A Brief Eternity at 11:16 PM

Jazz musicians get lost—truly lost.

I have no idea where they go.

But I feel enough to know they are not part of our ordinary world. They really go somewhere else and come back when they’re done, but they’re not playing either; they're just there.

When one musician finishes a solo and people cheer, the next one wants to take whatever the last one did and push it further. Higher and higher and higher. And the energy of the band syncs, heads moving, bodies moving, everyone together, and it’s just endless. HOW BIG ARE THEIR LUNGS? HOW LASTING WILL THEIR INSPIRATION BE? AND HOW LOUD WILL THE CHEER BE, already sitting there in the audience, just waiting for the cue to erupt? And the next one gets ready, and they’re improvising, and we’re waiting for the violinist to start again, but then there’s a false start. Nothing. We’re waiting. Then he wakes up, and there are turns and twists and notes that drop, and suddenly people go berserk in unison. And that’s just one solo, on a night I spent at CoHo, at Stanford, at 11:16 PM.

The joy, the smiles, the happiness, the redness of their faces, the attunement. What is jazz other than a way to experience the ultimate truth? Jazz does this. A great essay does this. Great music, great art, it knocks you over and leaves your legs in the air[1]. You are not the same after. You cannot be. You experience the eternal, and what else could you ask out of life? Other than another chance.

Mere play. You know they are experiencing the eternal because they become kids. Their mannerisms, their movements, their thoughts, their souls: childlike, pure, light, innocent. They’re playing, truly playing. Not playing an instrument, but playing the way children play, the most sacred form of play, where you lose yourself and don’t worry about coming back. You become part of it. Pure play.

What gets me is when they move their heads up and down and wrinkle their faces in ways they can’t control, looking at each other, everyone having their own reaction. Some smile like something has just surprised them, the smile arriving before they even know they’re smiling. Others move as if the music is speaking directly through them. They sway. The joy. It doesn’t matter which instrument they’re playing. I don’t care. No one cares. They’re all part of the same thing. And if you’re fully present, you, the person sitting there in the audience, can get transported with them. You don’t know where you are, but you don’t want to leave. You don’t care where you are. You are vaguely aware of the sensations, and if you focus too much on them, you start to come back. You don’t want that in a million years, so you try to be present again, and you go back. ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.

I wonder what they feel when they’re connected, when they close their eyes, when they look toward the horizon. I don’t know. The audience feels too much. You cannot help but feel, but experience. To have mastery, so much mastery, that you can connect in such a way. You cannot help but stop your thoughts, your concerns, your worries, and become immersed in what you’re witnessing.

WHAT DID YOU JUST EXPERIENCE? I don’t know, but whatever it was, it’s closer to the truth, to being fully alive, to transcendence, an escape from the ephemeral nature of reality. The truly beautiful. To become true and realize that total presence is a form of prayer, a way of reaching toward God, toward something eternal.

And jazz is such a medium.

La La Land isn’t a love story. Hell, far from it, so far from it. It’s about the power of jazz to connect you to that great energy, about what happens when you find something that can pull you out of yourself and make you want to give your whole life to it. And Soul is about the importance of the number 22, that point in your life when you decide whether you will compromise or not, and jazz shows up again. And Whiplash, yes, Whiplash: the tragedy of greatness, of wanting it so badly that you begin to destroy the very thing in you that made greatness possible in the first place.

The joy of playing. You don’t need to play to appreciate it. You just need to observe, to see their eyes, their faces, their whole expression tightens and opens with the music, like the guy with glasses and a beard and neatly combed hair in a tank top plays the bass like he’s crying. He’s speaking to it, and the bass responds. It becomes his way to connect. His bass becomes his Wi-Fi signal, and he gets access not just to the internet and the world but to the universe of music and of love.

He doesn’t look at it. He can’t. His glasses are foggy. The bass and the piano are full-on in sync, and he just goes and goes, improvising, following his intuition, and as he finishes, the drums come in full force, and what is the drummer going to do with THAT? He just connected, fully connected, with a few interruptions from the saxophone and trumpet, except they’re not interruptions. They’re the contrast that brings color and life.

And the end is coming. I don’t know, but their notes are getting longer, and everyone comes together, and they start again. And it’s ending, the grand finale. They start flirting with it, and then it just comes, and the audience starts clapping, cheering.

And just like that, they became gods for a few minutes. They experienced immortality, a world without time, without limits, without concerns. Just for a moment.[2]

That’s why you connect, to experience just a few minutes of that. That’s why you follow your intuition, your curiosity. And maybe that’s why I was there, why I ended up there, seemingly at random.

Experience the eternal,
Juan David Campolargo

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Notes

[1] Te tumba patas arriba.

[2] I had a conversation with one of these musicians, and I asked her what it was that inspires them to play music. Here’s a transcript:

“I play music to remember there’s magic in the world.” What a line…

I certainly felt magic when I saw them perform at their record release:

Go support them!