Jazz in Black and White

February 29, 19

Tonight was a monumental night. Still is a monumental night. With merely five dollars, I was rolled over by the power of mystical music and the hallucinogenic effects of too many snowy winter nights.

The month of February blanketed my town with a heap of constantly falling snow. The sun simply went away. The world altered the rainbow into merely two colors. White. Blindingly clean. Pure. A spackle of filling in the cracks on grey buildings, grey roads, grey windows, grey hats. Nighttime brought unforgettable blackness. Streetlights fizzled out, televisions spurted and the sidewalks grew lonely of misuse.

I forgot colors. I forgot smells. I forgot the face of the spunky meter maid on the ground below. She was gone. The meters didn't need her cause the cars stayed at home.

Tonight. Tonight was the night, I finally broke. I couldn't sit at home anymore. With scarf and hat in hand, I began the slow, slushy trudge down 2^nd street to the only street corner with a light seeping from the window. The drugstore is a fluorescent time capsule. Antihistamines, cookies, greeting cards, employees and hair dye stand in a permanent suspension of time and expiration dates. I like ice cream when the weather is cold. The drug store has one scoop ice creams in a one scoop size box. I bought two. Rocky Road and Pumpkin. The pumpkin must have been left over from the holidays.

Eating my ice cream in the minimal shelter of a bus stop, I head an insistent rumble bubbling from the basement steps across the street. With each step the rumble grew, and then another thump accompanied the first. By the time I hit the door at the bottom of the 16 steps, the slow squeal of a trumpet in front of a stand up bass and drums clung to my lapel and threw me to the ground with the smack similar to roast beef that was pushed from the countertop.

For two hours, three grizzled jazz musicians swayed, stomped, thumped, banged, shouted, sneered, opened a vein and bled. My only introduction to jazz music was in a library book. "The History of Jazz, Vol. 1". I didn't read it. The pictures were incredible though. Intense black, white and grays, framed in close on fierce, sweaty faces and gleaming instruments.

Jazz didn't have a sound I could hear. Jazz was intensity. A velocity swirling in my chest cavity. Jazz wasn't music to me. It was beyond music. Finally, these images etched in my mind careened into life. I am not even sure if the Lloyd Zeffler trio is a notable jazz band. Tonight, to me, they were the only jazz band. Lloyd Zeffler stood center stage, straight backed, his head a few inches short of the ceiling. A black hat, black suit and brown shoes lifting a trumped to his lips, the sound blows as if Gabriel's angel band at the gates of heaven included a square-shaped jazz drummer and a Slim Pickens look-alike on bass.

Time stood still. As still as my favorite black and white photo of the pianist "Stumpy" Johnson. As if the instruments were paintbrushes, splashes of color, swirls of blue and green streamed from the small stage, altering the dingy club into the deep blue sea. Tabletop candles became starfish. Bottles of booze turned into schools of fish; there goes a stray, swimming out to coral tables to fill bellies of woozy sharks.

The spinning torpedo in the middle is the Lloyd Zeffler trio. At the end of an incendiary performance, the band, without a cent of ado, tucked their instruments in and set down to a table squeezed into the back corner.

Square drummer sat down to a bottle of the cheapest hooch in the joint. His eyes never left the bottom of the shot glass for the remainder of the evening. Slim was obviously the ladies man of the group. Loud and extremely affable, every living organism was sucked into his charisma vortex.

Lloyd was something completely different. A small group his friends, often just 2, rarely more than 3 or 4, sat down nest to him, quickly falling into the easy conversation of long-time friends. Discussions grew heated at times, followed by fleeting moments of silence. Then on to a new topic and back to the same easy manner. Lloyd was enthusiastic in these discussions. A patient listener who waited for his turn, then exploded into a mass of superlatives. He loved music, the arts, food, science, religion. No topic was off the table. Not topic wasn't cared for with the loving embrace of kindly old Uncle Lloyd.

The more I heard him speak the more faith I had that other people were looking for the same experience, the same feeling in the pit of their stomach that I wanted. I wasn't alone. We are both on the same journey. Him through his music and me through his music.

I sat and nervously picked at a bowl of pistachios until Lloyd and his band decided to decamp to the all night diner on 2^nd street. The entire contents of the basement picked up and started the walk through a freshly prepared bed of snow. The pack of rowdy black suits and fur coats cut through the pristine slush. From far away it resembled licorice paving a way through vanilla ice cream.

At the diner, I slid into my usual booth, watched bleary eyed waitresses serve greasy burgers to carnivorous musicians. Kings and Queens never feasted with the voracity of this late night crew. They really were like kings and queens. Ruling the night time world with a fedora crowns and glimmering trumpets of power. In this kingdom, there are no subjects, merely loyalty and love between the self-appointed lords and ladies.

The morning sun began to peek through the skyscrapers, reflecting off the snow and into my face. If my face were not pressed into the tabletop, producing a pittance of drool.

The waitress told me Lloyd Zeffler and his knights had left long ago. I exited the diner and greeted the new day with an eagerness that is driven by a fierce sense of longing. A new day is just potential looking for someone to grab hold.

I bought a new record today. It's playing right now.