Patty Waters
College Tour

The air in Iowa is radioactive. It's radon, the subsoil is saturated with it. This makes the land fertile and the wind poisonous.

Someone is even happy.

It causes genetic mutations.

Like the painful whisper of Billie Holiday and the demonic scream of Diamanda Galás hybridized in the slight body of a white country girl raised on Sunday sermons and pumpkin pies.

Patty lives in a small hole of Iowa, it's called Logan, which has this good point: it's a shithole. So, as soon as you can, you run away.

And, indeed, Patty runs away, she leaves the Church choirs, the family (which, in the meantime, had moved to Denver), a father never known and a stepfather never loved, piano lessons, early musical experiences with the Jerry Gray Hotel Jazz Band, healthy values, school dances, and dolls given to her by her mother.

It's 1963, and Patty has brought her eighteen years to San Francisco.

Life is hard but there is Music there. And she understood the first time she listened to Billie Holiday that Music would be her life.

And one night she meets Miles Davis.

He was playing at "Black Hawk." He invites her to his home for a few days. He sends a limousine to pick her up. During those days Miles listens to her music, encourages her, helps her write "Moon, Don’t Came Up Tonight," which will see the light on her first album.

When Patty has a son, she will name him Andrew Miles.

Then, Patty leaves. She flies to Manhattan. That’s where you need to be. That's where things happen.

She works as a waitress. All day. It's still tough. But at night, she roams around the jazz clubs. She approaches all the musicians, especially the black ones, despite her almost pathological shyness.

She meets Ben Webster, Chick Corea, Bill Evans, Ornette Coleman. Keith Jarrett invites her to his home. She starts singing at some parties and in some clubs.

One evening Albert Ayler happens to listen to her.

Ayler is working on "Spiritual Unity" for Esp-disc of that madman Stollman. He decides that Patty is perfect for the "thing" being born at Esp.

That's how "Sings," Patty Waters' first album, comes out.

"Sings" is nocturnal and schizophrenic music: a handful of fragile and crepuscular torch songs, just voice, sighs, and piano on the first side, and then the 14 minutes of "Black Is The Color Of My True Love's Hair," where Patty transforms into a wolf howling at the moon.

It's 1965 and something like this could only see the light at Esp-disc.

What is it? What did she and Burton Greene make of that innocuous folk standard? It's reductive to speak of free jazz. It's free-form vocal experimentation, psychedelia, atonal music, orgiastic bacchanalia, nonsensical stuff, or a prank?

The critics didn’t like it, the public didn’t even notice. But some more courageous ears perked up.

Patty didn’t find success but found love.

Clifford Jarvis played drums in Sun Ra's Arkestra and was black. Patty didn’t care but others did. Her family never forgave her, and it wasn’t easy in Manhattan either. America wasn’t ready for her diversity, neither the musical one nor the personal one. She wrote “Song of Clifford” for him.

You don’t sing like that if you aren’t free inside. And freedom is never free.

Stollmann didn’t pay his artists but thought of everything to support their music. So he thought it best to have the New York State Council for the Arts sponsor a series of concerts in colleges.

The incredible thing is that he got the funding.

Stollmann put Patty, Sun Ra, Ran Blake, Giuseppi Logan, the trio of Burton Greene on a bus and sent them around for those concerts. They played, ate, and slept all together on that bus. Try to imagine!

The tapes that came out of it were published under Patty Waters' name with the title "College Tour."

If "Sings" lives at night, "College Tour" is a dawn record. It's the moment of awakening when the conscience is not yet awake, and the monsters are still free to scream. It's that moment when Molly Bloom vomits her soul. It's a record, if possible, even more extreme than "Sings," more abstract, more difficult, but, for me, even more beautiful.

Look at the cover: little Patty, who smiles shyly in a refined black and white in "Sings," has become the priestess of a Dionysian ritual. Her eyes are dark caves, the smile ambiguous and indecipherable, a dark symbol drawn on her forehead, a suggested nudity. The mutation is complete.

It will be her second album. The last one for almost thirty years.

Because Clifford had gone, he had his career to follow (and he would do good things, both alone and with people like Chet Baker, Archie Shepp, and others). But he left her something: a child.

Freedom isn’t free and, sooner or later, they’ll bring you the bill.

Patty drops everything and goes to Europe, but money runs out soon; from Esp-disc, she had received - in total - no more than 350 dollars. So she returns to New York and starts working as a ticket seller in an East-Side cinema.

She no longer wants to sing.

Stollmann searches for her, finds her in a small, sparse, and disordered apartment, but there is a grand piano. But Patty doesn't want to know anymore: she has a son to raise.

Patty goes to California. Andrew Miles is born in 1969, he will have what she didn’t have.

Because you do not sing like that if you don’t have a heart within.

With what voice will she sing lullabies to Andrew?

And Patty disappears.

But dramatic structure foresees three acts. It was fine for Aristotle, it's fine for life.

Third act: the discovery.

Because she disappeared, but her records did not. Someone discovers them, listens to them, talks about them. Those two incredible records are the epiphany of all vocal experimentation to come: Diamanda Galás, Yoko Ono, Meredith Monk, Patti Smith, Joan LaBarbara, Lydia Lunch, Sonic Youth more or less openly pay homage to her. But the best tribute comes from Yoko Ono, who, tired of being constantly told how much she owed to Waters, had written: “Ms. Ono did not know Ms. Waters or her work.”

In 1996, Patty is in Santa Cruz; she works as a shop assistant in a friend’s store. Life is hard. She is intercepted by pianist Jessica Williams, who lives in those parts and proposes a tribute album to Billie Holiday. The album will be titled "Love Songs."

No, this is not a Hollywood film. It doesn’t have that kind of Happy ending: the album doesn’t sell a damn thing. That train has passed. Patty will do some concerts, a record of demos and outtakes, "You Thrill Me: A Musical Odyssey 1962–1979," will be published in 2004 and a live album, "Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe: Live in San Francisco 2002," with old friend Burton Greene in 2005. But by now, it’s a matter for just a few intimates. She stays in Kauai, a small island in the middle of the Ocean; she followed Andrew Miles, who is a surfer.

She got lost in the middle of the Ocean. Like the sweet, fragile Tim; who - consciously or not - was the truest, most genuine epigone. Tim, the navigator of stars, who got lost between the Ocean of stars.

This is all, a small flower sprouted in the poisonous air of Iowa. What else ever came from there (and what do you expect from a place where the typical dish is a sausage, battered, fried, and stuck on a stick)?

Only two famous people come from Iowa. One real: John Wayne. And one imaginary: James Tiberius Kirk.

James T. Kirk, the captain of the Enterprise, the protagonist of Star Trek.

A navigator of the stars.

Was it a coincidence?

(Dedicated to Andrew Miles Waters. Wherever you are: fuck you!)