Here & Now 173: A singing world

Ballina. Thursday, 7.35pm

He’s small but has a big voice. And sweet. Out of this older little man comes the song of an angel.

Do angels sing?

I’ve seen the sacred selfies on church walls and in holy books for children (ain’t they all?) and it appears that angels are not so much singers as trumpeters. Maybe Louis was really Lucifer, blowing hot and cool, swinging in sinful freefall as he was shown the heavenly door while the saints went marchin’ in. Maybe God Himself is into jazz (even though jazz was always supposed to be the Devil’s music, with its pain and sexuality) and the angels lift their horns to praise His greatness with a Miles Davis tune. Because God is in pain, man.

Maybe on Sunday, when God is all done creatin’ and smotin’, he drops the needle onto a Billie Holiday track, opens a bottle of Irish whiskey and drowns His universal sorrow. (Where did it all go wrong? You create a world replete with the complex ecosystems of an Eden; you trigger an evolutionary process that should deliver the miracle of a conscious planet – and what do you get? A savage species stupid enough for not only its own suicide but intent on taking down the whole shebang with it.) What’s a God to do?

Drink. Listen to jazz.

It’s got to be better than a Gregorian chant, ho-hum hymn, clap-along Jesus folk music, or the lightweight metal cred of heavy Christian rock.

The angelic little man is one half of a duo. He is complemented in nearly every way by his partner: one small, the other tall; one tenor, the other baritone; one animated, the other chilled. But both blokes have shiny pates and almost spherical stomachs. Not so interesting to look at, but beautiful to listen to.

Art is beauty made by humans. And art is found in the most unlikely places – like in this camp kitchen of a caravan park in Ballina. The duo belongs to a Probus group from Brisbane which sits at long tables peppered with empty beer bottles, the odd half-empty bottle of red wine, and the watery eye of memories.

At the other end of the room, students from a Japanese university celebrate the birthday of their professor. There’s been candle blowing, Happy Birthday singing, and loud noises made by those things that unfurl a tube of paper (like a South American lizard’s tongue) when you blow into them.

Inspired by the Happy Birthday song and the acoustics of tiled walls and glass doors, the two old blokes jumped up (well, maybe not jumped) and now sing I Still Call Australia Home.

The chit cat of elders and the rowdiness of youth recedes like an outgoing tide as the two voices intertwine and play, curving up like smoke, twisting around each other and through the audience, tying us together, filling the room with a music that I know, now, is not an angelic anthem but the sound of humanity. No unfallen angel could make such sound, sweet and sad.

This is the pinnacle of Earthly evolution – not rockets to comets, not streaming Batman versus Superman on a phone, not dull men in duller suits slaving for corporate interests at a G20 junket, not Vegemite, Viagra or Velcro – it’s this: humans singing.

Art is beauty made by humans. Art is our purpose and great achievement. But I fear we are losing our ability to recognise art. We are blinded by celebrity and money, pixels and power. Our great achievements are not to be found in parliaments, board rooms, laboratories, factories, malls or studios.

It is here.

Two blokes making a doleful God tap His toe.

And making the planet spin.