It was early summer in the late 90s and K., my then-husband, and I decided to escape our current strife by visiting the Outer Banks. I was at the height of my 3-year-long infertility rollercoaster. My sister and her boyfriend were supposed to join us, but they’d recently broken up, so S. came alone, grieving and cranky, prone to pelting me with little sarcastic jibes and out-of-the-blue insults. I accepted her passive aggression. It matched the darkness that was bubbling up out of me due to my continued failure to make a human being with my body.
My mother called us before the trip to ask if she could join us. I never get to see you two girls. Her voice was mournful. I felt terrible about her loneliness, about the gap between us relatively close sisters and the woman who made us with her body.
The thought of spending an entire week with her made me want to kill myself.
During the early part of each day, K. and S. and I sat quietly on the beach. I lay on my towel, burrowing into the sand to make a concave bed. I had my Walkman headphones on. I snuck a glance over at my beloved husband, that asshole. Infertility had heightened the ambivalence at the heart of my marriage. Maybe I was built to be alone. Maybe there wasn’t such a thing as a modern, feminist, heterosexual partnership-of-equals.
Hadn’t it been wonderful, those years in New York City, grad school, dating around, suffering infatuations, but fundamentally just being alone? Oh bullshit, it was miserable. But still. Think about a typical gorgeous fall Sunday morning, a leisurely breakfast at the diner on 3rd Avenue and 17th Street. Alone at the counter with my journal, scribbling furiously and not looking up even when the friendly counterman, Miguel, refilled my coffee. Walking downtown aimlessly, stopping at the Strand for a book, strolling south to Washington Square Park. Listening to solo saxophonist buskers bleating out vaguely familiar old tunes (the same tunes I was now learning intimately as a fledgling jazz pianist: “Autumn Leaves,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” “Someday My Prince Will Come”).
I missed freedom and solitude. On her beach chair was my sister, reading a book, stressing about her doctoral thesis; next to her was my presumed life partner, dutifully cranking through a crime novel one of his officemates had written and published with a small press. I was close enough to touch their sun-warmed skin but I might as well have been in the hotel, looking down at them on the beach. I was apart from these people who were a part of me, these people I loved more than any other beings on Earth; I was alone in darkness they could not enter.
The song on my Walkman was “Ceora,” a tune on the Lee Morgan disc Cornbread. I kept replaying this one bossa nova track, absorbing it like Vitamin D from sunshine. The sweetly complex chord progression etched itself in my memory. Herbie Hancock’s long piano intro was a monument to cool restraint and simple beauty. Then the melody came in with Morgan on trumpet taking the top line and Jackie McClean and Hank Mobley harmonizing on saxes. I marveled at the masterful control these musicians had over their phrasing, playing the notes of the bridge just half a hair behind the beat while never losing the forward motion of the tune. I imagined myself driving along vast highways in a convertible, wheels moving forward and wind pushing back. I wanted nothing else in my life but this song.
When I’d first heard jazz musicians refer to musical phrases or motifs as ideas, or to instrumental soloing as a matter of learning to say something, it struck me as strictly metaphorical, or else grandiose and pretentious. I was biased in favor of the verbal, the literary, the philosophical. That’s where you found ideas. Musical stuff was just...stuff. Disembodied beauty. Saying something wasn’t really about saying anything in particular, was it? But as I studied more, I began to understand what the cats were all talking about. I was now feeling it from the inside. Music contained the purest ideas out there, the purest form of communication, going straight from the heart of the players to the ears of the listeners, bypassing all the bullshit complications clogging up people’s brains.
Once on a whim at Borders, I picked up a classic album by the Cal Tjader/Stan Getz Sextet, then drove over to a bar in Columbia to meet K. at his company’s happy hour. In the parking lot, I couldn’t keep from bursting open the plastic wrap and popping the CD in my car stereo. Just one track, I told myself. It was called “Ginza Samba,” and it blew into my car like a troupe of acrobats catapulting onto an empty stage. Fast guitar comping for a few measures, and then sax and vibraphone jumping in on a blazing melody together, a beach blanket bingo of a melody. I laughed out loud at the absurdity and joy of this thing. I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. Shook my head and shoulders, closed my eyes, hooted and hollered into the windshield.
How is it that I had lived for more than three decades and never before heard this music? What conspiracy of missed opportunities had kept it from me? I listened to the nearly 11-minute track twice, interrupting my private seated dance party just long enough to glance at the liner notes: Stan Getz on tenor, Cal Tjader on vibes, Vince Guaraldi (later of Peanuts fame) on piano, Eddie Duran on guitar, Scott LoFaro (dead too young) on bass, Billy Higgins on drums. Except for Duran, I had heard of all these musicians, had started to map out of mental universe of these giants young and old who’d played on each other’s records and collectively created the sound of the times. Oh it was a world of men, I could see that, and whenever I’d run across a rare Joanne Brackeen or Leni Stern or Marilyn Crispell I’d rejoice, and nurse a resentment at the same time, the resentment that the guys had been hoarding and hiding all this ecstatic brilliance. Those fuckers. The Getz-Tjader record had been made seven years before my birth, but it felt like a prodigal sliver of my own heart, returned to me at last.
I had to stop myself from embarking on a third listen. I turned off the ignition more forcefully than needed, opened the door, and thrust myself out of the car. I was shivering with internalized rhythm as I approached the wood double doors. Kevin was at the bar with his friends, laughing and smiling. I walked up to him, grinning maniacally. He gave me a quizzical look and kissed me.
Where the heck have you been?
I couldn’t explain. I could never put it into words that made sense, even to my best friend.
It was the beginning of my Blue Note period. John Coltrane’s “Blue Train,” Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage” and “Empyrean Isles,” and Horace Silver’s Song “For My Father,” all mastered by the legendary Rudy van Gelder. From other record labels but approximately the same era, I devoured Nancy Wilson’s and Cannonball Adderly’s eponymous recording, Jimmy Smith Back At the Chicken Shack, and Oscar Peterson’s Night Train. I was ravenous for these sounds, decades-old but entirely fresh to me. The unearthed soundtrack of my nights and days and dreams.
At some point, I grew brave enough to do something all serious players must do: learn to play recorded tunes or solos by ear. I decided to start with “St. Thomas,” Sonny Rollins’ beautiful calypso. I’d purchased a cheat of sorts from that early digital era, a computer program called Slow Gold that recorded a CD track to your hard drive, then slowed down the music while maintaining the same pitch. My ear wasn’t yet strong enough to learn fast or even medium-tempo passages at original speed—but then again, hadn’t Herbie Hancock himself talked about learning tunes off of 45 rpm singles by playing them at 33 1/2? The melody was easy enough, although I still had to start off slowly, work out the fingering, and build up the facility to play it at tempo.
Then came Sonny’s indelible solo, starting with little two- and three-note leaps, breaking into runs and turns, taking powerful breaths here and there to launch again into the next simple yet beautiful made-on-the-spot melody. Note by note, phrase by phrase, I learned that solo on my keyboard, inventing fingering and calling upon all my technical knowledge to imitate the free-flowing horn sound. It took me a whole day. I forgot to eat lunch. By late afternoon, I had learned everything Sonny plays up until Max Roach’s drum solo. I restarted the track at 100% original speed and played my right hand along with Sonny’s line, starting with the melody and smoothly connecting through all five choruses of solo. My fingers blurred over the keys to keep pace with Sonny. My heart was racing. I was smiling like an idiot to the empty room. When Sonny and I finished the solo on that final upbeat phrase, I jumped up and whooped and hollered and laughed. I was doing it. I could feel it. I was swinging. Nothing else in my life had any kind of rhythm or momentum to it, it was all train wreck and tears, but here I was, alone in my room, swinging like hell.