Look at them.
Four guys in suits that probably cost less than your cell phone bill, standing under studio lights in grainy black and white… they look like insurance adjusters. Like men who file their taxes early. Joe Morello starts that shuffle on the cymbal, Brubeck drops that chord on the piano and something cracks… you realize you’ve been had. These squares are about to take you somewhere you didn’t agree to go.
Five beats to the bar. FIVE. An extra beat hanging off the end like a loose thread. The insane thing, the thing that should get somebody arrested, is that it swings. It doesn’t limp. It struts. You stop counting by the second bar because your spine and skin have already signed the contract.
Then there’s Paul Desmond. Fuck me, Paul Desmond. He’s standing there with the alto like he’s waiting for a bus, bastard barely moves, face of a guy mentally working out a crossword, in ink, and out of the horn comes the most unbothered, clear, cool sound anyone ever pulled out of brass. No sweat. No screaming. Every other sax player in that era was out there bleeding on the bandstand, tearing the reed in half to prove he meant it. Desmond plays like he already knows he’s right and doesn’t give a shit if you agree. That’s more punk than half the records in my Spotify library.
Eugene Wright is the guy nobody writes about, and somebody should write poems about him … So here’s a lame one:
He holds the whole damn thing up.
That bass line goes around and around
like a ceiling fan in a room
where something bad is about to happen,
and he never blinks,
never wanders, never shows off.
He is the floor.
Everybody else gets to fly
because
Eugene decided to be the ground.
And then Morello takes the solo, and the room changes. He’s playing in five and messing with it at the same time: stretching it, hiding the one, making you think the floor is gone, then snapping it back into place like a card trick. He’s grinning a little. Of course he is. He knows you’re lost and he’s letting you be lost, and that’s generosity, that’s love, from a guy with a pair of sticks and very good posture.
What keeps me watching it at four in the morning when I should be asleep or at least doing something useful with my life. Charlie, my five-year-old, woke up from a nightmare, crawled into our bed and took it over, fell right back asleep. I didn’t. I know those monsters don’t leave. They just wait for you to get older. So I’m lying in the dark with a phone, watching four men in ties do something impossible and treating it like a Tuesday morning.
Five beats. Four men. One of the few perfect things anybody ever put on television. Watch it again. You’ll still lose count.