My long twenties are over

"As soon as you start talking about what happens, it's like, it never... you can never get to what it really is, and then it sort of... I'm almost afraid to talk about it, because it sort of... then you actually start thinking about it. You know what I mean? I like to... there's this place in music, if you can stay in this sort of naïve state, to me that's the best feeling, where you're never sure what's coming next and you're just, every moment, you're finding it."
- Bill Frisell

My twenties began a bit early, in 2014 around October and November, when I was 19 years old. The idea of love hit me, but I missed it and found alcohol instead.

It was October 9, 2014, and I was trying to play bass full-time. My hard drive holds a few tellings of this story (although, longest-tenured readers, you might have copies of another dramatized retelling I wrote, way back in your email inboxes). Here's the one that dates back from then:

Here's another one, from my own lips earlier this month:

"I got hired for a gig that was too heavy for me. At the time, I was abusing alcohol. One of the guys who hired me was abusing alcohol. I got up on that stage, I was not prepared to play the music. I played the music very badly. I was not aided and assisted all that much by the other musicians, it wasn't necessarily their job to do it either. It ended up being a really tough look for me. It ended up being a really tough experience for me that I wanted to not allow myself to re-create after that."

(When I went sober in December 2021, I felt immediate relief that this day would never come again.)

Here's the third, me again speaking, hosted by Chris Fraser (time 59:08):

"In October 2014, I was called to do a gig, and it went very badly for me for a number of reasons. It wasn't really my fault that it went badly, but I was predisposed to take it really badly as well. So the reason why it ended up impacting me a lot was internal. It was because of how I was already predisposed to feel about it."

(There's a chapter of a book that reveals more of the surrounding story here, though not my story. Maybe you know what book it is.)

I continue with Chris (59:49):

"At the end of November 2014 [...] Bill Frisell came to Cap with his trio and played a concert with Brad Turner. Now, these are my two favourite musicians in the world at the time. Brad is my biggest local inspiration as a composer, and who I was listening to and whose music I love so much. And then Frisell's music I love so much, and I always wanted to play and always have drawn so much from."

I was already a Frisell fan. Madeleine Elkins and I had been playing his tune "Gimme a Holler", which was part of the CapU ear-training curriculum. We busked at New Westminster's River Market biweekly, sometimes weekly, and closed every gig with the tune.

We dug his 2003 record East/West and in particular his arrangement of "I Heard it Through the Grapevine". And the East/West take of "Shenandoah" led me to the canonical version on his 1999 release called Good Dog, Happy Man.

There's much more of my fandom that I don't have time to write you about today, like how Frisell played with my onetime boss Dave Douglas, worked for years with Ron Miles who also became a favourite artist of mine, and made Ghost Town, the album so reassuring to me that I put it on when my basement suite was flooding during a power outage.

Anyway, in the podcast, Chris and I digress about how I cheated my way into CapU's jazz combo masterclass with Frisell despite having dropped out the year prior. We get back to it (1:01:41):

"As a result of being in one of those combos, I got to play Bill Frisell's music for Bill Frisell in the masterclass in November, and I got to go to that concert [...] I also had a really awkward, bad social experience in that masterclass as well which left an impact on me, again mostly just because of how I was gonna feel about it more than anything anybody else did. But you know, I'd had this terrible gig experience in October, then I had this terrible experience in the masterclass with both my musical heroes there. Then I go to the concert, and you know, I'm ready to like cry my eyes out all concert long [...] I think in the 24 to 48 hours after that concert, I wrote all the music of Aim to Stay."

In that masterclass, the Frisell composition that my combo played was "Pretty Flowers Were Made for Blooming" from Blues Dream on Nonesuch Records.

The awkward, bad moment came from another combo playing "Strange Meeting" later on. A student asked Frisell where the title came from. Frisell said it came from a poem but that he couldn't remember the poet. As it happened, I knew. I'd studied the poem "Strange Meeting" in a high-school English class, before my Frisellian love affair.

I piped up and said it was Wilfred Owen, the English poet of World War I, and that Owen was known for using slant rhymes. I might have even raised my hand. A CapU instructor cracked a good-natured joke about how I was a know-it-all. I started crying and walked out of the room, so I missed the rest of the masterclass. I'll never forget that my friend, and another friend, also stepped out to track me down.

I then heard the Frisell/Turner concert that night, and that's the story of my first album. It packages so many of the struggles that haunted my whole twenties: nothing good will happen from someone else choosing me so I must try and go it alone, I'm not good enough, I'm not doing enough. I'm that guy where it didn't work out, who doesn't deserve any of it.

I ended up with something, though, that no one could take away from me: a motivation, like a muse, that I could turn to in aspiration of never giving up. (Also, very soon into my twenties, I met my future spouse who decided to not give up on me. That's the tangible main reason I'm still in the game.) There are some things you can't talk about, though I've tried, except through your music. But there are no brick walls I won't try and run through as long as I have this muse that visited me then.

That was the last time I'd heard Frisell live until this Tuesday, June 24th at the Vancouver Playhouse. As the headliner of the 40th jazzfest, Frisell played with his longtime bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Rudy Royston. Here are some of the things they played in their 90-minute uninterrupted set:

Burt Bacharach's "What the World Needs Now". I'm going to write you about this song's place in the show as part of an upcoming recap of the broader festival. [Edit from the future: here it is!]

The Beatles' "In My Life".

Frisell's own "Throughout".

And Billy Strayhorn's "Isfahan", much to the delight of Chris Fraser, sitting to my right, who has played the tune with me on many gigs.

The encore was Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind". Their version sounded a bit like this:

When I see Frisell on stage, I see a personality that mirrors mine to some extent. He's undeniably meek in the same way that I'm shy and uncomfortable. He won't let himself glimmer under a bright light. Somehow I managed to shed a lot of that during my twenties, but it's still there for me, and it's still there for him.

I'm not that guy from 2014 anymore. What I need is in front of me, and it's enough. I can handle it. It isn't actually my business whether or not I'm deserving of anything. That's the feeling I've tried to let wash over me every time I listen to Frisell, and Tuesday was the clearest uninterrupted experience I've had of that.

The muse is occasionally turning prickly at the onset of my new decade. I tried to run away from it when I visited Copenhagen and then in my folk band years going into covid, basically succeeded, then ended up back in its throes heading into 2024, still searching for something that maybe I'll only get through musical expression even though I hardly ever spend time on my instrument. But now I get that growing my life away from it doesn't mean I've lost it all, like I'm afraid of.

On Sunday, I'll play my only jazzfest gig: as a side musician in the Madeleine Elkins Trio. If you time-traveled back to fall 2014 with the photo at the top of this piece and showed it to me, I'd understand that the next ten years turned out okay. The trio might even close out the Ocean Artworks afternoon show with "Gimme a Holler". And after that my long twenties will be over, and my thirties, promising that I'll be a different guy, will begin.