[pullquote]So there was the first of those vile truths, settling into a corner of reality like a spinning top in thick sand: even a spiritual voyage attracts hitchhikers, adorable moochers [/pullquote]So there was the first of those vile truths, settling into a corner of reality like a spinning top in thick sand: even a spiritual voyage attracts hitchhikers, adorable moochers unconcerned with the immensity – or dangers – of what is about to go down.[/pullquote]A confession: I am newly initiated into this strange world.
Last month on a cloudy Friday evening, following an escape into the tedium of late-night Newtown, a sudden confluence of truths washed over me, nearly sending me over the edge. Over the edge into full-blown delirium, the kind of delirium perhaps last felt at a previous, primordial birthing.
It was useless searching the face of the short man at the door, wielding a clipboard of all things, for any sort of sign that he understood my situation.
He might as well have been an eyeless mute. The man’s sole interest was confirming whether or not the R50 admission he was kindly demanding would materialise from my pockets (actually R100 if you count the disinterest shown in this transaction by the “date” beside me).
So there was the first of those vile truths, settling into a corner of reality like a spinning top in thick sand: even a spiritual voyage attracts hitchhikers, adorable moochers unconcerned with the immensity – or dangers – of what is about to go down.[pullquote align=”right”]Had I entered the pitch black, virtual space of improvised identity? Dizzy with panic, I shuffled desperately to the bar hoping a cold beer would wash away the bile taste of nausea in my mouth[/pullquote][
The hapless doorman too was obviously unaware of the supernatural activity in the air that night, the midwives of which were getting busy on the stage behind him. Money received, that soulless beast formally swatted away all inquiries with a gurgling sound from his face area.
Inside the aptly named Nikki’s Oasis a tall man dressed in all black held up a gleaming trumpet to the light and exhaled a bewitching sound through it. This made me feel light-headed and nervy, suddenly over aware of the fleeting nature of wonder.
Had I entered the pitch black, virtual space of improvised identity? Dizzy with panic, I shuffled desperately to the bar hoping a cold beer would wash away the bile taste of nausea in my mouth. Feya Faku blew one last note. Then Andile Yenana threw himself into a piano-solo that only quickened my existential breakdown.
“Once, he heard the Feya Faku Quintet play live”, I thought to myself, “that would do nicely as epitaph on my cracked headstone.” I was certain a clean break had been made with a dreary past devoid of joy and wonder. I was soaked in these revelations, and quickly damned-up these miracle waters within myself by refusing to speak throughout the quintet’s set.
But then I tried to explain the experience. First, to that half-dead doorman of earlier. He responded only in cheerless grunts.
Then to my hitch-hiking companion, who was only interested in explaining herself, but failing like I knew I never would.
My experience of the city at that exact moment and the feeling of the music were, and still are, untranslatable.
Charlie Parker biographer Ian Penman describes speaking about the effect of music via the “algebraic lingo of jazz theory about as clarifying as a book of algorithms baked in mud”. It’s too late to sign up for a music degree anyway.
