Kazan — summer 2014

In the evening Cleo and Teo took me to the Café Beebop to listen to jazz. Love the logo.

The evening was devoted to the music and legacy of Charles Mingus, so they showed some documentary clips of Mingus's life interspersed with jazz sets. They played not only Mingus's music, but also music composed by Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington and others. Very talented guys. They were bass player, drummer, pianist, alt sax, baritone sax and trumpet.

Mingus-style jazz is musically complex, and I'm afraid that I don't know enough about music to really appreciate when they are deliberately violating standard melody, harmony and rhythm. It doesn't delight or fascinate me, but the music was profoundly talented. The group evidently considered that their audience would be not quite as sophisticated as they themselves, so the last song of the evening was the most accessible of the pieces, with a rhythm that made you want to sway to it. Good call, that. It meant that we all left the venue with our bodies perked up and our hearts light.

The venue itself was great. Nice small stage. Probably 60 people filling the room. It's a cliché to call such a place ‘intimate,’ but the word applies precisely in this case.

When the sets started, it seemed to me that only the drummer, who was also the announcer and educator, was really enjoying the process of playing. He always had a big grin on his face. But after a bit so did the bassist. And then I could see the joy of movement in the torso and shoulders of the pianist, and then the alt sax player started grinning. The baritone sax player never had the big grins, but when he listened to the others’ solos, you could see that he was keeping time by flexing his jaw muscles, a thing I've observed in musicians before, and between sets he seemed really happy. As to the trumpet player, well, it's hard to smile while you are blowing on the trumpet. I never got the sense of joy from him, but he was definitely focused and present.

There was a moment where the baritone sax was about to cue in at the wrong moment. The alt sax reached out a hand and placed it on his shoulder, and that small direction fixed everything. I remember once watching a concert with Etta James and Chaka Khan and some others. Chaka was strung out on who knows what, and she was on the verge of hosing the performance. Etta reached out and grasped her firmly by the upper arm, and Etta made it look casual and didn't miss a note or syllable while singing. That centered Chaka enough that she finished the set adequately. Etta had done it subtly enough that Chaka wasn't publically humiliated. Gotta appreciate a musician who is both a professional and a considerate human being at the same time.

There was also a point in a set where during a drum solo one of the drums seemed to come loose, which put a brief wrench into things. All the other musicians just laughed with good humor, as did the drummer, who continued playing marvelously through the set, despite a drum that had to be adjusted shortly.

The educational part of the show was well done. There was a screen in the background that showed the documentary in English with Bulgarian subtitles. (I learned my first Bulgarian curse word when they translated Mingus saying, “Turn on the f***ing microphone.”) The clips were fairly short, but they spanned Mingus's musical interests, which were incredibly broad, his outspokenness on racial issues, and his family background and personal failings and how they influenced his music. It touched on his eventual death due to ALS. I found it incredibly respectful and honest. And several people in the group had reason to feel personally involved with Mingus because his last wife, Sue, had taught them in Belgium for a time.

All in all, a great evening.