When I was at my worst I found myself living in a studio apartment with rotting hardwood floors and no insulation in Dryden, New York, working the desk in an antique store in nearby Ithaca. The owner of this store was a really solid guy, an autodidact with a penchant for puns and word games. He taught me a lot, most of which I can't remember because I was so messed up on dissociative anasthetics and self-pity. But I remember this. He told me that there are only two truly American art forms: Jazz, and The Musical.
Skipping musical theater for obvious reasons, I was thinking about jazz the other day when I went down to Tula's to see a friend of mine play.
photo by Louie
Now look, when I was in school, my friends and I saw jazz as benign and banal, the provenance of the comfortable, the middle class, the decidedly middlebrow. The type of people who once met someone who went on to become mildly successful, the type of people who use terms like "provenance" and "decidedly middlebrow." People like our professors; the people we were destined, once we dropped out of school and quit the drugs and realized the impossibility of art, to become. Just without as much money.
And Tula's fits the bill, right? Crisp tablecloths, glass everywhere. Little candle-looking things on the tables, throwing off a lonely, wavering light. The room is dark in a way that accentuates action, rather than hides it. The doorman is wearing a sweater and is blatantly disdainful of people under the age of, oh, say, three hundred. People in suits, manicured nails and gold rings. Well sculpted, mostly grey hair. And a group of people on an ersatz stage playing music that sounds so real the effect is almost psychedelic; it cuts through the venue's weak attempt at classy and strikes into the heart of what jazz is about (I'm told): Authentic music played straight from the soul.
Look, I don't know how this jazz stuff works, but the name of the group tonight is the Chris Fagan quintet, and I'm here to see the eponymous Chris Fagan. He plays alto sax. And the rest of these guys play other instruments & they go along for a while, jazzing away, and then a bunch of them step back and let someone take the spotlight, stand up for a solo. Maybe this is professionalism, courtesy, a form of respect-I can't be sure, because as a writer
I know nothing about these things. But the music is real, it's serious, it's accomplished, and it has that vibe that runs through the human experience, that thing that connects us to that everpresent current of ecstasy that runs just below the surface of human life.
And this is the thing; these guys make it look easy, while there is something about their stance, their presence, their authority that tells you it's not. And you believe them. You believe them because it's so obvious that they believe in it.
I hate to state the obvious, but that's what writing is all about, so here goes. What we euphemistically call American culture is in its death throes. True fact: The title of every movie produced in America since 2002 has ended in the number 2, 3, or 4. Our athletes, ostensibly the symbolic representation of American masculinity and physical skill, are for the most part coddled crybabies lurching from DUI arraignment to ad shoot, shilling for the worthless product of the month. Even the most vital and revolutionary hip-hop has been rendered the punchline to a joke that starts "So Fifty Cent and Mariah Carey walk into a recording studio &" Which is not to mention that really liking American Idol sucks because earnestness is dead, pretending to like American Idol sucks because irony is sooooo dead, and actually disliking American Idol sucks because even though everybody knows it is an abomination and an affront to good, nay, even mediocre taste, no one likes an uptight elitist. You know a society has been cut adrift from its value system when no legitimate criticism can be leveled for or against American Idol. We ... are ... so screwed.
But what I saw at Tula's tonight gives me hope. Not for America, but for myself. Even in the land of the supermall theme park, there is room for talent, for genius, for technical skill cultivated out of sheer love, for its own sake. It makes me think, if you love it, do it, and let it be its own reward. Honestly, "authentic," "inauthentic," and things like that are basically subjective. But here's my subjective take on the subject: the curtain's falling on the American century, but there is still time to make our lives less Broadway Musical, more Belltown Jazz.
