Helldriver's Pit Stop

Time again to wander through the well-stuffed graveyard of my literary ambitions, whistling as I go, bending now and again to re-read inscriptions, I, patriarch of this obscure family of stones, one such yard among many thousands, some long-ago abandoned, some barely able to keep up with their parade of dead, some of a rare gothic beauty, so that, like the Recoleta in Buenos Aires, they draw millions of visitors annually to leave flowers and pinwheels and scrawled messages for the departed. In these graveyards the stones never weather, even the most ancient engravings are still legible, and even the oldest flowers smell as though they had been picked this morning. The pinwheels never fade, though neither do they turn. And the stones cannot be overturned, and the ground neither heaves nor settles, and the graves will not be robbed. If a stone disappears, it takes the whole graveyard with it, and leaves not a trace—for what stone can claim the memory of the vanished yard itself, of a lineage, a house, a clan?

I am patriarch, but also gravedigger and stonecutter. I make memorials; this is my chief occupation. Custody may be shared with Mother Experience, but the stones are all mine. This arrangement pleases me. The children pass away so quickly, you see. But the stones, the stones remain. I find them very companionable. And if the graves are never robbed, there is good reason: there is nothing to steal. These stones are as much cenotaphs as the marble tablets in Whaleman’s Chapel. Says Ishmael to the reader, about the bereaved: “Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say—here, HERE lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave.”

The bodies—the music of experience behind each of these stones—are similarly lost at sea, in depthless Time; they survive only in the inscriptions, in the fantasy the latter create that a body is buried somewhere beneath. Dig as much as you like, your shovel-blade will never strike a coffin’s hull. If indeed Ishmael’s body was “but the lees of [his] better being,” then what price resurrection? Resurrection be d—-d! As for Faith, I’ll put mine in those marble tablets, or rather in the words cut in them. Aye, Helldriver, Ishmael’s happy fate is thine, as it is all of ours: “a stove boat,” says he, “will make me an immortal by brevet … [through] a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity.” Faith may be a jackal, but the poor creature starves here—the mere idea of death is not enough to sustain him. It is the inscriptions, only the inscriptions that sustain me; I hope and fear that they are my true substance; my eternity, dear Ishmael—like yours—is anything but speechless!

*

Wandering among the year’s stones, I suppose the first thing to note is that the Pit has diversified—not in theme or purpose, of course, but in style and form. Scott Burnham, in the marvelous final chapter of his 1995 book on Beethoven, calls for rethinking the way academics in particular talk about music.* While I can’t really blame Burnham for my own evolving approach to writing about music, his words do remain a touchstone and an inspiration. (Perhaps professors of music should be more careful what they wish for?) Overall, there is more in the way of creative dialogues with music—more fiction, pastiche, parody—more play—than in the previous two years, though these remain scattered among the more traditional reviews, cultural analyses, personal reflections, and thoughts on pedagogy.

I also wanted to take a moment to clarify one aspect of my process. I’ve noted that I sometimes revise and post older pieces. Now, if an event is involved—usually a concert—there is always a lag between experience and text, usually a few weeks, sometimes more. Sometimes, I work the lag into the piece, as in the year between the show and the post that became “Animistic” (5.18.12). Sometimes, a concert review becomes part of a longer reflection on a genre or band, or I’ll wait a few months and bundle some shorter reviews in a single post. Some pieces, like my by-now-mythical post about Scarlatti, have been in draft form for going on two years; I keep turning back to do more reading and listening; I dread the monstrosity it threatens to become. The point is that I only call attention to something as a revision if it was actually finished and drawer’d before this blog was launched back in 2010.

“Year of the Oh” (3.6.13): In an earlier draft of this post there was more about gender and ethnicity in jazz. A very interesting discussion a couple of weeks back about women in heavy metal prompted me to reflect. If one calls too much attention to an individual musician’s gender (or ethnicity, or whatever), it smacks of tokenism. If one overlooks it, one ignores the very real disparities that still exist, in jazz as much as in other genres. How then to balance drawing gee-whiz attention to (say) gender, and ignoring it entirely? Perhaps I was thinking about this catch-22 when I decided to cut (more likely I was just concerned about length). What makes Oh’s situation particularly interesting is that she is a threefold anomly: in terms of gender, ethnicity, and choice of instrument. I hardly had to face such a dilemma writing about Kazzrie Jaxen (“All That Is Solid,” 12.19.12): disparities notwithstanding, women have been a deep presence in jazz piano since the ‘30s, and Jaxen, bright and wandering star though she is, stands on the shoulders of that tradition, as well as the traditions of classical and avant-garde piano. Anyway, later at the same venue, though not during the same discussion, someone commented that in indie rock, the (electric) bass was one instrument it was “okay for girls to play.” Given Oh’s obvious and deep debt to rock, do we have this obscure rule of music/genre/culture to credit for her evolution into bass-playing bipedalism—and perhaps for the presence of other female bass players in jazz as well?

Reviewing some previous jottings, I actually came across a page of notes I had missed about the Soundscapes Vanguard show. The details are useless now, but the thoughts they prompt about the role of the bass in jazz and other musics might be worth mentioning. Because of its pitch and usual place among the rhythm instruments, the bass is always present, but not always heard—something I alluded to about William Parker’s playing in “Two Free Jazz Epitaphs” (12.7.12). It reminds me of something Tobin, the priest, says to the unnamed “kid” in Blood Meridian: that he’ll know the voice of God has always been present when he stops hearing it.** This is the bass: the Voice that keeps the stars aligned and the planets on their respective axes and orbits, though we only really notice it’s there when things go to hell. It’s the reason Hendrix played so much cleaner with Billy Cox than with Noel Redding: Cox, the Voice, keeps Jimi on the straight and narrow. Redding was but a slovenly demiurge. This is also why a great bass solo is such a show-stopper: if you’re actually going to hear the Voice, you need the quiet of the church; the rest of the music has to stop, or nearly stop, and this creates a space that doesn’t exist for the other soloists—even for a soloist who plays an unaccompanied set. A great bass player knows how to exploit that silence, to frame him or herself in the contours of the sound that precedes and follows.

From reading Charles Rosen’s companion to the Beethoven sonatas, I learned that the beginning of the Opus 2 No. 3, which I noted gave one of the young pianists at the Cincinnati World Piano Competition difficulties (“Closer Than They Appear,” 8.4.12), is “famously awkward to play”—which tells me a little something about the presumed hierarchy of virtuosities. And then just the other day I had the chance to see the marvelous 1998 film about Svatoslav Richter, The Engima, at the Walter Reade. There, Glenn Gould calls Richter “one of the age’s great musical communicators.” Unlike a Paganini or Liszt, who made the act of performing apparent to the listener, Richter used his “enormous personality … as a conduit” between the music and the audience, allowing them to focus on the music itself rather than the performance. This is fairly close to what I was trying to say about the Hungarian pianist Bogdan Dulu in the same post, using Emerson to do so. Emerson or not, I could hardly have said it with anything approaching Gould’s authority … or with that smarmy erudition, in what sounds suspiciously like a ‘30s Hollywood “British” accent.§

Finally, about an old, old post: I was listening to the Eric Dolphy/Booker Little Memorial Album the other day—this is the third installment in the Five Spot recordings, the quintet also featuring Mal Waldron and Eddie Blackwell. Listening to “Booker’s Waltz,” I realized something that had been a bit of a mystery for me when writing about Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints” (7.26.10). There, I commented on the enjoyable effect produced when the accent from the drums comes a fraction of a beat before the bass. What I realized from “Booker’s Waltz”—and the same holds true for many if not all jazz waltzes—is that it’s a 2-against-3 rhythm with the two swung.§§ I guess this is what I meant when I said that some of the things that are fascinating and mysterious to a listener may be common practice to the musician.

It’s always fun to make such discoveries oneself, though I confess that, when I started this blog, I had rather hoped its place on the CUNY Commons would mean the occasional itinerant music scholar might wander by, sniff, squat, defecate, and pass on. (“A flatted fifth? Are you sure you don’t mean a flattened fifth? A squashed fifth—like a cockroach?”) Perhaps my good humor constipates them.

As long as we’re talking about graveyards, I should take this opportunity to chisel a line about two Commons yards abandoned or vanished: Footenotes and Librarianship in Lower Manhattan. The latter tossed the occasional asphodel into my Pit; many thanks for the recommendation of Chris McDonald’s book on Rush—it now occupies a happy place on my shelf between Will Hermes’ Love Goes to Buildings on Fire and Steve Waksman’s This Ain’t the Summer of Love. I hope the bibliographizing project goes well. As for Footenotes, obviously an enormous hole has opened in the Commons, like those gluttonous sinkholes swallowing homes all over Florida. I hope that with our collective hard work and goodwill we can manage to fill it. I promise to do my part, in the same manner I have always filled such holes: with prayers, slurs, cries, expletives, screams …

* “Rethinking music through the notion of presence and consciousness allows us to disturb the processual, cumulative standpoint to which we have grown so accustomed. If we can thus attenuate the valuation of process, we will be less inclined to read a composer like Schubert as the negative half of a binary opposition, as “process-minus,” or Beethoven simply as “process-plus.” Instead, we will ask why we value the presence of any given music and how we are present in the experience of that music. This is more difficult to do than it may seem, for the attempt to thwart current academic discourse is not to be construed as a refusal to think, in favor of some “be here now” haziness, a “dumbing down” in order to encourage emotional groping—it is rather the challenging business of talking about why music matters to us as something more than the occasion for a specialized branch of academic study. Indeed, this is the most difficult thing to do: although we all understand that music is vitally important to us, we do not yet possess a discourse equal to that understanding.” (Burnham, Scott. Beethoven Hero. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995.) Perhaps “discourse” could be pluralized?

** “When it stops,” said Tobin, “you’ll know you’ve heard it all your life. At night, when the horses are grazing and the company is asleep, who hears the grazing?” “Don’t nobody hear them if they’re asleep,” said the kid. “Aye. And if they cease their grazing who is it that wakes?” “Every man,” said the kid. “Aye,” replied Tobin. “Every man.” (Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian)

§ Or, as I have learned, a “cultivated Canadian accent of half a century ago.” See Mark Kingwell’s wonderful description of Gould’s voice in Extraordinary Canadians (the Gould chapter is currently available on line).

§§ If you tap out a 2-3 polyrhythm and then let your two-hand lag a little, you will hear this. You can work up to this by counting triplets for each three, and then, instead of tapping the two-hand directly between the second and third beats of the three-hand, tap two-thirds of the way through (on beat 3). In other words: ONE two three one two THREE one two three in the left hand, ONE two three ONE two three ONE two three in the right.

      How did little Blitz grow so tall?

I’d been busy watching the slow striptease of that black satin shirt, a button here, a button there—normally he’d be as topless as a go go girl by the set’s end, this small, gamey man with the boxer’s nose smashed onto his face and the glowering blue eyes. Tonight, though, he only has forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes! “We’re runnin’ out of motherfuckin’ time here,” he cries, in a voice that distills twenty-five years of Turnpike grit and Jersey mockery, the voice of an old boardwalk barker or casino whore: wheezy, grating, peppered with expletives, and pierced now and again by hoarse, squealing laughter. He’s trying to get himself off, you see, and he hasn’t yet, and he’s runnin’ out of motherfuckin’ time. When he stands hunched in front of the mic, his head stutters more than bangs, somebody pull the clutch out, Bobby’s stuck. And those big entrances: sprinting for the edge of the stage, catching the mic stand along the way, tilting it over one knee; he has to time them just right to pick up the first words of the verse post-bridge. But with all the head-stuttering and sprinting, with “Rotten to the Core” and “Electric Rattlesnake” and “Wrecking Crew,” with the shirt that comes off in dribs and drabs, he’s still not convinced. And so neither are we. And though we try to give him the energy with our own violent movement and adoring expletives, we know Blitz isn’t there.

And then, during “Elimination,” it happens: Suddenly he is atop the monitors, balancing on one foot, splayed, enormous, chest heaving, driven there by the fury of the music, by the jackhammer in his voice, by the cut-tin edges of his breath driving through that scream, eliminate eliminate eliminate ELIMINATE!—newly tall, this electric man with the boxer’s nose and eyes that dare you to be tall, too. Now the whole band is ready for “Fuck you,” they needed “Elimination” to get them to the brashness of “Fuck you.” And here again, as the song nears its end, Blitz climbs atop the monitors—but slowly this time, squeezes his legs together, holds out his arms, middle fingers raised. A self-crucifixion in blasphemy, or at least vulgarity; the stiffly-raised fingers are the nails from which he hangs. Fully unbuttoned, the shirt clings to either shoulder; the belted pants ride low on his hips, exposing the join of thigh and belly, just shy of decent; his body is a braid of muscle, and entirely hairless, jerked, it seems, by sun, tar and rage. A mirror-Christ. In that moment I am sure he will ascend, hover a few feet over the drum riser in a halo of noise and power, the thin raiment of his shirt still clinging to him, and then disappear up through the lights, his body but the husk and the echo of that voice, its flesh totem.

Somewhere between the becalmed pose of inverted worship and the fragging on the grenade of his own rage—somewhere in that cross of sky-daring rebellion and sneering martyrdom, the soul of metal.

The Takacs Quartet in 2012, photographed by Peter Smith

Quartets seem to be in the cultural crosshairs of late, at least judging from two recent middlebrow movie releases, The Last Quartet and Quartet (both 2012). If the latter, a geriatric Brit comedy set in a home for retired musicians, isn’t about a string quartet per se, it’s perhaps that much more an indication that quartet-ness has come to be regarded as a figure for community, a ready-made dramatic framework for exploring the dialectic between individual and group, the converse perils and joys of intimacy and isolation, and the struggles and strains behind finding a coherent, collective voice.

Watching the Takács Quartet in action during their master class at Weill Recital Hall last week was an engrossing reminder of these dramas of collaboration. The subjects were two of Beethoven’s late quartets, the Opus 131 and 132; the participants, three young quartets, the Spruce, Linden, and Attacca. It also made for an interesting contrast with my own previous experiences of master classes, all of which had been piano. When the pianist’s clear, single voice of authority is split in four, the dynamic changes, revealing to what extent a quartet’s unified voice is the product of consent, compromise, negotiation, and argument. The tightly-braided rope that is the quartet in its final, public form unravels into its individual strands, exposing an amiable babel of semi-private voices.

It was in this spirit that Takács violist Geraldine Walther called out, “Don’t worry, Ji Hee, he’s been telling me that for years!” just as the younger violist (of the Spruce Quartet) was about to make a third attempt to appease Takács violinist Edward Dusinberre. Dusinberre was on stage, circling the Spruce, score open in one hand, asking them to pick up the Allegro at different measures, stopping them to comment, ordering them to repeat. Walther sat in the audience; her voice could have been any of ours. Her comment actually provoked a good deal of laughter, as she would several times over the course of the evening, a testimony to the easy atmosphere the class maintained despite the intensity of the undertaking and the grave beauty of the music, as the veterans prodded their younger counterparts to approach certain passages differently and experiment with new sound combinations.

As the exchange between Dusinberre and Walther suggests, the personalities of the Takács players fit neatly into their roles in the quartet, at least as they appear in performance. Dusinberre played first fiddle for much of the evening. The most outspoken and demanding, he also seemed to have the clearest sense of what he wanted, of the dramatic trajectory of the piece as a whole, and the language with which to express it. Cellist András Fejér was the second on stage, though he spent most of his time leaning against its left or right flanks, like Dusinberre’s goon. When he had something to say, he would approach all full of righteous fire, make his point, and then slink away, setting the tempo by snapping his fingers. Violinist Károly Schranz was less present, though he did lead part of the discussion of the first movement of the Opus 132, while Walther sat either in the audience or at the base of one of the columns along the rear of the stage, interjecting something to lighten the mood if the musicians seemed flustered, or taking their side if Dusinberre pushed a little too hard. (As Dusinberre was trying to get more lilt out of a phrase made up of rapid tradeoffs between cello and viola, she said, brightly, “It’s my fault, I told him [Linden violist Eric Wong] to play it that way.”) The prowling dominance of the first violin; the thoughtful if less prominent contributions of the second; the stabilizing role played by the viola; and the pantoum of the cello, who spent much of his time on the margins, but who would thrust himself into the foreground when he had something to say, and then retreat, holding down the tempo. Dialogues have just such a rhythm: characters who speak more, characters who speak less, and characters who hardly speak at all, but whose presence and occasional contributions are all the more necessary for pacing and rhythm, and without whom the drama, which only the others seem to be moving forward, would collapse of its own weight.

From the standpoint of music writing, the most fascinating thing about a master class is the opportunity to watch and listen as music is transformed into something else. It’s a setting where all the nuances of oral and gestural communication are called into play. The swinging conductor’s arm, demonstrating not just tempo, but rhythm, mood and line, often accompanying the singing of melodies. The proximity or distance of the teacher’s body, sometimes leaning in over the players, sometimes touching them—and sometimes far away, the disembodied voice in the room that eventually worms its way into the musicians’ heads, and then into their muscles and sinew. As for the words themselves, they can be brilliantly concrete (as when Fejér asked for a particular passage to display greater yearning, and then affectionate yearning, when he realized that an aspect of the personal was missing), or tumble and bleed into gesture and song; they are tugged this way and that, collected like pebbles to create greater emotional nuance, marshalled together into narrative arcs (sickness and convalescence, despair and hope), or appear as murky tickers along the measures in the score.

At one point, Dusinberre asked violinist Sarah McElravy of the Linden Quartet how she interpreted a particular phrase. When she replied, he answered, “I agree with you; but that’s not what I’m hearing.” He asked her to match her playing to the concept he had just pushed her to wrestle into language. And she did. Even Dusinberre commented on this: the incredible facility these players had for transforming opaque, knotty instructions cobbled together from a clumsy mass of words, gestures, half-sung melodies and snapped fingers into concrete musical expression. It may have been partly the effect of hearing the phrases again, set off from the rest of the movement, and thus framed anew, or even just hearing them more than once; but there was no question about the differences, sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic, these changes created for the listener. It is something magical for the non-musician; one comes to appreciate the remarkable plasticity of the musical text that much more.

Another example was the debate about how to approach the different parts of the theme (the droning introduction and the chorale) of the Opus 132 Molto adagio: with or without vibrato? The Attacca Quartet was asked to try both, if only to hear the difference. The first thing one notices is that the lack of vibrato is part of what gives those big, perfect intervals and slowly-accreting harmonies of the introduction their sacred quality; too much voice, too much of the human, ruins the effect—the equivalent of inserting a figure into a Rothko painting. With the parallel introduction of the Opus 132, the Assai sostenuto, the Linden was asked to resist the temptation to play it crescendo. The addition of each instrument successively in the opening phrase did not necessarily mean the volume should increase. And then, for the third essay, another correction: that the sound was not growing did not mean the music should be played tentatively. So we listened to that introduction transform over three or four readings, into something yet more beautiful and more moving; the absence of crescendo had, somehow, an emotional payoff. The same thing happened with the droning of the Adagio: a side of the spirit of the piece hitherto hidden suddenly manifested itself, perhaps not only because we heard a difference, but because we were being taught how to listen.

I’ve noted elsewhere that younger quartets can play the romantic repertoire with an almost histrionic intensity, which can be sometimes exciting, sometimes alienating. The Linden Quartet brought just such an intensity to the Allegro of the Opus 132, stretching it almost to the point of snapping. Here Dusinberre provided a welcome counterweight, reminding the players that there is a limit to dynamic range: if you play all your fortes as fortissimos, there will simply be noplace else to go. (As a writer friend of mine likes to say, “The lights can’t always be on.”)

But Dusinberre and the Takács as a whole played an even more important role in this regard. “You need to lean into each other more,” he said at one point to the violin and cello; and they did, actually physically leaned into each other—producing, once again, audible results. It was a reminder that music making is deeply and essentially bodily, that there is no music without movement. This was clear enough from the nearness of the music-making bodies in the room—sweating, stamping, swaying bodies whose movement, sometimes slow, sometimes vigorous, was responsible for everything we heard. It’s the intimacy of the chamber in chamber music that Weill comes closest to reproducing: the chamber that is the body, its walls erected around that pious organ, itself a mass of chambers, a throne of meat busy flushing blood around the body’s plumbing; and the chamber-pot, the chamber as the place of voiding and excreting. Music has its share of this, is about this, much as we try to spiritualize it, sequester it in big, impersonal cultural temples with ceilings that mimic the heavens.

Of course, nobody knew this better than Beethoven, and nowhere is that struggle with physicality more fully expressed than in the Opus 132. It was, after all, his digestion that struck him down, as it had plagued him his whole life. He wrote the quartet as he recovered from a long illness he had presumed to be mortal, as a “sacred song of thanksgiving from the convalescent to the divinity”—a letter, so to speak, from the body to the spirit. But what does the young musician, the young man or woman, know about these things? This wasn’t just about playing or not playing your fortes as fortissimos. During the jauntier Andante interludes of that haunting slow movement, Dusinberre noted that the musicians were responding too forcefully to the “Neue kraft” instruction in the score. This was hardly the energy of an old man just recovering from a long illness; one could not play these passages with the almost harsh physicality due, say, a symphony or sonata of the composer’s heroic period. This was a late quartet, in the fullest sense of that word. Not to say that a younger artist can’t empathize with and imaginatively understand the aged, ill Beethoven, but rather that a younger artist would be unlikely to come to the piece with this knowledge, and even less with the emotional maturity necessary to embody it.

The last time I heard the Opus 132 played live was last fall at Fashion High School by the Pacifica Quartet. The whole concert was one of the finest quartet performances in recent memory, even, or perhaps especially, in its incompleteness. In the middle of the Molto adagio, the stage lights—true story—went off; a few minutes later the musicians, unable to see their scores, were forced to abandon the performance. (So much for Neue kraft.) Now, it’s hard to think of a piece of music where a sudden plunge into darkness is more appropriate … though a slow fade might have been preferable. I remember thinking, If only we could find a way for them to finish. I’m sure everybody else had the same wish, and the Pacifica, too. And Beethoven? He had such plans: a tenth symphony, another great choral work. That great mournful darkness of the spirit, the animating force of the music: maybe this, above all, was what the Takács Quartet was there to teach.

      I came out to hear somebody else, I can’t remember who. This was November of 2011, at Smalls. There were two bands on deck, two sets apiece. Somebody must’ve called in sick, or maybe the second band just asked the bassist to stick around, because she ended up playing all four sets. The old jazzhead sitting next to me wondered aloud if she was the house bass player. That’s all I remember—that, and the last-set bass solo. When it was over, and we got done clapping, we looked at each other as if to say, OK, and where the hell did she come from?

*

Where indeed? Born in Malaysia to parents of Chinese descent, raised in Perth, but that’s hardly an answer. In a global era, for a global music, Perth may just be the new Kansas City, Kuala Lumpur the West Coast. Still and all, rivers always reach New York. And so did she.

I think the pianist Vijay Iyer put it best: “I love the way she just blew into town and took over.” A year and a half ago I’d never heard of her; now, Linda Oh is hard to miss.

*

As so often happens, I lost touch with Oh for a few months after the Smalls show. She became just that amazing female Asian bass player, not to be confused with the other great female Asian bass player who gigs at Pisticci on Sunday nights (really, how many can there be?). And then, twice in March of ‘12, two very different trios: Fabian Almazan’s at the Vanguard, and Oh’s own  at the Rubin museum. Almazan is easily my favorite of the four young pianists spotlighted by Ben Ratliff in his Times article last year. Here, though, I wanted to focus on the Rubin set, and Oh’s first record, Entry, both of which feature Ambrose Akinmusare on trumpet.

From the opening bass strums and trumpet mewls of “Morning Sunset” to the Red Hot Chili Peppers cover for a closer, it’s hard not to hear echoes of the bass-led power trios I whetted my young ears on before coming to jazz. Today, it’s as easy to hear Roy Campbell’s Pyramid Trio, or the early electric Miles. Entry is a raw, heavy, tough, spare record, riff-based and rhythmically-driven, with a feel of bleak avenues and endless rooftops: music for a traveling cityscape, mournful but not without humor, homeless but never rootless, graspingly beautiful. Oh plays with a calculated heaviness, bellyflopping on low notes, slapping those fat strings, letting them hum and buzz. She doesn’t do much walking; when she finally does, at the end of “201,” just a track shy of the end, it’s more swagger than swing. There’s a gangly quality about the playing, too, a rough-and-tumbleness, as if we were waiting for the musicians all to collapse together in a heap.

The songs offer a pretty open terrain to improvise on, and at the Rubin set, as on the record, Akinmusire took full advantage, playing against the grain of the bass, missing high-note climbs by a note before careening back down, skittering into a solo and then backing off with a whine. He liked to fiddle with dynamics—bright, sharp cries and bugle calls followed by long, breathy interludes—his horn less an extension than a purer embodiment of his voice. As for Oh, it’s hard to know where to begin. Watching her play is half the fun; she’s so physically in tune with the music she’s creating that the instrument transforms her. Such a wealth of ideas, such a mastery of the bass’s rich vocabulary of harmonics, taps, strums and slides, and such a happy gift for melody and phrasing—each is rare enough in itself; to find them all together, and in a player so young, seems almost unjust.

Like the album, the set ended with “Soul to Squeeze,” the Chili Peppers ballad, actually a B-side from Blood Sugar Sex Magic. A friend of mine, a great writer, once said that the most affecting moments in fiction are the sort that take the reader by surprise—and very often, the writer as well. Something like this happened at the Rubin set with the Chili Peppers song. I’m not accustomed to being moved in this way by jazz. Exalted, excited, intellectually stimulated, sure. Once, though, I saw George Benson sit in as a vocalist during a Ron Affif set at the Zinc bar, this back in the ‘90s when the Zinc was on Houston and those Monday night jams had become a magnet for New York’s jazz Illuminati. He sang just one song, “All of Me,” and before I knew it there were tears in my eyes. It had nothing to do with the words, or the melody, or emotion per se, as it would with, say, a pop ballad, or a folk song, or a Chopin nocturne. It was rather a sense of presence, of contact, or the momentary revelation of the ideal in the guise of the real, like an avatar. True, “Soul to Squeeze” is a pop ballad; but I think the feeling on this night arose from something closer to the Benson experience. Oh started out with a pensive solo, really embellished statements of the melody, although this only became clear as the solo drew to a close. Then the horn, gently rising. It was like Oh’s bass had opened a door, and Akinmusire’s horn stepped through. An ease of walking, a lightness of step, as if answering some unheard call in the opening couple of bars of bass. They could have stopped there; nothing else needed to be said. You hear this, and the title of Akinmusire’s Blue Note debut, When the Heart Emerges Glistening, seems anything but corny. You want every band to do what they did.

When the set ended, someone from the museum came up and hung white stoles around each of the musicians’ necks, which was itself weirdly moving, and so fitting after the last song, blessing them for the blessing they’d brought us.

While I was waiting to pick up a copy of Oh’s new album Initial Here, a couple of music students, probably high school age, were noting to each other (in tones of disapproval) that all the tunes were modal, with none of those tricky bop changes to keep the musicians on their toes, and dissuade amateurs from the bandstand. They were wondering aloud whether she could really play changes—dare I say “keep up with the boys”? I wanted to turn to them and say they should have heard her at Smalls. (In Miles Davis’s gruff whisper: “She can play those changes like a motherfucker.”) A decade from now, after she’s won a Grammy and has a dozen albums under her belt, they’ll be talking about how they saw her when they were eighteen, when they used to have that Friday night music series at the Rubin, before anyone really knew who she was, and with Akinmusire, too, no, dude, I’m not shitting you, really, they used to play together, I’ll burn you her first album. And the younger musicians will regard them with awe and reverence.

It turned out she was hawking her own records. I had to ask her three times what the title of that ending song was; I’d only listened to Entry once at that point, and would only make the connection between the tune and the record later on. Either I couldn’t hear her, or it was the Perth accent; but the third time I asked, she signed it for me: “Soul,” she said, and made some sort of gesture I can’t remember—maybe put her hand on her heart?—“to squeeze”—and she hugged herself, briefly. Now, I have spoken to a fair number of musicians, and the majority have warm personalities, and seem like the sort of people you’d have over for dinner, open a bottle of wine with, maybe even let the conversation wander into politics. They might squeeze your shoulder, as Bob Stewart did mine the other day, big hands of a tuba player, if not your soul. But this exchange was special. She could have said it louder the third time, with that edge of annoyance that greets the tourist who doesn’t know when to stop asking and just smile. Instead, she treated me with the cheerful patience due an elderly ward. I’m not sure what this says, but I know it’s the opposite of bad.

*

By the time I caught Oh again, with her quartet at the Jazz Standard in June, I’d had a few chances to listen to Entry, a few less to Initial Here, the record she was supporting this night. They are as different as the show at the Standard would prove to be from the Rubin, and as both were from Smalls. If Entry is a fledgling, fusiony romp, weighty and starkly beautiful, Initial Here is remarkable at once for the deftness with which it captures the contemporary jazz idiom—Dave Douglas’s quintet comes to mind, as does Dafnis Prieto’s—and for the breadth of styles, rhythms and cadences it exhibits—from the bluesy Ellington spiritual “Come Sunday” to the Sturm-und-Drang drama of “Deeper Than Sad,” the jaunty Caribbeanisms of “Desert Island Dream” and the seemingly cadenceless and deeply moving “Thicker Than Water,” featuring the preternatural vocals of Jen Shyu. In fact, Shyu serves to remind us how much this record, as much as Entry, bears the mark of all the players in the band—and the collective musicianship here is pretty phenomenal. Each track is a surprise; the riches stretch end to end, like pearls on a string.*

What was most remarkable about the Standard set, though, was not just the opportunity to hear Oh in yet another creative format, but to hear the growth of one tune in particular. Called “Ten Minutes to Closing,” the title reflects the commission that comes as part of the invitation to perform at the Rubin: the musician composes one tune about a piece of art at the museum. As Oh told it at the Rubin, she only found one at the eleventh hour, so to speak—necessity being the mother of invention; and so the tune is less about the piece itself than about the artist’s struggle to create on demand. Perhaps the tune was trying capture that feeling of contingency and indecision. If so, it tried too hard; the changes felt forced, the structure ungainly. It was the only tune in the Rubin set that fell flat, leaving me wondering if it was still under construction, an inspiration arrived at too late.

At the Standard set, “Ten Minutes” came second, right after the hoppy opener “No. 1 Hit.” It had obviously been worked over since the Rubin: very recognizably the same tune, with the same flippant tone and quirky changes … but in every other way, different. Somehow, the arrangement for quartet had welded it into a whole. I’m looking forward to hearing how it sounds recorded.

It was nice to see the electric bass come out for an extended cooker, certainly the jam of the evening, a side of Oh that appears on Initial Here, but which I had not had a chance to witness live: that elixir of Riot Grrrl, Jaco and Flea that couldn’t but push the already-bursting energy of the night another notch higher. And yet, “10 Minutes” was the tune I remember best, because it presented the opportunity to watch the music grow, and the musicians with it. I’ve somehow gotten to the age—it’s definitely snuck up on me, like those tears—where a lot of the musicians I go hear are younger than I am. They’ve become like the kids in some fantastic musical neighborhood, all moved out and making good, and my seat at the club, or maybe the virtual one in the Pit, the porch swing from which I watch history go by. Remember Linda from down the street? Yeah, she’s all grown up and playing music in New York. Making quite a name for herself, too. And Ambrose! Remember Ambrose? Well …

*

I guess I’ve been writing a jazz Horatio Alger story of sorts, or maybe a David Levinsky (remember, he’s the one who wanted to be Irving Berlin), tracing this young immigrant musician’s rise from the good company of her similarly-emerging peers to Soundprints, the supergroup featuring Dave Douglas and Joe Lovano and Joey Baron, at the Vanguard almost exactly a year from that night I first caught Oh at Smalls. By now I was a certified Oh junkie, waiting out in the cold an hour for my fix, for the proverbial man. I stood in front of that red door so long people started thinking I worked there, and I even came to enjoy playing the part, holding the door, answering questions—why I wasn’t taking money is anyone’s guess. About twenty minutes into the queue, a couple of music students from NYU joined me—they always seem to come in pairs, like missionaries—good people to shoot the breeze with while the wind cut through our coats and all those who’d thought far enough ahead to make reservations glided past. At 9 o’clock, the VV staff grudgingly found us seats, me at the absolute and utter rear of the club, back against the wall, band visible over a sea of heads, waiters milling in and out of my vision, assholes at the table next to me unable to shut up, even after being asked politely, and then asked again. But the music: the music that night could have cut through an acre of lead, like neutrinos from a star gone nova, so what could a few assholes, waiters and extra feet of space do? Afterwards I ran into the music students again, their faces all alight, and they asked me if I was staying for the second set, all I had to do was buy a drink, how could I think of leaving? Ah, I had to go upstate tonight, there was no hope for me; but wasn’t it nice to see their faces, hear their voices again. It confirmed to me what I was feeling.

It’s always great to hear Douglas and Lovano together—it had been too long—and Douglas and Baron, of course, half of Masada in a club where Masada maybe never played. (You can cut Masada six ways and you’re always left with the better half, how’s that for a paradox?) The pianist, one Lawrence Fields, was the find of the evening; in a year he’ll be the hub of yet another wheel, just like Oh, just like Douglas and Lovano and Baron before her. And Oh? What does it say that, on a bandstand with Dave Douglas and Joe Lovano and Joey Baron and yet some other genius in the making, you proceed to play a bass solo that puts in the phone call to God, throws everyone else in shadow, and becomes, like at that gig a year ago at Smalls, the thing I remember best? And what does it matter if the words I might have used to describe it to you have long since disappeared, if they were ever there at all? I can still hear the gasp and sigh that came up from the audience when the rest of the band started back in—how could I not, sitting where I was, with all that audience between us. It was a register of the collective emotion, there on the cusp of the sound, sound made a moment of exalted flesh, which is always easier to describe. I can tell you about that gasp and sigh, and I can swear to what I remember; the solo itself goads me with its unspeakability, an unspeakability that fills me with the urgency of words.

*

Initial Here made one of the three top ten lists in the New York City Jazz Record for 2012—not bad for a sophomore album. It’s on Greenleaf, Douglas’s label; he just tapped Oh for his last album, Be Still. Douglas is like a trampoline for fresh talent—look at Chris Potter and Donny McCaslin. Meanwhile, Fabian Almazan’s trio is back at the Vanguard this month, Oh still on bass. I’ll be there, on my porch swing. Have I told you about Fabian? Well, I will say, with a bit of old Miss Havisham and a bit of John Jarndyce, let me tell you about Fabian …

* While it’s true they’re very different records, I’m loathe to construct them as absolute opposites, which language and logic sometimes compel me to do. Entry has its fair share of rhythmic and other playfulness, its Jaco inflections even without the electric bass (check out “Fourth Hand”), its moments of textured harmony (the intro to “Numero Uno”), and the full range of the bass’s vocabulary on display. Still, Initial Here is nimbler, works with a broader palette, and is consistently richer and more surprising in its arrangements and compositions.

The structural formula of metal consists of a classic rock ring in its most basic 1-5 manifestation and an extreme state of dynamic compression, and is generally distinguished by the presence of one or more tritones (TT). A progressive rock (PR) chain of varying lengths may also be present (Figure 1.1). Like those molecules to whose structure it is closely related, metal and its derivatives mimic and potentiate the synaptic action of norepinephrine (NE) in the central nervous system, particularly in the cerebellum’s vermis, while inhibiting frontal lobe activity. A second, sedative-hypnotic “rebound,” thought to be associated with increased serotonin levels, has also been identified, and has become the subject of some clinical attention.

Metal was first synthesized at the end of the 1960s by O. Osbourne and his legendary team of occult doctors. Working secretly in laboratories around Birmingham, England, it is said that Dr. Osbourne did not immediately recognize the combination of dissonance, distortion, blues riffs and pounding rhythms as a distinctly new molecule, and that it was only upon mistakenly ingesting a small quantity that he cried out, “What is this that stands before me? / Figure in black which points at me!”

Usage of metal increased steadily during the 1970s, although abuse did not become widespread until the early ‘80s, when derivatives like glam and speed began to be synthesized for use in a wide variety of recreational settings. The latter represents the beginning of a disturbing trend in the history of metal abuse, as the speed derivative greatly increased the potency of the original molecule by adding one or more hardcore (HC) groups, and by turning up the volume of ingestion. Indeed, perhaps no other aurally-ingested drug has been so widely abused as metal, leading to concerns about its impact on public health. Over the last two decades, despite brief dips in popularity, metal has remained a drug of choice among the young, with new, even more potent derivatives appearing every few years, such as death, doom, goth, and black, as well as “designer” compounds, like nu and groove. Chemically, these derivatives can be distinguished by the addition of a rap group (HH) or EMO ion, and by the multiplication and permutation of PR, HC and HH molecules.

The increasingly potent strains of metal that continue to be synthesized are a logical response to tolerance, which develops quickly (5-10 albums) in many users, as is the increasing use of metal in combination with other drugs, either to intensify its euphoric effect or mitigate its toxicity. Research into clinical varieties that exploit the sedative-hypnotic “rebound” effect in the treatment of Obnoxiously Violent Disorder (OVD), ADD, and other anxiety and mood disorders continues despite concerns about the drug’s highly addictive qualities.

Characteristically, metal produces a state of euphoria. Psychomotor performance may be improved, although this is quite erratic and improbable. Users also experience augmented alertness and the fight/fright/flight response, increased wakefulness, and feelings of power, invincibility, and the urge to dominate. In its post-stimulant, sedative-hypnotic phase, metal acts like a low dose of barbiturates, inducing a mild euphoria almost indistinguishable from that experienced at low-dose ingestion, as well as an increased sense of well-being, relaxation, and relief from anxiety. In its everyday use, metal is often combined with amphetamines, marijuana, alcohol, and, less frequently, with hallucinogens.

Despite the number of derivatives available, the effects are quite similar to that of its generic parent, mostly varying in the quantity that needs to be consumed; therefore, so-called “classic” metal will be discussed at length, and its derivatives compared as differences present themselves.

Pharmacological Effects

Effects vary markedly with the dose of the drug. In general, though, they may be categorized as those observed at low-to-moderate doses (5 to 50 minutes at medium to high volume) and those observed at high doses (above 100 minutes, often administered via headphones or at concerts). Again, these dose ranges are calculated for classic metal. Low-to-moderate doses of speed metal range from 2 to 20 minutes, while the effects associated with high doses can occur at 30 minutes or even less. Death metal and grindcore derivatives such as Napalm Death, which contain several HC groups and few or no PR chains, are even more potent, and doses have to be lowered even further. According to one recent study (Benton, 2006), a single minute of Deicide was enough to kill white bunny rabbits and other animals associated with childlike innocence and goodness (hence the unfortunate moniker “Bunnycide” which the band has carried ever since). “Designer” compounds are qualitatively less predictable, as the synergies between HH, HC and PR groups on the compressed rock ring are still poorly understood, and the mildly inhibitory effect of PR on HC groups requires further investigation. Generally speaking, however, “softer” designer derivatives mitigate the more deleterious effects of “meth metal” by inhibiting the function of the HC group, whether by frontal-lobe reactivitation or by promoting reuptake of NE from the synaptic cleft (DeGarmo, 1989; Keenan, 1996).

At normal aural doses, metal induces an increase in blood pressure, and a variety of other responses that are predictable from drugs that mobilize NE and thus induce the fight/fright/flight response (increased blood sugar, increased blood flow to musculature, decreased blood flow to internal organs, dilation of pupils, increased rate of respiration, and so on). In the CNS, metal is a potent stimulant, producing both EEG and behavioral signs of increased alertness and excitement. Characteristically, wakefulness, a reduced sense of fatigue, mood elevation, increased motor and speech activity, euphoria, and feelings of power and task-worthiness occur. Task performance may improve, although dexterity may not, as evidenced by increased errors that can result from the irritability and nervousness that occur. When short-duration, high-intensity energy output is desired, such as in athletic competition, performance may be enhanced despite the fact that fine motor skills may be reduced.

These responses continue for up to 30 minutes after ingestion has ceased, with predictably cumulative effects for longer ingestion durations. At this point, most users will experience a rebound feeling of lethargy, satiety, and well-being, as after successful copulation, sometimes lasting up to 12 hours. Prolonged use of low doses of metal or single use of a high dose is characteristically followed by this relaxed, soporific, careless state, customarily referred to as metal-induced satiety (MIS).

At moderate doses (5 to 50 minutes), effects include stimulation of respiration, production of a slight tremor, restlessness, increased motor activity, insomnia, and agitation. Blurred vision and cardiac palpitations may also occur. In addition, metal prevents fatigue, suppresses appetite, and promotes wakefulness.

During chronic uses of metal at high doses (100 minutes or more), a different pattern of physiological effects is observed, in part because such high doses are usually administered through headphones or at outdoor rock festivals, at volumes intended to saturate the auditory system and maximize the rates of neuronal activity—all of which abet the suppression of impulse control and activate the subject’s “lizard brain,” with particular, unrelenting excitation of the vermis, the locus of feelings of hatred and aggression in the brain (hence the epithet vermis odium, or “hate worm,” for metal among the drug’s more literate addicts). Doses in the range of a few hundred minutes to several days have been reported. During prolonged, high-dose “sprees,” an individual experiences a manic megalomania—the so-called “berserker state”—induced by radical changes in brain chemistry, chronic lack of sleep, and high levels of distortion. Users are put at risk of injury and even death from the irrational, violent behavior that follows the ingestion of high doses. High-level earphone delivery provides a “rush,” described by users as being extremely pleasurable and very similar to a violent sexual orgasm. In addition, MIS is at once more intense and more extended than at lower doses. These pleasurable effects, however, are offset by the more toxic ones. After the sedative-hypnotic period wears off, the subject will still appear lethargic, but also anxious and intensely hungry. Food, counseling, and Neil Diamond may be helpful in this withdrawal period. Otherwise the user may turn to more injections of metal, thus initiating a new spree. In the words of Araya et al. (1994), the “chemical rush” of metal may “leave [behind] a suicidal hole.”

Psychological Effects

The psychological effects of metal differ widely, depending upon the dose administered. At low-to-moderate doses, an individual typically experiences increased alertness, wakefulness, elevation of mood, mild euphoria, possible freedom from boredom, and increased energy. Occasionally, aggression, hallucinations, and psychosis may occur, but usually only at higher doses.

High-dose “berserker” use induces a pattern of psychosis characterized by confused, disorganized behavior, compulsive repetition of meaningless acts (maniacal laughter, headbanging, violent bodily contact with others, making the “evil eye”), violent thoughts and urges (to dismember, eviscerate, defenestrate, etc.), sadistic megalomania, impatience with the weak and helpless, delusions of imperviousness to pain and bodily immortality, gross paranoia, apocalyptic hallucinations, a Manichean worldview, and mild irritability. Individuals who inject high-potency death, black, and grindcore derivatives on a regular basis often attempt to antagonize high-dose toxic symptoms by adding an analgesic or other CNS depressant (e.g., Pink Floyd; Led Zeppelin III, side 2). Such a concoction is called a “speedball.” Chronic metal users also usually consume large amounts of these CNS depressants.

Interestingly, MIS may be accentuated by the use of these depressants, and the euphoria produced by sedative-hypnotic rebound may be more intense, with users falling toward the hypnotic-anaesthetic range of the sedative continuum. Post-berserker “deep MIS” is characterized by a marked decrease in anxiety and aggression, feelings of peace on earth and goodwill toward men, renewed ability to deal with annoying people, and repetition of stock phrases like “it’s all good” and “no worries.” An increased ability to concentrate on minor tasks is only hampered by lethargy and overall feeling of a need to sleep. This is sometimes accompanied by a giddy feeling of having survived mortal danger, similar to that survivors of natural catastrophes or terrorist attacks feel, but without concominant feelings of guilt.

Reinitiation of metal use generally follows the end of deep MIS, initiating a new cycle.

Side Effects and Toxicity

The side effects induced by low doses of metal are usually extensions of the drug’s behavioral actions. These side effects are usually tolerable and decrease within a few days as tolerance develops. Metal can cause heart palpitations. Sweating, dry mouth, nausea and vomiting may also occur.

The side effects of prolonged use of high doses are more serious. Psychosis and abnormal mental conditions, general mental dimness, muscular fatigue, a negative outlook on life, infections resulting from neglected hygiene and a variety of other consequences occur because of the drug itself and because of poor eating habits, lack of sleep, and the use of unsterile listening equipment.

Most high-dose users show progressive social, personal, and occupational deterioration, and their course is often characterized by intermittent periods of hospitalization for episodes of toxic psychosis, often directly after attending a “show” or similar event where high-potency, prolonged use is collectively reinforced.

Fatalities directly attributable to metal are rare, but humorous. Individuals with no tolerance have survived three-day black metal festivals—in Norway, of all places—and even larger doses are tolerated by chronic users. The slogan “metal kills” does not refer to a direct result of a single dose but, rather, to the deteriorating mental and physical condition and the destructive behavior induced by prolonged high-dose metal sprees. Only rarely does a high-dose use of metal result in the lethal rupture of blood vessels or twiglike snapping of the brain stem as a result of prolonged, excessively forceful headbanging, or a “breaking wheel” or self-eviscerating accident in the mosh pit.

Dependence

Metal dependence is twofold: psychological and physiological. Psychological dependence is described as a compulsion to listen to the music repeatedly for its enjoyable effects. The “berserker” state that sometimes follows even moderate doses of metal, and the “rush” that may be induced by high-volume use, can lead to a compulsion for misuse. MIS may be itself habit-forming, although it cannot be regarded in isolation from the drug’s other effects.

Withdrawal from metal produces a period of rebound passivity and exhaustion, prolonged inactivity, and EEG changes characteristic of sleep. This may be followed by severe emotional depression, often brought on by feelings of abandonment, sometimes expressed verbally by the addict as having been forsaken by metal. Once MIS has worn off, the patient generally returns to his previous level of anxiety, leading to an ever-deepening cycle of anxiety, metal aggression, and rebound satiety.

Tolerance

Tolerance to the many effects of metal develops at different rates and to different degrees. The habitual user is able to increase the dose considerably and/or resort to more potent derivatives in order to attain a desired effect as his or her tolerance to the central effect builds.

Medical uses

Since the discovery in the late 1980s that MIS can moderate mood and anxiety disorders, particularly OVD, research has been directed toward developing a safe, non-toxic treatment derivative. Challenges are myriad, and include: the extremely addictive nature of metal; the drug’s widespread availability outside a clinical setting; the relatively short duration of MIS; and the rapid development of tolerance, necessitating new ingestions of metal at ever-higher doses and more frequent intervals.

Artificial forms of metal, such as mixing amphetamine derivatives like Benzedrine or Dexedrine with grunge, or combining Bad Company with selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs), as well as low-potency dilutions of true metal, such as injecting grindcore with L-tryptophan, or adding a POP group or boy band (BB) subgroup to the metal molecule (e.g., My Chemical Romance), have thus far failed to produce either a weakened berserker state followed by extended MIS, or—grail of grails—to isolate the MIS period itself for subjects suffering from OVD. It is thus widely believed that the intensity and duration of the MIS period is directly proportional to the intensity of the CNS effects of metal and the duration of the ingestion period (Figure 1.2). Except in rare instances, low-volume exposure has proven ineffective (Halford, 1993).

Some evidence exists that, when low-potency, low-toxicity derivatives were administered to children with a genetic propensity for developing OVD, they acted as a gateway to true metal addiction, and that said addiction developed earlier than in untreated subjects (Portnoy et al., 2011). This seems likely given the rapid development of tolerance, especially among younger listeners. Regrettably, these compounds have become wildly popular among pre-adolescents, and are so cheaply and easily produced (and hence so profitable) that they are now available over the counter in most shopping malls and suburban convenience stores.

Results from short-term, high-dose “metal blasts” have shown more promise. Occulta and Apollyon (2002) showed that periods of MIS double the normal duration could be induced in patients suffering from OVD after a series of 30-second exposures to Amon Amarth.

If POP and BB  have failed utterly to treat anxiety and mood disorders like OVD in adults, this is likely due to the fact that children have as-yet underdeveloped senses of hatred, vengeance, betrayal, anger, and bitterness needed to appreciate true metal. In sum, while it may be true that music therapy has helped people to overcome a broad range of psychological problems, we are a long way from understanding how to use metal for this purpose. One must continue to strive for non-chemical alternatives to curb the propensity for violent behavior.

Metal and Public Safety

Given the pharmacological profile of metal that has been presented, what conclusions can be drawn about its social impact and continuing legal status?

While metal clearly has public health consequences, whether its production and consumption needs to be regulated, curtailed, or even criminalized, as some have argued, remains an open question. Certainly, metal culture has been demonized to the point that all recreational users are stereotyped as devil-worshipping baby-killers, and the music itself as a weapon of mass destruction against America’s youth. Consider, for example, the story of one young man, who, after 67 straight hours of listening to Pig Destroyer, was reported to have spontaneously combusted. In another, a Cannibal Corpse fan on a two-day grindcore binge began (according to his similarly inebriated girlfriend) bleeding from his eyes before collapsing; a brain autopsy later showed the cerebrum had been cooked into a hard paste which had to be chiseled off the inside of the skull. Stories of spontaneously aborted fetuses, massive cerebral hemorrhages, and literally exploding cardiac tissue have also made their way into the tabloid press. While they might be intended to warn users away from the drug, these sensationalized portraits of hardcore abuse at once attract new users (by the aura of glamorized danger) and serve as fodder for those groups lobbying for all metal’s criminalization.

On the other side is the phenomenal rise of metal rights groups in most major cities around the world, which advocate for the use of metal in its unadulterated, natural, “homegrown” form. These groups tend to paint a utopian picture, with metal in a role similar to that played by LSD for the “flower children.” Unlike acid, however, metal is understood as a conduit for channeling and dissipating “negative energy.” (“The releasing of anger,” remarks Phil Anselmo, a sort of tattooed Timothy Leary, “can better any medicine under the sun.”) The original sin, according to these groups, was the turning over of metal to vast record conglomerates, who make false metal for profit. The metal lobby has worked to have metal protected under the same laws that allow some Native American tribes to use drugs such as peyote in religious rituals, and “medical metal” has become something of a buzzword in the Bible Belt states, where religious fanatics are pursuing an aggressive ballot-initiative strategy to criminalize metal.

Of course, metal is neither a panacea nor a doomsday device. It is, rather, a faithful reflection of our aggressive, anxious times, where young people and adults alike consume drugs like metal to escape day-to-day problems, deal with assholes, and generally get by.

Correlations between metal and violent crime have generally been overstated. Even in a concert context, the controlled environment and relatively short duration of berserker effects post-ingestion, combined with the rapid onset of MIS, prevent violence from going beyond overturning and burning a few automobiles in the parking lot, a couple of fistfights, and a beer bottle broken over somebody’s head. Users are generally too stupified by the high-dose effects of the drug to plan antisocial behavior—as is to be expected, given the total inhibition of frontal lobe activity (the so-called “metal lobotomy,” the lack of EEG activity suggesting a cerebral “dead zone”). Rather, aggression is largely expended in the aforementioned behaviors, and the most dangerous effects seem to be confined to crowds in the grip of metal frenzy, and to the contusions, lacerations, head trauma, and acute spine and joint pain the high-dose user experiences as MIS begins to wear off, colloquially referred to as a bangover.

It is moreover unclear to what extent the other drugs often consumed simultaneously with metal are responsible for other violent acts for which metal bears the brunt of the blame. In short, neither informed current professional opinion nor empirical research has produced systematic evidence to support the thesis that metal, by itself, either invariably or generally leads to or causes violent crime. Instead, the evidence suggests that social and cultural variables account for the apparent statistical correlation between metal use and crime or delinquency.

The greatest danger to public safety today probably involves driving a car while in a state of acute metal intoxication. Feelings of invincibility, together with impacts on motor coordination and the visual impairment that results from headbanging, even with both hands on the wheel, can lead to excessive speed, erratic driving, extra miles, and poor choices.

While the public continues to debate the criminalization or regulation of metal, various harm-reduction approaches could be tried and evaluated. Safer modes of dispensing metal would go a long way toward curbing the more deleterious effects of the drug, as would federally-enforced volume limits. Albums could be made shorter, and listening equipment programmed with dissonance and dynamic compression sensors to filter total metal output. Perhaps the most conservative course of action would be for society to oppose widespread listening to metal, while at the same time refraining from punishing or demonizing those who choose this genre of music to listen to. Youth should be counseled, to borrow the words of Headlock, to “Tak[e their] hate and spend it wisely.”

Many passages in this post are embellished plagiarisms of passages from A Primer of Drug Action, by Robert M. Julien, M.D. (New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1988). Thanks to Dr. Julien for writing such an engaging textbook, filled with so many fabulous words.

      Among my handful of sacred places in New York—those cafés, gardens, and institutional spaces where I can best study, write, meditate, mosey, and otherwise get in tune with the Am and Is—I would include the music library of City College.

The library is housed at the southwest end of that beautiful neo-gothic monument Shepard Hall, a block away from my old Convent Avenue apartment. Shepard is shaped like an anchor, or a flexing cross, with the tall tower at the crown, the Great Hall for a shank, and the library in the half-rotunda where the shackle would be. (In cathedral terms, the hall would be the nave, and the library located under the apse.) The library has two floors, with listening carrels on the second, entry level, and the stacks and reading room on the first, accessed by way of a narrow staircase that turns twice, to the left on the way down, to the right on the way up. The stairs are wood, as is much of the work around the doors and upstairs windows. What with the woodwork, the two floors, and the cathedral environs, it reminds me, fittingly, of an organ. Unlike an organ, however, the library tolerates a charming amount of illogic—the improbably narrow staircase, for example. I don’t think you could get a cello down those stairs, let alone a bass.

I love this library for how small and self-contained it is. I loved the Marriott Library at the University of Utah (where I went to grad school) for the latter reason, and for the same reason feel little connection with the New York Public Library: none of the individual branches are adequate to themselves. The Performing Arts library at Lincoln Center is better in this regard, but still too diffuse … and, perhaps, too well-traveled. The music library at City can get a little busy during exam time, probably spillover from the Cohen, City’s main library. During the regular semester, though, there are rarely more than ten people there at any one time. This space filled with recordings, with notes, and with words about music basks in a near-monastical silence.

The Marriott had the kinds of stacks that rewarded careful, curious, passionate browsing. I would always go in looking for one or a few books, and walk out with a pile. I never wrote down call numbers very clearly—I couldn’t, not with those nubbins of pencils, on those business-card-size bits of scrap paper. So I could only ever get into the general vicinity of a book. And then I would have to browse, not by call number, but by title. Digging around, I would find a dozen other titles, some better than the ones I believed I’d come for. (It’s always more pleasant to ballpark, isn’t it, to have to ask, to get turned around, to play Marco Polo with wisdom. Every good book has a measure of serendipity about it.)

The music library multiplies the rewards for such browsing because it is organized around a single subject, and its collections are the cumulative reflection of the taste, wisdom, and judgment of the librarians and the faculty of the music department at City College, of a century (more or less) of thoughtful scholarship and librarianship.* And so, unlike at the University of Utah, where I used to set off with a half-legible call number for a compass and a walking-stick, a trip downstairs in the music library requires no call number at all—just a good bit of time, a bunch of questions you haven’t quite been able to formulate, and a lot of tunes that never leave your head.

Some days I would pick a stack at random and go through title after title, pulling books off the shelves, opening to the table of contents, or to a random page, in an odd, secular gesture at bibliomancy. After I had gone through a few shelves this way—sometimes all the way down to the floor—I might bring a few books over to one of the carrels under the arched, barred windows looking out onto the quad. For a sort-of basement, it gets nice light, particularly in the spring and early fall, when the sun has begun to go down behind the clock tower, and the light splashes across the tables, sometimes too warm and bright to work in. On those days, at that hour, from the steps of the North Academic Center, Shepard Hall looks like the Cathedral of Ys risen from the waves.

I have sat on the floor amid the stacks, too, my books piled in the space past the metal bookends, stumbling upon bits of musical esoterica—connections between Renaissance music and bird songs; the story behind the naming of Damrosch Park—scribbling down titles for future reference, occasionally taking books out, racking up enormous, humiliating, bankrupting fines, to be paid only after much arguing and whining and weaseling.

At least, at the Cohen. Never here. One must stay on good terms with one’s sacred spaces.

I return my books with pencil marks in them, after I have reached the limit of possible renewals, or have been threatened with losing borrowing privileges, knowing that in a few months, or years, or a decade, when I need that book again, I can go back to the same place in the stacks, find my old copy, and my marks again, and perhaps, finally, take notes, and erase the marks, at least some of them, and so return a clean(er) copy, and begin to set my accounts right with the universe.

I have spent afternoons there, too, my unsanctioned coffee thermos hidden in one of the nearby carrels, diligently plugging away at counterpoint homework, or parsing examples from Aldwell and Schachter, or writing out the first draft of some piece bound for the Pit Stop, or copying articles I am thinking of using for my Writing About Music class … or, of course, grading papers, while students paced up and down Convent Avenue and the shadows of the bars started to creep across the carrels.

And then before I knew it, it would be almost five o’clock: the closing announcement is made, and the blind man—the one I used to see walking to school, arm locked with a friend’s or good samaritan’s—emerges from one of the labs and rings the elevator. At Johns Hopkins, where I did my undergraduate work, the main library would close at midnight; and, if you happened to be there at that hour, you could participate in the pilgrimage across the quad to the “Hut,” the all-night library on the bottom floor of Gilman Hall. Gilman is the only academic building I know that held a candle to Shepard—held, because it was renovated a few years ago, and many of its most fantastic quirks removed. Leaving the music library at five, I could have relived (as farce) this memory by turning left, heading over to the Cohen; the flukes of the anchor may be buried in St. Nicholas Park, but the shackle points toward the Cohen, as though the newer structure were a vessel tethered to the older one by an invisible rope. Instead, I always went right. This much hasn’t changed. The difference is that I don’t live a block north anymore, but a thousand. I can’t see Shepard Hall out my window. But I can still imagine it, tiny and far below me, I tethered not by rope, but by a string, as the kite I cling to dips and flaps.

I suppose part of what made the music library sacred was that it allowed me to try on another identity. If I always crossed the upper floor quickly, making a bee-line for the stairs, maybe it’s because I felt a little like a charlatan, and was trying not to be noticed. Once, when I borrowed the score for the “Waldstein” sonata (for “Of Liszt and Other Ghosts”), the librarian, who directed me to the right area in the stacks, counseled me that these were mini-scores—fine to read, but not to play from. I assured her that I was in no way capable of playing the “Waldstein,” that I merely intended to read it. But even that was a bit of a ruse. I was like a man with a third-grade education walking around with a copy of Ulysses, just so he could run his finger along the lines and mouth the strange words to himself, marveling at the incantatory nature of the language.

For a writer, that edge—between two identities, two modes of representation, two disciplines—at once inside and outside—is the most natural of places. The erotic gaps between, as Barthes might have put it; the places where knowledge gapes. The music library is the space where, for me, those gaps appear, in the fantasy that always accompanies the word.

* And, of course, the realities of public school budgets. Still, I remember the first time I realized that I, as a faculty member, could request that the library order books. It was a dizzying confluence of responsibility and irresponsibility. I was helping to direct the purchases on which the future of an institution depended. I was standing with a shopping cart at the entrance of a fantasically large bookstore, watching the man with the starter’s pistol.

      It’s a Sunday afternoon in August, and I’m at the Howland Cultural Center in Beacon, New York, to hear the Kazzrie Jaxen quartet. I’m here because Kazzrie is here, and because my neighbor, a pianist and friend of Kazzrie’s, invited me. In a broader sense, I’m here because I am new to the peaceable kingdoms of the Hudson Valley, and I am still trying to find my moorings amid the upstate exiles. In the City you get used to the weight of people, smog, and noise. It settles on you, over time. Here, I’m like a man walking on the moon: every step threatens to catapult me into space, and I look around in vain for someone or something to hold me down.

The Howland Center is a tall, airy space with a churchy feel. It used to be the town library, until 1976, when the collection outgrew its confines, the books were (re)moved, and the building joined the National Historical Registry. The shelves have been taken down, but the cabinets remain, the numbers still stenciled on them, and black and white pictures of the town-as-it-was hang above the spaces where the books used to be. Instead of rectangular reading tables and card catalogs, there are round folding four-tops covered with plastic. There is fruit, cheese, wine, brownies, kids. A metal balcony encircles the room ten feet above, with more empty numbered cabinets along the walls and four lights suspended from the grillwork. A big grandfather clock, its brass, lute-shaped pendulum stilled, fails to measure the time.

The musicians put their things on top of the cabinets: instrument cases, a red fabric cooler, a few bottles of water. Jaxen, who plays piano, stops by our table to say a brief, warm hello. She is blond, nimble, radiant. Sinewy, though there is something wispy about her, too. Charlie Krachy, standing a few feet behind her with his tenor already hanging from his neck, is grey, plodding, down to earth—her complement in every way. Together with the rest of the band—Don Messina on bass, Bill Chattin on drums—Charlie will spend the next hour holding on to the sleeves of Kazzrie’s blouse and the hem of Kazzrie’s skirt, as she refuses to let that great ballast of the instrument world hold her down, and threatens to float up and away, like one of those newlyweds in a Chagall painting.

*

I had the chance to hear Kazzrie only once before, in an apartment in Morningside, on a Sunday afternoon not so different from this one. The musicians who played that day, and the vast majority of those in the audience, were part of a musical collective that seems to have grown up around the pianist and educator Connie Crothers. It was a trio of violin, piano and clarinet, playing freely improvised music. In such a setting, there is no agreement about structure or melody beforehand, and there are no standards, at least in the jazz sense of that term. Somebody starts to blow, or strum, or pluck, or whatever, and the musicians go wherever the spirit of the moment takes them, and the jam lasts as long as that spirit inhabits them. Then they pause, and start again. It is remarkably beautiful to watch as well as to listen to.

When the “set” was over, there was a break to eat and drink and chat. Then the real jam began, real because it was yet more free. Different people got up to play as the mood struck them, like Quakers moved to speak. Maybe what was most beautiful was the humility with which playing was approached. There was not that sense you sometimes gets at late-night jams, where one player after another wants to muscle in, take the limelight for a few bars, be heard. Here, everybody knew everybody else, or almost, and pretty much everybody had played together at one time or another. There was much hesitation and politeness; a smile and nod across the room, like you might ask a stranger to dance; the sudden leaping out of a chair, because nobody else had; the desire to share something. Of course, almost everybody there was a musician, they had all brought their instruments with them, or just themselves. It was even a little eerie to find that everyone else in the room was touched with the capacity to create ex nihilo, as much as it would be to find that they could bend spoons without touching them, or read each other’s minds. And there was the feeling that they all know each other on a level more intimate than I could ever know them, or perhaps anyone; and this produced a combination of admiration, envy, and unease. If this were a Polanski movie, I thought, they would be a coven. I even began to suspect that the reason each of them could improvise in this way must have something to do with the rest of them being present; that they create a sort of magic circle in which such things can happen. That they were all holding the edge of an invisible net, which they cast collectively into the air, to catch the bits of melodies floating around like pollen. As for the music, it is as ephemeral as the dappled bit of sunlight I noticed falling on the carpet when I glanced toward the window late that afternoon; it is music of that Sunday, and no other. One is not leaving a legacy, but living a moment. And so it is all the more necessary just to play. Maybe the feeling of humility comes partly from this.

Kazzrie was not part of the original trio that day. She flitted up to the piano during the jam two or three times, once dragging my neighbor along with her for a duet at the same keyboard. I remember the immense sound she got out of that piano, for such a wisp of person. But then there was a special radiance about her, an energy far greater than her size. Walking home with my neighbor after the gig, I was reluctant to single out any one performance, the whole afternoon had been so enjoyable, the collective musicianship so impressive. We have a running joke between us, my neighbor and I. Both of us have had the experience of sharing music we love with friends, only to be disappointed by a lukewarm or patronizing response. So now, when we talk about music, no matter how much we like something, all we will ever commit to saying is that it is interesting. “Was it interesting?” “Oh, yes. Definitely interesting. I have something you might find interesting as well.” “Great, I’d love to hear it. I like interesting music.” In this sort of exchange, you depend on the off smile or wrinkle of an eye to say more than words.

But when we talked about Kazzrie that afternoon, it was in tones of reverent, gushing appreciation. We were suddenly comfortable dropping our masks; something about the music demanded it. It only lasted a few moments. Then we returned to our more generally laconic, dispassionate discussion of music, and then we moved on to other subjects.

*

In a way, the Beacon set was the antithesis of that intimate gathering in Morningside. Before the quartet began, Kazzrie told the audience they were going to evoke the days of Young and Holiday, as well as play some more free improvisation. The set that afternoon was definitely tilted toward the former. The nine or ten songs were all standards, with the free excursions relegated to digressions at the ends of tunes. With the exception of two ballads, and to a lesser extent the songs Kazzrie sang in her pleasant, Holiday-inflected voice (“All of Me” and “I Ain’t Foolin’”), the selections were identically imagined and approached: the same forward momentum, hippity-hop bounce, arrangement, and order of solos. “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise,” which appeared early in the set, is such a delicate, haunting tune; I’ve always thought it carried faint suggestions of conspiracy, of betrayal. But the band played it with the same foot-tapping energy as they did everything else. This wasn’t so much sunup as high noon; the melody lost all shadow.

Was it the audience? I wondered. From the Q&A after the set, it was clear that at least a few people there were new to jazz. Maybe the quartet was afraid of alienating them.

I don’t think so.* While Charlie and the rest of the band did indeed evoke the days of Holiday and Young—and Young is not a bad touchstone for Charlie’s warm, sumptuous tone and wonderful sense of melody, both of which really shone on the ballads, and which the Howland space served to amplify—Kazzrie, singing excepted, did not. Something I learned from one of my jazz guitar teachers many years ago: you can swing your way through just about anything. (He demonstrated this by playing an uptempo solo with as many “wrong” notes as he could squeeze in.) In the middle of a heavy swing, an excursion into dissonance or even sheer noise is passed over almost unnoticed by many listeners—even by educated listeners who have not had much exposure to jazz. A steady rhythm allows us to box in and measure such transgressions; it reinforces the sense that they are temporary, regulated. A good beat can square even the most crooked line. The early free jazz players knew this—compare early Dolphy records to Out to Lunch, or Cecil Taylor’s Love for Sale and Conquistador!, or Coleman’s Free Jazz to AACM records from the mid ‘60s. For the average listener, there is something much more transgressive about the bassist and drummer dismounting and tramping off into the meadows to screw around than in even the most outlandish melodies or harmonies. It is the difference between walking into a room and frowning at the décor, and having the rug pulled out from under you.

It wasn’t just Holiday and Young, then, but early Cecil Taylor, that was evoked in me: that time in Taylor’s career when the piano worked like so many IEDs, blasting the rest of the band, and the whole musical experience, off kilter—“Excursion on a Wobbly Rail,” indeed. Like my jazz guitar teacher, Kazzrie could swing when she wanted to, but delighted in getting the notes all wrong; and, like Taylor, comping or soloing, she delighted in throwing rhythmic and harmonic curve balls while the rest of the band swung away, balls that (I have the feeling) whizzed right by many of the foot-tappers in the audience.

If Charlie’s big, huggable sound was all about pleasure, Kazzrie’s was bliss. There was something almost haughty about her, sitting sidesaddle at the piano, her shoulders hunching and relaxing, her mouth occasionally moving. She is almost too big a presence; she is swept away from the moment she sits down. And the way she smiled at that keyboard! Yet, I never got the sense, as is sometimes the case when such different musicians sit in together, that she was off in her own world. Her desire to float did not mean she was leaving the band, but rather that she was finding her own ways to approach them, and the music (cf. her bizarre substitutions on “All the Things You Are”). Comping, she was always listening, prompting, teasing the other players—particularly Charlie, whom she spent the hour scampering after while he soloed, chasing up and down scales and throwing pie-in-the-face chords at. And didn’t Charlie take it all not only in good humor, but with more than a little love and respect? For he never knew, when she went to the top of the keyboard, whether she was going to splash around in the shallow pool of those high keys, or turn them into harp-strings, purling around his tenor. And if she went to the bottom, he didn’t know if those octave runs up from the rumbling depths of the keyboard were going to sound like a Chopin etude or a boogie-woogie … with a dash of Richard Strauss’s bass strings thrown in. She might start a chorus with a single note, and slowly build outwards into a thicket of chord, modifying the rhythm as she went, until Charlie’s tenor, caught up in that beautiful dream, had to hack its way out of the morass of harmony. And then she might climb the keyboard with that same idea, maybe using it to thread her way into a solo, holding onto the tatters of the original idea to create seams. For there was always continuity, the remarkable sense that the concepts on this wide, weird palette come to her fully-formed. There is little, I imagine, she can’t do with a piano, little to which she can’t make it bend, like those spoons, back in that apartment in Morningside.

Did Kazzrie lie to us? Maybe a little. Maybe unintentionally. Maybe just not the whole truth. There was that bit of Holiday in her voice, and Young in Charlie’s horn. And she did say they were going to go a bit … out. Only she was never in. And so there was a subversive air to the whole performance, as if she wanted to plant bad seeds in this green audience by smuggling all that fabulous chaos and dissonance into a straight, sincere, swinging jazz set, smiling the whole way through, as if to say, “Who, me? I didn’t do it!” My guitar teacher warned me about people like you, lady. She was, finally, impossible to resist: she is so sunny and untroubled, so goddamn sure of herself, so certain that whatever she plays is going to win you over, so poised, and so clearly transported by the joy of making music, that if you were to tell her that her playing was, well, a little unorthodox, she would look at you like you were crazy.

*

It’s the same story as everywhere else. They used to make things here. Things you could touch. Hats, apparently. Lots of hats. The factories closed down in the ‘70s, right when they were moving all those books. Now they’re lofts, and the library is a façade. It’s all widgets and MacGuffins. When this sort of thing happened in SoHo, and Williamsburg, at least there was the rest of the City to ground them, like stones around a hot-air balloon. I mean, some neighborhoods still have metal trash cans, and people live in the buildings where they were born and raised. Or they come from faraway lands to squat, old new people without a pot to piss in, as they say. But here? They’re building a hotel and conference center on the river. Same as everywhere. Beacon just did it better, stronger, faster. Dia. Noche.

In the bathroom of this library without books, there is a picture of a chicken. Music, echoing in the spaces where books used to be. Presence, filling the space left behind by representation, twice removed. This is what I am thinking, staring at that picture of the chicken hanging over the toilet.

Maybe it was the rest of the band who were living a dream: the quaint beauty of the old country, the last century, jazz as it used to be, when the men worked on the waterfront or in the factories, and many of the women, too, and they met on dancefloors or smoky pubs, when the boom was taking off and the bomb was so real it made every moment precious. Maybe it was Kazzrie, with her big piano and her big sound, and her sound, and her sound that was nothing like theirs, nothing like anything but itself, no matter how much I try to find musical stones to pin it, who was holding the rest of them down; Kazzrie they depended on to stop them from floating away into some dream of a former time that wasn’t coming back. Kazzrie who kept the whole thing anchored in the present, who said, simply, You are here, like those maps in malls and museums. I didn’t have to worry about pictures of chickens or libraries without books, or even the fact that I’d moved so far out that the City was a faint glimmer and tug in space, a picture from Voyager, because I was a satellite of other, nearer bodies, and Kazzrie was here with her big piano to ground me in the living present.

* Another reason I don’t think so: I’ve attended other concerts by musicians in the same collective (perhaps not the right word; “New Artists” will do, I guess, because many of them have recorded for the small, independent label of this name) just as standards-driven as this one, and others made up entirely of originals, and yet others tending toward the free improv of that afternoon in Morningside. They are an impressively ecumenical bunch; I never got the impression anyone would get called a fascist for playing the tonic triad. For these musicians, “free improv” does not necessarily mean painting on an exploding canvas. From what I have witnessed, they often seem more interested in finding consonances and erecting structures, however temporary or strange, with dissonance reserved for shade and ornament, like vines over a trestle, than in creating the esctatic maelstroms associated (a little too facilely) with free jazz.

Fall is generally the time of year when I depend on finding some older piece to revise in order to keep the Pit Stop going. These two “epitaphs” are from 2003 or 2004. The evocation of the City in the first of the two is very much of that time. The second has been somewhat more updated. HD

1. CBGB’s 313 Gallery

Free jazz! Creative music! Avant-garde music! Liberation music! Et cetera!

In New York, once upon a time, it was called downtown music.

Downtown at CBGB’s 313 Gallery, they called it “freestyle,” and their Sunday night free jazz concerts “freestyle events.”

That word—freestyle—had a special resonance for me. I used to be a competitive swimmer. Everyone who swam knows what freestyle means. It means you wouldn’t get disqualified for doing something different. And that would have been fine, except the point was to win.

The 313 Gallery was not the place you would drag your out-of-town guests to, unless they shared your perversity—though I seemed to have a perverse predilection for trying to pervert the straight ones, once they’d tired of the museums, parks, and tall buildings. The next thing you knew, there we were, at CBGB’s, or Tonic, or Roulette, and they were enduring, like Bush’s freedom, squirming or angry or just plain bored.

There’s a reason these freestyle events were stuck into the cellar of CBGB’s, already music’s cellar, in the Lower East Side, one-time cellar of the City of New York. Like the Weather, the musical revolution, too, went underground. That club smelled like a cellar, goddammit. Must and damp, and behind that, and behind that …

The skid mark in Dali’s underwear. Stop your ears, Wynton. We’re 20,000 leagues under Lincoln Center.

Otherwise, the basement of the 313 Gallery shared the found-object aesthetic of many contemporary art spaces, trying hard to appear as discovered and unreconstructed as the music. The ads in the Voice called the seating comfortable, though many of the chairs were of the plastic lawn variety, and the sofas were past exhaustion. Pillars stood fickly between the audience and the space for the band, like at the old Iridium, though here they were so obviously functional that they stopped being in the way. On each, a plain white sheet of paper listed bands, members, set times.

What drew my attention most, though, was a red curtain hung carelessly behind the space where the band played, sagging at its middle, exposing the broken brick behind it, a strip of tin foil, maybe the space for the boiler.

I said found-object; I could have said ascetic. It was a space of denial, as if we were gathered inside a hair shirt. Maybe the club used to be a mission, and its spirit lived on in us. Self-abnegation had driven us into each others’ arms. In a city of this size, there is a kind of immediate intimacy formed in groups this small, as if the pressure of all the millions outside were brought to bear upon us. Strangers, we were suddenly of one blood, revolutions plotted in our ears.

In a city this size, any gathering this small must be transgressive.

*

Early one Sunday evening, March of 2003. The band of the moment was called Test. A fourpiece: two multireedists, bass and drums. Daniel Carter, that downtown workhorse, was blowing long and dizzy into his tenor; tonsured, reed-thin, he swept and looped in figure-eights from squat to tiptoe. Sabir Mateen, on alto, also had his eyes closed, though his face was less placid than Carter’s, his body rigid; with each burst of sound his waist-length dreads swung. I got stuck on the bassist, Matt Heyner: the expression on his face, the reiterated thrust of his right hand across the strings. I’d seen that face, that hand, maybe, in a porn movie. Yet, in this context, it remained chaste. And it’s remarkable that this should be so. They were playing a sort of music you might have been burned for, once upon a time.

On that red curtain, the shadows of musicians leapt like the shadows of flames, the shadows of devils dancing around a fire.

Test of endurance. Test of faith. Weapons tests, and tests of emergency response systems. Experiment, rehearsal, trial-run for something yet to come, something on the verge of coming, the moment before the moment, always delayed—test-imony to the ultimate goal of free jazz, which is, which must be, presence. Writers envy music for being a language that can say “now” and mean it. Free jazz shouts it through a megaphone. Free jazz throws a tantrum over it. Free jazz wants it NOW.

If jazz is (as we’re so often told) a music hewn from the living present, then why is so much of it mesmerized by tradition to the point of turning itself to stone? Free jazz lets us imagine, if only for a moment, what it would be like to get out from under that stone, to float unmoored. The moment is a fiction, of course—not least because the avant-garde has its own well-developed tradition, “the shape of jazz to come,” long since come. But the moment is only artificial in retrospect. Experience has no memory; its faith is raw, primitive, total. What better way to understand that moment of exhilaration, of connection free jazz affords us, than that moment when doubt escapes us?

Test ended their set with a coda and yielded the stage to an all-brown band called Chocolate Nemesis, anchored by the bass of William Parker. In whatever context Parker’s bass appears, it creates an undertow, is more felt than heard, and so helps close the gap between listening and experiencing. This night was no exception. Parker likes to flirt with rhythm: as soon as he’s settled into a groove, one we can dig our toes into, he undercuts it; the groove fractures into a prolonged stumble. But there is no pratfall, no cymbal crash, no punch line. That moment before the comic’s butt hits the boards and the audience bursts out laughing is prolonged—not repeated, like in slapstick, but prolonged. Because once the comic falls, all he can do is do it over again. But in Parker, in freestyle, the music stays on the cusp of an endlessly-deferred, ever-arriving climax, until any sense of structure—verse, chorus, bridge, coda, A, B, climax, origin, end—is lost. Land hasn’t just disappeared from sight; land has just disappeared. And since there is no place to return to, there is no time we can imagine ourselves saved.

Collectively, intimately, chastely, band and audience participate in this voyage whose destination is loss. With a music that promises so much, perhaps it can’t be otherwise.

That sagging red curtain, drawing our attention to what it’s supposed to hide!

*

A couple of months later I was walking through the Lower East Side with a friend of a friend. He was lamenting the disappearance of the “dark underbelly” of New York. Maybe he had never experienced desperate poverty, as I had not. Maybe, like other people of our class and age (middle, thirtysomething), he’d fed off the spectacle of poverty to remind himself of his own reality in the fantastic surroundings of “new economy,” or doctrinally free market, New York—ever more fantastic as the economy thumped back to reality. Suffering built this city’s character, but not my suffering. So we lamented the death of a tragedy that had used to be performed nightly on these dark stoops, on Stanton or Rivington or Ludlow.

Could we be consoled? Hadn’t we attended these freestyle events, in these cellars, in this last ungentrified outpost on the Bowery?

And yet, could I really believe that these freestyle events didn’t depend on the Bowery’s gentrification? Now through January first, at the Museum of Urban Grit’s new I-MAX theater, I, too, could experience The Dark Underbelly. (In 3D, of course.) Skid row, skid mark—we have to believe it exists, that we can reach over the rope and touch it. And if that’s what the music was really about, then maybe the mystical evocation of the present was just what I wanted from it: a hold against my own slipping reality: my own freestyle, the way my body used to feel hitting the freezing cold water on summer mornings. Maybe the music was really a torch song for the Lower East Side, an invocation of past suffering, the ghosts of the penniless immigrants, homeless people, junkies, freaks. An injunction to remember.

2. Tonic

      Among the many criticisms leveled at free jazz, one of the most common is that it forgets its audience. It wears its esoterism as a badge; its adherents believe themselves the elect.

The assumption seems to be that, before we can expect an audience to decode “difficult” music, they require a palliative. After all, the people must be given what they want, music must delight first, instruct second. Free jazz, perennially unsweetened, bitter at the root, and real hard to understand, is thus relegated to music’s cellar—at least until some apparently ever-deferred revolution of consciousness overtakes the general populace.

If John Zorn is the best-known avant-garde musician to have emerged from New York’s “downtown” scene, maybe it’s because he believes neither that a music’s “avant” status exempts it from seeking an audience, nor that finding an audience requires sweetening the music. As a label mogul and club entrepreneur—not to mention working musician—to believe the former would be suicide. Zorn has gone out of his way to promote what he calls “creative music.” It’s a silly label, and particularly bizarre coming from somebody whose contempt for generic boundaries has been his music’s best promotion. Then again, given that Tonic, his first venture, buckled under New York’s tectonic real estate shifts back in 2007 (cf. the Himalayan condo that rose up just across its Norfolk Street home), it does make you wonder whether the branding of the avant-garde presents the only hope of a mitigated salvation.

The latter idea, though—sweetening—would be suicide of a different sort. “Sweet” is not the first word that comes to mind when thinking about Zorn’s music. Take, for example, the first time I saw him, at 1999’s Vision Festival. He still wore his hair long then, and had on baggy pants, and he put one foot up on the monitor like Steve Harris (the bass player for Iron Maiden), and, head buried, horn braced against one thigh, and held at an angle less reminiscent of Pres than of the way those Tarantino gangsters fire their pistols, he proceeded to sonically violate me in a way that, once upon a very long time, believing my suburban white heavy metal the most transgressive music imaginable, I couldn’t have begun to fathom. And wasn’t I pleased to find out later that Zorn had recorded with Slayer’s original and only true drummer, that cocaine-infused dynamo Dave Lombardo? Didn’t I say then, “See, I told you he was a metalhead”?

Of course, Zorn’s no metalhead. Still, I like to imagine hundreds of such recognition scenes: “See, I told you he was a punk!” “See, I told he you he listened to [Stockhausen, Messiaen … fill in the blank]!” Suffice it to say Zorn’s musical universe is too elemental and too chaotic to adhere to the boundaries of any one genre for very long.

Were he to stop there, though, Zorn would fit neatly into the genre-bending that has characterized jazz for the last half-century. Nor is it enough to simply say that Zorn is at once an uncompromising musician and highly conscious of himself as a performer and promoter, or even that he knows how to market his uncompromising artistry. It’s rather how he handles—explodes, really—the “contradiction” between artist and performer that sets him apart. He wallows in it. He recognizes that only by actively invoking and manipulating the artist-entertainer binary can its conventionality be exposed, and the construct held up to ridicule.

*

       After the ’99 Vision Festival, I didn’t see Zorn again for almost four years. This was partly because I left the City half a year later to finish my doctorate, and didn’t return until the summer of 2002. In hindsight, though, I wonder if it wasn’t also to keep that Vision night’s cosmic mindfuck enshrined in my memory. There had been something so right about the church basement setting, the metal folding chairs in lieu of pews. Zorn’s partner that night was the percussion guru Milford Graves, a man for whom the word “grandstand” might have been invented. Between that set and the Anderson-Parker-Drake one that ended the night, I left feeling like some newly-minted evangelist, all ready to rush out into the wilderness and found a religion.

I guess four years was long enough, because when I saw Zorn billed with Brazilian singer-guitarist Vinicius Cantuaria for a set at Tonic, I decided the time was right measure, as Melville reckoned it, the size of god.

I got there late, but Zorn was later. The Goth-Tinkerbells who worked the door said he was having dinner, that he’d had a busy day and was running behind schedule.

The club was almost silent. Inside that halo of red Christmas lights, on the crotch-high altar Tonic called a stage, for the early-birds in the few chairs and the hipsters sitting crosslegged on the floor and the dozens shifting from one foot to the other behind them, Cantuaria thumbed bossas on his plump hollowbody, half-whispering in Portuguese. Erik Friedlander accompanied him on cello, filling the sonic near-vacuum with a restrained lyricism. After a few songs, a drummer sat in. He treated his kit like it was made of glass. Maybe it was the sound of bottles at the bar behind me.

Forty-five minutes later, Zorn trucked in, sat down on stage, and said, “That was the candy, this is the medicine.” There was no slow build into the cacophony, no time for the musicians or audience to adjust. It was like an evil clown had wandered onto a movie set right when the glamorous couple, lying on the beach in Rio, were about to kiss.

John Zorn: musical freedom-fighter or musical terrorist?

Wasn’t it just possible, I wondered later, that he’d planned the whole thing? It was of course so very very Zorn, just the kind of jump-cuts out of which albums like Naked City are built. And then the first piece Zorn drove into was longer, more dissonant and more wildly malevolent than anything that followed. When he finally let up (and Friedlander, too, and the drummer, both of whom had caught the wave without blinking), Cantuaria was still thumbing his bossas and whispering in Portuguese, a subdued act of resistance … or a state of shock. And Zorn lay his horn across his lap and looked wryly at the crowd, as if this Brazilian singer-guitarist had shipwrecked on a free-jazz set, and was playing the unwitting straight man in a musical comedy.

If music often finds its most nuanced accents in a blend of sweet and sour, Zorn, like some demented chemist, had separated the two—let Cantuaria give us the sugar until we choked on it, and then himself gave us the medicine until we choked on it. But far from demonstrating that each element couldn’t exist on its own, whether serendipity or plotted coup, the partitioning worked. It worked maybe because free jazz is finally not interested in musical instruction, but destruction—another kind of sugar, the kind that monkey-wrenches the culture industry, rotting the teeth of its gears, dissolving binaries—sweet-sour, instruct-delight, artist-entertainer. The show didn’t “work” in the sense of musicians playing together like good little boys and girls; according to that definition, it was a trainwreck. Later on, sure, sort of. But the minutes following Zorn’s entry were the performance’s jagged peak. There, in the unexpected moment where the performance “fails,” it finds its center as live experience. And how could that peak, or that abyss, when every expectation about the performance is torn away from us, appear, unless we had been fattened, sweetened, and kissed goodnight by Cantuaria?

It’s one thing to bend generic boundaries by bringing the free reeds of avant jazz to metal and punk—other musicians have done this, and clubs like Tonic and CBGB’s used to be around to capitalize on it. It’s quite another to descend like a roaring lion upon well-intentioned Brazilian singer-guitarists. The former marks a daring openness that has done much to expand the language of contemporary music, and to turn younger music fans onto new styles and sounds. The latter is a calculated effort to break down the perceived barrier between two conceptions of music’s role in culture—to mess with our heads at the very root of thought. It’s in the latter that Zorn really distinguishes himself. A serious and thoughtful musician, always ready with the blue note, the honk and squeal, this joker, macaw, one hand behind his back, always smiling at himself and at us. Shaman and showman, circus clown and medicine man, he is as much at home playing the ringmaster as with his head in the lion’s mouth, or swinging a hundred feet above the startled crowd without a net.

      The first thing I heard was laughter.

At The Stone, John Zorn’s Dieter-jazz follow-up to defunct Tonic, this is no mean feat. If Tonic had all the earnest scruffiness of a mid-90s Williamsburg squat—the garage with bedsheets for walls and a dirty skylight for a window—The Stone’s aim seems the opposite: to create a high-cult, gallery-like ambience for “creative” music. Even the name strains under the weight of its own symbolism: cornerstone of a new downtown, laid at the southeasternmost corner of the East Village/Alphabet City. Heavy stuff, this.

But laughter has a way of transfiguring spaces, making windows out of walls, turning stones into feathers. A child laughing in a museum always sounds insouciant. Laughter in a church turns the pulpit into a sandbox and the censer into a swing.

It was Steve Coleman doing the laughing. I might have guessed; I don’t think I’ve ever gone to see Coleman and not heard him laugh. This was at last year’s Pi Recordings festival, and Coleman, the resident heavyweight, was busy lightening the mood. He was sitting in an empty row of chairs at the far corner of our Spartan little auditorium, joined by the other musicians in that night’s trio, the trumpeter John Finlayson and pianist David Bryant. They all seemed to be enjoying themselves. But it was Coleman whose laughter rang out for The Stone to hear.

A well-known educator as well as composer and improviser, Coleman clearly enjoys working with younger musicians, and one can easily see why younger musicians like working with him—and why artists like Finlayson, a ten-year veteran of Coleman’s Five Elements band, would stick around. In his backwards baseball cap, chamois shirt and loose-fitting jeans, Coleman looked hardly older than his mentees, many of whom were appearing in other Pi festival sets, on other nights, in combinations and permutations that seemed to mirror the music’s complex logic of chord substitutions.

As a 2010 piece in the Wall Street Journal noted about his ongoing workshops at the Jazz Gallery, for Coleman “performance and instruction are often indistinguishable.”* The bandstand is a classroom, and vice-versa; a workshop is a set by another name. This was certainly borne out at The Stone, where Coleman spent the hour leading Finlayson and Bryant around the wormhole alleys of his harmonic imagination, restating lines, breaking them into bits, cycling through the bits until the other two musicians could patch the whole together. More than once he stopped playing and sang a melody, accenting the rhythm by clapping his hands. And just when they thought they had it, he would find some unexpected way out—the trapdoor, the corkscrew ladder, the skeleton key. No surprise that Coleman has compared his role to that of a Griot … or that he counts among his influences a visit to the Dagbon people of Ghana, who have—according to his rich, recondite website M-Base—“a tradition of speaking through their music, using a drum language that still survives today.”

Now, every good teacher knows that teaching is part performance. It’s not so much that Coleman exploits this crossover as that he seems most at home as a performer when he is teaching. At the same time, it’s possible to overstate Coleman’s role as leader. Some of the most enjoyable moments in the set had him laughing at, and then musically responding to, Bryant’s noodling diversions and interventions. The laughing teacher is the one who enjoys what his students have to contribute, who expects to learn as well as teach, to inspire and be inspired. Coleman, that is, never stepped back to play teacher—he was as fully present, as fully integrated in the music-making as the other two. It’s a difficult line to walk, between self-indulgence and self-effacement. Coleman made it look easy. Then again, if you like to teach, the classroom is often just a more structured, measured extension of whatever else you do.

Of course, teaching and learning are still work. Coleman may not be a harsh taskmaster, but his is a labor-intensive music, with a certain agony of force behind it. Finlayson had beads of sweat shining in his cropped afro, and not just because it was August. For a while, a moth circled around and around in the light above him, like some errant melody he couldn’t quite catch, hovering just out of reach of his spiraling drones.

Here is a thought: perhaps the set must be a lesson, because the lesson so conceived, and the teacher-student relationship so understood, embodies an ideal that allows egos to fuse, and the collaborative product of music-making to rise above the artificial strictures of clubs, sets, times, fees, and all the other elements of our culture that work to divide music from life, experience, spirit.

For this, finally, is Coleman’s project. In his wildly abstract musical imagination, jazz is code, a complex series of algorithms, but employed for the purpose of rising above mere intellectual play. Listening to a jam build over the course of eight or ten minutes (as one can do on Coleman’s most recent albums, like The Mancy of Sound) is like watching crystals grow in solution. Those clumped crystals, you may remember from your high school chemistry lab, always looked eerily organic, as if the submerged metal rods had grown hair. And this is precisely what happens in a Coleman jam: the austere, unforgiving beauty of pattern and code slowly takes on a palpable life. Math grows hair.

When the house lights came up, maybe because they’d played overtime, Finlayson and Coleman kept blowing as they exited (which, at The Stone, means either walking back over to the folding chairs, where everyone pretends they can’t see you anymore, or down to the basement). Had I stuck around a few more minutes, I have a feeling the conversation would have picked up right where the music left off.

* Unfortunately, Coleman has never been present the few times I attended these Monday night workshops. What I saw was a venue for up-and-coming musicians (the sort the Jazz Gallery exists to support and promote) to test out new compositions with each other, and with an audience. Apparently, Coleman’s absence from many of these “Steve Coleman Presents” events resulted in complaints—or so the guy working the door himself complained, on one of those nights when I was there and Coleman wasn’t. True, curator and organizer does not mean bandleader … but it is a little questionable to put the words “Steve Coleman Presents” in big letters on the ad, and then wonder why people—particularly visitors to Gotham—might be a teensy-weensy bit disappointed. Anyway, for a good idea what Mondays look like when Coleman is present, see the aforementioned Wall Street Journal article.

 Part Two of the Sehnsucht Trilogy

I met him at one of the city’s high-end jazz clubs, at the second set of a two-set evening, at a small round table pushed so close to the stage I could have touched the claw foot of the piano bench, the bell of the horn waiting on its stand. My usual table was further back, against the piano-side wall, under the big black-and-white photo of Charlie Haden. But it was Friday night, and the name on the bill—the crossover hit, the Grammy nomination—was the sort that grabs people who don’t usually go out for jazz. It was here or the bar; and the bar, all the way in the rear, beset by the noises of glass and ice and money changing hands, was out of the question. So I opened my book and, with the empty eye of the horn staring back at me, waited for the waitresses to finish running tabs and rushing out the stragglers, so they could begin to accommodate the new patrons, some of whom were still waiting outside in a line that stretched halfway down the block.

The hostess sat him across from me. He’d brought a book, too, used it as a shield, just like I did. Until, that is, our waitress mixed up our drink orders—his was a Shirley Temple, of all things—set them down in front of us, and moved on before either of us could say a word. Poor thing, she looked no end of harried. We had one of those I-think-this-belongs-to-you moments, like around the baggage carousel at an airport. If one of us—I can’t remember who—hadn’t made a comment about the decline in service, we never would have known each other for regulars. From there it was an easy step to the pandemonium of the evening, and then to the club’s recent mismanagement at the expense of the musicians and fans alike, the regrettable tendency to cut sets short on weekends to squeeze in a third—we both expressed surprise at the absence of a third set this evening—despite the great people who came through, who made it necessary to brave what he called “the feedlot.” I made some comment to the effect that at least the décor hadn’t changed—I was going to point to that Haden photo, probably taken in the late sixties—but he said, almost under his breath, “Well, not much.”

Just then the house lights dimmed, and the stage brightened, and the five musicians filed down what was left of the aisle—even some of the two-tops had three and four people around them—to a raucous welcome.

When the lights came up an hour later there was a long moment of silence, each of us, perhaps, waiting for the other to speak. At least, that was how it felt to me: like I needed to say something that would impress him; and this would mean, in part, not being overly impressed by the music. Maybe as a result, I found myself with nothing to say, and almost no recollection of what I had heard. For all I knew he regretted beginning the conversation in the first place, and was suffering the same pangs I was. But then neither of us had opened our books.

When at last he opened his mouth, it wasn’t to ask my opinion, but to offer his. He began by saying that he had followed this saxophonist’s slow rise over the years through other, smaller venues, and commented on the other eras of his career, and his fine work as a sideman. Eventually he wended his way back to a measured criticism of the evening’s performance, which, impressive though it had been, had lost some of the introspection and lyricism which had brought the player to prominence in the first place.

How could I hope to compete with that? It was all I could do to confess that I had enjoyed the set anyway, and go on to offer my own measured excuse on behalf of the artist: he might have been pandering to the crowd. If my friend noticed that I was pandering—by bringing the conversation back to the safe ground on which we had bonded, the way the common indignation of slogans leads one to become immediate comrades with the nearest marchers at a protest—he gave no indication. And if the arrogance with which I dismissed the audience was a bit too easy, I think he knew it as well as I did; and this led us to attack the subject with a self-conscious relish, and at a volume a little louder than was necessary. We looked back on a time when the club had been in danger of closing, before Lincoln Center had made jazz safe for the elite, fusion had burned itself out, the crossovers that invited the musical rabble into the temple had become commonplace, and venues like this had depended on the loyalty of connoisseurs like us, on whom, we agreed, it was now turning its back. Never mind that I only knew about these things from reading: it gave me an insider’s satisfaction, siding with him in this way, about a city where, ten years on, I still felt like a bit of an exile. When I tried to bring the level down a bit, by suggesting it might have been nice to have something to look at besides the musicians’ shoes, he seemed to take it as a signal that conversation was over, and started trying to flag down a waitress.

We shook hands under the awning outside, traded email addresses. And then, perhaps because it had begun to rain lightly, he offered me a ride home. I declined at first, but when he persisted, asking me where I lived, and then arguing that uptown would hardly take him out of his way to Queens, I remembered the Shirley Temple and agreed.

His minivan was parked near Washington Square. As we climbed Eighth Avenue, chatting about music, I began to form a clearer impression of my driver. He loved to talk, and he was one of those people with a head for stats, just applied to jazz instead of, say, baseball. He seemed to have seen everybody at one time or another, every legend who hadn’t died unreasonably young, and to have a story and an opinion about all of them. He called his favorite players “monsters”—a term I would come to adopt—and, when he was recalling a set that particularly impressed him, he would say the band had “played their butts off.” Our tastes turned out to be pretty similar, though I admit his forays into swing and boogie-woogie left me cold, while I tended to be more forgiving of the avant-garde, which he dismissed as “cerebral dissonance,” or, in a few cases, out-and-out charlatanry. It wasn’t his age; he couldn’t have been more than ten years older than me, and besides, a fair percentage of the crowd at avant-garde shows tended to be the full-bearded flotsam of the sixties. No, it was something else. The Shirley Temple. The lack of swearing, which, once I noticed it, made me conscious of my own bad mouth. The radio, tuned to BGO, the volume so low it barely registered. The minivan, of all things. And the way he drove! We could’ve taken the parkway, but here we were, on the avenues, and I don’t think we ever broke thirty. He would stop at yellow lights, braking heavily, as if we were narrowly avoiding a collision, wait for them to turn red. I was surprised a taxi didn’t rear-end us. I started to wonder how well he could see. And I decided that either he was actually quite a bit older than he appeared, or he was affecting great age, the way a boy might pretend to have a limp, because he believes it makes him look dignified in the eyes of his fellows.

The reflections of streetlights scattered on the wet pavement as we crawled our way uptown. At one point we made thirty-five greens in a row. I hadn’t realized I was counting until we had passed ten. At twenty-five I mentioned it to him, interrupting a monologue about Miles’s time with Bird. We counted the last ten aloud together, breaking into cheers when the yellow appeared at number thirty-six, and high-fiving after the car had skidded to a halt. Had he run that yellow, I thought, we would have made a couple more. Then again, we had caught up twice to a gypsy cab that was going much faster than we were, floating past it through newly-turned greens. Maybe there was a method here, a rhythm about the City that he understood, but which an outsider, who saw only the City’s frenetic pace, could never apprehend.

Anyway, whether because it was goodwill rather than disdain which had momentarily united us, or because, for the moment, it had been something other than music that caught our attention—whatever the reason, it was a kind of breakthrough. As he swung the car around to drop me off in front of my Morningside brownstone, I almost asked him what he was doing the following night. Instead, we shook hands warmly and promised to stay in touch. It was only as he was driving away that I noticed the Massachusetts license plate, and realized just how little he had told me about himself.

*

He was a native of Queens, but had lived for more than a decade in Boston. Whenever the opportunity presented itself—maybe eight or nine times a year—he drove down to the City and spent the weekend with his sister, who still lived in the old neighborhood, and took advantage to go out and hear as much live music as he could.

He told me this by way of apology, perhaps, as we sat side by side late one Friday evening at a familiar venue only a few blocks from the one where we had met, though a good deal more downscale: a basement shaped like a boxcar, with mirrors behind the bandstand and a bar with four stools at the other end. After almost two months and a few unanswered emails, I figured he had gone the way of most club acquaintances. And then, the previous night, a message had appeared, with nothing more than the name of the venue and time of the set, together with a link. I never responded; I didn’t make up my mind to go until late the following day. But he was there, waiting for me when I arrived, wildly flagging me down from the row of chairs closest to the stage, removing his jacket from the seat next to his, and making a point of telling me how the waitress had been throwing him dirty looks for the last half hour. It seemed like a natural segue from my tardiness to his two-month silence—or would have been, had he not suggested I get a drink, the set might start at any minute. It ended up taking me so long to find the waitress in the thick of the crowd that, by the time I sat down again, and managed to mumble something about not knowing he was an out-of-towner, I felt like I was being petty. Instead, I asked him what the jazz scene in Boston was like—to which he replied, without hesitation, “It isn’t New York.” And then a moment later, more cryptically: “They’re a little too smart for their own good.” I didn’t ask him to elaborate, and he didn’t offer, either about Boston, or Queens, or his sister, whom I imagined as a cross between Ella Fitzgerald and Edith Bunker, and wondered, idly, if she was married.

Once the music started, I found myself wondering at my own peevishness, and at my initial reticence about coming. It wasn’t that I’d been upset with him for not staying in touch—actually, I’d been pleasantly surprised by his message. It was that music was something I was accustomed to experiencing alone. Having him along, I thought, would be like wedging something between the music and me, as though I were being forced to listen through a screen, or from another room. Like the last time, I would be anxious about whether he liked what I did, or what was worse, have to account for my tastes. And yet here I was again, closer than I would have chosen to be, and with a much louder band than the last time. I could feel my ears callous with every blacksmith whack on the snare, every burst from the trumpet, every squeal of the alto. At such close range, the music bordered on disintegrating into a chaos of noise, the way blown-up newsprint looks like nothing but scattered pixels.

I looked for my friend in the mirrors behind the bandstand. They were intended to help those at the rear of the club see the musicians, and maybe this explains why I had such a hard time finding him, even though I found myself right away. But then he looked so different, there in the mirror—different but familiar: leaning forward with his eyes tightly shut, an almost pained expression on his face, head turned to one side, rocking slightly in time. Maybe it was his hearing, not his vision, that was going—maybe he was paying the price for sitting up front all these years, however many of them there were. Maybe it was all going, and this was the secret to the strange aura of his age. Only the longer I looked—and I looked for a long time, hardly anxious he might open his eyes and catch me—the older he seemed, until a shriveled, haggard old man I no longer recognized occupied the chair next to me. It was enough to make me close my own eyes, abandon myself to the music’s stormy harbor.

When the set was over we applauded along with everybody else, and then lapsed into the same silence as last time. Maybe he was waiting for me to talk, wary of monopolizing the conversation. But I couldn’t; I hadn’t yet found the distance necessary to formulate my experience in language. More than that, it was the same insecurity I had felt last time: I wasn’t qualified to speak. After all, though I was familiar with the leader, I had neither heard nor seen him with his working quintet before this evening. I was sure I had enjoyed it too much. There was nothing I could find to pick at. If I started gushing, I would only reveal my own ignorance, and my friend would recoil, and never invite me to go see music with him again.

After the silence had prolonged itself uncomfortably, and neither of us was getting up to use the bathroom, I made a meek little comment about how young all the other players were, or at least looked.

It turned out to be the opening he was waiting for. He started by lavishing praise on the bassist, remarking on how many melodically gifted and technically impressive “fiddle players” seemed to be coming out of music schools these days. About the leader, who was only slightly older than the rest of the band, he claimed that he was in rare form. Had I heard the latest album? I dropped my eyes and confessed I hadn’t. And he said—I’ll never forget this—“I envy you.” Envied me, apparently, for still having the opportunity to hear it for the first time.

He went on like this—about how comfortable the trumpeter seemed to be playing his own compositions, and how refreshing it was to find that he had the same flair for composing and arranging as for improvising, and so on—until I actually did have to use the bathroom. But then it was hard to find a pause to excuse myself. Watching the musicians pack their gear, my friend droning on, I started to wonder if they were listening to him, too. I’d forgotten how close we were to the bandstand, this though I was still half-deaf. Maybe I shouldn’t have resisted the urge to plug my ears. I had feared it would make me look like an old man.

And then I did something unusual, for me: I interrupted him. I actually talked louder and louder until he relented, just as he had done to me. It was only to suggest we get another round, and stay for the beginning of the open jam, which was supposed to start at twelve-thirty, but would likely start closer to one, it being almost twelve-thirty already. The suggestion itself was unusual. I disliked these Friday-night crushes, when the club was too dark to read in and everybody had to shout to make themselves heard. I wasn’t here to pick up girls, or make new friends, or rub shoulders with important people. I was here for the music.

At least, that was what I told myself. Some nights I would stay sitting at my table after the set was over, book closed, stirring the melted ice with one of those little red straws. Or I would sit down on the church steps halfway between the subway and home, and watch the groups of people just on their way out to the clubs. Back and forth, work to set to apartment, set to apartment to work. Every time I came home, the apartment was as empty as before. The next morning, my cubicle would be waiting for me, even emptier. Lying in bed, I would imagine my most recent outing as a pebble, carefully selected from a wide plain of such pebbles, and dropped into a container that resembled an aquarium. When the aquarium was almost full, just as I was about to add the last pebble, I would stop and asked myself: Why was I filling this aquarium with pebbles? All along it had seemed so important, but somehow I had never stopped to ask myself why. It’s not like I was the crow in the fable, trying to get a drink of water. The aquarium was empty but for the pebbles I put in it.

Tonight, though—tonight I felt energized. As if the music, the thrill of having it so close, had jounced me up to some higher state; and now, in the midst of falling, I glowed. And maybe he felt like I was trying to get rid of him, avoid riding home with him. It was true I’d taken him for an early bird, what with the Shirley Temples and the minivan. But no moreso than I was. In any case, he agreed without hesitation. I watched him for what must have been a very long time; he was talking again and didn’t seem to notice. He glowed, too; there was no trace of that face it had taken me so long to recognize in the mirror, the face that had aged before my eyes. I had a vague recollection of seeing it again, in the mirror, deep into that jam session. By that time he had bought another round, and a round after that, so that, when I got out of the van in front of my building a few hours later, I felt like I was stepping off a merry-go-round; and the only thing I remember thinking was that I’d left my damn book at the bar, before realizing, as I was trying to make my room stop spinning and just fall asleep, that I’d never brought one.

*

It always happened the same way: a couple of months of silence, then an email: tomorrow, name, venue, time. I wasn’t expected to respond, just follow instructions, wherever they took me. It was odd how much I trusted him, given how little I knew about him. As much as I trusted my few close friends, holdovers from college or high school, whom I saw a couple of times a year if I was lucky—or unlucky, as they were always loud family affairs where I ended up spending most of the time with their kids. And then he would always already be there, wherever “there” was, and no matter how early I thought I was, would flag me down like I was some long-lost friend descending from an ocean liner after a thirty-year absence. I guess you could say he never stood me up, though really the reverse is true. I did think about not going sometimes. Those emails, though: they might have looked like simple announcements, but I treated them like transmissions from my destiny.

I said I followed those emails wherever they took me, and in truth they took me further and further out, first into the nether reaches of Manhattan, then the boroughs—Brooklyn, usually, but occasionally the Bronx, and once even Staten Island. It didn’t matter how far-flung from the great state of Queens, either, he always gave me a ride home. It did me no good to protest. Riding the train out to the show, and sometimes the bus as well—it never occurred to me to ask him to pick me up, and he never offered—I would find myself wondering how on earth he’d discovered these places. Cafes and dinner clubs, the dining room of the Bohemian society, a plumber’s union hall. If they were actual music venues, they were invariably basements, mirrors for windows, giving the illusion of extra space and twinned people. Some of the more memorable ones looked like they belonged anyplace but the city, boroughs or no. One was a converted carriage house; I swore I could still smell the hay and horseshit. Another had rusty, rough-hewn farm relics—hoe blades, horseshoes—hanging uncanny as severed limbs on the wood-plank walls, and the mirrors were all set in quartered white frames. A third had a single long table running down the middle, where we sat like Germans at a beer hall, and the bartender handed drinks to the people seated at the ends, whose responsibility it was to pass them down. It got to the point that I started to wonder if I’d been fooling myself all along: here I thought I’d moved to the City, but it seemed like if you dug deep enough, it wasn’t so hard to turn up the arrowheads buried with the cobblestone. Just as much as the farm was a mask someone had hung on the forest. You could tell that the moment you walked far enough from the house that it set under the hillside, turning the world into another night; or you stopped working for a day, and just watched.

The musicians were as obscure as the venues, and they grew more obscure the further out from the center we went. Younger, too. I started to feel like we were on the trail of the Fountain of Youth; I kept waiting for him to take me to a high school gymnasium and proclaim that it was “the hottest ticket in town.” Then again, had he taken me to hear a marching band, I’m sure he would have had his reasons.

He must have some network of contacts, I thought. But if so, why didn’t anyone else ever come along—an old high school friend, say? I watched him down those Shirley Temples; he never ordered anything else. Once he held up his glass and said, “Signs of a misspent youth.” There was no other choice: I started to fantasize a dark past for him. Maybe he actually lived in Queens, with his sister. Some lost story by Poe: she was an invalid, there was a weird bond between them, etc. Maybe he didn’t have a sister at all. And then there was the matter of his hearing. We always sat right up front, as close to the music as possible—like I said, he always got there first, and always saved a seat for me. We got so close you could almost see the vibrations, the way raindrops makes a puddle quiver, or a breeze flutters a spiderweb. I remember one summer watching jazz in a park, and every time the pedal of the bass drum kicked, the membrane would flash, because it had distended in such a way as to catch the sun. It only lasted a few minutes; then the sun moved, and maybe the drum, too, from the kick of the pedal. Those nights sitting so close, I started to feel like I was the puddle, the spiderweb, or the skin of the drum: it was my body that had been stretched across a ring of metal, and was being pummeled into spent ecstasy.

But as for him—he had no past, so far as I could tell. About love, about politics—about growing up in New York during that seedy, thrilling time everybody my age wishes they had experienced, if only in a picturesque, arm’s-length sort of way—it was like these things didn’t exist for him. I got the idea, somehow, that he worked with computers. But who didn’t? I worked with computers, if you wanted to put it that way. Asking him anything directly was useless; his answers were always cryptic, if he answered at all. I had no idea, for example, what prevented him from making the trip to the City more often, besides the snail’s pace at which he drove. He didn’t wear a ring; but then I had overheard some of my coworkers talking about how they took theirs off when they were away on business, in case an opportunity presented itself. Once, on a ride home, I asked him where in Queens his sister lived. He told me I wouldn’t know it. And when I persisted: “Out by Throgs Neck. It’s not what it used to be. They should change the name.” And then he launched into some diatribe about the Louis Armstrong museum. I was tempted to ask him if his sister lived there, in the Armstrong museum. But I bit my tongue, and instead looked around the interior of the minivan—it always seemed suspiciously clean for someone routinely making a long-distance drive—for some revealing object or point of entry: The Angry Bird on the dash. The plastic troll hanging by its green hair from the mirror. The Red Socks key chain dangling from the ignition. The plastic Maverick thermos cup between the seats. The radio tuned to BGO, low.

Music, though. Here you couldn’t stop him. He would start with the familiar constellations, then build slowly outwards, ripples on a pond, to musicians of greater and greater obscurity, sidemen’s sidemen, though always just two or three degrees removed from a Miles or Duke. It wasn’t just that he knew so much more than I did, so many more names and titles and tunes. It was that he gave the impression that what he didn’t know wasn’t worth knowing. He seemed to enjoy bursting my bubble. Some of the players I most admired he claimed were imitators of earlier, lesser-known innovators. Once he even looked at me and said, “You know, jazz didn’t start with Bird.” I almost hit him. But it was hard to stay angry with him for long. Man, could he tell stories. You got the impression he’d been there, wherever and whatever it was, whether it had happened in 1920 or yesterday, like some jazz Forrest Gump. Maybe this was why I would always remember him as older than he was; and why I was always surprised to find, after a month or two without seeing him, an unaccountably young man flagging me down from somewhere near the bandstand—a man who, after all, was only a few years older than me.

There was hardly a musician he didn’t claim to have met at one time or another; and the way he would carry on, you’d have thought they’d grown up together. It was partly his habit of calling them by their first names—not just Duke and Miles, Wynton and Branford, but John, Horace, Art, Eric, and Sonny. And if you didn’t know which Sonny he meant, you waited for the context. Asking just elicited a polite stare before rolling on, if he deigned to pause at all.

I knew he hadn’t met half the people he claimed to, and that he was hardly on intimate terms with the rest. I knew, too, that, like me, the vast majority of what he knew must have come out of books, no matter how much he could make it appear otherwise. And yet, I didn’t mind it, at least as much as I maybe should have. I didn’t spend time looking for chinks in his armor, and was vaguely disappointed when I found one. A sax player whom he praised, for example, though he had dismissed the name when I had mentioned it some months earlier: I resisted the urge to call him out. No matter how much of a pedant he turned out to be, there was something endearing about him. I admit, I sort of enjoyed the idea that the name I had mentioned had become part of his repertoire. Maybe I just liked pedants, admired the mountains they raised out of something so insignificant as their insecurity. They had a peculiar majesty I could relate to.

It wasn’t friendship he was looking for. He didn’t invite me out anywhere else, or over to his sister’s place. When I offered him to crash at mine—to give his sister a break, I said—he demured, mumbling something about family obligations. Maybe I was the one looking for friendship, whatever that means. Sharing secrets, I guess. I don’t know why I was setting my expectations above the one thing we did share. Maybe I was looking for something I shouldn’t have expected to find. It’s funny, for a while I had been concerned about possible sexual overtones, probably because he was so opaque about his personal life. And yet here I was, craving something more, anticipating his coming to town, following his emails no matter what dark staircases they took me down, keeping my mouth shut despite thinking him a charlatan, so willing, eager even, to be his sounding board. For that was what he really wanted—not a friend, not a lover, but a cave in which to hear his own echo. And I, mute before him, never called him out. Not once. It was as though I felt the need to protect him. Or myself.

It was a little like he was pure sound, like he was made of all and nothing but the music he had absorbed over the years, and the information and experiences that had accrued around these, of which I was just one more encrustation. As if, were I to poke my finger into him, I’d find him hollow, he himself no more than the cavern for an echo, and the blare of a thousand trumpets would emerge from the hole, like that gag in the cartoons where someone yells into a paper bag. As though, were I to put my ear to his chest, I would hear the roar of a shell rather than the beat of a heart. When he drove off into the night, it wasn’t darkness he disappeared into, but silence, in which he dissolved like sugar in rain.

*

We went on like this for a couple of years: appearances and disappearances, nights spent in the lap of music, tall tales, rides home I hardly remembered from drink.

And then one night, as we were pulling up in front of my place, he made the offhand suggestion that maybe it was time for me to pick the next set. If it was intended as an admission or an apology, there was a barb in it; because when we went to shake hands, he added, “Don’t disappoint me.”

He must have known that I hadn’t grown up here. In fact, I was certain I’d told him as much: about moving to the city in my mid-twenties, about the way the sudden opportunity to hear so much live music had overpowered me, and about how, after more than a decade here, I still felt like a stranger. But for all I knew he didn’t remember, if he had heard me at all.

I should have resented it. I don’t have the stomach for the one-upmanship which passes for so much of male friendship. And yet, something inside me must have craved it—that, or I was just drunk enough to respond; because before letting go of his hand, I told him that I wouldn’t disappoint him. Then I watched him drive away.

I spent a lot of time over the next few weeks poring over the jazz papers and jazz blogs for a suitably obscure venue, and a suitably obscure artist who nonetheless had some pedigree, trying to pinpoint the time of my friend’s arrival by the calendar of his previous visits. I even went so far as emailing him my picks on the Wednesday before the weekend I expected him to show up. I never got a reply and, maybe as a result, never followed up on my own suggestions. When I finally did get an email, some three weeks later, it wasn’t a reply, or a query, but an announcement, like every other. Only it was cryptic even for him. The subject line read: The Amazing O. The body of the email had an address and a date. There was no venue, and nothing of a name but the epithet, and the apparent redaction.

This was on Wednesday. I wrote him back immediately, a much longer email than was necessary, reminding him that it was my turn—I actually wrote that—and asking whether he had received my previous email, and including a few new possibilities. Again I waited for a reply. I can’t say I really expected one, though I did spend the next two days at work checking relentlessly, and the rest of the time scouring the internet for anything I could find about this O—ridiculous, it sounded like the name of a magician you’d hire for a kid’s birthday party—or the venue, which I could do no more than pinpoint on a map. It was somewhere between the Rockaways and East New York. About this mysterious O, there was nothing—no website, no MySpace page, no videos on YouTube. A Google search turned up a vinyl cleaning product. By today’s standards, O did not exist.

Of course I went. An hour and a half on the train under the river, and then a twenty-block schlepp from the station. He caught me walking—I hadn’t quite reached the address, so far as I could tell—flagged me down from across the street, crossed it himself, skirting puddles. He said, “You’re here”—or maybe it was, “We’re here”—I couldn’t be sure which. A hint of doubt in his voice, as though for the first time he had not expected me to show.

I thought, almost said, Where? It was an old warehouse district, as yet unredeemed by lofts: a puddle-streaked alley of brick and opaque glass, the windows themselves stacked like bricks, the monotony broken only by an occasional corrugated metal loading dock, shut tight like the curtain in an empty theater. The avenues, though slightly wider, presented much the same vista in either direction.

He crossed the street again, and actually started back toward the subway. It was a moment before I followed. The rain had stopped, but the clouds had not lifted, giving to the night a gloomy, oppressive feel that augmented the dour abandonment around us. Odd that he hadn’t sent me the exact address, and after three blocks of silence I was on the point of asking him if we were lost, or if he had changed his mind, when he stopped suddenly in front of a black metal door. I realized that I must have passed it on my way from the subway, though I didn’t remember noticing it.

He pounded five times and waited. There was no noise but the distant hum of some highway.

“Are you sure about this place?”

I had no reason to whisper, but that was the way it came out. Again, it wasn’t that I distrusted him. He was too pure, too single of purpose, his deceptions too transparent and devoid of real malice. In the end, I think I felt a little sorry for him, and this—pity—was the real reason I had been able to follow him into whatever deep, dank hole he pointed me toward, and drink a little more than was prudent, and crawl into his car with the noise of the band still ringing in my ears. No, it wasn’t him I distrusted, but something else, in front of which he stood, with his back to it. Any darkness about him was just the shadow it cast.

I think he was about to answer me when a Hells Angel appeared, or everyone’s idea of a Hells Angel: bald, heavy-set, leather-clad and tattooed. Only this Hells Angel had bifocals pushed far down his nose, and a copy of the Financial Times folded in one hand—I recognized it from the pink pages. Now I wanted to ask what a Hells Angel was doing reading the Financial Times on a rainy night in some godforsaken warehouse in Queens. Only the way he grinned made my question moot. He might have been eating diamonds out of a popcorn bag.

He motioned us forward, and my friend nodded for me to go ahead. I looked back and forth between them and, after another moment’s hesitation, went inside. Here was the Angel’s stool and table, and a staircase leading down. It was as black as the door, glossed by red party lights that fanned out along the walls. A red EXIT sign glowing dimly below seemed to float in an abyss. I grasped for a railing and, finding none, started down, slow as an old man walking into a cold surf, my fingertips grazing the walls on either side. My shoes rang against the stairs—they were metal—and my friend’s joined soon after, syncopated with mine; and then, much louder, the door closing; and then only the crisp echo of our footfall. The whole staircase vibrated slightly with our descent. Soon a second vibration resolved itself: a thudding bass. It got louder the deeper we went, until the stairs started to buzz with it—until, when I had reached the EXIT sign, and the improbable door hanging beneath it—a door that might have been salvaged from a farmhouse, all wide, dark planks rotting at the edges, the wood grown around the nails like flesh around a sliver—that bass thudded like something pounding on the other side, wanting out.

It was much louder inside, though here the sounds of voices competed. Maybe it was the low, domed ceiling that amplified them, raised them to such a hysterical pitch; or the overall size of the space, though this was hard to gauge, riddled as it was with archways that might have receded into any number of alcoves, or communicated with other spaces entirely. It could have been a crypt, except that the gothic touches—the discreetly looming gargoyles, the vasefuls of wilted flowers—were countered by bucolic ones, such as the grapes hanging in bunches from trestles bolted to the ceiling. It was more like a dark bower, or fecund grotto. Although the dim light seemed to be provided by candles set on the tables and along the bar, and the clusters of votives in hardened white-wax cataracts around the archways, this was an illusion, something like the old movie technique where an actor lights a candle, and the lights on the set slowly go up. There were spots in bunches of thorny, blossomless stems throwing barbed shadows onto the low ceiling, and more around the gargoyles. The drinks glowed, too, as though neon bulbs floated inside the fluted glasses that waitresses carried back and forth on small, round trays.

It was only then that I noticed some of the waitresses were topless, and some of the patrons, too. One woman, who was quite short, simply walked around stark naked, like a toddler on the beach. I watched another, whose body looked like a Coke bottle that had been stretched in a glassworks, saunter by, pull a single grape from a bunch, and pop it into her mouth, all without looking around or changing her sullen expression. It was the same air of carefully-prepared apathy that hung over everything and everyone, extending to the easy nudity or the coiffed disorder of hair and clothing, as though the patrons and employees had all turned themselves into objects for some aristocrat’s picturesque garden.

I couldn’t decide whether I was overdressed or underdressed. I felt old; I was sure I was the oldest person in the room, my friend excepted. But no one seemed to have noticed our entrance, or to notice us as we started through the crowd, my friend now leading the way through all that flesh and noise. I had been on the point of turning around and asking him where the hell he had brought me—how it was I had wandered into this Star Trek fantasy of a Roman orgy—and whether the band was in a back room. But I had begun to suspect there was no band. For the first time I noticed the sampled moans on the speakers, around the thumping bass. In the corner of my eye, in the shadows of one of the archways, I thought I saw the rhythmic frenzy of a couple having sex—though when I turned to look there was nothing. I had a vision of all those empty eyes suddenly converging on me, full of rage and desire, and all these beings wandering about with the careless inevitability of celestial bodies all at once descending on me, like Maenads from the hills, and tearing me to pieces. The woman who had plucked the grape: I imagined her doing the same with my still-beating heart. I thought of all my pebbles. Life without them seemed terrifyingly weightless. And yet, I wondered if this wasn’t what I’d been craving all along.

A bead curtain struck me in the face. We were crossing under one of the archways, and a moment later we stood in a tall, narrow chamber, illuminated by a single white orb the size of a goldfish aquarium, suspended from a wire dropped from some murky nowhere above. The light was so weak, and the stairs so narrow, that only the first dozen or so steps were visible; so that, as my friend began his descent, he was slowly consumed by the black pool into which the stairs plunged. It was impossible to tell how much further down they went.

From the way the first stair gave, I guessed it to be made of wood; and this was confirmed once I had descended into total blackness, and the pounding bass was replaced by the sound of my creaking footsteps, and his footsteps somewhere below mine, together with the sound of running water, though I could not tell whether this was above or below. I went slowly, guiding myself by the damp walls; I was afraid of running into him, knocking him into the void. At one point I looked behind me, the way a swimmer might, to reassure himself that the surface isn’t further away than he remembered. A grey trapdoor of light somewhere far above, as though I had slipped into a mineshaft. I had dreamt about places not so different, although in my dreams they were always filled with water. I even took a quick deep breath, as though I expected to have to hold it.

It might have been an old subway station that some developer had finagled from the City. Only I couldn’t help feeling that we had fallen off the map, into some forgotten part of that system. I started to imagine the whole city was honeycombed with spaces like these, the subways just the tip of the iceberg. There was always a level deeper. Just when you thought you had arrived at the foundation of everything, there it was, another staircase. It was a world of staircases built on staircases; and everything that looked solid and eternal, steel and schist, was anchored in rotting planks like the ones we stepped on now, and perched over a void

Quiet knocking somewhere below. The sound echoed in the stairwell, which seemed to have grown narrower in our descent. I paused. The trickling, and, somewhere far above, the bass, barely audible, heard as though from underwater.

A second trapdoor of light appeared, and for a moment I hung suspended on an invisible wire between two lambent squares. A warm, almost rank smell wafted up to me, and carried upon it—a furious horn solo, a heavy swing, a ride cymbal going full tilt.

Jazz. It was the sound of jazz.

The rank smell turned to a heavy perfume, and I rushed toward it.

We were standing at the rear of a big, smoky room, the seeming antithesis of the faux mystery cult one long flight up. There were maybe ten other patrons, each sitting alone at one of the dozen or so tables. The band was a traditional fourpiece, trumpet-led, the piano an upright, which, together with the haze and the root-cellar environs, helped to create the atmosphere of a modern-day speakeasy.

There was one anomaly, or one more, though I didn’t realize it until after we had seated ourselves, for once at a table not nearest to the stage. The trumpet player was a woman. Maybe it was the way she brandished her horn, a sort of jazz Joan of Arc—and, truth be told, that horn, a twisted braid of dented brass, looked like it had been used to beat down a few infidels in its time. She was plain, a little dumpy, her hair cut short, dressed in black slacks and a red blouse open at the collar to expose a big wood-bead hippie necklace. Her ethnicity was anyone’s guess: skin a honey amber, eyes light, nose flat; when she cocked her head between lines, listening for a pick-up, a slight Asian cast fell over her features, then disappeared when she started to blow again, cheeks puffing out into cherry knots, fingers of her big hands dancing over the valves.

My friend’s voice, close to my ear: “The Amazing O,” it said. The voice seemed to emerge from and echo inside my own skull, though it was hardly louder than a whisper. I knew right away that he meant the trumpet, and that the bright, brash sound that had pulled me from the abyss of the stairs into this scourging warmth belonged to the leader of the band.

It was the ace in his sleeve, and he no doubt expected me to be impressed. And I was, to a point. But I couldn’t get over a vague feeling of disappointment. Was I supposed to marvel at the sex of the trumpet player, or the oddness of the space, or the temerity of the voyage? Women in jazz were rare enough, horn players even moreso; but this was a pleasant surprise, not a revelation.

He was looking at me expectantly, so I smiled, and nodded. And then he handed me a drink, and offered a silent toast.

Water. It was water, with a hint of a flavor I couldn’t place, a little sweet, and very cold.

I hadn’t noticed any waitresses. Turning, I saw no bar, at least from what I could tell through the wreaths of smoke that smelled less of cigarettes than a mild incense. It was likely used to hide that other ripe, loamy smell I had caught from the stairs. It would be difficult, I guessed, to keep such a smell out of a bunker like this—who knew what sort of ventilation it had, if any. Bunker didn’t quite capture it; it was more like a burrow, or a termite colony. The walls were the color of wet earth—might have been wet earth, for all I could tell. And then nothing was squared, the ceiling low and curving into the walls, so that the whole place resembled an earthen vault. The tables, all made of rough-hewn wood, scored like the beams of a cabin, were oddly shaped and unevenly spaced, as if they had grown where they stood. As for the solitary patrons, they were old, not just relative to the Lotus-eaters above, but to us, and male, every one of them. They reminded me of the barflies that hung around in the music pubs. Pale, downcast, with grey, thinning hair, they would get up and totter out just as the joint was beginning to fill. I imagined they had gotten trapped down here, maybe years ago. If this was a termite colony, they were the drones; and the being up there on the stage was their queen.

I had been a little distracted, I realized, by the novelty of the female horn player. Now I buckled down and started to listen—to forget the weirdness of the space, and the funny taste of the water, and the chorus of enthralled old men, and my friend’s expectations, and really listen. She was an impressive young player, no doubt about it. She’d taken her solo through a dozen choruses since we’d sat down, and showed no signs of slowing, or the band of reining her in. That said, in a city that seemed to sweat musicians of this caliber, and attracted the rest from all corners of the globe, she was one among many. She had the usual tendency of younger players to overquote or too-closely paraphrase; her style was lumpy with the sounds of older horns, the usual post-bop and contemporary suspects—Hubbard, Peyton, Douglas—though, like the younger Douglas, she wasn’t afraid to play out, sometimes verging into the territory of a Cherry, Bowie, or Ayler. The band was on target, giving her a nice combination of direction and space—but again, I had seen bands as good in far less exotic spaces, surrounded by far less mystery, without any of the cloak-and-dagger stuff of meeting on streetcorners and climbing down manholes. I started to wonder it that wasn’t all it was: a shaggy dog story, with me as the butt of the joke. The proverbial empty coconut shell, into which the duped yokel gazes slackjawed. Or maybe it was a test: he was the one who had come up with the “amazing” epithet, and was waiting for me to call it crap—a garble of post-bop clichés with the occasional Chicago-style “wrong” note thrown in to sound contemporary. And I was on the point of leaning over to ask him if that wasn’t his long-lost sister up there on stage, when I caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye. All the eagerness had drained out of his expression; I recognized it immediately as that haggard old face I had seen in the mirror two years before. Something about it made me think of the barflies at the other tables, and the thought made the hair on my arms stand up.

So I turned back to the Amazing O, if for no other reason than to stop thinking the thoughts that had begun to creep up on me. There was still no sign of her slowing down or stopping—if anything, she had gotten louder, and the rest of the band with her; and they had picked up the tempo, too, though these things had happened on such a long arc I only realized them in hindsight. Some of her lines were so extended I wondered where she got the breath. I didn’t notice the puffed cheeks and flaring nostrils that would have suggested circular breathing. Besides, with circular breathing there was usually a corresponding drop in volume.

I can’t quite put my finger on when the change started. Time was hard to measure, without the usual beginnings and endings, shared solos, title announcements. No, it was a wall of sound, monumental and anonymous as a cathedral, and just as calculated to subdue. And I don’t know if it was she who found a groove she’d been looking for, or I who found the groove she was already in, or if it was the two of us, working in tandem. Regardless, I started to notice that her lines had a funny aftertaste. Not bad, like something spoiled. Just something I couldn’t quite place. It wasn’t so much her unorthodox approach to phrasing, or even the unexpected enjambments and breaks—those halting, clockwork chromatic runs clipped off on notes most players wouldn’t have dared—as the way the phrases only revealed themselves once they were fully unfolded, and you contemplated them, for the fraction of a second before the next one started, as a totality. They lingered, those phrases, whether in the air or in my mind, as though they had found the natural frequency of either, or both. And then, some time later, who knew how long, I noticed that the bass had started walking less, stumbling more; the drummer mostly gave up on the ride; and O’s artfully-placed wrong notes turned into flurries, set off from each other by long, oddly-shaped drones. But the music didn’t descend into chaos; there was still a center, holding it all together; and that center, I decided, was her. Because her lines, no matter how sinuous or how jagged, seemed to cling to each other according to some broader vision: all those wildly swinging notes flying off in every direction appeared, with some distance, to form a straight line.

At first the change was just an intensely vivid elaboration on my earlier fantasies. For example, that she had gills, or some similar alteration in her biology—it was the only way she could play lines that long. That her horn and her body were fused, so that it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began, what was flesh and what brass, or whether she was all some strange new alloy. I realize there’s no way to visualize these things except as monstrous; so how can I even begin to explain that it was beautiful? Maybe by saying it was only an approximation, my mind seeking some visual analog for a phenomenon that was entirely aural.

I know, too, how all this sounds. The funny taste in the water. The mysterious friend to whom I felt an inexplicable attraction. The loneliness, the ennui. Now the strangely ambiguous woman with the horn. Forget the possibility that it was all a hallucination, at least for the moment—there’s nothing less satisfying in a story. The natural conclusion is that I had fallen in love. But this begs the question: In love with what? With the music, or with the woman on the stage? Were they to be distinguished? It was not the woman of an hour before, if it was a woman at all. (An hour? I might as well say a day, or a year. I wouldn’t have been surprised to emerge from this hole into broad daylight, spring flowers. Only I wasn’t thinking of leaving, not yet.) Beautiful it was, the image, yes, of all I desired. I was just surprised at what I desired—at how I had come to desire so many things from which I had once recoiled in terror or disgust. I want to say it was a beauty so transcendent that it rose above all petty differences, enveloping everything and its opposite in a single web of desire. For the music, transform her though it had, had not acted like a fairy godmother’s wand. She was not the princess rising ethereal in a ring of purifying fire. Or not just. She was the spider suffocating its prey in silk, turning and turning it into a gossamar white mummy. She was offal steaming on fallen leaves. She was the river dammed by the bloated bodies of drowned pilgrims, colonies of mushrooms devouring the forest. And then she was the incessant sound of their chewing, the scream caught in the throat the moment the headsman’s ax falls, the eightfold stampede of the spider’s legs as it dashes toward its prey, if we could only be made to hear these things.

But I did. I did.

There was a point after which all such associations and approximations failed me. The more deeply I fell, the less audible the other three instruments became, and the more her presence was magnified, until she loomed before me, solitary and enormous. That star over my head, on which her gaze had so long been fixed, except in those rare moments when she cocked her head to listen, to breathe, her body swaying ever so slightly, something I was sure only I witnessed, I and the horn—it became her as well, at once penetrating and surrounding me. And then it was just she and I, both of us, or neither. Only not just: there was something else, some presence greater than either of us, to whose audience she had admitted me, and to which I, like she, was transparent (it was her transparency that became mine), and which coursed through and around us in a sort of vibrating sea. I might have been a pebble lost in that violently mixing element, or a hundred pebbles, each of them me, yet each unrelated to the next, all small and light enough to float. And even this diffuse me came apart, mingled with everything around, mixed and shaped according to currents of sound that seemed to emanate from nowhere.

In the end, hindsight became impossible; my immersion was so total that the music ceased to unfold in time. At some point I must have shut my eyes, and drawn my knees up to my chest, and curled my body into a tight little ball, although all these things were, like the relative position of my body in space, and the non-passage of time, difficult to ascertain. How can I possibly describe what I heard then, when I can’t even describe what I saw? And then again I only saw what I heard. All I can say is that when I couldn’t take it anymore, I fled—away from that table that was just a table again, empty, and past all those solitary occupants enveloped like desiccated flies in a web, up those stairs, and up again, past the shelter of the bacchanal, and into the bright hard city night. The clouds had lifted, and the streets shimmered, and I fell like a supplicant before the file of streetlights, one happily broken, as the concrete rumbled ever so slightly from a train passing below.

*

I never saw him again after that night, but her I did—saw her, at least, the way she appeared when I had first arrived. It was almost a year later, and in an entirely different setting. I had tried a few times to go back to that strange subcellar, but could never be sure I had found the right door; and when I believed I had, nobody answered my knock, or went in or out during my hours-long vigil. At the same time, whenever I went out to hear music, I would think I saw her—not the way she had appeared when I first arrived, but as she was, just before I fled. It always happened the same way: my eyes closed, I would hear something that sparked her image; my mouth would suddenly go dry, and my flesh pimple, and my heart start to race. I would open my eyes, and, for just an instant, actually think I saw her. It didn’t need to be the trumpeter—there didn’t even need to be a trumpet. One night it was the drummer. It never lasted for more than a moment. Either she was an illusion, or some greater, more thoroughgoing illusion had interposed itself between she and I. Once it had happened, I found I could no longer interest myself in the music. It was as though it were being played in another room, for other people. I would end up leaving early. This happened enough times that, for a period of several months, I stopped going out, and even stopped listening to music at home, at least with any sort of attention.

And then one evening I went out to a pizza parlor with a few of my coworkers, one of whom I had just started dating, if you could call going out for drinks a few times dating. The last time, I had suggested we go hear music—I had just started listening again with some pleasure, if not the abandon of an earlier time, and mostly at home. She had said she wasn’t a musical person, whatever that meant. Maybe it meant we were already through—if, that is, we had ever really started. Anyway, the place was more than a pizza parlor, it had expanded a few years back into a full-service Italian restaurant, with a wine bar to attract the after-work crowd, and live music on Thursdays and Fridays to keep them there. I was doing my typical one-drink dash, with the usual chorus of disingenuous disapproval when I lay my money on the table and excused myself, promising I would stay later next time, and agreeing that I was lame, all the while watching my ersatz girlfriend out of the corner of my eye. She had sat at the other end of the table and had not looked at me once the whole evening. Still, I couldn’t quite convince myself it was over. I knew I would regret leaving, tonight more than usual, that by the time I was home I would have stopped blaming her and started blaming myself. But regret had never been enough to stop me.

I had just managed to disentangle myself from the good-byes and catcalls and one sloppy hug, and was heading for the door, a little lightheaded, jacket in hand, when I saw her.

It was unmistakably her, her as I had first seen her, her and not-her. It might have been the same band backing her up, for all I could remember of the rest of the musicians. Except that tonight there was a fifth, a singer, who was clearly the main attraction. She—O—followed that singer’s lead like a circus dog, leaping through the smoke rings of her vowels, running up ladders and sliding down chutes, barking whenever the singer snapped her fingers, adding little pirouettes and other flourishes in the margins of her voice. At one point she took a four-bar solo and sat back again. I looked and listened, listened and looked, for something, for anything, that would remind me of that night. This was dinner jazz, part of the general conversation of the unwinding after-workers, who were completely oblivious to the fact that the Amazing O was here, breathing the air they breathed, poised to level the whole place, to raze it to the ground, to transform—and to transform them with her, if they would only give her a moment of their attention. I had imagined that, like me, she would have raged against this, been one great resounding No to everything it represented. And so I couldn’t understand how she could seem so content. She closed her eyes and swung a little while the singer sang, and smiled at the other musicians, who smiled back at her. When she took her solo, a few people at the bar applauded, and she nodded. I applauded, too. I actually counted the number of times my palms met.

And then her gaze lighted on mine.

I can’t really describe how she looked at me, or the feeling that came over me when she did. But I was sure that she recognized me, and that, when she raised her chin ever so slightly, and narrowed her eyes, it was meant as a threat. As though we shared some terrible secret, and this was what she would do if I told. And what was the secret? It was this: that the dumpy little quintet grinding out cheap standards for an indifferent after-work crowd was the real. That the only real thing was the chains holding us to our ugly little lives. That I couldn’t have her. That there was nothing to have but my own wanting.

For a second time I had to look away; and that was when I saw him, or thought I did, in the mirror behind the bar: standing amid the crowd but indifferent to it, focused only on me. He appeared as he had that first time I had seen him in the mirror, and again the last time, in the corner of my eye: haggard, wasted—old—the whole city settled in the flesh of his face, like its map had been impressed there, which was also a map of his past. But there was something else, too, something I hadn’t noticed before: an intense longing, bordering on despair. I was about to turn to him—I had no idea what I would say, except welcome—when the bar erupted into cheers and applause: somebody had scored a touchdown on the TV. It was then, because the noise startled me, because I flinched, that I recognized the face in the mirror was my own.