“If jazz ain’t about hope and love, what is?”   - Branford Marsalis

It’s Christmas Eve, and I’m standing outside Birdland - the original Birdland at Broadway and 52nd.   I remind myself that it was torn down decades ago, that I must be in the midst of some Capra-esque fantasy, but there it is, shining like light cascading off a brass sax:  Birdland. It’s so real I can smell the mingling of Lucky Strikes and Jack Daniels already invading my clothes.

The front door is shackled shut by a rusty chain and padlock.  Undeterred, I creep cautiously around the corner to a side door, marked “Deliveries Only”.  Seeing it is narrowly wedged open by a rolled up newspaper, I peek in, surveying a back hallway, scantly lit and seemingly vacant.  Still convinced this must be slumber’s sweetest mirage, I am compelled to enter - little to lose, and so much to gain.

I inch down the hall, following a growing trail of men’s laughter and the exhalation of broken scales, notes abandoned at birth.  I find that the source of these sounds is a green room, a backstage lounge area where musicians gather to relax or warm up before a gig.  This, however, was no ordinary green room.  I peer around the doorframe, fully expecting to spot a cluster of strangers, a nameless ensemble chilling before their opening set.   Instead, I find myself amid an assemblage of bygone genius.

Standing not ten feet away from me is Dizzy Gillespie, engaged in a cuttin’ contest with Clifford Brown.  In a folding chair by the far wall, Thelonius Monk stares off into space, his lips moving gently to the melody he must be creating in his head.  Miles Davis has his finest threads on, and is gazing hard at himself in the mirror, a proud black prince admiring his royal garments.

Bud Powell is egging Charlie Mingus on, trying to get the beefy bassist to don a Santa suit for the show.  Mingus’ riposte is neither jolly nor genteel.  In the most remote corner of the room, behind a tray piled high with plates of half-eaten shrimp cocktail and cheeses, is a young Chet Baker.  His eyes shine with the brightness of a man free from demons, and hungry for another dance with his muse.

Slackjawed, I step into the room, eager to have an audience with these legendary musicians.  My presence is immediately felt as I cross the threshold.  Before I can utter a solitary accolade, Dexter Gordon calls me out.  “There you are…knew you’d make it.”

“’bout damn time,” mutters Miles in his trademark whisper, a slight smile revealing gentle intent.

What are these men talking about, I wonder.  A chill runs through my body as I fear the worst:  They think I’m here to sit in!  That I can’t play a note, save a few folksy guitar chords, is something I must bring to their attention, quickly.  But my tongue, now feeling gravity’s pull, squares firmly into a knot of nerves.  I stand before the giants of jazz, and I am a drooling idiot.

Swooping in to save me from the hallway, every bit as gentlemanly you would expect, is Duke Ellington, who tugs my elbow and leads me down the hall.  Little can shock me now, so I surpass the formalities and adulation.  “Duke…what the hell am I…”

He cuts me off, “Bird will explain.”  He guides me past a second room, where the ladies of the blues – Billie, Ella, Sarah – are comparing shoes and stories of broken hearts.  I freeze as we pass their doorway, gawking at their grace.  “We’ll catch them later,
I promise,” reassures Duke, who is now pulling me with the eager abandon of a child heading downstairs on Christmas morning.

Duke stops just short of the main room, leaving me in a tiny backstage area, with instructions to ‘stay put’.  Naturally, I agree, but the sounds of the main hall begin to tug at my ears.  Is that Bill Evans on piano out there?  Before I can peer around the curtain, I feel a presence come up on me.  I turn and find myself eye to eye with Charlie Parker.  The Yardbird.  The reason there is a Birdland, the reason there is so much that is beautiful in jazz.

“You’re here,” he smirks.

I can keep my ebullience in check no longer.  “You’re Charlie Parker!” I exclaim.
He knows this already, and tells me as much.

“Yes, I am.  And you’re here to make sure people know about this.”

“About what?”

“You saw the green room, right?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I smile, awaiting an explanation for these apparitions, these specters of song.

“Well, this is a one-night-only kind of gig.  We all came down for it,” says Bird, rolling up the sleeve of his button-down tuxedo shirt.

I start to ask what he means, but am distracted as his sleeve makes it above the crease of his elbow.  Anyone who knows anything about Charlie Parker knows that his inner arm must look like a tattered road map from punctuated veins and needle tracks, the Devil’s fangs that filled his blood with venom.

But Bird’s arm is as smooth as a newborn’s.  No marks, no evidence of his poisonous self-destruction.

Bird grins as he realizes my examination of his arm.  “I’m clean.  Clean as new fallen snow,” he swears.  “Now, I want you to go have a seat out there,” he points through the curtain to the main room.  “You gotta get down on paper all the shit that’s going down here tonight.”

“Why?” I ask.

“’cause nobody would believe it.  Probably still won’t,” he chuckles.  “But you can tell ‘em you saw it with your own eyes.  Paint ‘em a picture.  Make it feel real.  That’s what’s important.  Now, get your white ass out there, kid, you’re holding up my set.”

That gets me moving. Nobody, nobody stands between Bird and his music.  Whatever my purpose, whatever my calling here is in this fantastic netherworld, I’ll find out soon enough.  Right now, I’m about to witness the most amazing set in the history of jazz.

I wander into the main room, and squint to avert the glow of stage lights, which focus directly on Bill Evans, performing a solo piano version of “Stella by Starlight”, accentuated by a playful coda of “Santa Claus is Coming To Town”.  The house is packed, but I can only make out the shapes of shoulders and heads, the starkness denying me clarity of faces.  I grab the only seat I can find, a one-top by a column in the corner; secluded, but with an enviable view.  Perched from my high seat, my Bird’s nest if you will, I am able to see the stage as if I was seated upon it.

A shy Evans finishes his number and gives the audience a kind, meager wave as he exits. Seconds later Bird ambles onstage and speaks.  “It’s Christmas Eve, friends.  I know this whole scene is still new to you folks, but you’re here tonight because the Big Man said some spirits needed raising, that some souls needed refilling.  We’re gonna take care of all that for you the best way we know how.”

I am puzzled, but before I can assess his message, the stage is filled with an ensemble of performers only the most fertile of imaginations could conjure.  Bird on alto sax, Dexter on tenor sax, Mingus on bass, Bud and Monk side by side at the piano, Miles, Diz, Chet, and Clifford on trumpets, and the sure-handed professor, Art Blakey on drums.  It is a metaphysical menagerie, a jam session only God Himself could’ve pulled off.

Miles counts them off in a whisper.  On four, they burst into Monk’s “Round Midnight” with the unbridled fury of feral steeds.  They pass choruses back and forth, fingers like dry lightning, eyes stony steel.  Yet, amid this rampage of sound, there is joy, perhaps more joy than these men of jazz were ever known for revealing onstage in their day.  Miles is playing to the crowd, Bird and Diz are sharing musical jokes in their choruses, truly the other half of each other’s heartbeat.  And Mingus, grouchy old Charles Mingus, has acquiesced and is slapping his mammoth bass with a Santa hat perched atop his wiry mane.

“Round Midnight” fades into  “Confirmation”, followed by the light blue fire of “So What”, and the chiseled beauty of “Straight, No Chaser”.  “Autumn Leaves” bleeds into a bluesy “Winter Wonderland”.  Bird shares licks with Diz and Dexter on “White Christmas” before Dexter’s warm tone embraces “The Christmas Song”.  Mingus takes us to church with “Better Git It In Yo’ Soul”, and Chet wraps his gossamer wings around “Everything Happens to Me”.  Then more surprises unfold.

 Billie, Sarah, and Ella share the stage; a triumvirate of harmonies, unified by gin soaked throats that have tasted love’s sweetened honey and heartache.  Then, as Sarah takes a turn on “Body and Soul”, Coleman Hawkins ambles onstage to take a sax solo.  Chills dance on spines as Ella belts “Good Morning Blues”.  Then, in a moment that aches with private history, Lester Young appears by Billie’s side and, laying down his carried torch, kindly holds her hand as she sings “My Man”.
 
 
 
 

The set lasts some four hours, a blur of genius hurled upon a bittersweet canvas, each note hanging in the air just long enough to leave its nectar.  With midnight only minutes away, Bird says he has saved the best for last.  Everyone in the house, jazz aficionados and new converts alike, gasps with the joy of recognition, as a familiar, worn face shines through the backstage curtain.  It is Pops.  Louis Armstrong.

The crowd rises as one, and holds its collective breath.  He says nothing, merely smiling that ever-present grin, and counts off.  As the familiar notes begin, I am jolted by the irony of his psalm.  It is “What a Wonderful World”, a song that in recent times has seemed sadly unbefitting.  We are, after all, a people who have found ourselves suddenly bound by fear and uncertainty.  The lyrics hearken back to an innocence we did not recognize belonged to us. How could anyone now hear this song and not absolutely implode from emotion?  Will a single eye be dry?

Pops sings it with the grace of a poet, and as his gravelly foghorn fills the room with the final chorus, the house lights slowly rise.  Darkness lifts, and I see, for the first time, my fellow patrons.  These are faces filled with light, with the calm sense of a peace I’ve never known.  These are the souls of the departed, our fallen at rest.  And they are home.

As the mighty Satchmo holds his final note for a gentle eternity, the audience breaks me from my stare with fulminating applause for the men and women who have shared their musical mercy this night.

Then, as quickly as the song ends, the patrons are gone.  The house, only moments before alive with warm spirits, is empty.  The musicians clamor back to the green room, but as I make my way to follow, I am stopped at the backstage curtain.

“Sorry…you can’t go back there,” says Bird.

“But, I want to talk to them, find out what they have to say!”

“You just heard what they have to say, now go tell it,” says Bird, his face harder than before.

“Yes, yes…of course, I just…” I clamor to ask one more question before being sent away.

“What is it?  You know who we are, and you know who these people were here tonight.  Those they left behind need to know you saw their faces…their shining, peaceful faces.”

I turn, committed to the notion that I’ve been given a gift this night, and must piece the puzzle together from here.  But there is still one question burning in my throat, one query that should be meaningless given the scope of this evening’s wonders.  Still, I have to ask.

“Bird,” I holler, as he is closing the curtain.  “There’s one thing I don’t get. It’s just…um...why isn’t Trane here?”

“Good, kid.  Very good.  I guess there is one more thing you should know…”

Bird hollers to the musicians waiting in the back.  “You guys wait up.  I’ll be back.”

“Come with me, kid,” Bird smiles as he tilts his head indicating passage via the chained front door.  Then, he walks through the door as if he were mere smoke.  I stand, staring at the solid steel barrier for a moment, then, assessing the events of the evening thus far, take a leap of faith that will either result in gaseous travel through a ghostly byway, or a broken nose.

My faith rewards itself, and I find myself on the darkened corner of 52nd and Broadway, the Father of Be-bop by my side.

“Grab my coattail, kid, and don’t let go,” directs Bird.  With that, we take flight, putting to rest the origins of his nickname.  That I am riding Charlie Parker’s coattails, too, strikes me as funny.  So many have. But as New York shrinks beneath us on our ascent, I am too humbled to joke.

Moments later, after a fleeting ride over Union Square and the Village, Bird’s and my feet come to rest on the snowy sidewalk of Lower Manhattan’s financial district.  The streets bustle, not with last minute shoppers, but with rescue workers, still vigilantly clearing away the rubble of ruins that shook the mighty city, and all of us, just three months earlier.

The snowfall is gentle, and rather than impeding their progress, it seems to inspire, each of the flakes kindly hugging the tired shoulders of workers as they dance down from heaven.

“Man, it’s almost Christmas morning.  What keeps these people going?” I ask.

Bird grins as wide as I have ever seen a man smile.  He points across the street, nodding affirmation.

There, under the serene glow of a single streetlight, wrapped in the merest of coats, is the gentle giant of jazz: John Coltrane.  Trane breathes into his saxophone, releasing a rhapsody so sweet, the air around us seems to tingle with energy…with assurance.  With a love supreme.

Men and women in blue uniforms walk within a few feet of the mighty master, seemingly oblivious to his presence.  Some practically brush against him, their arms loaded down with debris.  He is impermeable.

“Do they…know he’s there?” I ask.

“Yes,” assures Bird.

“But they seem to be wa…”

“I didn’t say they could see him.  I said they know he’s there,” Bird replies.

“So, while you guys were delivering the love, Trane was out here…”

Bird finishes my thought, “with the hope.”

We turn and watch Coltrane, as the clock strikes midnight, lifting the burdens off the street’s sorrowful shoulders, sending the opening strains of “My Favorite Things” into the
Manhattan night.

I’d love to tell you that I shook John’s hand.  I did not.  Or that he took a break from weaving his healing tapestry to chat with the likes of me.  He did not.  What happened next was anti-climatic, to say the least.  I awaken, curled tightly in the embrace of a down comforter, my wife’s and son’s fingers unconsciously draped down my arm as they slept.  I untangle my bare feet from the confines of layered wool blankets, slide them into the familiar warmth of worn brown slippers, and crawl to the kitchen for a pre-dawn dose of coffee.  I ask myself, “Was it really just a dream?”

No. This was no dream.  This was real.  I was there.  I heard the groove and swing of that glorious night, and I saw those who have moved on.  I tasted the bittersweet nightclub air and the cold mix of snow and ashes on the street.  I watched mighty legends, whose offstage dances with demons rivaled their own legacies as musical giants, become their own better angels in a single act of grace.

I saw love.  I heard hope.  Both are as alive as the warm grooves that permeate the air every time music is voiced.  In a world riddled with uncertainty and fear, we struggle against unseen gusts as we round each corner.  But still, those notes play, and when we hear them, we find strength, assurance, and just enough peace to wrap our fingers around for another day.

I feel my chest warm, only to realize I haven’t even begun to drink my coffee. The kitchen window leaks in a glint of sunlight, and I lift it gently to welcome dawn’s chill.  When I do, I am greeted by the sound of a solitary bird.  He’s playing a song this morning.

It’s a song of hope.