23. Out Every Night For A Week!
The Year of Paying Attention
[The year is 2017.] While developing a scheme to live, at least temporarily, in New Orleans later this year, I came up with a simpler project: a week-long live-music-every-night marathon! Back when I was a twenty-something jazz radio producer in Boston, I was out at one venue or another constantly; why not recreate that hardcore experience in my aging, sagging early dotage? Great idea! I scoured the listings, planning for no club repeats, keeping the musical focus wide open. Sure, I was accustomed to being fast asleep in bed well before any self-respecting second set started, but I’d adjust! Power through! And only go to first sets.
I called Claire. We were teenagers when we met, in a seedy Boston jazz club, where she was bartending, and I jumped behind the bar to help her. She was studying at Berklee, ground zero for budding jazz professionals. She has red hair, plays baritone sax, and is a regular in the Downbeat Critics’ Poll. If anyone was up for this sort of challenge, it was Claire.
Such a marathon must start in the holiest of jazz shrines: the Village Vanguard. Beneath photographs of Miles and Monk and Dizzy, Claire leaned in, nudged her head to her right and murmured, “You know who that is, right?” At the next table doing some paperwork and nursing a cocktail was Lorraine Gordon, the no-nonsense widow of Max, who opened the Vanguard in 1935. Now Lorraine ran the show, frightening a new generation of jazz listeners who made the pilgrimage from around the world to this Seventh Avenue basement. The Vanguard books only A-list players, who this night were drummer Bill Steward, bassist Larry Grenadier and tenor sax player Walter Smith III. The club was packed.
The trio killed. After the set Claire went to say hello to some jazz luminaries who’d come for the music. I knew if I tagged along, she’d introduce me, saying “This is Tim Warfield, who had a jazz show in Boston,” but instead I loitered by the stairs leading up to Seventh Avenue.
Claire walked me to the subway, and I told her about the time I met Frank Zappa in a hotel bar. She described talking with Donnie Osmond about an all-woman band he was trying to assemble. We said goodnight, and I went home to collapse into bed beside the sleeping Sarah. Night one and I was already exhausted.
Night Two began with an ominous tickle in my throat, as I rode up five stories to the Jazz Gallery, in an ancient, tentative elevator (the sign taped to its back wall warned against more than five jazz passengers). A hip young quartet was playing, and I lost interest after awhile. Was it my cold, or was the music too cerebral, not swinging enough? Whatever, by Night Three, my live music marathon was falling apart. I lost track of time making online travel arrangements to visit JC in Georgia, and by the time I noticed, I decided going to bed made more sense. I woke up with a new resolve, and that night headed to Symphony Space on the Upper West Side, for Wall To Wall Steve Reich, a day-and-night marathon of that contemporary composer’s music. It was a wonderful show, but the writing was on the wall — this music marathon had turned grueling, and pushing on wasn’t going to make it into what I’d hoped it would be.
I waited until the last minute to admit defeat, confessing to my friend Katherine as we walked out of our Encore Transition class at the Union Theological Seminary. I told her I’d been hoping to muster enough energy to slip into a nearby jazz supper club for a Hammond B3 organ trio, but I couldn’t hack it, and tail tucked between my legs went into the subway with her to go home. Underground Katherine described her recent adventures in the Galapagos, and the joy of traveling with her kid. I described my own delight in running into daughter Lizzie on the street earlier that week, and then days later meeting her sister Ellen for dinner. Katherine’s life is busy and rewarding, and so is mine. As we chattered, I felt like Gene Wilder’s character Leo Bloom in Mel Brooks’s The Producers, when he’s disoriented — “I feel very strange,” he says to Zero Mostel’s Max Bialystock. “Maybe you’re happy,” says Max. “Yes,” says Leo, amazed. “That’s it. Happy! Well, whatta ya think of that? Happy!”
I’m happy.
Next week: The Worst Thing I’ve Done
