Shackling Water Page 11

  Everything for me is heightened up on stage, Sonny. You know what I mean. Burma nodded, wishing he did. It's like I'm in a rocketship, blasting away from earth into the blackness, riding my instrument like it was that rocketship and holding on for life. But there's a powerful telescope on board too, and any time I want to I can look through it and see what's happening on earth, and focus on the smallest kind of detail and the littlest particular: what style of shirt the bartender is wearing or whether the Germans at the back table have had too many drinks. Albert refilled Sonny's wineglass, from which the pianist had taken only a sip. Usually I notice that kind of stuff by accident, if my concentration is failing, because like I tell you all, you should never play for anyone but us. I don't care what kind of fine-ass chick is throwing fuck faces at you from the front table or which old Harlem stridepiano legend just walked in the joint; the only people you can depend on to understand shit are your bandmates.

  But sometimes another energy comes into the picture anyway, like a wind blowing against the side of my rocketship, and that's somebody in the audience who's up inside my thing. Albert lifted his clasped hands off of his lap, uncrossed his legs and refolded them the other way. I used to try and block that out, play past it, but that approach is wrong. That energy will still be there, and instead of converting it to usable fuel you wind up killing yourself to pretend you don't feel what you do. Better to acknowledge that energy and probe it, run your hands around it til you find a pressure point or pleasure spot.

  Albert smiled. Now, having said all that, what can you tell me about your tall young friend out there? Because he's thumping up against this old hull of a rocketship quite fierce. And I dig it, Jack.

  What Sonny told him impressed Albert even more; that Teef was here to study in silence, that he didn't want his name spoken in Van Horn's direction, that he was deep in the shed. That's a mark of maturity and what's more it's a mark of respect for the music, for himself and the music, nodded Albert, and left it alone except for occasional inquiries about Latif, the kind you'd make after somebody's unknown family.

  But things changed. It wasn't that Teef's energy had simply waned, Albert explained in agitation, that he'd numbed to the music as cats often did who got into the hustles even if the music and the music alone was what brought them downstairs to begin with. Once these new-jack movemakers realized that they were indeed playing for keeps, the band faded gradually like bed linens until they heard only a background ambience of sound, merging with the crowdnoise. That was fine with Albert; politicking hustlers and the player miscellany enriched the flavor of the vibe, souped up the room. They hung tough and made musicians' habitats their own in a symbiosis of mutual celebrity, celerity, and enterprise, and that was better than an audience of cats stroking their beards and concentrating on chord changes.

  Occasionally I'll feel a hustler break through into the music, Albert had told Sonny just tonight, in another dressing room conference see him look up in the middle of his business and feel us burning and stop, mouth the word goddamn! and catch a headnod something furious that might last til the solo ends, or maybe the song or even til the set break. And by the same nickel there are folks who come in simply to check out some tunes and then they start to look around and realize something's going on in here, and soon the foci of their fascination have become the interactions of a cast of welldressed characters whose smoothness and flamboyance, private language and eloquence of movement, make them almost musical in their own right. It's not very much music going on with most of them really, just rhythm, but rhythm will fool a lot of people who don't know.

  But none of that is our boy Teef, Sonny, Van Horn said firmly. Most cats would catch an ego from a gig like his, but for him it's joyless. He's not becoming something. He's drifting away from what he needs to be and he knows it.

  And the only way he knows to drop anchor is to drop it right on me, make me his secret enemy. Your boy is poisoning the room just when I've gotten used to looking his way for nourishment. Burma was on his feet this time. The wineglass and the cigarette in his hands notwithstanding, he felt like an infantryman awaiting orders. Albert clearly had a battle plan in mind. This is a dude I've never met, Albert allowed but I consider him a friend. And I'll be damned if I'm gonna dodge an unrequited goddamn laser beam of illness every night.

  If Teef hadn't been bothering him so much, Albert told Sonny afterward—laughing himself at Higgins' jokes about the old vaudevillian ringmaster spirit guiding him—Albert never would have done what he had. And even so it was nothing he had ever done before. He walked off the bandstand and stepped up to Latif out of the clear blue without introduction: You got some stuff you need to work out, brother, and we gonna help you work it out cause I can't have you staring at me like that anymore. I want you down here tomorrow night at nine o'clock sharp all tuned up, and we're gonna deal with these frustrations you feeling right now, alright?

  I can only imagine what this cat thought, Albert chuckled, tipping the last of the Merlot into Sonny's glass as he recounted the exchange to his band between sets. The way I phrased it was so smooth, too: not friendly and not hostile, just calm and businesslike, so he wouldn't know if this was my way of issuing a challenge or offering to heal his troubled spirit. Truth be told, I'm not quite sure myself, although I suspect it was some of both.

  I also suspect your man would still be staring at me, wondering what he was supposed to say, if I hadn't let him off the hook some after that shit. Albert twinkled. I hit him with a little smile and said, Do you accept my invitation? and he snapped out of it with a Yes Sir and I said Good, I'll see you then, and walked away clean.

  But Latif wasn't supposed to know the prologue to the invitation and so Sonny said he didn't know the whys or how longs of Van Horn's countersurveillance. Instead he leaned back into the familiar if undesired role of mere steady accompanist, house piano player and groundwork layer. He spoke only the necessary words just as he played only the necessary chords, letting Latif not listen to his heart's sweet hot content. All they could do was show up and see what the bossman had in store, Sonny said, and all Latif could do was get some goddamn sleep beforehand. Latif nodded but he couldn't stop graphing what few facts he had, and he was one moment euphoric at the prospect of playing with Van Horn, and the next tightfisted and terrified, ready to prove himself by swinging blindly at the heavyweight champ the moment he heard the first bell echo through the mostly empty club.

  But when it rang, it whispered. Latif walked alone into the club to find them all onstage, as if they'd lain in wait since last night. He climbed awkwardly from the pit onto the bandstand, highstepping the two-foot embankment instead of walking around. Mistake number one. He watched them enter and exit every night and they did it from the side, so what the fuck was he doing? Get it together, he told himself. Be a musician.

  Albert shook Teef's hand and that was it; they took their places wordlessly and Latif squared his shoulders and took a few deep breaths to open his throat. Sonny began quietly and eased Latif into the music, splashing him with playful incandescent droplets like a child who has already jumped into the ocean and returns to shore to rush his rabbithearted friend's progress. Murray Higgins made a slight tightwristed brushstroke against the ride cymbal, smiling at Latif and steady-nodding him the rhythm until Latif noticed and nodded back, fingering his horn pedals in practice. His hands moved fluidly over the instrument's controls: He'd burned away the hours of the day by taking his sax to Hanson's Horn House and having every cork and felt pad replaced, every spring checked so the instrument performed at its peak. The new-shined horn gleamed bright beneath the stagelights just like Albert's, and Latif felt muscular and sleek, nervous but alert, alive. He looked down from the stage and saw the room from a completely new perspective, saw how visible he'd been even from the spots he'd always thought were hidden. He breathed and tried to focus on the moment rather than the fact that the last quarter of his life had been spent in preparation for it. He was glad he had asked Mona to
stay home.

  The tune, “The Omen,” was something The Quartet did at Dutchman's only once in a great while because, as Sonny had explained when Teef had asked after his sentimental favorite It's a high holidays type of thing. The Horn himself was said to have blacked out on stage for a moment once while playing it at a festival in Nice, his solo a forty-minute soliloquy of chaos that eradicated the critical sensibilities of even the most judgmental listener at once, scraped away the intellect and left raw the emotions underneath.

  You couldn't stand ankle-deep for long on this one. “The Omen” was structured to accelerate exponentially, from Murray's tender brushwork to a pounding fullness of percussion and from there into staccato bursts of drums and piano stab clusters behind unbroken loping horn lines. Latif had often mused that if he knew what Albert was thinking when he played such songs as this, what slideshow flashed across his brain, he would understand the man himself; there could be no truer way. Did Van Horn see unborn children, lost loves, burned churches, iron shackles, untouched snow? Was he celebrating the unspeakable or lamenting the horrific?

  It was all at once, and so thinking Latif shook his head and bowed it toward Albert, declining the opening solo and insisting that Van Horn be the first saxophone to speak. Sonny watched, astonished, and ruminated. To claim the privilege of going last was rude and practically against the rules; if this had been a regular session instead of what it was, Latif would have instantly been branded a punk, perhaps shouted offstage. Tactically, it was a cagey gamble; Latif was on one hand accepting the task of following the leader wherever he might roam, of replying to what in all likelihood would be a flamethrowing nerve twister of a sermon. On the other hand, he gained the opportunity to find his themes in Van Horn's discourse, the chance to extrapolate, rebut or confirm, to prove he was not merely a talker but a listener and a conversationalist. Besides which, Burma reflected as the bandleader began to blow, anyone together enough to play coherently after The Horn got loose was no joke.

  Murray had already switched from brushes to his drumsticks, turning up the gas beneath Van Horn quicker than usual. Or perhaps Van Horn, conscious that his time was theoretically halved by the presence of a guest, had been the one to initiate the upswing; from where Latif stood inside the music, cause and effect blurred. He strained to hear Van Horn with the ears of a technician, to footnote phrases and ideas for his own response, but soon such an approach lost viability. Van Horn was all over the register, scaling castle walls and nosediving from the highest precipices into the grungy moat below. The logic of his solo was suspended in its own fluids, self-contained and conforming to a physics as emotional as musical. The colors changed so quickly—esoteric hues Latif would never have thought of but which became primary in Albert's hands, magentas melting into mellow greens and deepest browns, shining sliding and changing before Latif could rightly catalog them to begin with. This is all for me, he remembered, and forced himself to listen with emotional ears, to recognize the vital question not as What is he playing? but What is he saying?

  There was not a hint of animosity to be found in Van Horn's solo, Latif realized. There was a feeling which sometimes accompanied such, a certain aggression, a challenge with a pointed tip, but it was an invitation most of all, Come into this with me, come explore these stellar regions if you can. Take a deep breath because there's only what oxygen you bring with you out here, there's only the cord of the tradition to breathe through. We might float past God or your dead kinfolk; we might get lost in the infinitesimal wrinkled pathways around your grandma's aged eyes or beat our heads against the smell of sweet unworldly pussy.

  Van Horn kept it quick or so it seemed. He didn't ease himself back down onto the ground by lateral degrees the way most soloists would do, swaying his way to a landing like a feather in a breeze. He did most of the time but not tonight; tonight he hit a peak and that was it, he vanished in midair without a warning. It reminded Sonny of charades, that old parlor game of folks guessing a phrase from mimed and acted cues. A cat would be up there doing all he could, acting his ass off while people tossed forth a cacophony of wrong answers, and it all stopped on a dime at the exact moment that someone in the audience shouted the word. All of it led up to that, the sudden fingersnapped I got it, and once the word was said, the actor merely pointed to the answer and sat down. Van Horn was playing charades with himself tonight, Sonny thought, and once he got where he was going, guessed what he was miming, he knew it and cut out with the quickness.

  Just where that left Teef, Sonny didn't know; Van Horn had purposely released the baton in deep space and it was on Latif to grab it up before it plummeted to earth or floated weightless toward the sun. Murray Higgins bought him some ascension time with a long cymbal-crashing drumfill, and when it ended Latif wrapped his lips around his reed and reared his head back, jumping into the music with a long clear shrieking exclamation, train whistle and train at once, fast but earthbound, straight ahead. Even as he started he could feel defeat glistening on his skin, and he struggled to ignore it, to dismiss the very concepts of winning and losing, of beating Van Horn—what did that mean? He played a quick volley of question marks, looping curves punctuated by fat round weighty dots, and as Latif's mind unclenched and began automatically dissecting the groove, mapping what went where, the footnotes he'd made on Van Horn's solo bobbed up to the surface of his mind.

  He remembered the first phrase Van Horn had toyed with, the way he'd rearranged its sounds every which way like scrabble letters, and Latif replayed a few permutations, bending the notes his own way, looking for an intonation The Horn hadn't voiced, a pun Latif could wring from source material. He found one and made it twice, afraid to spare a look over at Sonny but sure the pianist was smiling with him; Burma plunked down a bass clef amen and adrenal confidence surged through Latif just long enough to power him through a few fast triples, shaving closer and closer to the front of Murray's beat before he calmed down. He had scored a point but it was bullshit, mere linguistic wrangling. To address Van Horn on the level of meaning, not vocabulary, was the real challenge, and Latif turned to it now.

  His careful study of Higgins' drumming had paid off; Latif was able to intuit enough of the drummer's math to hold up his end of the intricate game of addition and subtraction, multiplication and division. He filled the spaces Murray was leaving open for him with a spiraling truncated pattern based on Albert's phrase while hanging weightless in the very middle of the beat. Between the push and pull of rhythm instruments—drums pushing the tempo and bass dragging behind it, piano darting quick and slowing slow—there was a magic spot where gravity didn't exist. If you found that balance point you floated, supported in every direction: That was the secret physics of the game. In there, you could do anything: backflips, whatever. You never had to answer to the ground.

  Thanks to Higgins' sympathetic understanding, Latif had a few ungravitized moments to scroll through his palette, searching for some way to express his thanks, to comment on the profundity of exploration as he understood it. He hunted furiously, aware of time collapsing all around him, trying to work what he had up into a theme.

  Latif thought back to Boston, to his days of listening to Van Horn with Wessel Gates, to the first real draughts of music he had breathed, how they had filled his lungs and changed the shape of things to come. He tried to blow that feeling, the ecstasy of discovery, to let Van Horn know what he had been to him and still was now. Murray Higgins fed him electricity and Sonny comped behind him and Latif played on, grasping for the sounds to run it down. He couldn't quite wrap himself around his thoughts; they vaporized a quartersecond before he could squeeze them and screamed away like firecrackers in wisps and whining tendrils. Latif found himself playing counterpoint to his own mistakes, chasing them down and wrestling meanings from them before they sailed too far away.

  It felt overly academic, as if he were talking about music instead of playing it, and Latif shut his eyes and refocused on Burma and Higgins, on meshing with them instead of
trying to make the ceiling cave in with the rogue intensity of his contribution. Coherence was a lost cause now; Latif had abandoned every concept he'd introduced, and the only thing to do was latch onto an idea so compelling that the multiple personality disorder of his solo so far would be forgotten. He opened his ears as wide as he could and Amir's quick, serpentine bassline nudged its way into the forefront of the mix.

  The bass player was outside his line of vision, but Latif could imagine him bent over the thing, his top hand strong and rigid, gold rings flashing as he thumped thick rich bottom from the hollow mahogany. Latif rode the brawny simplicity of the bassline, taking cues from Murray's accents, and the four of them came together abruptly and synched into a groove. Latif lassoed long bright lines around the rhythm section, roping them in like he was hugging them, and found that he knew just how to interlock his phrases so they rose like stairsteps. He surged toward the peak, saw where he was going and sprinted two steps at a time. It came into sight and Murray let everybody know the moment was Latif's; he applauded with bass drops and crash cymbals as Latif stood at the summit and blew down toward the abyss, disappearing and letting the exhilaration he felt speak for itself.