1994
Dizzy
February passes by quickly. I suppose everything moves fast in 1991, or at least it does for me. This is the year I learn to think, the year I read Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Brave New World, and Stranger In A Strange Land one after the other. On the last day of February in 1991, I am looking for answers. I feel dizzy with being fourteen years old, dizzy with the last months of junior high, dizzy with the finalization of my parents' divorce, and most of all, dizzy with a feeling that I am supposed to be finding myself.
It rains all afternoon, but we know he will be there.
My father and I watch the unknown players with an impatient interest. As it starts pouring again, we duck into a Cuban restaurant for dinner: palomilla steak with black beans, rice, and plantains. Time passes. When will the downpour end? Just as I begin to lose hope, the heavens clear.
Appearing from nowhere, jazzmen mill about the stage. Drums rise, bass blooms, piano shakes off its blue tarpaulin, horns shine in cloudy lamplight. Local hero Spider Martin plays tenor saxophone, his teenage son on drums tonight, some anonymous bassist, the turbaned piano player, and of course, the big man with the upturned trumpet pointing accusingly at the sky...
Dizzy Gillespie is not in the least bit fazed by a little rain. The music soars from brass and ivory and excited young drummer's hands, sails into the clouds, tells them the story of jazz, and strolls off into the hidden moonlight. The man who reinvented jazz giggles like a child when someone covers the piano as drizzle persists. He crouches under the tarpaulin and plays unseen, blowing the top off "Cherokee" and naturally cascading "Night In Tunisia" with the voice of wisdom. Coming out from under the blue, Dizzy lets his arms fall to his side, singing a lesson to the sky:
"Hey rain...don't you fuck around with me! I said hey rain...don't you fuck around with me. You done fucked with the wrong man, rain...when you fucked with me!"
The clouds closed their collective mouth, embarrassed, and wandered off into the night.
I watch Dizzy's cheeks expand to incredible proportions, capturing air and twisting it into a song, using his trumpet to toy with the melody. I look deep into his eyes and see not my own reflection, but the memories of half a century of jazz. Dizzy's eyes introduce me to Charlie Parker, to John Coltrane, to Miles Davis, to the great blue bop of faces all full of light. Dizzy's upturned trumpet speaks to me: "Yes indeedy, life is short, kid. So whatever you do, you better blow!" About two years later, Dizzy Gillespie starts an endless gig playing to audiences of angels.
Those unspeakable things which Dizzy Gillespie revealed to me that night in February manifested themselves in different ways. I became a poet, or so people told me. Scratching brooding free verse in hidden notebooks, I spilled the blood of my spirit on paper. Wandering through the jazz tunnels of my mind, I explored myself.
I was the pretentious smart-ass who sat at the back of your English class in your senior year in high school, making wisecracks about Shakespeare and madly scribbling some unseen word. At some now forgotten point, I realized that my poetry was extremely visual. I decided I wanted to go to film school, and hopefully end up writing and directing. So here I am in what Walt Whitman and the natives called Mannahatta, the city that blows jazz out of chimneys and mufflers. This is the perfect place for me, an island wrapped up in itself, clutching a trumpet to its chest.
Three and a half years after a man called Dizzy spun my head around, I try to laugh at myself as often as possible. I see the world as a canvas for the artists of absurdity. These are the people, like a trumpet player I saw once, who force us to forget the world, to forget our daily shuffling lives, to forget the races and winnings, to ignore the horrors of existence, and instead, to lose ourselves in the songs of the universe, take pleasure in the simple poetry of a flower.
Dizzy Gillespie taught me that the world is much simpler than it seems. Life is a lone trumpeter, horn in the clouds, blowing a blues of eternity. He laughs at himself, wondering what makes people so sad, and plays on. Standing on an upside down wine glass, top of the world, he knows everything and nothing. The universe is no mystery, just a riddle without a punch line. Jazz is the sound track of reality.
While the cat chases his tail in circles, Dizzy Gillespie blows another chorus in the rain of heaven.