Lie to Me

One of my favorite writing projects ever was a blog that I did with a friend of mine, also a writer. Once a week we would come up with a theme and we would each post a variation on the theme. It was delightful. I love and admire her writing, it was good to have a theme to spark writing, and it was fun to have a joint project. As a result, it was one of the most fruitful moments in my poetic life.

The blog fell by the wayside, as blogs do, and we've both moved on to different writing projects. But it remains this golden period of six months or so when I was writing a poem every week and getting creative feedback. But the post that sticks out in my mind is not something I wrote, but her writing on jazz. I remember reading it for the first time and wondering at the post itself. She maintains that jazz is nothing but beautiful lies. I disagreed with her about her conclusion, but decided it was the creative space she was in.

I love jazz.

The very first jazz album I got was a CD of Billie Holiday tracks a friend of mine handed to me while I was a sophmore in high school. I listened to that album every day, sometimes several times a day. When my mother thought I was locked in my room with Slipknot blaring through my headphones, I was actually stretched back on my bed with Billie singing sweetly in the background.

I fell in the love with jazz for the reason any small town kid falls in love with jazz. I loved it because it encourages a kind of dreaminess that no other music has ever managed to bring out in me. When I listened to Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald, or later Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, I conjured up images of New York nightclubs stolen from The Catcher in the Rye. It was unspeakably glamorous and all I needed were the first notes of Bye Bye Blackbird to send me into a daydream.

When I finally saw live jazz for the first time I was a little disappointed, not in the music but in the atmosphere itself. Instead of a smoky, barely-lit club in New York, I was in a brightly lit, tiny wine bar in St. Cloud, the most prosaic place on earth. There was barely enough room for the four musicians, and there certainly wasn't enough space for a grand piano. I wasn't on a date, and I wasn't wearing some beautiful vintage 1950s dress. I was in a sundress and was there with a fellow writer who went often. However, once I got over my initial disappointment over the atmosphere, I settled into the music and it was wonderful. My writer friend and I went many times over the course of the next few years and those evening sitting in a bar in the sticky July heat, drinking a glass of scotch, and listening to Red Top still have a feeling of unreality about them for me.

I miss jazz.

Since moving last summer, my options for live jazz are pretty limited. I end up listening to a lot of albums at home rather than going out. I  can't complain too much. Nearly every night this summer I've fallen asleep to Miles Davis's Round About Midnight and I'm convinced it makes my dreams softer, warmer places. When I hear the phrase "A Love Supreme" repeated on John Coltrane's album A Love Supreme it takes on all the weight of a mantra for me. I listen to these albums when it's ok to get a little dreamy--when my writing has hit a wall and I need to think creatively, when I'm cooking, when I'm lying in bed reading a romance novel. But even as I'm losing myself in Johnny Hartman's voice and Jane Austen's writing, I can't help but feel a little twinge of envy toward my writer friend, who still goes to those jazz shows every Monday night.

This summer has been a strange one. Neither inherently good or bad, just strange. It's my year anniversary of graduating from Jesus School, taking a new job, moving to a new place. And my 28th birthday is rapidly approaching and I'm forced to look at some tough realities. Many of my favorite authors had published work by 28. Dating won't get any easier by simply moving to a new city. Hangovers are no longer something to be laughed at and bounced back from. Writing is hard and requires all of my attention and creativity.

These have all been difficult things to face, but the worst realization came tonight, as I was basking in a new romance novel and Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane's album. Jazz lies. The dreamy unreality it produces in me, the images it evokes, the daydreams its causes are lies. They're no better or worse than the sense of unreality caused by a good romance novel, but they are lies nonetheless. I pondered this. Wondered momentarily if I should quit listening to jazz, return instead to bluegrass, which reminds us that life is a struggle and then you die. Or perhaps I should revisit the Romantic composers in my library. Then again, there are all those indie albums my friends keep pushing on me.

My phone rang and it was a friend with an actual problem rather than existential mutterings about music. She needed comfort and support and I think I gave it to her. When we hung up over an hour later, I looked guiltily between the massive history of the French Revolution I've been reading for months and the romance novel I had been devouring that evening and would finish the next day. I listened to Johnny Hartman sing "You Are Too Beautiful" and thought about the advice I had just offered my friend about the break-up she was going through. As a soon-to-be bona fide adult, shouldn't I do the adult thing and put away the lies, pretty, compelling, and comforting as they were?

Eventually, I picked the romance back up and turned up the stereo without changing the album. Because with adulthood and its responsibilities rapidly closing around me, there are nights when all I want is someone to lie to me.