Hearing the music

By living in Concord, New Hampshire, I often have an hour more in my gig commutes than others in the band. An hour and a quarter to the Cantab every Thursday night, three and a half hours to our Newport, Rhode Island gig last Friday. I measure my trips by CD listenings—two, four, or six CDs per round trip, and I try to set myself up with a variety of choices to get me through all the usual early and late night moods of solitary travel.

I had the rare short ride last Saturday to our private gig in Readesboro, Vermont, just two beautiful hours of country driving from my Concord home. I started the trip under sunny skies with Elvis Costello’s “Get Happy,” but switched early to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” as the skies clouded up, and I soon replaced that one with “Hank Williams Alone with His Guitar,” as the clouds hung low and foggy in the mountains and the first rain started to fall.

The gig, a classy but relaxed wedding party, was held inside an enormous tent on the grounds of a country home, and we all loaded in before the rain got too bad. We parked in a fresh mowed field across the road that got more and more muddy as the rain settled in for the night.

I spent about half of each break in my car, listening to the rain on the roof, seat back in full recline, remembering how so often a musician will miss the music in a song by listening too intently to how the music has been written, performed, arranged and recorded. I’ll sometimes listen to a Jimmy Smith recording and hear nothing but reverb and organ riffs I should have learned by now. With the band’s current recording project, it seems that all I hear these days is studio technique-- mic placement, mix levels, stereo pans, drum sounds, horn voicings, all that, and I’ve been forgetting just to hear music.

That’s when the rain does me a lot of good. Rain, or the sound of city traffic, or even the hum of a neighbor’s air conditioner-- any ongoing noise that I can’t pull apart and figure out. Sound being what it is and nothing more. Something my ears can enjoy-- yes, even an air conditioner-- while my thoughts take a rest.

Returning to Concord after the Vermont gig, I chose not to play any CDs. I just listened to rain, tires and wind, and I remembered what Miles Davis used to say, that the space between the music is music, too. The drive home that night seemed a lot shorter than two hours, and upon pulling into my driveway, I turned the motor off and listened a bit more to the rain. “I think I liked it better with the tires in the mix,” I thought, and then I walked up the old creaky stairs to my second floor apartment and put on “Charlie Parker with Strings.”