Afternoon in Paris

I occasionally open up one of my fake books* to a random page and just learn whatever song is there. This usually leads me to some half-forgotten Glenn Miller tune from the 1940s, or to some weird syncopated pop song from the 70s, but it always makes for an interesting intellectual exercise. 

A couple of weeks ago I did this, and came across the John Lewis tune ‘Afternoon in Paris’. I’m sort of half aware of John Lewis from the Modern Jazz Quartet, but it’s not a band I’ve really ever dug into as my tastes run a little bit counter. However with the tune laid out in front of me I began to pick my way through it.

Creatively is a strange thing. I don’t know about anyone else, but it’s never been a smooth linear process for me. I find that it’s an all or nothing exercise and it hits me all at once. By trade I’m more or less a software developer – it’s pretty much all I’ve ever done – and I’d consider designing and building software a creative exercise. Likewise music, however much I struggle with it, is creative. And I go through these periods where all of a sudden it all gels and I’m improving across all axes at the same time. I had this span of, I don’t know, maybe 24 months, when I had moved countries (again), found a new bass teacher, had a new job, and got to play around with some of the early cloud platforms. And it was just this incredibly uplifting experience. Suddenly all the colors were a bit brighter, I was more or less relearning an instrument and fixing my poor habits, and just sort of nailing it all over the place.  And then like all things it quiets down and you’re back into an operational place, albeit at a different plane than where you started. But that’s okay as it will carry you for a while.

But when the tap is off, it is really off. You can till the ground and plant the seeds all you want, but what grows is frazzled and poor and it feels like you’re doing something performative rather than really transforming. I wouldn’t recommend getting older to anyone, but one thing that it has given me is a sense of the way that my own mind works. I’ve learnt that you can’t force things. But it doesn’t mean that you have to like it.

I saw this interview with Eric Clapton once, and he was talking about how his band Cream broke up in like 1968, and why it happened. Cream, and Jack Bruce the bass player – but more than ‘a bass player’ – was the great obsession of my teenage years. And I don’t know, I must have been about 19 or something watching this in my cold concrete student flat in Christchurch. And he said that every once and a while, you just have to go back to the well and give yourself the space to learn again, and maybe things would have been different if they had done that. That always stuck with me. 

(Ten years later I’m sitting in an apartment in Canberra watching the Cream reunion concert on DVD in my work laptop for the first time, and seeing these musicians playing together for the first time in 40 years, and I’m wiping away tears because I’m just so moved by the whole thing).

I sit there with this tune and I’m looking through the II-V-Is, the way that it starts on a major chord but then goes to the minor giving it this kind of wistful, not quite regretful, kind of feel. And there’s this pickup in the melody, and then in the first bar the next note is on the ‘and’ of one, going into a bunch of swung eight notes. It’s got this almost hesitant feel to it, but I’m trying to make it all smoothly connect so it sounds coherent and purposeful rather than a bunch of random notes that I’m playing on a Saturday afternoon. And it’s cool and all but not quite gelling. 

I saw another interview with Branford Marsalis once, part of that mega PBS jazz documentary series. He talked about John Coltrane and A Love Supreme, and that for a couple of years he’s always playing it in the background all the time. Making toast, doing homework, whatever, there’s John and the quartet playing away. And I found myself nodding to that – yeah I get it. When the tap is on you just have to drink as much as you can. 

I’m surrounded by devices these days and can pretty much conjure anything. It’s amazing, but mundane in its ubiquity. I ask Spotify to play ‘Afternoon in Paris’ and it comes on. It’s an album from the 1950s and not recorded very well. Maybe something live. And I go back and forth until I can really hear the melody. And I hear the pickup, and the pause, and the note and the swung eights and the key change. And the little phrase at the start, it’s kind of duh-duh-dah. And like okay, yeah, it’s what is written but not quite what is written so that makes sense. And it’s still not simple to play – well, at least for me – but it’s a bit clearer.

So I play through it a bit more, and I get to the bridge, and then I go back and play the pickup and the first couple of bars again, and you ask yourself – am I really getting it, or is this just performative and stunted. When you’re not feeling it then it turns out that incremental improvement is all you can take.

It’s Toronto, it’s February and it’s the middle of a pandemic. It’s minus ten outside and I’ve got a soft tissue injury in my leg from slipping on some ice while running a few weeks back. For the first three months of this perpetual lockdown last year I couldn’t find the attention to read more than a few pages of anything at a time. I’m a little better now but wow yeah this has been no fun. I really ought to learn Rust, or vue.js, or some other new software framework but I just can’t find my way to doing it.

Which is all to say sometimes you just have to meet things where they are. Growth and creativity are weird things, and they aren’t going to be there all the time. And I’ll keep practicing until they are. 

* A fakebook is a collection of jazz sheet music so called because you can take the book to a gig and use it to fake that you really know the tune.