“Jesús” - the golden horn of Salsa - was the leader of the band whose tape was cooking. He was screeching a clear octave above the horn riff. This Kat was really digging it.
“Jesús, cool ...” I rapped back as the Kat walked up to my car.
“Chops man - he’s up there with Maynard but he’s woodsheded the changes to the moon - right up there with cats like Clifford.”
“Yeah-man cool.” It was the best way to respond since after all, this Kat was hep.
I heard about Kats like this.
See Kats have major ears. They love to listen. Come all this way from Zoomland to dig music. They righteously believe - of all things - Earth is the best place on earth to tune in the best of all music. I was about to learn how deeply they were driven to us.
* * *
I first caught on to the true genius behind music like bebop sandwiching my head between speaker cabinets around the time I went to college. My euphoric delight was soon upstaged by self realization: I was never going to be a giant horn player like Miles or Diz, or Maynard even though I had the chops for it. I forgot my music scholarship and quickly went to work trying to discover a real way to make a living.
So here comes mid life. About the time normal people start to think retirement, I unravel my copesetic self and start to really dig music again.
Now you can imagine how cool it was for this Kat to jump aboard my ship of re-discovery. That’s exactly what he did. Only this guy wanted to be captain.
Kats like my friend had been coming to Earth to dig music for some time. More kept coming. They dug it all - country, rock, jazz, classical, native - all of it. People said they weren’t much to mix with, kind of weird, distant. Treated us like accidental geniuses. Looked at us like we were false gods that happened to have a knack for their favorite passion. Man this had to be a passion.
Zoomland - Earth’s name for the Kat’s home world was unimaginably far out. It took a map of the entire Milky Way to pin it. Not that they gave up their comforts by traveling to Earth. Just about any clear night you’d see at least one of their humongus mother ships flashing ad banners from orbit to all the Kats down here. A lot of Earth people made the trip up to the orbiting ships to check out the digs which they said were like super colossal visions of Vegas.
I really never thought much about running into a Kat. Except, well I guess I had an attitude. To me they seemed like an enharmonic bag of weirdness. Come all this way to dig the tunes but you don’t like to mix with the inhabitants.
This Kat blew all of it away.
I think, no, I know he was different.
He really liked us.
His name was Sayzar. He let me know it was cool just to call him, Bop Kat.
Bop Kat was into jazz. His tastes were highly developed. He knew how to relate to hip jams and trace them to musical footnotes, the natural trek of the music. He discerned the meaning of Trane’s Giant Steps solo as the peak moment, that from that point on, modern jazz had become stagnant classical music, meaning: every random rhythm and note, every tune, every phrase, inflection... had been used up. He even urged a little mystical caution pointing out how many great bopers died soon after peak performances just like they’d been snatched up by the Big Hipster in the Sky.
Like there was one hell of a band up there.
Old Bop dragged us from club to club, record shops to torn down buildings where giants once played. He got me to pick up my old horn. The whole thing was so freakin fun. I would not have gone there without him.
One day Bop Kat turned up carrying a little box. He gave it to me. Inside were two golden earplugs. Bop said they were self-contained sound systems he’d loaded himself with every toon from Diz to Jesús. You stuck them in and the sound was unreal. Alive.
Then one day we made it to New York. Walked through the door of the Blue Note in the middle of the day. Had a marvelous brew session waiting for live performers to begin. Just like in the torn down buildings, like a blind man Bop Kat felt his way over every inch of the club. He could get away with weirdness. He was after all, a Kat. Kats were sensually psychic. They took in the world around them with all kinds of senses where deep in the mind they believed they could conjure up pictures of the past. This day he was seriously into it. He was scraping the band floor emptying the scrapes into a jar. Strange. My old horn teacher used to talk about putting me in a jar.
A lot of things were way out there that night. Before we took the long drive back, Bop made me pull over next to a graveyard outside Red Bank, New Jersey. Count Basie was buried here. So was Clifford. It was so weird what happened to Clifford Brown.
His best performance ever was caught on tape during a Jazz Messengers’ concert at Birdland. “Thank you all. I love you all. Goodbye.” Blue Note Records caught Clifford’s last words in public. He burned up in a car crash heading home that night.
Bop Kat made his quick peace over Clifford’s grave. But he was more into taking me over to Basie’s rest hole. “You sat in with the Count, didn’t you?” He reminded me of one of the few highlights left in my composite picture.
“So?” I shrugged.
Then he got unglued.
“What the fuck’s going on with you?” Kat said.
He said no more all the way back home.
Then he disappeared from my life without saying goodbye.
Nine months later, after drying back up into my old remote self, I opened a bank statement. Seemed I deposited a million dollars last Tuesday. Then the phone rang. Doctor somebody from the hospital said I better get my ass down there right now!
Emergency sent me up to the fifth floor.
Bop Kat was sitting in the wait room. Got up like he’d been worried about me and said, “Finally. Follow me.”
He marched me down the hall past steel doors to a side room where inside a monstrously pregnant woman was screaming birth. Don’t ask me why I noticed this just then but she was altogether beautiful. The doctor and nurse saw I wasn’t ready for any of this. “Husbands can stay or wait outside,” the nurse said.
Bop Kat whisked me out. I begged him to cough up what the hell was going on while we sat there waiting and waiting. But you could never talk to a Kat after they go transcendental.
Finally the doctor came out, said everything went well. Something about quadruplets. We could take a look now.
“What the hell is this all about?” I could no longer hold it in.
At last old Kat spoke outside the window room.
“It’s your second chance, my friend.”
“This is Charles, Arthur, Theolonius and Eric. They’re yours. The New Jazz Messengers. You ‘re Dad and if you can screw your head back on, the man on horn. Get it?” He laughed. Then he just went on talking, anticipating questions as they materialized in my stunned head. “Couldn’t be me, man. I’m a Kat and no Kat ever figured out how to swing an axe. So what you think about Leona?
Did I tell you, you’re set for life. You’re moving as soon as the quartet’s ready to check out.”
Now wait a beat. This guy from way out there totally rearranged my life. God only knew how he engineered those children. Must have been the scrapings. And Leona.
Yet like the Kat said. I was set for life. Sweet Leona and me mixed tight as jewels set in a crown. Boys grew right. Bop Kat stuck around like a grandpa. He and I kept on chasing music. Salsa became our rage.
Nice house, nice cars, nice.
Boys and I’d be jamming by the time they turned eight, cooking by twelve.
I re-learned the horn right this time. I soared in tantalizing rhythms held true by brilliant discord. My head at last arrived to meet my chops head on.
By sixteen, we hit the public stage. Even then I hid behind the greatness of the New Q. So what if my hair was gray. I was the be-bop pop. I was never out for any more than that.
Then at eighteen Bop Kat booked the boys and me into the Blue Note.
As I look back, I should have guessed what was about to unfold that night.
First, I never expected to peak at the most important performance of my life. My horn and I were merged like in a dream. I streamed through the changes as a genuine virtuoso, poping high notes, texturizing riffs with grace and style. Everything cooked. My boys were headed to greatness. All that laid before them, before us...
No, before them.
I was staring at sixty-plus with zero desire to hit the proverbial road. Road chow and bus butt would likely choke the last of my good arteries.
Stepping up to the stage for our last set I saw it all. This was going to be my last performance. I could live with it.
I wasn’t very gifted at speaking over the mic. Still I was compelled to speak my last few words. They came exactly like this...
“Thank you all. I love you all. Good...”
Oh dear God.
I walked downstage and could see my boys staring like I was already half gone. Past the table where Leona sat, I senesed something was wiping me off her mind.
Old Kat met me in the doorway.
“Where am I supposed to go from here?”
* * *
Where I awoke - if I was really waking up - in my haze stood Bop Kat and a man I once met before while sitting in with Basie’s band. Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis offered me a smoke from his solid gold cigarette case. Kat opened the door of Eddie’s ‘49 Yellow Caddilac. Eddie got in, turned to me and said in his hep lisp, “S’t’s a bad ride.”
I hoped he meant his car.
Something in the air gave a richness to sound. We sped down a red clay road though a valley rimmed by rain forest mountains. An immense green spread over the valley floor. It was tobacco.
“Cuba,” the word resonated from my vocal cords.
Bop Kat turned to me. “Welcome to Ooo-bla Dee.”
The Land of Ooo-blah Dee.
It was the title of a crazy old Diz tune back when he was young and experimental. Yet somehow I got the clue.
Everything here was make believe.
Nothing ahead could surprise me now.
Just the same I had to surmise my situation a bit.
It must of been Sayzar’s homeworld. I couldn’t imagine a single light year more than ponder how far I was away from Earth.
No matter.
We rode into a Caribbean town beside the sea. Eddie turned uphill where
a side street, lined with classic cars, housed a row of night clubs. Kat turned and grinned from big ear to big ear. Though different by affect, we just pulled into the same spot where we first met. Unreal.
Car horns rang in the distance. There was no harsness to the sound in the rich air. Eddie got out and opened the trunk. He pulled out his tenor case and handed me my old horn case.
The name of the club was Zoomland.
Spread across its dimply lit stage were a mixed bag of axes, trumpets, trombones, saxes, flute...a baby grand, bass, guitars, even an old-style Cubano guitar called a tres...bongos, timbales, congas, claves, guiro, everything Salsa.
Kat sat me down at the bar for a single malt and an Oscuro. Seemed he preffered a more robusto cigar.
There was me once more asking him what the hell was going on.
“Don’t tell me you’re an angel and this is heaven and this is the ban...”
Oh shit.
“Not quite,” Kat said blowing smoke. “Nobody’s dead here. Never were really. Imagine, my friend. You practically lived a lifetime without knowing how much you were on the right track. It’s the Salsa, man. You mix it with bop and a new door opens wide. The music didn’t die with Trane after all. That’s his axe over there. That’s Clifford’s horn in the corner. And you’re in.”
So this was what it was, me a giant in the Vahalla of Jazz?
Come on.
Bop Kat kindly explained the rest of the riddle.
“Notice the air? Its density and weight are related to the size and spin and humidity of our world. Hearing to what you call a Kat, is like seeing and thinking to you. Technology for us is guided by the physics of sound. Music is simply intellegent noise. We are not limited by the weight of binary hex. Our chips have eight switches not one. Our limitations lie within a complexity that unfolds with the evolution of sound. The most complex form of intellegent sound is out there. On your world. Kats just can’t swing like you Earthsters.”
I got it. Coltrane’s dissertation with his love supreme was nothing less than talking to God. Had he really ended so would the evolution of music. The rut he left behind was supposed to challenge us. I guess. To move on. For the Kats to progress. Coltrane and the rest of us had to go Latino.
Yeah, I got it.
So what if Kats are full of shit.
Dig?
Vaya el paso de reencarnación!
Today I play and play and play.
FIN
Bio:Even though he's been offered $millions for his stories Dave Krikorian still likes to keep them safely tucked inside quality realms like Aphelion. He currently dwells along the pristine north shore of Lake Superior somewhat less than a tomahawk missle ride from Duluth, Minnesota.
E-mail: dave@m-linc.com
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