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Sport 32: Summer 2004
Whoopsydaisy
Whoopsydaisy
A, a good, good musician in general will know what space is—generally—knows when to shut up, knows when to come in, knows when they're giving too much or they're not giving enough—
Riki's got another gig. There's another drummer playing, instead. And he's really fucking up. He's playing kind of big-time—you don't know the word for it—oh; ugly drums. Big-time show-offy not-melodic not-listening kind of dumb stadium drums. Yawn, only much louder. It makes you feel embarrassed, you don't want to catch his eye, it's awful, how badly he's fucking it up and he doesn't even know, he's beaming, he thinks he's doing it right.
But the drums are, simply, horrible. Before Riki you wouldn't have known you knew this, you would just have lost interest, touched your girlfriend or flatmate on the arm, either fallen into a more absorbing conversation than the one they're having up there, or left. Now you know. You watch, half-scared for the guest musician, half-angry for the music, wholly fascinated: what will they do now? —He can be so rude, Jonathan; and here, playing, with someone much less powerful than he is fucking it up in the way he most detests—the one that involves your ego, and the music secondarily—here, surely, is where he will be most rude. It's only here, after all, that it's kind of deserved, kind of okay.
—No. (It's amazing, really.) He does the opposite. He waits, courteously; at one point he bites his lip, but his face is wiped utterly clean of contempt. Here, he is courteous in a way that seems astounding. Admirable, too. —It's because it's not toward another person: he is being courteous toward the music.
He's drunk, actually. At the last break you saw this clearly: the way he stumbled first over his words as he introduced the other musicians, then over his own feet as he squished between the vibraphone and the page 128 punters toward the bar, or toward the alley outside. He doesn't seem drunk playing, though. He's waiting, his face sober, in all senses, his gaze serious, careful. It's beginning to make you highly nervous for the guest player, how Jonathan's face is being slowly wiped of all expression. He is, most unexpectedly (you didn't know he had it in him), doing neutral and composed. At one point—you're sitting so close in this tiny bar you can see him do it—he draws a breath and then jumps in, the way a subtle, highly skilled dinner party conversationalist will leap into the monologue of a boor. The vibraphone sticks whir, blur, fly.
The drummer pounds on. There's no room for any other sound. After a while the two other musicians stand back and watch, their faces blank.
And then Jonathan's eyes slide stage-left (his right), to the double bass player: they look at each other for a moment and then—fatally—they smile.
Well, he won't be playing for them again, you guess—that particular guy on drums—