Somewhere in time...
Just got back home from this tiny jazz club - a place out of time, really, straight out of the 70s, with the thick brown carpet and the whole typical decor. Even the audience looked like they'd been there since at least 4 or 5 decades.
Seriously - at one point I started wondering if they weren't fumigating a retirement home nearby and knowing not what to do with them, they'd simply dumped their seniors in there. :P
The little stage was like a living room, with sofas and people sitting on it with their instrument, waiting for their turn to blow.
When I saw younger kids walking in with their instrument, I felt old. Those guys looked just like the jazz students in college back in Montreal, back in my days.
Technically, I would have brought a guitar but I just wasn't sure - I wanted to see how they rolled. Two minutes in, I was glad I'd left it home. Then there was one fellow who showed up with a beautiful Gibson ES type of guitar. That was quite a guitar lesson I took right there. My wife did go up for a number and it was terrific.
I hadn't really listened to jazz since back in the late 90s, so I really was having a moment out of time there. That's until that outrageously talented sax player took out his cell phone out of his pocket and started checking out his mails while another horn player was blowing - not a young guy mind you, he was a seasoned vet. He actually did that twice.
I can't imagine how I would have felt being up on stage with him.
It's one thing to see people in the audience with their phones taking pictures, but, on stage? What's next - the guy on second base texting his girlfriend at a ball game? A Catholic priest interrupting confession time to check his mail?
The funny thing is that, I was telling my wife about that aspect of jazz, that it's as much a matter of listening to the others as playing your part - get ideas bouncing around, sharing music...
The positive thing - it was refreshing to see those older gentlemen and their ladies sitting quietly and listening to music that actually required the listener to process more information than just a kick drum and an auto-tuned melody of 4 notes.
That was actually quite touching.
TCB - Tea, Cats, Books...