Happy New Years

We arrive thirty minutes before the set. There is another band on the stage, playing Sinatra tunes, and so we leave our stuff by the stage while matt looks for Katherine, she's an attractive vietnamese woman in a pink dress.

"Three Vietnamese Girls Walk to School Carrying Umbrellas of Many Colors"

First pubished in The Baltimore Review

by Mary Ann Larkin

Oh small girls
carrying halos of rain-drinking flowers
on morning-empty Irving Street,
you tip-toe far
from mango-green rivers
and wail of monsoon.
You place your white tennis shoes
in phosphorescent puddles,
first one toe then another,
the way the white crane,
canopied by sun and flower,
enters the lagoon.

I spot her stepping in high heels behind the pillars in the lounge peppered with tables. I seem disoriented, the pianist has a stern expression with an afro-around, from the bronx the guitarist reveals in a conversation. The room is dizzy, and I don't quite know where to look.

"They are, or me?" I ask the keyboards. "I'm not sure where to set up," I say. "All I know there is a contract somewhere in all of this," I tell him, reverting to simple phrases.

They set up in fifteen, the guitarist in black leather says. He bends at the waist setting an ampliphier on the stage, and later I imitate bending to lift my bow from the rainproof bass case.

Driving in, we see Dwight D. Eisenhower at the gates to the Italian Embassy, and the guard opens the gate for us to bring in our instruments. He's heavily perfumed, and dressed chic. The building is a modern architexture knock-off of Frank Lloyd Wright, and as I blabber in my cell phone about his bookie by the stage, a snapshot of the gerte and seymor Shavin house glows on the wallpaper. The speakers crackle distorted bass thumps shake and Sinatra sings the blues. Bronx is losing his hair graciously, and to look busy I shave some stress by scraping rosin on my bow, tightening the hairs with a sharp twist of the screw before we set up to tune up.

At the door we pass through the metal detectors and my bass tuners brush the device as the instrument turns to pass through. The machine beeps. The guard waves the wand over me. We are traveling back in time to figure out who screwed up. Stop! Justin is shouting at the tag on Bird's bounce as we round the second time around, and I'm not ready so we swing for a triple entente. I hit every beat, except the one where my blisters cut in the steel strings, and help the women dressed in American fashions walk where food has made a mess on the slippery linoleum. I don't slide, I step. Stop! Katherine in the pink dress scolds matt with the accusation he brought the wrong band. It's in the contract, he says. We are a musical trio.

Matt and Justin have food on the table which has a screw loose. I refuse to eat. An usher says he works for Katherine and his boss is furious. He says, do you know who the violinist is? Have you read where the violinist is playing in the subway? Yes, I say. Joshua Bell, matt says. Josh, I say, as if we know each other personally.

Where are you from? He asks matt and justin. Near or around Washington, they both say. Baltimore, I say. An anxious usher asking me where I'm from, is less than I deserve. An Armenian woman asks us, what is a double bass in a Renaissance quartet? We have no violins, I say. Ask him (points to matt), prego.

He explains the mess. Matt has a Myakovsky hair stylist and is determined as iron to have us play. My stand is made entirely of iron, and as I move the pages out of the light to the shadowy enclave where the Embassy has set us up, the bass inpin scrapes the hard floor. My bow is legatto by Stella by Starlight, and noone can hear we are lost in the romantically written mush, no less than we are lost in Washington D.C.. The saxophone sings the tune, the guitar fills the chords with soft strums, and we actually sound quite nice. Of course, I can only see five feet in front of me, and am almost blind, with cat hair brushed from my waterproof coat with a wet piece of toilet paper and a blue tie so low my pants are higher, tucked in with a black belt with a silver buckle. Blue circles around my hazel eyes, dark, wiry hair cut long styled like grandmas and a Elvis Costello moustache. Grandma from the bronx.

Katherine says, her guests pay sixty dollars to get in and she is respecting their safety, that we should please leave, and this is not what she booked. It's not the first time I've been asked to leave work, but that was in a kitchen! And it is the nicest place I have been kicked out of. Opera tickets are thirty dollars a pop, so the Embassy guests are paying for a Renaissance string quartet. The fat lady sings on the speakers.

We pack up pretty quickly. Matt's face is red. Justin has short sandy brown hair, a neatly trimmed beard, and eyes... I've never made eye contact with him, he reminds me of Justin, the mime, so my stillness, quietness are simply neuroticism. He calls me something else, because he's furious I'm out of my mind.

I don't break my back carrying my bass in one hand, my stand balanced on the bridge squeezing between trays waiters serve white wine casually, while I follow the trio out in the back of the line.

We get lost finding justin's cars' parked, where he took the shuttle to meet us. He steps in front of me at the stage where I'm waiting before the 20 minute set, and we shake hands. Bathroom's that way, I say, and give an exaggerated point. I was still looking for where the stage was then, and I was pasta primovera, in the wrong place; 30 minute sets shared with the bands, and we play half a set. The money's paid before we arrive.

Justin's crushed in the backseat and we take a long time to find the car. He's like a fossil, and I have to call seth to wish him happy new year, and to tell him we are lost in Washington D.C. He's the only one in the world, besides Nora and Daniel who get that joke, which I've repeated the whole night. He's at work, 7:00, asking for his sweater, and noone helps. He's drinking Champaigne.

Stella by Starlight was arranged e flat, flat fifth (b flat) with the melody b flat and a natural, falling on the downbeat a natural with the chord a flat, flat ninth (b flat) and the final closing with c natural and f natural on the saxophone.

The next section was b flat, major seventh (a) with a falling scale of e flat, d natural, c natural and b flat landing on d natural with an e flat chord, flat fifth (b flat) on the bass, with a mid-measure change to a flat, flat ninth (b flat) and an e natural on the saxophone. The head was on the change to G Major, seventh chord and the definition was stretched to mean, wherever the melody was.

If the stand was never shifted back out of the light where I could read the music, the tune might have sounded differently. The addition of fourths, major sevens, and augmented fifths, or lowered sixths, however the gawking audience reacts. We closed with e flat, flat fifth (b flat) with an a natural on the saxophone landing on a flat with the chord an a flat, flat ninth (b flat), up to d flat, flat fifth (a flat) with a sustained f natural on the saxophone.

To be lucid, an Italian sixth is c natural, e flat and a flat in the key of B flat Major. The French sixth is on the second scale degree lower, and the repetition on the root is common, otherwise known as the Napolean sixth.

Blues for Alice, or Bird's blues was the icing on the cake. To improvise a walking bass while the rest of the band dropped out, I plucked a variation of Scriabin's synthetic chord, the mystic chord, in minor (A,C,E), augmented (D, F#, B flat) and an extension of the French sixth (C,E,F#,B flat and D,A), keeping an eye on the precepts standard bass teaches for walking lines.

So to settle the dispute matt and I were having. The Italian Embassy is Italy, and we and the guests were Americans, but playing Italian sixths in jazz variations does not add up in Italy or in the USA. The Napolean, though brave, was quickly chased away by the Russians!