Berkeley-s Set List, 8th August
You can't sell a dream
I sometimes fear that wonderful aphorism of Kerouac's 'On the Road' -'more typing than writing' painfully true of my struggles. Despite my travails with words, the nicest sounds I'm able to make are voiceless- I play the clarinet and piano. An eccentric friend of mine brought up the idea while we were at the cricket of playing some jazz sets as a trio in one of the rare cafes that hide themselves away in Trowbridge. Never being one to duck a musical opportunity, I volunteered, and we got together with my clarinet, her double bass and a friend of mine and his keyboard.
We organised the music carefully. Middle of the road jazz very much in. Brubeck's 'Take Five', the Mission: Impossible theme tune- the Disney jazz standards 'Everybody wants to be a cat', 'Cruella D'evil' and the magnificently wiggly 'Trust in Me', with all the flexibility of a snake- (indeed the vaguely Indian overtones suit the music as the Indian scale is composed of quarter-tones rather than semi-tones, enabling plenty more sliding). On top of that we crafted some personal favourites: the old BBC Cricket Theme tune Soul Limbo was a must. We put in two classic Beach Boys tracks, and Queen's Elvis-reverential 'Crazy little thing called love'. Much satisfied with our work, we decided to branch out. We improvised a twelve bar blues and a jazz waltz that we ultimately wrote out a suspicious yet workable chord sequence for. Then we added some light-ish classical music, 'Ave Maria', Faure's 'Pavane', Williams' 'Schindler's List'. I insisted that we should encherry our music cake with the incomparably easy, cheesy 'Moon River'.
Thus was our set. The balance of the three of us was surprisingly good, with the odd good bass line, some nice piano improvisation, and the odd opportunity for a gleeful TCH to create randomly.
And so we went to see the cafe owner. Inside his little paradise, nothing was to go at anything but his own speed. We were in his game now. We played a mini-set tastefully shorn of the more liberal interpretations of 'jazz', staying close to our core. He liked it, and asked us to come back for discussions of pay and dates the next day.
And so we did. Tired Toby, tortured by tedium and sheer tonnage of full time toil, travelled again to Trowbridge after work Tuesday. Even more laconic, but revealed as duplicitous, this Tony. Words spoken trippingly on the tongue- sly, calculated insincerity passed off as amiability. He insisted that we would have his drinks. They were delicious- relaxing. Next, he talked slowly and calmly about what we did for degrees- our outlooks. He casually dismissed science as boring- the same experiment repeated with minor changes, over and over again. Irked by this bland yet sweeping assumption, I retorted that the same could be said, to an uninitiated observer about cooking. This impressed him, but it was his steely business side- not the affable fella he so wished to confuse us into being. He had done a PhD in Cookery- it was an art- it fostered creativity, it bore no relation! I had accidentally become the aggressor of the Trio.
Slowly, languorously, he worked his way towards the issue in hand. He explained that his cafe ws like no-where in Trowbridge. The drinks were of great quality- there were regular debate and philosophy groups- the ambience was fantastic, the place would be phenomenal. As to pay, after calling us to discuss it, he smiled cheerily- the staff get a good wage- they're all happy. I want you to get the same- perhaps more so, as you are being creative.
It dawned on me. We were a section of his dream- his entrepreneurial business where everything was an art to be won- nothing rooted to firnly in the dankness of details. But with the one contradiction of the conductor- the ringmaster of this surprise utopia, being a business mind shrewd enough to play the role but not be it. For he was not inviting us into the experience without the restraining hook. He obliviously ignored my attempt to work through the specifics of payment, of dates. He was hoping that we could become players in his collective fantasy, to be turned on and off at will. Yet he was doing so with business acumen.
He was trying to sell us a dream.
You can't sell dreams. They're free. That, like the Queen of 'Spirited Away', was the sadness in his life. You can't enforce happiness, only encourage it. We shall play music, and people will enjoy it, and his cafe. It's a dream of many people, fanned to participate, not of a whole field of corn, each ear set alight individually by one match.
It's a unmixable spiral to collide dreams and profit.That's perhaps the tragedy of the Millennium Dome, or of poetry. The merry-go-round of life continues, all candy floss and insincere ducking horses.
TCH
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