Dropping Notes
Oscar Peterson’s piano playing was highly glossed and brilliant.
He was the Maharaja of the keyboard, they said.
Technique sparkled like ceremonial regalia
as he rolled out the royal carpet of the American Songbook and the blues.
Music was in his heart and soul
as smooth as a silk suit and as flamboyant as
a specked tie, and the flourish of song
rushing through a room
washing away the dirt from our ears.
When he started dropping notes late in his career
his wife got suspicious and so did his peers
and a doctor found he’d had a stroke,
which explained things.
I’ve always dropped notes. Like most
mortal musicians, it’s part of my sound.
When I play, the glitches leave something out,
the missed note, dropped
into eternal silence, but for Oscar to tumble
to such depths, it took a stroke.
He said at a press conference at the Ritz in Montréal
that musicians are master mathematicians
and dared anyone to defy it.
Everything the hands and fingers and breath translate
into song, he seemed to suggest, is precisely placed.
After they rolled him into the auditorium the night
a university concert hall in Montréal was named
in his honour, he struggled over to the piano bench,
his left hand flopped simplistically like a lesser pianist’s
while his right hand did its usual magic.
In his shadow I ply my plectrum
and push the strings into chords
and lines of song that are mere wisps
of the possible that Oscar knew so deeply,
and though his hands have failed
we still hear the silence he has left us as a reminder
of the glitch that eventually gets us all.
Each body
Each body remembers the necessary
distance between lovers
the space & touch,
here & recalled
Each body remembers the necessary
distance of thought
the surge of inquiry, letting go of intrusion
leaves dropping into stream’s flow
Each body remembers
the necessary breath when
stomach knots, throat constricts, pelvis locks
breath shallow, please lengthen
Each body remembers the necessary
touch, right hand stroking left,
mother caressing brow
kissing eyelids
Each body remembers the taste of
cinnamon buns from the oven, brown
sugar & cloves caramelized
butter melting
Each body remembers
what we may not know
know unknown
our body
Each body remembers
what we may not know
know unknown
our body
friend
Each body
each body
Each reach
Latin America
There is a sun that laughs lost in dreams and happy curls of colourful birds in voices singing hymns ignited by fantasies and visions of lost paradises ignoring the waters of the seas honed into piercing waves pummelling my tears with salt and earth the kind used by the sailors of the ancient continent to bury their dead the same soil that buries our lives that deceives us granting us to continue day by day in that miserable little life of who got more or who will get more without really wanting anything only a bit of tranquility who knows? like the one that surrounded us when we were innocent children and filled our bellies with papaya nectar There is a sun that believes it is holding me without realizing my body is a mountain of ashes collected in urns of gold and clay like those ancient ones who loaded not knowing the weight of a future cowardly and without mercy like those that made us believe we were supportive and would never know what is to lower our heads or open our legs without permission without desire not as when I am flooded in that music that rocks and shakes me covered in honey forgetting the gall that devours my history that crushes my senses for centuries and centuries There is a sun that thinks it knows everything annoying that makes me sweat feeling stuck without air stored in snowy peaks in desert valleys dotted with reddish blue of troubled oceans with palm trees and bougainvillea dancers ready to remind me of the beauty of this land run down by horses and plundered by metallic boats ready to take me to bankruptcy to the pain of hunger and to those differences of class that snatch my breath suffocating me from sulfuric acid virtual wires and the sound of a disturbing rock and roll tasting of cola without coca There is a sun that does not stop rising that haunts me that does not turn off that does not leave me alone that does not let me live that only makes me dream
Respect
Outside the music practice room door
I wait to speak to the man inside
teaching a student the finer points
of John Coltrane’s “Impressions.”
I can’t tell who is student, who is teacher from the sound.
Both fluid, smooth and round trumpets, air through tubes
singing in the sweet spring academic air.
A backing track
plays the piano chords, bass lines and drum accompaniment.
Someone improvises a simple variation
and then an embellishment of the simple original melody.
A pause. The student repeats the teacher’s phrase.
Another pause. Then more lines, more repetition and soon
you can’t tell who is playing what.
The tone is pure, vibrato-less, dignified and poised,
though only three notes are used in motivic fashion,
inverted, retrograde, another note interpolated,
ultra-polated, infra-polated, ultra-infrapolated
to the whim of the imagination of the player
here restricted by the simplest of forms.
The track hovers for a few seconds in a fermata
and then there is silence. Seconds later,
cases snap shut. Voices mumble something, then
the door springs open and Professor Charles Ellison emerges,
black slick trumpet case in hand.
I greet him. We are to sit for an interview
on the jazz scene in Montréal. I’m writing
an article for Downbeat, an overview
of Montréal as a jazz town, and Ellison
is part of it, helped define it as an educator.
I tell him the session sounded interesting and that
I couldn’t tell the student from the teacher.
He looks at me puzzled, maybe insulted, annoyed.
I say the playing was beautiful.
He tells me that students don’t know
how to play the blues.
He was teaching how to play the blues
in a meaningful way
even if it’s not over blues changes, but two chords
like Coltrane’s tune
based on Miles Davis’s “So What.”
He tells me something like “people play the blues like
they wear expensive ragged jeans, rather
than proper clothes. I think the blues are like that.
You wouldn’t wear ragged jeans if you were poor
unless you had to, so why
play the blues that way? The blues
can be dignified and should be treated with respect.”
He then tells me about how people do not give seats up to the elderly on buses.
“I’ll come up to them and tell them to do so, if I see that,” he says.
Latin America
There is a sun that laughs lost in dreams and happy curls of colourful birds in voices singing hymns ignited by fantasies and visions of lost paradises ignoring the waters of the seas honed into piercing waves pummelling my tears with salt and earth the kind used by the sailors of the ancient continent to bury their dead the same soil that buries our lives that deceives us granting us to continue day by day in that miserable little life of who got more or who will get more without really wanting anything only a bit of tranquility who knows? like the one that surrounded us when we were innocent children and filled our bellies with papaya nectar There is a sun that believes it is holding me without realizing my body is a mountain of ashes collected in urns of gold and clay like those ancient ones who loaded not knowing the weight of a future cowardly and without mercy like those that made us believe we were supportive and would never know what is to lower our heads or open our legs without permission without desire not as when I am flooded in that music that rocks and shakes me covered in honey forgetting the gall that devours my history that crushes my senses for centuries and centuries There is a sun that thinks it knows everything annoying that makes me sweat feeling stuck without air stored in snowy peaks in desert valleys dotted with reddish blue of troubled oceans with palm trees and bougainvillea dancers ready to remind me of the beauty of this land run down by horses and plundered by metallic boats ready to take me to bankruptcy to the pain of hunger and to those differences of class that snatch my breath suffocating me from sulfuric acid virtual wires and the sound of a disturbing rock and roll tasting of cola without coca There is a sun that does not stop rising that haunts me that does not turn off that does not leave me alone that does not let me live that only makes me dream
