Don’t you let nothing, and I mean nothing, happen to her, you hear?
She wasn’t no Coltrane, you see. But Indonesia had one special song that she would do—Nina Simone’s Since I Fell for You. That song hit home like a fist. Every time I heard it, felt like my heart was being snared and slapped like a drum.
INDONESIA JAZZ BY ASPEN GAINER 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 22
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Music sparkles off his clothes, drips like sweat from his black brow. It pours out of the gap in his front teeth. The crowd, mesmerized, hears the melody in the way he smiles, the way the light flashes from his teeth. They hear it in the way he lifts the saxophone to his lips, caressing it like a lover. His liquid black gaze pierces my own, and a grin twitches at one corner of his mouth.
A burnt-out jazz joint. The air is thick and hazy; twitching, convulsing, ablaze with Coltrane-Davis-Monk notes. He’s sitting up on stage on the edge of a stool (the well-loved and well-polished saxophone on his knee) scatting and joking with the crowd. The breathy, bosomy back-up girl adds a voluptuous ambiance. He raises his sax to his lips again and his jazzy sorrow jumps out at me and fills me up.
His was a poor upbringing, raining pain and sadness on the small boy who had nothing in his life but music. At first it was the choir music in his church; that beautiful full-lipped, full-hipped, full-bosomed gospel burst forth with enough force to shake Jesus down from the heavens, enough force to shake the seeds of music off the tree of life right into the dirt of his little soul, where they flourished and blossomed despite rocky ground.
In youth, music was his spirituality. Music was his prayer. Whenever he needed to call out to Jesus, he climbed up to the choir and belted out his woes.
And the church belted right back—wailing as he wailed, rejoicing as he rejoiced. It sealed his fate.
Jazz. Of course his mother told him it was a waste of time. She didn’t spend fifteen years breakin’ her back workin’ just so he could be a no-account jazz musician. Why didn’t he do something respectable like Hettie’s son and lead the choir? Then he could have got a job repairing houses with the church boys, with them nice respectable young men. But no, not him.
He knew it was lodged deep in him, the music seed. At fifteen he left home, knowing he would never be free to follow his heart, his compulsion, otherwise.
Got a job cleaning a bar after close. They paid him a few bucks, just barely enough to have one meal a day, and they let him sleep in the back storeroom. That’s where he fell in love with the saxophone, and with Indonesia Brown, the woman who taught him to play.
It was a love story I first heard as I passed by his toll window, looking for a taste of the Big Apple. He scratched out his story right there in his velvet-gravel tones, paying no mind to the line of cars bleating behind me.