First Decade: Jazz and "Dark Souls"

Accidental selfie ca. January 2021, sweatshirt gifted to me by Walter & Matt for my 29th birthday

The first time I played Dark Souls was probably in September 2020, deep pandemic and almost exactly midway through my first decade in New York. I had a COVID pod with my triomates, Walter Stinson and Matt Honor, and I distinctly remember them putting the controller in my hands and saying, "You have to play this." They had alluded to the major parallel between the Souls games and my music at the time, namely the supposedly punishing difficulty level, and I quickly found myself pulled into the thrall of interactive entertainment in a way I hadn't felt since I was a pre-teen.¹

It's been years since that first intoxicating taste of Souls, and although I've wanted to write about the series and jazz for years, I never got around to committing many of my thoughts on the two  until now. 

In retrospect, I think my fondness for the original installment, my earliest exposure to the entire Soulslike-genre, is really due to the world-building and atmosphere^2: the feeling of being dropped into a ruined world and exploring it at your leisure/peril, without excessive cutscenes, music, or hand-holding.

A major assumption of modern game storytelling—developing a compelling narrative primarily through character development and dialogue, with its attendant cutscenes and plot-moving events—seemed to go out the window with Dark Souls, where you get one huge lore-heavy cutscene at the beginning, and then you're left on your own for most of the rest of the playthrough. In place of these conventional narrative devices, the core combat system and exploration provide the majority of the impetus for forging on: the sheer fun of being challenged along the journey, discovering new enemies and new weapons, and exploring alternatives or different ways of proceeding in the world. 

I felt a kind of kindred spirit in the foregrounding of this core aspect of the gameplay, which felt analogous to putting melody or other traditional elements of music in the background and letting the improvisational chemistry of musicians do the heavy lifting for the listener. Just because you don't disclose the narrative arc of the game in an obvious way doesn't mean it's not compelling for the player or even that it lacks a compelling narrative.

Similarly, not stating a central melodic theme in an obvious way doesn't mean the music won't be engaging for a listener, and it also doesn't mean there isn't a strong melodic core to a work—only that it's being expressed in another way, like as an invisible or occluded scaffolding for improvisation, whose outline or shape can be perceived through careful attention but which isn't necessary for the enjoyment of the proceedings.

Another aspect of the game that both inspired and felt validating at the time was the use of difficulty as a parameter of aesthetic expression³. The hardness or perceived difficulty of certain enemy encounters or other challenges in Dark Souls wasn't the point in itself, but it contributed to the overall experience and mood of the game; like spiciness, it can be meaningless or tasteless if employed without finesse, but it can contribute to a much more memorable or even life-changing experience if deployed sensibly and creatively. 

As I've written and talked about numerous times over the past ten years, I've sought to keep my own music at the edge of my capabilities to keep a certain searching or reaching quality to my sound. Keeping the challenge or complexity within reason raises the stakes for myself and the musicians I'm playing with in a good way: it makes the music something that we're figuring out and realizing together, but keeps it from being too easily done while also not being too much of a grind to achieve.  

On a broader thematic level, the sense of arriving in a world that's past its glory days in Dark Souls does feel a lot to me like entering the jazz scene of New York in the early 21st century. Much has been written and discussed about Dark Souls and depression, which brings to mind one of modern television's most famous characters struggling with depression, Tony Soprano, who famously says in the show's pilot: "...lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over." 

As the Chosen Undead in Dark Souls, you see firsthand the faded wonders of a world where timelines and eras are intersecting in strange ways that cause confusion and even agony for those involved. As an artist in the streaming era, you coexist in a virtual listening environment with all the greats of the past century and a decade of recorded music, and the ghosts of those artists haunt you in a very real way in that modern listeners of jazz can choose to check out just about any Coltrane, Miles, Bird, or whoever's record instead of yours with their limited time, energy, and money. 

In another sense, the Chosen Undead's arc seems to suggest a similar one for young musicians on the scene; sure, you exist and you can play, but so can multiple generations of more experienced, better known artists on your instrument vying for the same gigs. Just as the possessors of the four Lord Souls continue to dominate their regions of Lordran well into advanced age, many masters of your instrument are still working actively; of course, while the goal in Dark Souls is to defeat Seath the Scaleless or whomever in order to take their Lord Soul, in real life you can learn directly from the musical equivalent of Seath—heck, you can even maybe become friends or at least acquaintances with them, and they might even consider putting your name on the guest list for their shows, and they might even recommend you for gigs. 

So it's not quite as dire, but there are real financial consequences to an overcrowded marketplace with limited demand, and the ultimate theme of Dark Souls seems to suggest that perpetuating the cycle for so long has led to the world to its ruinous state; darkness, or at least the possibility of closure for now, seems to be the better option for all. As the series progresses, the cycle of linking the flame keeps the world going for better or for worse, where new kingdoms rise and fall, but ultimately the weight of all those civilizations threatens to collapse upon what remains in Dark Souls 3. 

In a meta-twist, the original game and its gameplay design have been so influential as to create a number of clones and to inspire developers in other genres to incorporate aspects of their design choices; in so doing, the ethos and spirit of Dark Souls lives on in ways that far exceed its original scope. Ideally, prior golden ages of jazz and improvised music would have a similar result—rather than keeping Gwyn, Lord of Cinder, barely alive as a Hollow shell of his former regal self, the knowledge and skills of Gwyn would be passed on to others to inspire and expand to new worlds that haven't yet been born.

Hollowing is one of the defining gameplay mechanics and source of lore for the entire series. In my understanding, the process of becoming Hollow is ultimately is tied to losing one's sense of purpose in the world, which then results in losing one's memories and sanity.⁴ You do seem to see a bit of this in the real world in all arenas of life: people who've given up their dreams or their ambitions, or who seem to live on mindlessly through their daily routines (independent of age or mental stability). As it relates to living a decade in New York, I'm still trying to fight on against the threat of becoming Hollow by taking care to remember my purpose and why I came to this deeply complex, but infinitely rewarding place. 

Apropos, Juanma Trujillo sent me this clip from a recent interview with Mark Turner, which basically sums it up:

[From having ego you] You get fear, anxiety, you know, attachment. F*** that s***, man—kill it [emphasis mine]! If you're afraid of something, f***ing step right in there. That's what I did. I was like, "All right, I'm just going to do it." And yeah, you sink or swim. You sink a lot and maybe you swim once. 

I played sessions with Seamus [Blake] all the time; he'd kick my ass every time. I said, "F*** it. Imma play with him again. I'm going do it again, again, again [emphasis mine]—until "Oh, maybe he didn't kick my ass so much that time; maybe we are similar, you know ...

...I did it all the time, you know, and yeah, people might not want to call you because they don't think you're as good. I said, "Fine, I'll wait," or I'll just step in even though they didn't ask me ... Yes, you get your feelings hurt. That's the f***ing point: until they don't hurt. You know what I'm saying? 

To me, this really eerily echoes this unforgettable, unmistakably winking line from the beginning of Dark Souls 2, where the aged firekeepers say straight to your face: "You'll lose your souls. All of them. Over and over again"—and that's the point! Without the innumerable and repeated "YOU DIED" moments, the journey is without meaning; you would might as well give up and go Hollow now (or play Stardew Valley). 

It's truly a cliché, but one never more reconfirmed than by a fresh playthrough of a Souls game and the immediacy of wanting to start a new run once the credits roll. It's not about beating the final boss and reaching the "end" of the storyline, but about all the choices and explorations made along the way (what build, what sequence of bosses or progression, all the way to the point of insane challenge runs). The only given of committing to this path is that you'll die along the way, but it'll be fun and, what's more, it'll be your choice.

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¹I wrote a micro-summaries of my impressions of the other Souls games as I played them in the February 2021 edition of my newsletter, and I've gone on to play and beat the other major releases since then (Armored Core 6, Elden Ring plus DLC, and Nightreign, plus I borrowed Max Light's PS3 to play the original Demon's Souls, which many have argued convincingly still surpasses the more recent PS5 remake). 

²Firelink Shrine and the initial areas of Lordran like the Undead Parish and Darkroot Garden actually remind me a lot of areas of central New Jersey where I grew up. Save for the presence of hollows and other hostile entities, central Jersey's wooded forest paths, occasionally mountainous terrain, and often partly cloudy weather felt a lot in my memory like those early areas of Lordran. I imagine part of the connection was also my nostalgia and desire to visit those areas during the lockdown, and instead partially fulfilling that virtually through exploring the game.

³Game Maker's Toolkit on YouTube has a number of interesting video essays on this and related topics, including "Should Dark Souls Have an Easy Mode? (See Pinned Comment)" from 2016.

⁴Much has been written on Hollowing as a metaphor not only for depression, but also for dementia and Alzheimer's disease.