....

Dammit, if I could do it all over again, I'd be a jazz musician.  And I'd play the tenor saxophone in a small corner nightclub in downtown Manhattan, where outside the streetlamp pooled orange-yellow light onto the corner.  And I'd live in a small studio apartment above the club, where I'd sleep and read during the days.

And at night I'd come down and play with my band, just a stand-up bass and drummer.  And we'd improvise for hours at a time, stretching songs to their absolute limit and taking them just that one step further.  And I'd sip cognac at the bar between sets and thumb through the pages of the book I'd brought with me.  But I'd feel most at home up on stage, where the half-filled club would murmur in approval at what we played.  And the place would smell like freedom--cigarettes, booze and musk, the way a jazz club should.

And there would be a tall, slim woman in red sitting at the corner bar-stool every Friday night.  I would just miss her stares as my eyes flitted across the room as I played, and she'd never buy me a drink and I'd never buy her one, but our romance would be all unspoken between us.  And if I'd see her on the street during the daylight hours, she might recognize me but I'd never recognize her, the shadows suddenly gone from her face.

And we would never record--hell, never think of recording.  Because we barely make enough money there to live, much less think of putting anything down.  It would simply be something you had to see and feel live, because the studio could never capture it.

And once in a while some woman would sit in with us and sing Fever, or some other overplayed tune, and we'd bear with it and do what we could with it, because it's not about what you play, it about how you play it.

And there would be no cell phones or laptops in the place, because those things just don't belong.  We'd block all the signals so that you could do what you should do in a jazz club--get away from those things for a while and live.  There is no life in a cell phone or a laptop.  But there is life in jazz music.

There would be nothing to distract you from it, just as it should be.  There would be the rhythm, there would be the club, and there would be me and my B-flat, making the environment.

And we wouldn't be famous, not really, because that's not what that's about.  If you've heard of us, it's because your friend went there and saw it live, not because he heard it on the radio.  Or it would be because you stopped in one lonely night and found it there, live and in person, just for you, a culture that fit the mood, a bar built around the need for that Clean, Well-Lighted Place that Hemingway once wrote about.  It would be the kind of place you'd see an old Hemingway or Faulkner in, that you could have a drink with either of them, and talk fishing, or politics, or even something more meaningless than that.

And it would have to be jazz, because Jazz is musical freedom; musical anarchy.  It is a slap in the face to all the structure, all the reason, all the sense in music and in the world.  It would be taking all that order, and turning it on its head, turning it around and saying "Look, that's enough.  There is no more control here.  What once was ordered is now chaos and we get to do it all over again."

And if I could do it all over again, I'd be a jazz musician.  And I'd play the tenor saxophone...