I bought a bass.
Not an upright bass the like ones that accompanied my modal
heroes, though maybe someday I’ll make it there.
I played guitar for years starting when I was a teenager in
the hopes of becoming a rock star. Not just a guitarist, but a Jimi Hendrix, a guitar
hero whose virtuosity left crowds jaw-dropped, a band-leader whose name
preceded him. I wanted to live the virtuosic flashiness of guitar-driven
instrumentalists who didn’t just lead the band but were the band.
It didn’t work out that way. I never had the mojo to distinguish
themself from the hordes of other strummers chasing the same dreams. I drifted
toward classical guitar and spent hours practicing the pieces that I loved. I
accidentally stumbled into a ska band in highschool and discovered the world of
performance was not a natural calling. The limelight, rather than the column of
glory I had conjured up in my mind, was more an uncomfortable glare that left me
wanting to hide in the back. I was constantly missing cues, losing track of
verses and choruses, uncertain of where I was. In college I studied flamenco
and devoured it as a natural offshoot of the classic music I had grown so fond
of, but stumbled when it came for the main event of accompanying dancers in
live shows. My guitar came with me when I came to South America. It
occasionally drew me back toward the solitary satisfaction of playing on my
own, especially pieces like Agustin Barrios’ Prelude in C minor that
create the quiet melancholy that only a guitar can evoke. But I’ve never been
one to promote myself, which meant I was mostly playing for an audience of one.
Doing my own thing was liberating and satisfying, but without any obvious
social outlet it was recipe for isolation. As a consequence, my guitar became little
more than a thing I moved from closet to closet and apartment to apartment. When
we moved to Brazil, I decided it didn’t make sense to continue idly sitting on
an instrument that could provide genuine benefit to someone else. So I gave my
guitar to a woman who worked with classic guitar students. I hadn’t touched it
for months, but still teared up when I handed it over, as if I had drawn a red line
under all those years of playing.
I didn’t really miss it as the years went by, and I didn’t
do much thinking as to why I walked away from making music. I only started to
reflect on this a few months ago after I had downloaded an iPhone app to help
practice reading music. The app would show notes on the bass clef that I would
have to identify. I would constantly lose my train of thought as my mind would
drift off toward whatever problem I was facing at work or whatever obstacles
were popping up in my home life. But from time to time I’d find brief windows when
the extraneous chatter stopped cluttering my mind and I could all of a sudden
read the notes almost effortlessly. It was an intense focus that would feel,
for a matter of minutes, as if my mind were clear enough to make music.
For the first time I understood where I had tripped up in
music. During all those years, I hadn’t been listening to what the music was
telling me – to live in the here and now. It wasn’t the conclusion that I
expected from a counter-intuitive and at times absurd effort to document
not only what kind of jazz I love by *why* I love it. But it’s a message I’ve
gotten from a lot of different corners of my life, through perhaps never
displayed in such stark relief. Picking up the bass is in some ways setting
myself up for the same let-downs of my earlier musical adventures. I may spend
years pondering music theory and practicing scales without ever joining a jazz
trio or playing at a jazz club. Getting a chance to play music and perform with
a group is never easy, less so for 39-year-old novice with a career and a
family. Perhaps that’s secondary to the bigger goal of being forced to live in
the moment. After all, there’s only one moment when a person can make music:
now.
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