Bass Trombone

Bass Trombone

by James Oliver Smith, Jr

 

—Opening Reflection—

tunnels, blood, caverns

rhythm

the sound of a bass trombone

things hidden that pulse

like cicadas on an August afternoon

—Opening Question: "Where are you from?"—

"Everywhere," I say, "in my first seventeen years I lived in thirty houses across five states: Texas, Arizona, Colorado, California and Washington." I tick the names off as I drum my fingertips against my thumb, a rhythm rising to slay the fog of a life flowing across the deserts of the American west, like blood spilling from the open wounds of cadavers.

I recite this like a mantra flowing from a damaged brain stuck in an algorithmic infinite loop.

—I - Commerce City, Colorado 1961—

I discover tunnels for the first time, dug in an open lot and shared with savages called ten-year-olds. I am hidden in the darkness of channels flowing beneath prairie grass and elm trees. It is the discovery of human flesh and the warmth of others in close quarters, mixed with the scent of earth and grubs. It is an escape from an invisible family where the father works multiple jobs to hide from the mother who works to build multiple churches to escape the guilt of being flesh.

I pick up my first trombone in music class, so nervous with the contact of something so cold to the touch, so lonely by itself, without life until played, molded to the warmth and personality of an artist, a musician, a performer. I am embarrassed. I can only giggle helplessly.

—II - Poteet, Texas 1965—

There is an open lot next door, up to my waist with alfalfa, bluebonnets and prairie verbena. I create tunnels by crawling into the thick floral mass, seeking the closeness of chlorophyll and blossoms beneath a cloud of bees and butterflies. Moisture beads up on my skin. Blades of grass draw stinging blood to air and salt. Each day there are new corridors of green, red and fluttery.

The band director presses a bass trombone into my arms. I cradle it warmly. The slide moves smooth and soft like tunnels in grass, corridors in the earth. There is the sensuality of a living presence that I must expand and contract with each breath, guiding the instrument in space and melody. No other instrument requires such physical awareness. You cannot play the bass trombone without the eyes and body working in concert to guide the flow of brass tubes between other bodies, music stands and chairs. The instrument itself changes shape, size and expression of music. It traverses air, melody and space, like blood within the body. The musician and instrument becomes an undulating beast that needs the musician's full physical, intellectual and visual presence to coexist in the world.

—III - Boston, Massachusetts 1969—

My eyes take in the motion of trains in tunnels at three levels: the green, the blue, the orange. Every direction beckons, including the future. My blood races to the rhythm of youth, hope and Berklee School of Music. I see Hollywood studios, Frank Sinatra and Quincy Jones, and I smell the humid breath of air forced ahead of trains as they whisk me away in veins of stone and steel.

I slowly, cautiously climb the steps of my apartment on Fayette St and stare into an open door and an empty room. My eyes gaze at the space once occupied by the bass trombone. I've never seen so clearly. From that moment the tunnels become obscure, dark and sad.

A salesman presses a bass trombone into my arms. I receive it, but the trains have taken me to explore new tunnels. Old channels become blocked, like clotted veins. The bass trombone lies silent in its velvet case.

—IV - Minneapolis 2001 – Passing On—

I press my bass trombone into the arms of a high school band director from Luck, Wisconsin. It is welcomed warmly. My eyes, ravaged by glaucoma have taken away my ability to provide all that the bass trombone needs.

A new path...

—V - Minneapolis 2002-University of Minnesota—

...leads to the tunnels beneath the university.

As an employee and student, the tunnels become an easy way to move from one building to another. For some, they are a luxury to be used during the coldest days or when they want an espresso or a sandwich, but there is a living pulse within these veins, these channels that move people to their classrooms to be feed knowledge or dining rooms for nourishment. They exist throughout: West bank (of the Mississippi river), East Bank and St. Paul, between them there are surface buses that move people—students, faculty, staff—like blood cells within arteries and veins, where they are disgorged into tunnels beneath and between buildings, capillaries where they are distributed to classrooms, labs and offices.

The similarities between my relationship with tunnels, breath, music, the bass trombone and the physically intimate connections between time, space and body have led me to think of cities and music as living creatures with a circulatory system like the body. Even more so with the discovery that I inherited a trait that causes my blood to clot aggressively, forcing veins to create new tunnels, new channels, new paths around the blocked passages. This presents an interesting conflict between my desire for the directed, structure of tunnels, as a liberation for the nomadic life of my youth in the seemingly infinite spaces of the American west, and the risk of blockage one is subject to when one lives in the tunnels and canyons of cities. This is why I am driven to understand more about these systems. I constantly take advantage of opportunities to discover new routes, just as I once explored new combinations of paths within the intricate tubes of the base trombone: combinations of triggers and slides, infinitely variable, on the fly, using ears and fingers to adjust slightly to the needs of harmony.

Knowing these tunnels well helps me feel safer, where I can avoid the obstacles that make life in a vision impaired world perilous at ground level. This knowledge is as vital to me as blood flowing freely through my body.

But the theft in Boston of my first bass trombone, the glaucoma that is stealing my sight and my thrombosis are all closing in upon my sense of space and expression. I passed the bass trombone on, along with the dream and intimacy of the connection between that horn and my body. I think that I buried the sensation, but...

—VI - Minneapolis 2009 - A curiosity Ferguson Hall—

...my doctor's office is just a couple of blocks away from the West Bank . I need to schedule blood tests every couple of weeks to make sure the blood thinners are working, and I do this over the noon hour, taking the shuttle from St Paul, through the East Bank, across the Mississippi, ending up on the West Bank.

This is where my curiosity intensifies. Ferguson Hall is on the west bank. I walk by it on my way to the doctor's office and I become aware it is the home of the School of Music. I'm drawn to the images of students entering and leaving with their instruments. I feel that there must be a branch of the tunnel system weaving itself beneath Ferguson Hall, but I don't know that part of the system because I am always trying to get somewhere on a tight schedule. I rarely feel free enough to explore. I am also puzzled by the apparent size of the building as seen from ground level. It doesn't seem large enough for a university of this size; there are never many students going through the ground level doors. I start to feel the vibrating presence of a living musical beast that I just couldn't see, but it was there. The feeling is intense and familiar. I am uncomfortable because I feel that the passing of the bass trombone means the passing of the feeling enveloping me whenever my hands, shoulder, lips and breath thread with the tubes of that horn. I feel that all I have left are tunnels that now serve as a safe refuge for my eyes, that no longer perceive the three dimensional space of the outside world with any confidence.

It has been years since I have felt the presence of this creature that I am when I meld with the bass trombone.

—VII - Minneapolis 2009 = One particularly stormy day—

On one particularly stormy day I forget to wear my raincoat, and my one remaining, functional eye is having difficulty with the outside world of wind, precipitation and fogged shadows, I map out, in my mind, the tunnels I know and realize there is one that goes beyond familiar corridors. It is obvious that the time has come to push further into the maze and see if I can surface somewhere closer to the doctor's office.

I step down from the campus shuttle with an intense determination, entering Blegen Hall briskly behind my walking stick that I use to lance the handicap button and slip in. Passing posters for student activities and foreign exchange opportunities in geography and African studies, I make my way to the intersection of tunnels between the Wilson Library, the Social Sciences tower and Blegen Hall. This is the frontier of my West Bank tunnel knowledge. To go beyond is new, but I venture in and realize that it continues on to Anderson Hall, where political science reigns. A new building enters my tunnel lore. Encouraged, I step through a set of double doors opening into a foyer with and entrance onto a wooded walk high on the west bank of the Mississippi. I linger momentarily to orient myself and look toward a second double doorway.

I take a deep breath, surprisingly apprehensive, almost frightened. Why is it so difficult to approach those doors? Is just the discomfort of an unknown passage, or a fear of how I will feel in the presence of that beast. The beast of sensation, of tubes and flesh; fear of what I think is no longer mine?

On the other side of these doors is a long, curved, bluish-white-lined hallway leading directly into the long-thought-of Fergusan Hall and the world of Music, a world once so key to what I once considered my future, but the past forty years had unfolded in ways that I would not have imagined. I haven't thought about music in any substantive way for years. It is no longer mine. I have no right to be here. I am tempted to turn around and retrace my steps. I know the way on the surface. Time is running short. My blood waits. I just want to make sure my blood flows freely. But my body...

—VIII - Minneapolis 2009 -Ferguson Hall—

I enter Ferguson Hall through the doors at the end of the curved passageway. A cacophony of sound greets me: the sound within a universe of music in the making, an incubator for harmony, the vibration of a presence that seeps deeply within my body and traverses my veins.—I REALIZE I AM IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST ITSELF!— Blood cells invigorate bones to the marrow and burrow deeply into the primal depths of the abdomen, the breast. Rhythm manifests itself in arms, legs, hands and feet. Even my head responds harmoniously to the rest of the body entranced by a song, an operatic aria or an inspiring instrumental solo.

A kaleidoscope of images floods my mind and body: busses, trains and sidewalks. Bodies in sync with music, rippling with undulating intensity—ear phones, IPods, radios, cell phones and even Kindles—even the ever-present zeal of panhandling minstrels riffing on bongos, emoting sonorously on a tarnished saxophone or just clapping hands in accompaniment to a tune expressed a cappella.

—VIII - Minneapolis 2009 - The Beast—

The thumb of my left hand grows rigid. It presses against the side of its neighboring index finger, seeking triggers that control the F and E attachments of the bass trombone it manipulated for over forty years before my eyesight brought about a reality I found difficult to accept: that the intimate force of brass tubing warming to the side of my neck, the odor of slide oil and the pulsation of rhythms, harmony and melodies from the depths of that horn would all have to fall by the wayside. All of my body—fingers, arms, legs, lips, torso, and toes—remember the slick, lacquered surface of a well strewn glissando and the humid rasp of breath streaming into a mouthpiece, subtly bubbling with the dripping spike of staccato sixteenths and mellow, held fermatas.

Calluses seem to well up at the points where my hands cradled and swayed with the bass trombone perched on the shoulder like the bazooka I saw in my dad's army picture book from the early fifties. The bazooka was my dad's weapon. That was how I saw the bass trombone: the workhorse of the orchestra's heavy artillery. No instrument can deliver a musical payload quite like this instrument. It rattles the walls and shreds the serene, mellow phrases of the all-too-nice and suave tubas and baritones. They have no teeth. The trumpets are too majestic and the tenor trombones too romantic—no guts, no attitude, no bitter aftertaste. When there is a need to send a shiver up the spine of spectator, you call in the bad boys with their base trombones and tell them to "lay it down dirty," plant a big stinking mess right there in the middle of the freshly cut meadow and watch the flower children scatter like day-old fawns at the first crack of hunter's rifles.

More melodies than I can easily follow envelope me as I walk through the tunnels beneath Ferguson Hall. Rehearsal rooms lined the corridor, each with one or more occupants busily taking advantage of the reserved in which they push their technical and interpretive musical skills. Everyone in that place is there for the same reason: to fill the space around them with the expression of sensation, the physical manifestation of creative energy. As a performer, one is never totally satisfied with listening.

The body of a performer wants to be a part of the performance, wants to experience the fusion of its own efforts with others, wants everything to become one. That is the state I find myself in: pulled back through the years —back to the Commerce City, to Poteet, to Boston.

There is an intimacy to that first, tenuous step towards something so demanding, like the first affectionate touch, the first hug, the first kiss, the first caress; the body as an instrument; a thing to be played; an instrument wanting to be one with an artist. It is not done casually. A person doesn't just pick up an instrument and carry it around for decoration. It calls the artist, demands that the artist create something. It demands that a person decide between playing it, or leaving it alone. Those who respond are never the same again.

Each student in those practice rooms lined up on either side of the tunnels, are performers. They have picked up some instrument and decided to unify, fuse and integrate with it; to become an integral part of its existence and a part of all who hear the two of them together.

I can recognize every instrument in that place of intermingled creative forces. It is as though I am sitting next the person playing, sensing the warmth of a body completely taken over by the act of forming this mixture of body, physics and creativity we call music.

Students congregate next to their assigned doors, instruments to their side on the floor, or leaning against the wall, or cradled in their arms, or suspended from fingers anxious to integrate with metal, plastic, wood or hide; infiltrating the air; settling beneath the skins of listeners and performers making one of all. Even the walls echo with the bleeding bars of percussive sting and vocal flare. They drip through plate glass apertures and doorframes. Toes swagger and twist with nervous anticipation. I watch youth inflame itself with confidence and glare: Oboes, flutes, guitars and keyboards—electric, acoustic, digital. They yield to seeking, expressive fingers. Faces contort with the rich, exposed vein of expression: furrowed brows, pursed lips, locks of hair bobbing within a soft, silent counterpoint. Bach, Holst, the Duke and Gershwin find the intersecting hallway and coalesce, oblivious to the practitioners inside their acoustically isolated chambers—ensembles, solos, duets, scales, concertos, arias...

My body wants to consume it all, breathe in the sweaty presence of freshly labored articulation. My fingers want to channel air through throttled brass arteries and a syrup seasoned slide. My ears want to ring with the glinted intensity of a bell under the influence of adrenaline. Through pools and eddies of instrumental glee I seek the voice of the one instrument that calls me. I can ferret out its sound from within a sea of distractions. It’s the dark and serrated glint of a bass trombone—my blood carries that presence through capillaries fully dilated with the rush ecstasy.

How long has it been since that day when I collapsed into the resignation of the inevitable? The horn was going to have to move on. I couldn't see the charts well enough anymore to experience the pleasure of transferring the written page into the vessel of body and instrument together. It was going to have to go even after thirty years of filling a dark chasm of hope, expectation and physicality, connecting me to that young man who performed in stage bands and transcribed, arranged and composed music. I, myself, was forced to decide between playing the horn or leaving it alone. I was no longer capable of playing it so I needed to let it go. I needed to allow it to be filled with someone else's breath, to be held by another set of fingers, to rest upon another person's neck.

That horn had been the cardiovascular link between that youth who looked ahead and saw something that I was not able to deliver. The cycle has become short circuited. Fifty years have slipped by and that creative spark that once leapt from the embrace with a bass trombone was snuffed out by the frustrations inherent to a body slipping away, in contrast to the youth I find myself suddenly surrounded by in the tunnels beneath Ferguson Hall.

I thought that part of me that fused with the personality of that horn was gone, that the blood had somehow been drained from all the veins, that the blood clots had indeed invaded and stopped all sensation. But seeing those young men and women with their own dreams billowing from their lungs, reeds and tubing, leaping from their fingers into strands of steel, gut, nylon and stretched skin remind me that within this body, my body, the body that has fused with bass trombones over the course of close to fifty years still flows in the blood that resonates with the spiritual mechanics and substance of those F and E attachments. It knows the exact level of breath needed to hit that low C below the bass clef with confidence and joy and time the crescendo to peak at exactly that moment when no orchestra of any size can hold back the pitch-black jagged tone that demands to have the last resonating stamp of a climactic chord, or control over the bottom of the darkest chasm of Dante's Inferno. No other instrument possesses the gritty rattle of a hungry dog or the dark romantic edge worthy of crooning in the velvet musk of a ballad sung by Satchmo or the Chairman of the Board.

—IX - Minneapolis 2009 - The Beast—

I smile as I step through the tunnel, allowing the youth and energy to wash over me, promising myself that this will be the route I take, rain or shine when my blood is checked, for I now realize, that with or without vision, for as long as the blood flows within my body, from heart to arteries, to capillaries and back through veins, that horn, and the music it formed with me will always flow forth from capillaries like the tunnel beneath Ferguson Hall, into, and through, and over all that flows with it.

—Final Reflection —

Tunnels in earth

the odor of flesh and grubs

stinging blood in air and salt

new corridors of green, red and fluttery

 

Reviews

[Larrycall]

amazing