The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

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  to Haden's beauty, to forget how deeply incapable of music he was: in fact the issue of self fell aside, only proisionally and for the moment, but sufficiently far so that something liing could get through the barbed wire and perimeter defenses at the prison's edge. Why was the place such a battlefield? How had it gotten to be this way? How did I manage to do this to myself? This should be completely fiieking simple!

  There was a long section in which the Bear's and Haden's Hues intertwined in diminishing volume. The Bear Uked it while it lasted, and said goodbye to it with a dying fall, a breathy trill, took t\ o steps back from the microphone and tangled his feet in a mess of cables.

  That's where Harwell picked things up, lingered awhile with Haden in the stillness, rumbling around in the piano's lower storeys, then Herbie-noodled his way back into tempo and got the tune racing again. Bass and drums sleeked themselves down and took off after him, low to the ground, running smooth and steady. The Hatwell kid had some ideas, thought the Bear, as he listened to the little bastard outplay him. The pianist built his solo out of long s^ift lines whose general curve was upward but which curled back into themselves before imloosing their charge of drama. As Hatwell homed in on his eventual destination there were stops and starts, big t^'o-handed chordal pileups that sometimes topped out with a bit of humor—the Bear heard a polnonal demohtion of "Stars and Stripes Forever" ride one buildup in the treble, and a bit of "All You Need Is Love" stumbling out of another climax in bits and pieces—and basically Hatwell's solo was riotous and unpredictable and disported itself over the entirety of the instrument as if the keyboard were still an undiscovered countn^ anyone with a sense of freedom and some soul and muscle could romp in ad infinitum. Nobody outside the outright avant-garde attacked the piano with quite this much abandon, and the Bear felt like shaking hands all around, packing up his alto and handing the album over to the pianist with his blessing. The solo ended out of tempo with Haden buzzing a repeated, sUghtly flatted triple-stop against the w^ood, and the Bear had enough sense to wave Billy off it: he'd alw^ays liked Haden's solos best when they were unaccompanied and he had room to go w herever he wanted, in or out of tempo. Haden's initial questings, once Billy fell aside in cTnbal-whispers, gave way to some plummets into his instrument's bottom range. The Bear closed his eyes and Hstened rocking as a series of would-be lyrical melodies rose, each of their notes nettled by minute variations of pitch and placement, as if they had entered a moral field under siege. Haden's struggle, whatever it was, made the Bear feel less alone. The bassist seemed to turn upon his notes some ultimate degree of attention and to question them as if at any moment they might drop their masks, fess up and tell him

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  the secret of his life. At that level of inquiry Haden's secrets, whatever they were, were identical to the Bear's, to anyone's, own. The whole band leaned in, listening, a palpable hush seized the room just in case appearances fell away and the world of unmeasured Meaning, from which music came and at which it was always pointing back, was of a mind to put in an appearance, against the odds, pull the scrims down and leave the stage bare of illusion, fall of truth. It came close. At the end of his solo, Haden had shifted almost imperceptibly back into the tune's fast tempo and Billy was playing quietly and looking at the Bear over the top of his baffle, eyebrows up. Did the Bear want to play again or should Billy take a turn?

  The Bear thought a drum solo would be a pretty good idea just then, and to communicate this thought to Billy he put the saxophone to his snout and began to play a sort of prelude for him. One thing led to another, and without meaning to he was beginning a second alto solo. It had taken him unawares. Harwell was laying out, there was plenty of room, and, since the bassist and drummer were keeping the volume down, there wasn't any pressure on him. As far as the Bear was concerned, he was playing a little intermission between main events and was only paying a sort of half-attention to the proceedings. His mind had a chance to slip the noose and wander awhile. Listen to these guys, he thought, hearing Haden and Billy's accompaniments and insinuations, the flex of beat, the suggested harmonic divagation, the threat or promise of distant thunder, eventual rain. Where else could you find a music like this? Where else encounter such simultaneous discipline and abandon? It was a whole rich multifarious world, and if you went outside its visible parameters you could draw from anything out there and bring it back in without bowing obeisance to any foreign gods. All you had to do was be able to play. All you had to do was know how to put it together. All you had to do was see how it already was together in potential, articulate and complete, and at the same time throw yourself wholly into the maelstrom of unknown process. All you had to know was the little secret that made it swing. It was no big deal. It was Hfe, is all, no more no less.

  They were still playing, Billy was laying back, and Haden was starting to get to the Bear—where he might have expected the bass to walk or run alongside him, there was this bup-bup-bup-bup triplet thing going on, pure comedy, and the Bear thought. Like what the hell is this? Hatwell was coming in with some spare, spaced octaves: tonic, dominant, nothing in particular, relative minor and lo, the music was starting to do what it was rumored or fabled to do, i.e., carry him past the rambling catastrophe of himself into greater knowledge and release. He could not, because of his continuing imprisonment, enjoy it in the fall amplitude of his essence, but he could sit

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  there at the fountain and regulate the flow as it came to his horn according to laws anyone with half a brain in a similar position ought to be able to acknowledge and a listener enjoy. In fact this is just what he had been looking for, the subtly right ingress or egress, the chance to know and not know what was going on. Right paw, left paw, note after note, who knows, it might add up to music. In any case, for the first time in living memory he was situated smack in the center of something more real than he was, still feeling nothing but awake enough to tick off the necessary moves and meanings and just generally let it flow.

  Haden vocalized, letting out one of his well-known Whooos. Yeah, but what does he know? Dead-eyed but with his heart on some slow-burning fire too interior to warm him, the Bear played what he knew from this equivocal position, rolling out his lines, chafing against the law of rhythm before consenting to its authority again, pulling on harmony's ropes and hawsers, getting those sails up, winching a few down and sailing on into the body of the day. If he had wanted, in the interest of greater speed, to heft the fall weight of his emotions into the music's swirls and currents, he would have come up against the problem that for all the moment's intensity he had no feelings really. This was still some sort of intermezzo between the weary self he lived with and the world he wanted to get to, so that it was nothing, really, in itself; and at the same time he knew that this was precisely the best he could hope to do with the moment and its pawfiil of material. Just don't think you're doing something ultimate or important and maybe you can keep it up awhile.

  When the Bear was done, Billy took a solo that rummaged around the set and exploded amid the cymbals, and then the whole band played the out head staggered and almost out of tempo due to some mutual unspoken decision they had made. At the end there were a few last thrashes from the hilltop of one instrument to the valley of another and then they were out. After a four-second pause for the reverberations to die away they looked at each other again. Haden was the first to laugh. Then Billy and Hatwell assented. The Bear did not. He was in some other, blank, terse state of mind and felt like maybe he could play for awhile today and that was the business at hand and there was not much of him left over for laughter or chitchat or camaraderie or whatever.

  James' voice came through the speaker: "You want to hear that back?"

  "No," said the Bear, his voice so loud it surprised him, but then it seemed that you had to hear it back and so the Bear excused himself. While everyone else listened to it in the control room, he wandered out of the studio and
up a hall, found himself in a huge recording room they must use for orchestras and heavy metal bands, an indoor football field, a place for a swimming pool,

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  anyhow something cavernous and gymnastic. The Bear wandered through it, looking up at the dark hangings that could be let down for damping the sound. He clapped his paws a few times to check out the reverb. The light was dim, the place deserted. The chrome of microphone stands gleamed under dulled-down service hghts. Interesting. Wonder if they're done hsten-ing in there. Give it another five minutes. Better safe than sorry. I don't want to hear it at all.

  When he got back it seemed that the musicians all liked it a lot but that it was seventeen minutes long—really?—and there was a certain amount of audio overspill that James was tending to between the gantries, baffles and mikes. Krieger wanted to do a second, acceptably shorter take, under improved acoustic conditions.

  "No," said the Bear. Nothing mattered to him at the moment, except getting on with it. He was pretty one-pointed about that, but even that did not count, not ultimately, he felt that cold and void.

  "And the drummer was singing while he played," Krieger complained.

  "Because he was enjoying himself," the Bear told him. "You've heard of enjoyment, right? Good. Now we have to play the next tune." His voice was so level it occurred to him that he sounded hypnotized.

  Some argument ensued but it did not touch him, and even though he contributed a few lines to the discussion it took place at a great remove, in some pointless contingent non-time, and when things got real again they were ready to try the next tune. Which one should it be?

  "'Book the Hook,'" said the Bear, "and we can keep it short." It was a jump tune built off a repeated riff spelled by a break figure, eight bars of A-flat 7, eight of B 7 +11, an eight bar release in A 7 flat 9 + 5, and then a last eight in B-flat 7 to close. "If it goes on too long, the changes'll start sounding like a trap. Under seven minutes it might be okay. So."

  The Bear counted off, slower than "Vehicle" but still up there.

  They played it, and not surprisingly Haden found some variations to work on the repeated rhythm figures that underlay the piece and Billy made the piece's foursquare structure tilt and stretch and rock itself silly. The Bear and Harwell took their choruses, then Charlie and Billy found a way to share two in tandem and they finished in brisk unison.

  "Cool," Hatwell said. "That's like half a record already."

  "Charlie?" asked the Bear. "If we could play a duet on something slow and then we could all take a Httle break?"

  "Funny," Haden told him. "After we almost did that rehearsal the other day I wrote a ballad for you in my hotel room. You want to have a look?"

  They played it together after three false starts in which the Bear couldn't

  lyS Rafi Zabor

  quite get a grip on the best way to phrase Haden's written hne. Once he had it loosened up right, the Bear let Haden's lyric understrumming coax him into deeper seas than he usually travelled. Every time the Bear would play a line, Haden would find something larger to say about it on the bass and the Bear would have to submit to the authority of what he had proposed. Haden surrounded him like an orchestra of basses, lured unknown music out of his lights and vitals, and coerced his consent to a beauty beyond the rim of his circumscriptive troubles of the moment. Did the Bear play well? Possibly. Did he keep to the chord changes? As a matter of fact, the Bear thought he had. When the Bear stopped, Haden took a solo, caressing up from the strings a richness of melody that paid tribute to the beauty of the bass and his own deep human nature. Accordingly, when Haden finished his solo, the Bear played Haden's written theme with unaccustomed literalness and modesty, and it was done.

  "Oh, man," Haden said after the necessary pause.

  "Really?" said the Bear. "Was it any good?"

  Everyone agreed, at least, that it was time for a break. Apparently someone had phoned out for Chinese food and Charlie wanted to make sure there would be enough vegetables. Did the Bear want anything to eat?

  "No."

  Various people were taking off for the toilet and the coffeemaker. The Bear wanted nothing to do with either. He noted that he had no physical needs: no hunger, despite the fact he'd had nothing since coffee and bagels that morning, no need for the bathroom despite eadier ominous gurglings and the amount of strong black coffee he'd swallowed down for breakfast. He seemed to have no needs at all. No discernible emotion either. No doubt if he didn't have to play the horn he wouldn't be breathing either.

  Jones spoke to him but he couldn't make much sense of the words.

  "Interview," Jones repeated.

  "What?"

  "You said you'd do one."

  "Oh yeah. Of course."

  The Bear sat down with the interviewer on opposing armchairs in the anteroom. There was also a tall thin woman with frizzy black hair and cameras dangling. She circled and snapped pictures, but the Bear shot her a particularly dark look and something went audibly wrong with her motor drive—did I do that?—and she went away for awhile. The interviewer, although evidently Jewish, he looked a lot like Shakespeare—about midway between the Chandos portrait and the Droeshout engraving—had an even more poignant air than Jones of being on the outside looking in. The guy

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  also sort of looked like Anne Frank with a beard. "I'm not really a critic," he explained into the microphone after he had set up the cassette recorder. "—really a critic," the machine repeated back to him, and once the guy had refumbled his papers back into his lap, they were ready to go.

  The Bear composed his paws upon his knees, not knowing what to expect.

  He found the interview process rather odd.

  "I was born in a boxcar on a railroad siding on the outskirts of Chicago," the Bear began in answer to the man's first question, and then the interviewer interrupted the Bear to tell him about his own childhood and how he had always wanted to communicate with animals, particularly with birds. He had wanted to convince the birds that he would never do them harm and that they ought to be his friends, but they flew away from him anyway. He had loved all animals really, and although social circumstance had prevented him from meeting up with bears, when he went to summer camp at the age of five in New Hampshire he . . . Had the Bear ever been to New Hampshire?

  "Never further north than the Adirondacks," said the Bear, "where basically I was hunting around for lady bears. By the way, it offends me that the human world calls them sows. ..."

  It offended the interviewer too, the guy assured him.

  "You see," said the Bear, "due to a whole bunch of unpredictable governmental and bureaucratic wrangles attending the defection of the Great Vichinsky, I wasn't separated from my mother right away. In fact, we were together long enough for me to . . ."

  The interviewer commiserated, with reference to the difficulties of his own childhood, while the Bear remembered the Chicago horizon, red lights blinking, while his mother conveyed what she could of the family lore. He remembered the taste of her milk, her warm, anxious, enveloping love. Too soon gone, and a too-cold human world for aftermath.

  "My father was American," he said when the interviewer had finished his story, "snuck in one night to diversify the circus' gene pool. My mother found him primitive but affecting. She took to him, I think, mostly out of compassion. There was a certain old-world condescension in her feelings for him. Even though, I was told, he was energetic as a lover he had little appetite for conversation in the aftermath, and however touching he was in his directness, it was felt he lacked perspective and nuance. . . . Anyhow I never really participated in the snobisme in which my mother's side of the family indulged itself."

  The interviewer spent a lot of time telling the Bear how this story made him feel, particularly in view of how the two sides of his own family had clashed Hke cymbals, or symbols, and the next time the Bear found a chance

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  to speak, the text was
Bird, Ornette and Jackie McLean, but even on these subjects he didn't get a chance to say a lot.