A jazz concert triggers a meditation on sound and sense.
Benny Green, Peter Washington, Kenny Washington, Donald Harrison, 2/17/11 at Kuumbwa
A drizzly Thursday thrashed by some bad gusts and downpours but calming down as the sun goes down and gray clouds grow dark over downtown where a young medium with a tight quartet is channeling Thelonious, just what I needed, a monastic reminder that a slight madness can be insanely sane, cracked with contagious syncopation that’s sophisticated like a big city with its dark lights and bright darknesses, its red streaks creating loud traffic that stops and starts, sort of honks like black and white swans or ducks, dances in sound, until the power lines and the piano strings can hardly be told apart. I celebrate the rain by taking my muse to hear a few blue notes she can groove to, an absurd beauty not unlike Beckett, a let us say philosophical angle on melody, a bit offbeat, slightly cubist, subtly ironical, a tone of puzzlement and wonder at the pervasive strangeness. Empty storefronts recede into abstraction, mere economics, while here we gather in transcendence, a sanctuary of improvisation, temple of cool communion, mosque of unspeakable gods more powerful than movies or computers, their wonders wordlessly, uselessly gorgeous like all those non-native eucalypts festooning the surprised landscape with their silvery-green leaves. Have I forgotten anything—that dark green smell filling the farmers market? The light green honeysuckle tricked by a fake spring into shedding its scent above the recycling bins? The green-eyed cats that use the hill behind our house for a hunting ground? The one time I saw Monk and heard him alive he was so stoned or zoned out he just sat there nodding at the piano, maybe banging out a chord now and again but mostly just keeping the beat in some inner space only he could navigate. His sound is singular, inimitable, invented within a sphere of deep genius, one of a kind. Now again he can be heard and the sky is sobbing in response after all those warm sunny days, reservoirs filling and the city’s gutters running, storm drains flowing to the ocean rhythmical as rivers.
