Sixth Sense

Perched on a stool in the jazz club, I looked around the crowded room and absorbed the excitement and anticipation running like an electrical charge through high wires. I thought how long it had been since I attended a live jazz performance and how much I was looking forward to hearing Tickles play again. I remembered my search for live jazz in Guangzhou, China.

Once we heard about a newly opened venue, Freedom Cafe, that specialized in jazz and martinis. A group of us jumped into a cab and ventured forth. The interior of Freedom Cafe had an aggressively 70s decor – lots of hanging plants in wicker baskets, empty bottles turned candle holder by melting multi-coloured crayons down the sides – and some distinctly Chinese characteristics – huge posters of Mao, Marx, Lenin and Stalin marching across the walls. A pile of equipment – inverted music stands, a dismembered drum kit and a tangle of cords and microphones – lay heaped in a corner.

Our martinis arrived in a dubious rainbow of colours. We sipped cautiously, slowly, and waited. A canned version of Puff the Magic Dragon played over and over, either stuck in a sound loop or the only song on the tape.

Finally we asked one of the waiters what time the jazz started. A beatific smile flooded his face.
“No jazz,” he said. “We not find any jazz players. But we have house music.” He pointed at the speakers from whence Puff’s sad story continued to pour, “Very good.”

I finished the last drops of my blue martini and we left.

On New Year’s Eve, the first I spent in the People’s Republic, a larger group of us made our way to a jazz bar on the fifteenth floor of an expensive hotel. We’d heard the jazz was worth the trek. Here we didn’t see any musical equipment at all except for a shiny black grand piano. It was surrounded by space, though, enough space to hold several musicians, so we sat in hope, nursing over-priced bottles of beer.

Time passed. Eleven thirty rolled around with no sign of a band. A rather inebriated man from another table wove his way up to the piano and began to crash his way through an unrecognizable song. A woman from the same table joined him and started to sing. To say her voice was scratchy, off key and off what little beat the man provided would be a vast understatement. When they at last stumbled back to their seats a mercifully short time later, the audience applauded vigorously. I have never heard relief so loudly expressed.

At 11:45, we asked our waiter when the music would start.

“No music tonight,” he said. “Is a holiday.”

On Saturday evening, Tickles (on tenor sax) was playing with a well-know pianist, trombonist, drummer, bass player and electric guitarist. The anticipation mounted as they adjusted charts on their stands and coaxed test sounds from their instruments.

The first bars of Crazy Rhythm flowed out and sent sizzling bubbles through my veins. Good jazz does that – it enters your bloodstream, it charges the neighbour air, it weaves its way through the tunnels of your brain leaving a trail of impressions and feelings. You’re drawn into the music as into the swift current of a racing stream. You arrive in a country you’ve visited before and realize you’re home again and how much you’ve missed that home.

My thoughts flitted over the last twenty odd years and the roll call of musicians I’d heard, both here at this club in Victoria and at a variety of locales in Vancouver. I thought, with a touch of timor mortis, about how we were all growing old. Even Tickles, my baby brother who is closer in age to Wumbles than to me, has passed the 40 mark.

By and large, jazz musicians are wonderful, generous people. Perhaps to relieve the euphoria that overtakes them at the end of a performance, they also tend to engage in an ongoing series of pranks and practical jokes that run between them like a sub-current.

I remembered being caught up in that current from time to time. At 2:00 one morning I called Cam (who’d never heard my voice) to offer him a gig and quizzed him about whether or not he was prejudiced before asking him to play – for a handsome sum – at the bar mitzvah of my hamster. On another occasion, Tickles (who’d had plastic wrap placed over his mouthpiece, which creates an instant mumps-like effect when the victim starts to play) dropped the mouthpiece of Cam’s alto sax into my purse and told me to make off with it. The next morning, Cam – looking distinctly ill at ease – had to meet me in a back alley in East Vancouver to retrieve it.

From all these memories, my thoughts strayed somehow to money. Baseball players, just for example, earn obscene sums while wages for jazz musicians haven’t gone up in 20 years. There’s a joke, one of the Pearly Gates variety, that has a ring of truth to it.

Peter stands by the fabled entrance to heaven, sorting out the saints from the sinners.

A lawyer appears. Saint Peter asks, “What was your annual income during your time on earth?”

The lawyer replies, “Oh, about $200,000.”

“Sorry,” says Peter and a band of little devils arrive to cart the lawyer away.

A doctor shows up.

“And what was your annual income?” asks Peter.

Having observed the fate of the lawyer, the doctor answers anxiously, “About $150,000; but I made a point of treating patients even if they couldn’t pay and I donated a year of my life to working free of charge with children in Cambodia.”

“Very well then,” says Peter, “In you go.”

Next in line is a rather ratty looking guy with holes in his jeans.

“Annual income?” asks Peter.

“Oh,” the guy ponders. “In a good year it might have been $30,000.”

Saint Peter’s face lights up. “What instrument did you play?”

And so Saturday night swept on through It Always Happens to Me, Sixth Sense and B’s Blues, pulling my thoughts and emotions through magical terrain until, too soon, came the finale, one of my favourites, Take the A Train.

Afterwards, in the alley behind the club, feeling a little giddy from the effects of two glasses of wine, I looked up at the sky. A full moon rode high in the black sea, shedding silver over the city, surrounded by a cloudy nimbus, as if some giant had blown a smoke ring that circled it perfectly. A lovely and most unusual seal upon a precious evening.