from Zelda Fitzgerald’s diary.

Scott was outraged when Zelda published her own book, Save Me the Waltz in 1932. She had used up all the material that he had been harvesting for his novel in progress Tender is the Night.

As Zelda, who provided counterpoint to Scott’s story arc, wrote, “Plagiarism begins at home.”

One day, as I was passing the cafe in autumn, I saw her in the window. When she looked up, there was a kind of oceanic shift in all the big waters around me. Sometimes I would write all day there by the window, and she would work too. “Well,” I would say, “hakkab jälle pihta.” “Jõudu tööle,” she would whisper and float off. Sometimes I would see her wandering around town, wearing sunglasses, listening to music. She would disappear around a corner, and I would watch her reflection in the windows she passed, until she vanished completely. But I was happy.

Then there was that day on the bus, the bus day, which happened at the end of August one summer when we were both heading to Tartu. I had disavowed any hopes of pursuing her, or anyone for that matter, but there she was. She sat across from me. I was too nervous to move. I wouldn’t even move my head. But other than greeting her, I felt her presence the entire way. I heard her munch on her damned juusturoll, acquired from a supermarket bakery (I often saw her in supermarkets) and the crumpling of the greasy paper in her hands as she took another bite. I could almost taste the crumbs as she did. I could make out just at the periphery of my vision, the whiteness of her shoes. She always wore those shoes. So many Estonians had shoes like those.

She was so ordinary in every way, and I would see women from behind everywhere who looked just like her. But none of them were her. She was sitting right there and all I could do was hide in my notebook, writing about her. What do you say to a woman who inspires you to write? Do you give her your messy first drafts? When we exited into the city, loud with traffic and the clanging of drills and jackhammers, we walked a while in the sun. She was going her way, I was going mine. She had exams. I had a conference. “Cool,” she said, blinking up at me. “Not really,” I said. She was just a young woman. What did I expect? Ecstasy? Euphoria? More poetry? I didn’t even know. All of this mythmaking was getting a bit too mythological for its own good. I did feel elated though. I felt a little like Fitzgerald. Later, I told the driver as I watched her once again recede into the streets of the city, “Can you believe I love that girl? I barely know who she is.”

The driver glanced in the rear view mirror. He said nothing back, but he must have understood.

There are only a few recordings of Scott Fitzgerald’s voice, by the way. Some were recorded in California in 1940, the last year of his short life. His voice is just as you would imagine it to be. A breathy tenor that lingers melodiously on the vowels. The voice of an old and dear friend. There is also a film of Fitzgerald in 1922, when he was just 26, the wunderkind of This Side of Paradise, writing at a desk in a garden, the sun against his features, at the height of his powers. Fitzgerald wrote and rewrote. This was his method. He pressed on, no matter the challenge.

Or so I like to think. For this is another myth of Fitzgerald that haunts me, along with his famous drunken antics, such as the time he and Zelda asked guests at a swanky Hollywood party in 1927 to hand over their watches for a magic trick and then went to the kitchen and boiled them in the tomato sauce. That when Fitzgerald awakened from another spree, he put on his tie and sat at his typewriter. Even when Zelda was institutionalized, and Fitzgerald’s career was dead, and he was in debt and living in dollar-a-night hotels in the South, he was still typing. Maybe it isn’t true, but, at his nadir, Fitzgerald did write “Crazy Sunday,” “Babylon Revisited,” and “The Crack-Up.”

I don’t believe a muse has to remain one though. She’s never just a heroine, a source of material. No, I think a muse must remain a person. A real person, a flesh-and-blood human being, with weepy moods, highs and lows, career highlights, dreams, traumas, and memories. A person to be cared for, despite all the words that are written about her. For as much as Scott was helping himself to Zelda’s diary for his literary projects, he did love her. When he arrived in California again in 1937, looking for work, and people remarked how his intense eyes appeared as if he was viewing the very openings of hell, I think it was the agony of seeing Zelda institutionalized that made them appear that way. I believe Scott did love Sheilah Graham, the English columnist with a colorful past and with whom he spent the last few years of his life in Hollywood. Scott turned Sheilah Graham into the main character in the novel he was working on, The Last Tycoon. Because to write about someone is to love them too. In a writerly, Scott Fitzgerald kind of way.

Scott died a few days before Christmas in 1940, a chain-smoker who guzzled Coca Cola and had been suffering from alcoholism for years. He stood up in Sheilah Graham’s apartment and dropped dead on the floor, a tragic figure. In the terms of the obtuse Estonian media, the man had what could be called an ootamatu terviserike.

One cold winter evening, I found myself on a lonely train platform, surrounded by forest, when a southbound train pulled up for a stop. There she sat. I could see her through the window, totally alone, staring out into the black darkness. How strange, I thought at that moment. To have her delivered to me, at this moment, like this.

First, I went and hid in another wagon on the train. But then I gave myself a little pep talk as the train rattled through the night and she sat there in her seat. “You can only keep running away from yourself for so long,” I lectured myself. “Something put her on this train. Go talk to her.”

Which I did. I wonder what we looked like, the sight of this enormous man seated across from a young woman who was half his size and half his age. The writer, denuded of his pens and notebooks, was forced to make conversation with his muse. She was all there. Her fox-like eyes, her silver rings. She was staring out the windows of wintertime Estonia, lost in her own story. Maybe she was writing poetry in her heart about another young man. Maybe I was some minor character. When we arrived at the station, it was flurrying, frost had formed on the platform. It occurred to me that this was like the scene of a novel. Such a scene demanded good dialogue.

“You know,” I said, affecting my most romantic posturing. “I do happen to like you very much.”

The young woman looked up curiously at the big man in the jacket beside her and said nothing.

“But do you want to know why I like you?”

The young woman shrugged a bit, as if to say, mul pole õrna aimugi. “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“I like to watch you when you listen to music,” I said. “You seem to be lost in another world.”

“That’s because music lifts us up,” she whispered. “Music can take us into other dimensions.”

The young woman put on her headphones again after that, tightened her coat, and walked home. I stood there for a while as the snow swept down. My hands were shaking then, both from the cold air and because I had been so bold to live out such a wonderful scene. Fitzgerald himself couldn’t have written it better on a $1,000-a-week screenwriter’s salary. It was just too perfect.

The Estonian version of this piece appears in the autumn 2026 edition of Edasi magazine. Special thanks to Robert Westbrook, the son of Sheilah Graham and author of Infinite Lies, who helped me with this story.

mill:liminal by murmer

*Into the mill. Mill:liminal is the audio accompaniment to the 2018 film The Mill, recorded at the Räpina Paper Factory in Estonia.*

MILL:LIMINAL IS NOT AN EASY RECORD to peg, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting or enjoyable. In fact, it’s among the more haunting, thought-provoking, and meditative recordings I have heard in some time. Released this year by Murmer, the handle of sound artist Patrick Tubin McGinley, it is the sonic accompaniment to a 35-minute film made with Daniel Edward Allen in 2018 called The Mill. To record The Mill, McGinley and Allen descended on the Räpina Paberivabrik, a paper mill in southeast Estonia that has been producing paper continuously since the 1730s. Here, the old mill’s creaks, whirs, rattles and hums are arranged into drone-like compositions distilled into seven, hypnotic tracks. McGinley reports that he was inspired to record the mill after having been a customer. Räpina produced the packaging for earlier releases, and he was drawn in by its mesmeric sounds.

McGinley’s approach to recording is very cinema verite. His sound recorders are the shaky hand holding the camera, giving you a first-person look — or in this case, listen — at what’s happening. The sounds for mill:liminal were recorded mostly with a Sennheisier MKH 30/40 boomed microphone rig connected to an SD744T hard disc portable field recorder. Additional sounds were recorded with self-constructed contact microphones and some with DPA 4060 miniature omnidirectional microphones. So what can sound like sound captured raw is actually the product of some serious technological sophistication and deep processing.

The result is unsettling, for mill:liminal sounds like consciousness melting off the slate of time. In some moments, the low and steady growl of the paper mill machinery takes on monastic tones, as if a monastery of Tibetan monks were assembled for prayer in the mountains.

It’s not hard to find parallels in McGinley’s work, but it does lead one to unexpected places. Is a man in a plaid shirt with a microphone in hand, poised to capture sounds in the field, not unlike Alan Lomax, with his field recordings of world music? McGinley does agree with that.

“I have long-standing thoughts about the world of field recording and experimental music being considered as folk music,” he says. “It’s music that has grown out of a community outside of academic circles, a sort of voice of a population.” Interestingly, he has noted that the mill, in its own way, is a living entity, as people play limited roles in maintaining its processes.

There are also sonic links to the experiments of minimalist composer La Monte Young and his Dream Syndicate. One can see how the hum of a paper mill aligns with Young’s tunings that matched the environmental sounds around him, most famously his reliance on a refrigerator’s 60-cycle electrical hum, which he considered as a foundational drone for his music. Young called the 60-cycle hum the “drone of Western civilization,” but as mill:liminal reminds us, these folk songs of machinery are all around us. If listened to, they can be a thing of beauty.

mill:liminal is available now as a digital download and will be available soon as a cd packaged in paper from the Räpina Paberivabrik. In addition to undertaking field recordings of creepy paper mills, Murmer also produces a regular weekly radio show called Framework Radio. Other recordings are available on Bandcamp.

drummer

I HAD BEEN SEEING Mai for a few weeks when she abruptly left me for a drummer. And not just any drummer, but Giorgio Marrakesh, the rhythm provider for one of New York’s most enduring indie rock ensembles. Mai was my kind of woman: a few years older, self-accomplished, intoxicatingly neurotic, a spicy summer cocktail of the dangerous and ridiculous, well shaken. She had her own TV show, which was called The Mai Show. She would emerge onto the stage of The Mai Show in her lovely pink tablecloth-looking dress as spellbound fans from everywhere applauded furiously. She would spin and settle onto one hip.

We had met at the Strand Bookstore downtown on a Wednesday afternoon. I had been paging through reproductions of 17th-century Swedish imperial maps; she had been reading a feature article about herself from 1994. She had just finished filming the day’s episode. She was sipping from a coffee cup. She wore those big glasses that famous people wear, to both draw attention to themselves and to avoid being seen. But those pink lips gave her away. It was all going swimmingly and summerly until Giorgio re-entered the picture. She went back to him at once. “He’s a drummer,” she said and shrugged. She related the end in a careless and wonderful way.

A drummer. Drummers sat in the back, surveying all before them. Drummers were steady, reliable. Drummers kept the beat. Drummers had their own philosophy. “But he’s just a drummer,” I wrote Mai. I sent telegrams to her apartment every hour on the hour, relayed by real messenger boys. “He’s just a drummer,” I continued. “He knows about cymbals, he knows about snares and tom-toms, he knows if it’s 4/4 or 6/8. Would a drummer write you a haiku?”

He’s just a drummer / Always playing with his sticks / Can’t write a haiku

A drummer, she was with a drummer, not a writer. But what is a writer? A writer is always writing. A writer is found in bookstores. A writer runs his fingers along old paperbacks by Salinger and Vonnegut, wishing he had written them, but secretly feeling superior to both.

“But can a writer also be worthy of your love?” I penned Mai. She read the letter while she was lounging around in her loft apartment, eating macaroni and cheese and talking to her agent. She never wrote back.

‘twilight haze’ by fuzzolini

FUZZOLINI’S NEW RECORD is called Beauty Exists in Everyone. I’ve seen this group perform a few times, and both times they were so loud, I thought I was about to go into cardiac arrest. Which is what makes listening to an actual recording, where I can control the volume, so refreshing. “Ah, so that’s what it’s supposed to sound like.” I wouldn’t blame them for the sonic dissonance. One aspect is that’s how rock clubs do it. It’s supposed to be loud. And I also think the group is going for the wall-of-sound effect. On the song “Twilight Haze” they manage to create that same kind of full noise tapestry without suffering from too much messy distortion.

I’m kind of impressed by Fuzzolini’s guitarist, singer and frontman (I guess you could call him that) Valter Nõmm, who looks like he fell asleep in about 1997 or so and just woke up in the forest somewhere, still wearing the same flannel shirt. He has maintained that kind of sensibility, as if he’s still listening to Soundgarden on his Walkman with his sunglasses on.

He’s not afraid of big, crunchy guitar sounds, but these bold strokes are applied sensitively, with the finesse of an artist. According to Nõmm, “Twilight Haze” was one of those songs that came out of nowhere. “Come out of nowhere” songs are mystical. Think of “Get Back,” which Paul McCartney conjured out of nothing. Better yet, nobody is quite sure of where they come from. They just come. Getting a few words out of this tight-lipped cat Nõmm is always an effort. He is a man who speaks in gestures and prefers to let his guitar do the talking. But he did manage to tell me that the song “was created spontaneously in the studio,” in one take.

The original track was just his guitar and drums, played by Lauri Pajos. Later Margus Voolpriit’s bass and Kristi Jõeste’s synths were added to the mix. “I decide to go for something cosmic,” Jõeste says. ” I started to feel a little bit like Sven Grünberg.” The synths give the track its “beamed in from space” feel. The vocals are performed by Mari-Liis Rebane, an audiovisual artist and producer, who sings with Fuzzolini. This too was improvised, which preserved its “raw emotion and exploratory style,” in her words. Rebane and Nõmm have known each other for 20 years and had collaborated before, but Fuzzolini gave them the opportunity to do more. She sings on several songs, including “Balloons,” for which she created the synth sequence.

“Twilight Haze” was the second track they recorded for the record. It seems they’re happy with it. “It carries within it the fluid feeling of moving through the night,” says Rebane. “I like it’s hypnotic quality,” Nõmm agrees. Cosmic synths, heavy guitars, smart vocals, big drums. What’s not to like?

Photos by Nicolas Bouvy

‘canto oscuro’ by araukaaria

Araukaaria on stage. Photo by Kerttu Kruusla.

ONE THING that has always impressed me about resident Viljandi Argentine musician José Manuel Prieto Garay, better known as Pepi, is his sincerity. It can be disarming at first, it can even make you a little suspicious, put you on guard. For how could a modern person be so sincere? At what point does such sincerity become an act? But his façade of sincerity is so durable and resilient that no matter what you throw at it, it just won’t stick. There’s no winking at the camera here, no hidden double meanings, no metamodernism. Everything is what it is.

This is sort of how I approach the new song by his group Araukaaria, too. “Canto Oscuro” is disarmingly sincere. It has a cinematic quality to it — it would make a good backing track to a montage about a religious pilgrimage. Considering the story behind it — the loss of Pepi’s father, a trip to Palestine — that’s not far off the mark. Pepi recounts a roadtrip between Chile and Argentina before his father passed away years ago in telling the story. His father was very ill at that time, and could barely make the trip. This song, “Canto Oscuro” (Dark Chant) is kind of like the soundtrack to that trip composed after the fact. It passes along like a mountain road at night.

Shadowy, lofty, winding, introspective.

“I think it was clear from the beginning of the song that it was some kind of lament or requiem,” says Pepi of the song. “I wanted to visualise the journey I lived with the music and lyrics.”

Supposedly it takes about 16 hours to drive from Santiago to Buenos Aires. “Canto Oscuro” is only about six minutes long, but it feels like it could be 16 hours long. There’s enough packed in, a flute motif by Rauno Vaher at its opening, atmospheric guitar playing by Viljandi virtuoso Norbert de Varenne, backing vocals by his sister María Julia Prieto Garay and keyboardist Lisanna Kuningas, and solid contributions by Fedor Bezrukov on bass and Johannes Eriste on drums, the rhythm section of an earlier incarnation of Araukaaria. Araukaaria is one of those bands like Nine Inch Nails, that revolve around a principal songwriter and musician, but that have a revolving cast of characters, some of whom return after various scrapes and adventures (Rauno Vaher was the original drummer, and the last time I saw them, he was back on drums).

“I like to work with different people and in particular here in Estonia most of the musicians are involved in three or four projects which makes it hard to schedule and coordinate,” says Pepi. “As the project is quite a live band project, having different people always brings a new flavor.”

One of these players is Lee Taul, also of Don’t Chase the Lizard, Black Bread Gone Mad, and the Songs and Stories from Ruhnu Island project, who provides epic sweep with her violin. And another is — surprise, surprise — Tomás del Real, another Viljandi Latin American musician, this time from Chile, who helps out on something called the charango, a “small Andean stringed instrument of the lute family,” as Wikipedia informs me. He hadn’t played it in years, he says. But here it is, filling out “Canto Oscuro,” fusing Estonian and Latin elements.

“One day I was working on some other stuff and Pepi rang me up and asked, ‘Do you have time today to help me with something? I need you to record a charango in two hours,” recalls del Real. “I hadn’t played in a while but I went over there and we locked in the studio for a little bit and I made what I could,” he says. “I knew that the song was important to him and that Chile in a way plays a part, this connection between his life here and there, so I guess I was one of the pieces he needed for that track.”

As a person who also lives a life bridging continents, I know that sentiment well. At times, in the air between Europe and the Americas, I have often thought of myself as pulling thread with a needle, trying to sew two lives, one here, one there, together. It’s this sense of disorientation, of displacement that lurks in the obscured background of “Canto Oscuro.”

It is felt, even if not expressed.

“Pepi has an ability to put images in music that the listener can understand without even understanding the lyrics,” says Kuningas. “A lot of his lyrics are very visual, and he is able to put these pictures in your mind.”

Most of the song was recorded in one live take, though a few elements — the backing vocals, the charango, classical guitar — were added later. Martin Mänd of Kopi Luwak recorded “Canto Oscuro.” It was mixed and mastered by Mattias Pärt. Animation to accompany the video was created by Pepi’s sister Camila. Pepi decided to release it on February 12, his father’s birthday. “This song is connected directly to my life, my story,” he says. “It’s a snapshot of that period of my life and has helped me to heal and to let go of a very big emotional burden.”

‘custer’ by johnny cash

AMERICAN COUNTRY GENTLEMAN Johnny Cash was feeling particularly aggrieved in 1964 and wishing to highlight the struggles of indigenous peoples in the United States, so he recorded a whole album of songs called Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian. The resulting record, released on October 1 of that year, less than a year after President Kennedy was killed in Dallas, and a month before Lyndon Johnson won a landslide victory against Barry Goldwater, is often a kind of side note. I don’t remember if it came up in Walk the Line. He didn’t mention it in A Complete Unknown either, even though it had just been recorded.

But it’s a beautiful collection, with spare, percussive musical accompaniment by the Tennessee Three, Cash’s backing band, which included Luther Perkins on guitar, Marshall Grant on bass, and WS Holland on drums. Session musicians Norman Blake, who is still alive (aged 87) and Bob Johnson helped out on guitar. The best parts of the songs are the lovely backing vocal contributions of The Carter Family. I had a hard time figuring out who was singing, but certainly Johnny’s future wife June Carter was in the lead, along with Maybelle, Helen, and Anita Carter. You can hear their sublime harmonies on “As Long As The Grass Shall Grow.”

“Custer” though might be my favorite on this record, if only for Johnny Cash’s dry and comic delivery. “Custer split his men / well, he won’t do that again.” We forget that for most of the time after George Armstrong Custer‘s defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, he was considered to be an American military hero. But in the 1960s, the Lakota version of events started to win out (Custer’s widow Libbie, by the way, lived until 1933, which shows you how recent this history was.) Cash makes fine work of the legend here, though he didn’t write the song. Peter La Farge, a Greenwich Village folky regular, penned most of the songs on Bitter Tears. La Farge recorded several records of music with Native American and Western themes for Folkaways Records. La Farge died the year after Bitter Tears was released of an overdose.

Probably one of the most contentious aspects was Cash’s claim of Cherokee ancestry and accusations of being a Pretendian. On the cover of the album, his fist can be seen lifted in solidarity. Cash wears a headband, which makes him look just a little like Charlie Sheen’s character in Hot Shots. His claims of Cherokee identity were later debunked by Cash himself. He had no documented Cherokee ancestry. However, claims that he was purely of Scottish or British Isles descent are also false. A DNA test by his daughter revealed that she had African ancestry on both sides of her family, meaning that somewhere in Johnny’s “pure Scots” woodpile were some Africans. Note that this ancestry wasn’t documented either. And on Geni, at least some claim that Cash’s Hagler family from South Carolina might be linked to the Catawba Chief Hagler. So maybe Johnny was Catawba and not Cherokee. It’s certainly possible. This great record is the subject of a documentary and a tribute album too. “Custer” at two minutes and twenty-one seconds is not, maybe, the standout track, but it’s just perfect.

I remember that when Cash died in 2003, I said to a friend at that time, “But he was young, just 71 years old.” And the friend said, “But he had lived his life. He packed as much as he could into those 71 years.” I suppose after he lost June, just a few months prior, he had no reason to keep on living. But you are missed, Johnny Cash. We’re still listening to your music every single day.

‘robert f. kennedy’ by the ethiopians

I HAVE DECIDED to create a new series that I call New Track. I was going to call it New Track of the Week, but I am not sure if I will write about a new track every week. What if I want to write about one every two weeks? Or if I want to write about two new tracks in one week? New Track of the Week would be limiting. That’s why this series is just called New Track.

New Track features a new track. It’s a new song I have discovered that I would like to write about and share with the world. In this way, I can feature all kinds of music. In particular, I would like to write about local artists in Estonia who are connected to Viljandi in some way, but not exclusively. Rather, I’d just like to write about whatever I happen to be listening to. And today’s new (inaugural) track is ‘Robert F. Kennedy ‘ by a Jamaican outfit called The Ethiopians.

How did I discover this track? I was in a record store in Amsterdam and was looking at a Don Drummond record. Don Drummond was a Jamaican ska trombonist and integral member of the famous group The Skatalites. A lot of great Jamaican recordings from the 1960s were released as 45s, and so many are now available in various compilations. So, it was through exploring these compilations that I came upon this breezy recording, “Robert F. Kennedy.”

Learning about Jamaican groups can be complex. Often I try to find out who the bass player was on some sessions only to be led down the rabbit hole. This 2:04 song was recorded about a year after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (who would have been 100 years old on November 20, which also happens to be my birthday). The song is also credited to the Sir JJ All Stars. The Ethiopians were a popular vocal harmony group in Jamaica and in 1969 released an album called Reggae Power on the Sir JJ label run by producer Karl Johannes “J.J.” Johnson. “Robert F. Kennedy” is an instrumental track off that record.

But who was in the Sir JJ house band? It consisted of Bobby Aitken (guitar), Winston Richards (drums), Vincent White (bass), Alphonso Henry (alto sax), Val Bennett (tenor sax), Dave Parks (trombone), Mark Lewis (trumpet), Bobby Kalphat (keyboards), and someone called “Iron Sprat” (bongos). At least I think it did. Of the group, at least Vincent White is still around and playing. Here’s an interview with him recorded in July.