The man in the middle of the stage was obese and ginger.  I wondered if he was really as spherical as he appeared or if the old VHS tape was adding weight, as I had heard appearing on TV could do.  He held his trumpet incorrectly, with the first three fingers of his right hand curled way around the valves so that he struck them with the underside of his knuckles, rather than the fingertips, which is how you learn it in school. “We’ll make the scene at a back town funeral,” he began. Looking at him I had expected his voice to be booming and low like Orson Welles, mostly because of his size.  But when he spoke it sounded more like Walt Disney.  A tenor.  Very middle American. Nothing about it that seemed like a jazzman’s voice, which I always thought of as gravelly with time and cigarettes.  “This is something that happens every now and again in our hometown of New Orleans.  It seems as though one of the beloved members of the congregation has passed away.  On hand for such an occasion is a small jazz band that sounds a little like this:”

Then he led in, stomping his foot four times instead of saying “one, two, three, four” and began playing a dirge.  The musical accompaniment to the groans and sobs and creaks of a descending casket.  With the trumpet always just a little bit ahead, the clarinet and trombone played along with him.  It was slow and melancholy, but with an ironic vitality that seemed to say, “Fuck this death nonsense, it’s too much trouble.”

He took the trumpet away from his mouth and began to speak again: “Then when the preacher says, ‘Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, it’s a real shame this brother couldn’t stay here on earth with us, the snare drum player starts the parade.”  A spotlight, whose color was a feeble chartreuse on the ancient VHS in the ancient VCR, shone on the snare drummer, in his velvet evening jacket.  I remember as he brought his sticks up to the ready position, the frills in his tuxedo shirt swayed with the movement of his arms.  He hammered out a vibrant parade beat, and the band was off.  Suddenly it wasn’t a funeral anymore.  It was an Irish Wake.  They were stationary on the stage, but if I closed my eyes I could see them marching down the street, the trumpet player waddling ahead, mopping his brow with a silk handkerchief and playing his battered old trumpet with his free hand.

I know now, from years of research based in morbid fascination, what an actual New Orleans second-line funeral looks like. When I think of watching that old concert on tape, I attach images of flag bearers strutting along in front of the brass band, attracting anyone and everyone who passes by to come join the celebration. They dance all the way back to the home of the dead man listening to the ecstatic melody borne of the dirge, and his family always dances the hardest.

It is safe to say that my discovering that tape when and where I did was responsible for my fascination with jazz.  It featured a group called the Dukes of Dixieland, which was made up of seven or eight gentlemen in crushed velvet evening jackets, ranging in age from medium-old to decomposing.   The audience was awash in sequins and cocaine, and the venue seemed to be a cavern.  Against all odds, however, the performance maintained an intangible classiness, in a way that only a New Orleans shitshow can maintain its classiness.

The Dukes of Dixieland and the style of music they play remains to this day the benchmark against which I judge all jazz music, which has more or less made me an outcast among jazz aficionados, since  “Dixieland jazz” has not been popular outside of New Orleans since the great depression. In the world of Jazz academia, a world far vaster and more populous than many would expect, only the kings of Be-Bop[1] are held in as high regard as I hold the Dukes.  There is a certain moment in the life of a young musician when he is forced either to jump into the funnel and learn how to become an active participant in whichever musical style happens to be in ascendancy at that point in time, or to play the music that made him smitten with playing music in the first place.  This is the moment, according to myth, in which legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson literally sold his soul to the devil, making him the best bluesman in the world without a day of conservatory training.  I probably wouldn’t do it now, but at 18 if Mephistopheles had presented himself with a similar proposition, there’s a distinct possibility that I would have gone Dr. Faustus all over everyone’s asses.

I’ve only ever had one recurring dream.  I’m in Preservation Hall in New Orleans, standing in front of the requests jar and its famous “requests: $1, ‘When the Saints Go Marching In:’ $5” sign.  I’ve got a roll of singles, and I’m really testing the band’s limits.  I’m asking for songs that haven’t been recorded in eighty years, just trying to stump them, being a real asshole.  Songs with names like “Clarinet Marmalade” and “After You’ve Gone” and “The Sheikh of Araby.”  Finally the tuba player gets fed up and asks, “OK, who’s the heavy hitter out there” and I raise my hand.  “What ax you play, man?” he asks, and I tell him trumpet.  “Well come on up, you got a mouthpiece?”  I turn out every pocket, but I know even before I do that I won’t find one.  I turn around and walk out, and I can never tell if the audience is disappointed or not.

I started having the dream when I was ten years old or so, around the time my grandfather lost control.  When I type that out it seems like he went on a rampage across state lines before falling in a blaze of FBI gunfire.  But really he just fell down the basement stairs.

He had an extremely rare form of Parkinson’s disease called “Louis’ Body Syndrome” which made chaos of his nerves and his mind, and he fought it off as best he could.  For the first year or two, it was just like he had mild dementia: he’d forget where he’d left things, couldn’t remember which channel Jeopardy! was on, that kind of thing.  Then, all of a sudden, he was heading down the stairs for some wine or some folding chairs or a record, and bang, the next thing I knew it he was in a nursing home and couldn’t remember who any of us were.

“The way,” I remember reading somewhere “is resolute acceptance of death.”  When I die, I want a second-line funeral.  The whole nine yards, just like they sing about: ten dollar gold pieces on my eyelids, Eureka brass band playing “South Rampart Street Parade” as they march away.  It seems to me the only way a funeral makes sense, and I wish they would have had one for my grandfather. I feel like that’s what he would have wanted too.

About the same time as my grandfather’s fall down the stairs, to everyone’s surprise, I was found to be quite good at the trumpet.  No one in my family has any musical talent.  The notion that I was going to be anything other than startlingly tone deaf had never been seriously entertained.  There’s a story my mother tells about leaving the hospital with me as a very young child.  A rabbi got into the elevator with us and after a quick sideways glance turned and said, “He’s going to be a musician.”  No one much thought of it at the time.  Just a crazy old man in an elevator.  But when I started getting good at it, the rabbi became a guardian angel-cum-prophet character in anecdotes.

No one liked going to the nursing home.  My grandmother went every day; I went once a week with my mother, brother, and sister.  Above all I hated the smell of the place.  Even in the atrium, where we sat in wicker garden chairs and talked to him like he still recognized us, the smell of decay was barely masked.  It stuck to us like cigarette smoke, and we smelled old when we left.  Then we would go to the house where my grandmother had been living alone, and I would try to follow the trail of proverbial breadcrumbs in my grandfather’s media cabinet, which is how I discovered The Dukes.

At my grandmother’s suggestion, when I was ten or eleven, I played for my grandfather in the atrium of the nursing home.  It was his birthday, but he did not seem to realize it.  I played “Tin Roof Blues” and “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow,” which was the theme song from Disney’s Carousel of Progress, which I knew he had taken his kids, my mother and uncle, to see at the 1964 world’s fair.  I didn’t look at the sheet music; I had committed the songs to memory.  I watched his face, silently praying for a smile or a twinkling eye.  I looked down at his black wingtips, which I knew he hadn’t put on himself, and waited in vain for a tapping toe.  After I had finished, a woman who must have been a hundred and twelve walked over from the other end of the atrium and told me how well I had played, how much she had enjoyed the music.  My grandfather stared straight ahead; the look on his face was blank, but vaguely contented.  I realized that this was the best reaction I was ever going to get.  I thanked the old woman and listened to the tennis balls on the legs of her walker scrape across the parquet.

By the time I was twelve I was playing every Tuesday night in a restaurant called The Catfish Café, with a blues band led by a music teacher of mine.  This period, looking back on it, was the most fun I’ve ever had playing music.  The place was owned by a couple of New Orleans ex-pats who came to New York to teach the philistine locals about gumbo and good music.  There were always musicians around, joining the featured band, strolling in with a demeanor as cool as their crisp white shirts and as flashy as their gold watches (every jazz musician has one.  I have a theory that the tradition began so that jazzmen would always have enough money to be buried, no matter when or where they might kick the bucket; the same reason sailors used to wear gold hoop earrings).

I would stand in the middle of the stage, and play “Basin Street Blues” and “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” and take improvised solos with the rest of the band.  When I finished a solo, sometimes the bandleader would say something like, “Can you believe he’s only twelve?” and I would smile when the audience clapped and whistled.  Then I would sit down at the table where all of the visiting jazzmen sat and drink Shirley Temples out of mason jars, talking about jazz and pretending to get their jokes about women and “tea,” which is what jazzmen of a certain age call Marijuana.

At fourteen, I was invited to a workshop at Berklee College of Music in Boston.  At sixteen, I was accepted to New York’s All State high school jazz ensemble, and a year later it was more or less taken for granted that when I applied to college, I would attend a conservatory.  The problem was that by this time, I had no interest in becoming a musician anymore.

My grandfather had spoken about jazz often and with passion, and because the music meant so much to him and me, it hit me on a visceral level.  Meanwhile, in green rooms and backstage warm-up areas and late night jam sessions in hotel rooms during conservatory visits, I was learning how differently my peers saw jazz.  A typical pre-performance “warm up” with my contemporaries would involve a group of saxaphone and trumpet players standing in a circle around a piano.  The piano player would nimbly strike the chord changes for one bebop tune or another (with younger musicians, it’s usually Dizzy Gillespe’s “Dizzy Atmosphere;” with the more experienced, it is always John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”) while the saxaphone and trumpet players take turns soloing.  The piano player, once everyone has taken a solo, will repeat the same chord progression, but faster and louder.  They’ll all repeat the process until the room is an aural miasma of lightning fast scales and arpeggios.  Then everyone chuckles and pats each other on the back.  Especially when I became a section leader, these kinds of impromptu solo sessions were non-optional social conventions, and I hated them. Technically speaking they are impressive events, such relatively young people exhibiting the kind of mastery it takes to solo over a tune as fast and complicated as “Giant Steps.”  But if I knew the piano player, I would always have him play the changes to something like “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning.” A ballad.  I would play the chorus, and then the solos would start.  And the solos would be exactly the same as the “Giant Steps” solos.  They showed a mastery of etudes and theory, but were unable to understand the heartache that a musician needs to evoke in order to play certain songs well.

Even in New Orleans, where I went as a senior in high school to visit colleges, none of the academics seemed to understand the beautiful foolhardy recklessness of the Dukes’ funeral dirge.  I remember walking into a meet and greet at a prominent New Orleans university, and feeling my heart sink into my stomach as I heard the same cacophonic chromatics that I had traveled to the Crescent City to escape.  Everyone wanted to play Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespe.  Loud and fast.  Try to play every note you know in every song.  The most disappointing part, though, was that teachers and music departments and whole conservatories seemed to encourage this kind of numb, mechanical approach to jazz, an approach that seemed to tout the complexities of jazz while ignoring its catharses.

My disillusionment was swift and final.  I had no intention of treating music as though it were biology.  I decided to go to a normal college, to leave music behind and only play for myself.  This involved explaining to several universities and several private teachers that I didn’t want to be a musician anymore.  There were arguments, and one of the teachers, whose band I played with at the Catfish Café all those years ago, still refuses to speak to me.

After three weeks in college, I was desperately seeking a fix.  I bombarded the music department with emails.  “Let me rent a practice room,” “Let me take private lessons,” “Let me join a small ensemble.” I must have sounded like a methadone addict.  For a few semesters the Hunter College jazz ensemble provided a sickly sweet dose of the intangible high, but eventually the old fears and qualms returned, and I was back to playing along with records in my apartment.

I stare at the ipod dock or the record player’s needle and listen to a song or an album over and over again, until I know it with my whole body, and then begin to play along.  At first there are very clearly two trumpet players playing: the superior one coming from the speakers and the weaker, tentative one from my own trumpet.  After a while though, they start to blend.  Read enough Hemingway, you start to steal his syntax; it’s the same thing in music.

The valves on my trumpet are heavy; you have to work to push them down properly.  The trumpet itself is heavy, too.  The metal on the bell is so thick I was able to get an engraver at Tiffany’s to carve a pattern into it.  It is silver, with gold valve caps and slides.  I bought it when I decided not to go to a conservatory, ironically enough.  Ten colleges had told me that I needed to buy the same trumpet everyone else had, a Bach Strad.  I hate Bach Strads.  They are too light, which gives them a shrill, piercing tone.  A heavier trumpet will give a beautiful velvet tone if you play it properly.  It’s not a trumpet for playing “Giant Steps.”  It’s a trumpet whose tone is so mellow that it’s assertive, and with the right bass player I could make you feel like you’ve just taken a Vicodin.

The schism I created between musician/academics and myself is a schism based in outlook.  In theirs, the musical canon is something akin to an encyclopedia: they listen to it so that they can repeat and paraphrase it; their goals are to become compendia of practical knowledge.  Their heroes are those musicians who extracted more from the musical form of a song or genre than anyone before them.  I must admit, to hear the masters of this type of playing can be a joy to hear, their styles are triumphs of work ethic: sharp, crisp, clear, symphonic.  Wynton Marsalis may never move me to tears, as Chet Baker has done on many occasions, but he can make a trumpet submit to his will like no other player in history.

Me, I listen to jazz the way some people listen to Gregorian chant.  When the right notes are hit, when that snare drum bangs out a defiant measure, signaling to the grim reaper that we know he is out there, but we don’t really care, I feel it in the back of my neck, in the pit of my stomach, in between my legs.  My heroes have always been those great New Orleans jazzmen of legend, self-taught and unable even to read music: Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbeck, Kid Ory.  In their tradition, the ear, not the cerebral cortex, remains the guiding organ.  It doesn’t matter when they play if they can read music, or build a chord, or know all seven modes of all twelve major scales.  They just have to listen.