A bit more memoir today. This is a series of things that happened between 1999-2000 or so. I first drafted it around 2010. I’ll be back with something more topical next week. It seems many people around the world have decided they really prefer fascism! To my friends in the reality-based community: Hang on, honeys.
1.
The front of the community college band room was filling up with two dozen or more boys and men, while the women, only five of us, sat opposite them at the very back of the room. We were not wallflowers so much as experts at seeing (and even erecting) invisible barriers—waiting, watching, presuming ourselves uninvited. The guys were anywhere from 16 to 60, mostly white, a few black, Latino, or Asian. On cue, they had launched eagerly out of their front-row seats, carrying trumpets, clarinets, electric guitars, and saxophones. Like social insects who form up and move collectively using only hormones and instinct, the male musicians needed no words to organize a long curved line stretching from the grand piano to the hallway door. A drummer and upright bassist took their spots behind the brass and reed players.
These were the cats and the cats knew the scene.
At the front stood Jamey Aebersold, world-famous jazz educator/entrepreneur, a slender, almost whispy white man of about 60 with a Midwestern-style dry wit poking through his church-deacon personality. He had pioneered the business of jazz play-along CDs—studio-recorded collections of famous tunes with just piano, bass, and drum backing tracks used to practice with. Every jazz player from aspirant to pro owned several if not dozens. Aebersold was said to be the only person to ever become a millionaire teaching music.
Jamey had spent most of the weekend explaining that Anyone Can Improvise (as the ads put it), breaking down various practice and listening habits, making this mysterious art sound rational and learnable. Now in the last hour of the weekend course, it was time to jam. He looked at the empty piano bench, then turned his sharp nose toward the back of the room.
Where are my piano players?
Here we were. Five cliches, the women who were all piano players, the pianists who were all women. The previous day we’d been dispersed throughout the room, but now after our lunch break we’d formed a posse and seated ourselves in a clump at the back, like the bad kids about to fail senior year. I glanced to my right: here was a perky 50-year-old woman from suburban Louisiana who had been struggling to learn cocktail piano from a course she bought via public television. She smiled and shrugged. To my left: a dour, dark-haired woman with angry eyes, who’d bragged earlier about her knack for memorizing music—she said she knew hundreds, maybe thousands of songs by heart. I now glanced at her. She shook her head No.
Jamey Aebersold stared at us, tenor sax strung as always at his chest, face solemn. He styled himself a jazz preacher, insisting that music was a higher calling: you don’t do it for fame or fortune; you do it to glorify God. I was afraid to let him catch my eye.
C’mon, ladies, Jamey said. We need one of you here now.
This was it, though. This was my moment to stop dreaming and start doing. I stood up as the other lady-posse members, their eyes widened, made way for me. If I was expecting applause or congratulations as I walked to the front, I didn’t get it. Jamey nodded once and turned back to face the band as I settled in at the grand piano. The song was John Coltrane’s “Impressions,” a simple tune in one sense—only two chords—but challenging for newbies because it was easy to lose your place. Sixteen measures of D dorian minor. Eight measures of Eb dorian minor, a half-step away. Then back down to the Dm7 for the last eight measures. Repeat, repeat, repeat as many times as you can stand it. The rudimentary improvising concepts I’d been learning with my classical teacher would help, I hoped. I had never before been on a bandstand of any kind or played piano with other instrumentalists. Occasionally I had accompanied a singer.
Jamey Aebersold called the tempo and the rhythm section to set up an intro. I put my hands down tentatively on the keys. I couldn’t recall the classic shell voicings I was just trying to learn, so I played, inelegantly, all four notes of the chord Dm7 in both hands: eight big fat notes in a row. D-F-A-C…. D-F-A-C. I did my best to chunk out rhythmic patterns against the steady repeated bass line. The drummer and bassist knew what they were doing and locked in with each other like cogwheels. Technically the piano was meant to be a part of this foundation they were building, but with my obvious inexperience, they were safe to ignore me and did just that.
When the entire row of saxophonists had each taken a turn playing a solo—yes, that was exactly as tedious as it sounds—Jamey swiveled around toward me, his eyes boring into mine.
A space in the sound opened up, an anticipatory hush.
I took my left hand off the keyboard entirely and, with my right hand, started plunking semi-randomly. I knew this much: on a Dm7 all the white keys were fair game. But then the sixteen bars had gone by and it was time to play in Ebm7. Theoretically any of the black keys should have sounded okay, but I could not make myself play those keys. I hesitated, I choked. Within three seconds, I'd lost my place.
I looked up. I must have seemed frantic. Jamey glanced over at me and nodded again—the slightest hint of encouragement. The band was proceeding without me. When I heard the very obvious descending half-step movement back to Dm7, I regained my confidence and played some more white keys.
I’m sure that this, my very first attempt at a spontaneous jazz solo, was meandering and meaningless and unmusical. A random series of notes that happened to be somewhat next to each other on the keyboard. No structure, no clear intention, no tension and release or rise and fall or beginning-middle-end. Just some notes. And yet the experience slapped my soul awake. Instantaneous conversion. Cosmic rebirth. Lightning strike to the head, cartoon-style. Why why why have I not been doing this my entire life? Why did I not know this was a thing that absolutely must be done by me all the time always and forever amen?
No matter that I had screwed up and lost my place—the band kept playing, the song did not train wreck, the groove kept moving, the world did not end, I was not taken out back and shot, nobody yelled at me, or even paid me any mind at all. My mother didn’t show up to scowl and my father didn’t show up to tell me it wasn’t too late for medical school. I had no power to ruin anything or break anything or impinge on the overall happiness of all the blaring teenage egomaniac tenor players in that room. I was not responsible for everything around me or even anything around me. My imperfection, inexperience, awkwardness...pfft. Mere ghosts dispelled by sound and rhythm. Somewhere between Ebm7 and Dm7 my life shifted forever.
I had spent many years craving a spotlight. I’d been trained by culture to believe that the soloist, the leading lady, the frontman, the star, the diva, was having all the fun while the anonymous men in tuxes and women in demure black dresses were just playing an instrument and doing a job, ho-hum. I'd probably assumed that the people in the orchestra pit or the back line of the band were jealous of those up front getting all the kudos, the autograph requests, the stalkers. But the jam session taught me different in the space of one song.
The real ecstasy had been here all along: here, in the rhythm section, embedded in the groove, carried by the collective. They’d be hiding the fun in plain sight all along! A massive musical conspiracy to mask the glorious truth while narcissists of one degree or another were out there pandering to their fans. I had aspired to that self-centered position with ambivalence and now I glimpsed an escape.
Suddenly it felt urgent to me, more urgent than anything else in my life, where there seemed to be only terrible disharmony and dissonance and unrelieved tension (blocked on a novel, unable to get pregnant, already unsure of my marriage). I had to will myself into this area of potential triumph, of small, regular triumphs, because every song and every solo played well would be a triumph.
2.
I needed more gigging experience. I needed to level up, catch up with the precocious teenagers, spend quality time with the weekend warriors. On a website called Baltimore Bands I found an established cover band calling itself DESIRE (all caps deliberate) that needed a new female keyboardist and singer. The person leaving the job was also hoping to sell her equipment to whoever replaced her—two keyboard synths, rack, amps, cables—for a dirt-cheap two hundred bucks. Their song list looked decent, with a few bits of cheese. I’d have to steel myself to do Alanis Morrisette’s “You Oughta Know,” with its screechy aggression and its infamous line about public fellatio. Much worse than that, I’d have to sing Shania Twain’s embarrassing “Feel Like A Woman.” But after debasing myself with these tunes and jeopardizing my self-image as a serious intellectual feminist type, I’d get to sing fun covers I actually loved, from Blondie, Madonna, B-52s, Natalie Merchant.
By this time I had become really good at pulling songs off recordings, a skill I’d only had the nerve to try when a friend explained how simple it was. You just had to focus, had to start where you were, open your ears, plunk out the bass line, plunk out the melody, interpolate the chords, and keep practicing. Once I saw how easily this task came to me, it seemed absurd I’d ever doubted myself. So I took the list of 50 songs on the band’s playlist, cued up the first of several burned CDs that the bandleader had passed along to me in the Double T Diner parking lot one afternoon, and taught myself all the keyboard parts or synthetic horn/string riffs in less than three weeks. (Yes, I was neglecting my novel and procrastinating on freelance writing jobs, but I had to.) I drove out to a farm west of Reisterstown to audition. The road out there was lined with farms, silos, truck lots, and dive bars—true country to my urban eyes. I drove up a long gravel driveway and parked my Saturn between several Ford F-150s. I worried that the all-white band members might be hostile upon meeting Indian-American me, but when I went inside they were perfectly nice. I was still so new to Maryland that I didn’t quite understand—there were suburban and rural towns out in this region a lot more racially integrated and sometimes more ethnically diverse than Baltimore City itself. I may have been a bit of a novelty in these parts but I hadn’t quite entered Oz. After four or five songs we played together, including the Alanis screamer—it so weird to shout-sing about a blow job while in a basement room among middle-aged men I didn’t know—they hired me immediately.
My first gig with DESIRE was at a bar in Sparrows Point, not far from the Bethlehem Steel plant, which was still active but not for much longer. On the drive out, it shocked me to see houses and trailers displaying Confederate flags. Inside Baltimore City or the tonier suburbs it was easy to forget that this had once been the Confederacy. Frederick Douglass had fled his master in Baltimore.
The bar was a blue-collar joint perched near fishing trawlers in a curve of the Chesapeake Bay. I unloaded my equipment and headed across the sharp gravel parking lot to a somewhat intimidating steel front door with a single small window. Once again, I fought back my innate fear of being in non-urban areas among white people who might very well miss the simpler times of Jim Crow. Again, I did not have a very good grasp of Maryland demographics or social geography, so my imagination was going a little wild.
Inside the bar, of course, everybody was warm and welcoming. They immediately deflated my paranoia. Patrons were trickling in as we set up our gear and started playing. First set included Blondie’s “Call Me,” Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game,” Natalie Merchant’s “Wonder” and “Carnival.” During one of my vocals, a work friend of my husband’s—a part-time bassist who’d been among the first good musicians to hear me play and call me a good musician—caught my eye, pointed to his ear, and then pointed upward, with a small wince on his face. You’re flat was the message. I did what I could to tune up. I wasn’t yet experienced enough to tell our guitarist, who was also running sound, to turn up the level on my monitor.
We played the songs more or less faithfully to the original recordings. Inebriated people clapped and cheered. When we closed out our last set with “Love Shack,” two drunk blonde women in denim mini-skirts rushed onto the dance floor to jump, hoot, and sing along. Many others followed. I wouldn’t have guessed that this staple song of every hotel wedding reception since 1985 could still be so popular. But there they were, men and women alike, dancing raucously without style or rhythm, singing along with barely an in-tune note among them, but as if their lives depended on it.
I had never had a servant’s heart. I was not born to be a nurse, teacher, or caretaker. Maybe I’d been poisoned—by the strange, arrogant, patronizing way my mother, trained at a Christian-missionary-run medical school in India, always talked about helping people —from ever considering a service profession. And I was probably born a diva in my own mind, even though I’d now found a nice safe place behind the keyboard to hide my imposter syndrome and melt into the band, where the real fun happened anyway. But it felt really, really good to make a bunch of drunk strangers happy for a few hours. Was this not a worthy pursuit? Social, collaborative, and communal. Maybe it would pull me out of my solipsistic darkness.
A plan was forming. Freelance writer by day, gigging musician by night. Make some money at each. Scramble my way up to better-paying work in both fields. Eventually, it would add up to a reasonable living, right?
Of course, I was as clueless as anyone that this newish Internet thing would collapse and destroy the cultural industries that had once paid writers and musicians reasonably well, just as surely as extractive global capitalism was about to collapse and destroy Bethlehem Steel.
Friends had come out from the city. One of my editors at CityPaper said Yours was the best version of “Love Shack” I’ve ever heard in my life! He was a bit drunk and maybe being facetious but I thanked him kindly. My husband, who’d been very unhappy about my decision to pursue music so avidly when I still hadn’t finished the novel and wasn’t contributing very much to the household income, gave me a kiss and said Nice job. Our bandleader had to hassle the bar manager for payment—apparently, no one ever wanted to dole out the agreed-upon amount for the band without an argument about crowd turnout—but after some squabbling she handed over 300 bucks. I’d just gotten paid to sing songs for the first time in my life and even though it was a lousy 75 bucks and these were silly cover songs played for a bunch of drunk people, it felt big. It felt real.
K. was trying to be supportive but it wasn’t easy. Months earlier he’d said This is just going to be a hobby for you, right? I don’t think I want to be married to a musician. You’d be out at night and we’d never see each other. My father worked nights—it was one of the main reasons my parents’ marriage fell apart.
I understood but felt a seething frustration. He just didn’t get it. I had to do this. I had to. The person I was closest to in this world could not understand what was driving me. In later years, I came to understand his perspective. He loved me and wanted me around. Of course he did. I’d have been upset if he didn’t, right?
3.
Right around then I stumbled across the great novel by jazz pianist-turned-writer Frank Conroy, Body and Soul, set initially in a hauntingly portrayed 1940s New York City. Six-year-old Claude is the son of an impoverished single mother. She loves her boy but has almost choice but to neglect him. While on shift as a gypsy cab driver, she locks him in their basement apartment with only an old upright piano for company. Bored and lonely, he teaches himself to play by ear. A year or so later, walking to school, Claude passes by a music shop and sees the owner sitting at a grand piano, looking at a sheet of music, translating the notes into arm and finger gestures, creating a gorgeous sound.
The boy walks into the store and demands to know what the old man is doing. He has never seen somebody reading music.
“How do you that?” the boy insists. “I have to learn to do that.”
The old man is charmed and amused, “You have to, do you?”
4.
My second DESIRE job came on a weekend when K. was out of town for work. We played the bar in Sparrow’s Point again to cheers and applause and happy dancers. It was past two when I returned home. Our gentrifying block on Riverside Park in South Baltimore was safe in the daylight, but on Saturday nights it reverted to the domain of car thieves, junkies, and drunken packs of teenagers—poor white people, the grandkids and great-grandkids of the Appalachian countryfolk who’d come north for abundant union jobs on the once busy docks, steel mills, and factories along the Inner Harbor. I was vigilant as I double-parked my car and briskly unloaded my keyboards and gear, keeping an eye out for anyone walking in either direction. Rainy weather had kept the usual rowdies and criminals inside, but I saw the shadow of a person slowly lurching up the other end of my block. Just as I was getting the last of my stuff in the front door, this figure materialized next to me.
Can you help me?! It was a young woman, skinny, dirty blond, wearing no coat, and maybe high on something. She was shivering, gripping her left elbow with her right hand, crying. I don't know where I am, I'm not from around here, I can't find my car, I can't move my elbow, I have to get out of here!
My mind remained wary but my heart instantly went out to her. Oh, honey, what happened? I heard a tone of maternal kindness emerge in my voice, a sound I didn’t know I possessed.
She could not look me in the eye as she spoke. I don't live around here, I'm from Georgia, my mother lives over in Brooklyn Park, but I don't know where my car is!
I asked a few questions and she gave some tearful, incoherent answers. She’d been on a blind date and an argument had started, and now she couldn't move her elbow. The way she described this date was chilling—it sounded as if she'd been forced into it by some cousin who’d brokered the deal. I found myself asking, Honey, did someone hit you? Did he hurt you? She didn't respond directly, just whimpered. I had a strong impulse to put my arm around this woman, take her into the house, and deadbolt the door against the boogeymen threatening her. Instinctively, I felt she was truthful. But I also thought about how stupid I’d feel if this woman were the decoy for some kind of robbery scam, or if she were a desperate junkie herself, trying to get into my house with a sob story.
In the back of these thoughts was my husband’s voice, persisting despite his absence. He often expressed worries about me playing gigs just like that night’s, being out in the danger hours without him. I knew he had a legitimate point about female vulnerability to criminals, and he’d come by his fears honestly as the son of a New York City cop. But I bristled at the notion that I couldn’t go wherever the hell I wanted, whenever the hell I wanted. Was K. just my mother all over again, insisting that it’s a man’s world and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it and I should just stop rebelling and accept reality?
Here I was now with this somehow damaged and apparently very vulnerable woman. Torn between the urge to protect her and the need to protect myself, I told her that the best thing would be for me to call the police.
Wait right here, I'll park my car, then I'll go inside and call.
She kept saying Yes, ma'am in a plaintive but weirdly polite way. I doubted she was more than a few years younger than me. She might even have been older.
I circled the block, heading for an empty parking space I’d spied earlier. But as I was straightening out in the spot, I looked 50 yards up the street and saw a dark sedan double-parked in front of my house. A large man got out and started tussling with the woman. I couldn't hear anything. Maybe if she’d been screaming, it would have spurred me to action. Instead, I just sat there baffled, second-guessing my own eyes. I watched like a complete idiot as he picked this woman up and bundled her into the car. Should I have gotten out of my car and run up to help her? I was too scared. Should I have locked my doors, driven closer, and started honking my horn, to wake the neighbors and maybe scare off this possible abuser or rapist? Or was it more likely that this woman, clearly fucked up, was being helped back to a safe place after a drug-fueled argument that had gotten out of hand? I tried to sell this less alarming scenario to myself, but I wasn’t buying it.
My mind raced for five seconds—too long. The other car was already making a U-turn. I got out and started walking back toward my house, watching with my mouth hanging open as the car sped out of sight and the woman in the backseat. She was being either subdued or comforted by a third person I hadn’t noticed until then.
I’d become a helpless, useless bystander. Terrible things had happened right in front of my eyes and I couldn’t make myself jump in. I stood at the threshold, doing nothing. Time raced on without me. I had missed my cue. A woman was forced into a date, a woman had been hurt, an out-of-state woman was maybe being trafficked, a drugged woman had maybe just been kidnapped in front of my eyes, a woman might be headed for a violent fate, I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know. The street was soon silent.
Shame bubbled up like gastric reflux. I cried out of sheer confusion and fear. I went home, locked the door, called 911, and explained everything I'd just heard and seen. The dispatcher didn't think there was much to be done, although he promised to send a patrol car to prowl the neighborhood.
Did you happen to get the car's license plate number?
No, I admitted. I had not even mustered that much basic common sense, the most trivial and ubiquitous lesson from decades of watching cop TV shows.
I slept fitfully and woke up still in tears, by myself, sprawled diagonally across the bed as if it had always been mine alone. It never occurred to me to wish K. was home or to talk to him. In fact, afterward I never told him it happened. He’d end up even more agitated by my new musician dreams. Meanwhile, the happy drunk dancers had disappeared from my inner vision, replaced by that woman’s bewildered face and her voice calling me ma’am. I had done the right thing for myself, my safety, our shared home. Who knows how aggressively those men would have come after her if I’d let her in my door? Or what they might have done to me? I did not possess a servant’s heart but I still momentarily hated myself for not serving as her protector. I’d made a rational call but it felt like a moral failure.
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As usual, "so many reactions", and this time I can't decide which one to ‼️ the most:
"No matter that I had screwed up and lost my place—the band kept playing, the song did not train wreck, the groove kept moving, the world did not end, I was not taken out back and shot, nobody yelled at me, or even paid me any mind at all. My mother didn’t show up to scowl and my father didn’t show up to tell me it wasn’t too late for medical school. I had no power to ruin anything or break anything or impinge on the overall happiness of all the blaring teenage egomaniac tenor players in that room. I was not responsible for everything around me or even anything around me. My imperfection, inexperience, awkwardness...pfft. Mere ghosts dispelled by sound and rhythm. Somewhere between Ebm7 and Dm7 my life shifted forever...A massive musical conspiracy to mask the glorious truth while narcissists of one degree or another were out there pandering to their fans."
Having all your conditioning and the tower of fear it gave rise to dissipate through that initial experience with just stepping up and having at it, and concurrently discovering the offramp from having to be the Diva;
Or that incredibly distressing incident you described at the end, to which you made the most sensible decision amidst a very difficult array of options. Why must it feel like such a craven moral failure to opt out of enacting the entirely likely case of seeing someone drowning so you jump in to save them and both of you drown? What does that accomplish?