When I was 17 or so, I was playing some piece in the high school concert band. We reached one of those high points in the piece and all of a sudden these shivers started running up my back and neck and into my head and then out into space.
Even before that, when I first chose the trumpet, there was no question. None at all. Some guy came to our third grade class and demonstrated ten or fifteen instruments and I knew I had to be a trumpet player.
Later on, I found out there is a trumpet player personality, and I have some of it, but not all of it. I like to show off, but I don’t like to, and anyway, I’m afraid I’ll mess up. I’m more of a turn my back on the audience and play kind of guy. If they like me, great. They’ll tell me later. If they don’t like me, I don’t want to know. I just want to get into the music.
A few decades later, after a fifteen year hiatus from the instrument, I was at a work with David Darling and Chungliang al Huang. It was the final night and we were giving a performance for everyone else at adult summer camp. When I arrived, I didn’t know I was going to be doing anything other than jamming with a group, but just before the performance starts, David taps me on the shoulder and tells me I’m going to do a solo improvisation.
I was thrilled and scared to death at the same time. I had always wanted to be a soloist—just me and an audience. But I didn’t know if I could handle seeing everyone looking at me. It was not a place where I could turn my back. I started playing, and this most amazing thing happened. A woman—a beautiful woman, at that—got up from the audience and started dancing—all alone. It was just me and her, and us making love right there in front of everyone, including my wife.
At first there was this feedback cycle between just me and her. I’d play and she’d dance to what I played and then I’d play to what she danced. Then, somehow, the audience joined. The energy from what was going on between us jazzed out into the audience and they swallowed it and turned it around and fed it back to us, which took us to an even higher energy level.
It was a perfect connection, and one I wished I could follow up on, but that was it. After I left camp, I never saw her again.
That moment had been the only moment like that for years and years, and then, last summer, it happened again. I was taking a harmonic workshop. Again, the last night of the workshop, we were doing these jams in pairs. We would stand in line and move up a step as each pair ahead of us finished. My partner and I, the first time, got a small taste of one of those special connections.
Without a word, we decided to get back in line again, and to make sure we were paired again (there weren’t necessarily the same number of people in each line, so you couldn’t be sure who you’d be jamming with). This time, when we started, that same energy grabbed us right away. This time it felt like a kind of jazzy cocoon—more raw, the way a harmonica sounds.
Both of us were completely new to the instrument. We’d only been playing for four days at the time. But the god of harmonicas took our harmonicas away from our lips and applied their own. Back and forth we’d go. Each taking a turn to play a lick, and then the other would respond to it, driving it harder and higher, each time.
Our teacher let us go on and on, far longer than any other pair. There were comments from the audience that it was an R-rated performance. It was clear to everyone the connection we had made, and when it was finally over, the applause was sustained and genuine.
It’s hard to know what to do after you’ve established a connection like that with someone. It’s like she became my harmonica wife in the space of ten minutes. We emailed each other a few times after that, struggling to figure out what it meant. It felt like it should go beyond, and yet I was in no position for that to happen, and so, after a few months, we stopped writing each other.
It’s safer to express that energy when you are with a larger group. When I play with the guys, there is a sort of energy like that, only more diffuse and less personal. It also gets diffused further by the people we are playing for. Their energy is rarely focused on any one of us for a very long time, although I suppose that could happen.
It’s that feeling of being outside myself, in the hands of some other consciousness, speaking in ways I could never speak normally that I want. It’s that feeling that I play for or dance for or even write for. It is for connection—incredibly intense connection with one person, or that amazing feeling of being connected with everyone, everywhere. Knowing that I’m not alone. At least for that moment.
Composing members:
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Composing members:
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