Stale Jazz and Fresh Kale

We are in Venice, in a medium-sized venue on an off-street. It has exposed brick walls and pizza with kale on it. It is Southern California and kale is everywhere. It is sadly more ubiquitous than jazz, which is most evident at this moment as four old pasty white men in pleated pants play the sax. To be clear, these four men are the entire band and they all play the sax. It is like a support group for the anonymous recovering from high school band camp and ex-wives. They all play “well” but it has the chirp and glib progression reminiscent of 1960s through 1980s comedy soundtracks: “I Dream of the Flintstones” and “Three’s Bewitched”.

Eventually, they slip into something from an equally middle-class machine of cartoon funk and manufactured, assembly-line soul. It’s all Looney Toons versions of the world in motion. It is good for what it is. Technically, it is jazz. Still, it is jazz without the dirt of lament, without that dredging of souls, gold, and the bottoms of rivers for lost love and rusted horseshoes. It is sex without desperation or climax. It is all the motions and movements without the interruptions—the perfect imperfections—of insatiable desire. It is the still part of a perfectly temperamental ocean.

Nevertheless, the venue is slick enough for a gentrifying new Venice. The pear and feta pizza is not my thing, but the nice bourbon and young, attentive bartender is. The Edison lights are standard, but standardly contemporary. A few bored looking old black men linger around the edges of the room, beyond the dronish, anemic crowd seated squarely in the center of the room. The crowd claps and whistles in the prompted spaces. The old black men do not.

If I ever tell you, “you play with precision”, you will know I think you have ability but not talent. I will never bed or confess with you because I will fear you are soulless. At the very least, I will fear that your soul lives in a cave that has been bricked shut in a dark space at the bottom of your left foot. I cannot watch people live dead lives. It scares me. No, I will say something kind and fitting for that sort of playing. “You play with precision.” Not passion. And the half-truths are all you can masticate because your gut is dead and your belly is not rumbling gluttonously. A person needs some acidity to process even the sweetest things. The language of half-truths and niceties is a very bland common ground.

My friends and I are posted at the bar, safely away from the front lines. For a minute, they chatter and I scribble in this little journal I am dusting off. We dip into more interesting things than the soundtrack-jazz. “It never says—” I offer, “It never says what kind of fruit we were tempted with in the bible. We just choose an apple because it is universal.”

“It never says?”

“Nope. It’s just the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It could have been a kumquat or a cashew. It’s all connotations and assumption. And thousands of years later, I say apple, offering you something to eat, and you may think of original sin, a bad childhood memory, a worm you bit into, an apple your brother threw, something you gave to a teacher—or maybe you think of the first boy you liked trading from his lunch bag. Maybe he gave you a Macintosh.”

“Maybe,” Laura laughs. This is a better free flow.

“Did a boy you like give you an apple?” Asks Mani, looking at Laura and teasing the way he always does.

“Metaphorically,” she laughs, poised with a cocktail she sips from like she is a small pretty finch. “Maybe it was a banana that was the fruit from the tree—and now it’s a whole mess of homosexuality as sin.”

We all laugh. This is better than the stale precision of this sort of jazz.