“El conocimiento está en tu cuerpo” – Argentinian graffiti.
I am alone in Buenos Aires. I decide to go to a jazz club called the Thelonius Club. It is just beyond the Palermo district. There is a neighbourhood like Palermo in every city with enough young people with enough money. It has converted warehouses, cocktail bars with exposed brick and indoor plants, and thrift shops with espresso machines. The sun has set and my taxi is rushing through. I see a man with baggy trousers, an earring, and a faded baseball cap. He kisses his girlfriend, and then pulls back and gently smiles at her. They are beautiful. They look happy.
I arrive at the Thelonius Club. It is on a street lined with trees with small pale leaves and tender white trunks. The club is all grey concrete. During the day it would be unnoticeable. It is covered in graffiti, mostly just random tags, only sensical to the graffiti artists that roam those streets. It has a large wooden door, which is half agar and shows a warm red light inside.
I show my ticket and am led into the main room. A woman with a white shirt, faded loose jeans and dark hair pulled back greets me. “Hola, cómo estás,” she says
“Soy bueno,” I respond.
I smile back to her, and she leads me to my seat. She sits me at a table on the left-hand side, a few tables back from the stage. The club is a large rectangle. Down each side are small tables with room for two, while in the middle are larger tables with six or seven seats around them. It is about three quarters full.
In front of me is a young couple. The women’s hair is long, dark and shiny. The man is tall, and slouched back. When he is not leaning close to her to whisper something in her ear, she is reaching across and playing with the back of his brown messy hair. They don’t care that anyone else is there.
The larger tables are mostly men in suits. They sit at a distance to each other, ordering bottles of malbec. Their conversations are brief and they rush to refill their glasses as soon as they are empty. They are happy as the lights dim and the band steps out on stage. The band has a guitarist, a drummer and a pianist. The saxophonist is a woman in her forties. She’s skinny, athletic and upright, with curly hair and a flowery jacket. She steps up to the microphone, thanks the crowd for something and says a few things about Charlie Parker.
None of the band has music in front of them. The music exists only in the minds of each musician. Can they feel the music in its completeness. Or can they only imagine it in sequence, like when I have to recite the alphabet from the start to remember just where one letter is. Or is it just instinctual. Like how a juggler doesn’t need to envision exactly when each ball is going to leave his hand and the subsequent arc it will take. He just practices juggling until it is never forgotten.
I feel someone walking slowly up from behind. I look up to see the waitress. She pulls out the chair from next to me and gestures to a man to sit down. He’s older, maybe in his fifties, but still with thick red hair and a scruffy beard. He’s wearing a loose white linen shirt tucked into a pair of cream trousers, with brown leather shoes. He sits down next to me. I get a waft of cigars and aftershave.
The woman on stage looks across at the drummer and puts the saxophone to her mouth. The drummer lightly taps the cymbal with his wire brush, “tsss-tsss, tsss-tsss, tsss-tsss”, and then the saxophone starts to play. The noise fans out from the stage. The room sinks under a warm sheet of music. It muffles the murmuring of the crowd. The waitress continues to shuttle between tables, taking whispered orders and returning them to the bar.
I can feel the man next to me tapping his foot. He then leans closer to me, the smell of cigars intensifies. “Esta es una de sus últimas actuaciones,” he says.
I can’t speak Spanish. Only a combinations of “lo siento”, “gracias” and “cómo estás”. I always appear overly polite and apologetic. It’s insincere. I would rather be rude, passionate and provocative, but they don’t teach you how to do that in 4th grade Spanish. Only to grovel and leave everything undisturbed.
“Lo siento, no hablo español,” I say.
“Ah, how do I say,” he pauses for a moment. “This is her final performance,” he says. “You are lucky”.
We sit in silence. The pianist’s fingers run over the keyboard. The saxophonist turns to watch him play. A warm smile broadens her face, before she turns back to the crowd. She lifts the saxophone. Starting softly at first. She then picks up speed. The man next to me starts to tap his foot. The solo goes on. The girl in front intensifies the ruffling of her partner’s hair. The music gets faster. I then close my eyes and feel a tingling spread over my lips.
She finishes playing, and we fill the room with applause. The man next to me leans back. He stretches both his hands out, with palms flat on the table and relaxes his face.
She leans into the microphone. “Gracias, por una segunda oportunidad y gracias por Charlie Parker”.
I can’t say a word of Spanish but after a month travelling in South America, I can understand some. I knew she would be playing Parker, so I played an album before I came. A few hours earlier, I was lying on my bed in the Recoleta neighbourhood, with the window open, staring at the ceiling fan listening to ‘Summertime’.
I lean slightly towards the man next to me. “This is her second chance,” I enquire.
He glances at me and gives a small and sad smile. “Yes yes, it was my sister who gave,” he says.
I assume his sister must have helped her pay off some kind debt. “How did your sister know her,” I ask.
“She didn’t,” he responds.
The saxophonist starts playing again. This time in harmony with the guitarist, who is sitting on a speaker, with one leg bent and the other stretched out. They stare at each other as they play. The music skips along, like children arm in arm.
“I don’t understand,” I say.
Suddenly the music slows and then gently crashes. Like the slow motion breaking of ice. The shards are sucked into the water, before bobbing back up to the surface. She holds the final note.
He looks up at the saxophonist. “She used to, um, drink much after the shows.” He twists the ring on his little finger. The waitress comes to our table and I order a beer. He asks for a “fernet con coca” and a clean ashtray.
“One day, the phone rang,” he glanced up at the saxophonist. “She wanted to thank me for my sister”. The drinks arrive. He reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out a cigar, lights it and takes a short puff. “It was a surgery, um, how do you say? A transplant.”
The saxophonist leans over, picks up a towel and wipes the sweat from her brow. She looks over the crowd before settling her gaze on our table.
“She’s really good,” I say, feeling insufficient.
“Yes, and she’s alive,” he says.
She continues to play. I look around the room, all the eyes staring down on her. I think about this man’s sister. Who was she and where is she now? When someone dies where does everything that is them go? All her memories. The traumatising ones that are always present. And the unexpected ones that lie dormant just touching larger memories, waiting to be disturbed. I think of those that came to the surface just when she didn’t expect it but also those other reservoirs which will forever remain untouched.
There was no physical “her” in the first place. She emerged, was loved by her brother and died. “She” was just a person for a moment. Those atoms still exist but are now scattered and for some reason she is gone. But her brother is here, next to me, loving her.
“I am so sorry about your sister,” I say. “My grandmother also loved jazz, her favourite Parker song was Summertime”.
“Gracias, significa mucho para mi,” he responds.
I nod back.
I look from him up to the musicians on stage. I think of recording the performance. My first at The Thelonius and her last. But no one else is. So, I close my eyes, and listen to the music. The music which exists in the musicians’ siloed minds, and then for an incalculable moment, in that room in Buenos Aires.
Karl's life 