A Life in Jazz: On Love, Loss and Self-Discovery to an Improvised Beat

“wind and crying blue rain tearing me up”
–Jimi Hendrix
*

I.

Listen, the first time I saw Miles Davis play live was at the Chicago Coliseum in 1981. Miles had just come out of retirement after six years of doing little more than snorting coke. Good to have him back. Great to have him back. I’m not sure if it was my first time hearing live jazz. Possibly so. Probably so. Anything before not worth thinking about since this was the performance that stuck with me, the one that blew me away and turned me into a jazz fiend. I was nineteen years old.

What I remember, many of Chicago’s luminaries had come out to see and hear Miles, including horn man Eddie Harris. (Back in the sixties, Miles had recorded Harris’s tune “Freedom Jazz Dance” with his second great quintet, a band that many critics laud as the greatest jazz combo of all time.) Just so happened that I owned most of Harris’s albums—purchased at my go-to shop, Second Hand Tunes in Hyde Park—even a rare gem called The Reason I’m Talking Shit, an LP of Harris telling Richard Pryer-style ribald jokes between songs during his live performances. (Harris could have had a career as a stand-up comedian.)

During the concert, I kept a close eye on Harris to see if he liked the music. He did. (Head bopping.) What was not to like? Miles had put together a killer band, many of the musicians he’d featured on his comeback recording, The Man With the Horn, with Marcus Miller (porkpie hat) on bass, chubby Mike Stern on guitar, Bill Evans (red headband) on saxophones, and the middle-aged Al Foster on drums. The flowing and colorful (garb) Mino Cinelu had been added on percussion. (By then, Miles had developed a long-standing reputation for discovering the up-and-coming cats who would themselves go on to become leaders, shapers, and trendsetters. True for Mike Stern and Marcus Miller, and perhaps Bill Evans, although less so.)

Something loose and free about the band in their way of moving in and out of improvisation, everyone communicating, Miles in his captaincy affirming, hinting, suggesting by asserting a chord, riff, or phrase on his electric keyboard, his hands precise and intelligent, Miles aware of the dynamic between himself and the other men. Although he does not make the music about himself, the band makes the music about him and projects themselves as one reflection: Miles. To a man, they are Miles.

I don’t know if you learn anything about love from jazz, but you can learn about jazz from love.

Watching, listening, I experienced a coordinated array of physical sensations: in my chest, my hands, my stomach, my feet.

When he wasn’t directing and cueing the band from his keyboard, Miles limped about the stage, the coolest walk I’d ever seen. (For weeks after the concert I too adopted a limp, walked with an invigorated feeling propelling me around the streets of Chicago. Didn’t know that Miles had a bad hip.)

The concert came to an end. The band lined up across the stage and took a bow to applause from the audience. Then the unexpected happened. Miles limped over to drummer Al Foster and kissed him on the mouth.

The message could not have been clearer. Miles was saying (to the audience, to himself), I’m a bad motherfucker. I can do anything I want. Even kiss my drummer.

Some forty years later over lunch inside a soul food restaurant on Chicago’s southside, I told drummer Philip Royster about the kiss, speaking loudly since the joint was crowded, customers taking seats at the other tables, customers already seated placing orders or eating, drinking, making conversation, enjoying themselves; clanking their utensils, scraping and clattering their utensils against plates; glasses sounding against the wooden tables; music blaring from speakers mounted on the walls. Then, not missing a beat, I offered Royster my interpretation of the kiss. I’m Miles. I’m a bad motherfucker.

Royster let his eyes drop down for a fraction of a second to his hands before he trained them back on my face.

Let me tell you, he said. Some nights are like that. You feel so connected to the other musicians.

I felt a strange light revelatory sensation at his words. Connected. The idea intruded forcefully into my thoughts.

He was looking back at me, an intense silent look. (Who can explain such a thing, an understanding shared between two people?)

It was something that only a musician would know.

*

It occurs to me now that Miles was the same age I was, nineteen, when he first saw Bird and Dizzy play at a club in New York. Bebop moving in waves through the smoky air, causing a warm feeling to come over him, to move inside him like smoke inhaled. Like fire swallowed setting everything alight inside. As he writes in his autobiography, Music all up in my body. Then gone when the set ended. (Thoughts running rapid with broken phrases until breathing settles.) He would spend the next four decades trying to live that music again, trying to capture that warm feeling Dizzy and Bird gifted him one night in a club in New York when he was nineteen years old.

Cold dark air of the river carrying him through the streets. Soon finds himself inside the grim silence of his apartment where he tries to screw his eyes shut against the bright interior, cold white light and the walls revolving in slow circuits. Feels his head pounding. Needs some fresh air and so leaves his flat and climbs the staircase to the top of the building. With a thin banging noise pushes the door open and walks out onto the roof and continues on to the ledge, where he squats down, takes a seat, perched. Hears the city before he sees it. Voices resonating in the air, moving at the pace of thought. Surveying the rooftops, he imagines his music as a bird of prey soaring from the parapet, owning the space above the five boroughs, the blocks above blocks, occupying that birds-eye perspective from which abstractions like neighborhood, city, or nation become spatial and flat.

*

In grad school, I read his autobiography from cover to cover several times after the book came out. Found it sound so inspiring that I wrote a poem dedicated to Miles. My good fortune to be friends with poet Quincy Troupe, Miles’s co-author. I gave the poem to Q and asked him to give it to Miles.

The quick light vibration of his reply: Sure.

Of course, I really believed that Miles would read the poem and be impressed by it, so much so that he would want to meet me and invite me to his home. Never happened. What did happen, a week or two later, I received a postcard in the mail from the Miles Davis fan club with a personalized note from the man himself, the man with the horn: I HAVEN’T FORGOTTON YOU!

Better than nothing.

*

Q was loyal to Miles and would never discuss Miles’s private business, stuff he had observed.

I saw things, he would say and leave it at that.

But somehow you also understood that in Miles Q had found a mentor, an older Black man who had become kind of a father figure for him as Q was for me. (To be in Miles’s presence, lifted into finer air: such was my envy.)

Once, I did something out-of-pocket, something that fucked up Q’s money, and Q was pissed. He let me know it.

I’m starting to hate you, he said.

We were speaking by phone.

Seeking his forgiveness, I tried to account for my behavior. I’d made a mistake, nothing intentional, a miscalculation, I had just failed to think things through—My bad—and because it wasn’t intentional, no malice intended, in fact—

Shut up and listen, he said. I’m going to tell you something Miles told me.

He told me. (What does one deserve?) I don’t remember what he said, but things have been right with us since.

*

At the time of his second great quintet, Miles was married to the dancer Francis. Few people knew that he had married her for one reason: they were the same height and build, a corporeal reality that made it possible for Miles to wear her clothes around their home.

So my friend Stanley Crouch claimed. He vouched for the veracity of the claim because he said he’d gotten it from the horse’s mouth. Of course, hearsay is hearsay. I will be the first to acknowledge, admit, that Stanley was a person beholden to some perplexing beliefs, admit, acknowledge that he sometimes entertained peculiar ideas and took baffling positions. For example, he believed that Miles had plagiarized his own autobiography. (Question: how does one plagiarize oneself?) For his part, Q claimed that Stanley was full of shit, that Stanley simply hated Miles because Miles had once cussed him out in a club.

The disguised aspects of Miles’s life are of little concern to me. (Thought: maybe Miles and his wife were just tight like that. Her wore her clothes, and she wore his.)

I never had a meaningful conversation with anyone who played with Miles, but my first wife Denise spent several hours sitting across from Duke Jordan on the Amtrak from New York to Chicago. (For those who don’t know, Jordan was a pianist who played on some of Miles’s seminal recordings with Bird and Dizz.) From what she told me, Jordan tried to hit on my her. I didn’t shrink from this fact, simply thought about what to say to her.

Sounds like his rap is as weak as his piano playing, I said.

(In the autobiography, Miles says that Jordan’s piano playing is garbage.)

She looked at me.

 

II.

A couple of weeks after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, I went to see Richard Bona at The Blue Note. A regular at the club, on this occasion I was out on a second or third date with a psychic named Miranda. (If every tomorrow were as prophetic in our speculations as yesterday is echoic in our memories.) Everyone was still asking Why? as in, Why did they attack us? A frantic urgency to answer this question along with desperate attempts to find the missing, hence flyers displaying the faces and names of the missing posted throughout Manhattan—Grand Central Station, Trinity Church, Port Authority, Penn Station, City Hall, and on every lamppost in Times Square and the Village—a collective refusal to believe, accept, that loved ones had perished under tons of rubble and in storms of fire and clouds of toxic gas.

Still limited flights, buses, and trains to New York, so Bona will have to take a taxi from Detroit to the club. Six hundred miles. (Time the pathway through space.) With his bass inside its cocoon-like protective case and strapped over his left shoulder, he walks to the corner and hails a cab, a vehicle that is bright and round like Ringo’s yellow submarine. Once inside, he places his axe on the floor near his feet, then looks at the driver in the rearview mirror. The driver’s eyes bright and serene. A detached smile hovering on his lips. The driver looks at him, not speaking. In this look Bona sees the question, Where to?

New York.

New York City?

Yes, sir.

…

Sure, just run the meter. Will pay in cash.

The driver glances with a feeling of calm certainty into the rearview mirror while he pulls into traffic. They start out at a leisurely pace, the driver rigidly clutching the snakeskin (faux) covered steering wheel with his long fingers. (He could palm a basketball.) Easily annoyed, the driver keeps giving punches to the center of the steering wheel.

Soon, traffic settles to a humble and respectful drone. The distance is uninteresting. The whole drive, his thoughts pull in opposing directions: at times toward his current destination, at others, the Cameroon, home turf and foreign soil, foreign soil and home turf. Everyone from his corner of the world erases their land from memory after they leave. Does he have an idea, a clear consciousness of his life, drawn as it is between native and western ways?

We should drop the bomb on them, the driver says.

Who?

The Arabs. The Muslims.

I’m a Muslim.

The driver watches him in the rearview mirror. But you’re a musician.

Yes, I am. That too.

The driver watches him. Fat insects crash into the windshield.

Sorry. I didn’t mean nothing by it.

Yes, you did.

One glance. Two.

The driver turns on the radio, sending ambient waves of sound undulating throughout the car. Bona feels like he is sealed inside a winter globe, shaken, the music sifting and swirling down around him. The hours suspended, floating in this space with him and the driver. To feel an interpenetration of thought between the two of them, an understanding, yes, looking at him (back of the head, profile), and knowing, without even speaking. Their combined breath in the car seems putrid. The sound of the other vehicles seems to linger under his nose like an annoying fly. Should he lower the window and let out some of the funk? Let out the music (a graph of impulsive notes) and let memory catch up with its ancient echoes.

That’s what’s paradoxical about jazz….The challenge is to make the melody recognizable and at the same time make that melody seem new.

From out of nowhere, bands of light form an illuminated rectangle around the car, light emanating from some unknown source suspended in the air. Bona slumps down on the seat, feeling damp, heavy. (Nothing is more terrifying than the interference of strange phenomena into everyday reality.) The driver switches the radio silent, the world glowing around them. Some intangible substance consisting of people’s thoughts, memories, and wishes.

Time and space dissolve slowly into a mass of soft melting sensations. No minutes. No moments. The world outside the taxi fades, vanishes. Only these concrete objects: his cocooned bass on the floor; his leather jacket on the leather seat next to him. His thoughts melt into a single reverie. The long march of his memory back to Cameroon, the land of his birth. Bona thinking about the invisible knots that bind the world together, Minta to Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf to Paris, Paris to Chicago, Chicago to Detroit, Detroit to New York. Happens so swiftly that one place becomes another. Which is why touring is so hard. Each departure a tedium.

Then the landscape changes, takes form in visible reality. The horizon expands in every direction. New York’s saw-toothed skyscape outside the window to his right. Cutting into focus. Impossible to look away. He feels so anxious, his body ringing with anticipation. Hopes things go well tonight. How will things go tonight? Why shouldn’t everything go well? Everything will.

Silently once more his breath fills his lungs and empties out into the closed interior space of the taxi.

They come off the expressway. Enter a tunnel. Exit on the other side into Manhattan, moving along wide and luminous avenues. The theaters, the parks, the cathedrals, the skyscrapers. Soon, they pull to a stop before The Blue Note. He pays the driver, thanks him, then seizes hold of the door handle and wedges the door open. Cradles his bass inside its case and steps out of the taxi into the late-afternoon air. Startled, birds start from their branches and flicker through the atmosphere. The taxi drives off. He stands motionless, not daring to approach the club. Limitless air and light. A smell of earth rises from the pavement. The sky is gray and still. The streets of the Village nearly empty, only a few solitary individuals that give his mind to the patterns of fate. Endless questions—rising from the sidewalk, falling from the trees. Carefully, quietly, he inhales a breath, breathes out again. Walks unhurriedly toward the glass doors of the club—after so many hours in the taxi, his legs struggle to keep up with each other—seeing his reflection advance, move forward. His thoughts seem to him to be at once clear and slow.

Once inside, he greets a waitress, although he finds it hard to smile, strikes up some small talk with the owner, a commonplace exchange, back-and-forth about Detroit, the taxi ride, upcoming dates. His own voice sounds hoarse and nasty to him, the voice of a gloomy oracle.

Thinks, I’m tired. So weary.

At least he has a few hours to relax, can eat some food, have a few drinks, do the soundcheck, go over the set list with the band. Does just this. Watched behind his closed eyelids the eruption of strange visual forms, shapes of light blooming and disintegrating, blue green and yellow.

Clanking of a door somewhere, and it’s time to go on stage for the first set. The corridor before him seems never-ending, extending miles, shadows short and dark, shadows light and long. He starts down it. At some point his stride lengthens, brisk, impatient. Peeps through the curtain. Sees the look of fear in the eyes of the audience. Why did they attack us? Their faces shrouded in an aura of sorrow. He leans against the wall to regain his composure. (Whatever disquiet we sense in a room we have brought there.) Takes the stage. Tries to appear as natural as possible. Feels tall and straight. Feels his narrow hips, his torso, his arms, and the contained focused power of his hands and fingers.

With a kind of funny shrug, Bona walks on stage with his bass guitar strapped across his body.

Good evening.

Applause.

Folks, it’s so good that I’m able to be here with you tonight. Because, let me tell you, I had to take a taxi all the way from Detroit.

More applause.

Smiling. Holding the mic light in his hand, barely touching it, like a delicate flower, trying to hide the exhaustion in his voice. Seated at my table twenty feet from the stage, I brazenly shift my body away from Miranda into his line of sight, a glass of gin and tonic in one hand. Bona stares down at me, and for a moment, I think I catch a glimmer of hate in his eyes, as if he wants to punch me—a pulsing sensation in my throat—but the glimmer fades quickly.

He taps the strings, the opening notes of a song like single drops of water. Starts to sing in Duala.

The words. His tone of voice. Slowing and congealing the formless language of my thoughts.

I sip my drink, the taste strange in my mouth, faint in my memory, awakening a low kind of aching sensation.

Allows his voice to rise, high and tense. Then a rapid flutter of bass notes.

The sound of breath leaving my mouth.

Each song like a prayer. Moving through my consciousness. Awakening a strange rising intensity all over me, making me want to get up from my chair and dance. (Songs manifest forces that do not pass through the usual circuits of knowledge.) To forever inhabit this space that Bona has cleared for us.

Lost in thought, I don’t notice that the music has ended—when?—that the set is over. Miranda watches me with a pleasant expression of interest. The territory between our bodies. The fine delicate filigree of lines at the corners of her eyes. The sweet slow measure of her breath. Her breasts small under dark cashmere. Something understood between us that can’t be expressed.

She gives a little shivering shake with her shoulders, then we leave the club raw with emotion, go back to my place and fuck all night, transported, the bed set afloat on an ocean of unreachable desires, new to each other. Although she seems to awaken all the faculties of tenderness that have lain dormant in me for so long, we never find the perfect balance between friendship and love. (Life only has purpose if you find someone who changes it.) We date for another two or three months.

Listen: I don’t know if you learn anything about love from jazz, but you can learn about jazz from love.

 

III.

A few months later, I went to The Blue Note (alone) to catch a show billed as Tenor Madness: Battling Generations—what better way to celebrate my son Elijah’s first birthday than to hear some live jazz?—which promised to be a clash of styles, musicality, and behavior. Constricted and stiff in a bad-fitting suit, the older balding tenor made jerky movements when he played, took short staggered steps reminiscent of the way Monk danced but without Monk’s timing. From his robotic demeanor I knew he was hopped up on H. The younger tenor stretched long and thin in an outlandish checkered zoot suit, his movements smooth quick and flashy, excessive energy signaling that he was flying high on coke.

Hopped up and coked out. Their music breathed its fire into the room. Their own private language. Just those two.

The beautiful calculations shooting through their hands. Two players matched in wonder and resolve. All give and take, all come and go. Moments replacing moments.

*

When Elijah was four or five years old, I took him to see Henry Threadgill at The Knitting Factory, his first jazz concert.

Elijah, what instrument did the man play?

Using both hands Elijah mimics a saxophone.

This sort of outing quickly became routine, father and son enjoying a night on the town to hear Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Mike Stern, Toots Thielman, Joe Lovano, James Carter.

Introducing his last number, Carter says to the audience, All things return to the one. What does the one return to?

Then a lungful of contracting air, followed by a ballooning rush of sound. (The body knows little of its power.) Carter determined to reveal the concealed complexities behind the simplest melodies.

The set ends. (Nothing taken. Nothing left behind.)

Seated at our table, Elijah and I wear matching outfits, including white Air Force One sneakers.

I tell Elijah to wait for me, that I’m going to go talk to Mr. Carter, that I’ll be right back. He nods in acknowledgment.

A few minutes later, I’m sitting across from Carter at the bar. I can see Elijah from the bar. Carter sees to it that I am given a free drink. Asks me if I want another. Why not? While I drink, he looks at me in a quiet observing way. Then I start singing his praises. He listens, watching me, showing no emotion. (His thin angularity, his shirt and suit pressed with sharp creases.)

Man, he says. I’m just trying to keep the reed wet.

He flips open a plastic CD case, steadies the paper under his sand, then inscribes the album to Elijah. I thank him.

He says, With this music, jazz, we have to get them interested early, while they’re still young. You’re doing the right thing. You’re a good father.

 

IV.

I had the good fortune to listen in on Jimmy Heath, Ron Carter, and Donald Byrd talk about their experiences as jazz musicians. The good fortune to hear many of the greats live before they passed away—none of us is long here—people like, among others, Freddie Hubbard, Von Freeman, Max Roach (with a five-piece brass band; he had to be helped onto the stage), Pat Martino, Roy Haynes, Chic Corea (an entire month at The Blue Note to celebrate his seventieth birthday), Larry Coryell, Wayne Shorter, Jimmy Smith, Mulgrew Miller, Alice Coltrane, Cedar Walton, Pharaoh Sanders, Abbey Lincoln, and McCoy Tyner.

The night I saw Abbey Lincoln at The Blue Note it was so cold that the crows congealed in the skies above Manhattan, fell to earth, and shattered in glassy black fragments on the streets.

Tyner at his worst. He commanded one corner of the stage as if cloaked in an invisible substance of solitude and hermetic unfriendly distance. Projected a thick vibration of boredom. He wore his hair slicked back into a thick black-gray wave, waterfall, a repository of all his years as a man and a musician on this earth. How hidden in his face his features were, tired, weary, yet a self showing through. Something weary about his body too. All those decades playing live gigs, that endless hustle to piece together a living that many jazz musicians know so well. (Easier to perceive the way the years accumulate in others.) He felt immensely heavy and ancient, numb, exhausted. How loud the noise of his breathing even over the sound of the music. At one point, he removed his fingers from the piano, allowing the keys to move on their own and regurgitate his celebrated and highly influential style that relies heavily on the left hand.

The band knows that Tyner is not in his element, but they are thankful for this miracle of existing completely together in this way. So many aspects of the world packed into their instruments, in this hour. Two obligations: keep Tyner company in his tense honest boredom; and play their asses off.

When the set is over, I insert myself into the green room, as if I belong there, hoping to speak to Tyner, but Tyner is out back of the club in his exhausted satisfaction, slouched on the stoop. (That’s what he wants. Distance. To be far away and alone.) Yet another night trying to find a moment of calm between sets. He enjoys the solitude more and more. It’s hard at first, but then you get used to it. Performing or fifty years. (More.) Lacks the courage to give it up. Still willing to listen to his own voice (and hands) saying things he doesn’t want to say.

Moonlight leaks from the sky, an otherworldly lull. Everything around him pounding in its pulse, the song of the world thronging in all its discord. He feels time ebbing, aware of his own irresistible indolence. For this reason he plays piano to song the past to sleep, only to do the opposite: keep it awake. The click and chime of passing time. The rise and fall, ease and pull of the solar, lunar, and stellar mechanicals of the universe. To exist at all is to feel the clock-steady undertow of inertia.

In the green room, the band enjoys a deep animal contentment that goes beyond words. I see drummer Jeff Tain Watts lean toward the bass player Christian McBride and say, It’s true, absolutely true, everything I’ve just said.

For a moment McBride watches him. Then his mouth stretches into a faint smile. I believe you, he says. I believe it if you yourself believe it.

I believe it.

Okay. Then we both believe it.

They share a laugh.

Ravi stands some feet away, in a space all to himself, looking serious in his spectacles. In a way I feel sorry for him. As much as he tries not to sound like his father, sound like Trane—a break in the pattern—once he really starts to feel the music, he sounds like Trane just like every other tenor saxophonist does, no getting around it, no escaping it.

I speak to him. Ravi, I say, you are looking more and more like your father these days.

He frowns. And my sons are looking more and more like me.

This curved story takes me to another awkward green room encounter some years later with guitar great Allan Holdsworth, not long before he passed away. When Allan’s face and body were bloated as if all the years of music (playing and knowledge) had accumulated in his skin, tissue, and organs. Music all up in my body.

Set done, Allan and his bass player leave the stage and make a speedy exit from the room, but Gary Husband lingers behind, fiddling around with his drum kit, tightening cymbals, testing the hi-hat, adding treble to his bass drum, making adjustments to the positioning of the tom toms. I wait for him to finish before I approach him. Tell him that I am a writer and want to give Allan a signed copy of my latest novel. Making my case, my voice sounds strange to me, lighter and thinner than usual.

Come on, I’ll introduce you to Allan.

Friendly or the blank politeness of impartiality? Either way, I can hear myself catching my breath. Inside my body the sense of decision feels invigorating and exuberant. I am about to meet Allan Holdsworth!

He leads me back to the green room, and there is Allan standing on the other side near a wall like I’d never seen him before, his guitar still strapped at an angle across his torso, a cigarette pinched in one hand—no photographs record him as a smoker—and laughing and talking to the bass player. Gary walks me over, causing Allan and the bass player to look at me in such a way to make clear that I am intruding.

Gary introduces me.

I say my say: Allan, I’ve been a fan for such a long time. I’ve been following you since I was nineteen years old. More than thirty years.

Here, Allan says, come let me give you a hug.

He opens his arms wide.

My hands and scalp hot, I stand looking at him, with a feeling of breath passing down my throat and up and out again. Instinctual reserve holding me back: I’m not in the habit of hugging strangers, even if Allan isn’t exactly a stranger. I know his music like the back of my hand. The hug is so painfully welcome.

 

V.

Perhaps because I am a failed guitarist, I have never suffered from that peculiar delusion that afflicts some writers, believing that I can do with words what jazz musicians can do with sound. I can’t. Still, the world does not always accept this limitation, insisting instead that writers go before the public to aspire and entertain. For example, a few years ago I was asked to sit with thirty-nine other men, all Black, all writers, on that iconic stoop in Harlem that served as the setting for the famous 1958 photograph, a Great Day in Harlem. That was the initial plan. By the time we convened, with one thing or another, the location had been changed to a library in Brooklyn.

Of those among us, only James McBride had a right to the jazz musician. An accomplished tenor saxophonist and writer, his connection to the music is so extensive and deep that most of his conversation centers on jazz—his favorite songs, memorable gigs, teaching the music to young people, and, importantly, his friendship with Sonny Rollins.

It’s important to remember that when you play a song today you are engaging in a never-ending conversation that goes back centuries, all the way back to Bird, all the way back to Mozart. And beyond.

You know, Newk would be pleased to see us gathered here today like this—young writers and older writers, writers at the beginning of their careers and writers at the end, famous writers and mid-career writers and those up-and-coming.

McBride’s porkpie hat formed a halo around his head.

You know, when I spoke to him the other day, he was talking about how we shouldn’t get too caught up on money. As a musician, you have to make a living but money is the least important thing, or at least it should be. He says that the most important thing is to create a space for some young musician to follow you. Do what you can to make it possible for some young person to play and learn the music. Open a door. Create a legacy.

*

After the photo shoot, I met up with Elijah at a pre-arranged location not far away in downtown Brooklyn, a cool bright October evening, sunlight on the treetops falling clear over the loosening leaves that were already starting to turn, popping bright colors, oversaturated reds and browns, curled dry and dangling. It had been a good day. (James McBride.) And I was in a good mood—with each experience, my life seems to grow all around me—but I felt my face changing, frown tugging at my mouth, my brow. Slipping back into my usual dissatisfied and complaining self.

Those writers—they are what they are and I am what I am.

I mentioned one of the writers who was passing around a bottle of E and J and bragging on himself.

Conscious of feeling a little flushed after saying all that. I tried with effort to smile, shake my head, disclaim the dramatics, and return to my good mood. Elijah gazed back at me. Then we descended together into the subway, bound for The Village to catch Cory Henry at The Blue Note. Elijah was two months shy of his nineteenth birthday.

He was a man now, and I was glad for it, because for the first time we could have meaningful conversations about common subjects of interest like movies—his two favorites Requiem for a Dream and Inception; Basquiat, Warhol; Drake and hip hop. Elijah turned me on to Future, Young Thug, J.I.D., and the Flatbush Zombies. We could express our mutual admiration for Virgil Abloh—the short life span glowing around each of us—for the way he brought together the worlds of haute couture, urban fashion, and the visual arts. (In Abloh, Elijah saw a career path for himself. He is studying the business side of fashion at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan.) Each week found us visiting one of New York’s many museums or galleries. Seeing each other as we are.

Our outings to hear live music were less frequent, although no week passed without me seated (alone) at a table in The Blue Note or Birdland or Village Vanguard or Iridium. I only thought to invite Elijah to join me when I planned to a hear a performer for the first time, someone whose music I did not know, making it possible for me and Elijah to enjoy the discovery together.

Would Cory Henry impress or disappoint us?

Hard to believe, but that night Henry showed everyone in the club why jazz remains a fluid and unsettled form, shifting and seeking. His ever-moving fingers bluesing the boundaries between modal bop soul and gospel. Erasure in every nuance, every inflection. Invention in every riff. And with the technical dexterity of Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson. Thoughtfully Elijah nodded his head in rhythm. Smiled.

Henry executed a fast run, and it seemed that the room attempted to lengthen and slow its breathing. Another quick run and time disappeared. What was so then is so now. What is now was then. I had the physical sensation and the certainty that everything around us had stopped moving, hands holding glasses and utensils, waitresses holding sliver platters, even the blood in my veins. Then gravity reached up to the ceiling and pulled me down back into my seat.

At the end of the set, Henry received a standing ovation, much deserved for it takes a certain bravado to reference and rework a tradition into new ways of thinking and doing.

What did you think?

He was amazing, Elijah said.

We were standing outside the club.

I’m glad you liked the show.

Soon, we hugged—the brief pressure of our bodies—then went our separate ways.

*

The next day, we met for dinner at a Korean restaurant and I took the opportunity to give him a copy of Albert Murray’s Stompin’ the Blues, which I still feel is the best book I’ve read about jazz.

Immediately Elijah bowed his head and started to read the description of the book on the back cover. The cover’s glossy surface caught the light and reflected it back on his face.

I hope you like it, I said. He’s good. The book is good. He’s a good writer. Does a good job of explaining what jazz music is all about. For him, it’s more than music. It’s a philosophy of life. You see, sometimes life is a low-down dirty shame. Shit happens. According to Murray, jazz shows us how to cope—and understand, make meaning, and move on. A low-down dirty shame.

The simple physical sense of being in the world, two men, father and son, seated at a table in a quiet New York restaurant, only the dim buzz of background noise, a rarity since the average establishment in the city blared music from overhead speakers. I was doing all the talking in an attempt to share what I know about making, creating, in an effort to open a window inside him, a window on the music, on me, on us—as Black men, as artists, as father and son. Measuring, analyzing, cautioning, dispensing encouragement.

That’s what’s paradoxical about jazz, I said. You go on stage to play “Green Dolphin Street,” a song that has been played a thousand times before, a million times. The challenge is to make the melody recognizable and at the same time make that melody seem new. In other words, you have to make the song your own, make it yours, but also keep it part of the tradition. You have to evoke the tradition, nod towards it, even as you push beyond it. That means you have to go away to come back. Like a boomerang. Does that make sense?

I think so, Elijah said. He set the Murray book down on the table between our plates and condiments.

I said, T.S. Eliot has this terrific essay called “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” where he talks about how we learn to write poetry by reading other poets, by studying the many great poems of the past. Then when you write a good poem, the tradition expands to include you. So that paradoxical thing where you both learn from the tradition, learn by imitating what’s come before you, which makes it possible for you to write something original. In this way, art is always a conversation with the past.

Using his chopsticks, Elijah dunked a dumpling into a tiny bowl of soy sauce.

Every Monday night I used to go over to The Jazz Gallery to hear this saxophonist named Steve Coleman riff for an hour or two on some topic. Just talking off the cuff about music, sharing what he knows. And all these young cats would be sitting around listening to Steve talk, trying to learn what they could. Young cats who wanted to have careers as professional musicians. (Thinking: jazz an open gate leading into another kind of life, one still littered with difficulty but free of the daily boredom of a day job or a “career.”)

One time Steve said something I will never forget. He said that music belongs to all of us. All of it—jazz, classical, R&B, hip hop, you name it. Said that it’s important to remember that when you play a song today you are engaging in a never-ending conversation that goes back centuries, all the way back to Bird, all the way back to Mozart. And beyond.

Interesting, Elijah said. He tossed the dumpling into his mouth.

*

Last winter, a friend gifted me with two tickets to see Lenny White perform at Dizzy’s Jazz Club, the venue with floor to ceiling windows located on the fifth floor of Jazz at Lincoln Center. (Both Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch played an instrumental role in founding the organization.) I invited Elijah to join me.

It was none other than Miles Davis who gave White his first opportunity to record for the Bitches Brew sessions way back in August of 1969. White was nineteen years old. Now in his mid-seventies, White fronted a fine band of younger musicians, although none of them impressed me the way that he did. A force of nature behind his drum kit sounding like four or five men dialoguing with each other in simultaneity. The one and the many. The many and the one. His rhythms came strong to my ear, causing me to feel an equally strong reciprocating force: I was experiencing a moment in the past or the future, a suggestion of what could be or what might have been.

However, it was hard to tell if Elijah was digging White. He watched the performance, taking sips from his slender glass of fruit punchI went on looking at him, but he didn’t return my gaze.

I asked, What do you think?

Some time elapsed during which he said nothing but seemed to be at every moment on the point of speaking.

That was the best song so far, he said.

*

A few weeks later I invited Elijah to join me for Connie Han at Birdland, two jazz outings in the space of a month, a first for us. I can picture the night so well, picture it with such perverse clarity and in such sharp detail and color, with such sinister persistence that I cannot eliminate it from my memory. We walk down a short staircase into the basement of the club. (A private party upstairs.) A room filled with small round tables that seem to float like rafts in the semi-darkness. We take a table near the front of the stage. Order drinks and food. It feels good to be in his company again.

I ask him how his classes are going at the FIT—I never pry into his life or bring up difficult topics—and, with a kind of innocuous look on his face, he explains that things are going well at school, that his studies keep him busy, lots of assignments that require research, weekly photo shoots that require preparation, little spare time, little time to rest, no time to rest.

(All words can give a false picture.)

Says that things are tough. He really needs to land an internship. But it’s so competitive. Especially in a city like New York.

Sorry to hear that, I say. I wish I could help.

But what do I know about business? What do I know about fashion?

Slim and sleek, Han has poured herself into the tube of a shiny black leather jumpsuit, her hair, should-length and jagged at the edges, the same color as her outfit. She looks like a streamlined fish ready to take to the water.

Be that as it may, her punk look is only so much costuming. (Elijah calls it “branding.”) She is the real deal. Echoes of Herbie Hancock, Bill Evans, Chic Corea, and Dave Brubeck in her playing and compositions.

I look at Elijah and see the joy on his face, a deep blaze of light moving under his skin. (To be held so again.)

Outside in the night air, we say good night. Speaking easily of the future, we make tentative plans to meet for dinner the following week. Perhaps catch another show. (Monster bass player Mohini Dey will be in town soon.) It seems that the words in my mouth shake. I can see something in his eyes when we part ways. (Something else he feels, knows, but does not say.) Elijah walking with long brisk strides, stepping into the street when he has to avoid oncoming pedestrians. I turn away from him and the deepest synapse of my brain sparks and breaks.

That was the last time I saw him.

*

Today, the sky overhead is pale blue, and the leaves of the trees are light and brittle, falling now and then in golden flurries through the air when wind touches the branches. I walk with my hands in my pockets to keep them warm. The hours pass with a difficult kind of grace. Have tried to reaccustom myself to a new rhythm in my son’s absence, everything I’ve been holding in for the past year wanting to come out. Not one day goes by without my thoughts turning to him, or one night without me seeing him in my dreams. My son, a lump of breath that fell into the world. I have always held myself secretly apart from everyone but him. May the river of his days grow more graceful as he ages. May he stay close to the earth. (The rise of a form into visible space.)

*

Fingertips stained dark from work I carry my notebook (a small door) to the desk in my office. Open it. Touch the paper with my fingers. Impossible to free myself. Fated to go over my past. What ought I have said that I had not? What ought I have done that I had not? Was I somehow contaminating his life, conscripting him into my own private misery? Each question haunted by the next. (The world cannot be dismantled by the word alone.) Every now and then I shore upon an island of answers.

I had believed once that life must lead to something, all the unresolved conflicts and questions leading to some great culmination. Now I look at my own life and see only the flowing blur of experience. Fragment-sequences in time swept toward a place before history, before chronology, where everything that ever-happened fades, where past present and future exist all at once in the sea of African time.

I take up my pen and write these words, hoping to cast a spell. Come back. Come back.

Bundanon
Illaroo, Australia
26 mai 2025