Misty Day in Uwa-cho

Saturday was glorious and sunny. Jan and I had devoted the afternoon walking to little temples in nearby hills so we had nothing to complain about when Sunday dawned cold and rainy. In fact, the weather was perfect for what each of us had to do that day. Jan was giving a speech to a group of local business leaders intent on promoting opportunities for women, and I was off to Uwa-cho about an hour away to play a jazz concert. We both had awakened with that “how-did-I-let-this-happen-to-me” feeling. I mean over-reaching is my specialty but falling on my face in public wasn’t too appealing. As for Jan, she had not only conceived a 45-minute oral presentation over the past few weeks but, with the help of her erstwhile assistant Tomoko, had written most of the talk in Japanese. The fact that she actually insisted on giving me the speech in Japanese to see what I thought was indicative of her nervousness about presenting it. That is kind of like reading Finegan’s Wake to a monkey, and I did the obligatory head and armpit scratching punctuated by a few, “Ee…ee…e e…Ahs” just to indicate I was listening.. (Actually, I must say it is AMAZING to hear Jan speak Japanese, especially now that I know a little bit about what that entails. And to write it? Truly amazing….)

I had a much less rocky hill to climb but I was a bit apprehensive too. It’s one thing to try to play jazz in bars where people may or may not be listening and quite another to play a jazz concert to people in seats they have paid for. In America we throw tomatoes at posers. Here I think it might be dead fish…. So we drank our morning tea and coffee apprehensively, wished each other luck, and set off our separate ways into the misty Matsuyama morning….

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“What does “misty” mean, Mr. Ken?” asked my musical mentor here, Hiroshi Igaue. Somewhere out there in the blackness more than 300 people were waiting for the answer, but for me there was only Igaue, all slicked back in a tuxedo bathed in the white spotlight that surrounded us both on the stage in Uwa-cho. Perhaps a little digression is in order. After all, you didn’t get a program…..

Hiroshi Igaue is an eclectic piano player and all-purpose entertainer—jazz musician, magician, radio host, emcee, jazz club owner, martial artist, etc.—who has taken me into his musical family in Matsuyama, namely his traveling band which at present comprises Igaue, a wiry old drummer named Sakurai-san, and me. The bass players, singers, percussionists, and other horns change depending upon who can make the gig. This Sunday, the Igaue Show was playing the Ehime Prefectural Historical Museum in Uwa-Cho, an ancient town near the Inland sea not far from where the ill-fated Ehime Maru set out on its last voyage.

One of the reasons I think Igaue likes to work with me is he gets to be Buffalo Bob to my Howdy Dowdy, asking me weird questions like, “What does “Them There” mean in Kay Starr’s cooking version of “Them There” eyes? (Answer: I don’t know. Ask Gary Cooper or somebody who might have ever said, “Them there.”) Or, what does the “Rain” represent in Credence Clearwater’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” (Answer: I think you’ll have to ask their pharmacologist, Hirosh. I haven’t a clue….”) But right now, I am wrestling with, what does “misty” mean because I’m about to play it and he thinks the audience would like to know, straight from an American. Since accentuating the obvious is my specialty, I noted that it had been raining during our entire drive from Matsuyama to the concert hall in Uwa-Cho but when we got out of the car, the rain had stopped and it was, well, MISTY, and that’s the way the singer of this song feels when he thinks about his girl, “…misty…and so much in love.”

As a wise man once said, talking about jazz is like dancing about architecture and I like to think the audience understood the concept of “misty” a little better after the band finished the tune. This was some band—the bass player was from Osaka (read Chicago) and the trumpet player from Tokyo (read, well, Tokyo). The singer was from Matsuyama but she’s the best I’ve heard yet and just delightful to behold, frankly, in a slinky red dress, diamonds glittering. The drummer is an old pro originally from Tokyo who came here 25 years ago and never left.

Once again, it’s obvious, but I am always floored by how quickly a disparate group of musicians can come together and become a band. This group had never played together as a unit, at least in person, but then again I guess we really HAD rehearsed together for years—by playing these tunes in all manner of settings with all manner of other players. This is not to say the rehearsal wasn’t without some bumps. Actually, the trumpet player, a husky slope-shouldered guy with a long blond pony tail (yes, a LOT of Japanese people dye their hair these days) and an impassive face was at best stand-offish throughout the warm-up. For him I probably represented, for lack of a better term, a pain in the butt. As the reigning pro on the stage, he, not I, was going to have to determine which notes to hit when we played fills behind the singer together and unlike many people I’ve met here, the idea of having to deal with an inarticulate foreigner didn’t seem to appeal to him. He rarely met my beseeching eyes. The conga player/percussionist—a woman from Tokyo-- had the same kind of haughty air. But, well, what can you do…

Needless to say, the trumpet player was correct in some of his apprehensions. During the rehearsal, I missed some cues for solos, blew some notes on fills much to his obvious displeasure and, never having played “Night in Tunisia” in anything but an Ithaca living room before, I turned that one into Night in Bedlam. (The standard jazz “literature” is available in fake books more or less in the same keys for most instruments. But when you play with a singer, you can throw your fake book out the window because she will always have a favorite key for everything and that is NEVER ever the key in the fake book. If you’re a pro, you just transpose but if you’re me, you can’t do that so my only shot is learning the song in her key (D flat for me if you care about such things) by myself in a little room off the stage. I just hope the trumpeter can’t hear me as I stumble through the changes.

I was still a little jittery during lunch in the dressing room. I tried to hurry through it because I needed to practice some more and besides many people—especially musicians—tend to smoke while they eat here and the room hung with cigarette haze. I was carving my way through a delightful obento (box lunch of fish, greens, tofu, chicken, pickles, etc.) when I chomped down on something hard and suddenly realized why I’d had a touch of tooth pain on the right side recently—my zillion dollar cap on the bottom right had come off. None of the smoke-wreathed musicians sitting around me looked like his hobby was dentistry. Thank God I hadn’t swallowed the cap so I picked it out of my mouth pretending it was a stray chicken bone and when no one was looking popped it into my pocket. Meanwhile, the right side of my mouth felt like the Grand Canyon and I wondered when it was going to start to hurt. The one thing you don’t need when you are trying to fake your way through a jazz concert in front of several hundred people with an unpleasant trumpet player on your left is a toothache. A few minutes later in my little practice corner, my first foray into dentistry was successful. I was able to pop the cap back on.

When I got back to the dressing room, everybody was getting into their tuxes and spiffing up, the major problem seeming to be how you hold a cigarette while you are adjusting your bow tie. And then suddenly it was two minutes to show time. We were standing in the hall off-stage together when…we started to become band. Igaue looking splendiferous in his hounds-tooth tux was joking with the stage manager. Sakurai the wizened old drummer, was literally bouncing up and down on his toes and throwing punches into the air with a drum stick in each hand, psyching himself up. The singer was staring off into space just looking great in red. The bass player was smoking his umpteenth cigarette and looking for a place to snuff it. The trumpeter was fidgeting with his horn…but he gave me a friendly thumbs up as we walked on stage and a sense of camaraderie started to smolder.

I am always amazed at the difference between the way pros play in rehearsals as opposed to on stage. The bass player and trumpeter were obviously superb musicians based on what I had heard in the warm-up but on stage they were simply astounding. They were having fun and it was infectious. The trumpet player bounces up and down as other people play solos occasionally shouting approval (even for me). Two songs into this three-hour program I realized I never wanted it to end. The highlight for me was a duet between the bass player and the singer on “Someday My Prince Will Come.” She sang the song in a breathy fashion as he laid down an intricate bed of rhythm and notes for her to rest on while she waited for her prince. Igaue eventually came out to join them softly on the last chorus. The trumpeter and Sakurai and I stood in shadows backstage. At the end, Sakurai, the veteran, just nodded, as if to say, “that’s it!”

Igaue saved what has become my signature song here for the end—Stand By Me. You know, I’ve played rock and roll for 40 years and there are a lot of songs I’d take to a desert island before I picked Stand By Me, but for some reason, it’s the one he likes best and when we are in that white spotlight again and he asks me, “Mistah Ken, what does “Stand By Me” mean?” I put my arm around him and say, “it’s when people have friends like you, Igaue-san….” (That’s one of the nice things about talking to 300 people who can’t understand you. You can be as soppy as you want and nobody even snickers.) Then the bass player started that classic introductory line and I’m alone in that white light piercing the blackness with this crackerjack band behind me and I realize how perfect the song is for this situation: “When the night has come and the land is dark and the moon is the only light you see…no I won’t be afraid, no I won’t shed a tear, just as long as you stand…stand by me….”

If they want an encore, Igaue always has us do “When the Saints Come Marching In” which a LOT of Japanese people know. This is one thing I AM an expert in—teaching Japanese people the words to “When the Saints” and this crowd all get “A’s”. We start playing and they sing along. The trumpet player is in Dixie heaven playing every lick Louis Armstrong ever invented. Sakurai the drummer, who always plays as if in a trance with his eyes half closed is wailing away and Igaue, a little half smile on, is doing a pretty good impersonation of Fats Waller. Meanwhile the singer and I each take a mike and stroll down the aisle offering audience members a chance to sing into the PA. Have you ever tried to offer anybody a wriggling scorpion? That’s the kind reception the mikes are getting. You can see people swaying and clapping but as you approach one who seems like a good candidate, their eyes freeze and they look very intently at the back of the seat in front of them. So the singer and I start to shout verses back and forth to each other over the audience and one thing leads to another and suddenly we are jumping up and down together in the front wagging our index fingers in the air shaking our heads seized by the fever this song has inspired for more than a century…and the saints came marching in, by God!

Later, I am standing alone in the Uwa-Cho train station. I am waiting for the last train out of town after a riotous dinner with the band and many of their friends at a local hotel where they are all spending the night. The highlight for me was a guitar pass-around and lots of English/American rock and roll, and the steak wasn’t bad either.

At the station, the mist that has wreathed the old town all day has thickened into a fog. The lights that govern the tracks are wreathed in pale red or green penumbra.

It is dead quiet. Nobody else is around. A song comes to mind…”Misty”… I almost take out my sax on the lonely platform but settle for whistling the tune in its entirety. I kind of missed the trumpeter’s solo in the middle. And now, a few years later and a continent away, I can still hear it.