Steel-trap smiles made room on the stage, a shuffle of seats, a place where chances die or lives are made, all the welcome of the seen-it-befores and the willingly-impressed, squeezed into a need for the new, hope for discovery, and fear of not-good-enough.
The room itself prepared for betrayal, but the ears plugged back into the main artery, on the off that something might open a vein or just shut out the silence.
The Kid opened his case and took out a pair of hands. Everyone gasped at the tendons and callouses, the length of the reach and the curl of long use. He attached them and flexed them and came up to the group and sat down with a comfort way past his years.
Staves crossed, he danced over a brief history of composition, plainsong to Bach and right over romance he played straight into cool. I heard chords buried under atonal cadences, squeezed between whole-tone and free jazz, unplayed references to Jellyroll, stride, Lester Brown, syncopated against voices lofted on solid riffs, the gifts of Bird found one long, strung-out night, reforming on Miles, scampering with Chick and Herbie, and soaring to Bop.
He told us: sevenths took me out of thirds and they expelled me from the nursery. On the street a big smiling wind showed me how to flatten my fifths and from there it was only a bus ride to the Village and the Vanguard and Birdland. In the lower shoals, all eddied with mist and restless listening, the minor blues found release in an augmented major cool that fused with a life beat ignored by the timid, scorned by the comfortable, and recovered by archaeologists of ancient sighs. It talked to me, whispered secrets, and taught me how to read the palimpsests of harmonies down to the bare rock surface of the first language. I can tell you this much, what I’ve gleaned from all those notes passed sub rosa between classes, that it’s nothing alone and everything together.
It’s the conversation that counts, the contact that matters, so talk to me now and let’s play some jazz.