The Fully Celebrated Ravings Of A Skeptical Immigrant

It’s Wednesday night, around ten something. The corporate week achieved its monotonous climax not long ago. You desperately need to recharge. Instead, you observe patiently as your thirsty lips order a pint. Not an inappropriate gesture, considering you’re standing at the bar. For all official purposes the establishment calls itself a ‘grille.’ You hear the owner once ran a lucrative cocaine operation back in the hungry nostril heyday of the ’80s. He has since shaved his beard and turned into a legitimate capitalist swine. Witnesses swear he’s come clean. Good thing, too.

The joint is next to a police station. Welcome to the Republic of Cambridge, you think, as you take a swig, and decide you like it – the beer, not necessarily the town. Cambridge, Massachusetts is the kind of municipality that would legalize marijuana but ban smoking. Militantly liberal, that’s what it is. You notice people heading up stairs and out of sight. One of them is carrying a big black bag, which looks like it might contain a baby giraffe. You never know. Got to keep an open mind.

Upstairs is an oblong affair. Light is concentrated in one corner of the room, immediately to your left as you ascend. From there it diminishes triangularly into a shifting interplay of shadows. Miscellaneous art is framed and scattered on recently painted walls. As you survey the ambience, instruments are unwrapped in the corner of your eye, and fiddled, tuned, teased. You habitually peel a pack and balance a cigarette unceremoniously in your unshaven elliptical mouth. People are still lingering over their food. House rules insist that smokers show restraint until they’re done.

You wait impatiently, fingers tapping for want of carcinogens. There’s a burst of sound, urgent and crisp, like an October morning. You pick up pieces of your nicotine-deprived self and turn to face the musicians.

“Some poor bastards, their minds and tastes shaped by the Invisible Providers, can only think of it as jazz, because one of the guys has a saxophone, and they’re next to Maynard Ferguson in the Jazz section at the Retail Roundup.” Liner notes resonate in inner ear. Got to keep an open mind.

The room is preoccupied tonight, agitated. The air is taut and strung like an assassin’s bow. The music seems to have adopted an angry agenda. It refuses to be ignored. Not surprisingly, it always traces back to the fundamental misery of economics. You learn that the ex-con turned proprietor had originally agreed to host a CD-release party to commemorate Marriage of Heaven & Earth, the band’s new album. Now that the event is sufficiently imminent to merit a definite date, he’s backing out. If that’s not bad enough, he isn’t polite about the wretched affair.

“Salsa night brings in more money than you guys,” he says.

Salsa night? What the…? Where words fail, music fills in. It screams with indignation. You feel like you’ve been recruited in a revolution that begins and ends with your ability to process asymmetrical layers of sound as they strip and transform in electric urban night. The score has been written. Now it must be settled.

Loudness as such is a brutish gesture and by no means a measure of celebration. Of this the Orchestra are eminently aware. Should they choose, they could trample the assembly effortlessly, like a rogue herd of sonic elephants. Instead, they nurture each note until it improvises its way into the composition—a method that, over time, has provoked critical applause, commercial interest even.

Some time back, a producer of a contemporary brand name ‘jazz’ band approached them after a show. “You guys are phenomenal,” he spat, dizzy with enthusiasm. “I love your sound. We’ve got to record an album and get you out on tour.” The composer slash alto saxophonist braced himself for the disclaimer. There’s always at least one. “One little thing,” the producer added, swallowing his words with casual spinelessness, “can you add a little funk? You know, the kids these days just eat up funk.” The response was as swift as it was unrepentant. No funk would be forthcoming from the Orchestra. Better to be a victim of one’s own vision than a victim of someone else’s profit margin. Amen to that.

The composer slash alto saxophonist smiles as he recounts the story. “Mind you,” he adds with a mischievous grin, “if he asked us now, I’d agree.” The smile dissolves in beer. Despite his matter-of-factness you know he couldn’t sell out then, and he can’t do it now. At first glance there’s something selfish about this logic, or worse, elitist. It’s that whole aloof artist ‘on the outside looking in’ bit. Whatever it is, it’s misguided. The Fully Celebrated Orchestra does not pose one way or another. Nor can their music be marginalized, for such an analysis would require an outline of the page it’s supposed to be on. ‘Eclectic’ fails to describe the plurality of their influences. It doesn’t stretch far enough. Ornette Coleman, heavy metal, Don Cherry, Willie Nelson, reggae, punk, Bismillah Khan and calypso channel each other to sculpt celebrated soundscapes from primordial planetary frequencies. There’s something very familiar about their sound, yet something quite foreign. If one may dare say these days, it embodies the foreignness that is America.

There’s an added ingredient in the mix tonight. An unlikely musician has materialized on the scene and is none too subtle about his intention of jamming with the band. He’s a beast of a man with a monolithic body and rounded oaken shoulders. He carries himself like someone accustomed to getting his way. Word has it he’s Cuban. Immaculate threads betray aristocratic extraction. The blood of a few generations of tobacco slaves is probably smeared across his family tree. He holds court on the table closest to the stairs, shoulders drooping, cigar smoldering with Caribbean desire.

His muscular face is knotted with discontent. Sweat drips off his protruding brow. His presence in the room has raised the ambient temperature a few degrees. As each musical movement draws to its conclusion, he claps with exaggerated enthusiasm, and rushesto engage the performers with dialogue. There’s a fine line between persistence and nuisance and he’s striding it carelessly like a steroid ballerina. After a few rounds of variation on this basic routine it appears like nuisance has won. Without warning, he hauls an immense plank of wood and takes a long time to place it on the unmarked stage. Feng Shui is a demanding mistress. After what, for all emotional purposes, seems like an eternity, at last, he appears satisfied or at least has reluctantly resigned his Conquistador will to the geometric limitations of this vast room, dimly lit and drunk with anticipation.

He collapses in a heap and wipes the accumulated sweat clinging to his protruding forehead with a massive hand as if for the last time. An uncanny calm descends over him. He crouches like a hunter poised for the primitive pounce—neck craned, ears cocked, scanning for opportunity. He commits a few inhibited attempts before lunging in with all the momentum he can muster—fingers pounding keys like frenzied pistons, blood pumping through alleys of quivering flesh like a prize steer that’s being forced to mate, not entirely against its will. At first there’s something profoundly unsettling about his contribution. It’s not for want of talent, and certainly not for lack of desire, but somehow, fundamentally, he just doesn’t belong. Maybe he’s trying too hard. Maybe, in his own strange way, he’s fueling the Orchestra. Walls of sound emerge around them like new-fold mountains shuddering to distant tectonic tango. They breed innumerable arms and heads like an unfathomable Hindu god illustrating an essential cosmic concept.

This is crazy, you’re running out of words—a well-documented condition that invariably occurs in moments of bliss as rare as this. Advocates of the antithetical persuasion argue that maybe it is the absence of words that makes such moments blissful to begin with. An unprofitable thought at best.

You hear voices, faint at first, distant. Soon they trespass the invisible limits of your arbitrary tolerance, steadily encroaching, getting uncomfortably closer. Above the clamor in your mind you hear them proliferate without hint of regret or apology. Stimulus has been introduced. Now the animal that breathes under your skin must respond. You reopen your eyes and concentrate on tracing the voices back to their impolite source. You track them down to a table close to yours, irritated at your inability to make the determination without the aid of your omnipresent myopic eyes. After you’ve seen what they look like, the voices begin to sound remarkably French, or some colonial hybrid. You notice the bias in your thought, but you let it slip away unpunished into the prejudiced corner where it resides. Failure is inexplicably articulate at rationalizing resentment. How dare they raise their voices with such impunity?

How dare they distract your blissful ear away from this, this magnificent happening you’re struggling to describe? They smear its sanctity with garrulous abandon, going on about this and that and the other thing. Who won the soccer match? Did anybody tape it? What’s going on with the presidential election? They rattle on in endless sentences of accented syllables.

The musicians aren’t distracted. Instead, they absorb the chaos around them and recycle it in waves of vibration. They encourage the anarchy, turning it inward until it unwittingly exhausts itself. In its wake is just air, and the air is suffused with alchemy, throbbing on the edge of existence like an incubated galaxy. You return your attention to the gum flappers. Ex-gum flappers to be sure, for the same three subjects are now cloaked in meditative silence—mouths agape, eyes relaxed and wide, mesmerized by this new and wondrous manifestation of voodoo. They move their heads occasionally from side to side trailing the unpredictable path of mathematical breath as it twists and turns and emerges renegade from the upturned belly of a benevolent metal dragon.

They have grown oblivious of each other and of the conversation that so completely consumed them a few short moments ago. The music has invalidated their need to flap gum, as it were, and led them without resistance into its wordless locomotive trance. It skids and slashes, screeching off the straight track whenever it feels like, which is delightfully often. Four maestros bob and weave like capricious kites in a hurricane. The trance is undeniable. It has transformed the room.

The room is a universe alive with possibility. Dizzy cornet spouting flowers of brass. You scribble intoxicated poems in your fragmented head until they no longer hold together as distinct thoughts slash expressions. You trip downstairs, slide across the bar, return triumphantly with a fistful of empty bar checks. Soon they too are smeared with involuntary scrawl. Words pour out of every source liberated by a pulsing grammar. Synapses tremble with newly formed associations. Memories bubble up unsummoned and disguise themselves in messy rows of universal symbols. Just when you think you know what the music’s up to, it finds another game to play – persistent bass hanging around like hungry junkie, shifty feet in cold turkey afternoon. Strings bounce ideas off wood. Sticks ricochet off hide.

Somewhere, in some other half-life, there was an intermission and you were in it for as long as it lasted. The composer slash alto saxophonist was there, as was the drummer, and a Flash artist who introduced you to the unassailable quartet. You were uncharacteristically speechless and happy. Star Wars Episode II surfaced as the pressing subject of discussion. Specifically, how the narrative structure jumped to higher levels, progressively, like a video game. It was plain as pudding. You soaked it up like an unopinionated sponge.

Now the waitress graces your table once more and solicits orders for last call. Thirsty lips demand another pint. The music’s not letting up, why should you? As the musicians dive into their last stand, it dawns on you. Every breath is a magic trick, a self-fulfilling prophecy, a spontaneous scheme designed to prolong its own existence. Breath is essential, hypnotic. It’s the stuff that inflates your nostrils with purpose. They say in Tokyo you can buy ultra-cool cans of extra-fresh designer breath from vending machines.

The material world rears its ugly head, appropriately rude and uninvited. It taunts you with reminders – rent, so called savings, the irreparable damage sustained by the bar tab. But you won’t let it get you down. Not tonight. If you leave here with nothing else, you shall leave with hope. The future is almost new, almost improved, almost obsolete by the time it arrives. Nothing lasts forever. Not even the so-called ‘System’. There’s an under-current here. And it’s stealthily undermining every assumption you’ve made. Right here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Fully Celebrated Orchestra have blown a hole through your carefully assembled parachute of expectation. After a first-rate, mind-juggling, foot stomping two-hours of uninterrupted virtuosity, short break notwithstanding, they sign off abruptly, without ceremony.

Every performance is an encore, solicited or not, it becomes its own extension, its own breath which ebbs and flows and wanders unhindered in this one great breath that is breathing everything around us into subsistence. You feel recharged, almost a new man. Outside, conversation picks up where it left off. It’s a new morning.