FlamingText

"What is it with you and Led Zeppelin?"

Part II

The Piper's Calling You to Join Him
"The show starts in twenty minutes. Hurry up and finish your bong-hits and let's get going!"

   I obligingly packed the bowl with a pistachio-sized nugget of crystallized green, covered almost entirely in fine purplish-red hairs. Gripping the carb with my thumb, I flicked the Zippo and took a heavy drag from the tube. It was a drag with urgency, my favorite kind: Emergency preparation for some entertaining event in the very near future that promised to be wildly enhanced by the effects of the hydroponically-grown cannibinoids that would soon be working their debilitating effects on my twenty-year-old brain. ¿ The bong made two trips around the three of us before we grabbed our coats and raced to the waiting car. I was with my friend Antoin and his friend Carl, a music aficionado whom I had only recently met. He had told us that the University's excellent jazz band, culled from the graduate program in Jazz Studies, would be playing a special performance and it was a chance to see some really fantastic players before they wised up and moved to New York. At this point in my life I could have given a rat's ass about jazz but I told myself I wanted to be open to new experiences and besides the really crucial thing was to define a mission and then execute it. Having a mission was important in those days: Otherwise you were just getting high and staring at the wall, and it's hard to make the case that you're really living life to the fullest when all you're doing is staring at a damn wall. ¿ So we had our mission and we intended to see it through!

  A hard rain had begun to fall as we sped the mile to the university and found parking just off campus, six blocks away from the auditorium. By the time we pulled into a parking space the rain was coming down in sheets and we found that not only were we dressed inadequately to stay dry in such a heavy downpour, but we were also going to be very late.

¿

"We can still make it if we run." Said Carl. Carl was slightly older than us, goateed and possessed of an enormous vintage record collection, a comprehensive knowledge of twentieth-century popular music and a ready supply of high-quality weed. He affected an air of worldly sophistication, more beatnik than punk rock. He was the sort of guy who lights a bong with a vintage Zippo. He gave the impression of being more accustomed to doing crossword puzzles or absent-mindedly sipping cognac than running six blocks in the rain at a dead sprint, but, driven on (no doubt) by a burning passion for late-twentieth century jazz music, he galloped right alongside us the whole way. Our full-tilt dash through the pelting rain concluded at the glass-and-steel doors of the recently-renovated auditorium. Out of breath and soaked to the skin we stepped out of the cold and damp and found ourselves in a full house that seemed to be positively buzzing with heated anticipation.

   And just in the nick of time too, as the crowd packed into the auditorium threatened to spill out of the room and into the glass-enclosed foyer. We wedged ourselves in at the back of the throng of standing-room-only patrons. For me this meant I was hemmed in on all sides by a perilous forest of shoulders and elbows, and as I strained to see over the people immediately in front of me the closeness of the room and the heat of all the bodies packing me in combined with the effects of the excellent weed to produce a heady mix that threatened to overwhelm me. Man, it's like a sauna in here, I thought. Like a fucking sauna. The swirling bedlam of overlapping conversations and stray horn notes subsided momentarily as the bandleader stepped up to the mike and told us the name of the piece that they were about to play. It was to be a modal jazz piece, oh-so-cleverly entitled "Jazz a la Mode," and after telling us the name of the featured saxophonist he stepped up to the podium and counted it in. The packed house perked up and the song began.

  I was happy to discover that the music was engaging and, as had not been the case in many of my previous experiences with jazz, not completely beyond my comprehension. I felt like I was getting it, and the band was much better than I expected from a university band. The music was angular, shaded with strange, fascinating harmonies, and as they laid down the main theme at the head of the song, I found myself completely engrossed. The head concluded and the soloist began to take the theme and twist it into new and endlessly novel shapes. It seemed to me that each phrase possessed a discernible color and attitude that lingered in the room even as the notes died down, each new figure building on the emotions of the one previous until a furious tension seemed to be winding itself up with every passing measure. The horn line alternated graceful curving arabesques with jagged astringent bursts, full of unexpected turns, unfolding in strings of perfectly fluid notes according to some alien geometry that seemed to me at once completely novel and yet oddly familiar. Try as I might, I couldn't unravel it; neither could I, for the life of me, abandon the attempt.

  At some point it seemed to me that the melody opened up a pathway in the air whose outlines I could dimly see, real enough to reach out and touch, and with all the mental energy I could marshal I began down that path, hoping to discover at its terminus the nature of this mysterious language being channeled through the sax line. Further and further I pushed towards some imaginary fixed point in the middle distance, trying to seize onto the thing, and at some point I dimly realized that I had lost my bearings -- I knew I was in the room but something seemed wrong. I was falling against some of the bodies that surrounded me, I was looking at the ceiling, hands were grabbing me and hustling me from the room, I was passing through the foyer, I was outside in the cold rain gasping for air.
"Are you alright?" Asked Antoin.
"I think so, I just -- what just happened?"
"We thought you were having a seizure." Said Carl, who was looking at me with an expression of shock and dismay. "Are you epileptic?"
"No. I don't think so. I don't know."

Posted by flamingbanjo at April 26, 2007 11:16 AM