Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Music Man
Today I got an email from my freaky cool shul about their upcoming festive celebration for Simchat Torah - the commemoration of the handing down of the law. It’s one of two times in the year that jews are supposed - nay, are obliged - to get good and sloshed. And this is a very observant congregation. The email mentioned that, for the services, “music will be provided by the Polyphonic Klezmer and Avant Hasidic band, Captain Zohar.” I really hope I can make it for that. Music can make all the difference.
Which is all the lead-in that I need for a story I wrote up a few weeks ago about a dude I saw listening to music:
We were on vacation - it feels so long ago that it must have been two other usses; so recently that I can smell the olfactory menagerie even as I sit her writing this - chickory and riverwater and horses and wood… It was New Orleans, 1991. We stayed in a B&B in the French Quarter that claimed, based on a frieze of a sunrise over the front door, that it was the original house of the rising sun. While in New Orleans I felt I’d reached an epitome of western culture when I rode in a horse-drawn carriage through rainy morning streets with an enormous julep in my hand. It’s a lovely town.
But the incident that really comes back to me was not that one. It happened well after dark at a blues bar filled wall-to-wall with people like me: wasted, white tourists out for a jolt of old-style revelry. The band was rocking hard and the drinks were cheap enough for everybody to have too many of them.
The building, like all of them, went back well into the 19th century, with a high ceiling and a very long floor. We were packed in tight, up against both walls from side to side and quite a ways back into the murk of some undefined area behind us. The windows were tall and narrow, and they were open to the humid night; rusty iron bars on the windowframes penned us in, separated our ecstatic frenzy from the vagrant inky night. The band up front pounded out a homoginzed yet satisfactorily authentic-sounding blues, whipping us into a manageable frenzy. I lost myself, as did we all, in their driving rhythms. It’s why we were there in the first place, after all.
It was then that I could not help but notice: one of us was not one of us. He was old, this man, and shabby and poor. The tight coils of his grey hair were matted and filthy and his clothing was tattered. His gaze was unfocused. His skin, dirty dark brown, shone dully in the night’s light. He stood outside a window near the stage, on the outside, looking in - or listening in, more like it, his eyes closed and his face inclined toward the music. He leaned drunkenly against the iron bars over the open window. As the band wailed and rocked, his right hand plucked at the bars, keepng perfect time, thrumming a walking line to the rollicking blues pouring off the stage. His left hand ran imaginary frets, making the changes a musician would make, his fingers contorted expertly as if he were standing at an upright bass on a stage instead of at a barred window in a piss-soaked alley. His face was a vision of Orphean transport as he made music in his mind.
The lead singer of the band was blind; his milky eyes veered randomly over the crowd as he emoted. The man in the alley stood about fifteen feet from him, really just on the fringe of the band itself. I was sure I could hear what he was playing, and that so could the lead singer, too. But as it turns out, it was actually just me.
