When the server shows me to my table, I ask her in my signature apologetic way if I can be seated at a table with a closer view of the stage. I am related to two of the performers, I tell her. My husband, a trumpet player, will be playing live music at a music club with a jazz quartet and for one night only, my son, Ben, will sit in with the group on guitar. I settle in my chair and wait for the lights to go up.
Seeing the two of them on stage together virtually overloads my senses. It takes every ounce of self-control not to stand up and wave to them, then turn to the audience to make sure they all see that I know them both. Imagining this embarrassing scene in my mind makes me giggle. I was put on this earth to mortify my children, no matter how old they are.
Our son Ben was born with something innately musical about him. Sure, my husband is a musician and career music educator, but Ben seemed to emerge from the womb with music already soaked into his DNA. It was his first language. Before he could walk, he strummed guitar strings. Before he spoke actual words, he scatted to songs in his own language.
Memories of Ben as a child are punctuated with music recitals, French horn lessons, Saturday evening jam sessions at the local homeless shelter, a lemonade stand featuring blues music, and rehearsals at our house for school talent shows. Most evenings after dinner, I was serenaded by his playing and singing while I puttered in the kitchen. Ben’s brothers and sister are musical too, of course — it runs in the family — but Ben played music as if it were totally involuntary. To him, it was as necessary as breathing. As he grew, his collection of guitars, amps, distortion pedals, microphones, and cords grew with him.
I didn’t properly savor the evening jam sessions in my living room with Ben and his dad, because I thought they would last forever. But kids grow up, and when Ben moved out to his own adult apartment, the absence of the living room sessions was noticeable.
My husband thinks Ben has listened to a lifetime of all his favorite music, processed it, then fused it together into his own style that has resulted in our all-favorite music on steroids. When Ben plays and sings, we hear unmistakable notes of Chet Baker, Paul Simon, the Beatles, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, Stevie Wonder, and Led Zeppelin, deconstructed then reconfigured through the filter of our kid, as he adds a dash of his own younger sensibility to it.
During the gig, I can see my husband glitching a little, stopping for a few seconds too long to look over at his son and marvel at the fact that they are sharing a stage. I want to film it all, but I also want to be present and witness this moment. By the end of the night, I have only recorded a few minutes. I’ve merely half-listened when people stop at my table to talk. When someone’s booming voice echoes from the back, it takes all my self-control not to leap up and shush them. This is a moment I want to douse in amber, to preserve for the ages. But I know better, that live music refuses to be captured. Recording devices can reproduce the sound for a later date, but it can’t capture the way the lights feel, or the way I see the couple in the booth nodding their heads to the music. It won’t pick up on the sound the audience makes when they recognize a favorite jazz tune, or the soft sound of voices when my son sings “Norwegian Wood.” Live music echoes the past, but it is disorienting because it refuses to stay still or remain the same. We experience time all at once and it makes us feel eternal.
I want to know when the next gig will be, but there are no guarantees. All I can do is stuff some bills into the tip jar, close my eyes, and wish for one more tune.
