The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  444 Rafi Zabor

  Like most talking bears, he had sentimental notions of Paris, and he used to sit there with Gigi on the box and in the middle of some random scene of no particular emotional import tears would pour down his face and he'd watch the rest of the movie dripping and not knowing why. He hked the score, but none of the standout tunes would work for the quartet—and could you imagine practicing "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" in a house full of Iris, Amy and Trace? But this slender httle waltz charmed his pants off and he was happy to play it now, lightly, graciously . . . though now it occurred to him that Frederick Loewe had fudged the resolution of the B section and that if Sonny had wanted to stroll these boulevards he wouldn't have been embarrassed to play "Thank Heaven"—the luxury of being a primary creator—and if the tune was going so dancingly well why was he getting those jabbing discontented chords in his back from Rahim Bobby Hatwell?

  The Bear looked over his shoulder to find the pianist glaring at him from his station at the Steinway Really? thought the Bear. Hey Bob, if I'm playing such utter bullshit how come Garrett and Linton are enjoying themselves on the tune?

  Hatwell looked over at the bassist and the drummer, then back to the Bear as if to say So What and hit him with a minor ninth.

  Surly motherfucker, thought the Bear, but when he returned his attention to his solo he found that much of the charm had gone out of it and he let it end.

  Much to his surprise Hatwell took a long, rather lyrical solo on the tune, probably exacting some convoluted form of revenge, although there was no way to tell: the man's facial expression was triumphantly unreadable. The little wars of bear and man. He played some needless background figures for the pianist and grinned around his embouchure. But felt, whatever the moment's small ironic pleasures, that the set was at risk all of a sudden, and he wondered, since it must continue, what they might play next. He didn't feel like doing one of his own tunes. More Sonny? Wouldn't that be overdoing it? He riffled through the band's working repertoire, discarded it and finally thought, yes, maybe that, although we've done one blues already.

  After Garrett's two deHcate choruses—substantial melodies teased out at their edges by hthe, guitaristic, single-finger strummings along the E-string, all wings and flutters, reference Mingus on Duke's "Fleurette Airicaine"—the Bear played the out-chorus of "Say a Prayer" as if the alto were feathery and breathy as a flute—a departure from his usual muscular presentation. He bowed to the poUte, proportional applause and stomped off a dangerously fast tempo without telling the band what the tune was going to be, but they peeped it in two bars of course, and got behind him on the downbeat of the

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  third: "Pursuance," the B-flat-minor blues that formed the third part of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. But, thought the Bear as he ht into the tune's scalar ascents, Trane's ladders to a possible heaven, it ain't no simple minor blues either. Anyone who thinks Trane got harmonically simpleminded once he went into his modal phase should listen closer to the way he put this thing together—Bostic I love you, he thought as the drummer put his boot behind the tune's written rhythm; thank you for knowing that there is no such thing as too much propulsion this tune this night. In tribute to the tune's generative impulses and the band's acknowledgment of them the Bear repeated the head an unconventional third and fourth time to build up a sufficient head of steam and think about it because hey lookit:

  It's a B-flat-minor blues all right but Trane built it on the F-minor penta-tonic scale, which through the flat seventh opens onto A-major pentatonic and anyhow resolves in the logical though unexpected daylight of B-flat major, so you can play it as a straight blues if you want but even without pushing the tune's composed parameters you're already out there in a wealth of alternate scales ... so that if you want to take it out the tune will hold you—obviously Trane wanted to indicate a plurality of possible ascents to a single illumination, and you had to admire the economy of means with which he had expressed the idea. By the end of the head's fourth repetition the rhythm section was playing with greater interior velocity than he had heard from them ever, and the Bear Ht into his solo loving what contemporary piano bass and drums could do—Linton springing loose a multilimbed complexity of polyrhythm that acknowledged all manner of detail within the larger motion of ruling onrushing time; Garrett moving his attack just slightly ahead of the beat and cutting it back in uneven groupings of three and four while his note choices worked their way along an axis arrayed betu^een B-flat and F natural, nodding hello to the implied tonalities along the way but pursuing a forthright central course nonetheless, good man; and Hatw^ell shunted some powerful Tynerish stacked fourths into place while audibly waiting to see where the Bear was going to take his line before committing himself to personal response. It was just this side of inconceivable, thought the Bear, that mortal musicians could converse on this level at this speed—flash remembrance of the juggling triangles of his dream: who are we really? The Bear wished he could play nearer Trane's level of inspiration, less for reasons of insane ambition than because life seemed to require it of him just now and anything less would seem like failure. In admission of this unpayable debt he quoted early some lines from Trane's recorded solo on the tune, that architectonic upsurge through detailed obscurity until the soul, having exhausted its own and music's known resources, could legitimately

  44^ Rafi Zabor

  tear itself open before the hoped-for illumined face of God—something, the Bear remembered, that Trane had achieved in a studio on a solo lasting four minutes tops.

  Ambition, take note.

  It would be nice to be able to play that well, but what are you gonna do really?

  After a chorus and a half of mixed invention and quotation, he thought to settle into a simple pentatonic scanning of the tune's written parameters, and hoped he might eventually begin to build something out of its rhythms. He played fluently and at speed, paws working well, lungs and embouchure dispensing power smoothly into the music's rush.

  I may be a long way down from Trane, but it feels cool to play even this well. Parenthetically it occurred to him to wonder why he was adapting the dynamic of Trane's calamitous argument with the nature of things when Ornette's subtler elision of dispute had always seemed the wiser course; but then the Bear had always had a difficult nature and it was too late to change now.

  Besides which, listen to how well it's working at the moment.

  The Bear took so much pleasure in how he was handling things he hardly noticed it when his attention began to wander; in fact it seemed to him that his straing thoughts detailed both the tune's legitimate business and his own: he saw himself heading upstate in a car—odd, when the plan was for him to stay at Jones and Sybil's through the weekend and the Monday off, and only van it back to what no longer felt like home at the end of the following week, an intelligent conception of a break from the family scene—but there he was, in foresight or imagination, heading north with Jones behind the wheel of what might be the new Accord they had farcically Ufted off of Bob Leine. lA'e're sure to give it back to him once the till is full and he can pay us the agreed amount, so the image didn't make sense as precognition, but it was TOd all the same. As the car headed up the Thruway, shadows of bare trees along the road fell across his eyes through the windshield, sim low in the eastern sk: is it morning? The rmxed pattern of hght and shade through which they sped seemed ver- like the pentatonic glide of chords— Trane so smart and subtle in his constructions^through which he urged the fluency of his evolving alto line. Well of course he dreamed of the way upstate. Wasn't he in love? Wasn't he doing what he knew best, banging his head into the world's brick wall in the name of the truest thing he knew? He knew nothing truer or better than his love of Iris. It was worth a life, wasn't it? And it seemed to him that the tune's goal, like the road on which he dreamed his way to an imagined Woodstock, was Iris, or was subtly encoded

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  in her bones and lights
and motions. Listen to how the music goes, Iris, up there into B-flat major: we can work things out. Look at the scales, observe their ideal tendency. See what the whole wide swarming composition is searching for. Get with me on this. Having wonderful time. Wish you were here.

  Even he could hear the fatuous pleading note in that.

  And if all the inclinations of his enraptured artifice were aimed true, why was Bobby Hatwell—exactly what the fuck was Hatwell hitting him with now? You could hardly call it accompaniment: that bare repeated minor seventh, C to B-fiat without the amehorative F between, and for emphasis Hat was doubling the bare, forked thing in octaves. What, the Bear would have liked to know, was the source of this violence, this assault?

  He looked over his shoulder to see Hatwell glaring at him from the keyboard. The Bear gave him a what's-up look and Hatwell laid a minor ninth and eleventh on top of the seventh, already sufficientiy tart, thank you.

  Look, the Bear thought at Hatwell furiously, just because you're more heavily invested in an ethos of struggle than I am, that doesn't mean . . .

  Just because you've confused death with daylight, that doesn't signify . . .

  Just because you've been beaten up more recently than I have, that doesn't indicate . . .

  Besides which, I know my way around this complicated chromatic labyrinth as well as you do, so what's your problem. Bob?

  But gradually the Bear's busy protesting mind ground to a halt and shut up, because whatever Hatwell's motivation might be, his aggressive chording had in fact begun to give the Bear's easy pentatonic fluency the lie; and, um, it did finally occur to him that he had played the last five choruses while thinking about riding upstate in a car.

  The Bear decided not to shoot the piano player, and thought. All right, I'll take you on, I'll dig in, I'll hit the tune's particulars as if they mattered and I were really capable of all their implications. Will that make you happy? Probably not.

  The Bear strengthened his stance at the microphone, lowered his center of gravity, filled his lungs, thickened his tone by choking up on the reed a bit and headed for the bottom of the next chord—digging in, he wished he had himself a tenor now, closer to the range of his speaking voice and not the alto's more specialized song. But songfulness was what had drawn him to the smaller instrument in the first place, that and how it felt in his paws, so probly he'd better get off the Thruway and deal with it.

  Vee vill do vhat vee can, he thought in the late Doctor Friedmann's voice. As a bonus I'll try not to get blood on the stage.

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  Place does have nice acoustics.

  Love the sound up there in the arches.

  Still don't see Salman Rushdie.

  The Bear took still firmer hold of the reed in his snout, directed its vibration with fiercer intent and sent his breath down the length and curve of horn with such power as he could muster up from his feet and legs and let branch breathwise in his ribs and assemble toward final form in the wide house of beating dark . . . anything to get this shit together . . .

  . . . and played some angry chromatic enumerative bullshit. . .

  . . . and heard the rhythm section let him know it.

  He shut his eyes to the room and wondered, as he had several times before in his life: if I could really play my ass off, what would it sound like? and he almost laughed into the mouthpiece because, as had happened several times before in his life, some part of him—convinced, no doubt, it had outfoxed the vanity trap—responded to the gambit, got up on its hindlegs and proposed the beginnings of an answer.

  As he dug in he heard the rhythm section respond—Jesus this tune is fast; faster, once you try to work some substantial phrasing into it—with such telepathy and invention what could a poor dumb bear hope to do? But hope had nothing to do with it, nor Trane nor Bird nor Ornette nor Sonny: he would have to shake this ragdoll bear and work sufficient sense or stuffing from it on his own.

  He dug the alto deeper into the tenor saxophone's timbral range than he would have believed possible—Jackie McLean call your office—and was doing this whirring arpeggiated thing in F minor that got up under the architecture of the changes and began to breach them: not outright demolition so much as the bending of structural oak, a creaking protest from the fundamentals. The rhythm section responded quickly to this information, which of course only increased the level of demand on him. Before I find my way out of here I might have to play some serious music: and what a shock that would be. Although imagery was a distraction at this level of play, behind his shut eyes he saw himself hibernating in the basement these past months as some phantasmal marrow of his being struggled up to inhabit the rooms and join Iris' life in the light; he remembered the rich dark earth outside, beneath; some fugitive and unseizable seed struggling to germinate deep in the mothering dark. Maybe you should try to remember you're trying to play music here; no, I want to gather these scents and memories, make them part of what I'm trying to evolve for these nice people, who for some reason have let loose a ripple of applause.

  He felt the beginnings of cramp in his right paw—the repeated reach, on

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  the run, down to low E-flat—and changed its angle of address to the keys at the bottom of the horn; obtained some momentary reHef by moving the action higher up, where his left paw was working fine; and stayed obstinately in F minor against the recurring pull of the tonic B-flat. Go farther, he told himself, and shook his right paw loose. Pull the sucker apart.

  Garrett was with him on this and Bostic, in the probable interest of countervailing centripetal force, was altering his attack to generate a less disparate sense of his drumset, pulling together its timbres, relating cymbal more closely to snare, deepening his relation to the beat, thickening its pulse— which, face it, was the way the Bear loved to hear the drums really—and what was more gratifying still, Rahim Bobby Hatwell was giving him room and support again. Sensing it, the Bear looked over his shoulder at the pianist and saw that he was using the pedal on those sustained chords, taking the pain and looking through it at the Bear.

  That's probly overdoing it. Bob, but you're great anyway. Thing about the great players is how events never seem to impinge on them. How, unlike me, they always have so much time.

  The Bear faced front, raised his alto up into a high cry before redescend-ing into dark, and if his eyes were open he didn't see the room. WTiat he did see, and didn't at the moment particularly want to see, was the edge of the world beginning to rise up.

  The vision thing.

  Not now, he told it, and fixed his attention on the workings of the music, bringing his line back up into the instrument's middle range—seemed he'd snuck around that threat of cramp, he noted—obtaining the chords' permission to blur the edges between their transitions and getting a firmer grip on the floorboards with his feet, careful not to scar the new wood with his claws but hunkering in, finding a place in which to stand, given the flimsiness of the world, stable enough to launch what had begun to ache in him already, if only things would stay put long enough for him to play it. He saw the edge of the world start to raise up again and slapped it down, repeated: Not yet. More development wanted here, more motivic working through, a more comprehensive gathering of the tune's particulars and my own.

  Toward the end of the summer tour, when the music got going particularly well, the Bear would begin to leave this world: things would start to drift loose from their moorings, and as his heart opened he'd begin to vanish into ecstasy or vision, the immaterial air of higher worlds making its way through the intervening veil at the entrance of his heart: something he loved but from which he had turned aside because of a necessary focus on the music and because such ecstatic departures seemed a suspect, too-sweet indulgence. He

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  had also turned aside for love of Iris, since if he lost touch with the world of form he would in some sense lose her too. Now, having lost her, he felt the same. She was more meaningful to him
than any solo on the horn or visionary flight he might take on the moment's provisional wings. So he repeated his refusal to fly out of here. He would hold to these notes, he would hold to particulars still.

  He brought the next chorus up from the bottom of the horn in a dazzle of cross-accented sixteenths—paws working fast and brilliant, tongue turning out complexities of accent, wind unending—and reprised Trane's written near-triadic melody, butting against its limitations the way Trane himself used to those fettered nights he couldn't quite break through. That's what there is to play, he told himself. Stick to that. Hold to the known. See what it yields.

  On the other paw, it occurred to him, why does it take so much work to keep infinity out? And why should I bother? When have I ever lost anything by dying?

  The Bear stumbled over this dilemma for an instant and, hearing a certain hesitation in mid-chorus, an alert Bobby Hatwell scattered an inquisitive handful of notes across the keyboard. The Bear nodded yes: good question. Who am I really?

  He reviewed the chromatic possibilities he'd enumerated—a flying analysis of an audible rainbow, a detailing of intelligible lights—as if they might yield a clue, and it seemed to him that for all its apparent variety his solo was a smallbrained semihysterical run up and down the keyboard of known ideas in the hope that some unknown chrismal coupling of its numbers might somehow free him. This seemed neither essential nor very likely. The Bear wanted what he had always wanted: music that ate Hfe and death for breakfast and drank down time and space like morning coffee. It had seemed easy enough to him in cubhood, but he'd never really been good enough and by now he was older and had seen too much empirical detail. He had passed the point of believing that his life's transcendent meaning—assuming it still had one, which since the loss of Iris he frankly doubted—^would ever be revealed to him or very easily fulfilled; and in the absence of that falfillment, compensatory visions and ecstasies were nice enough entertainments in their way, but were bereft of final meaning or importance, a string of zeroes without a signifies After so much life and change, vision was just more exile. What could be hoped for from music, in these conditions?