Heart Strings: A Tale of Two Concerts

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There is an emotional intimacy that certain performers let us share that expands musical pleasure, into rapture.

Lansing. Monday evening we took our seats in a small venue for a hundred people, the Creole Gallery in Old Town, with bohemian brick and mottled plaster walls, wooden chairs and old porous wood floors. It feels familiar and homey, as the venue for small, casual concerts. The gypsy jazz John Jorgenson Quintet seems to prefer these small, informal spaces, from what I gather touring their YouTube videos, and I can see why. If they were up and out on a remote stage in the Great Hall of the Wharton Center, where they fully deserve to perform with their outrageous skill and polish, we would be an audience, not participants.

Gypsy jazz is energetic at the get go. Many of the numbers are so fast paced that you have no breath left when one is done, and you're sure there are no note-stones left unturned in the musical riverbeds of the world. But John Jorgenson and his rhythm guitarist, bassist, drummer and violinist knew we couldn't take that pace any more than they could keep playing it for two full hour sets. So they mixed in Edvard Grieg (sorry, I don't remember which song), "Melancholy Baby" and "La Mer", among other calmer tunes. But for the most part, the rapid guitar picking, plucking, strumming, fingering, harmonics and violin bow stroking made it hard for me to sit still. So there was this energy in the room, flowing from the stage, and being boomeranged back from us, the listeners, many of whom were aging band members, exploding with appreciative whoops. There was also another force at play, and that was repartee. In the middle of John's frenetic strumming, violinist Jason Anick would reply with a decidedly schmaltzy quip, or a sarcastic violin moan, and the corners of John's mouth would turn up. Or vice versa. Again and again. The musical conversation of joy, love, and fun.

Here is John Jorgenson's Quintet playing Ghost Dance, but the only musician who is the same besides Jorgenson himself is the bassist, Simon Planting. The current members we saw are at John's site. And while you can catch a smile or two in this video, you can't sense the subtle frivolity we experienced at the show.

Paris. There was another concert of strings that had the same effect on me. It was Vivaldi, in an evening concert in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, another small venue for an audience of 100, one of three times I've sat in that stunning, historic space to listen to musical ensembles. (If you are interested, please read more about this jewel, Sainte-Chapelle. Here is one place to read more. You can read more about Sainte-Chapelle, and John Updike's poem after a concert at Sainte-Chapelle, at my post at Paris Deconstructed.) In spite of 6,500 square feet of windows telling biblical stories, rising 60 feet above and around us like a stained glass forest - reds, blues, purples muted in the softly lit chapel - the setting feels intimate, yet as unlike the Creole as a room can be. Old in the Sainte-Chapelle means 13th century. An ensemble of half a dozen musicians on cello, bass, violin and piano played many pieces, and often, there was the same camaraderie - the grins, the nods of understanding, the snickers while raising eyebrows and attacking strings with a bow flourish. I was so magnetized by the tangible connection between the musicians, that I left that concert floating on a cloud of euphoria. When I'm in Paris, all my senses are heightened (something I'd like to bring into the now, everywhere), which made this experience especially ecstatic.

At first, in both concerts, I wondered if the smiles, the quips, the fun, was put on. Was it just part of the performance, something to entertain and hold the audience? An act? At the Creole Gypsy Jazz concert, my eyes bored in on John's and Jason's faces to see if I could find a clue of artifice in their looks. They seemed genuine, though I couldn't be certain. I let it work its magic anyway. I believe that exuberance from us, the listeners in the wooden chairs, also amplified their emotive energy. When I glided out into the darkening warm summer night of Old Town after the Jorgenson concert Monday, with my hand in Don's, and a smile and a beat still lighting me up, it hit me that this fun, joyful exchange is necessary to their level of music. The musicians need it, as they need to practice thousands of hours to hone their skill. The music needs it, for the seeds of the notes to be broken open, and brought into the light of loving attention, to take root in the listener, and come alive, emotionally, and spiritually.
 
Here are 37 seconds of a concert in Sainte-Chapelle, not taken by me.

That night in Paris back in 1997, after listening and watching young violinists and cellists play like children on a playground of delicate but robust equipment, lying in bed, my soul left my body and met with those musical "children" in impassioned, playful conversation, all night. I woke up wondering, Was the conversation words, or did we speak in music? Was it a dream?

No matter how a violinist interprets Bach, Vivaldi or Mozart with bow strokes that are collé, legato, louré, martelé or staccato, or how many notes a gypsy jazz musician like John Jorgenson can strum and pluck out of a guitar in a minute, with joy and the force of love, the notes can't be squandered, or used up. The more you give, the more you get back. The riverbeds will always refill, and refresh - a far, far better immersion than what mere technical skill, melody, arrangement, and orchestration combined can provide.

I found this gypsy wagon at a flea market in Holland, Michigan in 2008

Jean "Django" Reinhardt was a French gypsy who was the first European jazz musician to make it big, and he started Gypsy Jazz - Jazz Manouche in French. 2010 is the 100th anniversary of the year he was born, in a gypsy wagon near Brussels. John Jorgenson was asked to play Django in the 2004 feature film, Head in the Clouds. How's that for synchronicity for this July in Paris? And you know what? I did not know until just now, at the tail end of this post, about that title Head in the Clouds. All that floating euphoria. I think I'd better see this film.

Jean "Django" Reinhardt

This post is part of the Paris in July blog theme, hosted by Karen at BookBath and Tamara at Thyme for Tea. Go to Paris in July to take your heart to the City of Lights. 

Photo of John Jorgenson found at johnjorgenson.com.

Photo of Sainte-Chapelle courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

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Why some people don't go to Paris

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Me? I'm ill equipped for it. French 101. That's it. Unless you count my mom sitting next to me on the couch, enlightening me on French pronunciation as a young person, starting with that vexatious phrase, qu'est-ce que c'est que ça. Really? KESS-KUH-SAY-KUH-SAH? When it comes to French, I am sandwiched between my mother who studied it through college and read Les Miserables in the original language (no doubt it's there in one of those floor-to-ceiling stacks in George Whitman's Paris bookstore at left), and my daughter who speaks it gracefully after six years of study. I learned Latin in high school, and I know some Turkish from living in Istanbul. On the ILR scale (Interagency Language Roundtable), I got to about a 2.5 out of 5 in Turkish (5 being that of a native speaker).  In French, I'd say I'm at around .2, maybe .3. How profoundly inadequate I was on my seven trips to Paris. Yet shamelessly, well almost shamelessly, I went anyway.

Many people take vacations in a variety of places where the language spoken is not their own. But I venture to guess that Paris is the one place where, first of all, the gap between the written word and its pronunciation is a wobbly bridge to cross, and second of all, it is spoken by people who are perceived [by some] to be mean and rude. So the image of waiting in line at a patisserie for pain aux raisins with French customers and having to fumble with Je voudrais une (or is it un?) pain aux raisins s'il vous plais and the correct francs, well now Euro coins, while also trying to find one's glasses to read said coins is just too frightening to contemplate. What scowls, what high scoffing eyebrows will fill that tiny space like arcs of raisins!

Yet I have found that when I have made the least effort to open a conversation with shop keepers, restaurant workers and taxi drivers with my limited (but I am certain very well pronounced, hawnh-hawnh) French, I have received gracious and helpful responses. When I haven't (I remember one particular taxi driver who I thought would break his transmission, he shifted so hard, and a certain crepes waiter in Montmartre who implied that I should order more than I did - What else was on the menu, s'il vous plais?), I have stood my ground and said in English something to show that I am not intimidated, and immediately there was respectful deference (at least in my presence).

One of the best moments in Paris was the spring Don and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary (2003, photo at right where we lived for a week). We were in a fromagerie the size of the postage stamp below, on Ile Saint Louis, picking up a Roquefort for supper. Don requested the cheese in French, and the seated French woman readied to slice with her big knife, adjusting it wider or narrower according to his hand instructions, cutting a wedge at last. She took his Euros and sweetly chirped with the song of a little sparrow, "Au revoir, Monsieur Foreigneur . . ." When we got outside the shop, in an incredulous tone, Don asked, "How did she know I wasn't French?"

I have a Paris blog called Paris Deconstructed, which is like Jacques Derrida's "literary revenge on philosophy" in that it is my revenge on the myth that Paris is the Eiffel Tower and rude people. I call it synchronicity that this post today happens to be exactly one year since my last post there, July 18, 2009, the second part of a story of meeting Mrs. Schott. And here's a post about that Shakespeare & Company Bookstore, and my encounters with the legendary Mr. George Whitman, which was my very first post at PD. I'll post there again when I get a round tuit. (Today that's pronounced to rhyme with Paris (the French way) and Ile Saint Louis: a round too-eee.)

This post is part of my participation in the Paris in July blog theme sponsored by Karen at BookBath and Tamara at Thyme for Tea, and told me by my dear friend DS at Third-Story Window. So, if like me, you can't afford a trip to Paris this summer, do start your reading tour de Paris at those and other participating blogs where the lingua franca is just, well, PARIS. Bon voyage!

Paris in July

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