By Eric Valentine<\/p>\n
This year, I got to celebrate the real America\u2014the truly free one\u2014one day before everyone else celebrated some other version of this country I\u2019m having a harder and harder time relating to lately. The truth of the matter is I don\u2019t know what\u2019s in the hearts and minds of every American each Fourth of July when they watch or blast fireworks, sing the national anthem a little more fervently during a ballgame, or barbecue and eat a few more hot dogs than they needed to. But my sense is that it\u2019s a different kind of patriotism than mine. And it wasn\u2019t until July 3, 2021, during my vacation in New York City, that I truly understood what I love about this country.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll set the stage, literally. On Saturday night my travel buddy Scott (Looney) and I headed to Greenwich Village to catch an improvisational jazz performance at a small, basement-level club called Smalls. Now, this is the part of the story where I\u2019m supposed to at least try to impress you with which amazing household name performed that night or provide you with a litany of jazz legends who once graced the stage. Wikipedia it; I have no clue who any of those people are, or were.<\/p>\n
This is also where I\u2019m supposed to tell you something about jazz that makes you finally, after all your years of existence, have an a-ha moment and discover that it\u2019s America\u2019s greatest artistic contribution to Western civilization, or something of that nature.<\/p>\n
Instead, I want to examine the mind-boggling, let\u2019s call it no-name talent playing that night. And I\u2019m going to go out on a limb and call the sounds I heard that night \u201cimpressive, but not the kind you hum in the shower the next morning and download online for playback the rest of your life.\u201d Improv jazz\u2014especially when sound mixed right like it was July 3\u2014is rap-battle-meets-team-building exercise. It\u2019s as stunning as it is not catchy. And that\u2019s the extent of my musical knowledge on the matter.<\/p>\n
The featured musician at Smalls was a black man who, over the course of the hour-long show, played each type of saxophone there is. Keeping both the core melody and rhythm for all\u2014at times\u2014five other musicians on stage was a standup bassist, a Latino 20-something wearing what had to be either ironic or a slap in the face to Yankees and Mets fans\u2014a classic blue-and-white L.A. Dodger cap. On the drums was a white guy in a button-up shirt and gold glasses who looked a lot like a young Harold Ramis, the guy who, among other notable film industry things, starred in the hilarious Bill Murray movie called \u201cStripes\u201d (all this is code for he had to be Jewish). On piano, a lady of some sort of Latina or Native American descent. I really don\u2019t know, I wasn\u2019t there working for ICE. They all started the night and played for about a half hour a series of riffs and runs and other jazz terms that I think I\u2019m using correctly.<\/p>\n
The next half hour turned the lead musician, the sax player, into more of an open-mic emcee. He would notice someone in the perfectly cramped audience pulling their instrument out of its case and he\u2019d call them up to the stage, while the other musicians reduced their frantic pace of playing to just near-frantic\u2014enough music space for the stage-entering musician to start his or her own etude\u2014and yes, I had to look up that term to make sure it was right, and it is right.<\/p>\n
The only thing more diverse than the original five musicians were the several replacements that followed. A Russian guy, who after the show I would learn was named\u2014you guessed it\u2014Vlad, took over the piano. A septuagenarian black lady took the mic and sang her heart out. The only person in the room older than her was a black trombone player who, after the show, was revered by the two Asian guitarist kids from the Manhattan School of Music who asked him if it were true he played with (some classical musician I never heard of). And then there was a middle-aged big bald white guy who took his trumpet skills to the stage, followed by the possibly Middle Eastern trombone player who was not out of his element either.<\/p>\n
This was taking place in a city where already over a century ago ghettoized immigrants were profoundly aware of everyone\u2019s differences but somehow coalesced in building this country from the ground up. Did I mention the obvious? Improvisational jazz has no practice, no plan. It is reactionary to the matter at hand. \u201cNo matter what\u2019s thrown at us, it will be hurled back newer and better than before.\u201d It is the musical metaphor for everything great about America. Fireworks, on the other hand, are the on-the-nose mini-replica of zero-sum battles and forever wars that seem to mostly keep us spinning our wheels. And my hope is that no matter where or how you celebrate July 4, 2022, a broader and fuller image of how you see this country\u2019s role on planet Earth will be true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Eric Valentine This year, I got to celebrate the real America\u2014the truly free one\u2014one day before everyone else celebrated some other version of this country I\u2019m having a harder and harder time relating to lately. The truth of the matter is I don\u2019t know what\u2019s in the hearts and minds of every American each […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16351,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","_pvb_checkbox_block_on_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-commentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16349"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16352,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16349\/revisions\/16352"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}