Huge families hold reunions in matching red tee shirts under the pine trees. Folks get married in a limestone field house with a round turret and picture windows. Everybody comes out here for Fourth of July, bringing grills and blankets and dogs and flags. Enough people bring electric radios and turn them up so we can all dig the symphony in Grant Park eight miles to the north, and watch the fireworks over our shining city.
I hate packing. Hating it slows me down. I want to be done quickly, but I have to figure out the banalities of what goes and what stays. Having overcome the usual fly morning headaches by a timely , I find the band and I have won the daily double.
On a Sunday. On the other end waits Hartford, Conn. I remember snow and try not to watch the clock. Hartford is blazing hot this time. We walk around for an hour dodging flops in the otherwise deserted, scorching upturned dumpster streets before giving up and finally taking lunch back in the hotel. We talk about the cover art problem and the gigs I have planned for the release week.
Also about The Palm, and how the time in the rhythm section is feeling these days, and whatever else is on the list. And how tired we are. Ten minute nap in the room. Warm up next, and play for a while.
Check the time. Fix the set list and dress. Call the cats. Dig the contract. Grab the charts and the microphone and the discs and the briefcase and elevator down to the lobby to go. How about that! People want to hear it in Hartford! Right now, back home, dark-haired Jenny is having friends over, eating olives and drinking wine on the plant-filled back porch with candles and incense.
Cats and I got to play music for an hour. One hour of what we do vs. We get paid to travel. Time is running out, in spite of all the good planning. And that means all the many gigs which I have personally envisioned, planned and solidified on calendars across town would become a lot of fuss over nothing. All the non-refundable events of week one — the NPR-sponsored free master class and concert at Roosevelt, the open rehearsals at Gallery 37, the gig with all three horns at the Mill on Wednesday, the press push on Thursday and even the prime-time Chicago Festival hit on Friday — would amount to one very public attention-grab pointing to nothing but empty jewel cases.
And now — right now — I need to design a record cover. How droll. Just as tall- walking as I remember. Karl was my first piano partner, and we hit for, probably, two or three years altogether. Well, nearly empty. Maybe my girlfriend Lisa in a little black dress and pearls. Maybe old red-cardigan Roosevelt, who lived across the street in a lonely 34th floor McClurg Court apartment. Sometimes people would come and clap. Most times not. Maybe six. Maybe nothing.
I had a gig. Those days, cat was bad, man. Cat was bad. He was a strong cat, too; whip thin, with a commanding intellect and mojo for days. He was forceful in his approach, with a vice grip on time — forceful in the statement he was making: weird, hip supernatural arpeggiated fractals crashing headlong into true-blue, church-certified gospel licks, careening off into a kiltery, odd-time bebop. Nothing subtle here. He played a squint-eyed challenge and could back it up, like a jackknife springing.
Cat had history. Ran his own all-black USO band in the mid sixties, piloting his green Cadillac through Southern overnights. In fact? Naturally, she started crashing in the back of the Caddie while Karl smoked and drove through the dark. It was one of these times when they were out there somewhere that the local Klan got wind of the deal, saw red, and set up a roadblock with torches and sheets, the whole nightmare. He sees the thing coming at a little distance and has time to quick get out his double barrel sawed-off shotgun from under the dashboard.
Well, he opens his window and, with his left hand, lays the barrel end pointing forward on the side-view mirror, finger on both triggers. Then, he gets that great big-assed V-8 all charged up and roaring. The Sheet-Heads dig this mother bearing down on them I guess they just had a mess of cats there but no logs or anything to jam up the actual road and try to close ranks. Before they can even raise a brick filled hand he throws up the brights and lets the have both barrels.
Manager wakes up screaming, but all she sees as they blow through is a red and white blur whooshing by and the reflection of fire and headlights.
As I say, she came on the road with the band once. Another time, he had a steady at a roadhouse owned by the outfit in the far southwest suburbs where you had to check your gun at the door. So I was in no mood, to put up with any of that bullshit! Sorry, Karl. My mistake. Al, get Karl a drink while he waits. And Karl, put the gat away, will ya? I picture him standing there, waiting silently, ominously at the bar; smoking a cigarette, burning from within, grinding his heel.
Steam rises slowly from the patio tiles so that, just ten feet away from something, there was a ghost between you and it. Five zealous, uniformed pool attendants ran around all afternoon through the tropical goop at top speeds bringing towels and drinks for the three or four of us who had lucky days off.
I can dig that amount of dedication to work; running in the heat. What I cannot imagine is going day after unspeakable day having to block out the poolside music they have at the Tokyo Grand. Arturo, sweating, in baseball hat and shorts and towering over our hosts like the biggest kid in fifth grade and just in from dodge ball recess. I get to meet Wayne there. I doubt he knows who I am or what I am talking about, which is fine. Wayne is the spearpoint — the very tip of the innermost cutting edge of the music.
The cats and I have been looking forward to hearing Wayne and seeing the band on this gig ever since we found out we were coming. Meeting Wayne now, I get that wide-eyed, breathless, try- not-to-say-anything-stupid you get around your ultimate hero the first time you meet him. Thankfully, Wayne is open and very kind.
I first met Patitucci in Malta, of all places. We also were on this Joanne Brackeen side together, with Liebs. John has been beautiful to me every time. Just smoking. I am writing this part retrospectively. Each one steps into the freedom and play of the concept the band is pursuing in such a way that the whole band is improvising as a unified consciousness, as one single, strong gesture after another. Such freedom, mastery and trust creates the ultimate in tension and release; the build and wreck, chase, catch and let go of improvised music at its highest level — tossing waves of color all over the place, with energies bouncing and caroming off and to and through the people listening.
The MOST. The reason they invented the word MOST. Here they are talking to the old clerk and joking around as she pulls out different snakes from different drawers built into a wall-sized cabinet. Oh, no. A live snake has just been cut open on national TV and its blood dripped into little cups of what looks to be room temperature vinegar for these cats to eat. As a further culinary gross-out, she laughingly puts the severed head on the white tablecloth, so it can watch itself be eaten and create more fodder for joking over dinner.
The cats can hardly take it. Two other ladies — I guess the talk show hosts — ask questions and encourage the singers with applause in between tries. They try it over and over again while she stops and starts them. When they get the pronunciation vaguely right, the coach pulls out magnets of little suns, rain clouds and, of all things, Tinkerbell figures and puts them on the cue cards in different places to indicate interpretation possibilities.
The singing itself is, well, interesting. The coach finishes out the half-hour show by accompanying herself at the piano and squeezing out her version of her very favorite song — eyes clamped shut with passion, her delicate touch at the keyboard just about creating intimacy, tension and velocity, her squeaky voice fairly crackling with emotion.
Oceans churning. A fox hunt — first from the mind of the fox, briefly, then from that of the fastest hound. Then spirals of paisleys. A forced flow of colors spinning and tumbling over the people and up the ultra-green mountainside. New worlds come next, and also new tendernesses.
Him keeps a fight up — a fight? A consistent and positive energy flow. In fact, they all do it. This is Big Buddha energy. This is the struggle to make music.
This is what we do — we struggle to make music. Feedback is just one more attack from the stuff that wants us to stop. I mean, shit, man. What do we have to complain about? Cat is clowning. So now everyone in the band is laughing, because they dig.
Cats on the side stages notice, and they start laughing, too. Then people in the front rows start laughing. Then, basically everybody — everybody overcoming at once. Laughing at the puny feedback. Laughing at the thought of being here, now. Hearing the music. Laughing with Wayne. The next two days, Wayne and the cats played tremendously, thunderously, leaping and gliding. They gave it away as a matter of course to a crowd culturally educated, and ready to receive such a blessing.
The people were all ages. They were all open. Older weekenders sat on their red blankets, accepting. Little kids put down their shovels and sand pails and waited, wide-eyed in little yellow hats. Beautiful people. On stage, Wayne created from an unimagined space with the same hooded, Buddha eyes Kerouac reports having seen on Bird when he played — looking nowhere but within.
Same ultimate genius intensity. Same relaxed and masterful power surge. Not seeing any one thing — seeing many things at once. Giant-eye view. Thick fog came in during the last set and silently covered the grass, the people, the tents, the speakers, the roof of the stage and all the mountain, so that it all disappeared. And pretty soon nothing was taller than Wayne and his band and his Buddha eyes. Who has the time for reflective journaling?
It almost always ends up being lists anyway — lists if phone calls to make, of thank-you notes to be written, tasks to execute or plan, what needs to go with me on the plane. All of this represents many, many phone calls and meetings — especially by Tony Karman. A two-and-a-half hour hang of respectable proportions takes a month or more to put together. And now there are more thank-you notes to be done. More music work from it, though — i talk of a more extensive Borders tour in the Chicago suburbs.
Also corporate date possibilities from the room manager, not to mention excitement over the recording itself. The great young EMI staff who you need to have on your team — just imagine how many artists they are told to push every month to their record stores! They are the foot soldiers of your campaign to sell discs and maintain job security. They can talk up your concert and supply you with table tents and big posters when you go out on the road.
They can take care of you when you are doing an instore or signing discs after a show. They represent for you and the label where the rubber meets the road, and they have the power to help make your career. Or they can ignore you, if you are a jerk.
Up at this morning to get to the plane delayed 1 hr to LaGuardia to drive the rental van through a storm for 5 hrs, doing two crackly phone interviews on the way while driving. And here we all are looking at each other wondering if we have the per diem bread between us to cover our costs. Not complaining — just reporting. Back to the hotel after to steam my jacket which is probably too bright for TV anyway and give Jenny a call.
Up at again. Cats pass out, or help me navigate. Given the rain, we were lucky to have arrived at 11am. We can hear the foghorns in the harbor. I look out the trailer window one minute getting hot dog stands ready and thirty or forty mangy seagulls in a loose, meditative spread over an empty, greening lawn.
All right, people! Now I can see the water. The richies park their water cruisers close enough to hear the music first-hand but still lose the crowded feeling on shore. God bless Jon Hendricks — again!
Clearly we are in the home stretch. Stupid, useless, power signifier is what that is. Then BAM. Then to a minute signing at the JVC tent. A minute radio interview follows. I chase down the money, this time in cash for expenses. Instead, I sign fifty festival posters for the promoters, grab a plate of food to eat while I drive. It can string you out pretty badly. If we miss it, should we try to get a cheap hotel out here somewhere? Hit at the Mill again last night with the cats.
Our good friend Brad Wheeler sat in on tenor. Two voiceover sessions today for Kenmore. This is a one-way ticket to Planet Fresh. Plus parking is always a challenge. But the real difference between session work and a regular gig is that there is no room for a timing error. In between sessions I race walk uptown, going to two wrong addresses first, for a meeting with John Iltis, a publicist I am hiring out-of-pocket to help Tony Karman and me manage the local record release details.
And they do a great job, as a rule. Can you imagine? Also, how is a lifetime of gigs just supposed to happen on its own? What do you think is in store for me creatively and professionally thirty years from now if all I ever do are Mill dates and the occasional festival hit? My goals are simple: to play music and write as well as I can and to assure myself the best possible opportunities for creative work in the future.
First, be an artist. But be a businessman, too. Unless you are Jarrett or Wayne you have to be. Even if you can become some tremendous sideman like Idris Mohammed or Billy Hart it will be hard enough. But how many singers get called up as regular sidemen? You can only be a leader, so you have to kick ass as a businessman. I want to never have to worry about having a record deal. I want always to have contact with the best players. I want more diverse artistic commissions.
I want an interesting, surprising, creative path. I do these things now so that the others will eventually come to pass. I need to work the system. I need to be smarter and quicker than the system. You want the gigs? Have the chance to be flown to L. Hipster Serie Poetry Dream. String Serie Luxurious. Hipster Serie Luxurious. High-cut briefs Serie Luxurious. Mini briefs Serie Amazing. Hipster Serie Amazing. High-waist briefs Serie Amazing.
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