So I'm going to cut off there and jump ahead.
It was an account of the performance of that piece
and the various solos.
And I'm going to pick up where Penguin,
who's the oboe player for the band, finishes his solo.
And Djamilaa, who's the keyboard player and singer, takes up.
And then N. decides to solo a second time.
"Penguin's concluding E flat tore the air.
It scraped and scratched and ripped
a slit Djamilaa's guitar solo tumbled out of.
She, too, extolled an economy of sorts,
taking up the note Penguin left off with
and opening by holding it herself.
She held it less than half as long
as he had but long enough to make her point,
following it with a run of descending figures that
rang like metal rods thrown down a stairwell.
The notes chimed and then clanged
in a frenzy of wah-wah feedback and fuzz tones
Jimi Hendrix or Sonny Sharrock would have been proud to claim.
A cross between crashing surf and a diesel truck,
it rose to a high cry.
Djamilaa took pains to attenuate.
Alive, high wire, she worried and extracted
a thin expiring hum's hallelujah from.
But this was only to get one's attention, it turned out.
Djamilaa let the diesel surf and the live wire hum subside,
gave Aunt Nancy and Drennette a sign to play more softly,
unplugged the guitar, and proceeded
to play it unamplified.
Aunt Nancy took up a low, rolling tumble figure,
and Drennette switched over to brushes for a slap
and stir whisper and kiss it became her purpose in life
to maintain.
Djamilaa led her thumbnail and thumb brush
and pluck the unamplified strings, coaxing a sound
from them close to that of a tidinit, the Mauritanian lute.
A low key guitar related to the Wolof halam
and the ngoni of Mali.
Recalling Lambert, she played a circling figure.
A tight circle returning repeatedly to the tonic,
all but agoraphobic in its tightness
but allowing a loose, unraveling twist every now and then.
It was intense as well as tight.
A dizzying perspicuity one grew lightheaded listening to.
Everything got very quiet.
One could hear the proverbial pin drop.
Introvert though they otherwise were,
Djamilaa's tight circles built outward, an exfoliative attack
whose phantom leaves one admitted to be such,
but heard or felt or inferred all the same.
An outward-mounting repercussive ring and a recondite seed
rolled into one each of them was.
Quintessential economy.
Compactness.
Quiver.
Esoteric twitch and flight from vacancy.
Recondite sprout.
The what was up Lambert claimed he walked rings around.
Djamilaa's more vertiginous claim
was that circles were all or nothing--
a dare, a distraction.
That what wasn't infiltrated all things
and was not to be outwalked or outrun.
A claim Aunt Nancy's role and tumbled
and Drennette's whispering kiss backed with mendicant solemnity
and calm.
It was a sepulchral, oddly seminal sound.
Seed if not bone, but a skeletal sound.
Some vowel was being made, one reluctantly knew.
Something possibly, everything newly renounced.
So taken in were Lambert, Penguin, and I
by what we heard, so absorbed, we almost forgot our part--
the six note ascending figure the three of us
were to play at that point.
We stood listening, more audience than band members
for a moment.
More than a moment.
Drawn in by the unamplified strings, monastic austerity.
Deeply taken in, mesmerized.
A quick paradiddle deviating from Drennette's whispering
kiss, however, snapped us out of it.
She evidently having noticed the nearly hypnotic state
we were in.
We pulled ourselves together and played the six note
ascending figure.
Lambert and I still on tenor and trumpet, Penguin back on flute.
We lowered to the fourth and played it again.
Took it back up a fourth and played it again.
We were whistling, walking past a graveyard.
That was it.
A mere taste.
A reminder.
The six note figure three times.
No more than punctuation, it threw Djamilaa's guitar
into relief.
Drennette and Aunt Nancy's mendicant support into relief.
The three of them going on as before
as we played it, continuing to go on
as before after we played it.
They went on that way until Djamilaa
brought her circular crimp and crawl to an end.
Whereupon Drennette took up her sticks again,
playing a two-footed barrage in which the drum set seemed
to shake and shudder, shiver and shake.
Drennette, plugging the guitar back in while this went on,
Aunt Nancy switching back to viola.
Lambert switched back to flute in which Djamilaa
got the guitar plugged in and Drennette's drum shudder came
to a halt. We went back to the head.
Lambert, Penguin, and I at our mics again,
cymbal sheen and guitar shimmer and all.
I don't know if it's that all that had gone
before loosened me up or what.
I'm not sure it's not that the glimpse I
got into Djamilaa's tidinit recess
forced my hand, fired me up.
Something inside me in any event said
it wanted more, wanted back in.
Insisted I have another go at the sun's white gleam on water.
The riverbank we stood on earlier.
Light's closer walk with water.
Something inside me said roll away smoke
had been a detour I'd have been better off not taking.
Choo-choo smoke-- a joke at my own expense.
That same something told me to motion to the band
that I was going to solo again.
To let Lambert and Penguin know to remain on flute,
no roll away smoke.
This idea, making eye contact and pointing to myself
and beginning my solo, pointing to the tenor and the alto
at Lambert's and Penguin's feet, shaking my head no.
Light's white sparkle on water again
flowed forward and backwards both.
Eucharistic flute, a cushion of air I rode and rested on.
Cymbal sheen and guitar shimmer--
the white light or gleam in question--
was the oral equivalent of the dappled creek or brook
or riverside close up on the cover of Herbie Hancock's
Empyrean Isles.
Aunt Nancy's rippling viola--
the waves of water in a physics experiment, simulating light.
Sonic travel fully living up to titular strut.
My tongue oddly endowed by laboratory light
joining riverside closeup.
The trumpet walked on air, walked on water.
I was free to go backwards and forward.
Free to do both with equal fluency.
Free to find fit.
Every note I played subjected waterside proximity
to laboratory light.
No balloons came out of the horn but B'Loon was with me, I knew.
Not that it mattered.
Not that I cared.
As it occurred to me that B'Loon blew with me
whether balloons came out of the horn or not,
whether or not it mattered.
Whether I cared or not.
Trickling water, the sound I've heard between my ears forever,
grew more pronounced.
No longer subliminal background noise, it rose in volume.
Came to the fore.
As clear as the day the man in the tuxedo
poured water through my hair.
I heard it loud.
A subcortical trickle I now pay close attention to.
A worming trickle of water running from my left ear
to my right.
An underground stream it might have been,
a mere trickle though it was.
Resonant, echoing as if in a subterranean cave.
The closer the attention I paid it,
the more it dictated what I played.
I continued my laid back ride and rest walk
atop Eucharistic air.
Approximate water, laboratory light.
Thanks to the trickling I heard, however, I
resorted to more triplets in 16th notes,
pushing the tempo a bit.
By turns, I got out in front of the rhythm section,
and, by bending and ghosting notes, fell behind it.
A backwards walking, forward walking strut,
if there ever was one.
It was as I played a 16th note turnaround pattern that
had a double time feel to it that the trickle thickened,
and my head began to fill with water.
I played on even so, as unforced and free to fit as ever,
cocking my head to the right to let the water out.
Head hipply cocked, horn addressing the mic,
I blew all the more collectively, calmly.
Water slowly trickling out of my ear.
The water flowed out to form a drop that
hung from my ear lobe.
The drop hung a while before falling onto my shoulder,
if not the floor, quickly replaced by another.
Neither teardrop nor bead of sweat--
though it could have been either--
each drop of water as it hung, I'm told,
looked, from the audience, the lights hitting it as they did,
just like a sparkling earring.
Drop after drop cleared my head.
An ephemeral gem and a fallen jewel emptying the horn.
As ever."
Yeah.
[APPLAUSE]