The chaos of my home life was a thief, robbing my attention. My mother and father were miserable together and took it out on us. The verbal abuse, undermining, and belittling had been piling up on me, at an accelerating pace, for years. My younger sister experienced some of the same but—in the loudness and vehemence of my defensive rebellion—she was also often ignored and forgotten.
Soon there’d be the revelations of my father’s nonstop affairs since the start of their marriage, a fact that helped explain my mother’s depression and rage, but did not excuse her pointing it toward my sister and me.
I was seventeen. I wasn’t listening to what I was hearing, wasn’t understanding what I already knew. I would have to spend the next several decades slowly restoring myself to myself. And yet—how close I had come, without arriving.
Jennifer D. was the first jazz fan among my friends; she hipped me to Pat Matheney, Spyro Gyra, Miles Davis, Manhattan Transfer. We’d hole up in her narrow attic bedroom under the slanted ceiling, listening to albums over and over, pretending to study for Marine Biology. Jenn got us tickets to see the band Weather Report at the Beacon Theater in March 1983. We took the PATH train in from the Harrison station—her mother was always kind enough to drop us off—made our way to the Upper West Side early, and walked into Teachers Too on Broadway, pulling open the heavy door and practically falling into the place due to nervous excitement. Vibrant chattering people stopped to look up and smile at us before returning to their conversations. I’m sure we looked fresh and pretty and completely out of place. If it wasn’t obvious we were below the legal drinking age when we walked in, we made it blatant by ordering Sloe Gin Fizzes.
Later in the lobby of the Beacon, we joined up with a beautifully diverse group of adults, older than us but younger than our parents, skin of all tones, wearing sleek expensive denim with fancy overstitching, or monochrome tailored linens, or dresses and kaftans in flowing billowing patterned natural fabrics, a real New York City crowd, a grownup version of the teenage rainbow tribe who proposed to teach the world to sing in the classic Coca-Cola commercial.
I knew it then. This was the city in which I might belong somewhere.
Our tickets put us in the front row of the lower balcony, a region called the loge, cantilevered out over the glossy heads of the people below us. I felt a slight sense of vertigo. I had spent many hours in large ornate spaces just like this, elbow to elbow with family members or happy strangers, watching the world’s best stage actors and dancers and singers. I had been with friends to the massive Brendan Byrne Arena in the Meadowlands to see The Police and David Bowie. I was filled with expectations but only the usual kind.
Presumably, I’d hear music from the practitioners onstage that would sound more or less like the music I’d already heard on the vinyl recording. Oh, how I had always loved my records, the mere physical fact of them. I took such great pains to cherish them. From my father’s den, I’d filched the vinyl care kit so I could wipe the dust off the grooves with the roughed-up velvet implement, then pour on a thimbleful of the protective coating liquid, then use the softer velvet implement to buff the disc to a high-gloss sheen—all the while making sure to hold it between my stretched palms, only the narrowest margin of imperfect skin defiling perfect black platter.
I loved the albums and thought of them as quasi-sacred objects, stamped for eternity. Like all record junkies, I knew not only the sound of each track but the exact order of tunes and the exact key change between tracks: there were probably a half-dozen albums I could sing accurately from beginning to end, including the guitar solos, funky bass lines, horn hits. It did not occur to me how provisional and contingent were these sounds. In live concerts if I heard something slightly different in the arrangement or instrument mix of the sounds I knew from the recording, or if a new Broadway singer had been employed to fill the place of the star who’d made the original cast album, I treated the variations as unfortunate flaws, necessary but not particularly welcome.
In a word, I did not know a thing about improvisation: the true lifeblood of music, its secret beating heart, the freedom of its first creation now locked up inside those unchanging PVC industrial products.
Five men came out onto the stage at the Beacon and took their places among their instruments—keyboards and saxophones and guitars and drums, as well as percussion-y toys I could not name. I also did not know the men’s names or anything about them, other than they’d been responsible for the hit “Birdland” and the other tracks on Heavy Weather to which I’d paid far less attention. They started playing. A drum groove, a wash of synth sound, high willow reedy saxophone lines, a rumbling bass movement barely discernible as notes. Disparate random-seeming sounds. Experiments, conjectures, gambits. And then somehow everything pulled together into a cohesive song, something I recognized from the album but didn’t remember the name of. Everything started at a moderate level and then got very loud. People in the audience began to stomp and holler—I’d never seen such a thing before. The sounds were kinetic, physical, a dance party more ragged and real than any disco track I’d ever heard. Unanticipated things happened and everything changed to its opposite. Loudness went soft, brightness went dark, rhythms fell off-beat but steadied themselves in strange groupings of five or seven or numbers I could feel in my body but couldn’t count.
The saxophonist breathed eerie long tones through the horn.
The man at the multiple keyboards started singing into a small microphone but it came out sounding like crazy robot violins.
The percussionist manipulated chimes and gourds and whistles, the bassist popped his fingers against the frets and made fat, low, liquid sounds like the complaints of an argumentative humpback whale.
The band of five men filled the entire hall with as much sonic information as a symphony orchestra ten times its size. I did not possess the mental categories to make sense of what I was hearing. A snake of unnameable emotion slithered into my spine. The vertigo got stronger. I did not know jazz fusion. The names Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter meant nothing to me, and I did not know enough to mourn the fact that someone with the melodiously memorable name Jaco Pastorius had left the band a couple years earlier after helping create its signature sound.
I had nothing but the moment itself to go by and the moment was blowing brain matter out through my ears. It was a living beast they were making together, an alien monster roaring in a foreign language: I knew not a word but the import was perfectly legible. It was truth. It was the unknown unknown, suddenly revealed. I sat on the edge of my seat, feeling like I might fall over the edge of the loge and be glad of it. I was being lifted out of my body, I was being danced around like a doll.
Never ever ever ever ever in my life had I been so happy.
When it was over I wanted to cry and scream at the injustice of time passing. I needed to be suspended in that one band’s one concert forever. Afterwards, Peggy and I floated out as if we’d sprouted wings. We were borne back to New Jersey on pure currents of electricity.
Years later, even after understanding in great detail the thing for which I’d been present—its musical and historical and social context, and even how to pull off an amateur version of such events with my own small talents and eager bandmates—even then, even now, I still sorely wish I had been able to connect the dots. I wish I had incorporated this concert into something else in my life at that moment, an energy, a wish, a dream, an ambition, or even just a continuing curiosity.
(If it had been Jolene Zawinul and Wanda Shorter up there, would the lightbulb have lit up over my head?)
Instead, this moment, so intense and profound and baffling all at once, came and went and was deluged by real life. Without so much emotional noise clanging in my ears, I might have stuck myself to this music and followed it everywhere, like a bewitched child skipping after the piper.
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I remember being introduced to real jazz—experimental jazz, difficult jazz—by friends in college. Made all the stuff that buzzed out of the radio seem accessible for the first time. The stories of the musicians complicated the tunes. Still need regular doses of Chet Baker, Gary Burton, Bill Evans…
You brought back memories of some of the great jazz concerts I attended in college. It's amazing how once the music starts, the rest of the world is irrelevant. That's why I like to host house concerts.