Tyler thought for a long moment before responding, and he was aware of everyone else’s eyes swiveling toward him as he said it. “I don’t get it.”
Maybe the goateed man sitting on the edge of the stage blinked with incredulity. Tyler didn’t know, because the blue-smoked John Lennon glasses, coupled with the shade cast by his carelessly/artfully tilted beret all but erased his eyes. “He’s saying that you need to look behind the notes, at what informs them, at what the player is adding of himself to the piece.”
Tyler found himself nodding automatically, just as he had done in countless over-his-head art lectures before. But since this wasn’t an academic setting, he felt irritated enough by his not understanding to try to lift his head a little higher so that he might actually catch something. “How are you supposed to know what someone’s *not* playing? Especially if it’s an original composition…”
The jazz man might have sighed a little. Or maybe he was just tired after finishing his set, and was unsure if he wanted to spend the time schooling these college kids who hung around afterward for autographs. “Even an original composition will lay it out for you first, young friend. At least, the good ones will. Then, like a branching tree, or an opening flower” – here he was actually moving his hands sinuously back and forth, clasping and unclasping his fingers – “it will go off in other directions, become its own thing. You grok it now? You dig?”
Tyler almost had it, but just as easily he lost hold of it. He could feel the friends he came with imperceptibly inching further away from him, into the smoky reaches of the crowd. “Uh… no, I don’t really, um, dig. So, to really put across a musical idea, you’ve got to… play something other than what it’s supposed to sound like?”
“You’re getting there, my young friend,” the jazz man said, snapping his fingers appreciatively. “Keep spinning the discs. You’ll get there.”
Tyler was about to ask if he meant “keep thinking about it” or “keep listening to the music”, but then, somewhere between the glasses and clipped beard, a nicotine-yellowed smile appeared. It was the first time the artist had done it since he took the stage eighty minutes ago. And for what might have been the first time since he had left high school, Tyler felt a rush of adrenaline brought on purely by academic thought. He felt like maybe he was blushing, or that the back of his neck was reddening, and people around him would think he was embarrassed that he had to ask a man such as this to explain his craft, but he didn’t care. He had actually asked a question and gotten an answer that made things clearer to him. He felt a little smarter, a little weightless.
Tyler never listened to jazz again after that night – admittedly, he had never listened to it before – and he broke up with the girl he had come with only two weeks later, but that rush he felt by making a connection with a learned person stayed with him. He found himself seeking out that feeling like a drug, asking more questions, getting more good answers. And it led him, inexorably, to the second part of his life.
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