Sport 32: Summer 2004
Jonathan
Jonathan
What's interesting is what happens to the musicians' faces when they play. They look and lock into each other's eyes with the sustained intensity usually reserved for lovers. Jonathan, who off-stage ambles around loose-limbed and amiable to the point of goofy, who maintains page 91 the loose-limbed amiable imperturbability of your classic stoner, on-stage becomes someone absolutely different. His feet twitch and flex at the pedals, curl away, strain back; his face also twitches, flexes, and strains. He can bend almost double over the keyboard, so that his left cheekbone—his eyes closed, his teeth grinding; he's hissing through his lips—is almost touching the keys. It can be so intimate or so revealing that you are obliged to look away. It would be embarrassing—it is embarrassing, actually; this is, after all, New Zealand; our present is like another country; we do things differently here—if it weren't so clearly unforced. Ask him about it later and he will look back at you blankly, halfway between puzzled and indignant. ‘If the music's really happening,’ Jonathan will say, flatly, ‘I don't know what it looks like from the outside.’
He does a good flat, Jonathan. A good blank, too—he can blank you like he was born for it. He is, one suspects, easily bored. Also: easily impatient, and quick to anger. Indulged, in fact, and therefore oddly vulnerable, overly defended, in the way of all those who have been indulged: well, he got found young. He got mentored and protégéd young; and his mentors, the ones to whom he played protégé, were amongst the best across several businesses. Bruno Lawrence. Geoff Murphy. Gaylene Preston.
—Patrick Bleakley, perhaps. Certainly if you ask Jonathan Crayford—half in a kind of faux innocence, half in genuine curiosity—why it isn't called The Patrick Bleakley Trio, his reaction is out of all proportion: he will do everything but stop the Volvo and throw you out. In the middle of Khandallah, yet (he's dropping Alda home; it's four o'clock in the morning, again).
His face looks like God set out working to a classical mould—cheekbones, brow, jawline—and then accidentally sat on it. The hair, which is longish, a rich dark brown and curly, is often contained beneath a battered beanie: he is unkempt to the point of studied. The eyes are green, darkly shadowed, unusually large, and set unusually far apart: he maintains a kind of permanent I-don't-give-a-fuck stubble. At the break—when he is approached and embraced, rapturously, by half a dozen punters—he smells, strongly but not unpleasantly, of sweat. Well: it's hot work, this jazz thing.
page 92Opinions about Jonathan vary. ‘He's an arsehole,’ is certainly one you'll hear without going looking for it, although it's always coupled with a grudging admission of the kind and degree of his talent. He has this unlikely alpha male thing going on, not necessarily pitched to endear him to other men. It makes you wonder. Are hippies allowed to be alpha males? —Aren't they meant to have bought out of all that structure, patriarchy, capitalist competitive war-y sort of shit? —But then hippies aren't meant to be control freaks, either. Welcome to the difficult, idiosyncratic, infuriating and invigorating world of Jonathan Crayford. Either you accept the rules here—which will contradict themselves, gratuituously, at random and without warning—or you just don't bother, 'cos he ain't coming into anyone else's. Too lazy? Too scared? Too weary? Just over it? —Who knows (and if anyone does, it almost certainly isn't Jonathan).
It is his intention or fantasy to abandon the IAP; to seed it, to establish it, and then let it go, to flourish without him. It is hard to imagine this happening any time in the foreseeable future. Jonathan combines a distaste for the telephone, a resistance to schedule, and a marked wariness of encroachment on his private time to think, with an apparently complete inability to delegate. This manifests not purely musically: for Alda's farewell, he will spend an entire day, from nine in the morning till seven at night, shopping for food and then cooking for upwards of thirty people; and this is toward the end of the first IAP wave, when he has not slept for more than a few hours at a time for weeks, when he has become silently frantic with exhaustion and suppressed resentment, when all his resources are close to depleted. By the time people start arriving he is white-faced and subdued; but all offers of help have been refused (and the food, the tables, the set-up, are perfect).
Or: packing up. Watch him, wearily, patiently looping cables and extension cords, shifting boxes, moving gear, loading the van. When one of the doco crew asks him if he needs help he will shake his head. ‘Nah thanks man,’ he will say, friendly but uninflected. No one else can do it right, it seems. Just easier to do it on your own, it seems, no matter how tired you are. Just to do it.
page 93I've been an ugly duckling all my life wondering why I when all my
friends were
and becoming well-known and I
I
I'm actually not all that much into recording I
I want to
I want to be a part of
I want to be a part of something that makes things change