Echoes

A quiet reverberation rings a tiny bell inside your body: an instantaneous bounce on white-washed wall from eye to artwork and back; a synapse firing in the brain jumpstarting the heart rate. You’re at the Basquiat show inside a clump of viewers here to make the scene. You’re standing in front of a large yellow canvas roped to a frame. Looking at the cartoon figure is like looking in a mirror. Like spying on a dead man. Not even a canvas but someone’s bedspread stretched like goatskin over a rectangular drum or a stiff net ready to receive your soul and send it back into its own body where it does (or does not) belong. Just you again peering into a vessel a thousand associations full. Same goes with the one of Charlie “Bird” Parker wailing away on his alto, also yellow, Bird’s eye glaring, and his fingers working invisible keys. Most of Jean-Michael’s heroes wear crowns but here Parker is a bird, majestic and wild. You can hear his solos knocking in your head. Later that night at the Blue Note: a quartet of old friends after years reuniting. The drummer’s smile is a regular at the bar, drinks all around. Even from cramped seats you can see the love passing back and forth like a peace pipe, like a poem recited by heart. McBride gives a lecture on insouciance and heckles himself from the back. Mehldau leans into his solos making sure to answer as much as he can of Redmon’s runs which are more like leaps and skip-hops; and Blade shoots up out of his seat and turns the cymbals into fireworks, into applause. Heading back to the hotel in an encore of rain, body electric, and mind whizzing around like one of Basquiat’s imaginary toys, one of those little whims of childhood brought forth into the land of money. That’s all and good night. It’s the body that connects the dots, the body that stores feelings, and the body that knows when to snap the picture in its camera body. The eyes scan and scan, the brain grabs onto all the shiny things it can while the body takes the echo, like the wall, and throws it back.