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– John Coltrane
Meteor showers of significant proportions were predicted for the evening. We drank on the way out to some land out by Pedernales Falls. We smoked too much pot. By the time we got where we were going I was so jangled, so high, that the flick of someone’s lighter made me jump.
“Did you see it?!! Did you see it?! A meteor shower!!!”
Everyone laughed at me. I’ve never done well high in crowds.
We sat and we chilled. The buzz found level ground and we watched. Showers of hypnotizing light fell. And the music. The music….
Joey loves jazz. And jazz was wafting in from some radio somewhere and Joey was rambling and rambling on and on about something and, to this day, I cannot tell you what.
Suddenly, it all made sense. The notes chased each other, around the tune. The words chased each other, around Joey’s sentences. The sky exploded around us. That was the night I got jazz. It clicked.
And then it went away.
No place has held my heart or attention nearly as long as Austin, Texas.
I am leaving here, now. Unexpectedly. And I leave in a sort of shock that did not accompany me on other moves.
There are things I will miss most. Mexican restaurants probably won’t serve migas. I will beg. I will pray the plate somehow is delivered from the kitchen of Cisco’s, though Cisco’s will be far behind me. I don’t need the benefit of time, the flash of an image or a color out of place to remind me of what I left behind – like a sweater the color of bluebonnets somewhere far from here.
The sound of Texas – of Austin, Texas – that’s what I will miss most of all.
Every possible type of music imaginable is in Austin, Texas. Sometimes it was just too easy. The music was always there. Too many nights, I sat at home thinking I’ll go out next week and listen. It will always be here. What’s the hurry? When you live three blocks from the Eiffel Tower, you think it will always be there.
Two years ago, when there still was a Deep Eddy Bookstore, I did a reading there. A man happened into the reading. If I recall, he was there to buy books, not to hear the reading. He stayed anyway, and listened.
After the show, he came up and said hello. And we talked. And his eyes were bright; I knew right off that he knew something important. I didn’t know what. Not then. But there was a spark like a lighter late at night under the black sky out in the hills of the Hill Country.
Paul. He said his name was Paul. He played sax. I should come see him sometime. He plays with Marcia Ball, that’s it. Marcia Ball? Hmm… I saw her band once, at a club I worked at in Tennessee. After the show the waitstaff got chewed out for dancing (barefoot, of course) when we should have been working.
“Paul Klemperer?” asked my other friend who plays sax, when I asked if he knew this guy. “He’s great.”
For two years, I missed Paul’s shows. Things came up. Work and life and parenting and marriage and divorce and a tumor and a book deal and a move and another. Once or twice I left a message. Once or twice he left one back.
I never forgot the eyes, though. His eyes. He knew something. What was it?
I saw a flyer a few months ago. Paul Klemperer. Playing somewhere. I left a message. Nada. I missed the show – the Eiffel Tower.
Finally, after two years of phone tag, another message. He was playing a gig, a jazz jam at Manor Road Coffeehouse. Could I come?
Four years had passed since my one-night stand with jazz. The tenuous hold had not held. Still, there was something in the memory of those eyes. There was a message.
I went alone and joined an initial audience of three. We were easily outnumbered by the musicians on “stage,” but no one seemed to mind the ratio. They fiddled around, tuned, chatted. Nothing was rehearsed.
Jazz is so all over the place. So improvised. The boys in the band went everywhere and back. They did what they pleased. They settled on a tune and started in. And not long into it, for only the second time ever, I got jazz again. Only this time, I was stone cold sober.
Three tenor saxes. Two stand-up bass. An electric bass. Congas. A drum kit. A trumpet from heaven. Two vocalists. In and out they wove. Politely they took turns, stepped down to let others improvise, jam, put in their own thoughts. It was about love. It was the music of musicians, a gathering of people who had practiced for years and years. Who were not getting paid. And who didn’t care. At best, we, the audience, reached 20.
The host displayed sheer delight in it all, stepping forward to offer smiles to the crowd, stepping back to let the other saxes move in, a cool hand of equal parts measured control and free-form happiness subtly but expertly guiding us on our trip. On tenor, on soprano, sax wailing up and down the scales, Paul, the messenger, sent his message out – the one I’d waited so long for – over the course of it all.
I think in jazz, I realized, after all those years of just thinking I was scattered. This was my head. This was my head. This is how it worked in there – words and thoughts and feelings and pain and joy and weirdness always working working working. Never shutting off. True, I always came back to some clear melody. But not without the work, the improv, the wandering.
I preferred rock. I preferred blues. I preferred singer-songwriters pouring it out, all plain and narrative. Spelling the emotions out with their metaphors and analogies and easy to follow beginning-middle-end. With jazz, with this jam, there was no telling where it would start or finish, who would step up to take a solo, who would hit an unexpected note. I tried to escape jazz my whole life. And now, for the second time ever, I got it. The Second Night I Got Jazz.
Four hours passed. It seemed no more than 15 minutes. There was this smile on my face by the end. Something clicked. Something worked.
I got it. I got it again. I beamed as I left that evening. I do not like jazz. I liked jazz this night.
My mind, the one that thinks in jazz, seizes opportunities like this. For years I have stored, unwittingly, data I thought I had no use for. At odd times I call up files of stuff I had no idea was still in there. At a keg party in Tennessee, for example, I meet a young carpenter. Suddenly, I find myself waxing poetic on types and cuts of wood. I give examples of the mantels and bannisters and paneling. In real life, I don’t know shit about wood. At this party, I might as well be wearing a tool belt.
Returning home from Manor Road Coffeehouse, the thoughts flood in… Uncle Tony’s basement in Philly, decades ago, I am sitting on the stool at his drum kit, staring up at a huge poster of Gene Krupa… I know how to spell Django correctly… Nights at the Elephant Room… The Brazilian quartet that beckoned me to dance long into a summer’s evening many moons ago… The one-night stand who left me early on a Sunday in San Francisco, because he said he had to go to church. John Coltrane’s church.
I am leaving Austin. And I must make a story up to tell myself, neatly, why suddenly Paul arrived again, finally to deliver his message to me. I tell him how sorry I am that I am going, that I will miss his upcoming gigs. I mean it. I ask for his schedule and my days are numbered here, as are his dates, so I settle for seeing him at a gig in a restaurant.
I listen to Paul play for a little while, until my child’s eyes start to droop with the weight of the late hour. In the car, as we wind along Lamar, I take pictures in my head. Pease Park at night… the red lights… the lights strung cheerfully outside of the Tavern.
Everywhere I go now, I take pictures in my head: Town Lake in the morning light… The statue of the firefighter holding a child on the Capitol grounds… The letters H-E-B… Live oak, pecan, chinaberry… Chipotle and Wheatsville and BookWoman. Everything hits a nerve. I have left enough places. I know what I give up as I go.
I turn on the radio. Jimmy LaFave and Bruce Robison and Kelly Willis all take their turns. I am thinking of Austin as if I am gone already. I am missing, before I even cross the state line, what I did not value enough. I am realizing, too late, the treasure I am about to lose.
There is music everywhere here. Perhaps, more importantly, there are musicians. Everywhere. Some might say there is an attitude attached to those who manage to make it in this town full of seven nights a week tunage, of hoping for gigs when there are no gigs to be had.
They are everywhere in this town, these musicians. I have seen a thousand shows. I will miss them dearly.
That Corky guy, over at the competition? So rarely do I agree with him. But I recall something particularly accurate he said. At SXSW, he noted, you will often find Austinites crowding the showcases of Austin bands. This despite all the other chances to hear them, 12 months a year. Why is that?
Austin will always be the theme of SXSW, the center of the storm, the melody around which all the other out-of-town bands improvise. It goes beyond your basic Texas jingoism. It’s a phenomenon. It’s a love and a pride that cannot be accurately pinpointed. It is a pure thrill to hop from club to club, like racing from class to class between the bells, to catch one brilliant Austin performer after another. To try to psychically convey to the out-of-towners around you, “Hey, this is my town. These are my bands.”
Poetry slams with Guy Forsyth… Town Lake with Kris McKay… Rollerskating with James McMurtry… Performance art with SXip… My son’s third birthday party with Don Walser… Shooting hoops with Fastball… Coffee with Pork.
It is, this conglomeration of songsters and styles, a sort of brilliant jazz. I get it now. I fear I am too late. I miss Austin already. I miss what will be lost to me, what, sadly, I let myself miss too often when it was right there at my fingertips.
I will be back one day. Austin, Texas, I am not done with you. I write a song in my head. It’s made up of pictures. It is a collage as unpredictable as improvisational jazz. It is my memories, which I know now I will never shake. So I must gather them and hold them tight until I come back home.
Spike Gillespie is back home in Austin for SXSW. She will be performing at the Spoken Word Showcase, Sat, Mar 21, 11:20pm at Mojo’s Coffeehouse.
Jazz saxophone man Paul Klemperer is playing with the Golden Arm Trio at their SXSW showcase, Sat, Mar 21, 9pm at the Elephant Room.
This article appears in March 20 • 1998 and March 20 • 1998 (Cover).