Around 1933, Billy Strayhorn wrote the jazz standard, “Lush Life,” a song about regret, love, heartache, a failed romance. How does one go on, running from jazz club to cocktail, to jazz club to another cocktail, with such a pain of a lost love? Strayhorn wrote the song as a teenager, somewhere between the ages of 16 and 19, living in Pittsburgh. The extraordinary thing is that the lyrics describe the world-weary disillusionment of a seasoned bohemian — late nights in jazz clubs, failed romances, existential drift — written by a kid who had barely lived any of it yet. It reads like a premonition of his own life more than a memoir of it.
The lyrics are genuinely literary in a way that stands apart from most popular song. Lines like "I used to visit all the very gay places, those come-what-may places" have this elegant, melancholic sweep. The vocabulary is sophisticated, the emotional register almost unbearably sad. There's also the biographical undercurrent: Strayhorn was a gay Black man in mid-century America. The loneliness in the song has layers that go beyond romantic heartbreak.
Tomoo Gokita named his current show at Taka Ishii Gallery Roppongi & Kyobashi in Tokyo, Lush Life, and his reasoning is to evoke a sense of memory, of loss, of remembrance. If you look at the entirety of Gokita’s career, he has always thought in terms of presenting nostalgic details, old films, old pop-culture, but through a distorted lens of his own imagination. They feel like relics of the collective, but his own personal memory’s of them. They are messy and somehow truly sublime. Here in Lush Life, the dark tones and charcoals feel unearthed from the past, ambiguous and minimal, enigmatic and alone.
Perhaps Gokita was using the Strayhorn composition (and the subsequent brilliant recording sessions of John Coltrane in the late 1950s also called Lush Life) as the standard for memory. These are the artists who spoke about, wrote about, memory in ways in which a visual artist can find the essence in the air and capture into a painting. It’s an unlikely collaboration between two artists, but one that Gokita is worthy to take on. —Evan Pricco
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