Holiday Notes Across A Hallway

A knock on the door of Augie Cannataro's apartment. He peered through the security window to see the single mother from across the hall. They had always nodded politely at each other when passing in the lobby or hallway. He was respectful but didn't want to approach an involvement in whatever her life was with her son, who Cannataro had also seen in passing and had heard through the walls of their apartments making painful attempts at saxophone practice.

He pitied the kid's lack of talent for the instrument, but if it kept the boy out of trouble or gave him an outlet to make friends, or wired his brain scholastically, so what? The kid sure enough wasn't going to become a star, or even wind up playing hotel lounge bars on Christmas Eve. Cannataro himself had just come from such work, a late afternoon cocktail party in which, once again, the bartenders had earned more in tips than individual musicians had been paid, where corporate drunks had held their wives, or girlfriends, or other assorted women from their offices close, while padding over to the bandstand and asking for Mel Torme's "Christmas song. " "'Chestnuts Roasting,' you know that song?" they'd ask, as if only they were hip enough to know of it, even though it had already been played half a dozen times since two in the afternoon. "Make it soulful, my man!" urged one, who fancied himself a bro-speak hipster after business hours. A dollar or two might find its way into the tip jar, as the couple shuffled back toward the bar for another pair of spiced Old Fashioneds, fifteen bucks each, holiday specials, cash, then rounding out the bartender with another twenty because it was Christmas and a time to share.

But they hadn't shared much with the musicians. Music was an incidental, an accompaniment. Of course, it would be there, assumed, provided by the house, why pay more? Cannataro's sax drew out the final phrase, "Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, to you," He aimed it soulfully, if only a bit sourly, at the couple. Nah, it wasn't sour; saccharine, maybe, but not sour. After all, it was Christmas Eve. Why be sour?

Arriving home, he took his saxophone out from its case and swabbed it out thoroughly, giving it a good cleaning. He poured two fingers of scotch into a tumbler, a call brand from a half-empty bottle dispensed from a lounge overstock, and stared at the amber liquid, and his brass horn. He sought solace in the liquor, where he had once found solace and glory in the horn. But he felt that the horn had abandoned him, or that it had led him into a life in which he was abandoned, after all those years of training and the practice, travel, set-up, performance, and teardown, when a gig earned him less than the staff who toweled and set out glassware, mixed drinks, and wiped down the bar top.

He considered his parents who had scrimped for his music lessons, encouraged him to play to supportive and disinterested relatives alike, then at high school dances, then music college, to become good, very good, but for all just a journeyman who could play anything, everything, but like everyone else at his level, good enough to play the best hotel lounges and society jobs, but little more. What did it matter?

First Introductions

The knock on the door had disrupted his melancholy. He opened for the woman, who smiled and introduced herself as Angela Starmont, extending a hand across the threshold. He had seemed distant, polite enough to her, and sometimes grouchy. She had never given much thought to what, if anything, might be bothering him. But she had heard him enter his apartment that Christmas Eve and from the absence of other footsteps assumed he was alone. A vein of Christmas spirit encouraged her to knock on his door. Cannataro answered it.

"Mr. Cannataro, hi. I know your name from the label on the mailbox in the lobby. I heard you in the hallway and looked out the security window in my door and saw you had a music case with you. Do you play?" He felt she was talking too fast, and not quite making sense. Of course he played. He rehearsed generally in late mornings into afternoons, but perhaps she wasn't home until late in the day and hadn't heard him.

"Yes. Saxophone. Tenor."

"Oh, my son plays. Perhaps you've heard him practicing?"

"Oh, no, never" Augie lied. "I had no idea." Whatever the kid was doing, he thought, it sounded more like torturing cats than any kind of practice.

"Oh, he loves it. He wants to play jazz someday."

It's good that the kid is young, Augie thought. Someday could be an eternity away.

"What kind of music do you play," she asked.

"Jazz," was his one-word answer.

"Oh, my son would love to meet you. Would you like to come over to meet him, have something to eat? We were just about to have some snacks, cheese and crackers and stuff. Casual..." She dangled the last word with a slight bounce of holiday merriment. Augie figured it was not to be taken too seriously, but an invitation nonetheless.

"Casual? " Cannataro asked. What was he letting himself in for?

"Yes, just something casual," she replied. "We're having dinner with my ex and his parents tomorrow. Come over for a glass of wine."

So there's an ex, and grandparents, and they get along enough for Christmas, he added up. And a kid who can't play who wants to play jazz. And snacks and a glass of wine. Why not? He followed the woman into her apartment. She introduced her son. "Joseph, this is Mr. Cannataro from across the hall. He plays saxophone too."

He grimaced that she had lumped him with the kid together both as horn players, "He plays saxophone, too?" like they were united. As if the afternoon hadn't been sufficiently morose, now he's equated with an apparent twelve-year-old who can't play?

"Oh, hi," the boy greeted him. "I've heard you playing in the afternoon when I get home from school. But you never seem to play any songs. All I ever hear are notes after note after note. Don't you know any songs?"

Great, it gets worse: the pipsqueak can't play, and now he criticizes me. "Joey, nice to meet you," Cannataro offered.

"It's Joseph, not Joey." the woman said. "We want Joseph to be proud of his full name."

Oh, it's going to be one of those, Cannataro thought again: it's already pretentious. And that Starmont moniker sounds like something that belongs uptown or suburban somewhere. But he switched on the charm that he could summon, even if drawn up from deep reserve and applied sparingly. "Well, Joseph, it's still nice to meet you. And I do know plenty of songs, but what I'm practicing are called long tones, and phrases, bits of songs. Practicing breath control, endurance, sounding each note precisely. So when I'm playing a job, I can play all the songs I know, I'm like an athlete who's in shape. Kind of like doing sit-ups on a horn. Do you play sports?"

Angela answered for the boy. "No, he's not very athletic, a bookworm actually, loves to read and not so much a video game player like his friends. So I thought an instrument might help him be more outgoing. But he mostly stays inside and plays what he likes.

"I don't just play, Mom. I shred...."

Yeah, shredding the paint off the walls, came the thought; but be nice: It's casual, for Christmas...

"So, Joseph, what do you like to play?"

"Coltrane. John Coltrane. Interstellar Space, man. It's way out! Have you heard of him? He really shreds..."

"Yes, John Coltrane, I think I have heard of him. But you know, he also played slowly."

"Nah, I'm not interested in that. That's beginner stuff. I want to blow." Well, he was certainly succeeding in that.

Interstellar Space

How had the youngster tumbled into Coltrane's Interstellar Space? "His father took him to the museum and planetarium one day," Angela explained. "Somehow they had that album on sale at the gift shop, and his dad bought it, thinking it relevant to their visit and Joseph's interest in music." She shook her head and laughed. "Relevant maybe, but not very listenable, certainly not the way Joseph plays it. His father tries to connect, consistently, I have to give him that, but somehow misses the mark. Sometimes by a mile, sometimes by light years. She laughed: "Thus, Interstellar Space."

Cannataro suggested that that the album wasn't quite beginner material, that it was like jumping from arithmetic to beyond astrophysics. But as the kid was a student, he would likely be working from some kind of textbook. So the conversation was turned back to Joseph. "Tell me, are you taking lessons? Are you learning from a book?"

"Yeah, but it's this old blue book called Rubank. Man, the book even has this old-fashioned cover that looks like it was published in the 1930s or something. That's almost a hundred years ago! And it says it's an Elementary Method.' Who wants that? And my teacher wants me to work on scales. Boring!"

Cannataro smiled. He loved the Rubank books, they did date back to the 1930s, 1934 as a matter of fact. He had learned from them and taught from them. The blue cover was like an old friend. Unchanging. Timeless. Fundamental. But the kid was right, unfortunately: who wants that these days?

"Well, you know, everything Coltrane did playing fast, was because he knew how to play slow. He knew his scales, in all the keys, and all kinds of alternate fingerings, different placement of his fingers to get different notes. He learned that from a real old-timer named Earl Bostic. And Coltrane practiced all the time. Sometimes he couldn't stop playing and even fell asleep with his horn. Miles Davis, you know Miles Davis? Miles told him that if he couldn't stop playing, to try taking the horn out of his mouth! You can read up on that sometime. That's all jazz history! Like in the old Rubanks: lots to learn there too!"

The boy perked up at the mention of Miles Davis, he had heard of Miles Davis, and if the guy from across the hall knew something about John Coltrane and Miles Davis, maybe he knew something after all, even if he never played complete songs in the afternoon.

"Let me go get my horn," Cannataro suggested, "and we can play together, some slow Coltrane. Interested?" The boy wrinkled his face as if to say no. But his mother intervened. "Oh, Mr. Cannataro, that would be great. It would be wonderful to hear you play."

"You can call me Augie," he offered.

He walked back across the hall and came back minutes later with a couple of compact discs and some sheet music he had downloaded and printed from a quick internet search. He gave Angela the disc, Giant Steps, asked her to cue up the sixth selection, and let it play. She offered him some of those promised snacks, and a glass of wine. The boy had cocoa.

Augie introduced the song's beginning. "You dig Coltrane, but you only want to play fast. Here's Coltrane playing slow, about one beat a second, beats per minute we call it, the sheet music calls for 57 of them here, in a song called "Naima." He's working directly from the scales." He showed the boy the opening measures in the sheet music and pointed out what they had heard.

"It's in 4/4 time, it's written here that's the time signature, four beats to a measure. It starts here with a half note with a dot, making it a half note plus a quarter note of value. One note, one tone, but held for three beats of time." Augie explained the rest of the first line, as the notes led down and back up, a held whole note, and on across the line. He offered for them to play it together. Augie continued with the lines after that, slowly, pointed out each note, and the finger placements, especially for quick and tricky flats.

"You know these notes, right? The fingerings for each?"

"Well, yeah, but they're so boring."

"But you know them. You know where to put your fingers in the right places. And you can read," he complimented the boy. "Not everybody knows how. But because you knew that, you could play the whole first line of 'Naima.' Let's start with that opening note again. It's the same note that Coltrane plays, the very same, you and Coltrane. Imagine that! Let's do it together."

The Listening Journey

Augie walked Joseph through the first page, showing how measures varied in structure and repeated, explained the math, which to Joseph's amazement made sense, wasn't boring. Augie suggested they get back to playing. The boy looked skeptical but gave it a try. Augie slowed the tempo down to even half its 55 beats per minute and finished a full page of a version of Coltrane. "Slowly, but Coltrane all the way," Augie rewarded. What they had accomplished, Augie said, was "Close enough for jazz, as they say."

"Who are they?," Angela and Joseph asked simultaneously.

"Augie laughed again. "Well, the 'they' who don't know what it's supposed to sound like. Who don't understand it and think it's all sloppy and crazy. Or who want to shred past it." He pointed playfully at Joseph. "Or players who go far out or fall short in improvising, creating, trying to reach beyond what they hear or can do, and just leave it there, that as close as they can get is good enough, as good as it's going to get anyhow."

"Close enough isn't good enough for jazz?," Joseph asked.

"Well, no," Augie replied, "not if you want to play precisely, not if you really care. And if you really like the music, then you treat it with care, even if you're shredding it. It's that important." He paused, considered: "But for now, close enough is good enough for us. We're on a journey."

"That's beautiful," Angela offered.

"It's a beautiful song," Augie replied. "A love song, to his first wife, but timeless." He considered too late that Angela, with that "ex" she had mentioned, might not have enjoyed a song about an ex, memories and all that, perhaps already as that former wife herself. But not to linger on that thought, he offered up another slow Coltrane piece. He had brought over the CD for the album Mating Call. Too late, he feared that too might have been perceived as something subliminal, but let that pass also.

"Here's another well-known Coltrane song, written by a pianist named Tadd Dameron, Coltrane and Dameron together here. Not enough people remember Tadd. Too bad; he wrote some great songs, in different styles, over many years. Some of his work with Coltrane gets reissued now under Coltrane's name, as Coltrane became more famous.

"This one kind of makes sense for tonight," said Augie. "It's a little damp outside, but not cold enough to snow. But it's cool: 'On a Misty Night.'"

Augie asked for the disc to be played, directed them to the gentle introduction and how it began to swing as it progressed, and then paused the recording. He went back to the sheet music, showed how it started, pointed out the notes and fingerings, and suggested they play together as far as they easily could, Joseph was amazed at how they could follow and approximate what Coltrane had done. Augie continued past where it would have been too complicated for the boy and stopped at the bottom of the first page.

He spread out the sheet music, and pointed out the way through it, as they returned to listening, to later in the song where Coltrane put together chains of sixteenth notes.

"That's a whole note, which would normally be held for four beats, but is divided up sixteen times, sixteen beats, sixteen notes, in the space that originally took four. And Trane has shredded it, but gently. See? It's all written down. See how it moves across the page, in order, not just all over the place? All those notes in order and moving by quickly."

"Those songs are lovely," Angela said. "Why hasn't Joseph heard of them?"

"Well, when you start with Interstellar Space, one of Coltrane's last works, unless you go back into his history you miss where he started from. You might miss all the people he played with along the way. That's where things get really interesting, like exploring the branches of a tree. Instead of going way outside, you can go deeply microscopic. History, like I said. Science even.

"Some people, Joseph for example, only know Coltrane for being way out. He did lead to what's called free jazz, where it seems almost anything at all is played. But even then, he had complete control of his horn. Not all the free cats could play ballads, these slow songs, not all of them ever learned the basics, their Rubank.

"But Coltrane could. And Joseph, you can too, and once you get a handle on that, then you can blow!"

Augie honked loudly a low C. Joseph and his mother jumped at the sound, and they all laughed. "That is kinda fun too, I must admit."

Augie and Joseph played the beginning of "Naima" again together, and then let the whole song play out on the Giant Steps CD, and then listened again to all of "On a Misty Night," and then back to the beginning of the whole Mating Call album. Joseph liked the beginning of the title song. Coltrane's sharp notes satisfied the boy's desire for an approximation of shredding. Dameron's piano established a Caribbean rhythm as Angela started dancing her own gentle rhumba. The album continued to the skipping melody of "Gnid," the warmth of "Soultrane," a groovy shuffle in "Romas," and Philly Joe Jones' drum beats at the start of "Super Jet" with Coltrane's fast playing there energized everyone.

The evening passed, under the spell of Coltrane and Dameron. Augie sipped at his wine, the boy sipped at his cocoa, Angela joined them with more wine of her own. Augie pointed out some listening details, tried to be educational but not boring. He shared what was meaningful to him. He spoke of giving each note its full value. Separating notes, breathing, and silence. "What we call a rest. You saw them in the sheet music. Like in 'give it a rest.'" He smiled at Angela's mom duties, and Joseph's enthusiasm, and with irony over his own irritation at the boy's noise emanating into the hallway.

"And starting and ending notes cleanly. One note ends where the next one begins. Sound isn't, then it is, and then it's not. If you've ever stayed up late, past midnight, it's today, and then one second later it's tomorrow. Like today isn't yet Christmas, but tomorrow will be. But you'll have New Year's and next year to look forward to. And you'll have further opportunities to learn the material."

Augie considered that he was drifting into being a tutor as he, uncharacteristically, imagined teaching the boy. Any discipline the kid gained would reduce the noise in what had been those damned efforts at blowing freeform. With the kid trained to enunciate each note, that deliberate staccato would get on Augie's nerves too, he knew, as he would hear it through the apartment walls, and he'd have to fix both the kid's impatient playing and Augie's own too-easy irritation. Augie would over time wish for more flow.

But the kid wasn't a bad kid. Angela was single it seemed, but for the ex and who knows what else, and quite good looking he granted. Better by far than whomever else Augie didn't come home with that evening, nor on most other nights. And they were just across the hall. Maybe they would become friends. Casual, as she had invited, or more. Who could tell?

Before the night grew too late, he said his farewells, with friendly hugs all around, and returned to his own apartment. So, the evening had been an unexpected success. This Christmas wasn't so bad, he admitted to himself. The swells back at the party at least had asked for "Chestnuts Roasting," although too many times, and they hadn't really been listening. But it was a good song; they could have requested "Holly Jolly Christmas," which would have put him up the wall before he was out the door. The New Year might bring some changes.

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