Jazz and paying attention

Jazz

I saw a jazz performance last night with a friend, over at the Barking Spider in University Circle. We had been in the same place about a year and a half earlier to see the same gig and she remarked that she didn't recognize some of the players. That is because it's a monthly gig organized by Cleveland Sax player Ernie Krivda to give some of his Tri-C Jazz students a chance to show their stuff playing out in a bar the way jazz is supposed to be. Many of the players were different and I only recognized a few faces.

But the feeling of sitting down to watch music made on the spot right in front of you is the same. The spider's the same place I first saw live modern jazz, with this same Sax player leading a gig I've gotten damn near religious about. It's a small place, and the musicians outnumber the patrons, along with a couple of their friends and George Foley, a pianist who's another regular at the spider, who walks in part way into the second set. I first came alone when I heard the music from outside in the parking lot of the coffee shop next door where I had been studying. I've returned what must be almost a dozen times by now.

Since that first time I've always loved watching them play because I can sit real close and see what everyone is doing, and can shift my attention from one instrument to another and try to pick it out as I watch it played. Last night the guitar had a solo which hit me with an unexpected memory. As soon as he started I was brought back to the Buenos Aires subway station where a jazz guitarrist named Elio Geraldi used to play for change, or, more likely, to get his name out (musicians are a dime a dozen in Buenos Aires and it helps to distinguish yourself in some way). I used to sit there underground and watch him play solos over a backing track of rhythm guitars. In an almost indescribable way it pulls you out of the station and simultaneously carves you right into it so that the sound and the place and the trains and the people are stuck together and so that even now they come all packaged together in my memory.

It seems incredible to me sometimes how infrequently I think about my time in Argentina, that entire year I spent in a different world--it just seems to have nothing to do with my life now. When I do, I'm sad to say that it's often been in the context of regret over not having as many courses that would be useful for my degree, for the math classes I didn't take, or for the independence I never quite felt I had. It's not ideal, but it's just hard to relate those experiences to my present reality.

But more than anything I think it's a symptom of, ironically, not being truly present in my life and not paying attention enough to what is going on. I feel that I've been trapped in a kind of several month long myopia, that I haven't been able to sufficiently back away from and pay attention to things. It may seem paradoxical, to say I've had my nose to the grindstone too much to pay attention to anything, but it's true--when you see the world through the microscope of assignments, tests and job interviews, you can fail to see the big picture.

Sometimes you actually have to back off a little bit and allow things to quiet down. My choir director back in high school told us that if you really want to sound impressive and make the audience listen to you, you should be quiet, sing so that you're almost whispering, then you'll have them so that when you want to get louder it will be captivating. Bass solos, with their lower frequencies and quieter volumes are too often tuned out, but I like to lean in even more and catch what's going on underneath else everything else in the ensemble, the heartbeat that is always there.

In the past year my mother has taken up meditation to help deal with the many stresses in her life. They tell you to let go of thoughts and emotions by just focusing on your breathing, or your heartbeat. In so doing, you can gain access to states of consciousness that would not have been possible otherwise. I don't practice it, but I know that that's true nonetheless. If you don't believe me, go see some live jazz, watch and listen for that acoustic bass.