Joys and Concerns 2

Birthday concert tonight, links, and a visit to Dealey Plaza.

Tonight, Monday, December 9th, at 8 PM, I’m playing at Ibeam in Brooklyn with bass guitarist Jerome Harris and saxophonist Jeremy Udden. It’s a birthday gig, $20 at the door. We’ll play songs associated with Sonny Rollins and Paul Motian, both of whom Jerome worked with for decades, and with John McNeil, with whom Jeremy and I played, much missed.

The lighting at Ibeam got a recent upgrade, so it’ll look and feel a little more “concert” than it ever has. More and more great shows are happening at Ibeam, it’s sort of coming into its own as a venue. We really need every place.

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Lots of good stuff on Substack:

• Ray Banks writes detailed, often hilarious reviews of a wide array of movies here. His review of Punishment Park sent me scurrying to the movie’s Wikipedia page, where I was reminded that the music was by none other than Paul Motian! More on this soon.

• Concert pianist Jeremy Denk is a brilliant writer. His look at Haydn’s Variations in F minor celebrates the composer’s distillation of pure, adult unhappiness, sending him looking for “truths and consolations” within such sorrow.

• Monia Ali studies modern fandom, and it’s fascinating. So often what seems like “fan behavior” is actually directed by corporations hoping to maximize profit by manipulating fan groups.

Thanks for all the good feedback for my look at McCoy Tyner’s/Joe Henderson’s Forces of Nature. The music speaks for itself— it doesn’t need me to write about it. So if I’m going to do so, it should be well-crafted, informative, and serious. With all the support from subscribers, and especially the paid subscribers, I do feel that I’m getting a bit closer to those goals.

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The only photo I took that day.

Last year it was John Coltrane and “My Favorite Things”. This year, with the dismal 2024 election and Forces of Nature, the Sixties are on my mind once again.

Last month, in Dallas with the Mark Morris Dance Group, on an afternoon of clear blue skies with a high in the mid-sixties, I took a walk to Dealey Plaza, the site of the Kennedy assassination.

A mile and a half from our hotel, Dealey Plaza is, at first glance, inviting and ordinary, a nice place to sit and have a coffee while downtown. But the truth emerges. That appealing green space by the highway underpass I’d spied was the infamous grassy knoll, while directly to my right, a multi-story building seemed out of place. When I realized what it was, the former Dallas Book Depository gave off a sheepish, furtive air, seemingly uneasy about its outsize place in history.

A few folks holding patriotic signs were gathered on the grassy knoll while someone made a speech exhorting American greatness through a bullhorn when I got in line for the Sixth Floor Museum. Only then did I realize what day it was: Friday November 22nd, 61 years to the day since Kennedy had been killed.

Inside, visitors are invited to walk past the corner window where Lee Harvey Oswald made his perch. Peering out the window from that sixth floor, the whole scene feels small— just a narrow road going under the interstate and a little patch of grass, close by and easy to see. On that day 61 years ago, three bullets were fired in about five seconds. Less than ninety minutes later, Oswald was apprehended by the Dallas police. Two days after that, he himself was murdered.

It was both unimaginable that the killing of Kennedy could have occurred in such an attractive, ordinary place, and plain as day that this happened here. The more time I spent, the more the eeriness pervaded. Dealey Plaza is pleasant, the museum is informative and respectful, but nothing can make this event less tragic or more comprehensible.

It was a great reminder that 2024 is not the first time everything has felt out of whack. Bad times and difficulties are, like Dealey Plaza, sadly and reassuringly ordinary. As Freddie DeBoer says, they’re not even bad times, they’re just times.