JAZZ SPACES

       There are places inhabited by the music, and I don't just mean dives or bars where it plays. When I lived in Ithaca, New York, in the mid 1990s, when it was still an undiscovered paradise, it was Dexter Gordon and me, traipsing along the snowy sidewalks. I listened to the beautiful, sensuous and warm saxophone of his playing, lifting me up and out and setting me down ever so lightly in the town in which I lived then, that was marked definitively, as Dexter's. And mine. Because of the music.

        Jazz seals you to times and places. I was born during the hard bop era and it's in my blood. And while it never made sense at first, it does now, that jazz was part of my creation too, in the melding between a North American dad as cool as Iowa wind in winter, and a mother as intemperate and warm as the Colombian sun. To be bicultural when I was brought up in the 60s and 70s was to know jazz and to be it. For the music is born of irreconcilable differences that due to the magic of performance and invention of musicians creates a new and better realm, a pathway of possibilities.

         It is probably said more often of the jazz medium than any other kind of music that the kind of performance you experience in a given time and place, live, can never again be repeated or recreated. Such is the magic of the moment and its importance in the creation of jazz.

        And just as I can go to Ithaca, New York, as I did recently, and hope to recreate that moment, it is irretrievably lost, gone. That place is no longer what it was, refined and touristy as it has become, and I am no longer who I was. And what is the best jazz, if not a rare conversation, an authentic meeting ground between differences? Dexter and our time together on those streets is a part of my internal history, is all, and while the memory of his ballads fused in a moment remains, I will never again feel about his music the way I did then and there, when no place was warmer than the street with his music in my ears.

       I haven't known too many jazz spaces i could call home, but Ithaca was definitely one.